In painting critical reporting on the Iowa caucuses debacle as a Russian plot, a Western government-backed information warfare shop smeared The Grayzone and independent reporter Jordan Chariton, falsely claiming both are “state-backed media accounts.”
The Alliance for Securing Democracy, an online censorship initiative of the Western government-funded German Marshall Project, falsely and hypocritically characterized The Grayzone and independent journalist Jordan Chariton as “state-backed media,” smearing them for their factual reporting on the shadowy network behind the controversial app that undermined the integrity of the Iowa caucuses.
The Grayzone has exposed the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) in a series of investigative reports as a neo-McCarthyite outfit prone to spreading disinformation, staffed by counter-terror cranks and national security hustlers.
The ASD’s parent organization also happens to be bankrolled by the US government, numerous European governments, and the European Union, at the tune of millions of dollars — making these false accusations against The Grayzone and Jordan Chariton actual state-backed smears.
Chariton, who founded the independent progressive news outlet Status Coup, hit back at the ASD’s outrageous claims. “The days of faux democracy gladiators defaming journalists – whose factual work they seek to discredit – as part of a Kremlin syndicate are over. It’s time to fight back,” he told The Grayzone.
On February 10, the ASD published a dubious analysis of a supposed Russian effort to spread conspiracies and disinformation around the Iowa caucuses. It honed in on the Russian-funded Sputnik News and three shows broadcast by RT. Those programs included “Going Underground,” which is hosted by British journalist Afshin Rattansi.
The post continued: “In addition, all the most popular tweets about Iowa retweeted in this time period by at least one monitored account pushed a narrative that the Democratic National Committee and/or the Democratic establishment more broadly seeks to undermine Sanders via nefarious means. Monitored accounts ‘Redacted Tonight’ (@redactedtonight) and ‘Watching the Hawks’ (@watchinghawks) are the primary accounts engaging directly with this material.”
On Twitter, state-backed media accounts spread various conspiracy theories about the Iowa caucus, many of which claimed the DNC, news media, and other candidates used “dirty tricks” to steal the victory from Sen. Bernie Sanders. pic.twitter.com/mQJcbaGKzd
— Alliance for Securing Democracy (@SecureDemocracy) February 11, 2020
On Twitter, state-backed media accounts spread various conspiracy theories about the Iowa caucus, many of which claimed the DNC, news media, and other candidates used “dirty tricks” to steal the victory from Sen. Bernie Sanders.
On Twitter, state-backed media accounts spread various conspiracy theories about the Iowa caucus, many of which claimed the DNC, news media, and other candidates used “dirty tricks” to steal the victory from Sen. Bernie Sanders. pic.twitter.com/mQJcbaGKzd
— Alliance for Securing Democracy (@SecureDemocracy) February 11, 2020
“Watching the Hawks” is hosted by American journalist and son of former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, Tyrel Ventura. “Redacted Tonight” is a political satire show hosted by American comedian Lee Camp. Camp opens each show by welcoming his live studio audience to “the comedy show where Americans in America covering American news are called foreign agents.”
The social media managers for both “Watching the Hawks” and “Redacted Tonight” are US citizens.
Nonetheless, the retweeting by these shows of factual reporting by The Grayzone and Jordan Chariton set off national security alarm bells among the disinformation warriors of the Alliance for Securing Democracy.
The Grayzone article that the ASD took issue with exposed the role of pro-Israel billiionaire Seth Klarman in pouring his money into the Super PAC behind the faulty Iowa vote results app, while at the same time donating directly to candidate Pete Buttigieg – the candidate who benefited the most from the sabotage of the caucus results.
The Klarman Family Foundation also happens to be a major funder of the ASD.
On Twitter, the ASD muddled the distinction between The Grayzone, Chariton, and the RT-sponsored Twitter accounts that retweeted them. The outfit claimed that “state-backed media accounts spread various conspiracy theories about the Iowa caucuses, many of which claimed the DNC, news media, and other candidates used “dirty tricks” to steal the victory from Sen. Bernie Sanders.” Attached to the tweet was a screenshot of tweets by The Grayzone and Chariton, making no mention of either “Watching the Hawks” or “Redacted Tonight.”
The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal responded to the smear with indignation: “Neither Jordan Chariton nor The Grayzone are state-backed media, unlike your fiscal parent. And our reporting is 100% factual, unlike yours,” Blumenthal wrote on Twitter. “We are currently exploring options for holding your McCarthyite operation fully accountable for spreading malicious disinformation.”
After enduring a withering barrage of online criticism for its malicious falsehood, the ASD issued a weasely “clarifying point.”
The Alliance for securing media citations and grants from oligarchs
The Alliance for Securing Democracy is the most prominent of an array of information warfare initiatives that exploited public hysteria over supposed Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential elections.
The group’s Hamilton 68 Dashboard claimed to have tracked 600 Twitter accounts supposedly “linked to Russian influence operations.” In the mainstream press, that dubious claim was stretched even further as the dashboard was touted as a tool for keeping tabs on “Russian bots.”
Among the widely cited claims of Russian covert influence campaigns was the #taketheknee trend inspired by blacklisted NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s high-profile protest of police brutality. The ASD’s cynical accusation, that a domestic protest movement against racism was being manipulated by the Kremlin, was reported uncritically by the New York Times.
As @BenjaminNorton reported, Alliance for Securing Democracy is co-directed by neocon Jamie Fly, who currently serves as the president and CEO of the US government's media propaganda arm, RFE/RL.
The ASD has even claimed that Stars and Stripes, a military publication operated out of the Department of Defense, was an outlet “relevant to Russian messaging themes.” It has made similar accusations against The Intercept.
Oddly enough, the sole proprietor of The Intercept is billionaire Pierre Omidyar, whose Democracy Fund is a major financial backer of the Alliance for Securing Democracy.
Aside from Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, the ASD is backed by Craig Newmark, the namesake of Craigslist, and the Klarman Family Foundation. As The Grayzone recently reported, Seth Klarman is a major funder of pro-settler Israel lobby organizations. He is also a prominent debt vulture strangling Puerto Rico with austerity. And, again, Klarman is a top donor to Buttigieg, the self-declared winner of the Iowa caucuses.
Ascertaining a full picture of just who is backing the ASD is not possible, however, as the organization’s public list of funders “does not include any donors who do not wish to disclose their charitable giving.”
But besides the centrist billionaires that fund it, the group’s fiscal parent rakes in money from Western governments, including the US State Department.
Meet the real state-backed disinfo shop
While the Alliance for Securing Democracy claims to be independently funded, it shares major backers with the German Marshall Fund (GMF), including the Sandler Foundation.
Likewise, Omidyar’s Democracy Fund gave somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million to the GMF, while Klarman Family Foundation chipped in between $250,000 and $499,999.
According to the ASD website, the group is “housed at the German Marshall Fund.”
Unlike The Grayzone and Jordan Chariton, the GMF is a state-backed entity that faithfully pursues the agenda of its government funders.
In the 2019 fiscal year, the German Marshall Fund received $1 million or more from both the German and Swedish foreign offices, at least $1 million from the US State Department, and $1 million or more from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a primary arm of the US government for fomenting regime change abroad.
The European Commission — which is the executive branch of the European Union — supported the German Marshall Fund to the tune of between $500,000 and $999,999.
The German Marshall Fund is a state-funded propaganda org that works with Facebook censor pages is complaining about what exactly? Oh that’s right! China! https://t.co/aY2M5qwZBs
Additional supporters of the German Marshall Fund include branches of the German and US government, anti-communist billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, NATO, internet giants like Google, the European Parliament, oil companies like Exxon, big agro companies like Bayer, large banks, and an array of global arms dealers such as Raytheon and Boeing.
The Theranos nanotainer of Russiagate online initiatives
The Alliance for Security Democracy’s bogus dashboard was undoubtedly the most-cited authority on Russian bot activity in the media. But its credibility suffered a major blow following a series of revealing remarks by founder Clint Watts, who confessed to Buzzfeed, “We don’t even think [all the accounts we monitor are] all commanded in Russia — at all. We think some of them are legitimately passionate people that are just really into promoting Russia.”
Having banked his credibility on fighting the supposedly pernicious presence of Russian bots, Watts went on to concede, “I’m not convinced on this bot thing.”
The ASD’s faulty methodology was developed by J.M. Berger and Jonathon Morgan. The latter was involved in orchestrating a false flag influence campaign targeting Alabama’s Senate elections, and was banned from Facebook after it was exposed. New York Times reporter Scott Shane, who reported on the disinformation campaign, was also responsible for hyping up the ASD’s supposed findings on the “take the knee” hashtag.
But among the ASD’s cadre of national security hacks, Clint Watts is perhaps the most shameless hustler. As The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal previously reported, “Watts appears to speak no Russian, has no record of reporting or scholarship from inside Russia, and has produced little to no work of any discernible academic value on Russian affairs.”
In his published work, Watts has not only called for the US to “befriend” the “al-Qaeda linked group” Ahrar al-Sham; he also urged Washington to support “jihadi[s]” in order to deliver “payback” to Russia.
In testimony to Congress in 2017, Watts claimed Russia organized a massive bot attack on his Twitter account after his article urging support for al-Qaeda was published. The tale was not just hyperbole; it appeared to have been a fabrication. He also regaled Congress with a story about RT’s and Sputnik’s coverage of a stand-off at Turkey’s Incirlik Airbase that was completely false.
Clint Watts has admitted to running an influence operation for 15 years aimed at improving approval for US foreign policy in the Middle East, which he has said “had almost no success,” and came at a cost of “billions a year in tax dollars.”
While he hypes his work for the FBI, where he spent at most one year, Watts has spent much of his career at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a hardline neoconservative think tank founded by an open white supremacist.
And left unmentioned in Watts’ bio is his affiliation with the Central Intelligence Agency: the Agency has published an article he co-authored with former CIA director and current CNN contributor John Brennan.
Besides producing dubious analysis, Clint Watts has exhibited a tendency for paranoid Cold War fantasies. In 2017, he warned an audience that Russia was “trying to knock us down and take us over,” then claimed that his colleagues had seen their computers “burned up by malware” after they criticized Russia.
In response to supposed Russian meddling, Watts has called for interfering in Russia’s elections, “but do[ing] it in line with the founding principles of democracy and America.”
He has also called for a government-imposed censorship campaign inside the United States, demanding it “quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”
Even as the Alliance for Securing Democracy was exposed by The Grayzone and others as the Russiagate version of the phony Theranos nanotainer – with Clint Watts playing the Cold Warrior analog to Elizabeth Holmes – the state-backed neo-McCarthyite operation has forged ahead, rebranding its dashboard as “Hamilton 2.0” and rolling out an “Authoritarian Interference Tracker.”
Currently, the ASD is hyping up claims by NATO vassal state Estonia about Russian interference in their country, according to its “Authoritarian Interference Tracker.” Coincidentally, former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves sits on ASD’s advisory council.
He is joined on the ASD board by Michael Chertoff, the notoriously self-dealing former Department of Homeland Security chief; and by John Podesta, who workshopped ways to “stick the knife” into Bernie Sanders while leading Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016. Podesta was recently nominated to the 2020 Democratic Convention Rules Committee.
Also on the ASD advisory council is neoconservative extraordinaire turned liberal media’s favorite Never-Trumper Bill Kristol, who is widely acknowledged as the leading media and think tank influencer behind the US invasion of Iraq. Kristol has called for a deep state coup to depose Trump, and is rolling out a wave of ads to undermine Bernie Sanders.
Former CIA director Michael Morell, who offered unsolicited advice on killing Russians and Iranians in Syria during a televised interview, and the obsessively anti-Russian former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul also occupy seats on the council.
While the ASD couches its work as an attempt to counter Russian disinformation, a clear pattern has emerged of efforts to suppress domestic reporting in the US that doesn’t conform to the imperial foreign policy consensus.
As The Grayzone previously reported, senior German Marshall Fund fellow and neocon movement veteran Jamie Fly appeared to take credit for a purge of popular Facebook accounts of alternative media outlets including The Free Thought Project, Anti-Media, and Cop Block. He promised it was “just the beginning.”
Now, the Alliance for Securing Democracy has trained its guns on The Grayzone. And with its latest falsehood, this malign organization has targeted an independent journalistic organization that has done more than any other to hold it accountable.
“We cannot risk dividing Americans’ future further, saying that you must either be for a revolution or you must be for the status quo,” Buttigieg said. “Let’s make room for everybody in this movement.”
This is a talking point that the tightly scripted and focus group-tested Buttigieg has been repeatedlyregurgitatingall month, so it’s worth taking a look at.
Claiming that it isn’t necessary to choose between revolution and the status quo is claiming that you can change the status quo without any kind of revolution. You are saying that the establishment which has created and reinforced the status quo can now suddenly, for some strange and mysterious reason, be counted upon to change it. That the status quo will change the status quo.
Anyone who has paid attention to US politics for more than a few years already knows that this is objectively false. From administration to administration, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office or who controls the House or the Senate, the status quo has been adamantly enforced along a rigid trajectory toward ever-increasing military expansionism, exploitative neoliberal economic policies, income and wealth inequality, police militarization, mass-scale imprisonment, Orwellian surveillance programs and increasing restrictions on journalism and free speech.
Change is not going to come from those institutions, it’s going to come from the people using the power of their numbers to force important changes that those institutions do not want to make. And Pete Buttigieg knows this. And so do the spooks and oligarchs who are backing him.
Progressives already got suckered into forfeiting their revolutionary spirit in exchange for flowery prose and empty rhetoric the last time they elected Pete Buttigieg for president, back when Pete Buttigieg was named Barack Obama. It was literally the exact same script they’re trying to recycle with Puppet Pete: a plucky young underdog with a knack for sparkly verbiage overcomes the frontrunner in Iowa in a stunning upset, then rides the momentum from that initial victory on to the Democratic nomination.
That’s what not choosing between revolution and the status quo looks like. It looks like continuing the status quo.
Which is why it’s so dumb when Buttigieg says “Let’s make room for everybody in this movement.” Movement? What movement? You don’t get to call it a “movement” when its entire agenda is to prevent any movement. Use a different word. “Let’s make room for everybody in this inertia,” or “Let’s make room for everybody in this stasis” or something.
