Tag: intelligence community

RUSSIA MOCKS U.S. FALSE FLAG VIDEO ACCUSATION AS “DELUSIONAL”

Russia has responded to the United States’ elaborate and bizarre accusations that it will produce a propaganda false flag video to use a pretext to invade Ukraine, calling the US narrative “delusional” and “nonsense”. “The delusional nature of such fabrications — and there are more and more of them every day — is obvious to any more or less experienced political scientist,” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in televised remarks Friday.

“It’s not my call to guess why our Western colleagues can be surprised now,” Lavrov added. “They are surprised with or without reason, mostly for no reason, or at some reasons that they make up themselves.”

Referring to a US State Department explanation on Thursday, which was met with considerable pushback even from US mainstream reporters, Lavrov described, “I saw on the Internet some statements by the Department of State that Russia was plotting to film some fake videos of an alleged Ukrainian attack on the Donbass. The craziness of such ideas…  is obvious to any more or less experienced political scientist,” the Russian top diplomat said.

When pressed for evidence by AP journalist Matt Lee, the State Department’s Ned Price tried to shut down the line of inquiry by suggesting Lee and other skeptics “find solace in information that the Russians are putting out” – to which Lee audibly laughed, given he was the most veteran American journalist in the room.

Earlier on Thursday the Biden administration and US intelligence came out with some explosive and outlandish claims, saying Russia is planning to release a video depicting graphic scenes of a “staged false explosion with corpses, actors depicting mourners, and images of destroyed locations and military equipment,” as CNN described it. The story was featured initially in The Washington Post and New York Times – and as usual was anonymously sourced to “officials say…”.

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Graphika: The Deep State’s Beard for Controlling the Information Age

Graphika is the toast of the town. The private social-media and tech-intelligence agency that tracks down bots and exposes foreign influence operations online is constantly quoted, referenced and profiled in the nation’s most important outlets. For example, in 2020, The New York Times published a fawning profile of the company’s head of investigations, Ben Nimmo. “He Combs the Web for Russian Bots. That Makes Him a Target,” ran its headline, the article presenting him as a crusader risking his life to keep our internet safe and free. Last year, business magazine Fast Company labeled Graphika as among the 10 most innovative companies in the world.

There is no doubt that Graphika leans into this cool and dynamic corporate image. From its beginnings in 2013, the company has expanded to employ dozens of people at its trendy Manhattan office. Describing themselves as “cartographers of the internet age,” the company puts out investigation after investigation about foreign influence operations online, especially concentrating on Russian, Chinese or Iranian attempts to manipulate social media. A layperson could certainly be blinded by its science and impressed by the complex and innovative graphs and charts. Yet when it comes to similar but far larger U.S. government programs, the intelligence and analysis agency is silent.

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Lee Harvey Oswald’s Last Phone Call

The man Oswald was trying to call, John David Hurt, was someone whose name had never been mentioned in connection to the JFK assassination in any of the voluminous records — and John David Hurt was an experienced former Special Agent of U.S. Army Counter Intelligence.

As Senator Richard Schweiker had said during the Church Committee Investigations, “”We don’t know what happened, but we do know Oswald had intelligence connections. Everywhere you look with him, there are the fingerprints of intelligence.”

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The US Has As Much Moral Authority As Saudi Arabia On The Legitimacy Of Elections

“Let there be no mistake – Sunday’s regional and municipal elections in Venezuela are nothing more than a sham,” reads a recent statement authored by Republican US Senators Jim Risch and Michael McCaul. “The illegitimate Maduro regime has taken drastic measures to dismantle or control every independent institution in the country, including hijacking political parties and the National Electoral Council to ensure state-sponsored electoral fraud.”

“Today’s elections in Venezuela are as illegitimate as Maduro’s tyrannical regime,” reads a tweet by Republican Senator Rick Scott. “The Venezuelan people deserve free and democratic elections NOW. The U.S. and all freedom-loving nations must stand up, condemn these sham elections and support the people in their fight for freedom.”

The imperial media are lining up behind the official US government line on Venezuela’s gubernatorial and mayoral elections, with The New York Times assuring us that conditions “are far from freely democratic” and The Washington Post reporting that opposition parties “say the elections have been stacked against them by the socialist government of President Nicolás Maduro,” who sees the elections as “a chance to reassert strength while projecting a veneer of legitimacy.”

This level of intrusiveness into Venezuela’s heavily internationally monitored democratic process is typical of what we’ve been seeing from the US political/media class with regard to electoral contests in empire-targeted Latin American nations like Bolivia and Nicaragua. Which is really silly, because the US has no more moral authority over the legitimacy of democratic processes than a totalitarian monarchy like Saudi Arabia.

US elections are of course corrupt and fraudulent, entirely dominated at the federal level by legalized oligarchic bribery in the form of campaign contributions, manipulated primaries, gerrymandering, voter suppression, shutting out third parties, and the worst voting system in the western world.

More than this, though, the United States is also the world’s single most egregious offender when it comes to interfering in foreign elections. As Claire Bernish has observed in The Free Thought Project, the US government’s own data shows that it interfered in no fewer than 81 foreign elections just between the years 1946 and 2000. You’d never know it from the shrieking of the political/media class post-2016, but this would also include brazenly interfering in Russia’s elections in the nineties to ensure the presidency of Washington lackey Boris Yeltsin.

