“Opposing Interventionism In Nation X Means You Love Nation X’s Government!”
By Caitlin Johnstone | December 27, 2019
Every time you speak out against western imperialism in a given nation or question western propaganda narratives about that nation’s government, you will inevitably be accused of loving that nation’s government by anyone who argues with you.
When I say “inevitably”, I am not exaggerating. If you speak in any public forum for any length of time expressing skepticism of what we’re told to believe about a nation whose government has been targeted by the US-centralized empire, you will with absolute certainty eventually run into someone who accuses you of thinking that that government is awesome and pure and good.
I have never, ever had this fail to occur, even once. If I write an article about the mountain of evidence suggesting we were lied to about a chemical attack in Syria, I get people telling me I think Bashar al-Assad is a girl scout who’s never ever done anything wrong. If I express skepticism of the flimsy narratives we’re being fed in the escalating propaganda war against China, I get “If you love Beijing so much and think Xi is so innocent you should go and move to China!” It’s one of the only completely predictable things about this job.
Which is of course idiotic. Understanding that the US government and its allies lie constantly with the full-throated support of western news media in no way suggests a belief that the targeted government in question is wonderful, and there’s absolutely no legitimate reason to infer such a thing. The indisputable fact that US-led military interventionism is universally disastrous and based on lies has nothing to do with anyone’s level of emotional support for the governments targeted for destruction by the US-centralized empire. Yet everyone reading this who’s ever tried to speak out against US foreign policy has encountered the behavior I’m describing here.
Why is that? Why do establishment loyalists engage in such a weird, nonsensical behavior with such reliable consistency? Why do they literally always accuse anyone who questions any narrative about any empire-targeted government of having positive emotions toward that government, even though there is no rational reason for them to do so?
I’ll tell you why: Hollywood.
Well, not just Hollywood. Really the dynamic we’re about to discuss has been going on for as long as there have been war stories. But the dominant storytellers of today are in Hollywood, and that’s where the dominant war stories are told.
For as long as war stories have been told, those stories have been framed as a battle between good and evil. The good side is the side you identify with, and the evil side is the one you want to lose. You see this in almost all depictions of war coming out of Hollywood today, from movies based on actual wars to sci-fi and fantasy films like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings. Over and over and over again from childhood we are trained to assume that mass military violence must have a Good side and an Evil side, so when we see a war being depicted anywhere we immediately start trying to sort out who are the Good Guys and who are the Bad Guys, usually without even thinking about it.
Obviously war isn’t actually about Good versus Evil; usually it’s nothing more noble than geostrategic agenda versus geostrategic agenda. But because people are conditioned from an early age to overlay any ideas about large-scale conflict with this false Good or Evil dichotomy, there’s an immediate assumption that if you’re suggesting that one side might not be Good, then the other side are the Good Guys. If you say the government pushing regime change in Iran is doing something immoral, then you’re saying they’re the Bad Guys, which means you think the Iranian government are the Good Guys.
Yes, the behavior in question really does boil down to something that stupid. This phenomenon where empire apologists will predictably accuse you of loving an empire-targeted nation just because you oppose imperialist agendas is primarily due to a combination of dumb binary thinking and watching too many Hollywood movies. In other words, it’s due to bad information meeting bad thinking.
All we can really do to address this dynamic is bring consciousness to it. When someone’s acting out the unexamined assumption that because you are critical of western imperialism you must necessarily believe that all of its targets are perfect and wonderful, you can point out the absurdity of this position and invite them to think a little harder about it. Or just link them to this article.
Beyond that, all you can really do is understand what you’re looking at, roll your eyes, and sigh.
US civilian contractor killed, multiple servicemen injured in rocket attack on Iraqi base near Kirkuk – reports
RT | December 27, 2019
An American civilian contractor was killed and several service members lightly wounded when several rockets struck an Iraqi military base near Kirkuk, US officials confirmed on condition of anonymity.
The Iraqi military confirmed earlier that multiple service members, including a US contractor and an Iraqi federal police officer, were wounded when “a number of missiles” struck a munitions storage facility in K1 military base on Friday evening. According to one official, the rockets hit as a “major” mission was getting underway.
No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack. However, while Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) terrorist are actively operating in the area using insurgency-style tactics – all recent rocket attacks on bases housing American troops have been pinned, absent any evidence, on “Iranian proxies.”
Washington’s latest load of sanctions against Tehran came complete with an accusation of “weapons of mass destruction proliferation,” while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo several weeks ago threatened Iran with a “decisive US response” if attacks against American interests in Iraq continue.
Senior OPCW official ordered deletion of ‘all traces’ of dissenting report on ‘Douma chemical attack’ – WikiLeaks’ new leak
RT | December 27, 2019
The leadership of the chemical weapons watchdog took efforts to remove the paper trail of a dissenting report from Douma, Syria which pointed to a possible false flag operation there, leaked documents indicate.
In an internal email published by the transparency website WikiLeaks on Friday, a senior official from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) ordered that the document be removed from the organization’s Documents Registry Archive and to “remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever.”
Email from the Chief of Cabinet at the OPCW, demanding deletion of dissenting engineering assessment: “Please get this document out of DRA [Documents Registry Archive]… And please
remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever in DRA”https://t.co/j5Jgjiz8UY pic.twitter.com/8yojf8teFC— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) December 27, 2019
The document in question is a technical assessment written by inspector Ian Henderson after a fact-finding mission to Douma, a suburb of Damascus, in the wake of an alleged chlorine gas attack. Western politicians and media said at the time that the government forces had dropped two gas cylinders as part of an offensive against jihadist forces, killing scores of civilians.
The OPCW inspector said evidence on the ground contradicted the airdropping scenario and that the cylinders could have been placed by hand. Considering that the area was under the control of anti-government forces, the memo lends credence to the theory that the jihadists had staged the scene to prompt Western nations to attack their opponents.
The final report of the watchdog all but confirmed that Damascus was behind the incident, but in the past months an increasing number of leaked documents and whistleblower testimonies have emerged, pointing to a possible fabrication. The OPCW leadership stands accused of withholding opinions contravening the West-favored narrative and using misleading language to report what the inspectors found on the ground.
The alleged email was written by Sebastien Braha, Chief of Cabinet at the OPCW. Its authenticity is yet to be confirmed, but the organization never said any of the previously leaked documents were not real.
Another document published on Friday outlines a meeting with several toxicology experts and their opinions on whether symptoms shown and reported in alleged victims of the attack were consistent with a chlorine gas poisoning. “The experts were conclusive in their statements that there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure,” the document said, adding that the chief expert suggested that the event could have been “a propaganda exercise.”
The Douma incident in April 2018 spurred Western governments into action, with the US, the UK and France delivering a barrage of missiles at what was dubbed chemical weapons sites in Syria days after. This didn’t prevent the government from seizing control over the neighborhood, but put the reputations of the three governments at stake. The OPCW report gave credence to the Western show of force.
Guardian corrects article about Julian Assange embassy ‘escape plot’ to Russia… a year later
RT | December 24, 2019
The Guardian has corrected an article describing a “plot” to “smuggle” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange out of London, more than a year after publication. Russia called the article “disinformation and fake news” from the outset.
Assange is currently languishing in London’s Belmarsh Prison, awaiting a hearing on his extradition to the US where he is facing espionage charges. However, in the run-up to Christmas 2017 he was still safe inside the city’s Ecuadorian embassy. At the time, Assange had become a thorn in the side of Ecuador’s new president, Lenin Moreno, and Moreno was reportedly mulling a plan to offer him a diplomatic post in Russia, shifting him out of the UK and away from the threat of extradition.
When The Guardian reported on the story in 2018, it turned up the drama. Citing anonymous sources, the newspaper described a “plot” to “smuggle” Assange out of London on Christmas Eve, speeding the fugitive publisher away in a diplomatic vehicle and onwards to refuge in Russia. Ultimately, the report claims, the plan was deemed “too risky” and called off.
