Aletho News

French journal of record peddles Zionist propaganda

By David Cronin – The Electronic Intifada – 08/14/2011

Is it impossible to escape from Israel-related propaganda?

Yesterday, I was in a Brussels coffee shop, where I picked up a copy of Le Monde. In a section marked “The laboratories of the future”, the French daily had a full-page feature about the Israeli Institute for Technology in Haifa, which is better known as the Technion.

Described by the paper’s headline writer as a “high-tech Eden”, the university was lavished with praise for its innovative work on treating Parkinson’s disease and sending microsatellites into Space. Peretz Lavie, the university’s president, was quoted as arguing that the Technion was a model for coexistence between Israeli and Palestinian students and that there would be peace in the Middle East if everyone else could follow the Technion’s example. Indeed, the only hint that the region’s problems may encroach on the campus was in a paragraph about how students sometimes have to drop their books to fight Israel’s wars (such as the attack on Lebanon in 2006).

It seems clear that Laurent Zecchini, the author of this piece, either relied entirely on the university’s authorities for information or had no interest in exploring its military links further. For if he did a little googling, he should have easily found a comprehensive study on the Technion by Tadamon!, a Palestine solidarity organization based in Canada.

Harmony in Haifa?

That study confronts the Technion’s official drivel. Far from being a place of harmony, Palestinian students in Haifa have been treated in an overtly racist manner. Last year, 10 such students were arrested when they staged a protest against Israel’s murder of nine activists on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. Yet there were no arrests of Zionist students who organized a larger counter-demonstration, which unlike the Palestinian one, was not authorized by the police.

Furthermore, the Technion has a history of close cooperation with the Israeli arms companies Rafael and Elbit, both of which supplied weapons used in the offensive against Gaza in 2008 and 2009. Technion has even joined forces with Rafael to run a business administration course specifically geared for that company’s managers.

Had Zecchini felt inclined to do a little more homework, he might also have got in touch with the Alternative Information Center, a campaign group working in Jerusalem and the West Bank. It has drawn attention to how Technion’s inventions include a remote-controlled bulldozer, designed to help the Israeli military demolish Palestinian homes.

The Technion, incidentally, is taking part in numerous EU-financed scientific research activities. And these activities have been enjoying some uncritical media attention of their own lately.

Mesmerized by murder

Home in Dublin last month, I saw an article in The Irish Times celebrating how the EU will be devoting a mammoth €7 billion to research in 2012. As the author of the article, Conor O’Carroll from the Irish Universities Association, didn’t acknowledge that Israel (including its arms industry) will be among the beneficiaries of this largesse, I contacted the paper’s editors asking if I could write an opinion piece rectifying this omission. Not a chance, I was told; the news agenda is way too crowded at the moment.

Somehow, though, The Irish Times has been able to find space in the not-too-distant past to promote Israel’s scientific triumphs. In May, it ran a puff piece about how Israel has “the highest density of start-ups in the world” and how it has been able to turn its “intermittent wars” to its advantage. “Military units often act as incubators for tech start-ups,” journalist Ian Campbell wrote. Mesmerized by this success story, Campbell forgot to trace how the products of this enterprising culture end up as tools of oppression.

Both Le Monde and The Irish Times are considered journals of record in their respective countries. It is a measure of how amenable they are to Israeli spin, that they are happy to present Zionist canards as undisputed facts.

Reading them often reminds me of my favorite comment from George Orwell: “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

August 14, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

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 | Leave a comment

“The Insurgents Are Losing”

Moon of Alabama | August 11, 2011

Reading through the comments on various news sites not one person seems to believe this Washington Post story:

A group of “less than 10” insurgents, including the fighter who allegedly shot the Chinook helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade, were tracked down at a compound in eastern Afghanistan early Monday and killed in airstrikes by F-16 fighter planes, according to Marine Gen. John R. Allen, the top commander in Afghanistan, and other military officials.

One wonders why the military felt the need to come out with this obvious fairytale.

It hurts its own credibility with such a story.

The Taliban deny it and claim that the fighters had immediately left Wardak province after trapping the helicopter. That story actually makes a lot of sense.

But there is even more unbelievable U.S. propaganda further down in the Washington Post piece:

“All across Afghanistan, the insurgents are losing. They’re losing territory, they’re losing leadership, they’re losing weapons and supplies, they’re losing public support,” [General Allen] said. “More and more, the insurgents are losing resolve and the will to fight.”

We know that the number of districts with Taliban activity is up, the number of IEDs is at a record high, the number of assassinations by the Taliban is up, the number of U.S. and Afghan security forces’ casualties is the highest ever and the number of civilian casualties is up sharply. But all that does not count. The insurgents are losing – the General says so, so they must be.

But who does he think will actually believe him?

August 11, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

IRAN AND AL-QA’IDA: CAN THE CHARGES BE SUBSTANTIATED?

By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett | The Race for Iran | August 1st, 2011

Last week, the Obama Administration formally charged the Islamic Republic of working with al-Qa’ida.  The charge was presented as part of the Treasury Department’s announcement that it was designating six alleged al-Qa’ida operatives for terrorism-related financial sanctions, see here.  The six are being designated, according to Treasury, because of their involvement in transiting money and operatives for al-Qa’ida to Pakistan and Afghanistan.  The announcement claims that part of this scheme was a “secret deal” between the Iranian government and al-Qa’ida, whereby Tehran allowed the terrorist group to use Iranian territory in the course of moving money and personnel.

