The Information Warfare Thread

[rohala]

Thanks Panzermann! Watched the videos and proceeded to watch similar videos on youtube.

 

 

That Stockwell character is extremely interesting.

[BansheeOne]

This is maybe an unfortunate indication of a trend of even Western governments attempting to control messages in the media, particularly in Eastern Europe.

 

Obama slammed Polish democracy on Friday. Here’s how Polish TV proved him right.

By Michael Birnbaum July 9

WARSAW — Amid fears of a rollback of Poland’s democratic freedoms, President Obama had a harsh message of concern during a trip here for a NATO summit. But viewers of Poland’s main evening news program saw exactly the opposite.

The twisted message would not instill confidence in the new Polish government’s protestations that its media institutions remain independent. Add one more fear to U.S. concerns that a major ally is turning in a new direction after the right-wing Law and Justice party won a sweeping victory in October.

Since its election, the new government has taken steps that critics say eliminate the independence of Poland’s top court, the Constitutional Tribunal, taken control of the main public broadcaster by installing a former politician as its head and initiated prosecutions of members of the former ruling party.

Obama’s tough message Friday, standing alongside Polish President Andrzej Duda, was that he “expressed to President Duda our concerns over certain actions and the impasse around the Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal.”

“More work needs to be done,” Obama said. “And as your friend and ally, we've urged all parties to work together to sustain Poland’s democratic institutions.”

But viewers of Telewizja Polska, the main public broadcaster, saw a very different suggestion on the evening news.

“Ninety-five percent of the meeting was about issues of NATO and security, but Obama praised Polish efforts at democracy,” the reporter said. “Concerning the issue of the constitutional tribunal, he said he is sure that spreading democratic values in Poland will not stop.”

Then the broadcaster played a clip of Obama’s friendly cushioning of his criticism, while skipping the substance of the message.

In the clip played on Polish television, Obama was also translated by a dubbed voice-over as saying that “Poland is and will be an example of democracy for the whole world.”

What he actually said was that “Poland stands and needs to continue stand as an example for democratic practices around the world.”

More than 100 journalists have been dismissed or have resigned from Poland’s public broadcaster this year, a measure of the major changes underway there. Some journalists say that anyone perceived as critical of the Law and Justice party is now under threat. Shortly after the party took office, it changed laws giving Poland’s Finance Ministry the direct power to appoint the head of the broadcaster. The new head is Jacek Kurski, a member of the Law and Justice party and a former member of European Parliament.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/07/09/obama-slammed-polish-democracy-on-friday-heres-how-polish-tv-proved-him-right/

 

And naturally, Russian media seize on the WP piece, since they would never distort the truth as part of government policy themselves, nossir.

 

Polish public broadcaster censors Obama criticism of country's democracy

Published time: 11 Jul, 2016 09:22

Edited time: 11 Jul, 2016 09:29

Speaking alongside President Andrzej Duda in Warsaw, Barack Obama voiced concern over “the impasse around Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal.” But viewers of Poland's top public broadcaster were told the US leader “praised Polish efforts at democracy.”

“I expressed to President Duda our concerns over certain actions and the impasse around Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal. I insisted that we are very respectful of Poland's sovereignty, and I recognize that parliament is working on legislation to take some important steps, but more work needs to be done,” Obama said after he and Duda met at a NATO summit on Friday.

“And as your friend and ally, we've urged all parties to work together to sustain Poland’s democratic institutions,” the US president stressed. “That’s what make us democracies – not just by the words written in constitutions, or in the fact that we vote in elections – but the institutions we depend upon every day, such as rule of law, independent judiciaries, and a free press,” he added.

Viewers of Telewizja Polska were given quite a different picture of the top evening news.

“Ninety-five percent of the meeting was about issues of NATO and security, but Obama praised Polish efforts at democracy,” the reporter said, according to the Washington Post. “Concerning the issue of the constitutional tribunal, he said he is sure that spreading democratic values in Poland will not stop.”

Other parts of Obama's message happened to be somewhat “lost in translation.”

"Poland stands and needs to continue to stand as an example for democratic practices around the world," the US president noted during his speech.

In the clip played on Polish television, Obama was translated as saying that: “Poland is and will be an example of democracy for the whole world.”

Duda's spokesman Marek Magierowski also chose to downplay Obama's criticism.

"President Obama made his statement, President Duda made his," Magierowski told reporters, Reuters reported. "It's difficult to force President Obama to say what this or that politician in Poland would like him to say. I don't see a problem here," he said.

[...]

 

https://www.rt.com/news/350621-polish-censors-obama-democracy/

[Stuart Galbraith]

Speaking of Russia, yet another media holding looks set to end up in the hands of the Kremlin.

http://www.intellinews.com/russian-tycoon-prokhorov-forced-into-fire-sale-of-his-assets-101239/?source=russia

On the positive side, Rupert Murdoch doesnt seem to be bidding.

