A Truly Horrendous and Shocking Revelation that Bodes Ill for 2020

There is a helpful roundup today in RT (see "Huge Psy-op in UK? Not interested. British media silent on Integrity Initiative months on") regarding the lack of coverage in the British media on the Integrity Initiative.

The Integrity Initiative (II) is a project of the Institute for Statecraft, a Scottish charity, funded by, among others, the British Ministry of Defense, the British Foreign Office, the U.S. State Department, NATO and Facebook. The Institute for Statecraft's stated mission is to educate about governance and advance human rights; it's real mission is to shore up support for a fracturing neoliberal consensus by fabricating a hostile Russian bogeyman.

That's where the Integrity Initiative project comes in: It's supposed to combat Russian disinformation, but in fact the Integrity Initiative produces fake news about Russian disinformation. It disseminates this Russiaphobia through clusters of journalists, politicians and academics.

Since the Institute for Statecraft was hacked in November what has become clear to me -- and what explains the silence in the mainstream Western media (RT focused solely on the mainstream British media, but the same goes for the U.S.) -- is that the II is how the mainstream media operates in general: clusters of journalists, politicians, academics and think-tankers are managed by the government (even if the form happens to be a charity) to produce official enemies.

A peek behind the Great Oz's curtain can be found in Glenn Greenwald's story Sunday, "NBC News, to Claim Russia Supports Tulsi Gabbard, Relies on Firm Just Caught Fabricating Russia Data for the Democratic Party." In a nutshell, NBC News Russiabaited antiwar presidential aspirant Tulsi Gabbard by citing analysis from New Knowledge identifying "‘chatter’ related to Gabbard in anonymous online message boards, including those known for fomenting right-wing troll campaigns.”

As Greenwald points out:

What NBC — amazingly — concealed is a fact that reveals its article to be a journalistic fraud: That same firm, New Knowledge, was caught just six weeks ago engaging in a massive scam to create fictitious Russian troll accounts on Facebook and Twitter in order to claim that the Kremlin was working to defeat Democratic Senate nominee Doug Jones in Alabama. The New York Times, when exposing the scam, quoted a New Knowledge report that boasted of its fabrications: “We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the [Roy] Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.'”

It's not as if New Knowledge's information warfare went under the radar. The New York Times alone has published six stories since it was revealed in December that New Knowledge's Jonathon Morgan created a ersatz Russian botnet to support the GOP's Roy Moore in the special election for the U.S. Senate in Alabama:

• "Secret Experiment in Alabama Senate Race Imitated Russian Tactics," Dec 19
• "Doug Jones ‘Outraged’ by Russian-Style Tactics Used in His Senate Race," Dec 20
• "Facebook Closes 5 Accounts Tied to Russia-Like Tactics in Alabama Senate Race," Dec 22
• "LinkedIn Co-Founder Apologizes for Deception in Alabama Senate Race," Dec 26
• "Democrats Faked Online Push to Outlaw Alcohol in Alabama Race," Jan 7
• "Fake News as ‘Moral Imperative’? Democrats’ Alabama Move Hints at Ugly 2020," Jan 13

All of this is an enormous body blow to the McCarthyite anti-Russian hysteria that undergirds much of the official Democratic Party. As Jim Rutenberg points out in the last article in the above list of six:

New Knowledge helped build the website for the Alliance’s [Alliance for Securing Democracy] disinformation-tracking database, Hamilton68, which had monitored suspected Russian-linked accounts, tracking the falsehoods they spread and the discord they tried to sow. (New Knowledge also helped write a report on Russian troll activity released last month by the Senate Intelligence Committee.) The Alabama project, Mr. Schafer told me, “undercuts our collective ability to take other countries to task for their deceptive, online behavior.”

A more appropriate question to ask, the one implied, is how much of the putative deceptive online activity attributed to hostile foreign actors is actually homegrown?

What are we supposed to do with "Russians Meddling in the Midterms? Here’s the Data" and "After Florida School Shooting, Russian ‘Bot’ Army Pounced," both sourced to Jonathon Morgan? Have these storylines been debunked and publicly repudiated? When are the congressional hearings scheduled?

NBC News citing Morgan and New Knowledge to tar the antiwar Gabbard is evidence that the fakeness of mainstream media is exposure proof. A truly horrendous and shocking revelation that bodes ill for 2020.

The Integrity Initiative is How Mass Media Works

Yesterday RT featured a round-up on the Integrity Initiative, "Do it CIA style: What you need to know about latest leak on UK-funded psyop":

In a December 16 editorial, the Scotland-based Daily Record, which has been one of the only major outlets reporting on the scandal, suggested that if the II [Integrity Initiative] was "gift-wrapping intelligence for journalists desperate enough to pass it off as their own work without proper attribution” then that is “worthy of further investigation.”

Still not a peep about the Integrity Initiative in Reuters, AP and The New York Times. I searched AFP too. Nothing.

What does that tell you? It tells you that the Integrity Initiative is the skeleton in the closet, the bare bones of how mass media operates in the Western world. Spooks set the agenda, and the taxpayers pay for it.

