The false premises and promises of PrescienceHFC.com
@ Catriona After following this site since the start, I think the site premises are fundamentally in error and create virtually meaningless results of little use to anyone. I will use as an example a question in my area: When will the Russian Ministry of Justice next designate a media outlet as a foreign agent?
The answer to this question is that Russia will do this in a tit-for-tat against Western declarations of this same kind, and to the escalating diplomatic war. So to make a time-based prediction, we have to back into predicting what the West (USA and pilot fish in Europe) will do. To do that, one must analyze the whole situation and who the actors are. I can go down that path, and I will do so below. But, I must point out that the whole point of intelligence is to support good decision making. And decision making is all about understanding what factors are relevant. Good decision making and good intelligence has nothing to do with these kinds of time-based questions. Fundamentally, such things are not time-based events, they are decision and actor-based, and highly fluid. So presenting such time-based predictions creates results that harm decision making.
I am well aware of the history of crowd-sourced predictions for national defense. I participated rather peripherally with the first incarnation which was aborted because journalists castigated it, and politicians expressed their lack of spine accordingly, so it died. That one was a betting site.
So, let me discuss what must be considered when going into the Russia question above. At the end I will circle back to this site and what it presumes to do, and discuss the error of it. I will also present my motive for why I would take this much time to address a site that I believe is fundamentally predicated on erroneous ideas.
The Russia-West matter
The heart of the personel for the USA’s intelligence to fight the cold war came over at the end of WWII fleeing the Russian advance. These were Ukrainian and Polish Nazi collaborators that we brought in for their language and political understanding of the USSR. Their hatred of Stalin was understandable given what Stalin did in Ukraine with forced collectivization leading to terrible starvation. That hatred was rooted in an older grudge against the empire of Moscow that was centuries old. That grudge is of the kind that one finds in the American southern states that lost the civil war. The Nazis were initially greeted as liberators, but then most of the people found out that the Nazis were on the whole even worse than Stalin. (A curious bit of history. Had the Nazi party been capable of even a little ideological flexibility and made friends with those who wanted to be their friends, they probably would have won WWII in Europe.)
Those people grew like a vine into the intelligence and our defense establishment and by the time of the Carter administration, Brzezinski, who was one of them, took over as National Security adviser. He is the one who convinced Jimmy Carter to give money and weapons to Islamist jihad in Afghanistan. That was done to bait the Russians into invading so that we could support jihad against them. It worked.
“Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.’” — Zbignew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, 1998 interview.
Now let us spin forward to 2014 and the Ukrainian revolution and civil war. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30131108 The bare facts are, the USA and Europe in the form of the IMF and World Bank, competed with Russia for a loan package to Ukraine. The president, Yanukovych, probably never intended to take the European package, it was just a game he was playing to negotiate better terms with Russia. Without going into details, Ukraine’s government was overthrown. What is missing from this article by BBC is two things.
First, there had been a promise, when Ukraine got its independence from the USSR, that Ukraine would never be part of NATO. The reason is simple. Russia has been invaded by Europe many times, and Ukraine is an invasion route into Russia. Anyone who watched the Winter Olympics in Sochi knows that this part of Russia has mild winters. It’s the only part of Russia that does. And Russia knows that its winters are its great defensive weapon. In addition, it is little appreciated that the coastline of Ukraine on the Black Sea is longer than the eastern coastline of the USA from Maine to the tip of Florida. (Let us not get bogged down in Mandelbrotean questions about the length of a coastline depending on the length of our ruler. I am using ordinary measurement.) So, while the BBC article does get it right that Russia was scared by the revolution, it neglects to mention that the effort by the USA and Europe to bring Ukraine into its orbit was a violation of the agreement the West has with the Russian Federation.
