Mar 15

Today’s News 15th March 2019

  • Italians Outraged After Court Rules Woman 'Too Ugly' To Be Raped

    The Italian Justice Ministry has ordered a preliminary investigation into an appeals court ruling by all-female judges which overturned a rape verdict by arguing in part that the woman who was attacked was too ugly to be a credible rape victim, according to The Star.

    The ruling has sparked outrage in Italy, prompting a flash mob Monday outside the Ancona court, where protesters shouted “Shame!” and held up signs saying “indignation.”

    The appeals sentence was handed down in 2017 — by an all-female panel — but the reasons behind it only emerged publicly when Italy’s high court annulled it on March 5 and ordered a retrial. The Court of Cassation said Wednesday its own reasons for ordering the retrial will be issued next month. –The Star

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    Two Peruvian men were initially convicted in 2015 of raping a 20-year-old Peruvian woman in Ancona – however the Italian appeals court overturned the verdict, absolving the men. In their decision, the judges ruled that the men “didn’t find her attractive,” and that “she was too masculine.“

    A lawyer for the victim, Cinzia Molinaro, said that the woman’s appeal to the Court of Cassation cited the “absolute unacceptability” of the Italian court’s decision to refer to the victim’s physical appearance. 

    The appeals court quoted one of the suspects as saying he had listed the woman as a “Viking” on his cellphone, adding that the “photograph present in her file would appear to confirm this.”

    The woman, who has since returned to Peru, required 14 stitches in her vagina after the attack. 

    “She had confused memories of what exactly happened during the night because she was drugged,” said Molinaro, adding that doctors had confirmed the presence of a “date rape” drug in her blood. 

    “I don’t remember how it all started, but I remember I shouted ‘enough, enough'” the woman reportedly told police. 

    In 2016, one of the accused rapists was originally sentenced to five years in prison for the rape, while the other was sentenced to three years for standing guard. While the ruling was overturned in 2017, the reasons for the acquittal only became known last week after the Italian supreme court annulled the appeal and ordered a retrial. 

  • The Trump Phenomenon As Seen From Europe

    Authored by Philip Giraldi via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    President Donald Trump is frequently seen through the prism of an American media that despises him and wants to discredit him so that he can either be impeached soon or defeated in 2020. To a certain extent the foreign media has picked up on that depiction of Trump, emphasizing his boorish qualities and narcissism while neglecting what he has or has not accomplished while in office. To be sure there have been major missteps which have driven the Europeans and others crazy, including the withdrawal from the international climate treaty and the nuclear agreement with Iran, but Trump, to his credit, has also recognized the futility of Washington’s Asian wars and is serious in his intent to reduce the American footprint in places like Syria and Afghanistan. He is also an enemy of what is seen as the Establishment in global policymaking, choosing instead to promote national interests rather than international treaties and obligations.

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    My wife and I recently spent a week in Venice for the Carnival that precedes the beginning of Lent. It was quite an experience as the event attracted literally tens of thousands of visitors from all over the world. On the Sunday preceding Ash Wednesday there were so many tourists crammed into the vast Piazza San Marco that it was impossible to move, but everyone was having fun and both my wife and I remarked on how polite and well behaved the crowds were. And the food was wonderful!

    In the course of the week we managed to speak to many of the co-celebrants, primarily those from Italy, Germany and Britain and the conversations inevitably turned to the subject of Donald Trump and what he is doing. I fully expected that I would receive an earful, but what actually developed was quite a surprise. Nearly everyone had good things to say about the American president, though there were suggestions that he might be more than just a little bit pazzo, verrückt, or bonkers.

    Their arguments went something like this:

    …world government has proven to be a disaster for most of the ordinary people in most developed countries. Wealth has been concentrated in the hands of the few who constitute the Establishment in each country and benefit primarily from globalism.

    Examples cited by the Europeans included the Clintons, who have become de facto billionaires, and Tony Blair, who is well on his way to doing the same. In Europe, the Common Market, which started out as a free trade and labor zone, has now morphed into a European Union and become a government that is far more heavy-handed and intrusive than the national governments that it has to a large extent replaced. The disastrous creation of a unified currency has crushed weaker national economies, but somehow the elites in each country seem to continue to thrive amidst all the damage being done to ordinary people.

    As a response, an increasing number of Europeans are entertaining following the Brexit model of either leaving the European Union altogether or abandoning the currency union while also reducing the power of the European Parliament. Nationalism is on the rise as Europeans realize that any aspiration to create something like a United States of Europe was from the start an illusion. Today, the Europeans continue to be betrayed by their elected leadership and the time has come to put a stop to it, which is why they admire Trump as they see him serving as a wrecking ball demolishing the entrenched Establishment and the globalism that it has promoted. People are demanding change and the last election in Italy, the repudiation of the policies of Angela Merkel in Germany, and the unrest in France demonstrate that the problem is not going to go away.

