jonathanturley | Below is my column in The Messenger on the view of diplomats in the
Biden Administration that the President is spreading “misinformation.”
My interest in the story is less the merits than the allegation. The
President is facing the same allegation of ignoring fact and spreading
disinformation that has resulted in thousands being banned or
blacklisted on social media. The Biden Administration has pushed for
such censorship in areas where doctors and pundits held opposing views
on subjects ranging from Covid-19 to climate control. The question is
whether Joe Biden himself should be banned under the standards
promulgated by his own Administration.
Here is the column:
An internal State Department dissent memo was
leaked this past week, opposing the Biden administration’s position on
the war between Israel and Hamas. What was most notable about the memo
is that some administration staffers accused President Joe Biden of “spreading misinformation.”
It was a moment of crushing irony for some of us who have written and testified against
the Biden administration’s censorship efforts. The question is whether,
under the administration’s own standards, President Biden should now be
banned or blacklisted to protect what his administration has called our
“cognitive infrastructure.”
For years, the administration and many
Democrats in Congress have resisted every effort to expose the sprawling
government censorship program that one federal judge described as an “Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.'” As I have written previously, it included grants to academic and third-party organizations to create a global system of blacklists and to pressure advertisers to withdraw support from conservative sites.
As a result, over the last four years,
researchers, politicians, and even satirical sites have been banned or
blacklisted for offering dissenting views of COVID measures, climate
change, gender identity or social justice, according to the House
Judiciary report. No level of censorship seemed to be sufficient for
President Biden, who once claimed that social media companies were “killing people” by not silencing more dissenting voices.
Now, though, President Biden himself is
accused — by some in his own administration — of spreading
misinformation and supporting war criminals.
dailycaller | Top Republican lawmakers requested information from Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas regarding an agency
group that will include former intelligence officials who signed a
letter suggesting the Hunter Biden laptop was a “Russian information
operation,” according to a copy of a Thursday letter first obtained by
the Daily Caller News Foundation.
DHS tapped
former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA
Director John Brennan and former CIA Operations Officer Paul Kolbe, all
of whom signed an October 2020 letter
casting doubt on the legitimacy of the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian
disinformation, to join the Homeland Intelligence Experts Group. In
response, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green and
Republican Texas Rep. August Pfluger are demanding to know DHS’
selection process for the group’s members, according to a copy of the letter.
“Multiple members of this Homeland Intelligence Expert
Group have shown an utter disregard for the truth, not to mention brazen
political bias. Does Secretary Mayorkas really think appointing leading
Russian-collusion hoaxers will increase trust in his department?
Clearly, he doesn’t care,” Green said in a statement to the DCNF.
Both Clapper and Brennan have been previously criticized for misleading the American public. On multiple occasions, Clapper gave incorrect information to Congress.
Clapper gave “inconsistent testimony” about contacts he had with the media while in office, Republicans charged. Additionally, Brennan denied that CIA officials had hacked the computers of Senate Intelligence Committee staffers, a statement that was later proven false.
“James Clapper and John Brennan have no place in
positions of power—much less on a board of so-called experts where they
will surely continue to serve as partisan Democrat operatives disguised
as national security officials. The Department of Homeland Security must
dispense with its disinformation boards and expert groups and focus on
the real national security issues facing our country—such as the
thousands of illegal migrants crossing our southern border on a daily
basis,” Pfluger, who serves as the chairman of the Subcommittee on
Counterterrorism, Law Enforcement, and Intelligence, said in a statement
to the DCNF.
The group will meet four times per year to advise
DHS on intelligence and national security efforts regarding issues such
as “terrorism, fentanyl, transborder issues, and emerging technology,”
DHS said.
DHS didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
CTH |The US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) has contracted New York-based Accrete AI to deploy software that detects “real time” disinformation threats on social media.
The company’s Argus anomaly detection
AI software analyzes social media data, accurately capturing “emerging
narratives” and generating intelligence reports for military forces to
speedily neutralize disinformation threats.
“Synthetic media, including
AI-generated viral narratives, deep fakes, and other harmful social
media-based applications of AI, pose a serious threat to US national
security and civil society,” Accrete founder and CEO Prashant Bhuyan said.
“Social media is widely recognized as
an unregulated environment where adversaries routinely exploit reasoning
vulnerabilities and manipulate behavior through the intentional spread
of disinformation.
“USSOCOM is at the tip of the spear in
recognizing the critical need to identify and analytically predict
social media narratives at an embryonic stage before those narratives
evolve and gain traction. Accrete is proud to support USSOCOM’s
mission.”
But wait… It gets worse!
[PRIVATE SECTOR VERSION]
– The company also revealed that it will launch an enterprise version
of Argus Social for disinformation detection later this year.
The AI software will provide
protection for “urgent customer pain points” against AI-generated
synthetic media, such as viral disinformation and deep fakes.
Providing this protection requires AI
that can automatically “learn” what is most important to an enterprise
and predict the likely social media narratives that will emerge before
they influence behavior. (read more)
Now, take a deep breath…. Let me explain.
The goal is the “PRIVATE SECTOR VERSION.” USSOCOM is the mechanical
funding mechanism for deployment, because the system itself is too
costly for a private sector launch. The Defense Dept budget is used to
contract an Artificial Intelligence system, the Argus anomaly detection AI, to monitor social media under the auspices of national security.
Once the DoD funded system is created, the “Argus detection protocol”
– the name given to the AI monitoring and control system, will then be
made available to the public sector. “Enterprise Argus” is then the
commercial product, created by the DoD, which allows the U.S. based tech
sectors to deploy.