Second, before Russia moved military units into Crimea, the government there requested protection for its citizens who were already reporting attacks, such as the pro-Yanukovych supporters who were waylaid on the road as they fled Kiev. So also did the citizens of Donbass in the Ukrainian far east ask for protection. This is a crucial detail and leaving it out is bad reporting. Russia also held a plebiscite and Crimea voted overwhelmingly to return to the Russian Federation. Leaving that out of the BBC article is further biased reporting. Crimea was not historically part of Ukraine for a very long time. It was given to Ukraine by Khruschev as a poltical sop that was thought to be meaningless at the time.
Why would Russian ethnics call immediately for help? I saw, first hand, and heard accounts from survivors of what happened to Russian ethnics in the Caucasus after Republic of Georgia split with the USSR. I employed a Russian ethnic from Ukraine’s west who left because of bigotry against him. Georgia’s independence was founded on a platform of ethnic superiority. Russian ethnics were beaten, hounded, sometimes killed, their assets seized, and the women raped. As an example, I know a woman who was in her late teens when independence happened. She was raped up to several times a day until her father helped her escape and she made her way to the USA as a refugee where she currently resides. She was raped in her apartment building, on the street, you name it. If you would speak to her, you would see the evidence in her face and manner of what this trauma did to her. Her family had been in Tbilisi for 250 years. South Ossetia also asked for help then, but Russia was too weak at the time to intervene.
Now let us look at how the USA, in the person of Barack Obama, and the western media, portrayed the events in Ukraine. The word used to describe the people of the east is “rebels.” And yet, those were the people who did not overthrow their government. Those are the people who did not force their president and members of parliament to flee the country. The spin used in media and by our government since has been Orwellian. To call people who don’t overthrow their democracy “rebels” is straight out of Orwell.
The USA sanctioned Russia for “aggression”. Think about what that looked like to Russia.
Through all of these events in Ukraine there was a key American presence, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son. Joe was vice president of the USA at the time. Hunter was discharged from the Navy Reserve for testing positive for cocaine about 6 months before he arrived in Ukraine. Hunter was given a seat on the board of Burisma, the oil and gas company. Hunter is now either worth hundreds of millions of over a $1 billion. Details are murky, and reportage is next to non-existent. Consider what that looks like to most foreign nations that are aware of it.
Consider what the Hunter Biden matter looks like to Russia. What it looks like is that the USA now operates like a banana republic, even enriching family of the administration in its support for revolutions. This matter is very important because it influences how Russia thinks it must deal with the USA. It makes them believe that our system is deeply corrupt in the way that the Yeltsin years were in Russia. The Yeltsin oligarchic period is the one living example of what American-style democracy looks like for Russians. There is support for the idea that the USA is an oligarchy, although the study is not quite as stark as what I think Russia’s view is.
Now we come to the current period and the Russia investigations against Donald Trump. The decision to blame Russia for the loss by Hilary Clinton to Donald Trump was made in the two days following the election, as this is in the book. John Podesta was already blaming Russia in October of 2016 for hacking his emails. John and Hilary might even believe this. I think it may be preferable to facing the fact they lost on the merits, otherwise known as denial. But it may just be cooked up because they thought they could sell it to damage Trump.
I have found zero evidence for Russian involvement with the DNC email release by Wikileaks. There was no mass data transfer visible. Plus, I am quite familiar with obtaining files from computer equipment. The most common method is direct physical access, and laying a false phishing trail. At least 60% of hacks are done this way according to others, and my opinion is that it’s probably 90%. When reviewing the stunning lack of security for the server used, which was an old Apple machine, it would be child’s play to get those files. Then, we have Craig Murray’s account that he got the flash drive on a visit to the USA and gave it to Wikileaks. Craig Murray is the former rector of University of Dundee and a history professor.