[Stuart Galbraith]

http://www.scmagazine.com/nato-sites-downed-as-measures-approved-opposing-russian-aggression/article/508730/

 

Three days after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Allied Transformation Command websites were knocked offline, the alliance has yet to release official comments over the cause of the outage that felled two military command websites.

The outages occurred during a NATO summit held in Warsaw last week, raising suspicions that Russian hackers could have attacked the websites in response to the summit's initiatives opposing Russian military aggression. “This is a suspicious timing for a technical failure,” a senior NATO official said, according to a Wall Street Journal report. “If this is a cyberattack, it would be no surprise.”

[DB]

So just what was on these websites that was more than marketing puff and mission statements?

 

Anything? Nothing?

[Stuart Galbraith]

Probably nothing much, but that seldom seems to matter. The hackers also took down the Estonian ministry of defence website and again that doesn't seem to host much other than what you suggest. The real message is pretty much the same as flying a bomber down a coastline. 'Yes, this time its just a warning, but next time.....

 

It doesn't demonstrate much of a capablity, but if nothing else it demonstrates potential intent. Which is surely worrying enough.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Keir Giles again, in a different lecture from that which I posted on the other thread. Cyber War in Perspective: Analysis from the Crisis in Ukraine

[bd1]

Well, i think this thread has a winner!

Quote

 

In 2012 an article appeared in a specialist journal called Economics and Law written by an "AE Vaino" - widely believed to be one and the same person as Mr Putin's new chief of staff.

It was titled "The capitalisation of the future".

Levers of power

Written in a dense academic prose - which many Russian commentators this week said they found almost impossible to understand - and accompanied by even more complex charts and diagrams, the article outlines new ways of organising and understanding society.

Quote

 

Mr Vaino argues that the economy and society in general have become too complex to manage by traditional means. Governments need to seek new ways of regulating and controlling them.

The article describes a new device called a "nooscope" which, it says, can tap into global consciousness and "detect and register changes in the biosphere and in human activity".

The "nooscope" bewildered many in Russia this week. Does the device really exist, they asked. What does it actually do? Is Mr Vaino really serious?

BBC Russian tracked down Viktor Sarayev, an award-winning economist and businessman who has co-authored a number of articles with Mr Vaino.

He described the nooscope as "a device that scans transactions between people, things and money", and claimed it was an invention of parallel significance to the telescope and the microscope.

But he was less forthcoming about whether it actually existed, or was still under development.

'Utopian idea'

Leading Russian academics meanwhile expressed deep scepticism about the theories and solutions propounded by Mr Vaino and his collaborators.

"There isn't any science in this," says Simon Kordonsky, a philosophy professor at Moscow's Higher School of Economics.

He dismissed the article as indulging in "mythological" hypotheses about the future which, he said, contrasted with the genuinely progressive ideas explored by the first generation of Russian reforming economists in the early post-Soviet years.

"If we evaluate this article by its meaning, then without doubt it's a cause for concern," says another philosopher from the same institute, Prof Vitaly Kourennoy.

"It represents a utopian idea which has no connection to science. It's propounding some kind of all-embracing system of government that has to be enforced by top officials."

Viewed from this perspective however, Mr Vaino's theories perhaps begin to make more sense.

They could actually be seen as part of a pattern that has emerged in Russian politics over the past decade, as President Putin has sought to reassert control after the chaos of the early 1990s.

Kremlin spin doctors

Some observers also draw parallels with the approach of one of Mr Vaino's predecessors - former presidential adviser and deputy prime minister Vladislav Surkov.

Dubbed by one Russian politician as "a puppet master who privatised the political system", Mr Surkov is credited with inventing the theory of "managed democracy", through which President Putin now runs Russia unchallenged.

Widely seen as a master of political spin, Mr Surkov specialised in manipulating information in a way which often left his interlocutors unsure as to where the facts ended and the fiction began.

This also appears to be an approach used by Dmitry Kiselyov, the powerful head of the state-run Russia Today media network, and a man often referred to as "the Kremlin's chief propagandist".

Tasked with broadcasting the Kremlin's point of view, both to Russians and the rest of the world, Mr Kiselyov told the BBC earlier this year that "the age of neutral journalism" had passed.

Blurred reality

In expounding his theories about the "nooscope" Anton Vaino seems to be echoing these more high-profile Kremlin colleagues.

There is no way to prove that the world "exists in reality and not in our imagination", he writes in the Economics and Law article, explaining why the nooscope is needed to interpret and manage world events.

Prof Kordonsky feels he has heard it all beforeI.

"It's a state of mind," he told BBC Russian. "It's a rejection of the current realities. They want to change things but they don't want to understand what things are really like. They have a perception of potential greatness […] and they're suggesting a way of changing the country and building a better tomorrow."

