Hackers Break Into the ‘Israeli’ Entity’s Electricity Network

 June 16, 2022

By Staff, Agencies

A hacker group identifying itself as the “Moses Staff” said it has broken into the ‘Israeli’ entity’s electricity network, vowing to plunge the regime into darkness.

The group said on Wednesday it had targeted the ‘Israel’ Electric Corporation, the largest supplier of electrical power in the occupied territories, as well as Dorad Energy Ltd., which serves customers throughout the territories, and technical solutions provider, Reali Technologies ltd.

“This is just the beginning; From now on, you will suffer irreparable damage,” the group said in a message.

“We will punish you. The goal is clear, definite, and precise. This is only a small part of our access to your power grid,” it added. “You will soon be in the dark,” the group concluded.

Earlier this year, the group struck ‘Israeli’ closed-circuit television cameras in the occupied Palestinian territories and Rafael Advanced ‘Defense’ Systems, an ‘Israeli’ “military technology” company. Back then, it posted a message regarding the cyberattack on its website, titled “We see with your eyes.”

Last November, Moses Staff said it had successfully conducted a massive cyberattack against the occupying regime, breaking into the servers of major companies, and adding that it was now in possession of comprehensive data that could be leaked.

According to Moses Staff’s website, the group has so far hacked scores of servers and hundreds of websites and compiled dozens terabytes of data.

In December 2020, ‘Israeli’ Haaretz newspaper claimed that a group of elite hackers that it introduced as Iranians had advanced as far as former Zionist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office and the regime’s major aerospace company.

The daily said the group that had emerged no earlier than in November that year, had attacked scores of Zionist targets, including at least 80 companies.

“Israel”: Iranian Hackers Broke into Email Accounts of Senior Figures

June 15, 2022

By Staff, Agencies 

The “Israeli” cybersecurity company Check Point Software Technologies announced on Tuesday that Iranian hackers have taken control of the email accounts of senior Zionist figures and impersonated them.

This “spear-fishing” – an individualized email spoofing attack designed to steal sensitive private information and credentials, or to steal money from them – has been going on since at least December 2021, though most probably for longer. The hacked figures include former “Israeli” foreign minister Tzipi Livni, as well as a former major general who served in a highly sensitive position in the “Israeli” military, a senior executive in the military industry, and the chairman of one of “Israel’s” leading security think tanks.

Check Point claimed that a group of Iranian hackers known as the Phosphorus APT group, which is also known by a number of other aliases, including ATP35, Charming Kitten and the Ajax Security Team are behind the attack.

The hackers broke into the email accounts of the targets, sent messages from them to other senior officials asking them to click on links in the message in order to hack into more accounts, said Check Point. One of the messages was sent to Livni from the account of a general in the reserves, who she had corresponded with in the past.

الكيان طبل أجوف ولا حرب «إسرائيليّة» في الأفق

الإثنين 13 حزيران 2022

 محمد صادق الحسينيّ

يكثر الحديث في الصالونات السياسية والأروقة العلنية والمغلقة عن احتمالات اندلاع حرب إقليمية كبرى قد يفجّرها الكيان للهروب من عجزه الاستراتيجي وانهياراته وتضعضع جبهته الداخلية…

والأدلة التي تساق لاستخلاص هذه النتيجة تستند الى تزايد الاعتداءات «الإسرائيلية» على سورية وآخرها مطار دمشق وعمليّات الإيذاء والاغتيالات المتعددة التي قام بها العدو مؤخراً لعسكريين وأمنيين إيرانيين، والحرب السيبرانية المفتوحة بين تل ابيب وطهران على كلّ المستويات…

اسمحوا لنا أن نختلف مع كلّ هذه التحليلات وتقديرات الموقف التي أخذت ترفع الصوت عالياً بالقول إنّ المنطقة باتت على صفيح ساخن أو أنّ طبول الحرب تسمع في كلّ مكان، لنقول إنّ الحرب لم يحِن وقتها وانّ الإشارة بإشعالها لم تأتِ بعد من واشنطن صانعة الحروب في العالم والتي لا حرب ممكنة الوقوع عندنا إلا بطبخها في البنتاغون أولاً واليكم الأدلة والقرائن والبراهين:

أ ـ إنّ التحدي الأكبر والأول الذي تعيشه أميركا الآن هو تحدّ داخلي يتألّف من شقين

أولاً: تزايد الخطر الأمني الذي يمثله ترامب وجناحه العنفي الذي يُحضّر لغزوة «كاپيتول ٢» والتي تقول التقارير إنها ستكون أعنف هذه المرة من الأولى.

ثانياً: معركة الأمن الجماعيّ السكانيّ الذي تعيشه أميركا والتي كلفت مواطنيها حتى الآن أكثر من ١٩ ألف قتيل خلال الأشهر الخمسة الماضية فقط والتي يقدّر الخبراء أنها ستصل الى نحو ٥٠ ألفاً حتى نهاية العام…وهو رقم يزيد على خسائرها في الحرب العالمية الأولى!

وهذه حرب أهلية بكلّ معنى الكلمة.

ثالثا ـ التحدي الثاني الذي تعيشه أميركا هو سعيها المحموم لإعادة الهيمنة الكلية المتآكلة لها على العالم والتي مثل صعود الصين الصاروخيّ دولياً التهديد الأكبر وجاءت روسيا من خلال عملية أوكرانيا لتشكل القشة التي قصمت ظهر البعير الأميركيّ فجعلته ليس فقط لا يستطيع ان يحرك ساكناً حتى في حدود دعم انفصال تايوان خوفاً من السحق الصيني الذي سمع به من وزير دفاع بكين، فما بالك عالمياً حتى بات عاجزاً عن الاحتفاظ بحليفه الأوروبيّ التاريخيّ الذي يتهدّده التشتت والضياع واحتياجه لتحشيد ٣٠ ألف جندي ورجل أمن إسباني ووصول كبار جنرالات البنتاغون منذ الآن بهدف منع فشل قمة الأطلسي في ٢١ الشهر الحالي في مدريد، والتي تهدف الى فرض أجواء العسكرة الكاملة على أوروبا المترنحة خوفاً من تداعيات حرب الطاقة مع روسيا التي لا تزال في أولها!

ولما كان من البديهي بأنّ ما من حرب تشنّها تل أبيب على العرب إلا ويكون قد تمّ التخطيط لها في البنتاغون.

فحرب ٨٢ خطط لها الجنرال هيغ في حكومة ريغان

وحرب الـ ٢٠٠٦ خطّط لها البنتاغون في حكومة جورج بوش الابن.

فهل جاءت الإشارة من الجنرال اوستين في حكومة بايدن لشنّ الحرب على لبنان او إيران!؟

لا إشارات تشي بذلك حتى الآن، بل ثمة إشارات معاكسة!

بايدن الغارق من قمة رأسه الى أخمص قدميه بالحرب الأهلية الأميركية وبالصين وروسيا والذي يعرف تماماً عجز بينيت (الآيلة حكومته الى السقوط) ومثله نتن ياهو (الذي يحلم باستعادة السلطة منه) عن مجرد خوض حرب على مستوى غزة، فما بالك بحرب إقليمية، مرجّحة جداً لو اشتعلت ان تصبح عالمية تطيح بما تبقى من هيمنة أو هيبة عالمية أميركية!

لهذه الأسباب مجتمعة جاء مشروع إدارة بايدن الذي يُحضر له منذ مدة وهو تشكيل قوة دفاع جوي أميركية ـ إسرائيلية ـ خليجية مشتركة يُراد لها ان تشرك كلاً من مصر والأردن والعراق لتكون هي مَن يتصدّى لما يسمّونه بالنفوذ الإيراني الجامح!

ايّ «يا كيانات الخدم الأميركية بمن فيكم قاعدتنا الصهيونية المتقدّمة دبّروا حالكم بحالكم»!

نحن لسنا في وضع يسمح لنا بشن حروب من أجلكم.

ولكن لماذا يصرّ «الإسرائيلي» على التصعيد اذن، وعلى ماذا يراهن؟

الأبله بينيت وأيضاً مثله نتن ياهو ولأنهما يعيشان أزمة وجودية الكيان وانعدام ثقة سكان الجبهة الداخلية بالدويلة لم يبقَ أمامهم إلا الهروب الى الأمام على «طريقة عليّ وعلى أعدائي»، خاصة أنهما مقبلان على سقوط حكومي والعودة الى الانتخابات الخامسة في أقلّ من سنتين، وبالتالي فهما يخوضان حروبهما الانتخابية مرة بالاعتداءات على محور المقاومة ويومياً بالدم الفلسطيني، لعلهم بذلك يخرجون من مأزقهم، ولكن هيهات لهم ذلك…

الأميركي لن يغامر في هذه اللحظة لا لأجلهم ولا لأجل خدمه الآخرين. ومَن سيخرجهم من أزمتهم بل من الوجود كله هو نحن…

نعم نحن وفي اللحظة المناسبة ساعة نحن نشاء وساعة نراها ناضجة…

هل يعني هذا انّ قوى المحور ستظلّ من الآن الى حين نضوجها متفرّجة ولن تعمل شيئاً؟

أبداً ليس كذلك… ستكون هناك ردود من حيث لا يحتسبون وفي أماكن حساسة لا يتوقعون، وبضربات إيذائية تجعلهم يندمون…

ولكن كلّ ذلك في إطار المعارك بين الحروب الى حين تحين ساعة المنازلة الكبرى، التي لم تظهر حالياً إشاراتها على شاشات المحور بعد…

هذا الأمر قد يتغيّر، ولكن من واشنطن، وليس من تل أبيب، لأنّ تل أبيب دكانة أميركيّة لا أكثر وكلب أميركي مسعور يحرّكه سيده ساعة يشاء…!

لكلّ نبأ مستقرّ.

بعدنا طيّبين قولوا الله…

فيديوات متعلقة

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• أمير عبد اللهيان يتّصل بالمقداد: «معاً ضدّ اعتداءات إسرائيل»
• عدوان إسرائيلي على دمشق
• حماس: “إسرائيل” تعتدي على سوريا لأنها لم تستطع تطويعها للحاق بركب التطبيع
• تهاون روسي بمصالح دمشق
• السلطات السورية تعلّق الرحلات عبر مطار دمشق
• دمشق تستبق سيناريو التوتير: عملية خاطفة في السويداء

Pegasus is Just the Tip of the Israeli Cyber Spying Iceberg, with Whitney Webb

July 23rd, 2021

By Mnar Adley

Source

Investigative journalist Whitney Webb joins MIntCast to discuss Pegasus, Toka, and the global Israeli cyberspying network.

Edward Snowden has called it “the story of the year.” An Israeli spying company has been caught selling software to authoritarian regimes that have used it to surveil more than 50,000 people worldwide.

That company is NSO, founded in 2010 by former members of Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s notorious intelligence squad. Their product is called Pegasus, and it was sold to military, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies in 40 countries, among them some of the world’s worst human rights abusing governments.

On this “MintCast,” investigative journalist Whitney Webb joins Mnar Adley today to discuss Pegasus, Toka, and the global Israeli cyberspying network. Whitney Webb is a writer and researcher for the outlets Unlimited Hangout and The Last American Vagabond. She principally covers intelligence, technology, surveillance, and civil liberties. Between 2017 and 2020, she was also a senior investigative reporter for MintPress. Her latest article, “Meet Toka, the Most Dangerous Israeli Spyware Firm You’ve Never Heard Of,” was published by MintPress earlier this week.

Pegasus is able to attack the cellphones of targeted individuals without them realizing it, monitoring and recording their calls, texts and accessing other information stored on their devices. Dozens of human rights activists, nearly 200 journalists, several Arab royals, and more than 600 politicians are known to have had their communications spied on and compromised. Among those include French President Emmanuel Macron, Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan and president of Iraq, Barham Salih.

Close associates of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi were also attacked and compromised just before his murder by Saudi operatives in 2018, strongly indicating that the information gleaned through Pegasus was crucial in this endeavor. NSO vehemently denied that their product was used in his assassination. Yet it also put out a statement insisting that it had no access to what its clients did with the software — two seemingly contradictory assertions.

The Pegasus story has made major waves in India, too, where it was revealed Prime Minister Narendra Modi had used it to spy on his political opponents in the run-up to the 2019 elections. The Indian Congress Party has accused the prime minister of committing treason. Also disclosed was that the government hacked the phone of a woman who accused the Chief Justice of India of raping her, a revelation undermining the entire justice system and the concept of a fair trial.

Yet a new MintPress News investigation asserts that Pegasus is merely the tip of the Israeli cyber spying iceberg and that another piece of software, Toka, is far more dangerous and outrageous. Toka markets itself as “a one-stop hacking shop for governments that require extra capability to fight terrorists and other threats to national security in the digital domain.” The company’s software is designed to infiltrate any device connected to the internet, not just smartphones.

Toka is a product of the Israeli national security state, having been co-founded by former prime minister, Ehud Barak, and was also designed by members of Unit 8200, leading Webb to suggest that it is a front for the Israeli government.

The Evil Cooperation: ’Israel,’ UAE Share Intel on Hezbollah’s Cyber Capabilities

By Staff, Haaretz

As part of the growing cooperation between the “Israeli” apartheid entity and the United Arab Emirates to face any type of Resistance, the two allies have shared intelligence and information related to Hezbollah’s cyber activities.

In an interview with Haaretz, the Gulf state’s head of cybersecurity Mohamed al-Kuwaiti said: “There’s good information-sharing between us – for example, the last attack that happened with Hezbollah, referring to a cyberattack by the so-called ‘Lebanese Cedar’ group in January.

According to Kuwaiti, the UAE was targeted as well. “In the case of Lebanese Cedar, it was first found by the private sector. And then through our cooperation, its findings were circulated and we searched and found some indications that this happened here, too. There’s more sharing on the side of the ‘Israeli’ partner, which allows us to share more on these aspects as well.”

In what Kuwaiti described as a sign of the close ties with “Israel”, Dubai is currently hosting a leading “Israeli” cyber conference – the first time it has been held outside the entity.

Though both the Emirati and “Israeli” officials refused to confirm that sensitive military intelligence was being shared on Iran, Kuwaiti stressed that “it doesn’t matter who’s attacking us. What we all need is to share information on defense mechanisms, the tactics, techniques and procedures used by attackers, patterns of attack and even the unique signatures that allow attribution.”

He further admitted that “there’s an increased threat because of the upgraded relationship with ‘Israel’.

There are those who don’t want to see this happen. However, this also created a lot of added-value for us,” he said.

“There are those who would love to bother us, or try to target us, to downgrade the relationship – and many of the incidents reflect this,” Kuwaiti added, explaining how the attacks targeted not just infrastructure but also more public online spaces. These include websites that suffered defacement attacks to alter existing content.

Sino-US Dialogue in Alaska: Outcomes.

March 23, 2021

by Zamir Awan for the Saker Blog

The first direct, high-level dialogue, under Joe Biden Administration, was held on 18-189 March 2021 in Anchorage, Alaska, USA. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Chinese Director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi, and Foreign Minister Wang Yi attended the dialogue.

After welcoming the Chinese guests, Secretary of state Mr. Blinken accused China of many issues, including Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyberattacks on the United States, and economic coercion toward our allies. Each of these actions threatens the rules-based order that maintains global stability.

Director Yang responded that “What China and the international community follow or uphold is the United Nations-centered international system and the international order underpinned by international law, not what is advocated by a small number of countries of the so-called rules-based international order. And the United States has its style — United States-style democracy –and China has the Chinese-style democracy. It is not just up to the American people, but also the people of the World, to evaluate how the United States has advanced its own democracy. After decades of reform and opening up in China’s case, we have come a long way in various fields. In particular, we have engaged in tireless efforts to contribute to the peace and development of the World and to upholding the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter.”

“The wars in this World are launched by some other countries, which have resulted in massive casualties. But for China, what we have asked for, for other countries, is to follow a path of peaceful development, which is the purpose of our foreign policy. We do not believe in invading through the use of force, in toppling other regimes through various means, or massacring other countries’ people because all of those would only cause turmoil and instability in this World. And at the end of the day, all of those would not serve the United States well. So we believe that it is important for the United States to change its own image and stop advancing its own democracy in the rest of the World. Many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States, and they have various views regarding the government of the United States. In China, according to opinion polls, China’s leaders have the wide support of the Chinese people. So no attempt to — the opinion polls conducted in the United States show that China’s leaders have the support of the Chinese people. No attempt to smear China’s social system would get anywhere. Facts have shown that such practices would only lead the Chinese people to rally more closely around the Communist Party of China and work steadily towards the goals that we have set for ourselves.”

“Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan are an inalienable part of China’s territory. China is firmly opposed to U.S. interference in China’s internal affairs. We have expressed our staunch opposition to such interference, and we will take firm actions in response. On human rights, we hope that the United States will do better on human rights. China has made steady progress in human rights, and the fact is that there are many problems within the United States regarding human rights, which is admitted by the U.S. itself as well. The United States has also said that countries can’t rely on force in today’s World to resolve the challenges we face. And it is a failure to use various means to topple the so-called authoritarian states. And the challenges facing the United States in human rights are deep-seated. They did not just emerge over the past four years, such as Black Lives Matter. It did not come up only recently. So we do hope that for our two countries, it’s important that we manage our respective affairs well instead of deflecting the blame on somebody else in this World. We’ve had a confrontation in the past, and the result did not serve the United States well. China will pull through and has pulled through such confrontation.”

Outcomes:

China availing this opportunity has conveyed that China will not accept U.S. supremacy and will not accept dictation. China will not allow any country to interfere in its domestic issues. Generally speaking, the Chinese are well-mannered, polite, submissive, and friendly people. It seems that the U.S. has crossed all the limits where China have to take a firm and blunt stand and express their point of view so clearly. It is up to the U.S. administration to analyze the Chinese response and do their homework before meeting them again.

The World has conceived well that the U.S. can not sustain its hegemony anymore. It is no longer a unipolar world, and the U.S. is no longer a unique superpower. The U.S. needs to understand the emerging geopolitics and have to accept realities. It might need to share power with other rising nations and respect them. The U.S. must keep in mind the existence of other emerging nations’ potential while making any decision.

It is an established fact that the U.S., after enjoying the global leadership role for seven decades, may not sustain this status anymore. The U.S. is on the decline and, with every passing day, may decline further. Whereas China is a rising power and, with the passage of each day, may grow further. The time is on the Chinese side. If Americans are wise, they might give up confronting China and extend cooperation to be the beneficiary of Chinse rise. There exists enormous goodwill about America among the general public in China.

The American claim of promoting democracy and the law-based rule is no more trusted as the Americans are a supporter of all dictators in the oil-rich Gulf countries in the Middle-East. The U.S. was behind the toppling of the democratically elected legitimate Government of Mr. Adil Morsey in Egypt. Again, it was the U.S. who was among the first nations to support the dictator General Sissi in Egypt. American history is full of supporting dictators around the globe. Regarding law-based rule, it is just a joke. It was the U.S. that destroyed Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, etc.

Under the Trump Administration, America was deteriorated in respect of human rights violations, hate among various ethnicities in America. And official discriminatory laws were introduced against Muslims; immigration laws were biased. The pandemic was mismanaged, the economy was collapsed. President Trump harmed America so severely that it might take several decades to recover such losses. President Trump has offended some of his close allies too.

President Joe Biden’s remarks about President Putin were misconceived and may spoil the geopolitics further. More tensions between Russia and the U.S. are predictable visibly. It may cement China-Russia relations further.

Author: Prof. Engr. Zamir Ahmed Awan, Sinologist (ex-Diplomat), Editor, Analyst, Non-Resident Fellow of CCG (Center for China and Globalization), National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan. (E-mail: awanzamir@yahoo.com).

Kim No-VAX does DARPA

December 20, 2020

A Back to the Future exercise: time-traveling to survey the sci-tech scene in the mid-1980s

by Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted at Asia Times

HAL9000_I’m_Sorry_Dave, Motivational Poster. Wikimedia Commons

I have been going through my Asia Times archives selecting reports and columns for a new e-book on the Forever Wars – Afghanistan and Iraq. But then, out of the blue, I found this palimpsest, originally published by Asia Times in February 2014. It happened to be a Back to the Future exercise – traveling in time to survey the scene in the mid-1980s across Silicon Valley, MIT’s AI lab, DARPA and the NSA, weaving an intersection of themes, and a fabulous cast of characters, which prefigure the Brave New Techno World we’re now immersed in, especially concerning the role of artificial intelligence. So this might be read today as a sort of preamble, or a background companion piece, to No Escape from our Techno-Feudal World, published early this month. Incidentally, everything that takes place in this account was happening 18 years before the end of the Pentagon’s LifeLog project, run by DARPA, and the simultaneous launch of Facebook. Enjoy the time travel.

In the spring of 1986, Back to the Future, the Michael J Fox blockbuster featuring a time-traveling DeLorean car, was less than a year old. The Apple Macintosh, launched via a single, iconic ad directed by Ridley (Blade Runner) Scott, was less than two years old. Ronald Reagan, immortalized by Gore Vidal as “the acting president,” was hailing the mujahideen in Afghanistan as “freedom fighters.”

The world was mired in Cyber Cold War mode; the talk was all about electronic counter-measures, with American C3s (command, control, communications) programmed to destroy Soviet C3s, and both the US and the USSR under MAD (mutually assured destruction) nuclear policies being able to destroy the earth 100 times over. Edward Snowden was not yet a three-year-old.

It was in this context that I set out to do a special report for a now-defunct magazine about artificial intelligence (AI), roving from the Computer Museum in Boston to Apple in Cupertino and Pixar in San Rafael, and then to the campuses of Stanford, Berkeley and MIT.

AI had been “inaugurated” in 1956 by Stanford’s John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, a future MIT professor who at the time had been a student at Harvard. The basic idea, according to Minsky, was that any intelligence trait could be described so precisely that a machine could be created to simulate it.

My trip inevitably involved meeting a fabulous cast of characters. At MIT’s AI lab, there was Minsky and also an inveterate iconoclast, Joseph Weizenbaum, who had coined the term “artificial intelligentsia” and believed computers could never “think” just like a human being.

Joseph Weizenbaum. Source: Chatbots

At Stanford, there was Edward Feigenbaum, absolutely paranoid about Japanese scientific progress; he believed that if the Japanese developed a fifth-generation computer, based on artificial intelligence, that could think, reason and speak even such a difficult language as Japanese “the US will be able to bill itself as the first great post-industrial agrarian society.”

And at Berkeley, still under the flame of hippie utopian populism, I found Robert Wilensky – Brooklyn accent, Yale gloss, California overtones; and philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, a tireless enemy of AI who got his kicks delivering lectures such as “Conventional AI as a Paradigm of Degenerated Research.”

Meet Kim No-VAX

Soon I was deep into Minsky’s “frames” – a basic concept to organize every subsequent AI program – and the Chomsky paradigm: the notion that language is at the root of knowledge, and that formal syntax is at the root of language. That was the Bible of cognitive science at MIT.

Marvin Minsky at MIT Lab. Photo: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

At the MIT cafeteria, Minsky delivered a futurist rap without in the least resembling Dr Emmett Brown in Back to the Future:

I believe that in less than five centuries we will be producing machines very similar to us, representing our thoughts and point of view. If we can build a miniaturized human brain weighing, let’s say, one gram, we can lodge it in a spaceship and make it travel at the speed of light. It would be very hard to build a spaceship to carry an astronaut and all his food for 10,000 years of travel …

With Professor Feigenbaum, in Stanford’s philosophical garden, the only space available was for the coming yellow apocalypse. But then one day I crossed Berkeley’s post-hippie Rubicon and opened the door of the fourth floor of Evans Hall, where I met none other than Kim No-VAX.

