The Campaign to Blame Putin for Everything - Antiwar.com Original by -- Antiwar.com

The Campaign to Blame Putin for Everything - Antiwar.com Original by -- Antiwar.com: Hardly a day goes by without some “news” about the Russian “threat,” and in the past twenty-four hours the hate-on-Russia campaign seems to have picked up speed. After learning from Hillary Clinton that Vladimir Putin is not only responsible for the Trump campaign, but also for the “global nationalist movement” that yanked the British out …

and here are some important points from the article but you should read the article in its entirety at Anti-War.com :

So the same company paid by the Democratic National Committee to echo the party line on the DNC hacks is now telling us that they know the Russians are behind this alleged hack. And yet, as cyber-security expert Jeffrey Carr points out here, there is no way CrowdStrike (or anybody else) could definitively point to Russian “state actors” as the culprits in this or any other case: that’s because the procedure they use in “tracing” a hack is inherently subjective, what Carr calls “faith-based attribution.”

Technical analysis of code and the software utilized by the hackers is less than helpful in identifying hackers: if Chinese characters are found in code, well then you’ve been hacked by the People’s Liberation Army. If Russian characters are discovered, well then it’s Putin’s spies. Except this is nonsense: as Carr explains it, if a Kalashnikov is used in a murder, does that mean the murderer is a Russian? Well, uh, no – and no one would ever make that assumption. And yet this is precisely the sort of “analysis” we’re getting from the hucksters who infest the “cyber-security” industry. In short,the “scientific” analysis marketed by these companies is based on assumptions that cannot be objectively verified.

These companies would like their customers to believe that their conclusions are based on science, but as Carr points out:

“It’s important to know that the process of attributing an attack by a cybersecurity company has nothing to do with the scientific method. Claims of attribution aren’t testable or repeatable because the hypothesis is never proven right or wrong..."

and further:

"...What we are dealing with here is an industry – “cyber-security” – that has a vested interest in promoting the idea that its methodology is “scientific,’ and that it can provide answers to its paying customers who want to know for sure who hacked their computer systems. It wouldn’t do to tell them that no definitive answers are possible, and that any attribution procedure is necessarily based on a whole range of assumptions that are not objectively verifiable. That wouldn’t do much to improve their profit margins. So they market themselves as “scientists” who have all the answers, when, in fact, they have no answers.

This is how a corporate scam turns into a political scam. Reporters looking for “experts” to verify what they already believe, and government officials and partisan players who have a similar agenda, are all too willing to suspend disbelief. A combination of technical ignorance, laziness, and extreme bias produces the kind of “journalism” that is fueling the campaign to attribute every case of hacking to the Russians..."

The Most Important Reaction To Hillary Clinton’s Speech On Trump’s Racism

Yes Trump is possibly a dangerous racist buffoon but once again Think Progress has an article which doesn’t bother to mention Hillary own checkered history on racism or her anti-immigration stance her defense of police shootings and her defense of Mass Incarceration and the War ON Drugs and her mass bombings of Muslim majority countries from Iraq, to Syria, to Libya to her unconditional support of the racist regime in Israel that treats all Palestinians, Muslims, Arabs as a little less than human. So someone at this site should post a more in depth article on Hillary’s checkered racist past and present and if she has changed enough to now be clear of such charges instead of presenting Trump as pure evil and Hillary supposedly on the side of the Angels?.

and :

"...Oh, those rascally Russkies are everywhere! According to our news media, they are not only responsible for the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, but Putin’s spies have also gotten their mitts on the computer files of the Clinton Foundation. The same evidence-free rationale – promulgated by the same “cyber-security” companies in the pay of the Democrats –   is utilized to validate this latest claim. And indeed a Bloomberg piece on the alleged hack informs us that

“If the Democrats can show the hidden hand of Russian intelligence agencies, they believe that voter outrage will probably outweigh any embarrassing revelations, a person familiar with the party’s thinking said.”

Deny, deflect, distract – that’s Hillary’s strategy. With a compliant media in tow, so far it seems to be working, at least to the extent that Russian hackers are now generally accepted as a veritable arm of the Trump campaign – when, in fact, there is absolutely zero evidence that Russian state actors are involved in any way. We haven’t seen this level of deception since the ginned up “evidence” of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction.”

This entire conspiracy theory is based on a much broader one, which has been pushed by a number of groups with a vehemently anti-Russian cold war agenda. The Legatum Institute, headquartered in Britain, as well as the usual neoconservative suspects in this country, have long maintained that the Russians, while militarily and economically weak, have turned to “information warfare” as their primary instrument of “aggression.” Legatum has been pushing for a government-subsidized “anti-disinformation” agency to combat this new “threat,” as well as urging outright censorship of Russian state-subsidized networks such as “Russia Today” and “Sputnik.”
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