NBC Pushes an Unfounded Conspiracy Theory on Behalf of CIA
WAYNE MADSEN | Strategic Culture Foundation
Retired National Security Agency (NSA) chief technology officer William Binney is being branded as a “conspiracy theorist” by corporate media outlets, most notably, the Comcast-owned National Broadcasting Corporation, for co-authoring a controversial memo issued this past summer by a group of former intelligence officers – Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
The memo opined that the leak of Democratic National Committee e-mails during the 2016 presidential campaign were not the result of Russian state-sponsored hacking but the result of an inside job by a DNC staffer who loaded the purloined e-mails onto a thumb drive. That view is contrary to an assessment made in a 2017 intelligence assessment by 17 US intelligence agencies. That assessment claimed that Russian government-sponsored hackers broke into the email servers of the DNC and then provided the emails to WikiLeaks. However, the assessment was not the unanimous view of 17 US intelligence agencies, but merely four – the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It was provided a chapeau of legitimacy by the Director of National Intelligence. Contrary to news reports, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and intelligence elements of the military services did not provide input to the assessment.
Binney was also accused by NBC “national security reporter” Ken Dilanian of pushing the “conspiracy theory” that the “NSA is collecting and storing nearly every US communication.” Far from being a conspiracy theory, NSA’s unconstitutional eavesdropping program, code-named STELLAR WIND and officially known as the “President’s Surveillance Program,” was proven in classified documents revealed by NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden and, earlier, by Justice Department prosecutor Thomas Tamm. A metadata-capturing program called PRISM ensnared the personal data of millions of Americans from AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL.
What raised the hackles of Dilanian and other media shills for the intelligence community is that Binney was invited to a meeting with Central Intelligence Agency director Mike Pompeo on the “hallowed” 7th floor executive level at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Pompeo, a former Republican congressman from Kansas, had two CIA technology experts sit in on the meeting.
Pompeo was reportedly urged to meet Binney by President Trump after the president saw one of Binney’s interviews on Fox News and suggested that Pompeo meet with the retired NSA official. Dilanian wrote that although Binney “has been feted in Europe and elsewhere as a truth-telling whistleblower . . . American officials of all political persuasions say his allegations about the NSA are false.” Dilanian offered up pure uninformed conjecture. Many current and former NSA, CIA, Justice Department, FBI employees, of all political persuasions, have confirmed that Binney’s statements about illegal NSA eavesdropping are correct. And, they have been proven correct by deliberations of the super-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).
Dilanian is nothing more than a CIA embedded reporter at NBC News. While Dilanian was the Tribune Washington bureau national security reporter, he was accused of submitting his stories to the CIA in advance of publication. Tribune owns the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. In one email, Dilanian wrote to the CIA press officer: “I’m working on a story about congressional oversight of drone strikes that can present a good opportunity for you guys.” In other cases, the CIA made significant re-edits of Dilanian’s stories. Dilanian left Tribune in May 2014 for the Associated Press. While the Tribune Washington bureau chief later called Dilanian’s e-mail exchanges with the CIA a violation of the newspaper chain’s news policy, the AP had no problem with Dilanian’s e-mail pen pals at the CIA. Dilanian later moved to NBC News.
NBC News, which has had a long relationship with the CIA since the agency’s implementation of the news media infiltration project called MOCKINGBIRD in the early 1950s, apparently has had no problem with Dilanian’s shilling for the CIA. The NBC attack on Binney appears to have been coordinated by Dilanian and his copy editors at the CIA who were not happy about Pompeo’s meeting with the NSA whistleblower. Pompeo has been all over the map on accepting the US Intelligence Community’s assessment on Russian hacking of the DNC computers, first accepting the assessment, then agreeing that it had no impact on the presidential election, and wavering back and forth to please Trump.
