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Foreign Office investigates reports that state-funded body targeted Corbyn
Leaked documents suggest Fife-based company promoted anti-Labour tweets
Peter Walker
Political correspondent
@peterwalker99
Mon 10 Dec 2018 03.22 EST
The Foreign Office minister, Alan Duncan, has ordered an investigation into reports the government provided funding to a Scottish-based company meant to counter online Russian propaganda, which also spread unfavourable views about Jeremy Corbyn.
The Institute for Statecraft, based in Fife, received hundreds of thousands of pounds in Foreign Office money.
According to the Sunday Mail, leaked documents show it tried to promote tweets calling the Labour leader a “useful idiot” who helped the Kremlin cause, and attacked members of his staff.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Duncan said he had learned about the allegations at the weekend and ordered an immediate investigation.
“I don’t know the facts but if there is any kind of organisation for which we are paying which is involved in domestic politics in that way, I would totally condemn it, and I have already over the weekend asked for a report to be on my desk by 10 o’clock this morning to say if there is any such activity,” he said.
Asked if this meant anti-Labour attacks by Statecraft must stop, Duncan said: “Not only must it stop, I want to know why on earth it happened in the first place.”
Duncan has previously responded to a parliamentary written question on the subject. His answer showed that in the 2017-18 financial year the Foreign Office funded the Institute for Statecraft’s Integrity Initiative with £296,500. This financial year, the sum was due rise to £1,961,000, the answer said.
According to the report, the body’s programme is supposed to counter Russian disinformation by using “clusters” of journalists and others throughout Europe – with a unit reportedly proposed in Lithuania - using social media to respond.
But its official Twitter feed retweeted anti-Corbyn messages such as the one calling the Labour leader a “useful idiot”. It added: “His open visceral anti-westernism helped the Kremlin cause, as surely as if he had been secretly peddling Westminster tittle-tattle for money.”
Other messages targeted Corbyn’s chief aide, Seumas Milne. The Institute for Statecraft retweeted a newspaper report that said: “Milne is not a spy – that would be beneath him. But what he has done, wittingly or unwittingly, is work with the Kremlin agenda.”
A spokesman for the organisation told the Sunday Mail that he was not aware of the tweets criticising Corbyn. “I’m not the one who controls the Twitter account,” Stephen Dalziel said. “If it was criticism of one of our politicians, then that shouldn’t be on there.”
'Propaganda of privilege': how Labour went to war with the media
Anti-Corbyn rightwing press attacks 'boost Momentum support'
[QUESTION] The US government seems to have completely abdicated cyber war, at least in relation to combating disinformation & propaganda, to its citizens! If that previous statement is wrong, what is the government doing to combat this threat; what can we as a citizens do to fight this?
22 days ago
John: It took the U.S. several years to figure out how to deal with the new world of nuclear weapons in the 1950s. We need to come to terms with cyber warfare, cyber defense and cyber deterrence. For example, when can we respond with non-cyber means to a cyber attack?
American Dream » Wed Dec 12, 2018 10:59 am wrote:Irony of ironies, Putin's role as spy chief is minimized in some sectors of Conspiracylandia. Same principle holds true for the mass torture- and killing- of those interned under the regime of Assad and Jamil Hassan, head of Syrian Air Force Intelligence.
JackRiddler » Wed Dec 12, 2018 11:15 am wrote:
Analytically, one concludes: Contempt for all other participants. Implication that discussion of Western intelligence operations or propaganda or sociocultural panics must always include some disclaimer about Putin. Desiring pretty much the situation of the 1950s Red Scare, when one could not say "I favor puppies" unless it was prefaced it with, "I hate Communists, but..." Just another disruption by a known bad actor.
Sorry, mods, it is unfortunate that we were at least given a one-month vacation from this guy but it was then cut short. Why raise and disappoint everyone's expectations like that?
American Dream » Wed Dec 12, 2018 11:25 am wrote:Difference of opinion is still allowed around here.
I'll let your own sketchy thinking speak for itself- and let it go at that.
www.thenation.com
Don’t Let Russophobia Warp the Facts on Russiagate
By Aaron Maté
14 December 2018 5:12 pm
Despite the media hoopla, Mueller’s latest filings do not bring us any closer to proving the long-sought Trump-Russia conspiracy.
Over the course of the Russia investigation, the procession of key associates “flipping” on Donald Trump has raised expectations that special counsel Robert Mueller would turn up proof of collusion. In just a few weeks, a flurry of activity by Mueller has brought these cases to their final act, and the prevailing media reaction leaves the impression that they lived up to the hype. Mueller’s latest court filings include “potentially devastating new information about Trump’s ties to Moscow,” writes James Risen of The Intercept. This makes it “reasonable to conclude that Mueller does, indeed, believe he can prove that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government,” Adam Davidson reckons in The New Yorker.
