Tag Archives: Cyberwarfare

Apocalypse Now: The Government’s Use of Controlled Chaos to Maintain Power

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

Figure One: Just stop a few of their machines and radios and telephones and lawn mowers…throw them into darkness for a few hours and then you just sit back and watch the pattern. 

Figure Two: And this pattern is always the same? 

Figure One: With few variations. They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find…and it’s themselves. And all we need do is sit back…and watch…and let them destroy themselves. — “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” Twilight Zone

Will 2024 be the year the Deep State’s exercise in controlled chaos finally gives way to an apocalyptic dismantling of our constitutional republic, or what’s left of it?

All the signs seem to point in this direction.

For years now, the government has been pushing us to the brink of a national nervous breakdown.

This breakdown—triggered by polarizing circus politics, media-fed mass hysteria, militarization and militainment (the selling of war and violence as entertainment), a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of growing corruption, the government’s alienation from its populace, and an economy that has much of the population struggling to get by—has manifested itself in the polarized, manipulated mayhem, madness and tyranny that is life in the American police state today.

Why is the Deep State engineering this societal madness? What’s in it for the government?

What is playing out before us is a chilling lesson in social engineering that keeps the populace fixated on circus politics and conveniently timed spectacles, distracted from focusing too closely on the government’s power grabs, and incapable of standing united in defense of our freedoms.

It’s not conspiratorial.

It’s a power play.

Rod Serling, the creator of the Twilight Zone, understood the dynamics behind this power play.

In the Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” Serling imagined a world in which the powers-that-be carry out a social experiment to see how long it would take before the members of a small American neighborhood, frightened by a sudden loss of electric power and caught up in fears of the unknown, will transform into an irrational mob and turn on each other.

It doesn’t take long at all.

Likewise, in Netflix’s apocalyptic thriller Leave the World Behind (produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s studio), unexplained crises lead to a technological blackout that leaves the populace disconnected, disoriented, isolated, suspicious, and under attack from mysterious ailments and each other.

As one of Leave the World’s characters speculates, the culprit behind the escalating catastrophes, which range from WiFi outages and mysterious health ailments to cities under siege from rogue forces, may be the result of a military campaign intended to destabilize a nation by forcing people to turn against each other.

It’s really not so far-flung a scenario when you consider some of the many ways the government already has the ability to manufacture crises in order to sow fear, fuel hysteria, destabilize the nation and institute martial law.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture health crises. Long before COVID-19 locked down the nation, the U.S. government was creating lethal viruses and unleashing them on an unsuspecting public.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture civil unrest and political upheaval. Since the days of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI has been using agent provocateurs to infiltrate activist groups in order to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize” them.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture economic instability. As the national debt continues to rise upwards of $34 trillion, with little attempt by federal agencies to curtail spending, it stands as the single-most pressing threat to the economy.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture environmental disasters. Deployed in 1947, Project Cirrus, an early precursor to HAARP, the government’s weather-altering agency, attempted to disable a hurricane as it was moving out to sea. Instead of weakening the storm, however, the government steered it straight into Georgia, resulting in millions of dollars in damaged properties.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture communications blackouts. Internet and cell phone kill switches enable the government to shut down communications at a moment’s notice. It’s a practice that has been used before in the U.S. In 2005, cell service was disabled in four major New York tunnels (reportedly to avert potential bomb detonations via cell phone). In 2009, those attending President Obama’s inauguration had their cell signals blocked (again, same rationale). And in 2011, San Francisco commuters had their cell phone signals shut down (this time, to thwart any possible protests over a police shooting of a homeless man).

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture terrorist attacks. Indeed, the FBI has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture propaganda aimed at mind control and psychological warfare. Not long ago, the Pentagon was compelled to order a sweeping review of clandestine U.S. psychological warfare operations (psy ops) conducted through social media platforms. The investigation came in response to reports suggesting that the U.S. military had been creating bogus personas with AI-generated profile pictures and fictitious media sites on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to manipulate social media users. Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare (or psy ops) can take many forms: mind control experiments, behavioral nudging, propaganda. In fact, the CIA spent nearly $20 million on its MKULTRA program, reportedly as a means of programming people to carry out assassinations and, to a lesser degree, inducing anxieties and erasing memories, before it was supposedly shut down.

We must never forget that the government no longer exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness.

Rather, “we the people” are the unfortunate victims of the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.

Think about it: Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic.

In almost every instance, the U.S. government has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.

Consider that this very same government has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, trap and control us.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from threats to our freedoms.The U.S. government is creating the threats to our freedoms.

It’s telling that in Leave the World Behind, before disaster strikes, the main characters—on their way to a family vacation—are utterly oblivious, connected to their electronic devices and insulated from each other and the world around them. Adding to the disconnect, the family’s teen daughter, Rose, is fixated on binge-watching episodes of Friends, even as the world falls apart around them. As TV critic Jen Chaney explains, the sitcom’s presence in the story “underlines how human beings crave escapism at the expense of embracing the actual present, a different way of ‘leaving the world behind.’”

We’re in a similar escapist bubble, suffering from a “crisis of the now,” which keeps us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from reality.

Professor Jacques Ellul studied this phenomenon of overwhelming news, short memories and the use of propaganda to advance hidden agendas. “One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones,” wrote Ellul.

“Under these conditions there can be no thought. And, in fact, modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but he does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them. He is even less capable of spotting any inconsistency between successive facts; man’s capacity to forget is unlimited. This is one of the most important and useful points for the propagandists, who can always be sure that a particular propaganda theme, statement, or event will be forgotten within a few weeks.”

