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In-Depth Interview: Former Iraq Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter Offers Insight and Analysis on Russiagate

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Scott Ritter, the weapons inspector who dispatched the myths of Iraqi WMD’s before the US invaded, has insights into Russiagate, based on his stint in Russia with Marine Intelligence, and careful examination of available evidence.Ritter posted this analysis on Truthdig on February 28.  He is skeptical of Crowdstrike, the cyber security firm hired by the DNC in April 2016, which quickly concluded that Russian hackers were the intruders, and that they shared their purloined data with WikiLeaks.  Ritter argues that the unit tagged APT 29 did penetrate the DNC servers, but were long gone by April, 2016.

Ritter explains how Crowdstrike installed monitoring gear at the DNC, and watched for over a month as hackers labelled APT 28 continued to rifle through files and export them, until Crowdstrike kicked them out on June 12.

Ritter’s analysis is based, in part, on revelations in January 2018 by the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant from anonymous sources in the intelligence services of The Netherlands.  The reports claim–without public evidence, just like the American intelligence assertions–that the Dutch hacked into Russia’s hacking center in Moscow, and witnessed a cat fight in cyberspace between FBI and Russian cyberwarriors.  The Dutch reports also assert that they had hacked the security cameras at the Moscow center, and could identify some people as officers of SVR, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.

While the Dutch reports remain unverified, Ritter finds them more credible than the unverified assertions of US intelligence memos in October 2016 and January 2017.  He dismisses Mueller’s indictments of the St. Petersburg troll farm team as a “joke”, and predicts that Mueller will likely conflate the separate hacks of APT 28 and APT 29 if and when indictments are made against those who allegedly sent stolen emails and data to WikiLeaks.

Ritter warns that Putin’s March 1 declaration of a new generation of Russian weapons should be take seriously, and says that Russia tipped off the US to their development in about 2007 but the US treated it as Russian bluffing.