The DoD cannot independently contract for the launch of an operation
against a U.S. internet network, because of constitutional limits via
The Posse Comitatus Act, which limits the powers of the federal
government in the use of federal military personnel to enforce domestic
policies within the United States. However, the DoD can fund the
creation of the system under the auspices of national defense, and then
allow the private sector to launch for the same intents and purposes. See how that works?
realclearwire | Americans are constantly debating policing
and gun control. But to discuss these issues, we have to depend on
government crime data. Unfortunately, politics has infected the data
handling of agencies such as the FBI and the Centers for Disease
Control.
Last year, the CDC became the center of
controversy when it removed its estimates of defensive gun uses from its
website at the request of gun control organizations. For nearly a
decade the CDC cited a 2013 National Academies of Sciences
report showing that the annual number of people using guns to stop
crime ranged from about 64,000 to 3 million. The CDC website listed the
upper figure at 2.5 million.
Mark Bryant, who runs the Gun Violence Archive, wrote to CDC officials after a meeting last year that the 2.5 million number “has been used so often to stop [gun control] legislation.” The CDC’s estimates were subsequently taken down and now lists no numbers.
The FBI is also susceptible to political
pressure. Up until January of 2021, I worked in the U.S. Department of
Justice as the senior advisor for research and statistics, and part of
my job was to evaluate the FBI’s active shooting reports. I showed the bureau that many cases were missing and that others had been misidentified.
Yet, the FBI continues to report that armed citizens stopped only 14 of
the 302 active shooter incidents that it identified for the period
2014-2022. The correct rate is almost eight times higher. And if we
limit the discussion to places where permit holders were allowed to
carry, the rate is eleven times higher.
The FBI defines active shooter incidents as
those in which an individual actively kills or attempts to kill people
in a populated, public area. But it does not include shootings that are
deemed related to other criminal activity, such as robbery or fighting
over drug turf. Active shootings may involve just one shot being fired
at just one target, even if the target isn’t hit.
To compile its list, the FBI hired
academics at the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center
at Texas State University. Police departments don’t collect data, so
the researchers had to find news stories about these incidents.
It isn’t surprising that people will miss
cases or occasionally misidentify them when using news stories, but the
FBI was unwilling to fix its errors when I pointed them out. My
organization, the Crime Prevention Research Center, has found many more
missed cases and is keeping an updated list. Back in 2015, I published a list of missed cases in a criminology publication.
theintercept |While perception management
involves denying, or blocking, propaganda, it can also entail advancing
the U.S.’s own narrative. The Defense Department defines perception
management in its official dictionary
as “[a]ctions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators
to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and
objective reasoning.” This is the part that has, historically, tended to
raise the public’s skepticism of the Pentagon’s work.
The term “perception management” hearkens back to
the Reagan administration’s attempts to shape the narrative around the
Contras in Nicaragua. The Reagan administration sought to kick what his
Vice President George H.W. Bush would later call the “Vietnam syndrome,”
which it believed was driving American public opposition to support for
the Contras. Ronald Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey, directed
the agency’s leading propaganda specialist to oversee an interagency
effort to portray the Contras — who had been implicated in grisly
atrocities — as noble freedom fighters.
“An elaborate system of inter-agency committees was eventually formed
and charged with the task of working closely with private groups and
individuals involved in fundraising, lobbying campaigns and
propagandistic activities aimed at influencing public opinion and
governmental action,” an unpublished draft chapter of Congress’s
investigation into Iran-Contra states. (Democrats dropped the chapter in
order to get several Republicans to sign the report.)
The Smith-Mundt Act, passed in 1948 in the wake of the Second World
War, prohibits the the State Department from disseminating “public
diplomacy” — i.e., propaganda — domestically, instead requiring that
those materials be targeted at foreign audiences. The Defense Department
considered itself bound by this requirement as well.
After the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon triggered backlash after
U.S. propaganda was disseminated in the U.S. In 2004, the military signaled that it had begun its siege on Fallujah. Just hours later, CNN discovered that this was not true.
But in 2012, the law was amended to allow propaganda to be circulated
domestically, under the bipartisan Smith-Mundt Modernization Act,
introduced by Reps. Adam Smith, D-Wash., and Mac Thornberry, R-Texas,
which was later rolled into the National Defense Authorization Act.
“Proponents of amending these two sections argue that the ban on
domestic dissemination of public diplomacy information is impractical
given the global reach of modern communications, especially the
Internet, and that it unnecessarily prevents valid U.S. government
communications with foreign publics due to U.S. officials’ fear of
violating the ban,” a congressional research service report said
at the time of the proposed amendments. “Critics of lifting the ban
state that it may open the door to more aggressive U.S. government
activities to persuade U.S. citizens to support government policies, and
might also divert the focus of State Department and the BBG
[Broadcasting Board of Governors] communications from foreign publics,
reducing their effectiveness.”
The Obama administration subsequently approved a highly classified
covert action finding designed to counter foreign malign influence
activities, a finding renewed and updated by the Biden administration,
as The Intercept has reported.
The IPMO memo produced for the academic institution hints at its role
in such propagandistic efforts now. “Among other things, the IPMO is
tasked with the development of broad thematic messaging guidance and
specific strategies for the execution of DoD activities designed to
influence foreign defense-related decision-makers to behave in a manner
beneficial to U.S. interests,” the memo states.
