Cambridge Analytica's Psy-Ops Warriors

[FarCenter]

In the ongoing furor over the pilfered data on 50 million Americans taken from Facebook by Cambridge Analytica and weaponized during the 2016 election campaign on behalf of Donald Trump, attention has focused primarily on CA's slick and fast-talking CEO, Alexander Nix, who's been suspended from his job over the scandal, amid investigations in at least four countries.

Less noticed, however, is the fact that behind CA and its parent, the London-based SCL Group – for Strategic Communications Laboratories – stands a shadowy clique of former spooks, military intelligence specialists in psychological warfare operations ("psy-ops" ), and right-wing military officers, at least two of whom have close ties to General Stanley McChrystal, the disgraced "runaway general" who lost his job as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2010 after a exposé by Michael Hastings in Rolling Stone

One of those generals, Michael T. Flynn, was Trump's national security adviser during the campaign and, for a few weeks, in the White House, and who, in 2016, served as an adviser to Cambridge Analytica. And, before being fired as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014 by President Obama, Flynn served as McChrystal's top intelligence adviser in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The other senior officer, much lesser known, is Steve Tatham, a British psy-ops specialist and a former commander in Britain's Royal Navy, who served as head of SCL Group's defense-related business. His official bio calls him "the U.K.'s longest continuously serving officer in information operations," and it notes that he served in Afghanistan during McChrystal's tenure there and then, later, as "Commanding Officer of 15 (U.K.) Psyops Group." Tatham, along with McChrystal and Andrew Mackay, a British general who served with McChrystal in Afghanistan, is the author of a 2011 book, Behavioural Conflict, whose subtitle is: "Why Understanding People and Their Motives Will Prove Decisive in Future Conflict." It applies what Tatham learned during counterinsurgency wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, the Balkans, and Northern Ireland as lessons in how to get people do what you want them to do.

During those wars, many generals, and their counterinsurgency experts, were operating according to the precepts of General David Petraeus' famous book, The Petraeus Doctrine: The Field Manual on Counterinsurgency Operations, written for the Joint Chiefs of Staff with General James Mattis, now serving as Trump's secretary of defense. Its central belief that winning a war means winning "hearts and minds" and adapting counterinsurgency to the culture of the target population appealed mightily to Steve Bannon, who readily applied it to political electoral strategy.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/trump-facebook-data-scandal-cambridge-analyticas-psy-ops-warriors-w518189

See also The New Military-Industrial Complex of Big Data Psy-Ops

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100210404024