If AE Vaino the political scientist and Anton Vaino the new chief of staff really are the same person, as most Russians presume, then the coming months may show if the nooscope can really deliver a "better tomorrow".

Share this story About sharing

 

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37109169

Edited August 24, 2016 by bd1

[Gregory]

[Corinthian]

I dunno where to put the following:

 

http://disinfo.com/2014/08/russia-wants-bulgarians-stop-vandalizing-soviet-monuments-look-like-american-superheroes/

 

 

Russia is demanding that Bulgaria try harder to prevent vandalism of Soviet monuments, after yet another monument to Soviet troops in Sofia was spray-painted, ITAR-Tass reported.

The Russian Embassy in Bulgaria has issued a note demanding that its former Soviet-era ally clean up the monument in Sofia’s Lozenets district, identify and punish those responsible, and take “exhaustive measures” to prevent similar attacks in the future, the news agency reported Monday.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Innovation in the Defense Department. Actually more interesting than it sounds, in that he does reference using outside companies in emerging technologies, including information technologies, and finding a way to interface them with the military.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Washington think tanks hacked by Russians.

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/suspected-russia-based-dnc-hackers-strike-again-targeting-washington-think-tanks-1578620

[BansheeOne]

As noted on the Turkish Troubles Thread, I'm cross-posting this here as a beautiful example for a Russian-style info warfare campaign, though I'm not sure if it was indeed orchestrated by Russia. As an aside, between this and the story that the US allegedly removed its nukes from Incirlik to a Romanian airbase which happens to have neither a special weapons vault nor indeed a functional runway since a missile defense site was built on top of it, this has put euractiv.com on my list of deliberate or unwitting outlets for such campaigns.

 

Does Turkey need Patriarch Bartholomew?

At least since Mustafa Kemal’s time, Orthodox Christians in Turkey have witnessed repressions from the state. Thousands of Turkish-tongue Christians had to emigrate. In 1971, the Halki theological seminary was closed down. The dissemination of orthodox literature and missionary activities of any kind are banned. In an attempt to foster patriotism and obtain a wider support of the conservative part of society, the Turkish government tried to build relations with nationalists, most radical of whom even made several attempts at Patriarch Bartholomew!

It’s no wonder that such a situation induced the Patriarchate to establish close ties with the American political elite. Congregations in the US and the donations from American businesspersons of Greek origin are the main sources of income for the Ecumenical Patriarchate. In its turn, Washington considers the condition of religious minority in Turkey an ace in the diplomatic game to put pressure upon Ankara. Moreover, being primus inter pares among the heads of the other Autocephalous Churches, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople can affect the whole Orthodox world. And, obviously, the US intelligence couldn’t have missed such a chance.

Thus, one of the members of the American-Israeli lobby in the Constantinople Patriarchate is Father Alexander Karloutsos, Public Affairs Officer close to Archbishop Demetrios. Thanks to his ties with high-level officials and Greek-American billionaires, he is basically the only person who controls the money flows from the US to the Phanar, and that gives him wide possibilities of exerting pressure upon the Ecumenical Patriarchate. On the other hand, Fr. Karloutsos is also in good relations with former CIA Director George Tenet, and with the preacher Fethullah Gülen cooperating with the American intelligence. That means the amount of financing is directly bound to how successfully the Patriarchate’s heads accomplish the tasks they receive from their US supervisors.

Besides that, Patriarch Bartholomew personally has met with Gülen, or Hoca Efendi, as he calls him, quite a number of times. For instance, they met on 6 April 1996 to discuss the prospects of interfaith dialogue. This was before Gülen fled to the US with the assistance of the diplomat Morton Abramovitz, CIA agents Graham Fuller and George Fidas, and the above-mentioned Fr. Alexander Karloutsos.

The Patriarch of Constantinople praised Gülen in 2012 when he took part in a meeting of Journalists and Writers’ Association (GYV) founded by the Turkish preacher. About a month before the event, the Chicago Tribune published an interview with Bartholomew in which he highly appreciated Gülen’s efforts to develop interfaith dialogue and foster intimacy among faiths “for the benefit of humankind.” Then, a week past the Association’s meeting, on 13 May 2012 in an interview dedicated to the award Bartholomew received from Roosevelt Institute, the Patriarch publicly mentioned his friendship with Hoca Efendi: “We really love him. We hope he comes back soon.” Should anyone wonder than why the Patriarch of Constantinople touched upon the inadmissibility of Muslim services in Hagia Sophia only on 11 July – a month after they had begun – and just 4 days before the attempted coup?

