The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby Harvey » Sun Dec 30, 2018 7:02 pm

Jerky » Mon Dec 24, 2018 5:22 pm wrote:Kuzmov's little game of three card Monty up there might be amusing, or even considered definitive and/or revealing by the sub-moronic likes of, say, Jimmy Dore, but considering everything he fudges to the point of nonsense and purposefully leaves out, it in itself is so obviously misleading that it might as well have come from RT, Sputnik, or even the Kremlin. Hell, even THOSE outlets might have considered it too stupid to run with!

Besides which, maybe go ask the Rosenbergs how much money it costs, or what percentage of the total extant social media real-estate one needs to occupy, in order to royally fuck with the whole wide world in such a way that there can never be any going back.

Jerky


Cartoon Character is slagging off this man as a moron:

And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Jan 02, 2019 11:31 am

.

By the way, this has got to be some kind of winner for combining category error with generally odious propaganda:

Jerky » Mon Dec 24, 2018 11:22 am wrote:Besides which, maybe go ask the Rosenbergs how much money it costs, or what percentage of the total extant social media real-estate one needs to occupy, in order to royally fuck with the whole wide world in such a way that there can never be any going back.

Jerky


Regarding category error: Even if this had any truth to it, it would be like if I advanced a critique of the advertising industry and the derisive answer was: "Yeah, but smallpox was worse, having killed so many millions."

I guess that's true!

But as for the truth content... Remember when the Rosenbergs dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a demonstration to the Russkies? Oh right, they didn't do that. Truman did.

Remember when the Rosenbergs passed the formula for the bomb to the Russkies? They didn't do that either, as has been long established. Julius spied for the Soviets, but he didn't have information on the bomb to provide. That was a made-up Cold War panic, sort of like #Russiagate but worse, since it was actually effective in whipping up the populace and got the courts to sentence the Rosenbergs to judicial murder. Ethel was innocent of any of this, she didn't spy for anyone but was executed anyway for having married Julius.

So as a totally made-up panic about Russia invented to serve a domestic propaganda agenda, I guess the invocation of this example is appropriate in some fashion. What kind of unreconstructed old-style Cold Warrior (who presumably is under 90 years old) would resort to such a thing in 2018 is an interesting question!

.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Jan 02, 2019 11:38 am

.

The exposure of the NSA-"State Department" veterans of "New Knowledge" and "Data for Democracy" is just amazing.

Morgan, Fox & Co. are the private contractors who authored the recent Senate committee report on how Russiabots turned the African American and the LGBT communities against Clinton and the American Way through the production of bad memes and rainbow dildos.

They are co-developers of the German Marshall Fund's "Hamilton 68" Russiabot panic platform (the current version of CODE ORANGE, I guess).

And they ran the Alabama disinformation campaign manufacturing fake Russiabots for Roy Moore, which they then pretended to expose so as to damage Moore. Their deception has been exposed in turn following the release of their magnum opus: the report that the Senate commissioned from their disinformation company, "New Knowledge," which got so much affirmative press from the NYT and the rest.

I'm sure this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The Alabama operation apparently cost $100,000 out of $31 million spent there. $100K also what the Petrograd Internet Research Agency spent for FB ads in 2015-2017. This supposedly swung the 2.5-billion dollar 2016 presidential election, but we are assured that the same sum had no effect in Alabama.

I am sure it didn't! I am sure it provided strong evidence of just how ludicrous claims of this Russiabot control of American society are.

Who would have thought #Russiagate -- at least the parts unrelated to actual Trump business, those claiming all-powerful remote manipulation by social media -- was not a general panic? Who would have thought it is not any size of wave, but itself a centralized private covert disinformation op perpetrated by a small, well-funded network of former NSA and "State Department" contractors and agents? Who would have thought it was dedicated war machine officials like the perjurer Clapper and the Bush-Obama spook apparatchik Brennan who got it going at the end of the Obama administration?

God forbid the opposition to Trump should have been aimed against his extreme right-wing politics, racism and misogyny, ecocidal madness, and appeals to fascism, rather than aimed against the enemy images preferred by the U.S. military-industrial complex!

Ummm... follow the link below because it's got a lot of tweets, links, and other stuff I'm not going to reproduce here.

Also, if your response is not related to the factual presentation or methodology of this article, but merely some attack on the source using generic insults and vague associations -- PLEASE DON'T. Pro or con, stick to the case. It's likely to make you a happier person.


Senate Report on Russian Interference Was Written By Disinformation Warriors Behind Alabama ‘False Flag Operation’

Hailed by Congress and the media as defenders of democracy, high-tech Russiagate hustlers Jonathon Morgan and Ryan Fox have been exposed for waging “an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation” to swing the 2017 Alabama senate race.

By Dan Cohen

On December 17, two reports detailing ongoing Russian interference operations commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee were made public. They generated a week’s worth of headlines and sent members of Congress and cable news pundits into a Cold War frenzy. According to the report, everything from the Green Party’s Jill Stein to Instagram to Pokemon Go to the African American population had been used and confused by the deceptive Facebook pages of a private Russian troll farm called the Internet Research Agency.

Nevermind that 56% of the troll farm’s pages appeared after the election, that 25% of them were seen by no one, or that their miniscule online presence paled in comparison to the millions of dollars spent on social media by the two major presidential campaigns and their supporters to sway voters. This was an act of war that demanded immediate government action.

According to Sen. Mark Warner, the Democratic chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the reports were “a wake up call” and a “bombshell” that was certain to bring “long-overdue guardrails when it comes to social media”. His Republican counterpart on the committee, North Carolina Senator Richard Burr, hailed the research papers as “proof positive that one of the most important things we can do is increase information sharing between the social media companies who can identify disinformation campaigns and the third-party experts who can analyze them.”


Mark Warner

@MarkWarner
Incredible. These bombshell reports demonstrate just how far Russia went to exploit the fault lines of our society and divide Americans, in an attempt to undermine and manipulate our democracy. Here's what we’ve learned:https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/russia-favored-trump-targeted-african-americans-election-meddling-reports-say-n948731 …

4,660
1:45 PM - Dec 17, 2018
Twitter Ads info and privacy

Russia favored Trump, targeted African-Americans with election meddling, reports say
The Russians set up 30 Facebook pages targeting black Americans, researchers found, and 10 YouTube channels that posted 571 videos related to police violence against African-Americans.

nbcnews.com
3,208 people are talking about this

But the authors of one of the reports soon suffered a major blow to their credibility when it was revealed that they had engaged in what they called a “Russian style” online disinformation operation aimed to swing a hotly contested special senate election. The embarrassing revelation has already resulted in one of the authors having his Facebook page suspended.

The well-funded deception was carried out by New Knowledge, a private cyber intelligence firm founded by two self-styled disinformation experts who are veterans of the Obama administration: Jonathon Morgan and Ryan Fox.


‘It may be designed to manipulate you’

[read more]
https://grayzoneproject.com/2018/12/25/ ... operation/

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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby Belligerent Savant » Wed Jan 02, 2019 8:04 pm

^^^^^^^ good stuff.