    There were some other lessons learned from Carnival. Post-Christian Europe is continuing to hang on to some vestiges of the Ancient Faith. I was amazed when the speaker at the final ceremony on Martedi Grasso introduced the finalists for Carnival Queen as being young women exemplary for their “Christian virtues and beauty.” I turned to my wife and commented how much I would like to hear similar words once in a while in the United States at a public gathering.

    We also encountered many recent refugees from South Asia and the Middle East, working in shops and restaurants. Most of them spoke excellent Italian and were clearly fully accepted by their Italian colleagues. As Venice has a huge tourism economy, it was not exactly a model for dealing with the waves of immigrants in parts of Europe where there is no work, but it was refreshing to see how people will come together if they are just allowed to cooperate without a whole lot of interference from the government and the loud agenda driven groups that proliferate on the political left of center.

    Finally, it was difficult being in Venice and not noticing that the largest group of foreigners in the city was Chinese, numbering certainly in the thousands, possibly as many as ten thousand. While Washington wastes its money on weapons and endless wars the Chinese are making deals and expanding both their personal and economic presence. Many shops in Venice and elsewhere in Italy are now owned by the Chinese. In Venice they sell their own cheap glass products to compete with the high-quality local Murano glass and they find plenty of buyers. As long as the Chinese glass is labeled “Made in China” it is perfectly legal, as much as the Venetians themselves hate it. We went into one shop that had an Italian salesperson. He told us not to buy anything as it was all Chinese junk.

    The Chinese, to their credit, have been promoting the so-called Belt and Road Initiative or BRI plan, which aims to establish a trade link connecting China by sea and land with southeast and central Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa using a network of roads and both rail and sea connections. It is not unlike the ancient Silk Road which spanned Asia and penetrated into Europe by way of the Italian merchant republics, most notably Venice. Northern Italy is seen as a key component or even the European hub for the new venture and Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte is prepared to sign an agreement with Beijing to develop the initiative further. Conte is doing so over objections from Washington, of course.

    As Mark Twain put it, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” Indeed.

  • US Airstrike Wipes Out Allied Afghan Base In 'Friendly Fire' Incident

    In the latest bizarre story to come out of the US “endless war” in Afghanistan, American warplanes obliterated an allied Afghan military post in an act of “self defense” on Wednesday. 

    The incident took place in the tribal Uruzgan province of south-central Afghanistan and reportedly began when a joint convoy of US troops and Afghan Special Forces came under fire by another unit of Afghan ground troops in what appears a major instance of accidental friendly fire resulting in a devastating two dozen total casualties on the Afghan side.

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    US DoD file photo: coalition jets in operation over Afghanistan. 

    The incident is under investigation, but US mission spokesman Bob Purtiman appeared to excuse US actions in a statement on Thursday: “We are operating in a complex environment where enemy fighters do not wear uniforms and use stolen military vehicles to attack government forces,” he said.

    American forces indicate they came under attack by an unknown entity. US planes flying overhead then destroyed the Afghan army post (described by the Pentagon as a “checkpoint”), which killed at least six soldiers and wounded nine others at the small base which housed a total of 17.

    The US side reported no deaths or injuries, though the Pentagon would likely not release such information until a full investigation is concluded. 

    The US Department of Defense confirmed the incident on Wednesday, which it described as a mistaken “example of the fog of war”. Pentagon Spokesperson Sgt. First Class Debra Richardson told The New York Times: “The U.S. conducted a precision self-defense airstrike on people who were firing at a partnered U.S.-Afghan force.”

    Ironically US officials described the aerial bombing of the allied Afghan post as a “precision airstrike,” per the AP: 

    The soldiers were killed by friendly fire Wednesday in what was supposed to be a precision airstrike by U.S. forces supporting Afghan soldiers battling insurgents near the city of Tarin Kot in Uruzgan province.

    It was the second major incident to cause Afghan casualties following a prior fight with Taliban: “For the second time in a few days, an Afghan Army base was destroyed on Wednesday — but this time by American airstrikes that followed a firefight between the Afghans and Americans, Afghan officials said,” the NYT report noted. 

    Last year the Pentagon acknowledged that war in Afghanistan is costing American taxpayers $45 billion per year, with a number of public studies putting the total figure at over $1 trillion since the US war began nearly two decades go. 

    The “endless war” has become more expensive, in current dollars, than the Marshall Plan, which was the reconstruction effort to rebuild Europe after World War II.

  • Whistleblowers Say NSA Still Spies On American Phones In Hidden Program

    Authored by Nafeez Ahmed via Medium.com,

    Meanwhile, the bulk of the NSA’s surveillance and “offensive” information warfare capabilities remain completely unknown…

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    On Monday 4th, the New York Times reported that the National Security Agency has “quietly” shut down a controversial phone records surveillance program revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.

