As in Nineteen Eighty Four, US/UK intelligence-media complex invents information for propaganda

The UK Ministry of Defence is operating a “service” whereby it “tweets” intelligence updates regarding the Special Military Operation in the Donbas, as the Russians call it. This Sunday, it published a statement that reads as follows:

In response to mounting losses, the Russian armed forces seek to bolster troop numbers with personnel discharged from military service since 2012.

In the previous FBEL article, it was explained that the Russians didn’t have to risk sustaining high numbers of casualties (and therefore could afford to be hugely outnumbered), and that it was difficult to see how this could be happening (as claimed by the US/UK/Ukraine) if there was an emphasis in the Russian military doctrine on using stand-off firepower to destroy or debilitate the enemy.

So, it looks very much like the UK MoD is doing that which the US Government has been reported as admitting to this last week to doing, namely inventing information purely to fight an information war against Russia. Portrayed as some kind of revolutionary mode of warfare, it appears to be, in fact, and regardless of claims to it being a valuable weapon of sorts, an effort to justify lying and being caught in a lie. NBC had the details:

U.S. officials said they had indications suggesting Russia might be preparing to use chemical agents in Ukraine.

President Joe Biden later said it publicly. But three U.S. officials told NBC News this week there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the U.S. released the information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions.

It’s one of a string of examples of the Biden administration’s breaking with recent precedent by deploying declassified intelligence as part of an information war against Russia. The administration has done so even when the intelligence wasn’t rock solid, officials said, to keep Russian President Vladimir Putin off balance.

So, this says that information was invented to accuse Russia so that guilt could be attributed to her even before an heinous act had been committed – with the excuse being that the accusation prevented the act from taking place. Not surprisingly, says the NBC piece, “observers of all stripes have called it a bold and so far successful strategy” – which would be because when Putin didn’t commit the pre-crime after all, because he never intended to, the scheme could be claimed to have worked. In the meantime, in the minds of an audience who only ever sees the headlines of the current fashionable news event, and never see the retraction, or any qualification (if there ever is one), Putin has been smeared as one who would use chemical agents in Ukraine.

So, as we can see, regardless of the preposterous claims made for a value worth in military terms, as the reader will soon fully appreciate to be the case, this method is purely about controlling the perspective of a domestic audience – in fact, it is about creating a world view that ignores a reality on the ground that US Government has no real power to shape:

[The idea is to] ‘undermine Moscow’s propaganda and prevent Russia from defining how the war is perceived in the world,’ said a Western government official familiar with the strategy.

As it turns out, this practice of “getting ahead” by inventing intelligence eats its slice of cake as well as having it, because although it now comes out that the claims made, for months, by US Government that Russia would invade Ukraine must have been, according to the model, for preventing that invasion, it was something that happened anyway. Not true, explains NBC on behalf of its masters:

The biggest success of the U.S. information offensive may have been delaying the invasion itself by weeks or months, which officials believe they did with accurate predictions that Russia intended to attack, based on definitive intelligence. By the time Russia moved its troops in, the West presented a unified front.

Here’s the truth of the matter. Russia’s “special operation” came as a complete surprise to the Americans, for reasons that have been stated elsewhere in these pages, and also – as we can now see – for the reason that NATO didn’t have time to evacuate its people, who are now in Mariupol and, it must be supposed, were in Ukraine in connection with the planned offensive against the Novorossiyan separatist states. As has been written about quite extensively at this place, that long period in which there were accusations made against Russia that she was going to commit an unprovoked act of aggression – with actual dates given for it coming and going – were entirely for the psychological pressure to bring to bear (so the plan seemed to have been) on Putin and the Russian leadership so as to stay out of the Ukrainian invasion of Luhansk and Donetsk. It follows that the Americans had no definitive intelligence about Russia’s intentions in Ukraine.