[Edit: much of the below content is also referenced, and covered in far more expansive detail, in the 'gray zone project' link JR included at the tail-end of his last post above]

The CEO and co-founder of New Knowledge, Jonathon Morgan, had previously worked for DARPA, and Morgan’s partner, Ryan Fox, is a 15-year veteran of the NSA who also worked as a computer analyst for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). "New Knowledge" raised $11 Million in investor money in the past year alone:

https://venturebeat.com/2018/08/29/new- ... fake-news/

(I added some 'color commentary' within brackets, in red)


Cybersecurity firm New Knowledge is ready to tackle the growing problem of fake news (by ACTIVELY PARTICIPATING IN IT). In particular, the startup has raised $11 million to protect companies from covert coordinated disinformation campaigns. (satire is truly dead)

Austin, Texas-based New Knowledge raised the money from existing investor GGV Capital, with participation from Lux Capital.


What further distinguishes New Knowledge is that its founders are AI and Homeland Security experts who grew up in the NSA and have worked as security advisers. Morgan, for instance, was an adviser for the U.S. State Department and published research at the Brookings Institution.




Excerpt from the watered-down version of events by the NY Times, reproduced below:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/a ... ussia.html


Secret Experiment in Alabama Senate Race Imitated Russian Tactics

("Imitated". Keep planting those seeds, NYTimes...)

The project’s operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. It involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention.

“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the report says.




And more recently, this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/22/us/p ... tions.html


Facebook Closes 5 Accounts Tied to Russia-Like Tactics in Alabama Senate Race

In an unusual move against Russian-style election deception inside the United States, Facebook said on Saturday it had removed five accounts of Americans who used its platform improperly in the hard-fought Alabama Senate election last year.

Among those whose accounts were removed was a prominent social media researcher who worked on the Alabama operation, Jonathon Morgan, according to a person briefed on the company’s action. Facebook did not name those whose accounts were closed, and it was not immediately possible to identify the others.

("Russian-style". Right. This tactic originates only from Russia, you see. Another 'subtle' insert of disinfo by the NYTimes.)


And also:

https://medium.com/@jeffgiesea/breaking ... edd854f17d


BREAKING: Here’s The After-Action Report From the Alabama Senate Disinformation Campaign

The following is a leaked copy of the secret after-action report from the Alabama Senate disinfo campaign, sometimes referred to as Project Birmingham. The New York Times broke the story of an orchestrated disinformation campaign in this December 19 article. The Times article referred to these documents, but they haven’t been publicly available until now. The images have been tweaked to remove watermarks and metadata.

Image

Image

Image

Image

Image

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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Jan 03, 2019 9:08 am

Aaron Mate admirable again with probably the best overall summary of the Russiabot side of #Russiagate (the supposed propaganda operation led by IRA, as opposed to the allegations regarding DNC/Podesta hacking, Manafort/Flynn, money laundering, bribery and possible blackmail, etc.).

In fact, this one will be my new go-to depogramming starter article for sufferers of #Russiagate.

Go to original for many links backing up references, including to comparisons of the Pennysaver-level Russsian ad campaigns to "Pearl Harbor, 9/11, Kristallnacht, and 'cruise missiles.'"

www.thenation.com
New Studies Show Pundits Are Wrong About Russian Social-Media Involvement in US Politics

By Aaron MatéTwitter
December 28, 2018

Far from being a sophisticated propaganda campaign, it was small, amateurish, and mostly unrelated to the 2016 election.
The release of two Senate-commissioned reports has sparked a new round of panic about Russia manipulating a vulnerable American public on social media. Headlines warn that Russian trolls have tried to suppress the African-American vote, promote Green Party candidate Jill Stein, recruit “assets,” and “sow discord” or “hack the 2016 election” via sex-toy ads and Pokémon Go. “The studies,” writes David Ignatius of The Washington Post, “describe a sophisticated, multilevel Russian effort to use every available tool of our open society to create resentment, mistrust and social disorder,” demonstrating that the Russians, “thanks to the Internet…seem to be perfecting these dark arts.” According to Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times, “it looks increasingly as though” Russian disinformation “changed the direction of American history” in the narrowly decided 2016 election, when “Russian trolling easily could have made the difference.”

The reports, from the University of Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Research Project and the firm New Knowledge, do provide the most thorough look at Russian social-media activity to date. With an abundance of data, charts, graphs, and tables, coupled with extensive qualitative analysis, the authors scrutinize the output of the Internet Research Agency (IRA) the Russian clickbait firm indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller in February 2018. On every significant metric, it is difficult to square the data with the dramatic conclusions that have been drawn.

• 2016 Election Content: The most glaring data point is how minimally Russian social-media activity pertained to the 2016 campaign. The New Knowledge report acknowledges that evaluating IRA content “purely based on whether it definitively swung the election is too narrow a focus,” as the “explicitly political content was a small percentage.” To be exact, just “11% of the total content” attributed to the IRA and 33 percent of user engagement with it “was related to the election.” The IRA’s posts “were minimally about the candidates,” with “roughly 6% of tweets, 18% of Instagram posts, and 7% of Facebook posts” having “mentioned Trump or Clinton by name.”

• Scale: The researchers claim that “the scale of [the Russian] operation was unprecedented,” but they base that conclusion on dubious figures. They repeat the widespread claim that Russian posts “reached 126 million people on Facebook,” which is in fact a spin on Facebook’s own guess. “Our best estimate,” Facebook’s Colin Stretch testified to Congress in October 2017, “is that approximately 126 million people may have been served one of these [IRA] stories at some time during the two year period” between 2015 and 2017. According to Stretch, posts generated by suspected Russian accounts showing up in Facebook’s News Feed amounted to “approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content.”

• Spending: Also hurting the case that the Russians reached a large number of Americans is that they spent such a microscopic amount of money to do it. Oxford puts the IRA’s Facebook spending between 2015 and 2017 at just $73,711. As was previously known, about $46,000 was spent on Russian-linked Facebook ads before the 2016 election. That amounts to about 0.05 percent of the $81 million spent on Facebook ads by the Clinton and Trump campaigns combined. A recent disclosure by Google that Russian-linked accounts spent $4,700 on platforms in 2016 only underscores how minuscule that spending was. The researchers also claim that the IRA’s “manipulation of American political discourse had a budget that exceeded $25 million USD.” But that number is based on a widely repeated error that mistakes the IRA’s spending on US-related activities for its parent project’s overall global budget, including domestic social-media activity in Russia.

• Sophistication: Another reason to question the operation’s sophistication can be found by simply looking at its offerings. The IRA’s most shared pre-election Facebook post was a cartoon of a gun-wielding Yosemite Sam. Over on Instagram, the best-received image urged users to give it a “Like” if they believe in Jesus. The top IRA post on Facebook before the election to mention Hillary Clinton was a conspiratorial screed about voter fraud. It’s telling that those who are so certain Russian social-media posts affected the 2016 election never cite the posts that they think actually helped achieve that end. The actual content of those posts might explain why.

