Information Wars, Media, UK December 8, 2019
US and UK military-intelligence apparatus campaigns to destroy Jeremy Corbyn
Days 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, could
be on the verge of becoming prime minister of the United Kingdom. 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 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, borrowing tactics from America's
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, are far from new. In
December, The Grayzone reported on the Integrity Initiative, a UK
government-funded secret network 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.
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
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 in the pro-Tory Telegraph blared that the NHS dossier
deployed by Corbyn "points to Russia." The liberal Guardian published a
similar report asserting that the leaked papers had been "put online by
posters using Russian methods." And the story gravitated across the Atlantic
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."
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, a well-known Syrian-Australian social
media personality, the famed Ukrainian concert pianist Valentina Lisitsa,
and a British pensioner named Ian Shilling.
This April, Nimmo was hired as Director of Investigations by Graphika.
Humbly describing itself as "the best in the world at analyzing how online
social networks form, evolve, and are manipulated," Graphika's partners
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.Graphika funding DARPA
Nimmo also works as a senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab
(DFRLab) at the Atlantic Council, NATO's unofficial think tank in
Washington.
As The Grayzone has reported, the Atlantic Council is a corruption-stained
money dump 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, 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.
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 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
over Reddit on the grounds that it was a potential vehicle for Russian
influence.
In a 2016 column 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' 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.
Hijacked Labour web Jeremy Corbyn terrorist
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, based
on the fascist anti-Semitic myth of "Cultural Marxism," which is itself
rooted in Nazi Germany's propaganda on "Cultural Bolshevism."
Hijacked Labour web Jeremy Corbyn postmodern neo-Marxism
In fact, the Hijacked Labour website directly references the right-wing
pundit, recommending a Jordan Peterson lecture titled "Postmodernism and
Cultural Marxism." The Peterson screed was published by The Epoch Times, a
right-wing media outfit run by the fascist Chinese 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."
Hijacked Labour web Jeremy Corbyn postmodern neo-Marxism Jordan Peterson
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?
Have they brought this judgment on themselves?", "New World Order Pledged To
Jews," and "This is how the 'Court Jews' 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 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
Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant
editor of The Grayzone, and the producer of the
