WHITE HELMETS: The Guardian Protects UK FCO Destabilisation Project in Syria
By John Schoneboom | 21st Century Wire | December 20, 2017
Today in Too Long Don’t Read : It’s hard to tell what’s going on in the world, isn’t it? Whom do you believe when there are competing, totally irreconcilable narratives out there? Are the White Helmets heroes or villains? The mainstream narrative has them as a neutral, unarmed, grassroots (and Oscar-winning) humanitarian group with no political affiliations, nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Independent journalists, notably Vanessa Beeley, Eva Karene Bartlett, Patrick Henningsen, and Khaled Iskef, among a few others, suggest a radically different picture, in which the White Helmets are nothing more than a propaganda front for terrorist groups like the Al Nusra Front.
The Guardian, in defense of the heroic narrative, just published a piece by Olivia Solon that turns the propaganda charge against the critics of the White Helmets and refers to them as “a network of anti-imperialist activists, conspiracy theorists and trolls with the support of the Russian government.”
I read this article with great interest, wondering whether it would actually back-up its claims and refute the allegations head on. That is what it would do if it were actual journalism. It would give a fair accounting of the allegations and assess the evidence behind them. If it found the evidence lacking, it would say why, it would offer context, additional evidence, show why the supposed facts were wrong, etc. That would be journalism.
Solon didn’t do that. She mentioned only one video, the so-called Mannequin Challenge piece, and dismissed it as simply the stupid mistake the White Helmets and their apologists said it was. As for the few cases of White Helmet involvement in terrorist activity that Solon did acknowledge, she dismissed these as a case of a few bad apples that left the overall courageous heroic narrative intact.
Watch White Helmets “Mannequin Challenge” spoof rescue video:
How can we tell what’s going on in the world? I feel that one way is to examine the way narratives are defended, and the way challenges are treated. What Solon has done is not journalism. Her work does nothing to examine or investigate seriously. It only tries to dismiss and defame with tired old negative buzzwords like “conspiracy theory” or new ones like “Russia” — never mind that the three main journalists she offers in support of her Russian operation CONSPIRACY THEORY are from the UK, Australia, and Canada.
There is no substantive analysis at all. Nothing. Meanwhile she uncritically and with a straight face describes the US-backed mayhem-generating team of mercenaries and fanatics as an effort to “stabilize” Syria. The piece also contains serious errors, e.g., Patrick Henningsen is NOT an editor at Infowars. Since it is not true, somebody had to have made it up. Is that an innocent mistake, or a cheap attempt to discredit? All of this tells us something about Solon and the Guardian and our media generally and these are clues to what is going on in the world. Look at what is and is not there. Listen to the dogs that are not barking here.
What else did she leave out? Was it anything important? I’ve taken the liberty of compiling a skeletal, condensed list of some of the important, credible allegations and facts that, to my mind, deserve more attention and investigation than the glib, contemptuous dismissals offered by the likes of Olivia Solon.
These are all taken from articles by Vanessa Beeley except where noted. If I’ve gotten anything wrong I hope she or someone else will correct me. Now, if you believe Solon, you’ll dismiss all of it in one fell swoop: “Well that’s Beeley! She’s appeared on RT for god’s sake!” And that is exactly the desired effect, I presume, of articles like Solon’s. To cancel out reams of evidence by impugning the messengers with what amounts to fear-mongering and slander.
But the thing is, you don’t have to take Beeley’s word for it. If you follow the links to her articles, you can see the photos and the videos and find the documentation yourself. For now, just have a look at the list. It’s simplified. You’ll have to follow the links if you want more details. But just have a look. These are things Solon couldn’t, wouldn’t, and didn’t deal with in her hack job hit piece. There may be alternative interpretations of some of the photos and videos, and they might make an interesting argument. Solon unfortunately chose not to do that, however, and while she couldn’t be expected to cover everything in one newspaper article, see if you think credible journalism would ignore all of this:
THE CONDENSED CASE AGAINST THE WHITE HELMETS
All from Vanessa Beeley’s two articles unless other sources are mentioned:
White Helmets & ‘Local Councils’ – Is the UK FCO Financing Terrorism in Syria with Taxpayer Funds?
WHITE HELMETS: State Sanctioned Terrorism and Hollywood Poster Boys for War
1: White Helmets were started and largely trained not in Syria but in Turkey and Jordan, by James le Mesurier, a former British military intelligence officer who went on to become Vice President for Special Projects at the Olive Group, “a private mercenary organization that has since merged with Blackwater-Academi into what is now known as Constellis Holdings.”
2: White Helmets receive substantial funding from the US, the UK, and the EU, at least $150 million over 3 years, from the same parties that are supporting the rebels/terrorists. No political ties?
3: White Helmets only ever operated in territory controlled by terrorist groups like Al Nusra Front, ISIS, and Nour Al Din Zinki, the latter are notorious for filming themselves torturing and beheading a 12-year-old boy. When those groups are forced to move, the White Helmets move with them, often in the same buses, as when they abandoned East Aleppo.
Mohammad Jnued, White Helmet and Nusra Front supporter. (Collage taken from his Facebook account)
4: The White Helmet leader, Raed Saleh, is tied to extremists, a fact acknowledged even by the State Department’s Mark Toner. Saleh was actually deported from the US out of Dulles Airport in April 2016, with no reason being disclosed. He is a close colleague of Mustafa Al Haj Yussef, another White Helmets leader, whose social media accounts show him openly declaring allegiance to Ahrar Al Sham, calling for unity with Al Nusra, advocating the shelling and execution of civilians and other equally charming practices. Actually a recent survey of social media activity carried out by the Syrian War Blog has conservatively identified 65 White Helmet operatives who have professed their membership of, or alliance with, extremist groups like Ahrar Al Sham and Nusra Front or even ISIS.
Also, Clarity of Signal – Massive White Helmets Photo Cache Proves Hollywood Gave Oscar to Terrorist Group
5: The White Helmet group in East Aleppo was established by the president of the UK-funded East Aleppo Council (EAC), Abdulaziz Maghrabi, often photographed with, offering support for, and maintaining active militant membership with terrorist groups Abu Amara and Nusra Front.
Abdulaziz Maghrabi (circled) with Abu Amara, one of the most brutal terrorist organisations in East Aleppo working as “security” for Nusra Front aka Al Qaeda in Syria. (Photo from Maghrabi’s Facebook account)
6: White Helmets in Idlib were photographed taking part in demonstrations and calling for the “burning and destruction” of the towns Kafarya and Foua, which resisted occupation by the terrorists and suffered a siege that deprived its citizens of food, water, and medicine in addition to attacks that killed some 1300 residents. White Helmets also participated in luring children evacuated from these towns off their buses to their death by a truck bomb in an event known as the Rashideen Massacre.
On the left White Helmets are carrying banners calling for burning of Kafarya and Foua, two Shia Muslim villages in Nusra Front controlled Idlib. On right post taken from the Facebook account of White Helmet, Abdul Halim al Shehab “Exterminate Kafarya”.
7: Muawiya Hassan Agha was present at Rashideen, and he later became infamous for his involvement in the execution of two prisoners of war in Aleppo. For this rogue bad appleness he was supposedly fired from the White Helmets, although he was later photographed still with them. He has also been photographed celebrating “victory” with Nusra Front in Idlib. There have been at least three other executions on video that show White Helmet involvement, not just being present and immediately cleaning up, but celebrating, mistreating bodies, and otherwise not acting in a manner consistent with being a neutral humanitarian group.
White Helmets in Idlib, celebrating with Nusra Front. Muawiya is on left in hi-viz jacket. (Photo: screenshot from Nusra Front video)
8: Videos show White Helmets participating in Nusra Front operations, e.g., joining in the beating and encirclement of a Syrian civilian, thoroughly mingling in with heavily armed Nusra terrorists.
9: The main White Helmets center in East Aleppo was integrated into the Nusra Front compound, and was adorned with a variety of graffiti and flags affirming the White Helmet affiliation to various terrorist groups, but predominantly Nusra Front.
Watch video by Pierre Le Corf showing the proximity of White Helmet centre in Sakhour to Nusra Front headquarters:
10: Numerous civilian witnesses from Aleppo were unfamiliar with the term White Helmets but knew the group as the Nusra Front Civil Defense and reported its participation in executions and atrocities.
11: On multiple occasions, the White Helmets have been exposed staging rescue scenes for both photo and video, recycling images in multiple propaganda pieces.
