PRESS RELEASE
The Nation Caves, Attacks VIPS Report
Sept. 5, 2017 (EIRNS)—Buckling to tremendous pressure, The Nation on Sept. 1 posted its promised post-publication review of the Aug. 9 article by Patrick Lawrence on the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) memo of July 24.
After a lengthy introduction by Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, the article offers a dissent by six VIPS members who did not sign the July 24 memo: Scott Ritter, Thomas Drake, Lis Ling, Phil Giraldi, Clan Westmoreland, and Jesselyn Radack. Their objections were followed by a rebuttal by initial authors of the July 24 memo.
William Binney and Ray McGovern of the VIPS will speak in New York’s Beacon Hotel at 1:00 p.m. Sept. 9 at a special meeting sponsored by Executive Intelligence Review: "The Russian Hack Inside Job: Who’s Trying To Destroy The Presidency And Start A World War With Russia?"
The dissenters’ objections reported by The Nation focus mostly on data transfer speeds, as though that were the only basis of the VIPS memo. The reply to the VIPs dissent, titled "Why This is Important," written by William Binney, Skip Folden, Ed Loomis, Ray McGovern and Kirk Wiebe, says:
"For more than a year, we have been pointing out that any data acquired by a hack would have had to come across the Internet. The blanket coverage of the Internet by the NSA, its U.K. counterpart GCHQ, and others would be able to produce copies of that data, and show where the data originated and where it went. But U.S. intelligence has produced no evidence that hacking by Russia led to it acquiring the DNC emails and passing them on to WikiLeaks."
They note,
"Most curiously, the FBI did not have access to the DNC computers for its own forensics, even though prominent politicians were calling the alleged Russian hack ‘an act of war.’"
This exchange among the VIPS is followed by a so-called "independent review" of the VIPS memo by Nathan Freitas, which attacks the VIPS’ conclusions. Freitas is director of the Tibet Action Network, a central part of the regime change apparatus in America. He attacks some of the claims in the VIPS memo, including the RSID evidence that Russian fingerprints were deliberately added to documents released by Guccifer 2.0. (RSIDs are identifiers that track documents across revisions.) Freitas’ errors on this issue were pointed out immediately on Twitter by Adam Carter, who has responded to the review in The Nation , specifically on the issue of RSID evidence.
Although The Nation printed the objection authored by six VIPS members—far from a majority of the VIPS members, and the VIPS rebuttal of their objections, the VIPS were not allowed to respond to Freitas’ statements, which were given the "last word" in the article.
Nathan Freitas leads the Guardian Project, an open-source mobile security software project, and directs technology strategy and training at the Tibet Action Institute. He is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
It should be emphasized: 1) there is absolutely no available proof that the DNC was hacked by Russia; 2) there is excellent evidence that Russian fingerprints were deliberately added to the documents released by Guccifer 2.0, an artificial entity created to smear any damaging documents later released by WikiLeaks, as originating from Russian hacking.
