Tag: intelligence community

Former top intel chiefs silent after Musk Twitter disclosures

America’s top former intelligence officials were mostly mum Saturday after the release of internal Twitter documents detailing how The Post’s bombshell revelations were censored by the social media company.

Leon Panetta, a former CIA director and defense secretary, John Brennan a former CIA director, Mike Hayden, a former CIA director, and Jim Clapper, a former director of national intelligence — who all once said The Post’s reporting had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” — declined or did not respond to request for comment about whether the latest disclosures had changed their opinion.

The quartet made their allegations as part of an open letter denigrating The Post’s reporting as Russian misinformation which was signed by dozens of other longtime intelligence hands.

“Our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case,” the letter read. “If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”

Of the four, only Clapper has ever publicly addressed the letter, offering a vigorous defense to The Post in March.

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AP Editor Said She “Can’t Imagine” A US Intelligence Official Being Wrong

The Associated Press journalist who reported a US intelligence official’s false claim that Russia had launched missiles at Poland last week has been fired.

As we discussed previously, AP’s anonymously sourced report which said “A senior U.S. intelligence official says Russian missiles crossed into NATO member Poland, killing two people” went viral because of the massive implications of direct hot warfare erupting between Russia and the NATO alliance. AP subsequently retracted its story as the mainstream political/media class came to accept that it was in fact a Ukrainian missile that had struck Poland.

AP’s firing of reporter James LaPorta looks at this time to be the end point of any accountability for the circulation of this extremely dangerous falsehood. AP spokesperson Lauren Easton says no disciplinary action will be taken against the editors who waved the bogus story through, and to this day the public has been kept in the dark about the identity of the US official who fed such extremely egregious misinformation/disinformation to the public through the mainstream press.

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The Quiet Merger Between Online Platforms and the National Security State Continues

The steady march of the post-2016 tech censorship campaign has been picking up pace lately, and we’ve just learned of another leap forward. According to recent major reporting from the Intercept, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been involved in efforts aimed at corralling what it refers to as “MDM”: misinformation, disinformation, and “malinformation.”

Documents obtained and made publicly available by the news outlet show that the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has been formulating a strategy to combat MDM regarding US elections and other matters. While seemingly unobjectionable on the surface ― who could be against combating false information, which is rife online? ― it raises serious questions about the extent of government involvement in the already-troubling phenomenon of tech censorship.

The conversations detailed in the documents show the federal government, and the DHS specifically, taking a more active role in tech companies’ efforts to suppress MDM. We’ve had some indications this was happening for a while, as when DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC in August that the government was “working with the tech companies” on “strengthen[ing] the legitimate use of their very powerful platforms and prevent[ing] harm from occurring,” and that it was doing so “across the federal enterprise” ― comments that were only reported in right-wing media.

The documents give us details about what that work has entailed. In these discussions, the government did not directly carry out censorship. Rather, they involved government agencies: doing “debunking” and “pre-bunking”; directing the press, local and state governments, and other stakeholders to “trusted resources”; carrying out “rumor control”; boosting “trusted authoritative sources”; giving financial support to its external partners; and improving information literacy. Much of the focus is on elections, with participants talking about using these resources to prevent people being misled about how, where, and when to vote, and stressing that CISA should strictly be a “resource” that at most uses its “convening power.”

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Government UFO report timed for Halloween seems to downplay spooky sightings

Right in time for Halloween, U.S. intelligence agencies were due on Monday to deliver a classified progress report on UFOs to Congress, with an unclassified summary of the report expected to be posted online later this week. Earlier this month, NASA also announced the 16 members of its new unclassified independent team, consisting of prominent scientists, an astronaut and a science journalist, to look at the phenomenon from “a scientific perspective.” 

Monday’s report comes after Congress called for the establishment of a permanent office to study UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena, the government’s new and improved term for UFOs) at the Pentagon last year and then held its first public hearing on the topic in more than 50 years this spring. That hearing discussed an unclassified report issued by a Department of Defense task force in 2021. 

Many UFO investigation proponents like myself were underwhelmed by the Pentagon’s unclassified 2021 report, which offered an explanation for only one of the 144 incidents the department said were being investigated. But at least it correctly acknowledged that it couldn’t rule out any explanation, including extraterrestrial origins. After all, in some of the incidents, Navy pilots publicly stated that they’d encountered exotic objects that were “not of this world” and “accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

But leaked details and communications from officials ahead of Monday’s report and the announcement of NASA’s new team suggested that some in the government are eager to put the issue to rest without a full, open-minded investigation — just as it did in the last open attempt to get to the bottom of the phenomena back in the 1960s. 

It’s particularly frustrating that NASA seems to be drawing its conclusions before even really getting started. In its tweet announcing the UAP panel members 10 days ago, NASA declared: “There is no evidence supporting the idea that UAP are extraterrestrial in origin.” This statement seems to prematurely signal its conclusions so no one will be surprised when the final report repeats the same finding.

Meanwhile, the headline of a New York Times article on Friday based on what it said was classified information from the intelligence report read, “Many Military U.F.O. Reports Are Just Foreign Spying or Airborne Trash.” Nodding to the Halloween timing, the author of the article, Julian Barnes, tweeted what might have been the subtext: UFOs are nothing “spooky or hypersonic” — in other words, just ordinary things, there’s nothing to see here and it’s time to move on.

