Inside The Neo-Con Propaganda Campaign Behind The New Cold War With Russia.

How Neo-Cons Manipulated Public Opinion Against Russia.

In my recent article, “How The West Provoked The War In Ukraine”, I reviewed the hidden history of how the West intentionally provoked and prolonged the proxy war in Ukraine to weaken Russia.

Just like with every neo-con war, there has been a mass propaganda campaign to go along with it, designed to demonize the official enemy, in this case, Russia.

Since at least 2012, there has been a concerted neo-con propaganda campaign to turn public opinion against Russia.

In this article, I will expose the long-running coordinated propaganda campaign from neo-cons designed to ramp up tensions with Russia and manufacture consent for war.

The Magnitsky Deception.

The first real launch of American hostilities towards Russia was the so-called “Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012”, a sanctions package against Russia sponsored by Neo-Cons, including John McCain and Marco Rubio, and signed into law by Barack Obama.

The law was in response to a claim from the American billionaire Bill Browder, the head of the Russian investment firm Hermitage Capital Management, who claimed that his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was killed in a Russian prison after discovering Russian corruption and testifying to it in court.

The BBC at the time noted that the sanctions package was “a sore spot in US-Russia relations” and made relations between the two countries “more tense”.

It turned out, however, that Bill Browder’s claim was a complete fabrication.

The dissident Russian journalist Andrei Nekrasov set out to make a documentary about Sergei Magnitsky, supporting Browder’s version of the story.

Halfway through the investigation, however, he found Browder’s story to be a complete fabrication and eventually exposed it in the final documentary, “The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes”.

For one, he uncovered that Sergei Magnitsky was actually Bill Browder’s accountant at Hermitage Capital Management and not a lawyer at all.

When interviewed in the documentary, Browder claims, “we immediately went through our list of lawyers and called up the smartest lawyer we knew, a young man named Sergei Magnitsky”.

In the documentary, Nekrasov goes to the book launch for one of Bill Browder’s books, where he spoke to one of Sergei Magnitsky’s former associates who said, “He wasn’t a lawyer, he was an accountant”.

The German investigative outlet Der Spiegel eventually exposed this deception as well.

Browder had continuously claimed that Magnitsky was put in prison because he testified to Russian government corruption in court, but the court transcripts do not show this at all.

While Browder has claimed that Magnitsky exposed corruption by two Russian police officers named Kuznetsov and Karpov, Der Spiegel noted that, “Magnitsky does indeed mention the names of the two police officers nearly 30 times and describes their role during a search. But at no point does he make a concrete accusation against them personally. In a second protocol of a statement made on Oct. 7, Kuznetsov and Karpov are not mentioned at all”.

Furthermore, as Der Spiegel noted, “Magnitsky did not make his statements entirely of his own free will, but as a witness in an ongoing investigation. According to other documents, the trial had been underway since February. This was confirmed to DER SPIEGEL by Magnitsky's lawyer at the time, Dmitry Kharitonov, who said his client had been summoned to testify.”

In reality, Sergei Magnitsky was summoned to court in a criminal police probe against Browder for tax fraud, and went to jail for Browder’s tax fraud, not for exposing any corruption. ‘

While Magnitsky did die in prison, it was really a result of the brutal Russian prison system and not an intentional murder.

Der Spiegel noted that in reality, “A prison doctor had diagnosed him (Magnitsky) with an inflammation of the pancreas four and a half months prior”.

It noted that a commission on his death, which included “human rights activists and opponents of the Kremlin,” found that while the medical neglect that caused his death shows the “cold-hearted nature of Russia's prison system”, “it contains no evidence of a targeted murder”.

The MH17 Deception.

By 2014, the U.S. backed a coup against Ukraine’s democratically elected government and installed a far-right puppet government, leading to the Russian annexation of Crimea and a civil war between Russian armed separatists in Eastern Ukraine and the new Western-backed Ukrainian government.

One of the next propaganda tools used by the West was when the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17- a civilian flight- was shot down over Eastern Ukraine during the fighting, killing 283 passengers and 15 crew members.

The West accused Russian-backed separatists of downing the plane using a Russian-supplied Buk missile launcher.

Dutch journalist Eric van de Beek, who wrote a recent book on the topic, noted that this claim was instrumental in the new Cold War, writing:

The MH17 crash also brought the Americans what they had wished for. Washington had urged the Europeans to impose tougher sanctions. The Europeans were divided among themselves. Three days after the crash, Secretary of State John Kerry said he hoped it would be a “wake-up call” for some countries in Europe that had been reluctant to move. “We think frankly that the sanctions may need to be tougher. It may well be that the Dutch and others help lead that effort.” The subsequent emotional speeches of the Dutch Foreign Minister, Frans Timmermans, at the UN Security Council in New York on July 21 and the European Commission in Brussels on July 22 provided a breakthrough. The British news agency Reuters characterised the meeting in Brussels as “a turning point in Europe’s approach towards Russia”. Countries that were previously resisting, such as Germany and Italy, now suddenly agreed to the measures desired by the US. “Within days of Timmermans’ address, senior EU diplomats had agreed on the broad outlines of potential sanctions on Russian access to EU capital markets, defence and energy technology,” Reuters wrote. “Timmermans’ impassioned speech, several diplomats said, made it difficult for others to hold a firm line against sanctions at Tuesday’s meeting.”

