Showing posts with label Mueller investigation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mueller investigation. Show all posts

Friday, May 10, 2019

Adam Carter — "Mueller Report - Expensive Estimations And Elusive Evidence"

On April 18, 2019, a redacted version of Robert Mueller's report on "RussiaGate" related activities was released to the public.
This article focuses on Volume I Part III titled "Russian Hacking & Dumping Operations" and provides details of the errors made, critical omissions, lack of conclusive evidence and reliance on assumptions and speculation.
We will also look at problems relating to attribution methods used, countervailing evidence that has clearly been disregarded and other problems that are likely to have affected the quality of the investigation and the report....
Sic Semper Tyrannis
"Mueller Report - Expensive Estimations And Elusive Evidence"
Adam Carter

See also at SST

Glaring Omissions and Misrepresentations in Mueller's Report
Larry C. Johnson

Sunday, July 15, 2018

Caitlin Johnstone — Five Things That Would Make The CIA/CNN Russia Narrative More Believable

Rallying the world to cut off Russia from the world stage and cripple its economy has been been a goal of the US power establishment since the collapse of the Soviet Union, so there’s no reason to believe that even the people who are making the claims against Russia actually believe them. The goal is crippling Russia to handicap China, and ultimately to shore up global hegemony for the US-centralized empire by preventing the rise of any rival superpowers. The sociopathic alliance of plutocrats and intelligence/defense agencies who control that empire are willing to threaten nuclear confrontation in order to ensure their continued dominance. All of their actions against Russia since 2016 have had everything to do with establishing long-term planetary dominance and nothing whatsoever to do with election meddling.
Those five things [analyzed above in the article] would need to happen before I’d be willing to jump aboard the “Russia! Russia!” train. Until then I’ll just keep pointing to the total lack of evidence and how very, very far the CIA/CNN Russia narrative is from credibility.
Questioning the narrative and find it wanting.

Caitlin Johnstone — Rogue Journalist
Five Things That Would Make The CIA/CNN Russia Narrative More Believable
Caitlin Johnstone

Also by the same author
I have said it before, and I will say it again, and I will keep saying it and saying it until it becomes mainstream conventional wisdom: it is the US intelligence community’s job to lie to you....
As we learned in the lead up to the Iraq invasion, whenever you see all mass media outlets converge upon a single narrative, it’s time to crank your skepticism levels up to eleven....
The social engineers are so adept that self-identified progressives can be made to cheer for the FBI, self-identified nationalists can be made to cheer for neoconservative regime change agendas against Iran, and self-identified liberals can literally be made to fear a movement away from the possibility of nuclear holocaust....
Since cold wars per definition depend on non-military maneuverings, a much greater emphasis is necessarily placed on psyops and mass media propaganda than in a conventional hot war. Remain skeptical of everything you hear about Russia at all times, because I will say it again: it is the US intelligence community’s job to lie to you....
Two Big “Russia! Russia!” Stories Released Days Before Trump-Putin Summit

See also

Backing up Caitlin Johnstone's claims based on skepticism and suspicion with authority. Must-read.
With Friday’s indictments of Russian intelligence officers, Ray McGovern and Bill Binney have written an open letter to President Trump making clear that the “evidence” behind the indictments is as fraudulent as the intelligence alleging WMD in Iraq. It is being published exclusively here ahead of the Trump-Putin summit on Monday.
Consortium News
Memo to the President Ahead of Monday’s Summit
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst for 27 years, former chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and briefer for the President’s Daily Brief one-on-one from 1981-1985, and William Binney, retired 36 year NSA veteran, formerly technical director of world military and geopolitical analysis and reporting, and developer of many of the collection systems still used by NSA

See also
Mueller could not have picked a more auspicious date if he weren’t an ignoramus on the history of autocracy and democracy, European and American. For it is one day later, on July 14, when every year France celebrates the start of the French Revolution. The reason for the celebration is the end of abuse of power by kings and pretenders to state authority, and their replacement by the democratic rule of law. That revolution, like the annual celebration, isn’t quite over.

What Mueller did this year was to issue what was called, before July 14, 1789, a lettre de cachet – a letter with the royal signet or seal. In the French practice, this was a combination of indictment, conviction, and order for arrest, confiscation of property, and punishment of an individual, who had no right in law to know the charge against him; prove the evidence; appeal the sentence.
The Mueller indictment of twelve officers of the Russian military intelligence agency, GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff) is a fresh US-Government style lettre de cachet. It names the men accused, their crimes, and the punishment. The penalties include “upon conviction [the twelve] shall forfeit to the United States any property, real or personal, which constitutes or is derived from proceeds obtained directly or indirectly as a result of such violation, and any personal property that was used or intended to be used to commit or to facilitate the commission of such offense.”

