Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Friday, 20 July 2018

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://www.cecaust.com.au
 

Russian meddling, MH17: the unproven allegations you’re being told are ‘irrefutable facts’

Australian politicians and media have joined the global frenzy over US President Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Trump’s apparent acceptance of the “evil” “thug” Putin’s word that Russia didn’t interfere in the US election, over the word of his own intelligence agencies, who are presumed to have the highest level of competence in the world. The Australian media are exploiting the fourth anniversary of the tragic downing of flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine and the grief of the families of the victims to pile on the hysteria and attack anyone who dares to express support for Trump’s desire to achieve peace with Russia. They are abusing the word “facts” to assert that Russia did meddle in the election, and did “murder” Australians on MH17. Following are their claims, which have been retailed in the media with the same breathless certainty as they used in reporting on claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in 2003; we contrast the claims with evidence and investigations that show them to be unproven or outright false assertions.

I: Russia ‘hacked’ the 2016 US presidential election

It is alleged that Russian intelligence officers/agents “hacked” the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) computers on 5 July 2016 to obtain, and later publish via WikiLeaks, material damaging to Hillary Clinton’s prospects of winning the election. The emails and other material made public included evidence that the DNC had helped Clinton rig the Democratic Party primaries against her opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders. This allegation is routinely presented as the “unanimous” finding of US intelligence agencies.

This charge is demonstrated in many ways to be an unproven allegation, not “fact”:

• Independent metadata analysis of the DNC leak’s metadata concluded that the communications had been copied by an insider, not “hacked” remotely. (Metadata is “data about data”, and includes the times of its creation and modification.) Former US National Security Agency (NSA) Technical Director William Binney, now a member of watchdog group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), endorsed this finding in a 24 July 2017 memorandum co-authored by former IBM Program Manager for Information Technology Skip Folden. They wrote: “In the early evening [of 5 July 2016], Eastern Daylight Time, someone working in the EDT time zone with a computer directly connected to the DNC server or DNC Local Area Network, copied 1,976 megabytes of data in 87 seconds…. That speed is much faster than what is physically possible with a hack. It thus appears that the purported ‘hack’ of the DNC by Guccifer 2.0 (the self-proclaimed WikiLeaks source) was not a hack by Russia or anyone else, but was rather a copy of DNC data onto an external storage device.” (Emphasis in original.) Another DNC document, released 15 June 2016 by purported hacker Guccifer 2.0, himself (rather than via WikiLeaks, which has a perfect record for authenticity), “was synthetically tainted with ‘Russian fingerprints’”, presumably in an attempt to implicate Russian Intelligence, the analysis found.
  
  
• “All 17 US intelligence agencies” did not find “the Kremlin” responsible for “hacking” the DNC. Only four agencies were involved in the three major reports issued by the US government on this matter in the waning months of the Obama Administration:
  
  
  • A one-page “Joint Statement from the Department Of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security”, published 7 October 2016, asserted: “The US Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of emails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organisations.” (Emphasis added.) No evidence was provided; and “confident” has no legal meaning, nor is it part of official US intelligence terminology. Then-Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper is an infamous liar—a perjurer, in fact. When asked at a 12 March 2013 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, “Does the NSA [National Security Agency] collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”, Clapper stated under oath: “No, Sir. Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect but not, not wittingly.” Whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed three months later that the NSA was (and is) constantly spying on all Americans, and much of the world besides.
    
    
  • A second document, the 29 December 2016 “GRIZZLY STEPPE—Russian Malicious Cyber Activity”, was a Joint Analysis Report (JAR) by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It, too, used deliberately misleading language to imply firm conclusions where none existed, including by conflating cyber “threat groups” with (Russian) hacker collectives, when in fact the definition of a “threat group” is a set of technical indicators, which any hacker worth his salt can mimic to cover his tracks. Its first page, however, disclaimed: “This report is presented ‘as is’ for informational purposes only. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not provide any warranties of any kind regarding any information contained within.” The FBI admitted that it had not even examined the DNC server, but had relied upon forensic analysis purportedly done by the DNC’s cybersecurity company, CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike’s founder and Chief Technology Officer Dmitri Alperovitch is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a virulently anti-Russian think tank in Washington, DC.
    
    
  • The third, supposedly definitive report, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections”, was released 6 January 2017 by the perjurer Clapper, and identified as a joint production of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the FBI, and the NSA. Once again, no evidence was provided; the CIA and FBI merely reiterated their “high” confidence of Russia’s guilt. The NSA, however—which, given its all-pervasive surveillance, would have the hard data if it existed—expressed only “moderate” confidence. This report disclaimed: “Judgements are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.” Even President Barack Obama, in his final press conference in office, 18 January 2018, described “the conclusions of the intelligence community” as “not conclusive”. The report did, however, acknowledge that all the material leaked through WikiLeaks and incriminating Clinton and DNC officials, appeared genuine. Clapper testified to Congress in May 2018 that the report was the work of only around two dozen “hand-picked” analysts from the three agencies.