    The claim was made by a senior Republican congressional aide who told the newspaper that the Trump administration had stopped using the program, which analyses the domestic call and text logs of American citizens, due to technical problems.

    On Twitter Snowden hailed the news as a “victory”, while Intercept journalist Glen Greenwald, who broke the Snowden story to international acclaim, took the story at face value. Neither of them raised the obvious question  –  is the “shut down” of this program merely a smokescreen to continue spying on American phones under new or different secretive programs?

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    Since then, further doubt was cast on the NYT report when NSA chief General Paul Nakasone refused to confirm or deny the story. But he did tell a major security conference on Wednesday that the agency was still “in a deliberative process” about whether to use a revamped version of the vast database of American phone records.

    All of this, however, is an elaborate ruse. According to two former top NSA officials interviewed by INSURGE, there is no credible reason to believe that NSA phone surveillance has truly been shut down.

    What shut down?

    When the NYT story broke, I reached out to two former senior NSA officials, Russ Tice and Thomas Drake, to find out what they thought.

    Both of them told me that the NSA’s shut down of this particular program did not imply an end to domestic phone record surveillance, but quite the opposite — that the program had been superseded by superior technology.

    According to Russ Tice, a former senior NSA intelligence analyst who had previously worked with the US Air Force, Office of Naval Intelligence and Defense Intelligence Agency, the latest claim that the NSA was rolling up phone surveillance beggared belief.

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    “Why would anyone believe a bloody word of what NSA says about their mass domestic surveillance programs?” said Tice, who was the first NSA whistleblower who exposed unlawful surveillance and wiretaps of American citizens as early as May 2005.

    “They have lied repeatedly in the past and they are likely lying now. They have been collecting meta data and content, word-for-word, both voice and text, for some time now.”

    I asked Tice how certain he was that the NSA was still conducting phone surveillance of Americans in the United States. “Of course NSA is still conducting phone and computer comms surveillance and yes, ‘wider programs’ go on and a new massive program that is more efficient is likely to have already been implemented,” he told me.

    The real reason the current program has become defunct is because there is now better technology for more advanced surveillance.

    “If anything, they no longer need this particular program to parse the card catalog — meta data — and can mine the content data directly with enhanced algorithms and processing and strapping. And when there is no pushback capability, congress is at the mercy of NSA to inform them on NSA’s abuses.”

    Hidden programs under secret interpretations of different laws

    Thomas Drake, a former senior executive of the NSA who blew the whistle on illegal mass surveillance, waste and mismanagement at the agency several years before Snowden’s revelations, agreed that NSA phone surveillance “continues in other forms” in spite of the closure of this particular program.

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    Much has been made of the impending expiry of the USA Freedom Act of 2015, due this December, under which the current phone surveillance program is run. But Drake told me that the NSA simply doesn’t need the Freedom Act to authorise continued warrantless phone surveillance of American citizens in the homeland.

    Surveillance can still continue, he said, “under yet other special, exigent, exceptional authorities and programs — including Section 702 and Executive Order 12333 — hiding in secret.”

    Drake acknowledged that the NSA was also shifting toward adapting to widespread the changes in technology use, which could well have made the old program less than useful. “Communications using traditional land line and cell phone numbers and regular cellular text messaging is increasingly taken place on other messaging apps,” he added. “With respect to other authorities and cut outs, there are yet still other surveillance players and actors, too.”

    In a series of tweets about the subject, Drake warned that the NSA’s recent history hardly vindicated the agency’s claims:

    “All these domestic spying programs fundamentally violated the Constitution, FISA & 4th Amendment on a mass scale, then went under cover of secret FISC approval, secret interpretations of law & then passage of unconstitutional ex post facto laws to make them ‘legal’.”

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    Tice and Drake’s views corroborate an independent analysis by The Register, which observes that the association of the Freedom Act’s Section 215 program with phone metadata could be advantageous for the agency:

    “If the NSA offers to give up its phone metadata collection voluntarily, it opens up several opportunities for the agency. For one, it doesn’t have to explain what its secret legal interpretations of the law are and so can continue to use them. Second, it can repeat the same feat as in 2015 — give Congress the illusion of bringing the security services to heel. And third, it can continue to do exactly what it was doing while looking to everyone else that it has scaled back.

    Here’s one thing we are sure of: the NSA has already figured out how to get all the information that was gathered through the metadata part of Section 215. It will be through a different law under a different secret legal interpretation.”

    A history of subversion

    According to Tice, illegal NSA surveillance was targeted across the federal government in order to secure political leverage. He describes this use of surveillance as a counter-democratic tool allowing the agency to pressure elected leaders across the House and Senate.

    Between 2002 and 2005, he said, he discovered that the NSA had been targeting all communications of Congress, FISA, the Supreme Court, senior Pentagon officials, the media, and even future presidential prospects.