Though the report painted a picture of a Kremlin-instigated cloak-and-dagger operation, Ecuador would have been well within its rights to grant Assange diplomatic status, had the UK Foreign Office signed off on it. However, plots and plans sell better than backroom diplomatic wrangling, and the paper went with the spy-movie version of events.
It even shoehorned in a paragraph on Assange’s “ties to the Kremlin,” and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ‘Russiagate’ investigation, for good measure.
The Russian embassy in London called the article a clear example of “disinformation and fake news by British media.”
On Sunday, the Guardian itself issued a correction. “Our report should have avoided the words ‘smuggle’ and ‘plot’ since they implied that diplomatic immunity in itself was illicit,” read a statement from the paper.
The correction was made after a complaint from Fidel Narvaez, who served as Ecuador’s London consul at the time of the alleged “plot.” The paper described Narvaez as a middleman between Assange and the Kremlin. Narvaez outright denied any discussions with Moscow.
Though The Guardian corrected its choice of words, the bulk of its story remains as is. The identity of the anonymous sources cited remain a mystery, as does the level of awareness the Russian government had about the plan at any stage in its formation.
As events transpired, Assange was bundled out of the embassy by Metropolitan Police in April, after Ecuador revoked his asylum. He has remained in prison since, with medics and UN observers sounding the alarm over his deteriorating physical and mental health, and comparing the conditions of his confinement to “torture.”
Media ignores explosives revelations about chemical weapons in Syria
By Yves Engler · December 22, 2019
The Canadian media gets a failing grade when it comes to its coverage of chemical weapons in Syria.
Among the basic principles of reporting, as taught in every journalism school, are: Constantly strive for the truth; Give voice to all sides of a story; When new information comes to light about a story you reported, a correction must be issued or a follow-up produced.
But the Canadian media has ignored explosives revelations from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. It’s a stark example of their complicity with belligerent Canadian foreign policy in Syria.
In May 2019 a member of the OPCW Fact Finding Mission in Syria, Ian Henderson, released a document claiming the management of the organization misled the public about the purported chemical attack in Douma in April 2018. It showed that the organization suppressed an assessment that contradicted the claim that a gas cylinder fell from the air. In November another OPCW whistleblower added to the Henderson revelations, saying that his conclusion that the incident was “a non chemical-related event” was twisted to imply the opposite. Last week WikiLeaks released a series of internal documents demonstrating that the team who wrote the OPCW’s report on Douma didn’t go to Syria. One memo noted that 20 OPCW inspectors felt the report released “did not reflect the views of the team members that deployed to [Syria].”
I couldn’t find a single report about the whistleblowers/leaks in any major Canadian media outlet. They also ignored explicit suppression of the leaks.
Journalist Tareq Haddad “resigned from Newsweek after my attempts to publish newsworthy revelations about the leaked OPCW letter were refused for no valid reason.” Haddad wrote a long article explaining his resignation, which detailed how an editor who previously worked at the European Council on Foreign Relations blocked it.
There is an important Canadian angle to this story. Twenty-four hours after the alleged April 7, 2018, chemical attack foreign affairs minister Chrystia Freeland put out a statement claiming, “it is clear to Canada that chemical weapons were used and that they were used by the Assad regime.” Five days later Prime Minister Justin Trudeau supported cruise missile strikes on a Syrian military base stating, “Canada supports the decision by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France to take action to degrade the Assad regime’s ability to launch chemical weapons attacks against its own people.”
Canadian officials have pushed for the organization to blame Bashar al-Assad’s government for chemical attacks since Syria joined the OPCW and had its declared chemical weapon stockpile destroyed in 2013–14. Canada’s special envoy to the OPCW, Sabine Nolke, has repeatedly accused Assad’s forces of employing chemical weapons. Instead of expressing concern over political manipulation of evidence, Nolke criticized the leak.In a statement after Henderson’s position was made public she noted, “Canada remains steadfast in its confidence in the professionalism and integrity of the FFM [Fact-Finding Mission] and its methods. However, Mr. Chair, we are unsettled with the leak of official confidential documents from the Technical Secretariat.”
Amidst efforts to blame the Syrian government for chemical weapons use, Canadian officials lauded the OPCW and plowed tens of millions of dollars into the organization. A June 2017 Global Affairs release boasted that “Canada and the United States are the largest national contributors to the JIM [OPCW-UN Joint Investigative Mechanism for Attributing Responsibility for Chemical Weapons Attacks in Syria].” The statement added that Canada “is the largest voluntary cash contributor to the organization, having provided nearly $25 million since 2012 to help destroy chemical weapons in Libya and Syria and to support special missions and contingency operations related to chemical weapons use, investigation, verification and monitoring in Syria.” Two months after the Douma incident Freeland announced a $7.5 million contribution to the OPCW in a statement heavily focused on Syria.In August Governor General Julie Payette even traveled to The Hague to push OPCW Director-General, Fernando Arias, on Syria. After a “meeting focused on OPCW activities in Syria”, Payette highlighted Canada’s “$23 million in voluntary funds for Syria-related activities.”
Ottawa backed the group that produced the (probably staged) video purporting to show chemical weapons use in Douma. The Liberals backed the White Helmets diplomatically and financially. In a release about the purported attack in Douma Freeland expressed Canada’s “admiration for … the White Helmets”, later calling them “heroes.” Representatives of the White Helmet repeatedly came to Ottawa to meet government officials and Canadian officials helped members of the group escape Syria via Israel in July 2018. Alongside tens of millions of dollars from the US, British, Dutch, German and French governments, Global Affairs announced “$12 million for groups in Syria, such as the White Helmets, that are saving lives by providing communities with emergency response services and removing explosives.”
Credited with rescuing people from bombed out buildings, the White Helmets fostered opposition to Assad and promoted western intervention. Founded by former British army officer James Le Mesurier, the White Helmets operated almost entirely in areas of Syria occupied by the Saudi Arabia–Washington backed Al Nusra/Al Qaeda insurgents and other rebels. They criticized the Syrian government and disseminated images of its purported violence while largely ignoring civilians targeted by the opposition. Their members were repeatedly photographed with Al Qaeda-linked Jihadists and reportedly enabled their executions.
The White Helmets helped establish an early warning system for airstrikes that benefited opposition insurgents. Framed as a way to save civilians, the ‘Sentry’ system tracked and validated information about potential airstrikes.
Canada funded the Hala Systems’ air warning, which was set up by former Syria focused US diplomat John Jaeger. It’s unclear how much Canadian money was put into the initiative but in September 2018 Global Affairs boasted that “Canada is the largest contributor to the ‘Sentry’ project.”
Ottawa is dedicated to a particular depiction of the Syrian war and clearly so is the dominant media. Committed to a highly simplistic account of a messy and multilayered conflict, they’ve suppressed evidence suggesting that an important international organization has doctored evidence to align with a narrative used to justify military strikes.
Journalists are supposed to seek the truth, not simply what their government says. In fact, according to what is taught in J-school, journalists have a special responsibility to question what their government claims to be true.
No journalism program in Canada teaches that governments should always be believed, especially on military and foreign affairs. But that is how the dominant media has acted in the case of Syrian chemical weapons.
Afghan Papers Inadvertently Document WaPo’s Role in Spreading Official Lies
By Joshua Cho | FAIR | December 18, 2019
The Washington Post’s publication of the “Afghanistan Papers” (12/9/19) unveiled over 2,000 pages of unpublished notes of interviews with US officials involved in the Afghanistan War, from a project led by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) to investigate waste and fraud. Hailed by some as the “Pentagon Papers of Our Generation” after the Post won access to those documents under the Freedom of Information Act in a three-year legal battle, the Post’s exposé found that senior US officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.
