Quote:

---

Inside the British Army's secret information warfare machine

A barbed-wire fence stretched off far to either side. A Union flag twisted in a gust of wind, and soldiers strode in and out of a squat guard’s hut in the middle of the road. Through the hut, and under a row of floodlights, I walked towards a long line of drab, low-rise brick buildings. It was the summer of 2017, and on this military base nestled among the hills of Berkshire, I was visiting a part of the British Army unlike any other. They call it the 77th Brigade. They are the troops fighting Britain’s information wars.

“If everybody is thinking alike then somebody isn’t thinking,” was written in foot-high letters across a whiteboard in one of the main atriums of the base. Over to one side, there was a suite full of large, electronic sketch pads and multi-screened desktops loaded with digital editing software. The men and women of the 77th knew how to set up cameras, record sound, edit videos. Plucked from across the military, they were proficient in graphic design, social media advertising, and data analytics. Some may have taken the army’s course in Defence Media Operations, and almost half were reservists from civvy street, with full time jobs in marketing or consumer research.

From office to office, I found a different part of the Brigade busy at work. One room was focussed on understanding audiences: the makeup, demographics and habits of the people they wanted to reach. Another was more analytical, focussing on creating “attitude and sentiment awareness” from large sets of social media data. Another was full of officers producing video and audio content. Elsewhere, teams of intelligence specialists were closely analysing how messages were being received and discussing how to make them more resonant.

Explaining their work, the soldiers used phrases I had heard countless times from digital marketers: “key influencers", “reach", “traction". You normally hear such words at viral advertising studios and digital research labs. But the skinny jeans and wax moustaches were here replaced by the crisply ironed shirts and light patterned camouflage of the British Army. Their surroundings were equally incongruous – the 77th’s headquarters were a mix of linoleum flooring, long corridors and swinging fire doors. More Grange Hill than Menlo Park. Next to a digital design studio, soldiers were having a tea break, a packet of digestives lying open on top of a green metallic ammo box. Another sign on the wall declared, “Behavioural change is our USP [unique selling point]”. What on Earth was happening?
Read next

“If you track where UK manpower is deployed, you can take a good guess at where this kind of ‘influence’ activity happens,” an information warfare officer (not affiliated with the 77th) told me later, under condition of anonymity.

“A document will come from the Ministry of Defence that will have broad guidance and themes to follow.” He explains that each military campaign now also has – or rather is – a marketing campaign too.

Ever since Nato troops were deployed to the Baltics in 2017, Russian propaganda has been deployed too, alleging that Nato soldiers there are rapists, looters, little different from a hostile occupation. One of the goals of Nato information warfare was to counter this kind of threat: sharply rebutting damaging rumours, and producing videos of Nato troops happily working with Baltic hosts.

Information campaigns such as these are “white”: openly, avowedly the voice of the British military.

But to narrower audiences, in conflict situations, and when it was understood to be proportionate and necessary to do so, messaging campaigns could become, the officer said, “grey” and “black” too. “Counter-piracy, counter-insurgencies and counter-terrorism,” he explained. There, the messaging doesn't have to look like it came from the military and doesn't have to necessarily tell the truth.

---

Quote:

---

I saw no evidence that the 77th do these kinds of operations themselves, but this more aggressive use of information is nothing new. GCHQ, for instance, also has a unit dedicated to fighting wars with information. It is called the “Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group” – or JTRIG – an utterly unrevealing name, as it is common in the world of intelligence. Almost all we know about it comes from a series of slides leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. Those documents give us a glimpse of what these kinds of covert information campaigns could look like.

According to the slides, JTRIG was in the business of discrediting companies, by passing “confidential information to the press through blogs etc.”, and by posting negative information on internet forums. They could change someone’s social media photos

---

Quote:

---

(“can take ‘paranoia’ to a whole new level”, a slide read.) They could use masquerade-type techniques – that is: placing “secret” information on a compromised computer. They could bombard someone’s phone with text messages or calls.

JTRIG also boasted an arsenal of 200 info-weapons, ranging from in-development to fully operational. A tool dubbed “Badger” allowed the mass delivery of email. Another, called “Burlesque”, spoofed SMS messages. “Clean Sweep” would impersonate Facebook wall posts for individuals or entire countries. “Gateway” gave the ability to “artificially increase traffic to a website”. “Underpass” was a way to change the outcome of online polls.

They had operational targets across the globe: Iran, Africa, North Korea, Russia and the UK.

---

Quote:

---

Sometimes the operations focused on specific individuals and groups, sometimes the wider regimes or even general populations. Operation Quito was a campaign, running some time after 2009, to prevent Argentina from taking over the Falkland Islands. A slide explained “this will hopefully lead to a long-running, large-scale, pioneering effects operation”. Running from March 2011, another operation aimed for regime change in Zimbabwe by discrediting the Zanu PF party.

