Obama's Stay Behind Agents

The Trump-Russia Scam - How Obama Enabled The FBI To Spy On Trump

by Moon of Alabama

January 13, 2019

Despite the loss of major narratives, the war of the deep state against U.S. President Trump continues unabated. The main of tool in this war are allegations of relations between Trump and anything Russia.

The war runs along several parallel paths. The narrative war in the media is most visible one. When any of the fake stories about Trump and Russia gets debunked and disposed, new ones are created or others intensified. In parallel to these propaganda efforts the deep state created an investigation that Trump has no way to escape from. Enabled by one of the Obama administration's last acts the investigation is using signal intelligence to entrap and flip the people surrounding Trump (see section three below).

The big price will be Trump himself.

Here we take a look at what transpired during the last weeks.

One major anti-Trump narrative was that 'Russian influence' helped to put him into office. This was based on the alleged nefarious influence a Russian clickbait company, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St. Peterburg, had on the U.S. electorate. That explanation never made sense. Little of the IRA activities had to do with the election. It used sockpuppets on Facebook and Twitter to attract people to websites filled with puppy pictures or similar nonsense. The IRA would then sell advertisement and promotions on these sites.

This was obvious for anyone following the factual content of the news instead of the 'opinions' a whole bunch of anti-Trump 'experts' and the media formed around them.

That the Mueller investigation finally indicted several of the IRA's officers over minor financial transactions was seen as a confirmation of the political aspects of the IRA activities. But nearly all the reporting left out that Mueller confirmed the commercial intent behind the IRA and its activities. There is nothing political in the accusations. Indeed point 95 of the Mueller indictment of the IRA says:

Defendants and their co-conspirators also used the accounts to receive money from real U.S. persons in exchange for posting promotions and advertisements on the ORGANIZATION-controlled social media pages. Defendants and their co-conspirators typically charged certain U.S. merchants and U.S. social media sites between 25 and 50 U.S. dollars per post for promotional content on their popular false U.S. persona accounts, including Being Patriotic, Defend the 2nd, and Blacktivist.

Part of the false narrative of a political influence campaign was the claim that the $100,000 the IRA spent for advertisement to promote its clickbait webpages through Facebook ads somehow moved people to vote for Trump. But 56% of the IRA ads ran after the election, 25% of all its ads were never seen by anyone. How a few $10,000 for ads only few saw moved an election that was fought with several billions spent by each candidate's campaign was left unexplained.

This week, only fifteen month after this site came to the conclusion that IRA was a commercial clickbait business, the Washington Post finally admitted that the alleged political targeting of voters by the IRA never happened:

[T]he common understanding is that Russia’s interference efforts included sophisticated targeting of specific voting groups on Facebook, which could have made the difference in states that Trump narrowly won on his way to an electoral-vote victory.

That understanding about Russia’s sophisticated targeting, though, is not supported by the evidence — if it’s not flat-out wrong. ...

Most of the ads purchased by the Russians didn’t specify a geographic target smaller than the United States on the whole, according to a Post review of the ads released by the House Intelligence Committee. Those that did target specific states heavily targeted those that weren’t really considered targets of the 2016 election, such as Missouri and Maryland. And of those ads that did target specific states, most happened well before or well after the final weeks of the campaign.

All the claims that some Russian sockpuppets influenced the 2016 elections were and are nonsense.The IRA sockpuppets never had any political intent.

Likewise the allegations that Russian intelligence hacked the DNC and Clinton crony Podesta's email are mere assertions for which no hard evidence was ever provided. The only known fact is that the emails and papers were real, and that their content revealed the shoddiness of Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and her campaign.

Now, as the 'Russian influence' narrative is dying down, the anti-Trump-anti-Russian campaign is moving to new grounds. Last week the New York Times claimed that Paul Manafort, who for some time ran the Trump election campaign, gave public and internal polling data to the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska: Manafort Accused of Sharing Trump Polling Data With Russian Associate. A day after that sensational claim made a large splash throughout U.S. media the New York Times recanted:

Kenneth P. Vogel @kenvogel - 18:39 utc - 9 Jan 2019

CORRECTION: PAUL MANAFORT asked KONSTANTIN KILIMNIK to pass TRUMP polling to the Ukrainian oligarchs SERHIY LYOVOCHKIN & RINAT AKHMETOV, & not to OLEG DERIPASKA, as originally reported. We have corrected the story & I deleted a tweet repeating the error.

Duh. Manafort gave polling data to his Ukrainian fixer Konstantin Kilimnik with the request to pass it along to Ukrainian oligarchs for who he had worked before joining the Trump campaign. Kilimnik had long worked for the International Republican Institute office in Moscow. The IRI is a CIA offshot under Republican Party tutelage that is used to influence politics abroad. Its long time head was the deceased hawkish Senator John McCain. While he worked with Kilimnik in the Ukraine, Manafort concentrated on moving the Ukraine towards the European Union and away from Russia. His and Kilimnik efforts were always opposed to Russian interests. But the NYT and others falsely try to pass them off as the opposite with the sole purpose of feeding the anti-Trump/anti-Russia campaign.

Another anti-Trump/anti-Russian propaganda effort is a new sensational NYT piece on obvious misbehavior in the upper rows of the FBI:

In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.

The inquiry carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.

The NYT lets it seem as if the decision to launch a counter-intelligence investigation related to Trump was as based on some reasonable suspicion the FBI had. It was not. This was an act of revenge by the upper anti-Trump echelons in the FBI with which they attempted to undermine Trump's presidency. Note what the claimed suspicion was based on:

Mr. Trump had caught the attention of F.B.I. counterintelligence agents when he called on Russia during a campaign news conference in July 2016 to hack into the emails of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump had refused to criticize Russia on the campaign trail, praising President Vladimir V. Putin. And investigators had watched with alarm as the Republican Party softened its convention platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit Russia.

Other factors fueled the F.B.I.’s concerns, according to the people familiar with the inquiry. Christopher Steele, a former British spy who worked as an F.B.I. informant, had compiled memos in mid-2016 containing unsubstantiated claims that Russian officials tried to obtain influence over Mr. Trump by preparing to blackmail and bribe him.

Trump made a joke during the election campaign asking Russia to release the 30,000 emails Hillary Clinton had deleted from her illegal private email server. There is no requirement, as far as I know, for any candidate to criticize this or that country. How can not following the non existing requirement to criticize Russia be suspicious? The Republican Party did not soften its convention platform on Ukraine. It rejected an amendment that would have further sharpened it. Overall the Republican platform was more hawkish than the Democratic one. The Steele dossier was of course from A to Z made up nonsense paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

It is non sensible to claim that these were reasonable suspicions sufficient to open a counter-intelligence investigation. The hasty FBI move to launch a counter-intelligence operation obviously had a different motive and aim.

After Trump fired FBI director Comey, the FBI was led by Andrew McCabe, later also fired for leaking to the media and lying about it. His legal council was Lisa Page who exchange tons of anti-Trump SMS messages with her lover, the FBI agent Peter Strozk. These are the people who initiated the counter-intelligence investigation:

Strzok and Page sent other text messages that raise the possibility they were discussing opening up a counterintelligence investigation against Trump before Comey’s firing.

