The Informant Cometh

By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

When you consider all the shadowy creatures scuttling around the backstage interstices of the Deep State, it’s a little wondrous that someone like this hasn’t stepped into the light before. Apparently now, a person whose name will soon be plastered across the pixel-verse, has been given clearance by the Justice Department to come forth and sing to the various house and senate committees about a fishy deal involving Russia and the Clinton dynasty.

The broad outlines of Uranium-Gate are already loaded like a platter of nachos grandes with piquant tidbits of suspicious detail. The informant worked for a DC Swamp lobbying firm that was hired by Tenex, a subsidiary of the Russian government-owned company Rosatom, to grease the skids for a deal to buy a Canadian company, Uranium One, which had substantial mining operations in the USA. According to The Hill website, the deal put about 20 percent of US uranium into the hands of the Russian company.

The informant recognized evidence of criminal behavior in the dealings he witnessed and voluntarily went to the FBI with it. The Hill report goes on:

     His work helped the Justice Department secure convictions against Russia’s top commercial nuclear executive in the United States, a Russian financier in New Jersey, and the head of a U.S. uranium trucking company in what prosecutors said was a long-running racketeering scheme involving bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering.

Those charges, based on evidence gathered in 2009, were not taken to court until 2014. And that was supposed to be the end of it.

Now, it also happens that the deal for Tenex to buy Uranium One had to be approved by nine federal agencies and signed off on by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, which she did shortly after her husband Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 to give a speech in Moscow sponsored by a Russian bank. The Clinton Foundation also received millions of dollars in “charitable” donations from parties with an interest in the Tenex / Uranium One deal. It happened, too, that the CEO of Uranium One at the time of the Tenex sale, Frank Guistra, was one of eleven board members of the Clinton Foundation.

The informant remained undercover for the FBI for five years. None of the Clinton involvement was included in the previously mentioned federal bribery and racketeering prosecutions. Meanwhile, the informant had signed a nondisclosure agreement with the Obama Justice Department, only just lifted last week.

As of this morning, the story is absent from The New York Times, formerly the nation’s newspaper of record. The FBI’s credibility is at stake in this case. Robert Mueller, who was Director of the agency during the Tenex /Uranium One deal, with all its Clintonian-Russian undertones is in the peculiar position now as special prosecutor for the Russian election “meddling” alleged to involve President Trump. Whatever that investigation has turned up is not known publicly yet, but the massive leaking from government employees that turned the story into roughly 80 percent of mainstream legacy news coverage the past year, has ceased — either because Mueller has imposed Draconian restraints on his own staff, or because there is nothing there.

The FBI has a lot to answer for in overlooking the Clinton connection to the Uranium One deal. The informant, soon to be attached to a name and a face, is coming in from the cold, to the warm, wainscoted chambers of the house and senate committees. I wonder if Mr. Trump, or his lawyers, will find grounds to attempt to dismiss Special Prosecutor Mueller, given what looks like Mueller’s compromised position vis-à-vis Trump’s election opponent, HRC. It’s hard to not see this thing going a long way — at the same time that financial markets and geopolitical matters are heading south. Keep your hats on.

What Did Hillary Clinton Know?

By Robert Parry

Source: Consortium News

The revelation that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped pay for the notorious “Steele Dossier” of hearsay claims about Donald Trump’s relations with Russia is not surprising but is noteworthy given how long the mystery about the funding was allowed to linger.

Another mild surprise is that the Clinton campaign would have had a direct hand in the financing rather than maintaining an arm’s length relationship to the dossier by having some “friend of the campaign” make the payments and giving Clinton more deniability.

Instead, the campaign appears to have relied on its lawyer, Marc E. Elias of Perkins Coie, and a confidentiality agreement to provide some insulation between Clinton and the dossier’s startling claims which presumably helped inform Clinton’s charge in the final presidential debate that Trump was Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “puppet.” Indeed, how much Clinton personally knew about the dossier and its financing remains an intriguing question for investigators.

Ultimately, the facts about who commissioned the dossier were forced out by a congressional Republican subpoena seeking the bank records of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that hired former British intelligence operative Christopher Steele to compile the opposition research, known as “oppo,” against Trump.

As part of the legal wrangling over that subpoena, the Clinton/DNC law firm, Perkins Coie, wrote a letter releasing Fusion GPS from its confidentiality agreement.

After that letter, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday night that the Clinton campaign and the DNC had helped fund the Steele effort with attorney Elias retaining Fusion GPS in April 2016 and with Fusion GPS then hiring Steele.

The Post reported that “people familiar with the matter” disclosed that outline of the arrangement but still would not divulge how much the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid to Fusion GPS. One source told me that the total amount came to about $1 million.

‘Trash for Cash’

An irony about Hillary Clinton’s role in funding allegations about Trump’s connection to the Russians, including claims that he cavorted with prostitutes in a five-star Moscow hotel while Russian intelligence operatives secretly filmed him, is that the Clinton camp bristled when Bill Clinton was the subject of Republican “oppo” that surfaced salacious charges against him. The Clintons dismissed such accusations as “cash for trash.”

Nevertheless, just as conspiratorial accusations about the Clintons gave rise to the Whitewater investigation and a rash of other alleged “scandals,” which bedeviled Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Steele Dossier provided a map that investigators have followed for the ongoing Russia-gate investigation into President Trump.

Much like those Clinton allegations, Steele’s accusations have had a dubious track record for accuracy, with U.S. government investigators unable to corroborate some key claims but, I’m told, believing that some are true nonetheless.

In the 1990s, even though the core allegations of wrongdoing about the Clintons and their Whitewater land deal collapsed, the drawn-out investigation eventually unearthed Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky and led to his impeachment in the House although he was acquitted in a Senate trial.

Some Democrats have openly hoped for the impeachment of President Trump, too, and they have hitched many of those hopes to the Russia-gate bandwagon.

There is also no doubt about the significance of the Steele Dossier in spurring the Russia-gate scandal forward.

When Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, offered what amounted to a prosecutor’s opening statement in March, his seamless 15-minute narrative of the Trump campaign’s alleged collaboration with Russia followed the trail blazed by Steele, who had worked for Britain’s MI-6 in Russia and tapped into ex-colleagues and unnamed sources inside Russia, including supposedly leadership figures in the Kremlin.

Steele’s Methods

Since Steele could not reenter Russia himself, he based his reports on multiple hearsay from these anonymous Russians who claim to have heard some information from their government contacts before passing it on to Steele’s associates who then gave it to Steele who compiled this mix of rumors and alleged inside dope into “raw” intelligence reports.

Besides the anonymous sourcing and the sources’ financial incentives to dig up dirt, Steele’s reports had other problems, including the inability of FBI investigators to confirm key elements, such as the claim that several years ago Russian intelligence operatives secretly videotaped Trump having prostitutes urinate on him while he lay in the same bed at Moscow’s Ritz-Carlton used by President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.

That tantalizing tidbit was included in Steele’s opening report to his new clients, dated June 20, 2016. Apparently, it proved irresistible in whetting the appetite of Clinton insiders. Also in that first report were the basic outlines of Russia-gate.

But Steele’s June report also reflected the telephone-tag aspects of these allegations: “Speaking to a trusted compatriot in June 2016 sources A and B, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure and a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin respectively, the Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting US Republican presidential candidate, Donald TRUMP for a least 5 years.

“Source B asserted that the TRUMP operation was both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir PUTIN. Its aim was to sow discord and disunity both within the US itself, but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance which was viewed as inimical to Russia’s interests. … In terms of specifics, Source A confided that the Kremlin had been feeding TRUMP and his team valuable intelligence on his opponents, including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary CLINTON, for several years. …

“The Kremlin’s cultivation operation on TRUMP also had comprised offering him various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia, especially in relation to the ongoing 2018 World Cup soccer tournament. However, so far, for reasons unknown, TRUMP had not taken up any of these.”

Besides the anonymous and hearsay quality of the allegations, there are obvious logical problems, especially the point that five years before the 2016 campaign, virtually no one would have thought that Trump had any chance of becoming President of the United States.

There also may have been a more mundane reason why Trump’s hotel deal fell through. A source familiar with those negotiations told me that Trump had hoped to get a half interest in the $2 billion project but that Russian-Israeli investor Mikhail Fridman, a founder of Russia’s Alfa Bank, balked because Trump was unwilling to commit a significant investment beyond the branding value of the Trump name.

Yet, one would assume that if the supposedly all-powerful Putin wanted to give a $1 billion or so payoff to his golden boy, Donald Trump, whom Putin anticipated would become President in five years, the deal would have happened, but it didn’t.

Despite the dubious quality of Steele’s second- and third-hand information, the June 2016 report appears to have impressed Team Clinton. And once the bait was taken, Steele continued to produce his conspiracy-laden reports, totaling at least 17 through Dec. 13, 2016.

Framing the Investigation

The reports not only captivated the Clinton political operatives but influenced the assessments of President Obama’s appointees in the U.S. intelligence community regarding alleged Russian “meddling” in the presidential election.

Still, a careful analysis of Steele’s reports would have discovered not only apparent factual inaccuracies, such as putting Trump lawyer Michael Cohen at a meeting with a Russian official in Prague (when Cohen says he’s never been to Prague), but also the sort of broad conspiracy-mongering that the mainstream U.S. news media usually loves to ridicule.

For instance, Steele’s reports pin a range of U.S. political attitudes on Russian manipulation rather than the notion that Americans can reach reasonable conclusions on their own. In one report dated Sept. 14, 2016, Steele claimed that an unnamed senior official in Putin’s Presidential Administration (or PA) explained how Putin used the alleged Russian influence operation to generate opposition to Obama’s Pacific trade deals.

Steele wrote that Putin’s intention was “pushing candidate CLINTON away from President OBAMA’s policies. The best example of this was that both candidates [Clinton and Trump] now openly opposed the draft trade agreements, TPP and TTIP, which were assessed by Moscow as detrimental to Russian interests.”