Does the Turkish government realize its failure after the recent coup attempt? Would they try to win the Orthodox patriarch over or crackdown on him? Obviously, it would be much easier for Erdogan to cut off the foreign financing of the tiny Turkish Orthodox community to get rid of it for good. On the other hand, the cooperation with its own Orthodox Patriarch could give Turkey new possibilities to improve its reputation and expand its influence in the Orthodox world. Should the authorities recognize the Ecumenical status of the Patriarchate of Constantinople at last?

Unfortunately, it would be extremely hard to ground such a decision at this moment. Instead of consolidating Orthodox Churches, the Council held in June on Crete simply alienated them. We saw Patriarch Bartholomew incapable of uniting the Orthodox world. Moreover, it turned out that his influence doesn’t affect even a half of Orthodox Christians! The reasons are his authoritarianism, pertinacity and hostility towards the Russian Orthodox Church.

Such a fact diminishes the Patriarchate’s value for those in power in Turkey. And Patriarch Bartholomew seems to have not that much time to attempt to change the situation.

Amb. Arthur Hughes is the career American diplomat, former United States Ambassador to Yemen, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Near East and South Asia, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs. Currently he is a Scholar at the Middle East Institute, board member of the Foundation for Middle East Peace and of the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs.

 

http://www.therussophile.org/does-turkey-need-patriarch-bartholomew.html/

 

Will Ankara take aim at Patriarch Bartholomew? [unpublished]

DISCLAIMER: All opinions in this column reflect the views of the author(s), not of EurActiv.com PLC.

17. Aug. 2016 (updated: 12:46)

NOTE: EurActiv has unpublished this article following confirmation that the author was a fake. We apologise for the inconvenience this has caused at a challenging time for Turkey and have taken measures to strengthen our internal processes as a consequence.

 

http://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/opinion/will-ankara-take-aim-at-patriarch-bartholomew/

 

Order of St. Andrew condemns fraudulent, dangerous articles targeting His All-Holiness

New York, NY

8/25/2016

The Order of St. Andrew, Archons of the Ecumenical Patriarchate today condemned recent attempts to threaten the well being of His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarchate Bartholomew through the posting of fraudulent articles online under the name of Ambassador Arthur Hughes. Ambassador Hughes had nothing to do with their content and has been working with the Archons to remove such posts and inform others that they are not his work.

In mid-august, Oriental Review Magazine published online an article titled "Does Turkey Need Patriarch Bartholomew?" supposedly written by Ambassador Hughes. The article described His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew as having close ties to Fethullah Gulen, the Turkish religious leader (who lives in the US), who Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has accused of being the leader of the recent failed military coup in Turkey. Following the protest of Ambassador Hughes, the article was taken down.

On August 17 Euractiv.com published a second spurious article wrongly attributed to Ambassador Hughes, making similar accusations, titled "Will Ankara Take Aim at Patriarch Bartholomew?"

National Commander Limberakis strongly condemned such efforts on behalf of the Order. "Not only are these articles fraudulent, they are dangerous attempts to disparage His All-Holiness. We call on all media outlets to more responsibly confirm the source of articles submitted with regard to His All-Holiness."

Below is the message from Ambassador Arthur H. Hughes:

On August 16, 2016, an organization known as Oriental Review, www.orientalreview.org, placed on its website an article concerning the Patriarch of Constantinople and attributed it to me. I can state categorically that I did not write this article, contribute it to Oriental Review, nor do I have any knowledge of the statements alleged in the article. Mr. Andrey Fomin, Founding Editor of Oriental Review, has acknowledged by email that they did not verify whether I in fact had sent the article, expressed regret and removed it from their website. Despite my repeated requests to Mr. Fomin, Oriental Review has not posted a statement indicating that the article in question and my alleged authorship were indeed a fabrication.

Arthur H. Hughes

United States Ambassador (Retired)

 

http://www.archons.org/news/detail.asp?id=917

 

CIA WORKS WITH CLERIC BLAMED FOR TURKISH COUP AND WITH PATRIARCH BARTHOLOMEW, SAYS US AMBASSADOR

The former US ambassador to Yemen, Arthur Hughes, has revealed the close links between the CIA and Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, who has been blamed by the Turkish president for the recent coup plot, and the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople (Istanbul), Bartholomew.

http://deutsche-wirtschafts-nachrichten.de/2016/08/20/us-botschafter-zu-tuerkei-putsch-guelen-ist-ein-mann-der-cia/

http://info.kopp-verlag.de/hintergruende/geostrategie/f-william-engdahl/fuehrende-us-geostrategen-raeumen-amerikanische-beteiligung-am-putschversuch-in-der-tuerkei-ein.html

http://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/opinion/will-ankara-take-aim-at-patriarch-bartholomew/

http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/96286.htm

The information confirms the notion that Gulen spearheaded a coup on behalf of the CIA to depose Turkey’s leader Recept Erdogan after Erdogan agreed to work more closely with Russia’s Vladimir Putin on Syria, and that the Greek Orthodox Church has been captured by the CIA, which in turn works for Globalists.

