Two former or current secret surveillance officers for Denmark’s Military Intelligence Service (Forsvars Efterretningstjeneste FE) and two current or former Police Secret Service (Politiets Efterretningstjeneste PET) were arrested for leaking “deeply confidential information”. Three of them appeared before Copenhagen’s City Court yesterday. To fængslet i hemmeligt grundlovsforhør: Medarbejdere anholdt for lækager fra FE og PET | Indland | DR

The court forbad media coverage in court. The nine-hour indictment hearing was held behind double locked doors. Denmarks Radio (DR), the public service radio-television-online medium, learned only that three of the four were heard in court, one was released and two remanded in custody. There is no information about the fourth person arrested.

FE is the equivalent to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. While the FE jurisdiction also covers military intelligence, they must not spy on Danish people—only foreigners and those in other countries. The Police Intelligence Service (PET) surveils Danes, as the FBI surveils people within the U.S. The constitution forbids blanket spying on any Danish resident without court approval.

Trine Maria Ilsoee, DR legal reporter, wrote that there is “nearly no precedence” that there is an “internal investigation in PET and FE.” If found guilty they could end up in prison for 12 years. (1)

As of now, the public does not know what the leaking is about. Ilsoee mentions two possibilities. One of those is Denmark’s biggest spying scandal to date.

Last May, Denmarks Radio (DR) published information provided by at least one FE whistleblower exposing how Danish governments (right and so-called left) have been violating its own constitution by spying upon all its inhabitants and upon its closest neighbor leaders. Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste lod USA spionere mod Angela Merkel, franske, norske og svenske toppolitikere gennem danske internetkabler | Indland | DR (2) (See France and Germany ‘seeking full clarity’ from US and Denmark on spying report – CNN )

Ironically, it may be that the state prosecutor in the current case is contending that those charged have violated Denmark’s constitution by revealing secrets. This may well be associated with the US’s Espionage Act, and Britain’s Official Secrets Act.

FE has been illegally and systematically spying upon its own citizens for United States economic profit and political interests. This has nothing to do with spying upon their “enemies” (Russia, China, Iran, et al.).

Operation Dunhammer is the codename for a FE internal investigation of how the US’s National Security Agency (NSA) was sucking all surveillance out of its spy network with the Danish military secret service.

For several months DR has been working with journalists from Sweden (SVT), Norway, Germany (Süddeutsche Zeitung, NDR, WDR) and France (Le Monde) on these new developments. Their work forced some of 35 national leaders known to be spied upon by the U.S. to come forth.

“We demand to be fully informed about matters concerning Swedish citizens, companies and interests. And then we have to see how the answer sounds from the political side in Denmark,” Swedish Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist told national broadcaster SVT.

Norway, Sweden Demand Answers on Espionage After Report of Denmark Helping NSA Spy on EU Politicians – Sputnik International (sputniknews.com)

PM Emmanuel Macron said such behavior is “unacceptable among allies”.

Danish Defense Minister Trine Bramsen said the government “cannot and will not enter into speculation about intelligence matters”, yet she emphasized that she views the systematic wiretapping of close allies as “unacceptable”.

The information of long-standing illegalities, which the understaffed and weak Danish Intelligence Oversight Committee (TET) presented to the public last August, includes:

1. Withholding “key and crucial information to government authorities” and the oversight committee between 2014 and today;
2. Illegal activities even before 2014;
3. Telling “lies” to policy makers;
4. Illegal surveillance on Danish citizens, including a member of the oversight committee. (Some of this illegal spying had been shared with unnamed sources [perhaps the U.S.?]);
5. Unauthorized activities have been shelved and;
6. The FE failed to follow up on indications of espionage within areas of the Ministry of Defense.

When DR first exposed some of this spying, Defense Minister Bramsen suspended five FE leaders responsible. Under pressure from several political parties, and most likely the U.S., she reinstated them in different jobs.

Bramsen said that a secret internal investigation into the reports by TET would begin in December and last one year. Results will be shown only to a select few in government and to only five parliamentarians, who must not share information with anyone else.

What is to be and not be investigated will not be revealed either. That was made clear by the government to DR when it first published the whistleblower’s revelations. Reporter Trine Marie Ilsøee wrote:

“We cannot expect that most of the possible illegalities committed will be made public.” She added that Denmark’s intelligence services are connected to and dependent upon foreign powers [i.e. U.S. and not Europe]. Denmark could be compromised if secrets were revealed. “After all, intelligence services operate in secrecy.”

Edward Snowden first revealed some of this spying, XKEYSCORE, in 2013, which also involves spying within the “international community”. XKEYSCORE: NSA’s Google for the World’s Private Communications (theintercept.com) and Portrait of the NSA: no detail too small in quest for total surveillance | NSA | The Guardian.

Denmark is one of the US’s closest Eyes, part of “9 Eyes” (UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand—5 Eyes—plus the Netherlands, Norway and France, and “14 Eyes”, which includes Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Italy and Spain).

What is unravelling seems to show that Denmark is US’s lead Eye into spying on other European allies. The Nordic countries share the same original language and cultural roots, including having been the warring Vikings. Sweden and especially Norway were also under Danish colonial control for centuries. Outposts of the U.S. Surveillance Empire: Denmark and Beyond – CovertAction Magazine.

Notes

(1) FE Major Frank Grevil revealed in 2004 that Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen knew that Iraq did not have “massive weapons of destruction” when he convinced the parliament to declare war on that country. This was the first time Denmark had declared war since 1864 when it did so against Germany. Rasmussen was rewarded by being named head of NATO. Grevil went to prison for four months. This was Denmark’s Julian Assange case, albeit the Yankees and British aristocratic state seek Julian’s death.

(2) The headline reads in English: FE (Military Secret Service) let USA Spy against Angela Merkel, French, Norwegian and Swedish top politicians through Danish internet cables. (The US had helped provide the technology.)

By Joe LAURIA

Former President Harry Truman told reporters two days after Dag Hammarskjöld’s death on Sept. 18, 1961 that the U.N. secretary-general  “was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘when they killed him.’”

The mystery of the second U.N. secretary-general’s death festered until the 2011 book Who Killed Hammarskjöld? by British researcher Susan Williams, who uncovered new evidence that pointed to the likelihood that U.S., British and South African intelligence had a hand in his death in a plane crash in Northern Rhodesia, today’s Zambia. on his way to negotiate a cease-fire in Katanga’s separatist war from the Congo.

Williams’ findings led to an independent commission that called on the UN to reopen its 1962 probe in the killing, which ended with an open verdict. “The possibility … the plane was … forced into descent by some form of hostile action is supported by sufficient evidence to merit further inquiry,” the commission concluded.

The UN General Assembly on Dec. 30, 2014 passed a resolution establishing a panel of experts to examine the new evidence and called on nations to declassify any relevant information.  In July 2015, the panel reported that it received limited cooperation from U.S. and other intelligence agencies. 