“And we need to open the case we’ve been waiting on now while Andy is acting,” Strzok wrote to Page on the day of Comey’s ouster.

Andy is Andrew McCabe, who served as deputy FBI director.

Page gave some indication in her congressional testimony in July 2018 that the text message was a reference to an investigation separate from the obstruction probe that has already been reported.

Normally the FBI needs to clear such counter-intelligence investigations with the Justice Department. In this case it did not do so at all:

In the case of the investigation into Trump, the FBI’s decision to open a file on the president so quickly after Comey’s firing in May 2017 was a source of concern for some officials at the Justice Department because the FBI acted without first consulting leadership at the department. But those worries were allayed when, days later, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was appointed to oversee the Russia probe ...

After Comey was fired, the FBI made a very hasty move, without reasonable suspicion and without informing the Justice Department, to launch a counter-intelligence operation involving the sitting president and his administration. What was the real purpose of this move?

Initiating a counter-intelligence investigation, for which there was no basis, gave the FBI, and later the Mueller investigation, unfettered access to NSA 'signals intelligence' that could then possibly be used to incriminate Trump or his associates.

It was the Obama administration which had given the FBI access to this tool:

The Hoarse Whisperer @HoarseWisperer - 4:05 utc - 12 Jan 2019

On his way out the door, we all were wallowing in our winter of discontent, Obama signed an executive order...

The order revised the rules around intelligence sharing among our intel community. Specifically, it made the firehose of raw intelligence collected by the NSA directly accessible to the FBI and CIA. Instead of having to ask for intel and getting what they filtered down the FBI and CIA could directly access the unfiltered “SigInt” or signals intelligence. Intercepted phone calls, emails, raw intel from human sources. Everything our vast intelligence vacuum hoovers up, available directly... but only for counterintel and foreign intel purposes.

The NSA can sit on virtually every communication into and out of the U.S. that takes place over networks. Obama made it possible for the FBI to directly access everything they had on Trump, et al. Obama supercharged the FBI’s ability to investigate Trump.

The Obama administration enacted the changed executive order EO 12333 in early January 2017, shortly before Trump took over:

Previously, the N.S.A. filtered information before sharing intercepted communications with another agency, like the C.I.A. or the intelligence branches of the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration. The N.S.A.’s analysts passed on only information they deemed pertinent, screening out the identities of innocent people and irrelevant personal information.

Now, other intelligence agencies will be able to search directly through raw repositories of communications intercepted by the N.S.A. and then apply such rules for “minimizing” privacy intrusions....

[T]he 12333 sharing procedures allow analysts, including those at the F.B.I., to search the raw data using an American’s identifying information only for the purpose of foreign intelligence or counterintelligence investigations, not for ordinary criminal cases. And they may do so only if one of several other conditions are met, such as a finding that the American is an agent of a foreign power.

However, under the rules, if analysts stumble across evidence that an American has committed any crime, they will send it to the Justice Department.

At that time Peter Lee, aka Chinahand, already had the suspicion that Obama was behind the FBI campaign against Trump.

With the changes in EO 12333 Obama gave the FBI the ability to launch a world wide snooping operation against the incoming Trump administration under the guise of a 'counter-intelligence' operation. The hasty FBI move after Comey was fired activated this instrument. The Mueller investigation has since used it extensively. 'Crimes' revealed through the snooping operation are turned over to the Justice Department.

The NYT claim that the counter-intelligence investigation was initiated because of reasonable suspicion of Russian influence over Trump is nonsense. It was initiated to get access to a set of tools that would allow unlimited access to communication of Trump and anyone related to him. It was Obama who on his way out of the door gave the FBI these capabilities.

There are signs that the unlimited access the FBI and Mueller investigation have to signal intelligence is used to create prosecutions via 'parallel construction':

The Hoarse Whisperer @HoarseWisperer - 18:50 utc - 12 Jan 2019

An active counterintel investigation means the Trump Administration’s crimes were only as secure as the weakest link in their weakest moment. We got hints of this early. Our intelligence folks picked up “signals intelligence” or SigInt from Russians talking to Russians.

Those “signals” aren’t the kind of evidence that finds its way into a courtroom. In fact, it’s important that it doesn’t. It would burn sources and methods. It lays out the crimes and the players though... and then prosecutors find ways to make triable cases other ways.

The public sees cases for specific charges carrying significant prison time without ever knowing that the NSA and prosecutors knew so much more than they ever revealed. Now, apply those principles to the cases we’ve seen Mueller bring forward so far.

Mike Flynn: pleaded out to a minor charge, rolled over in full and then produced five rounds of documents. Likely: Flynn was confronted with the intel they had on him and knew he was cooked. They knew the crimes. They heard and saw everything. There’d be no escape.

By flipping and pleading out Flynn, all of that secret intel stays secret. Our intelligence efforts are protected. And Flynn goes down. And he cooks a bunch of other gooses. He’s savvy enough to know that once they have the intel, all that’s left to do is make the case. ...

The 'crime' that did Flynn in was misremembering a phone call he had with the Russian ambassador. Similar happened with Rick Gates, Paul Manafort’s righthand man and a member of Trump’s transition team. Then it happened to Paul Manafort himself and to George Papadopoulos.

The Mueller investigation, thanks to the snooping Obama and the FBI enabled, knows the content of every phone call, chat and email any member of the Trump administration made and make to someone abroad (and likely also within the U.S.). It invites people as witnesses and asks them about the content of a specific calls they made. If they misremember or lie - bang - Mueller has the transcript ready. A crime has been created and an indictment for lying to the FBI will follow. This is what happened to Flynn and the others the Mueller investigation entrapped and convicted.

Because of the counter-intelligence investigation the anti-Trump gang in the FBI hastened to initiate, the investigators got hands on signal intelligence - phone calls, chats and emails - that allowed them to indict minor people for petty crimes and to flip them to talk to the investigation.

The aim, in the end, was and is to build a prosecution case against President Trump for whatever minor and petty half-baked illegal doing there may be.

To make such a prosecution and an indictment publicly palpable the media is assigned with launching story after story about nefarious relations between Trump and anything Russia.

As we have seen above with the IRA story, the retracted NYT's Manafort bang, and the NYT's false claims about the motive of the FBI's counter-intelligence investigation, none of these stories hold up to diligent scrutiny. Today's Washington Post adds another example of no-beef stories that insinuate mystic 'Russian influence' over Trump: Trump has concealed details of his face-to-face encounters with Putin from senior officials in administration.

The first graph claims:

President Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials, current and former U.S. officials said.

The rest of the story largely refutes the claim made in its headline and very first sentence: 

Trump did so after a meeting with Putin in 2017 in Hamburg that was also attended by then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
...
Trump generally has allowed aides to listen to his phone conversations with Putin ..
...
In an email, Tillerson said that he “was present for the entirety of the two presidents’ official bilateral meeting in Hamburg,”...

After Trump had a first White House meeting with the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov in Washington, lots of leaks about the talk appeared in the DC media. Trump was accused of giving information about an ISIS plot to the Russians that was allegedly secret. It was not. Since then Trump clamped down on the number of participants, briefings and readouts for such talks. That is simply a necessary and laudable behavior. Now the media try to construct that into 'Trump is concealing details' about talks with Russia even when the U.S. Secretary of State and others are present in these.