When the case went to trial in a Dutch court, the court convicted two Russians and one Ukrainian separatist for the downing in absentia, but acquitted the only defendant to show up on all legal charges.

Van de Beek- who reported on the trial- noted that much of the evidence that led to his acquittal poked major holes in the Western narrative.

For example, while the West claims the plane was shot down by a Russian-supplied Buk missile, Van De Beek noted the evidence for this was “two butterfly-shaped fragments” found on the plane’s wreckage.

But as he noted, tests show that the butterfly-shaped fragments were not consistent with what should be expected from a Buk missile.

He noted that “Russian Buk manufacturer Almaz-Antey conducted an experiment in 2015 in which a Buk missile was detonated near the cockpit of an Ilyushin airliner. It was clearly visible that the plating had been penetrated by numerous particles with a butterfly shape” which was not the case with the MH17 crash, and that “A test conducted by the JIT (Joint Investigation Team), using a Buk missile equipped with a ‘butterfly’ warhead, confirmed Almaz-Antey’s findings.”

Along with this, he noted that, “Explosives examination conducted by the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) revealed traces of the explosive PETN on the nacelle of the left motor ring. This is not found in the warhead of Buk missiles. These contain only the explosives TNT and RDX. So this, too, raised questions.”

He also noted that witnesses used to back up the Western narrative had major inconsistencies in their testimony.

One witness, for example he noted “states that he saw with the naked eye how the missile hit the cockpit. This is impossible. The plane disappeared from the radar 26.5 kilometers from Pervomaiskyi, at a height of 10 kilometers, flying over a densely clouded area, invisible to people on the ground. Also, according to the witness, he witnessed the incident on July 16, a day before the crash”.

The second witness used to back up the Western narrative, he noted, “stated that he saw the Buk Telar arrive with just one missile. That does not square with a video that the prosecution presented as evidence of the supply of the murder weapon; the Buk shown on a video in Makeevka carries four missiles”.

Van de Beek also noted that the official Western claim- that Russian separatists mistook the MH17 for a Ukrainian fighter jet-makes little sense.

He wrote that, “Not only has the prosecution provided no evidence of the mistake scenario, it has also made no attempt to make it plausible. How could the crew of a Buk Telar have mistaken a passenger jet for an enemy target? A fighter jet seeking to bomb flies at least half as low as a passenger aircraft at 10 kilometers (33,000 feet) altitude. The same is true of a military transport plane wanting to drop troops or provisions. Also, a fighter jet or transport plane would have reduced speed as they approached the deployment area. MH17 flew in a straight line, at constant altitude and at high speed toward the Russian border, in a known corridor for civil aviation.”

While Van De Beek concludes that “the culprits could have been either Russian or Ukrainian”, the evidence presented in the book shows that much of the Western evidence does not stand up to scrutiny.

The Birth Of A CIA Propaganda Outlet.

The MH17 disaster also brought the birth of Bellingcat, a shady propaganda outlet used by the CIA to launder its claims about Russia.

Journalist Kit Klarenberg noted that :

Bellingcat, which serendipitously launched just days before the downing of MH17, came to prominence by immediately seizing on this deluge of carefully-curated and potentially falsified information. With amazing speed, the organization claimed to have precisely mapped out what happened that fateful day, and exactly how it occurred. Despite its relative inexperience and opaque organizational structure, its findings were accepted without a shred of scrutiny by Western journalists, lawmakers, pundits, and the official Dutch MH17 tribunal, which concluded in November 2022.

Bellingcat was headed by Eliot Higgins, a blogger with no expertise in any of the issues he was touted as an authority on.

A New York Times profile on him wrote that “Mr. Higgins attributed his skills not to any special knowledge of international conflicts or digital data, but to the hours he has spent playing video games”.

Despite this, Higgins was useful to the neo-con establishment in laundering their propaganda about Russia.

According to a leaked UK government assessment, “Bellingcat was somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation itself, and by being willing to produce reports for anyone willing to pay”.

Bellingcat received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, a cutout of the CIA’s regime change arm.

In a Foreign Policy magazine article, Marc Polymeropolous, the former CIA’s deputy chief of operations for Europe and Eurasia, bragged about being able to use Bellingcat to launder CIA talking points about Russia, saying “I don’t want to be too dramatic, but we love this, whenever we had to talk to our liaison partners about it (Russia), instead of trying to have things cleared or worry about classification issues, you could just reference their work”.

Daniel Hoffman, a former CIA Chief of Station, said, “The greatest value of Bellingcat is that we can then go to the Russians and then say, there you go”.

Democratic Rep. Bill Keating the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe and Eurasia said that “the fact that it’s open-sourced is so important because we can talk about it more to the public,” referring to , Bellingcat and said, “he hopes through his work on the subcommittee to make Russia’s destabilizing actions a priority for the Biden administration”.

Rebranded Project For A New American Century For Russia.