In other words, the Russians supposedly intervened in the U.S. presidential campaign to turn the leading candidates against Obama’s trade deals. But how credible is that? Are we to believe that American politicians – running the gamut from Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren through former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to President Donald Trump – have all been tricked by the Kremlin to oppose those controversial trade deals, which are also broadly unpopular with the American people who are sick and tired of trade agreements that cost them jobs?

Of course, the disclosure that the Clinton campaign and the DNC help pay for Steele’s opposition research doesn’t necessarily discredit the information, but it does suggest a possible financial incentive for Steele and his collaborators to sex-up the reports to keep Clinton’s camp coming back for more.

 

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazonand barnesandnoble.com).

The Vegas shooter, general aviation, & CIA planespotting

By Daniel Hopsicker

Source: MadCow News

It is a circumstance unparalleled in American history.

Two weeks after a gunman started pouring down fire from a 32nd floor window in Las Vegas on people at a country music festival, police and the FBI remain in the dark over why he did it—and why he stopped.

Something hinky this way comes

The tragedy hit with no warning and took fifty-nine of our number. And despite  being recorded in real time on thousands of cellphones,  there is still no explanation for it.

The motivation of the shooter (or shooters’) remains a mystery.  Hopefully it was more than petulance.

But we don’t know.

Given the circumstances, you don’t need to be a “conspiracy theorist” to sense something  hinky about the official investigation into the Las Vegas Massacre.

In the absence of any sort of  coherent narrative, both concerned citizens and ‘conspiracy theorists’—and good luck telling them apart—are attempting to augment the official FBI investigation, such as it is, by crowd-sourcing clues with friends on the internet.

Admittedly, it isn’t much. But, at the moment, it’s all we’ve got.

The mind reels, boggles, then reaches for the remote

The disclosure that the Vegas shooter was a pilot who had owned multiple airplanes raised red flags with many observers. Coupled with the revelation that Paddock’s last proven employment had been some thirty years ago — and with a major U.S. defense contractor to boot—well, eyebrows were raised.   Even in today’s tawdry times, there are limits.

Say hello to “Paddock’s People.

A brief summary of the steps needed to trace previous owners of suspect aircraft ‘might could’ prove useful to the boys skulking behind baggage trains with their eyes peeled.

A sort of “How to Spot and Track CIA planes for Dummies.’   Abridged, with pictures and video, for modern attention spans that can be measured only with a finely-calibrated stopwatch.

The field of general aviation has been deliberately designed by the FAA to make little sense.  It’s a slog through mist and rising fog across a swamp bigger than Florida.

But it’s the fundamental course that must be assimilated by anyone with the ambition to get anywhere near good at spotting CIA planes.

Start with a two-week old headline: Las Vegas Shooter Was A Pilot, Aircraft Owner.

The report states that Stephen Paddock, going back to at least 2003, had been a private pilot with an instrument rating.  It went on:

“Multiple Twitter users are indicating that he owned at least two airplanes over the past several years.” 

Rampant speculation ensued, leading to a run on creative interpretation on the internet.  The FAA’s murky world of general aviation got lit up with klieg lights. It’s receiving intense scrutiny from everyone who wants to be the first to spot Paddock’s handlers.  Everyone looking for a clump of people. trying to  identify a ‘group.’ Call them what you will. Me, I’m dubbing them  “Paddock’s People.”  

As it happens, general aviation is”my” area. It’s  where the criminal activity investigated on this website—state-sponsored drug trafficking—mostly takes place.

So who knows? Maybe I can shed a little light. Stranger things happen all the time.

Spooks don’t fly Southwest.

General aviation includes both scheduled air charters and non-scheduled air transport operations, from gliders to powered parachutes to luxury jets. The ‘non-scheduled’ part of the industry, by far the most interesting, is peopled by everyone from Mobsters to covert operators from the CIA. All of them learned long ago that the best way to be shady is in a plane.

Not, however, in a commercial, plane.  Spooks don’t fly Southwest.

Gulfstreams and Learjets are the preferred ride of choice.

After the advent of “extraordinary renditions” in the early 2000’s, the phenomenon of “planespotting” came along hard behind. “Plane-spotters” began feverishly jotting down the “N numbers” of  ‘planes of interest’ taking off and landing at select airports around the world.

Shannon Ireland was hot. So was every international airport in Texas. There were, in fact, three CIA-connected FBO’s  located in Houston alone.

Planespotters quickly grew adept at unmasking the true owners of the planes they traced. They traced the ‘N’ numbers of a surprising number of  suspicious planes back to U.S. intelligence, and exposed CIA aviation assets that needed to be exposed for ferrying passengers between the CIA’s far-flung torture centers for a fee.

Planespotting was an important step for Americans wanting to know what their government gets up to on the average day.  It  did not, however, inspire universal glee.

Swallow hard first

The Associated Press reported that Paddock owned multiple planes. But only one of them—Paddock’s single-engine Cirrus—has been identified so far.

The Cirrus SR20 is a popular low-wing five-seat composite plane, best known for including an airframe parachute that can float the plane and its passengers down for a controlled landing on the ground as part of its safety pitch. Only introduced in 1999,  Cirrus Design was soon selling more four-seat piston-powered airplanes than anyone but Cessna.

This isn’t easy, but it must be said: Professional conservative Ann Coulter deserves credit for being the first to deride explanations describing Stephen Paddock as a successful full-time gambler, which she  found too ludicrous for words. On that we agree, probably for the first and last time. She’s onto something. It’s as if the New York Times never heard of using casinos for money laundering.

“Sure looks like he was laundering money. It is statistically impossible to be a consistent net winner at video poker. Like every game in Vegas, the odds are fixed for the house. If someone knows how you can beat the house at video poker, let us in on it. “

What that “something” is remains unknown. Or at least, it remains unknown to me. 

Investigating previous (and subsequent) owners  of single and twin-engine planes and luxury jets is an excellent tool for uncovering circles of associates and acquaintances  surrounding an airplane owner of interest, like Stephen Paddock.

Until one looks a little closer, Paddock seems like an ‘ordinary’ guy from Florida who inexplicably went nuts one day. That is, until you saw his arsenal, and wondered if he’d seen similar arsenals at other locations. Owning multiple airplanes isn’t sinister. But it is  just slightly out of the ordinary.  Ditto the oodles of still-unexplained cash.  Add to that a resume leaning heavily towards federal government work.  After working between 1985 and 1988 as an auditor at defense contractor Morton Thiokol— the O-rings that failed on the Space Shuttle Challenger—he apparently never held another real job.

Other than a few forays into rental real estate, little is known about how Paddock got rich, or spent his time.

Also tagging along: lawyers, guns, and money

The CIA loves general aviation because, worldwide, it’s the crucial component to successful covert operations. That’s because covert ops almost always involve surreptitiously inserting or extracting  someone or something— people, money, passports, guns, diamonds, drugs—into and then out from both friendly and unfriendly countries without being detected.

General aviation is a lot like the old Wild West. It’s also a lot like Wall Street. Many recall questions arising over how Wall Street got away with stripping $2 trillion from the American economy in 2008. The correct answer: “They were doing exactly what they were supposed to do.”

Because of the market’s importance to the well-being of untold millions in the U.S. and countless billions worldwide, before the 2008 depression most would have guessed that the Treasury Dept’s Security and Exchange Commission, the “powerful” SEC, rules securities markets like a line judge looking for a return man’s foot stepping out of bounds on a 110-yard return.

Guess what?  They don’t. The world financial crisis of 2008, from which no country has fully recovered, proves it.

Are you ready for a little more bad news? There’s no comparison between the SEC and the Agency administering America’s skies.  The FAA is worse.

After learning that Paddock in 2006 bought a 2-year-old Cirrus SR20 (N5343M), the push was on to discover more  about the plane.

Paddock had his Cirrus for almost four years. He sold it in 2010.

And this is the point where things go slightly off the rails.

“The real damn skinny. I shit you not.”

As promised, here’s the skinny about why some became confused over the FAA’s strange and arcane way of identifying aircraft.

Here’s what I know:

There is no airplane carrying the ‘N’ number which identified Paddock’s Cirrus, no N5343M today.   However there is a plane that used to be N5343M. that has left  citizens and “conspiracy theorists” alike scratching their heads.

It carried the same ‘N’ number as Paddock’s plane. But it is most decidedly not the same plane. Paddock owned a Cirrus SR20.  This plane is a Cessna 150.

The planes come from two different manufacturers.  They share nothing but the ability to fly.

They had just one thing in common: the confusing fact that they at one time had both been assigned the same ‘N’ number.

That’s not their fault, but that of the FAA, the lousiest, lamest and most corrupt Agency in the history of government in the known Universe.

The Cessna has since been deregistered.   Who knows? Maybe it was sold for spare parts at some mobbed-up Indian airline’s chop shop outside  Mumbai.

The Cirrus that used to be Stephen Paddock’s is still flying.  It is currently registered to a Dr John Rogers in Roanoke Virginia.  We can rest assured that Dr. Roger’s Cirrus and Stephen Paddock’s Cirrus are indeed the same plane,  because both planes have the same serial number, 1402.

But there’s something else that’s more confusing yet.   After buying what used to be Stephen Paddock’s plane (one unrelated owner came between them)  Dr. John Rogers had the temerity to change the ‘N’ number  on his new plane.

It went from being N5343M  to N145AW in the blink of a goddamn eye.

They can do that in general aviation.  The FAA can create doubt about the provenance of any American-registered airplane that catches their eye.

It’s all just one big goddamn masked ball.

Here’s one last detail for just the right funhouse mirror effect:  The Cirrus bought by Dr. John Rogers is  not the only American-registered airplane out there today  carrying ‘N’ number N145AW.

An airliner, a Boeing 737 which flies for America West,  is also registered with the FAA using the same ‘N’ number.

Hey. Don’t look at me.

“Volant.”  Like “Volare” but with less joie de vivre. 

Last week’s hot conspiracy theory was that Stephen Paddock somehow transferred his plane to a U.S. defense firm in Virginia that nobody had ever heard about, so it must be super-secret. If true, it would have been a revealing,  and maybe even a suspicious move, and it would make a good story.