Ever since Trump won the Republican primaries, the Clinton campaign, the Obama administration and the U.S. and British intelligence services prepared to prevent a successful Trump presidency. The Steele dossier, created by 'former' British intelligence agents and paid for by the Clinton campaign, was the basis for an FBI investigation that was seen as an insurance against a Trump win. Any possible Russia relations Trump might have came under scrutiny. This prevented him from fulfilling his campaign promise of coming to better relations with Russia. 

Shortly before Obama left the office he created the tool the FBI needed to put its investigation on steroids. When Trump fired Comey for his handling of the Clinton email affair, the FBI put that tool into action. With unfettered access to signal intelligence the Mueller investigation was able to entrap a number of Trump related people and to flip them to its side. It will use any information they give up to find some angle under which Trump can be prosecuted and eventually impeached. Even if nothing comes off this investigations, the media reports and slander all this created may well be enough to prevent an election of Trump for a second term.

I very much dislike most of Trump's domestic and foreign policy. But he was duly elected under the existing rules. The campaign the media and the intelligence services have since run against him undermines the will of the people. Unfortunately I see no way that Trump could escape from the hold it has gained over him. Exposing it as much as possible might well be his best defense.

Ukrainian Church Schism: Poroshenko Lays Groundwork for Holy War

Crisis in Ukraine: Religious Schism and War

by Christopher Black - NEO

January 6, 2019

“The signing of the Tomos or note of Autocephaly for the newly created Orthodox Church of Ukraine is not a church but a political act which may have catastrophic consequences for Ukraine.” So said the head of the Russian Federation Council’s international affairs committee, Konstantin Kosachev, on Saturday January 6, the day the document was issued.

“This is a new move towards destroying the unity of Orthodoxy, the consequences of which will be catastrophic, first of all for Ukraine itself and its people.”

One of the worst crises in the history of Christianity was the split between the Church centred in Rome and the Church centred in Constantinople, between the west and east regions of the old Roman Empire, that took place in the year 1054. Today, the NATO military alliance and its vassals in the Kiev regime in Ukraine have forced a further split within the Eastern or Orthodox Church by setting up a separate Orthodox church in Ukraine that rejects the age old authority of the Moscow Patriarchate with authority over the churches in Ukraine and purports to set up a separate Orthodox Church in Kiev.

This is not just a side issue in the Christian world or world politics. It is a key element of the NATO plan to use all forms of warfare in all realms of life to further their ambition of crushing the power of Russia. It is designed to engender hostility among the Slavic peoples, to reduce Russia’s prestige and Moscow’s reputation as the third Rome, to further divide the Ukrainian people against themselves and harden the artificial division between the Ukrainian and Russian peoples. But to understand the new division we have to review some history.

The split or schism within the Christian church had many complex causes which neither I, nor the reader, have the patience to enter into. Some of the causes were theological, some cultural, others political. To avoid boring you I will provide only what is essential from the past to understand the present.

For centuries the emperors in control of the eastern Roman Empire based in Constantinople, favoured Rome’s supremacy in Church matters because they wanted to safeguard the universality of the Empire and their claims to Italy. The separation of the churches in the two parts of the Empire evolved gradually over the centuries and reflected the long rivalry between Latins and Greeks, between Rome and Constantinople. But the Roman popes steadily expanded their control across Europe along with their spiritual and temporal power that the authorities in the second city of the Empire resented and feared.

The eastern Romans, who considered their emperor as an equal of the apostles, and who believed that matters of church doctrine could be resolved only through the Holy Ghost speaking through the Ecumenical Council, were shocked by the pope in Rome, who to them was just first among equals among all the church patriarchs, yet claimed he could formulate dogma and had spiritual and temporal supremacy over all the other churches and patriarchs; for in the early Church and for a long period, spiritual authority was deemed to be held equally between the patriarchs of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Aleppo.

The major split took place in 1054 when the Normans attacked some cities in southern Italy, defeated the army sent to stop them, and detained the Roman pope who was furious that the emperor in Constantinople had not come to his rescue. The patriarch and the Emperor in Constantinople tried to smooth things over but tempers and insults flared and the papal legates visiting Constantinople for the purpose of resolving the dispute only inflamed matters and ended their mission by excommunicating the eastern patriarch who in turn anathematised them.

This sequence of events resulted in the lasting separation of the eastern and western churches. The split need never have occurred. More goodwill, less bigotry, cooler tempers could have resolved all the issues but, as is the case now, ill will prevailed. Though the split of 1054 was not complete, for there were attempts in the 13th and 15th centuries to cement the two churches back together and an another attempt in 1965 at the Ecumenical Council, the injury could not be healed, has long festered and now has begun to bleed once again, but this time within the eastern church itself and within the context of a threatened general war.

When the Turks took Constantinople in 1453 they permitted the Orthodox Christians to remain and it was Mehmet the Conqueror, acting as a Roman emperor, who designated a new Patriarch for the city. Today the Istanbul patriarch claims authority over the scattered Greek Orthodox churches in Western Europe, the Americas and Australia and the eastern orthodox churches in Russia, the Balkans, Greece, Asia and Africa, though he has very few adherents in modern Istanbul.

As Christianity spread further east, first Kiev then Moscow became the important centres of the Orthodox Church and set up their own patriarchates or divisions of the Church. But, partly as a result of the Mongol invasions and other complicated events Moscow assumed a more authoritative and primary role resulting in the Patriarchate in Constantinople assigning the Moscow patriarchate with authority over the eastern churches, including Ukraine, in 1686. This has been the situation more or less up to the present.

But on October 15, 2018 the Russian Orthodox Church announced that it would break off all relations with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew, the claimed leader of Eastern Orthodoxy, after he agreed on October 11, 2018, to the April request of Kiev leader Poroshenko, and his minions in the church in Kiev, to grant autocephaly, or self-governance, to what they are calling the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, not to be confused with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church that does not recognize this action, the sole objective of which is to attempt to divide Ukrainians from the historical influence of the Russian Orthodox Church and Russia.

Poroshenko who, along with NATO, backed this action, stated that this step

“finally dispelled the imperial illusions and chauvinistic fantasies of Moscow.”

Ukraine currently has three Orthodox denominations, the largest of which is the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. That branch remained subordinate to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union and contains more than 12,000 parishes. This is a third of all parishes under the Russian Orthodox Church, and Ukraine contains some of the most symbolic ones, such as the monastery Kiev-Pechersk Lavra and its catacombs. The other two denominations are the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kiev Patriarchate, with 4,800 parishes, and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, with 1,000 parishes, which adds to the confusion when trying to grasp what is going on here.

But Russia has long been unhappy with Constantinople’s first-among-equals status and has sought to challenge and erode its role since the Moscow patriarchate sees itself as the dominant bastion of Eastern Orthodoxy. The Russian Orthodox Church alone has more than 150 million followers, half of the world wide adherents and the two patriarchates also differ on some points of doctrine, with Constantinople seeking closer alignment with the Pope in Rome, while the number of Christians in Istanbul can no longer support the claim of that city’s Christian leader to be head of the eastern church.