Things that are more real than Pete Buttigieg: – Milli Vanilli – aspartame – astroturf – boobs in LA – smiles at a Martha's Vineyard cocktail party – the Gulf of Tonkin incident – Bryan Williams' helicopter crash – Joy Reid's time travelling hackers – Epstein's suicide
As I’ve said many times before, I’m interested in this presidential election not because I am under the delusion that presidential elections tend to change things, but because the attempts to manipulate it, and the public’s response to those manipulations, could shake something loose that actually might. If enough people in the world’s most powerful nation wake up to the fact that they don’t have the kind of political system they were taught about in school, if they realize that everything they’ve been told about how their government operates is a lie, if they realize their lives have been made so unnecessarily difficult by a ruling oligarchic class with a vested interest in keeping them impoverished and distracted, well, then we’re looking at an actual transformative force.
Then we’re looking at the possibility of a real revolution. Not a violent revolution; those always result in a continuation of the same ills under a different system, and there’s nothing revolutionary about that.
I’m talking about a real revolution. One where people begin to open their eyes to the reality that their entire understanding of what’s going on in the world has been the result of mass psychological manipulation throughout their entire lives at the hands of the school system, the billionaire-controlled news media, and the political establishment. One where people open their eyes so wide to the power of narrative control that they become impossible to propagandize. One where people begin weaving their own narratives. Their own understandings of the world. Built not for the benefit of the powerful, but for the benefit of the people.
We’re seeing a lot of movement already in 2020, and it’s just getting started. I see the potential for a lot of light to reach a lot of new areas between the cracks which open up in that movement. And I see the guardians of the status quo having a harder and harder time maintaining the state of stasis. Their increasingly ham-fisted manipulations, such as installing a jarringly phony puppet like Pete Buttigieg, say a lot about their desperation.
Find ways of forcing them to overextend themselves and overplay their hand. Let’s show everyone what they’re hiding behind the puppet theater.
I write a lot about government secrecy and the importance of whistleblowers, leakers and leak publishers, and for good reason: governments which can hide their wicked deeds from public accountability will do so whenever possible. It’s impossible for the public to use democracy for ensuring their government behaves in the way they desire if they aren’t allowed to be informed about what that behavior even is.
These things get lots of attention in conspiracy circles and dissident political factions. Quite a few eyes are fixed on the veil of government opacity and the persecution of those brave souls who try to shed light on what’s going on behind it. Not enough eyes, but quite a few.
What gets less attention, much to our detriment, is the fact that the primary mechanism of our oppression and exploitation is happening right out in front of our faces.
The nonstop campaign by bought politicians, owned news outlets, and manipulated social media platforms to control the dominant narratives about what’s going on in the world contribute vastly more to the sickness of our society than government secrecy does. We know this from experience: any time a whistleblower exposes secret information about the malfeasance of powerful governments like NSA surveillance or Collateral Murder, we see not public accountability, nor demands for sweeping systemic changes to prevent such malfeasance from reoccurring, but a bunch of narrative management from the political/media class.
This narrative management is used to shift attention away from the information that was revealed and onto the fact that the person who revealed it broke the law or misbehaved in some way. It’s used to convince people that the revelations aren’t actually a big deal, or that it was already basically public knowledge anyway. And it’s used to manipulate public attention on to the next hot story of the day and memory hole it underneath the white noise of the media news churn. And nothing changes.
We’ve seen it happening over and over and over again. The narrative management machine has gotten so effective and efficient that it’s been able to completely ignore the recent revelation that the US, UK and France almost certainly bombed Syria in 2018 for a completely false reason. A few half-assed Bellingcat spin jobs and an otherwise total media blackout, and it’s like the whole thing never happened.
What this tells us is that our first and foremost problem is not the fact that conspiracies are happening behind a curtain of government secrecy, but that the way people think, act and vote is being actively manipulated right out in the open. Government secrecy is indeed one aspect of establishment narrative control, but controlling the public’s access to information is only one aspect. The bigger part of it is controlling how the public thinks about information.
The reason people never use the power of their superior numbers to force real change, even though they’re being exploited and oppressed in myriad ways by the ruling class, is because they’ve been propagandized into accepting the status quo as desirable (or at least normal). The propaganda of the political/media class is therefore the establishment’s front line of defense. Its most powerful, and essential, weapon.
This is important for dissidents of all stripes to understand, because it means we’re not just passively waiting around for another Manning or Snowden or an Ian Henderson to give us information which we can use to fight the oppression machine. Those individuals have done a great public service, but the battle to awaken human consciousness to what’s really going on in our world is in no way limited to leakers and whistleblowers. It is not at the mercy of government secrecy.
If you are engaged in any type of media, you are engaging the narrative matrix which keeps the public asleep and complacent. It doesn’t matter if you have a Twitter account, a Youtube account, some flyers or a can of spray paint: if you are capable of getting any kind of message out there, you are able to directly influence the mechanism of your oppression. You are able to inform people that they are being lied to, you are able to explain why, and you are able to point them to where they can find more information.
This is extremely empowering. You do not need to wait around hoping that some bombshell piece of information makes it past all the various security checks and spinmeisters and triggers a real social awakening. You can be that information. You can become a catalyst for that awakening.
The key to turning this ship around does not lie hidden somewhere behind a veil of government opacity. It lies in you. It lies in all of us. We can begin awakening our fellow humans right now by attacking the narrative management of the propaganda machine that sits right in front of us, unarmored and unhidden.
This is an updated and revised version of the full cover-story that appeared in the important publication, garrison: The Journal of History and Deep Politics, Issue 003. Issue 004 is due out this week and I urge readers to purchase it. You will read articles there that you will find no place else, brilliant, eye-opening analyses of issues that the MSM will never touch.
“It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
While truth-tellers Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning sit inside jail cells and Edward Snowden lives in exile in Russia, the American people hole up in an illusionary dwelling constructed to reduce them to children afraid of the truth. Or is it the dark? This is not new; it has been so for a very long time, but it has become a more sophisticated haunted doll’s house, an electronic one with many bells and whistles and images that move faster than the eye can see. We now inhabit a digital technological nightmare controlled by government and corporate forces intent on dominating every aspect of people’s lives. This is true despite the valiant efforts of dissidents to use the technology for human liberation. The old wooden doll houses, where you needed small fingers to rearrange the furniture, now only need thumbs that can click you into your cell’s fantasy world. So many dwell there in the fabricated reality otherwise known as propaganda. The result is mass hallucination.
In a 1969 interview, Jim Garrison, the District Attorney of New Orleans and the only person to ever bring to trial a case involving the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, said that as a result of the CIA’s murderous coup d’état on behalf of the military-industrial-financial-media-intelligence complex that rules the country to this day, the American people have been subjected to a fabricated reality that has rendered them a nation of passive Eichmanns, who sit in their living rooms, popping pills and watching television as their country’s military machine mows down people by the millions and the announcers tell them all the things they should be afraid of, such as bacteria on cutting boards and Russian spies infiltrating their hair salons. Garrison said:
The creation of such inanities as acceptable reality and unacceptable reality is necessary for the self-preservation of the super-state against its greatest danger: understanding on the part of the people as to what is really happening. All factors which contribute to its burgeoning power are exaggerated. All factors which might reveal its corrosive effect on the nation are concealed. The result is to place the populace in the position of persons living in a house whose windows no longer reveal the outside but on which murals have been painted. Some of the murals are frightening and have the effect of reminding the occupants of the outside menaces against which the paternal war machine is protecting them. Other murals are pleasant to remind them how nice things are inside the house.
But to live like this is to live in a doll’s house. If life has one lesson to teach us, it is that to live in illusion is ultimately disastrous.
In the doll’s house into which America gradually has been converted, a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory. [i]
Fifty years have disappeared behind us since the eloquent and courageous Garrison (read On the Trail of the Assassins) metaphorically voiced the truth, despite the CIA’s persistent efforts to paint him as an unhinged lunatic through its media mouthpieces. These days they would probably just lock him up or send him fleeing across borders, as with Assange, Manning, and Snowden.
It is stunning to take a cue from his comment regarding the JFK assassination, when he suggested that one reverse the lone assassin scenario and place it in the U.S.S.R. No American could possibly believe a tale that a former Russian soldier, trained in English and having served at a top Soviet secret military base, who had defected to the U.S. and then returned home with the help of the K.G.B., could kill the Russian Premier with a defective and shoddy rifle and then be shot to death in police headquarters in Moscow by a K.G.B. connected hit man so there would be no trial and the K.G.B. would go scot free. That would be a howler! So too, of course, are the Warren Commission’s fictions about Oswald.
Snowden, Assange, and Manning
If we then update this mental exercise and imagine that Snowden, Assange, and Manning were all Russian, and that they released information about Russian war crimes, political corruption, and a system of total electronic surveillance of the Russian population, and were then jailed or sent fleeing into exile as a result, who in the U.S., liberal, libertarian or conservative, would possibly believe the Russian government’s accusations that these three were criminals.
Nevertheless, Barack Obama, the transparency president, made sure to treat them as such, all the while parading as a “liberal” concerned for freedom of speech and the First Amendment. He made sure that Snowden and Manning were charged under the Espionage Act of 1917, and that Assange was corralled via false Swedish sex charges so he had to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London (a form of jail). He brought Espionage Act prosecutions against eight people, more than all former presidents combined. He hypocritically pardoned Manning on his way out the door as if this would polish his deluded liberal legacy after making her suffer terribly through seven years of imprisonment. He set the stage for Trump to re-jail Manning to try to get this most courageous woman to testify against Assange, which she will not do, and for the collaborationist British government to jail Assange in preparation for his extradition to the United States and a show trial. As for Snowden, he has been relegated to invisibility, good for news headlines once and for a movie, but now gone and forgotten.
Obama and Trump, arch political “enemies,” have made sure that those who reveal the sordid acts of the American murderous state are cruelly punished and silenced. This is how the system works, and for most Americans, it is not happening. It doesn’t matter. They don’t care, just as they don’t care that Obama backed the 2009 coup d’état in Honduras that has resulted in so many deaths at the hands of U.S trained killers, and then Trump ranted about all these “non-white” people fleeing to the U.S. to escape a hell created by the U.S., as it has been doing throughout Latin America for so long. Who does care about the truth? Has anyone even noticed how the corporate media has disappeared the “news” of all those desperate people clamoring to enter the U.S.A. from Mexico? One day they were there and in the headlines; the next day, gone. It’s called news.
The Sleepwalkers
But even though a majority of Americans have never believed the government’s explanation for JFK’s murder, they nevertheless have insouciantly gone to sleep for half a century in the doll’s house of illusions as the killing and the lies of their own government have increased over the years and any semblance of a democratic and peaceful America has gone extinct. The fates of courageous whistle-blowers Assange, Manning, and Snowden don’t concern them. The fates of Hondurans don’t concern them. The fates of Syrians don’t concern them. The fates of Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis, Palestinians don’t concern them. The fates of America’s victims all around the world don’t concern them. Indifference reigns.
Obviously, if you are reading this, you are not one of the sleepwalkers and are awake to the parade of endless lies and illusions and do care. But you are in a minority.
That is not the case for most Americans. When approximately 129 million people cast their votes for Donald Trump and HilIary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, you know idiocy reigns and nothing has been learned. Ditto for the votes for Obama, Bush, Clinton, et al. You can keep counting back. It is an ugly fact and sad to say. Such a repetition compulsion is a sign of a deep sickness, and it will no doubt be repeated in the 2020 election. The systemic illusion must be preserved at all costs and the warfare state supported in its killing. It is the American way.
It is true that average Americans have not built the doll’s house; that is the handiwork of the vast interconnected and far-reaching propaganda arms of the U.S. government and their media accomplices. But that does not render them innocent for accepting decades of fabricated reality for so-called peace of mind by believing that a totally corrupt system works. The will to believe is very powerful, as is the propaganda. The lesson that Garrison spoke of has been lost on far too many people, even on those who occasionally leave the doll house for a walk, but who only go slightly down the path for fear of seeing too much reality and connecting too many dots. There is plain ignorance, then there is culpable ignorance, to which I shall return.
Denying Existential Freedom
One of the first things an authoritarian governing elite must do is to convince people that they are not free. This has been going on for at least forty years, ever since the Church Committee’s revelations about the CIA in the mid-seventies, including its mind-control program, MKULTRA. Everyone was appalled at the epiphany, so a different tactic was added. Say those programs have been ended when in fact they were continued under other even deeper secret programs, and just have “experts” – social, psychological, and biological “scientists” – repeat ad infinitum that there is no longer any mind control since we now know there is no mind; it is an illusion, and it all comes down to the brain. Biology is destiny, except in culturally diversionary ways in which freedom to choose is extolled – e.g. the latest fashions, gender identity, the best hair style, etc. Create and lavishly fund programs for the study of the brain, while supporting and promoting a vast expansion of pharmaceutical drugs to control people. Do this in the name of helping people with their emotional and behavioral problems that are rooted in their biology and are beyond their control. And create criteria to convince people that they are sick and that their distress has nothing to do with the coup d’état that has rendered them “citizens” of a police state.
We have been interminably told that our lives revolve around our brains (our bodies) and that the answers to our problems lie with more brain research, drugs, genetic testing, etc. It is not coincidental that the U. S. government declared the 1990s the decade of brain research, followed up with 2000-2010 as the decade of the behavior project, and our present decade being devoted to mapping the brain and artificial intelligence, organized by the Office of Science and Technology Project and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). How convenient! George H. W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, Trump — what a difference! But this is science and the welfare of the world. Science for idiots.
Drip by drip, here and there, in the pattern of the best propaganda, as the French sociologist Jacques Ellul says – “for propaganda is not the touch of the magic wand. It is based on slow, constant impregnation. It creates conviction and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition”[ii] – articles, books, media reports have reiterated that people are “determined” by biological, genetic, social, and psychological forces over which they have no control. To assert that people are free in the Sartrean sense (en soir, condemned to freedom, or free will) has come to be seen as the belief of a delusional fool living in the past , a bad philosopher, an anti-scientist, a poorly informed religionist, one nostalgic for existential cafes, Gauloises, and black berets. One who doesn’t grasp the truth since he doesn’t read the New York Times or watch CBS television. One who believes in nutty conspiracy theories.
The conventional propaganda – I almost said wisdom – created through decades-long media and academic repetition, is that we are not free.
