This article appears in the October 18, 2024 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Anglosphere Escalates Censorship
To Defend Its Escalation Toward War
[Print version of this article]
Oct. 10—In London on Sept. 10-11, the British hosted a two-day “UK-U.S. Strategic Dialogue,” headed by Foreign Secretary David Lammy and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The British goal was to get Washington on board with having their long-range Storm Shadow missiles fired deep into Russia. After the affair, on Sept. 13, Lammy and Blinken arrived in Kyiv and met with Ukraine’s acting President Volodymyr Zelensky on his “Victory Plan,” while at the same time Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer arrived in Washington, D.C., to close the deal with U.S. President Joe Biden.
A key part of the thermonuclear showdown agreed to in London was the need to smash any hope in Moscow that there were any rational discussion partners left in the West. To that end, Lammy and Blinken first announced on Sept. 11 their escalated drive to silence dissent. Their statement said, “Recognizing the threat foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) poses to democracies, the United Kingdom and United States decided to increase the pace and scale of our joint efforts to disrupt Kremlin and other state-sponsored FIMI and to advance joint capabilities among our closest partners.” An immediate and central focus of the disruption operation involved the call by the two to silence Russia’s RT (formerly Russia Today, founded in 2005, as a state-associated media group) and to sanction individuals connected with RT. The “autonomous non-profit organization” is funded by Russia’s federal government.
In Washington on Sept. 13, as Starmer was meeting with Biden, Blinken gave a press conference announcing, with a straight face, that the U.S. would “respond forcefully to Moscow’s playbook of aggression and subversion, one that includes invading sovereign nations, fomenting coups, weaponizing corruption, carrying out assassinations, meddling in elections,” etc. He announced that the U.S. has designated three entities and two individuals—connected to RT and related circles in Russia and Moldova—for their connection to “Russia’s destabilizing actions abroad.” Their names and charges of international offenses were detailed in a five-page “Fact Sheet” released that day by the State Department.
Blinken claimed that the U.S., UK and Canada are working together to expose and disrupt “RT’s global malign activities.” However, the extremely broad formulations used in the Fact Sheet leave no room for doubt that this operation is also targeting U.S. citizens for repression. The Fact Sheet stated, “All transactions by U.S. persons or within (or transiting) the United States that involve any property or interests in property” of people who have been sanctioned by the U.S. “ … are prohibited” unless one can get clearance from the Office of Foreign Asset Control. And what constitutes “property or interests in property”? It states: “These prohibitions include the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any blocked person and the receipts of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person.”
The extremely broad net and the ambiguity in the formulations were apparently quite intentional. For example, what is a service “for the benefit” of RT, of a related company or of any of their staff? Does it include making a favorable comment on an RT article or, heaven forbid, merely passing on a link of an RT article without comment? If that gives RT any credibility, doesn’t it fall under the improvement of its trademark value? What of merely expressing an idea not involving RT, but one RT would view favorably—doesn’t that improve the “information space” within which RT is functioning? Unfortunately, these are not hypotheticals.
Three U.S. Cases: Ritter, Gabbard and Simes
The FBI’s efforts to silence discussion in the U.S. have become deafening, as raids, government censorship, and assassination attempts have recently gone through the roof. Take the cases of three American citizens over the last four months—Scott Ritter, Tulsi Gabbard, and Dimitri Simes. All three have publicly questioned various Anglosphere narratives—e.g. that Russia must be militarily defeated—which of course finds them in line with “Moscow’s position.” Ritter and Gabbard have both adamantly denounced the danger of nuclear war that such a policy entails.
