COMMENT: In early 2011, we did a For The Record series high­light­ing Wik­iLeaks’ Nazi links and affil­i­a­tions, which mor­phed directly into pro­grams about “The Mus­lim Broth­er­hood Spring.”

The latter–popularly known as the Arab Spring–was an intel­li­gence oper­a­tion under­taken by the GOP/Underground Reich fac­tion of the U.S. intel­li­gence appa­ra­tus and ini­ti­ated dur­ing the sec­ond Bush admin­is­tra­tion. I enun­ci­ated the goals of the oper­a­tion as:

• Bring­ing cor­po­ratist doc­trine to the Arab and Mus­lim worlds, cour­tesy of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, joined at the hip with the Repub­li­can Party and the Under­ground Reich.
• The desta­bi­liza­tion of the Obama admin­is­tra­tion a la “Octo­ber Surprise”–the Iran­ian hostage cri­sis delib­er­ately ini­ti­ated and sus­tained by the GOP and related intel­li­gence ele­ments to desta­bi­lize the Carter admin­is­tra­tion. Their hope is that Obama will be seen as insuf­fi­ciently tough on ter­ror­ism and the man who “Lost the Mid­dle East.”
• The GOP fac­tion of the CIA and State Department–which ini­ti­ated the con­tacts with the Egypt­ian Mus­lim Broth­er­hood as well as the April 6 Move­ment of sec­u­lar­ist activists–will be deci­sively involved with the desta­bi­liza­tion effort.
• The Mus­lim Broth­er­hood proxy war­riors ele­vated into power by the oper­a­tion will attempt to desta­bi­lize Rus­sia, India and China–the three large coun­tries that dom­i­nate the Earth Island and which, not inci­den­tally, have the power to tell the transna­tional cor­po­ra­tions to take a hike.
• The MB proxy war­riors will, even­tu­ally, be used to destroy Israel and, even­tu­ally, the United States itself, when the Under­ground Reich deems the coun­try to have out­lived its usefulness. 
• The final out­come of this imbroglio will suit the goals of the Under­ground Reich. Never for­get that the GOP is sim­ply a front for a Third Reich gone under­ground, with the seeds sown by its Naz­i­fied eth­nic out­reach divi­sion hav­ing cul­mi­nated in the ele­va­tion of Otto von Bolschwing pro­tege Helene Von Damm hav­ing selected the per­son­nel who com­prised the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tions. (Yours Truly–along with the late Mae Brussell–played a small role in break­ing the orig­i­nal von Bolschwing story in the San Jose Mer­cury News in 1981.) The United States might be com­pared with the air­craft that were hijacked on 9/11/2011. The planes may be fly­ing, but what is intended is any­thing but a smooth land­ing. The goal of the Under­ground Reich that con­trols the GOP is the sub­ju­ga­tion or anni­hi­la­tion of the United States.

It remains to be seen if the philo­soph­i­cal bank­ruptcy of Mitt Romney’s can­di­dacy and the shal­low, hyp­o­crit­i­cal nature of the man him­self hand Obama the elec­tion. With no poli­cies save the failed doc­trines that gov­erned the admin­is­tra­tion of George W. Bush–personally embod­ied by Rom­ney, the quin­tes­sen­tial one percenter–a can­di­dacy that was intel­lec­tu­ally bank­rupt from the out­set is hav­ing a tough time.

To date, how­ever, the desta­bi­liza­tion of Obama’s admin­is­tra­tion is pro­ceed­ing apace. It may not reach its cli­max for some time–perhaps years. Nonethe­less, the sig­nif­i­cance of “The Mus­lim Broth­er­hood Spring” should not be underestimated–it may well deci­sively alter the world power struc­ture for a long time to come.

Fol­low­ing the lethal attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya and other attacks on U.S. diplo­matic facil­i­ties (includ­ing the embassy in Cairo), the Obama admin­is­tra­tion is under fire from the GOP for his actions in the face of oppo­si­tion by the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood forces brought to power by the Arab Spring Operation.

