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No Amount of Propaganda Qualifies as Humanitarian Aid

By Jean Perier – New Eastern Outlook – 26.02.2017

Last month, Helsinki hosted an international conference on the humanitarian situation in Syria, resulting in the launch of a regional refugee plan for the next two years, focused on assisting Syria’s neighboring states in dealing with the refuge crisis. In accordance with this plan, UN officials seek 4.6 billion dollars worth of humanitarian aid to provide relief both to the Syrian refugees and the communities that provide them shelter. A spokesman for UN Secretary General Stefan Dyuzharrik emphasized the fact that the funds are going to help some 4.7 million refugees from Syria and 4.4 million people who assist them in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt. At the same time, as it’s been noted by Dyuzharrik, these funds are not meant to provide assistance to 13.5 million people in Syria itself.

So who is going provide those peaceful Syrians, who neither have the capacity nor the money to leave the country, with humanitarian aid?

According to UN estimates, out of more than 13.5 million Syrians that have found themselves in dire need of humanitarian assistance, some 6.3 million people are internally displaced persons, while another 5 million live in remote areas and destroyed cities with no infrastructure to support them.

Unfortunately, one is forced to admit that the absolute majority of Western countries are reluctant to provide any form of assistance to the Syrian population, who have witnessed their everyday life consumed by the the war. In particular, a full month has passed after the complete liberation of Aleppo, but no international humanitarian organization has made a single step to provide real assistance to the civilian population of the city.

The recent joint delivery of humanitarian aid organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent and the United Nations failed when the convoy was ambushed in the rural areas of the Aleppo province. As a result, militants took a part of the humanitarian aid destined for the Syrian inhabitants of the city of Homs.

Against this background, the sole real supplier of humanitarian aid to Syria at this moment is Russia, since the aid provided by other countries is often too insignificant to make a difference, if there is any.

However, a number of European and American media sources are still trying to push the blame for the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria on Russia. By rehearsing the mantras repeated by organizations funded by George Soros and various Western governments, they choose to completely ignore that it was the United States and its NATO allies that have been trying to destroy the Middle East as a whole, by destabilizing regional players, destroying their infrastructure, and thus subjecting the population of the Middle East to unbearable hardship and starvation. It’s hardly a secret these days that Washington has been sponsoring ISIS and its affiliates from day one.

At the same time, some official UN staff choose to ignore the United Nations Charter that binds them to remain impartial observers, and have started repeating the delusional stories that Western media sources publish. A specific example of this deeply disturbing situation is the string of accusations against Russia that was made during the final stages of the liberation of the city of Aleppo. Allegedly, the assistance Russia provided to pro-government forces aggravated the humanitarian situation that inhabitants of this city found themselves in.

Yet, those same UN staff members chose to ignore the fact that Syrian forces discovered warehouses full of medicine and food in eastern Aleppo after the liberation of the city. This fact has been completely omitted in the report presented by the UN Secretary General about the humanitarian situation in the Syrian Arab Republic. Meanwhile, those warehouses had enough goods to support the entire civil population of the city for several months, but militants kept the supplies for themselves and only allowed locals to take food when they agreed to join militant groups.

Against this background, the hysteria that some senior members of the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) and the UN staff indulged in, by announcing that a humanitarian catastrophe was taking place in Aleppo, while urging Russia to immediately ensure the delivery of food and medicine to areas of the city occupied by militants can only be qualified as propaganda, since they were deliberately deceiving the international community.

It appears that these actions of UN staff should become the subject of a thorough investigation in and of itself. This investigation should also clarify why the UN Secretary General’s advisers chose not to feature the facts about militant warehouses in Aleppo in the above mentioned report.

February 26, 2017 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | 1 Comment

What’s wrong with ‘alternative facts’?

By Kip Hansen | Climate Etc. | February 26, 2017

‘Alternative facts’ is a term in law to describe inconsistent sets of facts put forth in a court given that there is plausible evidence to support both alternatives. The term is also used to describe competing facts for the two sides of the case. – Wikipedia

So . . . what exactly is a ‘fact’?  From the Wikipedia:

A fact is something that has occurred or is correct.

Facts may be checked by reason, experiment, personal experience, or may be argued from authority.

In the most basic sense, a scientific fact is an objective and verifiable observation, in contrast with a hypothesis or theory, which is intended to explain or interpret facts.

