Putin Unmasks Anti-Russia Manipulation

By Manuel E. Yepe

http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico. 

Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.

What would Russia have gained from the murder of former Russian spy Sergei Skripel and his daughter Yulia? This is the question asked by Argentine-Canadian international information analyst Alberto Rabilotta. He praises the equanimity and impeccable realism that Russian President Vladimir Putin has demonstrated to show the falsity of the accusations without aggravating tensions that are the goal of the United States and its allies in this and similar conflicts.

The poisoning of the former Russian spy and his daughter in Britain on 4 March occurred when the fable of “Russiagate”, with which Putin allegedly manipulated the US elections in the name of Trump’s victory, was beginning to fall apart.

Anyone who knows about the behavior of the rulers and intelligence services of London and Washington, throughout history, and especially in recent times, knows that there is very good reason to believe that what happened to Skripal and his daughter happened when British Channel 4 journalists were about to reveal that the manipulation of the election in the United States and the Brexit referendum in Great Britain had been the work of the British company Cambridge Analytica (CA), which has offices in London, New York and Washington and which used data from Facebook.

Cambridge Analytica is an “offshoot” of the Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL), a company that has manipulated elections in numerous countries – including some in Latin America. This necessarily implies that it had strong links in the political world related to Washington and their structures of government and intelligence. Further proof of this is the fact that one of its main shareholders is the American billionaire Robert Mercer who has financed, among other reactionary campaigns, including that of a number of Republicans, including Donald Trump.

On March 19, TV Channel 4 in Great Britain broadcast a report on CA made with recordings -some of them secretly made- between the end of 2017 and January 2018, in which executives and collaborators of CA exposed the type of manipulation that this firm used in the Brexit referendum in Great Britain and in the United States elections that gave the victory to Donald Trump. On the basis of these, major propaganda campaigns were carried out to show that these events had been manipulated by Moscow.

Interestingly, before Channel 4 broadcast its report, CA founder and director Alexander Nix resigned. This shows he knew what was about to be revealed and what their consequences for the firm and its owners would be. Rabilotta notes that on December 15, 2017, the Wall Street Journal had written that Robert Mueller, special advisor to the Justice Department, had asked CA to submit documents from its investigation “on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.” From this it’s evident that even then the U.S. intelligence services were aware of CA’s role in that electoral process.

Moreover, The Times of Israel revealed that CA worked with Israeli companies and that, in addition to using Facebook data, it carried out classic blackmail operations with honey traps, which are Ukrainian prostitutes who specialize in recording situations that encourage blackmail, using former British and Israeli spies.

With the information available and beginning to emerge, it is clear that this entire operation, as well as those who participated in it and those who benefited from it, were known to the US intelligence services and their allies well before 19 March, the date when British Channel 4 broadcast its report. Thus, long before March 19 and the fateful March 4 – the poisoning of Skripel and his daughter – the key figures in London and Washington knew that Russiagate at the Capitol in Washington was destined to collapse permanently and disastrously. Not only that, but that the political and diplomatic cost of that campaign against Russia, forged from the beginning by millionaires, politicians and companies from the United States and Great Britain, would have to be borne, Rabilotta reiterates.

With the information available and beginning to come to light, it is clear that this whole operation, as well as those who participated in it and benefited from it, were known to the US intelligence services and their allies, long before March 19, when British Channel 4 broadcast its report.

Mr Rabilotta recalls that, on March 1, President Putin announced Russia’s progress on strategic arms and Syria launched an offensive to liberate strategic areas near Damascus controlled by financed and armed terrorist forces financed and armed by imperialism and its allies, who were preparing an operation using chemical weapons that would be blamed on the Syrian government to justify military intervention by the US and its allies.

May 7, 2018.

Fake News as Washington’s Weapons

By Manuel E. Yepe

http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico. 

Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.

Let no one think that using falsehoods as a pivot for the projection and execution of U.S. foreign policy is an innovation or a novel contribution by Donald Trump. This has been a tradition in Washington’s foreign policy since the explosion of the Spanish battleship Maine in 1898 in Havana, which led to the U.S. declaring war on the Spanishmonarchy and whose aftermath was the rise of U.S. imperialism.

In 1997, the release of the feature film WAG THE DOG, a free adaptation of Larry Beinhart’s novel “American Hero”, starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro and directed by Barry Levinson, was very successful in the United States.

The film is about a spin doctor and a film producer who are inventing a war to distract voters’ attention from a sex scandal that would hamper the re-election of the President of the United States. The film was released a month before the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the subsequent bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory by the Clinton administration and generated numerous comparisons of reality with the film.

On tape, the President is caught falling in love with a young minor in the Oval Office two months before the election. The spin doctor decides to draw the public’s attention with a fictitious war against Albania in order to draw its media attention to this conflict by diverting it from the White House.

The deception initially takes effect by moving the election statistics in favor of the President. But then this clashes with the interests of the CIA, which favors the opposition candidate. All this then is complicated by a succession of dirt and perversions typical of American politics.

Fake news has become a “fourth generation” weapon. Inserted into the new information technology scenarios, it surpasses them widely in scope and validity, given that the scenario in which it is poured exponentially surpasses the level of dissemination of content through the computer media of social networks, where the false becomes true.

An example of recent false news used as weapons of war has been the case of acoustic attacks against U.S. embassy officials in Cuba.

This fake news was denied in many ways, including by an investigation conducted at the University of Michigan by researcher Kevin Fu. He determined that the alleged attacks “were caused by interference between two ultrasound sources very close to those affected: one, a listening and spying device; the other, an ultrasonic blocker of the device. In other words, it was the very espionage activities that the Americans carried out inside their embassy that caused the acoustic attacks that affected their own diplomatic officials.

A large number of previous verifications had confirmed the fallacy, but the aim of this fake news was not to rectify something, but to provoke tension and break ties between Washington and Havana in line with the political objectives of the Trump regime.

Another recent case was that of the poisoning in England of the Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. The Russian government was automatically accused, allegedly the only producer of a chemical known as Novichok, which – it became known – is not only produced by Russian laboratories, but can be produced in several British laboratories. This showd that the treacherous accusation sought to discredit the Kremlin.

Worse still, there has been the alleged chemical attack by Syria on the city of Douma, recently liberated by the Syrian Arab Army from occupation by terrorist forces supported by the United States. A team of journalists from the U.S.-based One America News Network (OAN)-which is a purely conservative source of guidance and audience and supports Donald Trump-visited Douma. They publicly stated that it had found no evidence of the chemical attack which allegedly took place on April 7, making a mockery of its President.

The self-esteem of the US superpower’s foreign policy must be in a very bad way when it has to resort over and over again to falsehoods and manipulations to try to keep the idea of the invincibility of the US empire in the collective imagination.

May 3, 2018.