I was reading about the coming Italian election, when I came across this:



A report by the U.S. Senate last month highlighted Italy as a potential target for the Kremlin, and the Atlantic Council found evidence tying Russian hackers to fake online activity leading up to Germany’s general election and Catalonia’s struggle for independence from Spain last year.

I didn't think too much about it until I began reading the next article:



In an extensive report late last fall, the Atlantic Council think tank concluded that Russia’s influence may be strongest in Italy, where the highest-polling populist Five Star Movement has attracted both right-wing and left-wing supporters. “The party’s documented pro-Kremlin stance combined with its grassroots mobilization capacity make it a particularly important ally for the Kremlin, and thus a dangerous force against the E.U., NATO, and the transatlantic partnership,” they write, even though a direct link between the Kremlin and the Five Star Movement has never been proved and a recent increase in bot activity there has so far not been directly traced back to Russia.

That got me wondering just how many ScaryRussia! reports that the Atlantic Council puts out.

For instance, this one.



Russia’s attempts at influencing politics in Europe have increased since Putin’s re-election in 2012, according a report published by The Atlantic Council in November. The report says, “the Kremlin has accelerated its efforts to resurrect the arsenal of ‘active measures’ — tools of political warfare once used by the Soviet Union that aimed to influence world events through the manipulation of media, society, and politics.”

Atlantic Council Report: Russia Uses Greece as a Trojan Horse

It isn't just Atlantic Council reports. There's also multiple op-ed's that all stoke the fear.



“When Fillon’s poll ratings slumped and Emmanuel Macron, who is much more pro-EU and pro-U.S., surged, the Kremlin media jumped to broadcast attacks on Macron,” Ben Nimmo, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, told VICE News.

And this one.



"Spain was a secondary target,” said Ben Nimmo, who tracks Russian disinformation campaigns at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab in Washington. “The primary target is the validity of Western democracy.”

And more than anything else, this one.



Harding leaves little doubt: It was collusion. He presents an overwhelming number of connections between Trump and his close associates with Russian intelligence and organized crime, and he digs into all of them with hard evidence. Initially, Trump and his associates denied it all, but since they had to admit their many meetings with Russians, their guilt appears all the more evident.

...

Our only last hope is Robert Mueller and his ongoing investigation. Anders Åslund is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

(note: Luke Harding mentioned here wrote a hit-piece book on Edward Snowden)

BTW, Russia didn't mess with Germany's election.

Russia didn't mess with France's election (although the NSA confirmed the hack before France said that it was a lie)

So with all this xenophobic Russophobia propaganda coming out of this think tank, I had to ask, "Who are these guys?"

Paul Craig Roberts calls The Atlantic Council: The Marketing Arm of the Military/Security Complex.

Well, remember the very first Everyone-Is-A-Putin-Puppet article? The one using the web site Propornot? Well, people looked into that.



So, who's behind this poor attempt at shaping the narrative. Over the last week 2 independent researchers have both published their findings online. These 2 bits of research were both attempting to identify the clandestine group behind Prop or Not. The first bit of research was done using data forensics to identify the owners, and the second used linguistic analysis. Both pieces of research independently came to the conclusion that the main man behind Prop or Not is Atlantic Councils, Michael Weiss.

Michael Weiss is an author, the senior editor for The Daily Beast, a columnist for Foreign Policy, and a frequent national security contributor for CNN. He’s also editor-in-chief of The Interpreter, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and co-chair of the Russia Studies Center at the Henry Jackson Society.

That's not the only "coincidence". Remember Crowdstrike, the security company that examined the DNC email server and then told the FBI who hacked it? Funny thing about that.



In lieu of substantive evidence provided to the public that the alleged hacks which led to Wikileaks releases of DNC and Clinton Campaign Manager John Podesta’s emails were orchestrated by the Russian Government, CrowdStrike’s bias has been cited as undependable in its own assessment, in addition to its skeptical methods and conclusions. The firm’s CTO and co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank with openly anti-Russian sentiments that is funded by Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk, who also happened to donate at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation.

In 2013, the Atlantic Council awarded Hillary Clinton it’s Distinguished International Leadership Award.

A Ukrainian oligarch who was a big donor to the Clinton campaign.

What a coincidence!

Not only that, Crowdstrike falsely accused Russia of hacking Ukrainian artillery.

There's still time for the Trump administration to take action against Russian interference, writes Ambassador Dan Fried: https://t.co/dIETfcGAqG pic.twitter.com/m81rZgNT6n — Atlantic Council (@AtlanticCouncil) February 19, 2018

More commentary from me and my @AtlanticCouncil colleagues on Mueller’s indictment of several Russian citizens involved in information warfare ops (yes, that’s what they are) during the 2016 election. https://t.co/AINmTqX4UY — Michael Carpenter (@mikercarpenter) February 16, 2018

It appears that the Atlantic Council is the primary source of false, and eventually disproven hysterical accusations about Russia, that get picked up by the news media.

Even worse, the Atlantic Council is trying to lie us into a war against Russia, much like Bush/Cheney lied us into invading Iraq. Except this time it could mean WWIII and the end of life on this planet.