By Bill Van Auken, wsws.org
Main cover image above: Zioncon Democrat Adam Schiff (CA) has been one of the prominent warmongers pushing the Russiagate lie.
Dateline: 15 May 2017
The cyberattack that hit some 200,000 computers around the world last Friday, apparently using malicious software developed by the US National Security Agency, is only expected to escalate and spread with the start of the new workweek.
The cyber weapon employed in the attack, known as “WannaCrypt,” has proven to be one of the most destructive and far-reaching ever. Among the targets whose computer systems were hijacked in the attack was Britain’s National Health Service, which was unable to access patient records and forced to cancel appointments, treatments and surgeries.
Major corporations hit include the Spanish telecom Telefonica, the French automaker Renault, the US-based delivery service Fedex and Germany’s federal railway system. Among the worst affected countries were reportedly Russia, Ukraine and Japan.
The weaponized software employed in the attacks locks up files in an infected computer by encrypting them, while demanding $300 in Bitcoin (digital currency) to decrypt them and restore access.
Clearly, this kind of attack has the potential for massive social disruption and, through its attack on institutions like Britain’s NHS, exacting a toll in human life.
This event, among the worst global cyberattacks in history, also sheds considerable light on issues that have dominated the political life of the United States for the past 10 months, since WikiLeaks began its release of documents obtained from the hacked accounts of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
The content of these leaked documents exposed, on the one hand, the DNC’s machinations to sabotage the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, and, on the other, the subservience of his rival, Hillary Clinton, to Wall Street through her own previously secret and lavishly paid speeches to financial institutions like Goldman Sachs.
This information, which served to discredit Clinton, the favored candidate of the US military and intelligence apparatus, was drowned out by a massive campaign by the US government and the corporate media to blame Russia for the hacking and for direct interference in the US election, i.e., by allegedly making information available to the American people that was supposed to be kept secret from them.
There was no question then of an investigation taking months to uncover the culprit, much less any mystery going unsolved. Putin and Russia were declared guilty based upon unsubstantiated allegations and innuendo. Ever since, the Times, serving as the propaganda outlet of the US intelligence services, has given the lead to the rest of the media by endlessly repeating the allegation of Russian state direction of the hacking of the Democratic Party, without bothering to provide any evidence to back up the charge.
Ever since then, US intelligence agencies, Democratic Party leaders and the corporate media, led by the New York Times, have endlessly repeated the charge of Russian hacking, involving the personal direction of Vladimir Putin. To this day, none of these agencies or media outlets have provided any probative evidence of Russian responsibility for “hacking the US election.”
Among the claims made to support the allegations against Moscow was that the hacking of the Democrats was so sophisticated that it could have been carried out only by a state actor. In a campaign to demonize Russia, Moscow’s alleged hacking was cast as a threat to the entire planet.
Western security agencies have acknowledged that the present global cyberattack—among the worst ever of its kind—is the work not of any state agency, but rather of a criminal organization. Moreover, the roots of the attack lie not in Moscow, but in Washington. The “WannaCrypt” malware employed in the attack is based on weaponized software developed by the NSA, code-named Eternal Blue, part of a bundle of documents and computer code stolen from the NSA’s server and then leaked by a hacking group known as “Shadow Brokers.”
Thus, amid the hysterical propaganda campaign over Russian hacking, Washington has been developing an array of cyber-weapons that have the capability of crippling entire countries. Through the carelessness of the NSA, some of these weapons have now been placed in the hands of criminals. US authorities did nothing to warn the public, much less prepare it to protect itself against the inevitable unleashing of the cyber weapons it itself had crafted.
In its report on the global cyberattacks on Saturday, the New York Times stated: “It could take months to find out who was behind the attacks—a mystery that may go unsolved.”
The co-author of these lines was the New York Times chief Washington correspondent David E. Sanger, who, in addition to writing for the “newspaper of record,” finds time to lecture at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, a state-connected finishing school for top political and military officials. He also holds membership in both the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Strategy Group, think tanks that bring together capitalist politicians, military and intelligence officials and corporate heads to discuss US imperialist strategy.
All of this makes Sanger one of the favorite media conduits for “leaks” and propaganda that the CIA and the Pentagon want put into the public domain.
It is worth contrasting his treatment of the “WannaCrypt” ransomware attack with the way he and the Times dealt with the allegations of Russian hacking in the run-up to and aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election.
There was no question then of an investigation taking months to uncover the culprit, much less any mystery going unsolved. Putin and Russia were declared guilty based upon unsubstantiated allegations and innuendo. Ever since, the Times, serving as the propaganda outlet of the US intelligence services, has given the lead to the rest of the media by endlessly repeating the allegation of Russian state direction of the hacking of the Democratic Party, without bothering to provide any evidence to back up the charge.
With the entire world now under attack from a weapon forged by Washington’s cyberwarfare experts, the hysterical allegations of Russian hacking are placed in perspective.
From the beginning, they have been utilized as war propaganda, a means of attempting to promote popular support for US imperialism’s steady escalation of military threats and aggression against Russia, the world’s second-largest nuclear power.
