The imminent collapse of Russia. The sudden rebellion by Wagner troops followed by the equally sudden, non-rebellion had the MSM in a tizzy. Most interesting and hilarious was watching the MSM go from “Wagner mercenaries are murdering Ukrainians” to “Wagner mercenaries are going to free us from Putin’s tyranny.” And, of course, now… silence. To be fair, it’s probably best they just shut up. I am simply stunned that anyone continues to listen to these shills who either spout propaganda or simply have no earthly idea what is going on but feel the need to say… well, something. Surely, it must be getting humiliating at this point?
In any event, here are some thoughts and questions I have after having digested some of what appears to have taken place.
I watched the MSM come out with multiple (I counted 7 and then stopped counting) reports out on the Saturday morning. The fact we had this deluge of reports in such a rapid timeframe seemed odd to me. I mean the “mutiny” had literally only begun taking place hours prior. Hours!
Then we heard that the intelligence agencies briefed Congress earlier in the week about an expected uprising. Earlier in the week? So the spooks at the CIA and Congress knew about this ahead of time. Which means corporate media knew ahead of time. Which explains how they manage to have literally dozens of articles out within hours. They wrote the Russian Civil War narrative beforehand!
Which brings up the question. How did the security services know this was going to go down… before it happened if they weren’t playing a hand in the affair? An attempted Maidan coup 2.0?
If that’s true, then you know what that means? It means that the US has directly attacked Russia. That is an act of war.
Those conclusions, true or not, lead one to consider that maybe, just maybe we have the CIA involved in a foreign country attempting to overthrow its leadership.
It looks like the neocons, the CIA, and Britain’s MI6 did, too, if they helped nudge the event to fruition with assurances and cash — say, some of that $6.2 billion the Pentagon happened to find recently via an “accounting error.”
“At exactly the point of the AFU’s weakest moment and near-collapse on the battlefield he chose to strike Russia in the back as if obviously driven by a hidden hand.”— Simplicius on Substack
You’d think that the hapless DC neocons, Antony Blinken and his boss, Victoria Nuland, plus the gang at Spook Central, would have learned a lesson about the diminishing returns of color revolutions: namely, that these bold pranks blow back… and not in a good way.
The New York Times informs us that US Intel was well aware weeks beforehand of the developing coup attempt by Yevgeny Prigozhin and his personal army, the Wagner Group. Congressional leaders were briefed a day prior to its roll-out. Well, golly, can you suppose for a New York minute that Russia’s intel agency didn’t know all about it, too?
A vast array of explanations for this bizarre wartime vaudeville can be found in every corner of the Internet. I’ll go with this one: Prigozhin came to bethink himself a Napoleonic figure. Just as Bonaparte wowed revolution-weary France with his military exploits against her enemies, and seized leadership of the nation, Prigozhin’s mercenary army carried the brunt of the action in Ukraine this year, culminating in the heroic victory at Bakhmut. Priggy regarded the Russian Ministry of Defense as oafish, and by extension, his long-time friend and mentor, Vlad Putin, indecisive about it. The moment was ripe to seize power! As a recent US president might have said: he misoverestimated.
It looks like the neocons, the CIA, and Britain’s MI6 did, too, if they helped nudge the event to fruition with assurances and cash — say, some of that $6.2 billion the Pentagon happened to find recently via an “accounting error.” What better time to destabilize Russia than during Ukraine’s vaunted spring offensive (which, let’s face it, was not going too well)? In fact, Ukraine’s whole NATO-assisted project from the get-go looked like a bust. The Bakhmut “meat-grinder” was just the latest fiasco. But then, the irascible, disgruntled, and grandiose field marshal Priggy seemed like the perfect instrument to jazz things up for the demoralized West.
Pretty darn quick, on the road from Rostov-on-Don to Moscow, Priggy learned the hard way that he had no support in the government, the military, or among the Russian public. The coup fizzled before sundown the very day it started. Some say, any way you cut it, the result is Vlad Putin left looking weak and vulnerable. I don’t think so. His speech to the Russian people that day appeared, if anything, resolute. And the way he seemed to spit out the words “a stab in the back,” you couldn’t think he was play-acting. By evening, with the whole psychodrama concluded, the people of St. Petersburg crowded the quay along the Neva River and busted into patriotic song.
