Thread by @ClimateAudit

David Blake's recent book Loaded for Guccifer contains lengthy discussion of how NATO lobbied to expand definition of "war" to include ordinary hacking and surveillance - which are VERY hard to attribute.

https://twitter.com/HisBlakeness/status/1339004301163769860

2/ an important downside of expanded definition is that it creates much expanded incentive for false flag provocations. Blake argues that many, if not all, of the outrageously noisy and too-obvious cyber incidents since 2016 are false flags by parties who benefit from tension

3/ an important example of how a policy can create an incentive for false flags is Obama's famous "red line" on chemical attacks in Syria. Since Obama's policy was announced, one of major "business lines" of Al Qaeda and allied Syrian jihadis has been staged chemical incidents

4/ ALL of the evidence on ALL of the supposed incidents up to Douma came ENTIRELY from jihadis allied to AlQaeda. It defies logic that US-UK should credulously accept their evidence at face value, but they have. Douma was first site which could be properly examined by inspectors.

5/ Douma was proclaimed by US intel as a sarin attack; Trump admin promptly bombed Syria in an incident which seemed to me at the time to be the closest to major international war since Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 (when JFK was being deceived by US intel).

6/ the sarin allegations were fake. OPCW inspectors couldnt find any trace of sarin. The entire incident was staged. (Protagonists of the original fraud have tried to make back-up case that it was chlorine attack, not sarin attack, but that case doesn't work either.)

7/ Philip Watson has subsequently re-examined multiple supposed "chlorine attack" incidents and, in every case examined so far, has convincingly demonstrated fraud and staging by jihadis. I see no reason why ANY credence should be given to any of these incidents.

8/ I digress into this discussion of staged incidents in Syria because I urge extreme caution in reacting to supposed cyber incidents in which attribution is even more difficult and incentive for false flag even greater.

9/ also, before US and NATO get too self-righteous about computer hacking, it seems evident that US and NATO hacking are FAR more pervasive and sophisticated than corresponding efforts from Russia. (I don't know about China.)