Tag Archives: Cyber warfare

Trump Ordered Secret Cyber Attacks On Iran As An “Alternative” To War Thursday Night, by Tyler Durden

A cyber attack is war, it is not war’s “alternative.” From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

It’s been revealed that President Trump did order an attack on Iran – but not a military assault – instead, the US initiated a major cyber attack against an Iranian intelligence outfit the Pentagon believes was part of last week’s limpet mine incident involving two tankers in the Gulf of Oman.

According to Yahoo Newswhich first broke the story – which was later confirmed Saturday evening by CNN and The Washington Post – the “retaliatory digital strike” was launched on Thursday evening just as the world was bracing itself for possible US airstrikes on Iran:

On Thursday evening, U.S. Cyber Command launched a retaliatory digital strike against an Iranian spy group that supported last week’s limpet mine attacks on commercial ships, according to two former intelligence officials.

The report relies on unnamed defense sources, which further added more details in a CNN follow-up, including that the group is tied to Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and that the spy group had used unique software to track tankers that had been targeted in last week’s June 13 incident.

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The Stories are Beginning to Exceed even the Gullibility of Americans, by Paul Craig Roberts

The government and mainstream media’s concoctions grow loonier and loonier. From Paul Craig Roberts at paulcraigroberts.org:

The past couple of days have seen interesting developments.  The US or Israel struck a Japanese ship with small rockets and tried to blame it on Iranian mines.  The Japanese ship owner put a halt to the false flag event.  He pointed out that the damage was above, not below the water line and that crew members observed objects approaching in the air. https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/06/no_author/the-gulf-of-credibility/ 

In the New York Times, David Sanger, a generally unreliable reporter in my opinion, released what a person with my quarter century of experience in Washington would regard as sensitive national security information when he reported that Washington was putting malware into the Russian electrical grid.  Who leaked this sensitive national security information?  Why aren’t they being arrested and prosecuted for leaking to a reporter?  Why isn’t Sanger himself, like Julian Assange, arrested for trumped-up reasons?  It makes no sense to give to Russia the information in public disclosure as that allows Russia to find and eliminate the malware.  As it makes no sense, it raises the question whether Sanger’s story is correct or merely something handed to him by the NSA which wants to polish its image before it becomes a victim along with Brennan and Comey and Hillary in the attempted Russiagate frameup of President Trump.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/15/us/politics/trump-cyber-russia-grid.html?ref=cta&nl=top-stories?campaign_id=61&instance_id=0&segment_id=14339&user_id=c57a8c2d498023b54c8a416a37b2bb8a&regi_id=21653813ries 

Sanger’s story loses all credibility when he repeats the disproven allegation that “Russia’s Internet Research Agency [is] the group at the heart of the hacking during the 2016 election in the United States. It was one of four operations his so-called Russia Small Group organized around the midterm elections. Officials have talked publicly about those, though they have provided few details.”

Ray McGovern, William Binney and other retired intelligence professionals have proven conclusively that there was no hacking.  The information revealed by Wikileaks was a leak from inside the Democratic National Committee.

How is it possible that David Sanger doesn’t know this?  How can his New York Times editor not know this?

 

Israel and the Trillion-Dollar 2005-2018 US Intelligence Budget, by Grant Smith

It’s not just defense contractors who like big US military and intelligence budgets. From Grant Smith at antiwar.com:

The American public and think tank analysts are not supposed to know precisely how billions in taxpayer dollars flowing into the intelligence community are spent. Even the best plead ignorance. Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy commenting on huge budget increases told the Washington Examiner, “What exactly that signifies, it’s hard to say. Are there new program leads? Are there new acquisitions? It could be new operations or collection programs. We don’t know and we’re not supposed to know.”

Israel is one undeniably large factor behind spending surges since 2005. Israel successfully demanded enormous increases in joint U.S.-Israeli cyber warfare expenditures and benefited from related U.S. contingency planning. Due to onerous secrecy, Americans remain unable to engage in informed public debate about whether what amounts to US subjugation to the Israeli prerogatives driving these massive expenditures should continue.

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