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Showing posts with label Intelligence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Intelligence. Show all posts

Monday, 26 August 2019

Long Before Epstein: Sex Traffickers & Spy Agencies

Elizabeth Vos
Consortium news

The alleged use of sexual blackmail by spy agencies is hardly unique to the case of Jeffrey Epstein. Although the agencies involved as well as their alleged motivations and methods differ with each case, the crime of child trafficking with ties to intelligence agencies or those protected by them has been around for decades.

Some cases include the 1950s -1970s Kincora scandal and the 1981 Peter Hayman affair, both in the U.K.; and the Finders’ cult and the Franklin scandal in the U.S. in the late 1980s. Just as these cases did not end in convictions, the pedophile and accused child-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein remained at arms’ length for years.

“For almost two decades, for some nebulous reason, whether to do with ties to foreign intelligence, his billions of dollars, or his social connections, Epstein, whose alleged sexual sickness and horrific assaults on women without means or ability to protect themselves… remained untouchable,” journalist Vicky Ward wrote in The Daily Beast in July.

The protection of sex traffickers by intelligence agencies is especially interesting in the wake of  Epstein’s death. Like others, Epstein had long been purported to have links with spy agencies. Such allegations documented by Whitney Webb in her multi-part series were recently published in Mintpress News.

Webb states that Epstein was the current face of an extensive system of abuse with ties to both organized crime and intelligence interests. She told CNLive! that: “According to Nigel Rosser, a British journalist who wrote in the Evening Standard in 2001, Epstein apparently for much of the 1990s claimed that he used to work for the CIA.”

Vicky Ward, who wrote on Epstein for Vanity Fair before his first arrest, and claimed the magazine killed one of her pieces after Epstein intervened with editor Graydon Carter, said in a Tweet that one of Epstein’s clients was Adnan Khashoggi, an arms dealer who was pivotal in the Iran Contra scandal and was on the Mossad (the Israeli intelligence agency) payroll. This was also noted in a book “By Way of Deception” by former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky.
The Times of Israel reported that Epstein was an “active business partner with former prime minister Ehud Barak” until 2015, adding: “Barak formed a limited partnership company in Israel in 2015, called Sum (E.B.) to invest in a high-tech startup…. A large part of the money used by Sum to buy the start-up stock was supplied by Epstein.”

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Monday, 5 August 2019

The Trump Administration Is Using the Full Power of the U.S. Surveillance State Against Whistleblowers

The Intercept

 

Government whistleblowers are increasingly being charged under laws such as the Espionage Act, but they aren’t spies.

They’re ordinary Americans and, like most of us, they carry smartphones that automatically get backed up to the cloud. When they want to talk to someone, they send them a text or call them on the phone. They use Gmail and share memes and talk politics on Facebook. Sometimes they even log in to these accounts from their work computers.

Then, during the course of their work, they see something disturbing. Maybe it’s that the government often has no idea if the people it kills in drone strikes are civilians. Or that the NSA witnessed a cyberattack against local election officials in 2016 that U.S. intelligence believes was orchestrated by Russia, even though the president is always on TV saying the opposite. Or that the FBI uses hidden loopholes to bypass its own rules against infiltrating political and religious groups. Or that Donald Trump’s associates are implicated in sketchy financial transactions.

So they search government databases for more information and maybe print some of the documents they find. They search for related information using Google. Maybe they even send a text message to a friend about how insane this is while they consider possible next steps. Should they contact a journalist? They look up the tips pages of news organizations they like and start researching how to use Tor Browser. All of this happens before they’ve reached out to a journalist for the first time. 

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Sunday, 21 July 2019

"I've Had Many Strange Experiences In My Life" - Inside Epstein's 'Honey Trap' On E 71st Street

Eric Margolis
Zero Hedge

I’ve had many strange experiences in my decades of covering intelligence affairs. These run from being invited to KGB HQ in Moscow, Chinese intelligence in Beijing, US intelligence in Virginia, Libyan intelligence in Tripoli, South African intelligence, and even Albanian intelligence in Tirana.