Yet in addition to being distracted by our electronic devices and diverted by bread-and-circus entertainment spectacles, we are also being polarized by political theater, which aims to keep us divided and at war with each other.

This is the underlying cautionary tale of Leave the World Behind and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”: we are being manipulated by forces beyond our control.

A popular meme circulating a while back described it this way:

“If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti Mask. The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar … and why?”

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the government has never stopped shaking the jar.

The American Kleptocracy: A Government of Liars, Thieves and Lawbreakers

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable.”—H. L. Mencken

The American kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) continues to suck the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

Think about it.

Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.

Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic.

In almost every instance, the U.S. government (often spearheaded by the FBI) has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.

Who is the biggest black market buyer and stockpiler of cyberweapons (weaponized malware that can be used to hack into computer systems, spy on citizens, and destabilize vast computer networks)? The U.S. government.

Who is the largest weapons manufacturer and exporter in the world, such that they are literally arming the world? The U.S. government.

Which country has a history of secretly testing out dangerous weapons and technologies on its own citizens? The U.S. government.

Which country has conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins? The U.S. government.

What country has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting? The U.S. government.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from terrorism.

The U.S. government is creating the terror. It is, in fact, the source of the terror.

Consider that this very same government has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.

So why is the government doing this? Money, power and total domination.

We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness. Rather, these are the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.

Case in point: the FBI.

The government’s henchmen have become the embodiment of how power, once acquired, can be so easily corrupted and abused. Indeed, far from being tough on crime, FBI agents are also among the nation’s most notorious lawbreakers.

Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government, or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work.

It’s a diabolical plot with far-reaching consequences for every segment of the population, no matter what one’s political leanings.

As Rozina Ali writes for The New York Times Magazine, “The government’s approach to counterterrorism erodes constitutional protections for everyone, by blurring the lines between speech and action and by broadening the scope of who is classified as a threat.”

This is not an agency that appears to understand, let alone respect, the limits of the Constitution.

For instance, the FBI has been secretly carrying out an entrapment scheme in which it used a front company, ANOM, to sell purportedly hack-proof phones to organized crime syndicates and then used those phones to spy on them as they planned illegal drug shipments, plotted robberies and put out contracts for killings using those boobytrapped phones.

All told, the FBI intercepted 27 million messages over the course of 18 months.

What this means is that the FBI was also illegally spying on individuals using those encrypted phones who may not have been involved in any criminal activity whatsoever.

Even reading a newspaper article is now enough to get you flagged for surveillance by the FBI. The agency served a subpoena on USA Today / Gannett to provide the internet addresses and mobile phone information for everyone who read a news story online on a particular day and time about the deadly shooting of FBI agents.

This is the danger of allowing the government to carry out widespread surveillance, sting and entrapment operations using dubious tactics that sidestep the rule of law: “we the people” become suspects and potential criminals, while government agents, empowered to fight crime using all means at their disposal, become indistinguishable from the corrupt forces they seek to vanquish.  

To go after terrorists, they become terrorists. To go after drug smugglers, they become drug smugglers. To go after thieves, they become thieves.

It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens), or if we’ve gone straight to an idiocracy. 

This certainly isn’t a constitutional republic, however.

Some days, it feels like the government is running its own crime syndicate complete with mob rule and mafia-style justice.

In addition to creating certain crimes in order to then “solve” them, the FBI—the government’s law enforcement agency—also gives certain informants permission to break the law, “including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies,” in exchange for their cooperation on other fronts.

USA Today estimates that government agents have authorized criminals to engage in as many as 15 crimes a day (5600 crimes a year). Some of these informants are getting paid astronomical sums: one particularly unsavory fellow, later arrested for attempting to run over a police officer, was actually paid $85,000 for his help laying the trap for an entrapment scheme.

In addition to procedural misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, the FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, and harassment.

For example, the Associated Press lodged a complaint with the Dept. of Justice after learning that FBI agents created a fake AP news story and emailed it, along with a clickable link, to a bomb threat suspect in order to implant tracking technology onto his computer and identify his location. Lambasting the agency, AP attorney Karen Kaiser railed, “The FBI may have intended this false story as a trap for only one person. However, the individual could easily have reposted this story to social networks, distributing to thousands of people, under our name, what was essentially a piece of government disinformation.”

Then again, to those familiar with COINTELPRO, an FBI program created to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize” groups and individuals the government considers politically objectionable, it should come as no surprise that the agency has mastered the art of government disinformation.

The FBI has been particularly criticized in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks for targeting vulnerable individuals and not only luring them into fake terror plots but actually equipping them with the organization, money, weapons and motivation to carry out the plots—entrapment—and then jailing them for their so-called terrorist plotting. This is what the FBI characterizes as “forward leaning—preventative—prosecutions.”

Another fallout from 9/11, National Security Letters, one of the many illicit powers authorized by the USA Patriot Act, allows the FBI to secretly demand that banks, phone companies, and other businesses provide them with customer information and not disclose the demands. An internal audit of the agency found that the FBI practice of issuing tens of thousands of NSLs every year for sensitive information such as phone and financial records, often in non-emergency cases, is riddled with widespread violations.

The FBI’s surveillance capabilities, on a par with the National Security Agency, boast a nasty collection of spy tools ranging from Stingray devices that can track the location of cell phones to Triggerfish devices which allow agents to eavesdrop on phone calls. 

In one case, the FBI actually managed to remotely reprogram a “suspect’s” wireless internet card so that it would send “real-time cell-site location data to Verizon, which forwarded the data to the FBI.”