Next is the claimed Facebook manipulation of the election by Russia. Mark Zuckerberg testified that his staff found roughly $100,000 worth of advertising buys from Russian sources. He said that 25% of those ads were never shown to anyone. But the real kicker was that 55% of those ads were bought after the election was over. It is ridiculous enough to suggest that Russia could throw the presidential election with $100,000 worth of advertising when we know that advertising budget for the 2016 election was well into the billions, and we know that spending has a big impact. Add to this disparity in spending that both Democrats and Republicans did far more with Facebook data to target voters (viz. Cambridge Analytica, and Wikileaks recent disclosures that Democrats did the same thing starting with the Obama campaign). We are supposed to believe that 55% of 75% of $100,000, which is $33,000 of Facebook ads that anybody actually saw, determined the 2016 presidential election? That isn’t credible.
Most recently, we have the Skripal case in London that resulted in the UK severing diplomatic ties with Russia. (At least formally.) A nerve agent that Porton Down has not formally identified, has been identified by the press as Novichok. Novichok is just the catch-all name for the Russian nerve agents. I am friends with Jim Ketchum, the former head of human chemical weapons testing at Edgewood, and I have done a fair study of this area. They used to play with VX in the lab. We know that a religious cult in Japan was able to make considerably more nerve agent than was used in London. And I must ask if this agent was “far more deadly than VX” then how did Mr. Skripal and his daughter survive? That all suggests it was an amateur that made something nasty, or else an amateur used an agent taken from the old arsenal that had aged and broken down.
I was close to two hits on gentlemen from the Caucasus, both of which I believe were done using an assassins agent that came out of the KGB. One was Zviad Zhvania, the other Badri Patarkatsishvili. I am not going to name it, but it leaves no forensic trace at all. It causes death within minutes, and the person goes down in seconds. There is no antidote. I do not think the Russian government was involved in Zviad’s death because it was against their interests at the time. I doubt they were involved in Patarkatsishvili’s death either. The latter had made plenty of enemies, and could have easily been killed in Tbilisi if Russia wanted to. After the breakup of the USSR, knowledge of such traceless poisons became available, for a price, if you knew who to ask. Zviad’s case was investigated by the FBI because it was claimed he died of carbon monoxide poisoning. However, Zviad was not the ruddy color that CO poisoning causes. He had no detectable CO in his system. The only thing found was a little injection site under his upper lip. Sampling showed no identifiable poison. That meant Zviad and his bodyguard were killed by one of the traceless ones. (There are a number, including agents that will make a person into a homicidal maniac and leave nothing detectable in their body for autopsy.)
The proposition that the Kremlin would order a hit on a former Russian spy in London using something that would leave a trail like a club footed cow and then botch it is not credible in my view. Christopher Andrew concluded that Russia’s service is better at field operations than the Western ones are. I recommend his book, https://www.amazon.com/The-Sword-Shield-Mitrokhin-Archive/dp/0465003125. But we haven’t yet discussed motive for this assassination attempt, we have just assumed there must be one.
Motive is a big problem in the Skripal case. Moscow had Skripal in custody, and then gave him up. He wasn’t spilling anything new, the Skripal damage was old news. So why assassinate him? Given that the history of the KGB (now renamed FSB) is that great care was taken to avoid being known to assassinate this is even more problematic. Moscow has no reason to want to upset the West at this time. They want sanctions removed. They want de-escalation of the militarism in Europe directed against them.
Who would have a motive to attempt assassinating Skripal? There is only one actor that comes to my mind, and that is the current Ukrainian government or its oligarchs. This government has been called extremely corrupt by Mikheil Saakishvili, the man that John McCain picked to be the next president of Republic of Georgia. I was in Georgia for that transition and a bit after. (The only bloodless turnover of power in Tbilisi ever that we could find, by the way.) Saakishvili is not exactly a choir boy himself, and ended his career having to flee the country of Georgia. He may have redeemed himself a bit by resigning his governorship of Odessa oblast. http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/01/20/the-case-against-saakashvili-ukraine/ When a man like Saakishvili says a government is corrupt, he knows whereof he speaks.
