In my new book, We’ll Tell You What to Think: Wikipedia, Propaganda and the Making of Liberal Consensus, I expose who funds Wikipedia, what their intentions are, and how they seek to shape narratives favorable to neoliberal capitalism and the US empire.

Wikipedia is part of the very internet developed by the military with public money in the 1950s-60s, then called ARPANET. Generally speaking, corporations hope that the systems developed in the military that evolve in the public-corporate realm—satellites, computers, data analysis, etc.—will inspire new military-intelligence innovations in a permanent feedback loop.

In 2003, the CIA’s Director of Central Intelligence established the Galileo Awards Program to inspire those in the intelligence community to submit unclassified papers to shape the CIA’s adaptive capacities to cope in the information age. One partly-declassified report from 2004 states that times have changed and that the CIA now exists in a real-time information environment.

AMERICAN “VALUES”

Just as Woodrow Wilson said that most nations don’t need direct rule, merely the inculcation of elite US “values” where possible, the officer who contributed to the Galileo report includes an anecdote about the 19^th century Mayor of Nauvoo, Illinois, who said that he kept the massive frontier city in good order because he taught the inhabitants the “correct principles and they govern themselves.” The Mayor was Joseph Smith (1805-44), founder of Mormonism.

This principle applies to Wikipedia: set the overarching “values” and its contributors—mainly young, white, middle-class liberals—will reflect those “values”. They include progressive slogans but reactionary policies, humanitarianism but pro-war positions, and conformity to consensus opinion even when the consensus is wrong (e.g., “regime change” in Libya and Syria).

It also applies to the CIA’s “complexity theory”: “a simple tradecraft regime will emerge [from] an Intelligence Community that continuously and dynamically reinvents itself” (tradecraft means having the skills of spying, disrupting, etc.). The changes that require the intelligence community to adapt are unpredictable.

Consequently, the CIA is given five prescriptions:

1) Just as consumers are supposedly autonomous in “market” systems, officers must be free to act when necessary.
2) Just as cities are governed by property rules, officers must be “hardwired” with the techniques of tradecraft.
3) Officers must share more information to help the CIA thrive, just as consumers share information about niche products to help “markets.”
4) Officers need more feedback from the National Security environment.
5) Intelligence managers must be persuasive in their objectives, such as communication with other officers.

Technology makes the five “prescriptions” more realistic. The author cites Wikipedia as an interesting “tradecraft … or a rule set to which contributors and editors must abide.” The self-initiation is analogous to one of the five prescriptions. Wikipedia inspired the author’s advocacy of fostering a “healthy market of debatable ideas [which] emerges from the sharing of points of view.” But Wikipedia does not exist in isolation: “The occasional brilliant blog comment will shape the Wiki.” These principles, says the author, should be incorporated into the Defense Information Systems Agency’s SIPRNet.

TERRORISTS: A CASE-STUDY

The document in question was signed by CIA Director Porter Goss. Just a few years later, software had traced Wikipedia edits on Goss’s entry to the CIA. Other CIA edits included vandalism of the biographical entry for Iran’s then-President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. At the time, the CIA, Britain’s MI6 and Israel’s Mossad were attacking Iran in various ways, including via the funding of anti-regime terrorists, such as the Jundullah, a Balochi Sunni group.

Interestingly, the Wikipedia entry for Jundullah dismisses claims that the CIA had been working with the group. It does so by citing what it says is an “investigation” that debunked the claims. But in reality, the debunking source is merely a Reuters article that rejects claims of CIA involvement, but provides no counterevidence. Some of the information concerning anti-Iranian CIA activity came from Fred Burton.

Between 2012 and ‘13, WikiLeaks published emails from Burton’s employer, Stratfor; the private intelligence agency/global risks analyst. Not only do the leaked Stratfor emails confirm that edits had been made to Burton’s Wikipedia entry, they confirm that Stratfor wanted to use Wikipedia to boost its own company profile. Brian Genchur, Stratfor’s PR Manager, told colleagues: “I COULD alter part of Fred Burton’s Wikipedia entry (done a few days ago) because it contained a factual error that he was part of a gov. department that he really was never a part of because 1) it’s false and 2) it did not have sourcing attached” (emphasis in original. On an unrelated matter, Larry Sanger told WikiLeaks: “Speaking as Wikipedia’s co-founder, I consider you enemies of the U.S.—not just the government, but the people.”)

“INTELLIPEDIA”

By 2006, the Intelligence Community had developed its own Intellipedia. A Top Secret report released under a FOIA request instructed intelligence officers how to edit Wikipedia’s entry on MK-ULTRA, the CIA’s mind control program (1953-circa 1970s), for Intellipedia. MK-ULTRA led to deaths and involved the exploitation of prisoners, mental patients and foreign POWs. The CIA document reveals that the NSA has a mirror-site of Wikipedia. It states: “Be bold in modifying this Wikipedia import … Correct mistakes; remove bias; categorize; … when assimilation into Intellipedia is complete, remove this template and add {{From Wikipedia}}.”

During the Obama Years (2009-2017), the US Army sought the creation of Wikipedia-style Army Manuals. “Using the same free software behind Wikipedia, the Army’s ‘wikified’ field  manuals invite military personnel—from the privates to the generals—to collaboratively update the Army Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures in real time.”

Similarly, the US Department of Energy (DOE), which has partial control over the development of nuclear weapons (along with the Pentagon) sought to develop its Open Energy Information (OpenEI), “an open source web platform—similar to the one used by Wikipedia—developed by DOE and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to make the large amounts of energy-related data and information more easily searched, accessed, and used both by people and automated machine processes.”

CONCLUSION

Funded by weapons contractors like BAE Systems and Boeing, and until recently led by people like Katherine Maher, ex-World Banker and Fellow of the Truman National Security Project, which exists to promote “US values” at home and abroad, the Wikimedia Foundation that enables Wikipedia does not exist in a vacuum. Wikipedia does not present unbiased, scholarly encyclopedia entries. It is as much part of the military-industrial-complex as mainstream corporate media.

counterpunch.org

Britain is fomenting a diplomatic crisis between the European Union and Russia, according to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Evidence and precedent indicate Lavrov has his sight well-trained.

The British establishment’s notorious ability for machination and intrigue – hence the ancient moniker Perfidious Albion – can be seen as stirring the escalating row between the European Union and Russia in which diplomats are being expelled pell-mell.

This week, Russia ordered the withdrawal of representatives from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia. That came in response to the expulsion of Russian diplomats from those countries. Russia has also ordered home more diplomats from the Czech Republic. Poland and Italy have also been caught up in diplomatic antagonism with Moscow.

The row blew up last week when the Czech Republic accused Russian state agents of being responsible for twin explosions on its territory back in 2104. The blasts caused the deaths of two workers at an ammunition depot near the village of Vrbetice close to the border with Slovakia. Until recently, the Czech authorities had concluded that the explosions were an industrial accident.

What prompted the Czechs to revise their ideas and to now blame Russia for sabotage is the interpolation of Britain in providing “new information”. Specifically, it was the MI6-sponsored media group Bellingcat (a so-called private investigatory agency) which appears to have furnished the disinformation which purports to show the involvement of Russian military intelligence (GRU). Incredibly, the British claim their “evidence” shows that two of the GRU agents were also the same individuals who were alleged to have been involved in poisoning the Russian traitor-spy Sergei Skripal in England in 2018. The British claim to have passport information to support their claims, but such methodology is rife with forgery – a black art that the British are all-too skilled at.

On leveling the accusation against Russia, the Czech Republic then ordered the expulsion of 18 Russian diplomats. Moscow responded angrily, saying that the claims of sabotage were a “dirty fabrication” and pointing out that Prague did not provide any information for verification. Russia took swift reciprocal action by banishing 20 Czech diplomats from its territory.

However, the row continues to flare with the Baltic states entering the fray by banning Russian officials in “solidarity” with the Czech Republic. The move by the Baltic states is predictable as they are supercharged by anti-Russian political sentiment. It’s a case of any excuse for them to inflame relations.

The dispute comes at a fraught time when the European Union is discussing imposing more sanctions on Russia over wider concerns about the conflict in Ukraine, the imprisonment of blogger Alexei Navalny and a Russian security crackdown on Navalny’s shadowy Western-backed “opposition” network.

The skirmishing over diplomats is a convenient way to further damage relations between the EU and Russia, especially as the strategically important Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline project nears completion – a project that Washington wants to eviscerate for its own selfish commercial reasons. Uncle Sam’s junior partner Britain may be obliging in that regard and thus trying to curry favor for garnering an American trade deal in the post-Brexit world.

Certainly, Russia’s top diplomat Sergei Lavrov is clear about the stealthy British hand in recent events. In a media interview this week, Lavrov mentioned the United Kingdom in wary terms, saying: “As far as the relations between Russia and Europe are concerned, I still believe that the UK is playing an active and a very serious subversive role. It withdrew from the European Union, but we see no decrease in its activities on this track. On the contrary, they are trying to influence EU member states’ approaches to Russia to the maximum possible extent.”

It should be recalled that Britain has played a starring duplicitous role in demonizing Russia and poisoning international relations.

It was Bellingcat (MI6) that pushed the narrative that Russia was complicit in the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner in 2014 over Eastern Ukraine with the loss of nearly 300 lives. Based on British “evidence” (which has been debunked as fabrication), a Dutch investigation into the disaster has accused Russia. That affair has hardened European prejudices against Russia which has fomented the imposition of sanctions.