Walking through the headquarters of the 77th, the strange new reality of warfare was on display. We’ve all heard a lot about “cyberwarfare” – about how states could attack their enemies through computer networks, damaging their infrastructure or stealing their secrets. But that wasn’t what was going on here. Emerging here in the 77th Brigade was a warfare of storyboards and narratives, videos and social media. An engagement now doesn’t just happen on the battlefield, but also in the media and online. A victory is won as much in the eyes of the watching public as between opposing armies on the battlefield. Warfare in the information age is a warfare over information itself.

Over a decade ago, and a world away from the 77th Brigade, there were people who already knew that the internet was a potent new tool of influence. They didn’t call what they did “information warfare”, media operations, influence activities, online action, or any of the military vernacular that it would become. Members of the simmering online subcultures that clustered around hacker forums, in IRCs, and on imageboards like 4chan, they might have called it “attention hacking”. Or simply lulz.

In 2008, Oprah Winfrey warned her millions of viewers that a known paedophile network “has over 9,000 penises and they’re all raping children.” That was a 4chan Dragon Ball-themed in-joke someone had posted on the show’s messageboard. One year later, Time magazine ran an online poll for its readers to vote on the world’s 100 most influential people, and 4chan used scripts to rig the vote so that its founder – then-21-year-old Christopher Poole, commonly known as “moot” – came first. They built bots and “sockpuppets” – fake social media accounts to make topics trend and appear more popular than they were – and swarmed together to overwhelm their targets. They started to reach through computers to change what people saw, and perhaps even what people thought. They celebrated each of their victories with a deluge of memes.

The lulz were quickly seized upon by others for the money. Throughout the 2000s, small PR firms, political communications consultancies, and darknet markets all began to peddle the tactics and techniques pioneered on 4chan. “Digital media-savvy merchants are weaponising their knowledge of commercial social media manipulation services,” a cybersecurity researcher who tracks this kind of illicit commercial activity tells me on condition of anonymity.

“It’s like an assembly line,” he continues. “They prepare the campaign, penetrate the target audience, maintain the operation, and then they strategically disengage. It is only going to get bigger.”

A range of websites started selling fake accounts, described, categorised and priced almost like wine: from cheap plonk all the way to seasoned vintages. The “HUGE MEGA BOT PACK”, available for just $3 on the darknet, allowed you to build your own bot army across hundreds of social media platforms. There were services for manipulating search engine results. You could buy Wikipedia edits. You could rent fake IP addresses to make it look like your accounts came from all over the world. And at the top of the market were “legend farms”, firms running tens of thousands of unique identities, each one with multiple accounts on social media, a unique IP address, its own internet address, even its own personality, interests and writing style. The lulz had transmogrified into a business model.

Inside the base of the 77th, everything was in motion. Flooring was being laid, work units installed; desks – empty of possessions – formed neat lines in offices still covered in plastic, tape and sawdust. The unit was formed in a hurry in 2015 from various older parts of the British Army – a Media Operations Group, a Military Stabilisation Support Group, a Psychological Operations Group. It has been rapidly expanding ever since.

In 2014, a year before the 77th was established, a memo entitled “Warfare in the Information Age” flashed across the British military. “We are now in the foothills of the Information Age” the memo announced. It argued that the British Army needed to fight a new kind of war, one that “will have information at its core”. The Army needed to be out on social media, on the internet, and in the press, engaged, as the memo put it, “in the reciprocal, real-time business of being first with the truth, countering the narratives of others, and if necessary manipulating the opinion of thousands concurrently in support of combat operations.”

Then the business of lulz turned into geopolitics. Around the world, militaries had come to exactly the same realisation as the British, and often more quickly. “There is an increased reliance on, and desire for, information,” Nato’s Allied Joint Doctrine for Information Operations, published in 2009, began. And it reached the same conclusion as the British military memo: wars needed to have an “increased attention on Info Ops”. Simply put, information operations should be used to target an enemy’s will. “For example, by questioning the legitimacy of leadership and cause, information activities may undermine their moral power base, separating leadership from supporters, political, military and public, thus weakening their desire to continue and affecting their actions,” the document explains.

Russia, too, was in on the act. The Arab Spring

---

Quote:

---

, the revolutions in several post-Soviet states, Nato’s enlargement – each of those had chipped away at the crumbling edifice of Russian power. Russia had a large conventional army but that seemed to matter less than in the past. The Chief of the Russian General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, began to rethink what a military needed to do. Warfare, he argued in an article for Voyenno-Promyshlennyy Kurier (The Military Industry Journal), was now “hybrid” – blurring the lines between war and peace, civilian and military, state and non-state. And there was another blurring too: between force and ideas. “Moral-psychological-cognitive-informational struggle”, as Gerasimov put it, was now central to how conflicts should be fought.