12: Swedish Doctors for Human Rights analyzed a White Helmets video report and concluded “the measures inflicted upon those children, some of them lifeless, are bizarre, non-medical, non-lifesaving, and even counterproductive in terms of life-saving purposes…[including measures that] would have resulted in the death of the child, if not already dead.” The implication is that the White Helmets may have actually killed children and/or were using already-dead children “as propaganda props.”
13: The White Helmets have been filmed describing Syrian Arab Army bodies as “trash” and one particular video shows them flashing “V” signs while standing on bodies of Syrian soldiers piled onto a truck.
14: Many photos show White Helmet operatives carrying arms or posing, armed, with rebel groups including Nusra Front. At least one of them, Mo’ad Baresh, who was killed fighting against the Syrian Army, was an active rebel/terrorist while also a member of White Helmets.
15: The White Helmets claim to have saved over 90,000 lives but there is zero documentation of these lives — no names, no records of any kind.
16: The White Helmets’ critics cannot be described or dismissed as comprising only “fringe” voices. Eminent prize-winning journalist and filmmaker John Pilger described the White Helmets as “a complete propaganda construct.”
These are all things that can be looked up and verified, much of it is in photographs and videos, other bits are first-hand accounts from Syrian people via reporters who bothered to go there instead of reprinting Pentagon press releases. Solon and the Guardian do not even hint at the existence of a body of evidence like this, let alone debunk it.
If they had only tried, and made an honest effort, then an informative debate might have ensued. I am all ears for counter arguments. Let us subject all of this to scrutiny, by all means. Maybe there are errors, mistranslations, missing context, mistakes. If truth is what we’re after, we confront criticism squarely, not weasel away from it or ignore it.
The once-respectable Guardian declines the invitation, preferring to smear and ignore, a choice that speaks sad volumes about the paucity of arrows in its quiver. The whole thing suggests, I think, that we ought to consider that what has happened before — in the Cold War, in Vietnam, in Iraq — is happening again: that people with an interest in war are offering a narrative of lies for hearts, minds, and resources. To put it another way, we might want to consider seriously the possibility that they are gaslighting the hell out of us.
Screenshot taken from UK Column report on the Guardian clumsy hit piece.
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John Schoneboom is an author currently working on his PhD project at Northumbria University, Surrealpolitik and Cultural Gaslighting.
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE WHITE HELMETS BY READING THE FOLLOWING ARTICLES:
Geneva Press Club Event:
“They Dont Care About Us”: The White Helmet True Agenda
BBC and Guardian Whitewash of UK FCO Funding Scandal in Syria
What to Expect From BBC Panorama and Guardian’s Whitewash of UK Gov’t Funding Terrorists in Syria
White Helmets Evidence Presented at Geneva Press Club:
Vanessa Beeley Presents Exposé on White Helmets at Swiss Press Club in Geneva
‘Global Britain’ – UK Funding a Shadow State in Syria
‘Global Britain’ is Financing Terrorism and Bloodshed in Syria and Calling it ‘Aid’
White Helmets – Hollywood Poster Boys:
WHITE HELMETS: State Sanctioned Terrorism and Hollywood Poster Boys for War
21st Century Wire:
New Report Destroys Fabricated Myth of Syria’s ‘White Helmets’
Initial Investigation into White Helmets:
Who are Syria’s White Helmets?
21st Century Wire article on the White Helmets:
Syria’s White Helmets: War by Way of Deception ~ the “Moderate” Executioners
Who Funds the White Helmets?
Secret £1bn UK War Chest Used to Fund the White Helmets and Other ‘Initiatives’
Original investigative report:
The REAL Syria Civil Defence Exposes Fake White Helmets as Terrorist-Linked Imposters
Irish Peace Prize Farce
Tipperary’s White Helmets Peace Prize: A Judas Kiss to the Antiwar Movement and Syria
White Helmets Executions
WHITE HELMETS: Severed Heads of Syrian Arab Army Soldiers Paraded as Trophies
CNN Fabricate News About the White Helmets
A NOBEL LIE: CNN’s Claim That ‘White Helmets Center in Damascus’ Was Hit by a Barrel Bomb
White Helmets Links to Al Nusra
WHITE HELMETS: Hand in Hand with Al Qaeda and Extremist Child Beheaders in Aleppo
Report by Patrick Henningsen
AN INTRODUCTION: Smart Power & The Human Rights Industrial Complex
Open Letter by Vanessa Beeley
White Helmets Campaign for War NOT Peace – Retract RLA & Nobel Peace Prize Nominations
Staged Rescue Videos
(VIDEO) White Helmets: Miraculous ‘Rag Doll Rescue’
White Helmets Oscar Award Farce:
Forget Oscar: Give The White Helmets the Leni Riefenstahl Award for Best War Propaganda Film
Cory Morningstar report:
Investigation into the funding sources of the White Helmets, including Avaaz, Purpose, The Syria Campaign
Open letter to Canadian MPs from Stop the War Hamilton (Canada):
Letter from the Hamilton Coalition to Stop War to the New Democratic Party in Canada ref the White Helmet nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize:
Open letter to Canada’s NDP Leader on Nobel Prize:
Letter to NDP from Prof. John Ryan protesting White Helmet nomination for RLA and Nobel Peace Prize.
Pyongyang rejects biological weapons rumors, accuses US of fabricating pretext for attack
RT | December 21, 2017
North Korea has rejected media speculation, fueled by the US National Security Strategy, that it’s preparing for chemical warfare. Pyongyang accused Washington of fabricating yet another “false pretext” for a surprise attack.
As tensions on the Korean peninsula continue to escalate, a series of reports suggest that North Korea might be developing a program to fit biological weapons on intercontinental ballistic missiles. One such report appeared in Japan’s Asahi newspaper, which cited an unnamed person allegedly connected to South Korea’s intelligence. The allegations took root in the fertile media ground, already prepped by the assessment from Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy released Monday.
“As missiles grow in numbers, types, and effectiveness, to include those with greater ranges, they are the most likely means for states like North Korea to use a nuclear weapon against the United States,” the document notes. “North Korea is also pursuing chemical and biological weapons which could also be delivered by missile.”
North Korea dismissed the allegations that it’s preparing for biological warfare. “The DPRK, as a state party to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), maintains its consistent stand to oppose development, manufacture, stockpiling and possession of biological weapons,” the North’s Institute for American Studies, affiliated with the foreign ministry, was quoted as saying by state news agency KCNA.
Furthermore, the North accused the US of “fabricating” rumors as a potential justification for a surprise attack, pointing out that Washington already used the pretext of biological and chemical weapons to invade Iraq in 2003 and to strike Shayrat airbase in Syria in April 2017.
“It is the US that conducts military aggressions and cruise missile attacks on sovereign states in broad daylight while faking up ‘possession of WMD’ and ‘use of chemical weapons’ of those countries,” the KCNA statement reads.
North Korea urged Washington to abandon such behavior, or otherwise be ready for a “revenge” and “destruction” in case of an attack.
“The more the US clings to the anti-DPRK stifling move, by denouncing us as a state of ‘developing the biological weapons’, the more hardened the determination of our entire military personnel and people to take revenge will be and the earlier the days of destruction of the US, an empire of evils will come,” the statement said further.
Pyongyang’s statement follows the conclusion of last week’s US-South Korean ‘Warrior Strike’ military drills which focused on practicing a potential infiltration into the North to dismantle Pyongyang’s nuclear installations. The North could possess up to 13 types of pathogens that can potentially be used as biological weapons and that need to be secured in case of a war, according to the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses.
While the US keeps insisting that it is ready to pursue a military option to neutralize the North Korean threat, both Russia and China have been calling for calm, urging a diplomatic solution to the crisis based on a ‘double freeze’ initiative. The simple Sino-Russian proposal, rejected by Washington, seeks a simultaneous suspension to any missile launches and nuclear tests by Pyongyang, as well as large-scale military exercises by Washington and Seoul.
What Is The Guardian Afraid Of When Attacking Honest Syria Reporters?
By Adam GARRIE | ORIENTAL REVIEW | December 20, 2017
The recent Guardian hit-piece against journalists Vanessa Beeley, Professor Tim Anderson and Eva Bartlett is something far more sinister than most people have yet to realise. The piece which can be read here is a very crude attempt to discredit the efforts of independent journalists who have exposed the links between a group called White Helmets and terrorists committing war crimes in Syria, in contravention of well known principles of international law.