Let me repeat: we are not free. We are not free.
Investigator reporter John Rappoport has consistently exposed the propaganda involved in the creation and expansion of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) with its pseudo-scientific falsehoods and collusion between psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry. As he correctly notes, the CIA’s MKULTRA mind-control program has morphed into modern psychiatry, both with the same objectives of disabling and controlling people by convincing them that they are not free and are in need of a chemical brain bath.[iii]
Can anyone with an awareness of this history doubt there is a hidden hand behind this development? Once you have convinced people that they are not free in the most profound sense, the rest is child’s play. Convinced that they are puppets, they become puppets to be willingly jerked around.
“He played with me just as I used to play with dolls,” says Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.
Now who would want to get people to believe they were not free? The answer is obvious given a minute of thought. It is not just Nora’s husband Torvald.
Perfect examples of the persistence of the long-term, repetitive, impregnating propaganda appear in news headlines constantly. Here is an egregious example concerning the little understood case of the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy. On Friday, August 30, 2019, Sirhan, who has been in prison for fifty-two years for the murder of RFK that he did not commit, was stabbed by another prisoner. A quick click through the MSM headlines reporting this showed the same words repeated by all the corporate media as they fulfilled their function as CIA stenographers. One example, from CBS News, will suffice: “Robert Kennedy assassin hospitalized after prison stabbing.”[iv] RFK assassin, RFK assassin, RFK assassin … all the media said the same thing, which they have been doing for fifty-two years. Their persistency endures despite all the facts that refute their disinformation and show that Senator Kennedy, who was on his way to becoming president, was murdered, like his brother John, by forces of the national security state.
Sartre and Bad Faith
Lying and dissembling are ubiquitous. Being deceived by the media liars is mirrored in people’s personal lives. People lie and want to be deceived. They choose to play dumb, to avoid a confrontation with truth. They want to be nice (Latin, nescire, not to know, to be ignorant) and to be liked. They want to tuck themselves into a safe social and cultural framework where they imagine they will be safe. They like the doll’s house. They choose to live in what Jean Paul Sartre called bad faith (mauvaise foi): In Existential Psychoanalysis he put it thus:
In bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth. But with this ‘lie’ to myself, the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person, which means that I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived.
Such bad faith allows people to fabricate a second act of bad faith: that they are not responsible for their ignorance of the truths behind the government’s and corporate media’s lies and propaganda, even as the shades of the prison house ominously close around us and the world edges toward global death that could arrive in an instant with nuclear war or limp along for years of increasing suffering.
Those of us who write about the U.S. led demented wars and provocations around the world and the complementary death of democracy at home are constantly flabbergasted and discouraged by the willed ignorance of so many Americans. For while the mainstream media does the bidding of the power elite, there is ample alternative news and analyses available on the internet from fine journalists and writers committed to truth, not propaganda. There is actually far too much truth available, which poses another problem. But it doesn’t take a genius to learn how to research important issues and to learn how to distinguish between bogus and genuine information. It takes a bit of effort, and, more importantly, the desire to compare multiple, opposing viewpoints and untangle the webs the Web weaves. We are awash in information (and disinformation) and both good and bad reporting, but it is still available to the caring inquirer.
The problem is the will to know. But why? Why the refusal to investigate and question; why the indifference? Stupidity? Okay, there is that. Ignorance? That too. Willful ignorance, ditto. Laziness, indeed. Careerism and ideology? For certain. Upton Sinclair put it mildly when he said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on not understanding it.” Difficult? No, it’s almost impossible.
But then there are many very intelligent people who have nothing to lose and yet adamantly refuse to entertain alternative possibilities to the reigning orthodoxies that have them in their grip. As do many others, I know many such people who will yes me to death and then never fully research issues. They will remain in limbo or else wink to themselves that what may be true couldn’t be true. They close down. This is a great dilemma and frustration faced by those who seek to convince people to take an active part in understanding what is really going on in the world today, especially as the United States wages war across the globe, threatens Russia, China, and Iran, among many others, and expands and modernizes its nuclear weapons capabilities.
As for Assange, Manning, and Snowden, their plight matters not a whit. In fact, they have been rendered invisible inside the doll’s house, except as the murals on the windows flash back their images as threats to the occupants, Russian monsters out to eat them up. As the great poet Constantine Cavafy wrote long ago in his poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” and they never come: “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.” Then again, for people like U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, who knows the Russian barbarians have and will come again, life must be terrifying as he tries so manfully to bar the gates. The Russians have been the American solution in this fairy tale for so long that it’s hard for many Americans to believe another story.
The Two-Headed Monster
On the one hand, there is the massive propaganda apparatus operated by American intelligence agencies in conjunction with their media partners.
On the other, there is the human predilection for untruth and illusions, the sad need to be comforted and to submit to greater “authority,” gratefully to accept the myths proffered by one’s masters. This tendency applies not just to the common people, but even more so to the intellectual classes, who act as though they are immune. Erich Fromm, writing about Germans and Hitler, but by extension people everywhere, termed this the need to “escape from freedom,” since freedom conjures up fears of vertiginous aloneness and the need to decide, which in turn evokes the fear of death.[v] There are also many kinds of little deaths that precede the final one: social, career, money, familiar, etc., that are used to keep people in the doll’s house.
Fifty years ago, the CIA coined the term “conspiracy theory” as a weapon to be used to dismiss the truths expressed by critics of its murder of President Kennedy, and those of Malcom X, MLK, and RFK. All the media echoed the CIA line. While they still use the term to dismiss and denounce, their control of the mainstream media is so complete today that every evil government action is immediately seconded, whether it be the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001, the wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iran, etc., the coups disguised as color revolutions in Ukraine, Venezuela, Bolivia, Hong Kong, the downing of the Malaysian jetliner there, drone murders, the Iranian “threat,” the looting of the American people by the elites, alleged sarin gas attacks in Syria, the anti-Russia bashing and the Russia-gate farce, the “criminals” Assange, Manning, Snowden – everything. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Fox News, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, etc. – all are stenographers for the deep state.
So much of the ongoing propaganda travels under the banner of “the war on terror,” which is, of course, an outgrowth of the attacks of September 11, 2001, appropriately named and constantly reinforced as 9/11 in a wonderful example of linguistic mind-control: a constant emergency reminder to engender anxiety, depression, panic, and confusion, four of the symptoms that lead the DSM “experts” and their followers to diagnose and drug individuals. The term 9/11 was first used in the New York Times on September 12, 2001 by Bill Keller, the future Times’ editor and Iraq war cheerleader. Just a fortuitous coincidence, of course.Jacques Ellul on Propaganda
Jacques Ellul has argued convincingly that modern propaganda in a technological mass society is more complicated than the state and media lying and deceiving the population. He argues that propaganda meets certain needs of modern people and therefore the process of deceit is reciprocal. The modern person feels lost, powerless, and empty. Ellul says, “He realizes that he depends on decisions over which he has no control, and that realization drives him to despair.” But he can’t live in despair; desires that life be meaningful; and wants to feel he lives in a world that makes sense. He wants to participate and have opinions that suggest he grasps the flow of events. He doesn’t so much want information, but value judgments and preconceived positions that provide him with a framework for living. Ellul wrote the following in 1965 in his classic book Propaganda:
The majority prefers expressing stupidities to not expressing any opinion: this gives them the feeling of participation. For they need simple thoughts, elementary explanations, a ‘key’ that will permit them to take a position, and even ready-made opinions….The man who keeps himself informed needs a framework….the more complicated the problems are, the more simple the explanations must be; the more fragmented the canvas, the simpler the pattern; the more difficult the question, the more all-embracing the solution; the more menacing the reduction of his own worth, the greater the need for boosting his ego. All this propaganda – and only propaganda – can give him.[vi]
Another way of saying this is that people want to be provided with myths to direct them to the “truth.” But such so-called truth has been preconceived within the overarching myth provided by propaganda, and while it satisfies people’s emotional need for coherence, it also allows them to think of themselves as free individuals arriving at their own conclusions, which is a basic function of good propaganda. In today’s mass technological society, it is essential that people be convinced that they are free-thinking individuals acting in good faith. Then they can feel good about themselves as they lie and act in bad faith.
Culpable Ignorance
It is widely accepted that political leaders and the mass media lie and dissemble regularly, which, of course, they do. That is their job in an oligarchy. Today we are subjected to almost total, unrelenting media and government propaganda. Depending on their political leanings, people direct their anger toward politicians of parties they oppose and media they believe slant their coverage to favor the opposition. Trump is a liar. No, Obama is a liar. And Hillary Clinton. No, Fox News. Ridiculous! – it’s CNN or NBC. And so on and so forth in this theater of the absurd that plays out within a megaplex of mainstream media propaganda, where there are many shows but one producer, whose overall aim is to engineer the consent of all who enter, while setting the different audiences against each other. It is a very successful charade that evokes name-calling from all quarters.
In other words, for many people their opponents lie, as do other people, but not them. This is as true in personal as well as public life. Here the personal and the political converge, despite protestations to the contrary. Dedication to truth is very rare.
But there is another issue with propaganda that complicates the picture further. People of varying political persuasions can agree that propaganda is widespread. Many people on the left, and some on the right, would agree with Lisa Pease’s statement in her book on the RFK assassination, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, that “the way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the story of our time.” [vii] That is also what Garrison thought when he spoke of the doll’s house.
If that is so, then today’s propaganda is anchored in the events of the 1960s, specifically the infamous government assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, and RFK, the truth of which the CIA has worked so hard to conceal. In the fifty or so years since, a vast amount of new information has made it explicitly clear that these murders were carried out by elements within the U.S. government, and were done so to silence the voices of four charismatic leaders who were opposed to the American war machine and the continuation of the Cold War. To turn away from this truth and to ignore its implications can only be described as an act of bad faith and culpable ignorance, or worse. But that is exactly what many prominent leftists have done. Then to compound the problem, they have done the same with the attacks of September 11, 2001.
One cannot help thinking of what the CIA official Cord Meyer called these people in the 1950s: “the compatible left.” He felt that effective CIA propaganda, beside the need for fascist-minded types such as Allen Dulles and James Jesus Angleton, depended on “courting” leftists and liberal into its orbit. For so many of the compatible left, those making a lot of money posing as opponents of the ruling elites but often taking the money of the super-rich, the JFK assassination and the truth of September 11, 2001 are inconsequential, never to be broached, as if they never happened, except as the authorities say they did. By ignoring these most in-your-face events with their eyes wide shut, a coterie of influential leftists has done the work of Orwell’s crime-stop and has effectively succeeded in situating current events in an ahistorical and therefore misleading context that abets U.S. propaganda. They truncate the full story to present a narrative that distorts the truth.
Without drawing a bold line connecting the dots from November 22, 1963 up to the present, a critique of the murderous forces ruling the United States is impossible.
Among the most notable of such failures are Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Howard Zinn, and Chris Hedges, men idolized by many liberals and leftists. And there are many others who have been deeply influenced by Chomsky, Cockburn, and Zinn and follow in their footsteps. Their motivations remain a mystery, but there is no doubt their refusals have contributed to the increased power of those who control the doll’s house. To know better and do as they have is surely culpable ignorance.
From Bad to Worse
Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks, increased or decreased in the past half century? Who is winning the battle, the people or the ruling elites? The answer is obvious. It matters not at all whether the president has been Trump or Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, Barack Obama or George H. W. Bush, Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter. The power of the national security state has grown under them all and everyone is left to moan and groan and wonder why. All the while the doll’s house has become more and more sophisticated and powerful with the growth of electronic media and cell phone usage.
The new Cold War now being waged against Russia and China is a bi-partisan affair, as is the confidence game played by the secret government intended to create a fractured consciousness in the population. This fragmentation of consciousness prevents people from grasping the present from within because so many suffer from digital dementia as their attention hops from input to output in a never-ending flow of mediated, disembodied data. Trump and his followers on one side of the coin; liberal Democrats on the other. The latter, whose bibles are the New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, Democracy Now, The Guardian, etc. – can only see propaganda when they can attribute it to Trump or the Russians. The former see everything as a liberal conspiracy to take down Trump. The liberals have embraced a new McCarthyism and allied themselves with the deep-state forces that they were once allegedly appalled by, including Republicans. Their embrace of the formerly despised war-monger John Bolton in the impeachment trial of Trump is a laughable case in point, if it weren’t so depraved and slimy. It surely isn’t the bloodthirsty policies of the Trump administration or his bloviating personality, for these liberals allied themselves with Obama’s anti-Russian rhetoric, his support for the U.S. orchestrated neo-fascist Ukrainian coup, his destruction of Libya, his wars of aggression across the Middle East, his war on terror, his trillion dollar nuclear weapons modernization, his enjoyment of drone killing, his support for the coup in Honduras, his embrace of the CIA and his CIA Director John Brennan, his prosecution of whistle-blowers, etc. The same media that served the CIA so admirably over the decades became the liberals’ paragons of truth. It’s enough to make your head spin, which is the point. Spin left, spin right, spin all around, because we have possessed your mind in this spectacular image game where seeming antinomies are the constancy of the same through difference, all the presidents coined by the same manufacturer who knows that coin flipping serves to entertain the audience eager for hope and change.
This is how the political system works to prevent change. It is why little has changed for the better over half a century and the American empire has expanded. While it may be true that there are signs that this American hegemony is coming to an end (I am not convinced), I would not underestimate the power of the U.S. propaganda apparatus to keep people docile and deluded in the doll’s house, despite the valiant efforts of independent truth-tellers.
How, for example, is it possible for so many people to see such a stark difference between the despicable Trump and the pleasant Obama? They are both puppets dancing to their masters’ tunes – the same masters. They both front for the empire.
In his excellent book, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State, Jeremy Kuzmarov assiduously documents Obama’s crimes, including his CIA background.[viii] As Glen Ford, of Black Agenda Report, says in the first sentence of his forward, “Barack Obama may go down in presidential history as the most effective-and deceptive-imperialist of them all.” Read the book if you want all the details. They form an overwhelming indictment of the con artist and war criminal that is irrefutable. But will those who worship at the altar of Barack Obama read it? Of course not. Just as those deluded ones who voted for the reality television flim-flam man Trump will ignore all the accumulating evidence that they’ve been had and are living under a president who is Obama’s disguised doppelganger, carrying out the orders of his national security state bosses. This, too, is well documented, and no doubt another writer will arise in the years to come to put it between a book’s covers.