As the global war on terror
draws to a close, the Pentagon has turned its attention to so-called
great power adversaries like Russia and China. Following Russia’s
meddling in the 2016 election, which in part involved state-backed
efforts to disseminate falsehoods on social media, offices tasked with
combating disinformation started springing up all over the U.S.
government, as The Intercept has reported.
The director of national intelligence last year established a new
center to oversee all the various efforts, including the Department of
Homeland Security’s Countering Foreign Influence Task Force and the
FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force.
The Pentagon’s IPMO differs from the others in one key respect:
secrecy. Whereas most of the Department of Homeland Security’s
counter-disinformation efforts are unclassified in nature — as one
former DHS contractor not authorized to speak publicly explained to The
Intercept — the IPMO involves a great deal of highly classified work.
That the office’s work goes beyond simple messaging into the rarefied
world of intelligence is clear from its location within the Pentagon
hierarchy. “The Influence and Perception Management Office will serve as
the senior advisor to the USD(I&S) [Undersecretary of Defense for
Intelligence and Security] for strategic operational influence and
perception management (reveal and conceal) matters,” the budget notes.
When asked about the intelligence community’s counter-disinformation
efforts, Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, director of the Defense Intelligence
Agency, told Congress this month, “I think DIA’s perspective on this,
senator, is really speed: We want to be able to detect that and it’s
really with our open-source collection capability working with our
combatant command partners where this is happening all over the world —
and then the ability to turn something quickly with them, under the
right authorities, to counter that disinformation, misinformation.”
askapol |Last Thursday, July 27, the day after UFO whistleblower David Grusch testified before the House Oversight Committee, Ask a Polbrought
it up to Senate Intelligence Committee Vice-Chair Marco Rubio (R-FL)
who hadn’t caught the testimony but was quick to say he wasn’t
dismissing it.
“We’re not ignoring it,” Rubio says, adding
the Senate Intelligence Committee is trying to deal with it “in a very
different way” than their House counterparts.
Rubio also pulls the veil back a tad on his thinking as he describes the Senate focus on UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena).
“You
have to bifurcate this issue. The stuff that they're seeing over
restricted airspace, which everyone admits is real and needs to be
addressed,” Rubio says. “And then the stories about historic programs.
I mean, I don't know, that's gonna take—if that's even true—that's
gonna take a long time to unpack. And I'm not ignoring that either.”
As for if their investigation is bearing any fruit?
“Am I
getting answers? Like are people—no. We're getting a lot of information,
I'm not sure we're getting a lot of answers yet,” Rubio says. “But
these things take time.”
Forbes | UFO fever has been sweeping through the internet in the wake of
explosive claims made by “UFO whistleblower” David Grusch, a former
military intelligence official and Air Force veteran who says the U.S.
government is in possession of alien spacecraft.
Grusch recently appeared on NewsNation to elaborate on his claims, interviewed by journalist Ross Coulthart.
The past few years have seen the fringe beliefs of UFO enthusiasts spread from The Joe Rogan Experience to the New York Times and the Guardian, imbuing UFO mythology with a newfound sense of legitimacy.
During his NewsNation interview, Grusch offered no evidence for his
extraordinary claims, but said that his information comes from “several
sources.” Grusch confirmed that he had not personally seen any of the
alleged alien spacecraft, but has seen “some interesting photos” and
“read some very interesting reports.”
UFO skeptic Mick West released an excellent response video
to Grusch’s interview that delves into the details of his claims.
Notably, many of Grusch’s claims contain illogical assumptions,
popularized by science fiction tropes.
While science fiction can offer a glimpse into an imagined future,
the genre often reflects the cultural anxieties and technological
limitations of the time period in which it is conceived.
What are Grusch’s claims?
Grusch claims that the United States is in possession of multiple
“vehicles” or “spacecraft” constructed by a "non-human intelligence" and
that their existence is being concealed from the public.
Grusch says that these spacecraft have “either landed or crashed” on
Earth, and that both the U.S. government and defense contractors are
currently working to reverse-engineer the technology.
Extraordinarily, Grusch even claimed that some of the vehicles
contained the bodies of pilots, and that some of the spacecraft were
“very large, like a football field kinda size.”
Grusch stated that the vehicles were not “necessarily
extraterrestrial,” and speculated that they might come from another
dimension, stating, “as somebody who studied physics, where maybe
they’re coming from a different physical dimension, as described in
quantum mechanics.”
Grusch described the vehicles as being composed of “extremely
strange, heavy, atomic metal, you know, high up at the periodic table,
arrangements that we don’t understand.”
Grusch hinted that some of the alien beings were malevolent, and had
even killed humans. Grusch also implied that there is some kind of
secret agreement between the government and aliens, and that people have
been murdered to protect the secret.
Grusch claimed that he was taking “great personal risk and obvious professional risk” by speaking to the media.
theguardian |Hidden among the avalanche of documents leaked by Edward Snowden were images from a Powerpoint presentation by GCHQ, entitled The Art of Deception:
Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations. Images
include camouflaged moths, inflatable tanks, women in burqas, and
complex diagrams plastered with jargon, buzzwords and slogans:
"Disruption Operational Playbook", "Swap the real for the false and vice
versa", "People make decisions as part of groups" and, beneath a shot
of hands shuffling a deck of cards, "We want to build Cyber Magicians".
Curiously, sandwiched in the middle of the document are three
photographs of UFOs. Not real ones – classic fakes: one was a hub cap,
another a bunch of balloons, and one that turned out to be a seagull.