The paper published direct remarks on the war by US officials who assumed that “their remarks would not be made public”:
“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to US military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”
While more explicit admissions of deception on the part of US officials involved in wars are always appreciated, one question rarely discussed among the reports and opinion pieces praising the “Afghanistan Papers” is what this scoop says about the Washington Post.
If the Post is now publishing material demonstrating that US officials have been “following the same talking points for 18 years,” emphasizing how they are “making progress,” “especially” when the war is “going badly,” shouldn’t the paper acknowledge that it has been cheerleading this same line for all of those 18 years? Doesn’t it have a responsibility to examine how it served as a primary vehicle for those officials to spread these same “talking points” to spin the coverage in the desired fashion?
FAIR has been tracking the Post’s coverage of the Afghanistan War from the very beginning, when the paper—along with the rest of corporate media—was actively following the Bush administration’s “guidance” on how to cover the war. In 2001, a FAIR survey (11/2/01) of the Post’s op-ed pages for three weeks following the September 11 attacks found that
columns calling for or assuming a military response to the attacks were given a great deal of space, while opinions urging diplomatic and international law approaches as an alternative to military action were nearly nonexistent.
Eight years later, FAIR (3/1/09) found that the Post’s cheerleading coverage didn’t change much from 2001, as 7 out of 9 Post op-eds and 4 out of 5 editorials supported some kind of military escalation from the day Barack Obama was elected president (11/4/08) through March 1, 2009, as the US was debating a “surge” of additional troops in Afghanistan later that year.
Another study (Extra!, 11/1/09) of the first ten months of the Post’s opinion columns that same year found that
pro-war columns outnumbered antiwar columns by more than 10 to 1: Of 67 Post columns on US military policy in Afghanistan, 61 supported a continued war, while just six expressed antiwar views. Of the pro-war columns, 31 were for escalation and 30 for an alternative strategy.
The Post offered this lopsided coverage even though there were several polls at the time showing a majority of the US public opposed the war, because they believed that the Afghan War was “not worth fighting.”
The Post also has a history of facilitating official spin for the war. When WikiLeaks posted tens of thousands of classified intelligence documents related to the Afghanistan War, FAIR (7/30/10) found that the Post either dismissed them as not being as important as the Pentagon Papers (7/27/10), or absurdly spun the leaks as good news for the US war effort (7/27/10) because the “release could compel President Obama to explain more forcefully the war’s importance,” and because they “bolstered Obama’s decision in December to pour more troops and money into a war effort that had not received sufficient attention or resources from the Bush administration.”
The Post also buried attempts by whistleblowers and other journalists who were working to expose official lies and war crimes in Afghanistan. When US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning was sentenced to serve 35 years in prison for sharing intelligence documents that first exposed what the “Afghanistan Papers” are now corroborating, the Post, along with other corporate outlets, largely neglected Manning’s legal trials and punishment (FAIR, 12/4/12, 6/18/14, 1/18/17, 4/1/19). The New York Times, to its credit, did give Manning space for an op-ed (6/14/19) to explain why she risked her freedom to expose matters that the US military recorded but left unreported, including hundreds of US military attacks on Afghan civilians. The Post, for its part, found room to publish frequent op-eds by the Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon (e.g., 11/16/09, 6/26/10, 6/3/11, 2/10/13, 7/12/13) spouting the same optimistic US official talking points that the Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” has now exposed as lies (FAIR, 1/3/14).
In fact, one major reason why the Afghanistan Papers are unnecessary to discern deceit from US officials is that—as Michael Parenti pointed out in The Face of Imperialism—when US officials constantly provide new and different justifications for invasions, it’s a sign that they’re being dishonest, not incompetent.
The Post (12/9/19) admits this when it mentions that the US “largely accomplished what it set out to do,” with Al Qaeda and Taliban officials “dead, captured or in hiding,” yet “veered off in directions that had little to do with Al Qaeda or 9/11.” This is consistent with FAIR’s finding (Extra!, 7/11) that corporate media largely ignored the question of whether to end the Afghanistan War after the ostensible goal of the invasion—to capture or kill the leader of the group that carried out the September 11 attack—was [allegedly] accomplished in the death of Osama bin Laden.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that the Post’s Afghanistan Papers have inadvertently exposed the Post as a subservient accomplice in disseminating US official lies; corporate media rely on official sources for free content and “scoops” to subsidize their journalism, which often spreads dishonest but convenient talking points by these same sources to retain “access” to this information, trustworthy or not (Extra!, 5/02; New York Times, 4/20/08; FAIR, 12/12/19).
Political cartoonist and journalist Ted Rall pointed out, in an account (Common Dreams, 12/11/19) of being marginalized by corporate outlets like the Post :
“The Afghanistan Papers” is a bright, shining lie by omission. Yes, our military and civilian leaders lied to us about Afghanistan. But they could never have spread their murderous BS—thousands of US soldiers and tens of thousands of Afghans killed, trillions of dollars wasted—without media organizations like the Washington Post, which served as unquestioning government stenographers.
Press outlets like the Post and New York Times weren’t merely idiots used to disseminate pro-war propaganda. They actively censored people who knew we never should have gone into Afghanistan and tried to tell American voters the truth.
It’s this mutually beneficial relationship between the need for corporate media outlets like the Post for “access” to US official sources, and US officials who need corporate media outlets to propagate their preferred spin on US foreign policy to manipulate public opinion, that explains what the Afghanistan Papers expose as the Post’s own role in deceiving the US public. It’s why the Post’s coverage and editorial board can argue that the Trump administration shouldn’t “abandon the country in haste” (even though it’s been 18 years), and rally around the US’s “forever war” in Afghanistan (FAIR, 1/31/19, 9/11/19), even as the paper investigates the official lies the continuing occupation depends on.
Of course, this is also the reason why it’s systemically impossible for corporate outlets like the Post to take the opportunity to raise more substantive and provocative questions about whether deceit is a constant and essential aspect of US foreign policy, and not merely confined to isolated military invasions of “quagmire” countries like Vietnam and Afghanistan, despite the Afghanistan Papers providing a perfect opportunity to do so. To say nothing of challenging a worldview that invokes “winnable” wars, in which predictions of increasing numbers of (enemy) human deaths are best described as “rosy.”
There’s quite a long history of US media assisting officials in fabricating moral pretexts for invasion—from fictional accounts of North Vietnamese attacks on American destroyer ships in the Gulf of Tonkin (FAIR, 8/5/17), to conflating very different Islamic groups like the Taliban and Al Qaeda, or claims that formerly US-backed dictator Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs and the intent to use them against the US (CounterPunch, 6/11/14; FAIR, 3/19/07).
Observers note that the Afghanistan Papers “only confirm what we already know” (Daily Beast, 12/14/19), or that “the shocking thing about the Post stories… is how unshocking they are” (Atlantic, 12/9/19); even the Washington Post (12/12/19) reminds us that only people who “haven’t been paying attention” to the Afghan War are “surprised” by what’s found in the Afghanistan Papers.
Perhaps instead of pursuing FOIA requests to confirm the obvious, the Post could just interrogate its own contradictory coverage of the Afghan War and stop functioning as credulous mouthpieces for the US government. But to do that would also require confronting the lie that this entire so-called “War on Terror” has any moral credibility, when the US is a leading terrorist state that consciously pursues imperial policies that inflame hatred against the US to serve corporate interests (FAIR, 3/13/19, 11/22/19).
Absent that, an exercise like the Afghanistan Papers come off more as a “please consider” note to the Pulitzer judges than as an earnest effort to use the spotlight of journalistic investigation to speak truth to power and halt the ongoing, generation-long destruction of a foreign nation.