II: Russia shot down Flight MH17

As of 24 May 2018 the Russian military, specifically the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade, stands accused by the Dutch and Australian governments of having shot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine on 17 July 2014. Various Western politicians and media pundits, as well as some relatives of the victims, have gone so far as to accuse Russia, and President Vladimir Putin personally, of “murder”, implying that the aircraft was targeted deliberately. To date, however, the MH17 investigations have not produced conclusive evidence of what happened:

• The Dutch-led international Joint Investigation Team (JIT) refuses to release the “classified” evidence by which it claims to have proven the 53rd Brigade responsible. (The other JIT members are Australia, Belgium, Ukraine and Malaysia, but Malaysia was excluded until November 2014, by which time the other members had cemented control of the investigation.) Ukraine’s presence proves that the investigation is not impartial, as Ukraine is the other possible “suspect” in the incident; moreover, each member can veto the release of evidence, which gives Ukraine enormous influence over the investigation. The only publicly available evidence in this regard are several low-resolution photographs and videos collected from social media by the British internet sleuthing group Bellingcat, which has ties to both British Intelligence and the Atlantic Council; and unverifiable alleged telephone intercepts supplied to the JIT by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU)—as if Russian soldiers on a secret mission would converse on unencrypted telephones. Data supporting then-US Secretary of State John Kerry’s 12 August 2014 claim that US intelligence officers had observed the shoot-down live (“We saw the take-off, we saw the trajectory, we saw the hit, we saw this aeroplane disappear from the radar screens”) remains conspicuously absent. Ukraine claims that all its radars, both civilian and military, were shut down for maintenance on the day.
  
  
• Malaysian Transport Minister Anthony Loke, when asked how the new Mahathir government would respond to the JIT’s claim, told Singaporean news broadcaster Channel NewsAsia on 30 May 2018: “There is no conclusive evidence to point at Russia, under the JIT evidence. And of course we have to take into account our diplomatic relations, and so on. So any further actions [sanctions etc.] will be based on conclusive evidence.”
  
  
• The identification of the weapon used as a modern type of Russian “Buk” mobile surface-to-air missile (SAM) system, with a unique warhead known as a type 9N314M, hinges upon three distinctive bowtie-shaped fragments allegedly recovered from the wreckage of MH17. Of the 7,800 pre-formed fragments per warhead, 2,600 (one third) are of the bowtie or “double-T” type, and test detonations show that they leave hundreds of distinctive holes of the same shape. MH17, however, displays no such damage; thus if it had been brought down by a Buk (and not another of the 20-odd types of SAM theoretically available to either side of the Ukrainian civil war), it could only have been an older model without the bowtie fragments. Russia decommissioned and disposed of the last of its older Buks in 2011, but the Ukrainian Armed Forces still use them. Local television broadcasts showed several Ukrainian Buks deployed in the area where MH17 was shot down, a few days prior to the event, and evidence put forward by the Russian Ministry of Defence in late July 2014 showed a high level of activity by “Kupol” radars, a component of the older Buk launch systems, on 17 July when the tragedy occurred. Given Ukraine’s track record of accidentally shooting down a civilian airliner by locking radar on the wrong plane during training exercises (the downing of Siberian Airlines Flight 1812 over the Black Sea in October 2001 killed all 78 aboard), and in view of the tumultuous state of affairs within its military units in the months after the February 2014 coup and the outbreak of civil strife in the Donbass, the Ukrainian military should have been considered as possible perpetrators.
  
  
• Russia has not blocked international investigation of the MH17 tragedy. To the contrary, Russia co-initiated UN Security Council Resolution 2166, adopted 21 July 2014 (four days after the crash), which set forth requirements for an open and transparent investigation under UN auspices and demanded that “those responsible for this incident be held to account”. Instead, Russia was excluded from the JIT and its evidence ignored. Only a full year later, on 29 July 2015, when the direction of the forthcoming JIT “findings” was already apparent, did Russia exercise its UNSC veto to block a resolution drafted by the JIT countries on setting up an international tribunal to prosecute those allegedly responsible. Russia nonetheless continues to offer cooperation in a proper investigation under UNSC Res. 2166.

  Click here for a free copy of the latest issue of the Australian Alert Service, which includes a report on the positive substance of the Putin-Trump meeting, which has been swamped, intentionally, in the media hysteria.

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