Mueller has neither the power nor the intention of trying the accused, or the particulars of his lettre, in an American court of law. This is why on July 13 he intended to violate the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution, first introduced in Philadelphia on June 8, 1789, just a month before the lettre de cachet lost its power in Paris. The Fifth Amendment says noone shall be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”...
Dances with Bears
Robert Mueller Replaces Us Constitution With Royal Lettre De Cachet – Counter-Intelligence Operation As Due Process
John Helmer

See also

The timing of the announcement was clearly intended to embarrass Trump as he was meeting the Queen and to undermine his upcoming meeting with Putin on July 16. The indictments may also have been meant to embarrass Russia two days before the World Cup final to be held in Moscow....
“In this indictment there is detail after detail whose only source could be intelligence, yet you don’t use intelligence in documents like this because if these defendants decide to challenge this in court, it opens the U.S. to having to expose sources and methods,” [former CIA officer Larry] Johnson said.
If the U.S. invoked the states secret privilege so that classified evidence could not be revealed in court a conviction before a civilian jury would be jeopardized.

Such a trial is extremely unlikely however. That makes the indictment essentially a political and not a legal document because it is almost inconceivable that the U.S. government will have to present any evidence in court to back up its charges. This is simply because of the extreme unlikelihood that arrests of Russians living in Russia will ever be made....
In both the IRA case and Friday’s indictments, the extremely remote possibility of convictions were not what Mueller was apparently after, but rather the public perception of Russia’s guilt resulting from fevered media coverage of what are after all only accusations, presented as though it is established fact. Once that impression is settled into the public consciousness, Mueller’s mission would appear to be accomplished....
It is not only allies of Trump, as the Times thinks, who believe the timing of the indictments, indeed the entire Russia-gate scandal, is intended to prevent Trump from pursuing detente with nuclear-armed Russia. Trump said of the indictments that, “I think that really hurts our country and it really hurts our relationship with Russia. I think that we would have a chance to have a very good relationship with Russia and a very good chance — a very good relationship with President Putin.”
There certainly appear to be powerful forces in the U.S. that want to stop that....
Consortium News
Clinging to Collusion: Why Evidence Will Probably Never Be Produced in the Indictments of ‘Russian Agents’
Joe Lauria | editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Sunday Times of London, and other newspapers

See also
NOTE: There will likely be various amendments made to this article over the next 24 hours.
Disobedient Media
Mueller’s Latest Indictment Contradicts Evidence In The Public Domain
Adam Carter

See also
This is the sort of political climate that the Trump administration has been forced to deal with for almost two years – a non-stop full court rush from the Democrats.
And now, when there is a chance for the smallest breakthrough in US-Russia relations, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, rolls out charges against 12 Russian military officials, thereby severely polluting the atmosphere for the Putin-Trump summit.
Clearly, something has got to give one way or the other. The fate of relations between the world’s two premier nuclear powers can no longer be held hostage to poor-sport Democrats who simply do not know how to lose an election with grace.
Strategic Culture Foundation
US Deep State Hits Putin-Trump Summit with Preemptive Strike as Russiagate Fizzles Out
Robert Bridge

The story is "developing." In the absence of evidence, it looks like disinformation and pysops.

Friday, July 13, 2018

Moon of Alabama No Evidence In Mueller's Indictment Of 12 Russians - Release Now May Sabotage Upcoming Summit


Is the time of the release just ahead of the Trump-Putin summit coincident or poisoning the well?

People on different sides will view this diffidently.

However, most people only read headlines and the message is that the Russian intelligence interfered in the 2016 US presidential election, calling into question the legitimacy of Donald Trump as the president of the United States, as well as his independence of Putin's putative control over him through kompromat.

Thursday, February 22, 2018

Alex Christoforou — Julian Assange explains how “troll farm” in St. Petersburg was nothing more than social media spam business (Video)


Commercial operation.

The Duran
Julian Assange explains how “troll farm” in St. Petersburg was nothing more than social media spam business (Video)
Alex Christoforou

also

Democrats want taxpayers to give them $300M to fight $100K in “Russian troll” Facebook ads
Also at The Duran
Lucy Komisar, who is perhaps the greatest living investigative journalist, has discovered — and has documented in detail — that the source of the Russiagate charge against Russia, the source of the charge that Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign had connived with Russians in order to be able to win the U.S. Presidency, can be found in explaining the why’s and wherefore’s of the key event, when Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner, met with Russian lawyer Nataliya Veselnitskaya, in Trump Jr.’s Trump Tower office, on 9 June 2016.
Komisar figured it out: Veselnitskaya, thinking that Trump might become America’s President, lured (through George Papadopoulos, the Trump-campaign volunteer whom Komisar unfortunately doesn’t mention, but he was the contact between Veselnitskaya and the Trump team) Trump’s team, into that meeting, by promising (as communicated to them via Papadopoulos) to inform them of dirt against Hillary Clinton. But that wasn’t Veselnitskaya’s real purpose, Komisar has found....

