[rad-green] US and UK military-intelligence apparatus campaigns to destroy Jeremy Corbyn

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/08/us-uk-military-intelligence-apparatus-destroy-jeremy-corbyn/

[image: image.png]

*Grayzone          December 8, 2019*

*INFORMATION WARS, MEDIA, UK*






*US and UK military-intelligence apparatus campaigns to destroy Jeremy
CorbynDays before Britain’s historic election, the UK’s
military-intelligence apparatus is turning to the corporate media and US
government-funded NATO cut-outs to smear Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn with
evidence-free Russiagate allegations.By Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal*

The popular socialist leader of Britain’s Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn
<https://thegrayzone.com/tag/jeremy-corbyn/>, could be on the verge of
becoming prime minister of the United Kingdom
<https://thegrayzone.com/category/uk/>. And the mere possibility is
terrifying British intelligence services and the US government.

Since Corbyn was elected to the head of the Labour Party in 2015, in a
landslide victory after running on a staunch leftist and anti-war platform,
the corporate media has waged a relentless campaign
<https://thegrayzone.com/2017/05/31/jeremy-corbyn-war-on-terror/> to
demonize and delegitimize him.

With just days remaining before UK’s national election on December 12,
British intelligence agencies and US government-backed organizations have
escalated their attacks on Corbyn
<https://thegrayzone.com/2016/05/06/uk-labour-jeremy-corbyn-coup-antisemitism-smears/>,
borrowing tactics from America’s Russiagate
<https://thegrayzone.com/tag/russiagate/> hysteria and going to great
efforts to portray him — without any substantive evidence — as a supposed
puppet of the dastardly Kremlin.

These government-sponsored attacks on Corbyn, a lifelong anti-imperialist
and former chair of the Stop the War Coalition <http://www.stopwar.org.uk/>,
are far from new. In December, The Grayzone reported on the Integrity
Initiative
<https://thegrayzone.com/2018/12/17/inside-the-temple-of-covert-propaganda-the-integrity-initiative-and-the-uks-scandalous-information-war/>,
a UK government-funded secret network
<https://thegrayzone.com/2019/01/08/new-documents-reveal-a-covert-british-military-intelligence-smear-machine-meddling-in-american-politics/>
of
spies, journalists, and think tanks that rehabilitated Cold War-era
information warfare to demonize Corbyn and smear anti-war leftists as
Vladimir Putin’s unwitting foot soldiers.

But as polls show more and more popular enthusiasm for Labour and its
socialist program on the eve of the vote, and as the prospects of a
Corbyn-led government become increasingly plausible, Western government
spooks have rapidly laundered avalanches of disinformation through the
press, desperately trying to undermine the party’s electoral efforts.

Dozens of misleading hit pieces are circulating in the press that treat
PSYOP specialists and regime-change lobby groups funded to the hilt by
Washington, NATO, and the weapons industry as trustworthy and impartial.

British journalist Matt Kennard has documented at least 34 major media
stories that rely on officials from the UK military and intelligence
agencies in order to depict Corbyn as a threat to national security
<https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-12-04-how-the-uk-military-and-intelligence-establishment-is-working-to-stop-jeremy-corbyn-from-becoming-prime-minister/>
.

A powerful trans-Atlantic disinformation network sponsored by NATO-related
entities and dedicated to spreading fear about Russian meddling has set its
sights on the leftist Labour leader.
Western intelligence cut-outs blame Corbyn’s exposure of NHS scandal on
Russia

On November 27, the Jeremy Corbyn campaign revealed a 451-page dossier
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBtiG5Eb_8w> containing details of secret
negotiations between the UK’s Conservative government and the US to
privatize Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) as part of the Brexit
deal. The explosive revelation put the lie to Prime Minister Boris
Johnson’s promise that the NHS was not up for negotiation.

Less than a week later, a peculiar story dropped in the British media. A
December 2 headline
<https://twitter.com/hendopolis/status/1201627302347624448/photo/1> in the
pro-Tory Telegraph blared that the NHS dossier deployed by Corbyn “points
to Russia.” The liberal Guardian published a similar report
<https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/02/nhs-cache-leak-first-circulated-online-by-group-similar-to-russian-operation>
asserting
that the leaked papers had been “put online by posters using Russian
methods.” And the story gravitated across the Atlantic
<https://www.thedailybeast.com/was-russia-behind-mystery-british-government-nhs-document-leaked-on-reddit-ahead-of-the-election>
thanks
to the neoconservative Daily Beast tabloid.

In every case, the media relied on a single source to link the NHS dossier
– and Corbyn himself – to Russian interference: a supposed data consulting
firm called Graphika, and its director, supposed “information expert” Ben
Nimmo.

