“False Flags” Are So Common that U.S. Officials Commonly Discuss Them

Despite the attempt to marginalize the concept, "false flags" are so common that U.S. officials frequently use that phrase.

For example, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell:

Former Director for Transnational Threats on the U.S. National Security Council, Roger Cressey:

Former CIA counterterrorism official Philip Mudd:

Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney, a high ranking Air Force official:

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (and Neocon warmonger) John Bolton:

The Washington Post notes that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved as an acceptable interrogation method

A technique known as "false flag," or deceiving a detainee into believing he is being interrogated by someone from another country.

NBC News points out:

In another document taken from the NSA by Snowden and obtained by NBC News, a JTRIG official said the unit’s mission included computer network attacks, disruption, “Active Covert Internet Operations,” and “Covert Technical Operations.” Among the methods listed in the document were jamming phones, computers and email accounts and masquerading as an enemy in a “false flag” operation. The same document said GCHQ was increasing its emphasis on using cyber tools to attack adversaries.

Washington’s Blog asked high-level NSA official Bill Binney* if he had heard of the term “false flags” when he was with the NSA. Binney responded:

Sure, they were under deception and manipulation programs. I was not involved in doing them; but, I did have to figure out some that the other side was doing. The other side called them “dezsinformatsiya” and Manipulatsiya.” The Brits have been doing this for several hundred years and are quite good at it.

Washington’s Blog asked Philip Giraldi - a former counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer with the CIA - the same question with regards to his experience with the CIA. Giraldi responded:

Yes, of course. We did false flags, and called them that, frequently in the operations directorate using false documentation to indicated that we were nationals of a country that was not the United States. Almost every CIA officer had false third country identification when operating overseas....

We followed up by asking:

Is it fair to say some of the false flags were for the purpose (i.e. premeditated) of blaming another country or group ... not only just in case caught?

Giraldi replied:

Sometimes if it were a covert action attempting to do just that but more often just for cover reasons to make one appear to not be American...

Robert David Steele – a 20-year Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer, the second-ranking civilian in U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence, and former CIA clandestine services case officer - said:

Most terrorists are false flag terrorists or are created by our own security services.

***

In the United States, every single terrorist incident we have had has been a false flag, or has been an informant pushed on by the FBI.

Steele has repeatedly and publicly said (and also confirmed to Washington"s Blog) that he personally carried out a "false flag" attack while working as a U.S. intelligence officer.

Indeed, false flags are so common that there are official rules of engagement prohibiting false flags in naval, air and land warfare.

* William Binney is the highest-level NSA whistleblower in history. Binney is the NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, who served as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees, the 36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency and the NSA’s best-ever analyst and code-breaker, who mapped out the Soviet command-and-control structure before anyone else knew how, and so predicted Soviet invasions before they happened (“in the 1970s, he decrypted the Soviet Union’s command system, which provided the US and its allies with real-time surveillance of all Soviet troop movements and Russian atomic weapons”).

NSA Uses Trick to Spy On Americans

The government is spying on most Americans through our computers, phones, cars, buses, streetlights, at airports and on the street, via mobile scanners and drones, through our credit cards and smart meters, televisions, dolls, and in many other ways.

This week, ZDNet reported that the NSA uses a trick to get around the few flimsy American laws on spying … they shuttle internet traffic overseas so they can pretend they’re monitoring foreign communications:

A new analysis of documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden details a highly classified technique that allows the National Security Agency to “deliberately divert” US internet traffic, normally safeguarded by constitutional protections, overseas in order to conduct unrestrained data collection on Americans.

According to the new analysis, the NSA has clandestine means of “diverting portions of the river of internet traffic that travels on global communications cables,” which allows it to bypass protections put into place by Congress to prevent domestic surveillance on Americans.

***

One leaked top secret document from 2007 details a technique that allows the intelligence agency to exploit the global flow of internet data by tricking internet traffic into traveling through a set and specific route, such as undersea fiber cables that the agency actively monitors.

Leaked NSA document from 2007. (Image: source document)

The document’s example noted Yemen, a hotspot for terrorism and extremist activity. It is difficult to monitor because the NSA has almost no way to passively monitor internet traffic from the cables that run in and out of the country. By shaping the traffic, the agency can trick internet data to pass through undersea cables that are located on friendlier territory.

Goldberg’s research takes that logic and focuses it on US citizens, whose data and communications is out of bounds for the intelligence agencies without a valid warrant from the surveillance court.

