A very interesting article from NBC has come to my attention. It is from April 6, and has been reported on by many others, as well, but I am working a bit slower and don’t try to remain at the tip of breaking news, as my goals are to look at news differently.
We’ll analyze it here, as it contains a lot of very pertinent information on the current Cognitive Warfare that is being waged.
It is titled ‘In a break with the past, U.S. is using intel to fight an info war with Russia, even when the intel isn't rock solid’ and with the subtitle “It doesn’t have to be solid intelligence,” one U.S. official said. “It’s more important to get out ahead of them [the Russians], Putin specifically, before they do something."
The article starts hot, right off the bat:
“It was an attention-grabbing assertion that made headlines around the world: U.S. officials said they had indications suggesting Russia might be preparing to use chemical agents in Ukraine.
President Joe Biden later said it publicly. But three U.S. officials told NBC News this week there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the U.S. released the information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions.
It’s one of a string of examples of the Biden administration’s breaking with recent precedent by deploying declassified intelligence as part of an information war against Russia. The administration has done so even when the intelligence wasn’t rock solid, officials said, to keep Russian President Vladimir Putin off balance.”
This is pure information war. Cognitive War. The worst part: not based on truth. I am working on a further insight, but it has to do with the level of truth in messaging, the perception of truth, and the impact/potency of truth vs un-truth in cognitive war. There seems to be an important distinction.
Here, we see how US officials themselves admit to sending out a warning that is based on nothing concrete. They even flat-out admit that there is no evidence the Russians even have any chemical weapons brought into Ukraine.
So why did they put that warning out, suggesting there actually was such evidence?
“The idea is to pre-empt and disrupt the Kremlin’s tactics, complicate its military campaign, “undermine Moscow’s propaganda and prevent Russia from defining how the war is perceived in the world,” said a Western government official familiar with the strategy.”
Three points: disrupting tactics and planned military campaigns for the Russians, to act as a counter to Russia’s propaganda, and to prevent Russia from defining the perception of the war in the world.
With this, it is very important to notice how the target is not just Putin, his generals and his military, but also each and every one of us, as the stated goal is to influence the perception of this war.
The first point is only valid if the Russians actually ARE planning to use chemical or other such weapons. If they had no such intention, that warning by US officials has zero impact on the Russian tactics and plans. But the other two points seem properly meaningful. But this answer to both Russian propaganda and as counter to the perception of the war is fraught with a major problem: if not founded in truth, it might massively backfire.
Still, the article continues to praise this tactic:
“It’s the most amazing display of intelligence as an instrument of state power that I have seen or that I’ve heard of since the Cuban Missile Crisis,” said Tim Weiner, the author of a 2006 history of the CIA and 2020’s “The Folly and the Glory,” a look at the U.S.-Russia rivalry over decades. “It has certainly blunted and defused the disinformation weaponry of the Kremlin.”
Possibly, but with the huge difference that the Russians DID have missiles in Cuba, and that the US DID have photographic evidence of such.
The article does concede that there are problems, but only in passing:
“But the strategy has its dangers. One of them, the Western official said, is that getting something clearly wrong would be extremely damaging to U.S. credibility and play into Moscow’s hands.”
The article continues, in context of news that Putin is isolated and being lied to/misled by his own advisers, even though they had no real intelligence about that (the article cited two contrary statements by intelligence officials: one source saying that such was analysis rather than hard evidence, while another group dug in claiming this was very reliable evidence that was vetted at the highest levels):
At times, the Biden administration has released information in which it has less confidence or about things that are possible rather than truly likely.
The article goes, justifying and defending this tactic:
“It doesn’t have to be solid intelligence when we talk about it,” a U.S. official said. “It’s more important to get out ahead of them — Putin specifically — before they do something. It’s preventative. We don’t always want to wait until the intelligence is 100 percent certainty that they are going to do something. We want to get out ahead to stop them.”
Yeah, like putting out that Trump was colluding with the Russians, right?