We now know what Russian information warfare looks like. Moscow has built an apparatus that stretches from mainstream media to the backwaters of the blogosphere, from the President of the Russian Federation to the humble bot. Just like the early attention hackers, their techniques are a mixture of the very visible and very secret – but at a vastly greater scale.

Far less visible to Western eyes, however, were the outbreak of other theatres of information warfare outside of the English language. Gerasimov was right: each was a case of blurred boundaries. It was information warfare, but not always just carried out by militaries. It came from the state, but sometimes included plenty of non-state actors too. Primarily, it was done by autocracies, and was often directed internally, at the country’s own inhabitants.

A Harvard paper published in 2017 estimated that the Chinese government employs two million people to write 448 million social media posts a year. Their primary purpose is to keep online discussion away from sensitive political topics. Marc Owen Jones, a researcher at Exeter University’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, exposed thousands of fake Twitter accounts in Saudi Arabia, “lionising the Saudi government or Saudi foreign policy”. In Bahrain, evidence emerged of spam-like operations, aiming to stop dissidents finding each other or debating politically dangerous topics online. In Mexico, an estimated 75,000 automated accounts are known locally as Peñabots, after President Enrique Peña Nieto, flooding protest hashtags with irrelevant, annoying noise burying any useful information.

Disinformation and deception have been a part of warfare for thousands of years, but across the world, something new was starting to happen. Information has long been used to support combat operations, but now combat was seen to taking place primarily, sometimes exclusively, through it. From being a tool of warfare, each military began to realise that the struggle with, over and through information was what war itself actually was about. And it wasn’t confined to Russia, China or anyone else. A global informational struggle has broken out. Dozens of countries are already doing it. And these are just the campaigns that we know about.

On their shoulders, the soldiers of the 77th Brigade wear a small, round patch of blue encircling a snarling golden creature that looks like a lion. Called an A Chinthe, it’s a mythical Burmese beast first worn by the the Chindits, a British and Indian guerrilla force created during the Second World War to protect Burma against the advancing Japanese Army. An army of irregulars, the Chindits infiltrated deep behind enemy lines in unpredictable sorties, destroying supply depots and severing transport links, aiming to spread confusion as much as destruction.

It’s no accident that the 77th wear the Chinthe on their shoulder. Like the Chindits, they are a new kind of force. An unorthodox one, but in the eyes of the British Army also a necessary innovation; simply reflecting the world in which we all now live and the new kind of warfare that happens within it.

This new warfare poses a problem that neither the 77th Brigade, the military, or any democratic state has come close to answering yet. It is easy to work out how to deceive foreign publics, but far, far harder to know how to protect our own. Whether it is Russia’s involvement in the US elections, over Brexit, during the novichok poisoning or the dozens of other instances that we already know about, the cases are piling up. In information warfare, offence beats defence almost by design. It’s far easier to put out lies than convince everyone that they’re lies. Disinformation is cheap; debunking it is expensive and difficult.

Even worse, this kind of warfare benefits authoritarian states more than liberal democratic ones. For states and militaries, manipulating the internet is trivially cheap and easy to do. The limiting factor isn’t technical, it’s legal. And whatever the overreaches of Western intelligence, they still do operate in legal environments that tend to more greatly constrain where, and how widely, information warfare can be deployed. China and Russia have no such legal hindrances.

Equipping us all with the skills to protect ourselves from information warfare is, perhaps, the only true solution to the problem. But it takes time. And what could be taught would never keep up with what can be done. Technological possibility, as things stand, easily outpaces public understanding.

The Chinthe was often built at the entrances of pagodas, temples and other sacred sites to guard them from the menaces and dangers lurking outside. Today, that sacred site is the internet itself. From the lulz, to spam, to information warfare, the threats against it have become far better funded and more potent. The age of information war is just getting started.

---

Quote:

---

MI6 battling to stop Donald Trump releasing classified Russia probe documents

I6 chiefs are secretly battling Donald Trump to stop him publishing classified information linked to the Russian election meddling investigation.

The UK is warning that the US president would undermine intelligence gathering if he releases pages of an FBI application to wiretap one of his former campaign advisers.

However Trump allies are fighting back, demanding transparency and asking why Britain would oppose the move unless it had something to hide. ...

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by captaincrunch:
It's fun to watch you struggle.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 1kiki:
Trying to turn another good thread into your own personal crap-holes again?

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by captaincrunch:

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 1kiki:
Trying to turn another good thread into your own personal crap-holes again?

---

You must be talking to SIGHOLE. She loves to fill up FFF.net with these BS Clinton! Obama! fake news, tin foil hat threads.

---

Yep

T

Quote:

---

a part of the British Army the 77th Brigade "fighting" Britain’s information wars

---

Quote:

---

“If everybody is thinking alike then somebody isn’t thinking,” was written in foot-high letters across a whiteboard in one of the main atriums of the base.