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at the time noted that “in some cases, member states have not provided a substantive response, have not responded at all or have maintained the classified status of the documents in question despite the passage of time.”

To this day the U.S. and other governments have continued to stonewall the U.N. investigation. The National Security Agency says it has files but are refusing to turn them over, 60 years after the event. In November last year, The Observer in London revealed that a Belgian mercenary pilot, who died in 2007, confessed to a friend that he had shot down Hammarskjöld’s plane.

Consortium News Editor Joe Lauria wrote a series of three articles for The Wall Street Journal, including the first story in the United States about the new evidence.  We are republishing the series here on the 60th anniversary of Hammarskjöld’s death.  

U.N. Considers Reopening Probe into 1961 Crash that Killed Dag Hammarskjöld New evidence of possible foul play has emerged

By Joe Lauria
The Wall Street Journal
May 19, 2014

UNITED NATIONS—The United Nations is considering reopening its investigation into the mysterious 1961 plane crash that killed then-U.N. chief Dag Hammarskjöld after new evidence of possible foul play emerged.

The U.N. General Assembly put the case back on its agenda in March at the recommendation of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon after more than half a century of speculation that the Swedish diplomat’s plane was either sabotaged or shot down.

UN Seeks Clues on 1961 Death of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld Panel of Experts Will Evaluate New Evidence

By Joe Lauria
The Wall Street Journal
Dec. 30, 2014

UNITED NATIONS—The U.N. called on any nation with information that may shed light on the 1961 death of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld to disclose it after evidence emerged in the past few years suggesting foul play.

The request was part of a resolution adopted by all 193 nations in the U.N. General Assembly on Monday, which also establishes an independent panel of experts to examine the new evidence.

The inquiry aims to resolve one of global diplomacy’s most enduring mysteries: What caused a Swedish DC-6 airliner carrying one of the era’s most renowned statesmen to crash into a forest on its way to the former British colony of Northern Rhodesia?

Mr. Hammarskjöld, a Swedish diplomat, had been en route there half a century ago to negotiate a peace deal with separatists in the mineral-rich Katangan province in newly independent Congo, whose forces U.N. troops were fighting. At the time, both Sweden and Northern Rhodesia blamed the crash on pilot error, and a 1962 U.N. investigation ended without conclusion.

Evidence suggesting that the diplomat was shot down by mercenaries fighting for Katanga emerged in a 2011 book, “Who Killed Hammarskjöld?” That sparked new interest in the case. The book led to the formation of the independent Hammarskjöld Commission, made up of veteran international jurists.

In a September 2013 report, the commission examined both new and previously ignored evidence, including witness accounts of a second plane firing on Mr. Hammarskjöld’s plane.

“The possibility…the plane was…forced into its descent by some form of hostile action is supported by sufficient evidence to merit further inquiry,” the report concluded.

That notion was bolstered by Charles Southall, a former U.S. naval officer who was working at a National Security Agency listening post in Cyprus on the night of the crash. He raised the possibility that the Central Intelligence Agency has a tape-recorded radio communication by a mercenary who carried out the alleged air attack on Mr. Hammarskjöld’s plane.

Mr. Southall told the Hammarskjöld Commission that about three hours before the crash, he was called to work by a supervisor who delivered a cryptic message, telling him to expect an important event. Mr. Southall said he then heard a recording—intercepted seven minutes earlier—of a pilot carrying out an attack on Mr. Hammarskjöld’s plane.

Mr. Southall told The Journal that the intercept he heard was over a Central Intelligence Agency—not an NSA—circuit. The CIA refused to confirm or deny the existence of any intercept following a Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, request by The Journal. The agency upheld its decision after The Journal appealed it.

The General Assembly resolution followed Mr. Ban’s call earlier this year for the assembly to ask governments to “declassify any relevant records in their possession” related to Mr. Hammarskjöld’s death.

General Assembly resolutions aren’t legally binding. But by consenting, President Barack Obama’s administration has committed to make available any material it may have related to Mr. Hammarskjöld’s death from the CIA or any other party.

A senior American official said this month that the U.S. had already shown two classified documents to Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister until this year, who called them “trivial” and “immaterial.” Those were NSA documents, another U.S. official said.

In response to a FOIA request by the Hammarskjöld Commission, the NSA said it doesn’t have a transcript or an audio recording of what Mr. Southall says he heard. But the NSA asked the State Department to release a cable sent by then-U.S. ambassador to Congo, Edmund Gullion, just hours after the crash. The State Department complied.

“There is possibility [Mr. Hammarskjöld] was shot down by the single pilot who has harassed U.N. operations,” Mr. Gullion wrote, identifying the pilot as Belgian mercenary Jan Van Risseghem, who died in 2007.

The Hammarskjöld Commission report attempted to explore a motive for a killing. It set out the geopolitical context in which powerful interests saw Mr. Hammarskjöld’s defense of African nationalism as a threat.

The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland and South Africa supported Katangan independence to keep the province as a buffer against the southward wave of African nationalism, the report said.

The Belgian mining company, Union Minière du Haut Katanga—now called Umicore—supported independence to prevent Congolese nationalization of Katanga’s rich uranium and cobalt resources, the commission said. At the time Katanga supplied 80%of the West’s cobalt, which is widely used in batteries, jet engines and in the medical industry.

The province’s uranium was used in the manufacture of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs, and keeping the uranium from a pro-Soviet Congo was also a CIA priority, the commission said.

Dag Hammarskjöld at Idlewild Airport upon his return to New York from the Republic of the Congo. Aug. 6, 1960. (UN Photo)

U.N. Secretary-General Presses Probe Into Former Chief’s Death in 1961 Ban Ki-moon cites new evidence surrounding the crash that killed Dag Hammarskjöld

By Joe Lauria
The Wall Street Journal
July 6, 2015

UNITED NATIONS—U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon asked the General Assembly to open a full-scale probe into the plane crash that killed former U.N. chief Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961, after an independent panel reported Monday that evidence recently uncovered was worth investigating.

The panel reported that the continued refusal by intelligence agencies of the U.S. and other governments to declassify documents may be hindering the “final revelation” into what caused the crash. The panel recommended Mr. Ban continue to urge governments to disclose or declassify the documents, or allow him “privileged access” to information the governments may possess about the circumstances of Mr. Hammarskjöld’s death.

“I note … that in some cases, member states have not provided a substantive response, have not responded at all or have maintained the classified status of the documents in question despite the passage of time,” Mr. Ban said in his letter to the General Assembly. “I intend to follow up with the member states concerned.” The secretary-general said he’s appointed a special counsel to interact with U.S. and other intelligence agencies.

Mr. Hammarskjöld was killed on his way to Northern Rhodesia—now Zambia—when his Swedish DC-6 airliner plunged into a forest 9 miles from his destination in the city of Ndola on Sept. 18, 1961.