No, that was not the Hitchcock blonde and Vertigo icon; it was an altered hardware computer (No-VAX because it had moved beyond Digital Equpment Corporation’s VAX line of supercomputers), financed by the mellifluously acronymed Pentagon military agency DARPA, decorated with a photo of Kim Novak and humming with the sexy vibration of – at the time immense – 2,900 megabytes of electronic data spread over its body.

The US government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – or DARPA – was all about computer science. In the mid-1980s, DARPA was immersed in a very ambitious program linking microelectronics, computer architecture and AI way beyond a mere military program. That was comparable to the Japanese fifth generation computer program. At MIT, the overwhelming majority of scientists were huge DARPA cheerleaders, stressing how the agency was leading research. Yet Terry Winograd, a computer science professor at Stanford, warned that had DARPA been a civilian agency, “I believe we would have made much more progress”.

It was up to Professor Dreyfus to provide the voice of reason amidst so much cyber-euphoria: “Computers cannot think like human beings because there’s no way to represent all retrospective knowledge of an average human life – that is, ‘common sense’ – in a form that a computer may apprehend.” Dreyfus’s drift was that with the boom of computer science, philosophy was dead – and he was a philosopher: “Heidegger said that philosophy ended because it reached its apex in technology. Philosophy in fact reached its limit with AI. They, the scientists, inherited our questions. What is the mind? Now they have to answer for it. Philosophy is over.”

Hubert Dreyfus. Source: Berkeley Campus News

Yet Dreyfus was still teaching. Likewise at MIT, Weizenbaum was condemning AI as a racket for “lunatics and psychopaths” – but still continued to work at the AI lab.

NSA’s wet web dream

In no time, helped by these brilliant minds, I figured out that the AI “secret” would be a military affair, and that meant the National Security Agency – already in the mid-1980s vaguely known as “no such agency,” with double the CIA’s annual budget to pay for snooping on the whole planet. The mission back then was to penetrate and monitor the global electronic net – that was years before all the hype over the “information highway” – and at the same time reassure the Pentagon over the inviolability of its lines of communication. For those comrades – remember, the Cold War, even with Gorbachev in power in the USSR, was still on – AI was a gift from God (beating Pope Francis by almost three decades).

So what was the Pentagon/NSA up to, at the height of the star wars hype, and over a decade and a half before the revolution in military affairs and the full spectrum dominance doctrine?

They already wanted to control their ships and planes and heavy weapons with their voices, not their hands; voice command a la Hal, the star computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Still, that was a faraway dream. Minsky believed that “only in the next century” would we be able to talk to a computer. Others believed that would never happen. Anyway, IBM was already working on a system accepting dictation; and MIT on another system that identified words spoken by different people; while Intel was developing a special chip for all this.

Although, predictably, prevented from visiting the NSA, I soon learned that the Pentagon was expecting to possess “intelligent” computing systems by the 1990s; Hollywood, after all, already had unleashed the Terminator series. It was up to Professor Wilensky, in Berkeley, to sound the alarm bells:

Human beings don’t have the appropriate engineering for the society they developed. Over a million years of evolution, the instinct of getting together in small communities, belligerent and compact, turned out to be correct. But then, in the 20th century, man ceased to adapt. Technology overtook evolution. The brain of an ancestral creature, like a rat, which sees provocation in the face of every stranger, is the brain that now controls the earth’s destiny.

It was as if Wilensky was describing the NSA as it would be 28 years later. Some questions still remain unanswered; for instance, if our race does not fit anymore the society it built, who’d guarantee that its machines are properly engineered? Who’d guarantee that intelligent machines act in our interest?

What was already clear by then was that “intelligent” computers would not end a global arms race. And it would be a long time, up to the Snowden revelations in 2013, for most of the planet to have a clearer idea of how the NSA orchestrates the Orwellian-Panopticon complex. As for my back to the future trip, in the end I did not manage to uncover the “secret” of AI. But I’ll always remain very fond of Kim No-VAX.

Prominent Iranian physicist assassinated near Tehran

Friday, 27 November 2020 2:08 PM  [ Last Update: Friday, 27 November 2020 9:10 PM ]

A file photo of martyred Iranian physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh

Prominent Iranian physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh has been assassinated in a terrorist attack near the capital Tehran.

The Fars news agency reported that he had been targeted on Friday in a multi-pronged attack involving at least one explosion and small fire by a number of assailants in Absard city of Damavand County, Tehran Province.

The attack targeted the vehicle carrying Fakhrizadeh — who headed the Iranian Defense Ministry’s Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research (SPND), the agency said.

The Defense Ministry’s media office said Fakhrizadeh “was severely wounded in the course of clashes between his security team and terrorists, and was transferred to hospital,” where he succumbed to his injuries.

Fars said 3-4 people were killed in the shooting, all of whom were said to be terrorists.

Photos and footage shared online of the attack showed bullet holes on the windshield of Fakhrizadeh’s car and a pool of blood on the road.

The photo shows a car that was targeted in a deadly shooting attack by terrorists in Absard city, near the Iranian capital of Tehran, November 27, 2020. (By Fars news agency)

‘Serious indications of Israeli role’

In a statement, Iranian Foreign Ministry Mohammad Javad Zarif roundly condemned the terror attack, saying there were “serious indications” of the Israeli regime’s role in the assassination of Fakhrizadeh, a professor of physics at Imam Hussein University of Tehran.

“Terrorists murdered an eminent Iranian scientist today. This cowardice—with serious indications of Israeli role—shows desperate warmongering of perpetrators,” he said in a tweet.

The top Iranian diplomat called on the international community, especially the European Union, to “end their shameful double standards & condemn this act of state terror.”

‘Harsh revenge awaits criminals’

Meanwhile, Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Major General Mohammad Baqeri blamed the “savage” attack on “terrorists tied to global arrogance and the evil Zionist regime.”

The assassination, he said, did deal a blow to Iran’s defense industry, but the enemies should know that “the path opened by the likes of Martyr Fakhrizadeh will never end.”

The photo shows the site of a terror attack, which targeted an Iranian scientist, in Absard city, north of the Iranian capital, Tehran, November 27, 2020. (By Fars news agency)

Baqeri said “harsh revenge” awaits the terror groups as well as all those who had a hand in the terror attack.

The commander assured the Iranian nation that the perpetrators of the terror attack will be pursued and brought to justice.

In a similar message, Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Commander Major General Hossein Salami vowed a “harsh revenge and punishment” for those behind the act of terror.

The assassination of the Iranian scientist “was planned and run by the fake, terrorist and infanticide Zionist regime,” the chief IRGC commander added.

Iranian Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi also said in a statement that an operation had been launched to identify the terrorist elements complicit in the “brutal crime,” pledging that the Islamic Republic will avenge the martyr’s blood.

In turn, Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan, military advisor to Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, also reacted to Fakhrizadeh’s martyrdom in a tweet, vowing a crushing response to the perpetrator.

“We will come down hard on those who killed Martry Mohsen Fakhrizadeh like thunder and make them regret their deed,” he said.

“In the final days of their allied gambler’s political life, the Zionists are after intensifying pressure on Iran in order to trigger an all-out war,” said Dehqan in a reference to outgoing US President Donald Trump’s final days in office.

Fakhrizadeh’s name was mentioned multiple times in a presentation in 2018 by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during which he repeated baseless claims about the Iranian nuclear program.

Netanyahu described the scientist as the director of Iran’s nuclear program and threatened, “Remember that name, Fakhrizadeh.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands by a screen with a purported image of Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh during a news conference in Tel Aviv, Israel, April 30, 2018. (Photo by Reuters)

The Tel Aviv regime has made several attempts over the past years to throw a wrench in Tehran’s peaceful nuclear work.

The regime has been behind the assassination of several Iranian nuclear scientists. It has also conduced cyberattacks on Iranian nuclear sites.

‘The crime won’t block Iran path to scientific progress’

Iran’s Judiciary Chief Ebrahim Raeisi said the “big crime” was carried out by “traitorous elements linked to foreigners and international Zionism with the sinister goal of hindering the country’s scientific progress.”

Raeisi further praised the scientist’s role in speeding up Iran’s advancements in various scientific fields, including the nuclear industry, saying Fakhrizadeh’s martyrdom will not block the country’s path forward.

He called on the country’s security and intelligence institutions in addition to relevant judicial bodies to do their utmost to arrest and serve justice to the criminals and mercenaries involved in the crime as soon as possible.

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Social media’s erasure of Palestinians is a grim warning for our future

Jonathan Cook

26 October 2020 12:39 UTC 

Facebook, Google and Twitter are not neutral platforms. They control the digital public square to aid the powerful – and can cancel any of us overnight

Palestinian critics say Facebook has become ‘another face of occupation’ (AFP/File photo)

There is a growing unease that the decisions taken by social media corporations can have a harmful impact on our lives. These platforms, despite enjoying an effective monopoly over the virtual public square, have long avoided serious scrutiny or accountability. 

In a new Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, former Silicon Valley executives warn of a dystopian future. Google, Facebook and Twitter have gathered vast quantities of data on us to better predict and manipulate our desires. Their products are gradually rewiring our brains to addict us to our screens and make us more pliable to advertisers. The result, as we are consigned to discrete ideological echo chambers, is ever greater social and political polarisation and turmoil.

Western publics are waking up very belatedly to the undemocratic power social media wields over them

As if to underline the ever-tightening grip these tech corporations exert on our lives, Facebook and Twitter decided this month to openly interfere in the most contentious US presidential election in living memory. They censored a story that could harm the electoral prospects of Joe Biden, the Democratic challenger to incumbent President Donald Trump. 

Given that nearly half of Americans receive their news chiefly via Facebook, the ramifications of such a decision on our political life were not hard to interpret. In excising any debate about purported corruption and influence-peddling by Biden’s son, Hunter, carried out in his father’s name, these social media platforms stepped firmly into the role of authoritarian arbiter of what we are allowed to say and know. 

‘Monopoly gatekeeper’

Western publics are waking up very belatedly to the undemocratic power social media wields over them. But if we wish to understand where this ultimately leads, there is no better case study than the very different ways Israelis and Palestinians have been treated by the tech giants. 

The treatment of Palestinians online serves as a warning that it would be foolish indeed to regard these globe-spanning corporations as politically neutral platforms, and their decisions as straightforwardly commercial. This is to doubly misunderstand their role.How Facebook threatens vulnerable Muslim communities Read More »

Social media firms are now effectively monopolistic communication grids – similar to the electricity and water grids, or the phone network of a quarter of a century ago. Their decisions are therefore no longer private matters, but instead have huge social, economic and political consequences. That is part of the reason why the US justice department launched a lawsuit last week against Google for acting as a “monopoly gatekeeper for the internet”. 

Google, Facebook and Twitter have no more a right to arbitrarily decide who and what they host on their sites than telecoms companies once had a right to decide whether a customer should be allowed a phone line. But unlike the phone company, social media corporations control not just the means of communication, but the content too. They can decide, as the Hunter Biden story shows, whether their customers get to participate in vital public debates about who leads them.

The Hunter Biden decision is as if the phone company of old not only listened in to conversations, but was able to cut the line if it did not like the politics of any particular customer. 

In fact, it is even worse than that. Social media now deliver the news to large sections of the population. Their censoring of a story is more akin to the electricity company turning off the power to everyone’s homes for the duration of a TV broadcast to ensure no one can see it.

Censorship by stealth

The tech giants are the wealthiest, most powerful corporations in human history, their riches measured in hundreds of billions, and now trillions, of dollars. But the argument that they are apolitical – aiming simply to maximise profits – was never true. 

They have every reason to promote politicians who side with them by committing not to break up their monopolies or regulate their activities, or, better still, by promising to weaken controls that might prevent them from growing even more fabulously rich and powerful. 

Social media algorithms help drive decisions on content removal (AFP/File photo)

Conversely, the tech giants also have every incentive to use the digital space to penalise and marginalise political activists who urge greater regulation either of their activities, or of the marketplace more generally. 

Unlike their explicit deletion of the Hunter Biden story, which incensed the Trump administration, social media corporations more usually censor by stealth. That power is wielded through algorithms, the secret codes that decide whether something or someone appears in a search result or on a social media feed. If they desire, these tech titans can cancel any one of us overnight. 

This is not just political paranoia. The disproportionate impact of algorithm changes on “left-leaning” websites – those most critical of the neoliberal system that has enriched social media corporations – was highlighted this month by the Wall Street Journal. 

Wrong kinds of speech

Politicians increasingly understand the power of social media, which is why they want to harness it as best they can for their own ends. Since the shock of Trump’s election victory in late 2016, Facebook, Google and Twitter executives have regularly found themselves dragged before legislative oversight committees in the US and UK.

There, they are ritually rebuked by politicians for creating a crisis of “fake news” – a crisis that, in fact, long predated social media, as the deceptions of US and UK officials in linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11 and claiming that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” testify to only too clearly. 

The online fate of Palestinians points to a future in which the already-powerful will gain ever greater control over what we know and what we are allowed to think

Politicians have also begun holding internet corporations responsible for “foreign interference” in western elections – typically blamed on Russia – despite a dearth of serious evidence for most of their allegations. 

Political pressure is being exerted not to make the corporations more transparent and accountable, but to steer them towards enforcing even more assiduously restrictions on the wrong kinds of speech – whether it be violent racists on the right or critics of capitalism and western government policy on the left.

For that reason, social media’s original image as a neutral arena of information sharing, or as a tool for widening public debate and increasing civic engagement, or as a discourse leveller between the rich and powerful and weak and marginalised, grows ever more hollow.

Separate digital rights

Nowhere are ties between tech and state officials more evident than in their dealings with Israel. This has led to starkly different treatment of digital rights for Israelis and Palestinians. The online fate of Palestinians points to a future in which the already-powerful will gain ever greater control over what we know and what we are allowed to think, and over who is visible and who is erased from public life.

Israel was well-positioned to exploit social media before most other states had recognised its importance in manipulating popular attitudes and perceptions. For decades, Israel had, in part, outsourced an official programme of hasbara – or state propaganda – to its own citizens and supporters abroad. As new digital platforms emerged, these partisans were only too willing to expand their role.Facebook accused of censoring Palestinians under pretext of fighting hate speech Read More »

Israel had another advantage. After the 1967 occupation of the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza, Israel began crafting a narrative of state victimhood by redefining antisemitism to suggest it was now a particular affliction of the left, not the right. So-called “new antisemitism” did not target Jews, but related instead to criticism of Israel and support for Palestinian rights. 

This highly dubious narrative proved easy to condense into social media-friendly soundbites. 

Israel still routinely describes any Palestinian resistance to its belligerent occupation or its illegal settlements as “terrorism”, and any support from other Palestinians as “incitement”. International solidarity with Palestinians is characterised as “delegitimisation” and equated with antisemitism. 

‘Flood the internet’

As far back as 2008, it emerged that a pro-Israel media lobby group, Camera, had been orchestrating covert efforts by Israel loyalists to infiltrate the online encyclopedia Wikipedia to edit entries and “rewrite history” in ways favourable to Israel. Soon afterwards, politician Naftali Bennett helped organise courses teaching “Zionist editing” of Wikipedia. 

In 2011, the Israeli army declared social media a new “battleground” and assigned “cyber warriors” to wage combat online. In 2015, Israel’s foreign ministry set up an additional command centre to recruit young, tech-savvy former soldiers from 8200, the army’s cyber intelligence unit, to lead the battle online. Many have gone on to establish hi-tech firms whose spying software became integral to the functioning of social media.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends a 2019 cyber industry conference in Tel Aviv (AFP)

An app launched in 2017, Act.IL, mobilised Israel partisans to “swarm” sites hosting either criticism of Israel or support for Palestinians. The initiative, supported by Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, was headed by veterans of Israeli intelligence services. 

According to the Forward, a US Jewish weekly, Israel’s intelligence services liaise closely with Act.IL and request help in getting content, including videos, removed by social media platforms. The Forward observed shortly after the app was rolled out: “Its work so far offers a startling glimpse of how it could shape the online conversations about Israel without ever showing its hand.”

Sima Vaknin-Gil, a former Israeli military censor who was then assigned to Israel’s strategic affairs ministry, said the goal was to “create a community of fighters” whose job was to “flood the internet” with Israeli propaganda. 

Willing allies

With advantages measured in personnel numbers and ideological zeal, in tech and propaganda experience, and in high-level influence in Washington and Silicon Valley, Israel was soon able to turn social media platforms into willing allies in its struggle to marginalise Palestinians online.  

In 2016, Israel’s justice ministry was boasting that Facebook, Google and YouTube were “complying with up to 95 percent of Israeli requests to delete content”, almost all of it Palestinian. The social media companies did not confirm this figure.

The Anti-Defamation League, a pro-Israel lobby group with a history of smearing Palestinian organisations and Jewish groups critical of Israel, established a “command centre” in Silicon Valley in 2017 to monitor what it termed “online hate speech”. That same year, it was appointed a “trusted flagger” organisation for YouTube, meaning its reporting of content for removal was prioritised. 

Tech corporations are now the undeclared, profit-driven arbiters of our speech rights. But their commitment is not to open and vigorous public debate

At a 2018 conference in Ramallah hosted by 7amleh, a Palestinian online advocacy group, local Google and Facebook representatives barely hid their priorities. It was important to their bottom line to avoid upsetting governments with the power to constrain their commercial activities – even if those governments were systematically violating international law and human rights. In this battle, the Palestinian Authority carries no weight at all. Israel presides over Palestinians’ communications and internet infrastructure. It controls the Palestinian economy and its key resources.

Since 2016, Israel’s justice ministry has reportedly suppressed tens of thousands of Palestinian posts. In a completely opaque process, Israel’s own algorithms detect content it deems “extremist” and then requests its removal. Hundreds of Palestinians have been arrested by Israel over social media posts, chilling online activity. 

Human Rights Watch warned late last year that Israel and Facebook were often blurring the distinction between legitimate criticism of Israel and incitement. Conversely, as Israel has shifted ever further rightwards, the Netanyahu government and social media platforms have not stemmed a surge of posts in Hebrew promoting anti-Palestinian incitement and calling for violence. 7amleh has noted that Israelis post racist or inciteful material against Palestinians roughly every minute. 

News agencies shut down

As well as excising tens of thousands of Palestinian posts, Israel has persuaded Facebook to take down the accounts of major Palestinian news agencies and leading journalists. 

By 2018, the Palestinian public had grown so incensed that a campaign of online protests and calls to boycott Facebook were led under the hashtag “FBcensorsPalestine”. In Gaza, demonstrators accused the company of being “another face of occupation”. Leila Khaled shutdown shows how corporate tech is enemy of free speechRead More »

Activism in solidarity with Palestinians in the US and Europe has been similarly targeted. Ads for films, as well as the films themselves, have been taken down and websites removed. 

Last month, Zoom, a video conferencing site that has boomed during the Covid-19 pandemic, joined YouTube and Facebook in censoring a webinar organised by San Francisco State University because it included Leila Khaled, an icon of the Palestinian resistance movement now in her seventies.

On Friday, Zoom blocked a second scheduled appearance by Khaled – this time in a University of Hawaii webinar on censorship – as well as a spate of other events across the US to protest against her cancellation by the site. A statement concerning the day of action said campuses were “joining in the campaign to resist corporate and university silencing of Palestinian narratives and Palestinian voices”.

The decision, a flagrant attack on academic freedom, was reportedly taken after the social media groups were heavily pressured by the Israeli government and anti-Palestinian lobby groups, which labelled the webinar “antisemitic”.

Wiped off the map

The degree to which the tech giants’ discrimination against Palestinians is structural and entrenched has been underscored by the years-long struggle of activists both to include Palestinian villages on online maps and GPS services, and to name the Palestinian territories as “Palestine”, in accordance with Palestine’s recognition by the United Nations. 

That campaign has largely floundered, even though more than a million people have signed a petition in protest. Both Google and Apple have proved highly resistant to these appeals; hundreds of Palestinian villages are missing from their maps of the occupied West Bank, while Israel’s illegal settlements are identified in detail, accorded the same status as the Palestinian communities that are shown. 

New houses being built in the Nokdim settlement in the occupied West Bank on 13 October (AFP)

The occupied Palestinian territories are subordinated under the name “Israel”, while Jerusalem is presented as Israel’s unified and undisputed capital, just as Israel claims – making the occupation of the Palestinian section of the city invisible. 

These are far from politically neutral decisions. Israeli governments have long pursued a Greater Israel ideology that requires driving Palestinians off their lands. This year, that dispossession programme was formalised with plans, backed by the Trump administration, to annex swathes of the West Bank. 

Google and Apple are effectively colluding in this policy by helping to erase Palestinians’ visible presence in their homeland. As two Palestinian scholars, George Zeidan and Haya Haddad, recently noted: “When Google and Apple erase Palestinian villages from their navigation, but proudly mark settlements, the effect is complicity in the Israeli nationalist narrative.” 

Out of the shadows

Israel’s ever-tightening relationship with social media corporations has played out largely behind the scenes. But these ties moved decisively out of the shadows in May, when Facebook announced that its new oversight board would include Emi Palmor, one of the architects of Israel’s online repression policy towards Palestinians. 

Palestinians know only too well how easy it is for technology to diminish and disappear the voices of the weak and oppressed, and to amplify the voices of the powerful

The board will issue precedent-setting rulings to help shape Facebook’s and Instagram’s censorship and free speech policies. But as the former director-general of the justice ministry, Palmor has shown no commitment to online free speech. Quite the reverse: she worked hand-in-hand with the tech giants to censor Palestinian posts and shut down Palestinian news websites. She oversaw the transformation of her department into what the human rights organisation Adalah has called the Orwellian “Ministry of Truth”. 

Tech corporations are now the undeclared, profit-driven arbiters of our speech rights. But their commitment is not to open and vigorous public debate, online transparency or greater civic engagement. Their only commitment is to the maintenance of a business environment in which they avoid any regulation by major governments infringing on their right to make money.

The appointment of Palmor perfectly illustrates the corrupting relationship between government and social media. Palestinians know only too well how easy it is for technology to diminish and disappear the voices of the weak and oppressed, and to amplify the voices of the powerful. 

Many more of us could soon find ourselves sharing the online fate of Palestinians.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.Jonathan CookJonathan Cook, a British journalist based in Nazareth since 2001, is the the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is a past winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net

Iran Warns of Decisive Response to Any Cyber Threat

By Staff, Agencies

The General Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces warned that cyber threats from any state, group or individual against Iran will be responded to decisively.

The General Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces on Monday issued a statement about the cyberspace international law.

According to the statement, the Iranian Armed Forces believe that the cyberattacks resulting in financial damages or harm to people amount to the use of force.

“If such operations affect the national vital infrastructures, including the defense infrastructures, they would naturally violate the principle of use of force, be it under the ownership of the government or the private sector,” it added.

The statement also emphasized that the Iranian Armed Forces will reserve the right of self-defense if the intensity of a cyberattack on Iran’s vital infrastructures reaches the threshold of a conventional armed attack.

It added that Iran would never start a conflict in the cyberspace, but warned that any violation of the guidelines and policies mentioned in the statement from any government, group and individual sponsored or directed by any state would allow the Iranian Armed Forces to give a vigorous response to the threats at any level.

In remarks in July, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Tehran reserves the right to resort to the cyberspace or any other means to respond to the cyberattacks launched by foreign governments and regimes.