With this context, it is not surprising that there are competing ‘facts’ of which their proponents are equally certain. ‘Facts’ are being confused with hypotheses and theories, and too many ‘facts’ are being asserted by authority.

So . . . what’s wrong with ‘alternative facts?’

Nothing — absolutely nothing. Quite the opposite, really. Alternative facts are what we use to learn new things about the world around us. Science is the subject of using alternative facts to come to a better understanding. Discovering that there are alternative facts about something – even better, seemingly contradictory facts – is what points us to an area of study that promises the reward of new insights into the natural world.

Out in today’s world of U.S. Two-Party Politics – an Alice-in-Wonderland-esque landscape being repainted daily in the “news” and “social” media – a lot of ill-mannered, Queen-of-Hearts-style nonsense is being churned out by turning this perfectly good and useful idea – alternative facts – into a mockery of truth-finding — turning Truth into an one-word oxymoron.

Facts vs factoids

Much of what we know as facts, and much of what are presented to us as facts, are more correctly characterized as “factoids” – a word believed coined by Norman Mailer – which has two closely related meanings:

1) a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it is not actually true, or an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print.

a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it is not actually or strictly true, or an invented fact either deliberately created or created by sloppy thinking, poor logic skills, lack of critical thinking or poor journalism believed to be true because it appears in print, in a journal article, in mainstream or social media, on a web site or has ‘gone viral’ on the Internet.

2) a brief or trivial item of news or information.

Factoids are often presented to us as numbers – which influence us to find them somehow truer or more believable – or are presented as impossibly simplistic assertions about complex topics. Factoids most often are used rhetorically [as in argument, debate, or propaganda] in opposition to other facts in a fact-vs-fiction construction, explicitly stated or implied – “Here are the facts!” – implying that all else is fiction, all other ‘facts’ are false.

Tied to the use of factoids is the principle of “Only One Fact”. This is the rampantly popular idea that for each subject there exists only one fact (or set of related facts) and, from that, it follows that all other statements on the subject are falsehoods, lies, or errors. We hear this in common speech: “The fact is…” and we see on single issue websites “The Facts are…”. This “Only One Fact” version of reality is a serious cognitive malfunction – and leads to serious critical thinking errors.

Climate science, and the never-ending debate about its implications, is particularly rife with Factoids and Alternative Factoids. Each side, mostly from the extreme edges of the field, sling factoids at one another in endless streams of numbers, graphs, trend-lines, echo-chamber talking-points (prepared by their own side’s experts) – spiced with a truly incredible number and variety of personal opinions presented as if they were facts.

Once we weed out the truly daft opinions, the obvious non-physical misunderstandings and the delicious-and-nutty fruit-cakery served up from the far edges of climate alarm and hard-core “its all a big hoax” skepticism alike, we are still left with a huge number of seemingly true statements, facts, that seem to contradict each other, sometimes apparently in direct opposition.

Competing ‘facts’ about the Amazon

How’s that, you ask?  Let’s look at an example. It has long been considered a fact, and still is by almost all environmental movements, that:

[T]he Amazon forests are pristine forests, never touched by humans…. the rain forests of the Amazon were untouched by human hands before the arrival of European explorers in the 15th century. [The Amazon is] an old-growth forest — primary forest, virgin forest, primeval forest  — is a forest that has attained great age without significant disturbance and thereby exhibits unique ecological features and might be classified as a climax community [a biological community of plants, animals, and fungi which, through the process of ecological succession the development of vegetation in an area over time, had reached a steady state].

Yet, reappearing again in the science press this week is the story of ancient earthworks deep in the Amazon forest:

Deep in the Amazon, the rain forest once covered ancient secrets. Spread across hundreds of thousands of acres are massive, geometric earthworks. The carvings stretch out in circles and squares that can be as big as a city block, with trenches up to 12 yards wide and 13 feet deep. They appear to have been built up to 2,000 years ago.” The study [ doi: 10.1073/pnas.1614359114 ] states “We reconstructed environmental evidence from the geoglyph region and found that earthworks were built within man-made forests that had been previously managed for millennia.

The existence of these earthworks, and their antiquity are facts – actualities, they really exist and strong, replicable evidence exists for the dates of creation.