• Covert or Clickbait Operation? Far from exposing a sophisticated propaganda campaign, the reports provide more evidence that the Russians were actually engaging in clickbait capitalism: targeting unique demographics like African Americans or evangelicals in a bid to attract large audiences for commercial purposes. Reporters who have profiled the IRA have commonly described it as “a social media marketing campaign.” Mueller’s indictment of the IRA disclosed that it sold “promotions and advertisements” on its pages that generally sold in the $25-$50 range. “This strategy,” Oxford observes, “is not an invention for politics and foreign intrigue, it is consistent with techniques used in digital marketing.” New Knowledge notes that the IRA even sold merchandise that “perhaps provided the IRA with a source of revenue,” hawking goods such as T-shirts, “LGBT-positive sex toys and many variants of triptych and 5-panel artwork featuring traditionally conservative, patriotic themes.”

• “Asset Development”: Lest one wonder how promoting sex toys might factor into a sophisticated influence campaign, the New Knowledge report claims that exploiting “sexual behavior” was a key component of the IRA’s “expansive” “human asset recruitment strategy” in the United States. “Recruiting an asset by exploiting a personal vulnerability,” the report explains, “is a timeless espionage practice.” The first example of this timeless espionage practice is of an ad featuring Jesus consoling a dejected young man by telling him: “Struggling with the addiction to masturbation? Reach out to me and we will beat it together.” It is unknown if this particular tactic brought any assets into the fold. But New Knowledge reports that there was “some success with several of these human-activation attempts.” That is correct: The IRA’s online trolls apparently succeeded in sparking protests in 2016, like several in Florida where “it’s unclear if anyone attended”; “no people showed up to at least one,” and “ragtag groups” showed up at others, including one where video footage captured a crowd of eight people. The most successful effort appears to have been in Houston, where Russian trolls allegedly organized dueling rallies pitting a dozen white supremacists against several dozen counter-protesters outside an Islamic center.

Based on all of this data, we can draw this picture of Russian social-media activity: It was mostly unrelated to the 2016 election; microscopic in reach, engagement, and spending; and juvenile or absurd in its content. This leads to the inescapable conclusion, as the New Knowledge study acknowledges, that “the operation’s focus on elections was merely a small subset” of its activity. They qualify that “accurate” narrative by saying it “misses nuance and deserves more contextualization.” Alternatively, perhaps it deserves some minimal reflection that a juvenile social-media operation with such a small focus on elections is being widely portrayed as a seismic threat that may well have decided the 2016 contest.

Doing so leads us to conclusions that have nothing to do with Russian social-media activity, nor with the voters supposedly influenced by it. Take the widespread speculation that Russian social-media posts may have suppressed the black vote. That a Russian troll farm sought to deceive black audiences and other targeted demographics on social media is certainly contemptible. But in criticizing that effort there’s no reason to assume it was successful—and yet that’s exactly what the pundits did. “When you consider the narrow margins by which [Donald Trump] won [Michigan and Wisconsin], and poor minority turnout there, these Russian voter suppression efforts may have been decisive,” former Obama adviser David Axelrod commented. “Black voter turnout declined in 2016 for the first time in 20 years in a presidential election,” The New York Times conspicuously notes, “but it is impossible to determine whether that was the result of the Russian campaign.”

That it is even considered possible that the Russian campaign impacted the black vote displays a rather stunning paternalism and condescension. Would Axelrod, Times reporters, or any of the others floating a similar scenario accept a suggestion that their own votes might be susceptible to silly social-media posts mostly unrelated to the election? If not, what does that tell us about their attitudes toward the people that they presume could be so vulnerable?

Entertaining the possibility that Russian social-media posts impacted the election outcome requires more than just a contemptuous view of average voters. It also requires the abandonment of elementary standards of logic, probability, and arithmetic.
We now have corroboration of this judgment from an unlikely source. Just days after the New Knowledge report was released, The New York Times reported that the company had carried out “a secret experiment” in the 2017 Alabama Senate race. According to an internal document, New Knowledge used “many of the [Russian] tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections,” going so far as to stage an “elaborate ‘false flag’ operation” that promoted the idea that the Republican candidate, Roy Moore, was backed by Russian bots. The fallout from the operation has led Facebook to suspend the accounts of five people, including New Knowledge CEO Jonathon Morgan.

The Times discloses that the project had a budget of $100,000, but adds that it “was likely too small to have a significant effect on the race.” A Democratic operative concurs, telling the Times that “it was impossible that a $100,000 operation had an impact.”

The Alabama Senate race cost $51 million. If it was impossible for a $100,000 New Knowledge operation to affect a 2017 state election, then how could a comparable—perhaps even less expensive—Russian operation possibly impact a $2.4 billion US presidential election in 2016?

On top of straining credulity, fixating on barely detectable and trivial social-media content also downplays myriad serious issues. As the journalist Ari Berman has tirelessly pointed out, the 2016 election was “the first presidential contest in 50 years without the full protections of the [Voting Rights Act],” one that was conducted amid “the greatest rollback of voting rights since the act was passed” in 1965. Rather than ruminating over whether they were duped by Russian clickbait, reporters who have actually spoken to black Midwest voters have found that political disillusionment amid stagnant wages, high inequality, and pervasive police brutality led many to stay home.

And that leads us to perhaps a key reason why elites in particular are so fixated on the purported threat of Russian meddling: It deflects attention from their own failures, and the failings of the system that grants them status as elites. During the campaign, corporate media outlets handed Donald Trump billions of dollars worth of air time because, in the words of the now ousted CBS exec Les Moonves: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS…. The money’s rolling in and this is fun.” Not wanting to interrupt the fun, these outlets have every incentive to breathlessly cover Russiagate and amplify comparisons of stolen Democratic Party e-mails and Russian social-media posts to Pearl Harbor, 9/11, Kristallnacht, and “cruise missiles.”

Having lost the presidential election to a reality-TV host, the Democratic Party leadership is arguably the most incentivized to capitalize on the Russia panic. They continue to oblige. Like clockwork, former Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook seized on the new Senate studies to warn that “Russian operatives will try to divide Democrats again in the 2020 primary, making activists unwitting accomplices.” By “unwitting accomplices,” Mook is presumably referring to the progressive Democrats who have protested the DNC leadership’s collusion with the Clinton campaign and bias against Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary. Mook is following a now familiar Democratic playbook: blaming Russia for the consequences of the party elite’s own actions. When an uproar arose over Trump campaign data firm Cambridge Analytica in early 2018, Hillary Clinton was quoted posing what she dubbed the “real question”: “How did the Russians know how to target their messages so precisely to undecided voters in Wisconsin, or Michigan, or Pennsylvania?”

In fact, the Russians spent a grand total of $3,102 in these three states, with the majority of that paltry sum not even during the general election but during the primaries, and the majority of the ads were not even about candidates but about social issues. The total number of times ads were targeted at Wisconsin (54), Michigan (36), Pennsylvania (25) combined is less than the 152 times that ads were targeted at the blue state of New York. Wisconsin and Michigan also happen to be two states that Clinton infamously, and perilously, avoided visiting in the campaign’s final months.

