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The revelation has been made in the latest batch of “Twitter Files” that are being leaked to several journalists.

The screenshots, emails, and chat logs show how Twitter helped the U.S. government operate its secret propaganda and disinformation campaign.

The sole aim was to influence public opinion.

Among the goals and focus was Iran and the war on Yemen.

Spreading anti-Iran propaganda by consecutive U.S. government officials has been well-documented for decades now.

Using social media to spread anti-Iran propaganda and to shape public opinion in West Asia against Tehran has been emerging recently in media reports.

The U.S. military and intelligence community have long used a policy of fake online personas and third parties to “amplify” U.S. narratives in West Asia.

For example, using an authentic-looking Persian-language post can have greater influence and appeal instead of an official press release by the Pentagon.

For years, senior Twitter executives said they were working very hard and making “concerted efforts” to allegedly stop foreign government-backed accounts from spreading propaganda on their company’s platform.

In 2020, Twitter spokesperson Nick Pickles, in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, said that the company was taking “aggressive efforts” to shut down “coordinated platform manipulation efforts” attributed to government agencies.

This is while foreign governments rejected such accusations.

Now it has come to light that the government agencies spreading state propaganda, Twitter was referring to, was the U.S. government itself.

New internal documents show how the social media giant “whitewashed” a network of accounts affiliated with the U.S. military to change public opinion in West Asia.

And despite executives at the social media platform being aware of these accounts, they did not shut them down.

Instead, they allowed them to remain active for years, and the leaked documents show that some are still active.

Twitter places a visible blue mark next to accounts that the company verifies as genuine. Accounts with blue marks enjoy extra privileges.

The “whitelist” essentially gave Pentagon accounts the same privileges of verification without the visible blue mark.

It raises serious questions about the decision-making and malicious manipulating practices of Twitter before the company was sold to billionaire Elon Musk.

It has now been revealed the secret cooperation between Twitter and the Pentagon stretches back at least five years.

One account, which was run by Twitter and CENTCOM, the U.S. Central Command, which operates in West Asia, under the username @yemencurrent (now deleted), promoted propaganda and fake news on the U.S. and Saudi-backed war on Yemen.

Other accounts focused on promoting U.S.-backed militias in Syria, who are violating the country’s sovereignty and looting oil belonging to the government in Damascus.

Other accounts promoted anti-Iran propaganda in Iraq. The Pentagon used Arabic-language accounts when tweeting its propaganda issues.

Coincidentally, that’s when violent, deadly riots unfolded in Iraq by a group of thugs who murdered and torched the offices of anti-terror forces after they defeated Daesh with the help of military advisors from Tehran.

Another CENTCOM account, @althughur, posts anti-Iran propaganda focused on the Iraqi public as well. It also changed its Twitter bio from a CENTCOM affiliation to an Arabic sentence that reads “Euphrates pulse.”

Iraqi officials had complained of suspicious social media accounts spreading disinformation, directly accusing the U.S. embassy at the time.

This now indicates how widespread the Pentagon anti-Iran propaganda campaign had been.

The leaked internal logs show Twitter applied a special exemption tag to the CENTCOM accounts on the same day the request was sent by the United States Central Command for West Asia.

One Pentagon account by the username of @mktashif was identified by Twitter researchers as appearing to use a deep-fake photo to hide its real identity.

This account initially identified itself in its biography or profile as a U.S. government account affiliated with CENTCOM.

This information later changed to what non-Twitter researchers identified as a “deep fake.”

The new Twitter bio claimed that the account was an unbiased source of opinion and information and, roughly translated from Arabic, “dedicated to serving Iraqis and Arabs.”

The account routinely posted propaganda against Iran and the popular revolution in Yemen. It has now been deleted.

Erik Sperling, the executive director of Just Foreign Policy, a nonprofit that works toward diplomatic solutions to foreign conflicts, says “It’s deeply concerning if the Pentagon is working to shape public opinion about our military’s role abroad and even worse if private companies are helping to conceal it.”

It might be deeply concerning, but it certainly doesn’t come as a surprise.

“Congress and social media companies should investigate and take action to ensure that, at the very least, our citizens are fully informed when their tax money is being spent on putting a positive spin on our endless wars,” Sperling added.

Iran, Iraq, Yemen, and other American adversaries have long accused Washington of using social media platforms to wage a hybrid war against sovereign countries opposed to American foreign policies and wars.