The FBI has also repeatedly sought to expand its invasive hacking powers to allow agents to hack into any computer, anywhere in the world.

Indeed, for years now, the U.S. government has been creating what one intelligence insider referred to as a cyber-army capable of offensive attacks. As part of this cyberweapons programs, government agencies such as the NSA have been stockpiling all kinds of nasty malware, viruses and hacking tools that can “steal financial account passwords, turn an iPhone into a listening device, or, in the case of Stuxnet, sabotage a nuclear facility.”

In fact, the NSA was responsible for the threat posed by the “WannaCry” or “Wanna Decryptor” malware worm which—as a result of hackers accessing the government’s arsenal—hijacked more than 57,000 computers and crippled health care, communications infrastructure, logistics, and government entities in more than 70 countries.

Mind you, the government was repeatedly warned about the dangers of using criminal tactics to wage its own cyberwars. It was warned about the consequences of blowback should its cyberweapons get into the wrong hands.

The government chose to ignore the warnings.

That’s exactly how the 9/11 attacks unfolded.

First, the government helped to create the menace that was al-Qaida and then, when bin Laden had left the nation reeling in shock (despite countless warnings that fell on tone-deaf ears), it demanded—and was given—immense new powers in the form of the USA Patriot Act in order to fight the very danger it had created.

This has become the shadow government’s modus operandi regardless of which party controls the White House: the government creates a menace—knowing full well the ramifications such a danger might pose to the public—then without ever owning up to the part it played in unleashing that particular menace on an unsuspecting populace, it demands additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threat.

Yet the powers-that-be don’t really want us to feel safe.

They want us cowering and afraid and willing to relinquish every last one of our freedoms in exchange for their phantom promises of security.

As a result, it’s the American people who pay the price for the government’s insatiable greed and quest for power.

Suffice it to say that when and if a true history of the United States is ever written, it will not only track the rise of the American police state but it will also chart the decline of freedom in America: how a nation that once abided by the rule of law and held the government accountable for its actions has steadily devolved into a police state where justice is one-sided, a corporate elite runs the show, representative government is a mockery, police are extensions of the military, surveillance is rampant, privacy is extinct, and the law is little more than a tool for the government to browbeat the people into compliance.

Somewhere over the course of the past 240-plus years, democracy has given way to kleptocracy, and representative government has been rejected in favor of rule by career politicians, corporations and thieves—individuals and entities with little regard for the rights of American citizens.

This dissolution of that sacred covenant between the citizenry and the government—establishing “we the people” as the masters and the government as the servant—didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen because of one particular incident or one particular president. It is a process, one that began long ago and continues in the present day, aided and abetted by politicians who have mastered the polarizing art of how to “divide and conquer.”

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our freedoms have become casualties in an all-out war on the American people.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google compete for Pentagon Cloud warfighter project

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By Will Morrow

Source: WSWS.org

Amazon, Microsoft and Google are competing to secure a multi-billion-dollar Department of Defense contract to build and oversee the US military’s Cloud computing infrastructure, which will be used to control every aspect of the Pentagon’s global operations.

The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) project will transfer the large number of separate data control centers currently being run by the Pentagon into a centralized Cloud network that will be administered by one of the technology giants. The contract is reported to be worth up to $10 billion over the next decade, potentially making it the Department of Defense’s single largest acquisition ever. The winning bidder is expected to be announced in September.

The company that secures the contract will be completely integrated into all of the US military’s fighting operations. According to Nextgov, Brigadier General David Krumm, the deputy director for requirements for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described JEDI as a “global fabric” that will connect the headquarters with active combat forces, from an F-35 fighter jet pilot to a Pacific submarine captain to an Army platoon leader. “This is going to make a difference like few things have to get information to our warfighters,” Krumm said.

The Department of Defense hosted an industry conference on the project on March 7 in Arlington, Virginia, attended by technology companies, including representatives from Amazon and Microsoft. Krumm told the audience that JEDI would “change the way that this nation, its soldiers, its sailors, its Marines and its airmen fight and win our nation’s wars.”

The Cloud network will be required to hold data at all security classification levels, meaning security officials with top secret security clearances will be working at the facilities.

On May 16, Bloomberg Government published images of the advertisements produced by Amazon and Microsoft on electronic billboards in the Pentagon railway station about how their companies’ technology could support the military in battle.

Microsoft’s ad featured an image of a special operations soldier and the caption, “The cloud gets actionable insight while the action is still unfolding.” An Amazon Web Services ad included the statement, “Time to launch: months minutes,” to underscore that the cloud infrastructure will help coordinate missile launches.

The JEDI program was first announced in September 2017, a month after Trump’s Defence Secretary James Mattis carried out a tour of Silicon Valley boardrooms. Mattis met with Google’s Founder Sergey Brin and CEO Sundar Pichai, as well as executives at Facebook and Amazon, to discuss further integrating their technologies into the US armed forces.

The Defense One website reported on April 12 that “Brin in particular was eager to showcase how much Google was learning every day about AI and cloud implementation,” citing an anonymous senior Defense Department official. Mattis “returned to Washington, D.C., convinced that the US military had to move much of its data to a commercial cloud provider—not just to manage files, email, and paperwork but to push mission-critical information to front-line operators,” the article noted.

Significantly, the article notes that while Amazon and Microsoft have publicly expressed their desire to secure the contract, Google has “kept its own interest … out of the press. Company leaders have even hidden the pursuit from its own workers, according to Google employees Defense One reached.”