But it never happened.

It’s an unfortunate coincidence, certainly for Rogers,  that he uses the corporate name, “Volant,”  which in a variant is also used by an obscure U.S. defense contractor in Virginia.  There are two different “Volants”  in Virginia.  Who knows, maybe even more. They’re not the same company.

Dr John Rogers presumably knows little about defense contracting because he’s an oncologist. He’s fighting cancer, a  career that doesn’t encourage a lot of moonlighting.

Virginia incorporation documents show Dr John Rogers’ Volant LLC shares the same address in Roanoke Virginia that Dr Roger himself uses. That’s because he lives there. It’s his home address. And Dr. Roger’s airplane, the Cirrus SR 20 that used to belong to presumed mass murderer Stephen Paddock, is registered to this address as well.

His address is being redacted here  because the good doctor has probably already suffered enough indignity for having bought the former plane of a man who murdered 59 innocent people for no discernible reason. But you can probably find it at 4Chan.

Is everybody buying this? Hell, no. One irate 4Chan-ready soul wrote:

“Volant is nothing but a Department of Defense contractor. Meaning Paddock’s plane has been in the hands of the United States government for the past three years!”

“Isn’t it pretty to think so”

Since then posters on the internet have been frantically waving their arms through the air like kids making angel wings in the snow.

Probably it felt good for irate 4Chan guy to get things off his chest.   After all, assuming  a plane’s ‘N’ number follows it around like a lifetime shadow is a logical assumption.

It’s an honest mistake, and not half as bad as the poses of studied indifference being struck by America’s top journos, especially in lieu of real investigation into Stephen Paddock’s patchwork past.

America’s celebrity journalists seem faintly embarrassed at the lack of any motive even being offered for public consumption.

They should be. Maybe that’s why they seem so desperately eager to “move on.”

But the Las Vegas massacre hurt.  It won’t go away quickly. Knowing why it happened would help, but…fat chance of that!

Hunter Thompson once said something very nearly like:

“The nation’s press is a gang of cruel opportunists, fuck-offs and misfits. Journalism is a false doorway into the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole just deep enough for a wino to comfortably curl up and masturbate in,  like a chimp at the zoo.”

Let me make two things perfectly clear… One: Stephen Paddock’s real motive for mass murder is well-known in “certain quarters” (you know who you are). It may even be an open secret there. Those he intended to touch with his action can be assumed to have noticed.

Second thing:  Our vaunted Western free press may be a mile wide.  But its only an inch deep.

Stay tuned.

The Morgan Freeman Psy-Op Proves How Desperate The ‘Deep State’ Has Become

By Andrew Korybko

Source: Sputnik International

Morgan Freeman’s latest publicly stunt permanently stained his legacy after the famous actor decided to join the fake news industry by passing off a blockbuster script as a true story.

Morgan Freeman declared in his latest two-minute video that “We have been attacked. We are at war”, but he’s wrong in saying that Americans have been victimized by Russia, but should have rather told the truth that they’re under attack by their own government. To channel Freeman, “Imagine this movie script”, albeit modified to reflect real-life events instead of conspiratorial ones:

A globalist power cabal made up of the permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (the “deep state”), in conjunction with the Democratic Party, “Cultural Marxist” professors, the Mainstream Media, and Hollywood have attacked American democracy using non-stop infowar operations against their own fellow citizens to spread propaganda and false information aimed at convincing people that the Republican candidate and future President of the United States is really a Russian puppet.

A few years ago this might have sounded just as ridiculous as the narrative that Freeman read off in front of the cameras, but the difference is that this actually happened whereas his story still remains the realm of fiction. The conspiracy theory that Russia somehow swayed the 2016 election has no basis in reality, and it’s very condescending to the millions of average Americans in the Midwest who swayed the election for Trump to even infer that these patriotic citizens were under the influence of a foreign intelligence operation at the time.

Midwesterners didn’t tip the election for Trump because President Putin, the FSB, RT, or Sputnik told them to — which they didn’t — but because they had enough of the old order of business in the US and were desperately craving a change, any change, to improve the all-around deteriorating conditions that have come to define their lives. Trump promised law and order, jobs and strong borders, and a no-nonsense approach to American domestic politics, the complete opposite of Hillary’s platform and exactly what Midwesterners wanted to hear.

Even without the DNC leaks, many of those folks would never have countenanced voting for Hillary due to her husband’s toxic legacy and that of his party. Moreover, these voters didn’t need proof of Hillary and the Democrats’ corruption because they had suspected it all along, though the amplification of their crimes by the global media vindicated them for what The Establishment had falsely claimed for years was just another tinfoil hat “conspiracy theory”.

Now about actual conspiracy facts, many people could never have thought that their own government would turn against them and attack America’s sacred political system, its electoral democracy, through the incessant demonization of Donald Trump and the plethora of fake news that they disseminated about him. When Trump claimed that his campaign was under surveillance by the Obama Administration, he was dismissed as a crackpot, but it’s since emerged just the other day that former National Security Advisor Susan Rice did in fact authorize the spying of Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

On top of that, the never-ending assertions that Trump is in cahoots with the Russian government or somehow under the nefarious influence of shadowy Kremlin agents are regularly debunked by listening to the President and his Administration constantly talk about “Russian aggression” and watching them use this pretext to make hostile moves against Moscow. These actions strongly refute the claims of a secret Trump-Russian connection and most Americans understand that, but the “deep state” and their cohorts in the “Cultural Marxist” corners of academia, the Mainstream Media, Hollywood, and the masked mob of “Antifa” rioters believe that the population is just too stupid to see this and could therefore be easily misled into believing their fake news narrative that Putin’s proxy is in control of the White House.

The whole point behind this massive infowar operation against the minds of the American public is to delegitimize Trump’s election in a last-ditch bid to give the Democrats a chance to win back Congress during next year’s midterm elections. It’s also designed to influence the President’s domestic and foreign policy decision making, and it actually has succeeded to a degree in that respect if one holds the view that Trump truly believed what he said on the campaign trail but was later pressured by the “deep state” to take a decidedly neo-conservative stance towards International Affairs after he entered into office. Regardless, what’s important to focus on in this context are the American people themselves, who largely dismiss the conspiratorial, never-proven, and constantly debunked accusations that Morgan Freeman shamelessly told the American public with a straight face.

There’s a popular saying that one shouldn’t “shoot the messenger”, but that doesn’t mean that the said messenger is above criticism. Morgan Freeman is a beloved household name who’s universally praised for his excellent acting skills and the unforgettable memories that he’s imbued his audiences with, but politics isn’t his element, and no matter how much the “Committee to Investigate Russia’ pleads that it’s “non-partisan”, former National Intelligence Director James Clapper’s open involvement in the project proves that it’s linked to the same anti-Trump “deep state” that’s been undermining American democracy for over the past two years. Morgan Freeman should have known better than to lend his acting talent to pretending that a movie script is a real-life story, and that’s why so many people are disappointed in him on a deep, personal level.

The irony of it all is that Morgan Freeman could have actually done a lot of good if he had the courage to say the truth. Instead of imploring Trump to sit down in front of the American people, elaborate on Hillary’s “Russia Did It!” conspiracy theory, and then “legitimize” it through a full-blown nationwide anti-Russian witch hunt stretching from the Office of the Presidency all the way down to the paupers in the inner city, he himself could have sat down in front of the American people just as he did in his two-minute psy-op video and calmly explain the actual real-life “deep state” conspiracy against Trump and the American people. He didn’t do that, so there’s no use in speculating about “coulda, shoulda, woulda”, but for the sake of cracking a smile and thinking about what might have been, it sure would have been powerful if he channeled his blockbuster script but adapted it to actual events by saying:

“My fellow Americans, during this past election, we came under attack by our own government. I’ve called on the patriotic members of Congress and our intelligence community to use every resource available to conduct a thorough investigation to determine exactly how this happened. Our citizens are demanding accountability. For 241 years our democracy has been imperfect but nevertheless something to aspire to, and we owe it to the brave people who have fought and died to protect this great nation and save democracy. And we owe it to our future generations to continue the fight.”

But then again, Hollywood by its very nature is fake and deceptive, so it might be too much to ever hope for an American movie icon to stand up and say those brave words that were imagined above, though that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have resonated with tens of millions of dyed-in-the-wool patriotic Americans who are sick and tired of the “deep state’s” manipulative mind games.

Related Article:

Morgan Freeman, David Frum, and the no-good non-profit (The Baffler)

Freedom Is Not Necessarily The Absence Of Tyranny

By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market

Is it true that freedom is an overly idealized concept? Perhaps, but it is one of the few concepts worthy of idealization. It is so worthy, that it is worth dying for.

Since the dawn of recorded history human beings have fought and sacrificed to attain freedom. It is an inherent psychological construct. It is a principle that is rooted not only in the mind of man, but his spirit or soul. Scientists in the realm of the mind have struggled for generations to understand where it comes from — others have sought to dismiss it as a fanciful notion or societal construct. Nihilists claim it doesn’t really exist, while other people center their entire lives on the proliferation of it. The concept of freedom, love it or hate it, is central to all cultures and all civilizations. The most common dismissal of the idea of freedom that I have seen is the argument that none of us is really free because “tyranny exists”. Tyranny is a constant, therefore, in the view of the nihilists, freedom cannot exist. I believe this dim way of thinking stems from a misconception of what freedom is and where it comes from.

Freedom, first and foremost, begins in the mind, or the heart; whatever you are inclined to put more stock in. To think critically or to imagine wildly is indeed to be free. Tyranny, by extension, rises from the mire and muck in the physical world around us and ends in the mind and the heart. If one is free of mind, then one is never truly enslaved.

I have heard so many times the ignorant accusation that freedom requires action before consequence. That is to say, if you have suffered the consequences of a tyrannical system, then you have already failed to prevent your own enslavement. This is not how freedom functions. It has never worked this way.