---

Quote:

---

the 77th knew how to set up cameras, record sound, edit videos. Plucked from across the military, they were proficient in graphic design, social media advertising, and data analytics. Some may have taken the army’s course in Defence Media Operations, and almost half were reservists from civvy street, with full time jobs in marketing or consumer research.

---

Quote:

---

From office to office, I found a different part of the Brigade busy at work. One room was focussed on understanding audiences: the makeup, demographics and habits of the people they wanted to reach. Another was more analytical, focussing on creating “attitude and sentiment awareness” from large sets of social media data. Another was full of officers producing video and audio content. Elsewhere, teams of intelligence specialists were closely analysing how messages were being received and discussing how to make them more resonant. Another sign on the wall declared, “Behavioural change is our USP [unique selling point]”.

---

Quote:

---

“A document will come from the Ministry of Defence that will have broad guidance and themes to follow.” ... each military campaign now also has – or rather is – a marketing campaign too.

---

Quote:

---

Ever since Nato troops were deployed to the Baltics in 2017, Russian propaganda has been deployed too, alleging that Nato soldiers there are rapists, looters, little different from a hostile occupation. One of the goals of Nato information warfare was to counter this kind of threat: sharply rebutting damaging rumours, and producing videos of Nato troops happily working with Baltic hosts.

---

Quote:

---

But messaging campaigns could become “grey” and “black” too. There, the messaging doesn't have to look like it came from the military and doesn't have to necessarily tell the truth.

---

Quote:

---

GCHQ also has a unit dedicated to fighting wars with information.

---

Quote:

---

Almost all we know about it comes from a series of slides leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. Those documents give us a glimpse of what these kinds of covert information campaigns could look like.
According to the slides, JTRIG was in the business of discrediting companies, by passing “confidential information to the press through blogs etc.”, and by posting negative information on internet forums. They could change someone’s social media photos (“can take ‘paranoia’ to a whole new level”, a slide read.) They could use masquerade-type techniques – that is: placing “secret” information on a compromised computer. They could bombard someone’s phone with text messages or calls.

---

Quote:

---

“Clean Sweep” would impersonate Facebook wall posts for individuals or entire countries. “Gateway” gave the ability to “artificially increase traffic to a website”. “Underpass” was a way to change the outcome of online polls.

---

Quote:

---

They had operational targets across the globe: ... and the UK.

---

Quote:

---

Sometimes the operations focused on specific individuals and groups, sometimes the wider regimes or even general populations. Operation Quito was a campaign, running some time after 2009, to prevent Argentina from taking over the Falkland Islands. A slide explained “this will hopefully lead to a long-running, large-scale, pioneering effects operation”. Running from March 2011, another operation aimed for regime change in Zimbabwe by discrediting the Zanu PF party.

---

Quote:

---

Emerging here in the 77th Brigade was a warfare of storyboards and narratives, videos and social media.

---

Quote:

---

“Digital media-savvy merchants are weaponising their knowledge of commercial social media manipulation services.” The “HUGE MEGA BOT PACK”, available for just $3 on the darknet, allowed you to build your own bot army across hundreds of social media platforms.

---

Quote:

---

the British Army needed to fight a new kind of war, one that “will have information at its core”.

---

Quote:

---

The Army needed to be out on social media, on the internet, and in the press, engaged, as the memo put it, “in the reciprocal, real-time business of being first with the truth,

---

Quote:

---

countering the narratives of others, and if necessary manipulating the opinion of thousands concurrently in support of combat operations.”

---

Quote:

---

The Arab Spring fomented in part by Israeli troll farms

---

Quote:

---

A Harvard paper published in 2017 estimated that the Chinese government employs two million people to write 448 million social media posts a year. Their primary purpose is to keep online discussion away from sensitive political topics. Marc Owen Jones, a researcher at Exeter University’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, exposed thousands of fake Twitter accounts in Saudi Arabia, “lionising the Saudi government or Saudi foreign policy”. In Bahrain, evidence emerged of spam-like operations, aiming to stop dissidents finding each other or debating politically dangerous topics online. In Mexico, an estimated 75,000 automated accounts are known locally as Peñabots, after President Enrique Peña Nieto, flooding protest hashtags with irrelevant, annoying noise burying any useful information.

---

Quote:

---

Whether it is Russia’s involvement in the US elections, over Brexit, during the novichok poisoning or the dozens of other instances that we already know about, the cases ...

---

Quote:

---

are piling up.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:

---

MI6 battling to stop Donald Trump releasing classified Russia probe documents

I6 chiefs are secretly battling Donald Trump to stop him publishing classified information linked to the Russian election meddling investigation.

The UK is warning that the US president would undermine intelligence gathering if he releases pages of an FBI application to wiretap one of his former campaign advisers.

However Trump allies are fighting back, demanding transparency and asking why Britain would oppose the move unless it had something to hide. ...

---

MORE AT https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/11/21/exc-mi6-battling-donald-tr
ump-release-classified-russia-probe/amp/

Not a new story, just an indication that the battle over "Russiagate" is still going on.