    The NSA was essentially “collecting fodder for their lists of dirt for blackmailing all levels of top government officials”, said Tice. The idea was “to ensure they had leverage with those that could conduct oversight.”

    But NSA surveillance extends far beyond this to offensive capabilities which remain undisclosed to this day.

    Tice said that due to his role at the NSA, he was aware of a highly classified program of activity which has never been revealed before, concerning ‘Special Access Program (SAP) Offensive Information Warfare’.

    SAP refers to what Tice describes as the “black world”, an arena of completely unaccountable projects to develop technologies with frightening reach and power. “These programs go very far beyond just collecting communications — they can reach out and touch you, and cause great, even grave, tangible harm.”

    “I am talking hardcore offense. The Title 10 and Title 50 restriction did not apply to my world. As I was once told at an after action briefing when I brought up some collateral damage we had caused, ‘We are above the laws and any form of oversight, we do a we please. So just chill out Russ’. I was thinking, holy shit, we are out of control. Then later I was even more horrified to realize he was correct, we had no controls on us.”

    When I asked Tice to provide further detail on these offensive information warfare capabilities, he said that he declined to elaborate.

    But he did emphasise that Snowden’s revelations on mass surveillance represent a tiny tip of the iceberg on what the NSA has been doing. He claims that a whole black world of secret programs exists, largely funded by the trillions of dollars that have gone missing from the US Department of Defense. These have gone to “black programs that are hidden, in many cases, from Congress.”

    ‘Ghost’ black programs

    There are three different forms of SAP, Tice said: acknowledged, unacknowledged, and “Ghost” black programs. ‘Acknowledged’ programs are known to Congressional and Senate representatives sitting on the defense and intelligence committees.

    In contrast, ‘unacknowledged’ black programs are known to a select number of representatives — the top majority and minority chairs and members in the defense and intelligence committees. On rare occasion, a single select member of the House might come to know by invitation only.

    Then there are ‘Ghost’ black programs which the Pentagon and intelligence agencies “hide from all of Congress,” said Tice. “Many of these programs involved cutting edge technologies that are extremely expensive. I was an advanced technology analyst for many of these programs that included applications in space technology.”

    During Tice’s tenure, these programs were only operational outside the United States. “The real question is whether the NSA has now begun to subject the citizens of the USA to their formidable black world offensive information warfare capabilities. There will be no recourse against Big Brother when it wields NSA’s weapons domestically against us all.”

    Twelve years ago, Tice testified before the House Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations. He told the committee that although the NSA’s Special Access Program might have violated the Constitutional rights of millions of American citizens, neither the committee members nor even the NSA inspector general had the necessary security clearances to be told about the programs, let alone reviewing them more formally.

    Tice was scheduled to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee a week later about a “different angle” of NSA surveillance, but this never happened. Tice said that at the time the Pentagon and NSA had “told Congress they could not talk to me because they did not have the proper security clearances.”

    In short: don’t believe the chorus of headlines implying that the NSA is shutting down its bulk surveillance program. Far from it. The agency is merely evolving and recalibrating, and as usual, very few in the press, Congress and US government are asking the awkward questions that urgently need to be asked.

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    Published by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a crowdfunded investigative journalism project for people and planet. Please support us to keep digging where others fear to tread.

  • What Happens In An Internet Minute In 2019?

    During an average workday, a single minute might seem negligible.

    If you’re lucky, a minute might buy you enough time to write a quick email, grab a coffee from the break room, or make small talk with a coworker.

    But, as Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins notes, in other situations, a minute can also be quite extraordinary. Imagine being a quarterback in the Superbowl in overtime, or finding yourself in a life-and-death situation in which every second counts towards the outcome.

    Visualizing an Internet Minute

    When it comes to gauging the epic scale of the internet, it would seem that each minute leans closer to the extraordinary side of the spectrum.

    Today’s infographic from @LoriLewis and @OfficiallyChadd aggregates the online activity of billions of people globally, to see what an internet minute looks like.

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    How is it possible that 188 millions of emails are sent every minute? How does Google process 3.8 million search queries in such a short span of time?

    Simply put, the number of actions packed into just 60 seconds is extraordinary.

    A Side-by-Side Comparison

    The internet is incredibly dynamic, which means there are always new and interesting segments that are emerging out of the internet’s ether.

    To get a sense of this, take a look at the comparison of last year’s version of this graphic with the more recent entry:

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    Platforms such as Instagram and Netflix continue to grow at a blistering pace, while new categories such as smart speakers are quickly building a strong foundation for the future.

    Last year, for example, only 67 voice-first devices were being shipped per minute – and in 2019, there are now 180 smart speakers being shipped in the same window of time.

    What will this look like in 2020?

    Going Sideways or Backwards

    Interestingly, even as more and more people gain access to the internet around the world each year, there are still parts of the web that are plateauing or even shrinking in size.

