On the day the Israeli Defence Force massacred dozens of unarmed Palestinians in Gaza and maimed over 400 more, our media has carefully avoided the use of the word massacre. Here is a Google search of News I did five minutes ago on the word “massacre”.
A massacre occurred today in which more people were killed than at Glencoe. All of them were unarmed and the majority were well over a hundred yards from the border fence. It says everything about the kind of nightmare fascist state Israel now is, that if you look through those news results for “massacre”, the only mention you get of Palestinians is a claim by the Israeli Defence Force that the Palestinian Defence Forces were planning a massacre of Israelis.
The Turkish government have now come out with a statement condemning the massacre, and in the UK the Daily Express and the Daily Star have both reported that; but both have chosen to put the word “massacre” in the Turkish statement into inverted commas, as though it were not true.
The Western media far prefers the word “clashes” to “massacre”. Because those terrible Palestinians insist upon demonstrating against the continuing theft of all their land and resources, and keep attacking innocent Israeli bullets with their heads and bodies. If you look through the Google search of News this time for “clashes”, you discover that the western and Israeli media peculiarly have precisely the same preference for this entirely inappropriate word. That, again, is fascinating.
The gross injustice of the apartheid state of Israel appears immutable. The overwhelming force of the political and financial Establishment is behind Israel in the West, in the Russian oligarchy and even in most of the horribly corrupt leadership of Arab states. But the situation is not as dire as it seems, because the hold of those Establishment elites on the people they exploit has never been more shaky. Israel remains a touchstone issue. In order to help redress the terrible agony of the Palestinians, we must first effect a change in our own system of elite exploitation of the people at home. That change is coming.
In the age of globalization during the last quarter of the 20thcentury, the English language achieved global hegemony as the “lingua franca” for international communication. It is no small coincidence that during this same time, after the end of the Cold War, the US rose as the sole and dominant superpower with stated aims to achieve global hegemony. Just as English was the language of the British Empire, so English retained its imperial role when the US Empire succeeded that of the British. And as has been said of language, the power to control language is the power to control minds.
As a result, a number of countries realized that if they wanted to have a say in global affairs, they were going to have to be able to say it in English. In other words, unless they were happy with the embedded worldviews in the news narratives of CNN and the BBC and preferred no voice of their own, then they were going to have to create their own international broadcasts in English. Moreover, since the Internet revolutionized communications during this same time period, it became much easier to broadcast and thus imperative for countries to project their own perspectives on global affairs and engage in international discourse on issues that concerned them. Hence, at the end of the 20thcentury and particularly during the beginning of the 21stcentury, English news broadcasts sprang up from around the world to compete with established news organizations.
So, that’s the backdrop and context for the grand entrance of the state-sponsored broadcast station, Russia Today (RT), onto the global media arena in 2005. When Margarita Simonyan was appointed editor-in-chief (at the age of 25), she stated that RT would provide the same professionalism of mainstream international news channels but would “reflect Russia’s opinion of the world” and provide a “more balanced picture” of Russia. The late Danny Schechter, a renowned journalist who was on the staff of CNN at its launching, saw something similar at RT’s launching, describing it as another channel “of young people who are inexperienced, but very enthusiastic about what they are doing.”
However, almost immediately, Western pundits, officials, and MSM cried “foul,” as Cold War stereotypes of “communist propaganda” resurfaced. When RT began airing its counter-hegemonic narratives, challenging mainstream (particularly US) news coverage through Internet and satellite broadcasts, it quickly attracted millions of viewers throughout the world. It seemed that the more popular RT became, the more alarmed the US and the West became, accusing RT of being a “propaganda bullhorn” of Putin, spewing disinformation and lies.
So, is this true? Is RT merely Kremlin propaganda, spreading disinformation and lies, or is it a platform to present a more balanced picture of Russia, expressing the Russian perspective on global affairs? In my opinion, from extensive viewing of the news coverage and programs offered by RT, I would say that RT critics’ “propaganda” claim does not hold up to close scrutiny and is, in fact, propaganda itself; on the other hand, the alternate claim of offering a “balanced picture of Russia” and expressing the “Russian perspective,” though certainly closer to the truth than the “propaganda” claim, is not a truly accurate description of RT either. In other words, while the news coverage can be said to reflect the Russian perspective on global affairs, most of the hosts are not Russian; moreover, as far as providing insight into Russia and everything “Russian,” proportionally speaking, only a fraction of the programming or coverage revolves around Russia or Russian affairs.
So, now that I’ve told you what RT isn’t, I’ll explain what it is, the reason why I view and support it, and why I think the US establishment, including its corporate media, has been fiercely attacking RT and are out to shut it down. To put it plainly, RT is the #1 international broadcast that allows a platform for alternative narratives and dissenting views to be expressed. Just take a look at the hosts of the “shows” section of RT’s website, and you’ll understand what I mean. These are very independent-minded individuals, whose dissenting views are simply not allowed on MSM; in fact, some of them, like Larry King, Ed Schultz, and Thom Hartmann,[1] held celebrity status on MSM and only joined the RT staff because they were free to air their views without censorship. Ed Schultz, for example, stated that, unlike the usual censorship tactics of MSNBC, RT never quizzed him in advance about his guests or the content of his show; instead, he says that the very reason he likes RT is because of its policy of absolute freedom of speech. Imagine that! Here we have Ed Schultz, a media refugee from MSM, stating that, unlike MSNBC, he’s allowed to say anything he wants to on RT, without any editorial oversight whatsoever.