The gist of the Guardian piece is that the findings of the aforementioned journalists are not credible because they are being “used by Russia” to justify Russia’s foreign policy in regards to Syria.
First of all, the Guardian’s premise is rather absurd to begin with, as according to international law, Russia’s presence in Syria is fully legal while that of the countries that back the White Helmets (the US, UK and France, among others) is illegal.
Consequently, the presence of a so-called NGO like White Helmets (in reality they are handsomely funded by western governments) is also illegal as they are operating in Syria without the consent of the Syrian government and without any mandate from the United Nations.
Therefore, the burden of proof in any criticisms of Anderson, Beeley and Bartlett, lies on those who are openly advocating for violations of international law.
But even more fundamentally, there is a fatal flaw in the Guardian’s hatchet job.
On the 2nd of November, an exhaustive report on the alleged chemical attack in Syria’s Khan Sheikhoun was released by the combined Foreign, Defence and Industry and Trade Ministries of the Russian Federation.
The findings of this forensic study affirm that the journalistic findings of Anderson, Bartlett and Beeley regarding both the White Helmets organisation as well as the bogus US narrative on the so-called chemical attack at Khan Sheikhoun.
The following are the crucial findings of the official Russian study:
–“Victims” of the alleged attack arrived at hospitals hours before the alleged attack was said to have occurred.
–The crater at Khan Sheikhoun was consistent with that created from a ground based crude incendiary device, not an explosive dropped from a Syrian fighter jet, as the US alleged.
–The video of White Helmets ‘medics’ responding to the ‘chemical attack’ is a forgery. Based on the protective wear and lack thereof, seen on the White Helmets ‘volunteers’, the men would have died instantly if dressed in such a way around a real Sarin gas attack.
–Forensic reports show that gas was poured into the crater in question, only after the staged ‘rescue operation’ had long concluded.
–The OPCW report’s findings on the issue were politicised due to the influence of the US government.
Even prior to the report from the 2nd of November, the Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stated that the White Helmets are known to travel in terrorist circles and have been guilty of terrorist atrocities themselves.
On the 27th of April, Zakharova stated,
“The White Helmets not only feel at home on territories controlled by Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State (Daesh) but also openly express positive attitude towards them, provide information and even financial assistance to them.
There is documentary evidence proving that White Helmets members participated in some operations carried out by Jabhat al-Nusra, as well as covered up the signs of civilian executions”.
Yet the Guardian’s piece about western journalists in Syria, whose independent findings were later confirmed by those of the Russian government, does not mention this fact.
In reality, the Guardian piece is more than a hit-job on Anderson, Bartlett and Beeley, it is an attack on the official statements and forensic reporting of all levels of the Russian government.
The independent findings of the western journalists and those of the Russian government have been backed up by copious amounts of evidence. By contrast, the Guardian hit-piece does not attempt to offer any exculpatory evidence in respect of the White Helmets. The report merely attempts to destroy the credibility of Anderson, Bartlett and Beeley on the basis that their work has become popular and that their findings have been discussed on the news outlet RT.
The Guardian piece neither proves nor disproves anything. It merely attempts to use crude talking points borrowed from the American “Russiagate” narrative in order to demonise anyone said to be associated with Russia, even though Anderson, Bartlett and Beeley are not associated with the Russian government.
However, unlike those alleging Russian interference in the 2016 US election, the Guardian did not have the courage to attack the credibility of the Russian study which vindicates the findings of Anderson, Bartlett and Beeley.
Perhaps this is because Russia is more than capable of responding to such a frivolous attack, not least through the social media page of the Russian Embassy in the UK. Maybe however, even Guardian readers are growing tired of the anti-Russia narrative, so instead the Guardian thought they might be able to publish something more ‘exciting’ by attacking independent journalists?
Whatever the thinking of the Guardian’s editors might be, the fact of the matter is that unless the Guardian presents evidence from a study as exhaustive and as thorough as that which Russia conducted in the wake of the OPCW report which has been forensically refuted, the findings of Anderson, Bartlett and Beeley remain not only vindicated but validated.
Analyst Dismisses White House Claims Pyongyang Behind WannaCry
Sputnik – 20.12.2017
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Monday, White House Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert announced that North Korea is responsible for the May 2017 “WannaCry” global cyberattack that targeted Windows computers and was allegedly aided by leaked National Security Agency technology.
In the article titled, “It’s Official: North Korea Is Behind WannaCry,” Bossert points the finger at North Korea for being behind the cybercrime in which millions of users’ computer data was encrypted and then ransomed for bitcoins. The attack slowed down after a mistake in WannaCry’s code revealed a kill switch that prevented infected computers from spreading the virus.
“Cybersecurity isn’t easy, but simple principles still apply. Accountability is one, cooperation another,” Bossert wrote in his article. “They are the cornerstones of security and resilience in any society. In furtherance of both, and after careful investigation, the US today publicly attributes the massive ‘WannaCry’ cyber attack to North Korea.”
In a White House press briefing Tuesday morning, Bossert claimed that the US came to this conclusion after a “careful investigation.”
“We don’t do this lightly,” Bossert said during the briefing. “We do so with evidence and with partners,” adding that Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Australia and the United Kingdom all agree that North Korea is responsible.
“While victims received ransom demands, paying did not unlock their computers,” the homeland security adviser wrote. “It was cowardly, costly and careless. The attack was widespread and cost billions, and North Korea is directly responsible.”
On Radio Sputnik’s Loud & Clear, financial policy analyst Daniel Sankey asserted his belief that North Korea is not behind the cyberattack.
“I’m a little suspicious myself. The drums of war have been beaten against [North Korea] for some time now and it’s very convenient that now this severe cyberattack is being laid against the doors of North Korea,” Sankey told hosts John Kiriakou and Brian Becker.
“And of course, as usual, we can take the intelligence community’s word for it because they know better than us and they published it in the Wall Street Journal — so it must be North Korea,” he added sarcastically.
“I am a little skeptical because a big part of the virus was extorting various users to send bitcoin in exchange for access to their files again. In the end, they stole about $55,000 in bitcoin and that’s not enough money for North Korea to trouble itself with,” Sankey said.
“Also, what is North Korea going to do with bitcoin? They need commodities, they need cash, they need access to different markets. They don’t need bitcoin. How are they going to turn that into oil or coal or various other things they need? How are they going to convert that into a convertible currency? It’s really not feasible.”
Although Bossert said that the US did “not make the allegation lightly,” he didn’t provide any solid evidence and simply alluded to National Security Agency and Microsoft research. He also referred to the UK’s determination in October that North Korea was responsible for the attack.
In May, security firms discovered a link between the ransomware and southern China during an investigation of the code’s notes, which revealed that WannaCry’s creators were fluent in a form of Chinese very common in that region.
According to security firm Flashpoint, which conducted the analysis, “A typo in the note, “帮组” (bang zu) instead of “帮助” (bang zhu) meaning “help,” strongly indicates the note was written using a Chinese-language input system rather than being translated from a different version. More generally, the note makes use of proper grammar, punctuation, syntax, and character choice, indicating the writer was likely native or at least fluent.”
Although the linguistic analysis of the code did not reveal any Korean, the US has still confidently asserted that North Korea is responsible, and Sankey believes it’s because the underlying problem behind the attacks actually has nothing to do with the hackers but with intelligence communities, who may be actually be responsible for the crimes.
“I think that the real problem is that intelligence communities are becoming aware of vulnerabilities in these systems, and rather than working with the private sector to protect consumers and peoples’ data, they are just sitting on those vulnerabilities so that they can use them later to hack systems.”
In his editorial, Bossert concludes, “Mr. Trump has already pulled many levers of pressure to address North Korea’s unacceptable nuclear and missile developments, and we will continue to use out maximum pressure strategy to curb Pyongyang’s ability to mount attacks, cyber or otherwise.”
With the Trump administration’s increased use of aggressive language against North Korea’s continued nuclear weapon tests and with this new allegation that the country is responsible for WannaCry, it doesn’t appear that the relationship between the two is going to be getting better anytime soon.
Guardian Newspaper Pushing Fake News: ‘Putin Plotting to Cut Off UK Internet’
21WIRE | December 18, 2017
Although not as intense as the US mainstream media, the UK mainstream outlets are producing their share of fabricated narratives intended to stoke fear into the minds of the British public.
