People whose minds haven’t risen too much higher on the evolutionary scale than where humans began and so are locked into the dualistic thinking characteristic of those not too far removed from when we first arose out of the slime where we originated, readily, and eagerly, fell for the “Cognitive Warfare” meme that “the Russians did it,” as to how Trump got elected. It was perfect! It gave us a casus belli to escalate the cognitive warfare already taking place within our society against the Russians to foment hatred by Us, of Them, the necessary first step in any war of aggression (see Hermann Wilhelm Göring).
So it was an appealing cognitive warfare (the advanced form of, and preferred name now, for PsyOps, my one-time field) meme, with which in one "article of faith,” the pro-war, and easily led, anti-Russians, could feel superior to the “backward Slavic Russians,” as a one-time German government did (and still does?). Which supposedly hadn’t adopted the far advanced “Western” way of thinking, though that too is a false conceit of the West. With that, ordinary Americans (like some on this list serve) could fulfill their wish that Trump was a “traitor” on behalf of the Russians. And more important, avert their eyes from seeing that Trump was immersed in Israeli fascism!
And, once again fulfill an innate desire by almost all Americans who have steadily descended back into the evolutionary slime from which we originated, of the “need” for the “Enemy.” Preferably, a Nation, rather than an amorphous enemy such as al Qaeda or Isis. So one like Iraq, Libya, Iran, Cuba, or best of all, our preeminent Cold War Enemies, China and Russia. Wish granted!
With so much "collective memory” still geared to “hate them.”
And in the finest fascist tradition, that makes complete Carl Schmitt’s political theory, the essential element of fascism; the “Friend - Enemy Distinction:” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Concept_of_the_Political. Which is now a bi-partisan belief system in the US as the essential element of both political parties.
So we’re seeing the same political phenomena take place in the US and Europe today that took place in an earlier time in Germany, of the 1920s -1930s. Some people, like Peter Thiel and his “Conservative Revolutionaries,” excuse me, I mean, "National Conservatives,” say to that, “faster, please,” and promote Carl Schmitt as someone to “learn from,” as NatCon Peter Thiel and fellow NatCon Adrian Vermeule preach: https://hls.harvard.edu/bibliography/demystifying-schmitt/
I’ve previously shared Peter Thiel’s panegyric to Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, and how their “political theory” makes up one form of fascism, call it the “American form,” since it has prevailed in the US, as we see today in the New Right and the National Conservatives. While I disagree with some of the points made in the link below, that Schmitt wasn’t a “Conservative Revolutionary,” that isn’t upheld by facts nor by Schmitt’s role as Legal Advisor to Franz von Papen, and role in his machinations. But I share it for the point below, going to American Fascism:
"It could be argued that one of the best introductions to the thought of conservative revolutionaries is Leo Strauss’s lecture On German Nihilism. The Jewish philosopher argued that “the prospect of a pacified planet, without rulers and ruled, of a planetary society devoted to production and consumption only, to the production and consumption of spiritual as well as material merchandise, was positively horrifying to quite a few very intelligent and very decent, if very young, Germans."
"Political scientist and historian Karl Dietrich Bracherassessed the compromising[15]verdict as one of "grotesque ambivalence", since its legal section upheld the Prussian point of view, "while its basic political tenor, with its acquiescence to what had already happened, accommodated the coup-like whim of a government that was propped up only by the authority of the Reich President and the power of the Reichswehr."[16]
"Carl Schmitt, who had represented Papen in the trial along with Erwin Jacobi and Carl Bilfinger, later endorsed the legality of the coup in an expert opinion.[17]”
As he would later endorse Hitler’s "Night of the Long Knives” on the basis of "Der FührerProtects the Law.” A German precursor to “Unitary
The Israeli and American “Right” got what they preferred when they "constructively elected” Trump in 2016, with Cognitive Operations means
though his opponent would not have been much less preferred. But with the “benefit" by the anti-Russian, owners of Cambridge Analytica, the Mercers
doing it, they got a “two-fer,” the preferred candidate of Israeli fascists, and a casus belli for escalating the war against Russia.
Now, like a self-inflicted gunshot wound, it’s just a matter of the US “bleeding out,” to make our national suicide complete. Like what Der
Führer and his allied “Conservative Revolutionary” fascists, brought down upon Germany, in stages, by 1945, with the Schmittian, Peter Thiel endorsed, “Friend-Enemy Distinction” of National Conservatism, as it did for Germany’s “Conservative Revolutionaries."
