Facebook, Google and Twitter admit large-scale Russian infiltration

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Colin Stretch, general counsel at Facebook, Sean Edgett, acting general counsel at Twitter, and Richard Salgado, director of law enforcement and information security at Google, testify. (Credit: Google/Drew Angerer)

In hearings on Capitol Hill on Tuesday and Wednesday, senators of both parties repeatedly rebuked attorneys for Google, Facebook and Twitter for doing virtually nothing to detect Russian attempts to manipulate American politics in the 2016 election, and for underestimating the size and scope of that interference in their initial reports to the federal government.

“I don’t think you get it. I think the fact that you’re general counsels, you defend your company,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., told the top attorneys for the three social media giants. “What we’re talking about is the beginning of cyber-warfare.”

The fact that none of the three social media giants decided to send their chief executives to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee was also a subject of concern for Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine:

“It’s fine to send general counsel, but I think if you could take a message back from this committee, if we go through this exercise again, we would appreciate seeing the top people who are actually making the decisions,” he said.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the panel’s ranking Democrat, chastised the tech companies for not being responsive to governmental requests for information, even as the attorneys tried to put a contrite spin on their testimonies.

“I hear all your words,” Warner said, “but I have more than a little bit of frustration that many of us on this committee have been raising this issue since the beginning of this year, and our claims were frankly blown off by the leaderships of your companies.”

In a filing submitted this week to Congress, Facebook admitted that it had drastically underreported the influence that Russian internet trolls had wielded within its platform. In October, the company had claimed that 10 million Americans had seen advertisements purchased by people affiliated with various trolling operations run out of Russia. Facebook now says it believes that 126 million Americans had seen Russian-generated political content, which is almost equivalent to the number of voters who cast ballots in last year’s election.

The extent of the Russian meddling is likely to be even greater than that, however. Both Google and Twitter appear to be relying on data shared by Facebook rather than doing their own research, meaning that their conclusions are “derivative,” as Warner noted during the hearing.

Members of both the House and Senate Intelligence committees have not yet agreed to release all the advertisements purchased by social media accounts believed to be operated by people working for the “Internet Research Agency,”a large-scale trolling operation funded by the Russian government. Several of the ads were released in Wednesday hearing, however, and they reveal that the propagandists targeted a wide range of political issues and partisan viewpoints with their messages. Under U.S. law, it is illegal for foreign nationals to purchase political advertising.

Oftentimes, the ads in question were actually paid for in rubles, the Russian currency. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., focused on this in tough questioning to Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch.

“People are buying ads on your platform with rubles,” Franken said. “They’re political ads. You put billions of data points together all the time — that’s what I hear that these platforms do.”

In his response, Stretch said that the currency transactions were “a signal we should have been alert to,” but would not commit Facebook to prohibiting the purchase of political advertising in foreign currencies.

“I can tell you that we’re not going to permit political advertising by foreign actors,” Stretch said. “The reason I’m hesitating on foreign currency is that it’s relatively easy for bad actors to switch currency. It’s a signal, but it’s not enough — we have to sweep more broadly.”

Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., the chairman of the Senate committee, noted one particularly striking contrast where Russian-linked Facebook accounts sought to organize dueling rallies in Texas. One of the pages, called Heart of Texas, purchased an ad to protest “the Islamization of Texas” by directing people to assemble outside the Islamic Center of Houston. Another Russian-controlled page, called United Muslims of America, put together another event in the same location.

In his questioning of the witnesses, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., noted that the three companies only seemed to be banning accounts that misrepresented their owners’ identities, meaning that open attempts on the part of Russia or any other country to spread propaganda to Americans would likely be permissible on most social media services.

“We don’t have state-sponsored manipulation of elections as one of our rules,” Twitter’s chief attorney, Sean Edgett, said. “The other rules, like [a ban on] inflammatory ad content, would take down most of these posts, but we don’t outright ban it.”

Twitter has been more aggressive than Facebook and Google in that it has now banned Sputnik News and RT, websites that are openly owned by the Russian government, from purchasing advertising on its platform. Twitter’s reaction may have been a attempt to get ahead of disclosures of that it offered RT the chance to purchase 15 percent of the advertisements the microblogging service was planning to sell in the general election.