Since Trump’s inauguration, the Democratic Party has only intensified the anti-Russian propaganda. It serves both as a means of pressuring the Trump administration to abandon any turn toward a less aggressive policy toward Moscow, and of smothering the popular opposition to the right-wing and anti-working class policies of the administration under a reactionary and neo-McCarthyite campaign painting Trump as an agent of the Kremlin.
ADDENDUM
Media claims Trump revealed classified information to Russian visitors
By Patrick Martin
16 May 2017
A sensationalized report published on the web site of the Washington Post Monday afternoon claims that President Trump conveyed classified information to two high-ranking Russian officials during their well-publicized meeting last Wednesday at the White House.
The article, headlined, “Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian diplomats,” claims that Trump discussed possible terrorist attacks by ISIS using laptops carried on passenger aircraft during a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
The CIA-infested Washington Post (as is The New York Times and all the main US mainstream media) is Trump's main accuser for what is being termed, a "dangerous disclosure".
According to the Post report, Trump disclosed information obtained from “a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the US government, officials said. The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said that Trump’s decision to do so risks cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State.”
The newspaper claimed that after the meeting, recognizing the potential damage, White House officials called the CIA and the National Security Agency, which were in contact with the government that was the source of the information on ISIS.
The incident, assuming it is accurately reported and not a piece of deliberate disinformation from the US intelligence apparatus, suggests, among other things, that at least one country allied with Washington still maintains friendly relations with ISIS. Both Saudi Arabia and Qatar come to mind.
Washington itself played a role in the creation of the Islamic fundamentalist group, initially built up as part of the US regime-change operation in Syria directed at the government of Bashar al-Assad, Russia’s only ally in the Middle East. ISIS only came into direct conflict with the US after it sent forces across the Syria-Iraq border in 2014, and particularly after its rout of the Iraqi Army in the capture of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, in June 2014.
ISIS has been sustained since then with supplies and new recruits who have been able to reach its landlocked territory either through Turkey—a NATO ally of the United States—or through Saudi Arabia and Iraq, both non-NATO allies of the US. Any one of these countries, as well as the sheikdom of Qatar, which has heavily financed Sunni fundamentalist groups like ISIS, could be the “U.S. partner” described in the Post report.
In terms of US domestic politics, the Post report is clearly aimed at providing another boost for the anti-Russian campaign alleging that the Trump presidential campaign colluded with Russian intelligence agencies in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.
No significant evidence has yet been produced to substantiate claims that the Russian government was responsible for the hacking of materials subsequently published by WikiLeaks. Nor has there been any evidence of Trump-Russia collusion. The anti-Russia campaign has been launched in opposition to Trump’s initial suggestions of a more cooperative relationship with Moscow, including a pullback from efforts to overthrow Assad in Syria, to focus more military resources on China and East Asia.
The nature of the security breach alleged in the Post article hardly justifies the screaming headlines in the newspaper, the breathless reports that led the Monday evening news broadcasts on ABC and CBS, and the hours of cable television coverage that have ensued.
Trump’s major blunder, if the report is accurate, is to share information about potential ISIS terrorism with Russia without having permission to do so from the “U.S. partner,” an action that “jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State,” according to the Post.
From the standpoint of the deepening US political crisis, the main question raised by the Post report is how details of a closed-door meeting in the Oval Office made its way to the newspaper. The most likely sources are the CIA and NSA. The two spy agencies were either represented at the meeting or informed of Trump’s comments afterwards by White House homeland security adviser Thomas Bossert.
In other words, the Post report is another shot fired in the internecine war within the American state apparatus, initially focused on foreign policy, particularly in relation to Syria and Russia, but more generally provoked by the personalist, authoritarian character of the Trump administration, and Trump’s role as a loose cannon in both domestic and foreign policy.
White House officials flatly rebuffed the Post claims that Trump released information inappropriately. “The president and the foreign minister reviewed common threats from terrorist organizations to include threats to aviation,” H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser said in a statement. “At no time were any intelligence sources or methods discussed and no military operations were disclosed that were not already known publicly.”
The Post claims that Trump revealed to Lavrov and Kislyak the name of a city in ISIS territory where the details of the new terrorist threat had been learned, but the newspaper would not reveal this name to its readers, “at the urging of officials who warned that revealing them would jeopardize important intelligence capabilities.”
In other words, the newspaper chose to enlist in the ranks of the military-intelligence officials waging political warfare against Trump.
The reported blurting out of classified information to the Russians led several Democratic congressmen to recall Republican criticism of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton for being “extremely careless” with classified information that was found on the private email server she used while secretary of state.
Western security agencies have acknowledged that the present global cyberattack—among the worst ever of its kind—is the work not of any state agency, but rather of a criminal organization. Moreover, the roots of the attack lie not in Moscow, but in Washington. The “WannaCrypt” malware employed in the attack is based on weaponized software developed by the NSA, code-named Eternal Blue, part of a bundle of documents and computer code stolen from the NSA’s server and then leaked by a hacking group known as “Shadow Brokers.”