Yet even Jeremy Kuzmarov fails to see the link between the JFK assassination and Obama’s shilling for the warfare state. His few references to Kennedy are all negative, suggesting he either is unaware of what Kennedy was doing in the last year of his life and why he was murdered by the CIA, or something else. He seems to follow Noam Chomsky, a Kennedy hater, in this regard. I point out this slight flaw in an excellent book because it is symptomatic of certain people on the left who refuse to complete the circle. If, as Kuzmarov, argues, Obama was CIA from the start and that explains his extraordinarily close relationship with the CIA’s John Brennan, an architect, among many things, of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, and that Obama told CIA Director Panetta that the CIA would “get everything it wanted,” and the CIA killed JFK, well, something’s amiss, an enormous gap in the analysis of our current condition.
The doll’s house is a mind game of extraordinary proportions, orchestrated by the perverted power elites that run the show and ably abetted by their partners in the corporate mass media, even some in the alternative press who mean well but are confused, or are disinformation agents in the business of sowing confusion together with their mainstream Operation Mockingbird partners. It is a spectacle of open secrecy, in which the CIA has effectively suckered everyone into a game of to-and-fro in which only they win.
Our only hope for change is to try and educate as many people as possible about the linkages between events that started with the CIA coup d’état in Dallas on November 22, 1963, continued through the killings of Malcolm X, MLK, RFK and on through so much else up to September 11, 2001, and have brought us to the deeply depressing situation we now find ourselves in where truthtellers like Julian Assange, Chelsey Manning, and Edward Snowden are criminalized, while the real perpetrators of terrible evils roam free.
Yes, we must educate but also agitate for the release of this courageous trio. Their freedom is ours; their imprisonment is ours, whether we know it or not. The walls are closing in.
Lisa Pease is so right: “The way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the story of our time, and too few recognize this. We can’t fix a problem we can’t even acknowledge exists.”
If we don’t follow her advice, we will be toyed with like dolls for a long time to come. There will be no one else to blame.
FILE – In this May 6, 2019, file photo Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella delivers the keynote address at Build, the company’s annual conference for software developers in Seattle. Microsoft says it has detected more than 740 infiltration attempts by nation-state actors in the past year targeting U.S.-based political parties, campaigns and other democracy-focused organizations including think tanks and other non-profits. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File)
Russia, China and Iran are already being blamed for using tech to undermine the 2020 election. Yet, the very technologies they are allegedly using were created by a web of companies with deep ties to Israeli intelligence.
As World War II drew to a close in Europe, British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that “neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.”
Though numerous examples in the post-World War II era have proven Russell’s point, perhaps one of the best examples was the U.S. public’s willingness to swallow lie after lie about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq due to the climate of fear that followed the September 11 attacks. Those lies, propagated by dubious intelligence, government officials and a compliant media, resulted in catastrophes – large and small, both abroad and at home.
Today, an analogous narrative is being crafted by many of the same players – both in media and government – yet it has avoided scrutiny, even from independent media.
Over the past several months and with a renewed zeal in just the last few weeks, anonymous intelligence officials, dubious “experts” and establishment media outlets have crafted a narrative about the coming “chaos” of the 2020 election, months before it takes place. Per that narrative, certain state actors will use specific technologies to target the “American mind” in order to undermine the coming presidential election. The narrative holds that those efforts will be so successful that the U.S. will never recover as a democracy.
Though these anonymous government sources and their stenographers have already named the countries who will be responsible and the technologies they will use, they also admit that no evidence yet exists to back up these claims, meaning they are — at best — pure speculation.
Historically, the goal of such fear-inducing narratives has been the trading of civil liberties for increased security, or rather, the appearance of increased security. Yet, when the need for security is felt due to a fear that is based on government-driven speculation and not on evidence, the goal of that narrative is not about protecting the public from a real, tangible threat but instead about the consolidation of power by the very groups responsible for crafting it — in this case, the intelligence community and other key players in the national security state.
However, what is particularly odd about this narrative surrounding imminent “chaos” and meddling in the upcoming 2020 election is the fact that, not only have the instruments of said meddling been named and described in detail, but their use in the election was recently simulated by a company with deep ties to both U.S. and Israeli intelligence. That simulation, organized and run by the Israeli-American company Cybereason, ended with scores of Americans dead, the cancellation of the 2020 election, the imposition of martial law and a spike in fear among the American populace.
Many of the technologies used to create that chaotic and horrific scenario in the Cybereason simulation are the very same technologies that U.S. federal officials and corporate media outlets have promoted as the core of the very toolkit that they claim will be used to undermine the coming election, such as deep fakes and hacks of critical infrastructure, consumer devices and even vehicles.
While the narrative in place has already laid the blame at the feet of U.S. rival states China, Russia and Iran, these very technologies are instead dominated by companies that are tied to the very same intelligence agencies as Cybereason, specifically Israeli military intelligence.
With intelligence agencies in the U.S. and Israel not only crafting the narrative about 2020 foreign meddling, but also dominating these technologies and simulating their use to upend the coming election, it becomes crucial to consider the motivations behind this narrative and if these intelligence agencies have ulterior motives in promoting and simulating such outcomes that would effectively end American democracy and hand almost total power to the national security state.
Media, intelligence foreshadow tech-powered doom for 2020
Even though the 2020 U.S. election is still months away, a plethora of media reports over the past six months (and even before then) have been raising concern after concern about how the U.S. election is still so vulnerable to foreign meddling that such meddling is essentially an inevitability.
Part of the reason for the recent pick-up in fear mongering appears to have been the release of a joint statement issued by key members of the Trump administration last November. That statement, authored by Attorney General Bill Barr, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan, acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, FBI Director Christopher Wray, NSA Director Gen. Paul Nakasone, and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Christopher Krebs, claimed that foreign interference in 2020 was imminent despite admitting that there is no evidence of interference having taken place:
Our adversaries want to undermine our democratic institutions, influence public sentiment and affect government policies. Russia, China, Iran, and other foreign malicious actorsall will seek to interfere in the voting process or influence voter perceptions. Adversaries may try to accomplish their goals through a variety of means, including social media campaigns, directing disinformation operations or conducting disruptive or destructive cyber-attacks on state and local infrastructure.
While at this time we have no evidence of a compromise or disruption to election infrastructure that would enable adversaries to prevent voting, change vote counts or disrupt the ability to tally votes, we continue to vigilantly monitor any threats to U.S. elections (emphasis added).”
Despite the key caveat of there being no evidence at the time the statement was issued, media reports used the statement to claim that foreign interference in 2020 was imminent, such as in these reports fromBuzzFeed, ABC News, and Newsweek.
In addition to the reports that have cast the involvement of state actors — namely Russia, Iran and China — as assured despite no evidence, other reports have made the claim that this allegedly imminent interference will inevitably be successful, largely due to claims that the tactics used will rely heavily on technology that the U.S. can’t hope to successfully counter. CSO Online, an online news outlets that provides news, analysis and research on security and risk management, recently warned that “fixing America’s voting and election infrastructure problems is a long-term proposition, one that won’t be fixed in time for the election in November” while the New York Times warned of imminent chaos and that “stealthier” malevolent foreign actors had already created the foundation for “an ugly campaign season marred by hacking and disinformation.” Wired claimed last year that U.S. election security “is still hurting at every level.”
In another example, Rolling Stone published an article earlier this month with the headline “Hackers Are Coming for the 2020 Election — And We’re Not Ready,” which claims that “the reality is that: “We’ve made progress since the last election — but we’re much less secure than we should be.” The article goes on to say that claim that the goal isn’t necessarily to hack voting machines or change results, but “to merely create the impression of an attack as a way to undermine our faith in the electoral process.”
It continues:
The target is the minds of the American people,” says Joshua Geltzer, a former counterterrorism director on the National Security Council. “In some ways, we’re less vulnerable than we were in 2016. In other ways, it’s more.” Nearly every expert agrees on this: The worst-case scenario, the one we need to prepare for, is a situation that causes Americans to question the bedrock of our democracy — free and fair elections.”
Well before this type of rhetoric made its way into the U.S. media, Israeli intelligence-linked tech firm Cybereason claiming in a release on its website that “messing with a voter’s mind” would have a bigger impact than changing vote totals, even before the 2016 election. That release, published by Cybereason prior to the last presidential election, was authored by the company’s CEO, Lior Div, who used to lead offensive hacking operations against nation-states for Israeli military intelligence.
Notably, of all of these media reports, there is a clear consensus that one of the main tactics that will soon be used to meddle in the coming U.S. election will be the use of so-called “deep fakes.” Deriving its name from a combination of “deep learning” and “fake,” deep fakes involve video and audio that has been manipulated using artificial intelligence (AI) to create media that appears to be authentic, but is not. Concern about its use in the upcoming election has spurred not only a wealth of media reports on the matter but has prompted both the U.S. military and Congress to take action to limit its potential misuse.
One thing that stands out about the media narrative regarding election meddling and deep fakes is that several news organizations have published articles that state that deep fakes will be used to undermine the 2020 election, as opposed to stating that they could be used or that they are a phenomenon worthy of attention (though some reportshave taken this more measured approach).
The reason for this level of confidence may owe to statements made by prominent U.S. intelligence officials last year, including those made by Dan Coats, the former Director of National Intelligence (DNI), who claimed in the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment for the U.S. Intelligence Community that deep fakes and other hi-tech forms of fake media would be used to disrupt the 2020 election. Coats specifically stated:
Adversaries and strategic competitors probably will attempt to use deep fakes or similar machine-learning technologies to create convincing—but false—image, audio, and video files to augment influence campaigns directed against the United States and our allies and partners.”
Since Coats made the warning, numerous media reports have promoted the concern with little scrutiny, representing just one of the numerous times in U.S. history where narratives first authored by U.S. intelligence are subsequently promoted heavily by U.S. media, even when the claim made by intelligence officials is speculative, as it is in this case. Indeed, the narratives being promoted with respect to the 2020 election involve many of the same intelligence agencies (American and Israeli) and media outlets who promoted claims that were later proven false about “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion, among other pertinent examples.
Notably, deep fakes figured prominently and was the tool most used by malevolent hackers in Cybereason’s 2020 election simulation, which saw both video and audio-only deep fakes used to spread misinformation on national and local TV channels in order to impersonate police officers and election officials and to create fake bomb threats by posing as the terror group Daesh (ISIS). Cybereason also happens to be a partner of the organization funding the most well-known creator and producer of deep fakes in the world, an organization that — much like Cybereason itself — is openly tied to Israeli intelligence.
Aside from deep fakes, other technologies weaponized in Cybereason’s election simulation have also been the subject of several media reports, such as the hacking of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and appliances and even the hacking of vehicles that have some form of internet connectivity. In the Cybereason simulation, IoT hacks were used to cut power to polling stations and disseminate disinformation while vehicles were hacked to conduct terror attacks against civilians waiting in line to vote, killing several and injuring hundreds.
Most media reports have claimed that these technologies will be part of the coming “explosion” in cyber warfare in 2020 and do not specifically link them to imminent election meddling. Others, however, have made the link to the election explicit.
Naming the culprits in advance
In addition to the apparent consensus on how foreign meddling will occur during the 2020 election, there is also agreement regarding which countries will be responsible. Again, this is largely based on statements made by U.S. national security officials. For instance, the joint statement issued last November by the DOJ, DOD, DHS, DNI, FBI, NSA, and CISA regarding 2020 election security, states that “Russia, China, Iran, and other foreign malicious actors all will seek to interfere in the voting process or influence voter perceptions” before adding “at this time we have no evidence.”
Similarly, the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment for the U.S. Intelligence Community, written by then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, names these same three countries in relation to imminent 2020 election interference and states that their interference in the 2020 election is “almost certain.” The assessment adds the following about each nation:
Russia: “Russia’s social media efforts will continue to focus on aggravating social and racial tensions, undermining trust in authorities, and criticizing perceived anti-Russia politicians.”
China: “China will continue to use legal, political, and economic levers—such as the lure of Chinese markets—to shape the information environment. It is also capable of using cyber attacks against systems in the United States to censor or suppress viewpoints it deems politically sensitive.”
Iran: “Iran, which has used social media campaigns to target audiences in both the United States and allied nations with messages aligned with Iranian interests, will continue to use online influence operations to try to advance its interests.”
The vast majority of warnings regarding future election interference have come from U.S. intelligence officials with a dubious record of trustworthiness and a history of using the media to spread propaganda and disinformation, most famously through Operation Mockingbird. Most — if not all — of the recent and numerous articles on imminent interference rely heavily on claims made by the two aforementioned government documents, documents crafted by U.S. intelligence agencies for public consumption, as well as claims made by anonymous U.S. officials.
A recent New York Times article, for example, titled “Chaos Is the Point’: Russian Hackers and Trolls Grow Stealthier in 2020,” is based almost entirely on “interviews with dozens of officials and experts,” though the only government official named in the article is Shelby Pierson, the intelligence community’s election threats executive. The most quoted experts named in the article are Ben Nimmo, formerly of the hawkish, NATO-funded Atlantic Council and now with Graphika, and Laura Rosenberger, director of the neoconservative-created Alliance for Securing Democracy. The article nonetheless cites “American officials” and “current and former officials” several times to make claims about imminent election interference that paint a bleak picture of the current election season.
A recent article from The Hill relies on the acting head of DHS, Chad Wolf, as its only source, citing Wolf’s claim that “we fully expect Russia to attempt to interfere in the 2020 elections to sow public discord and undermine our democratic institutions” amid other warnings that Wolf gave about Chinese and Iranian cyber threats to U.S. elections. Other articles, including one titled “Russia, China plan to adjust their tactics to hack, influence 2020 elections” cite only Shelby Pierson of the U.S. intelligence community as its source for that headline’s claim. Another titled “Russia isn’t the only threat to 2020 elections, says U.S. intel” cites only anonymous U.S. intelligence officials, as the headline suggests.
Though Russia and China have consistently been named as the most likely election meddlers, reports have also been drumming up the likelihood that Iran will emerge as 2020’s foreign meddler of choice, especially in the months prior to and weeks after the killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani by the Trump administration. A recent “informal poll” conducted by the Washington Post asked hawkish think tank fellows, employees at companies like Raytheon and current and former federal officials if Iran would likely retaliate against the U.S. via cyberattack. The Post ran the results of the poll under the headline “Get ready for serious cyberattacks from Iran, experts say.”
