By Matthew Ehret | American Herald Tribune | June 11, 2020
This week, the Grayzone’s Gareth Porter exposed an important strategy led by the FBI to purge the internet of alternative media outlets who question the mainstream narratives being used to shepherd society into an Orwellian post-COVID world order.
Although FBI propagandists strewn throughout mainstream media have attempted to project the idea that the corrupt days of America’s internal Gestapo operation led by J. Edgar Hoover are a thing of the past, the reality is that its days of COINTEL PRO, MK Ultra, assassinations and media manipulation of the 1960s and 1970s not only didn’t go away but only amplified their influence during the modern age of cyberwarfare.
Porter’s Insight into the FBI’s Censorship Agenda
In his June 5, 2020 article entitled ‘FBI Launches Open Attack on ‘Foreign’ Alternative Media Outlets Challenging US Foreign Policy’, Porter exposed the FBI’s recent counter-intelligence strategy which was launched in the wake of the 2016 defeat of Hillary Clinton.
Knowing that alternative media was a decisive factor in the downfall of Hillary (and her neocon backers), a vast operation was put into motion designed to convince Americans that the elections were never really legitimate in the first place because… Russia.
Four years of Russiagate contaminated the American political landscape ultimately producing both a multi-million dollar nothing burger and also one of the most dangerous reforms in counter-intelligence operations that currently threatens to render what little remains of the first amendment forever obsolete.
Countering Malign Foreign Influences in the Media
In his article, Porter begins by describing the creation of the October 2017 creation of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Counter-Intelligence Task Force which generated a new procedure for extending internet censorship to any media outlet that could be labelled a “malign foreign influence” if connected in any way to America’s major adversaries of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
Porter describes how Facebook, Google, Twitter and Instagram promptly interfaced with the Task Force and began deleting accounts and pages of alternative media outlets who were labelled puppets of foreign actors. The biggest purge occurred in 2018 as Facebook deleted 559 pages and 251 accounts including Anti-media, the Free Thought Project and Naked Empire due to their supposed “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” tied to shadowy “malign foreign influences”.
While the American Herald Tribune was not officially listed as one of the targets during this operation, it’s de-platforming over Facebook, Instagram and Google was later admitted to have been part of the purge (more to be said on that below).
Shadowy Enemies and New Protocols
In an April 26, 2019 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, FBI director Christopher Wray described “malign foreign influence” to be “the fairly aggressive campaign we saw in 2016 and that has continued pretty much unabated, is the use of social media, fake news, propaganda, false personas etc… to spin us up, pit us against each other, sow divisiveness and discord, and undermine America’s faith in democracy”.
According to Wray (and echoed in recent days by former Obama advisor Susan Rice), such divisiveness and discord as we see across America’s protests now have less to do with the systemic corruption, economic injustice (or even George Soros’ moneybags fueling the fires of chaos)… but rather Russia, China and Iranian fake news campaigns.
Gareth Porter cites the important February 2020 remarks by the FBI’s Assistant Section for the Foreign Influence Task Force David Porter, who described the foreign operations which “seek to weaken an adversary from within” using “information confrontation to target the perceptions of their adversaries’ population”. These methods then “erode confidence in democratic values and institutions, encourage negative sentiment, apathy and mistrust of government.” One of the most dangerous by-products for agent David Porter is that the public loses confidence in the “credibility of an established, free and independent news media” pushing “consumers towards alternative news sources of news media where of course it is much easier to introduce false narratives.”
David Porter focuses his discourse on Russia and China explaining that the two nations differ in their methods of information warfare in the following manner: Where China “confines its manipulation to its geostrategic economic goals” and “wants to manage our gradual economic decline over the course of generations”, Russia is more vicious and just “wants to see us tear ourselves apart”.
How does the FBI decide who is guilty of “malign foreign influence”? Not by wasting their time “chasing content” or looking at what websites actually say, but rather by “attribution”. In laymen’s terms, “attribution” merely implies using behavioral pattern recognition logarithms to de-platform and censor alt media accounts. Evidence of actual funding by a foreign government or even systemic lying need not be considered under this sort of attribution. Merely having shared a server with a company that “at some point may have” hosted a website affiliated with a foreign government, or publishing narratives that are critical of the western establishment are sufficient proof to remove and blacklist you under this new digital McCarthyism.
The Targeting of the American Herald Tribune
Gareth Porter takes the time to showcase the important case study of American Herald Tribune as an example of the FBI’s brazen abuse of this loosely defined standard of “attribution”. Just days after the August 2018 takedown of the Tribune’s pages on Facebook (and Google’s cancellation of the site’s ad service which act as a vital revenue stream for any alternative media agency), Christopher Wray admitted to have provided social media companies with the “specific threat indicators” used to justify censorship… although they did not openly admit to targeting the American Herald Tribune at this time.
It was only on January 24, 2020 that Facebook finally confirmed publicly in the form of a CNN report) that American Herald Tribune was taken down due to Wray’s counter-intelligence program. The January 24 CNN article cited by Porter asserted that a Facebook spokesperson asserted that the Cybersecurity company FireEye (which is highly enmeshed in all branches of American intelligence agencies) found the AHT’s links to the Iran government’s larger influence operation “with moderate confidence”.
For anyone familiar with the modern newspeak of the FBI’s lexicon, “moderate confidence” means little more than “we feel that there may be some connection but have no actual evidence.”
Illustrating the Tribune’s great sin, the CNN article in question stated that “The articles posted to American Herald Tribune are largely in line with the views of Iran’s ruling establishment. It publishes stories criticizing American foreign policy and attacking President Donald Trump and Israel. Often the criticism is not unlike viewpoints expressed on authentic US-based independent websites, especially ones with an anti-establishment perspective.”
Here we have the essence of what the FBI considers the Tribune’s great crime: Permitting anti-establishment views to be published critical of American foreign policy. It’s really that simple.
The Strategic Reality of the Fight: A Word from Anthony Hall
Grayzone’s expose should be studied in tandem with a powerful report written by American Herald Tribune Editor in Chief Anthony Hall published on June 8 entitled COVID-19, Antifa, and Black Lives Matter: The Battle for Control of the Internet. In this important article, Hall explains that the current convergent of major global developments has come to a historic head.
As we move into and through this turbulent phase of history, the speed of world events has accelerated to unprecedented levels exemplified from the quick change of focus from one controlled fallacious narrative featuring Gates as the star performer Global Pandemic show to a new Soros-managed narrative of controlled chaos across America under the Black Lives Matter/Antifa show.
In his article, Hall points out: “In recent days the focus suddenly shifted from COVID-19 and compulsory vaccines to insurrection and anarchy from within. Suddenly the vaccine czar, Bill Gates, has been swept from the center stage of current events. Suddenly multi-billionaire Gates has been upstaged by multi-billionaire George Soros.”
In both cases of COVID-19 and Soros-financed mass anarchy, the target is the same thing: The free access to information on the internet which has become a focal point for the battle ground for the future of the human race. As Hall points out, “the drama of these cataclysmic times is serving to highlight the importance of the Internet not only as a medium for reporting events but as a vehicle that is instrumental in the shaping of events; in determining what actually happens or not.”
In the case of the current controlled chaos agenda, this battle is playing out over President Trump’s recent Executive Order invoking Section 230 of the Communications and Decency Act of 1996 in defense of a free and uncensored internet. On this point, Hall writes: “Love him or hate him, Donald Trump has recently moved forward with the most significant anti-censorship initiative in the history of the Internet. Trump is seeking to stop the takeover of humanity’s most vital infrastructure of communications by a cabal of extremists.”
Trump’s Executive Order stands in direct opposition to those forces of the Anglo-American Five Eyes empire which seeks nothing less than to turn humanity into a society of sheepish zombies as pliable as the mobs of Ancient Rome who would as soon cheer for Pompei one day as they would Julius Caesar, Brutus or Marc Antony the next… as long as blood and wine continued to flow in the gladiator arenas.
It is important to emphasize here that no one is safe from this new age of post-2016 cyberwarfare.
Whether you place yourself on the “left” or on the “right” of America’s political spectrum, the chances are that if your conscience is intact, then you don’t want your nation to become a dictatorship, you prefer the constitution not be shredded and you certainly don’t want the American Military Industrial Complex to blow up the world. If this is the case, then you would do well to pay attention to any FBI-run protocols which demand that the population be kept fearful and confused enough to willingly renounce their liberties, free speech and very constitution upon which so many people gave their lives, in exchange for a Deep State bureaucrat’s definition of “security”.
Matthew J.L. Ehret is a journalist, lecturer and founder of the Canadian Patriot Review.