Google’s integration into the military’s operations has triggered widespread opposition among its employees. A letter published in April written to Google’s CEO Pichai and signed by more than 3,000 Google workers, demanded that the company cease its collaboration with the Pentagon.

The letter was a response to Google admitting in March that it is providing the military with artificial intelligence software that can be used to detect objects in video surveillance footage, under what is called Project Maven. This technology can be directly used to develop automatic targeting for the US drone murder operations in the Middle East and North Africa.

The Defense One article stated that “Maven is more than either Google or the Defense Department has admitted publicly, according to the senior defense official who called it a ‘pathfinder’ project, a starting point for future collaboration between the Pentagon and Google.”

Media reports indicate that the company most likely to secure the JEDI contract is Amazon. The company is considered to have an edge because it is already operating a Cloud network for the US intelligence agencies, under a $600 million contract reached in 2013.

Since September 2016, Amazon has been providing facial recognition technology called Rekognition to police forces and private intelligence contractors. Rekognition is able to process video footage from police body cameras, surveillance cameras and CCTV to “identify persons of interest against a collection of millions of faces in real-time, enabling timely and accurate crime prevention” (see: “Amazon providing facial recognition technology to police agencies for mass surveillance”).

The distinction between the technology corporations and the state has become almost entirely blurred as they become ever-more integrated into the military-intelligence apparatus. This takes place as Washington is working to outpace its major geostrategic rivals, above all China and Russia, in the arena of advanced warfare technology and artificial intelligence, in preparation for a catastrophic war that would inevitably involve the use of nuclear weapons.

As they integrate themselves into the American military build-up, the technology giants are collaborating in mass political censorship of left-wing and anti-war websites, above all the World Socialist Web Site, in order to suppress mass opposition to war. Since April 2017, Google has altered its search result algorithms in order to censor the WSWS and other left-wing and anti-war websites.

 

The author also recommends:

Google, drone murder and the military-intelligence-censorship complex
[19 May 2018]

Russia and the War Party

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By Carl Boggs

Source: CounterPunch

The steady deterioration of American political discourse seems to have reached its lowest ebb in historical memory, visible in the rightward shift of both Democrats and Republicans.  One sign is the frenzied Democratic assault on Republicans from the right, especially in foreign policy.  Another is the resounding silence on the most crucial problems facing humanity: threat of catastrophic war, nuclear arms race, ecological crisis, health-care debacle, the worsening miseries of global capitalism.   Tabloid-style spectacles have increasingly filled media space.  Still another sign is the intensifying anti-Russia hysteria promoted by unhinged liberals in Congress and the corporate media, reminiscent of the worst McCarthyism.

Another example of this descent into absurdity is the book Russian Roulette, by liberals Michael Isikoff and David Corn – Beltway writers whose shrill anti-Russian crusade has received highest accolades by the New York Times and such promoters of the permanent warfare state as Rachel Maddow (whose gushing endorsement is on the back cover).  The subtitle – “The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump” – reveals the political obsession of Democrats (and plenty of Republicans) for the past eighteen months, to the exclusion of most everything else.   More than anything, the volume illustrates the staggering level of ignorance in the U.S. about Russian history and politics, crude propaganda easily displacing coherent analysis.  (A more general – and devastating – review of Russian Routlette by Paul Street appeared earlier in CP.)

Russian Roulette is filled with 300 pages of meticulous detail – Trump’s (actual, planned, or failed) business dealings in Russia, endless goings and comings of shady characters and “operatives”, electronic transactions across the great divide, a litany of speeches, conferences, dinners and other activities, computer hacking and trolling schemes, breathless tales of lurid behavior, Russians clandestinely entering the U.S., reports on secret files, and of course the menacing specter of Russian “oligarchs”.  All this is believed to demonstrate Putin’s ruthless war against America, his supreme goal being to “destroy our democracy”, instill chaos, and neutralize U.S. as well as European geopolitical power.  As we have been ritually informed by CNN and kindred venues, cyber warfare (for now) is the Russians’ preeminent mode of combat – and it has been so devastatingly effective as to paralyze normal American politics.  It was cyber warfare, moreover, that delivered the 2016 presidential election to the Russia-loving Trump.

Trump, it turns out, was guilty of the most grievous sin: he went so far as to mention the possibility of cooperative relations with Russia, the idea being to help fight terrorism and better manage the nuclear threat. His other crime was to question the neocon/Democratic/Clintonite agenda of regime change in Syria – an agenda (still alive) that could bring military confrontation with a nuclear state. Trump’s fanciful hope meant that he had to be a willing “stooge” of Putin and his nefarious plots.

It turns out that the myriad claims, charges, and allegations set forth by Isikoff and Corn amount to little of substance – surely nothing to prove that Putin has been conducting warfare against the U.S., or that Russians had decisively influenced the 2016 presidential election.  Evidence that Trump conspired in any way with Putin or his imagined assemblage of henchmen, former KGB agents, cyberwarriors, and oligarchs is similarly lacking.   Yet, for the authors the only way Hillary Clinton could have lost the presidency that was rightfully hers was because the Russians intervened, with help from the treacherous Wikileaks, the authors writing: “Never before had a president’s election been so closely linked to the intervention of a foreign power.”