It was a former British MI6 operative Christopher Steele who was instrumental in promoting the Russiagate dossier around 2016 which destroyed bilateral relations between the United States and Russia, and which continues to fuel fabrications about Moscow’s interference in American and European politics (even those Steele’s “dirty dossier” is a risible load of rubbish and has been debunked).

And it was the Skripal saga in Salisbury in March 2018 which Britain hatched to further poison international relations with Russia. That saga – with no proof against Russia – has become a concocted “standard proof” for the subsequent saga of “poisoning” the blogger conman Alexei Navalny. Western governments and media refer to the “Kremlin plot” to kill Skripal as “evidence” for another “Kremlin plot” to assassinate Navalny. This is tantamount to one fiction being used to prove another fiction. The same saga is now feeding into the Czech explosion row. And it all comes back to the devious ingenuity of Perfidious Albion.

Foreign Minister Lavrov added a further incisive comment on the role of Britain. He said: “At the same time, you know, they send us signals, they propose establishing contacts. This means, they do not shy away from communication [with Russia], but try to discourage others. Again, probably [this can be explained by] their desire to have a monopoly of these contacts and again prove that they are superior to others.”

The British establishment likes to boast that they “punch above their weight” in terms of influence beyond their territorial size. It’s not hard to see how they manage such a feat. It’s called duplicity, intrigue, lies, and dividing and ruling. Perfidious Albion par excellence.

It’s a scorpion battle inside a vortex of distorted mirrors inside a circus. So let’s start with the mirrors in the circus.

The non-entity that passes for Ukrainian Foreign Minister traveled to Brussels to be courted by US Secretary of State Blinken and NATO secretary-general Stoltenberg.

At best, that’s circus shadowplay. Much more than NATO advisers in a frantic revolving door in Kiev, the real shadowplay is MI6 actually working very close with President Zelensky.

Zelensky’s warmongering script comes directly from MI6’s Richard Moore. Russian intel is very much aware of all the fine print. Glimpses were even carefully leaked to a TV special on the Rossiya 1 channel.

I confirmed it with diplomatic sources in Brussels. British media also got wind of it – but obviously was told to further distort the mirrors, blaming everything on, what else, “Russian aggression”.

German intel is practically non-existent in Kiev. Those NATO advisers remain legion. Yet no one talks about the explosive MI6 connection.

Careless whispers in Brussels corridors swear that MI6 actually believes that in the case of a volcanic but as it stands still preventable hot war with Russia, continental Europe would burn and Brexitland would be spared.

Dream on. Now back to the circus.

Oh, you’re so provocative

Both Little Blinken and NATO straw man Stoltenberg parroted the same script in Brussels after talking to the Ukrainian Foreign Minister.

That was part of a NATO “special meeting” on Ukraine – where some Eurocrat must have told a bunch of extra clueless Eurocrats how they would be carbonized on the spot by Russian TOS-1 Buratino’s terrifying explosive warheads if NATO tried anything funny.

Listen to the sound of Blinken yappin’: Russian actions are “provocative”.

Well, his staff certainly did not hand him a copy of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu examining step by step the deployment of the annual US Army DEFENDER-Europe 21: “The main forces are concentrated in the Black Sea and Baltic region.”

Now listen to the sound of Stoltenberg yappin’: We pledge “unwavering support” to Ukraine.

Woof woof. Now go back to play in your sandboxes.

No, not yet. Little Blinken threatened Moscow with “consequences” whatever happens in Ukraine.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov’s infinite patience is nearly Daoist. Sun Tzu’s Art of War, by the way, is a Daoist masterpiece. Peskov’s answer to Blinken: “It is simply not necessary for us to go around forever proclaiming: ‘I am the greatest!’ The more one does this sort of thing, in fact, the more people doubt it…”

When in doubt, call the irreplaceable Andrei Martyanov – who always tells it like it is. The Crash Test Dummy gang in D.C. still does not get it – although some Deep State pros do.

Here’s Martyanov:

As I am on record constantly – the United States never fought a war with its Command and Control system under the relentless sustained fire impact and its rear attacked and disorganized. Conventionally, the United States cannot win against Russia in Europe, at least Eastern part of it and Biden Admin better wake up to the reality that it may, indeed, not survive any kind of escalation and, in fact, modern Kalibrs, 3M14Ms, as a matter of fact, have a range of a 4,500 kilometers, as well as 5,000+ kilometer range of X-101 cruise missiles, which will have no issues with penetrating North American airspace when launched by Russia’s strategic bombers without even leaving the safety of Russia’s airspace.

The Patrushev effect

The circus went on with the phone call from “Biden” – that is, Crash Test Dummy with an earpiece and a teleprompter in front of the phone – to President Putin.

Call it the Patrushev effect.

In his stunning interview to Kommersant, Triple Yoda Patrushev mentioned a very civilized late March phone call he had with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. Of course there’s no smokin’ gun, but if anyone would come up with the face-saving idea of a Biden-Putin phone call that would have been Sullivan.

The spin from Washington and Moscow is only slightly divergent. The Americans highlight that “Biden” – actually the deciding combo behind him – wants to build “a stable and predictable relationship with Russia, consistent with US interests.”

The Kremlin said that Biden “expressed interest in normalizing bilateral relations.”

Away from all this fog, what really matters is Patrushev-Sullivan. That has to do with Washington telling Turkey that US warships would be transiting the Bosphorus towards the Black Sea. Sullivan must have told Patrushev that no, they won’t be “active” in Donbass. And Patrushev told Sullivan, OK, we won’t incinerate them.

There are absolutely no illusions in Moscow that this putative Biden-Putin summit in a distant future will ever take place. Especially after Daoist Peskov had made it very clear that “no one will allow America to speak with Russia from a position of strength.” If that sounds like a line straight out of Yang Jiechi – who made shark fin’s soup out of Blinken-Sullivan in Alaska – that’s because it does.

Kiev, predictably, remains stuck in circus mode. After getting sharp messages from Mr. Iskander, Mr. Khinzal and Mr. Buratino, they changed their mind, or at least pretend to, and are now saying they don’t want war.

And here comes the intersection between circus and the serious stuff. The “Biden” combo never said, explicitly, on the record, that they don’t want war. On the contrary: they are sending those warships to the Black Sea and – circus again! – designating an envoy, Ministry of Silly Walks-style, whose only job is to derail the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

So the cliffhanger – like a teaser for Snowpiercer – is what happens when Nord Stream 2 is completed.

But before that, there’s something even more momentous: next Wednesday, on his speech to the Russian Security Council, President Putin will lay down the law.

It’s Minsk 2, stupid

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister, Sergei Ryabkov, has struck a much less Daoist note than Peskov: “The United States is our enemy, doing everything to undermine Russia’s position in the international arena, we do not see other elements in their approach to us. These are our conclusions”.

That’s stone to the bone realpolitik. Ryabkov knows the Hegemon’s “non agreement-capable” mindset inside out. So an added dimension to his observation is its direct connection to the only solution for Ukraine: the Minsk 2 agreements.

Putin reiterated Minsk 2 on his live teleconference with Merkel and Macron – and certainly to “Biden” in their phone call. The Beltway, the EU and NATO are all aware of it. Minsk 2 was signed by Ukraine, France and Germany and certified by the UN Security Council. If Kiev violates it, Russia – as a member of the UNSC – must enforce it.

Kiev has been violating Minsk 2 for months now; it refuses to implement it. As a faithful Hegemon satrapy, they are also not “agreement-capable”. Yet now they are seeing the – firepower – writing on the wall if they as much as think of starting a blitzkrieg against Donbass.

The open secret in the whole Ukraine/Donbass wilderness of mirrors under the circus tent is of course China. Yet Ukraine, in a sane world, would not only be part of a Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) corridor, but also part of the Russian Greater Eurasia project. China specialist Nikolai Vavilov recognizes the importance of BRI, but is also certain Russia is above all defending its own interests.

Ideally, Ukraine/Donbass would be inserted in the overall revival of the Silk Roads – as in internal Central Eurasian trade based and developed taking into consideration Eurasia-wide demand. Eurasia integration – in both the Chinese and Russian vision – are all about interconnected economies via inter-regional trade.

So it’s not by accident that the Hegemon – on the verge of becoming an irrelevant player across Eurasia – is going no holds barred to harass and try to smash the continental integration by all means available.

In this context, manipulating a failed state to meet its own doom is just (circus) business.

By Aaron MATÉ

Western media outlets have failed to disclose that Bellingcat is funded by NATO member states, including the US via the National Endowment for Democracy, and that Bellingcat has a dubious record. In a leaked assessment, the UK government’s Integrity Initiative wrote: “Bellingcat was somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation itself, and by being willing to produce reports for anyone willing to pay.”

And few have paid attention to reporting by the New York Times that shortly after Navalny was flown to Germany for treatment, “representatives from the Central Intelligence Agency and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service provided members of the German government with details about the poisoning, including the identities of the Federal Security Service officers involved, that directly implicated the Russian government.”

thegrayzone.com

Matt KENNARD and Mark CURTIS

Almost all of Britain’s former spy chiefs are personally profiting from working for cyber security and energy companies after retiring from the U.K.’s major intelligence agencies.