Ukraine is so corrupt now that North Korea got its ICBM technology from the rocket factory in the eastern part that is under control of our so-called friends. Think about that. The government of Ukraine either could not or would not prevent North Korea from getting missile technology that now allows them to hit Washington DC. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/world/asia/north-korea-missiles-ukraine-factory.html
So, we have established that Ukraine is now operating the way a nation like Zimbabwe does, except Ukraine has rockets and scientists. We know that manufacturing a chemical weapon can be done by amateurs in a religious cult. So let’s ask what the Ukraine government wants these days?
The Ukrainian government of Poroshenko wants more aid and weapons. They want both so they can have more to steal for themselves. And they want weapons so they can attack the eastern part of the country in their civil war.
This makes the Ukrainians the most likely parties to do the Skripal assassination gambit. The plotline is straight out of a TV episode committee. “Hey, let’s kill a Russian spy, and do it like Kim Jong-Un killed his brother!” This sort of thing appeals to the TV influence thought processes of modern Westerners and politicians. That the modern media and politicians bought it, hook, line, and sinker speaks volumes.
How much pull do the Ukrainian/Polish nationalist interests have in the West? They may have far more than they are given credit for. In 2015, which was a high point for Ukrainian/Polish nationalist success, this Stratfor piece was published. http://www.businessinsider.com/chilling-predictions-world-future-ten-years-decade-2015-12 My interpretation at the time was that with the success of the Ukrainian revolution, and the acceptance of the Orwellian spin on it by the mass media, the nationalists inside the beltway couldn’t hold back and tipped their hand.
Conclusion
All of that is the background for what motivates what Russia does. I apologize for this being 5 pages long. I did not think I could make the point properly without diving in at least for a surface skim of the history and revisiting the facts of the case.
So let me return to my starting point.
When a siloed question is asked, and a simplistic time-based prediction is requested, this is itself evidence of how gravely off in the weeds we are in the USA today. This question about when Russia would next apply its law creates a mass exercise in “How dumb can we make ourselves?”
I say this because this law in Russia was a direct response to the USA forcing RT to register as a foreign agent in the context of the events discussed above. The implicit ignorance of basic facts in the framing of this question is quite disturbing. Such things s this law in Russia do not appear out of nothing. The reasons and causes are easily visible to anyone who looks and thinks critically. After laying out a brief version of who the players are and what their motives are, it should be clear that without deep knowledge into what all of the players are doing and their motives, any such prediction is meaningless. What is not meaningless is to develop a map of the situation, what the motives are for all the players.
The site I would envision would identify and fill out motive, capability, and probable action potential. In this case that would be players from Vladimir Putin, Obama, Donald Trump, and Hilary Clinton, to the journalists, editors and owners of various media companies. It would include identification and motive of the Ukrainian/Polish nationalist faction. It would also have to include the allies of convenience in the military-industrial complex. What makes each of them tick? What pressures are they under?
As currently organized, this site and its exercises are not a solution to anything. It is, instead evidence of the fundamental problems both in media and in government today. Those problems are, gross ignorance, inability to think critically (the proverbial wet paper bag comes to mind), and the resultant treatment of events as if they were independent and appear with less cause or reason than thunderstorms or influenza.
Forgive me for being rather critical of what is going on at your site. But I think I must speak up.
I think we are on a train headed toward a war that we will absolutely lose. I am the only person that Stephen Cohen at NYU knows of that has been down inside of a working nuclear bomb shelter out in the Russian heartland in the past 20 years. To my knowledge, no other American even knows this network exists. Prof Cohen didn’t appear to know about it. And Russian architecture is fortress architecture. Do the math. Picking a fight and scaring an opponent you will lose to is not smart, but history is littered with such hubris. Sonny Barger, founder of the Hells Angels said, “The most dangerous man is not an angry man. The most dangerous man is a frightened man.”
I think that a fundamental rethink and reorientation is needed by prescienceHFC.com. This is my best contribution to your effort.