    You’ll see that Facebook logins and Google searches both increased only incrementally from last year. Further, the amount of emails getting sent is also quite stagnant, likely thanks to to the rise of workplace collaboration tools such as Slack.

    Snap is another story altogether. In the last year, the app saw a decrease in millions of users due to the infamous redesign that helped torpedo the app’s rising popularity.

    Regardless, we’re certain that by this time next year, an internet minute will have changed significantly yet again!

  • North Korea Mulls Suspending Nuclear Talks, Kim To Announce Decision Shortly

    Shortly after a de minimus reaction to the Bank of Japan’s economic downgrade, JPY surged against the dollar on headlines from Russian news agency Tass that North Korea is mulling suspending denuclearization talks with the US.

    TASS reports, citing Deputy Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui at a press conference in Pyongyang, that North Korea is mulling suspending denuclearization talks with the US.

    “We have no intention to make concessions to the US requirements [put forward at the Hanoi summit] in any form, much less the desire to conduct such negotiations,” said Choi Son-Hee.

    North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un will make an announcement on his decision about the nation’s further plans after the failed talks in Vietnam, Tass says.

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    At the same time as these headlines hit, Reuters reports that Chinese Premier Li Keqiang , coincidentally, called for “patience in dealing with Korean peninsula issues,” adding that “China’s stance on denuclearization in North Korea is unchanged.”

    Li urges “promoting dialogue between North Korea and the U.S. toward eventual outcome that all parties would like to see.”

    Coordinated?

    Safe-haven bid for Yen as carry traders derisk (perhaps as first in line of any missile tests)…

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    And cue the “fire and fury” tweet from President Trump.

     

  • US Officials Offered My Friend Cash To Take Down Tehran’s Power Grid

    Authored by Sharmine Narwani, commentator and analyst of Mideast geopolitics based in Beirut

    It took a country-wide power outage in Venezuela, whispers of a cyberattack, and smug tweets from US officials to make me suddenly recall the cloak-and-dagger story of a close Iranian-American friend nine years ago.

    My friend, an engineer  —  who I will not name for obvious reasons and who I will call ‘Kourosh’ for the purpose of this article  —  revealed to me in 2010 that he was approached by two “State Department employees” who offered him $250,000 to “do something very simple” during his upcoming trip to Tehran.

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    Kourosh was freaking out because he didn’t know how these guys knew he was going to Iran in the first place, and how they knew he was “cash-strapped,” in the second.

    He wasn’t a particularly political person, though he had participated in some DC protests in the aftermath of the hotly contested 2009 presidential elections. He was just one of thousands of Iranian-American engineers in the Washington-Maryland-Virginia technology belt looking to make a decent living.

    Kourosh told the US officials that he was not interested, that if Iran needed to make changes, Iranians inside the country were the only ones who should do it.

    I begged him to let me write this story, but he was very nervous and declined. Over the next year or two, I pushed some more and he gave me further information, but wouldn’t budge on its publication.

    Here’s what he revealed: The State Department guys had since approached him a second time. They offered him further details about the job. They wanted him to disable Tehran’s power grid in exchange for the $250k. They needed someone with technical skills, but said the job was a simple one. He would have to go to a specific location in the Tehran area with a laptop or similar communication device and punch in a code.

    Kourosh even told me the code. Said he had memorized it and could recite it in his sleep. Here it is: 32-B6-B10–40-E (symbol for epsilon).

    Okay, that’s not the actual code, but it looks exactly like that  —  same format, same sequence and amount of numbers and letters. I don’t feel comfortable publishing the code in case it is still relevant  —  sorry. If anyone knows what this code could be, please comment below.

    A colleague with an engineering background has this to say about it:

    “This could be a password for power grids or any equipment that is governed by an electronic or computer system. Manufacturers have codes they use for de-bugging or resetting a system. Control systems are all electronic and sometimes for any reason (like an earthquake) something is triggered and the system goes off. And then you reset it within the vicinity of the system usually and feed in the new code. You don’t have to physically be there if you can hack into it, but that’s of course harder. If they (the Americans) needed to have someone physically there during the sabotage attempt, it probably means they didn’t have remote access to the system.”

    I don’t actually know why Kourosh received that level of detail unless he was willing to go through with this act of sabotage on behalf of the US government, but he assured me he would never consider it — that he was just “curious” during the second meeting. “No way,” he told me. “Imagine it I did it and someone’s grandmother or father died because their life support machine switched off.”

    I remember these details because I discussed it with a number of people in and around 2010, without disclosing Kourosh’s name. Today, I dug up the old Facebook message I sent to Iranian-American author and activist Trita Parsi of the DC-based National Iranian-American Council (NIAC), a fellow Huffington Post blogger at the time. Trita gave me permission to post screenshots here:

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    Disclosure: My Iranian-American husband and I ran an internet company in the telecommunications industry in Washington years ago and I was a founding member of the Iranian-American Technology Council, so I knew a lot of engineers and technology folks from that very background.