A num­ber of sto­ries should be con­sid­ered in this con­text, many of them already cited by con­trib­u­tors. Among the sto­ries excerpted below are:

• A cyber­at­tack on a num­ber of key finan­cial insti­tu­tions has been [appar­ently incor­rectly] attrib­uted to an Islamist group upset about the  online Mohammed video may be a har­bin­ger of more destruc­tive things to fol­low. Note that cyber secu­rity experts are of the opin­ion that a small group would not have been able to pull off an attack like this. Whether a nation state or, per­haps, some of  the Pirate Bay/Anonymous folks may have been involved. We should not lose sight of the fact that the Pirate/Anonymous crowd were thor­oughly out­foxed and out­ma­neu­vered by the Nazis and fas­cists behind Pirate Bay and Wik­iLeaks and do not appear to have fig­ured out that they have “been thor­oughly had.”
• Was the attack on the finan­cial insti­tu­tions intended to desta­bi­lize the Obama admin­is­tra­tion? Who was behind it?
• With Romney/GOP tar­get­ing Obama’s han­dling of the econ­omy, as well as national secu­rity, an event that seri­ously dis­rupts the finan­cial sys­tem might help to do the job. Cyber-security experts were alarmed by the poten­tial of the hack­ing attacks on the banks.
• The GOP defeated an Obama admin­is­tra­tion bill to tighten secu­rity against cyber-attacks shortly before “The Hack­to­ber Surprise.” 
• In addi­tion to the “Hack­to­ber Sur­prise,” Obama’s U.N. Ambas­sador Susan Rice is under fire by the GOP for her state­ment that the embassy attack was spontaneous. 
• The GOP is plan­ning on using the Libyan Embassy attack to dis­credit Obama.
• The GOP is even com­par­ing Obama to Jimmy Carter and label­ing their gam­bit as “The Octo­ber Surprise.”

FTR #737 fea­tured a bullet-point sum­ma­tion of some of the key points in the For The Record series about WikiLeaks/Muslim Broth­er­hood Spring.

In a series done imme­di­ately after the 2008 elec­tion, we noted that Obama was con­tigu­ous to some of the same polit­i­cal forces beholden unto Karl Rove and the Mus­lim Brotherhood-related ele­ments that Rove and Grover Norquist shep­herded into the GOP. We pre­dicted that Obama would be “bad­jack­eted” as “soft on ter­ror.” Not unlike Lee Har­vey Oswald, we feel he was maneu­vered into posi­tion to take the fall for the events now unfolding.

Observe what is tak­ing place. The events now unfold­ing may not oust Obama at this point in time, but the agents of dark­ness iden­ti­fied here will, ulti­mately, ful­fill as prox­ies what Win­ston Churchill pre­dicted would hap­pen in the event of a Nazi vic­tory: “The world will be plunged into an abyss, made more sin­is­ter by the knights of per­verted science.”

“Cyber Attacks on U.S. Banks Expose U.S. Vulnerability” by Chris Strohm and Eric Engel­man; Bloomberg News; 9/27/2012.

EXCERPT: Cyber attacks on the biggest U.S. banks, includ­ing JPMor­gan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Wells Fargo & Co., have breached some of the nation’s most advanced com­puter defenses and exposed the vul­ner­a­bil­ity of its infra­struc­ture, said cyber­se­cu­rity spe­cial­ists track­ing the assaults.

The attack, which a U.S. offi­cial yes­ter­day said was waged by a still-unidentified group out­side the coun­try, flooded bank web­sites with traf­fic, ren­der­ing them unavail­able to con­sumers and dis­rupt­ing trans­ac­tions for hours at a time.

Such a sus­tained net­work attack ranks among the worst-case sce­nar­ios envi­sioned by the National Secu­rity Agency, accord­ing to the U.S. offi­cial, who asked not to be iden­ti­fied because he isn’t autho­rized to speak pub­licly. The extent of the dam­age may not be known for weeks or months, said the offi­cial, who has access to clas­si­fied information.

“The nature of this attack is sophis­ti­cated enough or large enough that even the largest of the finan­cial insti­tu­tions would find it dif­fi­cult to defend against,” Rod­ney Joffe, senior vice pres­i­dent at Ster­ling, Virginia-based secu­rity firm Neustar Inc. (NSR), said in a phone inter­view.
While the group is using a method known as dis­trib­uted denial-of-service, or DDoS, to over­whelm financial-industry web­sites with traf­fic from hijacked com­put­ers, the attacks have taken con­trol of com­mer­cial servers that have much more power, accord­ing to the specialists.

The notable thing is the vol­ume and the scale of the traf­fic that’s been directed at these sites, and that’s very rare,” Dmitri Alper­ovitch, co-founder and chief tech­nol­ogy offi­cer of Palo Alto, California-based secu­rity firm Crowd­Strike Inc. (0192981D), said in a phone interview.