According to Isikoff and Corn, the scheming Russians managed to infiltrate party machinery, elections, and the Internet, deploying squads of cyberwarriors from the notorious Internet Research Agency and other sites.  They also placed ads in Facebook and other social-media sites.  How many American voters were even exposed to such fare, much less swayed by it, cannot be established, but vague popular awareness of this Russian skullduggery did not appear until the Mueller investigation called attention to it more than a year after the election.  No one denies the actuality of Russian trolling and hacking enterprises. The problem for the authors here is that such operations are so universally practiced as to be rather commonplace, while it has yet to be shown they can alter election outcomes in the U.S.. Moreover, in this area of intelligence work (as in so many others) the U.S. has long been unchallenged world champion.

The authors describe Putin as an “autocratic, repressive, and dangerous Russian leader” who routinely kills his political enemies and crushes dissent.  Such oversimplified descriptions of Putin and the Russian scene in general are set forth as established truths, no discussion or evidence needed.  Why a duly-elected leader (with 76 percent of the vote earlier this year) can be so ritually dismissed as a ruthless tyrant Isikoff and Corn never get around to explaining.  Were election irregularities or illegalities reported?   Were voters threatened or coerced?   Is Putin any more authoritarian than the vast majority of leaders around the world?  Would Netanyahu in Israel, Macron in France, or Merkel in Germany (all elected by much slimmer margins) be described as simple despots?

As for Trump, Russian Roulette seeks to demonstrate that the candidate and then president somehow “aided and abetted Moscow’s attack on American democracy.” That’s right: the White House served as a willing, secret accomplice in Putin’s criminal schemes.  So many Trump associates –Paul Manafort, General Michael Flynn, Carter Page, et. al. – had indeed previously traveled to Russia, talked and dined with Russians, and (gasp) seemed to want something of a cordial relationship with business and other interests there.  (Why this should have been shocking is hard to fathom, since in 2016 and 2017 the Russian Federation was still an integral part of the global capitalist economy and the U.S. has been doing plenty of business there since the early 1990s.)

The authors’ unfounded generalizations are based mainly on three sources, most crucially the all-important (but phony) Christopher Steele “dossier” that was said to implicate Trump in a variety of offenses and scandals that even Isikoff and Corn admit is comprised of “sensational and uncorroborated claims” – that is, fake news.  They argue, further, that Putin hacked DNC communications and passed along damning emails to Wikileaks, but investigation (by William Binney and others) suggests they were more likelyleaked than hacked; Julian Assange firmly denies that the files (never viewed by the FBI) came from any state actor.  The establishment media paid little attention to the damning content of these emails, so their impact on the election in any case could not have amounted to much.  Even the Mueller Committee report earlier this year, which indicted 13 Russian trolls and hackers, conceded they had no appreciable impact on the 2016 election results.

In Russian Roulette the authors seem infatuated with the American “intelligence community” – purported last word on the question of Russian interference — writing confidently but misleadingly: “The intelligence community has identified Moscow as the culprit in the hacks of Democrats in October [2016].”  One cannot help wondering what sort of “community” Isikoff and Corn have in mind.

By “intelligence community” do they include the NSA, an agency that has been spying on Americans and the world with impunity for years while a spokesperson (James Clapper) lied about it before Congress?  Could they be referring to the CIA, active for decades in clandestine and illegal operations such as unwarranted surveillance, sabotage, torture, drone strikes on civilians, and regime change (by military force, not just computer meddling) in Vietnam, Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, and too many other countries to list here, all aided and abetted by flagrant lies and cover-ups?  Perhaps they have in mind the FBI, an agency long dedicated to destroying popular movements (Civil Rights, anti-war, etc.) through COINTELPRO and other illegal operations.  Or the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), which for decades has squandered hundreds of billions of dollars on a futile but disastrous and racist War on Drugs, filling jails with people targeted, harassed, jailed, and ruined for the crime of using banned substances?

Can Isikoff and Corn actually take seriously the murky claims of the most Orwellian surveillance apparatus in history?  Do they believe that this “community” is subject to any meaningful oversight and accountability?  Their remarkably clueless account – basic to virtually every narrative in Russian Roulette – reveals an astonishing disconnect from postwar American (and world) history.

The central Isikoff/Corn thesis is not only devoid of factual support but is totally inverted: the present state of affairs is exactly the opposite of what they argue.  There has been no “Putin’s war on America”, but rather sustained U.S. (and NATO) warfare against Russia – political, economic, ideological, military – since 2000, if not earlier.  The Russians occupy the other, targetedend of the power spectrum, obvious to any serious observer.  Who has invoked harsh and repeated economic sanctions on whom?  Who has militarily encircled and targeted whom?  Who has deployed nuclear weapons at whose border?  Who has financed and orchestrated a hostile coup adjacent to whose territory?  Who has carried out non-stop ideological hysteria against whom?

In the world as it now exists, it is worth asking whether Russia could plausibly assume the role of imperial aggressor in its dealings with the world’s leading superpower?   Consider that in 2017 the total Russian GDP as barely 1.5 trillion dollars, roughly one-twelfth that of the U.S. ($19.5 trillion) and not even one-tenth that of the European Union ($14 trillion).  Military spending breaks down accordingly: nearly one trillion for the U.S. and $250 billion for NATO compared to $61 billion for Russia.  As for intelligence operations, the imbalance worsens – a budget of six billion dollars for the FSB and military GRU combined, compared to $75 billion for Washington not counting another $45 billion for the DEA and DHS (Department of Homeland Security) in tandem.