“Iran reserves the right to take the appropriate and proportional reciprocal action at the appropriate time. We may employ any tool to defend ourselves against the cyberattacks, including the cyberspace or other weaponry. Moreover, we will do our utmost to prove the international responsibility of the country starting or facilitating such attacks, and to make them be held accountable for their illegal measures,” the spokesman said.

Turmoil in Belarus, Another US Color Revolution Attempt?

By Stephen Lendman

Global Research, August 16, 2020

Time and again, the CIA, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), International Republican Institute (IRI), National Democratic Institute (NDI), and USAID have been involved in US schemes to replace independent governments with pro-Western puppet ones.

Tactics include violent and non-violent labor strikes, mass street protests, major media propaganda, and whatever else it takes to achieve Washington’s aims — at times succeeding, other times failing.

In late 2013, early 2014, the Obama regime successfully replaced Ukraine’s democratically elected Viktor Yanukovych with pro-Western putschist rule — a fascist dictatorship in Europe’s heartland, targeting Russia.

For months in Hong Kong last year and sporadically in 2020,  Trump regime orchestrated violence, vandalism and chaos failed to achieve its aims that were all about weakening China by attacking its soft underbelly.

Tactics employed by the US in Ukraine, Hong Kong, and elsewhere were first used against Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

What appeared to be a spontaneous political uprising was developed by RAND Corporation strategists in the 1990s — the concept of swarming.

It replicates “communication patterns and movement of” bees and other insects used against nations to destabilize and topple their governments.

The CIA and other anti-democratic US organizations are involved.

Their mission is all about achieving what the Pentagon calls “full spectrum dominance,” seeking control over planet earth, its resources, populations, and outer space.

Swarming and related actions are war by other means, including by use of information and communications technologies, along with social media.

Cyberwar today is what blitzkrieg was to 20th century warfare.

Swarming is a way to strike from all directions in an overwhelming fashion similar to an all-out military attack.

Is this what’s been going on in Belarus for months, especially since the August 9 presidential election.

Longtime incumbent Alexander Lukashenko claimed victory by more an 80% majority over key opposition figure Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.“The Weaponization of Sanctions”: Waging War by Other Means against Russia

Now in Lithuania, she cried foul, claiming she won. He lost.

Disruptive actions against Lukashenko have been ongoing since last spring, dubbed a “slipper revolution” by Belarusian Belsat TV in May.

Like Ukraine, Belarus borders Russia, why Washington aims to transform it into a client state.

On Saturday, Lukashenko said he’s being target by a “color revolution” attempt to remove him from power he’s had as president since 1994.

Reportedly he said “(w)e have read the guidelines on how to conduct color revolutions,” adding that’s what happening in Belarus suggests that Russia is next if not effectively countered.

Late Saturday, he and Putin spoke by phone, a Kremlin readout saying:

Lukashenko initiated the call. He “informed Vladimir Putin about the developments following the presidential election in Belarus.”

“Both sides expressed confidence that all existing problems will be settled soon.”

“The main thing is to prevent destructive forces from using these problems to cause damage to mutually beneficial relations of the two countries within the Union State.”

In 1995, both countries agreed on this arrangement that lets their citizens work and/or live in either nation at their discretion — while retaining their passports and national identity.

A bilateral 1999 treaty calls for economic integration and mutual cooperation to defend both nations from foreign threats — with the intent of integrating Belarus with Russia.

So far, it hasn’t happened because Lukashenko’s power would be subordinated to Moscow.

Is now the time to accept where he hasn’t gone before because of concern about a fate similar to Ukraine’s Yanukovych?

Public anger is fueled by Belarusians wanting change, his dubious one-sided reelection margin, and police state tactics against street protesters, including thousands of arrests and reported mistreatment in detention.

Opposition elements demand he step down. Mass protests continued over the weekend, including many thousands in Minsk, the nation’s capital.

Lukashenko said he ordered the deployment of an air assault brigade to border areas in response to US-led NATO military exercises in bordering Poland and Lithuania.

Belarus “cannot calmly observe this” and do nothing, he reportedly said, adding that Putin offered to help protect the country’s security.

Now is the time for integration into Russia, perhaps in similar fashion to how Crimeans corrected an historic error by becoming the Republic of Crimea in the Russian Federation.

The alternative for Lukashenko may be a successful US-style color revolution that replaces him with pro-Western rule.

The alternative for Russia would be having another hostile US controlled state on its border.

Belarusians under Lukashenko are between a rock and a hard place — his hardline rule v. a likely worse fate under a US installed regime similar to Ukraine’s.

Full integration as a Russian Federation republic makes most sense, perhaps where things are heading.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.The original source of this article is Global ResearchCopyright © Stephen Lendman, Global Research, 2020

Diplomacy is reciprocal

July 25, 2020

Chris Faure for the Saker Blog

The US suddenly ordered China to end operations from its embassy in Houston, Texas (remember when they did the same to Russia). However, diplomacy is reciprocal and the Chinese so far refrained from a further provocative reaction. They are implementing a fair tit for tat measure, closing the US Consulate in Chengdu, keeping options open for further retaliation. They could have fanned the flames and closed the US Consulate in Hong Kong, or even a bigger one in Beijing, but kept to a fair reciprocal closure – so far.

More about the Consulate spat https://www.moonofalabama.org/

China responded to Mr Pompeo’s highly advertised ‘very important’ speech this week in short, not giving Pompeo that attention that he so craves. The Chinese stance is that Mike Pompeo maliciously attacked the Communist Party of China (CPC) and China’s socialist system, and he made remarks that ignored the facts, were full of ideological bias and turned black into white, which showed his Cold War mentality. From the Chinese Foreign Ministry: “Some US politicians have deliberately stirred up ideological disputes, talked about changing China, denied China-US relations, and provoked China’s relationships with other countries. Their purpose is to suppress China’s development and divert the public’s attention from their own country. These tricks cannot fool the Americans and international community.”

The US have stopped all basic diplomatic standards in a grab for their self-delusional rules-based international order. Just recently, Pompeo announced that they will not respect or accept any of the agreements in the South China Sea. He must be thinking that all of the ASEAN countries like him enough to drop their raft of regional negotiated agreements.

Despite Chinese accusations that the US opens their diplomatic pouches, which is in flagrant violation of all Vienna Conventions on Diplomatic and Consular relations, the most important is the following which shows that China is still keeping to fair diplomatic and pragmatic standard:

“It must be emphasized that China has no intentions to change the US in terms of its social system, and the US cannot change China either.”

https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/xwfw_665399/s2510_665401/2511_665403/t1800221.shtml

Having followed the Russian reactions on these types of actions by the US toward Russia, we have become accustomed to the frustratingly pragmatic and clinically diplomatic methods of dealing with western bullying. The Chinese are different and they enthusiastically take part in the war of words that is reaching cold war status if one adds in the trade war announced by Mr Trump +- two years ago and which he thought would be ‘easy to win’. What we see now as reaction to the US provocation to China in the US social sphere, many ordinary Americans are deeply into the ‘crush China’ rhetoric which attempts to blame China for all of the US ills.

https://sputniknews.com/analysis/202007241079970310-us-heading-towards-quagmire-in-the-south-china-sea-by-inciting-tensions-with-beijing-activist-warns/

While it remains unclear if this can be written off completely to electioneering and election rhetoric, what does clarify is that the harm done is not easily fixed, no matter the reason. It is however quite breathtaking how far Pompeo will push this, hoping for retaliation which he can then use to prove himself and the current US administration right. It is beyond a level of comprehension that Pompeo and Co could really think that they will make war against China.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202007/24/WS5f1a5b8da31083481725be24.html

In this time of ‘rhetorical cold war of words’, Godfree Roberts who regularly writes on China for the Unz Review started a new weekly newsletter, Here Comes China, Skulduggery, Good News, Offbeat Opinions, chock-a-block full of what is happening in China.

Godfree has offered the first four newsletters free to Saker readers. From economics, to space, to China-Iran Trade and Military Partnership, to the cleanup and recovering of the Yangtze river, a Hong Kong section, the media war on Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, and an in-depth look at Human rights in China, this newsletter stands unique in its scope and its presentation of Western opinions and Eastern opinions.

Godfree’s new book on China is just about ready for release. The book is called:

Why China leads the world: Democracy at the bottom, Data in the middle, Talent at the top.
A preview: https://www.herecomeschina.com/why-china-leads-the-world-the-book/

I also want to draw the readers’ attention to a two part essay written on Mao, Mao Reconsidered, and published in greanvillepost.com. Part 1, Part 2

China Sitrep – 5 selected topics from the Here Comes China newsletter:

Trump Empowers CIA to Launch Cyberattacks

The secret authorization, known as a presidential finding, gives the spy agency more freedom in both the kinds of operations it conducts and who it targets–including Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, which are mentioned directly in the document. The finding allows the CIA to more easily authorize its own covert cyber operations, rather than requiring the agency to get approval from the White House. The “very aggressive” finding “gave the agency very specific authorities to really take the fight offensively to a handful of adversarial countries,” said a former U.S. government official. The Central Intelligence Agency has conducted a series of covert cyber operations against Iran and other targets since winning a secret victory in 2018 when President Trump signed what amounts to a sweeping authorization for such activities. [MORE]

Belt and Road Finds New Life in Pakistan

China and Pakistan have signed deals for two hydro-power generation projects costing $3.9 billion in the disputed Kashmir region, and another to revamp the South Asian nation’s colonial-era railways for $7.2 billion — the most expensive Chinese project yet in Pakistan. The Chinese financing has helped rid Pakistan of an electricity deficit that left exporters unable to meet orders and major cities without electricity for much of the day. [MORE]

T.P. Wilkinson: The Yemen

The West encourages dissolution of state entities that could engage in normal relations with China or any other potential competitors. The Yemen is one of those long-term victims of British imperialism. When Britain nominally withdrew from Egypt, Nasser promoted his new government’s participation in his movement for Arab unity, opposed by British clients in Riyadh (the Saud family’s Wahhabi gangsters). The Saud family would like to have annexed the Yemen but could not without war against Egypt-against which the tiny mob had no chance. So David Stirling led a counter-insurgency funded by the British and Saudis to drive Egypt out of the Yemen and leave the country as a quasi-protectorate of Britain/US. Attempts to change that have been fought for decades but until a decade ago the client regime was well protected. Clearly chaos is profitable for the empire which between Somalia and Yemen prevent any stability in opposition to its interests. Not only do Somalia and Yemen lie close to the Suez route they also form part of the ancient East African trading basin that links Asia with Africa. As part of the overall strategy of Denial, this policy is aided by the designs of the mob in Riyad which lacks the population to occupy territories it would like to annex.

Xinjiang

This section from Here Comes China is an in-depth analysis. I suggest you read it in the newsletter itself. Main points:

Islam is neither the Uyghurs’ native religion nor their only one but, in its Wahhabi form, has caused problems around the world, for which we can thank to two fervent Christians, Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski,[2] who considered a united Eurasia, “The only possible challenge to American hegemony.” In 1979, months before the Soviet entry into Afghanistan, Brzezinski drafted and Carter signed a top-secret Presidential Order authorizing the CIA to train fundamentalist Muslims to wage Jihad against the Soviet Communist infidels and all unbelievers of conservative Sunni Islam and the Mujahideen terror war against Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan became the largest covert action in CIA history.[2] Brzezinski’s ‘Arc of Crisis’ strategy inflamed Muslims in Central Asia to destabilize the USSR during its economic crisis and, when Le Nouvel Observateur later asked if he had any regrets, Brzezinski snapped, “What is most important to the history of the world? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe?”

Twenty years later, in 1999, the CIA’s Islam strategist, Graham E. Fuller, announced, “The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Russians. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia.”[3]

Today, NED money supports the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) which calls China’s Xinjiang Province ‘East Turkistan’ and China’s administration of Xinjiang as ‘Chinese occupation of East Turkistan,’ runs articles like, “Op-ed: A Profile of Rebiya Kadeer, Fearless Uyghur Independence Activist,” and admits that Kadeer seeks Uyghur independence from China.

Faced with an armed insurrection, most states impose martial law or a state of emergency, as Britain did in Malaya from 1945 to 1957 and the US did with the Patriot Act, but China decided–despite popular outrage–to write off its losses and play the long game and founded The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO),[1] a political, economic, and security alliance, with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, who stopped funneling money and providing corridors for Uyghur terrorists to move into and out of China. The SCO has since expanded to include India and Pakistan and Iran has begun the accession process, making it world’s largest security pact in both area and population and the only one whose membership includes four nuclear powers.

Forming the SCO was easier than assuaging public outrage. An unheard-of lawsuit by victims’ relatives accused the government of reverse discrimination so they stepped up security and published their objectives:

1. restore law and order
2. prevent terrorists from inflicting more violence
3. use ‘high-intensity regulation’
4. contain the spread of terrorism beyond Xinjiang
5. purge extremists and separatists from society.

Neighborhood community centres–labelled ‘concentration camps’ in the western press–educate rural Uyghurs about the perils of religious extremism and train them for urban jobs.
In 2013 President Xi toured Eurasia and proposed the Belt and Road Initiative for three billion people, designed to create the biggest market in the world with unparalleled development potential, and built a gas pipeline to China from Turkmenistan through Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan which, like China’s other western pipelines, power lines, and rail and road networks, runs through the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

Beijing then moved jobs to Xinjiang and opened vocational schools to train rural youth in literacy and job skills and swore to protect its neighbors from terrorism in exchange for their pledge to reciprocate. To create jobs in the province Xi directed investment from forty-five of China’s top companies and eighty Fortune 500 manufacturers to Urumqi. Corporate investment increased from $10 billion in 2015 to $15 billion in 2017 and infrastructure investments of $70 billion in both 2017 and 2018 lifted the annual goods shipments past 100 million tons with a goal of hourly departures to fifteen European capitals. Half a million Uyghurs have relocated from remote villages to cities and, as a result, 600,000 Uighurs were lifted out of poverty in 2016, 312,000 in 2017 and 400,000 in 2018. The last poor Uyghurs will join the cash economy in mid-2020.

The PBOC, China’s central bank, is partnering with ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing to test the use of its sovereign digital currency, AKA Central Bank Digital Currency, CBDC. The regulator is working with Didi to apply digital currency electronic payment (DCEP) to the ride-hailing app, which currently serves a total of over 550 million users and is often described as China’s Uber. According to Didi, “the government seeks to support the development of the real economy sectors with innovative financial services.” Didi has more than 30 million daily ride-sharing orders and its bike-sharing daily orders reached 10 million. Meituan and Bilibilibili are also cooperating with banks in the digital yuan project. Meituan’s service platform has over 240 million consumers and five million local merchants, and Bilibilibili is China’s largest video-sharing website.

Sign up for your free one month sub to Godfree’s very extensive newsletter here. At the Saker blog, only a fraction of all the material can be covered.

BRITISH ESTABLISHMENT NEW FEARS: RUSSIA WEAPONIZES ‘FUNDAMENTAL NIHILSM’

Source

22.07.2020 

On July 21^st, the UK’s Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament (ISC) released a report specifically on Russia and the challenges it presents, as well as recommendations on how to deal with it. [pdf]

The ISC makes a number of points, mostly focused on the presumed Russian intervention in the UK political and economic life. They are:

1. Russian influence in the UK is the new normal. Successive Governments have welcomed the oligarchs and their money with open arms, providing them with a means of recycling illicit finance through the London ‘laundromat’, and connections at the highest levels with access to UK companies and political figures.
2. This has led to a growth industry of ‘enablers’ including lawyers, accountants, and estate agents who are – wittingly or unwittingly – de facto agents of the Russian state.
3. It demonstrates the inherent tension between the Government’s prosperity agenda and the need to protect national security. While we cannot now shut the stable door, greater powers and transparency are needed urgently.
4. The UK is a target for Russian disinformation. While the mechanics of our paper-based voting system are largely sound, we cannot be complacent about a hostile state taking deliberate action with the aim of influencing our democratic processes.
5. Yet the defense of those democratic processes has appeared something of a ‘hot potato’, with no one organization considering itself to be in the lead, or apparently willing to conduct an assessment of such interference. This must change.
6. Social media companies must take action and remove covert hostile state material: Government must ‘name and shame’ those who fail to act.
7. The UK needs other countries to step up with the UK and attach a cost to Putin’s actions. Salisbury must not be allowed to become the high water mark in international unity over the Russia threat.

The entire report is actually just a fraction, since there is a Classified Annex that contains most of the issues that are being discussed and are not available for open access.

Okay, so “What does Russia want?”, according to the ISC:

“The security threat posed by Russia is difficult for the West to manage as, in our view and that of many others, it appears fundamentally nihilistic. Russia seems to see foreign policy as a zero-sum game: any actions it can take which damage the West are fundamentally good for Russia. It is also seemingly fed by paranoia, believing that Western institutions such as NATO and the EU have a far more aggressive posture towards it than they do in reality. There is also a sense that Russia believes that an undemocratic ‘might is right’ world order plays to its strengths, which leads it to seek to undermine the Rules Based International Order – whilst nonetheless benefitting from its membership of international political and economic institutions.”

Russia, according to the report, also wishes to show that it is a “great power” no less than the former Soviet Union, and possibly even more so.

And the UK is a target since Russia “apparently” considers London as one of its top Western intelligence targets. That is primarily because of the good job that the UK has been doing in countering “Russian aggression.”

“This perception will have been reinforced by the UK’s firm stance recently in response to Russian aggression: following the UK-led international response to the Salisbury attack – which saw an unprecedented 153 Russian intelligence officers and diplomats expelled from 29 countries and NATO – it appears to the Committee that Putin considers the UK to be a key diplomatic adversary. The threat to the UK – and any changes to this following the actions taken in response to the Salisbury attack – is described in this Report, together with the action that the UK Intelligence Community is taking to counter those threats.”

The report provides several areas that need improvement in terms of the fight against Russia:

1. The Government Communications Headquarter (GCHQ) assesses that Russia is a highly capable cyber actor with a proven capability to carry out operations which can deliver a range of impacts across any sector. It’s allegedly been doing so since 2014, including GRU agents carrying out alleged phishing operations against UK government departments.
2. The spreading of disinformation (by which we mean the promotion of intentionally false, distorting or distracting narratives) and the running of ‘influence campaigns’ are separate but interlinked subjects. An influence campaign in relation to an election, for example, may use the spreading of disinformation, but may also encompass other tactics such as illicit funding, disruption of electoral mechanics or direct attacks on one of the campaigns (such as ‘hack and leak’). Equally, the spreading of disinformation is not necessarily aimed at influencing any individual outcome.
3. Whilst the Russian elite have developed ties with a number of countries in recent years, it would appear that the UK has been viewed as a particularly favourable destination for Russian oligarchs and their money. “What is now clear is that it was in fact counte-productive, in that it offered ideal mechanisms by which illicit finance could be recycled through what has been referred to as the London ‘laundromat’.

The report emphasizes that Russia currently poses a significant threat to the UK on a number of fronts – from espionage to interference in democratic processes, and to serious crime. It continues  that the response needs to be combined from all UK security and intelligence agencies, government bodies, included with the ministers of government, as well as the ISC. This will require renewed doctrines, more and improved projects.

And this will not be an easy feat:

“As already noted, the Russian government is an accomplished adversary with well-resourced and world-class offensive and defensive intelligence capabilities. The well-publicised mistakes Russian operatives made in Salisbury, and later in trying to infiltrate the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), have led to public speculation about the competence of the Russian Intelligence Services (RIS), and the GRU in particular. Whilst these attacks demonstrate that the RIS are not infallible, it would be foolhardy to think that they are any less dangerous because of these mistakes. Indeed, the likelihood is that the RIS will learn from their errors, and become more difficult to detect and protect against as a result.”

Of course, none of this can be achieved without due support from international partners such as the US, NATO and others.

Russia, however, supposedly can’t rely on allies, at least not as much as the UK:

“By contrast to the West, Russia has traditionally been suspicious of building significant international partnerships. However, we note that in recent years it has been proactive in seeking ‘alliances of convenience’ across the world. This has included deepened defense and security co-operation with China, as a useful partner against the US (going so far as to conduct joint military exercises), increased influence in South America, and substantive engagement in several African countries, including widespread trade campaigns.”

It’s interesting to note that to motivate the need of the expanded campaign against Russia, the report is extensively using such terms as “open source studies”, including some mysterious “credible open source commentary”, and complains about the “fundamentally nihilistic” approach of Russia.

Indeed, if one translates the report wording from the mainstream propaganda language to the ordinary English, the British government and special services complain that they have not enough leverages of pressure and instruments to influence Russia and needs to expand clandestine, diplomatic and propaganda campaigns against Moscow. At the same time, London tries to demonize tactical successes of the Russian state to inform the English-speaking audience of its point of view through diplomatic channels and English-language state media like RT and Sputniknews.

Probably, the main point of the concern for London is that in the conditions of the crumbling neo-liberal narrative (due to the global economic crisis, the COVID-19 outbreak and a series of crises in base states for the Euro-Atlantic establishment), the Russian behavior on the international arena became attractive for the part of the European and American population, which is still not fully indocrinated by the mainstream propaganda.

The Russian side has already denied all the accusations provided by the report of the UK Intelligence and Security Committee. Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry said that it has shown “nothing sensational” and is just “fake shaped Russophobia.”

In response to the report, the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov made a statement:

“Russia has never interfered in electoral processes in any country of the world: not in the United States, not in Great Britain, or in other countries. We do not do it ourselves and do not tolerate when other countries try to interfere in our political affairs,” Peskov told reporters.

The head of the international committee of the Federation Council, Konstantin Kosachev, believes that by criticizing Russia, Britain is trying to regain its positions in European politics.

“I am convinced that the reason for the appearance of such an odious report is the attempts of the British authorities to regain the European palm at any cost … And why not lead in Russophobia? While in the European Union, London lost some of its brilliance against the background of the Young Europeans, competing with each other, which of them in exchange for European dividends could ruin relations with our country more abruptly,” he wrote on Facebook.

It’s unlikely that the Russian statements will convince anybody in the British establishment because the main goal of the report was not to find the truth but to set conditions for a further action against Moscow.

At the same time, the content of the entire report is quite funny as the side blaming Moscow for the supposed “fundamentally nihilistic” approach and simultaneously proposing employing various propaganda, intelligence and censorship methods against the alternative point of view. Such complains are only fueling this ‘Russia-styled fundamental nihilism’ among the audience, which still is able to have own critical point of view and like to check facts. This demonstrates a sad tendency of the falling level of competence among personnel (including agents, analysis and propagandists) of the Western special services. These agencies are now forced to be fully in the framework of the neo-liberal, minorities-ruled agenda employing the policy of ‘tolerance’ and ‘inclusivity’ promoted by the globalists. Apparently, personal details of particular personnel have become more important that their skills.

Since the very start of SouthFront work, our team has been repeatedly accused of intervening in various processes in the ‘democratic countries’ and spreading top-notch ‘disinformation’ on the highest level (including  press briefings of the US Department of State and reports by the French Defense Ministry). And we are not going to stop on this. So, if you want to fuel some more ‘nihilism’ and coverage that disturb the Euro-Atlantic establishment and globalists, support our work.

