https://www.globalresearch.ca/biden-cyberattack-hypocrisy/5775359
Biden’s Cyberattack Hypocrisy. “The Russians are Coming”
On Monday, President Joe Biden said “evolving intelligence” indicates Russia is preparing a massive cyberattack against the United States in response to its support for Ukraine. “The magnitude of Russia’s cyber capacity is fairly consequential and it’s coming,” Biden said.
Days prior to Biden’s remarks, an FBI advisory issued to US businesses warned “Kremlin-linked hackers could target US organizations as the Russian military continues to suffer heavy losses in Ukraine and as Western sanctions on the Kremlin begin to bite,” reports CNN.
Anne Neuberger, Biden’s national security adviser, said during a White House press briefing on Monday Russia is preparing “preparatory activity” for a cyber attack on the United States and its allies. She declared the coming attacks are “not about espionage, it’s probably very likely about disruptive or destructive [cyber] activity” in response to US assistance to Ukraine. The following day, US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly made similar remarks to business executives, according to CNN.
(It should be noted Neuberger is a Zionist and thus an ardent defender of Israel; the Yehuda and Anne Neuberger Foundation has “donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby known as AIPAC, for its efforts to influence the US government and public opinion,” David Corn reported for Mother Jones in 2021.)
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in February a Russian cyberattack “on one will be regarded as an attack on all,” a statement that invokes NATO’s Article 5 of the Washington Treaty. “Article 5 provides that if a NATO Ally is the victim of an armed attack, each and every other member of the Alliance will consider this act of violence as an armed attack against all members and will take the actions it deems necessary to assist the Ally attacked,” explains the NATO web page.
The United States, and especially Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, have a vested interest in making certain Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the color revolution installed government of Ukraine remain in power.
The fact is the US, under the State Department and Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Victoria Nuland, and the US Ambassador to Kyiv Geoffrey Pyatt, were responsible for orchestrating the overthrow of the democratically elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych.
This is a taboo subject for the corporate media as it reports a one-sided blow-by-blow account of the war in Ukraine. Never mentioned is the fact the US orchestrated color revolution in Ukraine (and those in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan) violate the United Nations Charter and international law.
Prior to leaving office, President Obama looked into “an unprecedented cyber covert action against Russia in retaliation for alleged Russian interference in the American presidential election, U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.” As we now know—and some of us claimed at the time—the supposed effort by Russia to get Donald Trump elected was pure fantasy and rank political expediency. It took almost two years for ex-FBI Director Robert Mueller to discover the obvious—there had been no collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia. Despite this, many Americans, in particular Democrats, believe the conspiracy theory is true.
The effort to destabilize Russia continued under the outlier president Trump. He gave the CIA carte blanc to launch cyber attacks on Russia. “The secret authorization, known as a presidential finding, gives the spy agency more freedom in both the kinds of operations it conducts and who it targets, undoing many restrictions that had been in place under prior administrations. The finding allows the CIA to more easily authorize its own covert cyber operations, rather than requiring the agency to get approval from the White House,” reported Yahoo News in 2020.
The “very aggressive” finding “gave the agency very specific authorities to really take the fight offensively to a handful of adversarial countries,” said a former U.S. government official. These countries include Russia, China, Iran and North Korea — which are mentioned directly in the document — but the finding potentially applies to others as well, according to another former official. “The White House wanted a vehicle to strike back,” said the second former official. “And this was the way to do it.” (emphasis added.)
Those of us who study history and geopolitics know the CIA has had a free hand to conduct subversion and surveillance activities around the world and at home despite its charter. “When the CIA was created in 1947, members of Congress who feared the establishment here of the type of domestic surveillance apparatus that the Allies had just defeated in Germany insisted that the new CIA have no role in American law enforcement and no legal ability to spy within the U.S. The legislation creating the CIA contains those limitations,” writes Andrew Napolitano.
“Populations from at least 25 countries were denied the right to choose their own leaders,” writes Thomas Swan. “This is perhaps the main reason why America is hated so much around the world. The excuse given by CIA supporters is that Soviet influence over certain governments had to be curtailed. However, in many cases, no proof of Russian activity was ever found. The CIA had taken to dismantling any leftist or anti-US government, regardless of the regime’s domestic or foreign support.”