With this previous form in mind, the NBC piece appears to suggest that US intelligence services have information regarding a “phase two” in the Russian “special operation”, and also that it might be characterised as being “low confidence”. It does this by grouping information in a context-related set of paragraphs to create an idea of association between the points expressed:

Just this week, national security adviser Jake Sullivan stood at the White House podium and read out what officials said was more declassified intelligence, asserting that Russia’s pullout from areas around Kyiv wasn’t a retreat but a strategic redeployment that signals a significant assault on eastern and southern Ukraine, one that U.S. officials believe could be a protracted and bloody fight.

The idea is to pre-empt and disrupt the Kremlin’s tactics, complicate its military campaign,“undermine Moscow’s propaganda and prevent Russia from defining how the war is perceived in the world,” said a Western government official familiar with the strategy.

Multiple U.S. officials acknowledged that the U.S. has used information as a weapon even when confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high. Sometimes it has used low-confidence intelligence for deterrent effect, as with chemical agents, and other times, as an official put it, the U.S. is just “trying to get inside Putin’s head.”

Some officials believe, however, that trying to get into Putin’s head is a meaningless exercise, because he will do what he wants regardless.

What appears to be going on here is that the Americans are implying that their announcement of a “phase two” in the Special Military Operation is going to delay or stop the Russians from executing it. Now, it should be noted that there is also a hymn sheet for the same tune of “phase two” that alternative and ear-to-the-ground social media are all singing in unison at this time, and this subject is always treated with a good deal certainty. In fact, this has to be misplaced, because it is only a few Russians in high places who know what is going to happen next in their “special operation” – which could end as soon as the Ukrainians are driven out of Luhansk and Donetsk.

Imagine, for a moment, that the Russians don’t do that which so much expectation has been created for, and they don’t attack central Ukraine? So, this intelligence about “a significant assault on eastern and southern Ukraine” is really only gambling on what even the worst alternative media geopolitical analysts (with their big names and vast fandom) can guess at, so that US intelligence can seen to be correct in predicting the development (with the option to claim that they had delayed it), or it can be seen to have somehow prevented it, depending on what the Russians do – and all the while having scope to admit that the intelligence was not available in order to gain any foresight in any case. Having cake, and eating it too.

The whole point, then, is to maintain an illusion of power which does not actually exist: the apparent power to have influence over the actions of the leadership of the enemy, or the apparent power to exploit Russian weakness and know the best laid plans of the enemy, or the secrets that he tries the hardest to conceal. In truth, none of this exists: the Americans have admitted that they invent intelligence.

Of course, where declassified intelligence has no basis in fact, it can have no effect in reality, and it was a long time ago, it seems, that this site told its audience that “Mi7 propaganda is not going to change the outcome on the ground in any direct way”, and that “war propaganda as a matter of civil control” is always produced by the UK intelligence media complex (and people don’t realise it).

Of course, the quotes are about the UK situation, but things are entirely the same with the US intelligence-media complex, for the two work exactly the same and to the same purpose. Indeed, the following quote, which is from the FBEL article linked to above secondarily, works for any media producer in Anglo-globalist Empire of Lies:

…if one understands this genesis of and role for corporate-media [that it has produced war propaganda since at least the Second World War], one can understand why it unrelentingly publishes untruth: because the Big Brother regime for which it travails tirelessly is never wrong.

Remember how it was said above that this declassifying of low confidence intelligence was a matter of US Government having its cake and eating it as well? A matter, in fact, of it never being wrong?

Now, of course, this is an “in-the-eye-of-the-beholder” issue, because people who can find sources that ultimately come from the enemy and its support (and this is why Russian corporate-media has been banned in the Anglo-globalist empire) will know if declassified intelligence has to be weighed against a contrary piece of information.  The NBC piece suggests that there is a concern about this in the Anglo-globalist empire:

But the strategy has its dangers. One of them, the Western official said, is that getting something clearly wrong would be extremely damaging to U.S. credibility and play into Moscow’s hands.