The assault, which esca­lated this week, was the sub­ject of closed-door White House meet­ings in the past few days, accord­ing to a private-security spe­cial­ist who asked not to be iden­ti­fied because he’s help­ing to trace the attacks.

Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s admin­is­tra­tion is cir­cu­lat­ing a draft exec­u­tive order that would cre­ate a pro­gram to shield vital com­puter net­works from cyber attacks, two for­mer U.S. offi­cials with knowl­edge of the effort said ear­lier this month.

The U.S. Sen­ate last month failed to advance com­pre­hen­sive cyber­se­cu­rity leg­is­la­tion and the admin­is­tra­tion is con­tem­plat­ing using the exec­u­tive order because it’s not cer­tain that Con­gress can pass a cyber­se­cu­rity bill, the offi­cials said. . . .

A group call­ing itself Izz ad-Din al-Quassam Cyber Fight­ers claimed respon­si­bil­ity for the assault in a state­ment posted to the web­site pastebin.com, say­ing it was in response to a video uploaded to Google Inc.’s YouTube, depict­ing the Prophet Muham­mad in ways that offended some Muslims.

The ini­tial plan­ning for the assault pre-dated the video con­tro­versy, mak­ing it less likely that it inspired the attacks, accord­ing to Alper­ovitch and Joffe, both of whom have been track­ing the inci­dents. A sig­nif­i­cant amount of plan­ning and prepa­ra­tion went into the attacks, they said.

“The ground work was done to infect sys­tems and pro­duce an infra­struc­ture capa­ble of launch­ing an attack when it was needed,” Joffe said. . . .

. . . . “If bank­ing infra­struc­ture was affected in this way for an extended period of time, the nat­ural out­come of that is a loss of faith,” he [dyber-security expert Dmitri Alper­ovitch] said. “If you can’t get to your bank­ing site for three or four hours on a day when you have to do things, you start think­ing about what are my alter­na­tives because this might hap­pen again.”

The bank­ing indus­try wor­ries about an orga­ni­za­tion with more resources launch­ing attacks, said Ed Pow­ers, head of secu­rity and pri­vate issues for U.S. finan­cial firms at Deloitte & Touche LLP.

“This is com­ing toward the end of the month; it’s badly timed,” Joffe said. “Peo­ple have to pay bills today and tomorrow.”

“Hack­ers May Have Had Help With Attacks on U.S. Banks, Researchers Say” by Nicole Perl­roth; The New York Times; 9/27/2012.

EXCERPT: The hack­ers claim­ing respon­si­bil­ity for cyber­at­tacks on Amer­i­can banks over the past week must have had sub­stan­tial help to dis­rupt and take down major bank­ing sites, secu­rity researchers say.

Bank of Amer­ica, JPMor­gan Chase, Cit­i­group, U.S. Ban­corp, Wells Fargo and PNC all expe­ri­enced dis­rup­tions and delays on their bank­ing sites over the past week because of denial of ser­vice or DDoS attacks, in which hack­ers clog a Web site with data requests until it slows or col­lapses under the load.

A hacker group, which calls itself the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fight­ers, took credit for the attacks in online posts. They enlisted vol­un­teers for the attacks with mes­sages on var­i­ous sites. On one blog, they called on vol­un­teers to visit two Web addresses that would cause their com­put­ers to instantly start flood­ing tar­gets — includ­ing the New York Stock Exchange, Nas­daq and Bank of Amer­ica — with hun­dreds of data requests each sec­ond. This week, hack­ers asked vol­un­teers to attack banks accord­ing to a defined timetable: Wells Fargo on Tues­day, U.S. Ban­corp on Wednes­day and PNC on Thursday.

Rep­re­sen­ta­tives for Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank and PNC all con­firmed Wednes­day that their Web sites had expe­ri­enced dis­rup­tions because of unex­pected vol­umes of traf­fic. Both the New York Stock Exchange and Nas­daq saw a slow­down, but no seri­ous dis­rup­tion, on their Web sites.
Secu­rity researchers say the attack meth­ods being ped­dled by hack­ers — the custom-built Web sites — were too basic to have gen­er­ated the disruptions.

“The num­ber of users you need to break those tar­gets is very high,” said Jaime Blasco, a secu­rity researcher at Alien­Vault who has been inves­ti­gat­ing the attacks. “They must have had help from other sources.”

Those addi­tional sources, Mr. Blasco said, would have to be a well-resourced group, like a nation state, or bot­nets — net­works of infected zom­bie com­put­ers that do the bid­ding of cyber­crim­i­nals. Bot­nets can be rented via black mar­ket schemes that are com­mon in the Inter­net under­ground, or loaned out by cyber­crim­i­nals or governments. . . .