In fact Russia, despite its nuclear prowess, does not have the leverage and resources to threaten American (much less broader Western) geopolitical objectives – the real “threat” coming from the stubborn fact of Russian independence that was squelched during the Clintonite 1990s, when Washington used its power to reduce post-Soviet Russia to puppet status under Boris Yeltsin.   During the Yeltsin period the U.S. was never content with simple “meddling” in Russian affairs: it propped up a weak president, dismantled the public infrastructure, coddled an emergent stratum of oligarchs, and then spent $2.5 billion to sway the 1996 election in favor of a weak and unpopular Yeltsin.  Only with Putin’s emergence in 1999 did the nation regain a semblance of independence, restoring economic and political sovereignty, much to the disgust of Western ruling interests.

American intrusion into domestic Russian affairs is never explored by Isikoff and Corn, as it would undermine their one-sided tract. Nor do the authors have much to say about the post-Soviet eastward march of NATO, which allowed the U.S. and its allies to partially encircle Russia with both nuclear and conventional forces. The opening salvo of this strangulation gambit was President Bill Clinton’s “humanitarian” war against Serbia ending with the 1999 U.S./NATO bombings.   This was followed by President George W. Bush’s decision to scrap the crucial ABM Treaty with Russia in 2002 before invading Iraq in 2003.  CIA and State Department efforts to orchestrate regime change in Ukraine, ultimately achieved in 2014, came soon thereafter.

The ongoing Western campaign of economic warfare, media propaganda, and military provocations directed at Russia has only served to bolster Putin’s legitimacy, as shown by his overwhelming support in the 2018 election.  Yet Isikoff and Corn can write: “He [Putin] was a Russian nationalist to the core.  He wanted to extend Russian power. . . [as] an autocrat in the long tradition of Russian strongmen and had little interest in joining the club of Western liberal democracies – or winning its approval.”  Given the rampant imperial behavior of Washington and its European partners, Putin would have to be certifiably insane to respond in a manner that would permit further Western encroachments.

It is the expansionist U.S./NATO alliance that has maliciously targeted Russia, not the other way around.  Putin is surely a nationalist, but why not?  That just means he will fight for Russian national integrity against Western efforts to isolate and destabilize the country.  Any cyberwarfare activities launched by the Russians will appear to the rational observer as quite intelligible, a proven method to gain information about the plans of a vastly superior adversary overflowing with anti-Russia venom.

Like other Russia-bashing ideologues, Isikoff and Corn see terrible “oligarchs” everywhere, all naturally cozy with Putin. We have references to “Putin and his oligarch friends,” as if large-scale business interests could somehow have nothing to do with government.  They note that payments to IRA trolls “were being made through a holding company owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch and restaurateur close to the Russian president and known as ‘Putin’s chef”.”  Along with this disturbing revelation we are told that a “clique of [oligarchic] hardliners was able to outgun Russian moderates – a group including Yury Kovalchuk, billionaire owner of Rossiya bank and friend of the president “known as Putin’s banker”.  It would be a mistake to overlook the infamous Aras Agalarov, a real-estate mogul identified as “Putin;s Builder”.  Left out was any reference to “Putin’s Gardener”.

The authors deftly uncover a clique of diabolical oligarchs colluding with Putin to launch attacks on the West.  It might be useful to clarify the meaning of “oligarch”. One generally held definition is that they are exceedingly wealthy and powerful business and financial elites – the same interests that Washington zealously supported in Russia during the 1990s. These would be aligned with the very corporate and banking interests that dominate the global capitalist system, everywhere seeming to enjoy close relations with their governments.  American oligarchs (multibillionaires) in fact far outnumber their Russian counterparts – 565 to 96 – and possess many times the wealth and influence.  Further, if Washington really despises oligarchs, why did it install billionaire Petro Poroshenko as Ukraine ruler after the 2014 coup?

For Isikoff and Corn, Hillary Clinton might have been a terribly flawed candidate, but her loss nonetheless would not have occurred in the absence of “Putin’s underhanded intervention”.  No one questions whether Russian trolls and hackers were active in 2016 – or that Facebook ads were placed – but no evidence of their actual effectiveness has been presented, much less their capacity to determine an election outcome.

As they righteously celebrate the virtues of multiculturalism, diversity, and tolerance, liberal Democrats – now more than ever a neocon party of war – have come to embrace just the opposite: fierce hostility against other nations and cultures, smug provincialism, a recycled McCarthyism that spews hatred at even the slightest dissent from super-patriotic orthodoxy.  They pretend victim status when they are the ones targeting, attacking, smearing, and warmongering.

Worse yet, to satisfy their narrow political agendas they are perfectly ready to risk military confrontation with a nuclear power – a conflict that could lead to unprecedented global catastrophe.  Nowhere in this parochial text do the authors express the slightest concern for the horrors that might result from years of U.S./European hostility toward Russia.  Despite an unlevel economic and political playing-field, it is worth remembering that in nuclear matters Russia has rough parity with the West.  This might deter the neocons of both parties or it might not, the sad reality being is that liberal Democrats exemplified by Isikoff and Corn have little to offer the world beyond continuous war shrouded in a flimsy, desperate identity politics.

 

Carl Boggs is the author of The Hollywood War Machine, with Tom Pollard (second edition, forthcoming), and Drugs, Power, and Politics, both published by Paradigm.     

 

US Seeks to Monopolize Cyberwarfare

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By Ulson Gunnar

Source: New Eastern Outlook

The use of information to enhance martial power goes back to the beginning of human civilization itself, where propaganda and psychological warfare went hand-in-hand with slings, arrows, swords and shields.

The most recent iteration of this takes the form of social media and cyberwarfare where tools are being developed and deployed to influence populations at home and abroad, to manipulate political processes of foreign states and even tap into and exploit global economic forces.