All three corporate attorneys said their employers were trying to figure out how to stop foreign interference in election, but it became clear from their testimony that none of the tech giants is aware of the extent to which their platforms are used for such purposes. Under questioning from Rubio, none of the three could say whether countries beyond Russia had attempted to infiltrate American politics.

None of the senators of either party seemed satisfied with what they were hearing. Feinstein likely spoke for the room when she cautioned the tech companies: “You’ve created these platforms and now they’re being misused, and you have to be the ones to do something about it. Or we will.”

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Vaccine industry in panic as scientific study solves the riddle of why flu shots don't work

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(Natural News) The flu shot is a quack science medical hoax. While some vaccines do confer immunization effectiveness, the flu shot isn’t one of them. Recent studies, for example, have proven that flu shots sharply weaken immunity in subsequent years following immunization. In some years, the flu shot viral strains are completely wrong, offering no...

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Court: Student can be expelled for calling gay ‘marriage’ a sin on Facebook

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A Christian student who was expelled from university after posting on Facebook in support of Biblical teaching on marriage and sexual ethics has lost his case in a judicial review...

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Communism's bloody legacy: 100 years and 100 million deaths

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This year marks the 100th anniversary of one of the worst mistakes ever made: the Communist revolution in Russia.

Communist regimes went on to kill about 100 million people. Most died in famines after socialist tyrants forced people to practice inefficient collective farming. Millions of others were executed in political purges.

Yet when the Russian Revolution happened, people both inside and outside Russia were excited . Crowds cheered Lenin. No longer would nobles rule; no longer would capitalists exploit workers. Now the people would prosper together.

British journalist Theodore Rothstein wrote, “The undivided sway of the Imperialist nightmare is at an end … (there will be) rule of the labouring classes.”

But you can’t have government plan every aspect of people’s lives and expect things to go well. Instead, you get bureaucratic planning commissions and secret police.

That won’t stop some Americans from celebrating Communism’s anniversary.

A day of anti-Trump protests is scheduled for Nov. 4, and I’m sure some protesters will wave hammer-and-sickle flags. Some will wear Che Guevara shirts.

A few commentators will call the protesters “idealistic” but impractical. They shouldn’t. We should call them supporters of mass murder.

Lenin ordered the hanging of 100 property owners at the very start of the Revolution, saying people needed to see the deaths of “landlords, rich men, bloodsuckers.”

Mass murder and starvation rapidly increased the death toll after that.

It wasn’t exactly what philosopher Karl Marx had in mind – but it shouldn’t have surprised anyone. Marx’s writing is filled with comparisons of capitalists to werewolves and other predators who must be destroyed.

Marx admitted that capitalism is productive but said “capital obtains this ability only by constantly sucking in living labor as its soul, vampire-like.”

John Stossel’s logic is undeniable and refreshing — don’t miss his latest book, “No, They Can’t Why: Government Fails, but Individuals Succeed”

Even as the Russian regime killed millions, some journalists and intellectuals covered up the crimes.

Stalin kept most media out, so few Americans knew that millions were starving, but New York Times writer Walter Duranty saw it first-hand.

Yet he “covered up Stalin’s crimes,” says Tom Palmer of the Atlas Network, a group that promotes free-market ideas around the world.

Because Duranty wanted to support “the cause,” he wrote that “report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.”

Duranty “saw the truckloads of bodies,” says Palmer, yet “he wrote on the front page of the New York Times how wonderful everything was.” He even got a Pulitzer Prize for it.

In some ways, times haven’t changed that much. This year, the Times ran a series of essays commemorating the anniversary of Russian Communism, including one piece arguing that sex was better in the Soviet Union because the Revolution destroyed macho capitalist culture.

At least the New York Times eventually admitted that Duranty’s work was “some of the worst reporting in this newspaper,” but the Pulitzer committee never withdrew its prize.

Communism kills wherever it’s practiced. But people still people believe. Making a video on Communism’s 100th anniversary, I interviewed Lily Tang Williams, who grew up under the regime in China.

“Mao was like a god to me,” she recounts. “In the morning, we were encouraged to chant and to confess to dear Chairman Mao.”

Under Mao, Williams nearly starved. “I was so hungry. My uncle taught me how to trap rats. But the problem is, everybody is trying to catch rats. Rats run out, too.”

Still, she says, she was so brainwashed by Communist propaganda that she “cried my eyes out when Mao died.”