The utility of Russia-baiting goes far beyond absolving elites of responsibility for their own failures. Hacked documents have recently revealed that a UK-government charity has waged a global propaganda operation in the name of “countering Russian disinformation.” The project, known as the Integrity Initiative, is run by military intelligence officials with funding from the British Foreign Office and other government sources, including the US State Department and NATO. It works closely with “clusters” of sympathetic journalists and academics across the West, and has already been outed for waging a social-media campaign against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. The group’s Twitter account promoted articles that painted Corbyn as a “useful idiot” in support of “the Kremlin cause”; criticized his communications director, Seumas Milne, for his alleged “work with the Kremlin agenda”; and said, “It’s time for the Corbyn left to confront its Putin problem.”

The Corbyn camp is far from the only progressive force to be targeted with this smear tactic. That it is revealed to be part of a Western government–backed operation is yet another reason to consider the fixation with Russian social-media activity in a new light. There is no indication that the disinformation spread by employees of a St. Petersburg troll farm has had a discernible impact on the US electorate. The barrage of claims to the contrary is but one element of an infinitely larger chorus from failed political elites, sketchy private firms, shadowy intelligence officials, and credulous media outlets that inculcates the Western public with fears of a Kremlin “sowing discord.” Given how divorced the prevailing alarm is from the actual facts—and the influence of those fueling it—we might ask ourselves whose disinformation is most worthy of concern.


What the hell are these Russian clickbait memes compared to this operation, by the way?

(July 16, 2018)
Putin’s Attack on the U.S. Is Our Pearl Harbor
By MARK HERTLING and MOLLY K. MCKEW https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... bor-219015
"In 2016, our country was targeted by an attack that had different operational objectives and a different overarching strategy, but its aim was every bit as much to devastate the American homeland as Pearl Harbor or 9/11."

(Dec 17, 2018)
"cruise missiles of American politics"
Russians Targeted Mueller & Black Voters In Effort To Aid President Trump
"one of the most hearbreaking things was... it cost them nothing"
"they now own the mindset of 1/3 of this nation..."
:they make us not believe anything that we believed before."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlG05gi ... u.be&t=206

(16 July 2018)
“His performance today will live in infamy as much as the Pearl Harbor attack or Kristallnacht.” - Fmr. Watergate Prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks on Trump’s comments at the Helsinki summit https://twitter.com/AliVelshi/status/10 ... 6997179392

(18 July 2018)
"We are in a 9/11" level "national emergency because our country is under attack," says Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who wants to subpoena Trump's Putin meeting translator and the national security team that debriefed him
https://cnn.it/2NqNQNJ https://twitter.com/NewDay/status/1019553651709366276

(Feb 18, 2018)
Unhinged Jerry Nadler compares alleged Russian hacking with Pearl Harbor
TheMiddleBlitz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O60hKAET8E
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby liminalOyster » Mon Jan 14, 2019 12:50 am

"From a point of view of strength… rather, he has done what appears to be [Israel's] goals."
"Oh my god, the President’s words and actions lead us to conclude that somehow he has become a witting, unwitting or half-witting pawn...to [Israel.]'”

I swear this whole thing is like some weird ritualized psychodramatic potlatch to let out all the unutterable would-be-anti-semitic stuff by proxy.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby Grizzly » Mon Jan 14, 2019 1:30 am

Wait! Isn’t Palestine, semtic!?
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Jan 14, 2019 1:43 am

Grizzly » Mon Jan 14, 2019 12:30 am wrote:Wait! Isn’t Palestine, semtic!?


Oh, Jesus H., this nonsense. Historically - please look it up - "Antisemitismus" was coined as the name of a German movement that scapegoated the Jews for all the evils attributed to modern society in the late 19th century. This was the period in which scientific racism reached its full development. German intellectuals who targeted Jews as the source of modern social evils founded an "Anti-Semitic League," which targeted the Jews in Europe for their alleged importation of a "Semitic" culture (as opposed to the "European" culture). The progenitors of this movement and this term were not thinking of anyone other than the Jews, at least Jews as they imagined them. The term has stuck to views like theirs ever since. As German Wikipedia puts it, correctly in this case:

Der Antisemitismus war durch die tiefgreifenden gesellschaftlichen Umbrüche der Säkularisierung, Industrialisierung und widersprüchlich verlaufenden Demokratisierung mitbedingt. Er reagierte auf europäische Moderne und Aufklärung und zeigte zugleich die Krise des Liberalismus an, gegen den er sich richtete.

Die frühste bekannte Verwendung des Begriffes „Antisemitismus“ stammt von 1860, als der Bibliograph Moritz Steinschneider dem Historiker Heymann Steinthal attestierte, in einer Kritik an Ernest Renan die „Consequenzen, oder richtiger Inconsequencen seiner antisemitischen Vorurtheile“ aufgedeckt zu haben.[3]

Seit 1879 wurde der Begriff „Antisemitismus“ für eine rassistisch begründete Judenfeindlichkeit im Deutschen Kaiserreich populär, ausgelöst durch Polemiken des Historikers Heinrich von Treitschke, des Hofpredigers Adolf Stoecker und des Journalisten Wilhelm Marr. In dem 1879 erschienenen Pamphlet Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum hatte Marr weiterwirkende Vorurteile gegen Juden durch ihre Einordnung in eine angebliche Rasse von Semiten begründet. Um die rechtliche Gleichstellung der Juden zu revidieren und sie aus der Gesellschaft auszugrenzen, unterstellte Marr dem Judentum einen kulturell durchgesetzten „Semitismus“. Als offizielle Bezeichnung wurde der Begriff erstmals im Namen der Ende 1879 von Marr gegründeten „Antisemitenliga“ verwendet.[4]
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Jan 14, 2019 2:16 pm

.

Fascinating new story that I have annotated:


MEDIATOR

Fake News as ‘Moral Imperative’? Democrats’ Alabama Move Hints at Ugly 2020

By Jim Rutenberg
Jan. 13, 2019


Note that the use of "Democrats" is not exactly fair. Doug Jones' campaign was not responsible and did not know about the fake Russian bot operation on his behalf, and he has condemned it and called for investigation. The $100,000 (minimum) deception campaign was run by "New Knowledge," the private intel group run by "former" NSA and CIAState Department operatives who specialize in Russia Panic and are also involved in the "Hamilton 68" central panic board. (Some details below if these do not ring a bell.)


[...]

Sputnik and RT were keying off two articles in The New York Times, which broke the news of the Alabama efforts. The first, by Scott Shane and Alan Blinder in late December, detailed an operation that included the creation of fake Russian Twitter accounts, as well as a phony Facebook page purportedly set up by conservative Alabamians opposed to Mr. Moore, who ended up losing to his Democratic opponent, Doug Jones.

One of the people behind that effort, Jonathon Morgan, of the cyber security firm New Knowledge, minimized the effort by saying it was only an experiment to observe how such Russian-style tactics work in real time (though an internal report said the project was seeking to depress turnout for Mr. Moore).

The main financial backer of that project, the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, disavowed it, saying he did not know the money he had donated to groups affiliated with Democrats would finance such a thing. “I want to be unequivocal,” he wrote on Medium. “There is absolutely no place in our democracy for manipulating facts or using falsehoods to gain political power.”