Since the House will be turned over to Dems in January, Dems will drop any investigation of FBI/CIA/WH/Clinton/MI6 malfeasance* like a hot potato, leaving investigation/ exposure of the deep-state to either the WH (declassify and release) or to the DOJ, either continuing Huber's remit or appointing another prosecutor. I imagine that declassification and release would expose SUCH a can of worms that this might be something even Trump would be reluctant to do.

For example, I have heard - more than once- that the NSA has a giant database of illegally-gathered information on pretty much everyone of any importance/ interest (Remember that big data center in Utah? It wasn't built for shits and giggles.) and that they share that information with the CIA, FBI, local PDs etc. The TRICK is to create some sort of plausible investigatory pathway by which that information might have been discovered legally, obtaining paper-thin warrants or "turning" relatively unimportant people to develop a string of "evidence" which will lead them to the desired result.

Also, the UK seems pretty accommodating at just making stuff up, and MI6 and the CIA and FBI seem adept at looping the material into larger and larger importance, taking something that is (in essence) a made-up story, then questioning someone about it, then leaking the story, then using the leak to investigate further. Or creating "sting" operations to net the unwary innocent (called "entrapment").

Seems like exposure of those kinds of operations would create all kinds of havoc, even with important and legitimate intelligence-gathering.

*MALFEASANCE: (legal definition) illegal or dishonest activity especially by a public official or a corporation

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 1kiki:
Do we the people need to set up our own spy agencies to figure out what our government is doing in our name?

---

Quote:

---

Chilcot report: MI6 may have got crucial intelligence on Iraq WMDs from a Nicolas Cage film

MI6, desperate to find evidence which would prove that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction

---

Quote:

---

thought they had at last struck gold – a source with “phenomenal access” to the highest echelons of the Iraqi regime, one who would be the “key to unlock” the secrets of a chemical and biological arsenal.

The prized undercover “asset” not only confirmed that the WMD programme was going full blast but that the regime was actually building more facilities. The head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, was confident that the man would even produce a “CD with everything in it.” Under the circumstances the service’s reporting of a “ significant breakthrough” seemed, if anything, to be an understatement.

Doubts, however, began to creep in. One MI6 officer pointed out that the source’s description of the device and its spherical glass contents was “ remarkably similar to the fictional chemical weapons portrayed in the film The Rock”. In the film, according to the blurb which accompanied it, a FBI chemical warfare agent, played by Nicolas Cage, is sent on a mission with a British spy, Sean Connery to stop a mad general, Ed Harris, from launching chemical weapons on Alcatraz Island into San Francisco.

Nevertheless, what the Iraqi agent had to say played an important part in the conclusions of the dodgy dossier

---

Quote:

---

on Iraq’s WMD. Crucially, the material was not shown to the real experts on the subject, the scientific analysts of DIS

---

Quote:

---

( Defence intelligence Staff) by the JIC ( Joint Intelligence Committee) who were putting the document together.

The Chilcot report points out that “ The SIS ( MI6) report should have been shown to relevant experts in the DIS who could have advised their senior managers and assessment staff. Expert officials in the DIS questioned the certainty with which some of the judgments in the dossier were expressed.”

The inquiry also noted "Sir Richard Dearlove's personal intervention, and its urgency, gave added weight to a report that had not been properly evaluated and would have coloured the perception of ministers and senior officials. The report should have been treated with caution”.

The great scoop was unraveling fast. It was noted by MI6 on 2nd February 2003 that the source had failed to provide the information expected. By 18th February, the man was being described in MI6 notes as a liar who had been misleading them for a long time. But MI6 failed to tell others involved in producing the dossier about the debacle. Reports from the Iraqi was still being issued in April, a month after the war had begun.

MI6 finally met the source in June 2003. He had only been involved in Iraq’s chemical programme, in a minor capacity, before 1991. He denied providing any of the tantalizing material attributed to him. MI6 "concluded that its source was a fabricator who had lied from the outset". In July 2003, the “ intelligence” was officially withdrawn. The Chilcot Inquiry noted "the withdrawal of the reporting was done in a very low key manner compared with the way in which the original intelligence was issued’’.

---

Quote:

---

The withdrawl of the “evidence” was not known by ministers giving evidence to the inquiry by Lord Hutton into the death of Dr David Kelly in 2004, but was known by them at the time of inquiry by Lord Butler in the same year.

The “ Hollywood episode” was just the most colourful of many flaws in the dossier in which there was exaggeration and omission in the intelligence. The JIC broadly produced what Tony Blair’s government wanted to hear and it remained silent when the Prime Minister even ignored what caveats there were in the dossier to make his case for war.

Sir John Chilcot said “: “ In the House of Commons on 24 September 2002, Mr Blair presented Iraq’s past, current and future capabilities as evidence of the severity of the potential threat from Iraq’s WMD”.