But Mueller has not issued any charges, provided any evidence, or made any collusion allegations. If there does exist a case, Mueller hasn’t revealed it yet. For all of the excitement, what has been disclosed in the cases of Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn does not bring us any closer to the long-sought Trump-Russia conspiracy.
The sentencing of Cohen to three years in prison has made the most waves. All but two months of Cohen’s prison term are for corruption crimes unrelated to the Russia probe: tax fraud on his personal income, and campaign-finance violations on Trump’s behalf. Federal prosecutors in New York appear to be building a strong case that Trump helped coordinate illegal hush payments to two women in order to benefit his 2016 campaign. Andrew McCarthy, a former US attorney who frequently backs Trump, says that the president “is very likely to be indicted.” With American Media Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, also reaching a cooperation deal, prosecutors have locked up additional witnesses to implicate Trump in the scheme.
Compare that to what Mueller has extracted from Cohen in the Russia probe. Mueller’s filing on Cohen details a 2015 contact with an Olympic weightlifter who promised “political synergy,” with the Russian government, but whose overture Cohen ultimately “did not follow up on.” We also learn of a 2015 discussion inside the Trump Organization for a proposed Trump-Putin meeting that “ultimately did not take place.”
The only Russia-related criminal activity comes in Cohen’s lies to Congress about the effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, a failure that never got beyond a letter of intent. This is why Mueller portrays the development as entirely prospective, and in the conditional tense. The tower, he states:
was a lucrative business opportunity that sought, and likely required, the assistance of the Russian government. If the project was completed, the Company could have received hundreds of millions of dollars from Russian sources in licensing fees and other revenues [emphasis added].
The only Kremlin “assistance” that we know of comes in a January 2016 phone call between Cohen and a Kremlin assistant. According to Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, his aide informed Cohen that the “Presidential Administration doesn’t build houses, and if [the Trump Organization] want[s] to invest in Russia that we will be happy to see them at St Petersburg Economic Forum,” an annual gathering held months later.
What is also noteworthy about Cohen’s perjury conviction is the congressional testimony that Mueller does not allege to be false. Mueller does not claim that Cohen lied to Congress when he told them in September 2017: “I never saw anything—not a hint of anything—that demonstrated [Trump’s] involvement in Russian interference in our election or any form of Russian collusion.” Nor is Cohen accused of lying in claiming that he has never even visited Prague. That undercuts a core assertion of the Steele dossier, a set of largely unverified intelligence reports from former British spy Christopher Steele.
That Cohen was indicted for lying about a failed deal, but not for testifying that he never witnessed “any form of Russian collusion,” should raise doubts that he has given Mueller anything on collusion. Mueller’s statement that Cohen gave “useful information concerning certain discrete Russia-related matters core” to the Russia probe does not change that. The ambiguous wording could be interpreted either way—that information is deemed “useful” does not tell us whether it is incriminating, exonerating, or neither.
Mueller’s Manafort filing identifies the former Trump campaign manager’s alleged “crimes and lies” since agreeing to a plea deal in September. The document is heavily redacted, so a full picture is incomplete. Everything that Mueller does make public is devoid of collusion, in keeping with Manafort’s case to date. None of Manafort’s charges—those he was convicted of in his first trial, and those he pled guilty to in order to avoid a second trial—concern the Trump campaign or collusion with Russia. Manafort’s legal woes instead pertain to bank and tax fraud, as well as unregistered foreign lobbying, stemming from his political work in Ukraine, and to subsequent obstruction charges after Mueller’s initial indictment.
The only mention of a Russian in Mueller’s new filing comes in the accusation that Manafort lied about his contacts with business associate Konstantin Kilimnik. Mueller has previously asserted, without publicly offering evidence or specificity, that Kilimnik has “ties to Russian intelligence” that were “active” during the 2016 campaign. But to date, Mueller has only identified Kilimnik as material to cases related to Manafort’s Ukraine lobbying work, and accused him of witness tampering in those cases.
It is has been suggested that Mueller and Kilimnik’s dealings in Ukraine could somehow link them to a plot with the Kremlin. That theory is undermined by a glaring irony: When it comes to his work in Ukraine, Manafort, as former Fusion GPS researcher Graham Stack writes, was convicted for “doing the opposite of colluding with Russia.” In Ukraine, Manafort pushed a pro-Western agenda. I have noted this overlooked aspect of Manafort’s record in The Nation, and Mueller has provided substantial corroboration. Internal documents released by Mueller make clear that Manafort tried to steer his client, then–Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, to align with the European Union and away from Russia, or, in Manafort’s own words, promote “the key geopolitical messaging of how ‘Europe and the U.S. should not risk losing Ukraine to Russia.’”