But then, “when I was college student, I met a U.S. exchange student … He showed me a pocket Constitution and Declaration of Independence. A light bulb came on!”

For the first time, she realized, “I have rights … natural rights that cannot be taken away. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

She escaped to the United States. Now she says her mission in life is to teach Americans the importance of liberty.

I think her message is wiser than that of Karl Marx, Lenin and Stalin.

“Big, powerful government, it’s very scary,” she warns. “It will keep growing like cancer, will never stop. If you empower government, not the individuals, we’re going to lose this free country!”

 

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Will Spacey scandal expose 'gay' male obsession with young teens?

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I’d like to weigh in on the Kevin Spacey (age 26)/Anthony Rapp (age 14) tip-of-the-iceberg pederasty scandal that may rip open Hollywood like the hull of the Titanic.

Speaking as the only person ever charged for “crimes against humanity” (not a joke) in significant part for discussing the pedophile core of “gay” male culture – and one of the first people ever listed as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (for documenting that culture at the core of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party) – I’d just like to say, in advance, “I told you so.”

Frankly, however, pedophilia is too broad a term for this all-too-common aspect of homosexual orientation and misses the gender-specific nature of the problem. The correct term is pederasty, euphemistically known in historic “gay” society as “man/boy love,” as in the infamous North American Man/Boy Love Association, or NAMBLA – which was a regular participant in the early “gay”-pride parades before the LGBT movement got taken over by the marketing and PR strategists of the Democratic Party.

To be clear, I’m not saying all or even most men who identify as “gay” molest children. Even the word “children” is misleading in this context, since “children” connotes preschool and grammar school ages, while the target of pederasts are young teen and slightly pre-teen boys. And I’m not saying lesbians share this problem to the same extent that it exists in male homosexual culture (though lesbian abuse of girls is a problem, too).

What I am saying is that male homosexuality identity (from the days when the ancient Spartan military routinely drafted pre-teen boys and paired them with adult homosexual men) has always been oriented toward youth, and it is this man/boy sexual culture that not only spawned the modern “gay” movement but remains the largely hidden – in fact, politically protected and shielded – core of “gay” male society today. The American public has only once been allowed a glimpse of the pederast underworld – the Catholic priest scandal – which was exposed only because the left’s smoldering hatred of the Catholic Church briefly overwhelmed its protectiveness of “gay” society – but even they all conspired to falsely characterize the priests’ pederasty as “pedophilia” to obscure the homosexual connection.

Consider just a few salient facts documented in “The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party and on my blog ScottLively.net:

The German “Grandfather of Gay Rights,” Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, was molested at 14 by his riding instructor and went on to form the world’s first “gay rights” organization in the 1860s.

The first characterization of homosexual sodomy as a “human right” was by the German Society for Human Rights in the 1920s, whose most famous member was Hitler’s “gay” second-in-command Ernst Roehm (head of the Brown Shirts). Munich police records identified at least 11 boys recruited from a local high school for sex with Roehm – according to journalist Heinz Hoene’s book, “The Order of the Death’s Head” (called a “monumental achievement” by the New York Times).

The first American homosexual organization was the U.S. chapter of Roehm’s Society for Human Rights, started in Chicago in 1924 by Henry Gerber and two other men, all of whom were arrested shortly thereafter for sex with teen boys.

Related column: “C’mon, Disney! Tell the truth about same-sex attraction in kids,” by Linda Harvey

One of those abused boys, as an adult, molested another teen boy named Harry Hay, who is known today as the “Father of the American Gay Rights Movement.” Until his death, Hay was an outspoken advocate for man/boy sex and wore a sweatshirt reading “NAMBLA Walks with Me” in “gay”-pride parades after the pederast group had been banned by the marketing gurus who took over the “gay” movement.

The Stonewall Riots that are commemorated each year as “Gay Pride Day” were triggered by “gay” male patrons of the Stonewall Bar in New York City, angered at police efforts to arrest a 14-year-old boy transvestite prostitute (Mark Pascal, Varieties of Man Boy Love).

Many early “gay” activists were open pederasts, including NAMBLA founder David Thorstad, who also launched the Gay Activist Alliance in 1969, which spawned – directly or indirectly – innumerable LGBT activist organizations, including today’s political behemoth, the Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights Campaign, or HRC, which named me public enemy No. 1 of the global LGBT agenda in 2014.