Along with Bellingcat, the same neo-cons behind PNAC(Project for A New American Century), the think tank behind the Iraq war, rebranded into a new think tank called the “Foreign Policy Initiative” designed to ramp up tensions with Russia.

As journalists, Max Blumenthal and Rania Khalek reported in 2014 :

Launched by Weekly Standard founder William Kristol and two former foreign policy aides to Mitt Romney, Dan Senor and Robert Kagan (the husband of Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland), FPI grew directly out of the Project for a New American Century that led the public pressure campaign for a unilateral U.S. invasion of Iraq after the Bin Laden-orchestrated 9/11 attacks.

In 2010, when FPI rose from the ashes of PNAC, whose name had become synonymous with warmongering, mendacity and strategic blundering, it pivoted away from Iraq toward ‘rising resurgent powers, including China and Russia,’ according to its mission statement. Through a series of letters and manifestos urging President Barack Obama to take a more confrontational stance toward Russia, FPI has assiduously sought to establish the groundwork for a new Cold War.

On March 14, in The Weekly Standard, Kristol laid out FPI’s goals, writing that recent geopolitical crises could be exploited to reverse America’s ‘war-weary’ post-Iraq attitude and prevent further cuts to defense spending.

‘All that’s needed is the rallying,’ he insisted. ‘And the turnaround can be fast.’

(Emphasis: Mine)

As the reporters noted, the think tank provided the basis for the “Russian interference” claims that later subsumed Russiagate.

One of the think tank’s leading members, neo-con Jamie Kirchick, pulled several publicity stunts against the American arm of Russia’s TV station RT.

This included going on the network and changing the topic to Russia’s treatment of gay people- trying to get liberals to turn against Russia- and harassing reporters from the network outside the building.

He later organized another publicity stunt, getting the RT anchor Liz Wahl to resign on air.

As Blumenthal and Khalek reported at the time:

Up until two minutes before Wahl’s resignation, FPI (Foreign Policy Initiative) took to Twitter again to urge its followers to tune in to RT.

And finally, at 5:26 p.m., at the very moment Wahl quit, FPI’s Twitter account broke the news: “RT Anchor RESIGNS ON AIR. She ‘cannot be part of a network that whitewashes the actions of Putin.’ ”

The tweets from FPI suggested a direct level of coordination between Wahl and the neoconservative think tank.

Just over an hour later, an exclusive interview with Wahl appeared at The Daily Beast. It was authored by James Kirchick.

Wahl later did a major media tour where she repeated talking points fed to her by neo-cons about the menace of Russian disinformation.

The main funder of the Foreign Policy Initiative think tank was the neo-conservative billionaire Paul Singer, who later went on to be the initial funder of the Fusion GPS opposition research on Donald Trump, which eventually came up with the Steele Dossier that launched Russiagate.

The Atlantic reported at the time that the “primary seed donor (of the FPI) was billionaire Paul Singer”.

Forward Magazine later reported that, “A conservative news website funded by hedge fund billionaire and political megadonor Paul Singer was the first entity to contract a research firm to dig up dirt on then-candidate Donald Trump—leading to the infamous dossier containing unverified claims about Trump’s ties to Russia”.

The Russiagate Deception.

By 2016, neocons had already planted the seeds of the new Cold War. They had spread the Magnitsky Deception and a questionable narrative around MH17 to justify sanctions against Russia while laundering hawkish talking points through outlets like Bellingcat and think tanks like the Foreign Policy Initiative.

By the time of the 2016 election, this campaign ramped up into overdrive with claims that Russia swung the election from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump.

The main claim to back this up was the claim that Russia stole emails from the DNC and leaked them to WikiLeaks

New declassified documents, however, largely disprove this narrative.

Declassified documents show that in reality, the FBI and NSA had “low confidence” that Russia stole documents from the DNC.

As journalist Aaron Mate recently reported, “According to a previously undisclosed email exchange from December 2016, the head of the National Security Agency, Mike Rogers, complained that his analysts were denied access to the intelligence used to blame Russia for the hacking and leaking of Democratic Party material. Rogers sent his dissent to Brennan, the CIA chief; James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence; and Jim Comey, the FBI Director”.

In reality, the intelligence claim that Russia stole emails from the DNC was outsourced to CrowdStrike, a private Clinton Campaign hire firm whose CEO, Shawn Henry, admitted under oath had “no evidence that they (emails) were actually exfiltrated (from the DNC)”.

The Paul Singer and later DNC-funded Steele Dossier generated far more outlandish claims that Trump colluded with Russia to swing the election and that he was a puppet of the Russians.

The real intention behind this was to get Democrats to hate Russia and to get them to pressure Trump to implement neocon policies towards Russia.

In order to prove he was not a “Russian agent,” Trump approved lethal arms to Ukraine, blocked a peace deal that would have ended the war in Eastern Ukraine, and pulled out of the INF Nuclear treaty with Russia unilaterally.

All of these policies eventually helped lead to the proxy war in Ukraine.

Many believe that the American/Russian new cold war began with the Russiagate deception, but in reality, it was just the next step in a long propaganda campaign already underway.

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