In the beginning of the 21st century, the United States held an uncontested monopoly over the tools of cyberwarfare. Today, this is changing quickly, presenting an increasingly balanced cyberscape where nations are able to defend themselves on near parity with America’s ability to attack them.

To reassert America’s control over information and the technology used to broker it, Jared Cohen, current Google employee and former US State Department staff, has proposed a US-created and dominated “international” framework regarding cyberconflict.

His op-ed in the New York Times titled, “How to Prevent a Cyberwar,” begins by admitting the very pretext the US is using to expand its control over cyberwarfare is baseless, noting that “specifics of Russia’s interference in the 2016 America election remain unclear.”

Regardless, Cohen continues by laying out a plan for reasserting American control over cyberwarfare anyway, by claiming:

Cyberweapons won’t go away and their spread can’t be controlled. Instead, as we’ve done for other destructive technologies, the world needs to establish a set of principles to determine the proper conduct of governments regarding cyberconflict. They would dictate how to properly attribute cyberattacks, so that we know with confidence who is responsible, and they would guide how countries should respond.

Cohen, unsurprisingly, nominates the US to lead and direct these efforts:

The United States is uniquely positioned to lead this effort and point the world toward a goal of an enforceable cyberwarfare treaty. Many of the institutions that would be instrumental in informing these principles are based in the United States, including research universities and the technology industry. Part of this effort would involve leading by example, and the United States can and should establish itself as a defender of a free and open internet everywhere.

Cohen never explains how this US-dominated framework will differ from existing “international” frameworks regarding conventional warfare the US regularly abuses to justify a growing collection of devastating conflicts it is waging worldwide.

And as has been repeatedly documented, the United States’ definition of a “free and open internet everywhere” is an Internet dominated by US tech companies seeking to enhance and expand US interests globally.

Cohen ironically notes that:

Cyberweapons have already been used by governments to interfere with elections, steal billions of dollars, harm critical infrastructure, censor the press, manipulate public conversations about crucial issues and harass dissidents and journalists. The intensity of cyberconflict around the world is increasing, and the tools are becoming cheaper and more readily available.

Indeed, cyberweapons have already been used, primarily by the United States.

Jared Cohen himself was directly involved in joint operations between Google, Facebook, the US State Department and a number of other US tech and media enterprises which before and during 2011 set the stage for the so-called “Arab Spring.”

It included the training, funding and equipping of activists years ahead of the the uprisings as well as active participation in the uprisings themselves, including providing assistance to both protesters and militants everywhere from Libya to Syria in overthrowing governments targeted by Washington for regime change.

One such tool used in these efforts was described in a UK Independent article titled, “Google planned to help Syrian rebels bring down Assad regime, leaked Hillary Clinton emails claim,” which would report that:

An interactive tool created by Google was designed to encourage Syrian rebels and help bring down the Assad regime, Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails have reportedly revealed.

By tracking and mapping defections within the Syrian leadership, it was reportedly designed to encourage more people to defect and ‘give confidence’ to the rebel opposition.

The article would continue, mentioning Jared Cohen by name:

The email detailing Google’s defection tracker purportedly came from Jared Cohen, a Clinton advisor until 2010 and now-President of Jigsaw, formerly known as Google Ideas, the company’s New York-based policy think tank.

In a July 2012 email to members of Clinton’s team, which the WikiLeaks release alleges was later forwarded to the Secretary of State herself, Cohen reportedly said: “My team is planning to launch a tool on Sunday that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from.”

Would Cohen’s more recently proposed “framework” have prevented the United States’ use of these cyberweapons against sovereign states to undermine sociopolitical stability, overturn entire governments and plunge them into enduring chaos many still remain in 6 years later? Most likely not.

What Cohen and the interests he represents are truly concerned with is that nations are now not only able to recognize, prepare for and defend against US cyberwarfare, they may be capable of retaliating against the US.

Cohen’s proposal for an international framework to govern cyberwarfare simply seeks to define it in terms that leaves the US with both an uncontested monopoly over cyberwarfare as well as the means to wield it globally with absolute impunity.

It would be not unlike current “international” frameworks used to govern conflicts between nations which the US has used to justify an expansive, global campaign of extraterritorial war stretching from North Africa to Central Asia and beyond.

Such frameworks have become enablers of injustice, not a deterrence to it.

As nations from Iran to North Korea are discovering, the only true means of defending oneself from foreign military aggression is creating a plausible deterrence to dissuade foreign nations from attacking. This is done by creating a price for attacking and invading that is higher than the perceived benefits of doing so.

Nations like Russia and China have already achieved this balance with the United States in terms of conventional and nuclear warfare, and have now nearly established a similar deterrence in terms of cyber and information warfare. For the rest of the world, developing cyberdefense is not as costly as conventional military or nuclear arsenals, making cyberwarfare a corner of the battlefield unlikely to be monopolized by the US as it had done at the turn of the century.

Ensuring that no single nation ever has the opportunity to abuse such a monopoly again means exposing and confronting efforts by those like Google’s Jared Cohen and his proposal for an “international framework” for cyberwarfare that resembles the same sort of enabling the United Nations provides the US in terms of proliferating conventional conflicts across the globe.

Stripping the veneer off America’s propaganda menagerie

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By Wayne Madsen

Source: Intrepid Report

National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have doubled down recently on the games being played in cyberspace by America’s cyberwarriors. Snowden suggests that many of NSA’s most damaging malware programs are now in the hands of America’s opponents, thanks to enterprising foreign counterintelligence hackers known as the Shadow Brokers. Snowden believes that the malware, including destructive programs such as Stuxnet, are being auctioned off, via Bitcoin payments, by the Shadow Brokers. Snowden stated that the malware was obtained through hacking from a murky NSA operation called the “Equation Group.”