Devout
ufologists might seize upon this as further proof that our governments
"know something" about aliens and their transportation methods, but
really it suggests the opposite: the UFO community is a textbook case of
a gullible group susceptible to manipulation. Having spent too long
watching the skies and The X-Files, it's implied, they'll readily
swallow whatever snippet of "evidence" suits their grand theory.
If
there really is a UFO conspiracy, it's surely the worst-kept secret in
history. Roswell, Area 51, flashing lights, little green men, abductions
– it's all been fed through the pop culture mill to the point of
fatigue. Even the supposed enforcers of the secret, the "men in black",
have their own movie franchise. But a new documentary, Mirage Men,
unearths compelling evidence that UFO folklore was actually fabricated
by the US government. Rather than covering up the existence of aliens,
could it be that the real conspiracy has been persuading us to believe
in them?
Mirage Men's chief coup is to land an actual man in black: a former Air Force special investigations officer named Richard Doty, who admits to having infiltrated UFO circles. A fellow UFO researcher says: "Doty had this wonderful way to sell it – 'I'm with the government. You cooperate with us and I'm going to tell you what the government really knows about UFOs, deep down in those vaults.'" Doty and his colleagues fed credulous ufologists lies and half-truths, knowing their fertile imaginations would do the rest. In return, they were apprised of chatter from the community, thus alerting the military when anyone was getting to close to their top-secret technology. And if the Soviets thought the US really was communing with aliens, all the better.
The classic case, well-known to conspiracy aficionados, is Paul Bennewitz, a successful electronics entrepreneur in New Mexico. In 1979, Bennewitz started seeing strange lights in the sky, and picking up weird transmissions on his amateur equipment. The fact that he lived just across the road from Kirtland air force base should have set alarm bells ringing, but Bennewitz was convinced these phenomena were of extraterrestrial origin. Being a good patriot, he contacted the Air Force, who realised that, far from eavesdropping on ET, Bennewitz was inadvertently eavesdropping on them. Instead of making him stop, though, Doty and other officers told Bennewitz they were interested in his findings. That encouraged Bennewitz to dig deeper. Within a few years, he was interpreting alien languages, spotting crashed alien craft in the hills from his plane (he was an amateur pilot), and sounding the alert for a full-scale invasion. All the time, the investigators were surveilling him surveilling them. They gave Bennewitz computer software that "interpreted" the signals, and even dumped fake props for him to discover. The mania took over Bennewitz's life. In 1988, his family checked him into a psychiatric facility.
There's plenty more like this. As Mirage Men discovers, central tenets of the UFO belief system turn out to have far earthlier origins. Mysterious cattle mutilations in 1970s New Mexico turn out to have been officials furtively investigating radiation in livestock after they'd conducted an ill-advised experiment in underground "nuclear fracking". Test pilots for the military's experimental silent helicopters admit to attaching flashing lights to their craft to fool civilians. Doty himself comes across as a slippery character, to say the least. "He remains an absolute enigma," says Mark Pilkington, writer of the book Mirage Men, the basis for the documentary. He found the retired Doty working as a traffic cop in a small New Mexico town. "Some of what he said was true and I'm sure a lot of it wasn't, or was a version of the truth. I have no doubt Rick was at the bottom of a ladder that stretches all the way to Washington. It's unclear to what extent he was following orders and to what taking matters into his own hands."
Doty almost admits to having had a hand in supposedly leaked "classified" documents, such as the "Majestic 12" dossier – spilling the beans on a secret alien liaison committee founded by President Truman. But he denies involvement in the "Project Serpo" papers – which claimed that 12 American military personnel paid a secret visit to an alien planet in the Zeta Reticuli system – only to be caught out as the source of the presumed hoax. The Serpo scenario, it has been noted, is not unlike the plot of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. Does that suggest that the forgers lazily copied the movie? Or that the movie is based on real events and Spielberg was in on the conspiracy?
ng.opera | September 11, 2015, a terrible drama took place in Mecca.
107 people died and another 240 were injured. It was said that the
origin of this accident would be a sandstorm that occurred instantly
over the city of Mecca. Fans of conspiracy theories say Saudi Arabia has given Russia an ancient apocalyptic weapon discovered under the great mosque in Mecca, according to Daily Star
Through the darkest corners of the internet, there was a rumor that under the Masjid al-Haram mosque, the holiest place of Islam, a legendary weapon called the “Ark of Gabriel” was discovered.
According to the legend, the archangel Gabriel, who told the Virgin
Mary that she would give birth to Jesus, and would have dictated the
Qur’an to Prophet Mohammed – would also entrust to the founder of
Islamic religion a box or an ark with an “enormous power”.
Mohammed was told to bury the ark in an altar, to a place of prayer, to be dug up only when the end of the world is near.
On
September 11, 2015, in an attempt to move that mysterious weapon, it
instantly ejected a huge plasma emission that was so powerful that it
affected the crane that crashed across people, causing 107 victims.
A
second attempt to move the mysterious weapon took place on September
24, 2015, but this time, that huge plasma emission caused thousands of
deaths in Mina, very close to Mecca. The authorities blamed the “panic
of the crowd” and hid the truth from public opinion.
The
authorities did not give an official statement. A photo that was caught
before the catastrophe raises many questions. It's a flash that was
caught a few minutes before the tragedy was produced.
Immediately after the second catastrophe, His Holiness, Patriarch Kiril of Moscow, was contacted by the Saudis.
Why? Because the Russian Orthodox Church holds an old Islamic manuscript, which was rescued by the Roman Catholic crusaders in 1204 when they robbed the Hagia Sophia Cathedral in Constantinople (today Istanbul, Turkey).