A very important line is crossed, once you go from ‘likely’ into ‘possibly’. While ‘likely’ is based on actual evidence, however fragmentary, and with the caveat of that it might have been misunderstood, ‘possibly’ is based on ‘feeling’, on how the other is perceived. And any such warning based on ‘possibly’ only serves as confirming the existing idea: circular reasoning, feeding the confirmation bias.
The distinction is hard to make, especially for people without access to the actual intelligence. As I explained in the previous parts of my series ‘The War for our Minds’, the rapid succession of different news items and warnings serves a specific purpose. It creates a narrative, that aims to create a certain (positive or negative) feeling with the target based on each individual news snippet, and moves on quickly before it can be analyzed and digested, and brought back to true proportion. So even if the rectification or correction is later made (usually only in passing, at a fraction of the air time spent in spreading the original, false news snippet), the feeling remains. The rapid fire succession of such snippets not only prevents proper analysis, it also builds and reinforces the feeling. “Where there is smoke, there must be fire, right?”, and “it isn’t just one thing, it is so many!”, and in the minds of the targets, the manifold news snippets and resulting feelings become the proof, and a strong conviction sets in.
Based on ‘possibly’. Based on a pre-conceived idea, and NOT on fact and evidence.
Continuing, the article describes a 2020 memo signed by ‘nine of 11 U.S. military combatant commanders’, that urged the U.S. intelligence community ‘to declassify more information to counter disinformation and propaganda from Moscow and Beijing.’ This is basically a plea for Cognitive Warfare:
“The U.S. can bolster support from allies only by “waging the truth in the public domain against America’s 21st century challengers,” the officers wrote. But efforts to compete in the battle of ideas, they added, are hamstrung by overly stringent secrecy practices.
“We request this help to better enable the US, and by extension its allies and partners, to win without fighting, to fight now in so-called gray zones, and to supply ammunition in the ongoing war of narratives,” the four-star generals wrote to the acting director of national intelligence at the time, Joseph Maguire.
“Unfortunately, we continue to miss opportunities to clarify truth, counter distortions, puncture false narratives, and influence events in time to make a difference.”
But notice the key word: truth. This is NOT what the current Biden administration is doing, when it puts out warnings and claims that are not properly founded in actual evidence.
In light of this, I came across what independent journalist and writer Daniel Lazare said about this article in conversation with Sputnik (I know, ‘enemy sources’, but his point remains valid, regardless).
"It [NBC] is happy it put out other secret information even though 'confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn't high.' It even lauds intelligence officials for putting out a story about an imminent false-flag attack because, even though false, it supposedly forestalled war long enough 'to get allies on the same page in terms of the level of the Russian threat and how to respond.' Fake news is bad, in other words, except when the intelligence agencies do it, in which case it's good", Lazare says, adding that US news coverage has never been more one-sided than in the weeks since the beginning of Russian military operation in Ukraine, and this is clearly one of the reasons why".
“Fake news is bad, unless when WE do it. Then it is good.”
That is the take-away, and the reason for this article by NBC: justifying this practice, as if the end justifies the means.
I will end this here, as any further analysis is leading too far, and is too closely mixed with my other research topic, the place of truth in cognitive warfare. An article on that will be coming, hopefully sooner rather than later.
Thanks, it is great that you are willing to trawl through this insanity, as it saves me the bother. In short; the lunatics have taken over the asylum, and are blissfully unaware of the shortcomings of this state of affairs. Thankfully the fact that it is certain that our public life, narratives, 'official ' truths, etc, have all been hijacked, over frog-boiling time, by psychopaths, criminals, pedovors, and other such power-hunting weaklings and their unconscious minions - leaves me content that the human species is indeed worth saving. The best of us are still largely silent - and these attention-seeking buffoons do not define us. They will be the object of many future incredulous histories of this epic time we are living through. As you demonstrate, we are already taking notes.
Thank You Arn🙏