This latest fish tale comes from The Guardian newspaper, as “defense correspondent” Ewen MacAskil attempts to revive a two year-old mainstream media conspiracy theory about a secret Russian plot to cut transatlantic undersea internet cables which connect Britain and the United States. MacAskil writes:
“Russia could pose a major threat to the UK and other NATO nations by cutting underwater cables essential for international commerce and the internet, the chief of the British defence staff, Sir Stuart Peach, has warned.
Russian ships have been regularly spotted close to the Atlantic cables that carry communications between the US and Europe and elsewhere around the world.”
It turns out that this latest attempt by The Guardian to stoke fear in the minds of the British public – is a recycled version of a 2015 piece of mainstream fake news, apparently stitched together by the New York Times. It reads like something out of Cold War B movie, with shades of the Hunt for Red October:
“Russian submarines and spy ships are aggressively operating near the vital undersea cables that carry almost all global Internet communications, raising concerns among some American military and intelligence officials that the Russians might be planning to attack those lines in times of tension or conflict.
The issue goes beyond old worries during the Cold War that the Russians would tap into the cables — a task American intelligence agencies also mastered decades ago. The alarm today is deeper: The ultimate Russian hack on the United States could involve severing the fiber-optic cables at some of their hardest-to-access locations to halt the instant communications on which the West’s governments, economies and citizens have grown dependent.”
It seems that in the absence of an actual threat, mainstream media outlets like The Guardian and the New York Times are left with nothing else but to fabricate various Russian subversion narratives – with no actual evidence ever presented – in order to construct a public perception that Russia is somehow undermining all aspects of British and American society.
The Guardian Lies About Syria
McKaskel’s Red October article also has a conspicuous statement where the author attempts to bracket Russia’s legal (unlike the US and Britain’s illegal covert and fly-over ops) intervention in Syria with ‘hybrid warfare’ and ‘destablising NATO’. The propaganda value here is breathtaking:
“As well as conventional military involvement in Syria, Russia has been accused of engaging in hybrid warfare, including cyberwarfare, aimed at destabilising NATO.”
Rather than investigate and publish real news, it seems that the once respected liberal standard bearer The Guardian is firmly in the mainstream media’s fake new camp – promoting the NATO member state and US-UK establishment conspiracy theory that Russia is plotting to do all manner of evil and subterfuge in Europe and the US.
Meanwhile, editors at the Guardian refuse to do an real investigation in the the full scope of the UK government’s covert slush fund in Syria. As 21WIRE reported earlier this month:
“The BBC will be carrying out a controlled journalistic “explosion” on their Panorama programme, airing tonight in the UK. Their report, dramatically titled, “Jihadis You Pay For” is about to expose UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) for the funding of extremist and terrorist groups in Syria via their “Free Syrian Police” project set-up in ‘rebel-held’ areas of Syria since 2014. To referee this virtual clash of the titans, The Guardian has been drafted-in to do the honours.”
“The report, Jihadis You Pay For, will claim that Foreign Office money paid to the FSP reached people with links to the extremist group al-Nusra Front.” ~ The Guardian
In fact, it was The Guardian newspaper who actively campaigned on behalf of the UK and US government-funded pseudo “NGO” known as the White Helmets to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016. This, despite the fact that this western ‘first-responder’ construct has clear links to al Qaeda terrorists affiliates in Syria.
Here is good example of how The Guardian has been spinning blatant fake news about Syria. In their Nobel Prize promotional piece for the White Helmets, they printed a number of false and misleading statements. Here is one of them:
“In Aleppo, 300,000 people are exposed to a relentless barrage of airstrikes. The Syrian government and Russia now seem intent on crushing Aleppo, the opposition’s last stronghold, before a new American president takes office.”
What the Guardian conveniently fail to mention is the fact that the terrorists brigades backed by NATO members and Gulf-states – only occupied East Aleppo with an estimated remaining population of around 160,000. In contrast, there were some 1.4 million Syrians living under government protection in the much larger West Aleppo. These residents were under siege by terrorist Hell Cannons and random mortar fire which claimed at least 11,000 innocent lives during the terrorist occupation of East Aleppo. This was a common mainstream media trick which was more or less standard practice across most mainstream corporate outlets. Unlike the fabricated and totally undocumented and very likely falsified claims by the White Helmets that they “saved 90,000 lives” between late 2013 and 2017, the 11,000+ civilians deaths in West Aleppo at the hands of NATO and Gulf-backed terrorists are all documented by the Aleppo Medical Association.
The Guardian also claim that the White Helmets are “volunteers” – when in fact they are paid a regular salary which is much higher than the national average salary in Syria – a fact conveniently left out in the Guardian’s apparent foreign office propaganda piece:
“This is the backdrop against which the White Helmets operate – a western-funded Syrian search-and-rescue organisation whose members put their lives at great risk to save civilians, receiving only a monthly stipend of $150.”
The Guardian’s “journalists” would never dare mention that the White Helmet’s ‘monthly stipend’ is far in excess of the standard salary for a Syrian Army soldier who makes far below $100 per month.
To call any this journalism would be a gross overstatement.
By this account, The Guardian are guilty of the most egregious form of propaganda throughout its shameful coverage of Syria over the last 7 years.
Read more about the White Helmets here.
SEE ALSO: The Guardian Exposed – Conning Public into Financing ‘Independent Journalism’
VIDEO: Watch this Fake rescue video filmed and released by the White Helmets
NYT’s Argentina Op-Ed Fails to Disclose Authors’ Financial Conflict of Interest
Photo: Paul Singer
By Eli Clifton | LobeLog | December 13, 2017
On Tuesday, Mark Dubowitz and Toby Dershowitz, two executives at the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), took to the op-ed pages of The New York Times to celebrate last week’s announcement that Argentina’s former president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, would face treason charges for her alleged role in covering up Iran’s alleged involvement in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aries, killing 85 people.
But their op-ed fails to disclose a serious financial conflict of interest underpinning their attacks on Kirchner. One of FDD’s biggest donors financed a multi-year public diplomacy campaign against Kirchner all while attempting to collect $2 billion in debt from Argentina.
Indeed, legitimate questions exist about the bombing and suspicious 2015 death of Argentine Special Investigator Alberto Nisman who claimed in 2006 that Iran ordered the bombing. But Kirchner’s supporters fear that Argentina’s President Mauricio Macri is using judicial reforms and charges against Kirchner to remove his political opposition.
FDD has been eager to promote Nisman’s work. The group also runs AlbertoNisman.org “to honor the legacy of late Argentine Prosecutor Natalio Alberto Nisman and his tireless pursuit of justice.” FDD continues this work despite serious questions about large unexplained deposits to Nisman’s bank account.
Moreover, their rush to denigrate Kirchner omits a major conflict of interest in Dubowitz and Dershowitz’s funding. Between 2007 and 2011, hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer contributed $3.6 million to FDD. That coincided with his battle to force Argentina to repay the full amount of the sovereign debt held by Singer’s firm, Elliott Management, a payout that Kirchner rejected. Ninety-three percent of Argentina’s creditors accepted losses, but Singer was one of the few holdouts. Having bought up Argentina’s defaulted bonds at pennies on the dollar, he had then sued the country for payment in full.
Singer embarked on a 15-year legal battle to collect on Argentina’s debt payments by attempting to seize Argentine government assets around the world, including a 100-meter three-masted tall ship when it docked in Ghana). After financing public diplomacy campaigns against Kirchner, Singer’s firm walked away with approximately 75 percent of what he was owed, $2.4 billion. The deal, finalized last year, was largely credited to Mauricio Macri, Kirchner’s successor.
Groups receiving Singer’s donations kept up a steady drumbeat of attacks on Kirchner and sought to tie her to Iran and Nisman’s suspicious death. “We do whatever we can to get our government and media’s attention focused on what a bad actor Argentina is,” Robert Raben, executive director of the American Task Force Argentina (ATFA) explained to The Huffington Post.
ATFA, a group created by Singer and other hedge fund holdouts, spent at least $3.8 million dollars over five years in its efforts attacking Argentina.
“Argentina and Iran: Shameful Allies” was the headline of one ATFA ad that ran in Washington newspapers in June 2013 as the Obama administration was weighing whether to file an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in Argentina’s favor. The ad featured side-by-side photos of Kirchner and then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad connected by the question, “A Pact With the Devil?” That same spring, FDD release an English-language summary of a new “ground-breaking” report by Nisman detailing “Iran’s extensive terrorist network in Latin America.”
This was followed by a flood of op-eds by FDD fellows and a series of hearings held by the House Homeland Security Subcommittee. According to FDD’s vice president, Toby Dershowitz, the report, which contains serious flaws and leaps of logic (detailed by Jim Lobe here and here), provided:
[A] virtual road map for how Iran’s long arm of terrorism can reach unsuspecting communities and that the AMIA attack was merely the canary in the coal mine. … The no-holds-barred, courageous report is a ‘must read’ for policy makers and law enforcement around the world and Nisman himself should be tapped for his guidance and profound understanding of Iran’s terrorism strategy.
Singer’s largesse also extended to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) where he contributed $1.1 million in 2009. AEI Fellow Roger Noriega, who received $60,000 directly from Elliott Management in 2007 to lobby on the issue of “Sovereign Debt Owed to a U.S. Company,” published an article on the group’s website—“Argentina’s Secret Deal with Iran?”—citing secret documents about an alleged nuclear cooperation agreement between Tehran and Buenos Aires “brokered and paid for” by then-Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
In 2013, Noriega and Jose Cardenas, a contributor to AEI’s “Venezuela-Iran Project,” co-authored a seven-page policy report—“Argentina’s Race to the Bottom”—charging that Kirchner’s government was “casting its lot with rogue governments like those in Venezuela and Iran.”
Singer also gave $500,000 to The Israel Project (TIP) in 2007 and $1 million in 2012. By May 2015, the group’s magazine, The Tower, published no fewer than 48 articles that mentioned Argentina and 40 that cited Nisman and the 1994 bombing.
Neither AEI, TIP, nor FDD has bothered to disclose its funding from Singer when publishing work that advanced his public pressure campaign against Kirchner. Indeed, there is no public record of why Singer chooses to fund these organizations. But his funding poses a conflict of interest, especially when The New York Times publishes Dershowitz and Dubowitz without any public acknowledgement that their criticism of Kirchner conveniently follows the narrative and financial interests of one of the duo’s biggest financial donors.
Questioning the Russia-gate ‘Motive’
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the third presidential debate in 2016, during which Clinton called Trump Vladimir Putin’s “puppet.”
By Gilbert Doctorow | Consortium News | December 18, 2107
The American public is now experiencing mass paranoia over Russia-gate, hysteria about Russia supposedly corrupting and manipulating the U.S. political system. This panic originated with Obama administration holdovers in the intelligence community who outlined the narrative while providing few if any facts — and it has been carried forward by Democrats, some Republicans hostile to President Trump, and by the U.S. mainstream media.
The Russia-gate frenzy has similarities to the madness that followed the 9/11 attacks when public passions were manipulated to serve the geopolitical agenda of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. In that case, civil liberties that had become accepted norms in the U.S. were suddenly cast aside – and the public was deceptively led into the invasion of Iraq.
In both cases – the Iraq War and Russia-gate – the U.S. intelligence community played central roles by – regarding Iraq – promoting false intelligence that Iraq was hiding WMD and had ties to Al Qaeda and – in the Russian case – assessing (without presenting evidence) that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the hacking of Democratic emails and their publication via WikiLeaks to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign and to help elect Donald Trump.
While the Iraq deception was driven by the neoconservatives in the Bush-Cheney administration, the Russia paranoia was started by the nominally left-of-center administration of Barack Obama in the closing months of his presidency. It has been fanned ever since by liberals and centrists in the Democratic Party and the never-Trump contingent in the Republican Party as well as the mainstream media – with the goal of either removing Trump from office or politically crippling him and his administration, i.e., to reverse the results of the 2016 election or, as some might say, reverse the “mistake” of the 2016 election.
Because promoters of the Russia-gate hysteria talk about the Kremlin’s “war” on the U.S. political process, the frenzy also carries extreme dangers, even greater than the death and destruction from the Iraq War. Russia is the only country on earth capable of turning the United States into ashes within a day. And even as U.S. journalists and politicians have casually – and sloppily – hyped the Russia-gate affair, the Russians have taken the growls of hostility from the United States very seriously.
Rumbles of War
If Russia is preparing for war, as the latest issue of Newsweek magazine tells us, we have no one but our political leaders and media pundits to blame. They have no concern for Russian national sensitivities and the “red lines” that the Russians have drawn. U.S. senators and congressmen listen only to what U.S. “experts” think the Russian interests should be if they are to fit into a U.S.-run world. That is why the Senate can vote 98-2 in favor of elevating President Obama’s executive sanctions against Russia into federal law as happened this past summer so President Trump can’t reverse them.
There have been a few U.S. journalists and academics who have examined the actual facts of the Russia-gate story and found them lacking in substance if not showing outright signs of fabrication, including Consortiumnews.com, Truthdig.com, and Antiwar.com. But they make up a very small minority.
Instead the major U.S. media has taken the Jan. 6 “Intelligence Community Assessment” accusing the Russians of meddling in the 2016 election as unassailable truth despite its stunning lack of evidence. According to President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, that “assessment” came from a “hand-picked” group of analysts from the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency, not the “all 17 intelligence agencies consensus” that the public was repeatedly told.
Perhaps the most significant challenge to the Russia-did-the-hacking “assessment” came from a study of the available forensic evidence by a group of former U.S. intelligence officers with relevant technical expertise from Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
The VIPS’ analysis of the known download speed of one batch of Democratic emails concluded in July that the emails were likely extracted by a local download, not an external hack over the Internet, i.e., an inside job by someone with direct access to the computers. But the VIPS findings were largely ignored by the U.S. mainstream media, which has treated the original “assessment” by those “hand-picked” analysts as unchallengeable if not flat fact.
Besides the conventional wisdom that Russia did “hack” the emails and somehow slipped the emails to WikiLeaks, there is another core assumption of the Jan. 6 report – that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the hack of the Democratic emails and their publication through WikiLeaks because of his contempt for Hillary Clinton and his desire for Trump to win.
Indeed, the Jan. 6 “assessment” treats this supposed motive as the central evidence of Russian guilt, since actual physical or testimonial evidence is lacking. Yet what is also missing from the report is any recognition of other attitudes among the Russian political elite that would go against the report’s thesis, including whether Putin would have taken such a risk in the face of a widespread consensus that Clinton was the near-certain winner – and the strong possibility that any Russian operation would be exposed. An evenhanded intelligence “assessment” would have included these counter-arguments even if in the end they were cast aside. But the Jan. 6 report offered no such context or balance.
A View from Moscow
However, from my perspective – having participated in some of the leading Russian public affairs programs in 2016 – I heard Russian insiders close to President Putin expressing grave doubts about whether a Trump presidency would be good for Russia.
Political talk shows are a very popular component of Russian television programming on all channels, both state-run and commercial channels. They are mostly carried on prime time in the evening but also are showing up in mid-afternoon where they have displaced soap operas and cooking lessons as entertainment for housewives and pensioners.
The shows are broadcast live either to the Moscow time zone or to the Far East time zone. Given the fact that Russia extends over nine time zones, they are also video recorded and reshown locally at prime time. In the case of the highest quality and most watched programs produced by Vesti 24 for the Rossiya One channel, they also are posted in their entirety and in the original Russian on Youtube.
The panelists come from a rather small pool of Russian legislators, including chairmen of the relevant committees of the Duma (lower house) and Federation Council (upper house); leading journalists; think tank professors; and retired military brass. The politicians are drawn from among the most visible and colorful personalities in the Duma parties, but also extend to Liberal parties such as Yabloko, which failed to cross the five-percent threshold in legislative elections and thus received no seats in parliament.
(Since I live in Brussels, I was flown by the various channels who paid airfare and hotel accommodation in Moscow. That is to say, my expenses were covered but there was no honorarium. I make this explicit acknowledgement to rebut in advance any notion that I and other outside panelists were in any way “paid by the Kremlin” or restricted in our freedom of speech on air.)
During the period under review, I appeared on both state channels, Rossiya-1 and Pervy Kanal, as well as on the major commercial television channel, NTV. My debut on the No. 1 talk show in Russia, “Sunday Evening with Vladimir Soloviev,” on Sept. 11, 2016, was particularly useful because I had a chance to speak with the host, Vladimir Soloviev, for five minutes before the program.