As if to fill the void in their very own pages The New York Times has countered first with a "Those horrible Russians are dividing us and brain-washing our coloreds" rehash, and now today an exclusive about an alleged Chinese hack of an EU diplomatic network which -- lo and behold! --reveals that Trump agitates people.

How Long Do We Have to Wait for Mainstream Media to Cover the Integrity Initiative?

I just searched the web sites of Reuters, AP and The New York Times. So far there is no mention of the "Integrity Initiative." The Integrity Initiative is an information warfare campaign run by the Institute for Statecraft, a Scottish charity which receives money from the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office and which acts as a front for UK military intelligence to spread misinformation, mostly of the New Cold War, Russophobic variety.

The Integrity Initiative was hacked and some of its confidential files revealed early last month. As explained in a Sputnik opinion piece:

On November 5, international hacking syndicate Anonymous published a series of internal files it'd appropriated from Integrity Initiative, an off-shoot of the Institute for Statecraft. The material was explosive, revealing the organization — which claims to be concerned with defending democratic institutions from Russian "destabilization campaigns" — to be an international "information war effort" run by British military intelligence specialists, which has disrupted the domestic politics of other countries.

As part of this enterprise, the organization has amassed 'clusters' the world over — lists of politicians, businesspeople, military officials, academics and journalists — who "understand the threat posed to Western nations" by Russian "disinformation" and can be mobilized to influence policy. The files suggest clusters are operational in France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Norway, Serbia, Spain and the UK — and there are plans to extend the scheme to every corner of the globe.

They also offer numerous examples of cluster mobilization in action — one boasts of the success of 'Operation Moncloa', an effort to block the appointment of Pedro Banos, an army reservist and author the Spanish Socialist party wanted to make the country's Director of National Security.

When Banos' candidacy was announced, members of the Integrity Initiative's Spanish 'cluster' — including Gonzalez Ponz, spokesperson of the Partido Popular in the European parliament, and Nacho Torreblanco, director of the European Council for Foreign Relations Office in Madrid — colluded via a WhatsApp group to flood social networks with anti-Banos messages, and provide the Spanish media with a 'dossier' of negative material on the former head of counterintelligence and security for the European army. The Initiative's UK cluster supported their work — within 24-hours, the planned appointment was dropped.

While the files don't offer an example of any similar plot in the UK, its cluster there includes Ben Nimmo, a fellow at the Atlantic Council, who has repeatedly claimed Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is being supported by the Russian state through various means, including a "twisted cyber campaign", without any supporting evidence whatsoever. The Integrity Initiative's official Twitter account has also posted numerous tweets and links to articles attacking Labour, Corbyn — one post said he was a "useful idiot" in service of the Kremlin — and other prominent party figures.

Given how fraught Westminster is these days, it's the attack on Corbyn, and the blanket denials by Theresa May's government, that lead me to believe that the story will find its way to the principal mainstream outlets.

In the meantime, Moon of Alabama has posted a substantial article on the Integrity Initiative, as has Craig Murray, with the promise of further revelations. Niqnaq re-posts a Yandex translation of Colonel Cassad's piece on the Integrity Initiative:

Operation Integrity Initiative: The Institute for Statecraft

Hackers Anonymous continue to spread in parts of a large leak on the operations of British intelligence in Europe, held in the framework of the program Integrity Initiative. In the next portion of revelations describes the activities of the Institute of Statecraft and the influence of agents in Italy, France and Scotland. Interesting highlights: 

1. MI6 paid their own agents to fabricate evidence of Russian involvement in the organization of a referendum on secession of Catalonia from Spain, for the subsequent charges of Russia meddling in Spanish Affairs. 

2. Money from British Intelligence paid for a campaign to discredit Jeremy Corbyn and his entourage, which actually was done in the interests of the Cabinet Office of Theresa May. In fact, Intelligence became a tool of internal political struggle. 

3. Agents of influence paid by MI6 in different countries had to constantly speculate about Russian involvement in the poisoning of the Skripals, in order to create the ground for diplomatic condemnation of Russia. 

4. In 2014, one of the functionaries of the network proposed mining the harbour of Sevastopol and lock in the Bay of the Black Sea Fleet, followed by demonstrations of military presence of NATO in the Black sea. 

5. The Institute for Statecraft, led by Director Christopher Donnelly, was in fact a front for British Intelligence and part of the infrastructure of the operations of Integrity Initiative. 

6. The document expressed regret that Russia’s influence is strong in the countries where lustration has not been completed in relation to people educated in the Soviet Union. It was written before the lustration of MGIMO graduates in Poland. 

7. Expected to negotiate with Yushchenko that he told the world that Skripal not the first one who became victim of the “cruelty” Russia, connecting the “attempt on the Skripals” with the “poisoning” of Yushchenko in 2003. 

8. Emphasizes the reliance on prominent public figures for stream of best abstract operations of Integrity Initiative. For example, the famous footballer Gary Lineker during the World Cup in Russia. 

Remarkably, today part of the published documents was removed or unavailable.