إيران تستعدّ لعمل كبير

ناصر قنديل

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منذ عشرة أيام وعملية التفجير التي أصابت جزءاً من المنشأة النووية الإيرانية في نطنز، محور اهتمام ومتابعة في الأوساط الدبلوماسية والأمنية والإعلامية. فقد جاء التفجير في مناخ تصعيدي تشهده المنطقة مع منظومة العقوبات الأميركية المتشددة على قوى وحكومات محور المقاومة وشعوبها، ومحاولة الضغط لإيصال القيادة الإيرانية لقبول التفاوض على شروط جديدة لملفها النووي من جهة، ولدورها الإقليمي من جهة أخرى، مع رفع شعار العودة إلى ما قبل العام 2011 في سورية من قبل المبعوث الأميركي الخاص جيمس جيفري في شرحه لأهداف قانون قيصر للعقوبات على سورية، عارضاً التسليم بنصر الرئيس السوري وجيشه مقابل خروج أميركا وإيران بالتوازي من سورية.

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خرج الصحافي ايدي كوهين المعروف بعلاقته بمكتب رئيس الحكومة في كيان الاحتلال بنامين نتنياهو بتغريدة يقول فيها إن مصادر استخبارية غربية قالت إن طائرات حربية لجيش الاحتلال تولّت قصف منشأة نطنز، ثم نشرت صحيفة نيويورك تايمز تقريراً نسبت المعلومات الواردة فيه لمصادر موثوقة، لتقول إن جهاز استخبارات في الكيان يقف وراء القنبلة التي تسببت بتفجير في منشأة نطنز، ثم خرج وزير الحرب والخارجية السابق في الكيان أفيغدور ليبرمان ليتحدث عن اتهام لنتنياهو بالوقوف وراء التسريبات للتباهي، معرضاً أمن الكيان للخطر.

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تلا ذلك بأيام ظهور رئيس أركان القوات المسلحة الإيرانية الجنرال محمد باقري في دمشق موقعاً اتفاقيات تعاون عسكري أهمها ما يتصل بالدفاعات الجويّة السوريّة، وما قالت تعليقات صحف الكيان، إنها نقلة نوعية لوضع حد للغارات التي تشنها طائرات جيش الاحتلال داخل سورية وهي تستهدف بصورة خاصة مواقع إيرانية، ما يعني استعداداً لمرحلة أكثر تصعيداً في المواجهة، من جهة، ورداً شديد اللهجة على قانون قيصر، وتبشيراً استباقياً برفع الحظر عن بيع وشراء السلاح المفروض على إيران والذي ينتهي مفعوله خلال شهور مقبلة.

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أول أمس، وقع حريق كبير انتهى بتدمير البارجة الأميركية يو اس اس ريتشارد، في مرفأ سان دييغو العسكري، وسرت تكهنات باختراق سيبراني تسبب بالتلاعب بمنظومات حرارية في البارجة أدى لنشوب الحريق وتعطيل أنظمة التبريد، واتجهت الكثير من أصابع الاتهام نحو إيران، خصوصاً مع حرب سيبرانية تشهدها مواقع داخل الكيان تؤدي لتعطيل منصات مطارات ووزارات وهيئات حكومية، تظهر حجم الحضور الإيراني في هذا النوع من الحروب، في ظل الربط بينها وبين حال التصعيد الشامل الذي تشهده المنطقة.

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أمس، تحدّث الناطق بلسان الخارجية الإيرانية وقال «إنه في حال ثبت ضلوع كيان أو دولة في الحادث، فإن ردّ إيران سيكون حاسماً وهاماً وستثبت أن «زمن اضرب واهرب قد ولّى». ونفى المتحدث أن يكون لإيران علاقة بحادث البارجة الأميركية في سان دييغو، واعدا بإعلان قريب لمجلس الأمن القومي الإيراني لنتائج التحقيقات التي يجريها في حادث نطنز.

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الترقب سيد الموقف خلال الأيام القليلة المقبلة، وحبس الأنفاس سيستمرّ حتى تعلن إيران نتائج التحقيقات، والاتصالات على أعلى المستويات لاستكشاف اتجاه هذه النتائج وما إذا كانت ثمة احتمالات بتوجيه إتهام مباشر لكيان الاحتلال، وماهية الدور المقرر، والعيون شاخصة نحو مفاعل ديمونا كهدف محتمل، إذا سارت الأمور بهذا الاتجاه، وهو ما يعني نذر حرب كبرى تخيّم على المنطقة، والوسطاء التقليديّون بين إيران والغرب يقولون إن أشدّ المراحل خطورة تمر على المنطقة، وإن العروض لتفادي التصعيد الإيراني المرتقب إذا صحّت التوقعات، قيد التداول، وإن أشياء كثيرة من طروحات كانت على الطاولة قد تغيّرت.

فيديوات متعلقة

مقالات متعلقة

• أول تصريح لقائد فيلق القدس حول احتراق حاملة الطائرات الأمريكية
• إيران تهدّد برد حاسم و«زمن اضرب واهرب قد ولّى» لكل مَنْ يثبت تورّطه بحادث نطنز
• New Quds Force commander threatens US, Israel: ‘The difficult days have not come yet’
• Israeli forces on ‘high alert’ over fears of Iranian retaliation: Channel 13
• US commander warns Hezbollah of severe consequences if they attack Israel
• التعاون العسكري بين دمشق وطهران: تبديد رهانات… ورسائل في أكثر من اتجاه
• حزب الله العراقي يتبنى العمل العسكري الواسع لإخراج القوات الامريكية!
• حرب تموز : المواجهة بين المقاومة والإمبراطورية!غالب قنديل
• الحصار والعقوبات ودروس المواجهة!حياة الحويك عطية
• “نيويورك تايمز”: الصين وإيران تقتربان من شراكة تجارية وعسكرية!
• كتاب فرنسي: الغرب أخطأ، والأسد باقٍ!سامي كليب

Large cyber attack against Israel conducted from Gaza, Turkey, North Africa

By News Desk -2020-05-22

BEIRUT, LEBANON (11:10 A.M.) – Israeli media revealed on Thursday that the cyber attack on thousands of Israeli sites was carried out by a group of hackers from the Gaza Strip, Turkey and North Africa.

Initial reports indicated that Iran was behind the attack, in light of the recent escalation against the background of an Israeli attack that disrupted an Iranian port last week, in response to an Iranian disruption of an Israeli water system.

Ronin Bergman, a military and intelligence affairs analyst, told Ynet News, that the group referred to consists of 9 hackers, who are gathered by an “anti-Israel ideology” and formed their group on April 11th.

Bergman stated that the attack was simple and uncomplicated and aimed at defaming the sites, “taking advantage of the feet and weaknesses (of Word Press) to enter an Israeli server company.”

The Israeli media released a photo that it said was the leader of the hacker group, “Hello Loya”.

Reports indicated that the attack disrupted the work of the sites, replaced their main pages with pictures and video clips showing destroyed Israeli cities, and broadcast an anti-Israel message in both Hebrew and English, saying: “The countdown to the destruction of the State of Israel began a long time ago.”

Among the hacked websites is the Ehud Hatsla Association’s rescue teams, as well as local authorities and private companies, organizations, associations and websites of a number of museums.

One of the hacked websites, which appeared in the name of a hacker group involved in the attack, was “Hackers_Of_Savior”, and it was mentioned in the video clip of this group on YouTube: “We gather here to avenge the Zionist crimes against the Palestinians who died or lost their lives, their families and their lands.”

ALSO READ  

• Iranian cyber attackers allegedly target Israel on Quds Day: report
• Israel is pushing Iran out of Syria, will not stop: MoD

Ransomware attacks global IT systemsIran Repels Major Cyberattack, Minister Unveils

Source

15:11 11.12.2019

TEHRAN (Sputnik) – Iranian Minister of Information and Communications Technology Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi said on Wednesday that the country had repelled a major cyberattack on national infrastructure.

The minister did not name the date of the attack nor the responsible parties.

Iran has implemented mechanisms to help cut itself off from the global Internet but remains internally cohesive in case there is a cyberattack from abroad. The system was built after a 2010 malware attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Related

• Press TV launches own video-sharing site after Google attacks
• Google blocks access to YouTube accounts of Iran’s Press TV, Hispan TV
• Internet users shocked by new Google ban on Press TV
• Ex-US officials helped UAE build secret spy unit: Probe

Western media excited about ‘new Iran revolution’, but polls tell a different story about protests

Sharmine Narwani

Sharmine Narwani is a commentator and analyst of Middle East geopolitics. She is a former senior associate at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University and has a master’s degree in International Relations from Columbia University. Sharmine has written commentary for a wide array of publications, including Al Akhbar English, the New York Times, the Guardian, Asia Times Online, Salon.com, USA Today, the Huffington Post, Al Jazeera English, BRICS Post and others. You can follow her on Twitter at @snarwani

Reuters/WANA/Nazanin Tabatabaee

Data from two foreign polls tell a very different story about protests in Iran. The economy is tough, but a majority of Iranians back their government’s security initiatives and reject domestic upheaval.

On November 15, angry Iranians began pouring onto the streets to protest sudden news of a 50% fuel price hike. A day later, peaceful demonstrations had largely dissipatd, replaced instead by much smaller crowds of rioters who burned banks, gas stations, buses and other public and private property. Within no time, security forces hit the streets to snuff out the violence and arrest rioters, during which an unconfirmed number of people on both sides died.

Western commentators tried in vain to squeeze some juice out of the short-lived protests. “Iranian protesters strike at the heart of the regime’s legitimacy,” declared Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution. France 24 asked the question, is this “a new Iranian revolution?” And the LA Times slammed Iran’s “brutal crackdown” against its people.

They grasped for a geopolitical angle too: protests in neighboring Lebanon and Iraq that were based almost entirely on popular domestic discontent against corrupt and negligent governments, began to be cast as a regional insurrection against Iranian influence.

ALSO ON RT.COMIran has quashed ‘extensive & very dangerous conspiracy’ perpetrated by foreign enemies, Khamenei saysAnd despite the fact that the internet in Iran was disabled for nearly a week, unverified videos and reports curiously made their way outside to Twitter accounts of Iran critics, alleging that protestors were calling for the death of the Supreme Leader, railing against Iran’s interventions in the region and calling for a fall of the “regime.”

Clearly, the initial protests were genuine – a fact that even the Iranian government admitted immediately. Reducing petrol subsidies on the cheapest fuel in the region has been an issue on Iran’s political agenda for years, one that became more urgent after the US exited the Iran nuclear deal last year and began to tighten the sanctions screws on Iran again.

To try and understand Iranian reactions in the past twelve days, let’s look at two opinion polls conducted jointly by the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM) and Toronto-based IranPolls in the immediate aftermath of the 2017/2018 protests/riots – and in May, August and October 2019, when the US “maximum pressure” campaign was in full gear.

What leaps out immediately from the earlier 2018 poll is that Iranians were frustrated with a stagnant economy – and 86% of them specifically opposed a hike in the price of gasoline, the main impetus for protests this November.

Ironically, this month’s gasoline price hike was meant to generate upward of $2.25 billion earmarked for distribution to Iran’s 18 million most hard-hit families. In effect, the government was softening the fuel subsidy reduction with payouts to the country’s neediest citizens.

The 2018 poll also lists respondents’ single biggest woes, ranging from unemployment (40%), inflation and high cost of living (13%), low incomes (7%),financial corruption and embezzlement (6%), injustice (1.4%), lack of civil liberties (0.3%), among others.

These numbers suggest the 2018 protests were overwhelmingly in response to domestic economic conditions– and not over Iran’s foreign policy initiatives or “widespread repression” that was heavily promoted by western media and politicians at the time.

The same Suzanne Maloney quoted above on this month’s protests, insisted in a 2018 Washington Post article:“The people aren’t just demonstrating for better working conditions or pay, but insisting on wholesale rejection of the system itself.”

In fact, in the 2018 poll, only 16% of Iranians agreed with the statement “Iran’s political system needs to undergo fundamental change,” with a whopping 77% disagreeing.

ALSO ON RT.COMIranian protesters should be angry at the regime in Washington, not Tehran

 

Like protests this month in Iran, the 2017-18 demonstrations also morphed into small but violent riots, and Iranian security forces hit the streets to stop the chaos. But in the aftermath of those events – and despite endless foreign headlines about the “brutality” of the security reaction – Iranians overwhelmingly sided with their government’s treatment of rioters.

Sixty-three percent of those polled in 2018 said the police used an appropriate amount of force, and another 11% said they used “too little force.” Overall, 85% of Iranians agreed that “the government should be more forceful to stop rioters who use violence or damage property.”

This Iranian reaction must be understood in context of Iran’s very insecure neighborhood, region-wide terrorism often backed by hostile states and a relentless escalation against Iranian interests after Donald Trump became US president. His “maximum pressure” campaign has only worsened matters, and Iranians consider themselves in a state of war with the United States – on constant guard against subversion, sabotage, espionage, eavesdropping, propaganda, border infiltration, etc.

Earlier this decade, the US military declared the internet an “operational domain”of war, and cyber warfare has already been widely acknowledged as the future battle frontier in conflicts. Iran was one of the early victims of this new warfare, when the suspected US/Israeli Stuxnet virus disrupted its nuclear program.

The US military has set up war rooms of servicemen dedicated to manipulating social media and advancing US propaganda interests. The British army has launched a “social media warfare” division, its initial focus, the Middle East. Israel has been at the online propaganda game forever, and the Saudis have recently invested heavily in influencing discourse on social media.

It should therefore come as no surprise that the Iranian government shut down the internet during this crisis. Expect this to become the new normal in US adversary states when chaos looms and foreign information operations are suspected.

The western media themes of corruption, violent repression, popular rejection of the Islamic Republic and its regional alliances have been consistent since the 2009 protests that followed contentious elections in Iran. They flared up briefly in early 2011, when western states were eager for an “Iranian Spring” to join the Arab Spring, and became popular narratives during 2017-18 protests when social media platforms adopted them widely.

This November, those narratives sprung to the surface again. So let’s examine what Iranians thought about these claims in October when CISSM/IranPolls published their latest, extremely timely survey.

Iran’s regional military activities

Sixty-one percent of Iranians support retaining military personnel in Syria to contain extremist militants that could threaten Iran’s security and interests. Polls taken since March 2016 confirm the consistency of this view inside Iran, with a steady two-thirds (66%) of respondents supporting an increase in Iran’s regional role.

Asked what would happen if Iran conceded to US demands and ended the US-sanctioned Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) activities in Syria and Iraq, 60% of Iranians thought it would make Washington demand more concessions – only 11% thought it would make the US more accommodating.

Moreover, the October 2019 report says negative attitudes toward the United States have never been higher in CISSM/IranPoll’s 13 years of conducting these surveys in Iran. A hefty 86% of Iranians do not favor the US, and those who say their view of the US is very unfavorable has skyrocketed from 52% in 2015 to 73% today.

They could care less that Washington has sanctioned the IRGC and its elite Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani, who is the most popular national figure of those polled, with eight in ten Iranians viewing him favorably. If anything, a hefty 81% of Iranians said the IRGC’s Mideast activities has made Iran “more secure.”

As for the IRGC’s role in Iran’s domestic economy – a favorite subject of western foes who cast the military group as a malign and corrupt instrument of the state – today 63% of Iranians believe the IRGC should be involved “in construction projects and other economic matters,” as well as continuing their security role. In times of crisis, they’re viewed as a vital institution: the IRGC and Iranian military scored top points with the public (89% and 90% respectively) for assisting the population during crippling floods last Spring, which displaced half a million Iranians.

Economy and corruption

Seventy percent of Iranians view their economy as “bad” today, a figure that has stayed surprisingly consistent over the past 18 months, despite the imposition of US sanctions last year. The majority blame domestic mismanagement and corruption for their economic woes, but a rising number also blame US sanctions, which is possibly why 70% of Iranians prefer aiming for national self-sufficiency over increasing foreign trade.

Asked about the “impact (of sanctions) on the lives of ordinary people,” 83% of Iranians agreed there was a negative impact on their lives. Oddly, since the US exited the JCPOA, economic pessimism has dropped from 64% in 2018 to 54% last month-mainly, the poll argues, because Iranians feel the US can’t realistically pressure Iran much further with sanctions. Accordingly, 55% of Iranians blame domestic economic mismanagement and corruption for Iran’s poor economy versus 38% who blame foreign sanctions and pressure.

The blame for much of this mismanagement and corruption is pinned on the administration of President Hassan Rouhani, whose favorability numbers dropped under 50% for the first time, to reach 42% this August. Fifty-four percent of Iranians think his government isn’t trying much to fight corruption.

In contrast, 73% believe the Iranian judiciary is much more engaged in fighting economic corruption, up 12% since May.

On the economic front, it appears that Iranians have largely been disappointed by the promises and vision of this administration, which could benefit its Principlist opponents in upcoming parliamentary elections. The fuel tax hike two weeks ago was a necessary evil and a brave move by Rouhani, despite the mismanagement of its public rollout. Unfortunately, Iranians, who have railed against subsidy removals for years, are unlikely to be forgiving anytime soon.

On the political front, Iranians appear to be largely in lockstep with their government’s foreign policy and military initiatives, viewing the IRGC’s activities – domestic and regional – very favorably, and supporting Iran’s involvement in neighboring Iraq and Syria, both for security reasons against terrorism and because they believe in an active regional role for Iran. In terms of support for their leaders, a majority of Iranians view favorably the IRGC’s Soleimani (82%), followed by Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (67%) and Judiciary Head Ebrahim Raisi (64%), which covers an unexpectedly broad spectrum of political viewpoints in the country.

In light of these numbers, it is fair to say that there is no “second revolution” on Iran’s horizon, nor any kind of significant rupture between government and populace on a whole host of key political, economic and security issues. Foreign commentators can spin events in Iran all they want, but so far Iranians have chosen security and stability over upheaval every time.

*Poll numbers in this article have been rounded up or down to the nearest unit.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

The Terrorists Among US10| The IO Echo Chamber Scott Shane Joel Harding

October 13, 2019

by George Eliason for The Saker Blog

At the beginning of October, I was contacted by the New York Times, @ScottShane for an interview about US President Donald Trump. The biggest pressing question he had revolved around how (not if) I’m guiding US foreign policy and advising President Donald Trump on Ukraine and the deep-state war in the US from Donbass. Try reading that over your first sip of coffee. Exactly.

Welcome to the new IO. They keep setting up an elegant chessboard just to play a middling game of checkers.

Information Operations (IO) in action are defined by “What would we do? Disrupt, deny, degrade, deceive, corrupt, usurp or destroy the information. The information, please don’t forget, is the ultimate objective of cyber. That will directly impact the decision-making process of the adversary’s leader who is the ultimate target.” – Joel Harding

While I’m including the entire interview, I will scatter parts of it throughout as it pertains to what Scott Shane was attempting as a smear piece against alternative media. As for my connection to smaller publications than the New York Times, for all intents and purposes, they seem to have a lot stricter publishing guidelines. They wouldn’t print an innuendo journalist effort like the following effort-

When I started reading his article “The CrowdStrike Plot: How a Fringe Theory Took Root in the White House”, I was expecting something heady or at least thought-provoking. What he delivered instead sadly was an unvetted, undocumented attempt to take a swipe at something he had no grasp of. I wasn’t what he expected and in one of my answers to him, I encouraged him to really vet the basis of his question, triple-check his sources, and then fact check it until he knew the information was absolutely clean. His insinuation was…weird. I got a chuckle and you might too.

Why is a NYT, Pulitzer winner contacting me? We both write in the two areas that have the biggest geopolitical impact since before the 2016 election. The good part about this is after reviewing both of our creds and articles, you will need to fully decide if you’re going to give a deep state narrative priority or fact-based journalism.

“Together we’ll see if we can send that to enough people to make a case against him, embarrass him and make it impossible for his to show his face without being labeled a bad journalist, a liar, guilty of perjury, and a dirty propagandist…Photographs can be photoshopped, so can videos. Eyewitness accounts are suspect. Reporters stories are only as reliable as the news sources and that means they are not reliable. Even if the most reliable person in the world says something, their word can always be branded speculation, biased or that they are a paid troll, be it Russian or otherwise (although I really don’t know of any others).”Joel Harding Aug 31, 2015

@scottshane trotted out after I wrote the articles showing the timeline for the deep state coup going on right now. This was done from the perspective of the planners and on a timeline fashion with milestones and comments of progress from the planners.

It was directly after I positively identified the changes made to legitimize the first whistleblower were part of a cookie-cutter methodology from the Next Generation Regime change authors I identified.

So, yes, I was amused.

Looking at it from a head to head perspective, facts should win over politics when the fabric of society and the future are at stake.

His NYT profile page reads; Scott Shane is a reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, where he has written about national security and other topics. He was part of teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2017 for coverage of Russia’s hacking and other projections of power abroad and in 2018 for reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Donald Trump campaign and administration.

While I don’t know if any of the Pulitzer judges will do a face-palm over this, I do know the IO planners for Ukraine and US election interference are cheering his effort on.

Except, they already stated in no uncertain terms, there were no remotely successful attempts by Russians to influence the 2016 election.

“In response, another senior wrote: Perhaps we could stop telling the Kremlin their ops were so successful when there is little evidence their activities did anything to affect the outcome…and now for something completely different.  Good news. Russian propaganda is being ignored in the United States.”

And

“It is entirely possible the DNC hired online trolls, regardless their geographic origin, to undermine the US President-elect since their party is currently reeling from a crushing loss. – Joel Harding

 “Perhaps the DNC is hiring Russian trolls to wage guerilla warfare on Donald Trump’s nascent administration. I have no proof, so I put this in the form of a question.”- Joel Harding November 2016

Scott Shane’s Facebook’s Russia-Linked Ads Came in Many Disguises has a plausible reason even if he got the story wrong.

I’m not accusing the DNC of hiring Russian trolls to attack Trump, undermine his success, or throw the legal electorate process into disarray and confusion.  I’m not even accusing the DNC of hiring trolls, although that has already been proven.

But what’s that expression again? “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.”- Joel Harding December 11, 2016

So now we have the man that marked the inauguration of Ukraine’s Internet Army which had 40,000 trolls on opening day insinuating they were working for the DNC and Team Clinton.

“One of the really neat things about this election is seeing all my information operations and information warfare friends on social media, contributing and commenting, looking darned intelligent! Theirs is normally the voice of reason, maturity, and intelligence.” Joel Harding

Email between Ali Chalupa (Consultant for the DNC) and Luis Miranda, Communication Director for the DNC) dated 5/3/16

“In addition, already 21 November Dmitry Zolotukhin met with his US counterpart, team representative Bellingcat Aric Toler, who conducted a similar training for journalists in Kyiv on the invitation of Media Development Foundation. They also discussed the possibility of holding a conference in Kiev on thematic instruments OSINT-use techniques in the modern media.”

One of the Media Development Center’s sponsors is NATO. It is a project of the US Embassy in Kiev because of the association with the embassy’s diplomatic paper, the Kyiv Post.”

Dimitry Zolotukhin is the Deputy Minister of Information in Ukraine which does Intel and targets dissenters,  the Pravy Sektor/ Fancy Bear hackers answer directly to him. In the notice above which was prepared by his office, it is noted Bellingcat’s Aric Toler is working in an equal capacity to him in the USA.”- How Fancy Bear Destroyed Eliot Higgins Bellingcat Credibility\

The private Intel operatives hired by Alexandra Chalupa to do opposition research against Paul Manfort and Donald Trump were the Ukraine’s Intel Hacker groups. Because they worked for her, Bellingcat, and the Atlantic Council, they would need password access at the DNC.

Ukraine Cyber Alliance and CyberHunta work for the Ukrainian Information ministry. According to cyber expert Jeff Carr, Alperovich and the Ukrainians were the only 2 groups that had key components to hack. This relationship extended through the Atlantic Council.

Why did this relationship start?