The facts reported by Watling et al. (2017) in regard to the earthworks are not only alternative to our accepted facts [above] about the Amazon; they directly contradict long-standing, almost universally-accepted, facts.  It is because they are contradictory that we can begin to develop a new and better understanding of the ecology of the Amazon rainforests, their history, their evolution and the South American nations within whose boundaries these forests exist, can create national policies based on this better understanding.

By combining the two sets of seemingly contradictory facts– alternative facts, we can see that while the Amazonian forests are certainly old-growth forests, having existed in their current states for hundreds, up to thousands, of years, they are not “virgin forest, primeval forest” at all but have actually been created by long-term interactions with the human civilizations that lived within them.

This is not a trivial example of “new discoveries lead to better understanding”, though it could be viewed that way. There has been a long constant stream of alternative facts to the background fact of a pristine, primeval Amazon. The investigation of a soil type named “Terra Preta” (Portuguese for “black soil”) began producing alternative facts in the 1960s and they have rolled out regularly since. Yet it was fact not long ago, despite these alternative facts, that the land of the Amazon was relatively useless for agriculture.

Now we see that there is very strong evidence that the Amazon is not being newly deforested but is apparently being re-cleared, re-claimed as arable land. It is land that in the past was cleared and used for agriculture, speculatively thought to be a sort of ancient perma-culture, and for the building of extensive towns and cities.

Example: climate science ‘alternative facts’

Consider the following statement:

“Earth’s average surface temperature has risen by about 0.8° Celsius since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.”

Well, we have a fact – “Earth’s average surface temperature has risen”; a number related to the magnitude of the temperature increase (which must be considered subject to some degree of factual uncertainty);  and a time period. The statement can be considered, factual (subject to some caveats) or true. However, the statement implies causation — that the warming was caused by the Industrial Revolution–which makes it a factoid because the cause of the warming is a hypothesis.

Consider the following alternative statement:

“Earth’s average surface temperature has risen for the last several hundred years, since the depths of the Little Ice Age*, and by about 0.8° since the mid-19th century, which is the beginning of the instrumental temperature record.”

[* = “three particularly cold intervals: one beginning about 1650, another about 1770, and the last in 1850, all separated by intervals of slight warming.”]

This statement is equally true but again implies causation – “since the depths of the LIA”.

It is possible to construct a clear Fact about changes in global mean surface temperature changes and the associated uncertainties. However the IPCC’s mandate to focus on man-made climate change resulted in a conclusion dictated by their mandate that is arguably a factoid.

Conclusion

Not all alternative facts lead to a better understanding. Some just stand in opposition to one another until such time as new and better facts or evidence emerge from the confusion to help clarify the situation. Those new facts or evidence will be, at first, Alternative Facts – they should not necessarily be expected to match either of the preferred climate science factoids above.

As these new alternative facts emerge, they should be embraced and seriously considered by all sides and positions in the climate debate. Those new, alternative facts –those few that survive the fire of massive open public review– will lead to better understandings of the physical actualities of Earth’s climate which in turn will allow policy makers to make better climate policy.

February 26, 2017 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Netanyahu calls for international forces in Gaza

Palestine Information Center – February 26, 2017

NAZARETH – Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu has suggested deploying international forces in the Gaza Strip as a security solution to deal with the Gaza Strip.

According to Israel’s Channel 2, Netanyahu made his remarks during his meeting on Sunday morning in Sydney with Australian foreign minister Julie Bishop.

The two sides discussed several regional issues and Israel’s concerns over taking legal action against its officials at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

Netanyahu told the Australian minister that he did not oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state with the presence of Israeli security control over the entire West Bank and limited Palestinian sovereignty.

He also expressed his rejection of any presence of peacekeeping forces in the West Bank because of Israel’s bad experience with such forces, and called for dispatching them to Gaza.

He urged the minister to make efforts to prevent the ICC from putting pressure on Israel and dissuade it from seeking to try Israeli officials accused of committing war crimes against Palestinians.

He said that Australia could influence other countries to act against the ICC and force it to reduce its investigations and fact-finding missions on claims related to war crimes.

The two officials also talked about Iran, its nuclear program and its intervention in regional problems and agreed on promoting relations and cooperation between the two sides in the areas of security, intelligence, economy and technology.

February 26, 2017 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , , , | 3 Comments

Palestinian children attend class in the street after Israel shuts down school

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Ma’an – February 26, 2017

JERUSALEM – After Israeli authorities shut down a Palestinian elementary school in the occupied East Jerusalem town of Sur Bahir last Thursday over alleged “incitement” in its study materials, students attended class in the street on Sunday and protested against Israel’s decision to close the school.

