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Stephen McIntyre

@ClimateAudit

Apr 8, 2022 • 32 tweets • 10 min read • Read on X

bombing of civilians at Kramatorsk rail station by Tochka missile was criminal. But let's look at available data before uncritically accepting claims from Zelensky regime. The tail section of missile was found in parkette to WSW of rail station.

Google street view from east entrance of rail station looking south supports geolocation of tail section to WSW of station. google.com/maps/@48.72605…

the shadows in the picture are consistent with morning sun in Ukraine being to the ESE and the photo being taken looking south. Both the direction of the rocket itself and the direction from section to station indicate a WSW origin for the rocket

https://twitter.com/RWApodcast/status/1512395548552224770

for all plausible distances, territory to the WSW is held by Ukraine - a point that has been made by others but which I wanted to check out. Russian MOD is reported

https://twitter.com/RWApodcast/status/1512395548552224770

to have attributed origin of rocket to Dobropolye, a village about 45 km to the WSW.

https://twitter.com/Nrg8000/status/1512445329161191425

needless to say, there is argument back and forth on this issue. See for example

https://twitter.com/Nrg8000/status/1512445329161191425

in my quick survey, I haven't seen any counter-arguments that establish attribution to Russia - only that attribution of origin in Ukraine zones is not established by "metadata".

most such arguments focus on orientation of tail section itself as opposed to the direction indicated by line from tail section to head section, though the latter seems to me (as non-expert) as the more convincing.

unsurprisingly, tail section of Tochka-U in Kramatorsk looks similar to tail section of Tochka-U missile sent by Ukraine against Donetsk city.

a lot of shrapnel generated from cluster bomb delivered by Tochka-U in Donetsk city attack. Presumably munition in Kramatorsk was similar.

https://twitter.com/MaxvanderWerff/status/1512777674930155524

serial number of Kramatorsk missile Ш91579 has been located in one of the photos and firmly linked to Ukraine inventory. See

https://twitter.com/MaxvanderWerff/status/1512777674930155524

Attribution of Kramatorsk missile to Zelensky regime now appears to be conclusive.

neo-Nazi Ukrainian Pravy Sektor previously attested to have written "For children of Ukraine" on artillery shells - the message on Ukrainian Tochka-U used to bomb civilians in Kramatorsk

@MaxvanderWerff

@MaxvanderWerff has published some new Ukrainian serial numbers:
W915516:

https://twitter.com/MaxvanderWerff/status/1513021104553873408

; Ш915622:

https://twitter.com/MaxvanderWerff/status/1513021620734300161

initially, Ukrainian leaders Pavlo Lyrylenko, the local governor, and Zelensky adviser Oleksiy Arestyvich falsely or fraudulently stated that Iskander missile (unique to Russia) had been used at Kramatorsk. This framed opening narrative.

During the morning, as pictures became available, commenters pointed out that the missile was actually Tochka-U, the missile used by Ukraine - including at the attack on civilians at Donetsk city on March 14 (which did not interest Western media)

the false identification of rocket as Iskander enabled the narrative of a "Russian" attack to become established. So later, when rocket identified as Tochka, increasingly elaborate theories were advocated to maintain attribution to Russia, despite Tochka pointing to Ukraine.

the false information about Iskander missiles reported by Pravda Ukraine here: pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/…

it will not surprise readers that CNN reported the fake news that attack was by Iskander missiles used by Russia, not the Tochka missiles used by Ukraine
cnn.com/2022/04/08/eur…

a few commenters have argued that the serial numbers don't PROVE anything, that it's equally possible that W91579 went to Russia, even if W91566, W91565, W91511 and others are firmly attribted to Ukraine. But there's an important statistical error that these commenters are making

to state obvious, serial numbers are not RANDOMLY assigned. If they were, then we wouldn't be able to conclude anything, but they weren't. They were assigned in order.

second, rockets included in a shipment batch would not randomly chosen from an infinite inventory, but from an actual inventory (or to order) in which serial numbers would be related.

information that Ukraine was in possession of Tochkas W91566, W91565, W915611 (among others) is prior information that is highly relevant to attribution of W91579. It's theoretically possible that there was a break and appearance of W91579 in same close quarters was coincidence

But for that to be true, there has to be a pretty amazing coincidence i.e. statistically improbable. When combined with information from trajectory - again not total PROOF, but strongly indicative, and similarity of Kramatorsk attack to Mar 14 Donetsk attack by Ukraine

IMO the practical odds that rocket was not fired by Ukraine are minuscule.