But none was odder than the day I was invited to lunch in New York City with the by now notorious figure Jeffrey Epstein. The golden boy of Manhattan and Palm Beach society now sits in a grim jail cell accused of having sex with underage girls. He’s been doing this in plain view since the early 1990’s but, until recently, he seemed bullet-proof.

Soon after I walked into the entrance of Epstein’s mansion on E 71st Street, said to be the city’s largest private home, a butler asked me, “would you like an intimate massage, sir, by a pretty young girl?” This offer seemed so out of place and weird to me that I swiftly declined.
 
More important than indelicacy, as an old observer of intelligence affairs, to me this offer reeked of ye old honey trap, a tactic to ensnare and blackmail people that was old when Babylon was young. A discreet room with massage table, lubricants and, no doubt, cameras stood ready off the main lobby.

I had arrived with Canada’s leading lady journalist who was then close to Epstein’s sometime girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell and, it was said, procuress – something Maxwell denies. Bizarrely, Maxwell believed that I could get KGB Moscow Center to release satellite photos that showed the murder on his yacht of her father, the press baron Robert Maxwell, who was a well-known double agent for Israel and KGB, and a major criminal.

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Wednesday, 10 July 2019

Alex Acosta Reportedly Claimed Jeffrey Epstein ‘Belonged to Intelligence’

Michael Kreiger
Liberty Blitzkrieg

To appreciate the significance of what I’m about to share, you really need to go back and read yesterday’s post: The Jeffrey Epstein Rabbit Hole Goes a Lot Deeper Than You Think.

In that piece, I shared many lesser known, but extremely bizarre facts about Jeffrey Epstein and the people around him. I also noted that it appeared his real job was to run a blackmail operation to ensnare some of the most wealthy and powerful people on earth. I alluded to the possibility that he was collecting this priceless information on behalf of a third party, and then just today we learn the following via the Daily Beast:
“Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?” Acosta had been asked. Acosta had explained, breezily, apparently, that back in the day he’d had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He’d cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s attorneys because he had “been told” to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” he told his interviewers in the Trump transition, who evidently thought that was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta. (The Labor Department had no comment when asked about this.)…

For almost two decades, for some nebulous reason, whether to do with ties to foreign intelligence, his billions of dollars, or his social connections, Epstein, whose alleged sexual sickness and horrific assaults on women without means or ability to protect themselves is well-known in his circle, remained untouchable.
It should be noted the reason I attach credibility to the above is based on who wrote it, Vicky Ward. She has an extensive history of digging into Epstein, and wrote one of the earliest profiles on him back in 2003. 

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Sunday, 26 May 2019

Trump Targets UK, Australia And Ukraine Over 'Greatest Hoax In The History Of Our Country'

Zero Hedge

President Trump on Friday said that he wants Attorney General William Barr to investigate the UK, Australia and Ukraine for their roles in the 'greatest hoax in the history of our country.'

Speaking with reporters at the White House on Friday before his trip to Japan, Trump discussed his decision this week to issue a sweeping declassification order - leaving it in the hands of Barr to determine exactly what happened to Trump and his campaign before and after the 2016 US election. 

"For over a year, people have asked me to declassify. What I've done is declassified everything," said Trump, adding "He can look and I hope he looks at the UK and I hope he looks at Australia and I hope he looks at Ukraine." 

"It's the greatest hoax probably in the history of our country and somebody has to get to the bottom of it. We'll see. For a long period of time, they wanted me to declassify and I did."

"This is about finding out what happened," said Trump. "What happened and when did it happen, because this was an attempted takedown of the president of the United States, and we have to find out why."

"We're exposing everything. We're being a word that you like, transparent. We're being, ultimately we're being transparent. That's what it's about. Again, this should never ever happen in our country again."

After the Mueller report made clear that Trump and his campaign had in no way conspired with Russia during hte 2016 election, Democrats immediately pivoted to whether Trump obstructed the investigation. Trump and his supporters, however, immediately pivoted to the conduct of the US intelligence community, including the involvement of foreign actors and possibly their governments. 