Mr. Jones, the politician who benefited from the operation, angrily denounced it and called for a federal investigation. So maybe there was reason to think it was all just a blip.

Then came the second Times article, last week, on another shady tactic used against Mr. Moore. This one involved a Facebook page for a fake group of Baptists supporting Mr. Moore as a potential ally in their bid to ban alcohol in Alabama — a surefire way to alienate voters if ever there was one.

The phony teetotaling campaign was the work of another group of liberal activists with different financiers, whose identities remain unknown. And it came with an implicit warning: Get used to it.

more
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/13/busi ... rence.html



The next part has some real hilarity in it:

As one of the organizers, the progressive activist Matt Osborne, told The Times, “If you don’t do it, you’re fighting with one hand tied behind your back.” Given the way some of Mr. Trump’s backers — here and in Russia — have engaged in such tactics, he said, there was “a moral imperative to do this.”

Researchers who have been studying the Russian disinformation tactics have been girding for just such a development.

“One of the things we’ve been talking about in the last year is how the real threat’s going to be when it’s not just Russia or Iran — nation-states with budgets — but when every single person with an issue starts engaging in this type of manipulative behavior,” said Bret Schafer, an analyst at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a research project at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “It’s absolutely awful for democracy.”


My professional estimate is that it was circa 1994 "when every single person with an issue" -- or corporation with an interest, or government group with an agenda -- started "engaging in this type of manipulative behavior." (That of course means online, since it was such "manipulative behavior" began in meatspace circa the Discovery of Fire or the Dawn of Politics.) From the mid-1990s forward you had fake accounts in the thousands and then millions, daily copy-paste comment campaigns launched professionally and assisted by team fans, sock-puppet trolling, fabricated stories, echo chambers, mock sites masquerading as better-known sites with similar URLs, political spam and more resulting among other things in a widespread inability to distinguish satire from fakes, etc. etc. etc. And since this was the early Internet of course the gravitational center of all of this activity was the United States, pursued mainly by American actors, as is still largely the case today.

Well, not every single interest on the Internet. That point would have been reached around 2002, after the 9/11 shock and in the run-up to the war of aggression against Iraq. So it merely took another 14-16 years for the disinfo practitioners at the German Marshall Fund to finally attain this insight.

Continuing:

Mr. Schafer had particular reason to be chagrined. New Knowledge helped build the website for the Alliance’s disinformation-tracking database, Hamilton68, which had monitored suspected Russian-linked accounts, tracking the falsehoods they spread and the discord they tried to sow. (New Knowledge also helped write a report on Russian troll activity released last month by the Senate Intelligence Committee.) The Alabama project, Mr. Schafer told me, “undercuts our collective ability to take other countries to task for their deceptive, online behavior.”


Aw, sorry Schafer. Who would have seen that coming?

But let's change the subject.


Fight-fire-with-fire reasoning is bubbling up on the left


Ah, yes, "the left" as NYT defines it, as we shall see:

as the social media giants continue to struggle to stop distortion campaigns in real time. It was only after The Times and The Washington Post reported on the Alabama operations that Facebook shut down the suspect accounts.

None of this bodes well for the 2020 campaign, which has entered its first stage at a time when analysts in and out of government are still trying to determine the full effect disinformation had in the last presidential election.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania,


who practically lives on certain NPR programs, with extreme Russia Panic of the OMGPEARLHARBOR9/11PUTINWEAREATWARTREASON variety as her stock in trade

has concluded that the Russian activity probably affected the outcome. In “Cyber War,” her just-published book about the 2016 campaign, she reports that Russia “tried to mobilize, demobilize, and shift the sorts of voters that Trump needed to win.”

If the results of the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III confirm her conclusion, some people may be deterred from employing such tactics.


uh. no.

I mean, obviously it will make no difference either way. To suggest that the Mueller outcome will determine whether certain U.S. actors ("some people") will (continue to) engage in online deception is to provide them with a preemptive excuse for what they are going to do anyway. Even if the Mueller investigation is not a dud on the collusion-conspiracy front, as is near certain.

On the other hand, nothing spawns copycats like victory.

Big questions remain about how to keep American political campaigns from descending into disinformation, barring still-elusive legal or technical remedies, as Ms. Jamieson told me in an interview. “How do you make sure it’s marked off as inappropriate?” she said. “The real question for 2020 is, what is out of bounds? Is there anything?”

As a start, I reached out to various expected 2020 players to see if they would eschew such tactics.

I was heartened to receive this statement from Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey: “There is no place in our politics for deceptive tactics that undermine trust in — and the credibility of — our democratic process and stand in contrast to our values.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential exploratory committee said, “Our campaign doesn’t support these kinds of tactics.” The campaign manager for Representative Tulsi Gabbard’s 2020 committee, Rania Batrice, said Ms. Gabbard “strongly condemns” the use of disinformation.


I'd never thought I'd say that about a list that includes Cory Booker, but, I guess these are the people who believe they're seriously running for president?

The Republican Party chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel — sounding as if she might be relishing the Democrats’ turn under the microscope — said, “These tactics are shameful.”

Then there were those whose offices I never heard back from — Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Julián Castro, the Democratic Party itself and Mr. Trump’s re-election team.


Come on, Bernie. Wake up your people. You're like Patient Zero for this shit.

The real surprise was former Vice President Joe Biden.


Surprise? Really?


“Not going to have any comment on that for you,” a spokesman said.

Maybe Mr. Biden wants to keep his options open.




Meet the Left!

And while you're on their page, make sure to consult the Times for the latest Russia Panic stories, undeterred by these revelations, and enjoy all the other naive or intentional repetitions of bullshit defamations of political candidates, fabrications and stereotypes about countries targeted for war, and so on.

By the way, don't miss the Onion-worthy headline given to the NYT frontpage link for this story.

.
Last edited by JackRiddler on Mon Jan 14, 2019 6:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 14, 2019 2:34 pm

Mike Pompeo Rips As 'Absolutely Ludicrous' NYT Story On Alleged FBI Inquiry Into Trump
https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/mike-pom ... 56018.html



______________

emptywheel

Note that Trump's denials that he ever "worked" for Russia use the verb in a difference sense than the NYT headline he's denying.

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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby liminalOyster » Fri Jan 18, 2019 10:16 am

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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Jan 19, 2019 4:52 pm

Crossposting from conniption.

I had no idea about some of Mueller's history and want to check out details, but... wow.

conniption » Sat Jul 14, 2018 6:01 pm wrote:
caucus99percent

What Mueller won't find

Submitted by Bob In Portland
Tue, 06/12/2018


In the 1950s, when the science fiction genre started making itself felt in movies, there was always the pivotal scene where the protagonist discovers the dark secret but no one will believe him: a flying saucer hidden under the sand in a field, truckloads of pod people to replace real people, or that the friendly aliens' book "To Serve Man" wasn't a guide to helping humans, but a cookbook. It's that moment of sudden realization that no one will believe the hero because it sounds too crazy to believe.