Let’s address one nagging question: why did Mr. Putin allow the Wagner Group private army to play the leading role countering the Ukraine offensive? Answer: because he was saving and building-up the regular Russian army to strength in the further event that NATO might finally jump into Ukraine with all its multi-national feet when all else fails.
“Modern states are powerful things, vast machines built of human components that act according to their own logic and towards their own ends.” — Eugypius on Substack
As a Jewish American, and a connoisseur of my people’s folklore, I bring to your attention the troublesome figure of the dybbuk (dih-bik), a disembodied demon that, because of its sins, wanders restlessly among us and can enter the flesh of a living person, who will then afflict and torment the community until properly exorcised by a minyan of rabbis garbed in white burial shrouds wielding sacred oaths.
Thus, I give you Andrew Weissmann, Esq., attorney at law, the American chiefdybbuk, on the scene for decades now, sowing mischief and woe, leading an unholy host of fellow dybbukim calling itself Lawfare to infest the courts and meddle in elections. Think: Michael Sussmann, an imp of RussiaGate; Michael Bromwich, former DOJ Inspector General (!) and then advisor to one Christine Blasey Ford (remember her?); David Laufman, erstwhile DOJ counter-intel goblin and Blasey Ford “beach friend” errand boy; Marc Elias, engineer extraordinaire of ballot harvesting operations in the 2020 election and many related pranks; Dan Goldman, lead counsel for the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment against Donald J. Trump…dybbuks all!
The dybbuk Weissmann is best known, of course, for directing the Special Counsel’s “Russian Collusion” campaign (2017 – 2019) in the mental absence of its nominal chief, Robert Mueller, an endeavor that, in the end, could not find any instance of then-President Trump colluding with said Russians — but did, via a firehose of media leaks, succeed in casting a Trump derangement spell over half the US population. Dybbuk Weissmann lately haunts the MSNBC cable news channel as a “legal analyst.”
And yet, this shape-shifting fiend turns up again now in the Biden family global bribery matter, of all things. See if you can follow the convoluted tale coming out of Dybbuk Central a.k.a. Ukraine and the FBI. You may already know that in May, 2014, R. Hunter Biden, son of then-vice president Joe Biden, was appointed to the board of the Ukrainian natgas company Burisma, where he was paid $80,000-a-month for his expertise (he had none) in the global gas industry. As it happened, at exactly the same time Veep Joe Biden was appointed as then-President Barack Obama’s “point man” in Ukraine after the 2014 Maidan Coup, engineered by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the CIA, that ousted elected President Viktor Yanukovych.
By and by, Ukraine elected a new American-friendly president, Petro Poroshenko. Burisma was owned by an oligarch name of Mykola Zlochevsky. Apparently, the $80-K-a-month for Hunter Biden was not enough. The friendly American veep, Joe Biden, pressed Burisma’s Zlochevsky to provide $5-million payment each to Hunter and himself for additional Biden family services in Ukraine.
President Petro Poroshenko had a political confidant and fixer (problem solver) named Oleksandr Onyshchenko, then a member of Ukraine’s parliament. In the 2015-16 time-frame, Onyshchenko conveyed a message to Zlochevsky that paying large sums of money to the Bidens might not be a good idea. Somehow, Onyshchenko’s complaints about the Bidens’ grift operation made it into the leading Kiev newspaper. As we all know, in November, 2016, Donald Trump was elected US President. Catastrophe! Freak-out in the US embassy in Kiev!
December, 2016, American Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, sent panicky emails to the folks back home about Onyshschenko’s allegations of Biden bribery. One of the recipients was a CIA agent implanted in the National Security Council name of Eric Ciaramella, later known as the Ukraine Phone Call Whistleblower.
Now, you may recall that in the summer of 2019, the owner of a Delaware computer repair shop, one John Paul Mac Isaac, came into possession of a laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden — under law, being left 90-days after repairs were made — and seeing its startling contents, tried to give it to the FBI, but was rebuffed. By then, CIA agent Eric Ciaramella had blown his whistle over a phone call Mr. Trump made to new Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky inquiring about the Bidens’ doings there. Later that fall, with impeachment proceedings started against President Trump, FBI agents came back at Mr. Mac Isaac and took the computer into the agency’s possession.