Inside Journalist Tareq Haddad’s Spectacular Departure from Newsweek
A photo of Tareq Haddad is shown from his Twitter profile: @Tareq_Haddad
By Alan Macleod | MintPress News | December 20, 2019
It’s Manufacturing Consent meets Operation Mockingbird; in a long exposé essay that doubles as a goodbye to the profession, Newsweek journalist Tareq Haddad explained why he was very publicly quitting his job at the New York-based magazine. “Journalism is quickly dying. America is regressing because it lacks the truth,” he wrote.
The trigger for his decision was management suppressing his story on the bombshell news that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) hid a mountain of evidence suggesting the 2018 Douma Attack was staged, thus paving the way for more military intervention in Syria. But below the surface, it was about far more than that; Haddad’s essay described how journalists are worked to the bone and how media drives the public towards war, coordinating smears against politicians who stand against it. But most spectacularly of all, he alleges that there is a network of hundreds of government assets working as high-level editors in newsrooms across America, even naming the one at Newsweek.
Haddad knew the consequences of speaking out:
In the end, that decision was rather simple, all be it I understand the cost to me will be undesirable. I will be unemployed, struggle to finance myself and will likely not find another position in the industry I care about so passionately. If I am a little lucky, I will be smeared as a conspiracy theorist, maybe an Assad apologist or even a Russian asset—the latest farcical slur of the day,” he wrote.
MintPress News reached out to him for comment. He responded that he was certain that there were more capable and well-meaning reporters like him that could come forward. “Hopefully, those journalists will have the courage to push the issue with their editors or face the embarrassment the industry will experience when the truth of the matter is revealed to all,” he stated.
Newsweek was not alone in failing to report on the OPCW revelations. Virtually the entirety of the mainstream press (with the exception of Tucker Carlson) ignored or downplayed the findings that cast the Syrian Civil War in a considerably different light. In contrast, MintPress News, with a tiny budget compared to corporate media, has covered the story closely. Unsurprisingly, they have shown little interest in Haddad’s exposé of their corruption either.
“In any functioning democracy the Tareq Haddad affair should occupy mainstream media for weeks” Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Professor Emeritus of Bowling Green State University (Department of Journalism and Communications) told MintPress News. However, he noted, “We have neither a fully functioning democracy nor the uncontaminated information ecosystem that would enable such a thing.” Newsweek, for the record, claimed that the matter was much more mundane: “The writer pitched a conspiracy theory rather than an idea for objective reporting. Editors rejected the pitch,” it said in a statement.
The “conspiracy theory” referenced is that multiple whistleblowers have come forward to publicly accuse the OPCW of suppressing their evidence in order to reach a predetermined conclusion about the Douma attacks– one that supported military intervention. On the new evidence, former head of the OPCW Dr. Jose Bustani said it “confirmed doubts and suspicions I already had” about the incoherent report, claiming that “the picture is clearer now, although very disturbing.”
Truth, Haddad wrote, is “the most fundamental pillar of this modern society we so often take for granted,” claiming that, despite going into the profession after reading radical critiques of the media like Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, and knowing others (like Chris Hedges) had been fired for opposing war, “I believed that honest journalism could be done. Nothing I read, however, came close to the dishonesty and deception I experienced while at Newsweek.”
He spoke of constantly self-censoring and modifying his language as to not rock the boat and how staff were totally overworked. Haddad himself wrote an average of four articles per day on complicated topics he admitted he often had no experience with whatsoever. This is a phenomenon called “churnalism” by academics, where reporters are turned into cogs in giant news machines, churning out vapid and shallow writing or copying corporate press releases for the profit of the outlet. This is one reason why trust in media has been falling since the 1970s, and particularly in the last few years.
He also discusses how the media manufactured public consent for military intervention in Syria. One example of this was his boss’s refusal to publish another of his stories questioning the legitimacy of Bana Alabed, the youthful face of the pro-intervention movement. Meanwhile, those who stand up against war are smeared as assets of foreign powers. He condemns what he describes as coordinated attacks launching “preposterous accusations” against antiwar voices such as Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.
Academics found the case remarkable, but not particularly unusual. When asked for comment by MintPress News, Tabe Bergman, Lecturer in Journalism at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China replied,
“Sadly, the resignation of Tareq Haddad is merely the latest in a long series of dedicated journalists quitting their job at mainstream news organizations that try to squeeze every penny out of the ‘news product’ while placating the powers that be.”
Operation Mockingbird 2.0
Perhaps the most truly alarming claim Haddad makes in his tell-all treatise is that there is a network of hundreds of deep state assets placed into newsrooms across the country, working to control what the public sees and hears, planting stories and quashing others. As he says:
“The U.S. government, in an ugly alliance with those that profit the most from war, has its tentacles in every part of the media — imposters, with ties to the U.S. State Department, sit in newsrooms all over the world. Editors, with no apparent connections to the member’s club, have done nothing to resist. Together, they filter out what can or cannot be reported. Inconvenient stories are completely blocked.”
Dr. Boyd-Barrett compared his revelations to Operation Mockingbird, a widespread CIA infiltration of hundreds of agenda-setting news outlets throughout the United States during the 20th century, placing agents in key positions or persuading existing reporters to work with them. “The use of journalists has been among the most productive means of intelligence‑gathering employed by the CIA,” wrote the legendary investigative journalist Carl Bernstein, who broke the story for Rolling Stone in 1977. As such, Boyd-Barrett told us there is “nothing essentially new” with Haddad’s exposé:
“Discerning critics have long assumed the wholesale penetration of our media ecosystem and universities by intelligence agencies and other special interests and every so often something emerges accidentally to confirm their worst fears.”
While initially fearing he might never work in the profession again, Haddad said that he is still weighing his options and is considering crowdfunding as a model to finance new investigations as an independent journalist.
“There are numerous stories that haven’t had the attention they deserve in the mainstream press and they are well worth investigating further. Also, it’s worth noting that because of my initial piece, several journalists have reached out to me with information I wasn’t previously aware of so there are several threads to be investigated more,” he revealed.
Haddad’s exposé of the corruption and collusion at the heart of modern journalism is something long-discussed by academics such as Bergman and Boyd-Barrett, but rarely does such a clear example present itself. His account undermines the credibility of the entire for-profit corporate model of news that prevails across the world, precisely the reason why you are unlikely to hear about it on CNN or in the New York Times.
Alan MacLeod is a MintPress Staff Writer as well as an academic and writer for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. His book, Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting was published in April.
The 12 Strongest Arguments That Douma Was A False Flag
By Caitlyn Johnstone | December 20, 2019
There have been many US military interventions that were based on lies. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is not some kooky blogger’s opinion. It is an extensively documented and indisputable fact.
Nothing has ever been done to address this extensively documented and indisputable fact. No laws were ever changed. No war crimes tribunals were ever held. No policies or procedures were ever revised. No one was ever even fired. No changes were implemented to prevent the Iraq deception from happening again, and, when it happened again, no changes were implemented to prevent the Libya deception from happening again.
When you make a mistake, you take measures afterward to ensure that you never make the same mistake again. When you do something on purpose, and you intend on doing it again, you do not take any such measures.
There is a large and growing body of evidence that we have been lied to about Syria to an extent and to a level of sophistication that may be historically unprecedented. One particular aspect of the US-centralized empire’s military involvement in that nation, the 2018 airstrikes by the US/UK/France alliance and the alleged chemical weapons incident which preceded it, has been subject to intense scrutiny ever since it took place. And with good reason: there are many pieces of evidence indicating that the Douma incident was staged to falsely implicate the Syrian government.