In May, Declassified UK revealed that since 2000, nine out of 10 former chiefs of MI6, MI5 and GCHQ have taken jobs in the cyber security industry, a sector they promoted while in office as key to defending the U.K. from the “Russian threat.”

The British government was told for over a decade that the “gravest risk” to the country is an influenza pandemic, which its National Security Strategy identifies as a “tier one priority risk.” Yet the security services largely ignored health threats, despite claiming they are guided by the U.K.’s security strategy.

The burgeoning and profitable cyber industry in the U.K., where former spy chiefs gain employment, is now worth over £8-billion. Sir Iain Lobban, who ran GCHQ from 2008 to 2014, has become director or adviser to 10 private cyber or data security companies since leaving office. His own consultancy, Cyberswift Limited, had over £1-million in assets by the end of 2018, four years after he left GCHQ.

The “revolving door” between government and industry is meant to be regulated for conflicts of interest by the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA). However, Declassifiedcan find no evidence that an intelligence chief has ever had an ACOBA application rejected. This allows them to lobby their old agencies on behalf of their private interests after they leave office.

One former MI6 head, Sir John Scarlett, was given “unconditional approval” by ACOBA when he became an adviser to a major oil company in 2011, meaning he was immediately free to lobby his former colleagues in intelligence and parliament on behalf of the firm.

The last three heads of MI6 all joined oil or gas-producing companies, which are among the world’s largest contributors to climate change, after they left the service. Declassified can reveal that former MI6 chief, Sir Richard Dearlove, has earned more than £2-million from his role on the board of American oil and gas company, Kosmos Energy, which was until 2018 registered in the tax haven of Bermuda.

Another former MI6 chief, Sir John Sawers, has earned £699,000 since 2015 as a board member of oil giant BP, in addition to possessing shares in the company worth £91,300.

Climate change has also been largely ignored by the security agencies, evidence suggests, despite the U.K. government last year recognizing it as a “security risk,” adding, “There is no doubt that climate-related security challenges are real. They are here. They are now.”

Russia and cyber attacks have been evoked as the pre-eminent threats to the U.K. public, alongside terrorism, in countless public interventions by intelligence chiefs. Russia engages in offensive cyber operations, as do Britain and its allies, but the constant evocation of a threat from Russia, often without real evidence and amplified in the media, has helped U.K. security agencies accrue permissive investigatory powers and larger budgets, directly benefiting the private cyber and arms industry.

A senior U.K. military commander, Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti, said in 2013 that the threat posed to the U.K.’s security by climate change is just as grave as that posed by cyber attacks and terrorism.

Sir John Scarlett, former head of MI6, receives “unconditional approval” from the British government to lobby his former employers on behalf of oil giant Statoil. (Twelfth Annual Report 2010-2011: Advisory Committee on Business Appointments)

Badly Prepared for Coronavirus

UK Declassified’s revelations last May came amid rising public anger at how it could be that the U.K. was so badly prepared to deal with the coronavirus outbreak.

The British government had been widely criticized for its slow response and its failure to warn the public early about the level of risk posed by coronavirus, prompting calls for a reconsideration of what constitutes “security.”

The failure to address major threats to the public was striking in light of the substantial expenditure on the security services. Spending on the Single Intelligence Account – which covers MI5, MI6, and GCHQ – is predicted by the government to be £2.48-billion in 2020-2021. This works out at around £400 for every Briton.

It appears that no intelligence chief has ever made money working on the security threats posed by climate change or health pandemics. None also appears to have ever mentioned these threats while in office or after. Public warnings from intelligence chiefs which highlight the security threat from climate change would be likely to adversely impact the profitability of fossil fuel companies.

Paul Rogers, emeritus professor of peace studies at Bradford University, told Declassified: “The revolving door and its impact in the defence sector are fairly well known but this new investigation of its extent in the intelligence industry is a real eye-opener.” Rogers, who is also an honorary fellow at the U.K. military’s Joint Services Command and Staff College, added: “It does much to explain why the pandemic and climate change threats have been so widely discounted in the British security services.”

MI5 is Britain’s domestic security agency, while MI6 gathers intelligence externally. GCHQ, the largest of the UK’s spy agencies, collects signals intelligence.

Where Are They Now?

Nine of the 10 former heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ since 2000 have gone on to work for companies in the cyber and data security sector. Since 1992 – the first year after the end of the cold war – 13 of the 16 heads of agencies have done the same. The term “cyber security” is often used as a euphemism for offensive and surveillance products.

Sir Jonathan Evans led MI5 from 2007 until 2013 and within five months of leaving office became a member of the advisory board of Darktrace, a cybersecurity company created by the UK intelligence establishment. He also became an adviser on digital security to Luminance Technologies, an artificial intelligence platform, and chair of the advisory board of Blackdot Solutions, an internet intelligence company. Evans’ remuneration in these roles is not known.

In 2012, the year before he left MI5, Evans made his first public speech in two years in which he claimed there were “industrial-scale processes involving many thousands of people lying behind both state-sponsored cyber espionage and organised cyber crime”. He added: “Vulnerabilities in the internet are being exploited aggressively not just by criminals but also by states,” before concluding, “The extent of what is going on is astonishing.”

To the astonishment of even the Times newspaper, Jonathan Evans was in 2018 appointed to chair the government’s Committee on Standards in Public Life. He had six other paid jobs at the time.

In July 2015, Evans joined the board of Ark Data Centres, a company which offers “highly secure” data storage centres in the UK. In that role, Evans replaced his predecessor at MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller.

Manningham-Buller, who headed MI5 from 2002 to 2007, had in 2012 become a director of Ark, whose other staff include former UK military personnel and is based in Corsham in Wiltshire, where the Ministry of Defence (MOD) runs the British government’s new £40-million Cyber Security Operations Centre.

In March 2015, Ark won a £700-million outsourcing deal with the Cabinet Office to supply the government’s entire data centre estate. Two months later, Manningham-Buller stepped down from her position as a director of the company.

The year after she joined Ark, Manningham-Buller told a conference that, “It seems to me that a lot of people don’t want to recognise the threat” from possible cyber attacks. She added, “They want IT systems, they want connectivity, they want ease of access, they want business efficiency, and they choose quite often to ignore substantial threats.”

Sir Stephen Lander, head of MI5 from 1996 to 2002, became director of two companies in 2004: Streamshield Networks, which produces cybersecurity products, and Northgate Information Solutions, which develops IT software for police services and government.

Sir Jonathan Evans, head of MI5 from 2007-2013, gives his thoughts on the “cyber threat landscape” to Darktrace, a private cybersecurity company whose advisory board he joined in 2013, the same year he left service. Darktrace was valued at £1.65bn in 2018.

MI6 likewise has seen its former heads make significant sums in private cyber-related companies.

Sir John Sawers, head of MI6 from 2009 to 2014, created his own “political risk” consultancy in 2018, Newbridge Advisory, to help businesses and investors “understand” the threat of “cyber attacks, terrorism, political upheaval”, among other areas. Sawers charges up to $75,000 (£65,000) to speak on “cyber security”. “He looks at the current cyber threats, the policy of cyber security, the likelihood of a wide scale attack, and what organisations can do to protect themselves,” Sawers’ agency website notes.

Sawers’ predecessor, Sir John Scarlett – who headed MI6 from 2004 to 2009 – joined the board of advisors at the Chertoff Group, a US-based corporation which “delivers security and cybersecurity risk management”, soon after he left the service. General Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and CIA, is currently a principal at the firm. Scarlett also charges up to $55,000 (£48,000) to speak on “cyber threats”, specifically the question: “How vulnerable is our infrastructure to cyber attack and what should we do about it?”

Sir Richard Dearlove, who served as head of MI6 from 1999 to 2004 – overseeing the intelligence controversies which led to the US/UK invasion of Iraq in 2003– later became director  of Crossword Cybersecurity, a technology company focusing exclusively on the cybersecurity sector. He serves in the firm alongside Lord Nick Houghton, former Chief of the Defence Staff of the UK military, who is on its advisory board.

MI6 chiefs have all raised the spectre of the Russian cyber threat as they have taken jobs in the cyber security sector. In 2015, the year after he left MI6, Sawers publicly flagged the risk of Russian cyber attacks. Dearlove said in 2019 that “It’s deeply embedded in Russia’s DNA to use the capabilities that it has to disrupt our nations.”

Similarly, in 2018, Scarlett publicly proclaimed the “normal practice” of Russian “interference” in elections before the 2016 cyber attack on the Democratic National Committee.

Former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove’s personal page on the website of Crossword Cybersecurity, where he was appointed a director in 2016.

The heads of GCHQ, the U.K. government’s signal intelligence agency, have also found lucrative positions in the private cyber sector after leaving the service.

Robert Hannigan was GCHQ’s director from 2014 to 2017, establishing the National Cyber Security Centre as part of GCHQ in 2016, while being responsible for the U.K.’s first cyber strategy in 2009. Three months after he stepped down from GCHQ, in July 2017, Hannigan publicly warned that “a disproportionate amount of mayhem in cyber-space” was coming from Russia, and called for “pushback”.

The following month, Hannigan became chair of the European advisory board of BlueVoyant, a cybersecurity firm producing products to protect businesses against “sophisticated cyber attackers”, including nation state actors. In 2018, Hannigan became chair of BlueVoyant International.