As with Mueller’s filing on Manafort, the sentencing memo in Flynn’s case redacts key details. Mueller hails Flynn’s “substantial assistance” in a criminal investigation unrelated to the Russia probe, quite likely lobbying activities related to Turkey. When it comes to Russia, Mueller only specifically mentions Flynn’s provision of “firsthand information” about the transition period in late 2016 and early 2017. Not only does that period come after the campaign, the story of Flynn’s offenses is well known. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak. Flynn misled investigators by denying details of his efforts to convince Kislyak to not respond harshly to US sanctions and to vote against a UN Security Council measure critical of Israel.
In a new filing, Flynn’s attorneys suggest that overzealous FBI investigators entrapped him by encouraging him to speak to them without a lawyer and failing to warn him about making misstatements. Regardless, nothing incriminating has emerged from the recorded calls he was questioned about. As The Washington Post reported at the time, FBI agents who “reviewed” the Kislyak wiretaps had “not found any evidence of wrongdoing or illicit ties to the Russian government.” Had Flynn engaged in any type of “quid pro quo” or even treason with the Russian government, as has widely been suspected, Mueller surely would have indicted him for it, rather than charging him with a process crime and recommending no time behind bars.
Flynn, Cohen, and Manafort are among the 14 Trump associates tallied up by The Washington Post who “interacted” with Russian nationals “over the course of Donald Trump’s 18-month campaign for the presidency.” To the former US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, the contacts are “extremely unusual.” But as the Post itself acknowledges, Mueller “has not yet shown that any of the dozens of interactions between people in Trump’s orbit and Russians resulted in any specific coordination between his presidential campaign and Russia.”
It is perhaps unusual then that merely having contact with a Russian passport holder is deemed suspect. A stark illustration of that xenophobic mentality has come with the newly resolved prosecution of Russian pro-gun activist and graduate student Maria Butina.
Since her arrest in July, Butina has been portrayed as a Russian spy, and possibly even a covert Kremlin link to Trump, the Republican Party, and the NRA. It turns out that none of this is the case. After spending most of the past five months in solitary confinement, Butina agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiring to act as an unregistered foreign agent. As her plea document details, she openly tried to make political connections to members of the GOP and NRA at public events and private dinners in the hopes of establishing backdoor channels of communication. She did so at the behest of Alexander Torshin, who until recently served as deputy of the Central Bank of Russia. Butina was also aware that Torshin “sometimes acted in consultation with” his Central Bank superiors and officials at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. That is the extent of her Russian government ties.
Retracting an earlier claim, prosecutors now acknowledge that Butina had a genuine “interest in a graduate school education” in the United States. They have also abandoned contentions that she worked with Russian intelligence agencies, and that she was only using her boyfriend, Paul Erickson, to meet other influential Americans. Most critically, prosecutors have withdrawn a claim that led to misogynist media portrayals of Butina as a Russian “honeypot” who offered “sex for power.” The falsehood was based on their misinterpretation of Butina’s joking text messages—humor that the judge in the case said was obvious within “five minutes” of scrutiny.
Prosecutors, The New York Times reports, now “[face] questions about their initial portrayal of Ms. Butina as something like a character out of ‘Red Sparrow,’ the spy thriller about a Russian femme fatale.” The plea deal, the Times adds, “was likely to provide her defenders with new fodder to argue that her activities look sinister only to those who see the world through the outdated lens of the Cold War.” Comparing the actual facts in the Trump-Russia investigation to how they are being recklessly portrayed, it seems Butina’s is not the only case where a Cold War lens is warping our view.
New Docs Reveal Extent of CIA's Grotesque Mind Control Experiments
Earlier this year, the CIA marked the 65th anniversary of the launch of Project MKULTRA, a secret program which engaged in mind control experiments on people. Now, thanks to new documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, the public has a chance to learn just how far those carrying out the gruesome experiments were willing to go.
For many decades, the CIA tried to prevent documents related to Project MKULTRA from being released. However, late last week, John Greenewald Jr., founder of The Black Vault, a website specializing in declassified government records, released new documents said to detail the bizarre extent of the project's experimentation on both people and animals.
