Via Disobedient Media

It took just a few months for Disobedient Media to go from a sleepy news outlet to apparently garnering the attention of multiple power brokers on the global stage.





On February 10th, 2017, an article distributed by the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Lab attacked research published by Disobedient Media concerning the EU and added the Atlantic Council to a line of media houses and other outlets who deny the Wikileaks and Harvard Human Rights Journal supported research collected and published by Disobedient Media exposing the role that the Clintons and Department of State played in helping Laura Silsby and her co-conspirators off the hook after they were caught smuggling children illegally out of Haiti.





The Atlantic Council has accepted donations from funds owned by George Soros and a multitude of other foreign and domestic special interest groups, pushed harmful and imperialistic neoconservative political viewpoints to intellectuals and readers and promoted "black propaganda" now debunked by the intelligence community claiming that Russia was likely to hack the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections, and that Wikileaks is a pawn of the Russian government.





I. The Atlantic Council Has Received Funds From George Soros, Ukrainian Oligarchs, Special Interests And U.S., Foreign Government Agencies





The Atlantic Council has a troubling history of taking money from foreign special interest groups and government agencies in return for pushing propaganda to support various initiatives around the globe. The New York Times has named the Atlantic Council along with the Brookings Institution and the Center for Strategic and International Studies as being think tanks which have made undisclosed "agreements" with foreign governments. The article denounced the Atlantic Council for having "opened a whole new window into an aspect of the influence-buying in Washington that has not previously been exposed.”





In May 2016, a report by the Associated Press identified the Atlantic Council as one of a number of think tanks which had received funding from the Ploughshares Fund. The Ploughshares Fund is financed by George Soros' Open Society Foundation. A May 5, 2016 article by the New York Times revealed that the Ploughshares Fund was a major player in efforts to sell the Iranian nuclear deal to the American public. The deal has been generally criticized as a foreign policy failure, resulted in the transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars to Iran without any concessions in return and has failed to prevent Iran from continuing to illegally test long range ICBM missiles in violation of both the deal and international sanctions.





Atlantic Council has released a number of glowing reviews of Soros' "philanthropic" work despite the fact that his Open Society Foundation has recently been expelled from Hungary and is under audit along with affiliated NGO groups in Macedonia due to accusations of meddling in national elections and improperly seeking to influence public opinion.





The Atlantic Council proudly lists a jaw dropping number of various special interest groups, government agencies, foreign governments and well connected, wealthy individual patrons among its donors. Highlights on the list include the foundation of Ukranian oligarch Victor Pinchuk, The Open Society Foundation, the United Arab Emirates, Bahaa Hariri, the billionaire brother of Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc., NATO, the United States Department of State, Lockheed Martin Corporation and the Turkish Ministry of Energy & National Resources, whose head Berat Albayrak was the subject of leaks released by publishing giant Wikileaks exposing increasing political oppression in Turkey.





The willingness of the Atlantic Council to accept donations from the highest bidder, especially a plethora of foreign interests, some of whom have ties to government oppression, censorship and abrogation of human rights brings their incentive to attack Disobedient Media and this author into question. The financial involvement of NATO and the Department of State raises questions about their decision to attack reports by this author exposing State Department involvement in human trafficking and raising questions about the death of NATO Chief Auditor Yves Chandelon in suspicious circumstances at a time when NATO was moving massive amounts of troops, weapons and heavy equipment into the EU. Disobedient Media has also highlighted the involvement of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg with corruption scandals in Norway where large amounts of taxpayer money were donated to the Clinton Global Initiative, which closed its doors in the aftermath of Hillary Clinton's loss in the 2016 presidential election. The Atlantic Council's tightening relationship with foreign donors may actually constitute a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act according to the opinion of multiple legal experts.





II. The Atlantic Council Has Promoted Disinformation Seeking To Undermine The Integrity Of American Politics And Whistleblower Organizations





The Atlantic Council routinely promotes disinformation and false narratives that seek to undermine the political opponents of their sponsors. Ben Nimmo, the author of the smear article run against Disobedient Media, also promoted unsourced and unfounded claims that Russia was responsible for "hacking" the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. This conspiracy theory has been resoundingly debunked by various authorities in the intelligence community and by multiple media sources. The Atlantic Council, unfazed by the evidence that their claims of hacking were false, have continued promote these falsehoods in the aftermath of the election in what appears to be a possible effort to undermine American democratic institutions.





The Atlantic Council has also participated in efforts to discredit Wikileaks by portraying them as being played by Russia and complicit in influencing American politics. Wikileaks has a flawless track record for publishing authenticated documents over the course of its 10 year existence and has emphatically denied any involvement of the Russian government in the documents that were leaked to it and released ahead the November 8th, 2016 presidential election.





III. The Atlantic Council's Report On The EU Army Post Is Filled With Inaccuracies And Misrepresentation





On February 10th, 2017 the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab ran a smear piece in online publishing platform Medium concerning an article that this author wrote highlighting concerning details about efforts to create and equip the European Union Army. The authors made uneducated speculation about a supposed network of far right activists working to spread what they term "fake news," the controversial label created by the mainstream media to discredit information which is harmful to their interests. They similarly misrepresented the facts as presented concerning the EU Army. Wikileaks brought attention to the article the day of its release, labeling the Atlantic Council's claims as "fake news."





The crux of the attack rested on the assertion that they had uncovered some form of "network" being used by activists to spread what they termed "disinformation." The authors insinuated that the various subreddits that the story on the EU was posted to in some way collaborate because they share certain moderators. They additionally claimed that the various subreddits must be related because the primary language used to communicate was English, the lingua franca that is used throughout the United States and Europe as a primary form of communication between individuals from states with different cultures and languages.





Atlantic Council's "researchers" mischaracterized the process by which the story emerged onto the internet. On December 23rd, 2016, a draft of the EU Army story containing preliminary research and analysis was posted to Pastebin.com to create an online backup of the article. It was not intended to be publicly distributed and was passed around to handful of contacts with no instructions to distribute the information. The article was posted to subreddit r/the_donald the day after.





As has been noted previously by Disobedient Media, r/the_donald developed a reputation during the election for being one of the only forums where unbiased information could be distributed on Reddit without censorship and was chosen as an outlet for that reason exclusively. Other subreddits that the story was posted to are, naturally, anti-globalist and Euroskeptic and were included as forums for the post due to the author's assumption that those audiences would be interested in the research. As Reddit created the concept of subreddits specifically so that users could filter posts to view information they were interested in there is nothing unusual about this decision. There was never any intent to distribute the information beyond the Reddit posts and the further dissemination of the information was voluntary and was not solicited. Posting in subreddits devoted to certain politicians or political ideologies is not an endorsement of those views.





The Atlantic Council's decision to misrepresent the reach that the post had on Twitter is odd. The fact that they did so is telling and indicates that the audience which was reached may have been more significant than the Atlantic Council admits. Their decision to target Disobedient Media's story on the EU Army otherwise does not seem logical. Disobedient Media makes no claims as to the actual reach of the article other than to point out that this fact is irrelevant since it was posted to this author's personal Reddit account as a preliminary presentation of information with personal analysis of the data and was not intended to go viral in any way. Any purported "network" of right leaning social media accounts online is a fictional creation of the Atlantic Council and is as based in truth as their disingenuous efforts to claim that Russia was responsible in some way for "hacking" the American presidential election process.





Readers can find the final draft of the research and analysis on the EU Army here. The article has also been posted to ZeroHedge, where it gained over 15,000 views.