    I recall writing to Trita precisely because he was so keyed into the political heart of this community. It would be extremely dangerous for myself and colleagues in my industry if the US government was recruiting Iranian-American civilian engineers as saboteurs in third countries.

    This deep-dive by investigative journalist Whitney Webb into Venezuela’s power outage reveals some interesting details about a Bush administration cyberattack plan against Iran. Exposed by the New York Times in 2016, the “Nitro Zeus” plan — which involved the US Cyber Command — would, among other things, target crucial parts of Iran’s electricity grid.

    Take note, however, that US officials asked Kourosh to sabotage Tehran’s power grid during the Obama administration. Obviously aspects of the Nitro Zeus plan remained on the table despite a switch in government, political parties and policies.

    Back to Venezuela

    It’s been a grueling week for Venezuelans dealing with the nationwide blackout that has brought the country to a standstill. Last Thursday an “accident” at the Guri Dam power plant in Bolivar state — which generates around 80% of the country’s electricity — left at least 20 out of 23 Venezuelan states without electricity.

    As power started to flood back to central states, a second “cyber attack” on Saturday plunged the country back into darkness. Government authorities have charged US officials with launching the attack on Venezuela’s electricity infrastructure and say they will present evidence of this to the United Nations and other international organizations.

    The US has countered, blaming the power outage on corruption and infrastructure neglect by the government of President Nicolás Maduro — against whom Washington has been staging a rather unsuccessful coup effort these past months.

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    But in the midst of this to-and-fro between longtime adversaries, insightful news reports and analysis are starting to emerge, suggesting that a US cyberattack against Venezuela’s power grid is actually a very possible — even likely — scenario.

    Says Forbes Magazine‘s Kalev Leetaru:

    “In the case of Venezuela, the idea of a government like the United States remotely interfering with its power grid is actually quite realistic. Remote cyber operations rarely require a significant ground presence, making them the ideal deniable influence operation.”

    “Widespread power and connectivity outages like the one Venezuela experienced last week are also straight from the modern cyber playbook. Cutting power at rush hour, ensuring maximal impact on civilian society and plenty of mediagenic post-apocalyptic imagery, fits squarely into the mold of a traditional influence operation,” he continues.

    For those of us who have spent years covering US irregular warfare in the Middle East, infrastructure targets are part and parcel of these wars — sometimes via direct strikes, other times via proxies and sabotage operations.

    I’m not just talking about cyberattacks like the US/Israeli-made Stuxnet virus that destroyed hundreds of centrifuges at Iranian nuclear facilities.

    In Syria, for instance, the US military specifically targeted major economic infrastructure under the guise of ‘fighting ISIS.’ These include but are not limited to oilfields, wells and facilities, electrical transformer stations, gas plants, bridges, canals, a number of vital dams and reservoirs in the country’s northern agricultural belt — and power generation facilities.

    And US-backed proxies  —  part of the Pentagon and CIA’s ‘irregular army’ in Syria  — targeted bread factories, wheat silos and flour mills to deprive a population of basic food staples.

    As opposed to conventional wars, US irregular warfare seeks to covertly use influence ops to turn the largest part of a country’s population, the “uncommitted middle,” into supporting regime-change. Destroying infrastructure, creating shortages, unleashing political violence, propaganda dissemination — these are all steps outlined in the US military’s Special Forces Unconventional Warfare manual to create a disgruntled population that will turn on its government.

    And cyber warfare is the newest theater of engagement for the Pentagon, which is now openly ramping up its investment in “lethal cyber weapons,” regardless of the civilian casualties these attacks will leave in their wake.

    So far in Venezuela around 20 people are reported dead due to the blackouts, though I’ve seen some opposition sources place that number north of 70.

    Is Venezuela’s blackout part of US cyber warfare against a Latin American adversary? Has the US engaged in cyber warfare against Iranian infrastructure?

    Does a duck quack?

    Follow me on Twitter and Facebook if you like. All my work is archived on my website Mideast Shuffle.

  • Citadel May Scrap Plan For New York Headquarters After Amazon Fiasco

    Shortly after it was revealed that Citadel’s billionaire founder, Ken Griffin, purchased a New York penthouse for the record price of $240 million in January confirming once and for all that frontrunning retail orders really does pay, speculation grew that the Chicago-based hedge fund was relocating from the Windy City to the Big Apple. However, following Amazon’s recent close encounter with New York socialists which prompted Bezos to scrap plans for a Long Island City HQ2, Griffin may stick to frontrunning the CME instead of the NYSE.

    In an interview with David Rubenstein on Bloomberg TV, Griffin said he’s less likely to move Citadel’s headquarters to New York City in the wake of Amazon.com’s decision to abandon plans to expand into Queens.