Despite the media’s numerous warnings of imminent and “serious” cyber-retaliation from Iran, the only cyberattack attributed to the country after Soleimani’s death was the vandalism of the Federal Depository Library Program website, a rather benign act that was nevertheless blasted across headlines such as “US government website hacked with pro-Iranian messages, image of bloodied Trump.” The U.S. government is quoted in that article as saying that “At this time, there is no confirmation that this was the action of Iranian state-sponsored actors.”
Also notably absent from media reports is the fact that WikiLeaks revealed in 2017 that the CIA had stockpiled a library of “stolen” cyberattack techniques produced in other nations, including Russia and Iran. Those revelations, part of the Vault 7 release, revealed that the CIA’s UMBRAGE group was capable of “misdirect[ing] attribution [for cyberattacks actually done by the CIA] by leaving behind the ‘fingerprints’ of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.” In other words, the CIA was more than capable of conducting “false flag” cyber attacks and blaming them on foreign actors.
Conflict of interest-ridden Microsoft “defends democracy”
Last year saw the tech behemoth Microsoft join the effort to blame foreign state actors, specifically Iran, for cyberattacks against the U.S. This helped to bolster assertions that had largely originated with a handful of U.S. intelligence officials and hawkish, neoconservative-aligned think tanks as media reports on Microsoft’s related claims treated the company as an independent private sector observer.
Yet, as MintPress investigations have revealed, Microsoft has clear conflicts of interest with respect to election interference. Its “Defending Democracy” program has spawned tools like “NewsGuard” and “ElectionGuard” that it claims will help protect U.S. democracy, but — upon closer examination — instead have the opposite effect.
Last January, MintPress exposed NewsGuard’s neoconservative backers and how special interest groups were backing the program in an effort to censor independent journalism under the guise of the fight against “fake news.” Subsequent investigations revealed the risk that Microsoft’s ElectionGuard poses to U.S. voting machines, which it claims to make more secure and how the platform was developed by companies closely tied to the Pentagon’s infamous research branch DARPA and Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200.
ElecionGuard software has since been adopted by numerous voting machine manufacturers and is slated to be used in some Democratic Primary votes. Notably, the push for the adoption of ElectionGuard software has been spearheaded by the recently created Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which is the federal agency tasked with overseeing election security and is headed by Christopher Krebs, a former high level Microsoft executive.
In recent months, Microsoft has also been at the center of claims that Iran attempted to hack U.S. presidential campaigns ahead of 2020 as well as claims that Iran plans to target the U.S. power grid and other critical infrastructure with cyberattacks.
Last October, Microsoft penned a blog post discussing a “threat group” it named Phosphorus that they “believe originates from Iran and is linked to the Iranian government.” The post went on to claim that Phosphorus attempted to target a U.S. presidential campaign, which later media reports claimed was President Trump’s re-election campaign. Microsoft concluded that the attempt was “not technically sophisticated” and ultimately unsuccessful, but felt compelled to disclose it and link it to Iran’s government.
Media reports also left out the fact that Microsoft is a major government contractor for the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon. Notably, the Trump campaign, which Microsoft said was the target of this attack, was later identified as the only major presidential campaign using Microsoft’s “AccountGuard” software, part of its dubious “Defending Democracy” program that also spawned NewsGuard and ElectionGuard. AccountGuard claims to protect campaign-linked emails and data from hackers.
Microsoft surfaced not long after, again claiming that Iran was maliciously targeting the United States’ civilian infrastructure. This subsequent claim was first published by Wired and later covered by other outlets. Those reports cite a single person, Microsoft security researcher Ned Moran, who claimed that an Iran-backed hacking group called APT33 was targeting the U.S. “physical control systems used in electric utilities, manufacturing, and oil refineries.”
“They’re trying to deliver messages to their adversaries and trying to compel and change their adversaries’ behavior,” Moran told Wired. Moran also stated that “Microsoft hasn’t seen direct evidence of APT33 carrying out a disruptive cyberattack rather than mere espionage or reconnaissance, it’s seen incidents where the group has at least laid the groundwork for those attacks (emphasis added).”
Cybereason helps craft the narrative
While U.S. intelligence officials and media outlets alike have been largely responsible for setting the narrative that imminent meddling will be conducted by Russia, China and Iran, key components of that narrative, particularly with respect to China and Iran, have been laid by Cybereason, a company that recently ran 2020 doomsday election simulations and that has close ties to the intelligence communities of both the U.S. and Israel.
We’re three days into 2020, and the world is already on high alert from last night’s airstrike in #Baghdad. Read our latest blog to learn more about their history of #cyber retaliation and what could be in store. https://t.co/GktqUa4iaf
Shortly after the killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani earlier this month, an operation conducted in concert with Israeli intelligence, Cybereason warned that Iran could imminently retaliate with a cyber threat and quoted its own employees who explained what and how Iran would likely target in retaliation. Cybereason’s CSO Sam Curry, who actively participated in the firm’s 2020 doomsday election simulations, stated:
This means that Iran’s “forceful revenge” response is likely to be less about the flash and all about the bang. If you have connected systems that are responsible for kinetic world effects, like ICS systems and critical infrastructure around water, energy or vital services, it’s time to pay attention. Iran and the US are engaged in Cyber brinksmanship, which means that the gloves are off as Iran picks it’s targets (emphasis added).”
Cybereason also quoted visiting fellow for the National Security Institute and former advisor to the U.S. Secret Service (which participated in Cyberaeson’s election simulations), Anne Marie Zettlemoyer, who claimed that Iran could soon target Wall Street and critical U.S. infrastructure like the power grid:
An attack against the financial systems can be devastating economically and weaken the confidence and viability of markets. However, we cannot ignore the physical consequences and manifestations that can come from a cyberattack, particularly against critical infrastructure like energy and industry control systems.”
Cybereason’s claims regarding Iran’s interest in “critical infrastructure” systems likely originated with Microsoft, the claims were then parroted by the media in several reports, many of which quoted Cybereason’s Sam Curry. Curry is also a contributor to major news outlets like Forbes where he writes about Iran’s cyber warfare capabilities.
The Iranian hacking group, APT33, has been targeting industrial control systems used by power grids, manufacturing and oil refineries. Read CSO, @samjcurry's take on the group's focus in @ForbesTech. https://t.co/gAl3abUvlg
Notably, in Cybereason’s recent allegations against Iran, it states that “it’s clear that Iran has been preparing for future geopolitical conflict by gaining access to critical infrastructure and other important operations in the United States.” It backs these claims by citing an article authored by Curry for Forbes. Following Soleimani’s death, numerous media reports, including in the UK’s The Independent and ABC News, have cited Curry as an “expert” source in claiming that Iran would retaliate with cyberattacks.
Microsoft’s claims about foreign hackers and meddling — the evidence for which have never been made public but has been parroted as fact nonetheless — are frequently supported by Cybereason.
Last August, Microsoft claimed to have foiled Russian attempts at hacking two Republican-affiliated think tanks and, despite providing no evidence, Cybereason’s then-senior director of intelligence services Ross Rustici was quoted as an expert in several media reports as saying that such behavior was to be expected from Russia. In one such report, Rustici stated:
We’re very good at fighting the last war, but the Russians are very good at evolving their game. I suspect if they’re going to do a psychological operation around the elections, the way they do it will be different than what they did in 2016. How effective the defenses we’ve built for what they did in 2016 will be for those attacks is yet to be seen.”
None of the media reports quoting Rustici mentioned Cybereason’s ties to Israeli intelligence, referring to tech firms only a “Boston-based cybersecurity company” and similar variants. Cybereason’s Intelligence Group is stuffed with former and active members of U.S. and Israeli intelligence services and has released several reports about nation-state hacking with a focus on Russia and China.
Cybereason has also been at the forefront of claims that China has been engaged in aggressive cyberattacks against multinational companies that have also seen widespread coverage in U.S. media, despite the untransparent nature of the evidence for Cybereason’s claims.
In a story that received major coverage from outlets such as Fox News, Reuters, CNBC and others, Cybereason unveiled what it called “Operation Soft Cell,” an operation that stole mass troves of data from several global telecommunications companies. In each story, Cybereason is the sole source of the claim and declined to provide the name or location of any of the affected companies. The firm also claimed to have determined that the attack was likely perpetrated by someone “backed by a nation state, and is affiliated with China.” It further claimed to have debriefed and coordinated responses with U.S. intelligence.
In an article for Reuters, Cybereason stated that “this time as opposed to in the past we are sure enough to say that the attack originated in China” while Cybereason separately told CyberScoop that it had “found hacking tools such as a modified web shell and a remote access trojan that are commonly associated with, but not unique to, Chinese hackers.” Despite the incongruity, media reports laid the blame squarely on China, as seen in headlines such as “Chinese spies have been sucking up call records at multinational telecoms, researchers say.”
Prior to uncovering Operation Soft Cell, Cybereason had warned on its blogs in the months and years prior that China would imminently targetU.S. companies. The revelation of Operation Soft Cell — which originated exclusively with Cybereason — has been used to build the case that China is openly engaged in cyberwarfare against its rival states, like the United States, and targeting “democracy itself.”
Best Known Deep Fake Creator is Funded by Israeli Intelligence
While the media, and even Cybereason itself, have helped lay the foundation to blame specific state actors for 2020 election meddling well ahead of the fact, it is worth revisiting Cybereason’s “Operation Blackout” election simulation and the tactics used by the “bad actors” in that scenario.
That simulation, discussed in detail in the first installment of this series, saw the weaponization of specific technologies, namely deep fakes, hacks of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and hacks of vehicles, in order to target the 2020 U.S. election, resulting in the cancellation of the election and the imposition of martial law.
Given the current narrative regarding what state actors are likely to meddle in the 2020 election — namely Russia, China and Iran — and the tactics they will allegedly use, it is important to explore the sources of the technologies weaponized per that narrative as well as in “Operation Blackout.”
Indeed, if there is any clear overlap between the creators of those technologies and the state actors being blamed in advance for their imminent use, it would certainly lend credibility to the claims promoted by U.S. intelligence, the media and companies like Microsoft and Cybereason.
Yet, upon closer examination, it becomes clear that the companies and state actors most involved in developing these technologies are the very ones claiming that Russia, China and Iran will use them to undermine the 2020 election.
Take for instance the use of deep fakes. Not only have numerous media reports focused on how deep fakeswill be used to meddle in the 2020 elections, but Cybereason’s doomsday election simulation saw “bad actors” rely heavily on their use to spread disinformation and even make fake bomb threats. While much has been said of the coming election and deep fakes, remarkably few reports have bothered to look at the company best known for creating viral deep fakes.
Canny AI has garnered considerable media attention over the past few years for its persuasive deep fake videos that have frequently gone viral. In the last year alone, the tech firm’s viral deep fakes have included a controversial video of Mark Zuckerberg where the Facebook co-founder appears to be saying “Imagine this for a second: One man, with total control of billions of people’s stolen data, all their secrets, their lives, their futures,” as well as a video showing Richard Nixon giving a speech he never actually gave. More recently, Canny AI was behind the viral videos immediately prior to the 2019 U.K. general election that appeared to show Jeremy Corbyn and his rival Boris Johnson endorsing each other and another video that showed world leaders singing John Lennon’s “Imagine”:
Oddly, many of the media reports that discuss these viral videos fail to mention the role of Canny AI in creating these viral deep fakes and instead only mention the organization or artists with whom Canny AI partnered to create them. For instance, the Corbyn-Johnson videos were reported to have been producedby the group Future Advocacy and artist Bill Posters, but it was actually Canny AI that created those videos for that group. Similarly, the Nixon Speech deep fake was reported by several outlets as having been solely created by MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality. However, the Boston Globe noted that “the [MIT] team worked with Canny AI, an Israeli company that does Video Dialogue Replacement, and Respeecher, a Ukrainian startup specializing in speech-to-speech synthetic voice production” to create the video.
The Zuckerberg deep fake that Canny AI created led to lots of positive press for the company, with several media reports dubbing them as the company using “deep fakes for good” and that uses the controversial technology “responsibly.” The Zuckerberg deep fake has been cited as one of the main drivers behind Facebook’s new “deep fake” policy, which only bans some deep fake videos and has been criticized by U.S. lawmakers as insufficient. Notably, neither Facebook nor Facebook-owned Instagram ever took down Canny AI’s deep fake of Zuckerburg.
Given the concern over deep fakes in relation to the coming election and Canny AI standing out as the main producer of deep fakes that have gone viral over the past year, it is important to point out that Canny AI has ties to a state actor with a history of election meddling: the state of Israel.
Indeed, Canny AI is 100 percent funded by an Israeli start-up accelerator called Xcelerator, a joint venture between Tel Aviv University and Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet (sometimes called Shabak). According to Start Up Nation Central, the Paul Singer-created organization that promotes Israeli technology start ups, Xcelerator-funded “start-ups participating in the program benefit from close mentoring from content and technology experts from the Shabak, experts from Tel Aviv University, and industry leaders. The connection to the Shabak also provides the entrepreneurs with ways to test the capabilities of their technologies and cooperation opportunities (emphasis added).”
It is also worth noting that Xcelerator also backs an “anti-fake news” start-up called Cyabra, which has direct ties to Israel’s Mossad and offers its AI-driven “disinformation protection” to government agencies as well as politicians, particularly during election seasons. Two of Cyabra’s co-founders previously co-founded Psy-Group, which attempted to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election by weaponizing “fake news” and social media and later closed down its operations after U.S. government scrutiny into its activities began as part of the Mueller investigation.
Psy-Group also engaged in doxxing campaigns targeting Palesintian rights activists in the U.S. which were planned in conjunction with Ram Ben-Barak, the former deputy director of the Mossad who now advises Cyabra. Given that much of the concern ahead of the next election is related not only to deep fakes but also “fake news,” Cyabra’s rise and its clear ties to Mossad and the now defunct Psy-Group are important to note.
Furthermore, in examining the other technologies weaponized during Cybereason’s 2020 election simulation and cited in the aforementioned media narrative regarding 2020 meddling, a pattern similar to that of Canny AI emerges.
