Aletho News

Syria: TIME Magazine’s Desperate Lies

TIME claims to “sneak” into Syria, still bases entire report on “witness” accounts.

Tony Cartalucci | Activist Post | August 11, 2011

Claiming to be written in Hama, Syria, TIME’s latest article “Exclusive: A Visit to Hama, the Rebel Syrian City that Refused to Die” attempts to reestablish the US State Department’s sagging narrative regarding unrest they themselves funded, organized and are now openly promoting, this time, (allegedly) directly on the ground at the epicenter of the unrest. TIME’s report runs immediately into convenient obstacles preventing them from accessing anything remotely resembling evidence and, instead, defers once again to eyewitness accounts by admitted members of the opposition.

TIME first describes two of Hama’s hospitals guarded by the Syrian army which our intrepid reporter is unable to approach. Acknowledging the impossibility of verifying opposition claims, TIME decides to air them anyway stating, “by some accounts, security forces were killing wounded protesters in the hospitals,” echoing the now verified lies used to initiate war with Libya. TIME continues making a mockery out of journalism by citing “residents” who “speak of being unable to reach bodies in the streets, of snipers targeting people in their homes, of house-to-house searches, mass indiscriminate detentions, looting and even rape.” Of course, despite TIME being on the ground in Hama, they are unable to provide a single shred of evidence to confirm any of these claims.

TIME continues with a tale of an anonymous man who brings them a bag of spent anti-aircraft shells which TIME solemnly reminds readers are “not supposed to be used on civilians,” despite providing no proof that they were. TIME describes residents as supposedly not angry with Syrian troops despite just claiming they pillaged and raped their city, but are instead resolved to only bring down Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.

In fact everything in TIME’s “hard hitting” “on the ground” report is based only on witness accounts; the same dubious unverified reports that preceded the current ongoing NATO war crimes in Libya, and the same unverified reports that have been filtering out of London-based Syrian “human rights groups” for months now. The only “evidence” TIME seems to have provided in their daring “clandestine” reporting is graffiti allegedly left on Hama’s streets which TIME claims is “deeply offensive” to Hama’s “religiously conservative majority.”

The Rest of the Story

What is absent in TIME’s reporting, and what is now beginning to appear even in the corporate media are reports that these “pro-democracy” protesters are in fact armed militants, the resurgence of the Muslim Brotherhood (known to be “religiously conservative”) who in the late 1970s and early 1980s waged armed insurrection against the Syrian government. A recent CBS article, “No revolution in Syria’s 2 biggest cities, yet” notes what genuine geopolitical analysts have been saying for months now, that Damascus and Aleppo are devoid of anti-government “protests” and that the majority of the unrest is split along ethnic, not political lines. […]

TIME Conveniently Omits US Role in Unrest

TIME also conveniently forgot to mention that the ochlocratic armed mobs it was covering in Hama are on record the recipients of millions of dollars from the US State Department to train, organize, and equip them to rise up against the Syrian government. An April 2011 AFP report cited the US State Department who admitted to budgeting 50 million dollars over the course of two years to develop and equip activists with technology to use against their governments. The report also mentioned that over 5,000 activists from around the world, including from Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, and of course Syria were trained by the US State Department to then return home and topple their respective governments.

This State Department statement came after a Washington Post article claimed the US was secretly backing Syrian opposition groups since at least 2005. The State Department would also claim this funding was not meant to foster the US’s long expressed goals of regime change throughout the region, but rather to “build the kind of democratic institutions,” the US is trying to build “in countries around the globe.” The US State Department doesn’t seem fazed at all by the implications of one nation imposing its political order unto another and how it without a doubt constitutes an act of war. And while some might claim the United States’ model of liberal democracy is a superior one that should be imposed upon others, many at Nuremberg made the same tenuous argument in favor of the Third Reich and were hung from the gallows just the same. … Full article

August 11, 2011 - Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering