By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with [1]
How many times must we repeat: in this war which the US and NATO have started against Russia, force will decide the outcome, not words. So if President Joseph Biden (lead image, centre) and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken (left) are afraid of running the risk of losing the former – watch the Donbass in the coming weeks — they will stick to wars of words; that’s propaganda, info-war, cyber-war.
In wars of words, truth isn’t the first casualty [2]. It’s the first weapon – that’s to say, our side’s truth is our weapon; the other side’s truth is a pack of lies (aka deception, disinformation, active measures, trolling). By the way, the US Constitution’s free speech amendment is a two-edged sword in this war-making. Our side’s freedom to speak the truth or to tell lies is lawful; the other side’s freedom to speak their truth on our side of the front is an indictable crime, according to the Department of Justice. It’s foreign agent influence peddling [3], election interference, sedition, or (if Julian Assange did it) espionage.
In propaganda warfare, one of the rules of combat as the Germans, British and Americans have all practiced it, is that repeating a lie often enough will conceal the truth. In British and American libel courts, truth isn’t a defence for publishing lies about public figures. It’s enough for the liar to demonstrate that the fabrications were already in circulation to legalise repeating them in media. Repeat our side’s lie often enough and this will erase the truth of the other side’s as if it had never existed. Novichok, for example, is a war-fighting word — NATO side claims it was a poison to kill Sergei Skripal three years ago; that was a lie. NATO side has repeated that it was a poison to kill Alexei Navalny eight months ago. It’s still a lie, but as a war-fighting word, it has managed to kill the truth on our side of the front. Almost.
In war-fighting with words like this, the big gun of the US and NATO alliance is the woozle. Novichok is a woozle.
From Riga, on the Latvian front, a new shot was fired recently against Germany and Russia by NATO’s word warfighter, STRATCOM; that’s the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s Strategic Communications Center of Excellence. The word weapon this time is called Informationswäsche in German; information laundering in English; IW or IL for short.
The NATO warfighter who pulled the trigger doesn’t claim to have invented the IL weapon herself. Her name is Belen Carrosco Rodriguez, a Spaniard from Tenerife who is employed by Neon Century Intelligence [4](NEI). This unit occupies an office on Berkeley Square, London, describing itself as an “elite team…sourced from some of the most formidable agencies on the planet, including the UK’s GCHQ, the Swiss Army, US Special Forces and DARPA [Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency ]”. Rodriguez describes herself as having been a professional STRATCOM soldier for two years before turning mercenary at NEI [5]. Like Alexei Navalny, whose Novichok operation she has just analysed for STRATCOM, Carrosco Rodriguez has also weaponised her selfies.
Source: https://www.instagram.com/belencrrguez/?hl=en [6]
Source: https://twitter.com/ [7]
Source: English: https://www.stratcomcoe.org/information-laundering-germany [8] German: https://www.stratcomcoe.org/informationswasche-deutschland [9]
Carrosco Rodriguez and STRATCOM say the credit for inventing the IL weapon belongs to the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency in 2018. It is a weapon “used by hostile actors within an information influence campaign. In this process, false or deceitful information is legitimised through a network of intermediaries that gradually apply a set of techniques to distort it and obscure the original source…IL is leveraged by Kremlin-official or pro-Kremlin-actors in a hostile information influence campaign (HIIC) to further their interests in Germany.”
The Navalny Novichok case starts, not with the biomedical evidence published by the German doctors who treated [10]Navalny in Berlin; nor with the forensic evidence of Navalny’s water bottle, his underpants, and or his telephone tape-recording [11]. The STRATCOM report starts with the Russian lie that Navalny wasn’t poisoned by Novichok. “On Wednesday 2 September,” the report begins, “German government spokesman Steffen Seibert stated that toxicological tests on samples taken from Alexei Navalny had provided unequivocal evidence of a chemical nerve agent from the Novichok group.”
This is assumed to be the truth and accepted by Carrosco Rodriguez because the German, NATO side said it. What happened next, she reports, was that every attempt by anyone to test and verify the evidence was a shot from the IL weapon fired by the other side, the enemy, the Russians. Russian-source publications have been “laundered” into German-source media reports, and back again, in a circle.
STRATCOM has a ready acronym for this — SM. That’s “source magnification”, according to Carrosco Rodriquez. It’s “the process of increasing the number of information sources to enhance the impact of a manipulated piece of information regardless of quality or veracity. [It is] necessary for effective IL, as it supports the construction of legitimacy.”
Carrosco Rodriguez also calls SM the woozle effect, though she doesn’t explain where she got that term from.
As the lead image reveals, Woozle was an invention of the English writer, A.A. Milne, in his most famous book, Winnie-the-Pooh, published in 1926. In chapter three, “In which Pooh and Piglet Go Hunting and Nearly Catch a Woozle”, Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet follow tracks they spot in the snow believing them to have been made by an imaginary animal called a woozle. The tracks keep multiplying until Christopher Robin explains that they have been following their own tracks in circles around a tree.
The woozle effect, more recent than Milne’s Pooh and Piglet, is the term for multiplication of research references cited to substantiate something which may have been unproved or untruthful at the start, but which appears to gain in credibility by repetition. In the Navalny Novichok operation, for STRATCOM and Carrosco Rodriquez the German government spokesman Seifert wasn’t the Pooh; Navalny’s blood and urine weren’t traces (spuren [12]) of the woozle. The woozle was Russian, NATO insists; and because it was Russian, it cannot have been an imaginary Pooh-type woozle. It was the Russian-type woozle. That’s the real thing.
If you are reading this and you can’t tell the difference between the two woozles, you have been struck by an IL weapon. The clinical symptoms of a woozle strike are called a bamboozle. This is a much older war wound; in the original 17th century French it meant being turned into a baboon.
In NATO warmaking, making monkeys of targets is known by the acronym BABO. When lawyers take Carrosco Rodriquez and STRATCOM into a German court shortly to prove the truth of their allegations, and compel them to pay damages, it will be up to the judge to decide who’s the BABO in the Navalny Novichok story – and who retains human brains.