I put to him the question that interested me the most: whom did he want to see win the U.S. presidential election. Without hesitation, Soloviev told me that he did not want to see Trump win because the celebrity businessman was volatile, unpredictable — and weak. Soloviev added that he and other politically knowledgeable Russians did not expect improved relations with the U.S. regardless of who won. He rejected the notion that Trump’s tossing the neocons out of government would be a great thing in and of itself.
The Devil You Know
Soloviev’s resistance to the idea that Trump could be a good thing was not just an example of Russians’ prioritizing stability, the principle “better the devil you know,” meaning Hillary Clinton. During a chat with a Russian ambassador, someone also close to power, I heard the firm belief that the United States is like a big steamship which has its own inertia and cannot be turned around, that presidents come and go but American foreign policy remains the same.
This view may be called cynical or realistic, depending on your taste, but it is reflective of the thinking that came out from many of the panelists in the talk shows.
To appreciate what weight the opinions of Vladimir Soloviev carry, you have to consider just who he is – that his talk show is the most professional from among numerous rival shows and attracts the most important politicians and expert guests. But even more to the point, he is as close to Putin as journalists can get and is familiar with the President’s thinking.
In April 2015, Soloviev conducted a two-hour interview with Putin that was aired on Rossiya 1 under the title “The President.” In early January 2016, the television documentary “World Order,” co-written and directed by Soloviev, set out in forceful terms Putin’s views on American and Western attempts to stamp out Russian sovereignty that first were spoken at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007 and have evolved and become ever more frank since.
Soloviev has a Ph.D. in economics from the Institute of World Economics and International Relations of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He was an active entrepreneur in the 1990s and spent some time back then in the U.S., where his activities included teaching economics at the University of Alabama. He is fluent in English and has been an unofficial emissary of the Kremlin to the U.S. at various times.
For all of these reasons, I believe it is safe to say that Vladimir Soloviev represents the thinking of Russian elites close to Putin, if not the views of Putin himself.
I encountered similar skepticism about Trump elsewhere as well. On Sept. 27, 2016, I took part in the “Sixty Minutes” talk show on Rossiya 1that presented a post-mortem of the first Trump-Clinton debate the day before.
Presenter Yevgeny Popov and his wife and co-presenter Olga Skabeyeva made a point that was largely missing in Western news coverage – that the Democrats and Republicans had largely switched positions on the use of military force, with Clinton taking the more hawkish position and Trump the more dovish stance.
Doubting Trump
Yet, Russian politicians and journalists on the panel were split down the middle on whether Trump or Clinton was their preferred next occupant of the Oval Office. The Trump skeptics noted that he was impulsive and could not be trusted to act with prudence if there was some crisis or accidental clash between U.S. and Russian forces in the field, for example.
They took the cynical view that the more dovish positions that Trump took earlier were purely tactical, to differentiate himself from his Republican competitors and then Clinton. Thus, these analysts felt that Trump could turn out to be no friend of Russia on the day after the elections.
One Trump doubter called Trump a “non-systemic” politician – or anti-establishment. But that is not a compliment in the Russian context. It has the odious connotation applied to Alexei Navalny and some members of the U.S.- and E.U.-backed Parnas political movement, suggesting seditious intent.
The Oct. 20 program “Evening with Vladimir Soloviev,” which I watched on television from abroad, was devoted to the third Clinton-Trump debate. My main takeaway from the show was that there was a bemused unanimity on the very diverse panel that the U.S. presidential campaign was awful, with both candidates having serious weaknesses of character and/or careers. Particular attention was devoted to the very one-sided position of the U.S. mass media and the centrist establishments of both parties favoring Hillary Clinton.
Though flamboyant in his language, nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the LDPR Party, touched on a number of core concerns:
“The debates were weak. The two cannot greet one another on stage, cannot say goodbye to one another at the end. They barely can get out the texts that have been prepared for them by their respective staffs. Repeating on stage what one may have said in the locker room. Billions of people around the world conclude with one word: disgrace! This is the worst electoral campaign ever.
“And mostly what we see is the style of the campaign. However much people criticize the USSR – the old fogies who ran it, one and the same, supposedly the conscience of the world. Now we see the same thing in the USA: the exceptional country – the country that has bases everywhere, soldiers everywhere, is bombing everywhere in some city or other. …
“Hillary has some kind of dependency. A passion for power – and that is dangerous for the person who will have her finger on the nuclear button. If she wins, on November 9th the world will be at the brink of a big war.”
Zhirinovsky made no secret of his partiality for Trump, calling him “clean” and “a good man” whereas Clinton has “blood on her hands” for the deaths of hundreds of thousands due to her policies as Secretary of State. But then again, Zhirinovsky has made his political career over more than 30 years precisely by making outrageous statements that run up against what the Russian political establishment says aloud.
Zhirinovsky had been the loudest voice in Russian politics in favor of Turkey and its president Erdogan, a position which he came to regret when the Turks shot down a Russian jet at the Syrian border, causing a rupture in bilateral relations.
The final word on Russia’s electoral preferences during the Oct. 20 show was given by the moderator, Vladimir Soloviev: “There can be no illusions. Both Trump and Clinton have a very bad attitude toward Russia. What Trump said about us and Syria was no compliment at all. The main theme of American political life right now is McCarthyism and anti-Russian hysteria.”
This being Russia, one might assume that the deeply negative views of the ongoing presidential election reflected a general hostility toward the United States as a country. But nothing of the sort came out from the discussion. To be sure, there was the odd outburst from Zhirinovsky. But otherwise the panelists, including Zhirinovsky, displayed informed respect and even admiration for what the U.S. has achieved and represents as a country. But the panelists concluded that the U.S. has a political leadership at the national level that is unworthy and inappropriate to its position in the world.
Yet, back in the U.S., the ongoing hysteria over Russia-gate and the perceived threat that Russia poses to U.S. national interests, risks tilting the world into nuclear war.
Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. His latest book, Does the United States Have a Future?
Is TIME’s Afghan “cover girl” really a victim of mutilation by the Taleban?
Zero Anthropology | August 8, 2010
TIME : What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan (story)
BOING BOING : What Still Happened Despite 10 Years of Occupying Afghanistan (story)
ZERO ANTHRO : What Happens When We Don’t Fix Problems at Home (story)
The August 9th TIME magazine cover story is about a young Afghan woman whose nose and ears have been allegedly “mutilated” by the Taleban. The story has generated widespread self-serving moral indignation and self-righteous clamor in the U.S. propaganda machine supporting the occupation of Afghanistan run by the Israeli-American weapon-making industry. The American culture cleansing project in Afghanistan must be in need of a booster shot from the radical feminist forces that so fervently collaborated with the American war machine in initiating this racist imperial enterprise in 2001. Perhaps the flaunting of this fictitious story is a desperate attempt by the Obama war regime to offset the steep decline of support for this murderous program against unarmed and helpless pre-industrial Afghanistan. Let us recall the production of the picture of the frightened green-eyed Afghan girl on the cover of the National Geographic magazine to justify the United States sponsorship of local anti-government terrorist gangs who currently host the American occupation of Afghanistan.
TIME’s story does not provide its readers with any specific or credible factual text and context about what has really caused the deformity in this young woman’s face. Like much fiction that has been produced in the shadow of the American war machine in Afghanistan, this “story” appears to be a string of hearings and imaginings about women’s life in Afghanistan put together by Aryn Baker and Jodi Bieber, two young American journalists who probably first encountered Afghanistan in the pages of “the kite runner”. Having the readers see the reporters’ pictures (p. 4) in a “Kabul kite shop” speaks to the compelling impact of the untruths about life in Kabul in that “bestseller” book. What is the relationship of kites to a story about a mutilated nose? TIME’s story by Baker and Bieber has no truth value. Let us have a closer look at some of the cultural content and ethnographic claims in this fabricated telltale.
The narrative in which the Taleban single out this young woman for ears and nose mutilation at the instigation of her husband cannot be credible when exposed to the spatial, temporal, and cultural framework provided by the reporters. First, Urozgan province is located in central Afghanistan not “southern” Afghanistan. And if the alleged mutilation took place in central or northern Urozgan, TIME’s tale becomes even less credible for these parts of Urozgan are home to non-Paxtuns, especially Hazaras. What is the victim’s ethnic background? Even if the agency of this “mutilation” were the Taleban, why would they devote this amount of precious human resources in a hostile area to the personal disenchantment of a single Taleb foot soldier with his runaway wife, Aisha? This does not make tactical or strategic sense.