Assuring the public that the leak of the documents “closely resembles… a
known Russian operation,” Nimmo simultaneously conceded that “we do not
have all the data that allows us to make a final determination in this
case.”
[image: Ben Nimmo Atlantic Council NATO]Ben Nimmo at the DFRLab’s 2018
Digital Sherlocks conference in Berlin, Germany

Not one outlet covering story bothered to inform readers who Nimmo was, or
offered any detail on the powerful state forces behind Graphika.

In fact, Nimmo is not a data expert or a journalist, but a former NATO
press officer who previously consulted for the covert Integrity Initiative
propaganda farm, which was funded by the UK Foreign Office and dedicated to
spawning conflict with Russia.

Nimmo put his lack of journalistic precision on display when he launched a
bungled 2018 witch-hunt against Twitter users whose postings diverged from
the NATO line, branding several real live humans as Russian bots.

His victims included Mariam Susli
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOUHXqGsJTs>, a well-known
Syrian-Australian social media personality, the famed Ukrainian concert
pianist Valentina Lisitsa
<https://twitter.com/vallisitsa/status/978559232508416000?lang=en>, and a
British pensioner named Ian Shilling.

This April, Nimmo was hired as Director of Investigations by Graphika.
Humbly describing itself <https://graphika.com/our-story> as “the best in
the world at analyzing how online social networks form, evolve, and are
manipulated,” Graphika’s partners <https://graphika.com/graphika-labs> include
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s
Minerva Initiative, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, and the Syria
Campaign – the billionaire-funded public relations arm of the Syrian White
Helmets
<https://thegrayzone.com/2016/10/02/syria-campaign-pr-firm-lobbying-regime-change/>
.

Nimmo also works as a senior fellow
<https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/expert/ben-nimmo/> at the Digital Forensic
Research Lab (DFRLab) at the Atlantic Council, NATO’s unofficial think tank
in Washington.

As The Grayzone has reported
<https://thegrayzone.com/2017/05/19/us-funded-atlantic-council-shills-nato-autocrats-erdogan/>,
the Atlantic Council is a corruption-stained money dump
<https://thegrayzone.com/2019/10/13/dcs-atlantic-council-raked-in-funding-from-hunter-bidens-corruption-stained-employer-while-courting-his-vp-father/>
for
Ukrainian and Middle Eastern oligarchs, as well as Gulf monarchies, the
arms industry, the British Foreign Office and the US State Department.

Its DFRLab was enlisted by Facebook to “identify, expose, and explain
disinformation during elections around the world,” and subsequently
received $1 million from Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire to carry out
its work.

Last October, with guidance from Nimmo and the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab,
Facebook and Twitter deleted the accounts of hundreds of users
<https://thegrayzone.com/2018/10/23/facebook-censorship-of-alternative-media-just-the-beginning-says-top-neocon-insider/>,
including many alternative media outlets maintained by American citizens.

Among those targeted in the coordinated purge were popular alternative news
sites that scrutinized police brutality and militarism, along with the
pages of professional journalists
<https://twitter.com/RachBlevins/status/1050487416488890370>.

Now, in the UK, the Atlantic Council is injecting itself into a national
election campaign, exploiting an atmosphere of Russia hysteria that its
self-styled “information experts” have helped to stoke.

On December 6, Reddit announced
<https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsecurity/comments/e74nml/suspected_campaign_from_russia_on_reddit/>
that
its platform had been used by “suspected” Russian actors to publish the
scandalous NHS dossier that become a centerpiece of Corbyn’s campaign
against Johnson. As usual, the primary source for Reddit’s claim was the
Atlantic Council, which it credited with “provid[ing] us with important
attribution.”

Reddit’s Director of Policy, Jessica Ashooh, is the Atlantic Council’s
former Middle East Strategy Task Force Deputy Director, and an ex-official
of the government of the United Arab Emirates. She was hired by the social
media giant in 2017, at around the same time that Senate Select
Intelligence Committee co-chair Sen. Mark Warner was demanding more
government control
<https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/913155883038801920> over Reddit
on the grounds that it was a potential vehicle for Russian influence.

In a 2016 column
<https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/09/04/what-the-rise-of-the-islamic-state-tells-us-about-donald-trump/>
for
Foreign Policy, Ashooh likened Donald Trump to self-proclaimed ISIS Caliph
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and appeared to lament that “drone strikes on Trump
Tower are probably not coming any time soon.”

She complained that Trump was “giving voice to troubling narratives of
marginalization and disenchantment with the status quo,” and chided the
“elite class” for underestimating him.

Those same elite grievances have animated the campaign to destroy Corbyn, a
left-wing populist whose political views are alternately opposed to
Trump’s. And the same cynical tactics honed in the paranoid passion play of
Russiagate have been redeployed against the Labour leader.