Children who were enrolled at al-Nukhba (“the elite” in Arabic) arrived to the campus with their parents in an action organized by the parent committees of Sur Bahir’s schools, holding posters expressing support for al-Nukhba and denouncing Israel’s closure of educational institutions as “tyrannical.”

Last Thursday, head of the school Luay Jamal Bkirat and the school’s financial manager Nasser Hamed were summoned to an Israeli police station for interrogation, when Israeli intelligence officials informed them that the school was being shut down for carrying inciting content in the teaching materials used at the school.

Bkirat denied the claims, saying that al-Nukhba school was “teaching the Palestinian curriculum used in all schools in Jerusalem and that no one of the faculty had ever been summoned for interrogation before over incitement.”

He added that the school — which serves 250 boys from kindergarten to grade six — was opened last year and gained a temporary operating license from the Jerusalem municipality, and that the license was revoked in November for unknown reasons.

Bkirat condemned the decision and said that he would “conduct procedures to stop this decision which aims to destroy education.”

The Times of Israel reported that the school was shut down for being a “Hamas front,” after a months-long joint probe by Israel’s Education Ministry, Jerusalem police, and Israeli intelligence, the Shin Bet.

Israeli authorities from the education ministry claimed the school was established by Hamas with the aim of teaching “content that undermines the sovereignty of Israel,” and that the school’s aims were “consistent with the ideology of the terror organization, which calls for the destruction of Israel,” the Times of Israel said.

According to the Israeli news outlet, the ministry ordered the school not to open in September “and when it continued to operate, issued the closure order.”

Israeli Jews and Palestinians study in separate school systems in occupied East Jerusalem, with the Palestinian schools run by either Israel’s Jerusalem municipality, the Islamic Waqf and administered by the Palestinian Ministry of Education, private institutions, or UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for Palestinian refugees.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Education, Palestinian children suffer from routine Israeli interference and political pressure to replace Palestinian curricula with an Israeli one in occupied East Jerusalem, where full Israeli military and civil control deprives students from proper and secure educational services.

A 2016 report by Israeli daily Haaretz also said that Palestinian schools in occupied East Jerusalem received less than half the funds that the Jerusalem municipality transferred to Jewish schools in West Jerusalem.

Though Sur Bahir lies beyond the periphery of occupied East Jerusalem, the town remained under full Israeli security and civil control within Israel’s Jerusalem municipality after the territory was illegally annexed in 1967.

A 2011 report by the Applied Research Institute – Jerusalem (ARIJ) said that due to a lack of some levels of education in Sur Bahir, many students were forced to attend schools in neighboring villages.

February 26, 2017 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | 1 Comment

Elor Azaria verdict: a personal view

International Solidarity Movement | February 26, 2017

Hebron, occupied Palestine – Yesterday the Israeli soldier Elor Azaria was sentenced to 18 months in prison for the extra-judicial killing of Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, which happened last year in Hebron. Everybody in Hebron was waiting for the sentence. Everybody knew by one o’clock what it was. Everyone was heavy hearted. Palestinian friends compared a sentence of two years for stone throwing with Azaria’s eighteen months for murder. The implications here on the ground for what soldiers can do with impunity is also clear to all.

We at ISM had been in touch with Imad Abu Shamsiya, the Palestinian who filmed the execution, in case he wanted our support if the settlers were angry at the sentence as he has experienced large amounts of threats and harassment from both soldiers and settlers for bringing this incident to light.

Today I get email from the UK with news of how the case was reported on the BBC flagship morning show:

‘… almost all of the piece consisted of a discussion with their Jerusalem correspondent about Israeli anger that Azaria had been jailed. The fact that Palestinians were angered at the brevity of the sentence was tacked on as an afterthought. It was not explained that the Israeli soldiers are an army of occupation that is protecting settlers who are in Hebron illegally. It was not explained that Abdel Fattah al-Sherif had been lying injured and motionless on the ground for ten minutes and presenting no threat to anyone before Azaria executed him. Al-Sherif was described as “an attacker”, Azaria as “a soldier”. The framing of what happened could have been scripted by the IDF. The impression given was of the IDF acting in support of the civil authorities and being subjected to a military assault by enemy combatants. The right-wing Israeli perspective that Azaria was an inexperienced conscript who acted in the heat of the moment in battle was reported unchallenged. The alternative view that al-Sharif had committed grievous bodily harm or some such criminal assault before being totally incapacitated and that he was then murdered in cold blood by a heavily-armed agent of an occupying power was not given.’