The government only has to divert their internet data outside of the US to use the powers of the executive order to legally collect the data as though it was an overseas communication. Two Americans can send an email through Gmail, for example, but because their email is sent through or backed up in a foreign data center, the contents of that message can become “incidentally collected” under the executive order’s surveillance powers.

Thomas Drake – one of the top NSA executives, and Senior Change Leader within the NSA – blew the whistle on this deceptive practice more than a decade ago.

For his troubles, Drake was prosecuted under the Espionage Act and literally framed by the government.

Postscript:  Drake also notes that the government is storing for the long-term just about everything they’re collecting.

But don’t worry … the government would never think of doing anything bad with the information.

Norway's 'CIA' Pushes Plan To Unleash "Facebook Police"

Kripos, Norway"s National Criminal Investigation Service, is reportedly examining the legal aspects of how police accounts could be given access to areas of Facebook that are not open to the public. It would mean police gaining access to closed groups and interacting with members as they search for evidence of criminal activity, the Norwegian newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv reported.

“We have looked into the possibility of creating "uniformed accounts". But we have not decided whether it is something we should do,” communications officer Axel Wilhelm Due told Dagens Næringsliv, via the Local.

As The Telegraph reports, police in Norway and elsewhere have previously used fake Facebook profiles to investigate crimes including smuggling alcohol and tobacco.

Facebook has not given police profiles with enhanced access to private groups but they can apply for access to them in connection with criminal cases, Dagens Næringsliv reported.

Police superintendent Emil Jenssen of Kripos told Norwegian broadcaster NRK:

"We get lots of tips on areas where it is sold bootleg, drugs or other illegal things. Then we go inside these groups to preserve evidence for criminal cases.

"If there is a criminal case we can go to court and get an injunction and send it to Facebook. They send us so the information we need.

"We have the ability to do this in necessity as well if there is danger to life and health. When it goes very quickly, often under an hour. In other criminal cases it takes longer."

The company’s Norwegian press office told the paper that it didn’t want to comment on whether it would permit officially verified police accounts.

But such a decision would be a step forward for Facebook in terms of how it handles transparency surrounding intelligence or law enforcement agencies operating on the site. As the Snowden leaks revealed, Facebook and other tech giants like Google, Microsoft and Apple are already compelled to share our data with the National Security Agency, when it’s asked for.

If police officers are allowed to patrol content on the site, maybe Facebook could abandon some of its convoluted policies for policing what its users can and cannot see.

It also begs the question: Would this officially make “fake news” a crime?

Jay Sekulow: Obama Should Be "Held Accountable" For The "Soft Coup" Against Trump

In light of the recent flurry of leaks by the so-called "deep state", which includes such agencies as the NSA and FBI and which last week lead to the resignation of James Clapper after a phone recording of his  phone conversation with the Russian ambassador was leaked to the WaPo and other anti-Trump publications, an article published on January 12 by the NYT has generated renewed interest. One month ago, the NYT reported that "In its final days, the Obama administration expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections."

The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws. These include collecting satellite transmissions, phone calls and emails that cross network switches abroad, and messages between people abroad that cross domestic network switches. The change means that far more officials will be searching through raw data. Essentially, the government is reducing the risk that the N.S.A. will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency, but increasing the risk that officials will see private information about innocent people.

While previously the N.S.A. filtered information before sharing intercepted communications with another agency, like the C.I.A. or the intelligence branches of the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration, and furthermore N.S.A.’s analysts passed on only information they deemed pertinent, screening out the identities of innocent people and irrelevant personal information, following passage of Obama"s 11th hour rule, "other intelligence agencies will be able to search directly through raw repositories of communications intercepted by the N.S.A. and then apply such rules for “minimizing” privacy intrusions."

In other words, what until recently was a trickle of private data captured about US individuals by the NSA with only a handful of people having full, immersive access, suddenly became a firehose with thousands of potential witnesses across 16 other agencies, each of whom suddenly became a potential source of leaks about ideological political opponents. And with the universe of potential "leaking" culprits suddenly exploding exponentially, good luck finding the responsible party.

However, the implications are far more serious than just loss of privacy rights.

According to civil right expert and prominent First Amendement Supreme Court lawyer, Jay Sekulow, what the agencies did by leaking the Trump Administration information was not only illegal but "almost becomes a soft coup", one which was spurred by the last minute rule-change by Obama, who intentionally made it far easier for leaks to propagate, and next to impossible to catch those responsible for the leaks.

