Showing posts with label cyber-warfare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cyber-warfare. Show all posts

Monday, June 17, 2019

Gaslighting the Gaslighter-In-Chief

One of the New York Times's unacknowledged functions is transmitting blatant or cryptic messages to, from, and from within power centers. These messages, usually in the guise of anonymously-sourced news stories, serve both as public propaganda and as a means of pressuring or damaging chosen adversaries, and of dictating both domestic and global policy.

But the article published on Saturday about the United States' deployment of cyber weapons to potentially cripple Russia's entire power grid serves a much broader purpose than the standard saber-rattling by the weaponized oligarchy. It was planted specifically to embarrass Donald Trump with its revelation that the US military had performed an end run around him by deliberately keeping him out of the planning loop for such an attack.

The well-planted article further exposes Trump's own willful ignorance and his aversion to reading the fine print, given that he had willingly signed the bill granting the military this sole authority to launch such a cyber-attack without notifying him - or, for that matter, notifying or consulting with any other future president.

Even as Trump is rightly lambasted for all manner of unseemly dynastic power grabs, serial lying, corrupt practices and gross invocations of executive privilege, he is being at least partially stripped of his authority by unelected leaders and their compliant elected operatives in Congress. It's an intra-class struggle of a big group of oligarchs against one oafish oligarch who doesn't know when to keep his big mouth shut in the interests of his own class. He is a traitor to his class, but not in the good way that FDR was a traitor to his class. Trump is protecting nobody but himself and his immediate clan and by clannish extension, Saudi Arabia and Israel. Thanks to the cosily corrupt Kushner-Netanyahu connection, for example, Trump just had an illegal Israeli settlement in the Golan Heights named after him. It's terrible public relations for a United States which has always marketed itself as a bastion and defender of democracy. 

The Times article, wittingly or not, exposes the truth that the "Trump administration" is definitely not the same thing as President Trump. It is only tangentially related to him. Deliberately or not, it proves the existence of a shadow government, if not a coup government. This unelected, anti-democratic government operates with absolute impunity, while its corporate media stenographers not only collude with it and propagandize for it, they strenuously laser-focus the public's ire against Trump the person rather than at the far more dangerous Trump "administration" - which, really, is simply the convenient name given to the Military-Industrial Complex and the ruling oligarchy as they hide their identities and their agendas behind whatever "democratically" elected individual resides in the White House at any given time.

The Times article elicited the desired reactionary tweet-storm from Trump, who accused the Paper of Record of treason for spilling the secrets of cyber-war but, tellingly, did not also accuse "his" military of treason for the leaking of these secrets. 

He also failed (in public, anyway) to connect the dots between the Times leak and his recent order to investigate the "intelligence community" and the Obama administration for starting the whole #Russiagate franchise. He didn't address the probability that these same agencies and operatives are now getting their own revenge via this past weekend's gaslighting attack against him in the Times. He continues to ignore Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's warning, issued prior to his inauguration, that these agencies have "six ways from Sunday" of wreaking revenge on a president who doesn't acknowledge them as his superiors.

Nevertheless, the dichotomy between Trump and the permanent Security State is cynically bypassed right in the lead paragraph of the article written by the Times national security reporting team of David Sanger (who also served as the willing conduit of the "Obama administration's" leak of its Stuxnet virus deployment against Iran's nuclear program) and Nicole Perlroth:
The United States is stepping up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid in a warning to President Vladimir V. Putin and a demonstration of how the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively, current and former government officials said.
In interviews over the past three months, the officials described the previously unreported deployment of American computer code inside Russia’s grid and other targets as a classified companion to more publicly discussed action directed at Moscow’s disinformation and hacking units around the 2018 midterm elections.
So the Times acknowledges that it had known about the planning for cyber-war for quite awhile before it chose to alert the public over the weekend. "Former" government officials (not necessarily in the current administration) were among their sources. Later in the piece, they reveal that it was Barack Obama who "secretly" ordered the placement of the cyber tools within the Russian grid. So the timing of the story, right after Trump's initiation of a probe into the origins of Russiagate, is suspect. And the political motivations are obvious. The article is another neat way of keeping the Russiagate franchise alive after Robert Mueller found that no conspiracy existed between Trump and Vladimir Putin. It strives to weaken Trump, as the Democrats and their security state cohort have decided that actual impeachment should remain off the table.

And, it sends the not-so-subtle message to Putin that he should consider Trump to be a de facto lame duck president with no real power and that the US war machine will forever be in charge no matter who is president.