Shame.

The video so bravely filmed by Imad which led to the case being heard at all can be seen here.

February 26, 2017 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , | Leave a comment

London mayor backtracks after sparking row by likening Scottish nationalism to racism

RT | February 26, 2017

London Mayor Sadiq Khan sparked a row in tweets preceding his latest speech by implying Scottish nationalism is akin to racism. He was forced to backpedal after Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, slammed his remarks as “spectacularly ill-judged.”

“The last thing we need now is to pit different parts of our country or sections of our society against each other – or to further fuel division or seek separation.”

“There’s no difference between those who try to divide us on the basis of whether we’re English or Scottish, and those who try to divide us on the basis of our background, race, or religion,” Khan said in tweeted remarks preceding his speech to the Scottish Labour conference in Perth on Saturday. He also implied that a new Scottish independence referendum would be destabilizing.

“The world is an increasingly divided place – with Brexit, the election of President Trump and the rise of populist and narrow nationalist parties around the world,” he said.

He then went on to stress the need to find an “antidote to Brexit and the rise of right-wing populist parties” that does not “break away or push our neighbors away,” but is based on unity.

SNP [Scottish National Party] leader Nicola Sturgeon branded Khan’s statements as “spectacularly ill-judged,” tweeting that Khan’s “intervention… is an insult to all those Scots who support independence for reasons of inclusion & social justice.”

Sturgeon was not the only one who found his words insulting. People posted angry remarks on Twitter, saying London mayor’s own policies are more akin to racism, while warning that Khan’s Labour party now has little chance of success in Scotland.

However, shortly before delivering his speech to the Labor conference, Khan clarified his statements with the BBC, insisting that he was “not saying that nationalists are somehow racist or bigoted.”

“Of course, I am not saying that the SNP are racists or bigots.”

“What I am saying is that the world is increasingly divided by Brexit result and the election of President Trump, with the rise of populist and narrow nationalist parties across the world, now is the time to come together, now is the time for unity, not a time for division or isolation,” Khan told a BBC reporter.

While he followed his initial script during his speech, Khan also attempted to make his points more clearly.

“With the world becoming an increasingly divided place. Brexit. President Trump. And the rise of populist and narrow nationalist parties around the world. Now’s not the time to play on people’s fears. Or to pit one part of our country – or one section of our society – against each other.”

“In that respect, there’s no difference between those who try to divide us on the basis of whether we’re English or Scottish, and those who try to divide us on the basis of our background, race, or religion. Now, of course, I’m not saying that nationalists are somehow racist or bigoted – but now, more than ever – what we don’t need is more division and separation,” he specified.

Scotland voted 55 to 45 percent in favor of remaining in the UK in a tightly contested September 2014 referendum, but then largely opposed the UK’s decision to leave the European Union known as Brexit last year, with 62 percent of the Scottish population voting for Britain to remain in the EU. As the British government is increasingly leaning toward a “hard Brexit,” which would entail totally withdrawing from the European single market and customs union, the ruling Scottish National Party (SNP) has intensified calls for a second independence referendum lately, publishing a draft bill for the vote last October. However, the British government could block the second referendum, according to Defense Secretary Michael Fallon, who said earlier this month that London would not allow a repeat of the 2014 plebiscite.

Scottish independence campaigners claim that an independent Scotland would continue to work closely with the rest of the UK, insisting that their civic nationalism is inclusive and non-sectarian.

February 26, 2017 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | , , , , | 1 Comment

White House Cautioned Against Designating Iran’s IRGC a Terrorist Organization

By Stephen Lendman | February 26, 2017

In early February, unnamed US officials told Reuters the Trump administration might designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) a terrorist organization.

The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment. Iran categorically denies involvement in terrorism. No evidence suggests it, just baseless allegations.

Reports now indicate the proposed action stalled, US defense, state, and intelligence officials warning it could backfire, undermining Trump’s pledge to combat ISIS, along with complicating enforcement of the Iran nuclear deal.

US NATO allies are against it. The designation was supposed to be announced this month. It’s unclear if it’s suspended or cancelled altogether.