I don’t claim to know exactly who would have been involved in such a staging and to what extent. It is technically possible, as the UK’s Admiral Lord West speculated at the time, that it was perpetrated independently by the vicious al-Qaeda-linked Jaysh al-Islam forces who’d been occupying Douma, a last-ditch attempt to provoke a western military response that might save them from the brink of defeat at the hands of the surging Syrian Arab Army. Jaysh al-Islam has an established record of deliberately massacring civilians, and of using civilians as military leverage by locking them in cages on rooftops in strategic Douma locations to prevent airstrikes. The narrative management operation known as the White Helmets would also have been involved to some extent, and it’s very possible that Saudi Arabia, who backs Jaysh al-Islam, was involved as well.
Any number of other allied intelligence agencies could have also been involved to some degree (perhaps with the more expanded goal of ensuring continued US military commitment in Syria during an administration that is vocally opposed to it), and it’s unknown if anyone involved would have had direct contact with any part of any US government agency regarding any of this. All we know for sure is that there’s a growing mountain of evidence that the Syrian government was not involved, and that this raises extremely important questions about (A) who really killed those civilians in Douma and (B) how seriously any future demands for military action should be taken from the US power alliance.
That mountain of evidence includes the following 12 items. Taken individually they are reason enough to be skeptical of the narratives that are being promoted by a government with a known history of using lies, propaganda and false flags to advance preexisting military agendas. Taken together, and looked at with intellectual honesty, they are enough to obliterate anyone’s trust in what we’ve been told about Douma.
1. A leaked OPCW Engineering Assessment concluded that the gas cylinders on the scene were manually placed there.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is a purportedly neutral and international watchdog group dedicated to eliminating the use of chemical weapons around the world. In May of this year, a leaked internal OPCW document labeled “Engineering Assessment of Two Cylinders Observed at the Douma Incident” was published by the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media. The Engineering Assessment was signed by a South African ballistics expert named Ian Henderson, whose name is seen listed in expert leadership positions on OPCW documents from as far back as 1998 and as recently as 2018, and its authenticity was quickly confirmed by the OPCW in a statement sent to multiple journalists that it was “conducting an internal investigation about the unauthorised release of the document in question.”
Henderson ran some experiments and found no scientifically grounded theory for how the cylinders could possibly have been dropped vertically from the air while being found in the condition and locations that they were found in, concluding instead that they were manually placed on the scene. This is a huge difference, since the Assad coalition was the only side with aircraft and Jaysh al-Islam were the only forces on the ground.
“The dimensions, characteristics and appearance of the cylinders, and the surrounding scene of the incidents, were inconsistent with what would have been expected in the case of either cylinder being delivered from an aircraft,” Henderson wrote. “In each case the alternative hypothesis produced the only plausible explanation for observations at the scene.”
“In summary, observations at the scene of the two locations, together with subsequent analysis, suggest that there is a higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft,” Henderson concludes.
This is unsurprising, since the hypothetical physics of the empire’s airdrop narrative make no sense to anyone with any understanding of how material objects move. To get a simple explanation of this, watch the breakdown in this three-minute animation. For a more in-depth look, check out this long Twitter thread by Climate Audit’s Stephen McIntyre.
The existence of Henderson’s report was kept secret from the public by the OPCW, which might make more sense after we get through #2 on this list.
2. US officials reportedly pressured the OPCW to find evidence of Assad’s guilt.
https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1196246809070444545?s=20
In addition to whoever leaked the Henderson report in May, a second whistleblower going by the pseudonym of “Alex” emerged in October to give a presentation before the whistleblower’s advocacy group Courage Foundation exposing far more plot holes in the official Douma narrative. This same whistleblower also spoke with award-winning British journalist Jonathan Steele, who published a bombshell report on Alex’s revelations in CounterPunch last month.
Among the most stunning revelations in Steele’s article was Alex’s report that US officials attempted to pressure OPCW inspectors during the Organisation’s drafting of its Interim Report on their Douma investigation in July 2018, and that this intercession was facilitated by an OPCW official named Bob Fairweather.
“On July 4 there was another intervention,” Steele writes. “Fairweather, the chef de cabinet, invited several members of the drafting team to his office. There they found three US officials who were cursorily introduced without making clear which US agencies they represented. The Americans told them emphatically that the Syrian regime had conducted a gas attack, and that the two cylinders found on the roof and upper floor of the building contained 170 kilograms of chlorine. The inspectors left Fairweather’s office, feeling that the invitation to the Americans to address them was unacceptable pressure and a violation of the OPCW’s declared principles of independence and impartiality.”
It’s unknown what forces were at play that enabled the US government to insert itself into into an ostensibly impartial OPCW investigation with the help of an OPCW official, but it wouldn’t be the first time the US government leveraged the Organisation into facilitating preexisting regime change agendas against a disobedient Middle Eastern nation. In 2002 Mother Jones reported that the US government, spearheaded by John Bolton, had used the threat of withdrawing its disproportionately high percentage of funding from the Organisation if it didn’t oust its then-Director General Jose Bustani. The popular Bustani, who’d previously been unanimously re-elected to his position, had been hurting the case for war with his successful negotiations with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. In March 2018, after Bolton was selected as Trump’s National Security Advisor, The Intercept revealed that the campaign to remove Bustani had also included Bolton personally threatening his children.
Bolton was operating at the highest levels of the Trump White House throughout the entire duration of the OPCW’s Douma investigation. He was Trump’s National Security Advisor from April 9, 2018 to September 10, 2019. The OPCW’s Fact-Finding mission didn’t arrive in Syria until April 14 2018 and didn’t begin its investigation in Douma until several days after that, with its final report being released in March of 2019.
3. Levels of chlorinated organic chemicals didn’t indicate any chlorine gas attack took place.
“The main point is that chlorine gas degrades rapidly in the air,” Jonathan Steele told Tucker Carlson last month detailing what was told to him by Alex. “So coming in two weeks later, you wouldn’t find anything. What you would find is that the gas contaminates or affects other chemicals in the natural environment. So-called chlorinated organic chemicals [COCs]. The difficulty is they exist anyway in the natural environment and water. So the crucial thing is the levels: were there higher levels of chlorinated organic chemicals found after the alleged gas attack than there would have been in the normal environment?”
“When they got back to the Netherlands, to The Hague where the OPCW has its headquarters, samples were sent off to designated laboratories, then there was a weird silence developed,” Steele continued. “Nobody told the inspectors what the results of the analysis was. It was only by chance that the inspector found out through accident earlier the results would come in and there were no differences at all. There were no higher levels of chlorinated organic chemicals in the areas where the alleged attack had happened where there is some suspicious cylinders had been found by opposition activists. So it didn’t seem possible that there could have been a gas attack because the levels were just the same as in the natural environment.”
“[Alex] got sight of the results which indicated that the levels of COCs were much lower than what would be expected in environmental samples,” Steele reported in CounterPunch. “They were comparable to and even lower than those given in the World Health Organisation’s guidelines on recommended permitted levels of trichlorophenol and other COCs in drinking water. The redacted version of the report made no mention of the findings.”
“Had they been included, the public would have seen that the levels of COCs found were no higher than you would expect in any household environment”, Alex told Steele.
This inconvenient fact was omitted from both the OPCW’s Interim Report in July 2018 and its Final Report in March 2019.
4. Many signs and symptoms of alleged chlorine gas poisoning weren’t consistent with chlorine gas poisoning.
https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1187001753192919041?s=20
The OPCW’s Final Report on Douma in March 2019 assures us that the team found “reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place. This toxic chemical contained reactive chlorine. The toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine.” A leaked internal OPCW email, featuring an inspector voicing objections to the aforementioned Bob Fairweather over vital information being omitted from the developing Interim Report on Douma, contradicts this assurance, saying observed symptoms weren’t consistent with chlorine gas poisoning.
“In this case the confidence in the identity of chlorine or any choking agent is drawn into question precisely because of the inconsistency with the reported and observed symptoms,” the email reads. “The inconsistency was not only noted by the FFM [Fact-Finding Mission] team but strongly noted by three toxicologists with expertise in exposure to CW [Chemical Weapons] agents.”