On June 3, 2024, Ritter was prevented from boarding a plane in New York and his passport was seized. He was to speak at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in Russia, with the specific message that not all Americans agree that Russia is their enemy. Then, on August 7, his New York home was raided by the FBI, and he was informed that he was being investigated for being an unregistered agent of Russia. As an independent journalist, Ritter has proudly published articles in RT using the same sort of contractual arrangement that he has had with non-Russian publications. Any examination of his writings, whether in Russian or non-Russian publications, leaves little doubt as to the independence of his authorship. However, the position taken by the FBI is that he cannot possibly have independent thoughts and analyses about a better path for the U.S., but that Russian propagandists are putting words in his mouth. Hence, his advocacy of positions where the U.S. and Moscow can work together in peace is defined as evidence of being an agent of Russia; so, ipso facto, he should have registered as such under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
Dimitri Simes had his Virginia home raided on August 13 and was indicted by the federal government on Sept. 5. Simes was a dissident of the Soviet Union who immigrated to the U.S. in 1973, became a naturalized U.S. citizen, and was selected by President Richard Nixon to head the Center for the National Interest. Simes retired from that post in 2022 and was employed as a moderator of Russia’s Channel One political TV show “Big Game.”
Channel One Russia, a state-owned TV station, was sanctioned in May 2022 by the U.S. The standard for sanctioning Channel One was ridiculously low—not to be run by Moscow or even on behalf of Moscow, but to have “purported to act … on behalf of” Russia, whatever “purported” means. Does CBS or ABC, for example, purport to act on behalf of the U.S.?
Dimitri Simes, as a salaried employee of Channel One, is alleged by U.S. authorities to be in a scheme to violate U.S. sanctions—by using funds from his salary to pay his U.S. taxes! He and his wife are now each facing sentences of up to 60 years in prison. It is commonly thought that this action means that Simes will likely not return to his Virginia home, and that the Department of Justice chose to indict him as a public relations stunt to send a loud message.
Hillary Clinton, for one, thinks Washington is sending the right signal. A week after the Simes indictment, she explained that indictments against those in Russia mean there won’t be a trial; so it would be a “better deterrent” to criminally charge Americans.
The weaponization of official U.S. institutions goes beyond the FBI, Department of Justice, and the State Department, however. This summer, Tulsi Gabbard, an officer in the U.S. Army Reserve, a former Congresswoman from Hawaii, and a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, found herself subjected to special security checks at airports after having been put on a special list for suspected terrorists called “Quiet Skies,” a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) program that allows secret surveillance by air marshals. The Department of Homeland Security describes this, variously, as a list of “individuals who may pose an elevated security risk,” a list “designed to identify known or suspected terrorists or other individuals who may be a threat to transportation or national security.”
Gabbard has been outspoken on the very real and horrible danger of a thermonuclear exchange and the urgent need to conduct diplomacy to head it off. While she has not yet had her passport seized, nor her home or office raided, nor has she been indicted, certainly the message was delivered. Regardless, her drive to stop a nuclear war has only intensified, being a key part of her collaboration with Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy.
These three examples reflect the drumbeat through the summer from the thought police. Even a cursory review of such actions betrays a strategic intention, to chill any opposition to the escalation to a thermonuclear showdown with Russia. This includes perverting debate during a presidential election period, so as to ensure that the U.S. is locked into place.
UK/U.S. ‘Thought Control’ Operation in Overdrive for Elections
On July 29, the Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines issued “100 Days Until Election 2024 Election Security Update,” announcing that “we expect … a range of foreign actors” who are “conducting or planning influence operations targeting U.S elections this November” to make trouble. They are acting “to undermine the United States’ global role…. Moscow is leveraging Russia-based influence-for-hire firms to shape public opinion in the United States, including with election-related operations. These firms have created influence platforms, directly and discreetly engaged Americans, and used improved tools to tailor content for U.S. audiences, while hiding Russia’s hand.” Moscow is using “networks of U.S. and other Western personalities to create and disseminate Russian-friendly narratives…. Russia remains the predominant threat to U.S. elections.”
On Sept. 4, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray, speaking at a meeting of the U.S. Justice Department Elections Threats Task Force, announced that two RT employees ran a company “to publish and disseminate content deemed favorable to the Russian government…. The Justice Department will not tolerate attempts by an authoritarian regime to exploit our country’s free exchange of ideas in order to covertly further its own propaganda efforts, and our investigation into this matter remains ongoing.” Wray added that there were “companies working under the direction and control of the Russian government” involved in “even more malign activities” than RT, “companies that created media websites to trick Americans into unwittingly consuming Russian propaganda.”