Indeed, the other technologies linked to these “bad actors” and foreign meddlers — namely hacking IoT devices and hacking vehicles — are also pioneered by companies with deep ties to Israeli military intelligence, specifically Unit 8200, and Israeli tech companies that have aggressively spied on U.S. government institutions in collusion with Israeli intelligence in the past, namely Comverse (now Verint) and Amdocs.
Hacking the Internet of Things
In Cybereason’s doomsday election simulation, another of the tactics used was the hacking of devices and appliances connected to the internet, often referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT) and which includes everything from smartphones to power grid infrastructure to city traffic lights.
While most reports on IoT hacks to date have focused on “lone wolf” or non-state-aligned actors, one company has stood out for its efforts to create a tool that would allow governments and intelligence agencies to hack these devices with ease. That company, called Toka, announced in 2018 that it planned to offer “a one-stop hacking shop for governments that require extra capability to fight terrorists and other threats to national security in the digital domain,” with “a special focus on [hacking] the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), covering tech like Amazon Echo, Nest connected home products, as well as connected fridges, thermostats and alarms.”
The Israel-based company, which raised $12.5 million within months of launching, has since been busy marketing its services to governments around the world, most recently France where it described its product portfolio as “empower[ing] governments, Intelligence, and law enforcement agencies to enhance Homeland Security with groundbreaking cyber-intelligence and operational capabilities” during an exposition in Paris last November.
Even though Toka openly markets the ability to hack private consumer devices to governments and law enforcement agencies around the world, the clear threat to privacy has gone ignored by media outlets as the company has garnered nearly no media attention since it launched nearly two years ago.
Yet, Toka is not only notable for what it offers but also for its founders and investors. Indeed, the co-founders of Toka have been described as an “all-star” team, largely because of the role of former Israeli Prime Minister and former head of Israeli military intelligence, Ehud Barak. Barak, in addition to co-founding the company, serves as its director and is also the chairman of the board of the controversial Israeli company Carbyne911, which markets software to emergency call centers in the United States. Interestingly, Cybereason’s 2020 doomsday election simulation also dealt with the hacking and weaponization of 911 call centers. Also of note is the fact that another of Carbyne911’s leadership team, former Unit 8200 commander Pinchas Buchris, is an adviser to Cybereason.
Toka’s top brass is a who’s who of former Israeli military and intelligence officials
In addition to Barak, Toka was co-founded by retired Brigadier General Yaron Rosen, former Chief of the IDF’s cyber staff, where he was “the lead architect of all [IDF] cyber activities” including those executed by Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200. Rosen, who now serves as Toka’s CEO, has stated that Toka’s technology will only be sold to countries allied with the U.S. and Israel, telling Forbes that “Russia, China and ‘other enemy countries’ would never be customers.”
Toka’s leadership and software architects are similarly tied into Israel’s national security state. Several — including the “architect” of its hacking software — previously worked for Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office and developed “offensive technologies” for Israel’s head of state and other top Toka employees and executives share numerous connections to Unit 8200, other divisions of Israeli military intelligence and Unit 8200-connected tech companies like Check Point Technologies.
Though Toka’s leadership team makes its ties to Israeli military intelligence abundantly clear, important connections also appear in examining Toka’s investors. One of the major investors in Toka is Dell technologies, one of the world’s largest technology companies that was founded by Michael Dell, a well-known pro-Israel partisan who has donated millions of dollars to the Friends of the IDF and one of the top supporters of the so-called “anti-BDS” bills that prevent publicly employed individuals or public institutions from supporting non-violent boycotts of Israel, even on humanitarian grounds. It goes without saying that a major technology company investing in a company that markets the hacking of that very technology (computers, IoT, smartphones, etc.) should be a red flag.
With a major foot in the door through its connections to Dell, whose products are used by the private and public sectors around the world, other investors in Toka again reveal its ties to Israel’s military intelligence and the same controversial Israeli tech companies that have aggressively spied on the U.S. government in the past — Amdocs and Comverse. For instance, Entrèe Capital, a venture capital fund that is one of Toka’s main investors, is managed by Aviad Eyal and Ran Achituv. The latter, who manages Entrée’s investment in Toka and sits on Toka’s board of directors, is the founder of the IDF’s satellite-based signals intelligence unit and also a former senior Vice President at both Amdocs and Comverse Infosys (Verint).
Another notable investor in Toka is the venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz, which is advised by former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers, a close friend of the infamous pedophile Jeffery Epstein, whose own ties to Israeli military intelligence have been discussed in several MintPress reports. Epstein was also a close friend of Ehud Barak, co-founder and director of Toka, and invested at least $1 million in another company with close ties to Barak, Carbyne911. The remaining investors in Toka are Launch Capital, which is deeply tied to the Pritzker family — one of the wealthiest families in the U.S. with close ties to the Clintons and Obamas as well as the U.S.’ pro-Israel lobby, and Ray Rothrock, a venture capitalist who spent nearly three decades at VenRock, the Rockefeller family venture capital fund.
Unit 8200 – From Hacking Cars to Protecting Them?
Arguably the most disturbing aspect of Cybereason’s “Operation Blackout” election simulation was the hacking of vehicles that were then rammed into civilians waiting in line to vote at polling stations. In the simulation, this led to scores of dead Americans and hundreds of injuries.
As was the case with other technologies used to undermine the 2020 election in the simulation, this technology — the hacking of vehicles — is the bread and butter of an Israeli cybersecurity firm called Upstream Security that specializes in automobiles and boasts deep ties to the country’s military intelligence service.
Though vehicle hacking seemed out of left field when the 2020 election simulation took place last November, media reports about the imminent dangers of “car hacking” began to emerge just a month after the exercise took place, most of which cited a December 2019 report created by Upstream. Some of those reports have warned that car hacking could be used to undermine the coming U.S. election.
One report titled “Car Hacking Hits the Streets,” cites only Upstream’s report to claim that “In 2020, the connected-car market will reach a tipping point, with the majority of vehicles already connected to the Internet when sold in the United States, representing a large base of potential targets for attacks.” Another report, titled “New study shows just how bad vehicle hacking has gotten,” uses Upstream’s report (i.e. study) to claim that hacks of regular vehicles have exploded since 2016 and that most of the cars on U.S. roads today are vulnerable to hackers and that over 80 percent of those hacks occur remotely.
Neither report noted Upstream’s ties to Israeli military intelligence. Equally notable is the fact that both reports that covered the Upstream-written study say that only manufacturers can address the problem by partnering with a company like Upstream.
Lucky for Upstream, they have already partnered with a slew of auto manufacturers, including Hyundai, Volvo, Renault and even U.S. auto insurance giants like Nationwide, who now number among Upstream’s most important investors. The company’s original investors are Charles River Ventures, one of Cybereason’s first investors, and Israeli venture capital firm Glilot Capital.
Glilot Capital’s interest in Upstream is telling given the firm’s deep ties to Israel’s Unit 8200. Glilot was founded by two former Israeli military intelligence officers and has “a heavy focus on the cyber sector and the entrepreneurs who emerge from the elite Unit 8200,” according to the Jerusalem Post. Even the name of the firm is an homage to Unit 8200, as the unit’s main base is located in Glilot, near Herzliya.
“It’s as if Americans called a VC Fort Meade Capital [the US Army base in Maryland where the National Security Agency and the United States Cyber Command are headquartered], some VC names are meant to be symbolic, as in our case. Glilot is the home of several of the best intelligence and technology units in the IDF, it’s where we came from and it is where we find our best entrepreneurs,” Glilot Capital co-founder Arik Kleinstein told the Jerusalem Post in 2016.
Upstream is certainly the type of company that Glilot Capital is used to investing in. It was founded by two Israelis who both served in the IDF, with one of them serving in an elite intelligence unit. Upstream’s co-founders, Yoav Levy and Yonathan Appel, met while working at Check Point Technologies, the Unit 8200 alumni-founded company with deep ties to Israel’s military intelligence and military-industrial complex as well as the IoT hacking company Toka. Notably, Upstream recently partnered with the Japanese company Fujitsu, a longtime partnerwith Softbank — Cybereason’s main investor.
Softbank has also invested heavily in another Unit 8200-founded vehicle security start-up called Argus Cyber Security, a firm known for its numerous demonstrations showing how easy it is to hack vehicles. Argus is also backed by Nadav Zafrir, the former Unit 8200 commander who now runs Team8. Argus’ CEO Ofer Ben-Noon, a former captain in Unit 8200, told Forbes in 2014 that “Everything will be hacked in every single [car] brand. It will take time, it might be weeks, months, or a couple of years, but eventually it will happen.”
Since then, Unit 8200 alumni from Argus, Upstream and other Israeli automobile cybersecurity firms have shown media outlets around the world how much easier hacking vehicles has become in the years since Ben-Noon first made the claim. One such report from VICE includes a vehicle hacking demonstration, courtesy of a Unit 8200 alumni, and notes that “most cars today are susceptible to hacker attacks.”
Of course, Unit 8200 isn’t the only intelligence agency known to be experts at hacking vehicles. Indeed, in 2017, WikiLeaks revealed that the CIA was capable of hacking vehicles and exploring their use in committing “undetectable assassinations.”
“Bring down nations to their knees”
At the Tel Aviv Cybertech Conference in 2017, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated the following:
Today warfare has changed dramatically…With a click of a button, you can bring down nations to their knees very rapidly if you so desire and if you’re willing to take the risks, because every system can be hacked. Our hospitals, our airplanes, our cars, our banks. The most important word here is our data banks, they can be hacked.”
Media reports and even members of the Israeli public and private sector have openly acknowledged that Israel’s intelligence apparatus — from Unit 8200 to the Mossad — remains directly linked to many of the private technology companies founded by its former members, especially in the field of cybersecurity. Though reports on the matter often praise this merging of Israel’s public and private spheres, they rarely acknowledge the documented corruption within Unit 8200, the unit’s dark past in recruiting felons and even pedophiles to join its ranks, or the danger posed by having companies directly linked to foreign intelligence being given access to the U.S. government’s most classified and sensitive systems and data.
As was mentioned in the first installment of this series, Cybereason’s CEO Lior Div offers a clear example of this worrisome bridge between Israel’s public and private sector, as Div has openly stated that he views his work at Cybereason as a “continuation” of his service to Israeli military intelligence, where he led offensive cyberattacks against other nations.
Given Div’s past statements and his company’s clear ties to both Israeli and U.S. intelligence, Cybereason’s simulation of the 2020 U.S. election — which involved terrorist attacks and led to the election’s cancellation and the imposition of martial law — is highly concerning. This is particularly so considering that Cybereason’s investors have direct ties to individuals who would benefit from the election’s cancellation and also considering the clear narrative that has emerged in recent months regarding how the coming election will inevitably fall victim to tech-driven “chaos” in coming months.
The clear overlap between Cybereason’s simulation and the intelligence-driven media narrative is clear cause for concern, especially considering that the technologies that they highlight as ultimately upending the election are dominated by the very same intelligence agencies simulating and crafting that narrative.
The keyword that has been used to describe the end result of both Cybereason’s simulation and the prevailing media narrative regarding the 2020 election is “chaos,” chaos so imminent, widespread and unruly that it will shake American democracy to its core.
What has been left unsaid, however, is that a government’s solution to “chaos” is always the imposition of “order.” This means that — whatever “chaos” ultimately ensues prior to or on election day — will result in a government response that will do much more to crush freedom and undermine democracy than any act of foreign meddling has, be it real or imagined.
After a 2016 presidential primary race riddled with scandals, all of which worked against Bernie Sanders to the advantage of anointed establishment favorite Hillary Clinton, the 2020 Democratic presidential primary elections officially began with a massive scandal working against Bernie Sanders to the advantage of an establishment favorite.
The 2020 Iowa caucuses turned out to have been designed to depend on the use of a new, untested app with extensive ties to establishment insiders and to the Pete Buttigeig campaign, and because of problems using this app as of this writing we are still waiting on the full results of the election. The Iowa Democratic Party has bizarrely released a partial result with 62 percent of 99 counties reporting, which just so happens to have favored the campaign of a Mr Peter Buttigeig, who in the sample came out on top in delegates despite coming in second in votes.
A popular “gold standard” poll by the Des Moines Register that is normally released shortly before the Iowa caucuses had Sanders comfortably in first place. The results of the poll were instead left unpublished this time until after elections were underway due to a complaint by the campaign of, you guessed it, Pete Buttigeig. This would be the same Pete Buttigeig who attended the infamous “Stop Sanders” meetings with Democratic Party insiders last year, by the way.
According to an Iowa precinct chair, the problems using the app (developed by the aptly named Shadow, Inc) included literally switching the numbers entered into it on the final step of reporting results.
“A precinct chair in Iowa said the app got stuck on the last step when reporting results,” CNN reports. “It was uploading a picture of the precinct’s results. The chair said they were finally able to upload, so they took a screenshot. The app then showed different numbers than what they had submitted as captured in their screenshot.”
It doesn’t actually matter anymore who really won Iowa at this point; the damage is already done. Iowa is a sparsely populated state with an insignificant number of delegates; nobody campaigns there for the delegates, they campaign to make headlines and generate excitement and favorable press for themselves in the first electoral contest of the presidential primary race. This has already happened, and with Buttigeig first declaring victory before any results were in, followed by his delegate count lead announced hours later, the favorable press has predominantly gone his way.
Even if Sanders turns out to have won the delegate count as well, this will already have happened. He will have already lost the opportunity to start off the primary contest with a win and a rousing victory speech. In every way that matters, he has already been robbed, by extremely shady establishment dealings, in the very first electoral contest of the race.
The very first. Berners are already as outraged as they were at the height of the 2016 DNC scandal, which was still months out from this point in the race. They’re already getting screwed over, and it’s just getting started.
I see many people blaming this on incompetence, some in bad faith and some in good, but in either case there is no legitimate reason to do that anymore. It has been my experience that if someone seems to be totally incompetent but every “oopsie” they make just happens to end up benefiting them, it’s manipulation you’re dealing with, not incompetence. Some people are happy to look dumb if they can get what they want. If you watch their actions and ignore their words, a very revealing pattern shows up immediately.