Cambridge Analytica's Israeli Black Ops Team – Exposed at Last
In-house emails published here for the first time identify the Israeli hackers running global disinformation campaigns whom Cambridge Analytica officials tried so hard to keep hidden
Many details in the testimony of Brittany Kaiser – who positioned herself as the “whistleblower’ in the 2018 Cambridge Analytica data scandal – caused a furor around the world.
Kaiser did indeed help expose the dubious methods employed by the British political consulting firm – which was involved in disseminating extreme, polarizing messages in an attempt to influence election campaigns around the globe.
However, precisely what she did not agree to share in April 2018 – an hour and five minutes into her testimony in the British Parliament – drew less attention.
Then-MP Paul Farrelly asked her about the identity of the “Israeli hackers” who, according to a report in The Observer newspaper, she had introduced to her employers and who had supplied Cambridge Analytica with materials that had clearly been obtained by means of computer hacking.
“I don’t remember, to be honest,” Kaiser replied. “I never had a contract with that company. I introduced them to the client and they contracted individually.”
Farrelly pressed her: “You can’t remember the name?”
Kaiser said she could not and added: “I can try to find it for you.”
She has not fulfilled that promise, but email correspondence – which is being published now for the first time – reveals that the “Israeli hackers” are the same people who are at the center of an investigative report that is also being published now.
The team is headed by Tal Hanan, a provider of hacking and fraud services on a global scale, operating out of an office in the city of Modi’in, near Tel Aviv.
Hanan’s business is being revealed by a large number of media outlets worldwide as part of the Story Killers project initiated by the Paris-based Forbidden Stories organization, dealing with the global disinformation-for-hire industry.
The information about Hanan’s activity was obtained via an undercover investigative report spearheaded by journalists from TheMarker, Radio France and Haaretz, who posed as potential clients, got Hanan and his staff to talk about their activity in a series of meetings across about six months, and documented the conversations.
The content of the video clips from the meetings with Hanan and his team were later analyzed by tens of journalists from Le Monde, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Paper Trail Media, the international organization of investigative journalists OCCRP and other media outlets.
In his presentations for the supposed clients, Hanan – who used the pseudonym “Jorge” – gave a live display of hacked Google, Hotmail and Telegram accounts of eight targets in four different countries.
The services offered by the company – which identified itself as Team Jorge – include falsification of documents, dissemination of fake stories and an “army for hire” of some 40,000 avatars (fake identities on social media platforms). These avatars are controlled by a software system called AIMS, which, Hanan said, was developed by his staff.
According to the investigation, Hanan’s company is responsible for conducting more than 20 political and business campaigns in various countries.
‘They had Hispanic names’
The emails now being published – which were obtained in the course of the investigation by The Guardian – raise questions about the whistleblower’s memory lapses during her testimony in the British Parliament. They show that Kaiser, who had been Cambridge Analytica’s business development director, had been in contact with Hanan for a number of years and she in fact put him in touch with the company she worked for.
On May 6, 2015, Alexander Nix – CEO of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL – wrote to Kaiser: “What is Jorge's (from Israel black ops co) surname please and also the name of his company.” To which Kaiser replied the following day, “Tal Hanan is CEO of Demoman International [an Israeli company owned by Hanan],” and attached a link to a site on which his bio appeared.
Cambridge Analytica hit the headlines following its involvement in Donald Trump’s toxic 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, and for its part – whose scale is disputed – in the web campaign regarding Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union (aka Brexit).
<Alexander Nix – CEO of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL, Credit: HENRY NICHOLLS/REUTERS>
Alexander Nix – CEO of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCLCredit: HENRY NICHOLLS/REUTERS
Besides Trump’s campaign, the company was involved in election campaigns in countries where democracy is tenuous, including Nigeria and Indonesia.
The messages it disseminated were based in part on the collection of data about voters; the firm prided itself on its ability to utilize personal information in vast quantities: thousands of items of data points about tens of millions of voters around the world. Part of the treasure trove of data was harvested by exploiting Facebook.
According to the March 2018 report in The Observer, which linked the “Israeli hackers” to Cambridge Analytica, the hackers supplied information about rivals of the company’s clients. The rivals were Muhammadu Buhari, the then-opposition leader in Nigeria, and Timothy Harris, the future prime minister of the tiny Caribbean nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis.