Chilcot report: Tony Blair assured George Bush 'I will be with you, whatever'
Tony Blair's spin unspun: how his claims compare with the Chilcot report
Chilcot report: If there's one word to describe the UK’s approach to military action in Iraq, it’s ‘amateurism’
Chilcot report: Families of Iraq War dead lead calls for Tony Blair to be prosecuted

“ He said that, at some point in the future, that threat would become a reality. The judgments about Iraq’s capabilities in that statement, and in the dossier published the same day, were presented with a certainty that was not justified…. It is now clear that policy on Iraq was made on the basis of flawed intelligence and assessments. They were not challenged, and they should have been….”

The view of Britain’s intelligence community before the decision to produce the dossier was that “the threat from Iraq was viewed as less serious than that from other key countries of concern --- Iran, Libya and North Korea.” But this did not suit the government and Jack Straw, the then foreign secretary, played a key role in trying to make Iraq a target.

The government had commissioned an intelligence paper on the WMD threat from “rogue” states. On seeing it, on 8th March 2002, Mr Straw wanted to stress “ Good, but should not Iraq be the first and also have more text? The paper has to show why there is an exceptional threat from Iraq. It does not quite do this yet.” On 18th March, the report noted, the foreign secretary decided that a paper on Iraq should be issued without mentioning other countries of concern. However, four days later, “ Mr Straw was advised that the evidence would not convince public opinion that there was an imminent threat from Iraq. Publication was postponed”.

The operation to find “evidence” that would convince the public that military action was justified was under way. The task of doing this, through a dossier, was given to John Scarlett, the chairman of the JIC.

The JIC’s starting basis was to totally ignore the possibility that Iraq may not actually have any WMDs. “

---

Quote:

---

At no stage was the hypothesis that Iraq might not have chemical. Biological or nuclear weapons or programmes identified and examined by the JIC…Iraq’s statements that it had no weapons or programmes were dismissed as further evidence of a strategy of denial.”

In a foreword he wrote to the dossier, Mr Blair declared that “ assessed intelligence” had “ established beyond doubt” that Saddam Hussein had “ continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, that he continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons, and that he had been able to extend the range of his ballistic missile programme”.
Read more

But, the report points out : “ the assessed intelligence had not established beyond doubt that Saddam Hussein had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons … The main text of the dossier said that there had been “ recent” production. It also stated that Iraq had the means to deliver chemical and biological weapons [but] it did not say that Iraq had continued to produce weapons.” The report also points out “ the dossier made clear that, as long as sanctions remain effective, Iraq could not produce a nuclear weapon.”

The report stresses that “ the firmness of Mr Blair’s beliefs, despite the underlying uncertainties, is important in considering how the judgments in the Foreword would have been interpreted by Cabinet and in its discussions and by Parliament.

By allowing this to happen, said the report, John Scarlett and the JIC had failed in its duty. “ The JIC should have made that position clear because its ownership of the dossier, which was intended to inform a highly controversial policy debate, carried with the responsibility to ensure that the JIC’s integrity was protected.”

---

Quote:

---

Yes! It's called a Free Press

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:

---

Yes! It's called a Free Press

---

It sure would be great if we had one!

'Cause all I see is a "bought-and-paid-for" press!

---

Quote:

---

Major Psy-Op in Europe Exposed: UK Government Tramples on Values It Vowed to Protect

Those who have been saying that the West has turned Russia into a scapegoat to be blamed for each and every thing that goes wrong have been proved right. We have witnessed concocted stories invented to denigrate Moscow that have gone viral as directed by the secret services. The UK, the country that is spearheading the anti-Russian information campaign, offers a good example that illustrates how this is being done.

An online group of hackers known as Anonymous has just revealed covert UK activities in the EU. According to the documents released by that group, London is in the midst of a major program to interfere in the internal affairs of EU members, the US, and Canada. Anonymous threatens to release more information on the clandestine operations of the UK government, unless it agrees to remove the shroud of secrecy protecting those information-warfare efforts. On Nov. 24 Twitter deleted RT comments on the issue. The UK knows it has friends it can rely on in a crunch.

The Integrity Initiative is a London-based organization set up and funded by the government-friendly Institute for Statecraft, in cooperation with the Free University of Brussels (VUB) to wage information-warfare operations against Russia. Anonymous calls it a "large-scale information secret service." It aims to “change attitudes in Russia itself” as well as the influence of Russian natives living abroad. The Integrity Initiative’s budget for the fiscal year ending on March 31, 2019 is estimated at £1.96 million ($2.51 million). The network has received grants from NATO, the US State Department, and Facebook.

---

Quote:

---

The Initiative’s operations have been kept under wraps. Its activities are conducted by “clusters” of local politicians, journalists,

---

Quote:

---

military personnel, scientists, and academics involved in anti-Russian propaganda efforts. The list includes William Browder, a US-British businessman convicted in absentia in Russia for tax evasion.