This manuscript, titled “Gabriel’s Instructions to Muhammad”, presents the history of the instructions given to Mohammed by the angel Gabriel in a cave called Hira, located on Mount Jabal un-Nour, near Mecca.
The angel entrusted to Muhammad a “box/ark” with a “tremendous power,” belonging to God and only to God.
This “box” should not be used at all, but buried in an altar, “in the place of worship of angels before the creation of man,” until Qiyamah, that is, until “the Resurrection Day.”
Gabriel’s Ark to Russians?
What happened next to this mysterious “box” / “weapon” buried in Mecca?
There is information that “the weapon of the Angel Gabriel” might now be in the hands of the Russians, a Russian military ship, Admiral Vladimiski, leaving in November 2015 the Jeddah Saudi Port, carrying on board the mysterious object, called “Gabriel’s Ark”.
And the Russians took this weapon to Antarctica. Why there? I have no
idea, but not for nothing, the Nazis had secret bases in Antarctica.
There is something mysterious there …
Russia
has provided specialists and a ship to transport the object. It is also
said that to protect the ship, the Russians used nuclear weapons that
produced the catastrophe.
On September 25, Patriarch Cyril, the head of the Russian church, had a meeting with representatives of the Saudi authorities.
It is said that the object discovered is of an extraordinary importance to the Russian church.
This information came to the press after a Kremlin report, which unofficially came to the hands of some media representatives.
The report explains that the 15 scientists who participated in the
removal of the precious object from the underground, at the time of its
extraction, produced a huge explosion.
A plasma
emission caused an explosion in one of the tunnels. In ancient religious
texts, it is said that God forbade the use of this mysterious,
destructive object that Mohammed would have wanted to use.
This object was hidden under the largest mosque in Saudi Arabia.
Putin was the first head of state to be notified by the Saudi
authorities of the mysterious object discovered. He sent the famous
military ship, Vladimirski, to carry the mysterious object.
A
few days after this event, Putin ordered the bombing of Syria. It is
also said that after this discovery there was a very close relationship
between Russia and Saudi Arabia.
Interestingly, on
February 12, 2016, a historic meeting, the first in over 1,000 years,
took place in Cuba between Pope Francis, the leader of the Roman
Catholic Church and Patriarch Kirill of Russia, the head of the Russian
Orthodox Church.
Why? The exact nature of the
conversation is not known, but there is information “scattered” on the
Internet that Pope Francis would have given Patriarch Kirill another
secret Bible manuscript, owned by the Vatican Library, which speaks of
the same “Gabriel’s Ark” and about which is said to have been written
even by the Bible “Watchmen” (angels).
Leaders of the
greatest Christian denominations, Pope Francis and Patriarch of the
Russian Orthodox Church, Kirill, met for the first time in nearly a
thousand years.
After this meeting of Kirill with Pope Francis, in
6 days, on February 18, 2016, the patriarch of Russia goes directly to
Antarctica (read the news on The Telegraph)!
Surprise
surprise! What does Patriarch Kirill do in Antarctica? Beyond the
official lying statements, he seems to have gone there because the
Russian Navy Vladimir, carrying on board “Gabriel’s ark,” brought in
Antarctica this mysterious ancient object.
With the
help of the Pope’s manuscript, Kirill held a job (an “ancient ritual”)
for Gabriel’s Ark at the Trinity Church of King George (Antarctica), a
small Russian Orthodox church.
Interestingly, there are
rumors that President Obama, during his visit to Argentina (March
26-27, 2016), made a secret visit to Antarctica, in the unknown Russian
location where Gabriel’s ark is housed.
Bizarrely, part of the data is real. The Amiral Vladimisky vessel
called the Jeddah port at the beginning of that month on a
“military-religious” mission.
The reason for the appeal was not officially explained, the Russian press describing it as a mysterious business visit.
Navy spokesperson said:
“THE
CREW HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO REST. THE WATER AND FOOD SUPPLIES WERE
REFRESHED. “BUT STRANGELY, THE CARGO INCLUDED RUSSIAN-MADE CAPSULES THAT
WERE TO BE PLACED IN” MILITARY GLORY “AREAS AND IN THE SEASIDE PLACES
OF RUSSIAN SAILORS.
Sorcha Faal, whose unfounded
allegations about Gabriel’s Ark spread very quickly on the Internet,
offer no reason beyond the fact that Islam and the Russian Orthodox
Church are hostile to the Catholic Church for which Saudi Arabia would
offer Russia this weapon.
Equally well, Sorcha Faal
fails to explain why Russia would carry the gun to the Antarctic, but
only provides some links to conspiracy theories about the existence of a
“Nazi Nazi UFO base” at the South Pole.
Faal is
considered to be a pseudonym of David Booth who owns the What Does It
Mean site, the site that first appeared the information.
It
is very unlikely that Booth, whose beliefs are the same, and that
according to which a planet named Nibiru will strike the Earth until
March 2016, have access to the Russian army’s secret reports.
gilbertdoctorow | The many months long battle for the provincial Donbas city of
Bakhmut, or Artyomovsk as it is known in Russia, has been described
variously from on high in Washington, London and Berlin. When the likely
outcome was unclear, the defense of Bakhmut was called heroic and
demonstrative of the brave fighting spirit of the Ukrainians.
