In the lead-up to Britain’s historic election on Thursday, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has been hit with evidence-free Russiagate-style allegations, Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal report.
U.K. Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn. (Sophie Brown, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
By Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal
The Grayzone
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 U.S. 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.
Days before the U.K.’s national election on Thursday, British intelligence agencies and U.S. 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 U.K. 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 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 U.K. 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.
Corbyn’s Exposure of NHS Scandal Blamed on Russia
On Nov. 27, the Corbyn campaign revealed a 451-page dossier containing details of secret negotiations between the U.K.’s Conservative government and the U.S. 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 Dec. 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 at the DFRLab’s 2018 Digital Sherlocks conference in Berlin.
Not one outlet covering the 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 U.K. Foreign Office and dedicated to spawning conflict with Russia.
Turns out @benimmo – the guy who habitually identifies real people as Russian bots – is a former travel & fantasy fiction writer with no journalistic or security expertise. And he works for a military-intelligence front that has a special relationship with certain media outlets. https://t.co/mXwxE6IRKD
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 4, 2019
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.
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 U.S. 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 U.K., 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 Dec. 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 Senator 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 Blogs Against Corbyn
One of the most shockingly dishonest smears of Jeremy Corbyn was published in the British tabloid The Sun on Dec. 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.
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.”
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.”
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.
Nice to see “Aryan Unity” quoted as a source, lads. But what now of Searchlight’s own well established links with spooks? pic.twitter.com/RGCqG23DhG
— John Eden (@johnedenuk) December 7, 2019
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.”
The Sun has published a network map of "hard-left extremists" in the Labour Party, made by "former British intelligence officers". Its sources include the neo-Nazi website Aryan Unity (h/t @johnedenuk) and the antisemitic conspiracy site The Millennium Report. pic.twitter.com/wUnBIyNfvt
— Daniel Trilling (@trillingual) December 7, 2019
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.
This is shocking. The Sun publish a far-right conspiracy theory put together by neo-nazis only to pull it after people online expose it for what it is. https://t.co/13DT9Soixm
— Greg Johnson (@gregianjohnson) December 7, 2019
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.
Another story of "ex-military veterans in their spare time" led by "ex-SAS officer" demonising Corbyn as threat to UK, by the hilarious T.Newton-Dunn in the S*n. @DCKennard & @DeclassifiedUK just documented 34 similar media stories: it's now closer to 40. https://t.co/XATlZIX3d2
— Mark Curtis (@markcurtis30) December 7, 2019
The U.K.’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 Dec. 12, the people get to decide.
Ben Norton is a journalist and writer. He is a reporter for The Grayzone, and the producer of the “Moderate Rebels” podcast, which he co-hosts with Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com, and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling “Republican Gomorrah,” “Goliath,” “The Fifty One Day War” and “The Management of Savagery.” He has also produced numerous print articles for an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including “Killing Gaza” and “Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie.” Blumenthal founded The Grayzone Project in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.
This article is from The Grayzone.
The views expressed are solely those of the authors and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Smears worked — watching preliminary election results. I hope that Labour will find a progressive leader, a younger and more energetic person who will be able to tackle the 5th columns and declare no surrender to anti-new-anti-semitism. Those latter guys are only for the kill, nothing but utter admiration to the State of Israel can satisfy them.
As importantly, Brexit proved to be a dream of a demagogic issue, and now Britain will enter the paradise, free of EU shackles, and that paradise may prove disappointing. However, Blairites will howl like possessed.
As I write this, it appears that Johnson has won, and as I see Boris in Britain, Donald in DC, the Democrats working to push corporate slaves as leaders, I feel like all is lost and humanity is ruined. We are all dead, we just don’t know it yet.
You clearly are a victim of a social and MSM induced depression…. avoid the media for a month and you’ll feel better already.
( make an exception for CN )
The NYT ran an op-ed this morning with the headline “A Vote for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party Is a Vote for Anti-Semitism.” First thing I saw when I searched for his name. Very prominent on the Web.
Wait-a-minit! I can’t find my pearls. I have to clutch my pearls because the 2-faced USA is apparently meddling in the democratic election in a foreign country! that will get you impeached in the USA – OMG! Somebody alert Trump. Oh, he knows? He’s the one doing it? Then alert the FBI! Oh, Barr said he doesn’t give a shit?
Clearly the US wants Brexit. Once your economy tanks, we will buy your country, make the Pound into an ounce, replace it with the dollar, and make the UK our first all-English-speaking colony. Unless of course, Corbyn wins anyway.
What about Canada? They help so valiantly in Latin America and Ukraine, and you want to demote them to Colony no. 2? And sacrifice their “best minds” to supply the southern neighbor with neocons?
Misdirection is a common tactic.
Corbyn exposes privatization of NHS as being on the table in Brexit in order to gain US support (as if the US has any right to interfere), must be a Russian asset! He expresses sympathy for the Palestinians plight, therefore he is anti-semite!
Corbyn is a bit like Trump, he was elected to be leader of the UK Labour party, not by his political-animal peers, but by the lay members of his party, much to the elitists’ (aka Blairists) horror.