This is quite phenomenal when you consider the outrageous charges of American politicians and the corporate media that RT is a mere “propaganda tool of the Kremlin,” and that those who work at RT are “useful idiots’ or “Putin’s puppets.” Really? Just take a look at the kind of individuals, most of them Americans or British, hosting their shows on RT. These are very independent, very smart people who refuse to be anyone’s “puppet”; in fact, the very reason they came to RT was because they didn’t want to be puppets of the corporate media. Do you really believe that people like Larry King, Ed Schultz, Thom Hartmann, Jesse Ventura, Chris Hedges, Lee Camp, and George Galloway are all stooges for Putin? Give me a break.
The fact that their portrayal of RT is a complete fabrication tells you who the real propagandists are, who truly are guilty of spreading disinformation and lies to the public. Yes, in spreading their malicious lies about RT, they reveal themselves, and if they are deceiving you about this, they are probably deceiving you about just about everything else too. Actually, MSM has been in the public deception business for quite some time; as long as it’s good for the ratings, it’s called “news.”
Take the RussiaGate conspiracy theory, for example, which has zero evidence to support it with. Is it “hacking,” “collusion,” or “trolls?” I forget which meme is current. Similar to the various justifications (one after the other, all of them lies) to support the Iraq War, as soon as one conspiracy is debunked, it is followed by another, in the blink of a media eye, without comment on the fraudulent nature of the prior allegation, as in Orwell’s novel, as if it didn’t exist. And the familiar villain, the usual suspect, the Russian whipping boy, comes to their rescue once again.
Several months ago I penned a piece in CounterPunch about the anti-Russia hysteria that’s been sweeping the nation, so I won’t rehash that. However, what I find telling is that a disproportionate amount of this hysteria is actually directed at Russia Today. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at the FBI report in January of 2017, based on the investigation of supposed Russian interference into the 2016 election: roughly a quarter of it is about RT. When you think of it, that’s a large percentage devoted to a media outlet, especially when you consider that RT was never all that pro-Trump. As I mentioned, RT has a diverse blend of the hosts of featured programs, and they were anything but homogeneous in their views on the presidential candidates. It’s true that Peter Lavelle, the host of CrossTalk, believed that Trump should be given a chance, and Larry King gave a favorable interview to Trump; on the other hand, a number of other hosts were highly suspicious and critical of Trump. Okay, well, I admit that there wasn’t a whole lot of support for Hillary Clinton on RT, it’s true, but when you compare lackluster support for Clinton on RT with the overwhelming support that she enjoyed on CNN, can you really justify the claim that RT “interfered” in the 2016 election and CNN didn’t? The FBI report is a joke, really, as a CNN producer described it in private – a “nothing burger.”
So, if it’s true that Putin made so much effort to interfere in the American elections to ensure that Trump would win, and if it’s true that RT is Putin’s propaganda arm, then why didn’t Putin do more to use RT to propagandize in favor of Trump? Are you telling me that the tepid support of Trump on RT was the best propaganda that Putin could come up with? As an ex-KGB officer, I’m sure he could do better than that. It’s the same kind of “nothing burger” sock pocket, failed hot dog sales people that Mueller indicted – the 13 Facebook trolls who failed to wake Sleeping Beauty but were indicted for trying.
Okay, I realize I’m getting into fantasy here, but that’s my point: its total fantasy that MSM has been spinning 24/7. Wake up, people, and smell the Rachel Maddow koolaid you’ve been drinking; these people are professional liars – it’s what they do for a living. When RT’s press credentials were withdrawn at the White House, when their algorithms were suppressed on Google, Twitter, and Facebook, when the Russian Consulate in San Francisco was raided at hardly a moment’s notice, and when RT was singled out and forced to register as a “foreign agent” with FARA – an unprecedented move against a single media outlet – where was CNN or MSNBC? Did they protest this blatant form of media censorship? Only when Russia retaliated with a tit-for-tat response did they even mention it. And this media silence, aside from reporting on the Russian response, was not only true in the case of MSM, but sadly enough, Democracy Now! joined the media silence. Not a word was uttered in protest of this outrageous attack on the press freedom of RT. It boggles the mind to think that no one seemed to consider that this was not just an attack on RT but an attack on the freedom of press everywhere: to attack one is to attack all, especially when the justifications are based on “trumped up” allegations, which essentially boil down to: “We say Russia Today is a propaganda bullhorn of the Kremlin, and because we say it, you should believe us. After all, have we ever lied to you?” And then all the media bows down and assents to this madness. Forgive me if I’m not impressed with fairy tale logic.
To sum up, I support RT mostly because they are professionals and feature a line-up of fantastic programs and documentaries, which are informative and insightful. As far as I’m concerned, whether it serves Putin’s “agenda” (whatever that is) is beside the point. What matters is the authenticity of the journalism. Americans should be grateful for this source of alternative views that challenge homogeneous and hegemonic “mainstream” narratives. While all media either have some interest to serve or ideology to peddle, the health of the media in general can only be measured by its diversity. So, it’s not about whether you “agree” or “disagree” with the Russia Today broadcast; more importantly, the principle of fair play in media access and reach is crucial for the health and future of democracy. That’s why I support Russia Today, and so should you.