HRC’s founder was Terrance “Terry” Bean, an Obama fundraising bundler accused of sex with a teen boy in 2014 but who escaped prosecution when (after a public monetary settlement offer) the boy (who had been in hiding at the time) declined to testify.

Terry Bean is based in Portland, Oregon, a sewer of rampant pederasty and home of the “gay” apologist Gus van Sant, whose films have romanticized male teen prostitution, and of Sam Adams, who was also accused of sex with a teen boy while mayor (one of many big-city mayors in recent years – most recently Ed Murray of Seattle, who resigned in September).

Portland is where I had my eyes opened to the destructive LGBT agenda as spokesman for the No Special Rights Act (1992), and where I faced the first four of five major lawsuits by the “gay” movement trying unsuccessfully to silence my criticism.

It was there I learned about the homosexual/Nazi connection that led to writing “The Pink Swastika” with Jewish researcher Kevin E. Abrams – dangerous knowledge that got me targeted by the ultra-powerful Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC, long before it would begin smearing the pro-family movement as a whole.

Here is the SPLC’s dirty little secret that sort of ties everything together in one little vignette: the man/boy sex angle, the Hollywood angle, the Nazi angle and the protect “gays” from the pederast connection at all costs angle.

You see, SPLC’s most famous anti-Nazi lawsuit was against white supremacist Tom Metzger of Southern California, by linking him to the beating death of Ethiopian graduate student Mulugeta Seraw by Skinhead death-metal musician Ken “Death” Mieske and two others in Portland in 1988. Mieske was Metzger’s protégé and likely “gay” lover. He was also the darling of Hollywood “gay” giant Gus Van Sant, who once made a film about Mieske upon his release from prison for an earlier burglary conviction, titled “Ken Death Gets Out of Jail.” Mieske’s history as a teen sexual target of older men is documented in a book about the Seraw murder by Elinor Langer, titled appropriately “A Hundred Little Hitlers.” There’s more on the topic here.

I began this column stating that the Hollywood pederast Titanic may be about to sink – but then again it may not, because there is no higher priority on the political left than protecting the “gay” movement from the link to pederasty.

If the SPLC could bury the pederast and Van Sant connection in the Metzger “gay” Nazi case, while simultaneously mocking “The Pink Swastika” as ludicrous – without a hint of media coverage exposing its hypocrisy; and if Terry Bean could get off scot-free without anyone on the left admitting that his teen accuser may have been paid off under their very noses; and if Kevin Spacey can escape any real consequences for his assault of Anthony Rapp by turning his apology into a “coming-out” celebration (the most “sacred” of LGBT ceremonies), then there may never be a day of public reckoning for the many chickenhawks of Hollywood – whose scope of control and abuse would make Harvey Weinstein and James Toback seem like altar boys by comparison.

 

 

 

 

 

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The nine principles of ethical policing as written in 1829

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Policing in America today is a far cry from what policing was like just even a couple of generations ago. While it needs to be said that there are indeed many good-minded police in our society, there is also a startling rise in a new kind of insidious police brutality in America. A new callousness where many cops and police departments appear to be preying on the American public while viewing American citizens as dangerous enemies that must be dominated at all costs.Everyday another terrible video...

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Russian Content May Have Reached 126 Million Facebook Users, There Is Just One Catch

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One month ago, the media world and political punditry was in a furore after Facebook revealed that some 470 alleged Russian troll accounts had paid Facebook a whopping $100,000 to purchase 3,000 advertisements potentially influencing the outcome of the election (even though many of the ads "showed support for Clinton" and only half ran before the actual election). The furore did not last long: gradually the story fizzled, before becoming a watercooler joke that Russia had managed to buy the outcome of the US presidential election for a whopping 100 grand - which would make Vladimir Putin not only a propaganda genius of the highest order, but the best damn advertising mastermind to ever live, generating the highest ad IRR in history .

So, eager to keep the "Russia interfered in US elections" meme going (not to be confused with what the Washington Post one year ago titled "The long history of the U.S. interfering with elections elsewhere"), tomorrow Facebook's general counsel,  Colin Stretch , together with his peers from Google and Twitter, will will sit before the Senate judiciary subcommittee on crime and terrorism and try to fascinate the public with some far bigger numbers, while hopefully also pitching the vast reach Facebook and other social media have. To do that, Facebook will say that it estimates that a grand total of 126 million people may have seen content posted by Russian-backed accounts over more than two years that, as the WSJ puts it, "sought to disrupt American society", according to a prepared copy of the remarks obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

How is this number different from the far smaller number quoted previously when referring only to the Russian trolls' alleged ad outreach? Because this time, Facebook will count virtually every post created by these alleged Russian troll farms as direct form of propaganda: as the WSJ explains, tomorrow's definition of "reach" will include such content as "free posts and events listings."