After Patriarch Bartholomew’s decision, which he probably had no authority to make, Patriarch Filaret in Kiev stated that he would call a council of the leaders of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to choose a leader for this newly created church of Ukraine. The move marked the beginning of the establishment of an independent church in Ukraine, outside the control of Moscow and its patriarch, Kirill. It is also a self-serving decision because it serves to weaken the Russian Orthodox Church and strengthen the almost irrelevant Church in Constantinople that has long been under the sway of the NATO powers and serves their interests. It also is designed to destroy the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and force people to join this new church.

This has wider dimensions since Russian allies, Serbia and Belarus, already have backed the Moscow Patriarchate and condemned the granting of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

The split in the church may have other and more violent consequences arising from disputes over holy sites as several of Ukraine’s most holy sites and churches will be claimed by both the Russian and established Ukrainian churches and this upstart church. The Kiev Patriarchate has already laid claim to the famous 11th century Kiev Monastery of the Caves and the Holy Dormition Monastery in Pochayiv. Both sites are now controlled by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate and could face protests and vandalism.

Poroshenko has said,

“If you see people who call for seizing Lavra or a monastery or church by force, you should know that they are Moscow’s agents. The Kremlin’s goal is to ignite a religious war in Ukraine.”

Vadym Novinskyi, an opposition bloc member of parliament, predicted a “civil war and clashes over property “in every village and every town.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated,

“If the developments spiral into abusive practices, of course, Russia will protect Orthodox Christians’ interests, just like Russia protects the interests of ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking population everywhere.”

There have already been reports of problems over the Christmas period.

It was reported in Tass that,

“with deep indignation and disbelief that we have to inform the public that on December 9, 2018, the Ukrainian authorities prevented the incumbent head of the Donetsk and Marioupol Eparchy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Metropolitan Hilarion from crossing the disengagement line through the Novotroitskoye checkpoint to attend a scheduled prayer meeting”.

On December 26th Patriarch Kiril of Moscow and All Russia stated,

“the creation of a new autocephalous church in Ukraine and the persecution of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) could have dangerous consequences for the whole world.

“I believe the developments in Ukraine will undoubtedly have very dangerous effects in the lives of many countries. What is happening in Ukraine can be used as a precedent. That means that everything, which ensured inter-religious peace, religious freedom and human rights will, in all likelihood, stop to be untouchable, particularly, if these values stand in the way of solving certain political problems.”

Already priests in Ukraine face persecution arising out of this development. Over the past few weeks, Ukraine’s Security Service, the SBU, has conducted searches in the Ovruch diocese in Ukraine’s Zhitomir Region. This resulted in 20 clerics of the UOC’s Rovno and Sarny dioceses being summoned for questioning. Searches were also conducted in the apartment of Metropolitan Paul, Abbot of Kiev Pechersk Lavra. According to the SBU, these police actions were part of a criminal case on inciting inter-confessional strife opened against him, but no doubt are meant to harass and intimidate. Some already face criminal charges.

The tensions being stoked within the Church and the broader society by Poroshenko and the NATO intelligence services will no doubt be used as fuel for the fire as Kiev ratchets up its military actions against the peoples of east Ukraine in the Donbass republics and can lead not only to arrests and detentions of religious leaders and their supporters but also assassinations of those opposing their maneuvers, for on top of all the other problems faced by Ukrainians has been placed the bloody thorn of religious persecution, a Christmas gift from NATO.

Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel “Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

Celebrating a Century of British Disinformation: Russia and the Integrity Initiative

Operation Integrity Initiative - British Intelligence Celebrates a Century of Russia Lies and Self-Deception

by John Helmer - Dances with Bears

January 14, 2018

Moscow - There’s a reason Albion is well-known as perfidious. Like leopards and spots, it’s because he’s always been that way.

In the 1920s British secret services pursued Russians in the UK with the same zealous tactics and purposes as they have been doing in the past decade.

The partial of release of the 1920s archives, documented in a newly published book, reveals the same fabrications, false flags, contrived press leaks, meretricious politicians and journalists, sanctions, expulsions, and deep state deceptions as the British continue to pursue against Russia today.

Why is clearer then than now. A century ago, the British government, the country’s military leaders, and media proprietors were all agreed on the necessity of hanging on to the British empire and its colonies, especially India; and to neutralize – if necessary, liquidate – the locals seeking national independence. There were also British business interests in maintaining cheap commodity imports of oil, rubber, wool, and other raw materials in exchange for over-priced machine and manufactured exports into captive markets. The threats of nationalism abroad, unionism and wage bargaining at home were real. Blaming Russia, Bolshevism and Communism for “meddling” then was an obvious expedient for the police and military measures, and for the state budget funds required to protect the status quo.

But now, without an empire of captive peoples and markets; without army or navy with global reach; without credible British political party alternatives for the domestic terms of economic exchange; and also without Russian ideology to contend with, what explains the revival of Russia-hating as Conservative Party politicians and the chiefs of MI6, MI5 and the Special Branch police practiced it one hundred years ago?

This new book is written by an academic who is a true-believer in Russia-hating as British state policy, so he doesn’t answer the question. What can be learned instead from his book are the many flashes of déjà vu — and also the way the flashes, repeated often enough, cause British blindness. For this, the author demonstrates by his own example, there is no cure.

Timothy Phillips (right), author of The Secret Twenties, British Intelligence, the Russians and the Jazz Age, doesn’t have much of a background for this job, at least not in public. His publisher says he studied Russian at Oxford University, and since graduating “he has travelled widely in the former Soviet Union and has worked extensively as a translator.” How he makes his living at that may be paid for, according to the publisher, by the BBC — a state propaganda unit in the 1920s, acknowledges Phillips himself.

According to the newly released lists of British journalists and academics recruited by the secret services into what is nowadays called the Integrity Initiative, Phillips’s name doesn’t appear; more of those names in a moment, and the source of their pay.

Perhaps Phillips inherited his money or married it. The money shot isn’t a personal matter; in British operations against Russia, the money which pays for writers and media – today no less than a century ago – tells the real story.

Phillips’s book has dropped through the London market like a stone; sales are still stuck in the first printing. A newspaper in Scotland and a radio station in Australia gave it brief mentions. One London newspaper reviewed it positively; the Guardian reviewer also added something Phillips had left out – that many of the 1920s files on secret service fake news and press plants have been “accidentally and mysteriously ‘lost’ by Home Office civil servants.” The Guardian book review editor didn’t notice how the rest of the Guardian newspaper has accidentally and mysteriously revived the same techniques of inventing Russia stories, then ‘losing’ the sources.

The Guardian isn’t exceptional. There is no mainstream British newspaper or publishing house today which isn’t. Phillips’s book comes from Granta, a London publisher funded by the Tetra Pak family fortune of Sweden, and by the Russia-hating daughter of that family. The other minor, alternative and left-wing publishers in the UK sit on different sources of money, but say the same things. Compared to the 1920s, today’s media are more uniform and conformist in their sentiment towards Russia, and far less critical of the British secret service line. Nowadays only among a handful of internet websites and blogs can investigation be found at the standard of proof required by the British courts.

This, by the way, is an interesting circumstance Phillips reveals by not mentioning it. In his book the secret services and government ministries carefully avoided the courts. Search warrants, arrests, interrogations, forensic examinations, confiscations and deportations were all implemented in secret by administrative fiat; so none of the evidence of Russian culpability was ever tested by cross-examination, conviction or acquittal by judge or jury. For the Litvinenko, MH17 and Skripal cases, it’s the same now.