Consider that FBI Director Christopher Wray must have known about the laptop coming into his HQ and what it contained — and known that throughout the impeachment and Senate trial proceedings of Mr. Trump, And, of course, Mr. Wray did not volunteer any of this evidence about the Bidens to Mr. Trump’s defense attorneys. Nor did then-Attorney General William Barr, Mr. Wray’s superior. Odd, a little bit?
What would have happened if Kennedy had lived? The national-security establishment would have immediately become irrelevant and immaterial. They would have been left twiddling their thumbs, with nothing to do. Remember, after all, that the supposed threat from the Russian Reds was why the federal government was converted to a national-security state in the first place. Peaceful coexistence with the communist world would have meant no more justification for a national-security state. The Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA would have been dismantled and America’s founding system of a limited-government republic would have been restored.
Three days ago — June 10 — was the 60th anniversary of President Kennedy’s Peace Speech at American University. Reading or listening to the speech today, it is not difficult to see why the U.S. national-security establishment deemed Kennedy to be a grave threat to national security, just as it did with certain foreign leaders, such as Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran, Congo leader Patrice Lumumba, Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz and, later, President Salvador Allende of Chile.
For some 150 years, the federal government had been a limited-government republic. After World War II, however, the federal government was converted to a national-security state.
The difference was day and night.
With a limited-government republic, there was openness and transparency in governmental operations. Moreover, there was only a relatively small, basic military force. No Pentagon, no vast military-industrial complex, no CIA, no NSA, and no empire of foreign military bases. Governmental powers were limited and tightly constrained. No power to assassinate, kidnap, torture, or indefinitely detain people. No power to initiate coups or regime-change operations in foreign countries. No power of mass secret surveillance.
With a national-security state, dark-side secrecy became everything. “National security” became the two most important words in the American political lexicon. A large, permanent military establishment, along with the CIA and the NSA, came into existence. This vast national-security establishment vested itself with omnipotent, totalitarian-like powers, including assassination, torture, coups, secret surveillance, kidnapping, and indefinite detention. It established a vast empire of military bases, both foreign and domestic, and initiated a program of regime change in foreign nations. Foreign wars in faraway lands, such as Korea and Vietnam, became the norm.
The Cold War was actually one great big racket, one that became a cash cow for the vast military-intelligence complex and its ever-growing army of “defense” contractors who loved feeding at the public trough. This enormous racket was justified under the rubric of keeping America safe from a supposed vast communist conspiracy that supposedly was based in Moscow, Russia. Yes, that Russia!
There was no possibility whatsoever of a peaceful resolution of the forever war between the United States and Russia, U.S. oficials said. There could never be peaceful coexistence, they maintained. The war against the Russian Reds, U.S. national-security officials held, was a war to the death. That was why the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended to Kennedy that the United States initiate a surprise nuclear attack against the Russians, a recommendation that Kennedy indignantly rejected.
Having achieved a “breakthrough” after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy had decided that he was going to lead America in an entirely different direction from that of the national-security establishment. In his Peace Speech, Kennedy threw down the gauntlet against what had now become his enemy — the national-security establishment. Kennedy essentially declared an end to the Cold War racket and announced that henceforth Russia and the United States would live in peaceful coexistence. He declared an end to to the extreme anti-Russia hostility that the national-security establishment had inculcated in the American people, and he even praised the Soviet Union.
The very next night — June 11 — Kennedy delivered a nation-wide speech expressing support for the civil-rights movement, which the national-security establishment was convinced was controlled by the Russian Reds. That’s why the FBI wiretapped Martin Luther King and used blackmail with the aim of inducing him to commit suicide.
Navy SEALs were punished for 2003 death of Manadel al-Jamadi while he was under CIA interrogation
For the Navy SEALs and other military special operations troops, the message was clear: When things go wrong on missions involving the CIA, the agency will fight for its people; the military won’t always do the same.
Either way, it won’t be the CIA that takes the blame.
For years now, the CIA and the Navy SEALs have worked side-by-side on highly-classified missions battling terrorists around the globe.
When things go right, the result can be nothing short of spectacular. The daring 2011 Navy mission into Pakistan that resulted in the death of Al Qaeda kingpin Osama bin Laden was not only a miraculous success but a publicity coup for both the CIA and the members of SEAL Team Six that led the raid. Both revelled in the glory.