In all, Facebook will claim that Russian-linked accounts allegedly churned out 80,000 pieces of content - call them posts, surveys, notes, and pretty much anything else, as well as ads - between January 2015 and August 2017.

Going back to the revised "total reach" number, at first blush it sounds unprecedented: up to a whopping 126 million people, more than a third of the US population - and more than half of Facebook's entire US penetration - may have been brainwashed by those pesky Russians.

A quick tangent: when it comes to Facebook's US penetration, lately it's difficult to separate the truth from the lies, because readers may recall that on month ago, Brian Wieser, an analyst with Pivotal Research, calculated that Facebook claimed that its ad platform can reach millions more young adults in the U.S. than are estimated to actually live in the country. Facebook's Ads Manager claims to have a potential reach of 41 million people in the U.S. between the ages of 18-24, according to Wieser, even as the U.S. Census Bureau estimates there were only 31 million people in that age range last year.

Oops.

Of course, numbers are "fluid" when it comes to the advertising industry - and by fluid we mean grossly fabricated and fraudulent - and the last thing we want to do is get Facebook in even more trouble with its advertisers who one day will get sick of reaching robotic click farms in Bangladesh and ask for their money back.

However, there is one catch. When Facebook says that up 126 million people may have seen the allegedly Russian content, what it really means is that there has been a total of 126 million possible impressions and "click thrus" (we give Facebook the benefit of the doubt on the math here). What it did not say, or actually did as we will show momentarily, is that at the same time as the Russian content was running, everyone else was also desperately seeking to attract the attention - and clicks - of these 126 million potential eyeballs, or rather 256 million eyeballs, with their own content, ads, articles, and what not.

How much more content? Here is the math - the Russians supposedly created 80,000 pieces of content. Now, as WaPo explains, for Facebook, which places roughly 220 posts each day in the news feeds of U.S. users, the amount of content equals a tiny fraction of total content served. How tiny? Americans in total were served over 33 trillion stories in their News Feeds between 2015 and 2017. In this context, those 80,000 Russian posts appear... modest.

Which is precisely what Facebook will say tomorrow in its defense. Quote the WSJ:

In his testimony, Mr. Stretch plans to say that “any amount” of fake or malicious activity is “too much,” while at the same time playing down its importance, according to the prepared remarks. Mr. Stretch plans to argue that these posts were a small fraction of the content consumed by Americans during this period—0.004% of posts, or one out of 23,000 pieces of content.

In other words, yes - up to 126,000,000 Americans may have seen the "socially-damaging" Russian content on Facebook. The problem is that those same 126,000,000 Americans also saw a few trillion other stories in the same time period. And speaking of "socially-damaging", this is what Facebook will claim was the content of the ads and posts:

“Many of the ads and posts we’ve seen so far are deeply disturbing—seemingly intended to amplify societal divisions and pit groups of people against each other,” Mr. Stretch plans to say.

Judging by Donald Trump's twitter feed, at least one person was religiously clicking on the Russian Facebook content.

Which about covers Twitter. What about Google? Here is WaPo:

Google said it had found 18 English-language channels with 1,108 videos uploaded, totaling about 43 hours of content, that originated with Russian operatives.

 

The company also found that two accounts linked to the Russian troll farm spent a total of $4,700 on search and display ads during the 2016 election cycle.

So to summarize: having spent $100,000 on Facebook ads, and unleashed a troll army to wrote Facebook posts - which had a 0.004% change of being read - Putin then went for the kill, and assured himself a Trump presidency by splurging another $4,700 for Google ads and creating an additional 43 hours of video content. The rest is history.