In regard to Nigeria, The Observer noted, a group of Israelis arrived in the company’s London offices in 2015 with a portable storage device and offered the clandestine information – which included private medical and financial records of Buhari. Concurrently, the British company and Hanan – as he related in the meetings in which the investigative group posed as potential clients – together provided services to the campaign of then-President Goodluck Jonathan, who was seeking reelection. Jonathan lost to his rival in the March 2015 election.
<Muhammadu Buhari, opposition leader at the time of campaign, Credit: AP>
Muhammadu Buhari, opposition leader at the time of campaignCredit: AP
In her testimony to Parliament, Kaiser also sought to dodge questions about that meeting in the London offices of Cambridge Analytica. She admitted having known that private medical documents belonging to Buhari had been obtained, but tried to claim that, to the best of her knowledge, the Israeli group had arrived at the information legally through a clandestine operation.
Nevertheless, following a series of questions, Kaiser was forced to admit that she did not know how the personal information had been obtained.
Like in her testimony in Parliament, over the years Kaiser refrained from divulging the identity of the “Israeli hackers” she had worked with. In September 2019, she was interviewed by The Sunday Times to mark the publication of a book she had written. This time, though, she volunteered an item of information that referred to Hanan, aka “Jorge”: “They had Hispanic names,” she said.
A possible explanation for Kaiser’s disinclination to reveal Hanan’s identity can be found in something he told us in the meeting we held with him in his Modi’in office last December. When the conversation arrived at his ties with Cambridge Analytica, Hanan boasted that he and his staff were responsible for her landing the job in that company. One of the reasons the company contacted him in the first place, he said, was “the main lady there … the whistleblower” – referring to Kaiser. “Who put her into Cambridge Analytica? We did,” he added.
Hefty price
Additional emails attest to the connection between Kaiser and Hanan, and show clearly that she was his liaison within the firm. In January 2017, he sent her a video clip showing an early version of AIMS, the software for creating avatars – an advanced version of which was shown to us in the series of meetings. “It’s our own developed Semi-Auto Avatar creation and netowrk [sic] deployment system,” was how Hanan described the product in an email.
The first presentation of the capability in 2017 would appear to show that in 2015, when Hanan was working for Goodluck Jonathan’s election campaign in Nigeria, he did not yet have the army of avatars at his disposal.
The other services in Hanan’s chaos factory were definitely in Nigeria, though. In the meetings with us, he claimed he had successfully delayed the election by means of a photograph of polling places in northern Nigeria – part of which is controlled by Islamist organizations – in which it could appear that women were being deprived of the right to vote.
He explained that he thought postponing the election would benefit his client, but the results show that it did not help. The election was indeed delayed for six weeks, but Jonathan still lost.
Speaking with us, Hanan boasted that he had disrupted the election until the last minute. He claimed they had launched a cyberattack that had disabled the cellphones of the ranking figures in Buhari’s party throughout Election Day. “All the opposition, they come, they show their phones to the media and say: ‘Blockage of all leaders’ phones,’” Hanan said gleefully, quoting from a Nigerian newspaper headline.
An attack did indeed take place in 2015, and those responsible have never been found.
Besides the projects in Nigeria and Saint Kitts and Nevis, the emails reveal overtures by Hanan and the British firm with regard to other elections. One of them was the U.S. presidential campaign of 2016.
In the conversation in which he told us about his ties with Kaiser, Hanan maintained that he refuses, as a matter of policy, to become involved in U.S. politics. “I don’t shit where I sleep,”was the blunt explanation offered by Hanan’s brother, Zohar, who took part in the Modi'in meeting and was introduced to us as “Nick, the company’s CEO.”
This approach was echoed by Mashy Meidan, who was introduced as Max, a pensioner of one of Israel’s security agencies – one of several of who were presented as part of Team Jorge.
To illustrate his unbending position on the subject, Hanan related how he had passed up a big business opportunity: to take part in Trump’s 2016 election campaign. He said that in the period in which Cambridge Analytica had started to work with Trump, “Bannon came aboard and [Cambridge Analytica] called us.” Bannon is, of course, Steve Bannon, Trump’s then-chief strategist. Before working with Trump, he was an investor in Cambridge Analytica and had been vice president at the company.