He was on his way to negotiate a peace agreement there with Moise Tshombe, leader of the separatist Katanga province in the newly independent Congo. Mr. Hammarskjöld supported the spreading anti-colonial movement in Africa at the time and opposed mineral-rich Katanga leaving the Congo. U.N. troops were fighting Katanganese mercenaries about 100 miles away as Mr. Hammarskjöld was about to land.

Why the plane crashed has never been established.

A 2011 book “Who Killed Hammarskjöld?” by British researcher Susan Williams revealed significant new evidence about the crash and inspired an independent commission that recommended in 2013 that Mr. Ban either reopen an inconclusive 1962 U.N. investigation or start a new one. The secretary-general asked the U.N. General Assembly to create a panel to look into the new evidence, which the assembly did in December. Both Mr. Ban and the assembly, in a resolution backed by the U.S. and U.K., urged governments to declassify any information pertinent to the case.

The panel reported that it received only limited cooperation from U.S. intelligence agencies. It said the truth about what happened to Mr. Hammarskjöld’s plane would still require the U.N. to further “critically address remaining information gaps,” including what may be contained in classified material and other information held by member governments.

The panel’s report dismissed an array of the new evidence, including information suggesting that the plane may have been hijacked, accidentally shot down by a pilot trying to divert it, or that a bomb was placed on board. Using medical records from the time, the panel also rejected accounts that Mr. Hammarskjöld and the other 15 people aboard who were killed had been shot either on the plane or on the ground.

But the panel didn’t dismiss evidence that the plane may have been deliberately shot down. The three panel members traveled to Ndola to interview witnesses of the air disaster who told them they had seen a second plane near Mr. Hammarskjöld’s, and that the DC-6 had been set on fire before it went down.

The panel also examined accounts by Charles Southall and Paul Abram, two American servicemen working for the National Security Agency on the night of the crash, who said they heard intercepted radio transmissions indicating Mr. Hammarskjöld’s plane was shot down.

Although he worked for the NSA, Mr. Southall told The Wall Street Journal the intercept was over a Central Intelligence Agency circuit. The CIA declined to confirm or deny the existence of any intercept following a Freedom of Information Act request by The Journal. The agency upheld its decision after The Journal appealed it. The NSA told the independent commission that reported last year that it had no record of the Southall incident.

The NSA had one related file declassified. It was a cable sent by then-U.S. Ambassador to Congo Edmund Gullion hours after the crash, saying there was a possibility Mr. Hammarskjöld was shot down by a single pilot who had “harassed” U.N. operations, Mr. Gullion wrote. He identified the pilot as Belgian mercenary Jan Van Risseghem, who died in 2007.

The panel learned from the Belgian government that Mr. Hammarskjöld was aware of the danger posed by Mr. Van Risseghem. The secretary-general sent a telegram to Brussels two days before his fatal flight asking the foreign ministry’s help in “putting an end to Van Risseghem’s criminal acts against the U.N.,” the report says. Belgium then investigated and discovered that Mr. Van Risseghem had left Belgium to return to Katanga on Sept. 16, and wouldn’t have arrived in time to carry out the attack, the report says.

consortiumnews.com

New revelations concerning Denmark’s systematic spying upon its closest neighbor leaders—Germany, France, Norway and Sweden—since 2013 were broadcast and published online by the public service medium Danmark Radio (DR), May 30.

1. EU/NATO allies have been spied upon for the United States by the Danish Intelligence Service (Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste-FE), and without knowledge of parliament and, perhaps, even government leaders.
2. France, Norway and Sweden leaders spied upon have come forth with strong critiques and demands for an investigation, for full clarity, and an end to such “grotesque” behavior. They backed up Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel critical statements in 2014 when Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. tapped into her private cell phone calls. Edward Snowden: Leaks that exposed US spy programme – BBC News
3. This spying by FE is code named Operation Dunhammer (1)

In addition to spying upon its neighbors, FE has been illegally and systematically spying upon its own citizens for United States economic profit and political interests. This has nothing to do with spying upon their ”enemies” (Russia, China, Iran, et. al.). Huge Intelligence Agency Scandal Rocks Denmark and Puts its “Deep State” on Trial – CovertAction Magazine.

FE is the equivalent to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. While the FE jurisdiction also covers military intelligence, they must not spy on Danish people—only foreigners and those in other countries. The Police Intelligence Service (PET) surveils Danes, as the FBI surveils people within the U.S.

Both FE and NSA refuse to comment. Nor has Barak Obama or Joe Biden apologized to Merkel, whom Obama told in 2013 that such tapping into her phone would not occur again.

For several months DR has been working with journalists from Sweden (SVT), Norway, Germany (Süddeutsche Zeitung, NDR, WDR) and France (Le Monde) on these new developments. Their work forced some of 35 national leaders known to be spied upon by the U.S. to come forth.

“We demand to be fully informed about matters concerning Swedish citizens, companies and interests. And then we have to see how the answer sounds from the political side in Denmark,” Swedish Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist told national broadcaster SVT.

Norway, Sweden Demand Answers on Espionage After Report of Denmark Helping NSA Spy on EU Politicians – Sputnik International (sputniknews.com)

“We take the allegations seriously,” his Norwegian counterpart Frank Bakke-Jensen told national broadcaster NRK.

Both defense ministers emphasized that their Danish colleague Defense Minister Trine Bramsen had failed to inform them about the NSA’s espionage against Denmark’s neighbors.

“We did not get to know anything concrete about the case at all,” Frank Bakke-Jensen of Norway complained.”

“The French Foreign Ministry’s minister of state for European affairs, Clement Beaune, called the possible U.S. spying campaign on European politicians a very serious thing, and called for further verification of the information…If confirmed, Beaune did not rule out ’consequences.’”

PM Emmanuel Macron said such behavior is “unacceptable among allies”.

“Danish Defense Minister Trine Bramsen said the government “can and will not enter into speculation about intelligence matters”, yet she emphasized that she views the systematic wiretapping of close allies “unacceptable”.

Just why is it that the Danish government “cannot” speak publically (that is democratically) or even privately to its neighbor leaders about its spying is not forthcoming.

Concerning the new revelations, Edward Snowden states: Edward Snowden på Twitter: “Biden is well-prepared to answer for this when he soon visits Europe since, of course, he was deeply involved in this scandal the first time around. There should be an explicit requirement for full public disclosure not only from Denmark, but their senior partner as well.” / Twitter

Snowden had first revealed some of the spying in 2013, including against Germany Chancellor Merkel. XKEYSCORE

Chancellor Angela Merkel and Helle Thorning-Schmidt. Photo by Emilio Esbardo. Crescita e occupazione in Europa | | il Nuovo Berlinese |

These developments add to earlier ones published by DR last August and December (Huge Intelligence Agency Scandal Rocks Denmark and Puts its “Deep State” on Trial – CovertAction Magazine and Outposts of the U.S. Surveillance Empire: Denmark and Beyond – CovertAction Magazine.)

