Monday, July 3, 2017

Alexander Mercouris — The 12 baseless claims that form Russiagate


Lots of innuendo and no evidence.

The Duran
The 12 baseless claims that form Russiagate
Alexander Mercouris

9 comments:

Kaivey said...

I liked this.

'Not surprisingly believers in the scandal therefore insist on the truth of this claim. To deny it, or to express skepticism about it, is to open oneself up to charges of being a Kremlin stooge or a Putin apologist or – worse still – an agent of the Russian government. Unsurprisingly no political figure in the US is prepared to risk that, with even Donald Trump – the only politician in the US who has ever publicly expressed doubts about this claim – saying nonetheless that he still “believes” it.'

Kaivey said...

I have noticed that in the Guardian CiF my posts haven't been removed even though they are almost as forthright as they used to be. I gave up posting because they removed so many and I have only recently gone back. But I have noticed that many readers now take my line and under Nick Cohen's article yesterday where he stated how good liberal interventionism was because it hunted down tyrants and crooks. I noticed that in CiF section the majority were harshly skeptical and wrote more forcibly than me with some even criticizing Israel, which I never do because I knew the Guardian would remove it. They even removed a video by the Israel dissenter, an ex IDF soldier, Efrati I put out.

I noticed for some time recently that people were writing in CiF as forcibly as I used to write and I think they must be reading the alternative media. If the Guardian had removed the posts under Cohen's article about two thirds of them would have gone. This would look bad so maybe the Guardian has given up trying to remove posts like mine.

Kaivey said...

From Duran: Now don't you think this is kind of odd. Wouldn't government agencies take control with something as important as this. This is about national security after all. They obviously like the narrative as it is, so something fishy is going on.

'No agency of the US government has examined these computers. The only examination of the computers which has taken place, and the only investigation of the hacking allegation which has been carried out, has been the work of a private company – CrowdStrike – whose opinions the relevant US government agencies have simply accepted as true.'

Kaivey said...

Is there any conspiracy theories in this article? Looks legit to me.

Tom Hickey said...

If this were an isolated incident, it would be one thing. But it's one thing after another going back at least to Vietnam.

There is a constant stream of propaganda that has been largely unchallenged on than at the fringes until the Internet came along. Now the push is on to push alternative sources to the fringes again with the charge of fake news and being stooges for the enemy.

The boy who cried wolf

Of course, evidence could still be forthcoming wrt to Saddam's WMD, MH17, Russian government hacking directed by Putin, Trump being a Manchurian candidate, etc. It's impossible to prove a negative.

But it is reasonable to argue that all the uproar is about inference and innuendo that is baseless so far and therefore should count as propaganda and smearing, especially where there is motive.

Noah Way said...

The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, it should be a big lie, and one should stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

-- Joseph Goebbels.

Jefferson said...

The source URL is a Russian propaganda site. Their other articles and Facebook make this clear. They're also referred as such by the Washington Post here.

The article itself just points to areas where the evidence is classified and says, Hey, we haven't seen this evidence (They must not have any)! They're leading the "it's one thing after another going back at least to Vietnam." anti-American crowd by the nose. Occam's Razor suggests that actually, no, not all the different American intelligence agencies are lying as part of a massive conspiracy... Russia did actually hack the DNC, Guccifer 2.0 is Russian etc.

Jefferson said...

From the article: No agency of the US government has examined these computers. The only examination of the computers which has taken place, and the only investigation of the hacking allegation which has been carried out, has been the work of a private company – CrowdStrike – whose opinions the relevant US government agencies have simply accepted as true.

From Wikipedia: The U.S. Intelligence Community concluded that some of the genuine leaks that Guccifer 2.0 has said were part of a series of cyberattacks on the DNC were committed by two Russian intelligence groups.[12][13][14][15][16][17] This conclusion is based on analyses conducted by various private sector cybersecurity individuals and firms, including CrowdStrike,[18][19] Fidelis Cybersecurity,[19][20] Fireeye's Mandiant,[19] SecureWorks,[21] ThreatConnect,[22] Trend Micro,[23] and the security editor for Ars Technica.[24]

Jeff65 said...

Jefferson,

So what? The Washington Post is a US propaganda site. As is Wikipedia.

Having worked in the industry for 30 years, I know enough about computing to know that any attack signature could be easily impersonated by anyone who knows the signature. Unless you catch someone with physical evidence on a computer you can prove is connected to them, you don't have any meaningful evidence.

We have not seen any evidence who did it. All we have seen is unproven assertion.