There is no such thing as a world without the consequences of tyranny. Tyrants are everywhere, always. There are little tyrants in our everyday lives, and big tyrants that pull strings from behind the curtains and from the darker places. There are people reading this article right now that think they are liberty-minded, but act like tyrants towards those around them. There are people who think they are slaves when one simple choice or action could easily make them free. There are people who see private property as tyranny and seek to supplant it….with an even greater tyranny of entitlement and socialism. And, there are people who think freedom means freedom for them, but not for others. Each tyrant takes time to understand and remove from our lives. Some we simply need to walk away from; others need to be destroyed.

The point is, we are forever dealing with tyranny, and many of us are forever working to topple it. As long as we are able to pursue that goal, we are still free. The true slaves are those that have given up completely out of laziness or fear. Tyranny is always present, after all; why take a bath today when you are just going to end up soiled again tomorrow?

The idea that one can do nothing in the face of the machine is an old idea proven wrong time and time again, yet, it is also a very easy and comfortable lie to live in. Struggle is difficult. Sacrifice is foreboding and ugly. There are a million-and-one excuses and rationalizations as to why it is better to “accept fate” or circumstances. There is always another excuse that can be used to paper over cowardice.

Tyrants can, in fact, win and keep winning for the length of an epoch, exactly because of the logical fallacy that they cannot be resisted or be beaten. It is the self-fulfilling prophecy of nihilism that makes tyranny possible. Without it, tyrants inevitably fail and fall.

The great monster of our time that must be slayed is the monster of organized conspiracy. Past generations have confronted and defeated appendages of this monster, but they never beheaded it, and this is why our particular brand of tyranny persists. It is not enough for us to fight the tentacles of the beast anymore — it is the job of the freedom fighters of our era to stab at the brains of the wretched thing.

I am of course speaking of the banking cabal, the cult of financiers and elites that make up the globalist hierarchy. They pervade the halls of numerous institutions and think tanks, from the Federal Reserve and the Council on Foreign Relations to the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements. They sit in positions of great political influence and hold council (and some would say considerable sway) over world leaders. They write “theoretical” policies which are quickly adopted by governments and made into law. They are primary stockholders and owners of our mainstream media. Their slithering fingers are wrapped around academia and many scientific communities. They insinuate themselves into every foundation of thought, because thought is what they most wish to control.

They prefer to divide and conquer, to pit one group against another, or to give their ideological enemies enough rope to hang themselves with. If they can’t rule the psyche of a society or succeed in 4th generation warfare, they will fall back to the old standard of brute force. In fact, they might just do that anyway, because what tyrant doesn’t love instilling abject terror every once in a while?

And yet, these “elites” stand on a razor’s edge. Despite all their supposed power, despite all their wealth, despite the vast spiderwebs they weave, all of it can be turned to ash in an instant and they know it. Empires like this rely on anonymity, and they are anonymous no longer. The cabal is out in the open; they have to be.

To shift the world into true globalism and true centralization requires actions which can be masked from some people but not all people. They believe the intricate digital networks they have funded will buy them total information awareness, but these same networks also provide us with the tools to understand who they are and what they want. This double-edged sword of full spectrum data creates a Catch-22 timeline. The longer the globalists wait to implement the one world system they desire, the more time we have to educate millions of people. The faster they implement their one-world system, the more likely they are to make a mistake.

Time is running out. Time is working against them. Time is the master here, and the globalists are nothing but paper boats on a tidal wave.

This organized conspiracy increases its odds of success through psychological manipulation. There will come a time, perhaps sooner rather than later, when banking elites and their political allies can no longer stand outside the game unscathed. Risk is coming. So, they must encourage as much self-defeat in the minds of freedom champions as possible.

They will conjure crisis and catastrophe, they will conjure puppet enemy after puppet enemy, they will exploit useful idiots with collectivist views as cannon fodder, they will engineer conflicts between East and West. They will try to grind us down and break the legs of our resolve.

However, as long as there are people who know who the globalists are that are willing to hunt them down, the globalists cannot win. For what they desperately want is to stand out in the sun with criminal impunity, and without fear. They want to be untouchable. They want to be gods.

Real gods do not suffer consequences, and these people will suffer consequences.

The nihilists will cry, “When?! How?! Never!” But this is the nature of freedom. Freedom is in the fighting; winning is transitory. Tyranny can be subtle and it can be blunt, freedom is the same way. If you think because there is no shooting going on yet that a war is not happening, then you do not understand the nature of warfare.

Yes, it is possible that the fall of one globalist cabal might give rise to another, and another. But we are free to be there and to fight again. As long as we fight, we prevail. When we abandon the fight completely, that is when true slavery begins. Today, we fight using information versus propaganda, and we must be adept at this. We also must be adept at other forms of combat as the conflict escalates.

There will never be total absence of tyranny. The naysayers against the principle of freedom are delusional, or maybe they know such a standard is unattainable and this will make them forever “right.” When will the fight begin? It already has. It has been going on since time immemorial and we are merely here to continue it. This might seem like a task for Sisyphus – an endless circular nightmare. I look at it another way: We are a changing of the guard. We have inherited a responsibility beyond all responsibilities. In this age, we are the freedom fighters, and if we fail now then we pass an even more difficult horror on to some other generation down the line.

In my view this is unacceptable. The opportunity to end one longstanding tyranny is now. We must counter using information as long as is needed, and we must wake up as many people as possible, so when the time comes to storm the castle, the shared sacrifice is that much easier to bear. If you have taken up this fight in one form or another never let anyone tell you you are not free. Your ability to think and to act is concrete proof otherwise.

New York Times Propagates Russia Hacking Conspiracy Theory

The New York Times reports as fact that Russia hacked the 2016 US presidential election despite failing to present any evidence to support this claim.

By Jeremy R. Hammond

Source: Foreign Policy Journal

In late 2002 and early 2003, those of us who were warning that the US government was lying, that there was no evidence that Iraq still possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), much less active WMD manufacturing programs, were frequently dismissed as “conspiracy theorists”.

Of course, in reality, it was the US mainstream media that was propagating the government’s unfounded conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein had such weapons and, further, had a cooperative relationship with Al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization held responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The New York Times served the government in its campaign of deception by spearheading the media’s dissemination of the lies out to the public, thus manufacturing Americans’ consent for this illegal war of aggression.

Spreading government propaganda is a function the Times never ceases to serve well — the lesson from its own reporting during the run-up to the Iraq war, and from the mainstream media’s reporting in general, having been dutifully disregarded.

One of the latest government conspiracy theories the Times is helping to propagate, by serving effectively as the political establishment’s very own public relations firm, is the claim that the government of Russia was responsible for hacking into computers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and email accounts of John Podesta, who was then chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

In a report published September 1, 2017, the Times elaborated on this conspiracy theory under the headline “Russian Election Hacking Efforts, Wider Than Previously Known, Draw Little Scrutiny”.

In it, the Times reports as fact that Russia was responsible not only for hacking the DNC and Podesta’s email account, but also for hacking directly into the US election system itself. All that’s old news, however, so the Times‘ new spin is that Russia’s efforts to hack state electoral systems were much more extensive than previously thought.

However, the Times presents not one shred of evidence to support the underlying claim that Russia hacked these systems, much less that this alleged hacking was much more widespread than previously reported.

To the scrutinous reader who is familiar with the propaganda techniques mainstream media use in order to manufacture consent for various government policies, the total lack of evidence is apparent. In fact, the Times actually acknowledges that there is no evidence to support the claim it is making in the headline. Yet, through obfuscation, use of deceptive language, and various other techniques, the Times leads the general reader to believe that its headline is true.

An examination of the article is useful to see just how the Times manages to lead readers to the conclusion the Russia hacking is a demonstrated fact when, in reality, it remains just another conspiracy theory originating from the government that the Times is all too happy to help propagate.

The Alleged Russian Hacking of US Electoral Systems

The first thing to note about this New York Times piece is its title. The headline makes two claims: 1) it’s a fact that Russia tried to hack the US election, and this fact has been known publicly for some time; and 2) the Times has new information showing not only that US election systems were hacked and that Russia was responsible, but also that Russia’s hacking efforts even more widespread than previously known.

The story begins with the case of Durham county, North Carolina, where, we learn, various irregularities occurred at polling stations on election day last November (bold emphasis added throughout):

Dozens were told they were ineligible to vote and were turned away at the polls, even when they displayed current registration cards. Others were sent from one polling place to another, only to be rejected. Scores of voters were incorrectly told they had cast ballots days earlier. In one precinct, voting halted for two hours.

Susan Greenhalgh, a troubleshooter at a nonpartisan election monitoring group, was alarmed. Most of the complaints came from Durham, a blue-leaning county in a swing state [North Carolina]. The problems involved electronic poll books — tablets and laptops, loaded with check-in software, that have increasingly replaced the thick binders of paper used to verify voters’ identities and registration status. She knew that the company that provided Durham’s software, VR Systems, had been penetrated by Russian hackers months before.

“It felt like tampering, or some kind of cyberattack,” Ms. Greenhalgh said about the voting troubles in Durham.

Note that the Times does not say that Ms. Greenhalgh “believed” or “had heard” that Russian hackers were responsible for earlier hacking VR Systems, but that she “knew” this was so. With this verb choice, the Times is asserting that this claim is a proven fact.

The purpose of this assertion is to establish credibility in the mind of the reader that its headline is true, that the evidence shows that Russian hacking efforts were more widespread than previously known. If it is a fact that Russia hacked US election systems, then it is not hard to believe that its hacking was more extensive than previously thought.

But what evidence does the Times present to support its assertion that this earlier Russian hacking of VR Systems occurred?

Well, to answer that question, let’s first look at how Ms. Greenhalgh “knew” that Russians had hacked VR Systems. Much further into the article, more than halfway through, the Times tells us:

As the problems mounted, The Charlotte Observer reported that Durham’s e-poll book vendor was Florida-based VR Systems, which Ms. Greenhalgh knew from a CNN report had been hacked earlier by Russians. “Chills went through my spine,” she recalled.