Hannigan also set up his own consultancy, Tunny Associates, about which little is known, although the Tunny was the name given by British spies to a Nazi cipher machine cracked by Bletchley Park, the UK’s wartime code-breaking centre.

Hannigan’s predecessor, Sir Iain Lobban, who ran GCHQ from 2008 to 2014, has joined or advised no less than 10 cyber or data security companies since leaving office, including Hakluyt Cyber, Prevalent AI, and C5 Capital.

A biography on the C5 website states that Lobban “set new direction in cyber security for innovative partnerships internationally, with the private sector and with academia,” adding, “Sir Iain now focuses on the advocacy and demystification of cyber security, providing strategic advice and personal perspective, nationally and internationally, to governments and businesses.” The biography ends with the line, “He is also active in entrepreneurship, in the broadest sense of the word.”

In a 2011 article in the Times, Lobban argued that “the volume of e-crime and attacks on government and industry systems continues to be disturbing” and concluded that the “UK’s continued economic well-being” was under threat from cyber attacks.

Biography of Sir Iain Lobban, who was director of GCHQ from 2008-2014, on the website of C5 Capital, an investment firm focused on cybersecurity, which he joined in 2015, the year he left GCHQ. He says he is “active in entrepreneurship, in the broadest sense of the word.”

Before Lobban, GCHQ’s director was Sir David Pepper, who managed the agency from 2003 to 2008. After leaving GCHQ, Pepper joined the advisory board of Thales, an arms and cyber security company, and became a strategic adviser to Defence Strategy and Solutions, which helps arms firms secure government contracts.

Pepper’s predecessor was Sir Francis Richards who directed GCHQ from 1998-2003. In 2007, Richards became chairman of the National Security Inspectorate, a certification body that approves security providers. Richards is the only head of MI5, MI6 or GCHQ since 1992 who does not appear to have personally benefited from working in the private cyber or energy sector after leaving office. (Former MI6 chief, Sir David Spedding, died two years after he retired in 1999.)

Richards’ three immediate predecessors all joined cyber or data security companies. Sir Kevin Tebbitt and Sir David Omand became board members of Leonardo, the Italian weapons manufacturer that specializes in cybersecurity. Omand also joined the board of Babcock International, another arms company with a long line in cybersecurity products, while Sir John Adye, GCHQ director from 1989-1996, joined the board of two companies – Identity Assurance Systems and Opera Limited – focused on data and cyber security.

Earning from Fossil Fuel Corporations

The three former heads of MI6 since 2000 have all taken jobs with energy companies after leaving office – despite climate change being recognized as a major threat to the UK.

Sir Richard Dearlove has been on the board of Kosmos Energy – an oil and gas exploration company based in Texas – since 2012, where he also sits on the compensation committee. In the seven years from 2013 to 2019, Dearlove earned more than $2.5-million (£2-million) in fees from the company, having attended an average of 12 meetings a year. In 2018, Dearlove was Kosmos’ best compensated director. US filings show that on appointment Dearlove was also awarded restricted shares worth $140,000 (£113,400).

Dearlove has also been an adviser to a variety of consultancies that give advice on energy and extractives, while he charges up to £20,000 as a speaking fee where “the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan” are touted as conversation topics.

Dearlove made widely-covered public interventions during the 2017 and 2019 UK election campaigns warning that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was a “danger” and “threat” to Britain’s national security. Labour’s manifesto in 2017 promised “strict standards of transparency for crown dependencies and overseas territories, including a public register of owners, directors, major shareholders and beneficial owners for all companies and trusts.”

Kosmos Energy was until 2018 registered in the British overseas territory and tax haven of Bermuda. Since 2006, Dearlove has also been the non-executive chairman of Ascot Group – an insurance business domiciled in Bermuda.

In 2011, Sir John Scarlett became chair of the Strategy Advisory Committee at Norwegian oil giant, Statoil (now named Equinor). Scarlett’s name does not appear in the company’s annual reports or on its website and it is not known how much he has been paid in this role.

There are also two consultancies – SC Strategy and J&G Consulting – which Scarlett has started whose operations and clients are so secretive it is impossible to know if they involve cybersecurity or energy. It has been reported he earned £400,000 over three years from one of these.

Sir John Sawers was appointed a director of oil company BP in 2015, the year after he left MI6. “His management of reform at MI6,” BP wrote in its 2015 annual report, “complements BP’s focus on value and simplification.”

It appears that upon appointment, Sawers was awarded restricted shares worth over £90,000. Declassified can also reveal that in the four and a half years to 2019, Sawers earned £699,000 in fees and benefits from BP.

“BP will benefit from his extensive experience of the Middle East’s hotspots while a career diplomat, and his influential roles in formulating foreign policy,” wrote  TheFinancial Times. Sawers was a foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair and was appointed Britain’s special representative to Iraq in 2003. BP returned to Iraq in 2009 after a 35-year absence. The BP annual reports refer often to Sawers’ experience in the Middle East as a particular boon for the company and note that he has been at meetings which discuss “developments in the Middle East.”

In February 2015, Sawers also became a director of Macro Advisory Partners, a consultancy whose clients include the world’s leading energy institutions. Michael Daly, BP’s former global exploration chief, was also added to the board four months before Sawers.

The true extent of security services personnel profiting after service is unclear as the names of nearly all intelligence personnel are highly classified. But it has been revealed that former MI6 head of counterterrorism, Sir Mark Allen, also joined BP after leaving service, helping the company to negotiate a £15-billion oil drilling contract with Muammar Gaddafi, the then Libyan dictator. Allen had developed a relationship with the Gaddafi regime while in MI6 and was investigated for his role in the snatching and transfer of a Libyan couple to the north African country in 2004.

Chiefs of MI5 and GCHQ have also gained from oil and gas companies. Former GCHQ director Sir Iain Lobban became an advisor to Shell. Dame Stella Rimington, who was director-general of MI5 from 1992 to 1996, joined the board of BG Group – the oil and gas multinational – in 1997, the year after she left service.

She stepped down from the board in 2005 when the company was bought by Shell for £47-billion. Rimington was a company shareholder as well as earning £57,500 in fees from BG Group in 2004, her last full year on the board.

Adjusting the Dials?

Although the U.K. spends significant sums on its “security services,” there is no evidence that any of the British intelligence agencies has significantly prepared for health pandemics or have substantial expertise to work on the issue, as Declassified UK has revealed. Recent heads of MI5 and MI6 were promoted after working in counter terrorism.

The incoming head of MI5, Ken McCallum, has worked for the intelligence service for 25 years, but appears to specialize in cyber security and to have no health or climate expertise. At one point, he appears to have been seconded to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and became the department’s cyber security head. McCallum is also said to have headed MI5’s cyber activities around a decade ago.

Sources have said McCallum wants to “work more closely with the private sector in harnessing artificial intelligence” and “to be clearer about the threat posed by China – particularly in terms of industrial espionage and cyberwarfare”.

MI5 states that the “cyber” threat is one of its four main focus areas, but it does not mention health security issues despite claiming to be guided by the U.K.’s national security strategy which highlights an “influenza pandemic” as a tier one threat.

In contrast to the U.K., the CIA has a dedicated unit for health issues, while the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency has a National Center for Medical Intelligence which undertakes “collection, evaluation, and all-source analysis of worldwide health threats and issues.”

The outgoing head of MI5, Andrew Parker, has recently intimated that the government needs to recalibrate its security priorities. He said earlier this month: “There is no doubt at all that, having lived through the worst pandemic in a century, the government is bound to think differently about how to configure against that risk and adjust the dials accordingly across public spending, I’m sure. But all of those decisions are yet to be taken.”

According to Parker, some doctors and nurses who usually work at MI5 have been released back to the NHS so they can serve on the frontline, while MI5 has also been providing protective security to the design and construction of the new temporary care ‘Nightingale’ hospitals, but which have been revealed to be so badly staffed they have turned away patients.

GCHQ has made several public interventions since the coronavirus crisis began – all on the cyber threat posed by the pandemic, such as warning that criminals are using the coronavirus outbreak to launch online attacks.

Britain’s Cyber Industry

A recent government report states that the U.K. cyber security sector is worth £8.3-billion and includes over 1,200 companies, a number which has increased by 44 percent from 2017 to 2019. This growth is the equivalent to a new cyber security business setting up in the U.K. every week.

The government is allocating large amounts of money to cyber security. In 2016, it announced a National Cyber Security Strategy involving spending of £1.9-billion. A further £250-million is expected to be spent on a new joint MOD-GCHQ cyber force to combat “the rising cyber threat from nations such as Russia and Iran, as well as terrorist groups like ISIS.” With 2,000 personnel, it will have experts from the military, security services, and the cyber security industry.

The government has also allocated £23-million to building a “cyber business park” near GCHQ’s headquarters in Cheltenham, southwest England, and established a £135-million National Security Strategic Investment Fund so that British intelligence agencies can nurture start-ups developing technology seen as supporting the country’s national security priorities.

Alex Chalk, the Conservative MP for Cheltenham, has been a big supporter of the U.K. government’s cyber strategy in his constituency. “The thing that struck me was that we had an asset in GCHQ, which was absorbing a growing amount of public money, billions of pounds, and yet its impact… was quite limited,” he told Declassified. “I read around the subject and saw what the Israelis had done in a place called Beersheba in Israel, where they’ve got their equivalent of GCHQ.” In 2014, the Israeli government passed a resolution designating the city of Beersheba the country’s cyber capital, and it is now referred to as a “cybertech oasis.”