Oleksiy Arestovych, the important Zelensky adviser, who was jointly responsible for original fraudulent story of Iskander missile at Kramatorsk, admired ISIS cruelty techniques and tactics in interview a couple of years ago

Arestovych admired ISIS commanders as "wise and successful commanders" who thought through "detail, even the degree of cruelty" and that "cruelty for show" was "a wise strategy, taking their particular interests into account".

Arestovych said that governance according to the precepts of ISIS - "terrorism, middle age cruelty, the burning of people, shooting and cutting off heads" was "absolutely a network of the future".

Arestovych played a leading role in attribution of Kramatorsk to Russia, beginning with the fraudulent information about "Iskander" missiles. Would Arestovych have any scruples about sacrificing some Russian-speaking residents of Donets oblast? I doubt it.

uatv.ua/en/view-from-b…
Arestovych appears to have led Ukraine visit to Biden admin in Sep 2021 in which Kyiv regime's refusal to implement Minsk agreements was reinforced by Biden neocons.

this entire Sep 2021 interview is worth reading. At the time, Kyiv regime was shelling Avdiivka in Donbas and feeling smug about losses among Donbas civilians. Feckless Biden admin, then reeling from Afghan fiasco, seems to have egged them on, rather than trying to promote peace.

after reading this disturbing interview with ISIS-admiring Zelensky adviser Arestovych, it occurred to me that it's entirely likely that Zelensky is to Arestovych as Justin Trudeau was to Gerald Butts.

both Trudeau and Zelensky are actors. Canadians know that Justin Trudeau is a featherweight with intellectual depth of a minnow, but he is skilful at delivering poses, photo ops and word salads. An actor. Why should we expect anything more of Zelensky?

While we can learn nothing about Zelensky from his past political reflections (since, like Trudeau, there are none), maybe we can learn about his administration from the unscrupulous Arestovych, who admired ISIS tactics measured as political theatre.

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Stephen McIntyre

@ClimateAudit

Aug 12

Here's a listing of Minority HPSCI Staff in early 2017. Most of the redactions in yesterday's release can be identified here.

In two of the 302s, WHISTLEB described the HPSCI Democrat system for exfiltrating secret information from a secure room in a three letter agency: presumably FBI, from which copies and notes were prohibited.

As a work-around, three HPSCI Democrat staffers would attend the Secure Room and, after each visit, "would immediately compose summaries" on a standalone computer set up in a back room by "committee's network administrator" for exclusive use by "Russian team" members. After the three Russian team members had completed their visit summaries, they briefed certain other staffers.

All of the names underneath the redactions can be plausibly identified from contemporary HPSCI Democrat staff rosters as shown below.

Here is a transcription of each of the two descriptions of the Russian team and secondary briefees, showing character counts.

The Russian Team had two 16s (at least one with LN8) and an 11. (number denotes character count of full name.)

The secondary briefees were a 6+5 (12), two 13s (one a 5+7), an 11, and the communications director (a 14). One of the 13s was a new hire.

Read 9 tweets

Stephen McIntyre

@ClimateAudit

Jul 31

Durham Classified Appendix is almost entirely about "Clinton Plan". Unsurprisingly, nothing about the post-election events during which Russiagate collusion hoax actually metastasized under FBI and CIA into a national flesh-eating disease.
Emails from Lenny Benardo of Soros' Open Society Foundation feature prominently. Note that Benardo was mentioned in a Washington Post article by Demirjan and Devlin Barrett on May 24, 2017 (a few days after Mueller appointment) - archive archive.is/w43O2 reporting that the email had been dismissed by FBI as "unreliable". DWS, Benardo and Renteria said at the time that they had never been interviewed by FBI.

https://x.com/FOOL_NELSON/status/1658525717183725569

Fool_Nelson proposed Julie Smith as Foreign Policy Advisor-2 in Durham report at the time:

https://x.com/FOOL_NELSON/status/1658525717183725569

Here's a July 27, 2016 email (attributed to Benardo) which contains a detail relevant to the argument against @DNIGabbard's first drop, claiming that Russian interference concern was NEVER about election infrastructure, but always about DNC hack and Buff Bernie memes. Here Benardo talks about how to make Russia "a domestic issue" by raising the spectre of a "critical infrastructure threat for the election". Brennan subsequently did just that: raised concern about "infrastructure threat". ODNI played down that threat in their briefings and ultimately in the proposed post-election PDB of December 8, 2016 which was cancelled by Obama intervention.

Read 4 tweets

Stephen McIntyre

@ClimateAudit

Jul 22

the ICA version in the recent DNI documents is a different version (dated January 5, 2017) than the released version (dated January 6, 2017). There were many changes overnight - some substantive.

Before editorializing, I'll laboriously go through comparisons - final version on left, previous day version on right. (I apologize for not marking this on each of the following slides.)