Hacked documents and emails have revealed the extent of the influence of Billionaire George Soros on Hilary Clinton when she was Secretary of State and US ambassadors like Geoffrey Pyatt in the Ukraine.

A Greek Orthodox priest belonging to the Patriarchate, Alexander Karloutsos, helped organize the escape of Gulen to the USA in 1999 together with US diplomats Morton Abramowitz, the CIA agents Graham Fuller and George Fidas.

Karloutsos, who had close links to former CIA boss George Tenet, channels vast sums of money from US Greek billionaires into the Orthodox church in Istanbul.

“It’s no wonder that such a situation induced the Patriarchate to establish close ties with the American political elite. Congregations in the US and the donations from American businesspersons of Greek origin are the main sources of income for the Ecumenical Patriarchate. In its turn, Washington considers the condition of religious minority in Turkey an ace in the diplomatic game to put pressure upon Ankara. Moreover, being primus inter pares among the heads of the other Autocephalous Churches, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople can affect the whole Orthodox world. And, obviously, the US intelligence couldn’t have missed such a chance.

Thus, one of the members of the American-Israeli lobby in the Constantinople Patriarchate is Father Alexander Karloutsos, Public Affairs Officer close to Archbishop Demetrios. Thanks to his ties with high-level officials and Greek-American billionaires, he is basically the only person who controls the money flows from the US to the Phanar, and that gives him wide possibilities of exerting pressure upon the Ecumenical Patriarchate. On the other hand, Karloutsos is also in good relations with former CIA Director George Tenet, and with the preacher Fethullah Gülen cooperating with the American intelligence. That means the amount of financing is directly bound to how successfully the Patriarchate’s heads accomplish the tasks they receive from their US supervisors,” writes Hughes.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 28th, 2016 at 4:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through theRSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

 

https://birdflu666.wordpress.com/2016/08/28/cia-works-with-cleric-blamed-for-turkish-coup-and-with-patriarch-bartholomew-says-us-ambassador/

 

31.08.2016 Author: F. William Engdahl

Top USA National Security Officials Admit Turkey Coup

While the Obama Administration and the CIA officially cling to the fig leaf lie that US intelligence was innocent of any involvement in the failed July 15 coup d’ etat attempt by the CIA-run Fethullah Gülen organization in Turkey, the truth is coming out from senior US intelligence insiders themselves. It reflects a huge internal faction struggle within US leading circles in what by all accounts is shaping to be the most bizarre Presidential election year in American history.

The first admission that US intelligence had their hand in the anti-Erdogan coup, a coup launched just days after Erdogan announced a major strategic shift away from NATO and towards Russia, came from Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski is one of the most senior members of the US intelligence establishment, a former Obama Presidential adviser and former National Security Council architect of the Jimmy Carter 1979 Mujahideen Afghanistan terror operations against the Soviet forces in that country.

[...]

Brzezinski’s candid critique was followed up by an even more detailed expose of US intelligence ties to Fethullah Gülen, charged by the Turkish government with treason and backing the July 15 coup. In a guest article in the EU online mgazine EurActiv.com dated 17 August, 2016, Arthur H. Hughes confirms the intimate links between Gülen and the CIA, noting that “Gülen fled to the US with the assistance of the diplomat Morton Abramovitz, CIA agents Graham Fuller and George Fidas, and the above-mentioned Fr. Alexander Karloutsos.”

Gülen CIA friend Bartholomew I

Hughes’ article is a bombshell in many respects, and most definitely in his detailing of the intimate ties between the CIA, Gülen and the current Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, current Archbishop of Constantinople and Ecumenical Patriarch. Hughes described the above-mentioned Father Alexander Karloutsos:

“…one of the members of the American-Israeli lobby in the Constantinople Patriarchate is Father Alexander Karloutsos, Public Affairs Officer close to Archbishop Demetrios (of America-w.e.). Thanks to his ties with high-level officials and Greek-American billionaires, he is basically the only person who controls the money flows from the US to the Phanar (the Greek Orthodox part of Istanbul-w.e.), and that gives him wide possibilities of exerting pressure upon the Ecumenical Patriarchate. On the other hand, Karloutsos is also in good relations with former CIA Director George Tenet, and with the preacher Fethullah Gülen cooperating with the American intelligence.”

George Tenet, a close ally of the Clinton political machine is a Greek-American former head of CIA during the time of Bill Clinton and also George W. Bush. The Clintons are both on record praising Fethullah Gülen. It seems to be a cozy network of CIA-Gülen-Constantinople Patriarchate-Clintons, all financed with “money from Greek-American billionaires.”

