Some sleeper information in today's indictment

Around 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 11 last year, Duval Arthur, director of the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness for St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, got a call from a resident who had just received a disturbing text message. “Toxic fume hazard warning in this area until 1:30 PM,” the message read. “Take Shelter. Check Local Media and columbiachemical.com.”

St. Mary Parish is home to many processing plants for chemicals and natural gas, and keeping track of dangerous accidents at those plants is Arthur’s job. But he hadn’t heard of any chemical release that morning. In fact, he hadn’t even heard of Columbia Chemical. St. Mary Parish had a Columbian Chemicals plant, which made carbon black, a petroleum product used in rubber and plastics. But he’d heard nothing from them that morning, either. Soon, two other residents called and reported the same text message. Arthur was worried: Had one of his employees sent out an alert without telling him?

If Arthur had checked Twitter, he might have become much more worried. Hundreds of Twitter accounts were documenting a disaster right down the road. “A powerful explosion heard from miles away happened at a chemical plant in Centerville, Louisiana #ColumbianChemicals,” a man named Jon Merritt tweeted. The #ColumbianChemicals hashtag was full of eyewitness accounts of the horror in Centerville. @AnnRussela shared an image of flames engulfing the plant. @Ksarah12 posted a video of surveillance footage from a local gas station, capturing the flash of the explosion. Others shared a video in which thick black smoke rose in the distance.

Dozens of journalists, media outlets and politicians, from Louisiana to New York City, found their Twitter accounts inundated with messages about the disaster. “Heather, I’m sure that the explosion at the #ColumbianChemicals is really dangerous. Louisiana is really screwed now,” a user named @EricTraPPP tweeted at the New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter Heather Nolan. Another posted a screenshot of CNN’s home page, showing that the story had already made national news. ISIS had claimed credit for the attack, according to one YouTube video; in it, a man showed his TV screen, tuned to an Arabic news channel, on which masked ISIS fighters delivered a speech next to looping footage of an explosion. A woman named Anna McClaren (@zpokodon9) tweeted at Karl Rove: “Karl, Is this really ISIS who is responsible for #ColumbianChemicals? Tell @Obama that we should bomb Iraq!” But anyone who took the trouble to check CNN.com would have found no news of a spectacular Sept. 11 attack by ISIS. It was all fake: the screenshot, the videos, the photographs.

For months I have seen the results of what appears to be paid commentors, supported by or paid by Russia. The Russian paid commenters appear to have a list of talking points, which seem to change about once a week.

I could not prove, however, that there were actually paid commentors, paid by Russia. We have seen evidence of their talking points, I even blogged about it, here.

In countless discussion groups, I have been accused, by Russians (or pro-Russians) of being a paid commenter. On Facebook, especially, pro-Russian commenters accused me of being a paid commenter for the US. The first time I was accused of that I had to sit back and contemplate what they were saying.

I know for certain that the US does not have such ‘paid commenters’, I am not a paid commenter and I do not work for the US Government. I know that some Combatant Commanders have advertised for that capability, to create 50 or more false identities per person, but that would still limit the number of people commenting on behalf of the US – because of the limited number of people actually working in these US programs – even with defense contractors. I often wonder how large the Russians believe our Combatant Commanders headquarters and staff really are. I’ve been at multiple Combatant Commanders (then called CINCs), and they’re big, but when it comes to working in Information Operations, the staff is very small. In this era of cutbacks, I’m sure the staffs are even smaller.