When things go wrong, however, the blame is not always equally shared. A case in point: the death of an Iraqi insurgent in U.S. hands in Iraq.
The CIA and the SEALs follow different rules, report to different chains of command, and are ultimately accountable to two different systems of justice. How those two different systems play out when things go wrong is a theme of a book I’m writing on the death of Manadel al-Jamadi, an Iraqi insurgent captured by the SEALs in 2003.
Jamadi’s name may not be familiar, but there’s a good chance you’ve seen his face. His beaten and bloodied visage appeared in some of the nightmarish images from the notorious Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Photos showed U..S soldiers giving a thumbs-up over Jamadi’s ice-packed corpse. The title of my book comes from a nickname the guards gave the dead prisoner, The Ice Man.
US Army soldier Sabrina Harman was court-martialed for prisoner abuse after the 2003–2004 Abu Ghraib scandal. Here she is with the iced-up corpse of Manadel al-Jamadi, who died under CIA interrogation. Selfies like this were seized by U.S. Army / Criminal Investigation Command.
U.S. Army guards in the prison reported that CIA personnel had stood by idly while Jamadi died. Internal CIA documents I’ve obtained show that a military pathologist concluded that the position Jamadi was placed in was “part and parcel” of a homicide. He had been suspended by his wrists, which were handcuffed behind his back. One guard said he was surprised that Jamadi’s shoulders didn’t “pop out of their sockets.”
Someone had to be held accountable for this disaster. It turned out to b the Navy SEALs.
Even though the only people in the room when Jamadi died were a CIA polygraph examiner on temporary duty in Iraq and a translator (agency unknown), the ones held accountable in Jamadi’s death were members of the SEAL platoon that captured him in a top-secret, direct-action mission.
The charges against the SEALs centered on allegations that they had kicked and punched Jamadi on the way back to their base when he refused to stop talking. The SEALs were hauled into military court and threatened with prison for abusing—but not killing—Jamadi and posing for pictures with him. Most received administrative discipline. One officer was acquitted at court-martial.
Evidence gathered during the proceedings revealed that the CIA had conducted brutal interrogations of detainees. Detainees were slapped, choked, subjected to terrifying mock assaults, doused with cold water, and had their joints stretched in painful ways, according to classified testimony from the SEALs I obtained for my book. One former SEAL told me that a CIA interrogator had used a large wooden mallet to frighten a prisoner by smashing it into the plywood wall near his outstretched hand.
Although the SEALs didn’t know it, this was a rogue interrogation program. Months before the news media’s exposure of its torture program, CIA headquarters had sent a detailed cable to the Baghdad station that spelled out limits on what agency personnel in Iraq could and couldn’t do in interrogations. “Enhanced” interrogation techniques were forbidden. The guidance in the cables was ignored.
The CIA’s role in Jamadi’s death was investigated by prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Alexandria, Virginia, led by Paul McNulty and Chuck Rosenberg, and Special Counsel John Durham. Prosecutors declined to file charges in both instances and no one at the CIA was ever held publicly accountable. The CIA station chief and two officers “were fired because they went beyond the guidelines,” Rizzo said.
News accounts tell a different story. The station chief, Gerry Meyer, “resigned rather than take a demotion,” the Associated Press reported. “Steve, a CIA officer who ran the detainee unit there, received a letter of reprimand,” former officials told the A.P. David Martine, chief of the CIA’s Detention Elicitation Cell in Iraq, who was suspected of destroying evidence connected to Jamadi’s death, was also allowed to resign.
David Martine, a former FBI agent and CIA officer suspected of destroying evidence after Jamadi’s death, retired honorably after a 30-year career. But he was fired from Gannon University in Erie, PA in 2015 after his respectful remarks about torture’s efficacy were published in Newsweek.(Jeff Stein photo)
With help from attorneys at Loevy & Loevy, a Chicago-based firm specializing in civil rights and whistleblower cases, I filed a pair of lawsuits against the CIA to force it to disclose what happened to the Ice Man and the findings of an internal disciplinary board that reviewed the case.
Last week, the CIA produced a heavily redacted memo, dated June 22, 2007, in response to my lawsuit.
When originally released in 2021 on the Office’s public court docket, every part of the document was redacted except an “unclassified” marking. Given its explosive contents, it is not difficult to see why: as Canestraro’s investigation concluded, at least two 9/11 hijackers had been recruited either knowingly or unknowingly into a joint CIA-Saudi intelligence operation which may have gone awry.
“[I said] ‘we’ve got to tell the Bureau about this. These guys clearly are bad…we’ve got to tell the FBI.’ And then [the CIA] said to me, ‘no, it’s not the FBI’s case, not the FBI’s jurisdiction’,” Mark Rossini, one of the FBI agents in question, has alleged. “If we had picked up the phone and called the Bureau, I would’ve been violating the law. I…would’ve been removed from the building that day. I would’ve had my clearances suspended, and I would be gone.”
At least two 9/11 hijackers had been recruited into a joint CIA-Saudi intelligence operation that was covered up at the highest level, according to an explosive new court filing.
A newly-released court filing raises grave questions about the relationship between Alec Station, a CIA unit set up to track Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and his associates, and two 9/11 hijackers leading up to the attacks, which was subject to a coverup at the highest levels of the FBI.
Obtained by SpyTalk, the filing is a 21-page declaration by Don Canestraro, a lead investigator for the Office of Military Commissions, the legal body overseeing the cases of 9/11 defendants. It summarizes classified government discovery disclosures, and private interviews he conducted with anonymous high-ranking CIA and FBI officials. Many agents who spoke to Canestraro headed up Operation Encore, the Bureau’s aborted, long-running probe into Saudi government connections to the 9/11 attack.
Despite conducting multiple lengthy interviews with a range of witnesses, producing hundreds of pages of evidence, formally investigating several Saudi officials, and launching a grand jury to probe a Riyadh-run US-based support network for the hijackers, Encore was abruptly terminated in 2016. This was purportedly due to a byzantine intra-FBI bust-up over investigative methods.
When originally released in 2021 on the Office’s public court docket, every part of the document was redacted except an “unclassified” marking. Given its explosive contents, it is not difficult to see why: as Canestraro’s investigation concluded, at least two 9/11 hijackers had been recruited either knowingly or unknowingly into a joint CIA-Saudi intelligence operation which may have gone awry.
‘A 50/50 chance’ of Saudi involvement
In 1996, Alec Station was created under the watch of the CIA. The initiative was supposed to comprise a joint investigative effort with the FBI. However, FBI operatives assigned to the unit soon found they were prohibited from passing any information to the Bureau’s head office without the CIA’s authorization, and faced harsh penalties for doing so. Efforts to share information with the FBI’s equivalent unit – the I-49 squad based in New York – were repeatedly blocked.
In late 1999, with “the system blinking red” about an imminent large-scale Al Qaeda terror attack inside the US, the CIA and NSA were closely monitoring an “operational cadre” within an Al Qaeda cell that included the Saudi nationals Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. The pair would purportedly go on to hijack American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.
Al-Hazmi and al-Midhar had attended an Al Qaeda summit that took place between January 5th and 8th 2000, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The meeting was secretly photographed and videotaped by local authorities at Alec Station’s request although, apparently, no audio was captured. En route, Mihdhar transited through Dubai, where CIA operatives broke into his hotel room and photocopied his passport. It showed that he possessed a multi-entry visa to the US.
A contemporaneous internal CIA cable stated this information was immediately passed to the FBI “for further investigation.” In reality, Alec Station not only failed to inform the Bureau of Mihdhar’s US visa, but also expressly forbade two FBI agents assigned to the unit from doing so.
“[I said] ‘we’ve got to tell the Bureau about this. These guys clearly are bad…we’ve got to tell the FBI.’ And then [the CIA] said to me, ‘no, it’s not the FBI’s case, not the FBI’s jurisdiction’,” Mark Rossini, one of the FBI agents in question, has alleged. “If we had picked up the phone and called the Bureau, I would’ve been violating the law. I…would’ve been removed from the building that day. I would’ve had my clearances suspended, and I would be gone.”
On January 15th, Hazmi and Mihdhar entered the US through Los Angeles International Airport, just weeks after the foiled Millennium plot. Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi government “ghost employee” immediately met them at an airport restaurant. After a brief conversation, Bayoumi helped them find an apartment near his own in San Diego, co-signed their lease, set them up bank accounts, and gifted $1,500 towards their rent. The three would have multiple contacts moving forward.