Arthur H. Hughes is not a casual commentator on events in Turkey and the Middle East. He was US Ambassador to Yemen in the 1990’s during the Clinton Presidency, then Deputy Assistant to the Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. He also served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Near East and South Asia, and was Deputy Chief of Mission in Tel Aviv. His linking of Gülen to the CIA and to the Constantinople Patriarchate points to one of the least-public and most influential covert CIA-run networks in the world, the anti-Moscow Orthodox Patriarchate of Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople. Hughes suggests that if Erdogan and the Turkish government are serious about dealing with future coup threats, they should put the Constintanople Patriarchate under the magnifying glass.

[...]

 

http://journal-neo.org/2016/08/31/top-usa-national-security-officials-admit-turkey-coup/

 

Reportedly Turkish daily "Aksam", owned by a close associate of President Erdogan, ran this story today as fact, citing the fake statements by Ambassador Hughes.

[Panzermann]

For the upcoming POTUS election the ground work is being laid to blame it on the russians whatever comes out of the ballot box:

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/intelligence-community-investigating-covert-russian-influence-operations-in-the-united-states/2016/09/04/aec27fa0-7156-11e6-8533-6b0b0ded0253_story.html

 

 

http://www.wsj.com/articles/clinton-suggests-russian-government-using-cyberattacks-to-influence-election-1473118613

Edited September 6, 2016 by Panzermann

[Stuart Galbraith]

Im not sure cyber comes under this heading, but its somewhat relevant and interesting nonetheless.

 

Basically he says, Cyber is misunderstood, and thats bad because nations are overreacting to the threat. The good news is, cyber attack of the kind of stuxnet, are really very hard, and unlikely to be soemthign 12 year olds come up with.

[Panzermann]

Something like stuxnet ist a grave danger. It has been tailored exactly for its target, the centrifuges. And to know the target system you need informers. And the Siemens industry computers or compatibles are not your average Windows box. Which your average basement dwelling hacker kid does have neither.

 

But to save money more and more systems are directly hooked up to the internet which makes it much easier to access them. For the intended users as well as those not intended to have access.

[sunday]

Some Siemens Industrial Automation software runs under Windows. I think that was the one targeted in the Stuxnet attack.

[Panzermann]

But you still have to know the exact software running that you want to manipulate. Gaining admin rights only takes you half the way.

[Panzermann]

now for something completely different.

 

The story about forbidden burqas in IS held area seems to have been a plant by Iran. I have posted it elsewhere but cannot find it right now. https://amp.ibtimes.co.uk/islamic-state-bans-burka-northern-iraq-after-veiled-woman-kills-2-jihadists-1579804

 

Britains Daily Mail to the U.S. News and World Report and even Foreign Policy over the last few days, seldom mentioning the source of the speculation and often combined with a sputtering caveat that the terrorist group still requires mesh over eyes and gloves to keep hands covered.

Enshrining a strict dress code for women was one of the first things ISIS did after taking over cities. Women were instructed to wear loose-fitting black abayas over their bodies, gloves to hide their hands, and niqabs with an extra layer of mesh to obscure their eyes, or risk getting dragged in by the morality police.

 

But theres no hard proof that the terrorist group has backtracked even somewhat on its mandate for extreme coverage for women. And the burqa-a sack-like garment with a mesh eye covering common in Afghanistan-has never been pushed by ISIS or popular in Iraq, despite the pale blue-clad Afghan women accompanying some articles. In fact, it seems that the entire tale originated with Iranian state media, in an attempt to make ISIS look weak, less pious, or to capitalize on the burqini panic sweeping Europe.

 

Iran Front Page reported on September 4 that a source from Nineveh, Iraq told the Iranian-owned Arabic-language Al Alam News Network that the militant group banned niqab and burqa-clad women from security centers. It noted that the change came after "some fully veiled women killed a number of ISIS commanders and members in the past months." Iran's Western-focused propaganda outfit, PressTV, followed up with a similar story on September 5. It noted the hypocrisy of the terrorist group having killed insufficiently-veiled women before. Both articles mentioned that the alleged ban comes amid the controversy over the burqini in France.

 

Rumors of the ban all track back to an Iranian sources and subsequent articles brought little skepticism. (IraqiNews.com mentioned that a veiled woman killed two fighters in Sharqat, but just said the terrorist group asked fighters to be more alert.) Some even refer to the all-female Al Khansaa morality police force in Raqqa as ISISs female fighters-theyre not-rather than a group that performs functions that men, for modesty reasons, cannot.

 

Rasha Al Aqeedi, a Mosul native and research fellow at the Al Mesbar Studies and Research Center in Dubai, said the Tehran connection immediately raised a red flag.

 

Im thinking, why would anyone in Mosul contact an Iranian agency, she told The Daily Beast

...