The files, added to a trove of materials meticulously collected by Greenewald over the course of over two decades, detail experimentation on controlling the minds of human beings and dogs using psychotropic drugs, hypnosis, surgically-implanted electrical shock devices and radio waves.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) logo is displayed in the lobby of CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, on August 14, 2008
© AFP 2018 / SAUL LOEB
A Legacy of Drugs, Torture and Mind Control: Project MKULTRA's 65th Anniversary
Earlier this year, Canadian family members of Project MKULTRA survivors said they were planning to file a class-action lawsuit against the Canadian government and possibly McGill University over their role in the program, which was known to have used paralytic drugs, shock therapy, LSD, medically-induced comas, and exposure to repetitive messages for days on end in research aimed at reprogramming the psyche and, possibly, 'cracking' enemy spies through forced confessions.
However, according to 800 pages-worth of never-before-seen documents published by The Black Vault late last week, Project MKULTRA's 'research' went much further. The documents show, for example, that the project included elaborate experimentation on 'remote-controlled dogs', who were surgically implanted with devices which sent electrical signals to their brains to control their movement at distances for up to 200 yards. "The specific aim of the research program was to examine the possibility of controlling the behavior of a dog, in an open field, by means of remotely triggering electrical stimulation of the brain," one document explains.
Excerpt from document on MKUltra experimentation on dogs.
© CIA / http://WWW.THEBLACKVAULT.COM/
Excerpt from document on MKUltra experimentation on dogs.
The research on dogs was said to have followed up similar experimentation on rats. Discussions were also held on using cats for spy mission field work, as well as elaborate research on the possibility of using "electric fishes" for the "underwater detection, location and identification of objects."
CIA research on using 'electric fishes'.
© CIA / http://WWW.THEBLACKVAULT.COM/
CIA research on using 'electric fishes'.
Another of the documents revealed new details on the use of experimental mind control drugs on unwilling human beings, suggesting experimenting with the use of such drugs on inmates in prison hospitals and drugging suspected criminals awaiting trial.
Excerpt from letter on the use of induced amnesia.
© CIA / http://WWW.THEBLACKVAULT.COM/
Excerpt from letter on the use of induced amnesia.
Yet another document details experimentation with hypnotic speaking techniques to enable mind control over "large audiences."
Excerpt from letter on the use of hypnosis.
© CIA / http://WWW.THEBLACKVAULT.COM/
Excerpt from letter on the use of hypnosis.
Human brain
CC0
July 20, 1977: CIA Mind Control Project MKUltra Docs Released for First Time
The MKULTRA program, which engaged in experiments on unwitting US and Canadian test subjects, was started in the early 1950s, gradually curtailed starting in the mid-1960s, and reported to have been shut down entirely in 1973.
If the new documents presented by The Black Vault are verified, they will serve historians in helping to understand some of the even more grotesque aspects of a CIA project which already has a very dark history.
https://sputniknews.com/us/201812091070 ... -new-docs/
liminalOyster » Sat Dec 15, 2018 12:06 am wrote:So here's a koan: how should we relate to Sputnik's coverage of newly FOIA-ed MK Ultra docs? ...
New Docs Reveal Extent of CIA's Grotesque Mind Control Experiments
...
https://sputniknews.com/us/201812091070 ... -new-docs/
MacCruiskeen » Sat Dec 15, 2018 4:22 pm wrote:liminalOyster » Sat Dec 15, 2018 12:06 am wrote:So here's a koan: how should we relate to Sputnik's coverage of newly FOIA-ed MK Ultra docs? ...
By judging it on its merits, i.e, in the exact same way we should relate to any other coverage of any issue by any writer or speaker in any medium. Is the story well-documented, soundly argued, not reliant on appeals to authority/ guilt by association / strawmanning / rumourmongering/ gish galloping / or any other rhetorical ruses and errors of basic logic? Is it well-sourced, so that readers can check out for themselves the veracity of the claims made? Or are the authors mere stenographers to power, entirely reliant on Mr Sources-Say?
So it ain't no koan. Reason won't lead us astray here. On the contrary, it's the only thing that'll help us.
Also essential to acknowledge is that the truth or falsehood of a claim is independent of its possible usefulness to any govt, foreign or domestic. MKULTRA and countless other CIA crimes are already proven and well documented. If new evidence of that organisation's terrible destructiveness has arrived and been conscientiously reported in Sputnik or Granma or The Lockerbie Gazette or anywhere else, let's welcome it after exercising due diligence. Especially when the Western mass media very likely either won't report it at all or won't report it conscientiously.
By 2016 we'd developed the disinformation protection tools to track disinformation operations in real time, and were the first organization outside the US intelligence community to identify Russia's campaign to influence the US presidential election. As the information war escalated, we believed it was our responsibility to provide a reliable disinformation solution to national security agencies and corporations.
We formed New Knowledge to defend public discourse.
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