It is not until several paragraphs into the saber-rattling article that the New York Times finally, and almost casually. tells everybody (including the president) that he has been duped by the Deep State, largely as a result of his own ignorance and incompetence:
Mr. Trump issued new authorities to Cyber Command last summer, in a still-classified document known as National Security Presidential Memoranda 13, giving General Nakasone far more leeway to conduct offensive online operations without receiving presidential approval.
But the action inside the Russian electric grid appears to have been conducted under little-noticed new legal authorities, slipped into the military authorization bill passed by Congress last summer. The measure approved the routine conduct of “clandestine military activity” in cyberspace, to “deter, safeguard or defend against attacks or malicious cyberactivities against the United States.”
Under the law, those actions can now be authorized by the defense secretary without special presidential approval.
Sanger and Perlroth ascribe no human agency to the mysterious "slipping" of these legal authorities into the military authorization bill. But Trump cannot help but notice that Congress, while waffling on impeaching him, is nonetheless sneakily disempowering him even as it gives "his" administration nearly a trillion dollars a year to wage endless wars.
Two administration officials said they believed Mr. Trump had not been briefed in any detail about the steps to place “implants” — software code that can be used for surveillance or attack — inside the Russian grid.
Pentagon and intelligence officials described broad hesitation to go into detail with Mr. Trump about operations against Russia for concern over his reaction — and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials, as he did in 2017 when he mentioned a sensitive operation in Syria to the Russian foreign minister.
Translation: the reason, beyond party politics, to keep the Russiagate franchise alive is to maintain the legend that Trump is a Manchurian candidate. Without constant deep state gaslighting, he might be tempted to honor his campaign promises and initiate anti-nuclear proliferation talks with Putin in a misguided effort to avert World War Three and total planetary annihilation. Such an overture to peace would be a slap in the face to American Exceptionalism. So, if the public is told that Trump is so dangerous that the ever-so-benevolent war machine is keeping him out of their aggressive planning, then even his imposition of harsh economic sanctions against Russia is rendered meaningless in the minds of a carefully terrorized American public.

All they (the same folks who wanted to deport John Lennon from the United States for criticizing American aggression) are saying is, Give War a Chance.

Thursday, January 7, 2016

Courage Under Joystick

Finally acknowledging that drone attacks take a psychic toll on the people performing them from afar in airless little trailers, the Pentagon plans to recognize these operators with the same military honors accorded to soldiers who kill in more direct physical proximity to their targets.

Since President Obama has made drone operators "increasingly important," according to the New York Times, it's only right that the folks fulfilling his Kill Wish List should be given some long-overdue recognition. Whether Obama and his successors will have the chutzpah to give out Medals of Honor to joystick operators in televised East Room ceremonies remains to be seen, however. It seems highly doubtful, given that the president has steadfastly refused to divulge the names and details of the "enemy combatants" he chooses to obliterate in this highly secretive program. The fact that up to 90 percent of the drone targets turn out to be innocent civilians might make the award ceremonies a bit fuzzy too.

Instead of his eyes welling up and overflowing with tears over wedding parties turned into funerals by his predator drones, Obama would probably have to be satisfied with getting just a little misty...  at the very least, he'll play Misty for us.

Michael S. Schmidt writes that computer geeks who launch cyber-attacks will also be eligible for the bright shiny medals.
“It’s way past time,” said David A. Deptula, a retired three-star Air Force general who pushed the military to embrace drones. “People should be acknowledged and rewarded for their contributions to accomplishing security objections regardless of where they are located.”
Current and former military officials had been deeply divided about whether to recognize the drone pilots. An initial Pentagon plan in 2013 to honor them with a “Distinguished Warfare Medal” was criticized by some veterans’ groups, which feared that the award would rank higher than combat medals like the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart.
Ousted Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel scrapped the first plans for the drone and cyber medals, but now that he's gone, the proposal to honor the office-based warriors of Obama's "smart" foreign policy during his last year in office is gaining new life. 
“As the impact of remote operations on combat continues to increase, the necessity of ensuring those actions are distinctly recognized grows,” said a Pentagon document outlining changes to how the military gives awards and other decorations.
The use of drones has been widely credited with diminishing Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. But civilians have also died in drone attacks, fueling anger toward the United States among Muslims across the Middle East.
Nothing will tamp down anger like the sight of Obama awarding medals to remote-control geeks who turn Muslims into pink mist at his explicit direction, right?

The Pentagon also plans to award more medals to soldiers who are still alive, so that they might at least get some personal enjoyment from them.

And, given that the wars are now permanent, medal recipients will no longer have to wait as long before collecting their shiny objects from the Commander in Chief. It will be a virtual assemblyline of medals, ribbons and plaques.

As war is modernized, so must its rewards be modernized. When all else (like public support) fails, bring out the symbols and put on a show. CNN, Wall Street investors, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley will love it and even help direct it.

Just as the Oscars help sell movie tickets, just as the movies in their turn help sell video game tie-ins, just as the video games help hone the skills of the drone and cyber-espionage geeks of the future, so too will military awards shows and brand new acting categories help to further enrich the war profiteers.

They'll cry for American children killed by guns, but revel in the billions of dollars in lethal weaponry that they manufacture, sell and deploy against other people's children, all around the world.