Integrity Initiative

[peterms]

There was some discussion of this in the Labour Party thread, in the context of II's attempts to smear Corbyn, but the activities of the group are rather wider than just that, so I thought I'd start this for anyone interested.

Tim Hayward has a blog here which is regularly updated, giving links to articles about this operation as well as links to all the downloads of leaked documents.  It's useful, since the mainstream media are blanking the story, I don't know whether because there's a D notice out, or because so many of their own staff are listed as being involved and are using their position to suppress coverage.

Quote

... We now know a lot more about the coordination of that communications strategy, thanks to the recently accessed documents exposing the Institute for Statecraft’s so-called Integrity Initiative (here, here and here). ...

Be careful about downloading the documents, though - it seems there are attempts to infect them, to discourage people from getting them.

 

[peterms]

It's a bit long, and I'm sure several VTers could have produced a smoother translation,  but here's the II and Norway.  Neefs an editor,  really.

Oops.

Quote

...A starting good point is the article concerning an Atlantic Council event in Norway published at the website steigan.no on November 13. In this article by Terje Alnes four facts are presented, one is that the prime minister Erna Solberg is awarded a prize by Atlantic Council, another that the military is offered much more money in the budget, a lot of money was also given to Atlantic Council and finally all money to peace organizations had been cut that since a very long time had received support from the government...

 

[villakram]

Ahhh... look at that, another one of those conspiracies that never ever occurs.

[peterms]

 

[A'Villan]

Psyops is scary business.

I remember being very interested in this when you originally posted.

Any chance you could break the whole thing down for me in a few sentences, or paragraphs, if you don't mind?

Otherwise I'll try and find some time to get up to speed later today.

[peterms]

11 hours ago, A'Villan said:

Psyops is scary business.

I remember being very interested in this when you originally posted.

Any chance you could break the whole thing down for me in a few sentences, or paragraphs, if you don't mind?

Otherwise I'll try and find some time to get up to speed later today.

It's basically a network of people co-ordinated by a secretive unit which is funded by the Foreign Office, the British Army, and the Ministry of Defence.  It has ties to other propaganda outfits like the Atlantic Council and Bellingcat.  The networks consist of journalists and politicians, here and abroad, who can be relied on to circulate and amplify lines pushed by the intelligence services, but passing it off as their own independent thinking.  It attracted attention because it was smearing Corbyn, and a dump of hacked documents gave a lot of information about who was involved in which countries, what they were being paid and so on.  (The links in the article to the document dump won't work now, they had to keep moving them around every few days because the intelligence services were closing down hosting sites as far as they could, and I don't have a current link).  They have got in trouble with the charities regulator for misusing charitable status.

There's a piece here which gives some detail.

Quote

Recent hacked documents have revealed an international network of politicians, journalists, academics, researchers and military officers, all engaged in highly deceptive covert propaganda campaigns funded by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), NATO, Facebook and hardline national security institutions. 

This “network of networks”, as one document refers to them, centers around an ironically named outfit called the Integrity Initiative. And it is all overseen by a previously unknown England-based think tank registered in Scotland, the Institute for Statecraft, which has operated under a veil of secrecy.

The whole operation appears to be run by, and in conjunction with, members of British military intelligence.

According to David Miller, professor of political sociology in the school of policy studies at the University of Bristol and the director of the Organization for Propaganda Studies, the Integrity Initiative “appears to be a military directed push.”

“The most senior government people are professional propagandists and spooks,” Miller explained. “The ‘charity’ lead on this [Chris Donnelly] was also appointed as a colonel in military intelligence at the beginning of the project — a truly amazing fact that suggests this is a military intelligence cut out.”

A minister for the UK FCO has officially confirmed that it has been funding the Integrity Network...

 

[A'Villan]

1 hour ago, peterms said:

It's basically a network of people co-ordinated by a secretive unit which is funded by the Foreign Office, the British Army, and the Ministry of Defence.  It has ties to other propaganda outfits like the Atlantic Council and Bellingcat.  The networks consist of journalists and politicians, here and abroad, who can be relied on to circulate and amplify lines pushed by the intelligence services, but passing it off as their own independent thinking.  It attracted attention because it was smearing Corbyn, and a dump of hacked documents gave a lot of information about who was involved in which countries, what they were being paid and so on.  (The links in the article to the document dump won't work now, they had to keep moving them around every few days because the intelligence services were closing down hosting sites as far as they could, and I don't have a current link).  They have got in trouble with the charities regulator for misusing charitable status.

There's a piece here which gives some detail.

 

Thanks so much for that.

Reminds me of when the Northwood Documents were released.

They showed official documents pre 9/11 that American intelligence propose hijacking planes and committing terrorist acts on it's own in order to gain support for war.

You push a certain narrative and have your buddies support your claims and people are none the wiser. Oftentimes they assume credibility where it's just strength in number.

Like for example the U.S gaining support for war by committing terrorist acts on it's own people, then putting the blame on a party entirely removed from the act.

They have their agenda and all that's required to push it and have it come to be, is the backing and belief of enough people that it's seen to completion, regardless of merits.

Unfortunately unlike the coordinated network that you speak of, the general population and average person is none the wiser to being complicit in such schemes.

The multi-millionaire media reporter who has his reporting broadcast worldwide isn't aware that they are part of the problem and complicit in pushing an agenda.

They are being paid millions to push the belief that there are bogeymen at your door in the form of extremist terrorists, and that something righteous must be done.

They don't have the presence of mind to report the school of thought that a population of dozens of millions live on less than $2 a day in the countries being raped by the U.S.

And that the sole reason this reporter is paid millions per year to essentially push an agenda is so that Halliburton and the like, or TPTB get what they want.

Sorry for the rant, but psychological operations or psyops scares the poop out of me. It's so refined and the I just wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes sometimes.