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Syria: NSA Acknowledges Salman Role in 2013 Ghouta Attacks - Veterans Today

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The NSA is actually acting like a positive force in releasing this information. I feel it is doubtful that Snowden had anything to do with the document’s release, as it was very difficult to get the story out back then. I knew the reporter covering the Saudi gas canisters on the ground days after the […]

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Hillary's corruption may change U.S. politics forever

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(FOX NEWS)

By Newt Gingrich

The Left has been desperately working for months to find any shred of evidence that Donald Trump had even the slightest connection to Russia during the presidential campaign. Despite having the full support of their friends in the media, they have consistently failed to find anything substantive.

At first, I assumed the liberal elites were simply driven by their inability to accept that the American people elected Donald Trump as their 45th president. Now, I have another theory: The Trump-Russia story is meant to serve as a pure distraction aimed at masking real corruption by the Clinton political machine.

As The Hill reported on Sunday, while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, a Kremlin-linked bank paid her husband, former President Bill Clinton, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Also during her tenure as top diplomat, earlier reports indicate Canadian and Russian business executives directed many millions more to the Clinton Foundation. In fact, citing recently unsealed Federal Bureau of Investigation reports, The Hill described a thorough Russian campaign aimed at gaining access to the Clintons and capitalizing on their influence, while also spying on them to advance a pro-Russia agenda. In 2010, the FBI arrested 10 so-called “sleeper cell” Russian spies who had reportedly become too close to Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, while serving as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was also overseeing a laundry list of U.S.-Russian initiatives and dealings.

Among other things, she served on the Committee on Foreign Investment, where she voted in favor of President Obama’s approval of the sale of Uranium One, a Canadian business, to a state-owned Russian nuclear energy outfit. At the time, the Canadian company controlled 20 percent of the U.S. uranium reserves.

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In Shocking, Viral Interview, Qatar Confesses Secrets Behind Syrian War

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A television interview of a top Qatari official confessing the truth behind the origins of the war in Syria is going viral across Arabic social media during the same week a leaked top secret NSA document was published which confirms that the armed opposition in Syria was under the direct command of foreign governments from the early years of the conflict.

And according to a well-known Syria analyst and economic adviser with close contacts in the Syrian government, the explosive interview constitutes a high level "public admission to collusion and coordination between four countries to destabilize an independent state, [including] possible support for Nusra/al-Qaeda." Importantly, "this admission will help build case for what Damascus sees as an attack on its security & sovereignty. It will form basis for compensation claims."

A 2013 London press conference: Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al Thani with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. A 2014 Hillary Clinton email confirmed Qatar as a state-sponsor of ISIS during that same time period. 

As the war in Syria continues slowly winding down, it seems new source material comes out on an almost a weekly basis in the form of testimonials of top officials involved in destabilizing Syria, and even occasional leaked emails and documents which further detail covert regime change operations against the Assad government. Though much of this content serves to confirm what has already long been known by those who have never accepted the simplistic propaganda which has dominated mainstream media, details continue to fall in place, providing future historians with a clearer picture of the true nature of the war.

This process of clarity has been aided - as predicted - by the continued infighting among Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) former allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with each side accusing the other of funding Islamic State and al-Qaeda terrorists (ironically, both true). Increasingly, the world watches as more dirty laundry is aired and the GCC implodes after years of nearly all the gulf monarchies funding jihadist movements in places like Syria, Iraq, and Libya.

Since 2013 The Intercept (+WaPo?) hid NSA docs showing Saudi ordering 'rebel' attacks on Damascus. Now released. https://t.co/0PZrBKpJCw

— Julian Assange ???? (@JulianAssange) October 24, 2017

The top Qatari official is no less than former Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, who oversaw Syria operations on behalf of Qatar until 2013 (also as foreign minister), and is seen below with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in this Jan. 2010 photo (as a reminder, Qatar's 2022 World Cup Committee donated $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation in 2014).

In an interview with Qatari TV Wednesday, bin Jaber al-Thani revealed that his country, alongside Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United States, began shipping weapons to jihadists from the very moment events "first started" (in 2011).

Al-Thani even likened the covert operation to "hunting prey" - the prey being President Assad and his supporters - "prey" which he admits got away (as Assad is still in power; he used a Gulf Arabic dialect word, "al-sayda", which implies hunting animals or prey for sport). Though Thani denied credible allegations of support for ISIS, the former prime minister's words implied direct Gulf and US support for al-Qaeda in Syria (al-Nusra Front) from the earliest years of the war, and even said Qatar has "full documents" and records proving that the war was planned to effect regime change.