Notes
[1] Though no longer at RT, Tom was the host of “The Big Picture” for at least a couple of years and left the broadcast on good terms.
The British government has given the self-described ‘impartial’ Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) £194,769.60 for a project to help fund “communications equipment and cameras,” according to journalist Peter Hitchens.
The Sunday Mail’s Hitchens, a regular critic of British foreign policy, tweeted on Sunday: “Boris Johnson’s Foreign Office admits it gave £194,769.60 to the supposedly ‘independent’ Syrian Human Rights Observatory. How many other ‘independent’ bodies in the Syrian controversy aren’t as ‘independent’ as they look?”
The SOHR declares on its website that it’s “not associated or linked to any political body.” Hitchens in his Sunday Mail blog asks: “Is Boris Johnson’s Foreign Office not a political body?” Hitchens appears to question the legitimacy of the relationship, in relation to the Syrian conflict “in which the British government clearly takes sides.”
Fellow Mail journalist and author of ‘Not the Chilcot Report,’ Peter Oborne has added that the “Syrian Observatory has been treated as a gold standard for information on Syria. Quoted by BBC all the time. Always described as independent.”
The group has come under criticism, being accused by some as a tool of Western propaganda due to its location and lack of staff. Its operation is managed by one man in Coventry in the UK, Rami Abdurrahman, who fled Syria in 2000. He relies on a handful of Syrians to assist him in collating information from “more than 230 activists on the ground”, a network of people from his youth, reports New York Times.
Abdurrahman’s neutrality on the Syrian conflict came under fire when he told Reuters in 2011 he would return to Syria only “when Bashar al-Assad goes,” and according to CNN, was part of a delegation of Syrian opposition officials that met with the then-Foreign Secretary William Hague, that same year.
It’s not the only Syrian-focused human rights group to come under the spotlight with accusations of questionable neutrality because of UK government links. The White Helmets, officially known as the ‘Syria Civil Defence’ has also come under fire. Since 2011, the UK has provided the organization with £38.4m of funding, a freedom of information request has revealed, as reported in The Guardian.
The group operates in areas under the control of the Syrian opposition forces, including Islamist rebels such as Jaysh al-Islam, who controlled the city of Douma until recently, and the location of the latest alleged chemical weapons attack.
According to reports, Theresa May is preparing to increase funding to the White Helmets in response to media claims that President Donald Trump is to withdraw US support for the organization. In March, Trump froze a $200m (£148m) package of US aid to Syria, including money for the White Helmets.
The US President has said he would like to see his country relieve itself of military and humanitarian duties in Syria, calling on other countries to help fill the financial void to fund stabilizing and rebuilding projects in the country after the fight against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), claims ABC news.
Addressing parliament on Wednesday, the UK PM said: “We do support them [the White Helmets], we will continue to support them and … the international development secretary will be looking at the level of support in the future.”
Two Syrian groups claim to be impartial, yet are happy to receive funding from the UK government who, as Hitchens says, are clearly taking sides on the Syrian conflict.
Over the years Western media have developed a journalistic shorthand of repetition, for conveying distortions and imperial hypocrisy about Venezuela.
A Reuters article (4/18/18) reports that the European Union “could impose further sanctions on Venezuela if it believes democracy is being undermined there.”
The line nicely illustrates the kind of journalistic shorthand Western media have developed, over years of repetition, for conveying distortions and whitewashing gross imperial hypocrisy about Venezuela. A passing remark can convey and conceal so much.
The EU’s sincerity in acting on what it “believes” about Venezuelan democracy is unquestioned by the London-based Reuters. Meanwhile Spain, an EU member, is pursuing the democratically elected president of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, for the crime of organizing an illegal independence referendum last year. Weeks ago, he was arrested in Germany at Spain’s request, and other elected representatives have been arrested in Catalonia, where Spain’s federal government deposed the elected regional government after the referendum.
In July 2017, a few months before the referendum in Catalonia, Venezuela’s opposition also organized an illegal referendum. One of the questions asked if the military should obey the opposition-controlled National Assembly, which was an extremely provocative question, given the opposition’s various efforts to overthrow the government by force since 2002. The referendum required an extremely high level of political expression, organization and participation. It allegedly involved 7 million voters.
The Venezuelan government disregarded the results—as Spain disregarded the Catalan referendum results—but unlike Spain, did not jail people for organizing it, or send police to brutally repress voters. In fact, two weeks later, Venezuelan voters (overwhelmingly government supporters, since the opposition boycotted and did not field candidates) were violently attacked by opposition militants when they elected a constituent assembly. The attacks resulted in several deaths.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has hardly failed to call attention to the hypocrisy of both the EU and Spain, but the Reuters article made no mention of it.
Reuters also reported that “the country’s two most popular opposition leaders have been banned from competing” from Venezuela’s presidential election on May 20. Reuters didn’t name the two supposedly “most popular opposition leaders,” but in the past (e.g., 4/12/18, 2/28/18, 2/19/18) the wire service has identified them as Leopoldo Lopez and Henrique Capriles. As it happens, according to the opposition-aligned pollster Datanalisis, whose results have been uncritically reported by Western media like Reuters for years, opposition presidential candidate Henri Falcón has been significantly more popular than Capriles in recent months, and barely less so than Lopez.