This is his explanation:

There was a sea-change here at the NSA with an order that came from president Obama 17 days before he left office where he allowed the NSA who used to control the data, it now goes to 16 other agencies and that just festered this whole leaking situation, and that happened on the way out, as the president was leaving the office.

Why did the Obama administration wait until it had 17 days left in their administration to put this order in place if they thought it was so important. They had 8 years, they didn"t do it, number one. Number two, it changed the exiting rule which was an executive order dating back to Ronald Reagan, that has been in place until 17 days before the Obama administration was going to end, that said the NSA gets the raw data, and they determine dissemination.

Instead, this change that the president put in place, signed off by the way by James Clapper on December 15, 2016, signed off by Loretta Lynch the Attorney General January 3, 2017, they decide that now 16 agencies can get the raw data and what that does is almost creates a shadow government. You have all these people who are not agreeing with President Trump"s position, so it just festers more leaks.

If they had a justification for this, wonderful, why didn"t they do it 8 years ago, 4 years ago, 3 years ago. Yet they wait until 17 days left.

One potential answer: they knew they had a "smoking gun", and were working to make it easier to enable the information to be "leaked" despite the clearly criminal consequences of such dissemination.

As this point Hannity correctly points out, "it makes it that much more difficult by spreading out the information among 16 other agencies, if they want to target or take away the privacy rights, and illegally tap the phones, in this case General Flynn, it"s going to be much harder to find the perpetrator."

Sekulow confirms, noting that back when only the NSA had access to this kind of raw data, there would be a very small amount of people who have access to this kind of data. "But this change in the Obama Administration was so significant that they allowed dissemination to 16 other agencies, and we wonder why there"s leaks."

The lawyer"s conclusion: "President Obama, James Clapper, Loretta Lynch should be held accountable for this."

Full clip below:

Assange Agrees To Extradition If Obama Grants Chelsea Manning Clemency

Just hours after NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden urged President Obama to "save [Chelsea Manning"s] life by granting her clemency," Wikileaks" founder Julian Assange says he will agree to be extradited to the United States if the president grants clemency to the former US soldier Chelsea Manning, who is currently serving a 35-year sentence for leaking documents.

The US Constitution allows a president to pardon "offenses against the United States" and commute -- either shorten or end -- federal sentences. Obama has so far granted 148 pardons since taking office in 2009 -- fewer than his predecessors, who also served two terms, George W. Bush (189) and Bill Clinton (396). But he has surpassed any other president in the number of commutations, 1,176.

We noted previously that there was a number of high profile cases in front of President Obama as he prepares to leave The White House including Edward Snowden who tweeted yesterday...

Mr. President, if you grant only one act of clemency as you exit the White House, please: free Chelsea Manning. You alone can save her life.

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) January 11, 2017

And now, as AFP reports, Wikileaks" founder Julian Assange has offered himself up if President Obama releases Manning...

If Obama grants Manning clemency Assange will agree to US extradition despite clear unconstitutionality of DoJ case https://t.co/MZU30SlfGK

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) January 12, 2017

Assange has been living in the Ecuadoran embassy in London since June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to face sexual assault allegations.

The Australian former computer hacker said he fears Stockholm will in turn extradite him to the US, where he angered Washington over WikiLeaks" publication of thousands of US military and diplomatic documents leaked by former US soldier Manning.

Manning is currently serving a 35-year sentence in solitary confinement for handing over the 700,000 sensitive documents from the US State Department.

Supporters of the transgender soldier are putting their hopes in a pardon by Obama before he leaves office later this month, although the White House has said the president will not be granting her clemency.

Manning has already made two suicide attempts and currently has an appeal pending before a military court.

Washington has maintained the threat of prosecuting Assange over the 2010 leak, though no charges have been filed.

Interestingly, Assange"s offer comes just days after his uncharacteristically emotional interview with Sean Hannity...

"I have been detained illegally, without charge for six years, without sunlight, lots of spies everywhere. It"s tough... but that"s the mission I set myself on. I understand the kind of game that"s being played - big powerful actors will try and take revenge...it"s a different thing for my family - I have young children, under 10 years old, they didn"t sign up for that... and I think that is fundamentally unjust... my family is innocent, they didn"t sign up for that fight."

Perhaps his hope is that President Trump will pardon him at the end of his term?