This is all extremely blatant, and the feelings it brings up in people are completely legitimate. Yet narrative managers like Neera Tanden and Shannon Watts are telling everyone they’re just like Trump if they suspect the Democratic establishment is again doing the thing it did just four years ago.
Folks who are claiming anything may be rigged sound like Trump. Exactly like him. It’s pathetic.
If such extremely shady shenanigans had occurred in Russia or Venezuela, within minutes Mike Pompeo would have been holding a press conference demanding a new election under UN supervision and an international coalition of sanctions. It’s hilarious how America is constantly staging coups, implementing sanctions and arming violent militias on the basis that their government has an illegitimate democratic process, yet its own most important electoral proceedings would make any third world tin pot dictator blush.
And don’t give me that crap about how Democratic Party primaries are separate from the US electoral system and therefore don’t undermine American democracy; of course they do. If your country has a rigidly enforced two-party system and one of those parties has bogus internal elections, then you do not have any degree of democracy in your country. Saying “Well if you don’t like our rigged primary process you can vote for the other corrupt warmongering pro-establishment party” is not democracy.
The difference between a true totalitarian dictatorship and America is that the totalitarian dictatorship enforces one political belief system which supports the status quo, whereas in America you get the freedom of choice between two political belief systems which support the status quo. The entire system is stacked to ensure the continued rule of the oligarchs, spooks and warmongers who really run things behind the two-handed sock puppet show of the official elected government. The US doesn’t attack and undermine nations when they lack “freedom” or “democracy”, they attack and undermine them when they refuse to bow to the demands of the power establishment which controls the US government and its allies.
The sooner people wake up to this, the better. In Iowa, things couldn’t have gone worse for those responsible for keeping people asleep.
Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing by Stuart Schrader. University of California Press, 416 pages.
Always beware what everyone is saying but no one is talking about. It is often in these spaces of euphemism that the black magic of ideology casts its spell. George Orwell famously warned of how such language, what he called “question-begging” and “sheer cloudy vagueness,” becomes necessary “if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.” Every now or then a cliché bears some real wisdom and staying power, and Orwell’s counsel happens to be one. Take, for example, what has been said by various Democrats in the wake of the Trump administration’s assassination of Qassim Soleimani. Much of it has been encouraging for anyone interested in avoiding another full-scale bloodbath, but much has also begged additional questions or further clouded the semiotic landscape.
Consider the words of Senator Tammy Duckworth, who told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that the fallout from the assassination is “what the Iranians wanted. They want this. They want Americans pushed out of Iraq. They want greater influence in the Middle East. And they got exactly what they wanted.” The interview began with Duckworth insisting that the American people are not safer now—that, in fact, we’re in more danger. The senator would go on to plead an identical case on The Rachel Maddow Show, and her Democratic colleagues hit similar notes about the cost of “security” and “stability” elsewhere.
I would be the last to deny that the assassination has encouraged more needless violence and tragedy, as we’ve already seen with the accidental downing of a Ukrainian airliner carrying 176 people, or the fatal stampeding of at least fifty people at Soleimani’s funeral. But it is worth asking what U.S. involvement in Iraq Duckworth and her fellows are implicitly supporting, never mind what broader vision of U.S. influence in the region they’re defending. What mental pictures are being obscured by their language?
A short answer to these questions can be found in a January 9 posting on Foreign Policy’s website, co-written by two senior fellows at the Middle East Institute, a reputable think tank known for producing bien pensant foreign policy opinion on the Chevron or United Arab Emirates dime, among others. The authors urge more “defense institution-building,” specifically a 60 percent increase in funding for programs like the Ministry of Defense Advisors and Defense Institute of International Legal Studies, venues where U.S. troops would continue to “actively mentor, advise, and train” Iraqi soldiers. The article focuses on military support, but it is likely these upgrades would be accompanied by a U.S. civilian police presence. Advisors to the bipartisan Task Force on Extremism in Fragile States have long pushed for increased police mentorship in countries like Iraq or Afghanistan, including the repeal of Section 660, an obscure law that constricts the ability of the U.S. government to train police forces abroad.
Section 660, as it happens, was introduced in 1975, and was designed to prevent the kinds of human rights abuses that plagued mentorship programs in Latin America throughout the Cold War. This brings us to the longer answer to the question about what mental pictures are hidden by Duckworth’s verbiage. It is an answer that Stuart Schrader explores in his recent work of scholarship, Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.
Badges Without Borders tells the story of America’s post-WWII “global transit of police ideas and personnel.” Its critical framework is indebted to a rich legacy of thought centering on the racist underbelly of the international economic order, what Cedric Robinson called “racial capitalism.” It’s a legacy that can be traced from the oratory and writings of the Black Panther Party to the contemporary investigations of social theorists like abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore—one that continues to expose the connections between the military-industrial complex and the carceral state.
Throughout Badges Without Borders, Schrader seeks to combine this critical tradition with concrete, bureaucratic, fact. Joining a small but formidable band of painstaking researchers like Naomi Murakawa and Elizabeth Hinton, Schrader has dug up or parsed an imposing sum of transcripts, recordings, videos, correspondences, and other ephemera on modern policing within and without the United States. His chief task has been untangling a congeries of alphabet-soup agencies invested in the surveillance, disciplining, and all-too-frequent termination of nonwhite subversives, guerillas, or “criminals” across national borders, the most central being the Office of Public Safety (OPS). Along the way, a crucial leitmotif comes to the fore.
In the course of demonstrating why postwar anticommunist counterinsurgency efforts against postcolonial populations in the global South coincided with the suppression of black and brown communities and protestors across the United States, Schrader advances a theory of an “imperialism without imperialists” and a “racism without racists.” It is not that Bull “Look at ‘em run” Connors or Donald “We’re keeping the oil” Trumps haven’t existed. It’s that, until recently, they’ve been demoted to junior partners in a still shared (if publicly disavowed) project of maintaining fundamental—and fundamentally racialized—power relations across the globe. Their more refined associates, adept at communicating in the tongue of a race-blind, value-neutral social science, a procedural legalism, or even a soft but shallow humanitarianism and anti-racism, have taken the reins of the imperialist enterprise. It is the story of these more outwardly sympathetic but insidious figures, these good cops, that distinguishes Badges Without Borders.
Understanding the rise of the “good cops” requires understanding their origins. The “grandfather” of police professionalization in the United States, August Vollmer, served as a soldier in the Philippine-American war at the turn of the century. The notion that anything worthwhile about law enforcement could be learned from a brutal war of occupation that claimed hundreds of thousands of indigenous lives is itself dark foreshadowing. But what’s notable about Vollmer is his liberal pretensions: he envisioned a modern police officer who functioned as a key agent in the social uplift and economic development of downtrodden communities. Police would be responsible for keeping the peace, of course, but much of that chore could be achieved by introducing newfangled accessories like the bicycle-based patrol or the teletype. That these seemingly benign novelties were intended to ensure an environment compatible with the most stringent of regimes—Vollmer advised the Cuban dictator Gerardo Machado y Morales, for example—came as an afterthought.
Vollmer’s most influential protégé, Orlando W. Wilson, spent more time emphasizing this latter part of his policing theory. As police chief of Wichita, Kansas and Fullerton, California and, later, police commissioner of Chicago, Wilson pushed for a militarized chain of command, code of conduct, division of labor, and demeanor, attributes he saw as solutions to the corruption and ethnic patronage of local precincts. Like Vollmer, he supported technical innovations such as the police car patrol, two-way radio, and crime laboratory. It was a commitment to scaling up his model of policing to the international arena, however, that would leave its most lasting mark. “It looks like the name of Wilson will go down in Arabic annals with the name of Lawrence,” his fellow reformer Theo E. Hall quipped after an Arabic translation of Wilson’s textbook, Police Administration, was disseminated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
But if there was one man most responsible for globalizing American policing, it was Kansas City wunderkind and architect of President Kennedy’s Office of Public Safety, Byron Engle. Vollmer was no doubt inspired by his grunt work in the occupied Philippines, and the same could be said for Wilson’s military stint in occupied Germany, but it was Engle, a veteran of occupied Japan, who thought the hardest about forging a world occupied by U.S.-minted police. If Vollmer saw the occupation of the Philippines as a humane improvement on the brutishness of the Spanish empire, and Wilson saw the occupation of Germany as a vindication of liberal governance over illiberal tyranny, Engle saw the occupation of Japan as a blueprint for an internationally integrated future—one defined by a combination of centralized, Washington-derived funding and training, and decentralized discretion.
Schrader describes Engle’s program as “locally grounded, because police had to patrol a beat.” But it was also
forever expansionary, ever seeking the next nation in need of development and modernization, the next imperiled by radicalism. It sought the nooks and crannies of villages or growing metropolises where subversion and crime, or some novel configuration in combination of the two rooted, germinated, and blossomed.
As Schrader reminds his reader, this project ignored the hellscapes lurking behind this kind of “development” and “modernization,” which guaranteed not only a chronically unemployed or underemployed criminal class but a constant stream of radical reactions. Engle, a Democrat for most of his career (he rounded out his life an NRA-affiliated Republican) whose worldview was nevertheless shaped by a slew of affiliations with the FBI and CIA, could never bring himself to consider, in Schrader’s words, “the decentralized despotism of policing that for African Americans in particular amounted to thousands of everyday micro-fascisms.”
Lest one think the phrase “everyday micro-fascisms” is overblown, consider that numerous ex-Nazi policeman and soldiers became not only intelligence assets for the United States, but public safety trainers in places like South Vietnam and Nicaragua. Prior collaborators with the Japanese empire remained in the U.S.-administered Korean police force, while the Korean police were encouraged to retain the same anti-left posture they had assumed under the Japanese. This posture was encouraged worldwide, and not just by supposedly forward-minded, post-racial, police-intellectuals. Many liberal Cold Warriors tolerated right-wing authoritarians while opposing their leftist oppositions, whom they saw as a graver threat to liberal capitalist stability. This Faustian bargain helped lay the ideological and material groundwork for the mass disappearances and murders of leftists throughout Latin America, specifically in Guatemala, where Engle’s OPS was directly implicated. It was this very implication that led, after considerable leftist agitation at home, to Section 660 in 1975.
Whether WASPy mavericks like Vollmer, Wilson, and Engle, or progressive Jewish outsiders like Robert Komer—the man behind the pacification campaign in Vietnam—or Arnold Sagalyn—the counterinsurgency expert who established the blueprint for Lyndon Johnson’s War on Crime—the personalities chronicled in Badges Without Borders appear sincere in their devotion to what they saw as a post-racial politics of universal freedom and prosperity. This devotion manifested itself in myriad ways, from the promotion of “nonlethal weapons” to the championing of Title IX of the Foreign Assistance Act, the stipulation that demands democratic participation in the development and poverty reduction of all assisted nations. But given the men’s refusal to see that the institutions to which they had pledged their allegiance were responsible for perpetuating systemic modes of domination, they couldn’t predict where their favored reforms would lead—that CS (or CN and CR) gas, for instance, embraced by Lyndon Johnson in case “the Negroes started moving in [on] the White House,” would mark a mere addition to the extant repertoire of racist violence. The excessive use of such gas against peaceful protestors drove dissidents underground, only exacerbating racial turmoil. Police ended up killing more civilians after gas was introduced on American streets, since rather than using gas as replacement for violence, they deployed it as a supplement, mimicking tactics used in Vietnam.
The pattern moved in both directions. The first major implementation of CS in South Vietnam happened in 1966, and in a deliberate nod to anti-black subjugation, its perpetrators named it Operation Birmingham. As Schrader recounts, by 1969,
13,736,000 pounds of CS had been dropped on South Vietnam, an amount equivalent to a blanketing layer 80,000 square miles in size: 14,000 square miles more than the country’s total territory. Additionally, CS would have been used repeatedly in some areas and combined with defoliants. It leached into soil and ground water. The United States effectively tear-gassed the entire country, and then some.
As for Title IX, its developmentalist fruits were often consumed by the very national security state intended to protect them. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), for example, trained local Guatemalans, many of them schoolteachers, in leadership programs. According to a study of this period, up to two-thirds of its trainees were murdered by the Guatemalan security apparatus. “They were killed because they were agitators in terms of the powers that be,” the study concluded. “In terms of development, they were the ideal change agent . . . but that was the kiss of death for them.”
Mission creep, threat inflation, profit incentives, preexisting cultures of bigotry and cruelty, and the perceived need to manage the increasingly tumultuous blowback produced by decades of capitalist exploitation and neo-colonialist dispossession—all of these factors have conspired to build the monstrous infrastructures of surveillance and social control the United States exports across the world today. But so has modern liberalism’s failure to anticipate the natural trajectory of its own initiatives—that is to say, its failure to acknowledge the all-encompassing power relations of racial capital in which it has always been embedded. As Schrader writes, the “order police on American streets have created, the order OPS would propagate by proxy abroad, the order the War on Crime facilitated is the order of capital, the order of white supremacy, the order of empire.”
It is also, by its nature, an escalatory order. In the past twenty years alone, America’s wars in the Greater Middle East have claimed 800,000 lives or more directly through violence, and several times that number (at least another 1.6 million) indirectly, through disease, homelessness, forced migration, and the countless other fates borne from armed conflict. Those who have survived in the half-dozen or so countries reshaped by imperial American war, countries like Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, and Syria, now trudge on inside transnational police states, amid killer robots buzzing from above, paid skeins of unaccountable mercenaries, secret prisons and detention camps, onerous and hazardous checkpoints, and other mundane but vicious routines. In Afghanistan, many must also count their blessings against CIA-trained death squads, a confirmed reality only a handful of journalists and politicians in the United States seem at all concerned about.
In Badges Without Borders, Schrader limns how this nightmare grew up alongside a parallel despotism stateside, one that has disproportionately targeted a not unrelated population of nonwhite disposables. He also shows how this ruthlessness within and without U.S. borders has been propelled forward by a need to oversee the expansion of U.S.-led capitalism while containing the unwanted secondary effects of its exploitation and violence. To be sure, the governments of countries like Russia, China, and yes, Iran, have oppressive workings of their own that are an affront to anyone dedicated to social justice and peace, and public officials like Senator Duckworth are right to be suspicious of their machinations. But to accept U.S. “influence” in the Middle East, or anywhere else for that matter, as a benign or preferable given, is to repeat the same fateful errors of the good cops profiled in Badges Without Borders.
