via Moon of Alabama
U.S. ‘intelligence’ folks tell their stenographers at NBC News that their obvious lies are obvious lies.
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That announced ‘break with the past’ of faking ‘intelligence’ happened when?
How ‘rock solid’ was the ‘intelligence’ about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction or chemical weapons attacks in Douma, Syria?
U.S. ‘intelligence’, then and now, is pure imagination for the purpose of deceiving the U.S. and ‘western’ publicabout the reality of this or that conflict:
It was an attention-grabbing assertion that made headlines around the world: U.S. officials said they had indications suggesting Russia might be preparing to use chemical agents in Ukraine.
President Joe Biden later said it publicly. But three U.S. officials told NBC News this week there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the U.S. released the information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions.
Unlike the U.S. Russia no longer has any ‘banned munitions’:
The OPCW’s inspection teams have verified the destruction at seven chemical weapons destruction facilities in the Russian Federation. On 27 September 2017, the last of these facilities, located in Kizner, officially concluded its operations.With the total elimination of Russia’s declared chemical weapons programme, 96.3 per cent of all chemical weapon stockpiles declared by possessor States have been destroyed under OPCW verification.
That is why the U.S. ‘intelligence’ claim of a potential use of Russian chemical weapons was obvious nonsense from the get go:
It’s one of a string of examples of the Biden administration’s breaking with recent precedent by deploying declassified intelligence as part of an information war against Russia. The administration has done so even when the intelligence wasn’t rock solid, officials said, to keep Russian President Vladimir Putin off balance. Coordinated by the White House National Security Council, the unprecedented intelligence releases have been so frequent and voluminous, officials said, that intelligence agencies had to devote more staff members to work on the declassification process, scrubbing the information so it wouldn’t betray sources and methods.
Sure, devote more people for the ‘declassification process’ of creating mere fantasies or for the the reproduction of public sources:
Just this week, national security adviser Jake Sullivan stood at the White House podium and read out what officials said was more declassified intelligence, asserting that Russia’s pullout from areas around Kyiv wasn’t a retreat but a strategic redeployment that signals a significant assault on eastern and southern Ukraine, one that U.S. officials believe could be a protracted and bloody fight.
That ‘declassified intelligence’ Sullivan read out was the copy of a public announcement the Ministry of Defense of Russia had made on March 30:
Planned regrouping of troops in Kiev and Chernigov directions is underway.The first stage of the special military operation conducted by the Russian Armed Forces in Donbas and Ukraine was planned to force the enemy to concentrate its forces, means, resources and military equipment to hold on to high populated areas in these directions, including Kiev. To bring them down on the battlefield and, without storming these cities to avoid civilian casualties, inflict such a defeat on the armed formations of the Kiev regime that it would not be able to use these forces in the main direction of our Armed Forces in Donbass.
All these goals have been met.
At the same time, the Russian army also solved another task, namely – in the absence of an inflow of fresh enemy forces from the western and central regions of Ukraine, through professional military action, using the absolute air dominance it had gained, also using modern high-precision weapons – to create all the necessary conditions for the final stage of the operation to liberate the People’s Republics of Donbass.
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Thus, all the main tasks of the Russian Armed Forces in Kiev and Chernigov directions have been completed.
The objective of the regrouping of the Russian Armed Forces is to intensify action in priority areas and, above all, to complete the operation for the total liberation of Donbass.
To claim that official public announcement by the Russian military are ‘declassified intelligence’ is of course bullshit. But NBC News stenographers won’t tell you that. Instead we get more of this nonsense:
Multiple U.S. officials acknowledged that the U.S. has used information as a weapon even when confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high. Sometimes it has used low-confidence intelligence for deterrent effect, as with chemical agents, and other times, as an official put it, the U.S. is just “trying to get inside Putin’s head.”
Does anyone believe that Putin gives a f*** about U.S. ‘intelligence’ claims?
No:
Some officials believe, however, that trying to get into Putin’s head is a meaningless exercise, because he will do what he wants regardless.
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The biggest success of the U.S. information offensive may have been delaying the invasion itself by weeks or months, which officials believe they did with accurate predictions that Russia intended to attack, based on definitive intelligence.
Those ‘accurate predictions’ included the false claims that Russia would invade the Ukraine on February 11, February 14 and February 16:
The noise has become deafening.
> The U.S. intelligence briefing included specific reference to next Wednesday, February 16, as a start date for the ground invasion, three officials — based in Washington, London and Ukraine — told POLITICO. <
‘Could’ is doing a lot of work in those headlines.
Can we get it a bit more precise?
1am or 3am?
Which is it?
And in what timezone?
