Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

dropdeadfred .. Forget conspiracy theories. This is why Trump’s Russian connection is actually a problem.

Updated by Zack Beauchamp@[e-mail] Nov 1, 2016, 12:20pm EDT

[excerpt]

The hacks fit squarely within Russian strategic doctrine


Sasha Mordovets/Getty (Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images)

The bigger picture here is that Russia under Putin has something of a habit of using information as a weapon in foreign countries.

This is born, as the New York Times .. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/world/europe/russia-dnc-putin-strategy.html?_r=0 ’s Max Fisher explains, from a traumatic experience Russia had in the mid-2000s. A series of pro-Kremlin strongmen in former Eastern Bloc states were toppled by the so-called "Color Revolutions." In 2011, protests in Moscow threatened the very stability of the Putin regime itself. These were seen, in the paranoid climate of Moscow, as American intelligence operations.

As a result, Russian strategic leaders came to see the internal politics of other countries as a key battlefield.

Fisher points to a 2013 article ..
https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/2014/07/06/the-gerasimov-doctrine-and-russian-non-linear-war/ , by Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, as key evidence of this new Russian thinking. Gerasimov argued that "non-military means" had eclipsed weapons in their strategic importance. Controlling the information and propaganda environment can inflict serious blows on one’s enemies.

"The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness," Gerasimov writes. He advocates using "military means of a concealed character," including "actions of informational conflict" in order to accomplish Russian strategic objectives.

Gerasimov’s article uses the Arab Spring as a key example, which is telling. The Arab Spring wasn’t about wars between countries but rather upheaval inside countries. Gerasimov’s ideas, then, are explicitly designed to be used in attempts to influence other countries’ internal politics and conflicts.

That’s exactly what Russia is doing when it hands over the information to WikiLeaks. When you hand stolen information that’s damaging to Hillary Clinton to a radical transparency group that detests Hillary Clinton .. http://www.vox.com/2016/9/15/12929262/wikileaks-hillary-clinton-julian-assange-hate .. (mostly because of her relatively hawkish foreign policy), the result is eminently predictable: That information will be published online for the entire world to see.

The disclosures bring to light information that makes it seem like the American democratic process is fundamentally illegitimate. Some of the emails usually show normal behind-the-scenes maneuvering and activity that just looks shady because it happened in private, like Neera Tanden, head of the ideologically friendly Center for American Progress .. http://tinyurl.com/gvzccnb , emailing the Clinton campaign to talk about coordinating a Supreme Court message. Others show shadier stuff, like Democratic National Committee staffers discussing plans to undermine the Bernie Sanders campaign.

The result of either kind of leak, shady-seeming normal activity or actual malfeasance, is embarrassing to the United States and weakens the next likely president (Hillary Clinton) even before she takes office.

So it’s not just that the hack looks traceable back to Russian hackers. It’s that the strategic effect of the leak — releasing
information that breeds infighting among American political factions — fits squarely within Russian strategic doctrine.

It looks a lot like Russia is running Gerasimov’s playbook in America.

Trump’s policies are objectively pro-Russia

http://www.vox.com/world/2016/11/1/13487322/donald-trump-russia-agent-hack