Hacker News Reader

Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

I'm as suspicious of USA military as any other thinking human, but let's consider TFA's source. "bellingcat" is a CIA-sponsored limited-hangout sock puppet, run by video-game enthusiasts, and that's all it has ever been. There is no reason to assume that any particular point in TFA, or TFA taken as a whole, is particularly true.

View on HN

If you don't have clearance, you could verify this yourself. The info is still in search engine caches. If you do have clearance, then don't go about searching for classified info.

Occasionally salting in some verifiable bits is the "limited hangout" part. As TFA concedes, everyone who cared knew where these were already. Perhaps such people had mistakenly assumed that security was effective. At this time, there's no telling why the choice was made to disabuse the public of that notion, but that choice was not made within the bellingcat organization.

>"bellingcat" is a CIA-sponsored limited-hangout sock puppet, run by video-game enthusiasts, and that's all it has ever been.

Any links or sources for this?

They are very open about being funded by CIA cut outs like the National Endowment for Democracy [1]. If you're not familiar with the NED then you should read William Blum's description of them [2]. Radio War Nerd recently did an excellent two part series on the NED and spent a good amount of time talking about Bellingat, too. [3]

And as to them being a "limited hangout sock puppet" you're of course not going to find any source on this - because it's not known for certain - but in my opinion they are most likely something akin to that. They frequently get leaked information from US/UK intelligence organizations and they launder stories for CIA/MI6s. They might not know they are a limited hangout sock puppet for western intelligence but they certainly function as such. A good example is their actions around the OPCW leaks and claims of chemical weapons in Douma, Syria [4]. A lot of these stories unfold on Twitter so you'll have to search around

You can also search on HN - there's comments from many years past calling out Bellingcat as a front for western intelligence.

[1] https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3AEliotHiggins%20ned

[2] https://williamblum.org/chapters/rogue-state/trojan-horse-th...

[3] https://podcastaddict.com/episode/121232504

[4] https://thegrayzone.com/2021/03/24/author-bellingcat-opcw-wh...

Huh, is that "Radio War Nerd" aka War Nerd aka Gary Brecher aka John Carroll Dolan? I used to read his stuff all the time in the early aughties. It seemed like he was the one other person in the world who liked explosions and wasn't also taking crazy pills (i.e., literally the rest of the media corps).

Dolan came up with Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames in the eXile ( Moscow in the 1990s! Wow!) then did his own thing. Ames wrote `В Россию с любовью` sometime in the aughts. Taibbi we all know.

They're all still best buddies; who knows what kind of crazy stuff they got up to in 90s Moscow. Funny stuff.

Thanks for the details. I'll do some more digging.

Also, why do you think a CIA-affiliated site would do a write-up on this? Seems like it makes soldiers and their secure info look bad.

With USA military and unsupervised services, the primary goal is spending money. They DGAF about security of nuclear weapons in Europe. Those in charge don't even take any particular pride in their supposed "mission". This story could be helpful if someone in Congress were balking at a costly new IT project. Or it could be something else. From some sources, the signal-to-noise ratio is infinitesimal.

Situation is pretty dire, seems like you need someone to save the day.

Russia says so, it must be true.

If it is true, the CIA doesn't much like Israel's habits in Palestine.

The American military are just humans like anyone else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com