Worldwide Nightmare Theatre, Empire of Chaos Enhanced and Expanded

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Nick

OPCW report on the events of 4 February 2018 in Saraqib, Idlib:
https://www.opcw.org/fileadmin/OPCW/...26-2018_e_.pdf

Thanks, Nick! Couple key snips, bolds mine - the first is no slight of the OPCW's work, just, to use a legal phrase, "goes to possible bias on the part of the witnesses, your honor":

Through liaison with representatives of several NGOs, including Same Justice/Chemical Violations Documentation Center of Syria (CVDCS), the Syrian Civil Defence - also known as White Helmets - (SCD) and the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), the FFM contacted witnesses and confirmed their willingness to provide testimony and potential evidence. Furthermore, the FFM coordinated with the NGOs to organise movement of the witnesses.
...
6.2 The Syrian Arab Republic replied with a three-page summary report attached to classified Note Verbale No. 23 dated 12 March 2018. In this summary report, the Syrian Arab Republic shared with the Secretariat the following:
(a) Saraqib had not been under the control of the Syrian Government for a long period of time, including the time of the incident; and
(b) a technical analysis of the alleged incident based on open-source media.

So the upshot seems to be that somebody with access to a helicopter flew it in an area long-controlled by rebels and dropped a couple tanks of industrial liquid Cl near a populated area. Agreed?

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In other WNT news, looks like "death-worshipping bomb walrus" (thanks, Nina Illingworth) John Bolton is working very hard to scuttle the US/NK summit, by effectively demanding unconditional surrender unilateral concessions by NK.

[kladner]

I think I understood, at least, that OPCW specifically said that they could not determine the origin of the substances. Of course, that can be glossed over.

On to another disturbance in the Force. "Don't be Evil" Google is collaborating with DOD in enhancing AI for drones. Things like onboard human recognition for drones sound just a blink away from the Sci-Fi Beserkers: autonomous killing machines.

Welcome to Project Maven.

Should Google, a global company with intimate access to the lives of billions, use its technology to bolster one country’s military dominance? Should it use its state of the art artificial intelligence technologies, its best engineers, its cloud computing services, and the vast personal data that it collects to contribute to programs that advance the development of autonomous weapons? Should it proceed despite moral and ethical opposition by several thousand of its own employees?

Gizmodo reported this week that more than a dozen Google employees have resigned over Google providing AI support to a Pentagon drone program called Project Maven, which aims to improve the ability of drones to identify humans. This follows a public letter, signed by 3,100-plus Google employees who say that Google should not be in the business of war.

[Nick]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Agreed?

Yes, the OPCW fact-finding mission's mandate did not include trying to identify who was responsible.

[ewmayer]

Deafening Democratic Silence on Gaza Is Because They Own It Too | Black Agenda Report

More bipartisanship:

http://www.ianwelsh.net/gina-haspel-...ad-of-the-cia/

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by kladner

On to another disturbance in the Force. "Don't be Evil" Google is collaborating with DOD in enhancing AI for drones. Things like onboard human recognition for drones sound just a blink away from the Sci-Fi Beserkers: autonomous killing machines.

Welcome to Project Maven.

A lot depends on the application of the tech. If (human recognized in path) then (what action?)
In self driving cars, recognizing a probability of a pedestrian in or about to enter the path is important, and should lead to quick computation resulting in action for least harm possible.
In defense applications, amend that to something like least force casualty and collateral damage.
In chemical plant operations, AI might be set to damage plant hardware in unoccupied areas to relieve system overpressure and avoid or reduce staff fatalities and injuries.

In human-controlled drones, AI assistance in identifying humans in the visual scene to the human in control of the drone could help reduce casualties of friendly forces and of bystanders that are not combatants.

An ethical question arises, is it ethical or correct for a competent ethical entity to refuse to participate, knowing or anticipating the work will then probably proceed with some alternate probably less ethical or less competent entity substituted instead?

[kladner]

In my last post I set out the official Government account of the events in the Skripal Case. Here I examine the credibility of this story. Next week I shall look at alternative explanations.

Russia has a decade long secret programme of producing and stockpiling novichok nerve agents. It also has been training agents in secret assassination techniques, and British intelligence has a copy of the Russian training manual, which includes instruction on painting nerve agent on doorknobs.

The only backing for this statement by Boris Johnson is alleged “intelligence”, and unfortunately the “intelligence” about Russia’s secret novichok programme comes from exactly the same people who brought you the intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s WMD programme, proven liars. Furthermore, the question arises why Britain has been sitting on this intelligence for a decade and doing nothing about it, including not telling the OPCW inspectors who certified Russia’s chemical weapons stocks as dismantled.
If Russia really has a professional novichok assassin training programme, why was the assassination so badly botched? Surely in a decade of development they would have discovered that the alleged method of gel on doorknob did not work? And where is the training manual which Boris Johnson claimed to possess? Having told the world – including Russia -the UK has it, what is stopping the UK from producing it, with marks that could identify the specific copy erased?

