The Atlantic Council
The Council was formed as an offshoot of NATO and maintains extremely close connections to the military alliance.
It continues to receive major funding from Western governments and weapons contractors, and its board of directors is filled to the brim with former American foreign policy officials. Also appearing on the board are no fewer than seven former CIA directors and a number of top military generals.
Council employees have penetrated deep into big tech and social media organizations. In 2018, it announced it had partnered with Facebook to aid in the curation of Facebook news feeds of users worldwide, giving it considerable power over what sort of views to highlight and which to demote.
Its Deputy Director of Middle Eastern Strategy was appointed recently to the position of Director of Policy at Reddit, the eighth-most visited website in the United States. And it is not just Russia that is in the Council’s crosshairs.
The Council recently published an anonymous, 26,000-word report stating that its goal for China was regime change and advising President Biden to draw a number of “red lines” around it, beyond which the U.S. would respond militarily. Meanwhile, the head of STRATCOM, Admiral Charles A. Richard, wrote that the U.S. must prepare for a potential nuclear war with Beijing.
The military escalation has been mirrored by an intensifying online propaganda war, where the U.S. has attempted to isolate China economically and stop advancing Chinese technologies such as Huawei’s 5G network, mobile phone, and semiconductor manufacturer Xiaomi, and video sharing app Tik-Tok.
And the Council is guilty of ramping up suspicions of nefarious Chinese activity online, claiming the existence of a wide-ranging pro-Beijing bot network encouraging Americans to believe that China has handled the COVID-19 pandemic far better than the United States. That Americans might have come to that conclusion on their own appears not to have been considered.
There are on-going Western government efforts seeking to convince their populations of the existence of (foreign) government efforts to manipulate their opinions online.
Western governmental organizations point the finger at their enemies, all the while securing greater access and control over the means of communication themselves, to the point where it is now difficult to distinguish where the deep state ends and the fourth estate begins. (The Grayzone)
2019: Misinformation published by the “Atlantic Council” and “Integrity Initiative” helped destroy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party
The “Integrity Initiative’s” official “Twitter” account posted numerous tweets and links to articles attacking Labour and Corbyn.
The agitator in chief was Ben Nimmo a senior fellow of the “Atlantic Council”, who repeatedly claimed the Labour leader was being supported by the Russian state through various means, including a “twisted cyber campaign”, without any supporting evidence whatsoever.
The public need to be very wary of anything “researched” by Nimmo. Any theory about Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign which has the “Atlantic Council” at its heart (and which may also involve the now largely moribund “Integrity Initiative”) is liable to be cobblers.
(https://twitter.com/Ian_Fraser/status/1201646096897978370?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)
2019 Nimmo gerrymandered the general election enabling the success of the Tory party
Jeremy Corbyn revealed secret Conservative Party documents showing negotiations the Tory government had with the U.S. over the privatization of the National Health Service (NHS).
With just days to go before the general election, the scandal could have toppled the government and brought into power the most radical anti-war, anti-establishment government in the country’s history.
Corporate media went into overdrive to spin the news, and Nimmo was a key part of this, immediately announcing, without evidence, that the documents “closely resemble…a known Russian operation.”
His supposedly expert conjecture allowed the story to become “Corbyn’s links to Russia” rather than “Tories privatizing the NHS in secret.”
Nimmo’s work helped the Conservatives to an election victory and consigned Corbyn to the scrapheap. Much to the relief of the “Atlantic Council”, who through Nimmo had successfully branded Corbyn the “Kremlin’s Trojan Horse” — someone pushing Moscow’s agenda abroad.
And a British Army general was of a similar opinion, claiming that if Corbyn were to win the election, the military would respond. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also said that the U.S. government was “doing its best” to prevent a radical leftist from winning power in the U.K.
Feb 2021: Facebook hires ex-NATO press officer and social media censor Ben Nimmo as intel strategist
Nimmo, a former NATO press officer and current senior fellow at the “Atlantic Council”, announced Facebook had hired him to “lead global threat intelligence strategy against influence operations” and “emerging threats.” He specifically named Russia, Iran and China as potential dangers to the platform.
His announcement was greeted with joy by several NATO officials but was not met with such enthusiasm by others. “More censorship on the way as the former NATO press officer turned Pentagon-funded ‘researcher’ who labelled real people as Russian bots and peddled disinformation to link Jeremy Corbyn to Russian active measures moves to big tech,” responded investigative journalist Max Blumenthal.
Nimmo’s questionable past certainly raises questions over whether such an official having a substantial say in what 2.8 billion Facebook users worldwide see in their feeds is such a positive step for the free and open exchange of information.
Other relevant links
https://www.demdigest.org/tag/ben-nimmo/
https://graphika.com/posts/graphika-welcomes-industry-expert-ben-nimmo-to-the-team/
https://everipedia.org/wiki/lang_en/ben-nimmo
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/474945-nhs-corbyn-russia-nimmo/
2014/https://www.socialgrep.com/search?query=ben%20nimmo
https://wingsoverscotland.com/author/blair-graham/
https://infobrics.org/post/32850/
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4wP0LzRpchQJ:
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