Granted, to the uninitiated, coming to a realization so shocking and threatening to your current mental construction of the world can appear like paranoia. It becomes a question of the discoverer's knowledge and senses over what everyone else believes. Everyone else seems to be allowing him or herself to be absorbed into the great growing evil.

Today many of us, certainly readers here at Caucus99, are finding ourselves in similar positions. Our political structure is a lie, the people who are supposed to represent us and our interests don't, our law enforcement protects the property of the rich, not our lives, and often are in cahoots with the criminals from whom we are supposed to be protected. I am sure that many of our old friends and acquaintances have been alienated from some of us here when we began talking about Hillary's track record during the Presidential campaign, for example. In our current pasteboard world, if you are a Republican or Democrat you must assume that your designated political party, maybe with a couple of exceptions, are there to look after you.

And there that crazy friend goes, yelling about cookbooks.

I suppose my introduction to the corruption of those in power, at thirteen, was the assassination of JFK. Not actually the assassination, but the murder of Oswald two days later, in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters. I had slept overnight at a friend's and we came back from shooting basketballs to watch the transfer of Oswald to another facility. That was the moment that I realized all wasn't what it seemed. But, like most kids my age, the Beatles came along in a month or so and I was swept into the world of rock and roll, which kept me occupied until I began noticing girls. Until 1968. I was still noticing girls and rock and roll, but I was also noticing the number of progressives being gunned down by "lone nuts". And I was noticing Vietnam.

I'm not sharing this to explain to you how I became (that loathsome term) a "conspiracy theorist". I just want to explain to you that the democracy of the United States, and all the characters running across the stage in Washington, D.C., are the cookbook.

I wrote an essay here back in April of 2017 explaining how the Russiagate scandal had been designed to give Hillary Clinton a casus belli for her future war against Russia, and that what we were seeing since she lost has been a recycling of it to get Trump in line with the goals of the Deep State. So far nothing much has happened that has moved me from that belief. Now that the Deep State seems to have persuaded our Dear Leader that he can go on being himself as long as he understands the actual hierarchy and doesn't get in the way the Deep State, everything seems to be back on track. At least until Donald's next tweet.

But in order to understand the depth of criminality in our system one has to understand how things are done. After World War II a lot of social awareness began putting pressure on the old system that had driven the world into the Great Depression. FDR had demonstrated that the government could look out for the poor, could give them jobs when there were no other jobs to be had. The GI Bill sent millions of vets to college and helped to create the middle class we used to have. Unions had real power in negotiating wages and terms of service. Government could create a system to help the elderly. The African Americans, coming back home from fighting a war against fascism, refused go to the coloreds only water fountains. In short, the United States were in for some growing pains.

What happened? As I mentioned above there was a rash of murders of progressive political candidates and leaders in the sixties. But in order for the forces behind a return to the old rules to keep a lid on any revolutions there had to be something better than shooting every progressive who raised his head above the lectern. Thus the wave of recruitment of agents and assets in the late sixties by the CIA, FBI and other agencies. Although I didn't know it directly at the time, arriving on campus in 1968 it was evident that there was a "presence" of people looking over the shoulders of student activists.

Which brings me to another great revelation. It's not just politicians and political parties that are serving the Deep State. Any agency that can be corrupted by power will be, eventually.

Which brings us to the courts.

There are certain things that must be preserved for a ruling class to remain legitimate in the eyes of the public. Some people don't think much beyond the flag. But there are other things. The media is better than ever at keeping uncomfortable truths from the majority of Americans. But what happens where the criminality of the Deep State collides with our judicial system?

Let me introduce you to the man of the hour in Washington, Robert Swann Mueller III. Robert was born into the upper crust in our American class system. At one point in his education in private schools John Kerry was a classmate. (Kerry was also a fellow Bonesman with the Bushes.) Mueller met his eventual bride, Ann Cabell Standish, at one of the dances they attended. They married in 1966, three years after John Kennedy's assassination. If you have read much about the JFK assassination you would recognize her middle name. Her grandfather, Charles Cabell, had been second in command at the CIA when John Kennedy was elected President. In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy fired three men from leadership positions at the CIA: Director Allen Dulles, Cabell and Richard Bissell. Charles Cabell was Ann's grandfather. Her grand uncle, Earle Cabell, was the mayor of Dallas at the time of Kennedy's murder there. Recently declassified JFK documents revealed that Mayor Cabell was also an asset of the CIA at the time. Small world. You could say that Mueller married into the CIA, except that his great uncle was Richard Bissell. So between his family and his wife's family Mueller had two of the three people that Kennedy fired before he was assassinated by a "lone nut", as well as the mayor who hosted the assassination. The third man fired was Allen Dulles, who sat on the Warren Commission and managed to keep the CIA out of the investigation into JFK's murder. Perhaps Dulles was a guest at the wedding.

Soon thereafter Mueller decided to go to Vietnam because, he said, a classmate had died there and patriotism and so forth. He became an officer and eventually ended up as an aide-de-camp for the 3rd Marine Division's commanding general, General William K. Jones. Something else was going on in Vietnam. The CIA had installed its Phoenix Program. I cannot do justice to the Phoenix Program and won't considering Doug Valentine's work on it is available for everyone, but the Phoenix Program was the CIA's attempt to totally control the Vietnamese population. Besides massacres of villages, the program assassinated suspected leaders and spies for the Vietcong, coerced others into being their agents, and kept up files on all the relevant Vietnamese down to the village level. Like in later wars, the CIA incorporated torture, murder and psychological techniques in order to control their targets. As an aide-de-camp to a commanding Marine general, there is no way that Mueller didn't know about the Phoenix Program. He probably saw daily briefings.

When he came back to the US he studied law and quickly became a federal prosecutor.

One of the things to mark his career was to deny a pardon to Patty Hearst for her part in the whole Symbionese Liberation Army's "terror" campaign. What did the SLA have to do with anything? A short history: Donald DeFreeze, a small-time criminal in Los Angeles agreed to become an informant for the LAPD in order to stay out of jail. After awhile he got tired of ratting out others and asked to get out of the program. Instead, DeFreeze was incarcerated at the Vacaville Medical Facility for criminally insane prisoners in the California penal system. There DeFreeze met Colston Westbrook who gave classes for the "Black Cultural Association", an experimental behavior modification unit inside the prison. Who was Westbrook? He was a CIA agent, trained in psychological warfare and part of the Phoenix Program. DeFreeze was modified by Westbrook and company for two years. Soon thereafter, he was transferred to Soledad Prison, from which he "escaped" and became the infamous "Cinque". Then came the Symbionese Liberation Army, a caricature of a black militant group filled with mostly white people with military backgrounds. The murder of Marcus Foster, a progressive black leader in the San Francisco East Bay, was done by white men in blackface, according to eyewitnesses. The SLA claimed credit for it. The SLA kidnapped Hearst, subjected her to torture, rape, sensory deprivation and mind control tactics, just like the CIA did in the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. Then came the bank robberies.

I bring up the Patty Hearst case because, in 2000, decades after her prison sentence had been commuted, Mueller still opposed her pardon. Guess what he didn't notice when he rejected her pardon? This has been his pattern throughout his career. We'll return to Patty Hearst shortly.

