On the Phony Integrity Initiative

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Stuff To Read: Integrity Initiative, Skripal, Kaspersky …

The is no original piece ready to post today, but here are some interesting links:

• The Russian anti-virus company Kaspersky was contacted by someone who it found to be related to the U.S. National Security Agency. Kaspersky immediately told the NSA about the contact. Following that tip the FBI arrested Harold T. Martin, a NSA contractor who had collected the NSA entire arsenal of digital weapon at is home. Despite that very helpful tip by Kaspersky the U.S. government continues to harass the company and to claim that it was working as an agent of the Russian government.
  Exclusive: How a Russian firm helped catch an alleged NSA data thief, Kim Zettler, Politico

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There are several new stories about the Integrity Initiative though still none in any mainstream media.

• At Sputnik Kit Klarenberg looks into the Initiative’s ‘cluster’ operations Germany:
  Damaging Ties: Why Germany is the Integrity Initiative’s ‘Most Important Target’
• At the Grayzone Mark Ames and Max Blumenthal look into its operations in the United States:
  New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics
• Vesti News, a Russian TV station, draws a line between the Integrity Initiative and the Skirpal/Novichok case in Britain. The short segment seems to build on an earlier Klarenberg piece. While I also see a connection between the two, the data is -in my view- yet too scarce to draw any definite conclusion:
  The Skripal Set-Up: Hackers Release Proof of UK’s Elaborate Operation to Hoax Salisbury Scandal (vid, English subs)

Apropos Skripal

• Over several months Rob Slane at The Blogmire did a detailed analysis of the Skripal case and the often contradictory information that officials and media have published. Rob has the advantage of living in Salisbury, where the Skripals were allegedly poisoned. Today he published the summation of his series about the case:
  Summing up the Official Claims in the Salisbury Poisonings: Weighed in the Balances and Found Wanting
  Neither Rob nor I have a sound theory of what really happened in Salisbury. There are many possible explanations, but none for which there is sufficient evidence. What we do know is that the British government lied and lies about the case from A to Z.
• Last but not least a 20 minute video by Prolekult about the (geo-)politics of Brexit and the Skripal mess in Britain. Interestingly Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn seems to be pushing the ‘blame Russia’ racket just as much as the Conservatives. (Disclaimer – I do not endorse the views of the authors.):
  History is Marching | Part five: The Fall of the British Empire (vid)

Use as open thread …

Posted by b on January 9, 2019 at 12:58 PM | PermalinkCommentsnext page »

I posted this comment at Off Guardian. There are a couple of points that may be of interest:

The essential feature of this “Integrity Initiative” is that it is purportedly a charity or an NGO. Like Atlantic Council, or Bellingcat, it is funded by government(s) but it has, as this video demonstrates, the capacity to distance itself from government, Deniability.
Deniability is the central feature of all British regime change operations since 1945. The UK takes (took?) the UN Charter and Nuremberg seriously. Not in the sense that it follows the rules but in so far as it tries not to get caught waging aggressive wars and interfering in sovereign states by carrying out regime change operations.
Britain has become very good not just at keeping its secret operations secret and deniable. But , through its controls over the media, stopping leaks by ensuring that whistle blowers are not heard.
What this case indicates is that people like Donnelly, contemptible careerists playing games with humanity’s very existence, have prevailed over the more cautious and sensible Civil Servants in the Foreign Office, who used to keep a lid on the irrespresible folliy of psychopaths like Christopher Nigel, and have been given license not only to kill but to do so without reference to ‘M’ and Whitehall.
In this case, thanks to the weakness and demoralised state of the current government what has happened is that Donnelly has improved on the rolling regime change operation against Russia, (consisting of taking advantage of opportunities to castigate the Kremlin and blaming Putin for everything that goes wrong, every Russian expatriate’s death, every botched poison gas gambit by the White Helmets (another one of these NGOs run by ‘retired MI types),).. improved on it to the extent that, now, rather than waiting to comment on, and build frames around such events as Litvinenko’s death, they are constructing them out of whole cloth.
The key word here is bricolage, as used by Levi Strauss to describe one of the characteristic reactions of traditional societies to the irruption of western imperialism.
Donnelly, his acolytes and his dupes in the media are taking whatever they find lying around in the world and twisting it together to form apparent events. The White Helmets, for example, attempt a chlorine gas attack on Syrian forces. It fails but rather than deny that it ever happened British Intelligence convinces the media that, in fact the attack was not by the Jihadists but upon them. The media dutifully takes its cues, from the clusters and, almost before you know it, the US is bombing Damascus on the ground that Assad is carrying out poison gas attacks.
The MH17 affair is another instance: an airliner gets shot down, whether deliberately or not doesn’t matter, and Russia is blamed. All manner of phony ‘evidence’ is publicised. The real evidence such as Air Traffic Control records is suppressed. Sanctions are imposed. Russia further isolated etc. Then we had the DNC emails, again, a leak probably by a decent person disgruntled by the utter cynicism and criminality of the DNC’s tactics in the primary elections. Twisted into something resembling a Russian conspiracy against Clinton. Not one that anyone with enough brain to tie his shoelaces would credit but just enough to set the media lynch mobs, led by their clusters, into operation.
All of which leads inexorably to Salisbury and the Skripals.

And here perhaps there is more than bricolage: rather than picking up what providence has delivered and making a passably plausible story of it, here, one suspects, the matter was put together in advance. This wasn’t an accident blamed on Putin but a planned semi-assassination in which at least one of the victims was unaware of the plan… designed from the beginning to be used in the rolling anti-Putin regime change operation..
Which, and this is something that the old FO mandarins knew would happen if policy were left in the hands of Donnelly and Co, (straight out of schoolboy comics like Magnet or Hotspur), has proved to be exactly what Russia needed: a series of kicks at the Kremlin which drove it into the arms of Beijing and forced it to form an iron alliance which will lead not to regime change in Moscow but to the destruction of the Atlantic empire.

Posted by: bevin | Jan 9, 2019 1:19:20 PM | 1

Israeli opposition politician secretly visits Abu Dhabi, meets top Emirati officials: Report
https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/01/08/585240/Israeli-opposition-politician-secretly-visits-Abu-Dhabi-meets-top-Emirati-officials-Report

Another arab state selling out palestinians for Israel.

Posted by: Zanon | Jan 9, 2019 1:20:56 PM | 2