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Wednesday, 22 May 2019

Mossad and the Rise of the VC-Spy Alliance

Deep State Blog

The growth of intelligence agencies in the 21st century has been powered by the development of new technologies, created by start-ups, which are powered by intelligence agencies. This unvirtuous circle of money and espionage is a new and daunting challenge for civil liberties and human rights groups.

The U.S intelligence community has a venture capital organization, Inqtel, founded by the CIA in 1999. Israel’s Mossad has Libertad Ventures, founded in June 2017.

As The Times of Israel reports
Libertad was set up as a strategic investment arm of the Mossad. Its purpose is to help build the organization’s technological capabilities and create a bridge to the Israeli startup industry. Since its establishment, the fund has received hundreds of applications from both Israeli and foreign entrepreneurs, the statement said. The Mossad, the Shin Bet security agency and even the Israeli army are stepping out of the shadows and opening up to working with civilian firms, as greater cooperation is needed .
“Stepping out of the shadows” is another way of saying intelligence services are increasingly open about what they used to do secretly.

Inqtel’s board of trustees is an all-star team of Silicon Valley bankers and intelligence agency operatives, including former CIA director George Tenet. Its alumni includes dozens of high tech firms. Libertad, by contrast, says it will not disclose the name of companies it funds.

The alliance of venture capital and secret intelligence professionals serves the needs of both. The technologists gets funding. The spies get cutting edge tools to surveill enemies, control dissidents, and wage war: spyware, facial recognition technology, and autonomous weapons to name a few.

Some of these technologies may make the public safer–detection of chemical and nuclear weapons–but all of them make secret intelligence agencies stronger.

Israeli’s NSO Group exemplifies the VC-spy alliance. Created by veterans of Israeli signals intelligence service in 2011, NSO created the Pegasus software that can covertly take control of a mobile phone, copy its data and turn on the microphone for surveillance, all via a single phone call via What’sApp. NSO spyware has been licensed to dozens of countries including Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Bahrain and the UAE.

In February, Novalpina Capital, a London-based hedge fund, bought a controlling interest in the NSO Group. Spyware, it seems, is a high-growth investment opportunity.

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Tuesday, 26 March 2019

8 Historic Cases That Show the FBI and CIA Were Out of Control Long Before Russiagate

John Miltimore and Carey Wedler
Activist Post

Conservatives tend to have two bad habits. First, they’re prone to viewing the past through a nostalgic lens. Second, they tend to instinctively give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt.
These tendencies help explain why conservatives for decades have been able to overlook the many abuses—constitutional, legal, and moral—of US intelligence agencies.

Unlike some more seasoned media, conservatives have appeared genuinely shocked by revelations of the Trump-Russia saga: abuse of FISA warrants, classified leaks from top FBI brass, corruption, campaign moles, and an apparent plot to remove an elected president through undemocratic (and likely extra-constitutional) means.

These revelations are unique in that they have become highly public and involve a sitting president. However, an examination of the history of US intelligence agencies reveals government bureaucrats were out of control long before the 2016 presidential election.








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Thursday, 10 January 2019

The Real 'Russian Trolls': Hamilton68 and The Alliance for Securing Democracy

Joe Quinn
Sott.net


Given that most people have already taken a position on the topic, it seems a bit late in the day to be pointing this out, but there is now clear evidence to suggest that the 'Russia hacked our election' claim is not only entirely false, but the people who made the claim in the first place - members of the US intelligence, political and corporate establishment (as well as other ideologues) - were and are themselves the creators of the only "Russian troll" social media accounts that have actually been shown to have done any 'hacking'.

A December 19th 2018 NY Times article revealed that a group of "Democratic tech experts" decided to use "similarly deceptive tactics" (as those imputed to Russian trolls) in the Alabama Senate race contested by Roy Moore in December 2017. An internal report on what is called the 'Alabama effort', obtained by The Times, says explicitly that it "experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections." The project's operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. And how was the division sown?