Murray goes through the Government allegations, and IMO disposes of them as ludicrous.

[ewmayer]

Coincident with the start of the Trump/Putin summit in Helsinki, time to dispose of a pile of accumulated Russia-hysteria links:

o The Resistance as a cult | C.J. Hopkins, Counterpunch

Not to be out-apocalypsed by The Post, Roger Cohen of The New York Times published a full-blown dystopian vision wherein Trump, Putin, Marine Le Pen, the AfD, and a variety of other globalist-hating Hitler-alikes form “the Alliance of Authoritarian and Reactionary States” (the “AARS”), disband the European Union and NATO, impose international martial law, and start ethnically cleansing the West of immigrants.
...
And as if that wasn’t horrifying enough to whip folks up into a mindless frenzy, The New York Times (which, let’s remember, is an extremely distinguished and respected newspaper, and not at all a cheap propaganda rag) produced this charming little animated film depicting Putin and Trump as … well, a couple of tongue-sucking, titty-pinching homos. I found this kind of weird at first, as I had thought such ugly anti-gay sentiment had disappeared from liberal society, but apparently it’s fine in Resistance circles to stigmatize your enemies as butt-humping queers in order to render them more repulsive in the eyes of your sophisticated, liberal audience. I did a little research, and it appears this “Hitler on Hitler” porno The Times produced is just the latest in a rather long line of Trump on Putin “homo” jokes, which are perfectly harmless when told by liberals, but when told by conservatives are homophobic hate crimes.
...
Which is what I find so disturbing, presently. The ease with which the neoliberal ruling classes have programmed millions of Western consumers to believe a narrative no less ridiculous than Scientology’s “body thetans,” Manson’s “Helter Skelter” … or take your pick of any number of other cult narratives. The speed at which they switched from the War on Terror narrative to the Putin-Nazi narrative attests to the power of the corporate media and the neoliberal propaganda machine, generally. It really is an amazing achievement. In less than two years, they managed to condition a significant portion of the Western masses to forget about “the Islamic terrorists” that they had been conditioned to live in fear of, and to transfer their fear and hatred to Trump, and Putin, and anyone who appears to support them, or doesn’t sufficiently hate and fear them.

The ruling classes have achieved this feat by generating an ongoing series of episodes of mass hysteria. Most of them last a week or two, but their cumulative effect is powerful and enduring. Fake news, bots, travel bans, Confederate statues, neo-Nazi rallies, “novichok” attacks, kids in cages … anything the corporate media can use to channel more hatred toward Trump and Putin. None of these episodes are generated out of whole cloth. Obviously, the Russians are pursuing their interests, there is a white supremacist subculture in the United States, as there always has been, those kids were put in those cages, and so on … none of which began with Trump, or has anything exclusively to do with Putin, or triggered mass protests and widespread outrage until the neoliberal ruling classes and corporate media decided it should.

By way of analogy with the Alt-Right, blogger John Michael Greer (a.k.a. The Archdruid) refers to this kind of liberal-side brainwashing as the Ctrl-Left.

o Clinging to Collusion: Why Evidence Will Probably Never Be Produced in the Indictments of "Russian Agents" | Joe Lauria, Consortium News

Like previous U.S. government accusations against Russia for alleged election meddling, the indictment makes assertions without providing evidence. Indictments do not need to show evidence and under U.S. law, indictments are not considered evidence. And it is highly unlikely that the government will ever have to produce any evidence in court.
...
The indictment makes clear any evidence of an alleged hack of the DNC and DCCC computers did not come from the FBI, which was never given access to the computers by the DNC, but instead from the private firm CrowdStrike, which was hired by the DNC. It is referred to as Company 1 in the indictment.

“Despite the Conspirators’ efforts to hide their activity, beginning in or around May 2016, both the DCCC and DNC became aware that they had been hacked and hired a security company (“Company 1”) to identify the extent of the intrusions,” the indictment says.

The indictment doesn’t mention it, but within a day, CrowdStrike claimed to find Russian “fingerprints” in the metadata of a DNC opposition research document, which had been revealed by DCLeaks, showing Cyrillic letters and the name of the first Soviet intelligence chief. That supposedly implicated Russia in the hack.

CrowdStrike claimed the alleged Russian intelligence operation was extremely sophisticated and skilled in concealing its external penetration of the server. But CrowdStrike’s conclusion about Russian “fingerprints” resulted from clues that would have been left behind by extremely sloppy or amateur hackers—or inserted intentionally to implicate the Russians.