In interviews with Operation Encore investigators years later, Bayoumi alleged his run-in with the two would-be hijackers was mere happenstance. His extraordinary practical and financial support was, he claimed, simply charitable, motivated by sympathy for the pair, who could barely speak English and were unfamiliar with Western culture.
The Bureau disagreed, concluding Bayoumi was a Saudi spy, who handled a number of Al Qaeda operatives in the US. They also considered there to be a “50/50 chance” he – and by extension Riyadh – had detailed advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.
Conde was truly a rare gem: a thoughtful writer and political analyst and gifted researcher with a wealth of personal knowledge and experience who paid a heavy price for his defiance.
David W. Conde set the groundwork for Philip Agee’s 1975 whistleblowing account, Inside the Company.
In 1970, David W. Conde, an American journalist working in Japan, who had served with the U.S. Army Psychological Warfare Branch in World War II, published a now-forgotten book in New Delhi, CIA—Core of the Cancer.
Five years before publication of CIA whistleblower Philip Agee’s Inside the Company: A CIA Diary, the book provided a damning indictment of the CIA’s involvement in criminal operations—particularly in Southeast Asia—and manipulation of public opinion through tax-exempt foundations financed by large corporations that corrupted a generation of intellectuals.
Conde wrote that, “while there seems no question that historians will record that the CIA’s greatest defeat was its failure to overcome [Fidel] Castro’s forces at the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the CIA’s greatest victory may well turn out to be not its food poisoning, its ballot-stuffing, its coup d’états, or its mobilization of labor unions or students to serve U.S. interests overseas, but its research grants to U.S. and foreign scholars.”[1]
These scholars played an influential role in helping condition the public in the U.S. and in countries around the world to support U.S. foreign policy interests and Cold War mobilization against the Soviet Union.
Conde noted that, “in Hitler’s Germany and Prince Konoe’s Japan, thought police used torture, and ordered death or [used] the threat of death to convert communists into anti-communists, but America being a rich country, relied upon the power of its money.”
This money had a deeply corrupting effect, tarnishing intellectual and scientific integrity, debasing political life and causing almost all societal institutions to be up for sale.
A Maverick Caught in the Cross-Hairs of an Anti-Red Psychopath
Fraser Myers points out: “‘I am intersectional… I am a cisgender millennial, who has been diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder… I refuse to internalise misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be… I want you to be unapologetically you, whoever you are…’
These are not the words of some blue-haired student or tedious Instagram activist. Rather, they come from a recruitment video for the CIA. The Central Intelligence Agency – infamous for ‘enhanced interrogation’, drone warfare and trafficking drugs to pay for foreign coups – has officially gone woke.
3. Being woke is easier than actually paying workers.
When people complain about woke culture, they usually think about universities. They are sick of fake courses, demands for diversity, constant complaints of oppression, and the like. What we need to realize is that the situation is much worse than that. Woke culture in universities is just one part of an insidious plot to make our entire society woke.
Dr. Paul Alexander writes on May 9, ““’When other priorities, like gender or race, are introduced as a metric of assignment and advancement, the foundations of performance-based competition are sacrificed and the emphasis on safety takes a backseat,’ a current Air Force instructor pilot and former trainer for Undergraduate Pilot Training, who spoke on a condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal, told the DCNF.
‘As part of the larger military-wide effort to promote diversity in the service’s pilot ranks, the 19th Air Force command near San Antonio, Texas, ‘clustered’ racial minorities and female trainees into one class, dubbed ‘America’s Class,’ to find out if doing so would improve the pilots’ graduation rates. However, not only did the effort fail to boost minority and women candidates’ success rates, but officers involved say they were ordered to engage in potentially unlawful discrimination by excluding white males from the class, documents show.
‘When other priorities, like gender or race, are introduced as a metric of assignment and advancement, the foundations of performance-based competition are sacrificed and the emphasis on safety takes a backseat,’ a current Air Force instructor pilot and former trainer for Undergraduate Pilot Training, who spoke on a condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal, told the DCNF.