Mark Weisbrot (in an opinion piece for U.S. News, 3/3/18) broke the news that U.S. government officials had been secretly pressuring Falcón not to run, so that the election could be discredited as including no viable opposition candidate. Two weeks later, Reuters (3/19/18) discreetly reported Weisbrot’s scoop.
However, by far the most important thing Reuters neglects telling readers about the “two most popular opposition leaders” is that had they done in the EU what they’ve done in Venezuela since April 2002, Lopez and Capriles would both be serving long jail terms.
Capriles and Lopez together led the kidnapping of a government minister during a briefly successful U.S.-backed military coup in 2002 that ousted Venezuela’s democratically elected president, the late Hugo Chávez, for two days. Lopez boasted to local TV that the dictator installed by the coup (whom Lopez called “President Carmona”) was “updated” on the kidnapping.
Imagine what Carles Puigdemont’s predicament would be if, rather than organizing a peaceful referendum, he had participated in a foreign-backed, ultimately unsuccessful military coup against the Spanish government. Needless to say, running for public office would not be on the table. That would be the least of his worries.
In Venezuela, Capriles eventually served a few months in prison for participating in the coup, while Lopez avoided doing any time, thanks to a general amnesty granted by Chávez. Lopez was finally arrested in 2014 for leading another violent effort to overthrow the government.
I’ve reviewed before (teleSUR, 1/9/18) violent efforts to overthrow the government that Lopez, Capriles and other prominent opposition leaders have been involved with since the 2002 coup. I also described how Julio Borges and Henry Ramos (two other prominent opposition leaders) have openly sought to starve the Venezuelan government of foreign loans as it struggles with a severe economic crisis.
In August, Trump’s administration imposed sanctions on Venezuela’s entire economy that will cost Maduro’s government billions of dollars this year (FAIR.org, 3/22/18). It has threatened to go even further, brandishing an oil embargo or even a military attack. With sufficiently compliant media (and the collusion of big human rights NGOs like Amnesty International), such depravity becomes possible.
The Reuters article also says that Venezuela’s economic “collapse has driven an estimated 3 million people to flee the country.” No need to tell readers when the economic “collapse” began—2014—much less who made the estimates or if other sources contradict them. In fact, the U.N.’s 2017 population division numbers estimate Venezuela’s total expat population as of 2017 at about 650,000—only about 300,000 higher than it was when Chávez first took office in 1999. Even a group of fiercely anti-government Venezuelan academics estimated less than 1 million have left since the economic crisis began. (See FAIR.org, 2/18/18.)
Cherry-picked statistics aside, when Western powers want a democratically elected government overthrown, the approach is clear. Complete tolerance for violent foreign-backed subversion—which the powerful states and their allies would never be expected to tolerate—becomes the test for whether or not a state is a democracy. The targeted government fails the test, is depicted as a dictatorship, and all is permitted. Only the tactics required to bring it down need be debated.
Joe Emerberger is a writer based in Canada whose work has appeared in Telesur English, ZNet and Counterpunch.
The Great March of Return is a nonviolent protest that Palestinians in Gaza started on March 30 in order to serve notice to Israel that the Palestinians have never given up on their right, as refugees, to return to the homes and villages taken from them in the Nakba and thereafter. Since the onset of the March, residents of Gaza have gathered on the Gaza side of the border. The Gazans have been met with lethal violence from Israel. In addition to live fire, Israeli forces have used rubber-coated metal bullets and tear gas grenades against protesters, medical crews and journalists. As of May 7, Israel has killed forty seven Palestinians and wounded 7000. No Israelis have been wounded.
Israel has shown its usual genius for controlling the narrative, and has justified its brutal response as ‘defending the border’ although in fact, no Palestinians have successfully crossed the border.
Until bad publicity ended the practice or at least the filming of it, young Israelis displayed the hubris of the oppressor, crowding on bleachers to watch Gazans get shot. Although no Israeli has been wounded, the American media continues to describe the event as if both sides were fighting with equal brutality.
At first glance it seems little has been gained by the besieged Gazans. Palestinians remain stuck with the ‘terrorist’ label. But it is not Palestinians who are evicting people from their homes, stealing their land, or setting up apartheid roads and streets on Palestinian land. And it is not the Palestinians who have forced people into Gaza, making it the most densely populated land in the world, the world’s largest open air prison camp.
The Palestinian protest brings to light the scale of Israeli fearfulness, it may even be possible that Israeli’s deadly aggression points at Jewish guilt. After all, the Israelis know who are the indigenous people of the land they occupy.
By any reasonable measure, it is the Israelis who are the terrorists. Israel currently holds 6500 Palestinians incarcerated, including 500 held indefinitely in “administrative detention” without trial or charges, 350 children, six lawmakers and 700 who require urgent medical attention. Israel has been particularly brutal to Palestinian children. Since 2000, an estimated 10,000 Palestinian children have been detained and prosecuted in military courts. Various international human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, and Israeli groups, such as B’Tselem, have documented the fact that Israel subjects Palestinian children to abuse and torture, both physical and psychological.
Thus it is clear that the Great March of Return is an effort to fight what has become an intolerable situation for Palestinians. This is why Gazans, many of them refugees, are willing to march unarmed to the border when the response is so violent. The intention to make the March a peaceful protest was a deliberate one, designed to put the lie to Israel’s depiction of itself as a victim to remind the Israelis who the true people of the land are and to highlight the brutality of the occupation under which Palestinians live.