“Libya Attack: GOP Goes after White House, espe­cially Susan Rice” by Brad Knicker­bocker [Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor]; Yahoo News; 9/29/2012.

EXCERPT: As the pres­i­den­tial debates and the elec­tion approach, ques­tions about how the Obama admin­is­tra­tion has han­dled the attack in Libya that killed the US ambas­sador on Sept. 11 have taken a harder polit­i­cal edge.

For­mer Arkansas Gov. Mike Huck­abee says it’s a scan­dal worse than Water­gate – that the Amer­i­can peo­ple “have flat-out been lied too,” as he put it on Fox News Friday.

Eric Fehren­strom, a senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s cam­paign (also speak­ing on Fox News), says, “Pres­i­dent Obama needs to be held account­able for his administration’s attempts to mis­lead the Amer­i­can peo­ple about what hap­pened in Benghazi.”

Rep. Peter King, chair­man of the Home­land Secu­rity Com­mit­tee, has called for the res­ig­na­tion of United Nations Ambas­sador Susan Rice.

The broader theme here (and in many other par­ti­san and con­ser­v­a­tive blog com­ments) is that Pres­i­dent Obama wasn’t just unaware of the threat in Libya and its vio­lent out­come, but that he and his admin­is­tra­tion were pur­posely untruth­ful about what happened.

The head­line on Karl Rove’s col­umn in the Wall Street Jour­nal this week was “Obama’s Biggest Oppo­nent Is the Truth.”

“Every day, it seems, he attempts to dis­qual­ify his oppo­nent through delib­er­ate and unde­ni­able false­hoods,” Mr. Rove wrote. “This is only one side of a two-sided coin. The pres­i­dent can’t tell the truth about his own record either.” . . . .

“Shift­ing Reports on Libya Killings May Cost Obama” by Mark Landler; The New York Times; 9/29/2012.

EXCERPT: The Obama administration’s shift­ing accounts of the fatal attack on the Amer­i­can diplo­matic com­pound in Beng­hazi, Libya, have left Pres­i­dent Obama sud­denly exposed on national secu­rity and for­eign pol­icy, a field where he had enjoyed a seem­ingly unas­sail­able advan­tage over Mitt Rom­ney in the pres­i­den­tial race.

After first describ­ing the attack as a spon­ta­neous demon­stra­tion run amok, admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials now describe it as a ter­ror­ist act with pos­si­ble involve­ment by Al Qaeda. The chang­ing accounts prompted the spokesman for the nation’s top intel­li­gence offi­cial, James R. Clap­per Jr., to issue a state­ment on Fri­day acknowl­edg­ing that Amer­i­can intel­li­gence agen­cies “revised our ini­tial assess­ment to reflect new infor­ma­tion indi­cat­ing that it was a delib­er­ate and orga­nized ter­ror­ist attack car­ried out by extremists.”

The unusual state­ment was not solicited by the White House, accord­ing to Shawn Turner, the spokesman for Mr. Clap­per, the direc­tor of national intel­li­gence, but it seemed cal­cu­lated to relieve some of the pres­sure on the White House for the con­tra­dic­tory accounts given in the two and a half weeks since the attack. It is unlikely to stop ques­tions from the Rom­ney cam­paign, which senses an opportunity.

“This inci­dent is a hinge event in the cam­paign because it opens up the oppor­tu­nity to talk more broadly about Obama’s for­eign pol­icy,” said Richard S. Williamson, a for­mer diplo­mat and an adviser to Mr. Romney.

But the ques­tions are likely to come not just from par­ti­san Repub­li­cans. The Beng­hazi attack calls into ques­tion the accu­racy of intelligence-gathering and whether vul­ner­a­ble Amer­i­can per­son­nel over­seas are receiv­ing ade­quate pro­tec­tion. Even allies of the pres­i­dent like Sen­a­tor John Kerry, a Mass­a­chu­setts Demo­c­rat and the chair­man of the Sen­ate For­eign Rela­tions Com­mit­tee, have peti­tioned the White House for more infor­ma­tion about how the gov­ern­ment pro­tects diplo­matic instal­la­tions abroad.