Denmark will definitely not allow a full disclosure. That was made clear by politicians to DR when it first published the whistleblower’s revelations. DR judiciary reporter Trine Marie Ilsøee said, “We cannot expect that most of the possible illegalities committed will be made public.” She added that Denmark’s intelligence services are connected to and dependent upon foreign powers [i.e. U.S. and not Europe]. Denmark could be compromised if secrets were revealed. “After all, intelligence services operate in secrecy.”

The information of long-standing illegalities, including its constitution, by the Defense Intelligence Service, which the Danish Intelligence Oversight Committee presented last August, includes:

1. Withholding “key and crucial information to government authorities” and the oversight committee between 2014 and today;
2. Illegal activities even before 2014;
3. Telling “lies” to policymakers;
4. Illegal surveillance on Danish citizens, including a member of the oversight committee. (Some of this illegal spying had been shared with unnamed sources [perhaps the U.S.?]);
5. Unauthorized activities have been shelved and;
6. The FE failed to follow up on indications of espionage within areas of the Ministry of Defense.

When DR first exposed some of this spying, Defense Minister Bramsen suspended five FE leaders responsible. Under pressure from several political parties, and most likely the U.S., she reinstated them in different jobs at the same pay.

I wrote about this unconstitutional and anti-democratic policy of aiding and abetting the United States against Europe last December. Outposts of the U.S. Surveillance Empire: Denmark and Beyond – CovertAction Magazine

”Denmark’s military allows the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on the nation’s Finance Ministry, Foreign Ministry, private weapons company Terma, the entire Danish population, and Denmark’s closest neighbors: Sweden, Norway, France, Germany and the Netherlands (NL).”

Information the NSA acquired with the aid of Denmark’s Defense Intelligence Service was used to convince its government to buy Lockheed-Martin’s Joint Strike Fighter F-35 capable of carrying nuclear weapons, albeit Denmark forbids the possession of nuclear weapons on its territory.

“NSA and FE signed an agreement in 2008 that enables NSA to tap huge amounts of data sourced from Danish fiber-optic communication cables passing through Denmark. This metadata is stored by the Danish Defense Intelligence Service in a center built with NSA guidance and technical assistance on the small Danish island of Sandagergaard to which the NSA has access.

“Sandagergaard is one of three Danish military-intelligence ‘listening posts’ which trawls through and analyzes global internet data, seeking information, for example, on what Terma, Denmark’s largest weapons firm, has. This is clearly an intrusion on capitalism’s basic principle and need for free-market competition.”

On September 24, DR published articles (and broadcasted) exposed more illegal activity.

”FE may have violated one of the clear rules that apply to the Danish military and foreign intelligence service: FE is only set in the world to protect Denmark from external threats and to safeguard Danish interests abroad. FE may therefore only come into possession of Danish information by chance.”

Smug Defense Minister Trine Bramsen at ”flag day” ceremony for warring soldiers. Veteraner og udsendte soldater blev hyldet: Se fotos af flagdag og kranselæggelse på Kastellet. – politiken.dk

“Fiber optic cables suck up and copy metadata, sms, chat, telephone calls, emails. The cables fetch data over Danish internet traffic, tapping into Russian communication, as well as German and other European countries’ internet world. Whatever this new equipment is, it probably is similar to or more advanced than XKEYSCORE, which Denmark also possesses….Besides land-based electronic surveillance, there are hundreds of transoceanic submarine cables carrying information between many countries. For decades, Denmark has had a key European cable connected to the U.S., which NSA taps into. In addition, there are new submarine commercial cables.”

A military whistleblower first reported on illegal espionage to the military leadership in May 2015. His reports to superiors were ignored. He waited four years before he revealed illegal spying to the Danish Intelligence Oversight Committee. This undermanned five-person civilian oversight committee, founded in 2014, has only eight employees and a pauper’s budget of $1.3 million. It has no power to interrogate or even to see secret documents the FE wishes to hide.

The Defense Intelligence Service’s 2020 budget was $160 million. How the funds are used is secret, and no oversight committee knows how the money is used nor can they determine its usage.

NSA with FE “are deep inside and digging into some Danish industrial secrets, which is usually what we accuse the Chinese of doing all the time [Huawei],” Tobias Liebetrau, intelligence researcher for the Center for Military Studies at the University of Copenhagen, told DR.”

Prime Minister Frederiksen and President Trump at NATO meeting in London. She said about her talk with Trump, “We swing well.” Mette Frederiksen ved mødet med Donald Trump. I venstre side ses Trine Bramsen og Jeppe Kofod.Shealah Craighead/The White House/Ritzau Scanpix

Colleague Finian Cunningham explains what European “allies” mean in “real politics”.

“What this clearly demonstrates beyond any equivocation is that the European governments are quislings and vassals under Washington’s control. They are not ‘allies’ as that word implies a mutual partnership of equals. They are abject lackeys to American power who cheat on themselves. Talk about treacherous!

“This explains why Russia and China have both seen their relations with Europe deteriorate so badly. Under the prevailing EU governments, it is virtually impossible for Moscow or Beijing to conduct productive relations with Europe. That would require the European Union to have a modicum of independence and autonomy. As it is, however, the Europeans are mere subordinates to Washington’s diktat. And so, America’s renewed Cold War hostility towards Russia and China is reflected unquestioningly by the European bloc. Because the Europeans are nothing but satellites of the US imperium.” US Spying on EU Lackeys – Sputnik International (sputniknews.com)

Conclusion

There are ironies in these matters. First is the betrayal of Denmark’s long-standing friendly association with European countries and its leaders. Also, it has been Social Democrat women feminist leaders who started these spying activities since 2013 when the first SD woman PM was elected, Helle Thorning Schmidt. Following Snowden’s revelations, she embraced her “comrade” Chancellor Angela Merkel assuring her that Denmark was not and would not be involved. All the while she was lying. Then the next Social Democrat woman prime minister, Merete Frederiksen, and her feminist war minister, Trine Bramsen, went deeper into NSA’s spying activities.

These so-called “social democrats”, who are usually referred to as “socialists” by the likes of wishy washy Bernie Sanders, even “communists” by the likes of Donald Trump and other Republicans, are the most endearing Danish politician lap dogs, even more so than the more honest bourgeois politician hawks, who openly swear never-ending loyalty to the United States no matter what.

Another irony is that Denmark’s media, both DR and daily newspapers, did not even cover the extradition trial of Julian Assange in England—nor do they support him. Apparently, Danish media is afraid to back up an active publisher who reveals how the U.S. spies upon any and all, as well as conducting aggressive wars for self-interest profiteering. Yet DR has published a Danish whistleblower’s expose of its own government spying for Big Daddy.

Following DR’s first FE/NSA expose, I spoke on the telephone with DR foreign affairs editor Niels Kvale about the U.S. government threat to all journalists who reveal its “national security secrets”. I told him that DR reporters could be prosecuted in the U.S. just as they seek to do with Julian Assange. Kvale replied: “I was not aware of that. This sounds interesting. Send me your article and I will inform our journalists.”