It might be instructive to look at the Great March of Return in comparison to two of the great nonviolent movements of the twentieth century, India throwing off British rule and the fight against legal segregation (Jim Crow laws) in the American south. As in Gaza, in India and in the civil rights movement, the protestors were initially accused of being the perpetrators of violence.
Gandhi pioneered the concept of ‘Satyagraha,’ literally meaning ‘holding firmly to truth’ and as the term has come to mean, non violent protest. Although Gandhi championed Satyahraha for moral reasons, Gandhi had no better weapon available to effectively resist the British. Prior to Gandhi’s rise to power, Congress Party militants had committed individual ‘terrorist’ acts that had had little effect, and the people who mounted local uprisings were brutally suppressed. In one such protest in the province of Amritsar, Muslims and Hindus staged a massive protest. The British response, the massacre known as Jallianwala Bagh, was deliberately savage in order to produce a “moral effect” as General Dyer said. The British murdered at least 400 Indians, and followed the executions with a wave of random arrests, torture and public floggings.
Satayagraha presented an alternative to the usual response of protest followed by everyday submission to oppression. In fact, Gandhi accused the British rule of being particularly despicable because it left the Indians helpless and emasculated through its systems of taxation and class divisions. India, having been robbed of its economic and moral strength, was in no position to get into an armed conflict with the British. Satyagraha and its resultant publicity was simply the most effective strategy available to expose the injustice of British rule and to display the righteousness of Gandhi’s cause.
Although King read and admired Gandhi, his rationale for nonviolent protest was slightly different. King led nonviolent protests to highlight the extreme violence of the other side. King believed that there “was a deep, incurable sickness in our militaristic society, something that could not be fixed without radical change.”
Blacks in the south did not have access to the power of the state and its weaponry. King sympathized with the frustrations of Black rioters and regarded the threat of violence by Blacks as overstated by the United States. He told American leaders they lacked the moral authority to instruct Black citizens to disavow violence. “The users of naval guns, millions of tons of bombs, and revolting napalm can not speak to Negroes about violence,” he said.
Eventually the televised pictures of violent attacks perpetrated by police and civic leaders against unarmed men, women and children made support for Jim Crow laws less tenable. The federal government was forced to step in to protect the Black protestors and to avoid such federal intrusion, many of the Jim Crow laws were repealed.
Both Gandhi and King understood that their movements were too large to be won through negotiation. Nonviolent protest did not bring immediate results in either case. But by using nonviolence to highlight the violence that the ruling class used to keep the oppressed in their places, King and Gandhi were able to create a shift in the narrative to allow others to understand an intolerable situation. In some ways, these huge issues are not exactly “winnable.” “The grievances were not simply the material kind, which could be solved by slight adjustments to the status quo,” 1960s activist Hayden wrote.
I believe that the situation for Palestinians has reached that point where negotiation by interest groups is not possible. Israel has made clear that there are no two states available for a two state solution. Increasingly it seems that the only equitable long term solution is for Israel to recognize the Palestinian right of return and to become a country of all of its people.
Gaza does not possess the weaponry to fight Israel, but it does have the will to protest. We are in the early stage of a mass nonviolent protest and civil disobedience to an illegitimate authority. With time, perhaps the Gazans’ Palestinian brothers in the West Bank will join a similar protest. The brave soldiers of the great march of return have done more to expose the brutality of the Israeli regime than any violence, however well justified. Israel has proved its willingness to shoot thousands of unarmed Palestinians. Israel is outnumbered if not outarmed.
Can they really shoot millions without the world reacting?
If you have wondered why our Media is biased you may reach the conclusion that the media is not the solution but is a continuation of the problem. It is to us to demand that our media cover the conflict impartially and expose the very real hunting game that the Israeli Army is playing in Gaza.
Theresa May has confirmed that the UK will continue to fund the White Helmets, after the US withdrew £200 million ($271 million) in Syrian aid – including money that would go to the controversial group.
During PMQs Labour’s Matthew Pennycook, the Greenwich and Woolwich MP pushed the PM on whether or not she would continue to fund the The White Helmets, officially known as the Syria Civil Defence, a volunteer group that operates in areas controlled by jihadist and Al-Qaeda-linked groups in Syria.
“Despite the ever-present threat of death… the rescue workers of the White Helmets have never stopped saving the lives of their fellow Syrians,” Pennycook said. “Last week the Trump administration froze their US funding.
“With thousands of civilian lives at risk will the prime minister step up, pledge the government to plug the funding shortfall that now exists, and ensure these heroic rescue workers can continue their work?”
May did not hesitate in her response, praising the efforts of the non-governmental search-and-rescue organization.
“We recognise the very important and valuable work that the White Helmets are doing,” she said. “They are, as he says, doing this in horrendously difficult conditions. They are incredibly brave to be continuing with that work.”
The UK PM then pledged to review the current financial package for the White Helmets, hinting at further funding down the track. “We do support them, we will continue to support them, and my right honourable friend, the international development secretary will be looking at the level of that support in the future,” May said.
