CIA / INTEL AGENCIES

KEN LESLIE—As stated above, the orgy of killing and torture went on for a couple of years fuelled by the need to avenge the embarrassment of Tet. However, times were changing—if not substantially. The fake patriotic fervour of the 1950s bolstered by the right-wing certainties of the era was eroding fast especially in contact with a never-ending procession of coffins of young (increasingly middle-class) Americans. The main supporter of the war, Spellman, died in 1967 and the shaky consensus regarding the importance of the war began to crumble.

Yasha Levine examines how and why the internet was created, primarily as a military, global capitalist defensive tool, and how it now affects American lives and contributes to gut constitutional liberties. The idea of the Internet was to create a gigantic system of surveillance to be used as a “database radar” to spot political threats before they could grow enough to threaten the status quo. In sum, the Internet from its origins as the “Arpanet”, was set up to operate as a weapon for social control.

BEN NORTON—So why do the Russian correspondents, hosts and staffers for real Russian-backed English language news outlets like RT and Sputnik not make the same obvious language mistakes as the anonymous figures behind PeaceData? Why couldn’t Putin’s expert chaos agents find a few proficient English speakers to handle this advanced active measures operation? Once again, these questions were never entertained by the US media outlets amplifying the official narrative about PeaceData. It is certainly possible that PeaceData was a Kremlin operation. But so far, there is no evidence to prove it. Therefore the possibility must be considered that private contractors for US intelligence agencies borrowed the same tactics they employed during the scandalous 2018 Alabama Senate false flag operation, creating the PeaceData network themselves and falsely posing as Russians in order to smear authentic American independent media outlets as Kremlin-linked disinformation operations, to build the case for ultimately censoring them, and to justify their own paychecks.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—This narrative that we are being primed for will enable these same spy agencies to sell the story that at least one of the governments they have targeted for sabotage can be accused of election interference regardless of who wins. And the most depressing thing about it is that they already know they’ll be able to sell it successfully, because nobody has learned anything over the last four years despite the transparent scam of Russiagate.

CRAIG MURRAY—Once Navalny was in Berlin it was only a matter of time before it was declared that he was poisoned with Novichok. The Russophobes are delighted. This of course eliminates all vestiges of doubt about what happened to the Skripals, and proves that Russia must be isolated and sanctioned to death and we must spend untold billions on weapons and security services. We must also increase domestic surveillance, crack down on dissenting online opinion. It also proves that Donald Trump is a Russian puppet and Brexit is a Russian plot.