(1) Dunhammer in English means cattails or bulrush, which grow in bogs. “One particular famous story involving bulrushes is that of the ark of bulrushes in the Book of Exodus. In this story, it is said that the infant Moses was found in a boat made of bulrushes. Within the context of the story, this is probably paper reed (Cyperus papyrus).

When fish make beds over bulrush, they sweep away the sand, exposing the roots. This dense region of roots provides excellent cover for young fish.” Bulrush – Wikipedia.

So Operation Dunhammer could be Danish military intelligence spies’ metaphor for covering up its treachery against its own neighbor allies. Denmark is one of the U.S.’s closest Eyes, “9 Eyes”, which also includes Norway and France, and “14 Eyes”, which includes German and Sweden. That means that Denmark is U.S.’s lead Eye against allies Germany, France, Norway and Sweden. The Nordic countries have the same language and cultural roots, including having been the warring Vikings. Norway and Sweden were also under Danish colonial control for centuries. Outposts of the U.S. Surveillance Empire: Denmark and Beyond – CovertAction Magazine

American publication Newsweek reported this week on revelations of a massive U.S. military effort to control and influence the internet including social media.

The report is based on a lengthy investigation that took two years to complete, according to Newsweek. Its granular detail and multiple interviews with involved personnel certainly give the information credibility which merits further investigation, if not a Congressional inquiry. Tellingly, the report was largely ignored by other American corporate news outlets.

What it found is the existence of a “secret cyber army” within the regular U.S. armed forces numbering 60,000 personnel with an operational budget of $900 million a year. The cyber army operates domestically and overseas. It is not overseen by Congress which is a violation of the U.S. constitution. It is also, on the face of it, as Newsweek notes, in violation of the Geneva Convention which regulates the open conduct of conventional military.

There is every reason to believe that the cyber “special forces” work in conjunction with American military intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency. The labyrinthine nature has the sinister aspect of a police state apparatus, the like of which the Americans accuse Russia and China of running.

The report states: “The explosion of Pentagon cyber warfare, moreover, has led to thousands of spies who carry out their day-to-day work in various made-up personas, the very type of nefarious operations the United States decries when [allegedly] Russian and Chinese spies do the same.”

Newsweek goes on: “The newest and fastest-growing group is the clandestine army that never leaves their keyboards. These are the cutting-edge cyber fighters and intelligence collectors who assume false personas online, employing non-attribution and misattribution techniques to hide the who and the where of their online presence [and] even engage in campaigns to influence and manipulate social media.”

The Newsweek report is not the first time it has been revealed that the Americans and other Western military intelligence agencies have developed mechanisms for influencing social media and public discourse through the deployment of false persona known as “bots”. But what is eye-opening is the vast scale of the Pentagon’s cyberwarfare which is conducted against its own population as well as foreign nations.

This makes an absurdity of Washington’s relentless accusations against Russia of malign cyber conduct. Similar accusations are made by the Americans against China, Iran, and other nations. The reality is, however, that the Pentagon has built the largest, illegal undercover force in the world, according to Newsweek. The fact that the Western public doesn’t see this reality is a feat of perception management, or propaganda.

It has become a mantra for American and European politicians and media to accuse Russia of interfering in Western elections through supposed mischievous influence over social media. This mantra has been repeated so often that it has taken on the status of “fact”. It is said to be one of the issues that U.S. President Joe Biden wants to bring up in person with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin if the two leaders meet this summer.

In addition, Russia is alleged to have inflicted last year a massive cyber attack on American government departments and commercial corporations – the so-called SolarWinds Hack.

The ransomware attack on a U.S. oil pipeline earlier this month which hit nearly a dozen states on the east coast was also blamed on a Russian cyber gang with the implication that the Kremlin was partially responsible.

The scale of the Pentagon’s cyber army puts these issues into perspective. For a start, there has never been any verifiable evidence presented by Western governments that could in any court incriminate Russia over the allegations of malign conduct. But secondly what we have instead is voluminous evidence that it is the Americans who have the capability for systematic cyber crimes.

It was the Americans under the George W Bush and Barack Obama administrations who developed and deployed the Stuxnet malware virus which crippled Iran’s nuclear industry over a decade ago. No other nation has been caught so red-handed in an act of cyber warfare.

The revelations in 2013 and later by former CIA contractor Edward Snowden documenting in devastating detail a global campaign of illegal surveillance covering the internet and telecommunications by the American National Security Agency is another astounding facet. Snowden provided the Wikileaks whistleblower site archives showing how the CIA and NSA worked with U.S. internet tech companies to illegally infiltrate the private communications of governments and citizens all around the world. Not only that but the CIA has developed techniques for falsely incriminating others with their cybercrimes.

Aiding and abetting the Americans in their illegal global endeavors are the spy agencies of Britain and the other Five Eye allied nations, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, said categorically in an interview this week that Russia has not been involved in cyber hacking or malign influence against the United States or other Western nations. Naryshkin pointed out the absolute lack of evidence, to which the BBC interviewer flustered from having no intelligible answer.

What’s more, the Russian spy chief introduced some reality to the oft-vacuous allegations by citing the revelations made by Edward Snowden that it is the American NSA and CIA who have the known capability for massive malign cyber warfare. It is not unreasonable to speculate that these agencies have sought to incriminate Russia over the SolarWinds Hack and other attacks.

In conjunction with the Pentagon’s cyber army, the whole realm of American and Western accusations against Russia is a mockery of their own guilt-projection.

As a former intelligence officer, I find it amusing to read articles in the mainstream media that blithely report how the latest international outrages are undoubtedly the work of CIA and the rest of the U.S. government’s national security alphabet soup. The recurring claim that the CIA is somehow running the world by virtue of a vast conspiracy that includes the secret intelligence agencies of a number of countries, using blackmail and other inducements to corrupt vulnerable politicians and opinion makers, has entered into the DNA of journalists worldwide, frequently without any evidence that the current crop of spies is capable to doing anything more complicated than getting out of bed in the morning.

One problem with the theory about total global dominance through espionage is the sheer logistics of it all. Directing political and economic developments in two hundred nations simultaneously must require a lot of space and a large staff. Is there a huge office hidden in Langley? Or the Pentagon? Or in the White House West Wing itself? Or is it in one of the secure facilities that have been popping up like mushrooms just off of the Dulles Toll Road in Herndon Virginia?

To provide evidence that intelligence agencies extend their tentacles just about everywhere, the other claim that is nearly always made is that all former spooks are part of the conspiracy, as once you learn the secret handshake to join CIA, NSA or the FBI you never stop being “one of them.” Well, that might be true in some cases but the majority of former spooks are quite happy to be “former,” and one might also observe that many voices in the anti-war movement, such as it is, come from intelligence, law enforcement or military backgrounds. Of course, the conspiracy theorists will explain that away by claiming that it is a conspiracy within a conspiracy, making the dissidents little better than double agents or gatekeepers who are put in place to make sure that the opposition doesn’t become too effective.