    “Amazon opting out of New York is heartbreaking,” Griffin said, noting that he had been contemplating shifting his main office from Chicago and making New York his primary home when he spent a quarter billion dollars for a modest pied-a-terre near central park.

    Griffin’s purchase came two years after Citadel signed a lease to become the anchor tenant in a skyscraper at 425 Park Avenue (which will be completed in 2020), eight-tenths of a mile from Griffin’s new apartment (vertical travel not included). Griffin reportedly bought the place because he needed somewhere to stay when in town.

    However, Griffin said he has been discouraged by the political climate in the city that resulted in Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos’s decision in February to reverse plans to make Long Island City the retail giant new hub.

    “The Amazon event has been a huge backtrack in our internal planning,” Griffin told Bloomberg after the broadcast interview. “The current climate in New York has dramatically reduced our interest in moving our headquarters here. Successful firms develop talent. That creates success within those firms and then some people leave to start other businesses or drive other success stories. That’s why Silicon Valley is so remarkable.”

    Griffin said Amazon’s decision was “a loss for everybody.”

    There may be another reason why Griffin may be having a case of record buyer’s remorse: In the wake of his splashy apartment purchase, New York lawmakers promptly floated the idea of levying a tax on non-resident owners of luxury units to help finance $40 billion in upgrades to the regional transit system. The so-called “pied-à-terre tax” could raise as much as $9 billion, according to Robert Mujica, the budget director for Governor Andrew Cuomo.

    Is is unclear how much of a discount Griffin would have to offer to a prospective buyer it he wishes to engage in some “high frequency” flipping of his 220 Central Park South apartment.

    Separately, in his interview for “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations” on Bloomberg TV, Griffin said his outlook for the U.S. economy is bright and that the nation is seeing “real wage growth we haven’t seen in a decade.” Echoing views he made in an investor letter in February, he said Italy is headed for “a debt dynamic that’s unsustainable.” Regarding Brexit, the single biggest issue gripping the U.K. is indecision, he said. “Until they pick a path, it deters capital investment,” he said. “Politicians don’t appreciate when they create uncertainty it kills the willingness to invest.”

    Watch the full interview below.

  • Media Hit-Job Continues As Colbert Ambushes Tulsi Gabbard

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    Hawaii Congresswoman and Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard recently appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, where instead of the light, jokey banter about politics and who she is as a person that Democratic presidential candidates normally encounter on late night comedy programs, the show’s host solemnly ran down a list of textbook beltway smears against Gabbard and made her defend them in front of his audience.

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    Normally when a Democratic Party-aligned politician appears on such a show, you can expect jokes about how stupid Trump is and how badly they’re going to beat the Republicans, how they’re going to help ordinary Americans, and maybe some friendly back-and-forth about where they grew up or something. Colbert had no time to waste on such things, however, because this was not an interview with a normal Democratic Party-aligned politician: this was a politician who has been loudly and consistently criticizing US foreign policy.

    After briefly asking his guest who she is and why she’s running for president, Colbert jumped right into it by immediately bringing up Syria and Assad, the primary line of attack employed against Gabbard by establishment propagandists in American mainstream media.

    Colbert: Do you think the Iraq war was worth it?

    Gabbard: No.

    Colbert: Do you think that our involvement in Syria has been worth it?

    Gabbard: No.

    Colbert: Do you think that ISIS could have been defeated without our involvement and without our support of the local troops there?

    Gabbard: There are two things we need to address in Syria. One is a regime change war that was first launched by the United States in 2011, covertly, led by the CIA. That is a regime change war that has continued over the years, that has increased the suffering of the Syrian people, and strengthened groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS, because the CIA was using American taxpayer dollars to provide arms and training and equipment to these terrorist groups to get them to overthrow the government. So that is a regime change war that we should not have been engaging.

    Colbert: So, but if it is someone like Bashar al-Assad, who gasses his own people, or who engages in war crimes against his own people, should the United States not be involved?

    Gabbard: The United States should not be intervening to overthrow these dictators and these regimes that we don’t like, like Assad, like Saddam Hussein, like Gaddafi, and like Kim Jong Un. There are bad people in the world, but history has shown us that every time the United States goes in and topples these dictators we don’t like, trying to end up like the world’s police, we end up increasing the suffering of the people in these countries. We end up increasing the loss of life, but American lives and the lives of people in these countries. We end up undermining our own security, what to speak of the trillions of dollars of taxpayer money that’s spent on these wars that we need to be using right here at home.

    Like I said, this is not a normal presidential candidate. How often do you see a guest appear on a network late night talk show and talk about the CIA arming terrorists in Syria and the fact that US military interventionism is completely disastrous? It just doesn’t happen. You can understand, then, why empire propagandist Stephen Colbert spent the rest of the interview informing his TV audience that Tulsi Gabbard is dangerous and poisonous.