Before working with Trump, Bannon was an investor in Cambridge Analytica and had been vice president at the companyCredit: Natan Dvir
According to Hanan, Cambridge Analytica officials had told him, “‘We just need your technology, we’ll take a license, whatever you want to do. … All the money is on the table. Mercer [billionaire and Trump donor Robert Mercer, whose family also invested in Cambridge Analytica] has just put in $15 million.’”
Hanan explained that despite the temptation, he had rejected the offer.
However, emails that Hanan and Nix exchanged in July 2016 tell a somewhat different story. Hanan passed on to Nix an offer from a person he presented as ‘Tomer,’ without offering a surname. Tomer had sought to supply the Trump campaign with technology that creates video clips that are personalized for each viewer. He attached examples and explained that with the aid of this technology, it was possible to produce clips that would create the impression that “Trump is literally having a personal talk with each person.”
Nix rejected the offer outright: “Please thank your colleague – but we already have our own media production company,” he wrote, cc’ing Kaiser.
The rejection did not deter Hanan. In 2017, he offered his skills to help Cambridge Analytica with the election campaign of another client: Kenya’s then-president, Uhuru Kenyatta. Nix rejected that offer as well, citing what in his view was the hefty price Hanan was asking.
“Dear Jorge,” Nix wrote to Hanan, “at $400,000-$600,000 per month, and substantially more for crisis response – there is nothing in your services offering that I believe our clients would be willing to pay such a premium for.” Kaiser was an addressee in this email chain as well.
Death of an investigator
On the fringes of the emails now being revealed, there is a hint of an attempt by Hanan to join another Cambridge Analytica project. In the May 2015 email in which Kaiser passed on Hanan’s full name to Nix, she added another message: Hanan would like to talk to him about a certain matter. “His team has been working extensively in our concerned country for a while,” she wrote, and attached a link to an article on a Brazilian news site dealing with ties between the governments of Iran, Venezuela and Argentina.
The article had been published two months after the death of the Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who had been investigating suspicions against Argentina’s then-president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
In January 2015, Nisman was found shot in the bathroom of his Buenos Aires apartment. He had been the special prosecutor in the case of the July 1994 terror attack on the AMIA Jewish community center that left 85 people dead. His investigation found that Iran and Hezbollah had been behind the attack.
<The late Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman, then-president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and the site of the deadly bombing, Credit: AP, REUTERS>
The late Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman, then-president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and the site of the deadly bombingCredit: AP, REUTERS
The Brazilian article maintained that Kirchner had been bribed by Iran years earlier, in order to sabotage Nisman’s investigation. A memorandum of understanding which Kirchner had signed with the Iranians in 2013 was indeed intended to strip Nisman of his authority in the case and transfer it to a bistate body that was termed a “truth commission.”
In the email Kaiser sent, she went on to recount Hanan’s message to Nix: First, Hanan is in possession of intel about the subject referred to in the article, and claims that he is the person who “provided the intelligence” that led to the article being written.
Second, he heard that a wealthy American was interested in bringing about a change of government “in the concerned country” – apparently referring to Argentina, where an election was set for some five months later.
Having heard that the rich American had approached a U.K. firm that conducts election campaigns, he had deduced that it was Nix’s firm and was now hoping for an opportunity to take part in the project.
A report subsequently published by the British Parliament disclosed that Nix had indeed run a campaign against Kirchner and in favor of the opposition candidate, Mauricio Macri (who was elected Argentine president in November 2015). The report noted that according to an SCL internal document, the company had resorted to “information warfare” in the campaign – a sphere in which Hanan told us he was an expert. Among those involved in that “war,” the report stated, were “retired intelligence and security agency officers from Israel.”
Tal Hanan and Zohar Hanan refused to answer questions for this investigation. Tal Hanan denied “any wrongdoing.” Zohar Hanan, meanwhile, said: “I have been working all my life according to the law!”
Demoman International declined to comment.
Alexander Nix refused to respond to questions sent to him, blaming some members of the Story Killers consortium for previous misreporting.
In response to questions from the Story Killers project, Brittany Kaiser denied misleading the British MPs, claiming she really did not remember the names of Hanan or his company. She maintained that, to the best of her knowledge, the services Team Jorge provided during its collaboration with Cambridge Analytica did not cross the line of illegality.
“Clearly, the making of a political sausage is not pretty in many of its aspects,” she said.