The hackers were Alexandra Chalupa’s Oppo Researchers. They are the core of InformNapalm and work with the US Intel Community and Atlantic Council.Their manager was a Ukrainian contractor for the US State Dept.Crowdstrike worked for DNC and Team Hillary at the same time they did.Through the Atlantic Council the hackers worked with Andrea and Irena Chalupa on other projects.Because of Alexandra Chalupa and a Ukrainian State Department contractor Ukraine Intel hackers had access the entire time they worked for the DNC.

Would cyber Oppo researchers need access to the DNC server itself?

If they didn’t have permission to download or retrieve information- It’s a hack. It should be noted that Clinton kept 6 seats to State Department servers after she left for Oppo research that Ukrainian Intel had access to because of this situation.

At the same time, let’s look at Mueller’s Russians and see where they really fit in.

From 2014- Oct 2016 the Ukraine’s Intel and hacking group had a Russian component. Mueller indicted that group. It’s called Shaltay Boltay. Led by former FSB and GRU, they were a Russian criminal gang. Shaltay Boltay, AKA Anonymous International, worked for Ukrainian Intel throughout the election.

Shaltay Boltay wrote the story of the Internet Research Agency from Ukraine fabricating Russian interference. They worked for Clinton on the Ukrainian team doing Oppo Research. As part of CyberHunta, they would need password access to do their job.

The IRA (Internet Research Agency) was the tie Mueller unsuccessfully tried to use showing Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia. In fact, this is a part of the basis for @scottshane articles on the subject. And it is the only narrative proof for Mueller that was available.

Here’s the problem. The collusion work of the IRA was only known through a blog written by Ukrainian Intel hacking group CyberHunta, from Ukraine. They worked through the Information ministry created by Joel Harding. They were in Ukraine actively trying to hurt the Russian government. They were not in Russia.

Scott Shane ignores the fact that everyone involved are working with, working for, or is part of very few groups involved in this ongoing IO. The fact that every individual group or company I’ve written about, are tied together working on the same project set should raise concern by itself.

The Russian criminal gang were hired by Alexandra Chalupa. In October 2016 they went back to Russia and were convicted for treason

Further proof of relationship is in the Surkov government hack in Russia. From Ukraine, Shaltay Boltay was credited with the hack. After, it was the Ukrainian Intel group CyberHunta that released the emails to the Atlantic Council. Ukrainian Cyber Alliance bragged to RFE/RL they changed the geopolitics of the entire world by themselves in 2016.

Did you know HRC’s extended group was among those that wrote the rules governing cyberwar including attribution that made catching Russians for the DNC hack possible? It’s kind of like rewriting the whistleblower policy was supposed to work for the first Trump-Ukraine whistleblower, but with better results.

The Atlantic Council worked on this. Dimitry Alperovitch from Crowdstrike is their resident expert. As far as attribution, as long as there was a Russian in the room with former FSB or GRU ties, it could loosely be attributed to the Russian government according to Rule 17, article 8 Tallinn Manual on cyberwar.

The FBI, the DNC, and Team Clinton knew Shaltay Boltay did the Yahoo hack in 2013 that stole Huma Abedin’s State Dept passwords. The only reason Hillary Clinton’s campaign would have to provide this particular group of hackers passwords to do their job as Oppo researchers would be to throw a shadow on the Russian government.- Fancy Bear Exposed-the People Behind the Hacking Group

But, unlike Scott Shane, I work hard to find the professionals doing the IO work or guiding it. Here we have a group of professional IO operators. Joel Harding is happy because of how well they are doing their job in America trying to sway the 2016 election.

These statements take away the value of Scott Shane’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize entirely, all by themselves. The statements are directly from the IO planner coordinating the media effort behind the anti-Russian effort Shane Scott is part of which took wings in the US as a deep state coup.

In June 2016, the Ukrainian US State Dept. contractor, Christina Dobrovolska went to Washington to meet with her boss at a conference. She brought a Ukrainian Delegation to meet the OUNb Ukrainian Diaspora leader Nestor Paslawsky in New York and got Joel Harding rehired for another year.

If we look at Scott Shane’s article titled How a Fringe Theory About Ukraine Took Root in the White House, we see like a 2x Pulitzer winner, he brought out the big gun to show his narrative is true.

From @scottshane -“Ukraine is the perfect scapegoat for him because it’s the enemy of Russia,” said Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington who regularly visits Ukraine and is writing a book called “How to Lose the Information War.”

She noted that a number of Ukraine-linked stories, some of them distorted or exaggerated, have been pulled together by Mr. Trump’s supporters into a single narrative.

“Now it seems like all of these conspiracy theories are merging into one,” Ms. Jankowicz said. She studies disinformation, she said, but Mr. Trump produced one claim she’d never come across.“I do this for a living, and I’d never heard anyone say the servers were in Ukraine,” she said.

In 2016-2017, Scott Shane’s star expert Nina Jankowicz worked in Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, providing strategic communications advice to the MFA’s Spokesperson according to her bio at Foreign Policy International.

This means she was also working with Ukraine’s Information Ministry which does cyber Intel. She was working with Christina Dobrovolska who was the State Dept. liaison to OUNb Diaspora heads like Nestor Paslawsky. The idea Nina was working with Ukrainian Intel people and Alexandra Chalupa is not so farfetched because her position put her in contact with Joel Harding who beyond all this IO madness, wrote Ukraine’s Information Policy.

Nina’s contact with the IO coup group extends to the German Marshall Fund where Aaron Weisburd and Clint Watts are also experts. Jankowicz had contact with Karen Kornbluh because of her State Dept position as well as being another resident expert at the German Marshall Fund.

Kornbluh is on the board of what was the Broadcasting Board of Governors which oversee RFE/RL and other projects. Joel Harding worked at the BBG during this timeframe influencing major media outlets.

According to Mr. Shane’s article –Mr. Eliason and other purveyors of Ukraine conspiracies often point to the Atlantic Council, a research group in Washington, as the locus of the schemes. The Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk has made donations to the council and serves on its international advisory board; Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike’s co-founder, who was born in Russia and came to the United States as a child, is an Atlantic Council senior fellow.

That connection seems slender, but it may be the origin of Mr. Trump’s association of a wealthy Ukrainian with CrowdStrike.

So as not to disappoint Shane, his expert is an Atlantic Council expert and writes at EUvsDisinfo as well. For those not in the know, they were sued by news publications that label publications Russian propaganda.

The Atlantic Council signed a contract to work for/with the UWC (Ukrainian World Congress) and everything they do supports the Information Operation originally intended for Ukraine.

From Mr. Shane’s article- “Mr. Eliason and other purveyors of Ukraine conspiracies often point to the Atlantic Council, a research group in Washington, as the locus of the schemes. The Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk has made donations to the council and serves on its international advisory board; Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike’s co-founder, who was born in Russia and came to the United States as a child, is an Atlantic Council senior fellow.

That connection seems slender, but it may be the origin of Mr. Trump’s association of a wealthy Ukrainian with CrowdStrike.”

So, are the connections actually slender? Only for people stuck inside a narrative box.

I think this next point may sink Mr. Scott into a deep depression. He refers to alternative media in such a dismissive way that it needs addressing.

Scott Shane-“George Eliason, an American journalist who lives in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists fought Ukrainian forces, has written extensively about what he considers to be a “coup attempt” against President Trump involving American and Ukrainian intelligence agencies and CrowdStrike. He said he did not know if his writings for obscure websites might have influenced the president.”

Although the interview is carried in full below, this will give an idea of the contextual value of Scott Shane’s work.

From Scotts article-“CrowdStrike and Ukrainian Intel are working hand in glove,” he wrote in an email. “Is Ukrainian Intelligence trying to invent a reason for the U.S. to take a hardline stance against Russia? Are they using CrowdStrike to carry this out?”

My actual response to the question– Crowdstrike and Ukrainian Intel are working hand in glove. This is a sad fact proven by others including Jeff Carr. If the key components to the hack are in the hand of only 2 parties, it is simply making a determination of liability to the event.

What’s more important is determining Crowdstrike’s liability in the Intel Community coup attempt that’s being reported in mainstream media by journalists like Tucker Carlson, Sheryll Atkinson, and even former Congressman Ron Paul.

Now, you might understand why I got a chuckle from his article. If he based his 2017 Pulitzer on information from Crowdstrike, Dimitry Alperovich backed his attribution of a Russian Hack at the DNC on a lie he invented. If a Pulitzer Prize winner is afraid to publish what is actually said by an interviewee, he’s scared to death of the facts.

Let me show you what I mean. Part of the evidence Dimitry Alperovich used in his justification for the DNC hack Russian attribution was destroyed by VOA in an embarrassing way. This was his backing proof of Russian involvement. Shane’s work is backed by this fiasco whether he realizes it or not. You have to take the time to vet sources.

According to Alperovitch “The malware used to track Ukrainian artillery units was a variant of the kind used to hack into the U.S. Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the presidential election this year  said CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch.”

When VOA asked Crowdstrike about the sources they responded “We cited the public, third-party reference source that was quoted,” VOA was told. “But the source referenced in the CrowdStrike report on its website is not the site of the actual IISS, but an article on The Saker, a site that presents a largely pro-Russian version of events in Syria and Ukraine.”

How careful is Crowdstrike and Alperovitch with information? After all, they were dealing with Ukrainian Intelligence directly. Alperovitch even has a twitter social relationship with Ukraine’s hackers.

The chain of information went like this:  IISS Report(think tank) –>Colonel Cassad (Russian blogger)–> the Saker(analytical blog/ translator)—>Alperovitch/ Crowdstrike(information purposely misquoted to create Russian hacker) —>FBI—>CIA—>ODNI (DNI report)—-> You scratching your head wondering who makes this intel crap up. This is one of the DNI report’s secret sources and one that the whole report rests on.- Indict Clinton For the Russian DNC Hack January 16, 2017

To keep things simple, Shane’s 2017 Pulitzer is partly based on Alperovitch misquoting one of the analytic platforms Scott Shane disdains and I write for.

@scottshane do you feel the Pulitzer people are doing a face-palm about right now?

Now, alone this is damning, but it is taken from what is now a 10 part of the series over 30,000 words deep in dense proof provided from the same people who gave Robert Mueller his Russian narrative. They drew @scottshane into to take the feet out from my work. Instead, he makes the case for my work with his own choice of experts and takes away the narrative fictions that won his Pulitzer instead. Maybe you can return them quietly.

If it was just the NYT article, I’d probably still take the time to answer it. But it’s not. This is a coordinated 3-prong effort. That puts it square in the Information Operation coup against the US Presidency.

NBC ran the same type of article in the same timeframe. “Trump seized on a conspiracy theory called the ‘insurance policy.’ Now, it’s at the center of an impeachment investigation.

Just months after Trump’s inauguration, conspiracy theorists pushed a fanciful and unsubstantiated narrative in which the DNC framed Russia for election interference.”

And third, one of the private Intel companies working for Ukraine was able to push the following into the Senate Intel Committee. What they are doing is trying to turn the pressure this article series and the work of many other journalists back onto the journalists and news platforms. This will stop investigations on the IO coup as well as push the Senate toward impeaching the President of the United States based on their fabrications.

As noted in Part 8, Bellingcat and Eliot Higgins have been part of the Intel coup against the Presidency since it began. The timeline and milestones in the article is where they discussed their progress.

When I told Eliot Higgins about my findings and the proof was there, here was his response.

The choice is whether the fabric of United States democracy will be irreparably torn or not. If they win, the world loses.

If you couple both efforts with @scottshane‘s, it’s looks damning. All three have the same goal. All three efforts are within the same timeframe. It looks like a coordinated effort to destroy the fact-based story and give the narrative priority.

But, let’s give Scott Shane’s 2018 Pulitzer another whirl, shall we? In the end, and to Shane’s chagrin, DNI James Clapper’s candid admission the only proof he had of Russian influence on the 2016 election was Hillary Clinton (HRC) losing Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. “It stretches credulity to conclude that Russian activity didn’t swing voter decisions.”

Scott Shane won Pultizer Prizes for two consecutive years, 2017-18. It’s quite an honor, very prestigious. But, my question is how that is possible if he relied on Crowdstrike’s information that was debunked by Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty?

Now, for the Pulitzer Prize, your work was judged by 17 judges. In 2018, there were three or four from the NYT and one from the Washington Post. Both papers push the same narrative.

What are my qualifications to answer NYT Pulitzer Prize winner Scott Shane and his light on facts, heavy on narrative fictions?

My credentials are a little different. For 2017-2018, a few article series I wrote on how privatized Intelligence was taking shape and the problems with it taking preeminence over government agencies was listed #2 for both years by Project Censored. The other side to that was how privatized Intel was using these tools on the public at will, out of spite, and for money. The first-place story was one that was never written at all.

Project Censored’s list shows stories with the greatest national impact that are under-reported, pushed own or censored outright.

Stretched across thirty campuses, the initial round of judging is between over 200 news stories that go through five rounds of judging before making the top 25.  Faculty and students vet each candidate story in terms of its importance, timeliness, quality of sources, and corporate news coverage. If it fails on any one of these criteria, the story is not included. 

Once Project Censored receives the candidate story, we undertake a second round of judgment, using the same criteria and updating the review to include any subsequent, competing corporate cove In early spring, we present all VINs in the current cycle to the faculty and students at all of our affiliate campuses, and to our national and international panel of judges, who cast votes to winnow the candidate stories from several hundred to 25. 

Once the Top 25 list has been determined, Project Censored student interns begin another intensive review of each story using LexisNexis and ProQuest databases. Additional faculty and students contribute to this final stage of review.

The Top 25 finalists are then sent to our panel of judges, who vote to rank them in numerical order. At the same time, these experts—including media studies professors, professional journalists, and a former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, among others—offer their insights on the stories’ strengths and weaknesses.

Thus, by the time a story appears in the pages of Censored, it has undergone at least five distinct rounds of review and evaluation. – Project Censored

.

I’ve opened up a type of story that generally doesn’t get told until at least 20 years later. My articles are fact dense. This is part 10 in series that is the first time in journalism I’m aware of an IO coup or Intel Community crimes were opened up at the beginning of the stream, not forensically, after the fact. Most of the actors and actions were accounted for as they occurred.

The publications I write for seem to have a much higher standard of fact grading than the NYT is on this particular story and wouldn’t accept less than extremely dense sourcing from me. The stakes are too high. Some of the editors are even adversarial and had to be convinced beyond a shadow this was happening.

In 2005, at the beginning of Hurricane Katrina, I designed a methodology that would close the levees in New Orleans in less than a week. I contacted the USACE (United States Army Corps of Engineers) at the Pentagon which was where they were trying to get their heads around the stopping damage from happening and not losing the city.

I explained the plan to Colonel Paul Tan, who became my liaison. There were five plans on the table from five different national size contractors. When they heard mine, it became clear it was the only option.

Only one company in the world had the equipment to do this. I contacted the vice president of Erickson Aircrane and convinced him of why it could be done with his equipment. Great people at Ericson. They broke contract with the state of Washington and moved $30,000,000 worth of gear and support to Alabama to stage from. The base problem was you couldn’t get a barge in because the water was too shallow. You couldn’t do the work from dry ground so a crane couldn’t get in.

We could do it from the air successfully by reversing some the normal steps to account for head pressure on the water flow. The other side of that is understanding both the logistics and developing a schedule of procedures that was bulletproof.

Scott, pull the FOIA. My name and our company are prominent in the discussions and minutes early on from the Pentagon decisions.

The commander on the ground in New Orleans had the final word and decided to stay with the sandbags.

After it was over, we, Erickson Aircraft and our company were supposed to demonstrate the methodology for Michael Chertoff and FEMA as a next-gen option. He never set up a schedule.

Erickson’s vice president at the time, Lonny Alaramos, didn’t sign on to the plan for profit. He did it because so many people needed help and an entire city was being destroyed.

In 2011, the Fukashima meltdowns happened. I designed a methodology I gave to a nuclear operator for a bid on the Fukashima project to cut radiation exposure. It went into one of the unsuccessful remediation bids at the time. I used to have locked high rad clearance and about five years before my wife designed the protocol to keep reactors and pools safe during refueling that started to be used internationally. Non-Orthodox Means and Methods to achieve Radiation barriers and establish minimum of ALARA

If you want to have an interesting conversation, I can talk you through a remediation plan for the site at Fukashima I never bothered to publish. The graft and criminality was already apparent with the energy company.

Why add this to the conversation at all? I don’t generally talk about experiences like this because for most people, it’s too esoteric and outside their experience.

What these events show is the ability to go into large unknown situations under stress and not only grasp them fast but create forward-thinking solutions very quickly.

What Scott Shane was especially interested in was whether or not I was shaping Russia and Ukraine policy from Lugansk People’s Republic in Donbass. Topping it off, he asked a couple of times whether or not the President of the United States was getting his information about the DNC hack directly or indirectly from me. And whether or not I was comfortable with that.

Scott Shane-I’m especially wondering where President Trump got his info on this before he first discussed it publicly in April 2017:

Scott Shane– I’ve seen this piece of yours and wondered if there are other items from you or others that might have influenced the president

Scott Shane-Would it worry you if you thought President Trump was getting some of his thinking on this from your writings, presumably secondhand?

I wrote about the rise of unqualified starting Intel guys a few years back. The 2017 ODNI report was stuffed with them including Crowdstrike’s Alperovitch who was its centerpiece. Many of the superstars of the Intel Community sadly lack even reasonable experience or training in the field.

Yet, it is their expertise you want the President of the United States to continue to base decisions on? The unfiltered, non-fact graded political and income inspired reports they send regularly to Congressmen, agencies, and companies are what is destroying diplomacy and peace in the world. Here are some of your great Intel guys, once the trappings are laid bare ever since the Clinton administration pushed this mess into being.

US intelligence agencies built their methodologies on the methods and help of an out of work web-designer, a pornographer suffering from toxic black-mold induced delusions, a gift shop employee, a stay at home dad whose last job was selling underwear, and a man that heard coded intel messages in fax transmission beeps. Unfortunately, this isn’t a joke.-

Why Vault 7 Tools Used by Private Contractors Shows US Intel Needs a Ground-Up Rebuild Intel and News Building

This is what passes for advanced trainers in the Intel field in the Western world today for OSINT and online Intel gathering. This! This is what trains the entire ODNI and all the agencies including the FBI, CIA, and NIA.

If you ask if I was comfortable with a President of the United States getting actionable Intelligence or evidence from one of these people, their companies or associates? Nope. No. Never.

2 “Open-Source” Intelligence Secrets Sold to Highest Bidders

Early on, Eliason reported, the private contractors who pioneered open-source intelligence realized that they could circulate (or even sell) the information that they gathered before the agency for which they worked had reviewed and classified it. In this way, “no one broke any laws,” Eliason wrote because the information “shifted hands” before it was sent to an agency and classified. [For one account of how early open-source intelligence contractors worked, see Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “Private Jihad,” New Yorker, May 29, 2006.]

This loophole created what Eliason described as a “private pipeline of information” that intelligence contractors could use to their advantage. Members of Congress, governors, news outlets, and others often wanted the same “intel” that the CIA had, and, Eliason wrote, open-source intelligence contractors “got paid to deliver Intel for groups looking for specific insights” into creating or influencing government policy. 

As a result of these changes, according to Eliason’s second article, “People with no security clearances and radical political agendas have state sized cyber tools at their disposal,” which they can use “for their own political agendas, private business, and personal vendettas.”

Although WikiLeaks’s Vault 7 exposé received considerable corporate news coverage, these reports failed to address Eliason’s analysis of the flaws in open-source intelligence and private contractors. A notable exception to this was a March 2017 Washington Post editorial by Tim Shorrock. Noting that WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange had said the CIA “lost control of its entire cyberweapons arsenal,” Shorrock’s editorial reviewed the findings from his previous reports for the Nation and concluded that overreliance on private intelligence contractors was “a liability built into our system that intelligence officials have long known about and done nothing to correct.”

You asked if I was comfortable if he was getting his actionable Intel from me? Nope. No. Never. YOU shouldn’t be either.

The real question Mr. Shane is whether or not you feel comfortable that these unqualified people have been influencing and appearing in the PDB unedited since Bill Clinton was in office. Do you?

Is this a practice you would stop?

The Intel community is gearing up with 4-5 million new hires off the street. Software jockeying has hit a new low. They will influence the PDB. Are you comfortable?

Here’s the caveat. If you were earning your Pulitzers, you would have picked up on it.

I write facts. Facts are funny like science experiments. They can be reproduced by different people because they don’t change. Facts are documentable. Facts are what should be in the US President’s Daily Brief (PDB).

I am quite comfortable with all of my articles being fact-checked, fact graded, certified, scrubbed of politics, and used to decide foreign or domestic policy inside the. In fact, I recommend it.

As far as investigating and apprehending criminals, @scottshane should look at local and federal law. That is a law-enforcement issue. Not his, not mine. Exposing the people, groups, and NGOs so as to draw attention to their crimes is the job of a journalist.

Just so you know, Intel decisions and policy based on my writing is catching on a little in the EU. At least parts of this series have been distributed to every EU ministry and official. The damage these particular cyber terrorists and seditionists have done isn’t welcome with open arms anymore. Like every other terrorist act by a national on foreign soil, it’s a matter of time before they bring it home like Bellingcat’s Aric Toler is now.

NYT Scott Shane interview

Shane, Scott Hi George — I’m trying to track the Trump CrowdStrike-Ukraine theory back in time and I see you have labored in this field for years. Would you have time for a call, or just for an email exchange? I probably have until tomorrow.

I’m especially wondering where President Trump got his info on this before he first discussed it publicly in April 2017:

https://apnews.com/c810d7de280a47e88848b0ac74690c83

I’ve seen this piece of yours and wondered if there are other items from you or others that might have influenced the president: https://washingtonsblog.com/2017/01/crowdstrikes-russian-hacking-story-fell-apart-say-hello-fancy-bear-2.html

George Eliason– Hi Scott, I can give some basic answers but I really don’t know what President Trump thinks about. I must have lost my invitation to that BBQ.

What I would like to do is reverse the order of your questions because it makes the most sense.

Scott Shane– I’d like to hear your views now, and whether they’ve changed. Would it worry you if you thought President Trump was getting some of his thinking on this from your writings, presumably secondhand?

George Eliason-The only US President I know for sure was influenced directly by what I write is former US President Barrack Obama. He unequivocally modified foreign policy regarding Ukraine because of what I write.

I started writing articles detailing what was happening in Kiev +political background on January 2014. In March 2014, I was the only English speaking journo getting published in the west at all from Donbass.

On March 6, 2014, Obama signed an Executive Order that made even American journalists sanctionable who challenged the newly installed coup group V. Nuland bought cookies for.

Obama, the self-proclaimed “Killa” already demonstrated a willingness to drone strike Americans based on accusations. No investigation. No trial. Just drone em.

If he signed that executive order and I was the only American in the region. 2+2 invariably has the same result. If he didn’t know I was there or what I was writing, there was no need to formulate said executive order.

Scott Shane– George — Thanks for the reply. I understands that you don’t personally know the president. But you have been a significant voice for the view that Trump is voicing — that the official version of the 2016 hack is false ands that Ukrainian hackers were responsible. For instance you published this a few months before the president first talked about ties between CrowdStrike and Ukraine:

https://washingtonsblog.com/2017/01/crowdstrikes-russian-hacking-story-fell-apart-say-hello-fancy-bear-2.html

George Eliason-Crowdstrike and Ukrainian Intel are working hand in glove. This is a sad fact proven by others including Jeff Carr. If the key components to the hack are in the hand of only 2 parties, it is simply making a determination of liability to the event.