"We argued over the prey and that prey run away".Ladies and Gentleman: To these people #Syria #Assad was nothing but a f....ing hunting game https://t.co/w4oKO5TTK6

— EHSANI2 (@EHSANI22) October 27, 2017

According to Zero Hedge's translation, al-Thani said while acknowledging Gulf nations were arming jihadists in Syria with the approval and support of US and Turkey: "I don't want to go into details but we have full documents about us taking charge [in Syria]." He claimed that both Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah (who reigned until his death in 2015) and the United States placed Qatar in a lead role concerning covert operations to execute the proxy war.

The former prime minister's comments, while very revealing, were intended as a defense and excuse of Qatar's support for terrorism, and as a critique of the US and Saudi Arabia for essentially leaving Qatar "holding the bag" in terms of the war against Assad. Al-Thani explained that Qatar continued its financing of armed insurgents in Syria while other countries eventually wound down large-scale support, which is why he lashed out at the US and the Saudis, who initially "were with us in the same trench."

In a previous US television interview which was vastly underreported, al-Thani told Charlie Rose when asked about allegations of Qatar's support for terrorism that, "in Syria, everybody did mistakes, including your country." And said that when the war began in Syria, "all of use worked through two operation rooms: one in Jordan and one in Turkey."

Below is the key section of Wednesday's interview, translated and subtitled by @Walid970721. Zero Hedge has reviewed and confirmed the translation, however, as the original rush translator has acknowledged, al-Thani doesn't say "lady" but "prey" ["al-sayda"]- as in both Assad and Syrians were being hunted by the outside countries.

#Qatar's ex PM says that Qatari support for jihadists including Nusra in #Syria was in coordination w/ KSA, Turkey & the US via @BBassem7 pic.twitter.com/tu8IMRI7IP

— Walid (@walid970721) October 27, 2017

The partial English transcript is as follows:

"When the events first started in Syria I went to Saudi Arabia and met with King Abdullah. I did that on the instructions of his highness the prince, my father. He [Abdullah] said we are behind you. You go ahead with this plan and we will coordinate but you should be in charge. I won’t get into details but we have full documents and anything that was sent [to Syria] would go to Turkey and was in coordination with the US forces and everything was distributed via the Turks and the US forces. And us and everyone else was involved, the military people. There may have been mistakes and support was given to the wrong faction... Maybe there was a relationship with Nusra, its possible but I myself don’t know about this… we were fighting over the prey ["al-sayda"] and now the prey is gone and we are still fighting... and now Bashar is still there. You [US and Saudi Arabia] were with us in the same trench... I have no objection to one changing if he finds that he was wrong, but at least inform your partner… for example leave Bashar [al-Assad] or do this or that, but the situation that has been created now will never allow any progress in the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council], or any progress on anything if we continue to openly fight."

As is now well-known, the CIA was directly involved in leading regime change efforts in Syria with allied gulf partners, as leaked and declassified US intelligence memos confirm. The US government understood in real time that Gulf and West-supplied advanced weaponry was going to al-Qaeda and ISIS, despite official claims of arming so-called "moderate" rebels. For example, a leaked 2014 intelligence memo sent to Hillary Clinton acknowledged Qatari and Saudi support for ISIS.

The email stated in direct and unambiguous language that: 

"the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region."

Furthermore, one day before Prime Minister Thani's interview, The Intercept released a new top-secret NSA document unearthed from leaked intelligence files provided by Edward Snowden which show in stunning clarity that the armed opposition in Syria was under the direct command of foreign governments from the early years of the war which has now claimed half a million lives.

The newly released NSA document confirms that a 2013 insurgent attack with advanced surface-to-surface rockets upon civilian areas of Damascus, including Damascus International Airport, was directly supplied and commanded by Saudi Arabia with full prior awareness of US intelligence. As the former Qatari prime minister now also confirms, both the Saudis and US government staffed "operations rooms" overseeing such heinous attacks during the time period of the 2013 Damascus airport attack. 

No doubt there remains a massive trove of damning documentary evidence which will continue to trickle out in the coming months and years. At the very least, the continuing Qatari-Saudi diplomatic war will bear more fruit as each side builds a case against the other with charges of supporting terrorism. And as we can see from this latest Qatari TV interview, the United States itself will not be spared in this new open season of airing dirty laundry as old allies turn on each other.

via IFTTT