So the OPCW’s investigative team as well as three toxicologists said what was observed didn’t match chlorine gas poisoning symptoms. This information was, of course, hidden from us by the OPCW.
A leaked first draft of the Interim Report on Douma, before OPCW officials started cutting out chunks which didn’t suit the US narrative, gives more detail. Here are some excerpts (emphases mine):
“Some of the signs and symptoms described by witnesses and noted in photos and video recordings taken by witnesses, of the alleged victims are not consistent with exposure to chlorine-containing choking or blood agents such as chlorine gas, phosgene or cyanogen chloride. Specifically, the rapid onset of heavy buccal and nasal frothing in many victims, as well as the colour of the secretions, is not indicative of intoxication from such chemicals.”
“The large number of decedents in the one location (allegedly 40 to 45), most of whom were seen in videos and photos strewn on the floor of the apartments away from open windows, and within a few meters of an escape to un-poisoned or less toxic air, is at odds with intoxication by chlorine-based choking or blood agents, even at high concentrations.”
“The inconsistency between the presence of a putative chlorine-containing toxic chocking or blood agent on the one hand and the testimonies of alleged witnesses and symptoms observed from video footage and photographs, on the other, cannot be rationalised. The team considered two possible explanations for the incongruity:
a. The victims were exposed to another highly toxic chemical agent that gave rise to the symptoms observed and has so far gone undetected.
b. The fatalities resulted from a non-chemical-related incident.”
5. A doctor in Douma told journalist Robert Fisk that there was no gas poisoning.
Shortly after the Douma incident a video was circulated online and redistributed on news media around the world featuring people being hosed down with water in a hospital and an infant receiving a respiratory treatment. A doctor who worked in the hospital Assim Rahaibani gave the following account to journalist Robert Fisk days after the incident, saying those in the video were actually just suffering from hypoxia due to dust inhaled after a conventional bombing:
“I was with my family in the basement of my home three hundred metres from here on the night but all the doctors know what happened. There was a lot of shelling [by government forces] and aircraft were always over Douma at night – but on this night, there was wind and huge dust clouds began to come into the basements and cellars where people lived. People began to arrive here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a ‘White Helmet’, shouted ‘Gas!’, and a panic began. People started throwing water over each other. Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia – not gas poisoning.”
Lest anyone accuse Fisk of having any special loyalties to the Syrian government, in this same report he says it “is indeed a ruthless dictatorship.”
6. A BBC reporter said he has proof that the hospital scene was staged.
https://twitter.com/Dalatrm/status/1095677403198906369?s=20
The BBC, another establishment that can hardly be accused of Assad loyalism, saw its Syria producer Riam Dalati claiming earlier this year that he had proof beyond a doubt the aforementioned hospital scene was staged. While holding to the establishment line that the attack did happen, Dalati expressed uncertainty as to what if any chemical would have been used and said “everything else around the attack was manufactured for maximum effect.” Emphases mine:
“The ATTACK DID HAPPEN, Sarin wasn’t used, but we’ll have to wait for OPCW to prove Chlorine or otherwise,” Dalati tweeted. However, everything else around the attack was manufactured for maximum effect. After almost 6 months of investigations, i can prove without a doubt that the Douma Hospital scene was staged.”
“No fatalities occurred in the hospital,” Dalati continued. “All the White Helmets, activists and people i spoke to are either in Idlib or Euphrates Shield areas. Only one person was in Damascus. Russia and at least one NATO country knew about what happened in the hospital. Documents were sent. However, no one knew what really happened at the flats apart from activists manipulating the scene there. This is why Russia focused solely on discrediting the hospital scene.”
In other words, Russia knew that these “activists” were staging the scene for the news media, and understandably focused on discrediting their work.
“I can tell you that Jaysh al-Islam ruled Douma with an iron fist,” Dalati added. “They coopted activists, doctors and humanitarians with fear and intimidation.”
Dalati set his account to private for an extended period after these extremely controversial statements got him a flood of attention, but the thread is up on Twitter as of this writing (here’s an archive in case they vanish again).
7. More evidence the Douma scene was knowingly staged for media.
https://twitter.com/Dalatrm/status/984011488938643456?s=20
Riam Dalati also tweeted evidence after the attack that people had staged the corpses of two children to make it appear as though they died hugging each other for the purpose of emotional manipulation. If you’ve got a strong stomach (seriously think hard about whether this is something you want in your head before diving in), Stephen McIntyre also compiled some disturbing proof of dead infants being physically placed on top of other corpses in between video shoots of the Douma incident’s aftermath.
Whoever was positioning these bodies for the cameras clearly had a goal of generating an emotional response from the outside world. Which would be precisely the goal of staging a false chemical weapons attack.
8. Witness testimony at The Hague.
https://twitter.com/NeilClark66/status/989761664680521728?s=20
Seventeen Syrian civilians, including medical personnel and some of the “victims” seen in the aforementioned hospital footage, spoke at the OPCW headquarters in The Hague saying that no chemical weapons attack took place. RT reports:
“There were people unknown to us who were filming the emergency care, they were filming the chaos taking place inside, and were filming people being doused with water. The instruments they used to douse them with water were originally used to clean the floors actually,” Ahmad Kashoi, an administrator of the emergency ward, recalled. “That happened for about an hour, we provided help to them and sent them home. No one has died. No one suffered from chemical exposure.”
The briefing was boycotted by the US and 16 of its allies and was smeared as an unconscionable Russian hoax by media outlets ranging from Sky News to Al Jazeera to The Guardian to The Intercept, apparently for no other reason than that what these Syrians were saying didn’t match the unsubstantiated claims being promoted by the political/media class of the US-centralized empire. If you want to just listen to what the Syrians themselves say and make up your own mind, RT has an English translation video here:
9. The first OPCW Director General finds the glaring irregularities and omissions from the OPCW’s Douma report “very disturbing”.
After the aforementioned Courage Foundation presentation given by Alex this past October, the aforementioned former OPCW Director General Jose Bustani (the one whose kids John Bolton threatened) had this to say:“The convincing evidence of irregular behaviour in the OPCW investigation of the alleged Douma chemical attack confirms doubts and suspicions I already had. I could make no sense of what I was reading in the international press. Even official reports of investigations seemed incoherent at best. The picture is certainly clearer now, although very disturbing”
“I have always expected the OPCW to be a true paradigm of multilateralism. My hope is that the concerns expressed publicly by the Panel, in its joint consensus statement, will catalyse a process by which the Organisation can be resurrected to become the independent and non-discriminatory body it used to be.”
10. This OAN reporter literally just walking around asking people in Douma what they saw.
11. MIT Professor Emeritus Theodore Postol speaking about the plot holes and irregularities in scientific protocol with the Douma investigation.
12. Common sense: Assad stood nothing to gain from launching a chemical attack, while Jaysh al-Islam fighters stood everything to gain by faking one.
This is the initial reason why critical thinkers were so skeptical of the establishment Douma narrative: from the very beginning, it made no sense at all.Click this hyperlink to read a BBC article dated five days before the Douma incident, describing how the Syrian government “appears poised to regain control” of the town and how Jaysh al-Islam fighters were already evacuating. The battle was won. Assad would have stood absolutely nothing to gain from tempting a retaliation from western powers (which could have been far more severe than it ended up being) all to drop a couple of cylinders of chlorine gas, which incidentally is a highly ineffective weapon that ordinarily takes a very long time to kill.
Jaysh al-Islam (and whoever else they may have been working with), on the other hand, would have stood everything to gain by murdering a few of the civilians they had been holding captive in the town they’d invaded in the hopes that western forces would become their airforce for a bit and hold off the Syrian Arab Army from reclaiming Douma.