What’s more important is determining Crowdstrike’s liability in the Intel Community coup attempt that’s being reported in mainstream media by journalists like Tucker Carlson, Sheryll Atkinson, and even former Congressman Ron Paul.

The New York Times, your own paper, broke stories about the problem as they forecast it, almost 20 years ago along with News Week and a slew of other MSM publications.

The story of corruption and the possible criminal actions of the newly privatized deep state was updated 15 years ago by your publication and a lot of others.

Around 2007, RJ Hillhouse had enough respect that the DNI answered her charges publically.

Tim Shorrock detailed this magnificently in 2015. The top end of a private deep state replaced the Intel Agency heads in the hierarchy. In 2017, the ODNI and FBI bowed to Crowdstrike and refused to do their job which was to investigate a supposed criminal act.

I detailed this Intel Community coup so closely I was able to list milestones. I suggest you look closely.

• https://thesaker.is/the-terrorists-among-us-the-coup-against-the-presidency/
• https://thesaker.is/the-terrorists-among-us9hillary-clintons-democratic-coup-against-the-presidency/

The set up to the Ukraine whistleblower story is from a cookie-cutter formula given by the people at Rand that wrote the instruction manual for Next Generation Regime change.

What I feel is irrelevant. What you feel is irrelevant. Once the proof is there, and it is, do you protect the Office of the Presidency and the Republic itself? Or not?

My position is this. If former President Barrack Obama was somehow caught in this position, as much as I hate him, I would defend him and his presidency.

This is the same Barrack Obama that ordered drone strikes on Americans based on the people working with Crowdstrike today. Why are they all tied into Ukrainian Intelligence and the hackers?

Great journalists like Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett are going across warzones reporting. Should they have to worry that their work crosses some private companies narrative and could get them killed by supposedly friendly agencies?

Look at the current series I am writing, the same Intel Community Icon that reported to Congress that US drone strikes on an Americans was successful. In it, you’ll find a screenshot of Aaron Weisburd and Elliot Higgins of Bellingcat concluding Beeley’s reporting must not be allowed to make it into the President’s Daily Briefing.

As a journalist, you should angry for them.

George Eliason-Here’s the rub. In 2016, before anyone looked seriously at Donald Trump as “Putin’s guy,” Bernie Sanders was labeled “Putin’s guy.” The same exact method I’ve described being used now was used on Sanders. This means unless everyone that gives a damn about the country stops and takes a real look, Sanders should go play golf instead. He won’t make it out of the primary.

Sanders won. Sanders won. Sanders won. Sanders was…irrelevant.

This is the deeper part of the Crowdstrike crime story. This is. No candidate has a shot in hell of getting through the Democratic primary unless they are signed on to this mess.

Let’s be clear. My politics don’t matter. But for the sake of the argument, I am a conservative who writes for progressive and centrist publications.

I look at someone like Rob Kall of OpEdNews and wish he ran for Congress despite not agreeing with every position. He’d be great. Washington of Washington’s blog has been a heroic voice and will be glad the New York Times recognizes their work.

Some of the better geopolitical analysis is coming from The Saker blog. There are many good alternative news sources across the spectrum and they all matter.

Scott Shane- If Dimitri Alperovitch is working for Ukrainian Intelligence and is providing intelligence to 17 US Intelligence Agencies is it a conflict of interest?

Ukraine has been screaming for the US to start a war with Russia for the past 2 1/2 years. Using facts accepted by leaders on both sides of the conflict, the main proof Crowdstrike shows for evidence doesn’t just unravel, it falls apart. Is Ukrainian Intelligence trying to invent a reason for the US to take a hard-line stance against Russia? Are they using Crowdstrike to carry this out?

Scott Shane- Also, it would be helpful to know a bit more about you — where you grew up, education, how you landed in Ukraine, what work you’ve done there, who pays you now? Have you ever been paid by an army of the Russian state or Russian media, or DPR or LPR?  Or have you always been expressing independent views?

George Eliason-Sure. As you can see in the multiple screenshots above, the same Intel community guys that want to stop some of the world’s best women reporters at any cost, have spent 5 years trying to find me.

So with that in mind, right now the world seems to trust them. I’ve been very clear they need to be investigated and jailed. I remind them this on a regular basis.

But, what do they think of me when you get past the IO. I’m not associated with Russia or Russian media.

George Eliason-I am an American. What do you need to know about me? I am one of the few people to turn down the Carnegie Hero Award. I jumped into a flood that took down 8 bridges and failed to save a woman and her granddaughter.

It broke me for a long time. For the last 5 years, I’ve been writing about Ukraine, Donbass, and the IO, this has been out of pocket other than a camera I crowdfunded.

LNR wasn’t sure I existed until a year ago. I volunteered to monitor the elections here. The only contact I have with Russia is an occasional interview with the Russian Federation’s Permanent Deputy Representative to the UN, Dimitry Polanskiy.

As far as the Russian Army, in 5 years, I’ve yet to come across them. I did a cross-region check in 2014 specifically to ferret them out because western media insisted they were here. I documented the passports and did weapons checks. Weapons all have a manufacture date. The newest weapon was I think, 1967. The oldest rifle was 1919. No Russian army was here to pay anyone.

Lastly, what do I do for work? Today, I’m in between gigs. If you know someone in need of a decent researcher or investigative journalist send them my way.

Scott Shane Addenda questions

George, Plan right now is to cite you and quote you in the piece.

Scott Shane– Question: Obviously there has been much discussion of CrowdStrike and Ukraine, including by you. But some of what Trump said is hard to trace. Do you believe that “a very rich Ukrainian” owns CrowdStrike? Do you believe the hacked DNC servers are hidden in Ukraine? If not, do you have any idea where he’s getting that?

George Eliason-

Scott,

A rich Ukrainian owning Crowdstrike would be a new one on me. That’s not something I’d write without clean lines all the way through the research. The next question isn’t something you asked the other day. Great question and probably the only one I’m not willing to answer at the moment.

I’d like to take the content of the interview and publish whole after you publish. I don’t see any problems with that, do you?

best

George

End Interview

Let’s talk about the servers. Donald Trump mentioned servers in his phone call to Zelenskiy.

If it concerns Crowdstrike, how many servers would the US president be interested in? When he left office, Petr Poroshenko tore out the only server room in Ukraine secure enough to hold those servers.

Petr Poroshenko said he had to take the servers, they didn’t belong to him. Maybe someone should dust off their Pulitzer and go ask him instead of asking me.

 

The Terrorists Among US8- Trump Whistle Blower & the ODNI FBI CIA DOD NATO-COE

September 26, 2019

by George Eliason special correspondent of the Saker blog in Novorussia

Let’s explore the top of the chain in the Information Operation and Intel community coup against the presidency. The same private contractors responsible for the 2014 coup in Ukraine brought it home to the US in time to get involved in the election. Losing that bid, they have been working to alter the fabric of the country forever. No one likes to lose.

Enough information has come in about the whistleblower what group is a secondary source to determine who the primary sources of information against President Donald Trump is.

At the bottom of this article you’ll find the names of people overseeing the primary sources and why they were found so easily. If you have followed parts 1-7 in this series, you’ll walk away feeling like I somehow scripted the Trump-Zelenskiy whistleblower narrative.

The bigger questions of why is all this happening right now need to be answered. If you haven’t read The Terrorists Among US – The Coup Against the Presidency I suggest you start there because it shows a blow by blow of the coup in progress up to this point.

So, what if US Intel capabilities were under the control of a few extremely rich families that served their own political goals and those of their clientele? I’m seriously suggesting and going to prove that at the agency level, the US government no longer controls its own spies.

When we look at the concept of terrorists among the US, the ultimate betrayal is from people whose families became enriched because they positioned themselves as the first line of defense protecting the American way of life.

They were able to replace the work they did leading government agencies after they left with the work they were doing in the private sector. This is because they led all the agencies out of the post 9/11 world into a digital age no one knew anything about.

They are the same group hiring over 4 million people to work in the Intel, Information Operation, hacking, boots on the ground, and media, to change the world to their liking and that of their clients.

When that reality sinks in, remember, the US already has the entire digital world in net so tight that nothing slips by. Those 4 million undertrained people are for the benefit of the contractors described below.

The people leading these companies can’t make money in a normal world where diplomacy and mutual respect are the coin of the realm. Their profits and egos only exist where chaos and uncertainty reign. Even today it’s estimated that more than 70% of Intel workers are not government employees. This is what created the problem of privatized terrorism that exists today.

In a 2007 Washington Post OpEd entitled “The Value of Private Spies”, DNI McConnell conceded there was a huge danger in using private companies for intelligence and direct action work. Because of this he claimed “Our workforce has recovered to the point that we can begin to shed some contract personnel or shift them away from core mission areas, and the CIA is leading the way in this,” the ODNI stated.”

In 2007, CBS noted Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) lawyers revealed at a conference in May that contractors make up 51 percent of the staff in DIA offices. At the CIA, the situation is similar. Between 50 and 60 percent of the workforce of the CIA’s most important directorate, the National Clandestine Service (NCS), responsible for the gathering of human intelligence, is composed of employees of for-profit corporations.

After 9/11 the U.S. government shortened the learning curve by hiring contractors in droves. According to John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org in 2007 America’s spy network would soon resemble NASA’s mission control room in Houston.

“Most people, when they see that room, think they’re looking at a bunch of NASA people,” Pike notes. “But it’s 90 percent contractors.”

As discussed in US Intelligence Poses a Threat to the World, as early as 2004, more than 50% of Intel services were manned by private contractors. By, 2007, 70 percent of the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) unit is staffed by contractors, known as ‘green badgers.

Private Intel contractors trained the agency starting after 9/11. Soon it became the contractors that had the oversight. Managers left government service to work for private contractors and came back under lucrative corporate contracts.

Effective control, support, and management functions are in the hands of people that care more about a bottom line, politics, and a business forecast model.

The line between inherently governmental work and private contracting was smashed. While the lawman tries to bring the criminal in for justice, the bounty hunter brings back a body so he can be paid.

The New York Times headlined Private Surveillance Is a Lethal Weapon Anybody Can Buy Is it too late to rein it in? By Sharon WeinbergerJuly 19, 2019

The real 1% are Cyber

In a 2015 article at The Nation titled “How Private Contractors Have Created a Shadow NSA,” Tim Shorrock describes what he calls “the cyberintelligence ruling class.”

“Over the last 15 years, thousands of former high-ranking intelligence officials and operatives have left their government posts and taken up senior positions at military contractors, consultancies, law firms, and private-equity firms. In their new jobs, they replicate what they did in government—often for the same agencies they left. But this time, their mission is strictly for-profit,” Shorrock wrote.

Many of the principal figures come from America’s wealthiest families. Although the wealthiest have always had a lead in filling policy and cabinet positions, this time the public service aspect is missing.

 Shorrock goes on to detail how the same 1% Americans claim to be fighting is the cyberintelligence elite that controls the media.  Mathew Olsen is an example as the former National Counterterrorism Center director and current IronNet Corp. president. He joined ABC as a commentator. He goes further and shows how this is the rule and not the exception.

This is going on all across media channels. Every network has their own cyberintelligence “expert” to explain complicated topics, but their conflicts of interest almost always remain hidden.”

War and peace is no longer in the hands of governments. Until governments push back, your sons and daughters die grossly and openly for the highest paying lobbyist or business.

Michael Chertoff from 2005-2009 ran the massive Department of Homeland Security, where he was criticized for exempting the DHS from following laws on everything from the environment to religious freedom. A report issued by the Congressional Research Service said at the time that the delegation of unchecked powers to Chertoff was unprecedented. He was also known for railing against international law, warning that treaties such as the Geneva Conventions were placing undue constraints on U.S. actions abroad. As a long-time insider – in both the public and private sector – he is one of the top figures in the U.S. intelligence-security complex.

Private sector services mirror what they do for government including Intel-for-Hire, espionage, information operations, direct action, and state-sized propaganda operations. This is work that the government has stated on many occasions needs to remain with the agencies that can be held responsible to the public – and not to private companies that aren’t. .- From Mint News “How Intel for Hire Undermines US Intelligence

Intel Community Betrayal at Every Level

When we look at the Intel community as a whole and the agencies under the ODNI, how are we not betrayed? While there are real public servants in the Intelligence services, the trend is toward criminality and the leadership that deceived the public and violated their oaths of office.

As an example, DNI James Clapper’s admission the only proof he had of Russian influence on the 2016 election was Hillary Clinton (HRC) losing Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. “It stretches credulity to conclude that Russian activity didn’t swing voter decisions.”

That’s it that’s all. It would have been better if there was collusion if there was a Russian hack. Instead, it was part of an Information Operation that US Intelligence agency heads were in on.

The Information Operation (IO) detailed in the last installment is the single largest example of this known today. If you want to know what collusion is, start there.

Private contractors and political activists have taken it upon themselves to change the government in the United States of America. The private contractors are in the Intelligence field and work both for the government and the conspirators trying to overthrow the type of government the United States currently has.

How else can the existence of the IO coup be explained? The most extensive regime change operation by private contractors is going on in the US for 3 years and the ODNI, CIA, FBI, DOD, NSA, with budgets bigger than the next largest countries militaries, can’t find it or figure out what happened?

What is billed as the crime of the century is swept under the rug as far as investigations go? The DNC hack and Russian influence game tore at the fabric of the country. Is it because former FBI head Robert Mueller’s protégé started the newest dilettante mega-corporation in the spy game? Shawn Henry’s Crowdstrike just happened to be in a position to fabricate extensive and childish fables about the DNC, Podesta, and RNC hacks.

Remember, before it was Ruskies, according to Crowdstrike, it was Bernie Sanders stepping on HRC servers.

Let’s reverse the angle and expose the criminals.

If those crimes did happen under their watch Comey, Clapper and company should have been fired for incompetence because of all the information available to them at the time.

When did an actual crime occur according to ODNI agencies about the 2016 election? The crime occurred in December 2018 when the agency heads figured out their welcome was worn out with the incoming administration.

The above named were already working for the privatized 1% while still on government payrolls. They may not have gotten paid but they turned around and towed the narrative from that period forward. The wiretaps at Trump towers are ample proof of this.

Because HRC lost an election in states that had swing populations of bloc voters that hate HRC, the Russians did it, Mr. Clapper?

Reality dictates Clapper along with Comey, McCabe, Page, and company was willfully part of a conspiracy paid for by the lobbyist groups working to benefit a politician and supported by a foreign country (Ukraine) to overthrow the 2016 US elections. This started during the primaries and continued in the background throughout the election.

When this didn’t work out, the plan switched gears and became a full-court press to discredit and overthrow the presidency itself. Now keep in mind the infrastructure for the coup was put in place before Donald Trump declared his candidacy. It is a coup against the presidency.

The private Intel corporations that brought us the failed Hamilton 68 Russian catcher (courtesy of Michael Chertoff) and other media information war games are the only game in town for the likes of James Clapper, meaning there has to be some kind of lucrative life for a master spy.

The ODNI under Clapper and FBI leadership under Comey went all in for the conspiracy to overthrow the presidency after November 2016.

Why this happened and how this happened is the most dangerous game on the planet today. With the background articles 1-7 of the series in place, the explanation of why they did it became a matter of understanding process and people.

Like Joel Harding, they wanted more action but by playing the private spy game they didn’t have to color inside the lines anymore. Private Intel, IO, Espionage, and boots on the ground companies paint the lines as they go and pay for the lines to be moved as needed.

Those in the agencies or companies that went along with this because it was their job or worse, knowing they could make money lying to the press, public, and the in the PDB, must be investigated and dealt with in the harshest terms.

The reason is simple. You are the game they play. There aren’t enough bad guy countries on ten planet earths to support the game or generate the revenues consistently. That’s on September 26, 2019.

The agencies tasked with spying, IO, Infowar, Cyberwar, war, diplomacy, etc are all beyond compromised. Add in the almost complete ownership of media by stakeholders in these companies and you have a recipe for the end of everything we know.

Right now, they are keen on overthrowing the presidency. If successful, it won’t matter which party is seated in the Oval Office. Just take a position they don’t like.

Right now, they are set on controlling public opinion and political ideology. Most of the people gravitating into these fields in the private sector are politically and emotionally undeveloped. They understand the violence they are willing to bring the populace and the rush it gives them.

War and Peace

While all this is going on, at the same time, the agencies staffed with the same contractors are delivering intelligence that is supposed to be filtered. A neutral report is supposed to be written by the agency in charge before it is delivered into the presidential daily briefing (PDB). The PDB is the most important document produced because of its impact on the world daily.

From the PDB, the president of the United States decides:

•           Who is the enemy?

•           Who is friendly (or are there really any friends out there)?

•           Who is a danger and how?

•           Why are they a danger?

•           What is their motivation?

•           What steps will the US need to take to stop them, turn them in a different direction, or make peace with them?

What happens when the PDB is written by agency personnel or private contractors that want to destroy or embarrass the United States or the sitting president?

How bad does your politics have to be to be OK with starting wars for the sake of your undeveloped ego? It’s going on as we speak.

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the reported incidents of NSA employees’ violations of the law are likely “the tip of the iceberg” of lax data safeguards. The laws guiding the NSA’s spying authority in the first place are a bigger issue, he said. “If you only focus on instances in which the NSA violated those laws, you’re missing the forest for the trees,” Jaffer said. “The bigger concern is not with willful violations of the law but rather with what the law itself allows.”

The US government must bring these services back in house. The stakes are too high for the entire world not to. Americans are first on the plate for private Intel today. If you don’t think so, disagree with one of them.

Whistle Blowing Ukrainians

In what turns out to be one of the most fortuitous events in recent history, Donald Trump’s whistleblower source is in Ukraine. The whistleblower, according to a Ukrainian SBU source is Ukrainian. Lightning has struck again in the same spot for the thousandth time.

The same Ukrainian Intel and hacking groups are at it again.

According to the Hill, A whistleblower complaint released by the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday alleges that President Trump sought to enlist Ukraine’s help in the 2020 election by mounting a corruption investigation against former Vice President Joe Biden.

The declassified version of the whistleblower complaint details the government insider’s worries about Trump’s contacts with Ukraine’s leader, revelations of which on Tuesday triggered a formal impeachment inquiry against the president.

Now that we have the charge in place, the actual phone call showed…Ukraine’s Zelenskiy is about to have difficult days in Kiev with the nationalists there. US President Trump had a phone call and made no threats or conveyed anything to intimidate Zelenskiy.

September 24, 2019 MEMORANDUM OPINION FOR THE GENERAL COUNSEL OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Rather, the complaint arises out of a confidential diplomatic communication between the

President and a foreign leader that the intelligence-community complainant received secondhand…An “employee of an element of the intelligence community” (or an

intelligence-community contractor)…

The complainant describes a hearsay report that the President, who is not a member of the intelligence community, abused his authority or acted

unlawfully in connection with foreign diplomacy.

According to the New York Times– The whistle-blower who revealed that President Trump sought foreign help for his re-election and that the White House sought to cover it up is a C.I.A. officer who was detailed to work at the White House at one point, according to three people familiar with his identity.

The man has since returned to the C.I.A., the people said. Little else is known about him. His complaint made public Thursday suggested he was an analyst by training and made clear he was steeped in details of American foreign policy toward Europe, demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of Ukrainian politics and at least some knowledge of the law.

The C.I.A. officer did not work on the communications team that handles calls with foreign leaders, according to the people familiar with his identity. He learned about Mr. Trump’s conduct “in the course of official interagency business,” according to the complaint, which was dotted with footnotes about machinations in Kiev and reinforced with public comments by senior Ukrainian officials.

What seems to be the common denominators pertinent to the larger story? We have a lone gun Intel guy working on his own listening to rumors spun by whom?

It seems he was talking to Ukrainians in Kiev. There are a lot of Ukrainians in Kiev and quite a few in the Ukrainian government.

What we need to do to find the original source of the rumor is answer a couple simple questions.

Who in Kiev wants to destroy US President Donald Trump as a favor to Democratic Party allies they work with?

Who in Kiev wants to destroy newly elected president of Ukraine Zelenskiy?

Who in Kiev has the Intel capabilities and sophistication to listen in on government phone calls?

Those questions narrow the field down considerably. There is the opportunity aspect to consider with this too. How many people can listen in on a phone call with a foreign leader?

Lucky for us there is an international Information Operation (IO) going on to unseat US President Trump. This simplifies the field and cuts it down to anyone in Milestone March 1, 2014 from the Coup Against the President article.

That narrows it down to a small handful of disgruntled ultra-nationalist Ukrainians. To get to the absolute right person all that needs to happen is to extradite InformNapalm publisher Roman Burko, Deputy Information Minister Dimitri Zolotukin, and Christina Dobrovolska who supervise them. Christina left the operation 2 months ago but she has a lot of insight and likes visiting the USA.

Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat can be taken into custody as a material witness because of the vast amount of work his firm does the Ukrainian hacker Intel groups in Ukraine and Syria.

Aric Toler is in the US and will definitely provide useful insight although he’s a little timid around the most likely candidate for this, a hacker that goes by @UCA_ruhate_.

RUH8 or UCA_ruhate_  has been very vocal about his disdain for Zelenskiy and wants to hurt his presidency. These groups are familiar with how the US Congress works because they already have testimony on the Congressional record. Refer to Benchmark DNC Hacks

Alexandra Chalupa has a lot of experience with the same Intel groups. She used them to do OppoResearch for the 2016 election as shown in Milestone June 2016.

I’m sure with this caliber of help, all the information needed will come out.

The next thing to look at is who’s pushing the defense fund page for the unknown informer? It is the Ukrainian Diaspora Democratic party HRC advisor @AdamParkhomenko among other Diaspora members.

Adam worked with the Ukrainian hacker Intel groups at team Hillary and the Atlantic Council digital Sherlock program. His stint with Bellingcat and the Ukrainian hackers made memories to last a lifetime.

In the interest of justice for people of all political stripes and a return to sanity, the Intel community monster needs to be put in a glass cage isolated from society. Criminals among them have to be prosecuted.

The Terrorists Among US – The Coup Against the Presidency

by George Eliason for The Saker Blog

For the last few years, a deep state coup against the presidency has been in the media off and on. Starting in 2015 very serious efforts were made to put all the parts in place that guaranteed the 2016 US presidential election’s outcome.

This went so far beyond every extraordinary measure that it deserves special attention.

Before your eyes glaze over, this isn’t an article discussing theories. Why debate what could have happened when we can trace the route showing how things developed. We will show how this is continuing today through a continuing deep state coup.

The first thing you’ll notice is the title is present tense. The cyber terrorists I’ve written about through the last articles have very definite political goals in mind. That word “political” separates what they do from anything remotely close to 1st Amendment freedom of speech issues. The terrorists work for foreign countries directly or they work for groups working for foreign governments that aren’t trying to influence but change the fabric of the US. They’re doing a bang-up job so far.

The attacks on society, social groups, and governmental institutions have been for profit. The terrorist groups push political agendas at the expense of republican democracy in the west, eastern and central Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East.

Second, you’re going to see even the most successful conspiracies in history including this one are a matter of process. Things actually have to happen for the terrorists to be dangerous. It can’t just be ideas. They follow specific directions with their plans to reach goals and milestones.

Third, not all the most brilliant strategies are built on a clean process. Things get messy. When you include new methods, things evolve as you go. People start shooting from the hip or chattering if they are inexperienced. New people are generally clueless about how they should conduct your business.