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    Colbert: You got some heat for meeting with Bashar al-Assad. Do you not consider him a war criminal? Why did you meet with that man?

    Gabbard: In the pursuit of peace and security. If we are not willing to meet with adversaries, potential adversaries, in the pursuit of peace and security, the only alternative is more war. That’s why I took that meeting with Assad. In pursuit of peace and security.

    Colbert: Do you believe he is a war criminal? Do you believe he gassed his own people or committed atrocities against his own people?

    Gabbard: Yes. Reports have shown that that’s a fact.

    Colbert: So you believe the intelligence agencies on that. Because I heard that you did not necessarily believe those reports.

    The reason I call Colbert a propagandist and not simply a liberal empire loyalist who happens to have been elevated by billionaire media is because these are carefully constructed narratives that he is reciting, and they weren’t constructed by him.

    Trying to make it look to the audience as though Gabbard is in some way loyal to Assad has been a high-priority agenda of the mainstream media ever since she announced her presidential candidacy. We saw it in her recent appearanceon The View, where John McCain’s sociopathic daughter called her an “Assad apologist” and demanded that Gabbard call Assad an enemy of the United States. We saw it in her recent CNN town hall, where a consultant who worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign was presented as an ordinary audience member to help CNN’s Dana Bash paint Gabbard’s skepticism of intelligence reports about an alleged chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government as something that is weird and suspicious, instead of the only sane position in a post-Iraq invasion world. We saw it in her appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe last month, where the entire panel piled on her in outrage that she wouldn’t call Assad an enemy of the United States. It’s such a common propaganda talking point that the New York Times’ Bari Weiss famously made a laughingstock of herself by repeating it as self-evident truth on The Joe Rogan Experience without having the faintest clue what specific facts it was meant to refer to, just because she’d heard establishment pundits saying it so much.

    This is an organized smear by the mass media attempting to marry Gabbard in the eyes of the public to a Middle Eastern leader whom the propagandists have already sold as a child-murdering monster, and Colbert is participating in it here just as much as the serious news media talking heads are. It’s been frustrating to watch Gabbard fold to this smear campaign by acting like it’s an established fact that Assad “gases his own people” and not the hotly contested empire-serving narrative she knows it is. Gabbard is being targeted by this smear because she challenges US political orthodoxy on military violence (the glue which holds the empire together), so no amount of capitulation will keep them from trying to prevent the public from trusting her words.

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    “I don’t know whether America should be the policemen of the world,” Colbert said after Gabbard defended her position.

    “It is my opinion that we should not be,” Gabbard replied, causing Colbert to launch into a stuffy, embarrassing sermon on the virtues of interventionism and US hegemony that would make Bill Kristol blush.

    “If we are not, though, nature abhors a vacuum, and if we are not involved in international conflicts, or trying to quell international conflicts, certainly the Russians and the Chinese will fill that vacuum. And we will step away from the world stage in a significant way that might destabilize the world, because the United States, however flawed, is a force for good in the world in my opinion. Would you agree with that?”

    Again, this is a comedy show.

    Gabbard explained that in order to be a force for good in the world the United States has to actually do good, which means not raining fire upon every nation it dislikes all the time. Colbert responded by reading off his blue index card to repeat yet another tired anti-Gabbard smear.

    “You’ve gotten some fans in the Trump supporter world: David Duke, Steve Bannon, and, uh, Matt, uh, Gaetz, is that his name? Matt Gaetz? What do you make of how much they like you?”

    This one is particularly vile, partly because Gabbard has repeatedly and unequivocally denounced David Duke, who has a long-established and well-known history of injecting himself into the drama of high-profile conversations in order to maintain the illusion of relevance, and partly because it’s a completely irrelevant point that is brought up solely for the purpose of marrying Tulsi Gabbard’s name to a former Ku Klux Klan leader. Colbert only brought this up (and made Newsweek totally squee) because he wanted to assist in that marrying. The fact that there are distasteful ideologies which also happen to oppose US interventionism for their own reasons does not change the undeniable fact that US military interventionism is consistently disastrous and never helpful and robs the US public of resources that are rightfully theirs.

    This interview was easily Colbert’s most blatant establishment rim job I’ve ever seen, surpassing even the time he corrected his own audience when they cheered at James Comey’s firing to explain to them that Comey is a good guy now and they’re meant to like him. Colbert’s show is blatant propaganda for human livestock, and the fact that this is what American “comedy” shows look like now is nauseating.

    When Tulsi Gabbard first announced her candidacy I predicted that she’d have the narrative control engineers scrambling all over themselves to kill her message, and it’s been even more spectacular than I imagined. I don’t agree with everything she says and does, but by damn this woman is shaking up the establishment narrative matrix more than anybody else right now. She’s certainly keeping it interesting.

    *  *  *

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