In my opinion, Russia-gate is the same thing, misdirection. Look here! It’s not the Clinton power-to-play (hence her secret server), nor the DNC shafting Bernie Sanders (who says we have to be democratic?).
So is Ukraine-gate, it exists to purely and simply to stop the ‘true believers’ from considering Joe and Hunter Biden’s shennanigans in China and the Ukraine.
Have faith!
This article is about the US & UK Military-Intelligent Apparatus, but goes much further including the Atlantic Council as a money dump for Ukrainian and Middle Eastern oligarchies as well as Gulf monarchies. It would an exaggeration to say that in charge is Erik Prince who called himself Blackwater and the Saudi Crown Prince. But it is not just Democracy in Britain that is being sabotaged, but the remaining Democratic traditions in the US and Israel are being somehow torn apart as Netanyahu clings to power the latest claim is until March 2, and Trump even muses about being in power beyond even four more years. Saudi Arabia was an oligarchy run by the Saudi Ruling clan until Blackwater mercenaries arrested disobedient Saudi Prince’s. Erik Prince organized a meeting at the Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr. to try to coordinate the efforts of Netanyahu, the Saudi Crown Prince and Russia to get Trump elected, and ever since then the US and Israel have been weaved together to keep both Trump and Netanyahu in power.
Attention Consortium News: It’s not corruption and intrigue as usual but the bottom falling out. Erik Prince is now working for China and its artificial intelligence efforts to make total oppression of minorities possible. It’s time to sound the alarm.
Good to learn all this.
But there’s more to the picture. It’s odd not to mention in this piece that the Guardian (on the left on some matters but notoriously close to UK intelligence services, as documented here on CN in many pieces) has recently been running stories about a secret intelligence report that supposedly claims that *Boris Johnson* is a Russian asset. (One of the sources is allegedly good ol’ Christopher Steele.)
Maybe different factions in British intelligence are duking it out — I have no idea.
But one can’t properly interpret things without a fuller picture, which includes facts like this that may not seem to fit one’s preconceived narrative.
We seem to have crossed a rubicon the globe over, where the propaganda needed to sway the masses has grown as thick as molasses. It is quite something to behold, this brazen effort to control the narrative in the face of emerging universal truths. But I do believe people are starting to see this for what it is – a grand marketing scheme set in motion by violent thieves in service of global domination. How else to explain it? The system designed to enrich a tiny minority at the expense of everyone else (while pretending to do the opposite) has reached max capacity, and is now facing mass exposure for the fraud that it is. It’s jumped the shark. And anyone who can’t see it yet is either ignorant, lost in nostalgia, benefiting from the sickness of it all, or hoping to.
I pray that we are witnessing the final violent throws of a failing and desperate lot. We humans have a lot of work to do to reclaim our sanity and morality from these killers.
At the founding of US by its leadership and peoples feared a standing military would lead to Disasterous results to Freedom and Liberty had always had a strong military influence within government for centuries.
One can call Domestic Intelligence services as protectors from outside of borders but in truth they are and always been part of military .
Intelligence Services using domestic police forces at first and now media and education with financials are real powers behind the thrones.
Powers stemming from the successful implementations first noted in WWII Germany and later Russia/Soviet and China implemented for control over their peoples.
There are far too many both in US and Great Britain who benefit from aiding intelligence military merger which means they control the political systems in both nations.
How so very sad. What a disgusting, degenerate society we are becoming. Does this barrel have a bottom or do we just continue smearing anyone at will…any time, any place??? Regardless of who the person(s) is? Are we losing our dignity? Our integrity?
The intelligence services have become the new Praetorian Guard and, just as the Guard controlled who would be the Roman emperor, our intelligence services are doing that to us now. It’s not as if this is a new idea. Back in the mid-60s the movie 7 days in May suggested a military coup in the US and Harold Wilson, by all accounts, was threatened by the British elite for his socialist positions, prompting his resignation. And, while most don’t remember this, a group of industrialists sought to enlist Smedley Butler, the most decorated Marine in US history, in a plot to overthrow Roosevelt.
We also see the difference between our coups in Venezuela where we failed because the military was faithful to the country’s constitution and Bolivia which now has a military junta because their military wasn’t. Little Costa Rica shows us the only way out. Costa Rica has no military. After they regained civilian control after a 1948 coup, they simply abolished the military. Problem solved. They haven’t had a coup since.
And that’s the lesson. Intelligence services are generally too dangerous to be allowed to exist.
“The intelligence services have become the new Praetorian Guard”
Not new; they have been designed in hope to be from inception, but attempt and achievement often vary; useful foolery being a function of attempt and interaction, hence not “generally too dangerous”.
“And that’s the lesson.” even if not perceived perceived by all who tend to increase the dosage including of exposing their “assets” facilitating “collateral damage/surprises”.
Thanks to bold and honest reporting by sites like Consortiumnews, The Grey Zone, and The Real News Network we are finally seeing the extent and the depth of Fake News and its partners within NATO, and various think tanks…
Thanks to all for truly brave reporting.