There’s also an entertaining difference. In one of the longest-running British intelligence operations, starting in 1917 after the Revolution nationalized Russian crown and aristocratic property, the flow of diamonds and other gemstones was traced from Moscow and Leningrad through Poland and Estonia into cutting factories in Amsterdam, and the sales proceeds into London.

A US-published photograph of Russian crown jewels from an album 

issued in 1922 intended to stimulate buyer interest. The Russian valuation 

of the jewels for sale at the time was more than $250 million. 

Source: http://www.palagems.com/

From there the British authorities tried to track the money into left-wing organizations around the UK, also western Europe, and most “horrifying” – Phillips’s judgement – to nationalist organizations in the Punjab.

“A princess’s tiara, glimpsed at a ball in 1916, really could turn into sticks of dynamite or machine guns in the hands of violent rebels who wished Britain ill… This was just one aspect of Soviet financial wrongdoing” – Phillips again. 

He also converts the sterling numbers in the secret files into current pounds – altogether, less than £100 million current equivalent.

This number is less than the proceeds removed to London in 2004 and subsequently invested in residential and commercial assets in the city by a single runaway Russian banker, Vladimir Chernukhin; on that individual the Home Office has conferred citizenship and immunity from prosecution. Since 1991 the combined financial resources removed from Russia and invested in London by Russians with Home Office immunity runs into dozens of billions of pounds.

“Horrifying” – but not to Phillips; not now; not even with High Court judgements of liability, perjury, or dishonesty, nor the threat of the Home Office’s Unexplained Wealth Orders; for more details, click.

Among the successful, if minor, secret service operations identified by Phillips from the UK archives, one was the banning of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film, Battleship Potemkin. That was stopped by the British Board of Film Censorship (BBFC) in 1926 after a campaign started at the Admiralty characterising the film as “very objectionable propaganda against the discipline of the Fighting Forces.”

Secret briefings for the BBFC followed from Home Office officials and secret service agents. The censorship board’s criteria for banning Russian films included “Bolshevist propaganda”, “realism in death bed scenes”, “lampoons of the institution of monarchy”, and “officers in British regiments shown in a disgraceful light”. British support for releasing the film remained too weak to lift the ban for thirty years.

The two most successful operations of the decade were the Zinoviev Letter of 1924 and the police raid on the London office of the Russian Trade Delegation and the All-Russia Cooperative Society (ARCOS) in 1927. The first was purportedly a secret communication to British “comrades” from Grigory Zinoviev, then head of the Communist International (Comintern) organization in Moscow.

“Typical Bolshevik prose”, according to Phillips – “verbosity, didacticism and condescension”. But as the archive he reports revealed, ideal material to demonstrate Russian intervention in British politics during the national election campaign of October 1924.

Phillips concedes the document was planted in the press by the secret services and government officials to help the Conservative Party win the election. Because the Labour Party vote gained substantially in numbers, Phillips isn’t sure the letter made any difference to Labour voters. But to Liberal voters who switched to the Tories, Phillips concludes,

“there can be no question that the scale of the [Conservative] triumph was boosted by the Zinoviev Letter. A year of scaremongering had culminated in the scariest tactic of all: the production of apparent proof that the first Labour Government in history had been in cahoots with a hostile foreign power.”

Only the Zinoviev Letter was, Phillips admits, a forgery.

His research in the files isn’t new on this point. His fresh evidence is less than clear on how the document “fell into the hands of SIS officers in Estonia”. He thinks the forgers were White Russians. He concludes “there is no proof” that the forgery started in London; “nor of any…British spy actually being aware that the September letter was a fake.”

He records from the files that Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald was “absolutely sure that it was fraudulent”. He reports the names and methods of the secret service officials who managed to force MacDonald’s hand by deceptive official memoranda and false press leaks.

(If this sounds familiar — if it reminds you of the fabrication of the Golden Showers dossier by US and UK secret services and government officials to discredit Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the US election of November 2016, it deserves to; click to compare.)

The ARCOS police raid of 1927 (left) was an operation which started as a revenge by a disgruntled British employee at the Russian delegation office in London. His claim to have copied a British Army field manual on wireless signal training was turned by the Home Office, Foreign Office, MI5 and police into a 5-day search by more than 200 agents. The manual was never found, and no criminal court case prosecuted. Phillips doesn’t consider the evidence that the manual and the source narrative were faked from the start.

The purported evidence of espionage and sedition, leaked to the press and in parliament, led to a majority vote for expulsion of several dozen Russians. That took place in June 1927. Regime change was one of the objectives of the parliamentary advocates of the ARCOS raid and the sanctions following. “The Communist state in Russia…will not continue,” Phillips quotes one of the Tory advocates, “if we do our duty tonight [in parliament] and throw out Russian recognition.” After the vote, he said he was able to “breathe quite differently now that we have purged our capital of these unclean and treacherous elements.”

Phillips admits the operation was already underway before the prime minister and foreign minister were informed so that they were given no choice but to ratify it. He also acknowledges that several UK treaty commitments were violated, as well as the diplomatic immunity of the Russian premises, files, and staff. He concludes there were short-term political gains for Tory promoters like Winston Churchill and for secret service rivals. But the long-term outcome was the reorganization of all Soviet secret service codes, preventing British interception and decryption for thirty years. British agent networks in the Soviet Union were destroyed. Nothing Albion, er Churchill, said or signed later, when the British were desperate for Soviet support against Germany, was believed in the Kremlin.

Phillips winds up his book with an anachronism, not a comparison.

“From the end of the 1920s onwards – no matter how bad crisis or how big the dispute – the United Kingdom never again tried to beat the Russians simply by ostracising them. Britain had discovered the futility of such gestures…

“As we are now only too aware , the Soviet Union’s principal successor state poses new quandaries and threats for world leaders of the twenty-first century.”

To have written a book like this required more blinders than a team of cart horses. If Phillips was the horse, who or what was his driver?

The answer is that the same British secret services continue to operate in the same way – the SS way; that’s the Subsidization and Subversion of the British media to marshal parliamentary votes for operations; without the press, the services would become transparent liars, their accountability forced into parliament and the courts.

Alongside the paid operatives, there are also what Phillips calls the Russian side’s “fellow travellers” and “agents of influence”. Fellow traveller, Phillips explains, is,

“an English translation of the Russian word poputchik, which initially referred to Russian citizens who sympathised with, but did not actively participate in, the Bolshevik revolution. British and other foreign fellow travellers tended to be men and women working in cultural and academic professions who supported the Bolsheviks’ right to rule…”

Phillips documents intensive surveillance of these individuals at home, in hospital, at work, and on holiday; penetration of their organizations; interception of their letters; theft of their membership lists; and eavesdropping on their conversations. The rationale, Phillips reports (and endorses) was “an understanding that soft support for Bolshevism could be valuable to the Russian regime”, and the “belief that such soft support masked more dangerous and illegal types of assistance.”

The state budget required for this was never enough. Phillips reports the British services in the 1920s were “cash-strapped and perennially overwhelmed organisations.”