The case at hand is the business of overthrowing legitimate governments. One of these happens to be your own. The terrorists are in the business of destroying citizen rights and protections. Reducing innocent people into victims like a wolf does its prey.

The coup against the office of the president of the United States started unofficially in 2012. It wasn’t meant to, but it did. It was a reaction to something we never thought about. We certainly didn’t believe it.

This was long before anyone had issues with Donald Trump who was busy with other things at the time. So, understand the term coup against the presidency means against the executive branch.

Should it succeed, and it still may, the next world war will be one of the invariable consequences. Fascism and its sidekick nationalist chauvinism will become the new norm across the western world. If they win, there may be nothing left to turn the clock back to after this.

If we succeed, the coup against the US government stops. There will be no war with Russia. The war in Donbass stops. Criminals investigations, trials in court, and sentencing of seditionists and traitors can and will happen.

On the day before the 2016 election happened, I wrote an article about the current deep state coup and what some of the ramifications were. In the larger sense, it helps because it shows the coup started when no one knew who would be running in the general election or who would win.

Think about that. The first problem was Bernie Sanders, only afterward it became Donald Trump. The accusation against both was they were Putin’s lackeys.

Let’s start at the end of the story. In 2019, a deep state coup still continues against the office of the president of the United States. This materialized in the media as an Information Operation (IO) during the 2016 election cycle.

We are watching the second evolution of a new regime change method in play. It was originally developed to overthrow the election process and be the deciding factor for a given election.

The developers have decided it pays to screw the will of the people. And that is the easiest answer to every political problem we face today.

The newest iteration of this method was developed in 2012 as a new strategy for IO (Information Operations). It’s important to note IO is the realm of Green Berets (SF-Special Forces) and spies. With that in mind, the tactician, a former SF, took the following definition of IO and put it on steroids.

In military IO operations center on the ability to influence foreign audiences, US and global audiences, and adversely affect enemy decision making through an integrated approach. Even current event news is released in this fashion. Each portal is given messages that follow the same themes because it is an across the board mainstream effort that fills the information space entirely when it is working correctly.

The purpose of “Inform and Influence Operations” is not to provide a perspective, opinion, or lay out a policy. It is defined as the ability to make audiences “think and act” in a manner favorable to the mission objectives. This is done through applying perception management techniques which target the audience’s emotions, motives, and reasoning.

These techniques are not geared for debate. It is to overwhelm and change the target psyche.

Using these techniques information sources can be manipulated and those that write, speak, or think counter to the objective are relegated as propaganda, ill informed, or irrelevant. US Psychological Warfare in Ukraine: Targeting Online Independent Media Coverage

Former Green Beret Joel Harding pioneered IO for the US military. In 2012, he took his expertise, the core of regime change, to the extreme for Ukrainian nationalists inside the State Department and in the US Ukrainian Diaspora.

Harding revolutionized regime change by asking the crucial question; What if we did this at a whole nation level?

Next Generation Regime Change

What you are about to see is literally the cutting edge of US military regime change. Lessons from Others for Future U.S. Army Operations in and Through the Information Environment –Christopher Paul, Colin P. Clarke, Michael Schwille, Jakub P. Hlávka, Michael A. Brown, Steven S. Davenport, Isaac R. Porche III, Joel Harding

Today, this method is being used in the United States by public Intel officials, NGOs, lobbyists, and private IO and Intel contractors.

Joel Harding developed this IO program for the 2014 coup in Ukraine to enact regime change. It is being used to provoke a war with Russia in the western media. His method is being used across many of the conflict areas primed for regime change in the post-2014 world. Taiwan is the newest example. Syria has suffered the most from this.

Instead of focusing on a small group, Harding’s methods speed the process by controlling all the information everyone has access to within the operation zone and every zone that can influence the operation outcome across the world. Regime change will be welcomed by every sane person reading, watching, or hearing the news his channels are publishing.

This enables him to define the terms used and the enemies fought. Controlling the information means you decide who and where the enemy is. You decide what the enemy is.

All this deals with information that an adversary desperately needs to make an informed decision. That is how we ” influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp the decision making of adversaries and potential adversaries”.

Bottom line on the bottom. Cyber and EW are cool, but we dare not lose sight of their ultimate goal, targeting an adversary’s or potential adversary’s decision cycle. Cyber and EW are not goals nor ends by themselves, it’s all about information. Information is the most powerful tool or weapon at our disposal at all times. To Inform is to Influence

After managing the coup in 2014 Ukraine, Harding’s IO group started the war in Donbass. Every major event from the overthrow of Victor Yanukovych until today in Ukraine has its clear marker on it.

This same group is responsible for Russian interference accusations before and during the 2016 election as well as blaming Russia for the DNC hacking exploits. This is very dangerous. The real “hackers” had State Department server passwords from two sources for years, access to DNC servers, as well as state-level tools and support.

The goal of Harding’s employers is to break up Russia and China and reward their old cold war cronies in the Diasporas with countries of their own under a two-level nationalism which is subservient to their interests. This ensures corrupt US politicians will remain incumbents and national elections will always have pre-determined results. If US politicians ignore what these groups are doing or worse, continue to help them, they won’t stop until nuclear war occurs.

This current IO group works with the US State Department and all the agencies from the ODNI including the FBI, CIA, NSA, DHS, etc. Many of them are still trainers and contractors. They still provide the Intel that goes into the President’s Daily Briefing.

They can and do literally provide the president of the United States with enough rope to hang himself through foreign policy missteps. This quagmire has to be cleaned up.

The group we expose today is infecting the US and international media with their Information Operation talking points. This is part is integral to the process of regime change. None of them do this for any high or lofty goal of a better life.

They do this for money and an anti-American contempt for US democracy. To make their story more compelling, I’ll rely on the conspirator’s braggadocio and allow them to tell it while I provide context.

The rest of the article will show the single most successful IO campaign the world has seen.

2010

For the sake of this one event, the world is almost at war. This statement by Stepan Bandera II is the catalyst that prepared the ground for the Ukrainian coup in 2014 and brought us here today.

For the same day your court in Donetsk ruled to strip [Ukrainian Ultra Nationalist hero Stepan] Bandera of his Hero title, God bestowed the best gift possible to our family: the birth of Stepan Bandera’s fifth great-grandchild. The KGB succeeded in killing his great-grandfather. But try as you might, you will never stop the Banderas Coming soon to a gene pool near you! Signed, Glory to Ukraine! Glory to Her Children! In prostration, S.A. Bandera, Grandson of Hero of Ukraine.” This was the third-generation Stepan Bandera’s open letter to Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych in 2010.- Kyiv Post

2012

2012 was a pivotal year for history and international diplomacy. Every evil from the early 20th century that could never rise again was about to be given a platform and PR campaign that would make Adolf Hitler blush.

In 2012, regime changer and former Green Beret Joel Harding was already hard at work. He worked with the HRC (Hillary Rodman Clinton) State Department to develop the method for regime change in Ukraine. The attempt in the US was soon to follow.

“…but I was having problems describing a “whole of government” approach, and I was having even more difficulty explaining how a “whole of nation” effort might be divided. We finally came up with five categories for what I might call government/corporate/private information activities…I am also not certain how to include discussions on content, such as a narrative. Cultural, religious and historical considerations also may be discussed. Where would they fit in?

I also can’t forget the methodology of efficiency, how do we determine Methods of Effectiveness. Once again, the voice of my friend and mentor, Dr. Dorothy Denning reminds me of this important consideration.

If I take a whole of nation approach then I should include marketing, public relations, perception management, reputation management and strategic communications (with an s).

What have I missed?”- How Best to Discuss a Whole of Nation Approach to Information Activities?

Methods of Effectiveness are ways to measure your success or failure so you can adjust course. Harding was keen to publish those too. Pay attention to the dates as we go. We’ll be jumping back and forth across the timeline as we go to cover the involvement of different actors getting involved.

By 2019, Harding’s IO success included Ukraine’s Chief Rabbi Yaakov Bleich and the namesake and grandson to Ukrainian NAZI leader Stepan Bandera working together to rehabilitate Bandera’s murderous image. Bandera is responsible for the murder of close to 500,000 Jews and it was also his people staffed the death camps. When you can get Jewish leaders to deny the Holocaust, it’s a big win for your IO.- Haaretz.com

Milestone 2012

Recently, on a LinkedIn forum, I referred to the Swiss model for a cyber militia. As many of you are aware the Swiss have a ‘home guard’, where all citizens are trained, armed and sent home packing their own individual weapon. Each has the responsibility to secure their weapon, practice periodically and are subject to recall to defend their country. Basically, they go home, stay in shape and wait.- Joel Harding On a US Cyber Militia 2012

Milestone January 2014 Digital Maidan, gained momentum following the initial Twitter storms. Leading the effort were: Lara Chelak, Andrea Chalupa, Alexandra Chalupa, Constatin Kostenko, and others.

The Diaspora learned they could organize and fund the coup in Ukraine from the outside.

· Milestone February 4, 2015- The Ukrainian Diaspora illegally crowdfunded weapon for Ukrainian punisher battalions. This was a continuation of the practice using social media platforms through 2014. The Atlantic Council’s Michael Weiss reports the UCCA was raising money for weapons. These weapons were subsequently used in war crimes. This action by itself is enough to take away 5013C tax-exempt status for every Ukrainian group giving money for Ukraine’s war effort. Ukrainian Diasporas have been funding all the Ukrainian punisher battalions. According to Ukrainian Diaspora sources, Ukrainian Diaspora leaders like Ivanka Zajac is also making leadership decisions for the battalions including how they spend the money. Just knowing that the volunteers are murdering innocent civilians with continued funding by their groups makes the Ukrainian Diaspora liable for the crimes.

Milestone -February 8th, 2014 On Maidan”… Russian websites outright accusing the US of supplying ammunition and other support to the rebels. I asked a friend in a position within the US, that might know more about this, he claims it is a private initiative of US citizens. This I like” “- Harding

· In February 2014, Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat made his first analysis of Ukraine’s EuroMaidan. He claimed the Russians were attacking.

· February 22nd, 2014 marks Harding’s first visible involvement in the Ukrainian crisis. “Yesterday I agreed to help present the information about this situation, bringing in representatives from many of the sources cited above. It is time International Broadcasting is examined. “- Harding

Milestone– On February 22, 2014, Joel Harding did his first efficiency assessment. His only concern was whether or not the international media saw the February 22, 2014 ouster of Victor Yanukovych as a coup. According to Harding “This is a snapshot in time, showing headlines only. The intent is to show how a current situation is being divided in its presentation, pro or con the power in Ukraine, pro or con Russian/Chinese/Iranian, or, it could be argued, pro and anti-Western powers (US/UK, etc).

· On February 28th, 2014 he was announced director of the NSE Strategy Center. Harding reached out immediately to the IO community to see what information anyone had on current Russian cyberspace operations.

Milestone–On March 1 st 2014 Harding announced cyber options for Ukraine. “Since March 2014, in the wake of the rise of the volunteer movement, several activist groups and individuals assumed the state security functions in the media- and cyber-space

In January 2014, Harding worked with 17-year-old Sviatoslav Yurash to open Euromaidanpress.com. He took Yurash under his wing showing him how to run an IO platform. This can be seen in the comments early on. Sviatoslav Yurash went on to become the deputy representative in Kiev for the Ukrainian World Congress (UWC). The UWC was a sponsor of the 2014 coup and is a signatory partner to the Atlantic Council.

Yurash became the spokesman for the EuroMaidan protest that was turning into an insurgency. He became the post-coup Ukrainian Defense Ministry, Dimitry Yarosh, as well as the 3 conspirators, Arsenii Yatsenyuk, V. Klitschko, and Oleh Tyanhybok.

· Yurash web properties spawned InformNapalm and Ukrainian Cyber Intel UCA, CyberHunta, RUH8, TRINITY, Shaltay Boltay (Humpty Dumpty) aka Anonymous Ukraine: This hacker group is the branch of the hacktivist movement Anonymous in Ukraine. It is, however, internally divided in its position regarding the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. Some of its members are pro-Ukrainian and tend to be close to Cyber Hundred and Null Sector, while others are pro-Russian and close to CyberBerkut. The pro-Russian element is prominent, having claimed several attacks on NATO, US and EU governments’ websites (Carr, 2014). Cyber and Information warfare in the Ukrainian conflict

Anonymous/ Shaltay Boltay/Humpty Dumpty very important when the DNC hacks and influence story comes into play. Note now, they fall under Joel Harding’s IO operation. The other names for these combined groups you are more familiar with are APT 28, APT29, Fancy Bear, and Cozy Bear.

· March 2014 According to InformNapalm, InformNapalm, Myrotvorets, Ukrainian Cyber army, and other volunteer communities organized a series of effective campaigns in data collection, data analysis, identification of hostile activities and retaliation against them. The volunteers took on the roles of intelligence and counterintelligence agents.

· They collected the information on locations and movements of enemy weapons and equipment, blocked servers and websites engaged in Russian terrorist propaganda, and blocked bank accounts of the militants. And they still continue carrying out the important volunteer work in cyberspace. 2016 became the year of escalation of cyber-warfare…

Sviatoslav Yurash worked with Andrea Chalupa, Alexandra, Chalupa, and Irena Chalupa. His team works directly with the Atlantic Council through Bellingcat and Dimtri Alperovich from Crowdstrike. The importance of this will be clear shortly.

· Today, Yurash is a chief advisor to new Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Milestone-On March 3rd, 2014 Harding’s advice was “Now I have a thought bouncing around inside my head, which actually makes sense. But the repercussions are wild, off the charts, bloody and may destroy a nation. .. If one looks at that graphic, natural gas pipelines run through Ukraine. If one had the talent, one could close valves in any of those pipelines and shut down a major part of Russia’s exports and, therefore, a source of money, another kind of power which Putin must truly understand.

Bumping this up one step, blow up those pipelines, although that is going to make one helluva mess. This would result in a Russian invasion. End of story? No. Imagine trying to defend thousands of miles of pipeline. Ukrainian insurgents would make Russia devote dozens of divisions of soldiers…” At the time Victoria Nuland was trying to court Pravy Sektor into legitimacy by offering money and support.

· On March 16th Dimitri Yarosh answered. Yarosh threatened gas lines across Ukraine. The advice Harding gave threatened one of the only remaining sources of income remaining in Ukraine for the Kiev junta. Joel Harding was writing his own foreign policy.

Milestone May 2, 2014, Odessa Trade Union Massacre

It was after this event I figured out Joel Harding existed. Within a couple of days, it was evident from the reporting that a hand was guiding the narrative Ukraine was building. I didn’t know who Joel Harding was, but I could see his handiwork clearly. I started passively looking for him. The official death toll from Ukraine stands at 42.

This alone should have been enough to warrant independent investigations. When enough information came in, witness accounts put the Odessa Trade Union death toll to over 340 and later it rose closer to 400 with over 200 people missing that were never in the building.

According to a police detail who was guarding the scene and a Pravy Sektor member who carried the bodies out, 99 corpses were removed before the official count. That was just from the basement.

This isn’t public relations. This is a crime against humanity on Harding’s part. He covered up the crime which makes him part of it.

The free press part has already been covered. Building dissenting opinions make the work of IO/IIO professionals difficult or impossible. It’s called Information Fratricide and it is to be avoided by all means possible.

Information fratricide is defined as Actions, perceptions, and information from friendly forces that create improper impressions can adversely affect IO in sensitive situations.

Milestone MH17 July 17, 2014, All the information about MH17 from Ukraine comes from Ukrainian IO Joel Harding developed. His sources are described in the March 1^st milestone. Five years later, no other sources have been considered by the investigators. Harding took control of the information and took it out of the realm of witness testimony or forensics.

Milestone July 29, 2014, The Information War for Ukraine has taken on a whole new look.  Russia, you need to go down.  You need to choke on your ilk.  You need to feel the pain of exceeding the limits of acceptability.  You need to pay.

Suffer, Russia.- Words Fail the World Against Russia

• The addition of Eliot Higgins’ Bellingcat (see Feb 2014 Maidan) as an independent investigator cemented Ukraine’s reliance on Harding’s IO. Ukraine’s cyber team (InformNapalm, UCA, CyberHunta) provided the information Bellingcat collated and called their own.
• The Deputy of Information Policy (Joel Harding started the ministry) announces Bellingcat is his counterpart. They work under Harding. Pay attention as the rest of the IO team comes aboard. This is the same crew mounting the deep state coup. US Intel leaders at the ODNI, FBI, and CIA will be working very closely with them in just over 2 years.
• Harding’s IO team covered up the shootdown of MH17. This is a crime against humanity. The families will never see justice because until a real investigation is mounted, the only proof of wrongdoing is easily shown to be manufactured.
• Milestone Mark Paslawsky August 19, 2014, The nephew of Bandera’s 3^rd in command, Mikola Lebed was shot in the back as he fled at the battle of Ilovaisk with Donbass battalion.

“The second reason I mention Paslawsky is that he was, after all, a Ukrainian American. In killing him—and make no mistake about it: Putin killed him—Putin has taken on, in addition to the entire world, the Ukrainian American Diaspora. He probably thinks it’s a joke. But in killing a Ukrainian American, he’s made the war in Ukraine personal for Ukrainian Americans. Their intellectual, material, and political resources are far greater than Putin can imagine. Be forewarned, Vlad: diasporas have long memories. And this one will give you and your apologists in Russia and the West no rest.- Alexander Motyl Loose Cannons and Ukrainian Casualties

This event is what unifies the players, methods, and leaders fighting Ukraine’s IO and is the seed for the deep state coup in the USA. It’s important to note who Paslawsky’s brother is. Nestor Paslawsky is the apparent leader of OUNb Ukrainian American Diaspora. It is his rage and revenge that Motyl threatens Putin with. Paslawsky is coming for his pound of flesh.

The June 2016 milestone will show Harding, Ukrainian hackers, Team Hillary, Chalupas, the Ukrainian Diaspora, Bellingcat, and Aaron Weisburd working together pushing toward the overthrow of the 2016 general election.

Milestone-On December 12th, 2014 Harding wrote “Ukraine is a bright shining star. They approved a Minster of Information Policy. They received a National Information Strategy and are working on a counter-propaganda center.

• “I was in a discussion today about information being used in social media as a possible weapon.  The people I was talking with have a tool which scrapes social media sites, gauges their sentiment and gives the user the opportunity to automatically generate a persuasive response. Their tool is called a “Social Networking Influence Engine”.  No, not related to the SMISC BAA from a few years ago. Better. ..Can this be categorized as a munition?  I looked through and it does not seem to apply. The implications seem to be profound for the information environment.
• The implications may have far-reaching impact beyond the Department of Defense.  The people who own this tool are in the civilian world and don’t even remotely touch the defense sector, so getting approval from the US Department of State might not even occur to them.  If this does require ITAR approval, the corporate world that deals with information and influence will definitely be affected. ..So;   my question is, who at the US Department of State must I coordinate with to get a ruling if this “Social Networking Influence Engine” must receive ITAR approval? “- Joel Harding

Milestone January 2015 Andrew Aaron Weisburd joins Harding’s IO group and starts Kremlintrolls.com to start documenting websites against the Ukrainian agenda and geolocate readers for action against them.

Milestone February 23rd, 2015 Harding tweeted the creation of the i-army. The next day it was announced to the world. “This effort is geared to contain what they call Russian propaganda in the west.”In late January, Ukraine’s Minister of Information Policy, Yuriy Stets, promised to create an “information-army” to fight Russian propaganda…”

With this, the concept of the troll army was born. Right out of the gate, Ukraine was bragging the Ukrainian I-Army numbered over 40,000 volunteer trolls, hackers, commenters, and propagandists.  According to the Ukrainian Information Ministry– The first assignment is to “Invite your best and closest friends to the website of the Ukrainian Information Forces, where they can join the army by subscribing to a mailing list of daily assignments. This is very important, considering our information struggle against the foreign aggressor.”

· Ukrainian Cyber Troops/Army: This hacker group, which was founded by Eugene Dukokin, a former cybersecurity consultant and programmer (Maheshwari, 2015), targets pro-Russian separatists and Russian troops in Ukraine. The report accounts of pro-Russian officials to various banking and payment websites or social media in order to get the accounts closed. These actions are legal and do not require them to hack any systems (Kerkkänen and Kuronen, 2016) Cyber and Information warfare in the Ukrainian conflict

· In January 2015 Andrew Weisburd starting work for the Ukrainians showing them how he finds the networks of people he is paid to hurt.

· Weisburd starts Kremlintrolls.com and builds the first list of journalists and publications that are against Harding’s Ukrainian Information Ministry agenda.

· Between him and Joel Harding, over 200 publications were listed as Russian assets. Many of them are American websites.

· It should be noted that according to Weisburd and Harding the only real qualifier to be included on the lists is supporting someone other than Hillary Clinton

· According to Weisburd- These countries account for 81% of all the Kremlin Trolls and their engaged followers. The top five countries alone account for 58%. That the USA is ranked first came as something of a surprise. Detailed analysis is ongoing, and I’m unlikely to share the findings publicly.”

From the Economist-“As one of his other guests, a deputy from Mr. Poroshenko’s party, remarked later in the show: “Today, an information war is being waged against Ukraine.

Our task is to be united, to comment as one.”Information warfare, like the shooting kind, is a new art for Ukraine and the learning curve is steep…Criticism of the government is dismissed as mudslinging by Kremlin agents. Last month authorities jailed Ruslan Kotsaba, a western Ukrainian blogger who had spoken out against mobilization. 

Ukrainian authorities accused him of working in Russia’s interests; Amnesty International labeled him a 

As one of his other guests, a deputy from Mr. Poroshenko’s party, remarked later in the show: “Today, an information war is being waged against Ukraine; Our task is to be united, to comment as one.”

Milestone April 16, 2015, Joel Harding/ Ukraine Ministry of Information Policy property Myrotvorets claims first murder victim, Oles Buzina.

From here, we have most of the players lined up. Two years of IO events clearly showcase their handiwork now that it’s been put in context. The same IO teams responsible for developing the terms Russian trolls and characterizing fake Russian influence started characterizing journalists and news sites that were contrary to Harding’s mission as close to enemies of the state as they dared.

“Disrupt, deny, degrade, destroy, or deceive” The 2016 US Election and Deep State Coup

Milestone 1990, Nigel Oakes of Cambridge Analytica fame started the Behavioral Dynamics Institute. He set up a facility that became home for the leading experts in strategic communication and manipulation. He wanted to turn the ability to change people’s behavior into a commercial business. Shifting mass opinion would be more lucrative than traditional advertising ever could be. Based on this, in 1993 he opened Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL).

He expanded into military disinformation, social media, and voter targeting. Within a few years, he advertised he could change the outcome of elections. His company participated in 25 international elections since 1994. Because he was successful, by 1997 SCL was in trouble in the UK because its principals were ignoring the principle of neutrality at home and targeting UK election results.

According to Wikipedia “SCL’s involvement in the political world has been primarily in the developing world where it has been used by the military and politicians to study and manipulate public opinion and political will. It uses what have been called “psy ops” to provide insight into the thinking of the target audience.”

SCL promoted itself as having the knowledge, the people and the experience to help global brands, political organizations, world leaders and militaries deliver measurable and lasting behaviour change.

Wikipedia goes on to say SCL claims that its methodology has been approved or endorsed by agencies of the Government of the United Kingdom and the Federal government of the United States, among others

The SCL Group has been working at the forefront of behavioural change communication for 25 years. Developed in conjunction with the Behavioural Dynamics Institute, SCL has evolved into a multi-disciplined group of behavioural research and communication agencies.