This is especially true in Latin American countries, where the Pentagon has been seeking regime change across the region.

A report by the Washington Post in 2020 revealed that officials from Facebook identified fake accounts attributed to CENTCOM’s influence operation on its social media platform.

Leaked Twitter emails show that in 2020, the senior Pentagon attorneys invited Facebook and Twitter executives to attend classified briefings in a sensitive compartmented information facility, also known as a SCIF, used for highly sensitive meetings.

On July 26, 2017, Nathaniel Kahler, at the time an official working with CENTCOM, sent an email to Twitter with a request to approve the verification of one account and “whitelist” a list of Arabic-language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages.”

Stacia Cardille, then an attorney with Twitter, noted in an email to her colleagues that the Pentagon may want to change its previous activities by classifying its use of social media “to avoid embarrassment.”

“Combatting attempts to interfere in conversations on Twitter remains a top priority for the company, and we continue to invest heavily in our detection, disruption, and transparency efforts related to state-backed information operations. Our goal is to remove bad-faith actors and to advance public understanding of these critical topics,” Twitter claims.

The latest leaks are in line with a major report published in August by the Stanford Internet Observatory, which focused on thousands of accounts that they suspected to be part of a U.S. state-backed disinformation operation, many of which used photorealistic human faces generated by artificial intelligence, a practice is also known as “deep fakes.”

The researchers connected these accounts with a vast online ecosystem that included “fake news” websites, meme accounts on other social media platforms such as Telegram and Facebook, and online personalities that echoed Pentagon messages without disclosure of any Pentagon affiliation.

Some of the accounts claimed Iran was “threatening Iraq’s water security and flooding the country with crystal meth,” while others promoted allegations that Iran was harvesting the organs of Afghan refugees.

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“The full picture of what happened in August – and all the warning signs that could have predicted the outcome – will only be revealed if the information that the departments of Defense and State have already restricted from public release is made available,” John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR), said in a statement on Friday.

Speaking at the Military Reporters & Editors Association Annual Conference in Arlington, Virginia, on Friday, Sopko called on the two departments to release all the relevant information.

He said the restriction of information by the Defense Department, which he said dated back to 2015 would have helped Congress and the public assess “whether we should have ended our efforts” in Afghanistan.

The Defense Department restricted the public release of information about “the performance of the Afghan security forces,” which included “casualty data, unit strength, training and operation deficiencies, tactical and operational readiness of Afghan military leadership, comprehensive assessments of Afghan security force leadership and operational readiness rates,” Sopko said.

A State Department spokesperson admitted the department had requested “some reports be temporarily removed to redact identifying information from public records and protect the identities of Afghans and Afghan partner organizations” due to security concerns about the evacuation effort.

“The identifying information are the only details intended to be shielded,” the spokesperson said, adding that SIGAR has the authority to restore the reports.

The Pentagon declined to comment on the damning findings of the report.

Sopko told reporters that after the Taliban captured Kabul, the State Department requested him to temporarily suspend online access to certain reports he issued to ensure the safety of Afghans who worked for the United States.

The department “was never able to describe any specific threats to individuals that were supposedly contained in our reports,” said Sopko, who added he “reluctantly” barred access to the documents.

The US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. American forces occupied the country for about two decades on the pretext of fighting against the Taliban. But as the US forces left Afghanistan, the Taliban stormed into Kabul, weakened by continued foreign occupation.

Following the 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded and occupied Afghanistan, despite the fact that no Afghan was involved in the attacks. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans died in the US war on the country.

In his first congressional testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee members on September 28, Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the war in Afghanistan a “strategic failure”. He added, “There’s no way else to describe that.”

Last week, former US special representative for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad said the US military was “losing ground each year” to the Taliban.

Khalilzad said that “militarily things were not going” well for the United States which forced Washington to leave the country.

“I think with regard to terrorism, we largely have achieved that objective. On the issue of building a democratic Afghanistan – I think that – that did not succeed. The struggle goes on,” he added.

He pointed out that in order to reverse the progress that the Taliban were making in Afghanistan, it was “going to require a lot more effort.”

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In his first major policy speech on Friday, Austin stressed the need for the US military to move forward a faster and more innovative approach by harnessing emerging technological advancements and computing powers.

“The way we fight the next major war is going to look very different from the way we fought the last ones,” the Pentagon chief said during a trip to the US Pacific Command in Hawaii.