Almost since the smoke cleared in Beng­hazi, Repub­li­cans have accused Mr. Obama’s aides of delib­er­ately play­ing down the attack. Sen­a­tor John McCain, Repub­li­can of Ari­zona, con­demned the administration’s ini­tial account of the attack as “dis­grace­ful,” say­ing on CBS that it “shows a fun­da­men­tal mis­un­der­stand­ing not only of war­fare, but of what’s going on in that part of the world.” . . . .

“Rom­ney Team Tries Hang­ing Jimmy Carter Label on Obama” by Scott Shane; The New York Times; 9/29/2012.

EXCERPT: A pres­i­dent strug­gling simul­ta­ne­ously to cope with anti-American tumult in the Mid­dle East and fix stub­born eco­nomic trou­ble at home: Is Pres­i­dent Obama replay­ing the one-term pres­i­dency of Jimmy Carter?

So Mitt Rom­ney and Paul D. Ryan have repeat­edly sug­gested, try­ing to use the glum prece­dent of the Carter pres­i­dency to taint Mr. Obama’s record and pro­duce the same elec­toral result 32 years later.

The Repub­li­can can­di­dates and their sup­port­ers have played the Carter card not nearly as often as the Obama team has brought up George W. Bush, who lurks near Mr. Carter in the lower ranks on his­to­ri­ans’ rat­ings of Amer­i­can pres­i­dents. But they have pressed the Carter par­al­lels all the harder since mil­i­tants assaulted an Amer­i­can diplo­matic mis­sion in Libya and killed four Amer­i­cans, say­ing it recalled the Iran­ian hostage cri­sis that dom­i­nated the news as Ronald Rea­gan ran his suc­cess­ful cam­paign against Mr. Carter.

“I mean, turn on the TV and it reminds you of 1979 Tehran, but they are burn­ing our flags in cap­i­tals all around the world, they are storm­ing our embassies,” said Mr. Ryan, the Repub­li­can nom­i­nee for vice pres­i­dent, on a visit to Ohio on Mon­day. “We’ve lost four of our diplo­mats, and what is the sig­nal that our gov­ern­ment is send­ing the rest of the world?” . . . .

“GOP’s Octo­ber Sur­prise” by Craig Unger; Salon.com; 10/01/2012.

EXCERPT: Accord­ing to a highly reli­able source, as Mitt Rom­ney and Pres­i­dent Barack Obama pre­pare for the first pres­i­den­tial debate Wednes­day night, top Repub­li­can oper­a­tives are primed to unleash a new two-pronged offen­sive that will attack Obama as weak on national secu­rity, and will be based, in part, on new intel­li­gence infor­ma­tion regard­ing the attacks in Libya that killed U.S. Ambas­sador Chris Stevens on Sept. 11.

The source, who has first­hand knowl­edge of pri­vate, high-level con­ver­sa­tions in the Rom­ney camp that took place in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., last week, said that at var­i­ous times the GOP strate­gists referred to their new oper­a­tion as the Jimmy Carter Strat­egy or the Octo­ber Surprise.

He added that they planned to release what they hoped would be “a bomb­shell” that would make Libya and Obama’s for­eign pol­icy a major issue in the cam­paign. “My under­stand­ing is that they have come up with evi­dence that the Obama admin­is­tra­tion had pos­i­tive intel­li­gence that there was going to be a ter­ror­ist attack on the intelligence.”

The source described the Repub­li­cans as chortling with glee that the Obama admin­is­tra­tion “def­i­nitely had intel” about the attack before it hap­pened. “Intel­li­gence can be graded in dif­fer­ent ways,” he added, “and some­times A and B don’t get con­nected. But [the Rom­ney cam­paign] will try to paint it to look like Obama had advance knowl­edge of the attack and is weak on terrorism.”

He said they were jubi­lant about their new strat­egy and said they intended to por­tray Obama as a help­less, Jimmy Carter-like pres­i­dent and to equate the tragedy in Libya with Pres­i­dent Carter’s failed attempt to res­cue Amer­i­can hostages in Iran in 1980. “They are so excited about it,” he said. “Over and over again they talked about how it would be just like Jimmy Carter’s failed raid. They feel it is going to give them a last-minute land­slide in the election.” . . . .

. . . The source declined to reveal the names of the GOP oper­a­tives who were present. But he said, “These were the top guys in the party. It was a pri­vate, unguarded plan­ning con­ver­sa­tion.” He fur­ther described par­tic­i­pants in the meet­ing as con­sist­ing of well-known names tied to the big Repub­li­can super PACs and peo­ple who had access to high-level national secu­rity intel­li­gence. [Ital­ics added.] . . . .