"We orchestrated an elaborate 'false-flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet," the report says.

One participant in the Alabama project, Jonathon Morgan, is the chief executive of New Knowledge, a small cyber security firm that wrote a scathing account of Russia's social media operations in the 2016 election, and which was released this week by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Morgan said that the Russian botnet ruse "does not ring a bell," adding that others had worked on the effort and had written the report. He said he saw the project as "a small experiment" designed to explore how certain online tactics worked, not to affect the election. This appears to be a lie on both counts, given that, as the AL Senate race was in process, Morgan tweeted that the "Russian botnet" that he and others had created was "taking an interest" in the campaign. 


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See also: New Studies Show Pundits Are Wrong About Russian Social-Media Involvement in US Politics

Wednesday, 18 July 2018

Trump Flogs Himself For Telling The Truth About Russian Witch Hunt After Establishment Freakout

Chris Menahan
InformationLiberation 


"I've been a very, very naughty boy!"

"I'm so sorry I told the truth to the American people and the world about the deep state witch hunt working to sabotage my presidency and destroy US relations with Russia!"

"I believe the same intelligence community which spied on my presidential campaign and said Iraq had WMDs is the most trustworthy bunch of people in the world!"


"I believe the unelected bureaucrats that comprise our intelligence community which oversaw targeted assassinations and created a presidential 'kill list' for Obama are never in the wrong and questioning them is treason!"

"John Brennan, James Clapper, Robert Mueller, Peter Strzok and Sally Yates et al. have all shown themselves to be above politics and not political hacks for the establishment!"

"Did I mention I think JFK was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald and believe in the magic bullet theory with all my heart?!"

Trump was made to publicly flog himself in a meeting Tuesday at the White House for questioning the wisdom of our shadow government. He didn't go quite as far as I said above, but that's obviously what the establishment wanted of him. (You have to wonder if Jeff Flake or some other loser didn't threaten to vote against his Supreme Court pick to get him to do this.)
 


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Thursday, 14 June 2018

Next? US intelligence developing human DNA-like models to hoard your personal data

RT

As US intelligence services struggle to store the trove of data collected during its snooping operations, a team of researchers are developing radical new storage technology based on an unusual model - human DNA. The Molecular Information Storage program, run by the rather protractively-named Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), is recruiting scientists to help develop a system for storing huge amounts of data on "sequence-controlled polymer," molecules with a similar makeup and structure to DNA.
 

The technology has huge potential as researchers believe DNA-like polymer technology can store data more than 100,000 times more efficiently than current methods. The IARPA hopes that it could one day process entire exabytes of data while reducing the amount of physical space required to store it. To give you an idea of the scale: one exabyte, or one quintillion bytes, is four million times the storage capacity of a 256GB iPhone X.

The issue of how to store data is a live one for the world's intelligence services. Costly data centers take up huge amounts of land, an unsustainable situation given the increasing amount of data generated by each person on a daily basis.

"Faced with exponential data growth, large data consumers may soon face a choice between investing exponentially more resources in storage or discarding an exponentially increasing fraction of data," the IARPA said in a statement cited by Nextgov.

Some data centers are even housed in urban locations. The Lakeside Technology Center in Chicago is the largest data storage facility in the US, spanning 1.1 million square feet, an entire city block. On the site of the former printing press for the Yellow Pages, the center was transformed in 1999 and now holds more than 50 generators whirring around the clock. The Chicago facility is only matched by the NSA's $1.5billion Bumblehive data center in Bluffdale, Utah, which is just over 1 million square feet.
Ultimately, the IARPA aims to scale down an exabyte storage facility so that it can fit in one room and run for less than $1million per year.

There are three distinct strands to the project, with the agency hoping to create systems for storing and retrieving information. The IARPA is calling on developers to help put together an easy-to-use operating system.

Monday, 28 May 2018

Microsoft Wins Lucrative Cloud Deal With Intelligence Community

Bloomberg

 

Microsoft Corp. said it’s secured a lucrative cloud deal with the intelligence community that marks a rapid expansion by the software giant into a market led by Amazon.com Inc. 

