@snoopydawg

Research into members of the Integrity Initiative's Spanish 'cluster' has led to some extremely troubling conclusions.

On December 19 2017, The House of Commons' Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee initiated ‘fake news' inquiries. and received evidence and testimony from a number of witnesses.

Among them were David Alandete, Editor of Spanish newspaper El Pais; Francisco de Borja Lasheras, Director of the European Council on Foreign Relation's, and Mira Milosevich-Juaristi, Senior Fellow for Russia and Euroasia at Elcano Institute. They'd been invited to discuss the alleged Kremlin effort to interfere in the October 2017 Catalonian independence referendum. This trio of men had reported the Russian interference via Sputnik News and RT together with a nexus of social media sites, bots, trolls, with guidance from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

This was fake news and anti-Russian propaganda.

We now know that the trio is directly and indirectly connected to the Integrity Initiative — an "information war effort" based in London that has received millions in UK government funds and is subject to more than one official investigation into its activities.

During the Catalon protests and referendum, the trio provided misinformation and lies to the newspaper, El Pais, which began publishing stories alleging Assange was helping Sputnik News and RT to promulgate "fake news" about events in Catalonia.

The Atlantic Council and NATO's StratCom reports began echoing these baseless allegations in their own anti-Russian reports. Soon the dubious notion that Catalan independence was a Russian plot, facilitated — if not led — by Julian Assange, became widespread in mainstream Western discourse.

Integrity Initiative's anti-Russian rhetoric and lies tying Russia to the Catalonian quest for self-determination, and tying Assange to Russia would have grave consequences for Julian Assange. The irresponsible propaganda was a significant factor behind Ecuador's March 2018 decision to cut off Assange's access to the internet, and bar him from receiving any visitors other than his legal team.

Issues with the trio's ‘expert' testimony did not end there. The House of Commons Committee condemned the reporting of David Alandete, Francisco de Borja Lasheras, and Mira Milosevich-Juaristi, as "exceptionally misleading." An independent data analyst, M C McGrath, submitted expert testimony to the Committee and had serious questions about the trio's competence and probity.

"I discovered numerous instances of misinterpretation of data sources, use of inaccurate information, lack of attention to detail, and poor research methodology. As a result of these errors, I would suggest that the conclusions drawn in these reports and presented in the December 19 Committee session are exceptionally misleading."

The reports coming out of Integrity Initiative were done with dubious research methodology; one-sided analysis; exaggeration of the influence of bots and trolls; careless analysis of data from questionable sources; and a deliberate overstatement of the influence of Assange on RT and Sputnik.

#3

Russia Gate was cooked up long before the election just in case Trump lost or won by some fluke just to keep him in line.

Bernie Gate