John Chuckman
COMMENT – EARLY THOUGHTS ON THE “CYBER-ATTACK”
Actually, it is incorrect to call this exploit an “attack.” It clearly is a large-scale effort to collect information, not to damage anything.
Collecting information about others is what America’s NSA, CIA, FBI, and other massive agencies do around the clock. Ditto, Britain’s GCHQ and MI6.
The word “attack” only puts an unduly harsh name to the matter. I think it fair to say it is in keeping with America’s now-always aggressive tone towards Russia, China, and others.
And still, we have no information at all about who is responsible, with Trump suggesting China and Pompeo suggesting Russia, while neither of them has any information to support what he is saying.
Israel is just as likely as any other candidate to be responsible for this. The US intelligence community recognizes Israel in private as extremely aggressive at collecting information.
Its name of course does not come up in our sanitized press, and if it proves true that it is responsible, we’ll never see it reported.
Meanwhile, just as in the cases of Skripal or Navalny, great fun can be had with Russia.
LATER COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN ABC NEWS
Top Intelligence Democrat accuses Russia of cyber hack
that resulted in 'big haul'
Sen. Mark Warner added that the breach "may be
ongoing"
Calling someone guilty, not just before a trial, but even
before an investigation?
The fact is there is a list of potential candidates for this operation, including one of America's own intelligence services and at least one of its allies.
Do we ever hear anything sensible or informed from Washington anymore?
Not really, and there is a good reason for that.
Prejudice dominates the nation's politics, along with money.
There are no honest expressions of opinion or efforts to understand, outside a very few cases.
But the irresponsibility of hyping hatred against Russia is a very foolish and dangerous game. Russia is, literally, the only nation on earth that can obliterate, entirely, the United States, China’s active nuclear forces, at least for now, being just a fraction of Russia’s. Of course, that fact itself is just one of the reasons Russia is hated with such passion by Washington’s elites who would like to control every corner of the planet.
I think we see here a good measure of the threadbare nature of contemporary American politics.
NOTE ON FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS AND SIMILARITIES TO RECENT-PAST ANTI-RUSSIAN EVENTS
The United States Treasury has just announced all classified systems appear to have been safe from the “attack.” Only unclassified systems were affected. To my mind, this raises questions about the authenticity of the entire “hacking” event.
Even more suspicious is the fact that American sources now say it was done by the same Russian group that hacked the Democratic National Committee in 2016, a group with the handle, “Cozy Bear.” Well, the only problem with that is that the Democratic National Committee was not hacked. As I’ve discussed before, the embarrassing WikiLeaks material was downloaded from inside the Democratic Party, as several top technical experts outside government have explained. A key suspect in doing that was the late, murdered Seth Rich. And can you imagine a Russian intelligence group using a handle like “Cozy Bear”? It’s preposterous.
The new “cyber-attack” was first headlined as being extremely serious and generated all kinds of immediate calls for reprisal against Russia from prominent American politicians. Their calls came despite no one’s yet knowing anything about the event, including who was responsible, what was the purpose, or the extent of the damage, if any.
The pattern much resembles recent-past British and German “poisoning” cases against Russia, cases where the victim survived what was impossible to survive with bizarre events following, as the disappearance from the earth of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the hands of British security services a couple of years ago.
The immediate flap raised by American politicians over “Russia’s cyber-attack,” politicians who had no evidence before they spoke, mimics the pattern of British Prime Minister Theresa May concerning the “poisoning” of Sergei Skripal a couple of years ago and the pattern of Chancellor Angela Merkel concerning the “poisoning” of Alexei Navalny more recently. Both leaders made extremely serious charges against Russia in the absence of genuine evidence.
CNN is now headlining the idea that Navalny, was in fact poisoned by contaminated underpants. Previously, he was declared poisoned by a water bottle conveniently brought to Germany by one of his alert supporters who discovered it in a search of his room in Siberia.
Of course, we have never received any convincing proof that he was poisoned at all. Russian doctors had attended him first, certainly saving his life from what was suspected to be diabetic shock, and they even took blood samples showing no poison. I remind readers, too, that military nerve agents like Novichok, supposedly used in both cases, are among the deadliest substances known. They kill within a few moments of skin contact. See these summaries and analyses to appreciate fully the absurdities of the story:
Have we indeed reached the stage in the workings of American empire anticipated by CIA Director William Casey many years ago when he reportedly said, "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false"
At least in matters concerning Russia, that would seem to be very much where we’ve arrived.