The Jan 6, 2017 version contained a preface entitled "Background... The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution", not present in the Jan 5 version (as shown). It has two sections.

The first section entitled "The Analytic Process" stated that these assessments "adhere to tradecraft standards".

"On these issues of great importance to US national security, the goal of intelligence analysis is to provide assessments to decisionmakers that are intellectually rigorous, objective, timely, and useful, and that adhere to tradecraft standards."

Now recall the dispute over inclusion of Steele dossier information in the ICA as an appendix and, as we recently learned, as a bullet supporting the assessment that Putin "aspired" to help Trump. Some IC professionals objected to the inclusion of Steele dossier information on the grounds that it did not meet tradecraft standards for inclusion in an ICA. Comey, McCabe and FBI insisted on its inclusion on the grounds that Obama had said to include "everything" - which they interpreted as mandating inclusion of Steele dossier information even though it didn't meet tradecraft standards.

Reasonable people can perhaps disagree on whether this was justified or not. What was not justified was the claim that the inclusion decision complied with "tradecraft standards". It was bad enough to include non-compliant material, but the claim that the included material "adhered to tradecraft standards" was miserably false. The recent Tradecraft Review should have addressed this fault.

The preface also included the following assertion:
"The tradecraft standards for analytic products have been refined over the past ten years. These standards include describing sources (including their reliability and access to the information they provide), clearly expressing uncertainty, distinguishing between underlying information and analysts’ judgments and assumptions, exploring alternatives, demonstrating relevance to the customer, using strong and transparent logic, and explaining change or consistency in judgments over time."

The "past ten years" here refers to the period of time since the savage tradecraft review by the WMD Commission, an excellent repot on a previous intelligence failure of similar scale to the Russia collusion hoax as an //intelligence failure// - which it was (even if non-criminal).

They state that "standards include describing sources (including their reliability and access to the information they provide)". Now apply that to the description of the Steele network in the classified appendix (declassified and released in 2020) shown below and transcribed as follows:
"the source is an executive of a private business intelligence firm and a former employee of a friendly foreign intelligence service who has been compensated for previous reporting over the past three years. The source maintains and collects information from a layered network of identified and unidentified subsources, some of which has been corroborated in the past. The source collected this information on behalf of private clients and was not compensated for it by the FBI".

This description does not remotely comply with the warranty in the Preface. We know that Steele (the "source") had told the FBI that his information was funneled through a "Russian-based sub-source" who Steele refused to identify. Steele did however tell the FBI that Sergei Millian was one of the sub-subsources to the "Russian-based sub-source". By mid-December 2016, the FBI had figured out that Steele's "Russian-based sub-source" was Igor Danchenko, an alumnus of U of Louisville, Georgetown and Brookings Institute, who lived in northern Virginia and had an American-born daughter. A fulsome description of sources IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE WARRANTY IN THE PREFACE would have included these details and more.

It would have also stated that the FBI planned to interview the Primary Sub-Source as soon as possible. Given the importance of the document, the obvious question from any sane reviewer of the draft ICA would be: "uh, why don't you interview Steele's Primary Sub-Source right now? Today? " "And, by the way, why are you saying that he is 'Russian-based' when he lives in northern Virginia?"

If the reviewers had known that Steele's Primary Sub-Source had lived in northern Virginia and was available for interview, maybe they would have said: "uh, maybe we should hold off this ICA until we talk to Danchenko. This is a big document, maybe we should do some due diligence". But they weren't given that option, because Danchenko's location in northern Virginia was concealed from them. The warranty in the prefatory Background was false.

Subsequently, a few weeks later, when the FBI interviewed Danchenko and he revealed that there wasn't any "layered network" and that the key allegations were based (at best) on an anonymous phone call and that many of the sourcing claims in the dossier were untrue, the intelligence community had an obligation to fess up. To retract their claims about the Steele dossier, which, by the end of January, had emerged in public consciousness as the driving predicate of the Russia collusion investigation. Once the FBI knew that the sourcing claims were fraudulent, they had an obligation to disclose that to the rest of the IC and to publicly disown the Steele dossier, which had become important to the public precisely because of its endorsement in the ICA.

Read 9 tweets

Stephen McIntyre

@ClimateAudit

Jul 14

Trump's latest tariff venture is a 50% tariff on copper, ostensibly for national security reasons. Copper markets are something that I analysed in the 1970s; so I know the structure of the markets and statistics. I was even been involved as a junior analyst in a trade case about US copper tariffs.

Under the US Defense Production Act, Canada is considered "domestic production" for the purposes of national security, but neither Trump nor the Canadian government seem to have had any interest in this legislation.