On the same day, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken weighed in on the State Department’s actions to “counter Kremlin-backed media outlets’ malicious operations seeking to influence or interfere in the 2024 U.S. elections,” which featured the designation of RT’s parent company and subsidiaries as entities controlled by a foreign government. He proclaimed that these “foreign governments should also know that we will not tolerate foreign malign actors intentionally interfering and undermining free and fair elections.” As part of the “whole-of-government” operation, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control targeted several RT employees as part of the U.S. response to “Moscow’s malign influence efforts targeting the 2024 U.S. presidential election.” Simes was indicted the next day.
A few days later, an outfit based in France called “Intelligence Online,” in their article “Washington-Based Non-Profit Continues Spreading Kremlin Message,” opened with: “The Schiller Institute has continued to cooperate with Russian media outlets, even while the U.S. cracks down on foreign influence.” It called for the U.S. Department of Justice “to shut Schiller up.”
On September 17, the British Foreign Office sent its Deputy Head of the Russia Policy Department, Ian Paterson, to Kiev to coordinate with the head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) Defense Forces officer Andriy Kovalenko, on their “joint efforts” to silence those who oppose war on Russia. The decision to escalate from a proxy war to a nuclear showdown certainly warranted the announced increase in the “pace and scale” of the operation.
Kiev’s CCD, run out of Ukraine’s Office of the President’s National Security and Defense Council, enjoys robust support from the U.S. government. Since 2021, the State Department has provided the CCD with funding, while the FBI and the Department of Justice have been closely collaborating with it. In March, 2022, the CCD defined “Information Terrorism … [as that] committed by means of instruments affecting the consciousness.” Foreign citizens who say or write things with which Russia would agree, are classed as information terrorists. The acting head of the CCD, Andriy Shapovalov, explained that these information terrorists “have to answer to the law as war criminals…. Infoterrorism must be equated with actual terrorism and require appropriate measures to counter it.” Anyone associated in any way with “infoterror,” including “editors, cameramen, writers, presenters, etc.,” shall be treated as “information terrorists.”
Assassinations Are the Muscle Behind ‘Thought Control’
How are “information terrorists” to be treated, if threats and blackmail prove insufficient?
Prior to the CCD, the infamous Myrotvorets hitlist gang ran assassinations within Ukraine from the time of the 2014 Western-backed Maidan coup. It began by targeting, in particular, Ukrainian journalists who dared to cover what Kiev’s paramilitary forces were doing to native Russian citizens in the Donbas. Then, in 2021, the Zelensky government, in setting up the CCD, effectively moved at least some of this operation into the Office of the Presidency. There, a category designating “information terrorism” as being those who spread information challenging Kiev’s narrative, were to be dealt with appropriately. More and more foreigners have been added to the CCD’s blacklist since then—a list which is provided to Ukraine’s Security Service, the SBU, to be acted upon.
In mid-July 2022, the Schiller Institute (SI) was placed front and center in the CCD’s initial target list of 72 non-Ukrainians. The first 31 names were of Schiller Institute leaders or of individuals who had participated in SI conferences. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder of the Schiller Institute, was at the head of the list.
A month later, the first known assassination of a foreigner from the Myrotvorets hitlist occurred near Moscow, with the August 20 car-bombing of Russian writer Darya Dugina. More assassinations have followed, such as Illya Kyva, a former Ukrainian legislator who had fled to Russia, and Maxim Fomin, a Russian reporter on the battle in the Donbas.
In 2023, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—whose father and uncle were both assassinated—began his Democratic Party presidential campaign; but the Biden Administration denied him any Secret Service protection. Then in September 2023, a gunman flashing a U.S. Marshal badge showed up just prior to Kennedy taking the stage. He tried to pass himself off as a member of Kennedy’s security team. As former Congressman Dennis Kucinich, then Kennedy’s campaign manager, wrote to President Biden:
The man was carrying a fully loaded weapon and was accompanied by a second individual who carried additional weapons and ammunition…. The threat level to our candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is increasing every day…. A specter of violence haunts our political process. Indeed, political assassinations pose a grave threat to democracy.