“Why would Assad use chemical weapons at this time? He’s won the war,” Major General Jonathan Shaw told The Mail on Sunday at the time. “That’s not just my opinion, it is shared by senior commanders in the US military. There is no rationale behind Assad’s involvement whatsoever. He’s convinced the rebels to leave occupied areas in buses. He’s gained their territory. So why would he be bothering gassing them?”
“The jihadists and the various opposition groups who’ve been fighting against Assad have much greater motivation to launch a chemical weapons attack and make it look like Assad was responsible,” the ex-SAS and Parachute Regiment commander added. “Their motivation being that they want to keep the Americans involved in the war – following Trump saying the US was going to leave Syria for other people to sort out.”
Admiral Lord West made similar comments on the BBC around the same time, prompting BBC host Annita McVeigh to flip into frantic narrative management mode suggesting that he’s “muddying the waters” during an “information war with Russia”.
“President Assad is in the process of winning this civil war, and he was about to take over Douma, all that area,” West said. “He’d had a long, long, long slog slowly capturing that area of the city, and there just before he goes in and takes it all over, apparently he decides to have a chemical attack. It just doesn’t ring true. It seems extraordinary, because clearly he would know that there’s likely to be a response from the allies. What benefit is there for his military? Most of the rebel fighters, this disparate group of Islamists, had withdrawn, there were a few women and children left around. What benefit was there militarily in doing what he did? I find that extraordinary.”
“Whereas we know that in the past some of the Islamo groups have used chemicals, and of course there’d be huge benefit in them labeling an attack as coming from Assad, because they would guess quite rightly that there would be a response from the US as there was last time, and possibly from the UK and France,” West added.
“If I were advising some of the Islamist groups, many of whom are worse than Daesh,” West said, “I would say look, we’ve got to wait until there’s another attack by Assad’s forces, particularly if they’ve got a helicopter overhead or something like that and they’re dropping barrel bombs, and we set off some chlorine. Because we’ll get the next attack from the allies. And there’s no doubt that if we believe he’s done a chemical attack we should do that. And those attacks will get bigger, and it’s the only way they’ve got, actually, of stopping the inevitable victory of Assad.”
These are not Assad sympathizers or Kremlin assets saying this. These are not a bunch of hippie dippie anti-imperialists. These are lifelong military men, thinking in military terms, describing what they were seeing. And what they were seeing is the thing that a false flag is.
https://twitter.com/ShoebridgeC/status/1206347865729183746?s=20
And now here we are. The US is still illegally occupying Syria in spite of Trump’s repeated verbiage about getting out, and those children are still dead.
This isn’t just some idle philosophical question. People died. A massive war crime occurred and the more minutes tick by before a legitimate investigation is launched–with full transparency and accountability this time–the less available evidence there will be. Which is why establishment narrative managers on Syria go full dead-weight when asked if they support a full criminal investigation into what happened. They don’t actually believe it will go their way, and rightly so.
Meanwhile the illegal occupation of Syria drags on, perhaps until Trump can be replaced with a more compliant puppet, and we’re all basically just sitting around waiting to be deceived again.
This cannot continue. This must not continue.
UN reiterates that it can’t verify US allegations against Iran in Aramco attacks
Press TV – December 20, 2019
The UN Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs Rosemary DiCarlo has reiterated earlier remarks by the UN General Secretary that the body cannot verify US claims blaming Iran for attacks on Saudi Arabia’s Aramco oil facilities.
DiCarlo made remarks during a UN Security Council briefing on the eighth report of the Secretary General on the implementation of resolution 2231 which endorsed the Iran nuclear deal in 2015.
“At this time, we are unable to independently corroborate that the cruise missiles, or the recovered components we inspected, are of Iranian origin,” she said speaking of alleged missile debris related to the September 14 attack on the oil facilities.
“We have recently received confirmation that some of the cruise missile components were, in fact, not made by the identified manufacturers but could have been copies,” she added.
DiCarlo also said the Secretariat is “unable to independently corroborate” whether drones used in the operation were of “Iranian origin”.
The attacks, which successfully halved the Saudi kingdom’s oil production, were claimed by Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement and were in response to Riyadh’s nearly five-year onslaught against the country.
The operation displayed a significant advancement in Yemeni military capabilities, successfully striking one of Riyadh’s most important and also most heavily protected assets.
Washington, however, which has provided the bulk of Saudi Arabia’s air defense systems, was quick to blame Iran following the attack without providing any conclusive evidence to back up its claims.
Washington’s allegations against Tehran came at a time when Saudi officials had said that they lacked enough information to identify the perpetrator of the attack.
Washington’s jump to blame Tehran for the attack came as the operation, conducted by Yemen’s ragtag military forces, was widely seen to be undermining the efficiency of Washington’s much-prized Patriot surface-to-air missile systems deployed in Saudi Arabia.
Two days following the attack, Russian President Vladimir Putin pointed to the utter failure of the US defense systems, mockingly suggesting that Saudis may be better off buying Russian-made missile defense systems.
Washington insists on blaming Iran
On Thursday, Washington claimed that it had obtained new evidence blaming Iran for the attack.
A US report, cited by Reuters, said Washington “assessed that before hitting its targets, one of the drones traversed a location approximately 200 km to the northwest of the attack site”.
“This, in combination with the assessed 900 kilometer maximum range of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), indicates with high likelihood that the attack originated north of Abqaiq,” the report said, referring to the location of one of the oil facilities.
Speaking with Reuters, US Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook said the newly-declassified information proved that Iran was behind the operation.
“As many nations have concluded, there are no plausible alternatives to Iranian responsibility,” he said.
Hook’s comments come despite the fact that Washington’s own report stopped short of claiming that Iran was the origin of the attack.
“At this time, the US Intelligence Community has not identified any information from the recovered weapon systems used in the 14 September attacks on Saudi Arabia that definitively reveals an attack origin,” Reuters quoted the report as saying.
Addressing the Security Council on Thursday, Iran’s Ambassador to the United Nations Majid Takht-Ravanchi vehemently rejected Washington’s accusations regarding the Aramco operation.
He also described US sanctions on Iran as being “economic terrorism” targeting ordinary people as well as different sectors of the Iranian economy.
UN slams US JCPOA withdrawal
Speaking on Thursday, DiCarlo also urged for the full and effective implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) to “secure tangible economic benefit to the Iranian people”.
“We therefore regret the withdrawal of the United States from the JCPOA in May 2018,” she added.
Washington reimposed economic sanctions which had been lifted under the deal after withdrawing from the deal last year.
“Certain actions taken by the United States, since its withdrawal from the Plan, are contrary to the goals of the Plan,” she said.
“The reimposition of its national sanctions lifted under the Plan, as well as its decision not to extend waivers for the trade in oil with Iran and certain non-proliferation projects, may also impede the ability of Iran and other Member States to implement the Plan and 2231,” she added.
The UN official said Iran has stated that the suspension of its JCPOA commitments in response to the failure of signatories of the JCPOA to uphold the agreement, “are reversible and that it intends to remain in the Plan”.
“In this regard, the recent decisions by Belgium, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway to also join the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX) are positive developments,” she added.
Why Western Media Ignore OPCW Scandal
Strategic Culture Foundation | December 20, 2019
The credibility of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is on the line after a series of devastating leaks from whistleblowers has shown that the UN body distorted an alleged CW incident in Syria in 2018. The distortion by the OPCW of the incident suggests that senior directors at the organization were pressured into doing so by Western governments.
This has grave implications because the United States, Britain and France launched over 100 air strikes against Syria following the CW incident near Damascus in April 2018. The Western powers rushed to blame the Syrian government forces, alleging the use of banned weapons against civilians. This was in spite of objections by Russia at the time and in spite of evidence from independent investigators that the CW incident was a provocation staged by anti-government militants.