The Integrity Initiative network has offices from which to conduct its covert operations in France, Germany, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Norway, Serbia, Spain, and Montenegro. Its plans to expand to the US, Canada, Eastern Europe, and the MENA region are already underway.

The Anonymous hackers mention Operation Moncloa that was launched in June in Spain to prevent Pedro Baños, a colonel known for his Russia-friendly views, from being appointed the new head of Spain's influential national security agency.

It’s all part of a broader picture. In March, Prime Minister Theresa May promised to “defeat” Russia with a new cyber-warfare initiative titled the Fusion Doctrine. Back then, Ms. May told British intelligence services to use social media “to prevent the spread of misinformation.” In other words, she has pulled the military into this anti-Russian propaganda effort. Security sources have floated the idea that that the UK must harness “soft power” and “counter-propaganda” on social media networks.

---

Quote:

---

Is it possible to imagine any media remaining independent in a country where they're part of a "soft power strategy" implemented by the government under the rallying cry of protecting national security?

This is the origin of so many fantasies about Russia and the imaginary threat it poses. The plan included an enhanced role for the BBC World Service

---

Quote:

---

to promote British “values” abroad, ensuring that the Ofcom shuts down media organizations that fail to meet “high British standards.” Only gullible people can believe that such “values” and “standards” exist. Russia has been used as a bogeyman to justify measures aimed at killing off the freedom of the media. Any story about Russia’s nefarious deeds spread by British news outlets should be taken with a grain of salt.

The UK government is facing some hard times. The Brexit deal with the EU is headed to parliament for approval. It’s impossible to predict whether the MPs will vote yes or no. Both outcomes threaten the very existence of the United Kingdom. The use of the “Russian threat” is seen as one way to keep the nation united and the media under control.

Keeping its activities out of the public eye, the government is doing exactly what it has so indignantly accused Russia of. The pot is calling the kettle black. As the freedom of the press is being suppressed and the media networks are following the government’s instructions about what information they should offer their readers, UK officials continue to brazenly deliver their pompous speeches about the need to protect those very values to which the government itself poses the greatest challenge. Anonymous is right — any responsible government must explain the intentions behind the Integrity Initiative, how exactly it is funded, and why its activities should be shielded from public view.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Major Psy-Op in Europe Exposed: UK Government Tramples on Values It Vowed to Protect

SIGGY propaganda text dump goes here:

---

Quote:

---

Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy, sources say

---

Quote:

---

WikiLeaks Categorically Denies Assange-Manafort Meetings
Update: WikiLeaks has fired back at the Guardian, tweeting: "Remember this day when the Guardian permitted a serial fabricator to totally destroy the paper's reputation. @WikiLeaks is willing to bet the Guardian a million dollars and its editor's head that Manafort never met Assange."

---

Quote:

---

Joint Information Activities Group (JIAG)

JIAG provides specialist information activities training, operational delivery capability and capacity building for defence and other government departments.

---

Quote:

---

The UK National Security Capability Review and the Fusion Doctrine

---

Quote:

---

Theresa May: UK will use ‘every capability at our disposal’ to defeat enemies

... “Crucially, what all of these incidents have made clear is that our national security is conditional on not only the police and security services who work so hard to keep us safe at home, or on the brave men and women of our armed forces working tirelessly around the world – but on our ability to mobilise most ­effectively the full range of our capabilities in concert to respond to the challenges we face.”

New investment in a £1.9 billion cyber security strategy announced earlier this year will see the team dedicated to combatting misinformation from hostile states like Russia expanded...

More resources will be put into the UK’s network of embassies and high commission to strengthen Britain’s ability to project soft power.

“Based on the new Fusion Doctrine, this approach will ensure that in defending our national security we make better use of all of our capabilities: from economic levers, through cutting-edge military resources to our wider diplomatic and cultural influence on the world’s stage,” Mrs May adds. “Every part of our government and every one of our agencies has its part to play.

---

Quote:

---

“Integrity Initiative” Exposed as UK Special Ops vs. EU Countries

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Britain!

I've posted before that the UK is the source of much malicious information-warfare material. From the MI6 "assessment" that the Iraq had WMD (which was used as the basis for OUR intelligence "assessment" that Iraq had WMD!) to the "Steele dossier" to the "white Helmets", it seems that when our intelligence agencies want something, British intelligence is all-too-happy to cook it up for them. That way there's "plausible deniability" on our side. (And I'm sure OUR intelligence agencies provide the same service to MI6.)

Beware "intelligence" from Britain!

---

Quote:

---

I've posted before that the UK is the source of much malicious information-warfare material. From the MI6 "assessment" that the Iraq had WMD (which was used as the basis for OUR intelligence "assessment" that Iraq had WMD!) to the "Steele dossier" to the "white Helmets", it seems that when our intelligence agencies want something, British intelligence is all-too-happy to cook it up for them. That way there's "plausible deniability" on our side. (And I'm sure OUR intelligence agencies provide the same service to MI6.)