In fact, Russia had not decided to invade Ukraine at that time. The decision was most likely made after February 19, after the Ukrainian military had intensified its bombardment of Donbas and after the Ukrainian president Zelinsky had threatened to acquire nuclear weapons:
Starting in mid February the OSCE observers around Donbas noted in their daily reports a strong increase in ceasefire violation and explosions.
biggerMost of the violations came from the Ukrainian site and the explosions of the fired shells and missile happened on Donbas held grounds. On February 19, at the hight of the fire, Zelensky gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference. He prominently mentioned the Budapest Memorandum under which the Ukraine had given up the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the USSR:
“.. Ukraine will have every right to believe that the Budapest Memorandum is not working and all the package decisions of 1994 are in doubt.”
One of the package decisions Ukraine took in 1994 was the entering of Ukraine into the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Russia understood Zelensky’s remark in Munich as a threat by Ukraine to acquire nuclear weapons. It already has the expertise, materials and means to do that.
A fascist controlled government with nukes on Russia’s border? This is not about Putin at all. No Russian government of any kind could ever condone that.
I believe that this credible threat, together with the artillery preparations for a new war on Donbas, was what convinced Russia’s government to intervene by force.
The Russian military operation was clearly provoked. It started on February 24, months after U.S. ‘intelligence’ had falsely warned of an ‘imminent’ attack, eight days AFTER Ukrainian artillery preparations to attack Donbas had begun, five days AFTER Zelinsky’s nuclear speech and two days AFTER the U.S. and its allies had implemented unprecedented sanctions against Russia.
NBC News, as well as other western outlets, allow themselves to be abused by presenting U.S. ‘intelligence’ claims they know are outright lies:
Game or not, U.S. intelligence officials say it has been successful. Intelligence is rarely definitive, and Biden officials have calculated in some cases that it’s better to pre-empt something that might not happen, rather than stay silent and watch it unfold.“It doesn’t have to be solid intelligence when we talk about it,” a U.S. official said. “It’s more important to get out ahead of them — Putin specifically — before they do something. It’s preventative. We don’t always want to wait until the intelligence is 100 percent certainty that they are going to do something. We want to get out ahead to stop them.”
Edged on by the ‘intelligence’ community the ‘western’ media ‘get ahead’ and produce one lie after the other.
Here they are, reporting on some scruffy cat in Bucha, a town that had seen five weeks of intense front-line fighting.
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The recently sensationalized mass graves in Bucha were of its Volkssturm ‘civilian defenders’ and of Russian soldiers deceased there. They were dug on March 12 and had nothing to do with the recent pull back of Russian forces. Some carefully filmed bodies in the streets of Bucha have likely been casualties of weeks old Ukrainian artillery strikes. Others bound and killed there, likely by Ukrainian Azov fascists, were wearing white arm bandsidentifying them as neutral to Russian forces.
Only rarely do we get insight from ‘western’ media of what the people on the ground in Ukraine really feel:
8:58 6 Apr – In eastern Ukraine, some don’t blame Putin for the war
Jonathan Beale, BBC News, Donbas
We visited the town of Lysychansk, about a mile from the front line. It’s one of many residential areas to have been hit by Russian artillery over the past few days.
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A Ukrainian soldier led us through the mostly-deserted streets to an underground shelter.Inside in a gloomy room we talked to two old women, who were trying to keep warm in front of an electric fire.
We asked them who they thought was responsible for shelling their town – astonishingly, neither blamed Russia or President Vladimir Putin. They thought their grim situation was as much the fault of Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Whenever such rare reality reports, like the above or this one, come out, they get buried in an overwhelming stream of ‘intelligence’ bullshit and pro-war propaganda:
A video posted online on Monday and verified by The New York Times appears to show a group of Ukrainian soldiers killing captured Russian troops outside a village west of Kyiv.“He’s still alive. Film these marauders. Look, he’s still alive. He’s gasping,” a man says as a Russian soldier with a jacket pulled over his head, apparently wounded, is seen still breathing. A soldier then shoots the man twice. After the man keeps moving, the soldier shoots him again, and he stops.
At least three other apparent Russian soldiers, including one with an obvious head wound who has his hands tied behind his back, can be seen dead near the victim. All are wearing camouflage, and three have white arm bands commonly worn by Russian troops. Equipment is scattered around them and there are blood stains near each man’s head.
For every atrocity Ukrainian troops and militia commit U.S. ‘intelligence’ will create five or more fairy tales of ‘Russian atrocities’ which the media, well knowing that such claims are likely false, will lap up and repeat.
The only advice one can give in such a situation is to always assume that it is the exact opposite of what any ‘intelligence’ claims that is actually happening.