Given the fact that how the so-called American “Deep State” actually gets together and plots is unknown, one would have to concede that it is an organization without much structure, unlike the original Turkish Deep State (Derin Devlet), which coined the phrase, that actually met and had centralized planning. I would suggest that the problem is one of definitions and it also helps to know how the national security state is structured and what its legitimate mission is. The CIA, for example, employs about 20,000 people, nearly all of whom work in various divisions that collect information (spying), analysis, technology and also are divided into staffs that work transnationally on issues like terrorism, narcotics, and nuclear proliferation. The overwhelming majority of those employees have political views and vote but there is a consensus that what their work entails is apolitical. The actual politics of how policy comes out the other end is confined to a very small group at the top, some of whom are themselves political appointees.

To be sure, one can and probably should oppose the policies of regime change that the Agency is engaged in worldwide but there is one important consideration that has to be understood. Those policies are set by the country’s civilian leadership (president, secretary of state and national security council) and they are imposed on CIA by its own political leadership. The Agency does not hold referenda among its employees to determine which foreign policy option is preferable any more than soldiers in the 101^st Airborne are consulted when they receive orders to deploy.

Nearly all current and former intelligence officers that I know are, in fact, opposed to the politics of U.S. global dominance that have been pretty much in place since 9/11, most particularly as evidenced by the continued conflict with Russia, the ramping up of aggression with China, and the regime change policies relating to Syria, Iran and Venezuela. Those officers often consider the invasions and exercise of “maximum pressure” to have been failures. Those policies were supported by truculent language, sanctions and displays of military readiness by the Trump Administration but it now appears clear that they will all be continued in one form or another under President Joe Biden, likely to include even more aggression against Russia through proxies in Ukraine and Georgia.

The officers engaged in such operations also observe that regime change has basically come out of the closet since 2001. George W. Bush announced that there was a “new sheriff in town” and the gloves would be coming off. Things that the intelligence agencies used to do are now done right out in the open, using military resources against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria while the biggest change of all, in Ukraine in 2014, was largely engineered by Victoria Nuland at the State Department. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was also active in Russia supporting opposition parties until the Kremlin forced them to leave the country.

So, it is fair to say that the Deep State is not a function of either the CIA or the FBI, but at the same time the involvement of John Brennan, James Clapper and James Comey in the plot to destroy Donald Trump is disturbing, as the three men headed the Agency, the Office of National Intelligence and Bureau. They appear to have played critical leadership roles in carrying out this conspiracy and they may not have operated on their own. Almost certainly what they may have done would have been either explicitly or implicitly authorized by the former President of the United States, Barack Obama, and others in his national security team.

It is now known that President Barack Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan created a secret interagency Trump Task Force in early 2016. Rather than working against genuine foreign threats, this Task Force played a critical role in creating and feeding the meme that Donald Trump was a tool of the Russians and a puppet of President Vladimir Putin, a claim that still surfaces regularly to this day. Working with Clapper, Brennan fabricated the narrative that “Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.” Brennan and Clapper promoted that tale even though they knew very well that Russia and the United States have carried out a broad array of covert actions against each other, including information operations, for the past seventy years, but they pretended that what happened in 2016 was qualitatively and substantively different even though the “evidence” produced to support that claim is weak to nonexistent.

I would, nevertheless, argue that their behavior, though it exploited intelligence resources, was not intrinsic to the organizations that they led, that the three of them were part and parcel of the real Deep State, which consists of a consensus view on running the country that is held by nearly all of the elements that together make up the American Establishment, with its political power focused in Washington and its financial center in New York City. It should come as no surprise that those government officials who are complicit in the process are often personally rewarded with highly paid sinecure jobs in financial services, which they know nothing about, when they “retire.”

The danger posed by the Deep State, or, if you choose, the Establishment, is that it wields immense power but is unelected and unaccountable. Even though it does not actually meet in secret, it does operate through relationships that are not transparent and as the media is part of it, there is little chance that its activity will be exposed. One notes that while the Deep State is mentioned frequently in the national media there has been little effort to identify its components and how it operates.

Viewed in that fashion, the argument that there exists a cohesive group of power brokers who really run the country and are even able to coopt those who are ostensibly dedicated to keeping the country safe becomes much more plausible without denigrating the many honest people who are employed by the national security agencies. The Deep State conspirators don’t have to meet to plot as they all understand very well what has to be done to maintain their supremacy. That is the real danger. The Biden Administration will surely demonstrate over the next several months that the Deep State is still with us and more powerful than ever as it operates both inside and outside the government itself. And the real danger comes from the Democrats now in charge, who are if anything more given to playing with consensus politics that involve phony threats than were the Republicans.

The U.S. Congress wants answers on what has been apparent foot-dragging by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) in answering congressional questions about NSA forcing the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) into incorporating a NSA-engineered back door into the Dual_EC_DRBG encryption algorithm standard developed for use in federal government computer systems and networks. On January 28, Democratic Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Cory Booker of New Jersey, along with eight of their Democratic colleagues in the House of Representatives – Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, Ted Lieu of California, Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts, Bill Foster of Illinois, Suzan DelBene of Washington, Yvette Clarke of New York, and Anna Eshoo of California – sent a letter to NSA director General Paul Nakasone requesting information on the forced introduction by NSA of the Dual_EC_DRBG algorithm into the products of Juniper Networks that permitted a massive breach of its customers’ systems in 2015, five years before a similar breach occurred with the products of SolarWinds, another vendor reliant on the same NSA-manipulated encryption algorithm.

The gist of the Congressional inquiry into the role NSA may have played in manipulating the U.S. civilian government technical standards development and approval process is not the first time the legislative branch of government has smelled a rat when it comes to NSA inserting “Trojan horses” into standards developed for civilian government and commercial use. In the case of Dual_EC_DRBG, NSA’s zeal in providing itself with a hidden back door to spy on targeted computers and networks relying on the NIST standard may have boomeranged. Back doors of any nature in information technology products is a hack waiting to happen. There is also a suggestion that the U.S. Intelligence Community’s haste in blaming “Russian,” “Chinese,” “North Korean,” “Iranian,” and other hackers for the SolarWinds breach was to cover its own tracks in pushing for widespread use of an encryption standard for which it had implanted a serious security design flaw.

In their letter to Nakasone, the Senators and Representatives wrote, “The American people have a right to know why NSA did not act after the Juniper hack to protect the government from the serious threat posed by supply chain hacks. A similar supply chain hack was used in the recent SolarWinds breach, in which several government agencies, including the Departments of Commerce, Defense, Homeland Security, Justice and Treasury, were infected with malware contained in the updates to SolarWinds software that permitted access by hackers.

A problem in the U.S. government’s supply chain suggests that traditional configuration management controls were abandoned by NIST and NSA, as well as federal agency end-users when it came to approving the contracts with Juniper and SolarWinds for their services.