Austin did not mention any specific adversary by name but the impetus behind his speech was clearly a rapidly rising China, which has been increasingly intent on challenging the United States on multiple fronts including in cyberspace.

“Galloping advances in technology mean changes in the work we do to keep the United States secure across all five domains of potential conflict — not just air, land and sea, but also space and cyberspace,” Austin said.

Austin, who rose in the ranks fighting the conventional wars of the Middle East, put forward a competitive new model of deterrence consisting all domains of warfare.

“What we need is the right mix of technology, operational concepts and capabilities — all woven together in a networked way that is so credible, flexible and formidable that it will give any adversary pause,” he said. “We need to create advantages for us and dilemmas for them.”

“We can’t predict the future,” Austin said. “So what we need is the right mix of technology, operational concepts and capabilities – all woven together in a networked way that is so credible, so flexible and so formidable that it will give any adversary pause.”

The remarks come as the United States prepares to withdraw its remaining troops from Afghanistan by September 11 on orders from President Joe Biden, who seeks to score a political win by ending America’s longest war and resetting Pentagon priorities.

Austin acknowledged that he has spent “most of the past two decades executing the last of the old wars,” and said preventing a conflict in the future would mean creating “advantages for us and dilemmas” for the adversaries.

Austin’s speech underscored the fundamental shift in the Pentagon’s thinking from fighting conventional wars in the Middle East to getting ready for a more sophisticated future conflict against China or Russia.

Two weeks ago, the top US spy chief said China posed a great threat to the United States with cyber capabilities that can affect and disrupt the nation’s critical infrastructure.

In testimony before Congress, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said China was “an unparalleled priority for the intelligence community,” accusing Beijing of striving to change global norms through a variety of tactics.

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The US Department of Defense declassified the footage “to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos,” it said Monday in a statement.

“After a thorough review, the department has determined that the authorized release of these unclassified videos does not reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems, and does not impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena,” it said.

The Pentagon said the aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as “unidentified.”

The videos showed a round object that moves fast and does not appear electronically on the radar.

Taken in 2004 and 2015, the videos were leaked in the public domain after unauthorized releases in 2007 and 2017, according to the statement.

Pentagon’s release came days after the US Navy announced Thursday that it is drafting new guidelines for pilots and other personnel to report encounters with “unidentified aircraft”.

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“Iran has an extensive missile development program, and the size and sophistication of its missile force continues to grow despite decades of counter-proliferation efforts aimed at curbing its advancement,” the Pentagon study said about Iran’s missile force.

Iran has “the largest missile force in the Middle East,” the report added.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, a US intelligence official said that Israel was included in the analogy.

The US Department of Defense also repeated allegations that Iran’s missiles force was not for peaceful and defensive purposes.

“Iran has embraced ballistic missiles as a long-range strike capability to dissuade its adversaries in the region — particularly the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia — from attacking Iran,” the report said, adding that Tehran had developed a series of missiles that could strike at a distance of 2,000 kilometers — capable of reaching Tel Aviv or Riyadh.

Authorities have time and again said that Iran’s missile force has not been established for non-conventional purposes and is only meant as part of the country’s deterrence capability.

The US has ratcheted up pressure on Iran since last year after withdrawing from a 2015 nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic and other countries.

Since then, the administration of US President Donald Trump has been trying to reduce Iran’s oil exports to “zero,” and sent an aircraft carrier strike group as well as some 1,500 additional forces to the region to counter an alleged threat from Iran.

Iranian officials have dismissed such moves as psychological warfare, saying the country has its own ways of confronting the American animosity.

The Islamic Republic says it poses no threat to any country but will defend itself if attacked.

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US officials speaking to Reuters news agency on the condition of anonymity said the next shipment of training equipment and all subsequent shipments of F-35 materials have been cancelled.

“Pending an unequivocal Turkish decision to forgo the delivery of the S-400, deliveries and activities associated with the stand-up of Turkey’s F-35 operational capability have been suspended while our dialogue on this important matter continues with Turkey,” the spokesperson said on Monday, Al Jazeera reported.

Ankara, which is a production partner in the making of the stealth jet as well as a NATO ally, has so far refused to back down on its planned purchase.

The move comes just days after Turkey’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Mevlut Cavusoglu said Ankara was committed to a deal to buy the Russian system and was discussing delivery dates.