IRGC involvement is important in combating regional terrorism in Syria, Iraq and perhaps Yemen.

The administration’s proposal was part of a broader scheme to get tougher on Iran – instead of responsibly working to end 38 years of US-instigated adversarial relations.

If implemented, it would be the first move of this kind under the 1996 Foreign Terrorist Organizations law against a foreign government – meant for al-Qaeda and likeminded groups.

It would likely initiate tougher sanctions on Iran, possibly undermining the nuclear deal, sabotaging what took years to agree on.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif praised the IRGC’s efforts in combating terrorism, saying:

“The entire world admits that the IRGC has rendered the utmost support to (Iran’s) neighboring countries in the face of terrorism” – warning of adverse consequences if Trump orders more sanctions on Iran.

Reports indicate he intended to designate the ICRG and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood terrorist organization on Monday – during a visit to CENTCOM’s Tampa headquarters.

It’s believed Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states urged him to target Iran’s IRGC. It’s now on hold.

Stephen Lendman can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book is titled Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.

February 26, 2017 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , , , , , | 2 Comments

Human Rights Watch Cites Al Qaeda and Collaborators in Latest Syria Report

By Tony Cartalucci – New Eastern Outlook – 26.02.2017

On the heels of Amnesty International’s admittedly and entirely fabricated report regarding Syria’s Saydnaya prison, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has published its own baseless report on Syria – this one regarding alleged chlorine bomb attacks in Aleppo during the city’s liberation late last year.

In a post on HRW’s website titled, “Syria: Coordinated Chemical Attacks on Aleppo,” it claims:

Syrian government forces conducted coordinated chemical attacks in opposition-controlled parts of Aleppo during the final month of the battle for the city, Human Rights Watch said today.

However, when qualifying HRW’s accusations, it admits:

Through phone and in-person interviews with witnesses and analysis of video footage, photographs, and posts on social media, Human Rights Watch documented government helicopters dropping chlorine in residential areas on at least eight occasions between November 17 and December 13, 2016. The attacks, some of which included multiple munitions, killed at least nine civilians, including four children, and injured around 200.

Watching the videos and viewing the photographs reveals that none of them actually link any of the alleged “chlorine attacks” to Syrian forces, or even to chlorine itself.

The body of evidence presented by HRW also reveals that the interviews they conducted with alleged “witnesses” included almost exclusively opposition forces. Among them were the US-UK funded White Helmets – referred to disingenuously as “Syria Civil Defense” in HRW’s report – who served as designated terrorist organization Jabhat Al Nusra auxiliaries, often found on the battlefield shoulder-to-shoulder with armed militants.

Not only are these clearly compromised sources of information based on their admitted political alignments, but also because of their respective, systematic fabrications throughout the Syrian conflict. It is telling of HRW’s systematic bias that it would base an entire report on compromised sources drawn from the opposition, but not even a single report based on government claims. United Arab Emirate-based Al Nusra propaganda platform Orient News was also cited, as were other notorious anti-government propaganda networks including the Aleppo Media Center. In reality, a true rights advocacy organization would only report what is physical evidence verified. Human Rights Watch has deliberately avoided doing so not only in Syria, but amid virtually every conflict it involves itself in.

From conflating the number of civilians “trapped” in eastern Aleppo, to attempts to downplay or dismiss the role designated terrorist organizations played in the occupation of Aleppo, the groups and individuals cited by Human Rights Watch have practiced deliberate deceit throughout the battle for Aleppo, and the Syrian conflict at large.

For Human Rights Watch – an allegedly world-renowned rights advocacy organization – to cite such sources indicates that this latest report, like Amnesty International’s recently fabricated report, constitutes a politically-motivated attack hiding behind rights advocacy, not upholding it.

Considering the timing of Amnesty International, Human Rights, and also the Atlantic Council’s reports, rolled out in a multi-organizational campaign attacking the Syrian government, the individual deceit of each organization transforms into collective and coordinated impropriety.

A final consideration in the wake of Human Rights Watch’s latest, politically-motivated report is the fact that all actual evidence points to the opposition itself for being behind both the production and deployment of chlorine-based weapons.

