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.] . . . .