#hamilton68

These are really the lowest of the low… accounts and blogs have been hacked by some that made themselves appear as Russian, leaving notes in my GoDaddy portal… Little did I realise that they were trying to make my site appear as some kind of Russian Calibrator It got so bad that I had to start keeping all my passwords in a notebook. Good lord talk about a pain but when they destroyed Post-Nuke…

Text of Clint Watts 17 January 2018 testimony to U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation aka his 'OMG WE GOTTA DO SOMETHING! THE ROOSKIES ARE BRAINWASHING AMERICANS WITH FAKE NEWS' shtick

Watts Up: The Support for Syria Terror Connection Between an Ex-FBI Agent and DDCI Morrell

As Assange's tweet points out, the advisory board for the Hamilton 68 project is a mix of Democratic Party Hillary hacks and GOP neocon #NeverTrump ers. The connection between the likes of ex-CIA Deputy Director Mike Morrell and the group's leading front man Clint Watts, involves Syria. As RogueMoney readers will recall, Morrell's first interview after leaving the Agency, during which he openly campaigned for Hillary Clinton, was with PBS Charlie Rose (this was prior to Rose's firing over sexual harassment allegations).

Morrell would later admit that his immediate campaigning for Hillary upon leaving Langley, and his boss Director John Brennan overt disdain for Trump, just might have given the then presidential candidate the impression that much of CIA leadership was out go get him (gee, ya think?). But to date we've never seen Morrell get asked, much less answer for, the points he made in the Rose interview, demanding the U.S. 'kill' Russians and Iranians, because the latter had not paid a sufficient price for what they'd done in helping Iraq insurgents target Americans from 2004 to 2009. Rose naturally did not ask Morrell in the interview how he would expect the Russians or Iranians to respond if CIA increased lethal aid to the jihadists attacking their personnel supporting the Syrian government, given the vulnerability of American troops to infiltration and IED attacks on both sides of the Syraq border and the Houthis eagerness to kill Saudi forces on Saudi soil as Persian payback against Riyadh.

What Morrell and Clint Watts had in common before joining the same 'G-NGO', was a fierce support for the 'moderate rebels' cause in Syria, even while Watts co-signed a 2014 Foreign Affairs article calling the Qatari-funded Ahrar-al-Sham jihadists "an Al-Qaeda linked group worth befriending". The article would haunt Watts on social media, as various individuals trolled him as an apologist for terror -- so long as it could be funneled at U.S. geopolitical adversaries. As Alternet's Max Blumenthal, whose father Sid Blumenthal happens to be a close friend of the Clintons and thus no stranger to intrigues, wrote:

"Watts rehashed the same argument at FPRI a year later, urging the U.S. government to harness jihadist terror as a weapon against Russia. “The U.S. at a minimum, through covert or semi-covert platforms, should take advantage and amplify these free alternative [jihadist] narratives to provide Russia some payback for recent years’ aggression,” he wrote. In another paper, Watts asked, “Why shouldn’t the U.S. redirect some of the jihadi hatred towards those with the dirtiest hands in the Syrian conflict: Russia and Iran?” Watts did not specify whether the theater of covert warfare should be limited to the Syrian battlefield, or if he sought to encourage jihadists to carry out terrorist acts inside Russia and Iran. The premise of these op-eds should have raised serious concerns about Watts and his colleagues, and even questions about their sanity. They had marketed themselves as national security experts, yet they were lobbying the US to “befriend” the allies of Al Qaeda, the group that brought down the Twin Towers. (Ahrar al-Sham was founded by Abu Khalid al-Suri, a Madrid bombing suspect who was named by Spanish investigators as Osama bin-Laden’s courier.) Anyone cynical enough to put such ideas into public circulation should have expected a backlash. But when the inevitable wave of criticism came, Watts dismissed it all as a Russian bot attack."  -- https://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/clint-watts-fake-russia-expert

A cynic might even suggest that part of what motivates Watts and Morrell to push the 'Russian interference' storyline so hard, is to deflect attention from their own fierce advocacy on behalf of Saudi and Qatari interests in Syria. If investigators began digging into that, they might uncover just how close Morrell's former boss 'Riyadh' John Brennan became to the Saudi royals during his time as CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, or for that matter, what the Gulf states are receiving in return for their lavish donations to D.C. think tanks.