The CIA, following Trump’s “presidential finding,” engaged in a new round of computer and network subversion against Russia and Iran. The 2018 finding gave a green light to the CIA to wipe or dump hacked banking data and target foreign intelligence services, media organizations, charities, religious institutions, or other non-state entities for disruptive or destructive cyber actions, according to a report posted at Axios.
In fact, Trump’s finding was little more than a formality. In addition to overthrowing elected governments, the CIA has engaged in assassination, the distribution of heroin and cocaine, and making certain local officials, most notably state governors, are onboard with the establishment’s program (see “Former Governor Jesse Ventura Explains That CIA Embedded In Many State Governments”).
“Recently we have noted a significant increase in attempts to inflict harm on Russia’s informational systems from external forces,” Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of Russia’s Security Council, told the Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily in January of 2017, prior to the US election. Patrushev said the Obama administration had “deliberately ignor(ed) the fact that the main Internet servers” complicit in the attacks “are based on the territory of the United States and are used by Washington for intelligence and other purposes aimed at retaining its global domination.”
In short, the intelligence apparatus of the US was engaged in subverting Russia’s computer networks (and those in China, Iran, and North Korea) years before the current crisis in Ukraine and the contested US election. This was accomplished under the bogus assertion that Putin and Russia colluded with the Trump team to get him elected, thus painting the real estate magnate as a Russian tool.
“The U.S. CIA’s hacking unit has been conducting attacks over the last 11 years on Chinese aviation firms, technology companies, oil sector companies and other critical industries,” Emily Fang, a correspondent in Beijing, told NPR in 2021.
China, Russia, North Korea, Israel, and other nations have probed the networks of adversaries for years, and may have indeed engaged in cyberattacks. However, as Wikileaks discovered in 2017, the CIA is at the forefront of this activity. Its sophisticated arsenal of cyberattack tools include “malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized ‘zero day’ exploits, malware remote control systems,” according to WikiLeaks “Vault 7” archive of documents purloined from the CIA.
The “Year Zero” documents introduce “the scope and direction of the CIA’s global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of ‘zero day’ weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.”
The events of 9/11 gave the agency the emphasis it needed to expand its cyberattack efforts.
Since 2001 the CIA has gained political and budgetary preeminence over the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA found itself building not just its now infamous drone fleet, but a very different type of covert, globe-spanning force — its own substantial fleet of hackers. The agency’s hacking division freed it from having to disclose its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary bureaucratic rival) in order to draw on the NSA’s hacking capacities.
All of the above represents factual information, not a conspiracy theory. I believe—and this is my opinion based on years of dedicated research—that the majority of cyberattacks launched against US corporations and the government originated with CIA hackers who leave behind traces implicating the above roster of official enemies.
In the days to come, as the war in Ukraine continues, we may face cyberattacks on critical infrastructure here in the US. The warfare state is dedicated to confronting Russia and China, even if it results in a nuclear conflagration. There is no better way to get Americans onboard with criminal behavior than to let them sit in the dark for a week or more without access to streaming television and their precious smart phones that are in effect surveillance devices.
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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/03/31/the-us-empires-ultimate-target-is-not-russia-but-china/
The US Empire’s Ultimate Target Is Not Russia But China
The Pentagon has produced its latest National Defense Strategy (NDS), a report made every four years to provide the public and the government with a broad overview of the US war machine’s planning, posturing, developments and areas of focus.
You might assume with all the aggressive brinkmanship between Moscow and the US power alliance this year that Russia would feature as Enemy Number One in the 2022 NDS, but you would be assuming incorrectly. The US “Defense” Department reserves that slot for the same nation that’s occupied it for many years now: China.
Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes the following:
The full NDS is still classified, but the Pentagon released a fact sheet on the document that says it “will act urgently to sustain and strengthen deterrence, with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as our most consequential strategic competitor and the pacing challenge for the Department.”
The fact sheet outlines four priorities for the Pentagon:
- Defending the homeland, paced to the growing multi-domain threat posed by the PRC
- Deterring strategic attacks against the United States, Allies, and partners
- Deterring aggression, while being prepared to prevail in conflict when necessary, prioritizing the PRC challenge in the Indo-Pacific, then the Russia challenge in Europe
- Building a resilient Joint Force and defense ecosystem
“The Pentagon says that while China is the focus, Russia poses ‘acute threats’ because of its invasion of Ukraine,” DeCamp writes, showing the empire’s view of Moscow as a second-tier enemy.
