The mainstream media’s extreme enthusiasm for the Hitler Diaries shows their rush to embrace any forgery if it is big and astonishing enough. For the Guardian to lead with such an obvious forgery as the Trump “commercial intelligence reports” is the final evidence of the demise of that newspaper’s journalistic values.
We are now told that the reports were written by Mr Christopher Steele, an ex-MI6 man, for Orbis Business Intelligence. Here are a short list of six impossible things we are asked to believe before breakfast:
1) Vladimir Putin had a five year (later stated as eight year) plan to run Donald Trump as a “Manchurian candidate” for President and Trump was an active and knowing partner in Putin’s scheme.
2) Hillary Clinton is so stupid and unaware that she held compromising conversations over telephone lines whilst in Russia itself.
3) Trump’s lawyer/adviser Mr Cohen was so stupid he held meetings in Prague with the hacker/groups themselves in person to arrange payment, along with senior officials of the Russian security services. The NSA, CIA and FBI are so incompetent they did not monitor this meeting, and somehow the NSA failed to pick up on the electronic and telephone communications involved in organising it. Therefore Mr Cohen was never questioned over this alleged and improbable serious criminal activity.
4) A private company had minute by minute intelligence on the Manchurian Candidate scheme and all the indictable illegal activity that was going on, which the CIA/NSA/GCHQ/MI6 did not have, despite their specific tasking and enormous technical, staff and financial resources amounting between them to over 150,000 staff and the availability of hundreds of billons of dollars to do nothing but this.
5) A private western company is able to run a state level intelligence operation in Russia for years, continually interviewing senior security sources and people personally close to Putin, without being caught by the Russian security services – despite the fact the latter are brilliant enough to install a Manchurian candidate as President of the USA. This private western company can for example secretly interview staff in top Moscow hotels – which they themselves say are Russian security service controlled – without the staff being too scared to speak to them or ending up dead. They can continually pump Putin’s friends for information and get it.
6) Donald Trump’s real interest is his vast financial commitment in China, and he has little investment in Russia, according to the reports. Yet he spent the entire election campaign advocating closer ties with Russia and demonising and antagonising China.
Michael Cohen has now stated he has never been to Prague in his life. If that is true the extremely weak credibility of the entire forgery collapses in total. What is more, contrary to the claims of the Guardian and Washington Post that the material is “unverifiable”, the veracity of it could be tested extremely easily by the most basic journalism, ie asking Mr Cohen who has produced his passport. The editors of the Washington Post and the Guardian are guilty of pushing as blazing front page news the most blatant forgery to serve their own political ends, without carrying out the absolutely basic journalistic checks which would easily prove the forgery. Those editors must resign.
The Guardian has published a hagiography in which it clarifies he cannot travel to Russia himself and that he depends on second party contacts to interview third parties. It also confirms that much of the “information” is bought. Contacts who sell you information will of course invent the kind of thing you want to hear to increase their income. That was the fundamental problem with much of the intelligence on Iraqi WMD. Highly paid contacts, through also paid third parties, were inventing intelligence to sell.
There is of course an extra level of venial inaccuracy here because unlike an MI6 officer, Steele himself was then flogging the information for cash. Nobody in the mainstream media has asked the most important question of all. What was the charlatan Christopher Steele paid for this dossier?
As forgeries go, this is really not in the least convincing. It was very obviously not written seriatim on the dates stated but forged as a collection and with hindsight. I might add I do not include the golden showers among the impossible aspects. I have no idea if it is true and neither do I care. Given Trump’s wealth and history, I think we can say with confidence that he has indulged whatever his sexual preferences might be all over the world and not just in Russia. It seems most improbable he would succumb to blackmail over it and not brazen it out. I suppose it could be taken as the sole example of trickledown theory actually working.
A French court on Thursday ordered the release on bail of former prime minister of Kosovo and ex-rebel leader Ramush Haradinaj, who was arrested in France, early January on suspicion of war crimes.
Haradinaj, was ordered to remain in France
I wonder if anyone will bother to watch the news anymore, almost nothing from anywhere in the world is really believable, is that the point of false news, to make the population give up caring?
“In a fascist system, it’s not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can’t tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.”
Naomi Wolf
Good analysis by Finian Cunningham;
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46205.htm
(Note the term “inverse-projection”, a tactic often displayed by certain commentators here)
Steele’s partner Burrows must have been a watcher of the old House of Cards:
Well, according to a new article in the Daily Mail, the former ambassador to Russia was not Tim Barrow after all, it was Andrew Wood, a Blairite who was ambassador to Russia from 1995 to 2000. According to the Daily Mail article, Wood denies having given the dossier to John McCain, he just told him about the contents of it at a meeting in Canada in November 2016. McCain then sent an emissary to England to get the dossier. The Daily Mail article doesn’t say who gave the emissary the dossier. McCain then handed it over to the FBI.
@ Lysias
Thanks for the latest link.
Must admit I had a chuckle after following the Mail’s link to the Guardian article to see that the Guardian has made a point of stating that the Democrats’ commissioning someone to dig up dirt on Trump were not necessarily Hillary, her team or anyone connected with the Democratic NC! Trust the Guardian to make sure they’re not saying anything remotely bad about Hillary!
“This was not necessarily the Hillary Clinton campaign or the Democratic National Committee. Opposition research is frequently financed by wealthy individuals who have donated all they can and are looking for other ways to help.”
So that’s how the Guardian is funded these days.
“Why sometimes I believe in as many as six impossible things before breakfast”
Lewis Carroll – Alice’s adventures in Wonderland
Here we go, off down the rabbit hole again
“Commercial intelligence” of this kind is a major (and very lucrative) subgenre within espionage fiction. Almost all major corporations commission work of this kind. The literary creative effort is often supplemented by direct access to the supposed sources, where a 30-minute Q & A over Skype with an anonymous “expert” or “insider” can easily cost £ 5,000 or more, of which the source receives £ 500 if s/he is lucky. Craig Murray himself must have been approached by a zillion commercial intelligence agencies trying to recruit him as a confidential source.