Although the White Helmets say they act solely as a makeshift emergency response team in a time of crisis, claiming to have heroically saved more than 70,000 lives in war-torn Syria, others question its motives. Footage from Syria has repeatedly appeared to show members of the White Helmets assisting jihadist groups, while multiple accounts from civilians suggested they only helped “their own” and use civilians caught up in conflict only for publicity.
Gina Haspel is almost certainly going to be the next director of the CIA. This shouldn’t happen, but it will.
For those unfamiliar: Haspel was deputy head of the Agency under now-secretary of state Mike Pompeo. But that wasn’t her first job. She also oversaw the CIA torture programme in a secret black-site in Thailand. In 2005 she was promoted (probably because she’s really good at torturing people), and was then in charge of the CIA’s global network of torture sites.
This makes her a terrible person, but probably quite a good CIA agent.
Just to be clear, this is not a theory a rumor or a smear. Nobody debates these facts. This was her job. She supervised torture camps.
The response in the press is pretty disheartening, to be honest. Or, at least would have been, before reading the news and being outraged became my full-time unpaid job.
This story, from CNBC, went with a beautifully disgusting headline:
Trump picks Gina Haspel as first female CIA director—her history with torture could hamper her confirmation
Her “history with torture” doesn’t mean she should be in prison, doesn’t mean she’s an inhuman monster, doesn’t even make her exempt from government office, no. It just might be a bit of a complication. Like a drunk-driving conviction or an affair with a porn star. Torturing people is an embarrassing faux pas.
… deciding to headline her genitalia rather than her long history of breaking international law. I would suggest “She could be the first torturer to ever run the CIA” as a better headline. It is, unfortunately, not true… but that’s never stopped CNN before.
The HuffPoat least has the sense to be seemingly undecided about it, just not in the way that you’d think:
Gina Haspel’s dark past makes her a complicated figure for feminists to support.
“Complicated” to support, is an interesting phrase. Some might have gone with “impossible” or “morally repugnant”. Trying to turn this into some kind of ethical quandary for feminists is offensive. Rather like the Guardian’s pitiful attempts to show the sympathetic side of the soldiers in the Abu Ghraib torture pictures.
Speaking of The Guardian… our trusty friend has a new story on Haspel today… its headline?
Gina Haspel must atone for her past to become CIA director
They don’t exactly say how one “atones” for a past as a professional torturer, but then this is The Guardian. There’s not to reason why, there’s just to puff out comfy certitude.
It refers to the detention and torture of people who were never charged or faced trial as “one of the darker chapters in modern US history”… which feels so much like simultaneous under and over statement, it’s actually hard to correct.
It’s NOT one of the darker chapters in US history, ancient or recent. But only because of everything else The Guardian refuses to report on. Torturing a few hundred people is nothing compared to starving 500,000 Iraqi children to death, when you think about it.
The Western press tend to talk about torture as if it was a temporary blip, an accident. A speed bump on our moral high-road. It is none of those things. The West LOVES torture, we have a long tradition of it. The CIA wrote handbooks on it in the 1960s. America tortured people for decades before they got caught. They claim to have stopped now, but they would have claimed they never started… before the leaks happened. It’s almost certainly still going on. Believing otherwise is just naive.
Our side tortures people. People who probably don’t know anything and never did anything.
… not that being guilty or having information justifies torture. That’s the rhetorical trap the media sets around torture. The debate about “effectiveness”.
We don’t ban torture because it doesn’t work, just like we don’t eat babies because it’s expensive and we don’t ban slavery because it’s really hard to find good chains. Even addressing the pragmatic angle is inappropriate. Torture is wrong, and a civilised society does not question that fact.
Of course, the “moral ambiguities” around torture are only for our side. The other side have no ambiguity. If they use torture – even only allegedly – then they are evil. Assad’s (thus far theoretical) torture prisons are one of the reasons we should invade Syria. (You remember, Amnesty International recreated one using echo-location). Unfounded accusations of torture have been levelled at Cuba and Venezuela over the years too.
It’s “torture” when they do it, you understand. Not “enhanced interrogation”. It’s “not who we are”, but it IS who THEY are.
For all that, Barack Obama remains the only modern leader to publicly admit to the use of torture. Remember that when the pronouncements about “our enemies” start flying around.
We have documented, and confessed, cases of using torture. Assad and Putin, Tehran and Beijing, Venezuela and Cuba, do not.
And the people who carried out this torture? They’re getting promoted.
Imagine Putin admitted the FSB tortured Chechens who had committed no crimes, and then appointed one of the torturers as head of the FSB. Would our press demand he “atone” for his dark past? Would we call him a “controversial” figure? Or would there be long editorials about Russia “thumbing their noses at international norms”?
Gina Haspel is a war criminal. The Hague was literally made for people like her. But she will never be charged, she will never be tried, she will never be hanged. Because she’s one of OUR monsters, doing dark deeds for our side. She will face no reckoning from us, instead we ask only that she “atone”, whatever that means.
It is so easy to forgive the crimes of the monsters you create.
Reporter Pearson Sharp, who visited Douma, Syria, about 10 days after a chemical attack allegedly took place there, spoke with Sputnik Radio’s Fault Lines with Garland Nixon and Lee Stranahan on Monday after he was smeared by ThinkProgress.
Pearson said that after the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack that spurred US President Donald Trump to fire almost five dozen Tomahawk missiles at the Shayrat Air Base in Syria in April 2017, he was motivated to find out if it was really true that there was evidence that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons to kill Syrian civilian targets in Douma, as London, Washington and France have alleged.