👴🇺🇸🇺🇦🇷🇺"The Russians have suffered over 100 000 cssualties in Bakhmut...I'ts hard to make up. It's hard to make up" - Joe Biden
Casualty figures issued by Kiev and then trumpeted from Washington
suggested that the Russians were stupidly throwing away the lives of
their fighting men by using WWI style human waves of attackers who were
decimated by the defenders. Russian lives are cheap was the message. The
fact that Russian artillery on site outnumbered and outperformed
Ukrainian artillery by a factor of five or seven to one was freely
admitted by the Western propagandists as they pleaded for increased
supplies to Kiev. They, nonetheless, issued casualty reports for the
Russians that inverted the force correlation. It was assumed, obviously
with reason, that the public was too lazy or too uninterested to do the
arithmetic.
At one moment, the spin doctors in Washington, London and Berlin said
that Ukrainian defense of Bakhmut made sense because it was pinning
down Russian forces and giving time to the Ukrainians to train and
position their men for the heralded “counter offensive” during which
they would overrun Russian positions at chosen points in the 600 mile
line of combat and drive a wedge through to the Sea of Azov, opening the
way for recapture of Crimea. Those were grand words and ambitions to
justify continued and ever rising Western military assistance to Kiev.
At another point, the spin doctors said it would be better if Ukraine
stopped losing men in Bakhmut and launched instead that much vaunted
counter-offensive. Now we were told that Bakhmut is just a Russian
fantasy, that it has no strategic value.
In the past couple of weeks, the Russian command has issued daily
reports on the progressive capture by Russian forces of Bakhmut, square
kilometer after square kilometer. We were told they controlled 75%, then
80% and most recently more than 90% of the city proper while artillery
bombardment of the remaining blocks of high rise residential buildings
that were being used by Ukrainian defenders for their sniper attacks and
intelligence reports on Russian troop movements pulverized everything
in their path.
At this point, the attention of Western media defending truth against
Russian disinformation was directed at the Ukrainian “successes” in
recapturing settlements on the flanks of Bakhmut. Just three days ago The New York Times
was telling its readers that these “breakthroughs” by the Ukrainians
put in jeopardy the Russian forces holding the city proper: they might
be surrounded and compelled to surrender or die. The possibility that
the offensives on the flanks were only intended to facilitate withdrawal
of remaining Ukrainian soldiers from Bakhmut and were tolerated by the
Russians to avoid bloody fights to the death – that possibility crossed
no one’s mind at the NYT, it seems.
Midday yesterday, 20 May, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner
Group which did most of the fighting for Bakhmut on the ground, claimed
total victory. In the evening, President Vladimir Putin announced to
the Russian public that Bakhmut was taken. Joyous messages of
congratulations filled the internet message services in Russia as the
broad public celebrated a victory as iconic as the Battle for
Stalingrad.
Meanwhile, the defenders of the Western public against Russian
“disinformation” were hard at work, straining their brains to find what
to say. This morning’s New York Times still speaks of the battle for Bakhmut as undecided, pointing yet again to the Ukrainian hold on the flanks.
Given their losses in men and materiel defending Bakhmut, the
surrender of the city to the Russians will be a great blow to Ukrainian
fighting morale when it is finally admitted. So will the fate of their
Commander in Chief General Zaluzhny who, according to Russian sources,
has been hospitalized for the past two weeks and remains in critical
condition after falling victim to a Russian strike on a provincial
command center which killed most of the high officers around him. If
nothing else, this speaks to the amazing success of Russian military
intelligence directing their firepower.
Meanwhile, Western media attention to Ukraine is conveniently
redirected at the nonstop travels of President Zalensky who went from
his European tour on to the Middle East, where he attended the meeting
of the Arab League, and thence via French military jet to the G7
gathering in Hiroshima where he held talks with fellow heads of state
and joined them for the obligatory group photos. All the talk was about
when the U.S. will formally give its consent to the dispatch of F16s to
Kiev. For the disseminators of Western disinformation this is a
wonderful distraction from a war that clearly is going badly for Kiev
and in particular a distraction from the counter offensive that looks
less likely with each passing day of Russian military strikes on the
command centers and weapons stores of the Ukrainian side.
The plume of radioactive smoke and ash that rose from the Khmelnitsky
store of British depleted uranium artillery shells in Western Ukraine
after a Russian missile strike, just like the extensive damage to the
Patriot air defense installation near Kiev by a Russian Kinzhal
hypersonic missile tell us all what will be the fate of future Western
arms deliveries to Ukraine. It is an interesting question how much
longer the Ukrainian military or politicians will put up with their high
flying, good life President while the country is well on its way to
hell.
The photo they ran with–depicting Vitaly Klitchko inspecting the downed wreckage of a hypersonic missile–is quite misleading. Firstly, its from earlier in the month, not the recent attack on the Patriot missile battery. Secondly, that's not Kinzhal wreckage… the Kinzhal is
much larger and has different nose cone angles.
Ukraine presented "proof" that they shot down a Kinzhal, hoping perhaps that people will fail a basic shape recognition test. pic.twitter.com/CHRCFJ3jJN
And while the article invites, indeed sets up the
inference that the Russians have rounded these guys up because the
missiles were shot down (even though they weren’t), buried in the
article is a little problem with timing:
NBCNews | The three scientists — Anatoly Maslov, Alexander Shiplyuk
and Valery Zvegintsev — were employees of the Khristianovich Institute
of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in the Siberian city of
Novosibirsk. They were all detained on suspicion of high treason over
the past year, according to the letter published on the institute’s website.
The
letter professes the men’s innocence and praises their academic
achievements, adding that all three chose to stay in Russia rather than
accept highly paid and prestigious work abroad.
