Clint Watts

Clint Watts   (deep state operative, propagandist, spook)
Nationality	US
Member of	Alliance for Securing Democracy, German Marshall Fund

Clint Watts is an US intelligence operative with significant ties to the Russiagate propaganda campaign and the drive for strengthening censorship. His most famous quote is “Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words. America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”

Career

Clint Watts is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Instituteand Non-Resident Fellow at the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy. He is also a frequent commentator om NBC News and MSNBC. His writing and media commentary focuses on terrorism, counterterrorism, social media censorship and the fight against media not directly or indirectly controlled by the US government.

Article written by Michael Doran, William McCants and Clint Watts.

Watts’ tracking of terrorist foreign fighters allowed him to predict the rise of the Islamic State over al Qaeda in 2014. From 2014 – 2016, at the time when the US tried to use them to topple the Syrian government.

Russian Influence

He worked with Andrew Weisburd and J.M. Berger to artificially create the Russian influence scare leading up to the U.S. Presidential election of 2016. This research led Watts to testify before four different Senate committees in 2017 and 2018 "regarding Russia’s information warfare campaign against the U.S. and the West," even though "Watts appears to speak no Russian, has no record of reporting or scholarship from inside Russia, and has produced little to no work of any discernible academic value on Russian affairs."

In these hearings he stated “Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced — silence the guns and the barrage will end.”

As this “civil war” rages on, he said, “our country remains stalled in observation, halted by deliberation and with each day more divided by manipulative forces coming from afar,”calling for a US government-imposed censorship campaign.

The Alliance for Security Democracy’s bogus dashboard was the most-cited authority on Russian bot activity in the media. But its credibility suffered a major blow following a series of revealing remarks by founder Clint Watts, who confessed to Buzzfeed, “We don’t even think [all the accounts we monitor are] all commanded in Russia — at all. We think some of them are legitimately passionate people that are just really into promoting Russia.”

His writing has appeared in a range of publications to include the New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Daily Beast, Politico, Lawfare, War On The Rocks and the Huffington Post. Before becoming a consultant, Clint served as a U.S. Army infantry officer, a FBI Special Agent, as the Executive Officer of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (CTC), as a consultant to the FBI’s Counter Terrorism Division (CTD) and National Security Branch (NSB), and as an analyst supporting the U.S. Intelligence Community and U.S. Special Operations Command.

He has an ffiliation with the CIA: the agency has published an article he co-authored with former CIA director and current CNN contributor John Brennan.

In 2017, he warned an audience that Russia was “trying to knock us down and take us over,” then claimed that his colleagues had seen their computers “burned up by malware” after they criticized Russia.

In 2019, he held a lecture for Norwegian editors and journalists, explaining the dangers of Russian influence "creating noise to sow doubts".

 

Event Participated in

Event	Start	End	Location(s)	Description
Munich Security Conference/2023	17 February 2023	19 February 2023	Munich Bavaria Germany	Annual conference of mid-level functionaries from the military-industrial complex - politicians, propagandists and lobbyists. The real decisions are made by deep politicians behind the scenes, elsewhere.

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