Assange, fearful that a new Ecuadorian president will hand him over to a Clinton administration in 2017, claims to have more hacked bombshells to drop on Team Clinton, courtesy of weak security in Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign computer systems.

We have entered a new phase of cyberwarfare, one in which America’s (and Israel’s) most damaging computer hacking and disruption programs are available to anyone willing to pay in Bitcoins on the cyberblack market. The Democratic Party’s leaked emails, coupled with the leaked State Department cables, has Hillary Clinton in an outrage. These disclosures, along with the Snowden disclosures that illustrate how America spies on friend and foe, have stripped the veneer off of America’s propaganda menagerie. Two of the three culprits Mrs. Clinton would like to see in prison for the rest of their lives are, for the time being, outside of Gulag America. Snowden is enjoying political asylum in Russia and Assange has asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The third, Chelsea Manning, is serving a 35-year prison term at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas and allegedly recently attempted suicide.

Paul Ceglia, who claims to have been the co-founder of Facebook, says he is on the run from the CIA after he filed suit against Facebook and its owner Mark Zuckerberg. Although Zuckerberg admits to having a past business relationship with Ceglia, the US Justice Department criminally charged Ceglia for trying to defraud Facebook after the former associate of Zuckerberg brought a civil suit in federal court in Buffalo against the company. Interestingly, Facebook has donated more money to Hillary Clinton than any other presidential candidate. But what is really at issue in the bizarre case is that Ceglia claims that Facebook’s seed money came from the CIA’s venture capital firm IN-Q-TEL, a charge to which WMR can attest after compiling a massive list of CIA front companies and proprietaries in the soon-to-be-published book: “The Almost Classified Guide to CIA Front Companies, Proprietaries and Contractors.”

The CIA and its partners at Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and other social media firms have striven to control the new media in the same manner that the CIA controlled the “old media” through operations like MOCKINGBIRD. During the Cold War era, the CIA claimed that all the world’s ills were due to Communist front organizations that influenced the media. The truth is that the so-called “fronts” often provided actual accounts of the misdeeds of the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies. However, with U.S. newspapers, magazines, and broadcast networks carrying the water for the CIA, it was Langley’s interpretation of the news that made Western headlines. The “Communist” reports were relegated to the nether regions of “Soviet disinformation” campaigns and “active measures.” The CIA laughably put out a periodical report on such “disinformation” tactics. In reality, what was called “disinformation” was actually bona fide news.

Today, when the CIA wants to debase a news article, it uses such operations as Snopes.com and Wikipedia to engage in CIA disinformation tactics. Uncomfortable truthful news items are quickly dispatched with the term “conspiracy theory.” There is little doubt that Facebook, Wikipedia, and Snopes are part of a “new MOCKINGBIRD” designed for the digital age. Like them or not, Snowden, Assange, Manning, Ceglia, and others have pulled the veil off of the new MOCKINGBIRD.

A formerly secret February 1987 CIA report on Soviet disinformation tactics illustrates that what was described then as “propaganda” was, in fact, the truth.

  • The CIA called baseless charges in a Soviet book that Jonestown, Guyana was a CIA behavioral control operation. It was.
  • The Soviets accused Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) of having the goal of weaponizing outer space. Not only was that the goal then, but it remains the goal of present incarnations of SDI.
  • The Soviets and the Afghan president, Najibullah of the Afghan Communist Party, said that they reached out to 50,000 Afghan mujaheddin in Afghanistan and Pakistan, who agreed to lay down their arms and join a coalition government, with eight opposition parties joining the Communists. The CIA and Western media called the news bogus. It was true with television footage of Afghan refugees returning to their homeland from India. The Soviets wanted an internationally-guaranteed neutral Afghanistan before withdrawing their troops. The CIA wanted a radical Islamic Afghanistan from which to launch attacks on the southern Soviet Union. That decision came back to bite the United States on September 11, 2001.
  • The CIA accused the Sandinista government of Nicaragua and the Soviets of being behind the Christian “Evangelical Committee for Development Aid” as a Communist front group. If so, it would have been the first time Communists and Christian evangelicals broke bread together. The CIA’s charge was fatuously false.
  • The Soviets accused the U.S. of using Africans as test subjects for a new AIDS vaccine. This charge has been proven with Africans being used as “guinea pigs” for various new vaccines in programs funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative, Pfizer Corporation, and other entities linked to CIA biological and genetic warfare operations.
  • Articles in two Bolivian newspapers that stated that the U.S. Information Service in La Paz was trying to recruit Bolivian journalists to write pro-Pentagon articles were deemed by the CIA to be bogus. The CIA charge was false and it included smearing the Federation of Bolivian Press Workers as a Communist front. That is the usual practice by the CIA when it’s caught red-handed.
  • The Soviet news agency Novosti was accused of running a false article, titled “The Relationship Between Journalists and the CIA: Hundreds of Them in International Press.” The article was spot on.
  • The CIA charged as Soviet disinformation charges that the CIA killed nine nonaligned leaders, including Indian Prime Ministers Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. In fact, the CIA has killed many more than nine nonaligned leaders.

In the digital world of YouTube, Facebook, Google, and other social and news media sites, the CIA continues its game of disinformation while accusing others of conducting the same game plan. Some three decades after the Cold War, the CIA’s charges of Soviet disinformation can now be seen as disinformation in their own right.

 

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).