“We know
each of them as a patriot and a decent person who is not capable of
doing what the investigating authorities suspect them of,” it said.
It
is rare and risky in modern Russia to speak out in defense of people
charged with treason, especially after a bill was adopted last month
increasing the maximum sentence for the crime to life in jail.
The Russian state media agency Tass reported on the arrests of Maslov and Shiplyuk last summer and on Zvegintsev’s this week. It said Zvegintsev was detained about three weeks ago and is under house arrest. NBC News could not verify those details.
Shiplyuk was in charge
of the laboratory of hypersonic technologies at the institute, which
has “unique hypersonic aerodynamic installations designed to study the
fundamental and applied problems of hypersonic flight,” according to his
bio on the website. Maslov is a renowned expert in the field of
aerogasdynamics, it said.
The institute released an open letter
in support of Maslov after he was arrested in June for what it said was
“high treason,” saying his colleagues were “shocked” by his detention.
It was also raising money on behalf of the families of Maslov and
Shiplyuk to cover their legal expenses.
Tass reported
this week that the materials in Maslov’s case are classified and have
been handed over to a judge in a St. Petersburg court. The agency said
Maslov’s case was investigated by the FSB, Russia’s secret service.
While
the details of their cases have not been made public, the open letter
by their colleagues said the three men could have been arrested for
simply doing their jobs, including making presentations at global
conferences and taking part in international scientific projects. Their
work was also repeatedly checked by the institute’s expert commission to
ensure it did not include “restricted information,” the letter said.
“In
this situation, we are not only afraid for the fate of our colleagues.
We just do not understand how to continue to do our job,” it added,
raising concerns about “a rapid decline in the level of research” if
employees are too afraid to do their work.
racket | Years ago, when I first began to have doubts about the Trump-Russia
story, I struggled to come up with a word to articulate my suspicions.
If
the story was wrong, and Trump wasn’t a Russian spy, there wasn’t a
word for what was being perpetrated. This was a system-wide effort to
re-frame reality itself, which was both too intellectually ambitious to
fit in a word like “hoax,” but also probably not against any one law,
either. New language would have to be invented just to define the
wrongdoing, which not only meant whatever this was would likely go
unpunished, but that it could be years before the public was ready to
talk about it.
Around that same time, writer Jacob Siegel — a former army infantry and intelligence officer who edits Tablet’s afternoon digest, The Scroll—
was beginning the job of putting key concepts on paper. As far back as
2019, he sketched out the core ideas for a sprawling, illuminating
13,000-word piece that just came out this week. Called “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation,” Siegel’s Tablet article
is the enterprise effort at describing the whole anti-disinformation
elephant I’ve been hoping for years someone in journalism would take on.
It will escape no one’s notice that Siegel’s lede recounts the Hamilton 68 story
from the Twitter Files. Siegel says the internal dialogues of Twitter
executives about the infamous Russia-tracking “dashboard” helped him
frame the piece he’d been working on for so long. Which is great, I’m
glad about that, but he goes far deeper into the topic than I have, and
in a way that has a real chance to be accessible to all political
audiences.
Siegel threads together all the disparate
strands of a very complex story, in which the sheer quantity of themes
is daunting: the roots in counter-terrorism strategy, Russiagate as a
first great test case, the rise of a public-private
“counter-disinformation complex” nurturing an “NGO Borg,” the importance
of Trump and “domestic extremism” as organizing targets, the
development of a new uniparty politics anointing itself “protector” of
things like elections, amid many other things.
He concludes
with an escalating string of anxiety-provoking propositions. One is
that our first windows into this new censorship system, like Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership,
might also be our last, as AI and machine learning appear ready to step
in to do the job at scale. The National Science Foundation just
announced it was “building a set of use cases”
to enable ChatGPT to “further automate” the propaganda mechanism, as
Siegel puts it. The messy process people like me got to see, just
barely, in the outlines of Twitter emails made public by a
one-in-a-million lucky strike, may not appear in recorded human
conversations going forward. “Future battles fought through AI
technologies,” says Siegel, “will be harder to see.”
More
unnerving is the portion near the end describing how seemingly smart
people are fast constructing an ideology of mass surrender. Siegel
recounts the horrible New York Times Magazine article (how did I forget it?) written by Yale law graduate Emily Bazelon just before the 2020 election, whose URL is titled “The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation.” Shorter Bazelon could have been Fox Nazis Censorship Derp: the article the Times
really ran was insanely long and ended with flourishes like, “It’s time
to ask whether the American way of protecting free speech is actually
keeping us free.”
Both the actors in the Twitter Files and
the multitudinous papers produced by groups like the Aspen Institute
and Harvard’s Shorenstein Center are perpetually concerned with
re-thinking the “problem” of the First Amendment, which of course is not
popularly thought of as a problem. It’s notable that the
Anti-Disinformation machine, a clear sequel to the Military-Industrial
Complex, doesn’t trumpet the virtues of the “free world” but rather the
“rules-based international order,” within which (as Siegel points out)
people like former Labor Secretary Robert Reich talk about digital
deletion as “necessary to protect American democracy.” This idea of
pruning fingers off democracy to save it is increasingly popular; we
await the arrival of the Jerzy Kozinski character who’ll propound this
political gardening metaphor to the smart set.