Cambridge Analytica was developed as a subgroup of SCL and designed specifically to take part in the US elections.

While the end of Cambridge Analytica is known, it wasn’t the only company spawned out of the Behavioral Dynamics Institute.

Remember Milestone July 29, 2014, by Joel Harding about MH17 The Information War for Ukraine, has taken on a whole new look.  Russia, you need to go down.  You need to choke on your ilk.  You need to feel the pain of exceeding the limits of acceptability.  You need to pay.

Milestone 11 Aug 2014 1st tweet from IOTA Global. We are an InfoOps, PsyOps, & StratCom training org staffed by 30 experts from 6 nations. iota-global.com

IOTA Global was what changed. Joel Harding started advertising the company he started with his friend IO expert Steve Tatham. IOTA Global and Cambridge Analytica while loosely partnered were worlds apart in terms of skill sets.

IOTA Global is an organisation of the world’s most recognised military Information Operations, Psychological Operations, and Influence professionals, backed by proven social and behavioural scientists, who provide the capability transfer and advice to governmental clients, globally.  Our members have commanded Information Operations and Psychological Operations units on operations; they have written NATO and national doctrine; they lecture in the world’s Defence Academies. Teamed with some of the leading behavioural scientists in the field, there is no other organisation with the same experience and knowledge.

…IOTA Global is the world’s experts.

As predominantly ex-military Officers and diplomats, we understand the importance of discretion and we appreciate the needs of governmental and military organizations. We work only with clients approved by our own respective governments. All IOTA Global products and services are subject to Export Control regulation by the UK Government. Our expertise is so strong that we are the only commercial IO company subject to such conditions.

Through Joel Harding, IOTA Global’s expertise was shared with Ukraine’s Intel community which works for Ukraine’s Information Ministry that Harding is responsible for.

· Milestone July 18, 2014, This appears to be IOTAs first venture into the information space about MH17.

· August 13, 2014, Haynes Mahoney, previously @StateDept and Deputy Chief of US Mission to #Syria has joined

· Milestone June 2015 IOTA Global has been selected as the research and advisory partner to the Norwegian Defence Research Organisation (FFI) for a major project on understanding IO threats and developing future capabilities.

· Milestone July 20, 2015, 8 weeks in Latvia doing #NATO course in TA Analysis. I’m now a senior trainer in the #BDI methodology. stratcomcoe.org/lv/NewsandEven… @iotaglobalIO

· Milestone October 2015 Pleased to have been helping @STRATCOMCOE Latvia with training today. #Stratcom @iotaglobalIO

· Milestone November 2015 Behavioural Conflict @BehaviouralC · 27 Nov 2015

· @iotaglobalIO in Chisinau Moldova working with NATO to build Moldovan govt

· StratCom capability with @STRATCOMCOE

· Milestone December 2015 @iotaglobalIO assists @stratcomcoe in @CanadaLatvia funded capacity building of Ukraine Govt Strat Coms.

SCL Elections shut down, SCL Group’s defence work needs real scrutiny– We can’t understand the significance of Cambridge Analytica without looking at the network it sits in, and how inadequate controls nurtured aspects of this networks’ development. It’s been frustrating to watch some of the key players manage to escape crucial questions that should be asked of them. Because this isn’t just a scandal about an obscure, unethical company. It’s a story about how a network of companies was developed which enabled wide deployment of propaganda tools – based on propaganda techniques that were researched and designed for use as weapons in warzones – on citizens in democratic elections. It’s a logical product of a poorly regulated, opaque and lucrative influence industry. There was little or nothing in place to stop them.- Emma Briant OpenDemocracy.net

While all this success is going on, Harding doesn’t neglect Ukraine, NATO COE Latvia, or the US press with his efforts. From the beginning, he pulled together a team that trains and influences the ODNI and its agencies. For Russia, Ukraine, and Syria, Harding’s teams are writing what the media is presenting and the Intel committees and US president are reading.

Even at this point, everything is about Russia and anything favorable toward Russia is an American heresy. Harding’s machine looks well oiled when it has no visible opponents standing in the way.

· Milestone November 2015 Information Policy Advisor to the Minister Dmitry Zolotukhin met with his US counterpart, team representative Bellingcat Aric Toler. In the notice above which was prepared by his office, it is noted Bellingcat’s Aric Toler is working in an equal capacity to him in the USA. One of the Media Development Center’s sponsors is NATO. It is a project of the US Embassy in Kiev because of the association with the embassy’s diplomatic paper, the Kyiv Post.

· Milestone November 2015 “I am building a database of planners, operators, logisticians, hackers, and anyone wanting to be involved with special activities I will call ‘inform and influence activities’. I have received a few different suggestions to help organize operations – of all sorts – against anti-Western elements. No government approval, assistance or funding. This skirts legalities. This is not explicitly illegal and it may not even be legal, at this point. That grey area extends a long way. I am only trying to assess the availability of people willing to participate in such efforts. Technology, equipment and facility offers are also appreciated. If you would like to be included in my database, please send a tailored resume to joel_harding@”

At the same time, team Bellingcat was training the groups in Ukraine its methods and branches out to doing seminars across the western world. Andrew Weisburd, his partners Clint Watts, and J Berger are filling the media with stories of Russian trolls and Russian conspiracies.

January 2016 started with an unfocused attempt to prove Russian interference in the US election primaries and general election. Until the late summer of 2016, the accusations were incoherent and partisan. The White House and Intel Agencies denied there was any Russian election interference and didn’t put any credence on the rapidly coagulating narrative in MSM.

In fact, the ODNI chief James Clapper said there was no evidence of Russian interference in late November 2016.

Milestone June 2016, Joel Harding met with Christina Dobrovolska and a small contingent of Rada MPs after meeting with one of her bosses, Alexandra Chalupa.  Chalupa was working with the Ukrainians to get OppoResearch on Donald Trump. By working with the Information Ministry, Chalupa was working with a group she was familiar with through her sister Andrea’s work with them, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council, and Crowdstrike. Yes, later we’ll detail how Ukrainian Intel worked with Crowdstrike on the DNC hacks. See Milestone Mark Paslawsky August 19, 2014

Christina and Joel worked on the Ukrainian project together since the beginning or according to Harding for years already. Dobrovolska worked with Harding’s Information Ministry in Ukraine with Ukrainian cyber Intel CyberHunta, Ukrainian Cyber Alliance (UCA), and RUH8.

As a side note, according to the Ukrainian State hackers Milestone March 2014- And they still continue carrying out the important volunteer work in cyberspace. 2016 became the year of escalation of cyber-warfare… The Ukrainian Intel project provides Bellingcat’s MH17 intelligence as well as Syria Intel through the same workgroups. Refer to the March 2014 Milestone.

Chistina Dobrovolska took the visiting Rada members to the top of the Ukrainian Diaspora, OUNb head Nestor Paslawsky in New York after meeting Harding and Harding was hired.

It was only subsequent to this meeting that the Russian interference and hacking charges started to crystallize into a narrative that went across the spectrum of media. Connecting the Diaspora to Ukraine’s Monsters Through a Ukrainian Diaspora Handler

How important is the Diaspora to understand the events around the 2016 election and subsequent coup attempts? It couldn’t be done without them. In 2010, HRC set up the International Diaspora Engagement Alliance. This brought all the Diasporas supporting HRC together to work on foreign policy initiatives under the umbrella of the State Department. HRC’s State Department set up the Ukrainian coup and subsequent war the same way she did in Syria, Libya, Yemen, and so on by tapping the various Diasporas. The Diasporas decided who should be in power. All in all her choices have been solidly nationalist chauvinist oppositional governments or figures in exile.

“We understand the Clinton camp has hired beaucoup and Zwanzig (a lot) of trolls, we also understand the Kremlin has done the same. We just do not know if Trump has followed suit. From a counterintelligence perspective, this is confusing as heck.- Joel Harding

While the Clinton trolls turned out to be a real I-army (Ukraine), the Kremlin trolls turned out to be the list of American alternative news and analysis websites that published articles against a Clinton presidency.

Benchmark November 2016, this panned out for HRC in a big way. The Central & Eastern European Coalition (CEEC) brought her a 20 million strong bloc vote and internet army based on one question. Will you stand against Russia? The story of the Diasporas full support for HRC can be read here as well as the electoral math that goes with it.

This includes the story of the single Diaspora bloc responsible for the election win by Donald Trump. I still can’t believe Sara Palin spoke to this group and thought they were “cheez heads.”

If you go to the CEEC website, this group represents 20 million US BLOC votes in any election. This means with a little organizing they can and do determine elections.  The Atlantic Council (AC) is the primary think tank among many it employs. The AC is signatory as a working partner with the Ukrainian World Congress which represents another 20 million Ukrainian Diaspora donors worldwide. The AC is signatory with the Ukrainian Congressional Committee of America (UCCA).

The Atlantic Council and its resources primarily through its experts like Irena Chalupa, Dimitry Alperovich, or Aric Toler work to support the Ukrainian and American IO effort. When we get to the DNC hacking aspect, you’ll see how closely the AC works with the hackers the AC experts found.

Photographs can be photoshopped, so can videos.  Eyewitness accounts are suspect.  Reporters stories are only as reliable as the news sources and that means they are not reliable. Even if the most reliable person in the world says something, their word can always be branded speculation, biased or that they are a paid troll, be it Russian or otherwise (although I really don’t know of any others). Harding Aug 31, 2015

What you are about to read should be impossible. No matter how directly or indirectly Hillary Clinton was behind the Ukrainian coup in 2014, showing US government agencies conspiring at the directors level to overthrow the 2016 election and continuing to pursue a coup against the presidency on her behalf should not be possible.

Let’s set the bar.

Is US & international media complicit in the coup against Donald Trump?

The answer is yes. Media is the backbone of any Information Operation and to overthrow the US government it is the key component. The IO operator has to control information and the impact it has on the population.

For a deep state coup against the US presidency to be possible through IO, mainstream media has to be complicit. No proof can stand without this leg in place. Information Operations are about controlling all the information. You set the message and control it.

Why would mainstream media work with Joel Harding’s IO group?

Two years ago I started breaking a story that all of a sudden became popular early in the winter of 2016 with the Washington Post’s introduction of propornot which listed news websites that published”misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy.”

The Russian troll and interference lists Joel Harding and Andrew Weisburd drew up became the model for anti-Americanism inside DNC McCarthyite circles. The Atlantic Council project called @propornot plagiarized these lists to come up with the one the Washington Post made famous and start the fake news meme.

One of the really neat things about this election is seeing all my information operations and information warfare friends on social media, contributing and commenting, looking darned intelligent! Theirs is normally the voice of reason, maturity, and intelligence.” Joel Harding

Tablet Magazine’s story SPIES ARE THE NEW JOURNALISTS-  And with the help of big names in media, they’re turning journalism into an intelligence operation By Lee Smith makes short work out of finding friends for Joel Harding. At the agency and policy-making level, Harding pioneered IO and cyber in the US.

If you look at Harding’s Ukraine and Syria team, they are a who’s who of agency, state, law enforcement, and military trainers. These aren’t just the guys the media listens too, Lee Smith drives it home they are the media too. With so many journalists and analysts freelancing, who are they working for?

The media is now openly entwined with the national security establishment in a manner that would have been unimaginable before the advent of the age of the dossier—the literary forgery the FBI used as evidence to spy on the Trump team. In coordinating to perpetuate the Russiagate hoax on the American public, the media and intelligence officials have forged a relationship in which the two partners look out for the other’s professional and political interests. Not least of all, they target shared adversaries and protect mutual friends.

Fellow MSNBC contributor Naveed Jamali— author of How to Catch a Russian Spy and a self-described “Double agent” and “Intel Officer”—joined in tweeting: “Here’s the other thing to understand about espionage: once you’ve crossed the line once, the second time is easier. While at DIA Flynn had contact with Svetlana Lokhova who allegedly has Russian intel ties.”

Lokhova is seeking $25 million from NBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Dow Jones & Co., owner of the Wall Street Journal, and U.S. government informant Stefan Halper. The British historian alleges that Halper was the source for the press’ multipronged smear campaign against her, a private citizen.

Unlike the New Journalists at CNN and MSNBC/NBC, Julian Assange meets the old-fashioned definition of a journalist, meaning a person who is willing to take personal risks to publish information that powerful people and institutions routinely lie to the public about in order to advance their political and personal agendas.

This problem is unique in that it is private-sector spies that are staffing publications and Intelligence work that gets reported to the agencies and the Presidents Daily Briefing. They literally write the stories their clients want to sell to the government thereby setting policy.

Why aren’t the publishers complaining about this?

If the journalists work for and with Intel, who would they complain to? One of the functions of the US State Department is maintaining America’s image abroad. So, suffice to say it has tools to do this in what was until recently called the Board of Broadcast Governors (BBG), now the USAGM.

Milestone 2016 According to The Quasi-Legal Coup-Hillary Clinton Information Operations In Election 2016 published November 7, 2016, the 8-member board, appointed by the President of the United States, are the who’s who of powerful media moguls in film, news, print, and radio. Appointment to the BBG is like being awarded an ambassador position for the media industry. It’s also why big media carries the same line or themes.

· The 7th member of the board of directors which runs RFE/RL in 2016 was Mathew Armstrong. He is a longtime friend and mentor to Joel Harding. He provides Harding a lot of access and influence in media. Armstrong’s background is public relations. He is an expert in IO and IIO operations. His bio: Author, lecturer, and strategist on public diplomacy and international media. He has worked on traditional and emerging security issues with both civilian and military government agencies, news organizations, think tanks, and academia across several continents.

· After the election results came in and Mathew Armstrong found himself without a job, he has sequestered himself to the no extradition country of Switzerland for some unknown reason.

· In what appears to be a conflict of interest, at least two BBG board members were working actively for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

· Karen Kornbluh is helping refine and to get Hillary Clinton’s message out. ” All of them are names to watch if Clinton wins — and key jobs at the FCC and other federal agencies are up for grabs.”

· According to her bio: Karen founded the New America Foundation’s Work and Family Program and is a senior fellow for Digital Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Karen has written extensively about technology policy, women, and family policy for The Atlantic, The New York Times and The Washington Post. New York Times columnist David Brooks cited her Democracy article “Families Valued,” focused on “juggler families” as one of the best magazine articles of 2006.

· Michael Kempner is the founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of MWW Group, a staunch Hillary Clinton supporter, and may get a greater role if she is elected.  Kempner is a member of the Public Relations Hall of Fame. Michael Kempner hired Anthony Weiner after the sexting scandal broke in 2011.

· Jeff Shell, chairman of the BBG and Universal Filmed Entertainment is supporting a secondary role by being an honor roll donor to the Atlantic Council. While the BBG is supposed to be neutral it has continuously helped increase tensions in Eastern Europe. While giving to the Atlantic Council may not be illegal while in his position, currently, the Atlantic Council’s main effort is to ignite a war with Russia. This may set up a major conflict of interest.

Today, Karen Kornbluh is Director of Technology Programming at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a think tank dedicated to finding Russian trolls in cyberspace. The German Marshall Fund subgroup, Alliance for Securing Democracy has former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff its board of advisors.

Milestone 2019 Kornbluh is still on the board of the BBG, now renamed to the USAGM and is supposed to be politically neutral in her work. Instead, the German Marshall Fund helped produce the failed Hamilton 68 troll finder cobbled together by Joel Harding IO superstars Andrew Weisburd, Clint Watts, and J Berger.

This team has the distinction of fabricating most of the lies that plague the Trump presidency today starting with Russian election interference.

This state agency within the State Department is actively working against the office of the presidency.

What’s missing?

To say this is happening and not tie Joel Harding in would be a travesty. Joel Harding’s bio at InfoWarCon includes working at the BBG. Harding quite literally positioned himself to decide what the narrative for HRC politics would be and accomplished it.

Joel Harding has shown clearly what the world looks like when a private citizen is allowed to put themselves in positions that are clearly a state responsibility. The world today is according to his client’s politics.

Benchmark January 2015 US broadcasters put RT on same challenge list as ISIS, Boko Haram

RT, formerly known as Russia Today has been labeled a threat by Andrew Luck, the brand new CEO of the US Broadcasting Board of Governors or BBG. Thank you, Joel.

Benchmark- Everything up to this point takes the legs away from the Russian influence and hacking lie. As you ‘ll see, the accusations of collusion along with everything else can’t be real unless some of the information Harding’s IO team released was real.

· This fact makes it clear that the general election was being thrown to HRC through an illegal maneuver that threatens US democracy. After the election, it is coldly clear these same forces used these tools and resources to try to overthrow the presidency of the United States.

Milestone June 2016 The DNC HACK, ALMOST HACK, AND ATTRIBUTION

I have the distinction of showing you Russian hackers without a Russian hack. After HRC left the State Department she retained 6 seats (passwords) to the State Department server for research purposes. Alexandra Chalupa was one of those researchers and she was investigating Paul Manafort in 2015.

One of the groups working for Chalupa (Diaspora royalty) is Christina Dobrovolska’s Ukrainian Intel. Refer to Milestone March 2014 and Milestone of June 2016.

The Ukrainian Intel hacker group working for the Atlantic Council and the DNC through Alexandra Chalupa and Christina Dobrovolska was the only hacker group outside of Crowdstrike that had the X-Agent component of the DNC hack.

· They had access to the DNC servers because of this.

· In January 2016, Alexandra Chalupa claimed there was a hack attempt that Google informed her of. The origin according to Google was Ukraine.

· Because of the Yahoo email hack, some of their members had Huma Abedin’s State Department passwords already

· Their favorite way to hack was phishing exploits. This was the same used on the Podesta hack.

· Ukrainian hackers code in Russian because the Ukrainian language is too underdeveloped. It’s too young to have the expressiveness.

· Russian hacker contingent of Ukrainian Intel was in Kiev working with Ukrainian Intel at the time of the hack. They did OppoResearch with Alexandra Chalupa and Andrea Chalupa.

Benchmark DNC HACKS

If there is only one group that possesses the tools, means, opportunity, and can blame part of their own group to get away with it, all that’s left is to ask- WHO BENEFITED FROM THE “HACK?’ HRC & TEAM HILLARY.  Was there a hack? Nothing remotely close to what is claimed happened.

· “So the help of the USA, I don’t know, why would we need it? We have all the talent and special means for this. And I don’t think that the USA or any NATO country would make such sharp movements in international politics.” We have no Need of 2016 Help Ukrainian Hackers of #Surkov Leaks

· Ukrainian Intel hackers testify as experts for US Congress– Usovsky’s correspondence with the Russian MP and director of the Institute of CIS countries, Konstantin Zatulin, who provided this funding, was revealed by the Ukrainian groups CyberHunta and Cyber Alliance. Usovsky coordinated his anti-Ukrainian actions with…” – Statement of Mustafa Nayyem and Svitlana Zalishchuk Members of the Parliament of Ukraine before the Subcommittee on Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs of the Senate Committee on Appropriations March 29, 2017

Ukraine’s IO hackers testify in front of Congress to get more money and support so they can continue their operations?

Milestone Early 2017 HRC advisor Ukrainian Diaspora member Adam Parkhomenko goes to work with the Ukrainian Intel hackers at the Atlantic Council through Bellingcat and the Digital Sherlock program.

Tic Toc Why The Clock Stops for Progressives if Trump is Dumped

According to the Washington Times ” As recently as Nov. 17, 2016, James Clapper, the nation’s top intelligence officer told Congress his agencies “don’t have good insight” into a direct link between WikiLeaks and the emails supposedly hacked by a Russian operation from Democrats and the Hillary Clinton campaign.”

· January 10, 2017, According to Reuters “Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said on Tuesday the U.S. intelligence community’s report concluding that Russia orchestrated hacks during the 2016 presidential campaign was based on a mix of human sources, collection of technical data and open-source information.”

In January 2017, when the ODNI report came out, the report relied almost in its entirety on Joel Harding’s IO groups which now included Dimitry Alperovich and the Atlantic Council. Alperovich has a professional relationship with the Ukrainian Intel hackers.

The only evidence Dimitry Alperovich provided outside this loop came from a blog Joel Harding tries to denounce. The information stream went like this: IISS Report(think tank) –>Colonel Cassad (Russian blogger)–> the Saker(analytical blog/ translator)—>Alperovitch/ Crowdstrike(information purposely misquoted to create Russian hacker) —>FBI—>CIA—>ODNI (DNI report)—-> You scratching your head wondering who makes this intel crap up. This is one of the DNI report’s secret sources and one that the whole report rests on.

Benchmark  May 31, 2018, Former top spy James Clapper explains how Russia swung the election to Trump “It stretches credulity to conclude that Russian activity didn’t swing voter decisions.”

But now I’m speaking as a private citizen, having left government service and knowing what I know about what the Russians did, how massive the operation was, how diverse it was, and how many millions of American voters it touched. When you consider that the election turned on 80,000 votes or less in three key states, it stretches credulity to conclude that Russian activity didn’t swing voter decisions, and therefore swing the election.

If you refer to the Benchmark November 2016 the group that caused HRC’s loss by that small margin is laid open and they give their own reason why they bloc voted Donald Trump into the presidency.

Benchmark The ODNI and associate agencies based their claim of Russian hacking and influence on a group of Influence peddlers including- Aric Toler, Petr Poroshenko, James Clapper, Dimitry Alperovich, Dimitry Yarosh, Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama, Andrij Dobriansky, Ivanka Zajac, George Masni, Taras Masnij, Alexandra Chalupa, Irena Chalupa, Elliot Higgins, Nestor Paslawsky, Joel Harding, Andrew Aaron Weisburd, Clint Watts, Andreas Umland, and Andrea Chalupa. Oh, lest I forget, it just wouldn’t be the same without Ukrainian nationalism’s uber nazi- Stepan Bandera III.

Key organizations working directly and indirectly with Joel Harding’s IO are Bellingcat, InformNapalm, Stopfake, Propornot, InterpreterMag, Euromaidan Press, Hamilton 68 Dashboard, Facebook, and Twitter.

Linked into the article already is the continuation of the IO starting with the Women’s March which was about everything other than Women’s rights. Trans rights and Immigration topped the headlines while Ukrainian Diaspora allies that don’t qualify for status were tucked in. The Ukrainian Diaspora was bold enough to have youth dressed in WWII OUN nazi uniforms parading around in New York.

Charlottesville had IO operatives on both sides. George Soros footed the bill for Black Lives Matter who were taking down the statues and the so-called neo-nazis forgot to change and some were wearing Ukrainian Diaspora aligned polo shirts with their own CEEC nation logo emblazoned on it.

What this did was legitimize the destruction of historic monuments without even a public hearing and attempt to delegitimize the presidency of the United States.

The free speech protest in Boston on the heels of this was shut down by these same IO actors. The rally was even recognized by the Atlantic Council as a legitimate free speech rally.

What they took note of was the salient point, no one gave a damn about freedom of speech.

If those attempting to impeach Donald Trump do so on any of the false information provided by the IO actors, no future presidency is safe. Without those lies, what is left to target this president? That’s the question that needs to be answered.

Every one of the Intel seniors, leaders of the Intel community that took part, agency heads, and department heads, groups, companies, and private citizens responsible for organizing this have to be investigated. While there is no way to put the genie back in the bottle, Congress has to regulate who gets to do this and how.

If this IO wins and the president is cast out, war with Russia and then World War is the only inevitable event left to look forward to. If you don’t like Donald Trump, vote in 2020 like any other person that believes in western democracy.

If we don’t stop this Information Operation deep state coup, you may not get the chance.