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Dem Senator Says Mystery Joggers Gave Him ‘Eerie’ National Intelligence Tip In Early 2000s

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) wrote in his recent memoir that as the Senate debated war in Iraq in 2002 he was given a tip about security information by two joggers that ended up influencing his vote on the war. 

Leahy’s claims, first published in his August 2022 memoir “The Road Taken,” were highlighted Friday by journalist and historian Garrett M. Graff, who said the senator’s claims provided “a rare glimpse into the shadowy way that the intel agencies interact with Members of Congress.”

The Vermont senator, who was skeptical of the move toward war in Iraq, said in his book that he was contacted by two runners who told him to check specific intelligence briefings while out on a walk with his wife Marcelle. 

“Two joggers trailed behind us. They stopped and asked what I thought of the intelligence briefings I’d been getting. Marcelle realized this was a conversation she would normally not be involved in and kept on walking ahead,” Leahy wrote. 

He said that he was told by the joggers to ask for “File Eight” and “File Twelve,” both files which related to intelligence on Iraq. 

“Quickly thereafter, I arranged to see File Eight and it contradicted much of what I had heard from the Bush administration,” Leahy claimed. The Democrat would go on to be on of 21 senators to vote against the authorization of war in Iraq. 

He called the alleged encounter with the joggers the most “eerie” experience he had in Washington, D.C.

“It was the eeriest conversation I’d ever experienced in Washington. I felt like a sensational version of of Bob Woodward meeting Deep Throat — only in broad daylight,” he wrote. 

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America’s Open Wound. The CIA Is Not Your Friend

“Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.” ― Baruch Spinoza

It hasn’t been a month since President Biden mounted the steps of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, declaring it his duty to ensure each of us understands the central faction of his political opposition are extremists that “threaten the very foundations of our Republic.” Flanked by the uniformed icons of his military and standing atop a Leni Riefenstahl stage, the leader clenched his fists to illustrate seizing the future from the forces of “fear, division, and darkness.” The words falling from the teleprompter ran rich with the language of violence, a “dagger at the throat” emerging from the “shadow of lies.”

“What’s happening in our country,” the President said, “is not normal.”

Is he wrong to think that? The question the speech intended to raise—the one lost in the unintentionally villainous pageantry—is whether and how we are to continue as a democracy and a nation of laws. For all the Twitter arguments over Biden’s propositions, there has been little consideration of his premises.

Democracy and the rule of law have been so frequently invoked as a part of the American political brand that we simply take it for granted that we enjoy both.

Are we right to think that?

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Exposed: Covert Pro-Western Info Op

A covert online propaganda operation said to be the world’s largest promoting “pro-Western narratives” has been found to be operating primarily out of the United States, targeting Russia, China and Iran.

“We believe this activity represents the most extensive case of covert pro-Western IO [Information Operation] on social media to be reviewed and analysed by open-source researchers to date,” say the researchers from Stanford University and internet research firm, Graphika.

The researchers found most of the Information Operation “likely originated in the United States.” From there it ran a massive, interconnected web of automated “bot” accounts on Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms.

The covert operation to influence online audiences has been using “deceptive tactics to promote pro-Western narratives,” while “opposing countries including Russia, China and Iran.”

“The accounts heavily criticized Russia in particular for the deaths of innocent civilians and other atrocities its soldiers committed in pursuit of the Kremlin’s ‘imperial ambitions’ following its invasion of Ukraine in February this year,” the report says.

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Former CIA Station Chief: Intelligence Agencies Cannot ‘Be Reformed’ Unless POTUS Can ‘Fire Every Federal Employee’

Former CIA officer and station chief Scott Uehlinger told Breitbart News on Thursday that intelligence agencies cannot be cleansed of political and partisan corruption unless the president has the unitary power over the federal government’s personnel decisions.

Uehlinger discussed left-wing and partisan politicization of federal intelligence agencies on Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with special guest host and retired Navy SEAL and FBI agent Jonathan Gilliam.

“It’s a real cause of concern, not just among regular folks, but [among] people who served in these agencies,” he stated. He emphasized the ubiquity of such political orientations among intelligence agency employees.

He remarked, “The infection in these organizations is not just the political appointees. It’s basically everyone from mid-grade-level and up, if not lower because they’re all the recipients of a super-liberal education.”

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HOW ONE SPOOK-RUN LONDON COLLEGE DEPARTMENT IS TRAINING THE WORLD’S SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGERS

Staffed by NATO military officers and former government ministers and notorious for training the West’s top spies, the Department of War Studies at King’s College London is also providing the workforce for many of the largest social media companies. This includes Facebook, TikTok, Google, and Twitter.

A MintPress study of professional databases and employment websites reveals a wide network of War Studies alumni holding many of the most influential jobs in media, constituting a silent army of individuals who influence what the world sees (and does not see) in its social media feeds.

Set in an imposing building near the banks of the River Thames in Central London, the Department of War Studies is at the heart of the British establishment. Current staff includes the former Secretary General of NATO, former U.K. Minister of Defense, and a host of military officers from NATO and NATO-aligned countries.

It is also a favored training ground for the secret services. A 2009 report published by the CIA described how beneficial it is to “use universities as a means of intelligence training,” writing that “exposure to an academic environment, such as the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, can add several elements that may be harder to provide within the government system,” also mentioning that the department’s faculty have “extensive and well-rounded intelligence experience.”

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