The author suggests that there is a worry about containing the audience of the intelligence-media complex on the plantation of its psychological manipulation and control; in other words, that governments will lose power to do that because of contrary narratives, that may well be buried very deeply, but yet remain discoverable in the public arena.  The US, basically, has felt the need to publicly claim the excuse of national security for the abuse of public good faith in the official narrative – and that is what this all boils down to. Indeed, the admission goes as far as revealing that Ministry of Truth sized allotments of personnel have been rededicated to creating the lies “for the sake of national security”, as if to reinforce the sense of real requirement:

Coordinated by the White House National Security Council, the unprecedented intelligence releases have been so frequent and voluminous, officials said, that intelligence agencies had to devote more staff members to work on the declassification process, scrubbing the information so it wouldn’t betray sources and methods.

Naturally, with this institutionalisation and industrialisation of the lie (or the admission of it), one has to think of Orwell’s book, where huge numbers of frightened and yet eager civil servants work to create fabrications also on an industrial scale, and the reader is again asked to consider an extract from Nineteen Eighty Four that was first quoted in an earlier FBEL article:

But actually, he [Winston] thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.

“Very likely,” it says, “no boots had been produced at all”: in the end, there is no relation between what these agents invent and what exists in reality. Likewise, there is no reason to believe anything that comes from US Government concerning Russia’s “special operation”, nor indeed anything that concerns Russia. And the same can be said of the output from the UK intelligence-media complex.

Note well how the NBC piece says “as the war has proceeded, the [Biden] administration has used intelligence to warn of possible Russian actions and draw attention to Russian military failings” – and isn’t this exactly what the UK MoD is doing when it states that Russia is recalling previously discharged military personnel (the action) because of casualties (the failing)? Straight off the bat, because there is now revelation of the method – we have insight into how the combined US/UK military intelligence-media complex works – we would be acting irrationally indeed to put any credence in this claim by the MoD. Moreover, that we know it would be a claim based on a lie would not leave us struggling to comprehend the incongruity to our understanding of a reality on the ground whereby huge Russian casualties (the Ukrainians claim tens of thousands approaching a tenth of a million) are highly improbable, if not impossible.

Now, that the UK MoD doesn’t also, along with its American counterpart, freely admit that it invents intelligence for “national security” is probably not to do with whether or not British people are increasingly waking up to how they are always being lied to, but instead to do with an arrogance, or perhaps instead a fear, where there cannot be any concession to the state of “never being wrong”. UK Government, it would have us believe, doesn’t lie. It is the archetypal Big Brother, after all. It is the ultimate authoritarian tyrant. This inflexibility (or weaselling), however, is not a bad thing, because stiff and unbending and brittle breaks the easiest.

Update, 11th April:

The UK MoD today has issued an update to warn that Russia could use phosphorus munitions in Donetsk. This is exemplar stuff, according to the NBC piece which is the subject of this article, for having been invented, akin to the American make-believe regarding Russia’s future use of chemical weapons. The Scotsman carries the story, and says…

Russian forces prior use of phosphorous munitions in the Donetsk Oblast raises the possibility of their future employment in Mariupol as fighting for the city intensifies…

Russia’s continued reliance on unguided bombs decreases their ability to discriminate when targeting and conducting strikes while greatly increasing the risk of further civilian casualties.

The allegations of previous use of “phosphorus munitions” by Russia are apparently substantiated by some very flimsy evidence indeed (including one occasion of a bright burning firework in a photo claimed to be a shot of the Kiev skyline – see here). Russia will no doubt have denied previous allegations, and indeed we should also note that during the uprising of the Novorossiyan separatists in 2014, the Russians accused the Ukrainians of using the munition on their own citizens (see the foot of the page).

The UK MoD’s notion that Russia is reliant on unguided bombs is a candidate for the “al-Assad barrel bomb” award for lying; the MoD, if the thought ever crossed its mind that it was a public servant, would do much better  admitting how Russia’s fleet of guided cruise missiles has spoiled its plans for rearming and reinforcing the Ukrainian Nazi junta.

The following images are screenshots from here.