Twitter 'You May Have Been Targeted by Russian Propaganda Emails' Seized Upon by Democratic Deep State Shills as Further 'Proof' Moscow Tilted Election Scale for Trump

Above is a tweet posted this weekend by Clint Watts, a former FBI agent trained in standards of admissible evidence, rambling about how Russian hackers and troll accounts swung the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump. The fact that the 'DNC hack' has never conclusively been shown to have been a hack rather than an inside job data dump by disgruntled Bernie bros (Seth Rich possibly among them) is naturally ignored. But the most interesting thing about Watts is not what he says, which RogueMoney readers and anyone who follows cable news have already heard ad nauseum over the past year since Trump's inauguration, but which groups and money interests he represents. Again Blumenthal writes: 

"A look at the Beltway power players behind the group reveals a collection of military interventionists from both parties, all united in their desire for intensified conflict with Russia. They include neoconservative former Bush advisors like Kori Schake and Democrats like Jake Sullivan, an ardent military interventionist who served as the top foreign policy advisor to the 2016 Clinton campaign. Another Clinton surrogate, the former CIA director Michael Morrell, advises the ASD. Morrell has said that the U.S. should support Islamist insurgents in Syria in order to “have the Russians and the Iranians pay a little price.” Morrell added that he wanted to “bomb [Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s] offices in the middle of the night.” To round out its board of advisors, the ASD recruited the most recognizable face of neoconservatism in Washington, Bill Kristol. A founder of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and a vocal supporter of every war the U.S. has waged, Kristol complained in 2014 that Americans were “war weary.” He clamored for a public relations campaign to influence them in favor of open-ended military operations, urging a “rallying” of pro-war spirit. This year, Kristol openly endorsed a “deep state” coup to oust the Trump administration. (Kristol’s son-in-law, Matthew Continetti, is the editor-in-chief of the Free Beacon, the neoconservative online outlet that served as the initial financial channel for funding the “dirty dossier” composed by a former British MI5 officer named Christopher Steele. Produced by Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm, the 35-page memo alleged that Vladimir Putin manipulated Trump through “kompromat” [compromising material] he gathered by secretly filming prostitutes urinating on Trump in the presidential suite of Moscow’s Ritz Hotel. The document's most lurid claims remain unsubstantiated.)"  -- https://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/terror-cranks-sold-america-russia-panic

Again, the connections to 'the Vulture' hedge funder Paul Singer through Kristol and the Free Beacon, which started the 'Russians' dirt dig on Trump that Fusion GPS picked up from the Clintons once 'ex' MI6 man Christopher Steele came into the picture, are evident. Andrew Weisburd, who is the more crankish face of Hamilton 68 reporters and MSNBC omit to avoid discussing his Putin praising Internet Haganah days, is another, less interesting globalist troll. But as Wikispooks reported, two ex Mossad officers gave Weisburd advice in his post-9/11 hunt for alleged Hamas sympathizers online, run out of his attic in Carbondale, Illinois. A record of allegedly fighting Islamist radicals online did not prevent Weisburd from later cheerleading for terrorists who sent suicide bombers against Sunni, Allawite and Christian Syrians supportive of Assad (for more on Weisburd, see our previous piece on Hamilton68, "The Clint Watts Con, Part II" -- CLINT WATTS WANTS YOU TO KNOW HE CAN TYPE COMPUTATIONAL PROPAGANDA IN ALL CAPS SO THERE, SKEPTICS THAT KREMLIN MINDRAYS SENT VIA SOCIAL MEDIA DIDN'T ELECT DONALD TRUMP PRESIDENT!).

Essentially, Hamilton68 is intended to be a more 'respectable' up market 2.0 version of the failed PropOrNot project, which the Washington (Langley/Bezos) Post had to distance itself from after facing libel lawsuit threats. To avoid similar potential litigation from 'Kremlin trolls' who turn out to be patriotic Americans, Hamilton68 ducks naming names, as an otherwise sympathetic to its cause New York Times reporter had to admit:

"ASD has explicitly refused to name the Russian bot accounts that it claims to track. The group explained, “We are not willing to publicly attribute even one specific account incorrectly.” This makes it impossible to know if the group has attributed any accounts correctly. In perhaps the only case in which the ASD named one of the “Russian” Twitter accounts it was tracking, the group fingered a Twitter user named Marcel Sardo, branding him as the possibly robotic ringleader of a sinister Kremlin-driven influence operation. But when the New York Times' Scott Shane investigated Sardo’s identity, he discovered that the account in question belonged to an actual human—a 48-year-old computer programmer from Zurich with no ties to the Russian government. Indeed, Sardo was a private individual who openly sympathized with Russian foreign policy. The questionable methodology behind ASD’s Hamilton 68 dashboard was conceived by a team of researchers who earned their stripes in the so-called war on terror. They include J.M. Berger, a self-styled terror expert who has focused exclusively on Sunni jihadism. Also lending a hand was Jonathon Morgan, a computer scientist who worked with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Neither of these figures has demonstrated any record of research, scholarship or journalism on Russia. Then there was Andrew Weisburd, an ASD fellow whose vigilante tactics have provoked allegations of bigotry, extremism and malicious harassment."  -- https://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/terror-cranks-sold-america-russia-panic

The German Marshall Fund Supporting Partisan/Neocon Hackery of Hamilton68 Represents EU/Berlin Meddling in American Politics to Falsely 'Link' Pro-Trump/Mueller Critics to Kremlin by Dubious or Made Up Association