There is some credence to Binney’s contention that weak DNC security led to either an internal compromise of sensitive e-mails or an external hack. Then-DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile did not create a Cybersecurity Advisory Board until after the e-mail hacking became public in August 2016. Instead of asking non-partisan technical experts to serve on the advisory board, Brazile packed it with Democratic Party hacks, ironic, since the title of her new book is “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House.” Among the members of Brazile’s advisory board were former members of the Obama administration, including Rand Beers, formerly with the Department of Homeland Security; Nicole Wong and Aneesh Copra of Albright Stonebridge Group; and Perkins Coie partner Michael Sussmann, a former federal prosecutor who was a lawyer for Hillary Clinton and the DNC. Albright Stonebridge is the lobbying firm of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
According to a retired technical officer with the US Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Technology Development Services (TDS), the computer systems maintained by TDS have had their security weakened by senators who want ease of access to the systems maintained by the DNC, the Republican National Committee, and the four campaign committees of the Senate and House – the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee (DSCC), the National Republican Senate Committee (NRSC), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC). The DCCC was reportedly penetrated by hackers while the DNC was also being hit. However, based on the revelations by the retired TDS official, Binney is correct in stating that the “inside hack” was done either by DNC and/or DCCC authorized users or by those who penetrated the systems from the US Senate or House of Representatives computers.
US Senate and House computer systems and network have been vulnerable to outside penetration ever since 2002, when Foxcom Wireless, a Jerusalem-based Israeli wireless start-up firm, received a contract to install a wireless system in the US Capitol and Senate and House office buildings. Foxcom was heading into bankruptcy before landing the lucrative contract for the US Capitol complex. Foxcom Wireless moved its headquarters to Vienna, Virginia and renamed itself MobileAccess Networks. In 2011, Mobile Access, Ltd. was bought by Corning, Inc. and merged into its Corning Cable Systems subsidiary.
It was discovered after the contract with the US House that Foxcom paid $280,000 to Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who was later convicted for bribery, mail fraud, and tax evasion, who helped secure the contract by lobbying members and staff of the powerful House Administration Committee, which was seen, at the time, as a corrupt congressional version of New York’s infamous Tammany Hall. The powerful committee has been dubbed the “City Hall” of Capitol Hill.
There was not a single member, except for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who voiced objections to the Foxcom contract.The deal had the personal support of House Speaker Dennis Hastert, later convicted of lying to federal investigators about details of his paying hush-money in a pedophile scandal.
The congressman who originally introduced Foxcom to the House Administration Committee was House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer. Hoyer’s sister, Bernice Manocherian, once served as the executive president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the largest Jewish influence-peddling operation in the United States. House Administration Committee members who approved the deal with the Israelis were committee chairman Bob Ney and Representatives Candice Miller, Zoe Lofgren, and Juanita Millender-McDonald. Ney was later convicted of conspiracy and making false statements in the Abramoff influence-peddling scandal.
Foxcom ensured that its “contract” to “re-wire” Congress saw no oversight from TDS technicians or employees of either the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms or House Information Resources Office. The House Information Resources Office reports to the Chief Administrative Office of the House. Today, it is convenient for the media to ignore what Abramoff’s actions have since allowed the Israeli mafia – the true culprits in the 2016 DNC/DCCC hacks – to have accomplished. Many of the Trump Organization’s global partners are members of this particular mafia and its various branches.
NBC hacks like Dilanian and the perpetual happy-faced bobblehead Katie Tur, as well as their dubious colleagues at CNN, Wolf Blitzer – the former public affairs officer for AIPAC – and Jake Tapper, are not able to see prior to 2016 to discover that the security holes within the telecommunications networks of Congress – with access to the DNC and RNC – were placed by Israeli intelligence agents in the early and mid-2000s. Brazile’s expert cyber-security committee could never turn their attention toward the Israelis, given the large amounts of money Haim Saban and Harvey Weinstein lavished on the Democratic Party. Russia may be getting the blame for HackGate, but Israeli mobsters, hailing originally from places as diverse as Lithuania, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine to Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, and Moldova, deserve all the credit.