So there were irregularities at the Durham county polling stations, and Durham county used VR Systems for its polling system, which Ms. Greenhalgh “knew” Russians had hacked because she’d heard it on CNN.

Mid-article, however, the Times also quotes Ms. Greenhalgh acknowledging, with respect to the specific case of Durham county, “We still don’t know if Russian hackers did this.”

If we don’t know whether Russian hacking was responsible for the supposed irregularities in Durham county’s polling station, why is the Times using it as an example to support the claim made in its headline that this hacking was more extensive than previously thought? If there are cases where there is evidence, why not feature one of those, instead?

The answer is that no such evidence exists; the Times has no evidence to support that claim in its headline. In fact, it acknowledges this in several other places in the article. What the Times is trying to do is to build the case that we can safely assume that what happened in Durham county was a consequence of Russian hacking. After all, if Russia hacked VR Systems, that certainly could explain those election-day irregularities, right?

But how solid is the Times‘ premise that Russia hacked VR Systems in the first place?

The Times doesn’t attempt to support this premise solely with hearsay about something CNN reported. It exerts slightly greater effort to convince the reader. Nine paragraphs into the article, we read:

Beyond VR Systems, hackers breached at least two other providers of critical election services well ahead of the 2016 voting, said current and former intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information is classified. The officials would not disclose the names of the companies.

Note here that the Times is once again acknowledging that it doesn’t actually have any evidence to support the claim that Russia hacked other companies in addition to VR Systems, which it is using to support the claim made in its headline that the Russian hacking was more widespread than previously thought. The Times is simply parroting government officials who’ve made this claim.

The Times‘ case crumbles even further the deeper one reads into the article. With respect to the Durham county irregularities, the Times next notes:

There are plenty of other reasons for such breakdowns — local officials blamed human error and software malfunctions — and no clear-cut evidence of digital sabotage has emerged, much less a Russian role in it. Despite the disruptions, a record number of votes were cast in Durham, following a pattern there of overwhelming support for Democratic presidential candidates, this time Hillary Clinton.

But months later, for Ms. Greenhalgh, other election security experts and some state officials, questions still linger about what happened that day in Durham as well as other counties in North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia and Arizona.

So keep in mind as we proceed that the Times is here once again acknowledging that no evidence exists to support the suspicion that the Durham county irregularities were due to Russian hacking. Yet it attempts to lead readers to that conclusion by suggesting that Russians did hack states’ electoral systems:

After a presidential campaign scarred by Russian meddling, local, state and federal agencies have conducted little of the type of digital forensic investigation required to assess the impact, if any, on voting in at least 21 states whose election systems were targeted by Russian hackers, according to interviews with nearly two dozen national security and state officials and election technology specialists.

Note that here the Times is attributing the claim that Russia hacked into states’ electoral systems to various sources. In its next paragraph, however, the Times does away with attribution and transforms this claiminto an ostensibly verified fact:

The assaults on the vast back-end election apparatus — voter-registration operations, state and local election databases, e-poll books and other equipment — have received far less attention than other aspects of the Russian interference, such as the hacking of Democratic emails and spreading of false or damaging information about Mrs. Clinton. Yet the hacking of electoral systems was more extensive than previously disclosed, The New York Times found.

Here we see that the Times is back to asserting as fact that the Russian hacking was more extensive than previously reported, even though it has admittedly not yet provided even a single piece of supporting evidence! How can it do that? Well, transparently, what is important to the Times is that its readers believe that its headline is true, not to actually demonstrate it. Whether it is actually true does not matter; it is just the belief that the Times is aiming to instill.

This is the nature of propaganda.

Turning to the premise, note that the Times is here claiming as fact that, one, US electoral systems were extensively hacked, and, two, Russia was responsible.

It continues:

Intelligence officials in January reassured Americans that there was no indication that Russian hackers had altered the vote count on Election Day, the bottom-line outcome. But the assurances stopped there.

Government officials said that they intentionally did not address the security of the back-end election systems, whose disruption could prevent voters from even casting ballots.

That’s partly because states control elections; they have fewer resources than the federal government but have long been loath to allow even cursory federal intrusions into the voting process.

That, along with legal constraints on intelligence agencies’ involvement in domestic issues, has hobbled any broad examination of Russian efforts to compromise American election systems. Those attempts include combing through voter databases, scanning for vulnerabilities or seeking to alter data, which have been identified in multiple states. Current congressional inquiries and the special counsel’s Russia investigation have not focused on the matter.

Note here how the Times is explaining that the federal government has not really focused much on investigating US election systems irregularities even while continuing to assert as fact that there were Russian efforts to compromise those systems! Further:

“We don’t know if any of the problems were an accident, or the random problems you get with computer systems, or whether it was a local hacker, or actual malfeasance by a sovereign nation-state,” said Michael Daniel, who served as the cybersecurity coordinator in the Obama White House. “If you really want to know what happened, you’d have to do a lot of forensics, a lot of research and investigation, and you may not find out even then.”

In interviews, academic and private election security experts acknowledged the challenges of such diagnostics but argued that the effort is necessary. They warned about what could come, perhaps as soon as next year’s midterm elections, if the existing mix of outdated voting equipment, haphazard election-verification procedures and array of outside vendors is not improved to build an effective defense against Russian or other hackers.

So, again, the Times is acknowledging that the kind of forensic investigation that would be required to determine whether US election systems were hacked have not actually been conducted. How, therefore, can the Times report as fact not only that such hacking occurred, but that Russia was responsible?

It gets worse. The Times at this point in the article has already acknowledged that there could be perfectly benign explanations for what happened in Durham county. As we continue reading, we learn that the those supposedly alarming irregularities the Times opened the article with were not actually all that irregular (and hence not all that alarming). To the contrary:

Still, some of the incidents reported in North Carolina occur in every election, said Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an expert on election administration.

“Election officials and advocates and reporters who were watching most closely came away saying this was an amazingly quiet election,” he said, playing down the notion of tampering.

The Times next quotes Ms. Greenhalgh’s admission that there’s no evidence hackers got into Durham county’s system (much less that Russia was responsible).

Keep in mind that the claim the government and media have been making is that Russia interfered in the US election to throw the vote to Donald Trump. Yet, in the case of Durham county, the result was that, as the Times informs, “Hillary Clinton won 78 percent of the 156,000 votes”. This is a strange outcome if we are to assume that Russia hacked the system to tamper with the election!

But the Times is not unskilled in the art of propaganda, so it has an explanation ready for us: Russia tried to hack the system there, but was just unsuccessful! It continues:

Details of the breach did not emerge until June, in a classified National Security Agency [NSA] report leaked to The Intercept, a national security news site. That report found that hackers from Russia’s military intelligence agency, the G.R.U., had penetrated the company’s computer systems as early as August 2016, then sent “spear-phishing” emails from a fake VR Systems account to 122 state and local election jurisdictions. The emails sought to trick election officials into downloading malicious software to take over their computers.

The N.S.A. analysis did not say whether the hackers had sabotaged voter data. “It is unknown,” the agency concluded, whether Russian phishing “successfully compromised the intended victims, and what potential data could have been accessed.”

VR Systems’ chief operating officer, Ben Martin, said he did not believe Russian hackers were successful. He acknowledged that the vendor was a “juicy target,” given that its systems are used in battleground states including North Carolina, Florida and Virginia. But he said that the company blocked access from its systems to local databases, and employs security protocols to bar intruders and digital triggers that sound alerts if its software is manipulated.

Take note again of the Times choice of verb: the NSA report “found” that hackers working for Russian intelligence had penetrated VR Systems’ computer systems. Through this choice of verb, the Times is communicating that it is a verified fact that Russia hacked VR Systems. But is it? To answer that, let’s turn to the Times‘ source.

The Intercept reported on this alleged hack much earlier, on June 5, 2017. Unlike the Times, however, The Intercept provided the following important caveat:

While the document provides a rare window into the NSA’s understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the underlying “raw” intelligence on which the analysis is based. A U.S. intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive.

To reiterate, the supposed evidence that exists proving that Russia hacked VR Systems is classified and still unknown to either the public or the media, including The Intercept and New York Times.

As The Intercept notes, the NSA report “states unequivocally in its summary statement that it was Russian military intelligence, specifically the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, that conducted the cyber attacks described in the document.”

But upon what actual evidence is that unequivocal statement based?

The Intercept, like the Times, proceeds to accept this unequivocal summary statement as fact despite its acknowledged lack of access to the evidence supposedly supporting this claim:

The NSA has now learned, however, that Russian government hackers, part of a team with a “cyber espionage mandate specifically directed at U.S. and foreign elections,” focused on parts of the system directly connected to the voter registration process, including a private sector manufacturer of devices that maintain and verify the voter rolls.

Here The Intercept is being as disingenuous with its readers as the Times. Note again the deceptive verb choice. The NSA had not actually “learned” that Russia tried to hack US electoral systems; it had rather assessed that this was so. As the manufactured “intelligence” about Iraq’s WMDs should have taught us, those are far from the same thing.

Conveniently, The Intercept provides a graphic image from the NSA report illustrating the point:

The key element of this chart to note is in the left column, where it identifies the “Operators” responsible sending Phishing emails — emails designed to trick the recipient into giving away login credentials for whatever system the hackers were trying to get into. Note that, according to the NSA, these “Operators” were “Probably within” the GRU.

“Probably”.

So, does the NSA know that the Russian government was responsible for these Phishing emails?

No.

The NSA is claiming this is so. But the supposed evidence it is basing this claim upon has not been shown to even exist.

Now, perhaps the NSA has solid reasoning to arrive at this conclusion. Perhaps it has solid, though not definitive, evidence to back this up.

But the New York Times ought to be properly informing its readers that the Russian hacking of VR Systems is an allegation. It ought to be including the caveat with this information that this is according to the government, but that it has not yet been proven. Moreover, the Times ought to be informing its readers that the evidence supposedly supporting this conclusion has not been made public, and, further, that nobody at the Times has been able to verify it even exists.

