Re: your first few paragraphs
You have essentially created a strawman. I am not talking about U.S. propaganda, nor am I claiming U.S. propaganda is open or whatever. I am only discussed anti-disinformation campaigns by the U.S., like the one launched after Operation INFEKTION. I don't even know what you're trying to prove, talking about the CIA's propaganda efforts elsewhere. That has nothing to do with what I'm talking about.
If you think CIA suddenly just stopped doing that, well, good luck with that level of naivete. Intelligence agencies most certainly do not operate on that basis.
Once again, my post neither mentions the CIA nor U.S. propaganda. Why are you bringing this up? It seems you wanted to rant about U.S. propaganda, so you decided to do it here, even when it isn't relevant.
Bellingcat has been just one man for a very long time, including many of the few stories they pushed that weren't utterly absurd, which you painstakingly went to find
Painstakingly? I found those links in seconds. This is getting absurd, considering I went out to find several highly detailed articles written by Bellingcat and co, and you end up dismissing them as being part of a minority. There are many, many more such articles. How many more do you want? Hundreds? What an absurd, fallacious argument.
And yes, you can have nice and detailed analysis of a tweet. In fact, that's much of mass media in US appears to be doing today.
Huh? When did I ever claim such a thing? You know full well Bellingcat's article don't just rely on tweets. And that isn't comparable to tabloid media outlets reporting on a tweet. Completely different things.
P.S. If you're still of opinion that citizen investigative journalism is such a great thing, then here's some on bellingcat. Which is actually quite a bit more accurate than bellingcat itself, as it often cites actually reliable sources, rather than just itself and random facebook posts.
This fully confirms what I suspected earlier: you have been successfully influenced by Russian disinformation. I mean this respectfully. Why, you ask? Your WikiSpooks link literally says this:
On 23 Aug 2014, Bellingcat made an estimate of the exact location where the James Foley execution video was made (outside Raqqa, a reported Islamic State stronghold in north-central Syria, yet failed to notice that the video itself was a fake
It repeats the conspiracy theory that the James Foley execution videos were fake. The sources WikiSpooks uses for this claim are liveleak and this bonkers article in which it repeats the claims that Osama Bin Laden was an actor. Yeah, real better than big, bad Bellingcat.
Your link quite literally repeats Russian disinformation. CyberBerkut emerged around the annexation of Crimea in March, 2014. It purports to be a pro-Russian Ukrainian hacking group, that supports the Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine. However, this group is actually a disinformation front for Russian intelligence. This isn't the first time CyberBerkut pretended to hack a video/document/audio but in reality, forged some stuff and then pretended to "hack" it from enemies of the Kremlin.
One of the earliest examples of disinformation by CyberBerkut was this video which it claimed it "hacked" from the laptop of one of John McCain's aides when he visited Ukraine as a show of U.S. support (McCain is demonized in Russian media for being a hardliner towards Russia). They claimed the video shows some actors pretending to be Jihadi John and James Foley, his execution being filmed in front of a green screen! But the good folks over at MetaBunk did a frame-by-frame comparison of the real execution video and the so-called "leaked" filming of the set. They found that the actor had different movements compared to the real JJ, along with several other visual mismatches. Here's the full debunking:
This "secret" video was prominently featured on sites like InfoWars and Global Research.
Now, who would have the time, money, resources, and will power (complete with actors, clothing, cameras, props, etc.,) to put so much effort into creating a fake video to spread the conspiracy theory that America is staging ISIS' videos and is controlling it? Only a state like Russia, of course.
Russian disinformation targets people like you. It first seeded into your mind that McCain is a bad, warmongering man. With your view of McCain tarnished, they spread disinformation McCain was part of a conspiracy to stage fake ISIS videos.
What a stunningly ironic example of why America should relaunch the Information Agency. Otherwise, more and more people will be brainwashed.