Last week, four US senators introduced a bipartisan bill that would prohibit the transfer of F-35s to Turkey until the US government certifies that Ankara will not take delivery of the system.

Security fears

The disagreement over the F-35 is the latest diplomatic dispute to strain US-Turkey relations.

The two countries are at odds over the Middle East policy, including the war in Syria and sanctions on Iran, and Ankara has demanded the US extradite Fethullah Gulen, a former imam it accuses of orchestrating an attempted coup.

The US decision on the F-35s is expected to complicate Cavusoglu’s planned trip to Washington this week for a NATO summit.

Reuters reported last week that Washington was exploring whether it could remove Turkey from the production of the F-35.

Turkey makes parts of the plane’s fuselage, landing gear and cockpit displays.

In an attempt to persuade Turkey to drop its plans to buy the S-400, the US offered the pricier, US-made Patriot anti-missile system in a discounted deal that expired at the end of March.

Turkey has shown interest in the Patriot system but not at the expense of abandoning the S-400.

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The two vessels “conducted a routine Taiwan Strait transit Mar. 24-25 … in accordance with international law,” spokesman Lt. Joe Keiley said. “The ships’ transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the US commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific. The US will continue to fly, sail and operate anywhere international law allows.”

The dispatch, which comes amid military and trade tensions between Beijing and Washington, is the third such sailing since Jan. 24, when the guided-missile destroyer USS McCampbell, which is also based in Yokosuka, and the USNS Walter S. Diehl conducted what the US Navy also called “a routine” Taiwan Strait transit. On Feb. 26-27, the US Navy also sailed the USS Stethem destroyer and the cargo and ammunition ship USNS Cesar Chavez through the waterway.

But this week’s mission was unusual, experts said, in that it was believed to be the first one involving a coast guard vessel.

Lyle Morris, a senior policy analyst focusing on China, called the dispatch of the Bertholf “a bold move,” one going beyond mere port calls and traveling through nonsensitive areas.

 “For one, it signals a new level of interoperability between the USN and USCG,” he said, using the acronyms for the US Navy and coast guard. “It signals a willingness to send a cutter for sensitive national security missions. It doesn’t get much more sensitive than the Taiwan Strait.”

Morris said the Bertholf, which left California on Jan. 20 for a monthslong mission in support the US Indo-Pacific Command, is doing new and unique things with its first deployment to the region.

 “It’s also making a statement to the Chinese to send a cutter to the strait,” he said. “It’s another way of showing China that the US is putting its money where its mouth is to advance the ‘Free and Open Indo-Pacific’ concept.”

The 180-km-wide Taiwan Strait separates communist China from self-governed and democratic Taiwan, which Beijing views as a renegade province that must be brought back into the fold — by force if necessary. Although the waterway is regarded as international waters, China has long been sensitive about the presence of US military forces there.

That presence has grown since last year, with the most recent operation being the sixth known transit in about seven months. The US Navy also sailed two ships through the strait in October and November — operations that were shadowed by multiple Chinese warships — and conducted a similar operation in July. Prior to that, the operations were believed to occur only about once a year.

The US has no formal ties with Taiwan but is bound by law to help it defend itself and is the island’s main source of arms. The Pentagon says Washington has sold Taipei more than $15 billion in weaponry since 2010. Recently, Taiwan has sought bolstered military assistance from the US, requesting improvements to its fleet of F-16 fighter jets. Beijing has warned Washington against further arms sales, the official Xinhua News Agency reported last week.

Beijing has called Taiwan “the most important and sensitive issue in China-US relations” and has bolstered its military presence near the island nation in recent months, sailing its sole operating aircraft carrier through the Taiwan Strait in January and March last year and holding large-scale “encirclement” exercises and bomber training throughout 2018.

In a report released in January, the US Defense Intelligence Agency noted that China continues to undertake ambitious steps to modernize and better equip its military — steps that are driven primarily by “Beijing’s longstanding interest to eventually compel Taiwan’s reunification with the mainland and deter any attempt by Taiwan to declare independence.”

 “Beijing’s anticipation that foreign forces would intervene in a Taiwan scenario led the (People’s Liberation Army) to develop a range of systems to deter and deny foreign regional force projection,” the report added.

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Syrian Deputy Parliament Speaker Najdat Anzour said that institutions such as the Pentagon and the CIA and the lobbies that influence the US are often against Trump.

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