Subsequent reports by the OPCW later in 2018 and 2019 distort the incident in such a way as to indict the Syrian government and retrospectively exculpate the Western powers over their “retaliatory” strikes.
However, the whistleblower site Wikileaks has released more internal communications provided by 20 OPCW experts who protest that senior officials at the organization’s headquarters in The Hague engaged in “doctoring” their field reports from Syria.
Copies of the doctored OPCW reports are seen to have suppressed important evidence casting doubt on the official Western narrative claiming that the Syrian government was to blame. That indicates the OPCW was engaged in a cover-up to retrospectively “justify” the air strikes by Western powers. This is a colossal scandal which implies the US, Britain and France wrongly attacked Syria and are therefore guilty of aggression. Yet, despite the gravity of the scandal, Western media have, by and large, ignored it. Indicating that these media are subordinated by their governments’ agenda on Syria, rather than exposing the truth as independent journalistic services.
An honorable exception is Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson who has given prominence to the scandal on US national TV. So too has veteran British journalist Peter Hitchens who has helped expose the debacle in the Mail on Sunday newspaper.
Apart from those sources, the mainstream Western media have looked away. This is an astounding dereliction of journalistic duty to serve the public interest and to hold governments to account for abusing power.
Major American news outlets have been engrossed in the Trump impeachment case over his alleged abuse of power. But these same media have ignored an arguably far more serious abuse of power with regard to launching missiles on Syria over a falsehood. That says a lot about the warped priorities of such media.
However, their indifference to the OPCW scandal also reflects their culpability in fomenting the narrative blaming the Assad government, and thereby setting up the country for military strikes. In short, the corporate media are complicit in a deception and potentially a war crime against Syria. Therefore they ignore the OPCW scandal.
That illustrates how Western news media are not “independent” as they pompously claim but rather serve as propaganda channels to facilitate their governments’ agenda.
An enlightening case study was published by Tareq Haddad who quit from Newsweek recently because the editors censored his reports on the unfolding OPCW scandal. Haddad explained that he had important details to further expose the OPCW cover-up, but despite careful deliberation on the story he was inexplicably knocked back by senior editors at Newsweek who told him to drop it. There is more than a hint in Haddad’s insider-telling that senior staff at the publication are working as assets for Western intelligence agencies, and thus able to spike stories that make trouble for their governments.
Given the eerie silence among US, British and European media towards the OPCW scandal it is reasonable to posit that there is a systematic control over editorial policies about which stories to cover or not to. What else explains the blanket silence?
The scandal comes as Western powers are attempting to widen the powers of the OPCW for attributing blame in such incidents. Russia has objected to this move, saying it undermines the authority of the UN Security Council. Given the scandal over Syria, Russia is correct to challenge the credibility of the OPCW. The organization has become a tool for Western powers.
Russian envoy to the OPCW and ambassador to the Netherlands Alexander Shulgin says that Moscow categorically objects to expanding the OPCW’s functions and its powers of attributing blame. The extension of powers is being recommended by the US, Britain and France – the three countries implicated in abusing the OPCW in Syria to justify air strikes against that country.
The Russian envoy added: “The OPCW’s attribution mechanism is a mandate imposed by the US and its allies, which has nothing to do with international law and the Chemical Weapons Convention’s provisions. Any steps in this direction are nothing more than meddling in the UN Security Council’s exclusive domain. We cannot accept this flagrant violation of international law.”
Thus, the OPCW – a UN body – is being turned into a rubber-stamp mechanism by Western powers to legalize their acts of aggression. And yet despite the mounting evidence of corruption and malfeasance, Western corporate media studiously ignore the matter. Is it any wonder these media are losing credibility? And, ironically, they have the gall to disdain other countries’ media as “controlled” or “influence operations”.
Democrat advice for ‘combating online disinformation’ is common sense buried under hypocrisy and censorship
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | December 19, 2019
There is actually some good advice in the Democratic National Committee’s five suggestions for avoiding “disinformation” online. Too bad it’s buried in hypocrisy and promotion of literal disinformation shops, grifters and frauds.
On Tuesday, as Democrats launched their final impeachment push in the House of Representatives, the DNC posted a set of recommendations to its followers to protect themselves from “disinformation.” While the jokes about flogging the dead horse of ‘Russiagate’ write themselves at this point, some of the advice offered is actually quite solid.
For instance, it makes perfect sense to actively seek out information from multiple sources. The DNC spoils it, however, by insisting the sources have to be “authoritative.” As in what, approved by the Party? Well, no, merely by the self-appointed gatekeepers such as MediaBiasFactCheck and NewsGuard.
We’ve written about NewsGuard before. As for MBFC, it lists the Alliance for Securing Democracy – operators of the ridiculous Hamilton68 dashboard – and Bellingcat as “least biased” news sources. Enough said.
“Ask yourself who the author of online content is,” also amounts to good advice. That too is tempered by the realization that in its more commonplace, lazy form it amounts to identity politics: stuff “our” people create has to be correct, while anything done by “them” is suspect.
The third point is perhaps the strongest: “When you share, make sure you are sharing content that is true and helpful to others, not as a knee-jerk reaction to content that angers or scares you.”
One only wishes the Democrats would take their own advice, given how widespread the “woke rage clickbait” business model has become. A whole bunch of online outlets have catered to hate-clicks of Democrats perpetually aggrieved by Donald Trump’s presidency, until they went out of business and fired their staff.
The fourth piece of advice urges people to “try to inject truth into the debate” using fact-checkers like Snopes or PolitiFact. Leaving aside the proliferation of partisan fact-checkers and the whole industry of “arguments” based on redefining the meaning of words, this method is somewhat of a rare bird – mainly because of too many people following points two and three too literally, and generally launching personal attacks rather than debating the issues.
By far the worst offender, however, has to be the fifth point, urging DNC followers to “educate” themselves by reading a variety of articles, books and reports that actually peddle outrageous propaganda.
For example, one of the recommended resources is a report on disinformation by New Knowledge – a Democrat-funded shop that literally faked an army of Russian “bots” to sway a 2017 US Senate race in Alabama.
Another is a New York Times “documentary” on a Soviet conspiracy to “tear the West apart” that tells more about its authors than anything they claim.
Other recommendations include “smart civil society groups” that are literally disinformation shops run either by the Democrats themselves (Media Matters for America), or the Atlantic Council and NATO (Disinfo Portal). There is also Graphika, an outfit currently employing the Atlantic Council’s former chief troll-hunter Ben Nimmo, a disinformation story unto himself.
But wait, there’s more! Among the recommended authorities are Russiagate pushers Clint Watts and Malcolm Nance, CNN and MSNBC authorities on “disinformation” and “Russian bots” despite being repeatedly and colossally wrong on everything pretty much all the time.
Needless to say, DNC’s advice has attracted far more derision than appreciation on Twitter, with responses dominated by snark along the lines of “Tell us more about this and the Steele dossier,” or “disinformation [is] information that doesn’t lead to election of Democrats.”
Nor was all of the negative feedback from conservatives. “Coming from those who rigged the 2016 Democratic primary, no thanks. I don’t take advice from criminals,” quipped one diehard Bernie Sanders fan.
Tough luck, Democrats. Do better.
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Book Review
In 2014, Michael Parenti Wrote A Prophetic Article About Ukraine
The Dissident | January 28, 2026
This week, the influential left-wing scholar Michael Parenti passed away at the age of 92.
Parenti was well known for his sharp criticism of U.S. foreign policy and U.S. imperialism throughout his life, waking up many to the reality of it and the lies used to justify it.
This is best underscored in one of his last published articles, “Ukraine and Regime Change”, which was published in the book “Flashpoint In Ukraine: How the U.S. Drive for Hegemony Risks World War III”, where he predicted to a tee what the result of the 2014 U.S. backed coup in Ukraine would be. … continue
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