 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/07/how-iran-conned-the-internet-into-believing-a-fake-isis-story.html

 

*clap clap clap*

[wendist]

Sweden is joining the Nato Strategic Communications Centre (Stratcom) as part of its efforts to combat disinformation.

 

http://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=2054&artikel=6529871

[Panzermann]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/01/pentagon-paid-for-fake-al-qaeda-videos.html

 

they dropped the faked alquaida videos burnt on CDs during house raids and searches. In real player format. And the real player software connects to the internet autimatically and they tracked the IP addresses used via a specific google analytics account. They also produced propganda videos advertising the new regime.

[Gregory]

Suspicions of Russian Meddling

 

The latest hack of the Democratic nominee’s campaign reveals Clinton has some misgivings about Obama’s push to modernize the nuclear arsenal.

 

Hacked Audio of Clinton Fundraiser Raises More Suspicions of Russian Meddling

 

Another day on the campaign trail, another hack of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. This time it’s an audio recording of the Democratic presidential candidate speaking to donors at a February fundraiser in northern Virginia, and the subject isn’t just the usual stuff of politics: It goes to the heart of American nuclear strategy.

 

The recording that was passed to the right-leaning Washington Free Beacon website marks another alarming episode in a campaign season marked by a series of digital thefts that security experts believe have been carried out by Russian-backed hackers to disrupt the U.S. presidential election.

 

The hack reinforces concerns that Russia is trying to influence and interfere in the U.S. election in favor of the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, who has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and whose aides have long had friendly ties to Moscow and its allies. Both the Clinton campaign and lawmakers have alleged that Russia is attempting to meddle in the election.

 

But it’s not clear this latest hack will have much of an effect on the race for the White House, as the recording touches on questions of longer-term nuclear modernization, as well as relatively obscure details of the Defense Department’s nuclear programs that are unfamiliar to most voters — and apparently even to Clinton herself.

 

In the recording, made at a routine fundraising event at one supporter’s home in the leafy Washington suburb of McLean, Virginia, Clinton questions the elaborate, long-term $1 trillion modernization plan for the country’s nuclear force, which is supported by President Barack Obama’s administration, and whether and to what degree all of it is needed.

 

“Do we have to do any of it? If we have to do some of it, how much do we have to do?” she asked.

 

The timing of the leak will feed suspicions that Moscow’s proxies are somehow involved. On Thursday, Defense Secretary Ash Carter wrapped up a four-day swing through some of the nation’s most critical nuclear missile installations, touting the U.S. arsenal and promising hundreds of billions of dollars in upgrades in the coming years.

 

The Pentagon plans to spend $108 billion over the next five years to maintain and upgrade its nuclear force, including the nuclear-tipped cruise missile program.

 

Speaking Monday at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, Carter said Washington has underfunded nuclear weapons modernization over the past 25 years — while Russia and China have ramped up their efforts — and many systems “have already been extended decades beyond their original expected service lives. So it’s not a choice between replacing these platforms [and] keeping them. It’s really a choice between replacing them [and] losing them.”

 

The next day at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, Carter went further, suggesting that Washington should “adapt” traditional conceptions of deterrence in the face of North Korea’s unpredictability and Russian modernization programs. “We can’t just do things the old way,” he said. “We have to look at those whom we’re deterring and adjust what we’re doing to take that into account.”

 

Carter’s comments marked one of the most strident defenses of the American military’s nuclear capability by a U.S. official in years, analysts say.

 

“He emphasized in a forward-leaning and deliberate way how nuclear forces are the backbone of our forces, including conventional forces,” said Thomas Karako, the director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “That was an important speech.”

 

But it was Carter’s remark that the United States is “refreshing NATO’s nuclear playbook” to deter Russia that drew a swift rebuke from the Russian Foreign Ministry, which accused Carter of “plotting a dangerous game.”

 

Moscow added that “Carter’s statement means that if Russia comes under attack from U.S. allies, the Americans will be ready to back it and threaten to use their nuclear weapons against us.”

 

The audio recording of Clinton’s remarks has also surfaced on a website called DC Leaks, which previously published large volumes of hacked emails from U.S. military and civilian officials and organizations. Researchers at the cybersecurity firm ThreatConnect have identified the site as part of information operations carried out by Russian agents against U.S. targets during the election season. The site has posted emails belonging to former Secretary of State Colin Powell; Gen. Philip Breedlove, the former commander of NATO forces in Europe; and documents from financier George Soros’s philanthropic outfit.

 

The audio file in question was contained in an email sent by Ian Mellul, a Democratic operative, to Nick Merrill, a Clinton official. Merrill did not respond to questions about the file and the policy differences between Clinton and the Obama administration on nuclear weapons.

 

There has been no claim of responsibility for the email hack, but the episode — and the fact that the Clinton campaign has been targeted yet again — will likely turn the spotlight back on the Trump campaign’s ties to Moscow.