The Taleban dragged Aisha “to a mountain clearing near her village” where “[s]hivering in the cold air and blinded by the flashlights trained on her by her husband’s family, she faced her spouse and accuser… and men moved to deliver her punishment. Aisha’s brother-in-law held her down while her husband pulled out a knife. First he sliced off her ears. Then he started on her nose. Aisha passed out from her pain but awoke soon after, choking on her own blood. The men had left her on the mountaintop to die” (pp. 20-22). If the men wanted Aisha to die, why did they not kill her on the spot, on the mountain? Why give her a chance to live? Why risk her potential recovery and/or rescue?
To receive her punishment, why would Aisha have to be dragged to the mountain clearing (or is it a “mountainside”)? Where is this mountain clearing or side located in Urozgan? However, it must be at a distance from the village. And if TIME’s narrative is valid, the mutilation is a public affair with the husband, his family, and Taleban officials present. Thus, there are witnesses to the mutilation of Aisha’s nose and ears. These witnesses, especially members of her husband’s family, can be located. Did Aisha “pass out” from “pain” or loss of blood? How does a victim whose ears and nose have been mutilated and is choking on her own blood, and left alone “on the mountainside to die” survive such virtually fatal injuries? The human face is heavily irrigated with blood. I am not a medical doctor, but based on common sense, it would not take more than a few minutes of suffering heavy blood loss from open veins around the nose and ears to become fatal? How does a rural 19 year girl in such perilous medical condition, bleeding from open veins around her nose and ears, manage to move from a mountainside in remote Urozgan to a “shelter” in downtown Kabul hundreds of miles away? “A few months after Aisha arrived at the shelter, her father tried to bring her home with promises that he would find her a new husband. Aisha refused to leave. In rural areas, a family that finds itself shamed by a daughter sometimes sells her into slavery, or worse, subjects her to a so-called honor killing—murder under the guise of saving the family’s name” (p. 26). Now, what are the prospects (or practical feasibility) for marriage of a woman who has her ears and nose mutilated for having dishonored her own family, husband, and in-laws in patriarchal Afghanistan or for that matter in patricentric United States? What would be the market value of Aisha’s labor? What kind of labor could a severely mutilated woman like this produce as a slave? Only total ignorance of the Afghan cultural plane and complete disregard for the intelligence of the audience by the American popular media would allow such fabricated prattle to see the light of public print.
Aisha’s disposition could be congenital. It could be caused by a bacterial or viral infection such as cancer, a malady not rare in Afghanistan among both men and women. Or it could be related to an injury caused by firearms or explosives. Harelips and other deformities in the mandible, although rare, occur in the population of Afghanistan. Incidents of human body deformities in Afghanistan have steadily increased with the expanding military interference of the United States going back to the 1980s. These incidents have soared since 2001 with the American occupation and experimentation with weapon systems designed for “population centered wars” in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The non-Paxtun Northern Alliance warlords and their inner circles are the only Afghans that pray and beg for the American military presence in Afghanistan. It was these anti-Paxtun American trained and subsidized terrorist gangs who scouted and pimped for the American occupation of Afghanistan. And it is the Northern Alliance that opposes a political solution in Afghanistan because any such solution would remove them from power and expose and punish their criminal deeds. Amrullah Saleh, a known psychopath and a leading member of this criminal gang who headed Afghanistan’s intelligence services, recently expatiated: “I have killed many of them (Taleban) with pride”, killing “them is part of my blood” (Lara Logan interview on “60 Mintes”, August 1, 2010). The informants for TIME’s reporters of this story are the female dependents of the Northern Alliance criminal clique one of whom is credited with this rabid hateful lie “I go running in the stadium where the Taliban used to play football with women’s heads” (p. 24). This woman is pictured standing in Kabul stadium with three Kabuli teenagers in the background clearly running-in-place! There is not a shred of evidence for a football game played with human heads anywhere at any time in Afghanistan. TIME magazine has truly stooped to the lowest standards in journalism. During the 1990s the Kabul stadium was used once for the public execution of a woman found guilty of violating a Taleban decree.
The American intimate love affair during the past three decades with the various gangs of terrorists including Al-Qaeda, Hezb-e Islami, Northern Alliance, and sporadically the early manifestation of the Taleban movement during the 1990s has inflicted irreparable damage on the political, economic, and security prospects of Afghanistan. The ethnic and sectarian divisions caused by the American military operations and criminal deeds in South Asia has brought the frail state structure of Afghanistan to the verge of total collapse. It has destabilized the whole region. Tens of thousands of innocent and helpless Afghans have been slaughtered by the American Zionist-controlled killing machine. These are war crimes and crimes against humanity for which history will condemn its perpetrators.
On an ethnographic level, the manipulation of the body of the subject human population by the state has historical roots in several culture areas including Europe, the Middle East and South Asia. To this day in the popular lore of non-Paxtun areas of Afghanistan (especially among the Farsi-speaking population) a person, male or female, who compromises the interests and standards of the larger community, is symbolically labeled “beeni borida” (Farsi, one whose nose has been cut, one who has lost his nose, i. e. one who has lost her/his honor, a person without honor). The equivalent of this linguistic construct and its cultural content does not exist among Paxtuns.
However, no matter the untruths and distortions from which TIME’s August 9th cover story is concocted, we need a proper comparative cultural framework for the understanding of abuse of the human body including the practice of mutilation of body parts. An informed glance at global ethnographic realities connects such practices with a relation of power called patriarchy—male domination of society. As a system of ideas and practices patriarchy “is a threat to public health everywhere” (Laura Nader, Anthropology News, September 2006, p. 7) including Afghanistan and the United States. In principle the socio-cultural ingredients involved in the mutilation of the human body in Afghanistan are not different than the socio-cultural forces that impose industrial “vaginal rejuvenation”, “pussy tightening” (JoAnn Wypijewski, The Nation, 9/28/2009, p. 8), and breast enhancement in Euro-America. In no other culturally constructed space are women, womanhood, and femininity so universally abused, exploited, demeaned, and vulgarized than in the Euro-American industry of internet pornography—the biggest money making enterprise in cyberspace. Comparative studies reveal that American domestic violence is approximately 25%–about the same as in Syria and Bolivia (Nader 2006:7). The extensive system of shelters for abused women throughout the United States is symptomatic of a widely practiced tradition of physical and verbal abuse of women by men that is qualitatively not different than the abuse of women by men elsewhere in the world.
TIME, you are a beeni borida!
_________
Addendum by Max Forte:
[“In 2005, 1,181 women were murdered by an intimate partner. That’s an average of three women every day. Of all the women murdered in the U.S., about one-third were killed by an intimate partner” (source). 17.6 % of women in the United States have survived a completed or attempted rape. Of these, 21.6% were younger than age 12 when they were first raped, and 32.4% were between the ages of 12 and 17. 64% of women who reported being raped, physically assaulted, and/or stalked since age 18 were victimized by a current or former husband, cohabiting partner, boyfriend, or date. Only about half of domestic violence incidents are reported to police. The National College Women Sexual Victimization Study estimated that between 1 in 4 and 1 in 5 college women experience completed or attempted rape during their college years. One out of every six American women have been the victims of an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. Factoring in unreported rapes, about 5% – one out of twenty – of rapists will ever spend a day in jail. 19 out of 20 will walk free. The costs of intimate partner violence against women exceed an estimated $5.8 billion. These costs include nearly $4.1 billion in the direct costs of medical care and mental health care and nearly $1.8 billion in the indirect costs of lost productivity and present value of lifetime earnings. A University of Pennsylvania research study found that domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to low-income, inner-city Philadelphia women between the ages of 15 to 44 – more common than automobile accidents, mugging and rapes combined. In this study domestic violence included injuries caused by street crime (see sources).]
Protecting the Shaky Russia-gate Narrative
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the third presidential debate in 2016, during which Clinton called Trump Vladimir Putin’s “puppet.”
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | December 15, 2017
If Russia-gate is the massive scandal that we are told it is by so many Important People — across the U.S. mainstream media and the political world — why do its proponents have to resort to lies and exaggerations to maintain the pillars supporting the narrative?
A new example on Thursday was The New York Times’ statement that a Russian agency “spent $100,000 on [Facebook’s] platform to influence the United States presidential election last year” – when the Times knows that statement is not true.