Money is not as short these days, as the release of the archives of Operation Integrity Initiative and its think-tank hub, the Institute for Statecraft, reveals. Its current annual budget amounts to about £2 million. It’s one of many such operations at British universities, think-tanks, and media organizations, the financing for which comes from British agencies such as the Foreign Office and Defence Ministry, as well as NATO offices, the US State Department, the Lithuanian Defence Ministry, and many other think-tanks funded from the same sources.

The Institute for Statecraft calls itself “an independent body dedicated to refreshing the practice of statecraft, to improving governance and to enhancing national security.” Its money comes from “Government bodies; with Armed Forces and other agencies of national security; with International Organisations; with the corporate world; and with Academia.” The only government this institute is provably independent of is the Russian one. Poputchiki is what a Russian might call them, but not Phillips.

The internal documents of Operation Integrity Initiative were first disclosed publicly in November. In addition to the names of the academics on the Institute’s official payroll, the fresh disclosures revealed lists of British fellow travellers and agents of influence. Their job, according to the operational papers, is to amplify secret service fabrications in the mainstream press.

The way this megaphone works now isn’t very different from the way Phillips reported from the 1920s archives. Groups of journalists, spies, soldiers, academics and lobbyists are paid to meet regularly for conferences at which they exchange information and publish papers to each other. The job of these media networks is to then report the fabricated messages of these meetings; endorse and legitimize each other’s faking; as well as to attack and discredit critical or alternative views.

Follow this story in the US-based Moon of Alabama website here and here and here.

A report by a group of British academics has identified fresh details of operations and funding sources for Integrity Initiative, including the money Facebook is contributing. This report also traces the military and intelligence backgrounds of the operatives.

Former UK ambassador Craig Murray has identified names and roles in the operation of Foreign Office analysts on Russia, and the MI6 case officer for Sergei Skripal.

OPERATION INTEGRITY INITIATIVE 2018 

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Source: https://www.cyberguerrilla.org/ 

and https://www.moonofalabama.org/ 

For the record of faking and lying by Neil Buckley of the Financial Times, read this archive; for James Nixey of the Chatham House think-tank, click. For Edward Lucas of The Economist, read this; and Anne Applebaum, the Polish freelancer, here.

Bobo Lo and Andrew Wood are ex-Australian and British diplomats who sell their fabrications through think-tanks and commercial consultancies. Wood’s operations have included fabricating, then amplifying the Golden Showers dossier.

The two Russian names on this list are those of Vladimir Ashurkov, a former Alfa Bank employee then fund-raiser for Alexei Navalny; and Igor Sutyagin, whose Russian conviction and imprisonment for espionage ended with his expulsion to the UK in 2010. For responses by the named journalists, read section 7.1 of this report.

The Institute for Statecraft’s official response has been to acknowledge the truth and blame the Russians for revealing it:

AFTERWORD: Following completion of this review, further materials have been published to reveal the global reach of the British espionage and deception operation – reaching much further than the British armed services are capable of, and not only against Russian targets.

Max Blumenthal and Mark Ames have published this analysis of Integrity Initiative in the US through the State Department, think-tanks and universities. For a comprehensive list of alt-media reporting on the operation, updated to January 12, read this from Tim Hayward. 

Brothers From Different Mothers: Bolsonaro/Netanyahu Compare Notes

When Bolsonaro and Netanyahu Are ‘Brothers’: Why Brazil Should Shun the Israeli Model

by Ramzy Baroud - PalestineChronicle.com

January 9, 2019

Newly-inaugurated Brazilian President, Jair Bolsonaro, is set to be the arch-enemy of the environment and of indigenous and disadvantaged communities in his country. He also promises to be a friend of like-minded, far-right leaders the world over. It is, therefore, not surprising to see a special kind of friendship blossoming between Bolsonaro and Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

“We need good brothers like Netanyahu,” Bolsonaro said on January 1, the day of his inauguration in Brasilia. Bolsonaro is a “great ally [and] a brother”, Netanyahu replied.

But, while Bolsonaro sees in Netanyahu a role model - for reasons that should worry many Brazilians - the country certainly does not need ‘brothers’ like the Israeli leader.

Netanyahu’s militancy, oppression of the indigenous Palestinian people, his racially-motivated targeting of Black African immigrants and his persistent violations of international law are not at all what a country like Brazil needs to escape corruption, bring about communal harmony and usher in an era of regional integration and economic prosperity.

Netanyahu, of course, was keen on attending Bolsonaro’s inauguration, which is likely to go down in Brazilian history as an infamous day, where democracy and human rights came under their most serious threat since Brazil launched its democratic transition in the early 1980s.

In recent years, Brazil has emerged as a sensible regional power that defended Palestinian human rights and championed the integration of the ‘State of Palestine’ into the larger international community.

Frustrated by Brazil’s record on Palestine and Israel, Netanyahu, a shrewd politician, saw an opportunity in the populist discourse parroted by Bolsonaro during his campaign.

The new Brazilian President wants to reverse Brazil’s foreign policy on Palestine and Israel, the same way he wants to reverse all the policies of his predecessors regarding indigenous rights, the protection of the rainforest, among other pressing matters.

What is truly worrying is that, Bolsonaro, who has been likened to Donald Trump - least because of his vow to “make Brazil great again” - is likely to keep his promises. Indeed, only hours after his inauguration, he issued an executive order targeting land rights of indigenous peoples in Brazil, to the delight of the agricultural lobbies, which are eager to cut down much of the country’s forests.

Confiscating indigenous peoples’ territories, as Bolsonaro plans to do, is something that Netanyahu, his government and their predecessors have done without remorse for many years. Yes, it is clear that the claim of ‘brotherhood’ is based on very solid ground.

But there are other dimensions to the love affair between both leaders. Much work has been invested in turning Brazil from having an arguably pro-Palestinian government, to a Trump-like foreign policy.

In his campaign, Bolsonaro reached out to conservative political groups, the never truly tamed military and Evangelical churches, all with powerful lobbies, sinister agendas and unmistakable influence. Such groups have historically, not only in South America, but in the United States and other countries as well, conditioned their political support for any candidate on the unconditional and blind support of Israel.

This is how the United States has become the main benefactor for Israel, and that is precisely how Tel Aviv aims to conquer new political grounds.

The western world, in particular, is turning towards far-right demagogues for simple answers to complicated and convoluted problems. Brazil, thanks to Bolsonaro and his supporters, is now joining the disturbing trend.

Israel is unabashedly exploiting the unmitigated rise of global neo-fascism and populism. Worse, the once perceived to be anti-Semitic trends are now wholly embraced by the ‘Jewish State’, which is seeking to broaden its political influence but also its weapons market.

Politically, far-right parties understand that in order for Israel to help them whitewash their past and present sins, they would have to submit completely to Israel’s agenda in the Middle East. And that is precisely what is taking place from Washington, to Rome to Budapest to Vienna … And, as of late, Brasilia.

But another, perhaps more compelling reason is money. Israel has much to offer by way of its destructive war and ‘security’ technology, a massive product line that has been used with lethal consequences against Palestinians.

The border control industry is thriving in the US and Europe. In both cases, Israel is serving the task of the successful role model and the technology supplier. And Israeli ‘security’ technology, thanks to the newfound sympathy for Israel’s alleged security problems, is now invading European borders as well.