It is a great business to be in, but the point is that this type of creative writing is not meant to see the light of day, ever. At least the saner heads amongst the people who commission them know that the intel they are buying will at best be half-true, a mixture of common knowledge, shrewd guesses and a few genuine factoids. It is common practice for such reports to be “sexed up” with unverifiable salacious details regarding the private lives of top politicians and other key players. As long as the circle of recipients is restricted, there is no real harm in that. However, the general public do not understand that such reports are not meant to be taken literally, that the authors expect their readers to take even factual assertions with a large pinch of salt. Hence poor old Christopher Steele comes across as a complete fraud, even though his “commercial intelligence” is precisely what his client(s) ordered and of comparatively high quality.
“As long as the circle of recipients is restricted, there is no real harm in that. However, the general public do not understand that such reports are not meant to be taken literally, that the authors expect their readers to take even factual assertions with a large pinch of salt.”
Hmm, Peter. Maybe someone should explain this to the print and broadcasting media on both sides of the Atlantic, along with the “intelligence” communities and certain politicians too since they are the ones who absolutely got this report out there and presented it, pretty much, as fact (even while insisting that none of it could be verified!) To counter the lack of verification/confirmation/accuracy they’ve just gone after people Steele worked with and got direct quotes on his “integrity” thus pushing the idea that it’s all true.
I have no reason to doubt Steele’s “integrity”. For an intelligence officer, professional integrity involves neither leading your sources, telling them what you want to hear, nor misusing them as mouthpieces for your own views by adding to or selectively suppressing parts of their testimony. However, in the context that we are discussing here, that trait is irrelevant, because a question along the lines of, “What do you know about any eventual relationship between Donald Trump and Russian intelligence?”, leaves your sources in no doubt what you are after, what you want to hear. The sources will deliver accordingly, and the findings are a foregone conclusion.
As to why this collective work of fiction is now being presented as fact, “Cui bono?”, is always a good question to start with. The nation that has most to gain from poisoning the relationship Trump-Putin right from the start is Ukraine. Steele’s dossier also contains multiple indicators pointing towards the contributors being Ukrainian rather than Russian. Even if Ukrainian intelligence did not directly contribute to the dossier, the reason why it has been published just now almost certainly has to do with Ukraine. The U.S. were and still are gearing up for a military show of force vis-à-vis Russia. Presumably, some hawks within U.S. military and intelligence circles are keen for tensions between the U.S. and Russia to continue unabated. The Steele dossier is a convenient tool for steering Trump into that direction: if he came across as dovish towards Russia, everybody would assume that the allegations in the dossier must be true, that he really is Putin’s Manchurian Candidate.
This keeps getting better and better 🙂
I have just learned that the Steele dossier is based upon telephone interviews (!) conducted by Russian-speaking subcontractors based in the UK. I am inclined to believe that, because this methodology would be entirely typical of the world of commercial intelligence. However, if true, this means that:
– both UK and Russian intelligence would have been aware of this investigation and of the allegations against Trump from the start. It is simply inconceivable that international phone calls to high-ranking Kremlin officials would not have been monitored.
– the U.S./UK intelligence community consider the dossier credible because they know that it accurately reflects what was said during those conversations. No doubt they have the recordings to prove it.
– Steele could have been sold a pup. Russian-speaking émigrés based in the UK will have their own axes to grind with Putin, their own agendas and their own contacts inside Russia. Perhaps those Russian-speakers even were Ukrainians with connections to Ukrainian intelligence.
This may raise a chuckle or two from the Guardian today.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jan/12/bbc-sets-up-team-to-debunk-fake-news
Comments on the article in the paper are closed, obviously! : )
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jan/13/uk-media-chiefs-called-in-by-minister-for-talks-on-fake-news#comments
Ukip leader Paul Nuttall REFUSES to rule out standing in Stoke-on-Trent by-election
Good man
UKIP were/are a one trick pony, and now we’re out of the EU (thankfully) the rest of what they have to say sounds like regurgitated tory nonsense.
Not sure that’s true Pete Rose, much as I dislike UKIP.
In the aftermath of Brexit many who voted to Leave and holding hard to that Party such is the dismay about how the vote actually went and such is the absolute confusion about how Brexit is actually going to be achieved. Let’s face it, May and her government are in chaos over it, many MPs across the Parties are up in arms that she may be trying to prevent them from getting a vote and there’s the legal stuff too.
I daresay Paul Nutter, as I call him (sorry Michael) and UKIP will be standing ready to challenge anything that doesn’t go their way and to stir up Leave voters accordingly.
Witnessing the USA lapsing into a full-blown schizophrenia, as the most advanced stage of a truly putinoid psychosis, is — surely, for all of us unexceptional folk in all the rest of the world — a joy to behold. Indeed, Schadenfreude, at its most exquisite. So what’s your problem with that?
Spy who went out in the cold: MI6 dirty dossier author Christopher Steele is pictured with his family on seaside stroll amid fears he’s become a ‘target for Russian hit squads’
•Photo showing spy Christopher Steele enjoying a family holiday have emerged
•Reports claim Russia has tapes of ‘perverted sex acts’ involving Donald Trump
•Friend now claims Steele was paid £200,000 to produce salacious reports
•Steele had a string of contacts in Moscow after years of spying on Russia
•His research claimed that Donald Trump had been ‘sexually compromised’
15 January 2017
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4121562/Pictured-family-seaside-stroll-spy-dirty-dossier-Trump-target-Russian-hit-squads.html