When visiting Douma, Pearson explained that instead of describing what he personally saw, he wanted to put the camera on people in the town instead and let them tell the story. After interviewing dozens of Douma residents, Sharp found that “consistently, not one person in the town said they heard anything about an attack.”
ThinkProgress tried to diminish the journalist’s integrity by impugning his employer, One America News Network (OANN), as a “far-right, pro-Trump media outlet.” However, that accusation has little traction, since if Sharp had wanted to parrot the Republican US president, he wouldn’t have reported that there was no evidence of a chemical attack in Douma — the opposite of what the White House continuously claims.
ThinkProgress accused OANN on April 18 of “defending the Syrian government against claims that it had used chemical weapons on its citizens,” which is clearly a made-up claim with no evidence, Sharp told Fault Lines. Sharp noted that he would not have hesitated to report that Assad did use chemical weapons if that’s where the evidence pointed.
“That was the whole point. In a way, it wasn’t me reporting; it was the people reporting and I was just giving them the camera. Whatever they said would have gone on camera, regardless” of whether the accounts he heard aligned with a political stance, the journalist told Sputnik.
ThinkProgress tried to make a crime out of Sharp’s decision not to manipulate the accounts he was receiving, writing, “at no point does OANN try to mask the pro-Assad language peppering the report.” They complain that Sharp offers no evidence for their “wild claims” — though of course, the US, UK and France have also failed to demonstrate the truth of their allegations that a chemical attack did take place, let alone what agents were used and by whom.
Before the Western coalition carried out their retaliatory attack on Syria, the head of the Pentagon literally told Congress the US had no evidence of an attack other than social media reports — truly bulletproof reporting worthy of a response by the full force and might of NATO forces.
“OANN and Sharp’s reporting falls short in many respects, but perhaps most glaring is its apparent inability to provide concrete evidence to support any of its wild claims,” ThinkProgress said in its April 16 report, “Far-right website claims it found no evidence of a chemical attack in Syria: The latest instance of far-right media pushing a ‘false flag’ conspiracy theory.”
The outlet, on the other hand, confidently claims that “The April 7 attack left at least 70 people dead and around 500 others exposed to deadly nerve agents. The Syrian Army is suspected to be behind the attack, which targeted rebel forces who had recently agreed to hand over the territory to the government,” without citing any evidence of its own.
Former British Ambassador to Syria Peter Ford told Sputnik that the “rebel” militants from Jaysh al-Islam had pre-arranged buses to take them out of Douma to the northern city of Idlib; there was absolutely zero military reason for Assad to use chemical weapons and a whole list of reasons why Assad would be leery of using chemical weapons, not the least of which being that it would provoke the militaries of the US, UK and France to launch airstrikes on the country.
“The idea that Assad would — having virtually reconquered Eastern Ghouta — wait until the end of this very successful recovery operation to launch a completely unnecessary attack on a bunch of civilians… really, you have to be totally naïve to believe Assad would see any advantage in this,” Ford told Sputnik in April.
ThinkProgress took issue with the fact that Sharp reported from Syria with the permission of the country’s government. Pearson contends this didn’t impact his reporting in the least in terms of who he was able to interview.
“We were brought in, the government just sort of dropped us off in these neighborhoods and hung back and let us go where we wanted to go. A lot of the reporters stayed around the cars, talking to people in that area. I tried to wander as far as I could, talk to as many people as I could, and get away from that area. I literally walked blocks away — out of sight of the government cars we were with — and talked to random people on the street with an interpreter,” Sharp said.
“Not one person had seen or heard anything” about a chemical attack, Sharp emphasized.
“The point to make here, to emphasize is, I’m not a weapons expert, I’m not a chemical munitions expert. I don’t know for a fact that there was or wasn’t [a chemical attack]. But I did go there and I did talk to everybody who was there when it was supposed to happen and none of them saw anything,” he added.
And while ThinkProgress contends that the “ultra-right” OANN is a Trump propaganda outlet, in fact, OANN reported that it’s not at all clear or obvious that the pretext for Trump’s “smart” missile attack on Syrian targets is on the level. It seems strange to degrade the reporting of another journalist for allegedly being pro-Trump when that journalist is reporting information that stands in stark contrast with the official White House narrative — particularly as you yourself actually repeat the Trump administration’s version of events. But that’s what ThinkProgress has done.
ThinkProgress is apparently convinced by the White House’s secretive “evidence” that a chemical attack took place in Douma. It’s a remarkable about-face for ThinkProgress, which reported, “No, there are still no WMDS in Iraq” in 2014, to now become a lapdog of the powerful and disseminate the US government’s bold speculative claims as the ubiquitous background story on Douma and smear reporters who don’t obediently echo the same perspective.
The Guardian has published an article titled “Revealed: UK’s push to strengthen anti-Russia alliance”, with an update on the British government’s efforts to help form an international coalition that will “combat Russian disinformation”.
“Russian denials over Salisbury and Douma reveal a state uninterested in cooperating to reach a common understanding of the truth,” the article’s author complains on behalf of the empire he serves, “but instead using both episodes to try systematically to divide western electorates and sow doubt.”