But continuing in its propaganda effort, the Times reminds us that, “In an assessment of Russian cyberattacks released in January, intelligence agencies said Kremlin spy services had been collecting information on election processes, technology and equipment in the United States since early 2014.”

But that was just another example of the government making a claim for which no evidence has actually been provided. Each of these claims simply builds upon those that preceded it. In the next manifestation, the New York Times claim that Russia’s supposed hacking was even more extensive than previously known will likewise be presented as fact, and the acknowledgments about the lack of supporting evidence will be omitted, just as the Times omitted that important caveat from The Intercept.

Of course, to write and publish this kind of story requires extreme cognitive dissonance on the part of journalists and editors at the Times. This psychological phenomenon of holding two fundamentally contradictory beliefs at the same time is palpable throughout the piece. Once more, even while reporting its headlined claim as fact, the Times acknowledges that it has no evidence to support it:

Beginning in 2015, the American officials said, Russian hackers focused instead on other internet-accessible targets: computers at the Democratic National Committee, state and local voter databases, election websites, e-poll book vendors and other back-end election services.

Apart from the Russian influence campaign intended to undermine Mrs. Clinton and other Democratic officials, the impact of the quieter Russian hacking efforts at the state and county level has not been widely studied. Federal officials have been so tight-lipped that not even many election officials in the 21 states the hackers assaulted know whether their systems were compromised, in part because they have not been granted security clearances to examine the classified evidence.

Of course, nobody at the New York Times has seen that evidence, either, to be able to verify that it even exists.

The Times closes by noting that, unlike Ms. Greenhalgh, Durham county officials “have rejected any notion that an intruder sought to alter the election outcome.” Nevertheless, the county has turned over computers to the North Carolina State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement in order for the matter to be investigated.

Of course, the Times‘ purpose with this piece, rather than being to properly inform the public, is to lead readers into the belief that, regardless of whether it happened in Durham county, there were extensive efforts by the government of Russia to hack into state electoral systems.

Never mind that the Times presents not one shred of actual evidence to support either of the two claims it makes in its headline.

Conclusion

We can again recall how the media, including the New York Times, piled lie upon lie in order to manufacture consent for the US’s war of aggression against Iraq.

Here, again, the political establishment has an agenda. Donald Trump campaigned on a platform of seeking improved relations with Russia, a deescalation of tensions, and greater cooperation with Moscow. The so-called “Deep State” was upset by Hillary Clinton’s loss. In order for the national security state to retain the authoritarian powers it has assumed supposedly in order to keep Americans safe, it needs to convince Americans that they need protecting. Russia has been selected to serve as a useful “enemy” to that end.

Framing Russia as an enemy of the United States also serves the interests of the military/security complex and the goal of maintaining and expanding US hegemony across the globe. This narrative has been used, for example, to prevent Trump from deescalating in Syria and increasing cooperation with Russia there. Trump had indicated that he would shift US policy away from the Obama administration’s goal of seeking regime change in Syria and only focus on combating the so-called “Islamic State” (a.k.a., ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh). The national security state has maneuvered rather to ensure that relations between the US and Russia remain tense and that US policy remains effectively to prolong the violence.

Whatever the motives for the propaganda campaign, we can observe that this propaganda campaign is occurring. Members of the establishment media have not only failed to learn the relevant lesson from their reporting about Iraqi WMD, but refusing to do so almost seems a job prerequisite.

News consumers should not make the same mistake.

Scrutinize. Question. Think.

If we want the mainstream media to change its behavior and actually do its job of properly informing the public, then news consumers need to change their behavior. Ever news consumers knows the old adage that you can’t believe everything you read in the newspaper. Nevertheless, all too habitually, that is precisely what they do — just as the journalists and editors they are relying on for information all too habitually accept claims from government officials as fact.

It is supposed to be the job of news media to analyze information, assess the veracity of sources, question government claims, and reveal the truth. Yet the establishment media not only fail to do so, but actively serve to propagate conspiracy theories originating from the government, and thus to manufacture consent for various government policies and the private agendas of the politically and financially powerful.

In light of how the mainstream media serve this function, it is critical for the consumers to develop the analytic skills necessary to determine the truth for themselves and be able to identify state propaganda when they see it.

Hopefully, this exercise has provided some useful insights into how to do just that.

False Flag Terrorism Isn’t a “Theory” … It’s ADMITTED and Widespread

Source: Washington’s Blog

Presidents, Prime Ministers, Congressmen, Generals, Spooks, Soldiers and Police ADMIT to False Flag Terror

In the following instances, officials in the government which carried out the attack (or seriously proposed an attack) admit to it, either orally, in writing, or through photographs or videos:

(1) Japanese troops set off a small explosion on a train track in 1931, and falsely blamed it on China in order to justify an invasion of Manchuria. This is known as the “Mukden Incident” or the “Manchurian Incident”. The Tokyo International Military Tribunal found: “Several of the participators in the plan, including Hashimoto [a high-ranking Japanese army officer], have on various occasions admitted their part in the plot and have stated that the object of the ‘Incident’ was to afford an excuse for the occupation of Manchuria by the Kwantung Army ….” And see this, this and this.

(2) A major with the Nazi SS admitted at the Nuremberg trials that – under orders from the chief of the Gestapo – he and some other Nazi operatives faked several attacks on their own people and resources which they blamed on the Poles, to justify the invasion of Poland.    The staged attacks included:

  • The German radio station Sender Gleiwitz [details below]
  • The strategic railway at POSunka Pass (Jabłonków Incident), located on the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia
  • The German customs station at Hochlinden (today part of Rybnik-Stodoły)
  • The forest service station in Pitschen (Byczyna)
  • The communications station at Neubersteich (“Nieborowitzer Hammer” before 12 February 1936, now Kuznia Nieborowska)
  • The railroad station in Alt-Eiche (Smolniki), Rosenberg in Westpreußen district
  • A woman and her companion in Katowice

The details of the Gleiwitz radio station incident include:

On the night of 31 August 1939, a small group of German operatives dressed in Polish uniforms and led by Naujocks seized the Gleiwitz station and broadcast a short anti-German message in Polish (sources vary on the content of the message). The Germans’ goal was to make the attack and the broadcast look like the work of anti-German Polish saboteurs.

To make the attack seem more convincing, the Germans used human corpses to pass them off as Polish attackers. They murdered Franciszek Honiok, a 43-year-old unmarried German Silesian Catholic farmer known for sympathizing with the Poles. He had been arrested the previous day by the Gestapo. He was dressed to look like a saboteur, then killed by lethal injection, given gunshot wounds, and left dead at the scene so that he appeared to have been killed while attacking the station. His corpse was subsequently presented to the police and press as proof of the attack.

(3) The minutes of the high command of the Italian government – subsequently approved by Mussolini himself – admitted that violence on the Greek-Albanian border was carried out by Italians and falsely blamed on the Greeks, as an excuse for Italy’s 1940 invasion of Greece.

(4) Nazi general Franz Halder also testified at the Nuremberg trials that Nazi leader Hermann Goering admitted to setting fire to the German parliament building in 1933, and then falsely blaming the communists for the arson.

(5) Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev admitted in writing that the Soviet Union’s Red Army shelled the Russian village of Mainila in 1939 – while blaming the attack on Finland – as a basis for launching the “Winter War” against Finland. Russian president Boris Yeltsin agreed that Russia had been the aggressor in the Winter War.

(6) The Russian Parliament, current Russian president Putin and former Soviet leader Gorbachev all admit that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered his secret police to execute 22,000 Polish army officers and civilians in 1940, and then falsely blamed it on the Nazis.

(7) The British government admits that – between 1946 and 1948 – it bombed 5 ships carrying Jews who were Holocaust survivors attempting to flee to safety in Palestine right after World War II, set up a fake group called “Defenders of Arab Palestine”, and then had the psuedo-group falsely claim responsibility for the bombings (and see thisthis and this).

(8) Israel admits that in 1954, an Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including U.S. diplomatic facilities, then left behind “evidence” implicating the Arabs as the culprits (one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to identify the bombers, and several of the Israelis later confessed) (and see this and this).

The U.S. Army does not believe this is an isolated incident. For example, the U.S. Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies said of Mossad (Israel’s intelligence service):

“Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act.”

(9) The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950′s to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister.

(10) The Turkish Prime Minister admitted that the Turkish government carried out the 1955 bombing on a Turkish consulate in Greece – also damaging the nearby birthplace of the founder of modern Turkey – and blamed it on Greece, for the purpose of inciting and justifying anti-Greek violence.

(11) The British Prime Minister admitted to his defense secretary that he and American president Dwight Eisenhower approved a plan in 1957 to carry out attacks in Syria and blame it on the Syrian government as a way to effect regime change.

(12) The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s through the 1980s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism.

As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: “You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security” … so that “a state of emergency could be declared, so people would willingly trade part of their freedom for the security” (and see this) (Italy and other European countries subject to the terror campaign had joined NATO before the bombings occurred). And watch this BBC special. They also allegedly carried out terror attacks in France, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK, and other countries.

The CIA also stressed to the head of the Italian program that Italy needed to use the program to control internal uprisings.

False flag attacks carried out pursuant to this program include – by way of example only:

(13) In 1960, American Senator George Smathers suggested that the U.S. launch “a false attack made on Guantanamo Bay which would give us the excuse of actually fomenting a fight which would then give us the excuse to go in and [overthrow Castro]”.

(14) Official State Department documents show that, in 1961, the head of the Joint Chiefs and other high-level officials discussed blowing up a consulate in the Dominican Republic in order to justify an invasion of that country. The plans were not carried out, but they were all discussed as serious proposals.

(15) As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in 1962, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. See the following ABC news reportthe official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.

(16) In 1963, the U.S. Department of Defense wrote a paper promoting attacks on nations within the Organization of American States – such as Trinidad-Tobago or Jamaica – and then falsely blaming them on Cuba.

(17) The U.S. Department of Defense also suggested covertly paying a person in the Castro government to attack the United States: “The only area remaining for consideration then would be to bribe one of Castro’s subordinate commanders to initiate an attack on Guantanamo.”

