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In a bombshell NBC scoop published Wednesday, the authors of the report alleged that US spy agencies used deliberate and selective intelligence leaks to mainstream news outlets to mount an information warfare campaign against Russia during the latter’s month-long military offensive in Ukraine, despite being aware the intelligence wasn't credible.
The US intelligence assessment that Russia was preparing to use chemical weapons in the Ukraine War, that was widely reported in the corporate media and confirmed by President Biden himself, was an unsubstantiated claim leaked to the press as a tit-for-tat response to the damning Russian allegation that Ukraine was pursuing an active biological weapons program, in collaboration with Washington, in scores of bio-labs discovered by Russian forces in Ukraine in early days of the military campaign.
The crux of the NBC report, however, isn’t what’s being disclosed but rather what’s still being withheld by the US intelligence community that the mainstream news outlets are not at liberty to report on.
Despite being aware of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s major unilateral concession to Kyiv, halting Russian offensive north of the capital and focusing on liberating Russian-majority Donbas in east Ukraine, practically spelling an end to Russia’s month-long offensive in Ukraine, US security officials are still deceptively asserting that Russia’s pullout from areas around Kyiv “wasn’t a retreat but a strategic redeployment” that signals a “significant assault on eastern and southern Ukraine,” one that US officials believe could be a “protracted and bloody fight.”
Regarding the malicious disinformation campaign mounted by Western media on behalf of NATO powers, the report notes: “The idea is to pre-empt and disrupt the Kremlin’s tactics, complicate its military campaign, undermine Moscow’s propaganda and prevent Russia from defining how the war is perceived in the world, said a Western government official familiar with the strategy.”