One of CrowdStrike’s founders [Dimitri Alperovitch] has ties to the anti-Russian Atlantic Council raising questions of political bias. And the software it used to determine Russia’s alleged involvement in the DNC hack, was later proved to be faulty in a high-profile case in Ukraine, reported by the Voice of America.

The indictment then is based at least partially on evidence produced by an interested private company, rather than the FBI.
...
In both the IRA case and Friday’s indictments, the extremely remote possibility of convictions were not what Mueller was apparently after, but rather the public perception of Russia’s guilt resulting from fevered media coverage of what are after all only accusations, presented as though it is established fact. Once that impression is settled into the public consciousness, Mueller’s mission would appear to be accomplished.

Lastly, this snip near the end of the piece reminds us of the ludicrousness of the whole witch-hunt, which is that the leaked material damaged the Clinton campaign by revealing the truth about where the *real* election-meddling collusion occurred:

The emails, which the indictment does not say are untrue, damaged the Clinton campaign. They revealed, for instance, that the campaign and the Democratic Party worked to deny the nomination to Clinton’s Democratic Party primary challenger Bernie Sanders.

o More interesting detail on the founders of Crowdstrike:

It gets better: the founder and CEO of Crowdstrike, Shawn Henry, was once Robert Mueller’s deputy for counterintelligence at the FBI. You couldn’t make this stuff up!
...
A high proportion of the most incriminating DNC emails released by Assange were written AFTER Crowdstrike claimed to be providing protection to their system. So either Crowdstrike’s efforts to protect the DNC were a total screw-up — in which case why should we trust their judgment on cyberissues?- or the emails were LEAKED, NOT HACKED. Which is precisely what Craig Murray and Kim Dotcom have been claiming.

o The Federalist discusses the need to "simulate" the alleged Russian hacking of the DNC server:

After CrowdStrike’s purge of the hostile code from the DNC server, [June, 2016] the evidence is likely now gone forever. Mueller cannot prosecute any hacker or conclude his investigation without making the embarrassing admission that the FBI never examined the server. No matter how many agents or lawyers Mueller hires, Humpty Dumpty will never be put back together again.
——-
With the Mueller investigation paralyzed by the FBI’s early missteps, the Special Counsel is left to simulate progress by charging unrelated offenses of unregistered lobbying, tax evasion, [ed. various people with Russian names living in Russia and not likely to ever see the inside of a u.s. courtroom] and something to do with Russians setting up fake twitter accounts. Investigators have netted a few charges of lying to the FBI and still pray for an obstruction of justice charge against Trump. Is it possible to obstruct a stationary object?

[wombatman]

Meanwhile, while Trump was showing his ass to the world today, this dropped:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/16/u...mid=tw-nytimes

The Justice Department said in court documents that the woman, Mariia Butina, worked to establish “back channel” lines of communication with American politicians. “These lines could be used by the Russian Federation to penetrate the U.S. national decision-making apparatus to advance the agenda of the Russian Federation.”

Note that this indictment came from Trump's own Justice Department, not Mueller.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Folks seem to be straining themselves to come up with the best ways to describe Il Duce's totally unsurprising performance in Helsinki. "Treason," though being much bandied about, doesn't fit the definition of "treason against the United States" in the Constitution. For one thing, we're not at war with Russia. Of course, the less-formal usage simply meaning "betrayal" fits pretty well.

There is also a lot of speculation about "what Putin has on Trump." To me, this seems like nonsense. If Putin had "blackmail material," IMO Il Duce simply wouldn't care. What seems much more likely to me is, Putin is dealing with Il Duce as what he is -- a narcissist. He says things to make Il Duce feel good. Perhaps he hints at the prospect of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.

In any case, it is pointless and fatuous to try to appeal to any sense of loyalty to country on Il Duce's part, for he has none.

So, how to describe Il Duce WRT Putin. Stooge? Tool? Lackey? Acolyte? Worshiper? Brown-noser?

As to Il Duce's Republican enablers, it would be hard to do better than Canto III of Dante's Inferno:

These have no longer any hope of death;
And this blind life of theirs is so debased,
They envious are of every other fate.

No fame of them the world permits to be;
Misericord and Justice both disdain them.
Let us not speak of them, but look, and pass."

[rogue]

Knowing Trump, Putin is offering him the chance to open a new Trump hotel somewhere in Russia and knowing Putin the location of that hotel would be in Crimea.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by rogue

Knowing Trump, Putin is offering him the chance to open a new Trump hotel somewhere in Russia and knowing Putin the location of that hotel would be in Crimea.

Right on the head...