According to the Israeli Ynetnews, Israel is the seventh largest arms exporter in the world and is emerging as a leader in the global export of aerial drones.

Europe’s excitement for Israel’s drone technology is related to mostly unfounded fears of migrants and refugees. In the case of Brazil, Israeli drones technology will be put to fight against criminal gangs and other internal reasons.

For the record, Israeli drones manufactured by Elbit Systems have been purchased and used by the former Brazilian government just before the FIFA World Cup in 2014.

What makes future deals between both countries more alarming is the sudden affinity of far-right politicians in both countries. Expectedly, Bolsonaro and Netanyahu discussed the drones at length during the latter’s visit to Brazil.

Israel has used extreme violence to counter Palestinian demands for human rights, including lethal violence against ongoing peaceful protests at the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel. If Bolsonaro thinks that he will successfully counter local crimes through unhinged violence - as opposed to addressing social and economic inequality and unfair distribution of wealth in his country - then he can only expect to exasperate an already horrific death toll.

Israeli security obsessions should not be duplicated, neither in Brazil nor anywhere else, and Brazilians, many of whom rightly worry about the state of democracy in their country, should not succumb to the Israeli militant mindset which has wrought no peace, but much violence.

Israel exports wars to its neighbors, and war technology to the rest of the world. As many countries are plagued by conflict, often resulting from massive income inequalities, Israel should not be seen as the model to follow, but rather the example to avoid.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His latest book is The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, London, 2018). He earned a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, UCSB.

America's Destructive Inertia: The Unstoppable Global Catastrophe

If America Stopped Destroying The World, The Bad Guys Might Win

by Caitlin Johnstone - Rogue Journalist

January 13, 2019

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters on Saturday that the government under Venezuela’s recently re-inaugurated president Nicolas Maduro is “illegitimate”, and that “the United States will work diligently to restore a real democracy to that country.”

Pompeo’s remarks, which were echoed by Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton, are interesting for a couple of reasons.

The first is because Venezuela’s presidential election in May of last year (which incidentally was found to have been perfectly legitimate by the international Council of Electoral Experts of Latin America) was actively and aggressively meddled in by the US and its allies. The second is that while the US government is openly broadcasting its intention to keep interfering in Venezuela’s political system, it continues to scream bloody murder about alleged Russian interference in its own democratic process two years ago.

What is the difference between the behavior of the United States, which remains far and away the single worst offender in foreign election meddling on the planet, and what Russia is accused of having done in 2016? According to a comment made by former CIA Director James Woolsey last year, it’s that the US interferes in foreign democracies “for a very good cause.”

And that’s really the only argument that empire loyalists have going for them on this subject. The US is different because the US has moral authority. It’s okay for the US to continue to interfere in the political affairs of foreign nations while it would be an unforgivable and outrageous “act of war” for a nation like Russia to do the exact same thing, because the US is countering the interests of the Bad Guys while Russia is countering the interests of the Good Guys. Who decided who the Good Guys and Bad Guys are in this argument? The US.

This “What we do is good because we’re the Good Guys” faith-based doctrine was regurgitated with full-throated zealotry in a recent speech given by Pompeo in Cairo, in which he cited “America’s innate goodness” in making the absolutely ridiculous claim that “America is a force for good in the Middle East” which has been “absent too much” from the region previously. America’s nonstop deadly interventionism in the Middle East is “good”, because America is “innately good”.

America’s constant military interventionism, election interference and other nastiness are painted as Good Things done by Good Guys to fight the Bad Guys. The argument, when you boil it right down, is that if America wasn’t constantly starting wars, invading sovereign nations, staging coups, sponsoring proxy conflicts, arming terrorists, bombing civilians, torturing people, implementing starvation sanctions on impoverished populations, pointing nuclear weapons everywhere, spying on us all with a globe-spanning Orwellian surveillance network, interfering in foreign elections, and patrolling the skies with flying death robots, the Bad Guys might win.

Sort of makes you wonder who the Bad Guys really are, huh?

The theme of Good Guys fighting Bad Guys resonates with a population that has been raised for generations on Hollywood films featuring a handsome action hero emerging victorious after a ninety-minute struggle and karate kicking an ugly villain off a cliff before kissing the pretty girl, but it doesn’t accurately reflect the reality we actually live in.

Our world is dominated by extremely powerful people who are motivated not out of interest in good or evil but a drive toward power and profit which is completely disinterested in morality of any kind, and the empires they build for themselves have their foundations on the backs of ordinary people who are just trying to get by. The majority of those extremely powerful people either live in the United States or have formed alliances with US power structures, and all their agendas in Asia, South America, the Middle East and elsewhere have nothing to do with “protecting democracy” or being a “force of good”, and everything to do with amassing more power.

Even among those who recognize that the US-centralized empire isn’t a shining beacon of virtue in our world, the notion remains prevalent that if American power ceases to be a unipolar dominator then someone worse will take over the world. This fear-based mindset ultimately underlies all establishment manipulation and all educated support for it: the idea that someone needs to rule and dominate the world to prevent someone else from doing the same.

But what are the fruits of this mindset? A corporatist Orwellian dystopia hurtling toward climate collapse if nuclear war doesn’t kill us all first.

We can’t keep doing this. We literally can’t; we’ll evolve beyond this fear-based dominator paradigm or we’ll all perish beneath its feet very soon. We are now in a position where our irrational fear of being invaded by China has pushed us to the brink of extinction, so it isn’t even a gamble to step off that train and try something else instead.

It is entirely possible that the US is capable of functioning like a normal nation and simply defending its own shores and sustaining itself without interfering in world affairs. It is entirely possible that the threat everyone imagines of some foreign power stepping in as the unipolar dominator should America vacate that role is the product of fearful imaginings with no bearing on reality and a fundamental misunderstanding of humanity.

It is entirely possible that we are capable of creating a world where nobody dominates anybody, and no iron-fisted world leader of any kind is needed. Either way, the train we’re on is headed for a brick wall, so we’ve now got nothing to lose by stepping off.

_________________________

The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet new merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Liked it? Take a second to support Caitlin Johnstone on Patreon!

 

Nation-wide Protest Follows RCMP Wet'suwet'en Raid

Outrage In Canada After Militarized RCMP Arrest 14 Wet’Suwet’en Land Defenders on Sovereign Indigenous Land

by TRNN

January 11, 2019

The Wet’suwet’en people have never signed treaties with Canada or otherwise ceded their lands, a fact confirmed by Canada’s own Supreme Court in 1997 in a landmark decision known as Delgamuukw. On Monday, January 7, indeed, armed police, some dressed in camouflage fatigues, broke down homemade barriers at a checkpoint on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory and arrested 14 land defenders.

Solidarity protests erupt across Canada while Justin Trudeau faces hostile questions about indigenous rights in British Columbia

Indigenous Movements, Dissent, and the Security State

Policing Indigenous Movements Dissent and the Security State

by Andrew Crosby and Jeffrey Monaghan

May 2018

“An accessible must-read for all Canadians concerned about respectful relations with indigenous people and the decline of civil rights in the war-on-terror era.” — Publishers Weekly

In recent years, Indigenous peoples have lead a number of high profile movements fighting for social and environmental justice in Canada. From land struggles to struggles against resource extraction, pipeline development and fracking, land and water defenders have created a national discussion about these issues and successfully slowed the rate of resource extraction.