 

The deal, which the company said Wednesday is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, allows 17 intelligence agencies and offices to use Microsoft’s Azure Government, a cloud service tailored for federal and local governments, in addition to other products Microsoft already offers, such as its Windows 10 operating system and word processing programs. 

 

The cloud agreement gives Microsoft more power to make its case to the Pentagon as goes up against competitors like International Business Machines Corp., Oracle Corp. and Amazon for the agency’s winner-take-all cloud computing contract for up to 10 years. Amazon Web Services, the leading cloud provider, is widely perceived to be the front-runner for the job, which is expected to amount to billions of dollars over the duration of the contract. 

 

"What this does, is it reinforces the fact that we are a solid cloud platform that the federal government can put their trust in," Dana Barnes, the vice president of the company’s national security group, said in an interview. "If the IC can trust it, so can the DOD." 

 

A Pentagon spokeswoman didn’t comment on the Microsoft cloud agreement.

Monday, 7 May 2018

De-Briefing Academics: Unpaid Intelligence Informants

Prof. James Petras
Global Research 

Introduction

Over the past half-century, I have been engaged in research, lectured and worked with social movements and leftist governments in Latin America. I interviewed US officials and think tanks in Washington and New York. I have written scores of books, hundreds of professional articles and presented numerous papers at professional meetings.

In the course, of my activity I have discovered that many academics are frequently engage in what government officials dub ‘de-briefing’! Academics meet and discuss their field-work, data collection, research finding, observations and personal contacts over lunch at the Embassy with US government officials or in Washington with State Department officials.

US government officials look forward to these ‘debriefings”; the academic provided useful access to information which they otherwise could not obtain from paid, intelligence agents or local collaborators.

Not all academic informants are very well placed or competent investigators. However, many provide useful insights and information especially on leftist movements, parties and leaders who are real or potential anti-imperialist adversaries.

US empire builders whether engaged in political or military activities depend on information especially regarding who to back and who to subvert; who should receive diplomatic support and who to receive financial and to military resources.

De-briefed academics identify ‘moderate’ and ‘radical’ adversaries, as well as personal and political vulnerabilities. Officials frequently exploit health problems or family needs to ‘turn’ leftists into imperial stool pigeons.

US officials are especially interested in academic gate-keepers who exclude ‘anti-imperialist’ critics, activists , politicians and government officials.

At times, US State Department officials claim to be sympathetic ‘progressives’ who oppose ‘Neanderthals’ in their institution, in order to elicit inside information from leftist academic informants.

Debriefing is a widespread practice and involves numerous academics from major universities and research centers, as well as non-governmental ‘activists’ and editors of academic journals and publications.

Academic participates in debriefing frequently do not publicize their reporting to the government. Most likely they share their reports with other academic informers. All claim they are merely sharing research and diffusing information for ‘science’ and to further ‘humane values’.

Academic informers always justify their collaboration as providing a clear and more balanced picture to ‘our’ policymakers, ignoring the predictable destructive outcomes likely to ensue.

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Sunday, 6 May 2018

Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Classified History

James Henry
whowhatwhy.org

It’s been half a decade since two bombs exploded at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon, yet the government continues to maintain a seemingly impenetrable wall of silence around what it knows about the primary instigator of the attack that traumatized a major city for nearly a week bombing mastermind Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

It’s been four years since the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community wrote an “unclassified summary” of a report (IGIC Report) that laid out what federal agencies knew about Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the years leading up to the bombing. But most of that report commissioned by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) remains classified. 

However, the inspectors general (IGs) expressed  their own displeasure with the level of secrecy veiling the final report: in its first few lines they asked for a review of the protocols — known as “classification and sensitivity designations” — used to withhold the majority of it.

In our ongoing efforts to make public as much as possible about the history of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, WhoWhatWhy requested through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) those classification designation reviews.

It’s now been more than two years — and we’re still waiting.