For the most part, major media outlets uncritically transmitted the Obama Administration’s charge, without much manifestation of serious effort to verify it, find out more about the sourcing upon which it was based, or place it in any sort of detailed and nuanced historical context.  Stories by Joby Warrick, see here, in the Washington Post and Helene Cooper, see here, in The New York Times exemplify this kind of “reporting”.

For nearly ten years, a cadre of hawkish analysts, politicians, and some Iranian expatriates have pushed their insistent but unsubstantiated claims of extensive collaboration between the Islamic Republic and al-Qa’ida.  Some even charged that Osama bin Ladin was “living in luxury” in Iran, an assertion later elaborated in a 2010 “documentary” film that was extensively “covered” on Fox News.

During her service at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations and at the National Security Council in 2001-2003, Hillary was one of a handful of U.S. officials who participated in nearly two years of substantive talks with Iranian counterparts about Afghanistan and al-Qa’ida.

–Since leaving government, we—and other former U.S. officials knowledgeable about the U.S.-Iranian dialogue over these matters—have related how the Iranians raised, almost immediately after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the problem of al-Qa’ida personnel trying to make their way from Afghanistan into Iran, consistently warning about the difficulties of securing Iran’s 936 kilometer-long border with Afghanistan (as well as its 700 kilometer-long border with Pakistan).

–We and others have also related how Tehran documented its detention of literally hundreds of suspected al-Qa’ida operatives, repatriated as many of these detainees to their countries of origin as it could, and requested U.S. assistance in facilitating repatriations of detainees whose governments did not want to cooperate (a request the Bush Administration denied).

–Furthermore, we described how, over the course of 2002 and early 2003, Bush Administration hardliners made substantive discussion and coordination with Iran over Iraq dependent on Tehran finding, arresting, and deporting a small number of specific al-Qa’ida figures—beyond the hundreds of suspected al-Qa’ida operatives the Islamic Republic had already apprehended—that Washington suspected had sought refuge in Iran’s lawless Sistan-Balochistan province.  Although Tehran deployed additional security forces to its eastern borders, Iranian officials acknowledged that a small group of al-Qa’ida figures had managed to avoid capture and enter Iranian territory, most likely through Sistan-Balochistan, in 2002.  The Iranian government located and took some of these individuals into custody and said that others identified by the United States were either dead or not in Iran.  At the beginning of May 2003, after Baghdad had fallen, Tehran offered to exchange the remaining al-Qa’ida figures in Iran for a small group of MEK commanders in Iraq, with the treatment of those repatriated to Iran monitored by the International Committee for the Red Cross and a commitment not to apply the death penalty to anyone prosecuted on their return.  But the Bush Administration rejected any deal.

Today, much of the American media unquestioningly “reports” information provided by the U.S. government about Iran’s supposed links to al-Qa’ida, noting, as Helene Cooper does in her story, that U.S. “officials admit that they are largely in the dark about what is going on with the Qaeda operatives believed to be in Iran.”   But the only reason why the United States does not know more or have a cooperative relationship with the Islamic Republic over al-Qa’ida is that Washington cut off talks with Tehran over al-Qa’ida and Afghanistan in late May 2003.  This decision was supposedly taken because the Defense Department claimed to have a communications intercept indicating that an al-Qa’ida figure inside Iran might have been involved in the May 12, 2003 Riyadh terrorist bombings.  But the claim was never substantiated and was disputed by much of the U.S. Intelligence Community; by 2007, the Bush Administration was reduced to telling the Washington Post that “there are suspicions, but no proof” that an al-Qa’ida figures in Iran “may have been involved from afar in planning” the May 2003 attacks, see here.

Not even the George W. Bush Administration was prepared to make concrete accusations that the Islamic Republic was deliberately facilitating al-Qa’ida’s terrorist activities.  Now, however, the Obama Administration is advancing specific, on-the-record charges that Iran is helping al-Qa’ida.  There is no reason for anyone to have any confidence that official Washington “knows”, in any empirically serious way, that Tehran is cooperating with al-Qa’ida in the ways that are alleged.

Of the six al-Qa’ida operatives sanctioned by the Treasury Department last week, only one is alleged to be physically present in Iran—and, by Treasury’s own account, he is there primarily to get al-Qa’ida prisoners out of Iranian jails.  Moreover, the United States apparently has no hard evidence that the Iranian government is supportive of or even knowledgeable about the alleged al-Qa’ida network in the Islamic Republic.  In her story, Helene Cooper writes that a “senior Administration official” said “in a conference call for reporters” (which means that the White House wanted everyone to hear this, and Helene did not have to leave her office to hear it), that “our sense is this network is operating through Iranian territory with the knowledge and at least the acquiescence of Iranian authorities”.  A “sense” that al-Qa’ida is operating in Iran with “at least the acquiescence of Iranian authorities” now apparently amounts to proof of a “secret deal” that can be authoritatively referenced in the announcement of a legally and politically significant action by the Treasury Department.

This is all strongly reminiscent of the way in which the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations prepared the way for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.  And much of the mainstream media seems content to reprise the dishonorable role they played in making that war possible.  As her pre-war reporting on Saddam Husayn’s weapons of mass destruction programs unraveled in the war’s aftermath, Judy Miller of The New York Times sought to defend herself by arguing that “my job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself.”  Ms. Miller may no longer be at The New York Times.  But it seems that her spirit lives on there, at the Washington Post, and in too many other journalistic venues.

August 3, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment