@CB

...in the first 36 hours after such an event. If you pay close attention, you have the whole plot, the aim of the covert operation, the front group, the shooters, the physical evidence, a timeline of the action, the set up, and the nationality of the conspirators.

I specifically recall this in Benghazi, Libya, Russo-Georgian-Osettia attack, Syria's 2013 chemical attack, and Syria's 2017 Chemical attack.

Then, by the 48 hour mark, the facts are forgotten and the news-talkers start making it up. By 72 hours, an entire new narrative is in place, completely devoid of any reality, whatsoever. It's destined for chaos. And because everybody knows what really went down, they are never solved.

There are other incidents that are not obvious in that first 36 hours, for example, cyber attacks or the Skripal attack in the UK. Those require dedicated independent non-state forensics. Similarly, investigations into Flight MH17 and MH370 started strong and then became significantly clueless over time.

Ukraine has always been an open book. Within the first 12 hours we knew who the snipers were, had their photos, knew their nationalities, where they were trained, and when. The propaganda that came out of that event as well as the referendum and reunification of Crimea, I believe, changed America forever. It never let up to this day and has resulted in wide-spread insanity across the land.

Savchenko was only used as a pawn in a prisoner exchange between Ukraine and Russia.

It is interesting that she has now exposed the truth about the Maidan

'War Hero' Savchenko Accused Of Terror Plot, Levels Own Accusations In Ukraine
March 15, 2018

KYIV -- Lawmaker and former Russian captive Nadia Savchenko has traded incendiary accusations with senior Ukrainian authorities and faces possible arrest over what Prosecutor-General Yuriy Lutsenko alleged was a detailed plan for a devastating "terrorist" attack on parliament.
...
Savchenko became a national hero and was greeted with fanfare when she returned to Ukraine in a prisoner swap with Russia in May 2016, but has faced mounting criticism since then. She has drawn fire for holding talks with the Russia-backed separatists without the government's consent.

In January 2017, lawmakers called for an investigation into what they said were anti-Ukrainian actions after Savchenko suggested that Kyiv would have to relax its claim on Crimea, which Russia seized after Yanukovych's ouster in 2014, in order to regain control of the territory held by the separatists in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

More than 100 protesters were killed in the 2013-14 demonstrations, centered on Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnost (Independence Square) that preceded Yanukovych's flight to Russia. Forty-eight of them were allegedly gunned down in February 2014 by snipers who Ukrainian authorities claim received direct orders from the Moscow-friendly Yanukovych.

In her remarks on March 15, Savchenko said that she saw Parubiy, who was on the antigovernment side at the time, "leading snipers into the Hotel Ukraine," which looms over the Maidan. "I saw a blue minibus and armed people coming out of it, I have said earlier [to investigators] who those people were. Those people are now lawmakers."

She said the deaths on the Maidan will never be thoroughly investigated, asserting that the government that came to power after Yanukovych's downfall does not want it to happen.
...

I expect she may run against Tymoshenko in a bid to replace Poroshenko in the coming elections. This would be a game changer in Ukraine. The west may have to stage another 'intervention'.

@wendy davis
This reminds me of the shit that went down at DKos when it gradually became apparent that we had been hoodwinked by Obama and the rest of the Dims. We were repeatedly told to have faith - we peons simply did not have the intellectual prowess to understand his '11th dimensional chess' moves. "Don't Worry, He's Got it."

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/08/13/too-big-to-fail-russia-gate-one-ye...

...
What Role does Evidence Play?

Rosenstein’s predicament—and there is no indication he understands it as one—brings us to an essential problem: What is the place of evidence in American public discourse? Of rational exchange?

The questions are germane far beyond the Russia-gate phenomenon, but it is there that answers are most urgent. What is implicit in the Rosenstein indictments has been evident everywhere in our public sphere for a year or more: Make a presumption supported by circumstantial evidence or none and build other presumptions upon it until a false narrative is constructed. The press has deployed this device for as long as I have been a practitioner: “Might” or “could” or “possibly” becomes “perhaps,” “probably” and “almost certainly,” and then moves on to unqualified fact in the course of, maybe, several weeks. Now this is how our most basic institutions—not least agencies of the Justice Department—routinely operate.

This is what I mean when I refer to ours as a republic in peril.

There is the argument that certain things have been uncovered over the past year, and these are enough to conclude that Russia plots to undermine our democracy. I refer to the small number of Facebook advertisements attributed to Russians, to strings of Twitter messages, to various phishing exercises that occur thousands of times a day the world over. To be clear, I am no more satisfied with the evidence of Russian involvement in these cases than I am with the evidence in any other aspect of the Russia-gate case. But for the sake of argument, let us say it is all true.

Does this line up with the Russophobic hysteria—not too strong a term—that envelops us? Does this explain the astonishing investments our public institutions, the press, and leading political parties have made in advancing this hysteria as they did a variant of in the 1950s?

As global politics go, some serious thought should be given to a reality we have created all by ourselves: It is now likely that America has built a new Cold War division with Russia that will prove permanent for the next 20 to 30 years. All this because of some Facebook ads and Twitter threads of unproven origin? Am I the only one who sees a weird and worrisome gap between what we are intent on believing—as against thinking or knowing—and the consequences of these beliefs?

There was an orthodoxy abroad many centuries ago called Fideism. In the simplest terms, it means the privileging of faith and belief over reason. It was the enemy of individual conscience, among much else. Fideism has deep roots, but it was well around in the 16th century, when Montaigne and others had to navigate its many dangers. Closer to our time, William James landed a variant on American shores with an 1896 address called “The Will to Believe.” Bertrand Russell countered this line of thinking a couple of decades later with “Free Thought and Official Propaganda,” a lecture whose title I will let speak for itself. Twenty years ago, none other than Pope John Paul II warned of a resurgence of Fideism. It is still around, in short.
...

Russia-gate One Year After VIPS Showed a Leak, Not a Hack’, Patrick Lawrence, Special to Consortium News, aug. 13

a few bits:

“None of this has altered the basic case. VIPS and forensic scientists working with it have continued their investigations. New facts, some of which alter conclusions drawn last year, have come to light, and these are to be addressed. But the basic evidence that Russia-gate is a false narrative concocted by various constituents of national power stands, difficult as this is to discern. Scrape back all that is ethically unacceptable and unscrupulously conveyed into the public sphere and you find that nothing has changed: No one “hacked” the Democratic party’s mail in the summer of 2016. It was leaked locally, from what one can make out, to expose the party leadership’s corrupt efforts to sink Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign to win the Democratic nomination.” [snip]

“To my knowledge, no one with an understanding of the science involved, including various former skeptics, any longer questions the validity of the specific finding based on the observed transfer rate. That remains the bedrock evidence of the case VIPS and others advance without qualification. “No one—including the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA—has come out against this finding,” Binney said Monday. “Anyone who says the speed we demonstrated can be achieved remotely, our position is ‘Let’s see it. We’ll help any way we can.’ There hasn’t been anyone yet.”

There is also the question of where and when leaks were executed. Research into this has turned out differently.

Evidence last year, based on analysis of the available metadata, showed that the copy operation date-stamped July 5, 2016, took place in the Eastern U.S. time zone. But Forensicator, one of the chief forensic investigators working on the mail-theft case anonymously, published evidence in May that, while there was activity in the Eastern zone at the time of that copy, here was also a copy operation in the Pacific time zone, where clocks run three hours earlier that EST. In an earlier publication he had also reported activity in the Central time zone.

Plainly, more was awaiting discovery as to the when and where of the copy operations. The identity of Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be a Romanian hacker but which the latest Mueller indictment claims is a construct of the GRU, Russian military intelligence, has never been proven. The question is what G–2.0 did with or to the data in question. It turns out that both more, and less, is known about G–2.0 than was thought to have been previously demonstrated. This work has been completed only recently. It was done by Binney in collaboration with Duncan Campbell, a British journalist who has followed the Russia-gate question closely.”

[the duncan campbell whose 'analyis' was promoted by the queen of the mueller investigation/russiagate marcy wheeler.

"Campbell’s is an important and successful effort to push back against disinformation (and to get Bill Binney and Ray McGovern to back off their support for it). It does the following:' etc.

they ran simulations, looked at file sizes, etc., then:

“But they discovered something else of significance, too. At some point G–2.0 had merged two sets of data, one dated July 5, 2016, which had been known, and another dated the following September 1, which had not been known. In essence, Campbell reverse-engineered G–2.0’s work: He took the sets of data G–2.0 presented as two and combined them back into one. “G–2.0 used an algorithm to make a downloaded file look like two files,” Binney explained. “Those two shuffled back together like a deck of cards.”

“This throws various things into question. The conclusions initially drawn on time and location in VIPS50 are now subject to these recent discoveries. “In retrospect, giving ‘equal importance’ status to data pertaining to the locale was mistaken,” Ray McGovern, a prominent VIPS member, wrote in a recent note. “The key finding on transfer speed always dwarfed it in importance.”

but i guess that's what i'd meant about facts being sometimes movable feasts: sometimes collaboration yields different ways of assessing data, metadata. so i'm glad binney met with the author of the Hit Job/VIPs detractor in good faith; good on him, good on campbell.