 

This week, one of Trump’s advisors, Carter Page, was forced to resign after a report that he may have met with Russian officials under sanction by the United States and the European Union and that U.S. intelligence agencies were investigating him for possible back-channel ties to Russian leaders. Page, a onetime consultant to and investor in the Kremlin’s state-run gas company Gazprom, has long defended Russian government policies. The Trump campaign spent days denying he was even part of the candidate’s advisory team before Page finally announced he was leaving the campaign.

 

In the leaked recording, Clinton stumbles on a technical question about a new nuclear weapon. A former senior Pentagon official asks Clinton if she favors scrapping a proposed new nuclear-armed cruise missile, known as the long-range standoff (LRSO) weapon.

 

Clinton indicates she would oppose such a missile, signaling a less hawkish stance than Obama. But it’s not clear she entirely understands the question, as she quickly shifts to describing the dangers of tactical nuclear weapons, which are a separate category of shorter-range weapons and not what she was asked about. She refers to the 2011 arms control treaty negotiated with Russia during her tenure as secretary of state and adds that the accord did not cover tactical nuclear weapons.

 

The question to Clinton came from Andrew Weber, a former senior Defense Department official who has urged the Obama White House to call off the new cruise missile on grounds that it is a dangerous and unnecessary addition to America’s already vast nuclear arsenal.

 

The U.S. Air Force reportedly plans to buy a total of 1,000-1,100 of the new missiles at a cost of $10.8 billion, with the first missile due to be completed by 2026. They would allow nuclear capability on advanced, radar-evading bombers like the B-2 and a planned long-range bomber still under development, rather than relying on the old, slow-flying, nonstealthy B-52 bomber.

 

The new cruise missile has set off a debate between the Defense Department and critical defense wonks — the Pentagon wants more flexibility, while arms control experts worry it will be destabilizing — but is hardly the centerpiece or linchpin of U.S. nuclear policy.

 

“People are reacting to this like it means something, but it doesn’t,” said Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert and contributor to Foreign Policy. “It’s a living room in February where she’s been blindsided and is giving a pat response.”

[JasonJ]

ICANN no longer under US government control.

 

 

 

The U.S. government just relinquished control over one very large entity — the internet. As of Saturday, October 1, the federal National Telecommunications and Information Administration no longer exercises control over the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which has long been the manager of internet domain names. But now, ICANN is truly an independent non-profit, free from the oversight of the American government.

Instead, as an autonomous not for profit organization, ICANN will now answer to international stakeholders across the internet community, including a governmental advisory committee, a technical committee, industry committee, internet users, and telecommunications experts.

Lawrence Strickling, Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information at the Department of Commerce, released a brief statement early Saturday on the transition, saying simply. “As of October 1, 2016, the IANA [internet Assigned Numbers Authority] functions contract has expired.”

The decision to release ICANN from under the thumb of the government has become a highly politicized issue, with some lawmakers insisting that the move would be akin to the U.S. “giving away the internet,” and could serve as a threat to First Amendment rights.

Related: Google’s Project Loon runs test of balloon-based internet service over Peru

But others say that these are misguided notions. As Ingrid Burrington, an expert on the infrastructure of the internet noted, critics of the deal are “under the impression that we owned the Internet to begin with, and we never really did … your Internet is going to keep working the same way.”

Stephen Crocker, ICANN’s board chairman and one of the engineers involved in the formation of some of the earliest internet protocols, also applauded ICANN’s newfound freedom. “This transition was envisioned 18 years ago, yet it was the tireless work of the global Internet community, which drafted the final proposal, that made this a reality,” he said in a statement. “This community validated the multi-stakeholder model of Internet governance. It has shown that a governance model defined by the inclusion of all voices, including business, academics, technical experts, civil society, governments and many others is the best way to assure that the Internet of tomorrow remains as free, open and accessible as the Internet of today.”

 

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/u-government-no-longer-controls-160017929.html

[Stuart Galbraith]

The Russia and China among others were pressuring for it to be sold off onto the international market, which had the US Government cacking itself so I was hearing the other day. Happily the solution that has found seems to be quite popular in that it stops other national Governments exploiting it.

[Panzermann]

We have international air or sea travel organisations. For data travel it should be the same. The internet is for all humanity now and has outgrown its US roots.

 

---

 

now for something completely different:

 

modern art

 

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

 

The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art - President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." As for the artists themselves, many were ex- communists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.

 

The existence of this policy, rumoured and disputed for many years, has now been confirmed for the first time by former CIA officials. Unknown to the artists, the new American art was secretly promoted under a policy known as the "long leash" - arrangements similar in some ways to the indirect CIA backing of the journal Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender.

(...)

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html Edited October 9, 2016 by Panzermann