Mueller has presided over many cases where it's been important for the prosecutor to overlook the fingerprints of the CIA. He prosecuted what was known in the San Francisco Bay Area as the "drug tug" case which had connections to an island in Panama. It was a drug smuggling case and had tentacles into things like bank frauds in Northern California. He prosecuted Manuel Noriega's drug-smuggling without noticing Oliver North's drug-smuggling, arms running and money laundering through Panama as a part of Iran-contra.

Mueller would invariably land on cases with Deep State intelligence connections.

For example, he prosecuted Pan Am 103. Initially, and then later confirmed by an insurance investigator's report, the bomb that brought down the airliner was believed to be placed onboard by baggage handlers working at the Frankfurt Airport. They were given the bomb by a terrorist cell who in turn got it from one Monzer al-Kassar, who was a very large heroin dealer, estimated at supplying twenty percent of the US's heroin at the time. A big operator. And, in fact, one of the passengers on the plane was a drug mule for al-Kassar. Al-Kassar also happened to be a part of the Iran-contra operation, supplying weapons for North's Enterprise. The operation was, according to the early reports, carried out by a cell of Palestinian terrorists based in Frankfurt, the Palestinian Liberation Front-General Command, who got the bomb from al-Kassar and put the bomb on that airline.

Mueller, put in charge of the case, pursued an entirely different direction, accusing two Libyans of bombing the plane. At the time Libya and Khadafy were getting blamed for a lot of terrorist activity, but the case against the two was so weak as to hardly be circumstantial.

There were other questions arising from Pan Am 103. A top official in the FBI, Oliver "Buck" Revell, rushed onto the tarmac in London to pull his son and daughter-in-law off of Pan Am 103 before it went on to explode over Lockerbie, Scotland. Also changing flight plans were South African President Pik Botha and his negotiating team. Apparently, someone that Revell and Pik Botha knew gave them the warning.

There was one group that didn't get warned. That was the McKee Team, an assembled group of US intelligence agents tasked to investigate American hostages in Beruit. They allegedly discovered a link between the hostage takers, drug traffickers and the CIA. They were returning to the US, against orders, presumably to spill the beans. This was essentially a clean-up operation, tying up loose strings of the Iran-contra operation. So was Noriega's prosecution.

That's why Mueller got the case. He knew where to look and where not to look.

He also prosecuted ancillary Iran-contra cases. He prosecuted John Gotti for dealing cocaine in the New York City area. The cocaine he sold was part of the the Iran-contra (CIA) plan where Southern Air Transport flew weapons to Latin America for the contras (whom Congress had voted against aiding) and bringing back cocaine from Latin America on its return flights, to include Mena, Arkansas. One of the CIA's pilots, Barry Seal, bragged that he had a "get-out-of-jail" letter written for him by then-Governor Bill Clinton. At the time, Asa Hutchinson was the federal prosecutor for that corner of Arkansas. He also didn't notice all that cocaine. Hutchson later served as George W. Bush's first "drug czar" before going into politics. How coincidental.

Mueller, who had been appointed Assistant U.S. Prosecutor under GHW Bush, became FBI Director under George W. Bush just in time not to see the CIA fingerprints on 9/11, which should not be surprising considering whom he didn't see when he investigated BCCI. As head of our country's biggest law enforcement agency Mueller did not pursue the House of Saud's part in 9/11 even though fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and a number of them could be traced to Saudi intelligence, and the money chain could be traced to Saudis living in the US, some of whom flew out of the US while all other US flights were grounded. He did not investigate Mohammed Atta's time in Frankfort, Germany, where he was employed by a front company for the BND, West Germany's equivalent to the CIA. Nor did Mueller investigate Huffman Aviation where Mo Atta and another hijacker matriculated in flying planes into buildings. Huffman is interesting because while Mo was studying in Huffman's Venice, Florida aviation school a Huffman plane was busted in Orlando with 43 pounds of heroin. Curiously, the pilot walked away from the DEA without being charged and no one was prosecuted at Huffman.

Ask Colleen Rowley about Mueller's leadership in the 9/11 investigation.

Additionally, Mueller oversaw the anthrax letter case, never investigating Battelle Memorial Corporation, which had a building within a mile of the mailbox where the letters had been mailed. (Battelle Memorial's corporate motto is "It Can Be Done".) Instead, he centered FBI investigations on scientists in government labs in Fort Detrick, Maryland, who had neither the expertise nor the equipment to make the weaponized military grade anthrax found in the letters. One scientist sued and won millions. The other allegedly "committed suicide". Battelle is noteworthy because it handles the US military's anthrax program. Mueller had no interest that two of the targets who received anthrax letters were at the time the most vociferous opponents of the Bush Administration's Patriot Act.

Perhaps his greatest accomplishment aiding the Deep State as FBI Director was his shutting down of Operation Green Quest, the FBI's investigation into the funding behind 9/11 and the terrorist network behind it. Names began popping up like Grover Norquist, the Muslim Brotherhood, old Nazis and the royal family of Luxembourg. Nothing to see here. Move along.

A closer examination of Robert Mueller would probably find a lot more of these cases and I encourage others to continue the search. For example, it's been alleged that Mueller sent innocent men to jail for crimes committed by Whitey Bulger for the benefit of someone or something within the government and that this allowed Bulger to continue his criminal activities for years.

***

It's been seventy years since the CIA was created, fifty years since JFK was most likely murdered by them. In order to avoid any consequences for their crimes more and more institutions have had to be infiltrated and corrupted by them. Many of the heroes of the Left have turned out to be purveyors of "modified limited hangouts" which served the Deep State. Ramsey Clark, who was given the mantle of "good guy" by the media of the Left, was active as LBJ's Attorney General in blocking Jim Garrison's investigation into the JFK assassination and was named by Doug Valentine in his THE CIA AS ORGANIZED CRIME as a major proponent of the CIA's OPERATION CHAOS and the FBI's COINTELPRO. While the media spent a good deal of time talking about how great they were in releasing the Pentagon Papers to the public, the hero who exposed the military, Daniel Ellsberg, turns out to have been CIA, operating with CIA black ops in Vietnam. And while the Pentagon Papers exposed our military's great errors in Vietnam the CIA was generally spared. Again. Bob Woodward, our hero of Watergate, had been a courier for the Office of Naval Intelligence only a few years earlier. Thus, the CIA and Deep State, which had soured on Nixon, orchestrated that President's departure.

I raise this because Robert Mueller's current task is the investigation of our sitting President. No matter how much you dislike Trump you can't help but notice that the "evidence" against him conspiring with Putin and Russia is thin gruel. And while Trump, like most politicians who ascend to the big seat, has a lot of questionable, even indictable business connections around him, the great dangers of a Putin-Trump conspiracy trumpeted by the media have been fading because, apparently, there was never a there there. Thus, as Mueller oversees this case, he will find people surrounding Trump who have lied to FBI agents, who have perhaps not registered as foreign agents, and other crimes that routinely happen out of the public spotlight and aren't prosecuted. What was obvious to me from the start, that this was a psyop that involved U.S. intelligence, Ukrainian intelligence, Clinton and the DNC, will not be obvious to Mueller. Thus, as his career has shown, Mueller has been put in place not merely to prosecute those around Trump as a means of pressure on his administration, but to not see the CIA's hand in it.

