Collaboration of Bellingcat Founder and ISIS Twitter Account Exposed in New Report

Western “experts” like Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council frequently promoted the ShamiWitness account despite its frequent promotion of Daesh talking points and brutal deeds.

Whitney Webb
By Whitney Webb
ShamiWitness Higgins Header

MINNEAPOLIS  -- A new report has exposed the past collaboration of Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat and influential neo-conservatives with the “most influential Twitter account” of the terror group Daesh, also known as the Islamic State (ISIL, ISIS). That collaboration helped promote the account, which posted under the Twitter handle @shamiwitness, as

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Omidyar’s Intercept Teams Up with War-Propaganda Firm Bellingcat

Despite promoting itself as an “independent” and open-source investigation site, Bellingcat has received a significant portion of its funding from Google, which is also one of the most powerful U.S. military contractors and whose rise to prominence was directly aided by the CIA.

Whitney Webb
By Whitney Webb
Bellingcat Atlantic Council Bana Alabed

NEW YORK -- The Intercept, along with its parent company First Look Media, recently hosted a workshop for pro-war, Google-funded organization Bellingcat in New York. The workshop, which cost $2,500 per person to attend and lasted five days, aimed to instruct participants in how to perform investigations using “open source” tools -- with

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The Unthinkable Consequences of Outsourcing U.S. Intelligence

Privatized intelligence operations have become a favored practice of the U.S. and other Western governments, but the tactics of so-called spies for hire are often unethical and possibly illegal

George Eliason
By George Eliason
cyber warfare Photo: Christiaan Colen/flickr)

Decades ago, philosopher Marshall McLuhan predicted a future world war fought using information. While World War I and World War II were waged using armies and mobilized economies, “World War III [will be] a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation,” McLuhan said, a prophecy included in his 1970 book of

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How The Propaganda Machine Gaslights Us Into Submission

The media has given a few elites the ability to effectively turn a false story that they themselves invented into an established fact so broadly accepted that anyone who doubts it can be painted in the exact same light as someone who doubts the roundness of the Earth.

Caitlin Johnstone
By Caitlin Johnstone
President Bush speaks at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., on, July 12, 2004 where he his decision to invade Iraq even as he conceded on that investigators had not found the weapons of mass destruction. (AP/Mark Humphrey)

The dynamics of the establishment Syria narrative are hilarious if you take a step back and think about them. I mean, the Western empire is now openly admitting to having funded actual, literal terrorist groups in that country, and yet they’re still cranking out propaganda pieces about what is happening there and sincerely expecting us to believe

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