I remember the difficulties of trying to make long-term forecasts of copper supply and demand. Copper is also a market with voluminous statistics maintained consistently for a very long period. US Geological Survey for US consumption and primary production of refined copper for 1950-2024 are shown below. As someone who, in the 1970s, actually thought about what this chart would look like, it was interesting to re-visit.

In the 1920s and 1930s, US copper company were industrial behemoths: Anaconda, Kennecott, Phelps Dodge and Asarco, all now forgotten, were among the top 20 or top 50 US stocks back in the day. In the 1970s, they were still major companies. US accounted for about 25% of world production and consumption.

But, as you can see, since 2000, both US primary production and US refined consumption have declined precipitously. US refined consumption is now at lower levels than in the 1970s and US primary production is less than the early 1950s.

What will be the impact of a 50% tariff on copper imports? In the next post, I'll show how the changes in US market compare to world production.

although US copper production has declined since the 1970s, world copper production has almost quadrupled. US share of world copper refined production (here primary plus secondary scrap) has decreased from about 25% to 3%.

US copper production and consumption no longer dominate world markets - despite what the Beltway may imagine. An approximate 3% share doesn't get to dictate prices.

That means that the 50% copper tariff will be borne entirely by US copper consumers (i.e. manufacturers using copper). US producers will almost certainly increase their price to match the price of imports. So the tariff will be a bonanza for US domestic producers (e.g. Freeport McMoran) and a burden for US manufacturers.

the copper data also shows a vignette into the remarkable change in world economic geography since 9/11. In 2001, US still produced more copper than China. In 2024, China produced more than 13(!) times as much copper as USA. This isn't just production, but also consumption. Chinese manufacturers consume most of their copper production; their copper consumption is accordingly an order of magnitude greater than US copper consumption.

So when Trump puffs about the importance of USA as a market, this is simply not true of a basic commodity like copper. And I'm skeptical that it is true for other basic commodities.

Read 4 tweets

Stephen McIntyre

@ClimateAudit

Jul 9

on first page: Brennan's lawyer, Robert Litt, was General Counsel at ODNI in 2016 and involved in some key events. Litt published an article in October 2017 lawfaremedia.org/article/irrele… which claimed that "The dossier itself played absolutely no role in the coordinated intelligence assessment that Russia interfered in our election." The recent Tradecraft Review, abysmal as it was, admitted that the dossier was cited in the classified ICA as a bullet support for the claim that Putin "aspired" to help Trump get elected.

@15poundstogo very Clintonian here

Brennan refers here to two press releases issued by William Evanina in July and August 2020. The Evanina statements were prompted in large part by the release of Biden-Poroshenko tapes by Ukrainian parliamentarian Andrii Derkach (who had previously in October 2016 published receipts showing that Hunter Biden was getting paid $1 million per year by Burisma). Shortly after Evanina's statements, "Trump" administration sanctioned Derkach. As a result of these sanctions, Derkach was de-platformed and the Biden-Poroshenko tapes were deleted from nearly all locations. One of the tapes showed that Poroshenko and Biden gloated in August 2016 about the removal of Manafort as Trump campaign chair as a result of Ukrainian interference (Black Ledger announcement.)

Read 11 tweets

Stephen McIntyre

@ClimateAudit

Apr 13

New thread on new information from redactions.

I just noticed that the information in Binder on Trump briefing in Aug 2016 was previously published by Grassley in July 2020, a few days after identification of Steele Primary Sub-source (and thus we, in this corner, were otherwise preoccupied).
grassley.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/…

The new version sheds light on a previous redaction. Katrina, Norm, Ted, John and Amir were mentioned. Just noting this for future reference.

something else that I'm noticing in the less redacted documents: Kevin Clinesmith was much more prominent in Crossfire Hurricane operation than we previously realized.

In real time, Hans, myself and others had vehemently and savagely criticized Durham's useless plea agreement with Clinesmith that had failed to use their leverage over Clinesmith to obtain a road map of the Russiagate hoax operation. Compare for example Mueller's use of leverage over Rick Gates to interview him about 20 times, If anything, there was more leverage over Clinesmith.

Durham's failure to lever Clinesmith looks worse and worse as we now see Clinesmith's name in multiple Crossfire documents that had previously been redacted.

For example, here is Clinesmith on August 30, 2016 - early days of Russiagate hoax - approving the reporting of FBI surveillance of Trump and Flynn while they were supposedly providing a counterintelligence briefing.

In this briefing, they failed to give Trump and Flynn the same warning about Turkey that they had previously given Clinton's lawyers.

here's an example where the "declassified" Binder contains a redaction not made in the version published by Grassley almost five years ago. the name of Edward (Ted) Gistaro of ODNI

Read 19 tweets

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