(18) A U.S. Congressional committee admitted that – as part of its “Cointelpro” campaign – the FBI had used many provocateurs in the 1950s through 1970s to carry out violent acts and falsely blame them on political activists.

(19) A top Turkish general admitted that Turkish forces burned down a mosque on Cyprus in the 1970s and blamed it on their enemy. He explained: “In Special War, certain acts of sabotage are staged and blamed on the enemy to increase public resistance. We did this on Cyprus; we even burnt down a mosque.” In response to the surprised correspondent’s incredulous look the general said, “I am giving an example”.

(20) A declassified 1973 CIA document reveals a program to train foreign police and troops on how to make booby traps, pretending that they were training them on how to investigate terrorist acts:

The Agency maintains liaison in varying degrees with foreign police/security organizations through its field stations ….

[CIA provides training sessions as follows:]

a. Providing trainees with basic knowledge in the uses of commercial and military demolitions and incendiaries as they may be applied in terrorism and industrial sabotage operations.

b. Introducing the trainees to commercially available materials and home laboratory techniques, likely to he used in the manufacture of explosives and incendiaries by terrorists or saboteurs.

c. Familiarizing the trainees with the concept of target analysis and operational planning that a saboteur or terrorist must employ.

d. Introducing the trainees to booby trapping devices and techniques giving practical experience with both manufactured and improvised devices through actual fabrication.

***

The program provides the trainees with ample opportunity to develop basic familiarity and use proficiently through handling, preparing and applying the various explosive charges, incendiary agents, terrorist devices and sabotage techniques.

(21) The German government admitted (and see this) that, in 1978, the German secret service detonated a bomb in the outer wall of a prison and planted “escape tools” on a prisoner – a member of the Red Army Faction – which the secret service wished to frame the bombing on.

(22) A Mossad agent admits that, in 1984, Mossad planted a radio transmitter in Gaddaffi’s compound in Tripoli, Libya which broadcast fake terrorist transmissions recorded by Mossad, in order to frame Gaddaffi as a terrorist supporter. Ronald Reagan bombed Libya immediately thereafter.

(23) The South African Truth and Reconciliation Council found that, in 1989, the Civil Cooperation Bureau (a covert branch of the South African Defense Force) approached an explosives expert and asked him “to participate in an operation aimed at discrediting the ANC [the African National Congress] by bombing the police vehicle of the investigating officer into the murder incident”, thus framing the ANC for the bombing.

(24) An Algerian diplomat and several officers in the Algerian army admit that, in the 1990s, the Algerian army frequently massacred Algerian civilians and then blamed Islamic militants for the killings (and see this video; and Agence France-Presse, 9/27/2002, French Court Dismisses Algerian Defamation Suit Against Author).

(25) In 1993, a bomb in Northern Ireland killed 9 civilians. Official documents from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (i.e. the British government) show that the mastermind of the bombing was a British agent, and that the bombing was designed to inflame sectarian tensions. And see this and this.

(26) The United States Army’s 1994 publication Special Forces Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces – updated in 2004 – recommends employing terrorists and using false flag operations to destabilize leftist regimes in Latin America. False flag terrorist attacks were carried out in Latin America and other regions as part of the CIA’s “Dirty Wars“. And see this.

(27) Similarly, a CIA “psychological operations” manual prepared by a CIA contractor for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels noted the value of assassinating someone on your own side to create a “martyr” for the cause. The manual was authenticated by the U.S. government. The manual received so much publicity from Associated Press, Washington Post and other news coverage that – during the 1984 presidential debate – President Reagan was confronted with the following question on national television:

At this moment, we are confronted with the extraordinary story of a CIA guerrilla manual for the anti-Sandinista contras whom we are backing, which advocates not only assassinations of Sandinistas but the hiring of criminals to assassinate the guerrillas we are supporting in order to create martyrs.

(28) A Rwandan government inquiry admitted that the 1994 shootdown and murder of the Rwandan president, who was from the Hutu tribe – a murder blamed by the Hutus on the rival Tutsi tribe, and which led to the massacre of more than 800,000 Tutsis by Hutus – was committed by Hutu soldiers and falsely blamed on the Tutis.

(29) An Indonesian government fact-finding team investigated violent riots which occurred in 1998, and determined that “elements of the military had been involved in the riots, some of which were deliberately provoked”.

(30) Senior Russian Senior military and intelligence officers admit that the KGB blew up Russian apartment buildings in 1999 and falsely blamed it on Chechens, in order to justify an invasion of Chechnya (and see this report and this discussion).

(31) As reported by the New York TimesBBC and Associated Press, Macedonian officials admit that in 2001, the government murdered 7 innocent immigrants in cold blood and pretended that they were Al Qaeda soldiers attempting to assassinate Macedonian police, in order to join the “war on terror”. They lured foreign migrants into the country, executed them in a staged gun battle, and then claimed they were a unit backed by Al Qaeda intent on attacking Western embassies”. Specifically, Macedonian authorities had lured the immigrants into the country, and then – after killing them – posed the victims with planted evidence – “bags of uniforms and semiautomatic weapons at their side” – to show Western diplomats.

(32) At the July 2001 G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy, black-clad thugs were videotaped getting out of police cars, and were seen by an Italian MP carrying “iron bars inside the police station”. Subsequently, senior police officials in Genoa subsequently admitted that police planted two Molotov cocktails and faked the stabbing of a police officer at the G8 Summit, in order to justify a violent crackdown against protesters.

(33) The U.S. falsely blamed Iraq for playing a role in the 9/11 attacks – as shown by a memo from the defense secretary – as one of the main justifications for launching the Iraq war.

Even after the 9/11 Commission admitted that there was no connection, Dick Cheney said that the evidence is “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein’s regime, that Cheney “probably” had information unavailable to the Commission, and that the media was not ‘doing their homework’ in reporting such ties. Top U.S. government officials now admit that the Iraq war was really launched for oil … not 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction.

Despite previous “lone wolf” claims, many U.S. government officials now say that 9/11 was state-sponsored terror; but Iraq was not the state which backed the hijackers. (Many U.S. officials have allegedthat 9/11 was a false flag operation by rogue elements of the U.S. government; but such a claim is beyond the scope of this discussion. The key point is that the U.S. falsely blamed it on Iraq, when it knew Iraq had nothing to do with it.). 

(Additionally, the same judge who has shielded the Saudis for any liability for funding 9/11 has awarded a default judgment against Iran for $10.5 billion for carrying out 9/11 … even though no one seriously believes that Iran had any part in 9/11.)

(34) Although the FBI now admits that the 2001 anthrax attacks were carried out by one or more U.S. government scientists, a senior FBI official says that the FBI was actually told to blame the Anthrax attacks on Al Qaeda by White House officials (remember what the anthrax letters looked like). Government officials also confirm that the white House tried to link the anthrax to Iraq as a justification for regime change in that country. And see this.

(35) According to the Washington Post, Indonesian police admit that the Indonesian military killed American teachers in Papua in 2002 and blamed the murders on a Papuan separatist group in order to get that group listed as a terrorist organization.

(36) The well-respected former Indonesian president also admits that the government probably had a role in the Bali bombings.

(37) Police outside of a 2003 European Union summit in Greece were filmed planting Molotov cocktails on a peaceful protester.

(38) In 2003, the U.S. Secretary of Defense admitted that interrogators were authorized to use the following method: “False Flag: Convincing the detainee that individuals from a country other than the United States are interrogating him.” While not a traditional false flag attack, this deception could lead to former detainees – many of whom were tortured – attacking the country falsely blamed for the interrogation and torture.

(39) Former Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo suggested in 2005 that the US should go on the offensive against al-Qaeda, having “our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization. It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps, and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion within al-Qaeda’s ranks, causing operatives to doubt others’ identities and to question the validity of communications.”

(40) Similarly, in 2005, Professor John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School – a renowned US defense analyst credited with developing the concept of ‘netwar’ – called for western intelligence services to create new “pseudo gang” terrorist groups, as a way of undermining “real” terror networks. According to Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh, Arquilla’s ‘pseudo-gang’ strategy was, Hersh reported, already being implemented by the Pentagon:

“Under Rumsfeld’s new approach, I was told, US military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists

The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls ‘action teams’ in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. ‘Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?’ the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. ‘We founded them and we financed them,’ he said. ‘The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.’ A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, ‘We’re going to be riding with the bad boys.’”

(41) United Press International reported in June 2005:

U.S. intelligence officers are reporting that some of the insurgents in Iraq are using recent-model Beretta 92 pistols, but the pistols seem to have had their serial numbers erased. The numbers do not appear to have been physically removed; the pistols seem to have come off a production line without any serial numbers. Analysts suggest the lack of serial numbers indicates that the weapons were intended for intelligence operations or terrorist cells with substantial government backing. Analysts speculate that these guns are probably from either Mossad or the CIA. Analysts speculate that agent provocateurs may be using the untraceable weapons even as U.S. authorities use insurgent attacks against civilians as evidence of the illegitimacy of the resistance.

(42) In 2005, British soldiers dressed as Arabs were caught by Iraqi police after a shootout against the police. The soldiers apparently possessed explosives, and were accused of attempting to set off bombs. While none of the soldiers admitted that they were carrying out attacks, British soldiers and a column of British tanks stormed the jail they were held in, broke down a wall of the jail, and busted them out. The extreme measures used to free the soldiers – rather than have them face questions and potentially stand trial – could be considered an admission.

(43) Undercover Israeli soldiers admitted in 2005 to throwing stones at other Israeli soldiers so they could blame it on Palestinians, as an excuse to crack down on peaceful protests by the Palestinians.

(44) Quebec police admitted that, in 2007, thugs carrying rocks to a peaceful protest were actually undercover Quebec police officers (and see this).

(45) A 2008 US Army special operations field manual recommends that the U.S. military use surrogate non-state groups such as “paramilitary forces, individuals, businesses, foreign political organizations, resistant or insurgent organizations, expatriates, transnational terrorism adversaries, disillusioned transnational terrorism members, black marketers, and other social or political ‘undesirables.’” The manual specifically acknowledged that U.S. special operations can involve both counterterrorism and “Terrorism” (as well as “transnational criminal activities, including narco-trafficking, illicit arms-dealing, and illegal financial transactions.”)