In the most recent intelligence-backed assault on Corbyn, corporate media
outlets have even relied on Nazis and neo-fascist blogs as sources.
Using literal Nazi blog posts to smear Corbyn as a terrorist sympathizer

One of the most shockingly dishonest smears of Jeremy Corbyn was published
in the British tabloid The Sun on December 7.

The story, hyperbolically titled “‘HIJACKED LABOUR
<http://web.archive.org/web/20191207155226/https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10501848/jeremy-corbyn-extremist-network/>’
Ex-British intelligence officers say Jeremy Corbyn is at the centre of a
hard-left extremist network,” claimed the “Labour leader’s spider’s web of
extensive contacts stretch from Marxist intellectuals to militant groups
and illegal terror organisations.”

The piece uncritically echoes the opinions of a right-wing lobby group
called Hijacked Labour, which was founded by former military intelligence
officers with the express goal of ousting Corbyn and purging the Labour
Party’s anti-imperialist faction.

In lieu of any actual evidence, the report relied on a graphical web
created by these conservative disgruntled ex-spies, which attempts to link
Corbyn to terrorism through many degrees of separation — and cites
neo-Nazis to do so.

The conspiratorial web does not show any tangible ties between these
figures, and impugns Corbyn with vague far-right buzzwords like “global
Marxism” and “postmodern neo-Marxism.” The latter term is a non-existent
and paradoxical concoction of ultra-conservative pundit Jordan Peterson
<https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/is-jordan-peterson-the-stupid-mans-smart-person/>,
based on the fascist anti-Semitic myth of “Cultural Marxism
<https://www.salon.com/2019/05/05/a-users-guide-to-cultural-marxism-anti-semitic-conspiracy-theory-reloaded/>,”
which is itself rooted in Nazi Germany’s propaganda on “Cultural Bolshevism
<https://twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/status/1035250685338693632>.”

In fact, the Hijacked Labour website directly references the right-wing
pundit, recommending a Jordan Peterson lecture titled “Postmodernism and
Cultural Marxism <http://archive.md/vNXaP>.” The Peterson screed was
published by The Epoch Times
<https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/trump-qanon-impending-judgment-day-behind-facebook-fueled-rise-epoch-n1044121>,
a right-wing media outfit run by the fascist Chinese cult Falun Gong
<https://thegrayzone.com/2019/09/30/reports-china-organ-harvesting-cult-falun-gong/>,
which maintains that science and race-mixing are demonic and insists Donald
Trump was sent by God to destroy the Communist Party of China.

The anti-Corbyn group of British spooks also implored readers to watch a
video by Thomas DiLorenzo, a right-wing neoliberal economist at the
libertarian Mises Institute, which Hijacked Labour claims “works against
the deconstructive and destructive effects of Cultural Marxism.”

Given the conspiratorial web’s reliance on far-right terminology, it might
not have been a surprise that it also cited literal Nazis as a source.

Critics on Twitter quickly pointed out that the Hijacked Labour website
used by the British media to attack Corbyn cited a neo-Nazi website called
Aryan Unity.

Together with this white supremacist page, the former British military
intelligence officers cited a critique of antifascists published by the
far-right website The Millennium Report. This blog has run blatantly
anti-Semitic posts with titles like, “Why are the Jews so reviled worldwide
<http://archive.md/Y0tuf>? Have they brought this judgment on themselves?”,
“New World Order Pledged To Jews <http://archive.md/Bss6h>,” and “This is
how the ‘Court Jews’ <http://archive.ph/pGsUi> have been strategically
placed into power families over millennia.”

After facing backlash on social media, The Sun article was removed from the
website. And the new URL
<https://www.thesun.co.uk/legal-removal/10501848/jeremy-corbyn-extremist-network/>
for
the post includes the term “legal-removal,” suggesting that the publication
may have been threatened with legal action for publishing the absurd story.

But this was far from the only corporate media attack on Corbyn that relied
on military intelligence apparatus as a source.

British journalist Mark Curtis has expanded his colleague Matt Kennard’s
tally and shown that some 40 media stories have been published in major
corporate media outlets smearing Jeremy Corbyn with the unsubstantiated
claims of British spies.

The UK’s military intelligence apparatus has demonstrated a striking
ability to influence the mainstream media, stirring pseudo-scandals almost
every week. Desperate to prevent the election of the first authentically
left-wing British prime minister, it is no longer disguising its role in
the assault on Corbyn.

But there is one weapon Corbyn boasts that this unelected, opaque element
can only hope for: the hearts and minds of masses of British people. And
this December 12, the people get to decide.

*Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant
editor of The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels
<http://moderaterebelsradio.com/> podcast, which he co-hosts with editor
Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com <http://bennorton.com/> and he
tweets at @BenjaminNorton <https://twitter.com/BenjaminNorton>.*

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