WaPo | The Kremlin’s disinformation
casts the United States — and Ukraine — as villains for creating germ
warfare laboratories, giving Mr. Putin another pretext for a war that
lacks all justification. The disinformation undermines the biological
weapons treaty, showing that Mr. Putin has little regard for maintaining
the integrity of this international agreement. The disinformation
attempts to divert attention from Russia’s barbaric onslaught against
civilians in Ukraine. In 2018, the Kremlin may have been seeking to
shift attention from the attempted assassination of former double agent
Sergei Skripal in Britain, or from the Robert S. Mueller III
investigation that year of Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential
campaign.
The biological laboratories are just one example of Russia’s wider disinformation campaigns.
Data shared by Facebook shows Russians “built manipulative Black Lives
Matter and Blue Lives Matter pages, created pro-Muslim and pro-Christian
groups, and let them expand via growth from real users,” says author Samuel Woolley in “The Reality Game.”
He adds, “The goal was to divide and conquer as much as it was to dupe
and convince.” During the pandemic, Russia similarly attempted to aggravate existing tensions
over public health measures in the United States and Europe. It has
also spread lies about the use of chemical weapons, undermining the
treaty that prohibits them and the organization that enforces it. In the
Ukraine war, Russia has fired off broadsides of disinformation, such as
claiming
the victims of the Mariupol massacre were “crisis actors.” Russia used
disinformation to mask its responsibility for the shoot-down of the
Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 over Ukraine in 2014.
The
disinformation over Ukraine, repeated widely in the Russian media,
plays well with social groups that support Putin: the poor, those
living in rural areas and small towns, and those being asked to send
young men to the front. Mr. Putin so tightly controls the news media
that it is difficult for alternative news and messages to break through.
Disinformation
is a venom. It does not need to flip everyone’s, or even most people’s,
views. Its methods are to creep into the lifeblood, create uncertainty,
enhance established fears and sow confusion.
The best way to strike back is with the facts, and fast. Thomas Kent, the former president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, has pointed out
that the first hours are critical in such an asymmetrical conflict:
Spreaders of disinformation push out lies without worrying about their
integrity, while governments and the news media try to verify
everything, and take more time to do so. Mr. Kent suggests speeding the
release of information that is highly likely to be true, rather than
waiting. For example, it took 13 days for the British government to
reach a formal conclusion that Russia was behind the poisoning of Mr.
Skripal, but within 48 hours of the attack, then-Foreign Secretary Boris
Johnson told Parliament that it appeared to be Russia, which helped tip
the balance in the press and public opinion.
In
Ukraine, when Russia was on the threshold of invasion, government and
civil society organizations rapidly coordinated an informal “early
warning system”to detect and identify Russia’s false claims and
narratives. It was successful when the war began, especially with use of
the Telegram app. In a short time, Telegram use leapt from 12 percent
adoption to 65 percent, according to those involved in the effort
Also
in Ukraine, more than 20 organizations, along with the National
Democratic Institute in Washington, had created a disinformation
debunking hub in 2019 that has played a key role in the battle against the onslaught of lies. A recent report
from the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National
Endowment for Democracy identified three major efforts that paid off for
Ukraine in the fight against Russian disinformation as war began. One
was “deep preparation” (since Russia was recycling old claims from 2014,
they were ready); active and rapid cooperation of civil society groups;
and use of technology, such as artificial intelligence and machine
learning, to help sift through the torrents of Russian disinformation
and rapidly spot malign narratives.
Governments
can’t do this on their own. Free societies have an advantage that
autocrats don’t: authentic civil society that can be agile and
innovative. In the run-up to the Ukraine war, all across Central and
Eastern Europe, civil society groups were sharpening techniques for spotting and countering Russian disinformation.
Plain old media literacy among readers and viewers — knowing how to discriminate among sources, for example — is also essential.
Open societies are vulnerable because
they are open. The asymmetries in favor of malign use of information
are sizable. Democracies must find a way to adapt. The dark actors morph
constantly, so the response needs to be systematic and resilient.
Rand | This week marks one year since Russia's full-scale invasion of
Ukraine began, igniting the largest armed conflict in Europe since World
War II.
RAND researchers have been analyzing the war from countless angles, providing insights on Russian and Ukrainian capabilities, the potential for diplomacy, refugee assistance, and much more.
What have we learned? And what might lie ahead?
We asked nearly 30 RAND experts to reflect on this
grim anniversary by highlighting notable takeaways from the first year
of Russia's all-out war—and sharing what they're watching as the
conflict in Ukraine grinds on. Here's what they said.
“Russia seems poised to resume limited offensives. Ukraine also seeks
another successful counteroffensive. Yet both sides' capabilities are
being worn down. Ukraine will need continued and predictable support as
Russia digs deep into its reserves.”
What stood out in Year One
“The trajectory of Russia-Ukraine negotiations seems odd in retrospect. The sides came closest to outlining the contours of a settlement in the first six weeks of the conflict. What was nearly agreed to then would be inconceivable now.”
What to watch in Year Two
“I will be watching closely to see if Russia is learning from its mistakes or just perpetuating them.”
What stood out in Year One
“Of the war's many takeaways, perhaps the most fundamental is that
large, conventional wars are not just confined to history books. It's a
lesson that many only half-believed until February 24, and one that the
world must never forget going forward.”
What to watch in Year Two
“The big strategic question is whether the front lines will stagnate
and eventually turn the war into a frozen conflict. The answer will
ultimately come down to whether Western military aid or the ongoing
Russian mobilization gains the upper hand.”
What stood out in Year One
“The strategic failure of the Russian leadership and the incompetence of the Russian military.”
What to watch in Year Two
“The evolving views of the Russian elite and the Russian populace toward Putin and the war.”
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