It is not just intelligence agency chiefs who have moved into the lucrative world of cyber technology. The most successful British cybersecurity firm is Darktrace, which works on artificial intelligence-based cybersecurity and was incorporated four days after the first of the revelations by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden was published by The Guardian in June 2013.

Darktrace has been valued at £1.65bn. Company material openly mentions “the UK intelligence officials who founded Darktrace”. Among its team are “senior members of the UK’s and US’s intelligence agencies including the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the Security Service (MI5) and the NSA.”

One co-founder was Stephen Huxter, a senior figure in MI5’s “cyber defence team” who became Darktrace’s managing director. Huxter then hired 30-year GCHQ veteran Andrew France as the company’s chief executive. France, like Huxter, had been involved in dealing with “cyber threats”, rising to the position of deputy director of cyber defence operations at GCHQ, where he was charged with “protecting government data” from cyber threats.

Darktrace later appointed Dave Palmer, who had worked at MI5 and GCHQ, as its director of technology, while John Richardson OBE, its director of security, had a long career in “UK government security and intelligence” working on “cyber defence”. Darktrace staff have also included ex-MI6 officials. Poppy Gustafsson, co-founder, has said that her work left her feeling like she was “living in a story by the novelist John le Carré”.

Declassified contacted Sir Richard Dearlove and Sir John Sawers for comment, but neither responded. Sir Iain Lobban declined to comment.

consortiumnews.com

The Origins of Gang/Counter-gang Operations

British agent Frank Kitson produced an insidious little 1960 handbook called Gangs and Counter-gangs  based on his work coordinating special operations against the 1955 Mau Mau uprising in Kenya which threatened to break this valuable African region free of British colonialism. Kitson’s handbook was a modern adaption of a centuries-old practice according to the needs of putting down independence and civil rights movements that threatened to undo the age of empires.

During his work in Kenya, Kitson recognized that when outnumbered and faced with organized independence movements, it is just not very effective for thinly spread colonialists to try to put them down by force directly and much wiser to change the rules of the game by a slight of hand. The formula for changing the game is to cultivate one or more opposition groups to whatever force is posing a threat to the empire… and then cultivate a counter-gang to that opposition group to create a new set of conflicts within your target population (Hence the name “gang/counter-gang”). While the target society becomes polarized by the two warring (yet ultimately controlled) opposition movements, the genuine independence movement simply gets diffused and lost in the chaos.

Describing his insight which would later be put to use in the FBI’s COINTEL program within America soon thereafter, Kitson wrote:

“As a result of our informers and pseudo gangs we were getting to know a bit about the future movements of the gangs which was much better than merely analysing past events. We had a long way to go before we could say that we were producing the information that would enable the Security Forces to destroy the Mau Mau in our area… I began to feel that at last I was on the road which led to the desired goal.” [p.90]

The Case of the Civil War

A useful pre-20th century example of this sort of operation was witnessed with British Intelligence’s support for BOTH southern rebels one the one side of the 1861-65 Civil War and radical abolitionists on the northern side of the war. To add a degree of sophistication here, the abolitionist movement itself was polarized between violent vigilante abolitionists like John Brown vs the “peaceful” abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison who really just wanted the Union to dissolve and liberally “agree to disagree” with the slave-loving confederacy to the South.

Before and during the war, President Lincoln and his allies had to contend with all of these controlled opposition movements who could only seem to agree on one thing: Break up the Union. When he realized how this gang/counter-gang operation was being run, former slave Frederick Douglass broke with the abolitionists in order to support Lincoln whom he recognized had the only principled strategy to fully ending slavery (and colonialism) forever from the earth (1).

A more recent display of Kitson’s strategy can be found in the efforts to lay the blame on the coronavirus pandemic squarely on China.

COVID-19’s Anomalous Origins

In late January 2020, with the publication of a report from the Kuzuma School of Biological Sciences, the theory of COVID-19’s natural evolution was first put into serious doubt. Although the Indian team was forced to retract their paper under immense pressure, researchers such as Dr. Luc Montagnier, Francis Boyle, Dr. Judy Mikovits and Pierre Brigage increasingly pointed out the anomalous traces of HIV sequences spliced throughout the COVID-19 genome implying a laboratory origin.

Increasingly doctors working on the front lines in New York such as Dr. Kyle-Sidell began reporting the anomalous behaviour of COVID-19 symptoms as unlike any pneumonia he had ever seen and observed that COVID-19 acted more like some form of high altitude sickness, with ventilators not only useless but resulting in deaths in 9 out of 10 patients (meaning they were actually provoking deaths).

With these growing anomalies, thinking citizens became increasingly concerned by the disturbing matter of the vast Pentagon-controlled bioweapons infrastructure scattered throughout the globe. Bulgarian researcher Dilyana Gaytandzhieva’s reported on the Pentagon’s 25 bioweapons labs– all of whom were conducting billions of dollars of secretive research on new and more virulent forms of viruses, with over $50 billion spent on the practice officially ever since Dick Cheney’s Bioshield Act of 2004 was signed into law.

By March, even China’s foreign Ministry raised the possibility that the virus came to China via the American team who participated in the Wuhan Military Games in October 2019- an event at which several athletes were hospitalized for COVID-like symptoms.

On May 13th, the Russian government directly put into question America’s bioweapons laboratories in Georgia and Ukraine with Sergei Lavrov saying: “These [U.S.] laboratories are densely formed along the perimeter of the borders of the Russian Federation, and, accordingly, next to the borders of the People’s Republic of China.”

A May 14th report from China’s Global Times stated: “The U.S. can’t just claim all reasonable inquiries to its bio-labs as “conspiracy theories,” and when U.S. politicians keep accusing China’s lab in Wuhan as the origin of COVID-19 without providing any evidence, they should respond to the questions on U.S. bio-labs, including the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick.”

It is tough to dismiss this sort of matter as “conspiracy theory” when North Carolina’s Chapel Hill bioweapons labs went so far as to create a novel coronavirus called SHCO14 designed to jump from bats to humans with USAID/CIA grant money in 2015 and events sponsored by both the Rockefeller Foundation, the CIA and Bill Gates have been using novel coronaviruses in their pandemic scenarios for over a decade (2).

The China Counter-Gang Narrative

When it became evident that the story of the laboratory origins of COVID-19 wasn’t going to disappear on its own, a new counter-narrative was spun which involved embracing the evidence of the laboratory origins while shifting the blame from the hands of Anglo-American intelligence to… China.

Emerging out of the bowels of Oxford’s Henry Jackson Society, the lie was concocted early on that the culprit behind this virus’ origins was none other than China whose BSL-4 laboratory in Wuhan had been conducting research on novel coronaviruses and had received $3.7 million grant from the U.S. National Institute of Health from 2014-2019. Is this proof that China caused COVID-19? Some people who want you to think emotionally while ignoring big swaths of reality say so.

Here the story subdivided itself further, as one group represented by Niall Ferguson, Mike Pompeo and Steve Bannon maintain that the international spread of the virus was done deliberately with China apparently going so far as to intentionally pack planes full of sick people to contaminate the world (a lie entirely annihilated by Daniel A. Bell on April 211st), and another group which includes some well-intended dupes like Francis Boyle or Montagnier which maintain that COVID-19 leaked out by accident.

No matter what form this sleight of hand has taken, it has been just that: a misdirection designed to ensure that the truth of the Pentagon’s bioweapons labs would be lost in the chaos stirred up by the blame-game with President Trump now falling for the anti-China line and entertaining the possibility of cutting America from all relations with China unless nations suffering from COVID are paid trillions in reparations.

Now we should not be surprised to find MI6’s very own former director Sir Richard Dearlove to be a loud voice in this anti-China clamor.

The same Sir Richard Dearlove that covered up Princess Diana’s death while director of MI6’s Special Operations from 1994-1999, who oversaw the Yellowcake Dodgy dossier while director of MI6 in 2002 and who vetted another dodgy dossier created by his former employee Christopher Steele in 2016 designed to overthrow President Trump and usher in a war with Russia, has now joined the propaganda operation to blame COVID-19 entirely on China.

On June 4, Sir Dearlove stated “I think this started as an accident… if China ever admits responsibility, will it pay for repairs? I think this will make every country in the world rethink how it sets up its relations with China and how the international community will behave towards Chinese leadership… Of course, the Chinese must have thought “If we are to suffer a pandemic, perhaps we should not try too hard to warn our competitors, so to speak, that they will suffer from the same disadvantages that we have.”

Sir Dearlove’s comments were timed to coincide with a new University of London peer-reviewed paper entitled “A Reconstruction of Historical Etiology of the SARS-CoV-2 Epidemic” which stated that the virus’ sequencing indicated “intentional manipulation”. The British researchers stated that the virus “was probably designed through a Wuhan laboratory experiment to develop ‘high potency chimeric viruses”.

Amidst the turmoil and confusion caused by these gang/counter-gang operations radiating noise and polarization across the political and scientific landscape, the reality of the financial collapse looms over head as one system sits upon the precipice of collapse and a battle wages over who will control the emergence of the new system. Will this inevitable new system be a multi-polar order defined by cooperation on space exploration, new discoveries and long-term infrastructure benefiting all nations and cultures, or will it be an order defined by a 21st century Anglo-American oligarchy sitting atop an ivory tower as a divided world of chaos and depopulation suffers from below?