According to Facebook, only 44 percent of that amount appeared before the U.S. presidential election in 2016 (i.e., $44,000) and few of those ads addressed the actual election. And, we know that the Times is aware of the truth because it was acknowledged in a Times article in early October.
As part of that article, Times correspondents Mike Isaac and Scott Shane reported that the ads also covered a wide range of other topics: “There was even a Facebook group for animal lovers with memes of adorable puppies that spread across the site with the help of paid ads.”
As nefarious as the Times may think it is for Russians to promote a Facebook page about “adorable puppies,” the absurdity of that concern – and the dishonesty of the Times then “forgetting” what it itself reported just two months ago about the timing and contents of these “Russian-linked ads” – tells you a great deal about Russia-gate.
On Thursday, the Times chose to distort what it already knew to be true presumably because it didn’t want to make the $100,000 ad buy (which is not a particularly large sum) look even smaller and less significant by acknowledging the pre-election total was less than half that modest amount – and even that total had little to do with the election.
Why would the Times lie? Because to tell the truth would undercut the narrative of evil Russians defeating Hillary Clinton and putting Donald Trump in the White House – the core narrative of Russia-gate.
Another relevant fact is that Facebook failed to find any “Russian-linked” ads during its first two searches and only detected the $100,000 after a personal visit from Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a leading legislator on Internet regulation.
In other words, Facebook’s corporate executives dredged up something to appease Warner. That way, Warner and the Democrats could blame Russia for the Trump presidency, sparing further criticism of Clinton’s dreadful campaign (in which she labeled half of Trump’s voters “deplorables”) and her neo-liberal economic policies (and neo-conservative foreign policies) that have alienated much of America’s working class as well as many progressives.
Leaving Out Context
The Times also might have put the $100,000 in “Russian-linked” ads over a two-year period in the context of Facebook’s $27 billion in annual revenue, but the Times didn’t do that – apparently because it would make even the full $100,000 look like a pittance.
Trimming the total down to $44,000 and admitting that only a few of those ads actually dealt with Clinton and Trump would be even worse for the Russia-gate narrative.
Ironically, the Times’ latest false depiction of the $100,000 in ads as designed “to influence” the 2016 election appeared in an article about Facebook determining that other Russian-linked ads, which supposedly had a powerful effect on Great Britain’s Brexit vote, totaled just three ads at the cost of 97 cents. (That is not a misprint.)
According to Facebook, the three ads, which focused on immigration, were viewed some 200 times by Britons over four days in May 2016. Of course, the response from British parliamentarians who wanted to blame the Brexit vote on Moscow was to assert that Facebook must have missed something. It couldn’t be that many Britons had lost faith in the promise of the European Union for their own reasons.
We have seen a similar pattern with allegations about Russian interference in German and French elections, with the initial accusations being widely touted but not so much the later conclusions by serious investigations knocking down the claims. [See, for instance, Consortiumnews.com’s “German Intel Clears Russia on Interference.”]
The only acceptable conclusion, it seems, is “Russia Guilty!”
These days in Official Washington, it has become almost forbidden to ask for actual evidence that would prove the original claim that Russia “hacked” Democratic emails, even though the accusation came from what President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper acknowledged were “hand-picked” analysts from the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency.
These “hand-picked” analysts produced the evidence-lite Jan. 6 “assessment” about Russia “hacking” the emails and slipping them to WikiLeaks – a scenario denied by both WikiLeaks and Russia.
When that “assessment” was released almost a year ago, even the Times’ Scott Shane noticed the lack of proof, writing: “What is missing from the [the Jan. 6] public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. … Instead, the message from the agencies essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’”
But the Times soon “forgot” what Shane had inconveniently noted and began reporting the Russian “hacking” as accepted wisdom.
The 17-Agencies Canard
Whenever scattered expressions of skepticism arose from a few analysts or non-mainstream media, the doubts were beaten back by the claim that “all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies” concurred in the conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered the hacking to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump. And what kind of nut would doubt the collective judgment of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies!
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper talks with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, John Brennan and other national security aides present. (Photo credit: Office of Director of National Intelligence)
Though the 17-agency canard was never true, it served an important purpose in establishing the Russia-gate groupthink. Wielding the “all 17 intelligence agencies” club, the U.S. mainstream media pounded politicians and policymakers into line, making any remaining skeptics seem more out of step and crazy.
So, in May 2017, when Clapper (along with former CIA Director John Brennan) admitted in congressional testimony that it wasn’t true that all 17 agencies concurred in the Russian hacking conclusion, those statements received very little attention in the mainstream media.
The New York Times among other major news outlets just continued asserting the 17-agency falsehood until the Times was finally pressured to correct its lie in late June, but that only led to the Times shifting to slightly different but still misleading wording, citing a “consensus” among the intelligence agencies without mentioning a number or by simply stating the unproven hacking claim as flat fact.
Even efforts to test the Russian-hack claims through science were ignored or ridiculed. When former NSA technical director William Binney conducted experiments that showed that the known download speed of one batch of DNC emails could not have occurred over the Internet but matched what was possible for a USB-connected thumb drive — an indication that a Democratic insider likely downloaded the emails and thus that there was no “hack” — Binney was mocked as a “conspiracy theorist.”
Even with the new disclosures about deep-seated anti-Trump bias in text messages exchanged between two senior FBI officials who played important early roles in the Russia-gate investigation, there is no indication that Official Washington is willing to go back to the beginning and see how the Russia-gate story might have been deceptively spun.
In a recently released Aug. 15, 2016 text message from Peter Strzok, a senior FBI counterintelligence official, to his reputed lover, senior FBI lawyer Lisa Page, Strzok referenced an apparent plan to keep Trump from getting elected before suggesting the need for “an insurance policy” just in case he did. A serious investigation into Russia-gate might want to know what these senior FBI officials had in mind.
But the Times and other big promoters of Russia-gate continue to dismiss doubters as delusional or as covering up for Russia and/or Trump. By this point – more than a year into this investigation – too many Important People have bought into the Russia-gate narrative to consider the possibility that there may be little or nothing there, or even worse, that it is the “insurance policy” that Strzok envisioned.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
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The Doctrine of ‘Superior People’: The Bond between Israel and World Zionism
By James Petras :: 09.04.2015
Introduction
The single greatest feat of Israel and its overseas missions has not been material success, or the military conquest of millions of unarmed Palestinians, it has been ideological – the widespread acceptance in the US of a doctrine that claims ‘Jews are a superior people.’
Apart from small extremist rightwing sects who exhibit visceral anti-Semitism and denigrate everything Jewish, there are very few academics and politicians willing to question this supremacist doctrine. On the contrary, there is an incurable tendency to advance oneself by accepting and embellishing on it.
For example, in August 2015, US Vice-President Joseph Biden attributed ‘special genius’ to Jews, slavish flattery that embarrassed even New York’s liberal Jewish intellectuals.
Israel’s dominant role in formulating US Middle East policy is largely a product of its success at recruiting, socializing and motivating overseas Jews to act as an organized force to intervene in US politics and push Israel’s agenda.
What motivates American Jews, who have been raised and educated in the US to serve Israel? After all, these are individuals who have prospered, achieved high status and occupy the highest positions of prestige and responsibility. Why would they parrot the policies of Israel and follow the dictates of Israeli leaders (a foreign regime), serving its violent colonial, racist agenda?
What binds a majority of highly educated and privileged Jews to the most rabidly rightwing Israeli regime in history – a relationship they actually celebrate?
What turns comfortable, prosperous American Jews into vindictive bullies, willing and able to blackmail, threaten and punish any dissident voices among their Gentile and Jewish compatriots who have dared to criticize Israel?
What prevents many intelligent, liberal and progressive Jews from openly questioning Israel’s agenda, and especially confronting the role of Zionist zealots who serve as Tel Aviv’s fifth column against the interest of the United States?
There are numerous historical and personal factors that can and should be taken into account to understand this phenomenon.
In this essay I am going to focus on one – the ideology that ‘Jews are a superior people’. The notion that Jews, either through some genetic, biologic, cultural, historical, familial and/or upbringing, have special qualities allowing them to achieve at a uniquely higher level than the ‘inferior’ non-Jews.
We will proceed by sketching the main outline of the Jewish supremacist ideology and then advance our critique.
We will conclude by evaluating the negative consequences of this ideology and propose a democratic alternative. … continue
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