Beware "intelligence" from Britain! - SIGNY

If you'd gone to the 1996 movie "The Rock,” you would have suspected that MI6's Iraq assessment was phony baloney. Nicolas Cage, playing an FBI chemical warfare specialist, joins Sean Connery, playing a former British spy, to prevent chemical weapons being launched against San Francisco.- SECOND, QUOTING THE ARTICLE

---

Quote:

---

“At no stage was the proposition that Iraq might no longer have chemical, biological or nuclear weapons or programmes identified and examined by either JIC [the Joint Intelligence Committee, the umbrella organisation representing all the intelligence agencies] or the policy community.”

---

Quote:

---

Opinion: The Guardian’s Desperate Attempt To Connect Assange To Russiagate Backfires
by Elizabeth Lea Vos

The Guardian's latest attack on Julian Assange was not only a fallacious smear, it represented a desperate attempt on behalf of the British intelligence community to conflate the pending US charges against the journalist with Russiagate. ...

Hours before the (Clinton-appointed) judge in the case delaying their ruling for seven days, The Guardian lobbed an unexpected shot across the bow, claiming that: "Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign."

In the wake of the article's publication, WikiLeaks and Paul Manafort have flat-out denied that any meeting ever took place between the former Trump campaign manager and the WikiLeaks co-founder. The Courage Foundation called the allegations "fabricated," while members of Assange's legal team strongly denied the allegations. WikiLeaks soon announced the creation of a Gofundme effort, raising funds to sue The Guardian for what it called an 'entirely fabricated story.'

At the time of writing, The Guardian had already been observed modifying its claims, adding qualifiers to both the title of the article and the body of the text.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The Guardian, caught - literally- making shit up.

Quote:

---

Opinion: The Guardian’s Desperate Attempt To Connect Assange To Russiagate Backfires
by Elizabeth Lea Vos

The Guardian's latest attack on Julian Assange was not only a fallacious smear, it represented a desperate attempt on behalf of the British intelligence community to conflate the pending US charges against the journalist with Russiagate. ...

Hours before the (Clinton-appointed) judge in the case delaying their ruling for seven days, The Guardian lobbed an unexpected shot across the bow, claiming that: "Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign."

In the wake of the article's publication, WikiLeaks and Paul Manafort have flat-out denied that any meeting ever took place between the former Trump campaign manager and the WikiLeaks co-founder. The Courage Foundation called the allegations "fabricated," while members of Assange's legal team strongly denied the allegations. WikiLeaks soon announced the creation of a Gofundme effort, raising funds to sue The Guardian for what it called an 'entirely fabricated story.'

At the time of writing, The Guardian had already been observed modifying its claims, adding qualifiers to both the title of the article and the body of the text.

---

MORE AT https://disobedientmedia.com/2018/11/opinion-the-guardians-desperate-a
ttempt-to-connect-assange-to-russiagate-backfires/

-----------

---

Quote:

---

At some point I wonder how much is a failure of the Queen.

---

Quote:

---

Leaked Memo Touts UK-Funded Firm's Ability To Create "Untraceable" News Sites For "Infowar Campaign"

The hacking collective known as "Anonymous" has published more explosive documents detailing a UK-based psyop to create a "large-scale information secret service" in Europe in order to combat "Russian propaganda" — which has been blamed for everything from Brexit to Trump winning the 2016 US election to this month's anti-Macron "Yellow Vest" protests.

We previously detailed the first trove of documents which were dumped online November 5th to the site Cyberguerilla, revealing the private UK organization with deep government ties, the Integrity Initiative, to be engaged in an aggressive campaign to organize "clusters" of journalists across the West engaged in “counter-propaganda” efforts on social media networks and in media. And now a new trove of leaked Integrity Initiative documents has been dumped online Friday.

This week the Integrity Initiative and its founding parent organization, the Institute for Statecraft — which is known for its close relationship with the UK military and defense officials — is at the center of debate in the House of Commons over its anti-Corbyn and anti-Labour smears involving labeling party leader Jeremy Corbyn a “useful idiot” for Moscow, even while the company is a recipient of official Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) funding.

The early November online leaks of confidential Integrity Initiative documents were the first to reveal the UK government's relationship to the private project devoted to "fighting Russian disinformation". According to The Guardian:

FCO funding of the Integrity Initiative was revealed by a set of stolen documents posted online last month by hackers under the banner of the Anonymous hacktivist collective. The organisation has not disputed their authenticity, but in a statement suggested that Russia was responsible for the hack and that Moscow had used its media channels to amplify its impact.

We noted previously that the work done by the Initiative — which claims it is not affiliated with government bodies, is done under "absolute secrecy via concealed contacts embedded throughout British embassies," according to memos in the November leak. It does, however, admit to working with unnamed British "government agencies."

---