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

Notes

(1) As I wrote in my recent report, while the Civil War raged on, the British Empire’s strategists under the leadership of the X Club’s Thomas Huxley to polarize the scientific community around a controlled debate between Darwinism on the one side vs radical creationism on the other while all principled approaches to creative/directed evolution developed by Cuvier, von Humboldt, von Baer and Dana were lost in the sandstorm.
(2) Philanthrocapitalism, past and present: The Rockefeller Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the setting(s) of the international/global health agenda by Anne-Emanuelle Birn, University of Toronto, 2014 is one useful resource as is the September 2019 Global Vaccination Summit and October 2019 Event 201.

From 1869-1872, the world got to see these creatures exposed when the first international criminal case occurred between Britain and the USA known as the Alabama Claims affair. The outcome of this case found Britain guilty of militarily supplying the Confederate South during the Civil War which nearly saw the dissolution of the Union between 1861-1865. While many supporters of Lincoln knew that vast Confederate operations in British Canada were vital in executing the war (and also guiding Lincoln’s 1865 assassination), international distractions and corruption from within America resulted in little more than a $15 million slap on the wrist while all sins were deemed forgotten and the shadow creatures went promptly back to work.

In 1934, the light shone again upon the shadow creatures when General Smedley Butler blew the whistle on a fascist coup plot led by the top echelons of the Anglo-American banking establishment against Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His exposure to Congress and the media again shed light onto the dark creatures crawling around inside of America’s soul and saved the republic from an early slide into fascism which certainly would have found itself allied with fascist forces of Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan and Britain during the course of the war that was yet to occur. While FDR survived his 1933 assassination attempt, 1934 coup attempt and prolonged war with Wall Street and the City of London, the light was kept focused upon the shadow creatures for a number of years… but then he died before accomplishing his grand vision. His allies like Harry Hopkins, Henry Wallace, Dexter White, Sumner Wells and others who shared his anti-colonial vision to internationalize the new deal were targeted for destruction under the new FBI-led fascism of the Cold War age and the shadow creatures again took power.

JFK, Malcolm X, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. did their best to shine light upon the darkness and right the wrongs of this imperial impulse within America’s deep state (that really never left with the United Empire Loyalists in 1776)… but their candles were also snuffed out.

The common thread among the great American leaders of the 19th and 20th centuries mentioned above was their devout commitment to the principles enshrined in the American constitution, and the internationalization of those principles in the form of anti-colonial programs for rail and industrial development for all peoples. This traditionally American concept of a global system was premised upon certain principles of “open system economics”, “win-win cooperation”, interconnectivity with a focus on rail and the defense of national sovereignty. The British System of governance on the other hand was premised upon closed system, zero-sum thinking, monetarist, and antithetical to national sovereignty.

Beautifully describing this clash between two paradigms, Henry Carey who would become Lincoln’s leading economic advisor and champion of the spread of the American System globally stated in his Harmony of Interests (1851):

“Two systems are before the world; the one looks to increasing the proportion of persons and of capital engaged in trade and transportation, and therefore to diminishing the proportion engaged in producing commodities with which to trade, with necessarily diminished return to the labor of all; while the other looks to increasing the proportion engaged in the work of production, and diminishing that engaged in trade and transportation, with increased return to all, giving to the laborer good wages, and to the owner of capital good profits… One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other in increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.”

Russiagate: more than just another scandal

Today, as the world finds itself again caught between two opposing systems (multipolar vs unipolar), the light has found itself cast upon America’s shadow creatures as the scheme known as Russiagate which promised to undo the 2016 election and accelerate America’s war with Russia (and China) has lost those remnants of viability it once enjoyed.

In recent weeks, Richard Grenell (acting director of National Intelligence) put more water on the fires of the Russiagate myth by forcing the release of thousands of pages of testimonies and side evidence of 53 people including many high level Deep State operatives embedded within the Obama state department, cabinet and Five Eyes intelligence apparatus. Upon inspection, many of these testimonies revealed that leading players of the effort to overthrow Trump admitted to Congress that they knew of no collusion between the Trump Campaign and Russia although continued to lie to the media for years that such collusion did exist. These testimonies and side evidence also revealed that Trump’s allies like Michael Flynn, Roger Stone and George Papadopolous were targeted for entrapment by the FBI and CIA. Emails from the FBI’s Counterintelligence head Bill Priestap were especially candid asking “what is our goal? Truth/admission or to get him to lie so we can prosecute him or get him fired?”

The released evidence also revealed that Comey’s FBI not only held a meeting with Obama and a team of officials in the Oval Office on January 6, 2020 to discuss entrapment procedures targeting Flynn, but Comey’s Assistant Deputy Director of the FBI Peter Strzok proceeded to command the FBI to keep the ‘Operation Razor’ investigation on Flynn open even though the department had publicly committed to dropping the operation on January 5 finding no evidence of Russian collusion after 3 months of surveillance. This extension gave Comey time to arrange the “casual meeting” between his agents Strzok and Bill Priestap in Flynn’s office on January 26, 2016 in order to discuss the content of Flynn’s discussion with the Russian Ambassador Kislyak wherein the General bit the bait and told the lie that he relayed his discussion to the Vice President.

All original notes of the meeting supposedly compiled by the two agents interviewing Flynn were promptly lost and replaced with heavily edited commentaries by Strzok’s love interest Lisa Page who were both later caught red handed admitting to be the “resistance” committed to bringing down Trump from within Washington. Other evidence made public in recent weeks revealed that three dozen Obama officials and intelligence operatives made “unmasking requests” to the FBI-riddled Justice Department in order to make Flynn’s name public in the recorded transcripts with the Russian Ambassador.

All in all, Attorney General Barr’s decision to drop all charges against Flynn (and hopefully Roger Stone who was similarly targeted) makes a lot of sense.

A Word on the Steele Dossier

Three years of investigations including the incredible Horrowitz report of December 2019 have demonstrated startling abuses of power from the FBI, and deep seated connections between the FBI and CIA with the DNC, Hillary Campaign, Perkins Coie (the DNC law firm) and MI6’s Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS. Steele’s dodgy dossier itself was funded by the Hillary Campaign and the DNC via the law firm Perkins Coie which also gave funds to Steele’s American partner Fusion GPS on whose board sit figures such as the husband of Obama’s senior policy advisor Shailagh Murray, and the wife of the DOJ’s 4th highest official Bruce Ohr.

The fact that the blatant lies were compiled on the DNC/Clinton dime by British intelligence and then distributed to leading FBI-connected media mouthpieces like the NY Times, Mother Jones, Washington Post and Buzzfeed was not a coincidence and neither was the role of Steele’s former boss Richard Dearlove who also acts as advisor to Steele’s Orbis enterprise.

While running MI6, Sir Dearlove not only gave the world the dodgy “yellowcake” dossier in 2002 which justified the destruction of Iraq but was the figure who advised Steele to give the dossier to the UK government in the Autumn of 2016 and then send it to officials in the USA. It was in this manner that the dossier made its way into the hands of James Comey and James Clapper who leaked it’s existence via a memo to the National Endowment of Democracy’s David Kramer and Buzzfeed.

This dossier was not only was instrumental in justifying the FISA warrants used to surveil the Trump Campaign- giving rise to the Robert Mueller witch hunt that contaminated three years of American history and did irreparable damage to U.S.-Russian relations, but also induced the late Cold Warrior John McCain to call for the activation of NATO’s article 5 threatening to put America on a war footing with Russia.

There is no such thing as “former MI6”.

Steele is such an ugly figure in this story that a few additional words should be said on the man who had served as the head of MI6’s Moscow bureau recruiting and handling oligarchs and other spies during the dark days of the 1990s. After this stint, Steele acted as case officer of the anti-Kremlin journalist (and Boris Berezovsky employee) Alexander Litvinenko who turned out more useful dead than alive in 2006 with Steele being the first to lay the blame on Putin. Later, Steele acted as advisor to Victoria Nuland during the State Department-led overthrow of Ukraine’s government in February 2014. Very little that has been destructive during the past few years have been untouched by Steele as Newsweek even revealed that Steele’s firm Orbis (which was used to compile the dossier along with Fusion GPS and on whose board sits Sir Dearlove) had direct connections with another Russian defector… Sergey Skripal.

Upon his release from prison, George Papadopoulos had the wits to review his own experience as a target of this entrapment operation producing a book of extremely high value entitled Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump. In this book, Papadopoulos diligently reconstructs his experience with British and Italian intelligence networks centered around Sir Dearlove’s close friend and associate Stefan Halper who crafted an elaborate web of intrigue that was later used to entrap the hapless consultant into lying to the FBI.

In spite of these and other revelations of the injustices and abuse of power of the shadow creatures embedded within the heart of America, the myth of Russia’s takeover has continued in the psyche of dumbed down liberals who only knew how to shape their image of reality from MSNBC.

This is Not a Liberal vs Conservative Problem

What has become ever more apparent amidst this ongoing drama, is that this “deep state” is not categorizable as a creature of the left, as many Trump supporters foolishly do. In fact, many of the most psychotic participants of this process find themselves among the so called “right” of America professing their public loyalty to Donald Trump while promulgating the myth of Russia’s enemy image (and obstruction of the true role of British Intelligence).