But their success has also meant an increase in the surveillance and policing of Indigenous peoples and their movements. In Policing Indigenous Movements, Crosby and Monaghan use the Access to Information Act to interrogate how policing and other security agencies have been monitoring, cataloguing and working to silence Indigenous land defenders and other opponents of extractive capitalism.

Listen to the authors speak to From Embers here.

Through an examination of four prominent movements — the long-standing conflict involving the Algonquins of Barriere Lake, the struggle against the Northern Gateway Pipeline, the Idle No More movement and the anti-fracking protests surrounding the Elsipogtog First Nation — this important book raises critical questions regarding the expansion of the security apparatus, the normalization of police surveillance targeting social movements, the relationship between police and energy corporations, the criminalization of dissent and threats to civil liberties and collective action in an era of extractive capitalism and hyper surveillance.

In one of the most comprehensive accounts of contemporary government surveillance, the authors vividly demonstrate that it is the norms of settler colonialism that allow these movements to be classified as national security threats and the growing network of policing, governmental, and private agencies that comprise what they call the security state.

Mystery at Heart of German State Christmas Advent Calendar Hack

Was the hack of German politicians data supported by the state?

by Ulrich Rippert - WSWS

12 January 2019

News broke at the beginning of January that personal and political data from German politicians, well-known musicians, and journalists was stolen and published online. According to current figures, 994 active or former politicians have been affected by the hack.

The main content of the leaks was personal contact information, including phone numbers and addresses, as well as internal party documents like application letters to party congresses. In a few cases, highly sensitive personal information was made public, including pictures from personal ID cards, documents confirming direct debit payments from bank accounts, chats with family members, and credit card details of relatives. Some of the documents are several years old.

Interior Minister Horst Seehofer

The data was published before Christmas on Twitter in the style of an advent calendar.

The account which published the data has more than 17,000 followers. Personal details from celebrities have been repeatedly published there since 2017. Media reports have noted that multiple copies have been made of the data, making it almost impossible to delete.

At a press conference on Tuesday, federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (Christian Social Union, CSU) announced that the security agencies would take tougher measures in response to the hack. “The investigators responsible are working at top speed,” he said. A suspect has already been questioned and is cooperative, he added. The suspect is a 20-year-old student from the state of Hesse. The Interior Minister praised the “swift investigation,” and thanked the security agencies for “good and rapid cooperation.”

In the future, the cyber-security sector would be a focus around the clock, Seehofer declared. A new draft security law is almost complete and will be presented in the first half of 2019, he added. The Federal Agency for Security (BSI) will hire more personnel. The qualifications of BSI workers will also be reviewed more closely and improved in the future.

Seehofer said nothing about the fact that signs point to far-right forces around the Alternative for Germany (AfD) being involved in the attack. And it is well known that the right-wing party enjoys strong support from the security agencies.

A glance at the facts suggests that the data hack was part of the political conspiracy which the federal government has used to impose its policies of militarism and the strengthening of the repressive state apparatus to suppress all opposition in the population.

Firstly, it is noteworthy that of all the parties represented in parliament, only politicians from one remained unaffected by the hack: the AfD. 56 percent of parliamentary deputies, or a total of 398, have been affected, including 204 from the CDU/CSU, 90 from the SPD, 47 from the Left Party, 31 from the Greens, and 26 from the Free Democrats, but not a single one of the AfD’s 91 deputies.

The source of the attack also points to far-right circles. Die Zeit has carefully examined the case, and came to the conclusion,

“It is not yet possible to say who exactly was responsible for stealing the data. But the people associated with the accounts provide further indications that those responsible are active in right-wing politics. The main account, 0 rbit, participated in right-wing extremist discussions on Twitter.”

According to Die Zeit, other far-right accounts have ties to the main account, including AN_Ofiziell (anonymousness), which is active in right-wing politics and presents itself as part of the Anonymous hacker group. The twin account anonymousnews.ru was also connected to the main account. The suspected person behind the account is a right-wing extremist from Erfurt who was sentenced to two years and ten months in prison in December 2018 due to illegally trading weapons. The man filed an appeal against the ruling and is currently free under strict police surveillance.

Julian Reichelt, editor-in-chief of the Bild newspaper, pointed to another aspect of the case Tuesday that undermines the official narrative of a lone 20-year-old student living out his fantasies of unlimited power online. It concerns the huge set of data he is currently reviewing and analysing with a trained team of specialist investigative reporters.

“This wasn’t one or two boys eating pizza and drinking cola in a basement. It must have been a larger structure. The most likely explanation is that there was state support for this hack, regardless of where it came from,” Reichelt explained.

The Bild editor-in-chief indicated that a state “possibly with subversive intent,” tried to undermine the Federal Republic, but then wrote,

“According to the investigators, there is no political motivation, nobody pulling the strings from Russia, China, or another country.”

The question is therefore posed: was the data hack organized by the AfD’s far-right network, which reaches deep into the state’s security apparatus and is used by the government to enforce its right-wing, anti-social, and militarist policies?

The right-wing extremist networks, which are present in all parts of the state apparatus, are well known.

Last summer, the head of the domestic intelligence agency, Hans-Georg Maassen, was removed from his post after defending neo-Nazi marchers in Chemnitz.

In its latest report, the domestic intelligence agency neglects to mention the AfD, even though it regularly agitates against immigrants, promotes racism, and trivialises the Nazis’ crimes and the Wehrmacht. By contrast, the Socialist Equality Party (SGP) is named in the report as a “left-wing extremist” party, with the justification that it criticises the capitalist system.

In the army, a neo-Nazi network was discovered when the terrorist plans of Franco A., (right) were accidentally revealed. The army officer, who had procured firearms and apparently planned attacks on high-ranking politicians, had registered himself as a Syrian refugee. He seemingly planned to blame his crimes on refugees. Nonetheless, the Frankfurt Court of Appeals saw no reason to press charges against him.

When Focus magazine published new details in November about the “conspiratorial network of around 200 soldiers in the army,” other media outlets ignored the revelation and the issue was quickly dropped.

A far-right cell in the police in Frankfurt was recently exposed, which described itself as “NSU 2.0”—a reference to the neo-Nazi National Socialist Underground terrorist group.

The existence of a right-wing conspiracy within the state apparatus is thus not the product of conspiracy theories, but bitter reality.

This is the context within which the political campaign to defend the AfD which began immediately after the data leak must be understood. A violent attack on the leader of the right-wing party in Bremen served as the pretext for politicians to line up with statements of solidarity for the AfD. On Tuesday morning, contrary to all the facts, a report was spread claiming that the AfD member was beaten severely by three masked individuals with a wooden baton.

Later, after footage from security cameras was reviewed, it was confirmed that the AfD politician was pursued by three men, who attacked him from behind. A spokesman for the Bremen state prosecutor stated that the pictures showed “nobody kicking someone lying on the ground,” and nobody striking the victim with an object.

Despite this, media outlets have reported the attack as an attempted murder, and all parties have declared their support for and solidarity with the AfD.

Fight Google's censorship!

Google is blocking the World Socialist Web Site from search results.
To fight this blacklisting:

Share this article with friends and coworkers