TIME Magazine in an article titled, “Syria’s Civil War: The Mystery Behind a Deadly Chemical Attack,” would admit:

In August rebel forces took Sabbagh’s factory by force, as part of a sweep that also netted them an electricity station and a military airport about 30 km from Aleppo. Sabbagh, who has since fled Aleppo for Beirut, says his factory is now occupied by Jabhat al-Nusra, a militant group with strong ties to al-Qaeda that has been designated a terrorist group by the U.S. He knows this because his site manager has struck a deal with the rebels — they supply 200 L of fuel a day to keep the generator running so that the valves of his $25 million factory don’t freeze up. The factory isn’t operational anymore, but this way at least, says Sabbagh, it might be one day in the future. In the meantime, he has no idea what has happened, if anything, to the 400 or so steel barrels of chlorine gas he had stored in the compound. The yellow tanks, which hold one ton of gas each, are used for purifying municipal water supplies. “No one can know for certain, but if it turns out chlorine gas was used in the attack, then the first possibility is that it was mine. There is no other factory in Syria that can make this gas, and now it is under opposition control,” he says.

Military experts since the advent of modern chemical warfare have noted its limited utility during combat. It has very temporary tactical advantages when used on a very large scale – a scale much larger than any of the alleged attacks cited by Human Rights Watch. Strategically, a military force with superior conventional means would have no logical use for chemical weapons.

Likewise, chemical weapons would not turn the tide in the battle of Aleppo for the occupying terrorists. However, the use of chemical weapons in Aleppo and the use of the West’s powerful propaganda arms to assign blame to the Syrian government did promise a very significant political and possibly strategic advantage. It was accusations of “weapons of mass destruction” that served as a pretext for war with Iraq in 2003 – a pretext the US attempted to recreate versus Syria in 2013.

With these latest, weak, and baseless accusations presented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Atlantic Council, we are witnessing a redux of 2013 propaganda aimed at undermining the Syrian government and expanding the West’s pretext for more direct involvement in the Syrian conflict.

February 26, 2017 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

Milo Djukanovic’s Claims of Russian Assassination Plot Are a Desperate Ploy to Further NATO Bid

By James George JATRAS | Strategic Culture Foundation | 26.02.2017

Reports surfacing in the British media of a Russian plot to kill Montenegro’s former prime minister Milo Djukanovic should be seen for the cynical ploy they are. To give just the smallest bit of defense to these British publications – yes, it is true Djukanovic is making these allegations. Is there any substance or proof to these allegations? No. The UK media has shown it is as politicized as its American mainstream counterparts like CNN by publishing such fake news.

Good reason to doubt these baseless charges starts from the fact that they come from Djukanovic, who has a stupendous reputation for corruption and is trying to move forward desperately with NATO accession for Montenegro which has stalled in the U.S. Senate for about two months. At this point if he were to say the sky is blue, it would be reason to disbelieve him and look for an ulterior motive.

Djukanovic transparently is throwing this red meat on the table in the context of hysteria that is going on in Washington concerning allegations of Moscow’s hacking the American election (“the Russians did it!”) and the open attack by the “deep state,” by elements of the intelligence community with their leaks, and by the mainstream media that just claimed the scalp of general Mike Flynn, President Donald Trump’s former National Security Adviser. Besides criminally seeking to overthrow the constitutionally elected government – as they have imposed “regime change” on other countries – they want to do anything they can to block any rapprochement from the Trump administration with Moscow.

Djukanovic has very artfully inserted himself into this narrative. His message is simple: you can’t let the Russians win. Nothing else matters. He is trying to use “the Russians are coming” meme as a way to jumpstart Montenegro’s stalled NATO bid. Let’s remember the debate in Washington isn’t about letting Montenegro into NATO because having it as an ally makes American more secure. Montenegro obviously does nothing for our defense. The question is whether the NATO door will remain open, particularly for Georgia and Ukraine.

It seems no one cares to ask why America should be allied with a nation that doesn’t particularly want to be allied with us. According to opinion polls, it is far from clear that most Montenegrins want to be in NATO and aligned to us in the first place. Most recent polls indicate a slight plurality in the “against” camp despite relentless government propaganda and the braying of Soros-controlled media. A recent survey indicated that some 84% of Montenegrins want a vote on the matter. Even a solid majority of NATO supporters favor a referendum. Djukanovic won’t hold a referendum because he knows he would lose it.

Djukanovic’s ploy is well timed. It both feeds and feeds off of the anti-Russian frenzy, which is the basis of what former Congressman Denis Kucinich has called an attempted coup to bring down the Trump administration. Calls are openly heard for “patriots” in the intelligence services to overthrow Trump for the “good of the country.”