A ‘significant backlog’ of pilot candidates waiting to begin classes offered the 19th Air Force, which conducts pilot training for the entire service at Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas, a chance to build a class from scratch, a spokesperson for Air Education and Training Command (AETC) told the DCNF. So, the 19th Air Force ‘clustered’ candidates from ‘underrepresented groups” into Specialized Undergraduate Pilot Training (SUPT) class 21-15, with the initial intent of roughly mirroring the racial and gender makeup of the U.S.”
The entire defense establishment has become woke, and this has become a means of spreading the American Empire. Fraser Myers points out: “‘I am intersectional… I am a cisgender millennial, who has been diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder… I refuse to internalise misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be… I want you to be unapologetically you, whoever you are…’
These are not the words of some blue-haired student or tedious Instagram activist. Rather, they come from a recruitment video for the CIA. The Central Intelligence Agency – infamous for ‘enhanced interrogation’, drone warfare and trafficking drugs to pay for foreign coups – has officially gone woke.
The recruitment video went viral. It outraged the right for portraying America as weak to its adversaries. And it outraged the left, who accused the CIA of dishonestly ‘co-opting’ progressive politics.
In truth, the CIA has been woke for some time – and no one should be surprised by its drift in this direction. The ‘Humans of CIA’ campaign, which highlights the diversity of the agency’s staff, has actually been running since 2019. A year before, Gina Haspel, despite her alleged involvement in ‘extraordinary rendition’, became the first female CIA chief – a move the Trump administration tried to spin as a victory for ‘women’s empowerment’.
It’s not just the CIA, either. The broader defence establishment is now bound up with woke politics. A watershed moment arrived in 2019 when MSNBC could proudly proclaim that the ‘military-industrial complex is now run by women’. As well as Haspel at the CIA, Andrea Thompson at the Pentagon was America’s lead weapons negotiator and in charge of the nuclear stockpile. The five largest arms contractors – Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the defence arm of Boeing – were also run by women. In the same year, Raytheon, the world’s largest manufacturer of guided missiles, began its partnership with the Girl Scouts, apparently to ‘close the gender gap in STEM’.
Of course, for US militarism to be truly ‘intersectional’ it has to encompass race and sexuality as well as gender. At the weekend, the US Navy celebrated its first ever all-gay helicopter crew. Dow Chemical, which produced skin-burning napalm for the Vietnam war, has drawn media praise for its gay CEO. ‘How Dow Chemical Got Woke’, was how Bloomberg reported it. Earlier this year, ex-CIA chief John Brennan made headlines when he declared that he was ‘increasingly embarrassed’ to be a white man – perhaps not everyone can be ‘unapologetically themselves’ at Langley, after all.
Why do they bother? Why have the warmongers gone woke? Partly it is a question of image. Of course, just as big companies like to align their corporate missions to Black Lives Matter because it is too gauche to say they are out to make a profit, the CIA and the defence establishment cannot simply say that they are out to dominate other countries or defend US commercial interests.”
Wokeness has spread to the business world as well. Michael Rectenwald offers an outstanding analysis: “Why have the biggest and most profitable American corporations embraced leftist politics, as seen in their woke advertising and social justice activism? Hint: It’s not because they’ve become non-profits and taken up philanthropy.
Leading “threat intelligence” firms are creating fake online personas to gain access to every corner of the web.
U.S. intelligence agencies also have a record of coming up empty after infiltrating private, online spaces, raising the possibility that the security justifications for the current incursions are weaker than the agencies are claiming. The documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that FBI and CIA spies had created fake personas to hunt for potential terror plots discussed in online games, such as World of Warcraft and Second Life, as well as on platforms like Xbox Live. Those initiatives fizzled after the intelligence agencies found little to no evidence of terror communications.
That anonymous internet persona with an anime cartoon avatar in your Discord chat might actually be a contractor sent to spy on you.
Enter the world of “threat intelligence.”
It’s the term of art for a growing set of surveillance and security firms that create fake online personas to infiltrate and scrape data from private corners of the internet. The industry provides corporate and government clients with insight into conversations on private, invite-only Discord chats, WhatsApp groups, Reddit forums, and dark web message boards to help those powerful customers keep tabs on a variety of potential threats, from political hacktivists to the illegal markets that traffic in stolen passwords and intellectual property.