Anatoly Karlin

also
The effort of the American ruling class to offset its economic decline using military force is leading mankind to the brink of another world war...
At the same time, it serves as a ready-made pretext for censorship and domestic repression that goes far beyond the extraordinary measures adopted under the framework of the “war on terror.” Russia, the American people are supposed to believe, uses domestic social opposition to weaken the United States, rendering political dissent effectively treasonous.
Already, this campaign has led the major US technology firms to implement far-reaching measures to censor political speech on the Internet. Google is manipulating its search results and Facebook is manipulating its news feeds, while seeking to turn the social media platform it has developed into an instrument of corporate-state surveillance.…
WSWS (Trotskyite)
The Russian meddling fraud: Weapons of mass destruction revisited
Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore

also

Counterpunch
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Russiagate
Thomas L. Knapp | director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism

also

Zero Hedge
"We Primed Ourselves For Discord" - The Dangers Of Exaggerating Russia's Role In The 2016 Election
Tyler Durden

My take: The overreaction to alleged Russian "meddling" is irrational unless there is a hidden agenda driving it. Cui bono?

Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Paul Craig Roberts — Russiaphobia Is Out of Control

All Mueller has found is a bait-click commercial marketing scheme that had nothing to do with election interference.…
When a country armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and overwhelmed by its own exceptionalism and indispensability has political and media lunatics equating a bait-click commercial marketing scheme with Pearl Harbor, that country is a recipe for the end of the world.
After done a significant amount of research on this, I have come to this conclusion, too. 

Paul Craig Roberts
Russiaphobia Is Out of Control

See also

Stephen F. Cohen delves more deeply into the issues raised by PCR above.
Its allegations and practices suggest disdain for American institutions, principles, best interests, and indeed for the American people....
In short, as Cohen has argued previously, Russiagate and its elite adherents are now the number-one threat to American national security, not Russia itself....
The Nation
‘Russiagate’ Is Revealing Alarming Truths About America’s Political-Media Elites
Stephen F. Cohen | Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies, History, and Politics at New York University and Princeton University



Pat Lang — Project Lakhta - What was the goal?

Since the end of the first Cold War and the collapse of the USSR the US has treated Russia with overbearing contempt and hostility. The Russians appealed to the US to be allowed a more open role in European affairs. The response was to drive the borders of NATO far to the east, to the borders of what is but a rump of the Russian Empire before WW1.
The Russian response is to use what they see as a legitimate instrument of statecraft against us. This instrument seeks the weakening of enemies through exploitation of their own defects.

Our response to this is to adopt a high handed attitude that speaks volumes about us. We admit that we do the same things to others even as we claim an absolute right to do this because we are the future of humanity, the dwellers in the "city on the hill."...
Sic Semper Tyrannis
Project Lakhta - What was the goal?
Col. W. Patrick Lang, US Army (ret.)
At the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lang was the Defense Intelligence Officer (DIO) for the Middle East, South Asia and counter-terrorism, and later, the first Director of the Defense Humint Service. At the DIA, he was a member of the Defense Senior Executive Service. He participated in the drafting of National Intelligence Estimates. From 1992 to 1994, all the U.S. military attachés worldwide reported to him. During that period, he also briefed President George H. W. Bush at the White House, as he had during Operation Desert Storm.
He was also the head of intelligence analysis for the Middle East for seven or eight years at that institution. He was the head of all the Middle East and South Asia analysis in DIA for counter-terrorism for seven years. For his service in the DIA, Lang received the Presidential Rank Award of Distinguished Executive. — Wikipedia
See also
None of Risch’s remarks addressed the fact that the U.S. Constitution gives Congress, rather than the president, the power to declare war.
The Intercept

Masha Gessen — The Fundamental Uncertainty of Mueller’s Russia Indictments


Even Russian ex-pat Putin-phobe Masha Gessen gets the Mueller indictments essentially right.

First politicized intelligence, then politicized justice.

The New Yorker
The Fundamental Uncertainty of Mueller’s Russia Indictments
Masha Gessen, staff writer


See also
Military's 'sock puppet' software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda
The Guradian (March 17, 2011)
Nick Fielding and Ian Cobain

Monday, February 19, 2018

John Helmer — A Lesson in Political Sociology for Robert Mueller – a Lesson in Warfare for Dmitry Peskov



The three types of power which decide the fate of regimes are force, fraud and subversion; that’s to say, arms, money, media....
Detailed analysis of the indictments. Important if you are following this closely.

Dances with Bears
A Lesson in Political Sociology for Robert Mueller – a Lesson in Warfare for Dmitry Peskov
John Helmer, from Moscow