Now, those good cops seem to be everywhere. Democrats have been fond of elevating prosecutors and district attorneys for some time now, and especially fond of rallying behind FBI and CIA figures in recent years. Many of the lawyers in Obama’s administration responsible for providing a thin legal or ethical veneer to its ugliest features, from the drone war to the surveillance leviathan, are now happy household names, former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder foremost among them. (Holder, it should be noted, oversaw the implementation of “Operation Ceasefire” in the 1990s, which has been described as “basically stop-and-frisk of cars.”) Otherwise excellent broadcast journalists like Chris Hayes still feel a need to conduct softball interviews with unrepentant boosters of America’s imperialist footprint, like former soldier and Congressman Max Rose or Samantha Power, the latter of whom has barely been held to account for helping to turn Libya into a latter-day slave market.
On the other hand, there’s the launch of the well-funded anti-militarist think tank Quincy Institute, with one of the most eloquent critics of Pax Americana, Andrew Bacevich, at its helm. There’s Bernie Sanders and his millions of enthusiastic, anti-war supporters, many of whom are eager to start fighting for a more democratically organized world. There’s the Movement for Black Lives, which has not only widely publicized evils of police brutality and mass incarceration but connected these evils to America’s encroachments across the planet. And there’s the reemergence, in recent public discourse, of Congresswoman Barbara Lee, the only Congressperson to vote against the original Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF) in 2001. These are all promising signs of an incipient anti-imperialist awakening, but as with the coming climate crisis, we are running out of time.
As we approach the 72nd anniversary of the assassination of Mohandas K. Gandhi on 30 January 1948, it is worth reflecting on one simple fact that he did not realize. His efforts to teach humanity that conflict, including violent conflict, could be resolved without violence were based on one fundamentally flawed assumption: that at least some humans were interested in, and committed to, seeking out and using nonviolent strategies for dealing with conflict in each and every context.
Unfortunately, as his own experience taught him and he showed clear signs of realizing towards the end of his life, the fundamental truth is that humans love violence and it is this love of violence that will ensure the extinction of Homo sapiens in the near term absent a profound response that shows no sign of emerging yet. See Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’.
This love of violence, reinforced by the enormous fear associated with resisting it, is generated by the violent parenting and education models that we have long been using and which inflict enormous ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence on all young people throughout their childhood and adolescence in the name of ‘socialization’. See ‘Why Violence?’, ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’ and ‘Do We Want School or Education?’
These violently dysfunctional parenting and education models ensure that virtually every child emerges into adulthood as an unconsciously terrified, self-hating and powerless individual. This individual has been terrorized into surrendering their unique Self and accepting the ‘socially constructed delusional identity’ they have been given to participate in society as a submissive student, worker/soldier and citizen. ‘Powerful’ is not a word that can be used to describe the typical human being.
This ‘individual’, among a vast range of other violent and dysfunctional behaviors, chronically over-consumes (as they have been taught to do) to compensate for their inability to feel their deeply suppressed feelings including their fear, (emotional) pain, anger, sadness, love and joy. Unfortunately, of course, this over-consumption cannot make someone psychologically whole and that is why virtually all humans who are in the circumstances to do so, chronically over-consume and chronically accumulate in an endless but futile attempt to satisfy deep but unmet emotional needs. See ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.
As a result of this socially-approved psychological dysfunctionality, we are now confronted with an interrelated series of military, nuclear, ecological, economic, geoengineering, 5G, biodiversity and climate crises that are not being contained in any way because virtually everyone is deluding themselves about the drivers of these interrelated crises – on two distinct levels – and what must be done about them.
Most fundamentally, as briefly identified above and elaborated in the references cited, to the extent that some humans are even interested in tackling this multifaceted crisis in our biosphere, they are failing to identify their own psychological dysfunctionality and its causes as the primary driver of this crisis. And secondly, therefore, they are attempting to resolve the crisis without understanding its cause.
As a result, virtually all people end up powerlessly begging the insane global elite – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – or its compliant government agents, to fix this crisis for them rather than taking the necessary strategic action (in one or more of a range of ways) themselves.
This was classically illustrated at the recent World Economic Forum gathering in Davos, which had no problem co-opting the usual range of concerned high-profile individuals to participate in (and thus add a veneer of legitimacy to) its annual forum despite its extensively documented role in killing and exploiting fellow human beings and plundering the Earth while obscuring and ‘greenwashing’ its violence using the corporate media. See the WEF’s delusional ‘How to Save the Planet’ which obviously does not even mention the wars, grotesque inequality – see ‘5 shocking facts about extreme global inequality and how to even it up’ – and other violence it helps to generate and maintain, let alone mention what is actually necessary if we are to tackle this multifaceted crisis and avert human extinction. For one brief exposé of the World Economic Forum’s central role in elite violence, exploitation and destruction, see ‘Exposing the Giants: The Global Power Elite’. For more detail, see Giants: The Global Power Elite.
Needless to say, the co-opted individuals are politically naïve, to put it mildly, and have no understanding of how the world actually works. For a brief outline of this latter point, see ‘Why Activists Fail’.
So what are the functions of elite-sponsored gatherings such as the World Economic Forum in Davos?
In essence, its functions are to deflect attention from elite violence, exploitation and destruction and to delude people into believing that its intention is to act in the best interests of humanity and the biosphere. This is done so that people continue to focus their efforts on lobbying the elite (and their government agents) rather than taking effective action themselves. How is this done?
At elite fora of this nature, there are always two agendas. The public agenda is designed to delude the gullible public: it is designed to pay lip service to selected problems at a superficial level using a panel of high profile speakers to distract our attention. But the deep agenda is undeclared and is only discussed by key groups of elite individuals who meet secretly to plan, organize and strike deals regarding their ongoing violence, exploitation and destruction. Some of these individuals might even appear at the public forum so that their presence is noted; many will not be seen at all. But none of them is paying attention to what is spoken at the public gatherings because it is irrelevant to them.
Of course, the elite-owned and controlled corporate media will dutifully report the public gatherings with high profile speakers begging the elite to take some form of action to address one or other of our crises. But the corporate media well understands that it must make no reference to the many secretive gatherings held throughout the forum where the real action takes place. A fine outcome for everyone involved: the concerned public is deluded into believing that because its spokespeople have spoken (and been given prominent media attention) that their concerns have been heard, and the elite has deflected all attention from the further violence, exploitation and destruction it has planned.
So this charade, played out routinely throughout the year in a variety of elite-controlled fora where it is intended – but in stark contrast to the strict secrecy surrounding other elite gatherings such as those involving the Group of Thirty and the extended executive committee of the Trilateral Commission which perform the core policy-planning for the global elite – masks the most fundamental problem of all.
Which, in essence, is this: Who wants to address their own psychological dysfunctionalities and/or who wants to reduce their own consumption? It is far easier to delude oneself about the cause (anything but our own psychological dysfunctionalities and over-consumption), blame someone or something else (such as capitalism) and beg someone else (such as elites and their governments) to fix it. And then powerlessly complain when nothing happens.
This is why the obvious lack of interest in even understanding, fundamentally, what is driving violence in each and every context is such a glaring omission from the scholarly literature. Of course, there are plenty of attempts to explain violence in particular contexts, ranging from those supposedly explaining the cause of domestic violence to those supposedly explaining the cause of war or the climate catastrophe, but these are always incredibly simplistic because they do not understand what is causing violence per se (and hence driving it in each and every context). And if we do not understand the fundamental cause of violence – see ‘Why Violence?’ – then it cannot be addressed, as our incredibly violent world – with humans now on the brink of precipitating their own extinction – clearly demonstrates. (Of course, as more than 50 years of experience has taught me, there is no funding to undertake research to understand violence nor any funding to work to end it: Obvious symptoms of our love of violence.)
So let me illustrate just some of the ways, apart from chronic overconsumption and chronic accumulation, in which this human love of violence manifests.
Most obviously, humans love profiting from violence and the larger the scale at which the violence is conducted the better. So, for example, the shareholders, executives and staff of weapons corporations – particularly Lockheed Martin (USA), Boeing (USA), BAE Systems (UK), Raytheon (USA), Northrop Grumman (USA), General Dynamics (USA), Airbus Group (Europe), United Technologies Corporation (USA), Leonardo (Italy), Thales (France), Almaz-Antey (Russia) – make enormous profits or simply earn a salary/wage by manufacturing and selling weapons to kill people all over the world whom they do not even know.
Needless to say, these shareholders, executives and staff are devoid of a conscience or moral compass in any form, as well as the capacities for love, empathy and compassion in any meaningful way. ‘We make weapons to defend our country’, they might claim. Which only proves they are devoid of the capacity for critical analysis as well, given the real reason that military violence is inflicted around the world – see Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield and ‘Understanding NATO, Ending War’ – and the myriad ways that conflict can be resolved without violence provided one has the intellectual, emotional and moral capacities to do so. See ‘Human Intelligence or Human Awareness?’ and ‘Challenges for Resolving Complex Conflicts’.
Similarly, shareholders, executives and staff of fossil fuel corporations – see a long list of key corporations in ‘Strategic Aims’ – love profiting from the exploitation of resources that, when burnt, are destroying Earth’s climate. Like their counterparts in the weapons industry, these people are so psychologically damaged that they are simply devoid of capacities such as conscience, love and compassion as well as that for critical analysis too.
But the list of humans who simply love profiting from violence is endless. Consider those involved, from politicians and bureaucrats to military officers and soldiers, who authorize, organize, plan and conduct war as well. Not to mention taxpayers, of course, who happily (or fearfully) pay for it all.
Or consider those in the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries who are intent on destroying our damaged minds even more completely – see ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’ – or those involved in the many other industries that also profit from inflicting, financing and/or promoting violence in one or more of its myriad forms, whether against humans or the biosphere.
These industries include the following: the major asset management corporations (such as BlackRock and J.P. Morgan Chase), the major banks and their ‘industry groups’ like the International Monetary Conference, the large investment firms, the major financial services companies, the big technology corporations, the major media corporations particularly including the three global news agencies (Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Thomson Reuters), the large marketing and public relations corporations, the major agrochemical giants, the huge biotechnology (genetic mutilation) corporations, the major mining corporations, the nuclear power corporations, the major food multinationals (selling processed, poisoned, genetically mutilated and/or junk food) and water corporations. For the names of key corporations in each of these industries, see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.
But separately from the manifestations of violence illustrated above, which fall mainly into the domains of direct (biological and physical), institutional (socially endorsed), structural (such as capitalism and imperialism) and ecological violence, there are several other domains of violence each of which has its own manifestations too. These include violence that is labeled cultural (‘those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence – exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, empirical science and formal science (logic, mathematics) – that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence’ in the words of Professor Johan Galtung) and psychological (‘lies, brainwashing, indoctrination of various kinds, threats, etc. that serve to decrease mental potentialities’), for example. For a fuller discussion of these categories of violence, see ‘Ending Violence, Exploitation, Ecological Destruction and War: Creating a Culture of Peace’.
So if you share Gandhi’s passion to end violence, then we must do many things.
Most fundamentally, we must nurture children so that they have the capacity to live by their conscience, the intellectual capacity to critique society and the courage necessary to resist elite and other violence strategically and fearlessly, while living sustainably despite the entreaties to over-consume. See ‘My Promise to Children’ and ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.
If your own intellectual and/or emotional functionality is the issue and you have the self-awareness to perceive that, and wish to access the conscience and courage that would enable you to act powerfully, try ‘Putting Feelings First’.
If we are to resist elite violence effectively, in a great many contexts, we must campaign strategically to do so. Whether you are engaged in a peace, climate, environment or social justice campaign, the 12-point strategic framework and principles are the same. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy. And, for example, you can see a basic list of the strategic goals necessary to end war and halt the climate catastrophe in ‘Strategic Aims’.
If you want to know how to nonviolently defend against a foreign invading power or a political/military coup, to liberate your country from a dictatorship or a foreign occupation, or to defeat a genocidal assault, you will learn how to do so in ‘Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy’.
Given that substantially reducing consumption is imperative if we are to survive, we will also need to become largely self-reliant. You can learn how to to do this in a way that has strategic impact by participating (preferably now using a substantially accelerated timeframe) in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ which outlines a simple plan to systematically reduce your consumption by at least 80%, involving both energy and resources of every kind – water, household energy, transport fuels, metals, meat, paper and plastic – while dramatically expanding your individual and community self-reliance in 16 areas.
Or, if the options above seem too complicated, consider committing to:
The Earth Pledge
Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:
I will listen deeply to children (see explanation above)
I will not travel by plane
I will not travel by car
I will not eat meat and fish
I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
I will not buy rainforest timber
I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.
Conclusion
Human beings love violence. This love of violence is the inevitable outcome of parenting and education models that are designed to destroy the ‘Selfhood’ of each child and turn them into a ‘socially constructed delusional identity’ that readily participates, as a submissive student, worker/soldier and citizen, in their society on the promise that they can over-consume as compensation for surrendering their unique Self.
This over-consumption requires extraordinary levels of violence in its many domains so that the nature and extent of the violence is largely obscured from the attention of most people.
Nevertheless, the simple reality is this: If enough of us reduce our consumption and increase our local self-reliance, capitalism will fade away, wars and other military violence against resource-rich countries (in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Central/South America) to steal resources on our behalf will cease, and the enormous pressure on our biosphere will be decreased. Of course, we can accelerate this outcome by acting strategically on several other fronts at the same time, as noted above.
But we need a global movement – and soon – for this strategy to succeed. Mind you, no other strategy has any prospect of succeeding.
While the global elite is destroying the biosphere to produce the goods we all buy, it does not need to respond to our entreaties no matter what form they take. In essence, if you fly and drive, the elite will make sure the war economy extracts the raw materials to make your aircraft and your vehicle, and the fossil fuels (or equivalent) to fuel them. If you don’t fly and drive, the elite won’t destroy more of the biosphere (often destroying countries, killing people and inflicting other atrocities in the process) to produce these commodities for you. Your personal choice (for good or bad) makes a vital difference, including because of the example you set for others.
As Gandhi, already wearing his own homespun cloth, noted more than 100 years ago: ‘Earth provides enough for every person’s need but not for every person’s greed.’ This is something that those attending the World Economic Forum are too psychologically damaged to understand.
And you?
Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.
After the Crash 