And that’s just election interferences. It doesn’t include more brazen interferences in who governs foreign nations like direct military invasions, staged coups, color revolutions and proxy wars.

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‘Cloak and dagger’ military-intelligence outfit at center of US digital vaccine passport push

Described as “the most important organization you’ve never heard of,” MITRE rakes in massive security state contracts to pioneer invasive spy tech. Now it’s at the heart of a campaign to implement digital vaccine passports.

While vaccine passports have been marketed as a boon to public health, promising safety, privacy, and convenience for those who have been vaccinated against Covid-19, the pivotal role a shadowy military-intelligence organization is playing in the push to implement the system in digital form has raised serious civil liberties concerns.

Known as MITRE, the organization is a non-profit corporation led almost entirely by military-intelligence professionals and sustained by sizable contracts with the Department of Defense, FBI, and national security sector.

The effort “to expand QR code vaccine passports beyond states like California and New York” now revolves around a public-private partnership known as the Vaccine Credential Initiative (VCI). And the VCI has reserved an instrumental role in its coalition for MITRE.

Described by Forbes as a “cloak and dagger [research and development] shop” that is “the most important organization you’ve never heard of,” MITRE has developed some of the most invasive surveillance technology in use by US spy agencies today. Among its most novel products is a system built for the FBI which captures individuals’ fingerprints from images posted on social media sites.

MITRE’s own COVID-19 umbrella coalition includes In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Palantir, a scandal-stained private spying firm.

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The “17 Intelligence Community Agencies” Canard on Russian Interference

CANARD–a false or unfounded report or story; especially :  a fabricated report. That’s how Merriam Dictionary defines the term and it certainly seems to be a dandy word to describe the claim that Russia interfered in the 2016 Presidential election and that the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies agree.

As John Durham’s investigation of the origins of Russia gate continues to chug along, I thought it would be helpful to revisit the huge canard–i.e., that Russia tried to tip the 2016 election to Trump.

I nominate Hillary Clinton as The Queen of the Canard. We now know, thanks to John Durham’s indictment of Hillary’s lawyer, Michael Sussmann, that Hillary and her campaign adopted and implemented a political smear in the summer of 2016 to portray Donald Trump as a proxy of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. This lie did not stop with the election of Trump in November 2016. In May 2017, during an interview by Walt Mossberg at the CODE conference, Hillary still was eager to feed the lie that Russia ensured Donald Trump’s victory and  cited “17” U.S. intelligence agencies as her evidence:

Hillary: Now, the question is, where and how did the Russians get into this? And I think it’s a very important question. So, I assume that a lot of people here may have — and if you haven’t, I hope you will — read the declassified report by the Intelligence community that came out in early January.

TRENDING: EXCLUSIVE: Coomer Deposition Released! Verifies Antifa Facebook Posts, Extreme Left Bias

Mossberg: This is 17 agencies …

Hillary: Seventeen agencies, all in agreement, which I know from my experience as a Senator and Secretary of State, is hard to get. They concluded with high confidence that the Russians ran an extensive information war campaign against my campaign, to influence voters in the election. They did it through paid advertising we think, they did it through false news sites, they did it through these thousand agents, they did it through machine learning, which you know, kept spewing out this stuff over and over again. The algorithms that they developed. So that was the conclusion. And I think it’s fair to ask, how did that actually influence the campaign? And how did they know what messages to deliver?

Hillary was knowingly liying, but she could feign fconfusion about this supposed fact given by pointing to the joint statement issued 7 October 2016 by the Director of National Intelligence and the Director of Homeland Security:

The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.

But this was a lie. It was not a legitimate judgement of the U.S. intelligence community and did not reflect the views of 17 separate U.S. intelligence agencies. Why?

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(READ: UNCLASSIFIED summary) Intel assessment on Covid-19 origins

As widely expected, the Intelligence Community (IC) assessment of Covid-19 origins fails to conclusively answer much of anything.

On some points in the assessment, such as whether Covid-19 was genetically engineered, there is broad disagreement with scientists who say the evidence shows man’s intervention.

The assessment also gives China the benefit of the doubt, guessing that Covid-19 was not developed by the Communist Chinese as part of a weapons program and that the Communist Chinese had no advance knowledge of the disaster.

Sources say that early in the pandemic, government scientists who examined the genetics of the virus concluded Covid-19 was genetically engineered, but they were not authorized to announce those findings.

Meantime, questions about whether it originated in the Wuhan, China biolab; whose scientists had received funding and partnered with Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and other components of the National Institutes of Health (NIH); were falsely termed “debunked conspiracy theories” and censored on social media and on the Internet. When President Trump raised the possibility, the media falsely claimed the idea had been debunked.

A World Health Organization (WHO) team sent to investigate in China included a controversial scientist with a conflict of interest. Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance was also part of the U.S.-Chinese partnerships on coronavirus research and “gain-of-function” studies funded by U.S. tax money and approved by Fauci.

The WHO team initially concluded the virus did not come from the Wuhan lab. But amid growing controversy, WHO officials and others expressed the need to look further.

As more scientists spoke out to validate the “lab origin” belief, it was widely acknowledged that it had been a mistake to say the idea was disproven or debunked.

After Joe Biden took office, he asked for an assessment from the Intelligence Community, which has been known for markedly wrong intelligence assessments on important issues in recent years.

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