I spoke to representatives of ZeroFox, DarkOwl, Searchlight Cyber, Recorded Future, CyberInt, Flashpoint, and other threat intelligence firms at RSA Conference 2023, an annual convention for cyber security professionals from across the world that is held in San Francisco.
“We have personnel who already have established credentials in these environments so that we’re able to go in and look for things,” said A.J. Nash, the vice president of intelligence at ZeroFox, a leader in the threat intelligence industry that is based in Baltimore, Maryland.
Nash confirmed that the company is active in Discord, an audio and video group chat app popular among young video-game players.
“We can do the same thing with Discord,” Nash added. “It’s hard to infiltrate a small group because everybody knows everybody. But some of the groups that are larger, yeah, we have the ability to get into some opportunities.”
An executive at DarkOwl, a Denver-based threat intelligence firm that provides clients with a special database of information from its snooping, explained that the company creates fake identities and usernames to gain admission to many of the private platforms and chatrooms that it uses to collect information.
“What we do, we work with personas,” said Magnus Svärd, a director at DarkOwl. “We’ve done this at scale since 2018 so there’s some trust in the personas that we’ve built up, whether they’re on Discord, on Telegram, or wherever.”
Searchlight Cyber, a British firm that specializes in dark web message boards, similarly uses internet personas to gain access to private online forums and chat platforms.
“We actually get invited to those. We have human actors and get invited. We obviously don’t identify as Searchlight on them,” said Peter Ritter, a sales manager at the firm. “Then we see what’s going on there.”
CyberInt, an Israeli threat intelligence firm, advertises how its team of analysts uses fake personas to thwart hackers, retail fraud, hacktivists, and other cyber security threats.
In one video posted by CyberInt, an analyst for the firm discusses her approach to go into online communities and “detect threat actors when they are young or starting out at 14 or 15, that’s when I start observing and documenting their malicious activities.” At that age, they are “more careless and open,” the analyst said.
In another CyberInt marketing video, the firm walks a potential client through the process of using a fake online alias to contact a hacker over the messaging app Telegram and “get as much information as we can.”
Danny Miller, a director of marketing at CyberInt, confirmed to me that his firm has analysts infiltrating Discord servers, among other platforms.
Many of these firms maintain close ties to law enforcement and government agencies. Several are currently under contract with the Federal Bureau of Investigation or military intelligence.
The role of ZeroFox’s collaboration with the FBI, in particular, came to light in documents unearthed by the special House committee investigating the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. In a Jan. 3, 2021, email exchange between FBI officials preparing for the right-wing protests slated to occur, one official noted that the FBI team charged with monitoring groups due to assemble at the Capitol had just signed on with ZeroFox days earlier. The official said that the agency was still learning how to use the software to monitor social media posts from political extremists headed for Washington on Jan. 6, 2021.
It’s like saying “Yeah unfortunately it looks increasingly probable that I’m going to get into a fight with the guy sitting in front of me on the plane, he really takes exception to the way I keep slapping the back of his head,”
“Biden 2024: Eh you know you’ll vote for me anyway ya losers.”
“Biden 2024: Because fuck you, that’s why.”
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No I will not be supporting any US presidential candidate. Not because I don’t think Australians have any business involving themselves in US political affairs (we absolutely do), but because the elections are fake and the next president will with absolute certainty be another corrupt imperialist monster. I won’t be picking any favorites in the next WWE event either.
The only reason to pay attention to a US presidential election is to highlight the elite manipulations that go into it to help people understand that the game is rigged. Once you get sucked in to cheering for actual candidates you’ve lost sight of what’s really happening, like someone who got so drawn in to the movie that they forget they’re sitting in a theater.
Only the most trustworthy empire managers get anywhere near the presidency, because the stewardship of a globe-spanning empire is too important to be left in the hands of the voters. Being in that office is itself the greatest sign of corruption you’ll ever see. People talk about CIA involvement in presidents like Bush Sr or Obama and I’m like, “It gets so much worse than that, mate: did you know he was the president of the United States?”
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The clear message from the US security state is that intelligence cartel insiders like Mike Morell are allowed to interfere in US elections and orchestrate brazen psyops to circulate disinformation because they want a particular candidate to win, but ordinary Americans are not. If you do it it’s disinformation and a threat democracy which calls for more internet censorship and possible criminal charges; when Mike Morell does it it’s no big deal.
MCViewPoint 