It is uncertain whether Djukanovic will successfully ride the wave of Russophobia to get Montenegro into NATO. What is certain is that America is on the edge of turning into a banana republic. Trump has very little time to strike back, hard. One way for him to show who’s boss is to turn thumbs down on Djukanovic and his trickery.

February 26, 2017 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

US Ambassador to UN Nikki Haley: We Must Sanction Assad Over Chemical Weapons!

By Daniel McAdams | Ron Paul Institute | February 24, 2017

Recently, we had a look at the ways President Trump’s Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, is making her predecessor, “humanitarian bomber” Samantha Power, look like a model diplomat by comparison. It turns out Haley’s ghastly performance at the UN thus far is no fluke. Each time she opens her mouth she spews not the kind of foreign policy that President Trump campaigned on, but rather the boot-in-the-face know-nothingness that we have grown accustomed to in recent years.

In the latest “Haley Alert,” the Ambassador is furious over a Russia-threatened veto of a UN Security Council resolution offered by the US, UK, and France to impose new sanctions on the Syrian government over unproven allegations that Syria used chemical weapons against its own population.

Yes, under Ambassador Haley we have entered a time machine back to 2013, where the US is ready to deploy its entire diplomatic (and perhaps military) arsenal against the one government in the Middle East actually fighting President Trump’s sworn enemies: ISIS and al-Qaeda.

President Trump, in one of his first interviews after the November election, starkly contrasted his position with those both of the outgoing Obama Administration and his defeated opponent, Hillary Clinton:

I’ve had an opposite view of many people regarding Syria. … My attitude was you’re fighting Syria, Syria is fighting ISIS, and you have to get rid of ISIS. Russia is now totally aligned with Syria, and now you have Iran, which is becoming powerful, because of us, is aligned with Syria… Now we’re backing rebels against Syria, and we have no idea who these people are.

His employee, the US Ambassador to the UN, clearly does not share her boss’s “opposite view” on Syria. And she is not afraid to contradict her boss’s position on a regular basis. Today the US Mission to the UN released Ambassador Haley’s remarks condemning the threatened Russian veto of new sanctions against Syria, and her comments do not in any way suggest a diplomat remotely well-informed about the complex matters at hand:

I think what we saw in there was pretty amazing, because you had unity in the fact that we needed to be concerned about chemical weapons being used in Syria. You had an overwhelming vote to say we need an investigative mechanism that would prove that these chemical weapons were being done by the Syrian regime. Now you’ve got the results that have come out, and people don’t like what the results are. It is ridiculous. How much longer is Russia going to continue to babysit and make excuses for the Syrian regime? People have died by being suffocated to death. That’s barbaric.

So what we’re going to do is – we were given all these reasons on why we shouldn’t propose the resolution. We were given all these reasons on why the timing was wrong. That is exactly why the timing is right. That is exactly why this resolution needs to happen. Whether people are going to veto it or not, you are either for chemical weapons or you’re against it. People died because of this, and the United States isn’t going to be quiet. Thank you.

Let’s unpack this head-scratcher of a statement. First off, “we need an investigative mechanism that would prove that these chemical weapons were being done by the Syrian regime.” So she is stating that there must be an investigation to prove what she has pre-determined to be true before the investigation took place? Does that sound like “innocent until proven guilty”? Or does it sound like Hoxha-era revolutionary justice? “We must have a trial to prove comrade X guilty so we can execute him!”

And this from Haley: “How much longer is Russia going to continue to babysit and make excuses for the Syrian regime?”

Ms. Ambassador: Do you mean the regime that just liberated Aleppo from its murderous occupation by al-Qaeda? You know, those guys who attacked the US on 9/11?

If Assad is using chemical weapons against his own people (Why? Presumably for fun?) then why once Aleppo was cleansed of the al-Qaeda occupiers have former residents flocked to return to an Aleppo under Assad’s control? Do they enjoy being gassed?

US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley is an absolute train wreck. She embodies the worst traits of her predecessors with a much lower level of understanding of foreign affairs or diplomacy. Will President Trump recognize his mistake in appointing her to represent the US at the UN and replace her with someone who will actually carry out his foreign policy? Or was he simply lying when he said he had an “opposite view” from the conventional Washington wisdom on Syria (and Russia as well)?

February 26, 2017 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | 1 Comment