Key figures among this group who have played and continue to play a dangerous role as right-wing gatekeepers of the Empire include Trump’s former Advisor Steve Bannon who has lied repeatedly of Russian interference into the Trump Campaign (even testifying that Roger Stone served as the agent between Trump and Julian Assange), and also current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Pompeo has not only led a mission to destroy Julian Assange for over two years accusing him of being a stooge of Putin, but has also withheld vital information delivered to him by former NSA whistleblower Bill Binney with whom he met in October 2017 at the request of Trump. In this meeting, Binney presented the results of forensic studies he conducted of the DNC emails published on Wikileaks revealing that they were not subject to a hack but rather an internal download from within the DNC itself onto a thumb drive. In his affidavit to the Stone case, Binney restated the argument he delivered to Pompeo earlier saying: “Wikileaks did not receive stolen data from the Russian government. Intrinsic metadata in the publicly available files on Wikileaks demonstrates that the files acquired by Wikileaks were delivered in a medium such as a thumb drive”. Had Pompeo made these findings known in 2017, the entire Russiagate affair could easily have been put to bed much earlier.

Even Crowdstrike’s President Shawn Henry was revealed to have admitted in the newly released testimonies that his private firm (contracted by the FBI to have sole control over the DNC servers), could find no evidence of a hack.

Both Pompeo and Bannon are among the loudest of the droves of neocon sociopaths promoting war with Russia and China while projecting the weak image of their support of the confused and beleaguered President who has been labelled such a threat by those orchestrators of Russia gate for the simple fact of his 1) support of nationalism and industry within America and 2) his long-held support for positive relations with Russia and China.

If it were not for Russia and China’s vital alliance, then no multipolar alternative to the collapsing western financial system would exist and any hope for salvation for the Middle East, Africa, Asia or even the western alliance would be nil by this point in time. Trump’s very existence as an American force representing a tendency to avoid war, defend national sovereignty and collaborate with other nation states on building big projects around the world and in outer space, is itself an intolerable threat to the global empire which presided over the deaths of eight American presidents, and orchestrated every major war of the 19th-20th centuries.

This is the same empire that is currently putting every ounce of energy into the effort to convince Trump that he has no choice but to take a hard line approach to China amidst the current coronavirus hysteria in order to win the upcoming elections, going so far as to condemn Xi Jinping as complicit in the spread of covid-19 and pulling America out of the Open Skies Treaty earlier this week. When one traces back the origins of the anti-China line now promulgated by Pompeo, and Bannon (and unfortunately adopted by Trump as of this week), we find ourselves right back onto the porch of British Intelligence’s own sophist Niall Ferguson. Another driving force behind the origins of the “make-China-pay-the-USA-for-causing-the-pandemic” formula is none other than Britain’s neocon Henry Jackson Society whose founding principles were signed by sir Richard Dearlove!

Trump’s decision to play such a dangerous game in order to “win elections” is beyond folly since no one in their right mind should even assume that a 2020 U.S. election will even occur under chaotic conditions of martial law which today’s multifaceted crisis threatens to usher onto the world.

While the light shines ever more upon the shadow creatures within America, the time to act appropriately upon that exposed darkness is running out and only a strong commitment by the patriotic forces in America and other western nations to ally with Russia, and China in order to bring a new Multipolar system into being can put America back onto the tracks which such leaders as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F Kennedy had envisioned.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

First though, some background to the issue. British government policy holds implicitly that agents or informants operating for the state’s security service, MI5, are permitted to commit crimes without fear of prosecution if those crimes are committed in the line of duty to protect national security.

This is tantamount to the British state granting its agents and proxies a “license to kill”. The judges in the panel of the so-called Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) have formally recognized this hitherto secret government policy as “legal”. The panel voted by 3 to 2 in favor. The two dissenting judges expressed deep concern that the ruling was “opening the door to future abuses” of power by British state agents.

MI5 is the branch of state intelligence that deals specifically with internal security. The other branch, MI6, deals with overseas activities. The disturbing implication is that MI5 can act with impunity, including acts of murder, against British citizens in the name of national security. The powers granted to it are secret and beyond public scrutiny in the courts. That means Britain’s secret services are now officially untouchable and above the law. This is a description fitting for a police state, not a supposed democracy which proclaims to be under the rule of law.

Four British-Irish human rights groups challenged the policy of immunity but they were over-ruled last week by the five-judge panel. These groups are to further appeal the decision in the courts. One of them, the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ), based in Belfast, has considerable expertise in investigating the abuse of state power during the armed conflict in Northern Ireland (1969-1998). CAJ has documented the extensive involvement of British military intelligence in waging a dirty war in Northern Ireland where its agents colluded with and directed paramilitary agents and informants to carry out assassinations. Hundreds of such extra-judicial killings remain “unsolved” and represent a painful legacy for citizens across Northern Ireland.

One of the most notorious killings was that of Belfast human rights lawyer Pat Finucane (39) in 1989. British agents smashed into his home while he was having dinner with his wife and three young children. The attackers shot him in the head 12 times as he lay prone on the floor in front of his family. The British government has previously acknowledged “shocking collusion” by its agents in Finucane’s murder. But the British authorities have pointedly refused to hold a full public inquiry, thereby blocking any prosecution.

Thirty years after the murder of Pat Finucane and hundreds of other Irish citizens by British counterinsurgency operations, Britain is now formally granting the same license to kill citizens anywhere in the United Kingdom – under the pretext of national security. The development has grave implications for human rights in Britain. It also casts a sinister cloud over what kind of Britain the new Conservative government under Boris Johnson is creating post-Brexit.

Strategic Culture Foundation conducted the following interview with Daniel Holder, the deputy director of the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ), based in Belfast.

INTERVIEW

Question: Is CAJ concerned that the Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruling last week will lead to serious human rights abuses by British security services in the future?

Daniel Holder: We are very concerned that this ruling for now permits MI5 to continue to authorize informant or agent involvement in serious crime. This could include crimes that constitute human rights violations. There were such experiences during the Northern Ireland conflict of informant-based paramilitary collusion, with agents of the state involved in acts as serious as murder and torture. Far from the so-called “intelligence war” helping bring the conflict to an end we consider that such practices by covert units of the security forces as having prolonged and exacerbated the conflict.

Question: On Brexit impact, will leaving the EU and its human rights standards add to concerns of abuse of power by the British state?

Daniel Holder: Although the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is part of the Council of Europe system and not the EU, those advocating for Brexit often confuse the two and hostility to the EU also manifests itself in hostility to the ECHR and its court in Strasbourg. Being an EU member state, however, does mean ECHR membership is obligatory, and that will go with Brexit. Although the ECHR being incorporated into Northern Ireland law is also a key part of the 1998 peace deal known as the Good Friday Agreement it is deeply concerning that the new British government is already advocating breaching this commitment by stating it will change the domestic ECHR law (the Human Rights Act) so it does not apply to acts before the year 2000. They are quite open that the reason for doing this is to impede investigations into the security forces during the Northern Ireland conflict – and top of the list as to what the UK does not want a light shined on is precisely the issue of the crimes of agents of the state within paramilitary groups, practices often referred to as “collusion”.

Question: Are British government claims justified that undercover work by security services and their agents may require freedom for agents to participate in unlawful activities in order to protect national security?

Daniel Holder: All police and security services the world over use informants. They are a vital policing tool, but they have to be used lawfully, and the question always is: where do you draw the line as to what they are allowed to do? On occasions where absolutely necessary this may involve informants being involved in crimes like conspiracies with a view to thwarting them; but the bottom line is that informants can never lawfully be “authorized” to be involved in serious crimes that constitute human rights violations, such as kidnap, killings and false imprisonment, nor can they act as agent provocateurs. All of that is illegal.

Question: The narrow majority in the five-judge high court granting immunity to MI5 from prosecution for crimes suggests there is concern among state judges that the existing policy is dubious and treacherous. Do you perceive deep misgivings among the authorities?

Daniel Holder: Yes, but not just now, going back some of the archival documents and investigations that have taken place into the Northern Ireland conflict have revealed significant misgivings at that time, about just such a policy. Take the government-approved De Silva review published in 2012 into the murder of human rights lawyer Pat Finucane, where “shocking” levels of collusion were admitted. This report conceded that that officers were being asked to do things that could not be done lawfully, which is another way of saying the policy and practice was unlawful. We now have a secret policy, the limits of which are unknown, on the basis of a power that does not exist in law, that tries to continue to place agents of the state above the law. The concern is that the errors of our past could be repeated if the same circumstances arise again, here or elsewhere.

Question: The British judges’ ruling last week seems contradictory. On one hand the ruling claims MI5 agents are not immune from prosecution, but on the other hand it says they can act unlawfully if it is done in the public interest?

Daniel Holder: The system and policy are contradictory. The policy says that MI5 informants are in theory not immune from prosecution, but MI5 will know about their crimes – and indeed authorize them – but conceal this from police and prosecutors, despite legal duties that apply to everyone in Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom to promptly inform the police when you are aware someone is committing a crime. Again, this is the security service placing itself above the law.

Question: Is this the kind of policy that leads to rampant lawlessness seen elsewhere, for example in Brazil and The Philippines where police officers and state agents are killing thousands of people extrajudicially with impunity? Northern Ireland’s past conflict of rampant British state collusion in killings is surely a warning too?