Not only was Kennedy denied Secret Service protection yet again, but there’s every indication that Secret Service protection has been kept at a minimum level for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump—or worse, that there has been active security stripping from him, leading to at least two attempted assassinations.
On May 15, 2024, a seeming “lone assassin,” Juraj Cintula, disturbed by the Prime Minister of Slovakia Robert Fico’s stance in opposition to the proxy war in Ukraine, fired four shots into him. The CCD had earlier targeted Fico for his strong stance against the war. Fico had led his party back into power with his election victory in 2023. Fico had warned, both before his shooting and following, that foreign NGOs and Western-owned news media in Slovakia were creating the conditions for political assassinations.
On July 13, another seeming lone assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, fired eight shots at Trump at his campaign rally in Western Pennsylvania, but only hit his ear. Only an unexpected turn of the head by Trump prevented another assassination. The Secret Service had refused to provide high-level protection, merely treating the candidate on the level of a retired former President. And, violating all standard procedures, they had failed to secure a nearby rooftop with line-of-sight to the speakers’ podium that Trump used. On July 6, when Crooks registered for the rally, he also searched the Internet for details on Cintula’s shooting of Fico.
On Sept. 16, Ryan Routh, yet another seeming lone assassin, camped out near the 6th hole on Trump’s golf course in Florida with a high-powered rifle with scope. Routh had spent at least eight months in Ukraine, attempting to recruit foreigners to paramilitary units to fight Russia. He swore that he would fight and die, helping Ukraine defeat Russian President Vladimir Putin. Of note, his 2023 interview in The New York Times clearly put him on the radar screen as an individual with both the mania to do anything to destroy Russia, and a willingness to engage in illegal activity to further Kiev’s cause. Routh’s 2023 book endorses assassination of both Putin and Trump. The AP reports several warnings to the U.S. government about Routh. An initial check at any point would have shown that Routh had a rap sheet, which included an armed showdown he had with police while carrying an automatic weapon. However, he apparently never made enough of a blip on U.S. security watch lists, and had little trouble lying ready to assassinate Trump for 12 hours.
There are obvious questions about the day of Routh’s stakeout. For example, Lora Ries, a former Acting Deputy Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security, who had oversight over the Secret Service, raised key points. As quoted by Reuters, she asked, “How was Routh not spotted by an advance team? Did the (Secret Service) use a drone over the golf course? Dogs? If not, why not?”
Pre-Emptive Censoring as a Signal for Pre-Emptive Nuclear War
When “debunking” is not enough to minimize the circulation of inconvenient information, the strategy of pre-emptive censoring, or “prebunking,” is employed. Debunking involves actually countering some material. The “prebunking” concept is that the material could be debunked, but allowing it to be heard messes up the minds of too many people in a democracy. In regular English, the population is too dumb for a democracy to work, so an elite guard will step in and pretend to protect that democracy by stopping the material from being heard.
Playing nuclear chicken is the reckless gamble of a country or a military alliance devoid of solutions, threatening the ultimate blackmail to get their way.
It is not accidental that both pre-emptive censoring and pre-emptive nuclear war are partners at the center of London’s and Washington’s current agenda. From 2014 to 2022, Russia insisted on the implementation of the signed Minsk accords for a peaceful resolution in Ukraine, and for a partner in the West that would discuss the joint security concerns of Russia and the rest of Europe. Moscow finally drew the conclusion that the gang which intended to put nuclear missiles on their border had the upper hand in the West, and then took measures into their own hands.
Pre-emptive censorship, or prebunking, is not only an ugly assault on America. The more silencing of antiwar voices and potential discussion partners in the West there is, the clearer the signal to Moscow will be that the intention is war. There is no shortcut for a democratic republic to flourish, much less survive, than to make cogitation popular again.