Thanks, Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal, for this pertinent overview of the scurrilous, dirt-bagging actions and attitudes of the Brit “Intelligence” and “Military” (in quotes because they are, fundamentally, criminals, liars and in a sane, just world would be in prison) portions of the anti-Corbyn sectors of the British population, which more widely includes zionists, the Blairites (i.e. Thatcherites who took over the Labour party after the Snatcher headed the Tory government), and those in the comfortable bourgeoisie who want the austerity (imposed on the working poor in the UK) to continue and don’t (any longer) care about the existence, or not, of the NHS because they get private health insurance with their high-paying jobs.
Corbyn’s problem is that he is far too willing to apologize, to accept the smears as genuinely intended criticism or the like instead of demanding evidence, proof of what he is accused of and simply denying it. Better yet refusing to engage with the slander and continuing to push for his program.
Of course the same exact thing would happen here if some mildly anti-Zionist candidate were ever to become the nominee of either the GOP or Dem Party — he’d be branded a dangerous anti-Semite who’s unfit for office.
Also, the same exact thing would happen here if one of the major nominees was proclaiming a desire to make peace with Moscow, he’d be branded an irrational Putin puppet or Kremlin stooge. Oh wait, that’s exactly what did happen.
It is not his position on the NHS, pro/anti Palestine/Israel, Nationalisation or deregulation that will cost him votes.
It is his lack of position on Brexit that will cost him dearly.
He has a very clear position on Brexit and has had it for some time. However the media has consistently created confusion about it. His position is to re-negotiate a deal with the EU, this time to include a bilateral trade agreement (something the hard Brexiteers don’t want but everyone else does) and then put that deal to a new referendum with the alternative to remain in the EU. He has said, honorably, that he will take a neutral position in that campaign. This very simple and clear and obvious proposal has been consistently confused in the media and he has been consistently criticized for the confusion.
This all may indeed cost him dearly but it’s just another right-wing media ploy which has been playing out for months.
PS Thanks Ben and Max for this excellent article.
As you say he wants to renegotiate a deal with the EU and then organize another referendum …. meaning Brexit becoming a never ending nightmare.
Staying neutral on such an issue is a terrible election blunder….. first exit poll seems to confirm this.
Come on Brits, vote Corbyn so that your National Health Service may be preserved, protected, and enhanced. Don’t let this cherished resource disappear. On this side of the pond, you can just go die in a ditch if you don’t have the money to pay these bloodsucker’s exorbitant medical fees. Don’t let that happen to you. Go Corbyn!
The authors too easily dismiss the dangers of Postmodern neo-Marxism, and deprecate the network diagram with clickable information, a truly marvelous tool widely use to explain and bedazzle. For example, the pop-up on Postmodern neo-Marxism gives this quote: “Jean-Francois Lyotard, deceased, French philosopher [note the syntax of a text mining tool], most famous for defining postmodernism as an incredulity toward metanarratives.”
Incredulity toward metanarratives! This is pretty vile. Social harmony relies on citizens accepting their places in society through sharing common ideas and beliefs, to wit, metanarratives. Entities like intelligence agencies and well-controlled research organizations like Atlantic Institute and dozens of other work together to create uniting, harmonious vision, and then propagate it using a variety of tools, even a dash of physical intimidation. Alas, they work against wreckers like Jeremy Corbyn to is spreading incredulity. In aggregate, billions of USDs, Canadian dollars, Euros, British pounds, Arab emirate dirhams etc. are invested into metanarratives. But spreading discord is easier than constructing harmony! Malicious actors like Greyzone and Consortium News can inflict considerable harm to narratives with resources 100-1000 times smaller.
Actually, perhaps they should use the list of narratives that they damaged in their periodic appeals for donations.
——-
Vivian O’Blivion: you seem to have stopped your intellectual progress at “modernism”, while deconstruction (post-modern) has its uses. What is a “national security risk”? This notion is often misunderstood, but it is rather clear that Corbyn is a risk, and Boris Johnson is not. For example, do you know that “intelligence sharing with USA” is one of the pillars of “national security”?
Personally, I do not know if this notion entails anything valuable, details are secret. However, at many occasions one can observe threats made to European governments and sometimes they dissipate through some invisible negotiations, and sometime they lead to abject submission, and none is more dire than excluding from intelligence sharing with USA. Most notably, non-cooperation with American sanctions on Iran had that threat and EU biggies folded.
Well as they say it takes all types to make a world.
Overheard the other day from a homeless man getting a parcel of food from a food-bank:
“I’m voting for Boris cos he’s going to Get Brexit Done”
God help us
The only thing missing is the Zinoviev letter!
“The only thing missing is the Zinoviev letter!”
It isn’t missing.
It has presented in slightly different forms over the interim, since the opponents continue to be enmazed in the linear.
The notion that Jeremy Corbyn is a national security risk is derisible. Corbyn is an open book who’s every move has been tracked and covered by the tabloid, gutter press for decades (and misrepresented for their propaganda aims). Now, the affection craving, narcissist, serial adulterer Johnson as a national security risk, that’s another matter. Do we think for a second that the FSB hasn’t determined the details of the NDA signed by young Tory activist, Danielle Fleet?
It’s probably also risible.