Daniel Holder: The practices by covert elements of the security forces of tolerating, facilitating and even directing informants in paramilitary groups involvement in serious crime, including killings, and assisting their evasion from justice, in our view was one of the most serious patterns of human rights violations that prolonged and exacerbated the Northern Ireland conflict and has left a deeply poisoned legacy that we are still struggling to deal with today. There have been significant reforms to the Police Service in Northern Ireland since the peace process to prevent recurrence, but the UK security and intelligence agencies also need to bring their practices within the law, otherwise somewhere, history could repeat itself.

During the weeks since the “Darroch memo” scandal erupted, mainstream media has totally mis-diagnosed the nature of the breakdown in US-British relations, and has brushed over the most relevant evidence that has been brought to light by Darroch’s cables. This spinning of the narrative has made it falsely appear that the Ambassador merely criticized the President as “clumsy, diplomatically inept, unpredictable and dysfunctional” and was thus unjustly attacked by the President causing the poor diplomate to resign saying “the current situation is making it impossible for me to carry out my role as I would like.” Former British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt went so far as to say that Darroch was “the best of Britain” and encouraged all diplomats to continue to “speak truth to power.” International press on both sides of the ocean followed suit portraying Darroch as a hero among men.

Hog wash.

The reality is that Darroch’s messages to the British Foreign Office go much deeper and reveal something very ugly that challenges the deepest assumptions about recent history and modern geopolitics.

Sir Darroch and Britain’s Invisible Hand Exposed

Sir Darroch, (Knight Commander of St. Michael and St. George) is not your typical British diplomat. The Knight made a name for himself as a leading agent of Tony Blair while acting as Ambassador to the European Union from 2007-2011 in an effort to win international support for a regime change operation against Iran, Syria and Libya.

Blair and the highest levels of the British oligarchy had managed America as its “dumb giant” throughout the entire post-9/11 regime change program on the Middle East. While many have labelled this policy as “American”, we shall come to see that it was merely the carrying out of the “Blair Doctrine” announced in the 1999 speech in Chicago calling for a post-nation state (post-Westphalian) world order.

It is important to remind ourselves that the dodgy WMD dossier  had been crafted by the British Foreign Office before being used by neo con hawks such as John Bolton and Cheney as justification to blow up Iraq in 2003. It was also the earlier Anglo-Saudi sponsored BAE black operation run by Prince Bandar bin Sultan which funded and directed 9/11 earlier. As US Ambassador beginning in January 2016, Sir Darroch was instrumental in vetting Christopher Steele as “absolutely legit”. Steele’s “dodgy dossier” on Trump was used to justify the greatest witch hunt of a sitting President in history.

When viewed in the same light as the British-directed Russia-gating of the President, these memos shed valuable light upon the Byzantine methods which British intelligence has used to conduct its subtle manipulation of America for a very long time.

Trump Whisperers and Britain’s Other Tools

In his memos, Sir Darroch called for “flooding the zone” with Trump whisperers who can influence the President’s perceptions of the world and push him towards the British agenda on issues such as de-carbonization, Free Trade, and war with Iran.

Sir Darroch said to his superiors that “we have spent years building the relationships; they are the gatekeepers… the individuals we rely upon to ensure the U.K. voice is heard in the West Wing.” Who are these voices who been built up over years? National Security Advisor John Bolton is a long-standing visitor to the British embassy and former Chief of Staff John Kelly has had regular early morning breakfast dates. A Washington Post assessment of July 8^th described Darroch’s “coterie- including Kellyanne Conway, Stephen Miller, Mick Mulvaney, Sarah Sanders and Trump ally Chris Ruddy” who have met at the embassy and “share about the President and his decision-making.”

Darroch also revealed that Trump’s resistance to the British position on war with Iran was not acceptable when the President chose to cancel an attack on Iran on June 21^st after an America drone was shot down. Moments after Trump’s cancellation of the attack, a Darroch memo complained that Trump was “incoherent and chaotic” and that Trump could fall into line once he was “surrounded by a more hawkish group of advisers… Just one more Iranian attack somewhere in the region could trigger yet another Trump U-turn.”

Only two weeks after sending this cable, Britain orchestrated a crisis by seizing an Iranian ship on July 5^th which snowballed into an Iranian seizure of a British tanker and greater danger of confrontation amongst the NATO axis and Iran.

The biggest confusion spread by the controllers of “officially accepted narratives” when assessing such things as 9-11, regime change wars, or the current debacle in Iran is located in a sleight of hand that asserts that America leads the British in the Special relationship. This belief in an “American empire” betrays a profound misunderstanding of history.

The Fallacious History of US-British “Friendship”

For much of the 19^th century, Americans generally had a better understanding of their anti-colonial origins than many do today. Even though the last official war fought between Britain and America was in 1812-15, the British failure to destroy America militarily caused British foreign policy to re-focus its efforts on undermining America from within… generally through the dual infestation of British-sponsored ideologies contaminating the American school system on the one hand and British banking practices of Wall Street’s ruling class on the other. This attack from within required more patience, but was more successful and led to the near collapse of America in 1860 when Lord Palmerston quickly recognized the Southern slave power’s call for independence from the Union. Britain’s covert military support for the Confederate cause was exposed by the end of that war and led to Britain’s payment of $15 million settlement to America as part of the Alabama Claims in 1872.

As the informative 2010 Lpac documentary “The Special Relationship is for Traitors” showcased, during the early 20^th century leading American military figures like Brig. General Billy Mitchell understood Britain’s role in supporting the Confederacy and Britain’s manipulation of global wars. General Mitchell fought against the “special relationship” tooth and nail and led the military to create “War Plan Red and War Plan Orange” to defeat Britain under the context of an eventual war between the English-speaking powers. These plans were made US military doctrine in 1930 and were only taken off the books when America decided it was more important to put down London’s Fascist Frankenstein threat than fight Britain head on in WWII.

The Rhodes Scholars Take Over

Before the “Churchill gang” (that Stalin accused of poisoning FDR) could take control of America, Franklin Roosevelt described his understanding of the British influence over the US State Department when he told his son: “You know, any number of times the men in the State Department have tried to conceal messages to me, delay them, hold them up somehow, just because some of those career diplomats over there aren’t in accord with what they know I think. They should be working for Winston. As a matter of fact, a lot of the time, they are [working for Churchill]. Stop to think of ’em: any number of ’em are convinced that the way for America to conduct its foreign policy is to find out what the British are doing and then copy that!” I was told… six years ago, to clean out that State Department. It’s like the British Foreign Office….”

With FDR’s death, these British operatives took over American foreign policy and wiped out the remaining pro-American forces in the State Department, disbanding the OSS and reconstituting America’s intelligence services as the MI6-modelled CIA in 1948.

In 1951, the Chicago Tribune published a incredible series of exposes by journalist William Fulton documenting the cancerous penetration of hundreds of Oxford Trained Rhodes Scholars who had taken over American foreign policy and were directing America into a third world war. On July 14, 1951 Fulton wrote: “Key positions in the United States department of state are held by a network of American Rhodes scholars. Rhodes scholars are men who obtained supplemental education and indoctrination at Oxford University in England with the bills paid by the estate of Cecil John Rhodes, British empire builder. Rhodes wrote about his ambition to cause “the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British empire.” The late diamond and gold mining tycoon aimed at a world federation dominated by Anglo-Saxons.”

Sir Kissinger Opens the Floodgates

A star pupil of William Yandall Elliot (a leading Rhodes Scholar based out of Harvard) was a young misanthropic German named Henry Kissinger.

A decade before becoming a Knight of the British Empire, Kissinger gave a remarkable speech at a May 1981 event on British-American relations at London’s Royal Institute for International Affairs. At this event Kissinger described the opposing world views of Churchill vs. Roosevelt, gushing that he much preferred the post-war view of Churchill. He then described his time working for the British Foreign Office as Secretary of State saying: “The British were so matter-of-factly helpful that they became a participant in internal American deliberations, to a degree probably never practiced between sovereign nations… In my White House incarnation then, I kept the British Foreign Office better informed and more closely engaged than I did the American State Department… It was symptomatic”.

As Kissinger spoke these words, another anglophile traitor was being installed as Vice-President of America. George Bush Sr. was not only the son of a Nazi-funding Wall Street tool and former director of the CIA, but was also made a Knight of the Grand Cross and Order of Bath by Queen Elizabeth in 1993. The most disasterous foreign policies enacted under Reagan’s leadership during the 1980s can be traced directly back to these two figures.

The Potential Revival of the ‘Real’ America

Think what you may of Donald Trump. The fact is, that he has not started any wars which a Jeb or Hillary were happy to launch. He has reversed a regime change program active since 9/11. He has fought to put America into a cooperative position with Russia. He has undone decades of WTO/City of London free trade. He has called for rebuilding productive industries following through by reviving the protective tariff. To top it off, he has been at war with the British-directed deep state for over three years and survived. Now that Bolton has been outed as an ally of Sir Darroch, there is an open acknowledgement that Trump is gearing up to replace the neocon traitor as we speak. Trump has many problems but being a British asset is not one of them.

If you’ve made it this far, you shouldn’t be surprised that the collapse of the special relationship is a very good thing, since America now has a real opportunity to rediscover its true anti-imperial nature by working with Russia, China, India and other nations under the new cooperative framework of space exploration and the Belt and Road Initiative.