The history of NSA and civilian and commercial encryption standards is replete with examples of what is the subject of the current congressional probe into the Juniper Networks and SolarWinds events. In the 1990s, the NSA, with the backing of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), pushed for a backdoor in an encryption micro-circuit developed by NSA engineers. Marketed as the “Clipper Chip,” the backdoor technology that foresaw law enforcement holding, in escrow, the decryption mechanism immediately came under attack by privacy and civil liberties advocates, as well as major high-tech computer and telecommunications companies, including AT&T, Microsoft, and Apple. The Clipper Chip backdoor technology was developed in concert with a military contractor, Mykotronx.

Civilian government and commercial users of the 56-bit Data Encryption Standard (DES) algorithm, developed by IBM and issued as a federal standard in 1977 by the National Bureau of Standards, the forerunner of NIST, were content with its security and performance. It would later be discovered that an original 128-bit DES algorithm developed by IBM was scaled back to 56-bits under pressure from NSA. At the time, the code-breaking ability of NSA to crack a 128-bit DES would have taxed other code-breaking priorities, for example those employed against Soviet, Chinese, Israeli, and French diplomatic and military encryption codes. NSA believed it had mastered breaking international diplomatic, military, banking, and industrial encryption ever since it was able to install backdoor decryption capabilities in many Western commercial encryption products, including the Hagelin cipher machines that were produced by Crypto AG of Switzerland. Advances in encryption technology forced NSA to become more aggressive in its demand for a backdoor advantage in cracking encryption products, including the 250-bit RSA algorithm for commercial end-users and the freeware encryption product “Pretty Good Privacy” (PGP).

The Senate-House letter to NSA contains a paragraph that provides some insight into the NSA Dual_EC_DRBG Trojan horse algorithm that was implanted in Juniper Network’s products. That paragraph states, “Sometime between 2008 and 2009, Juniper added the algorithm to several of its products. Juniper made this change secretly, which it kept from the public until 2013. In response to a recent congressional investigation, the company confirmed that it added support for the algorithm ‘at the request of a customer,’ but refused to identify that customer or even confirm whether that customer was a U.S. government agency. According to Juniper, no one involved in the decision to use this algorithm still works for the company.” Based on NSA’s similar efforts in the past, two facts can be ascertained. The “customer” that made the request was, in fact, NSA, and the company employees involved in the decision to use the algorithm were temporary employees provided by NSA.

The FBI also saw sophisticated encryption systems in the hands of the public to be an impediment to its longstanding access to communications systems, with or without a court order. For many years, the FBI enjoyed unhindered access to Washington, DC’s analog phone system from its own remote access wiretapping room located in the Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue, now the Trump International Hotel.

With the current congressional inquiry into NSA blaming various state actors for the Juniper/Solar Winds hacking, it appears that we have come full circle. Some thirty years ago, the NSA back door in question was the Clipper Chip. Today, it is Dual_EC_DRBG. In the early 1990s, the chief critic of NSA’S actions was Democratic Representative Jack Brooks of Texas, the chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee and a cigar-chomping protégé of House Speaker Sam Rayburn and President Lyndon Johnson. NSA was able to withstand the heat placed on it by the likes of Brooks. They obviously believe they will be able to obfuscate on the encryption backdoor issue with Wyden, Booker, and the Democratic House members.

There is every likelihood that the “damaging” hacks from unnamed actors abroad into U.S. federal, state, and local government networks and computer systems, as well as those in the private sector, have been carried out by U.S. Cyber Command personnel testing their backdoor Trojan horse capabilities. For every well-publicized hacker attack blamed on foreign players, the NSA and Cyber Command enjoy huge boosts in their operating budgets. Victims of hacking attacks also bear responsibility for their dilemmas. The rush to outsource computing capabilities and data storage to “cloud” operations brings about inherent security vulnerabilities. Those who began worrying about computer security risks in the late 1960s, including those working for the Central Intelligence Agency, would have gone ballistic if they lived long enough to see the CIA outsource its cloud computing requirements to Amazon.

So, who is ultimately at fault for the succession of major hacking events in the United States? The quote from Cassius in William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” is germane, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

Thomas NEWDICK

Well you’ll be happy to know that the next US president and his crack team of ventriloquists are assembling a cabinet of mass murderers that’s as diverse, inclusive and intersectional as America herself.

It’s been obvious for a long time that Joe Biden’s cabinet would be packed with Obama holdovers, war pigs and whatever primary opponents he owes favors to, but now that he is the media-anointed winner of the presidential election we’re getting a bit more confirmation on who they’re expected to be.

A new Politico report informs us that the heavy favorite to lead the US war machine into further imperial conquest as Secretary of “Defense” is a butcher of the fairer sex named Michele Flournoy, who was Obama’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 2009 to 2012.

In an article titled “Biden: A War Cabinet?”, Antiwar’s Mariamne Everett writes the following:

Flournoy, in writing the Quadrennial Defense Review during her time as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy under President Clinton, has paved the way for the U.S.’s endless and costly wars which prevent us from investing in life saving and necessary programs like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. It has effectively granted the US permission to no longer be bound by the UN Charter’s prohibition against the threat or use of military force. It declared that, “when the interests at stake are vital, …we should do whatever it takes to defend them, including, when necessary, the unilateral use of military power.”

While working at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a “Top Defense and National Security Think Tank” based in Washington D.C., in June 2002, as the Bush administration was threatening aggression towards Iraq, she declared, that the United States would “need to strike preemptively before a crisis erupts to destroy an adversary’s weapons stockpile” before it “could erect defenses to protect those weapons, or simply disperse them.”

“In 2009, she joined the Obama administration as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, where she helped engineer political and humanitarian disasters in Libya and Syria and a new escalation of the endless war in Afghanistan before resigning in 2012,” report Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J S Davies in another Antiwar piece on Flournoy. “From 2013–2016, she joined Boston Consulting, trading on her Pentagon connections to boost the firm’s military contracts from $1.6 million in 2013 to $32 million in 2016. By 2017, Flournoy herself was raking in $452,000 a year.”

Flournoy would be the very first female head of the US war department, and if that doesn’t make you want to listen to P!nk and kiss your Hillary Clinton pendant I don’t know what will.

Will Michele Flournoy Be the Angel of Death for the American Empire?
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies@medeabenjamin @NicolasJSDavieshttps://t.co/Qqyjl5vguN pic.twitter.com/buybd2P0nO

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) September 25, 2020

A favorite to lead America’s other war department, also known as the State Department, is former National Security Advisor and Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice. Rice is an ideal choice for a leading role in the Biden administration because she holds the valuable trifecta of being (A) female, (B) Black and (C) an enthusiastic promoter of the Iraq invasion which murdered a million human beings.