When one begins examining high-profile court cases in post-1963 America one sees a cast of people who keep popping up. Prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, coroners, witnesses, reporters, authors. This ensemble keeps reappearing in these show trials. We may not know what Mueller will find, but we know what he won't find.

There was a review at Truthdig back in 2016 of Jeffrey Toobin's book on Patty Hearst, AMERICAN HEIRESS (Toobin himself worked as an associate counsel to Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh during the investigation Iran–Contra affair and Oliver North's criminal trial). In part it reads: "Toobin features the characters who populated the edges of Hearst’s story. Robert Shapiro, who would later work with [F. Lee] Bailey on the O.J. Simpson case, makes a cameo appearance. Lance Ito, the judge in that case, briefly shared a shooting range with a machine-gun toting SLA member. Reverend Jim Jones offered to help with the food distribution effort; that enterprise also employed Sara Jane Moore, who served 32 years for attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford during his 1975 visit to San Francisco. Congressman Leo Ryan, who represented Randy and Catherine Hearst’s district, endorsed the commutation of Patty’s sentence. “Off to Guyana,” he wrote Patty in 1978. “See you when I return. Hang in there.” Jim Jones’ henchmen shot and killed Ryan before he could board his flight home. Robert Mueller, the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco before taking over as FBI director, strenuously opposed Hearst’s pardon, claiming that her attitude, born of wealth and social position, “has always been that she is a person above the law.”"

When Mueller wrote that line he must have laughed out loud.

https://caucus99percent.com/content/wha ... -wont-find
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Jan 21, 2019 6:11 pm

Too bad the Intercept is Greenwald, Scahill, and Lee Fang on the one side (I'm sure I'm missing a couple of good ones), and a whole bunch of suspect material on the other.

But THIS - very necessary archival memory of the lies without end that have been floated and shot down. Must follow link, extensive visual documentation:

https://theintercept.com/2019/01/20/bey ... sia-story/

Beyond BuzzFeed: The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump/Russia Story

Glenn Greenwald
January 20 2019

.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby PufPuf93 » Tue Jan 22, 2019 11:51 am

Thanx for the Caucus99 article and link JR.

I have long thought the Mueller investigation bought time and ultimately will provide cover for Trump, not for the ends of Trump but for the goals and continuation of the nebulous "Deep State" brought to us by the CIA to support multi-generational wealth and power. What happens as we descend day by day does not change my mind. We experience a political double bind bought to us by the MSM.

Here is yesterdays article from Caucus99.

From: https://caucus99percent.com/content/rus ... oure-sorry


Russiagate means never having to say you're sorry

Submitted by gjohnsit on Mon, 01/21/2019 - 11:28pm

I've been thinking about doing an essay of all the false Russiagate "bombshells" (over 50 now), but then I figured that eventually someone would do the work for me.

Of course that is only one of the lists of fake Russiagate news.

You might be incline to think that after getting it consistently wrong so often that the media might start questioning the whole premise of the theory.

Another indication of something being wrong with this Trump konspiracy story is how many people on the left don't buy it, despite the entire media establishment pushing it hard. Isn't it curious that the media has to try to shame leftists into getting onboard with Russiagate over and over again?

But this is Russiagate, and like Saddam's WMD's and ties to al-Qaeda, there are no consequences for getting it wrong.
As long as you get it wrong in the politically acceptable direction.

For instance, Mueller saying that Buzzfeed was wrong hasn't caused Buzzfeed to retract their story.
The entire idea of Russiagate is laughable.

Russia, nor any politically isolated, economically tiny nation like Russia, never had the ability of seriously impact our multi-billion dollar presidential elections, and the fact that they spent less than $200K on puppy memes and sex toy ads proves it.

So why would Trump konspire with Putin to do something he wouldn't be able to do?

Or to put it another way: It’s hard to know where to begin with this horseshit. There’s the idea that Russian intelligence agencies can “pick candidates” and get them nominated in Democratic primaries by force majeure, a feat that even the Queens County Democratic machine has shown itself incapable of.

But let's say for the sake of argument Trump did konspire with Putin.

Is it politically realistic to think that a sitting president would be indicted for treason?!? Of course not. That would trigger a constitutional crisis the country has never seen before, at a time in which faith in the system is already shaky.

They'll obviously avoid that.

At this point, liberals have worked themselves into a mania. They probably can't picture the Mueller investigation not ending with Trump resigning...but they should because we've seen this before.
Fitzmas.

"Fitzmas" is the atmosphere of excitement and anticipation preceding the conclusion of Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury investigation into the Bush regime's treason and perjury.
In case you've forgotten this episode, consider that this happened just 9 months ago.

The statement came on Friday when the president granted a full pardon to I. Lewis Libby Jr., who was Mr. Cheney’s top adviser before he was convicted in 2007 of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with the disclosure of the identity of a C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame. Mr. Libby, the president declared, had not received justice.
Still don't see the parallels? Then consider this factoid.

James Comey has hired Patrick Fitzgerald, a former US attorney and personal friend of his, to represent him, Fitzgerald's office confirmed Wednesday.
...In 2003, when he was deputy attorney general, Comey appointed Fitzgerald as special counsel to investigate the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity.
That's a curious connection to say the least.

Now let's look at a few headlines from the recent past.

Newsweek, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune.

It was only a matter of time before Donald Trump, ur Dick Cheney, was indicted.
Or not.

Don't get me wrong. Trump is incredibly corrupt on an unparalleled level.

But simple corruption is not something that will get you fired in Washington these days.

In the end, Russiagate won't be about Russia, or collusion, or even corruption.

It'll be about silencing dissent on the left.


RT points out that Google, Bing, Facebook and Youtube have hidden various progressive, socialist and anti-war websites, citing changed “algorithms” to fight “fake news.” World Socialist Web Site found that 13 such websites had seen their traffic plunge by 55% shortly thereafter. These and others affected include wsws.org, Black Agenda Report, Global Research.ca, Consortium News.com, Alternet.org, democracynow.org, counterpunch.org, Truth-Out.org, Police the Police, Free Thought Project, counterpunch.org, wikileaks.org, truthdig.org, mediamatters.org, commondreams.org, TheIntercept.com, and ACLU.org.

Facebook and these other media technology corporations are taking their cue from the blacklist published in Washington Post by PropOrNot. Even journalists who question the Russia-did-it story, like Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Maté, are accused of being agents of the Kremlin.

Ultimately, Russiagate is about silencing information exposing the lies, crimes, fake news and false flag war operations of corporate America and the national security state.

Once again, this has been done before. In the late 1940's the establishment liberals turned on the socialists, and it was never enough to satisfy the right-wing.

In the end, only progressives lost. It'll be the same this time around too.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 22, 2019 11:53 am

edited ...my comments have been moved to my thread
Last edited by seemslikeadream on Tue Jan 22, 2019 6:28 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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