Ahead of a meeting with China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has made some comments which clearly illustrate the US-centralized empire’s actual problem with Moscow.
“We, together with you, and with our sympathisers will move towards a multipolar, just, democratic world order,” Lavrov said to the Chinese government on Wednesday.
And that right there ladies and gentlemen is the real reason we’ve been hearing so much hysterical shrieking about Russia these last five or six years. It’s never been about Russian hackers. Nor about a Kremlin pee pee tape. Nor about Trump Tower. Nor about GRU bounties in Afghanistan. Nor about Manafort, Flynn, Bannon, Papadopoulos or any other Russiagate Surname of the Week. It’s not even actually about Ukraine. Those have all been narrative-shaping constructs manipulated by the US intelligence cartel to manufacture support for a final showdown against Russia and China to prevent the emergence of a multipolar world.
The US government has had a policy in place since the fall of the Soviet Union to prevent the rise of any powers which could challenge its imperial agendas for the world. During the (first) Cold War the strategy promoted by empire managers like Henry Kissinger was to court China out of necessity to pull it away from the USSR, which was when we saw business ties between China and the US lead to immense profits for certain individuals in both nations and the influx of wealth which now has China on track to surpass the US as an economic superpower.
Once the USSR ended, so too did the need to remain on friendly terms with China, and subsequent decades saw a sharp pivot into a much more adversarial relationship with Beijing.
In what history may one day view as the US empire’s greatest strategic blunder, empire managers forecasted the acquisition of post-soviet Russia as an imperial lackey state which could be weaponized against the new Enemy Number One in China. Instead, the exact opposite happened.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Bloomberg New Economy Forum last year that she’d “heard for years that Russia would become more willing to move toward the west, more willing to engage in a positive way with Europe, the UK, the US, because of problems on its border, because of the rise of China.” But that’s not what occurred.
“We haven’t seen that,” Clinton said. “Instead what we’ve seen is a concerted effort by Putin maybe to hug China more.”
The empire’s expectation that Moscow would come grovelling to the imperial throne on its own meant that no real effort was expended trying to establish goodwill and win over its friendship. NATO just kept on expanding and the empire got increasingly aggressive and belligerent in its games of global conquest. This error has led to the strategist’s ultimate nightmare of having to fight for global domination against two separate powers at once. Because empire architects incorrectly predicted that Moscow would end up fearing Beijing more than it fears Washington, the tandem between China’s economic power and Russia’s military power that experts have been pointing to for years has only gotten more and more intimate.
And now here we are with Russian and Chinese officials openly discussing their plans to create a multipolar world while Chinese pundits crack jokes about the US empire’s transparent ploys to turn Beijing against Moscow over the Ukraine invasion:
On the empire’s grand chessboard, Russia is the queen piece, but China is the king. Just as with chess it helps to take out your opponent’s strongest piece to more easily pursue checkmate, the US empire would be well advised to try and topple China’s nuclear superpower friend and, as Consortium News editor-in-chief Joe Lauria recently put it, “ultimately restore a Yeltsin-like puppet to Moscow.”
Basically all we’re looking at in the major international news stories of our time is the rise of a multipolar world crashing headlong into an empire which has espoused the belief that unipolar domination must be retained at all cost, even if it means flirting with the possibility of a very fast and radioactive third world war.
This is the Hail Mary pass of the US hegemon. Its last-ditch effort to secure control before forever losing any chance at it. Many anti-imperialist pundits I read regularly seem quite confident that this effort will fail, while I personally think those forecasts may be a bit premature. The way the chess pieces are moving it definitely does look like there’s a plan in place, and I don’t think they’d be orchestrating that plan if they didn’t believe it had a chance to succeed.
One thing that does seem clear is that the only way the empire has any chance of stopping the rise of China is by maneuvers that will be both highly disruptive and existentially dangerous for the entire world. If you think things are crazy now, just you wait until the imperial crosshairs move to Beijing.
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