(46) The former Italian Prime Minister, President, and head of Secret Services (Francesco Cossiga) advised the 2008 minister in charge of the police, on how to deal with protests from teachers and students:

He should do what I did when I was Minister of the Interior … infiltrate the movement with agents provocateurs inclined to do anything …. And after that, with the strength of the gained population consent, … beat them for blood and beat for blood also those teachers that incite them. Especially the teachers. Not the elderly, of course, but the girl teachers yes.

(47) An undercover officer admitted that he infiltrated environmental, leftwing and anti-fascist groups in 22 countries. Germany’s federal police chief admitted that – while the undercover officer worked for the German police – he acted illegally during a G8 protest in Germany in 2007 and committed arson by setting fire during a subsequent demonstration in Berlin. The undercover officer spent many years living with violent “Black Bloc” anarchists.

(48) Denver police admitted that uniformed officers deployed in 2008 to an area where alleged “anarchists” had planned to wreak havoc outside the Democratic National Convention ended up getting into a melee with two undercover policemen. The uniformed officers didn’t know the undercover officers were cops.

(49) At the G20 protests in London in 2009, a British member of parliament saw plain clothes police officers attempting to incite the crowd to violence.

(50) The oversight agency for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police admitted that – at the G20 protests in Toronto in 2010 – undercover police officers were arrested with a group of protesters. Videos and photos (see this and this, for example) show that violent protesters wore very similar boots and other gear as the police, and carried police batons. The Globe and Mail reports that the undercover officers planned the targets for violent attack, and the police failed to stop the attacks.

(51) Egyptian politicians admitted (and see this) that government employees looted priceless museum artifacts 2011 to try to discredit the protesters.

(52) Austin police admit that 3 officers infiltrated the Occupy protests in that city. Prosecutors admit that one of the undercover officers purchased and constructed illegal “lock boxes” which ended up getting many protesters arrested.

(53) In 2011, a Colombian colonel admitted that he and his soldiers had lured 57 innocent civilians and killed them – after dressing many of them in uniforms – as part of a scheme to claim that Columbia was eradicating left-wing terrorists. And see this.

(54) Rioters who discredited the peaceful protests against the swearing in of the Mexican president in 2012 admitted that they were paid 300 pesos each to destroy everything in their path. According to Wikipedia, photos also show the vandals waiting in groups behind police lines prior to the violence.

(55) On November 20, 2014, Mexican agent provocateurs were transported by army vehicles to participate in the 2014 Iguala mass kidnapping protests, as was shown by videos and pictures distributed via social networks.

(56) The highly-respected writer for the Telegraph Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says that the head of Saudi intelligence – Prince Bandar – recently admitted that the Saudi government controls “Chechen” terrorists.

(57) Two members of the Turkish parliamenthigh-level American sources and others admitted that the Turkish government – a NATO country – carried out the chemical weapons attacks in Syria and falsely blamed them on the Syrian government; and high-ranking Turkish government admitted on tape plans to carry out attacks and blame it on the Syrian government.

(58) The former Director of the NSA and other American government officials admit said that the U.S. is a huge supporter of terrorism. Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted on CNN that the U.S. organized and supported Bin Laden and the other originators of “Al Qaeda” in the 1970s to fight the Soviets. The U.S. and its allies have been supporting Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups for many decades, and providing them arms, money and logistical support in LibyaSyriaMaliBosniaChechnyaIran, and many other countries. U.S. allies are also directly responsible for creating and supplying ISIS.

It’s gotten so ridiculous that a U.S. Senator has introduced a “Stop Arming Terrorists Act”, and U.S. Congresswoman – who introduced a similar bill in the House – says: “For years, the U.S. government has been supporting armed militant groups working directly with and often under the command of terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda in their fight to overthrow the Syrian government.”

(59) The Ukrainian security chief admits that the sniper attacks which started the Ukrainian coup were carried out in order to frame others. Ukrainian officials admit that the Ukrainian snipers fired on both sides, to create maximum chaos.

(60) Speaking of snipers, in a secret recording, Venezuelan generals admit that they will deploy snipers to shoot protesters, but keep the marksmen well-hidden from demonstrator and the reporters covering the events so others would be blamed for the deaths.

(61) Burmese government officials admitted that Burma (renamed Myanmar) used false flag attacks against Muslim and Buddhist groups within the country to stir up hatred between the two groups, to prevent democracy from spreading.

(62) Israeli police were again filmed in 2015 dressing up as Arabs and throwing stones, then turning over Palestinian protesters to Israeli soldiers.

(63) Britain’s spy agency has admitted (and see this) that it carries out “digital false flag” attacks on targets, framing people by writing offensive or unlawful material … and blaming it on the target.

(64) The CIA has admitted that it uses viruses and malware from Russia and other countries to carry out cyberattacks and blame other countries.

(65) U.S. soldiers have admitted that if they kill innocent Iraqis and Afghanis, they then “drop” automatic weapons near their body so they can pretend they were militants.

(66) Similarly, police frame innocent people for crimes they didn’t commit. The practice is so well-known that the New York Times noted in 1981:

In police jargon, a throwdown is a weapon planted on a victim.

Newsweek reported in 1999:

Perez, himself a former [Los Angeles Police Department] cop, was caught stealing eight pounds of cocaine from police evidence lockers. After pleading guilty in September, he bargained for a lighter sentence by telling an appalling story of attempted murder and a “throwdown”–police slang for a weapon planted by cops to make a shooting legally justifiable. Perez said he and his partner, Officer Nino Durden, shot an unarmed 18th Street Gang member named Javier Ovando, then planted a semiautomatic rifle on the unconscious suspect and claimed that Ovando had tried to shoot themduring a stakeout.

Wikipedia notes:

As part of his plea bargain, Pérez implicated scores of officers from the Rampart Division’s anti-gang unit, describing routinely beating gang members, planting evidence on suspects, falsifying reports and covering up unprovoked shootings.

(As a side note – and while not technically false flag attacks – police have been busted framing innocent people in many other ways, as well.)

(67) A former U.S. intelligence officer recently alleged:

Most terrorists are false flag terrorists or are created by our own security services.

(68) The head and special agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office said that most terror attacks are committed by the CIA and FBI as false flags.

(69) The Director of Analytics at the interagency Global Engagement Center housed at the U.S. Department of State, also an adjunct professor at George Mason University, where he teaches the graduate course National Security Challenges in the Department of Information Sciences and Technology, a former branch chief in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, and an intelligence advisor to the Secretary of Homeland Security (J.D. Maddox) notes:

Provocation is one of the most basic, but confounding, aspects of warfare. Despite its sometimes obvious use, it has succeeded consistently against audiences around the world, for millennia, to compel war. A well-constructed provocation narrative mutes even the most vocal opposition.

***

The culmination of a strategic provocation operation invariably reflects a narrative of victimhood: we are the 
victims of the enemy’s unforgivable atrocities.

***

In the case of strategic provocation the deaths of an aggressor’s own personnel are a core tactic of the provocation.

***

The persistent use of strategic provocation over centuries – and its apparent importance to war planners – begs the question of its likely use by the US and other states in the near term.

(70) Leaders throughout history have acknowledged the “benefits” of of false flags to justify their political agenda:

Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death”.
– Adolph Hitler

“Why of course the people don’t want war … But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship … Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
– Hermann Goering, Nazi leader.

“The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened”.
– Josef Stalin

Postscript 1:  It is not just “modern” nations which have launched false flag attacks. For example, a Native American from one tribe (Pomunkey) murdered a white Englishwoman living in Virginia in 1697 and then falsely blamed it on second tribe (Piscataway). But he later admitted in court that he was not really Piscataway, and that he had been paid by a provocateur from a third tribe (Iroquois) to kill the woman as a way to start a war between the English and the Piscataway, thus protecting the profitable Iroquois monopoly in trade with the English.

Postscript 2:  On multiple occasions, atrocities or warmongering are falsely blamed on the enemy as a justification for war … when no such event ever occurred. This is more like a “fake flag” than a “false flag”, as no actual terrorism occurred.

For example:

  • The NSA admits that it lied about what really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 … manipulating data to make it look like North Vietnamese boats fired on a U.S. ship so as to create a false justification for the Vietnam war
  • One of the central lies used to justify the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq after Iraq invaded Kuwait was the false statement by a young Kuwaiti girl that Iraqis murdered Kuwaiti babies in hospitals. Her statement was arranged by a Congressman who knew that she was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S. – who was desperately trying to lobby the U.S. to enter the war – but the Congressman hid that fact from the public and from Congress
  • Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind reported that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a document falsely linking Iraq with Muslim terrorists and 9/11 … and that the CIA complied with those instructions and in fact created the forgery, which was then used to justify war against Iraq. And see this and this
  • Time magazine points out that the claim by President Bush that Iraq was attempting to buy “yellow cake” Uranium from Niger:

had been checked out — and debunked — by U.S. intelligence a year before the President repeated it.

  • The “humanitarian” wars in Syria, Libya and Yugoslavia were all justified by highly exaggerated reports that the leaders of those countries were committing atrocities against their people. And see this

Afterword: The corporate media will likely never report on false flags … as it is ALWAYS pro-war.

Saturday Matinee: The President’s Analyst

“The President’s Analyst” (1967) is a political satire written and directed by Ted Flicker. James Coburn stars as Dr. Sidney Schaefer, a psychiatrist recruited by the U.S. government to serve as the president’s private psychoanalyst. Overwhelmed by stress and paranoia, he goes on the lam and is promptly hunted down by foreign and domestic intelligence agents as a pawn in a technocratic plot to control the world. The film’s comedic sensibility is at times dated but features themes which are even more relevant today such as the conflict between power and ethics, transhumanist aspirations of Big Data corporations, the ever-encroaching surveillance state and resultant loss of privacy.

Watch the full film here.