Tamerlan’s younger brother, Dzhokhar, was convicted and sentenced to death in 2015 for his role in the attack. He’s currently being held at the US government’s maximum-security penitentiary in Florence, Colorado. Tamerlan was killed in a shootout with police days after the bombing and many important details about his history died with him. 

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Friday, 13 April 2018

Lavrov: Intel services of ‘a state’ that promotes Russophobia behind ‘staged’ Douma chemical attack

RT

Moscow has "irrefutable" data that the incident in Douma, Syria was staged by the intelligence services of a foreign state pushing a "Russophobic campaign," Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated.

"We have irrefutable evidence that it was another staging, and the special services of a state which is in the forefront of the Russophobic campaign had a hand in the staging," Lavrov said at a news conference with his Dutch counterpart Stef Blok on Friday.

During their meeting in Moscow, both diplomats touched upon Syria, which has recently been threatened with new military strikes in the wake of an alleged chemical attack. Some Western leaders, including from the US and France, claim that the Syrian government is behind the alleged incident. It comes despite a team from the Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), tasked with establishing the truth, only just arriving in the country.

Russia’s top diplomat warned against following the Libyan and Iraqi scenarios amid the intensifying bellicose rhetoric.

“God forbid something adventurous will be undertaken in Syria similar to the Libyan or Iraqi experience… I hope nobody dares to,” Lavrov told reporters. 

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Sunday, 21 January 2018

The Real Life House of Cards: Insider Deals, Murder & Espionage- The Clintons, Seth Rich & Awans!’




Due to popular demand Newsbud.com has released this full video to the public. The trailer was initially released on August 5th 2017. 

To get full access to videos like this and more, be sure to join the Newsbud Activist Community! 

Follow the saga of the Clinton’s in this unique time line starting with the race for the White House with all of the major scandals leading up to present day including Russia gate, Seth Rich, the Awan’s and much more only available at Newsbud.com 

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Thursday, 28 December 2017

Civil Servants Are Deliberately Destroying Documents From The UK's National Archive

Zero Hedge

In yet another galling example of historical revisionism put into practice, the Guardian reported Tuesday that thousands of documents from the National Archives have gone missing in recent years – and some may have been deliberately destroyed by civil servants hoping to purge unflattering details about the UK's abuses of power from the historical record.

Per the Guardian:
Thousands of government papers detailing some of the most controversial episodes in 20th-century British history have vanished after civil servants removed them from the country’s National Archives and then reported them as lost.

Documents concerning the Falklands war, Northern Ireland’s Troubles and the infamous Zinoviev letter – in which MI6 officers plotted to bring about the downfall of the first Labour government - are all said to have been misplaced.

Other missing files concern the British colonial administration in Palestine, tests on polio vaccines and long-running territorial disputes between the UK and Argentina.

Almost 1,000 files, each thought to contain dozens of papers, are affected. In most instances the entire file is said to have been mislaid after being removed from public view at the archives and taken back to Whitehall.
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Saturday, 9 December 2017

The U.S. Media Yesterday Suffered its Most Humiliating Debacle in Ages: Now Refuses All Transparency Over What Happened

The Intercept

 

Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time. The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, with countless pundits, commentators and operatives joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of people, while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened.

The spectacle began on Friday morning at 11:00 am EST, when the Most Trusted Name in News™ spent 12 straight minutes on air flamboyantly hyping an exclusive bombshell report that seemed to prove that WikiLeaks, last September, had secretly offered the Trump campaign, even Donald Trump himself, special access to the DNC emails before they were published on the internet. As CNN sees the world, this would prove collusion between the Trump family and WikiLeaks and, more importantly, between Trump and Russia, since the U.S. intelligence community regards WikiLeaks as an “arm of Russian intelligence,” and therefore, so does the U.S. media.

This entire revelation was based on an email which CNN strongly implied it had exclusively obtained and had in its possession. The email was sent by someone named “Michael J. Erickson” – someone nobody had heard of previously and whom CNN could not identify – to Donald Trump, Jr., offering a decryption key and access to DNC emails that WikiLeaks had “uploaded.” The email was a smoking gun, in CNN’s extremely excited mind, because it was dated September 4 – ten days before WikiLeaks began promoting access to those emails online – and thus proved that the Trump family was being offered special, unique access to the DNC archive: likely by WikiLeaks and the Kremlin.