Some quotes from Rice, courtesy of Everett:

“I think he [then Secretary of State Colin Powell] has proved that Iraq has these weapons and is hiding them, and I don’t think many informed people doubted that.” (NPR, Feb. 6, 2003)

“It’s clear that Iraq poses a major threat. It’s clear that its weapons of mass destruction need to be dealt with forcefully, and that’s the path we’re on. I think the question becomes whether we can keep the diplomatic balls in the air and not drop any, even as we move forward, as we must, on the military side.” (NPR, Dec. 20, 2002)

“I think the United States government has been clear since the first Bush administration about the threat that Iraq and Saddam Hussein poses. The United States policy has been regime change for many, many years, going well back into the Clinton administration. So it’s a question of timing and tactics. … We do not necessarily need a further Council resolution before we can enforce this and previous resolutions.” (NPR, Nov. 11, 2002; requests for audio of Rice’s statements on NPR were declined by the publicly funded network.)

Susan Rice with Yossi Cohen, head of the Mossad. pic.twitter.com/jABipR0HPB

— Sam Husseini (@samhusseini) August 5, 2020

Rice, who is also notorious for helping to deceive the world into the destruction of Libya, may have difficulty getting confirmed for Secretary of State in a Republican-held Senate. But one way or another she’s guaranteed to be playing some role in the Biden administration.

Also under discussion for a role in leading the US threshing monster is Senator Tammy Duckworth, who has for months been aggressively attacking the Trump administration for not confronting Russia over the completely discredited claim that Moscow had paid Taliban-linked fighters to kill occupying coalition forces in Afghanistan.

You might think that someone who promotes cold war escalations on a daily basis which have no relationship to facts or reality might make Duckworth an unsuitable candidate for military leadership, but what you are apparently too bigoted and Russian to realize is that the Senator from Illinois is both a woman of color and handicapped. I bet you feel silly now.

Reminder: Donald Trump has not publicly called out a foreign dictator who reportedly has put bounties on American troops for 130 days.

— Tammy Duckworth (@SenDuckworth) November 3, 2020

Up for consideration as leader of America’s most sociopathic government agency is Obama’s former CIA Deputy Director Avril Haines, who protected all perpetrators implicated in a Senate report on CIA torture from suffering any consequences for their unspeakable brutality, and helped redact that same report. If selected Biden would become just the second president with the highly progressive distinction of selecting a female CIA Director, the first being Donald Trump when he appointed Torturer-in-Chief “Bloody” Gina Haspel (whose appointment Haines supported).

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to see how else the Decency President plans to uplift us with girl power and diversity of ethnicity and sexual orientation in the most powerful force of human slaughter in the history of civilization. 2021, here we come!

Intersectional Omnicide

Our weapons will be manufactured by corporations
that have pansexual CEOs and Muslim shareholders.

The bombers will be emblazoned with rainbow flags
and flown by empowered women of all colors
who will scream “YAAASSS QUEEN!” as the mushroom clouds arise.

The desert sand will turn to glass in the blasts,
and that glass will become a ceiling,
and that ceiling will be shattered
by a lesbian CIA Director.

People will be vaporized on the spot,
or watch their own bodies fall apart like sandcastles,
but they will never be misgendered.

We will march as equals,
white, black, Asian, indigenous,
and whatever miscellaneous extras we can find
(so long as they’re photogenic enough for Instagram),
arm-in-arm singing “Fight Song” in one voice
beneath a drone-filled sky
to the edge of extinction
where we will leap together
screaming “This is all Susan Sarandon’s fault!”
into the face of the abyss.

It won’t be pretty,
it won’t be wise,
but at least,
for one glorious flash,
we will get to feel like we really tried.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

In a media interview this week, he dismissed the so-called Russiagate scandal as a “fabrication” orchestrated by the American Central Intelligence Agency. Many other observers have come to the same conclusion about allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. elections with the objective of helping Donald Trump get elected.

But what is particularly valuable about Binney’s judgment is that he cites technical analysis disproving the Russiagate narrative. That narrative remains dominant among U.S. intelligence officials, politicians and pundits, especially those affiliated with the Democrat party, as well as large sections of Western media. The premise of the narrative is the allegation that a Russian state-backed cyber operation hacked into the database and emails of the Democrat party back in 2016. The information perceived as damaging to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was subsequently disseminated to the Wikileaks whistleblower site and other U.S. media outlets.

A mysterious cyber persona known as “Guccifer 2.0” claimed to be the alleged hacker. U.S. intelligence and news media have attributed Guccifer as a front for Russian cyber operations.

Notably, however, the Russian government has always categorically denied any involvement in alleged hacking or other interference in the 2016 U.S. election, or elections thereafter.

William Binney and other independent former U.S. intelligence experts say they can prove the Russiagate narrative is bogus. The proof relies on their forensic analysis of the data released by Guccifer. The analysis of timestamps demonstrates that the download of voluminous data could not have been physically possible based on known standard internet speeds. These independent experts conclude that the data from the Democrat party could not have been hacked, as Guccifer and Russiagaters claim. It could only have been obtained by a leak from inside the party, perhaps by a disgruntled staffer who downloaded the information on to a disc. That is the only feasible way such a huge amount of data could have been released. That means the “Russian hacker” claims are baseless.

Wikileaks, whose founder Julian Assange is currently imprisoned in Britain pending an extradition trial to the U.S. to face espionage charges, has consistently maintained that their source of files was not a hacker, nor did they collude with Russian intelligence. As a matter of principle, Wikileaks does not disclose the identity of its sources, but the organization has indicated it was an insider leak which provided the information on senior Democrat party corruption.

William Binney says forensic analysis of the files released by Guccifer shows that the mystery hacker deliberately inserted digital “fingerprints” in order to give the impression that the files came from Russian sources. It is known from information later disclosed by former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that the CIA has a secretive program – Vault 7 – which is dedicated to false incrimination of cyber attacks to other actors. It seems that the purpose of Guccifer was to create the perception of a connection between Wikileaks and Russian intelligence in order to beef up the Russiagate narrative.

“So that suggested [to] us all the evidence was pointing back to CIA as the originator [of] Guccifer 2.0. And that Guccifer 2.0 was inside CIA… I’m pointing to that group as the group that was probably the originator of Guccifer 2.0 and also this fabrication of the entire story of Russiagate,” concludes Binney in his interview with Sputnik news outlet.

This is not the first time that the Russiagate yarn has been debunked. But it is crucially important to make Binney’s expert views more widely appreciated especially as the U.S. presidential election looms on November 3. As that date approaches, U.S. intelligence and media seem to be intensifying claims about Russian interference and cyber operations. Such wild and unsubstantiated “reports” always refer to the alleged 2016 “hack” of the Democrat party by “Guccifer 2.0” as if it were indisputable evidence of Russian interference and the “original sin” of supposed Kremlin malign activity. The unsubstantiated 2016 “hack” is continually cited as the “precedent” and “provenance” of more recent “reports” that purport to claim Russian interference.

Given the torrent of Russiagate derivatives expected in this U.S. election cycle, which is damaging U.S.-Russia bilateral relations and recklessly winding up geopolitical tensions, it is thus of paramount importance to listen to the conclusions of honorable experts like William Binney. The American public are being played by their own intelligence agencies and corporate media with covert agendas that are deeply anti-democratic.