It’s impossible to convey with words what a spectacularly devastating scoop CNN believed it had, so it’s necessary to watch it for yourself to see the tone of excitement, breathlessness and gravity the network conveyed as they clearly believed they were delivering a near-fatal blow to the Trump/Russia collusion story:


There was just one small problem with this story: it was fundamentally false, in the most embarrassing way possible. Hours after CNN broadcast its story – and then hyped it over and over and over – the Washington Post reported that CNN got the key fact of the story wrong.

The email was not dated September 4, as CNN claimed, but rather September 14 – which means it was sent after WikiLeaks had already published access to the DNC emails online. Thus, rather than offering some sort of special access to Trump, “Michael J. Erickson” was simply some random person from the public encouraging the Trump family to look at the publicly available DNC emails that WikiLeaks – as everyone by then already knew – had publicly promoted. In other words, the email was the exact opposite of what CNN presented it as being.

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Monday, 8 May 2017

Israeli spy agencies’ budget has doubled in ten years

Intel News

The combined budget of the two primary intelligence agencies of Israel, the Mossad and the Shin Bet, has doubled in the past decade, according to a report issued by the Israeli Ministry of Finance. Shin Bet is Israel’s domestic intelligence service, and is primarily responsible for counterterrorism and counterintelligence. The Mossad is Israel’s primary intelligence service, which means that it collects intelligence from foreign targets. The secretive agency also conducts covert and clandestine operations when authorized to do so by Israel’s government. The two agencies tend to work together with varying degrees of [success], but have distinct budgets.

Last week saw a rare instance of the release of a government report on the finances of these two agencies, which tend to shy away from discussing details about their financial scope. The information was included in a larger report about the Israeli government budget for 2018. The Finance Ministry report said that the 2018 budget for the Shin Bet and the Mossad will reach 8.6 billion shekels in the coming year. That amounts to approximately $2.5 million. The ministry report noted that the budget for the two spy agencies has increased by just under 10 percent since last year. The same budget for 2017 was 7.8 billion shekels. That represented an increase of 300 million shekels from the 2016 budget.

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Monday, 10 April 2017

Former CIA Officer: "The Intelligence Confirms The Russian Account On Syria"

Robert Parry
Consortium News 

President Trump earned neocon applause for his hasty decision to attack Syria and kill about a dozen Syrians, but his rash act has all the earmarks of a “wag the dog” moment.

Just two days after news broke of an alleged poison-gas attack in northern Syria, President Trump brushed aside advice from some U.S. intelligence analysts doubting the Syrian regime’s guilt and launched a lethal retaliatory missile strike against a Syrian airfield.

Trump immediately won plaudits from Official Washington, especially from neoconservatives who have been trying to wrestle control of his foreign policy away from his nationalist and personal advisers since the days after his surprise victory on Nov. 8.

There is also an internal dispute over the intelligence. On Thursday night, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. intelligence community assessed with a “high degree of confidence” that the Syrian government had dropped a poison gas bomb on civilians in Idlib province.

But a number of intelligence sources have made contradictory assessments, saying the preponderance of evidence suggests that Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels were at fault, either by orchestrating an intentional release of a chemical agent as a provocation or by possessing containers of poison gas that ruptured during a conventional bombing raid.

One intelligence source told me that the most likely scenario was a staged event by the rebels intended to force Trump to reverse a policy, announced only days earlier, that the U.S. government would no longer seek “regime change” in Syria and would focus on attacking the common enemy, Islamic terror groups that represent the core of the rebel forces.

The source said the Trump national security team split between the President’s close personal advisers, such as nationalist firebrand Steve Bannon and son-in-law Jared Kushner, on one side and old-line neocons who have regrouped under National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, an Army general who was a protégé of neocon favorite Gen. David Petraeus.

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