Western mass media outlets everywhere have been sounding an increasingly shrill alarm about “Russian disinformation” regarding the Salisbury Skripal poisoning and the alleged Douma gas attack in Syria, and this Guardian article by Patrick Wintour forms a new step along the same trajectory. No attempt is ever made to describe why it is so dangerous to “sow doubt” about unproven allegations long before investigations into either event have run their course. More curiously, no attempt to address Iraq is ever made.
Wintour spins a narrative about the US, UK and their tight network of allies having a complete monopoly on truth and facts, taking it as an obvious truism that the Russians could only be lying about the sudden deluge of unproven accusations the west has been piling upon them ever since late 2016. The western empire is plainly just and virtuous, so nobody questioning its assertions could be anything other than deceitful and evil. Even though this same empire lied us into a war with Iraq fifteen years ago.
No attempt has ever been made to make sure nothing like Iraq ever happens again. Nobody who helped inflict that unforgivable evil upon our world was imprisoned for war crimes, nor even put on trial for them. No changes in policy, procedure or government transparency were made to ensure that the US, UK and their allies are never again able to deceive us into another catastrophic military engagement. No changes were made to ensure that the mainstream media hold their governments to account instead of falling in line and deceiving the public into war like they did in 2002 and 2003.
And yet we’re expected to take it for granted that nothing like that could possibly ever happen again, to such an extent that journalists like Patrick Wintour don’t see any need to even address the matter in their arguments about the west’s monopoly on truthful narratives.
This is plainly absurd. Any argument about the truth of what’s happening with regard to Syria or Russia which does not begin with an explicit and thorough explanation as to why this is completely different from Iraq should be instantly rejected as illegitimate. Anyone talking about “Russian disinformation” who does not thoroughly address the disinformation which led up to the Iraq invasion should be laughed out of the building. But they never address it. Ever.
Bush and Blair did not oversee the destruction of Libya, so obviously the system which allows disastrous military interventions based on lies was not fixed by their leaving office. It remains broken. It remains broken, and we’re being asked to pretend that this isn’t blatantly obvious as we are inundated with extremely suspicious narratives about Russia and Syria which are being used to manufacture support for escalations against those countries.
A recent BBC News segment titled “Russia’s (dis)information warfare” warned viewers of the many horrible, sneaky tactics those dastardly Russian propagandists will use to try and trick good upstanding Britons into doubting that their government is the paragon of honesty and integrity.
“If you want to check whether you’re dealing with a bit of Russian propaganda,” instructed Newsnight‘s Gabriel Gatehouse, “there’s one phrase that’s a dead giveaway: false flag operation.” Which is itself a perfect little slice of dishonest propaganda, since false flag operations are known and admitted to have been perpetrated by governments around the world, including the UK and the US. This isn’t “Russian propaganda”. It’s history.
“Another weapon in Moscow’s propaganda arsenal is a method known as ‘whataboutism’,” Gatehouse cautions later in the segment. “Here’s how it works: you say you have intelligence that Russia used a chemical weapon in Salisbury. Well, what about Iraq? One narrative is apparently neutralized by another, apparently unrelated, objection.”
Gatehouse goes on to speak to a woman who is skeptical of the establishment Syria narrative who does appear on RT, and she brings up Iraq. Gatehouse calls her a “useful idiot” to her face, moves on, and never brings up the subject of Iraq again.
Pardon me, but what the actual fuck?? On what planet is that a reasonable thing to do? What about Iraq? What about Iraq? It is an extremely relevant question that demands a thorough answer. You don’t get to just add “-ism” to the question, call the questioner a useful idiot, and then move on as though you have fully addressed the issue. That’s not a thing.
Iraq is in no way, shape or form “unrelated” to the questions people are asking about Douma and Salisbury. The lies we were told about Iraq which led to the escalations in that country could not possibly be more relevant to the escalations we’re seeing justified by unproven allegations against Moscow and Damascus. If you do not address Iraq, you cannot make a legitimate case about a narrative that is being used to advance preexisting neoconservative agendas against governments which are disinterested in being absorbed by the imperial blob.
Until the Patrick Wintours and Gabriel Gatehouses of the world have clearly and articulately explained how their current allegations against Syria and Russia are proven to the extent required in a post-Iraq invasion world, until they have explained how this is nothing like the lies which led up to the Iraq invasion, until they have explained what safeguards are in place to prevent anything like the Iraq war from ever happening again and outlined how those safeguards are being followed today, their arguments are illegitimate and can be unapologetically dismissed.
This isn’t going away. They don’t get to pretend Iraq didn’t happen and that we imagined the whole thing. They will engage the subject fully and completely in this debate, or they will lose the debate. And rightly so.
Would you believe that a twitter account purporting to be Yulia Skripal appeared 2 days ago & her first follower was The Washington Post ? The lies continue unabated. I challenged her to show her face & give us the grand interview the whole world wants to see. I got no reply.
I sometimes try to get establishment loyalists to explain to me exactly why we’re all meant to be terrified of this “Russian propaganda” thing they keep carrying on about. What is the threat, specifically? That it makes the public less willing to go to war with Russia and its allies? That it makes us less trusting of lying, torturing, coup-staging intelligence agencies? Does accidentally catching a glimpse of that green RT logo turn you to stone like Medusa, or melt your face like in Raiders of the Lost Ark ?
“Well, it makes us lose trust in our institutions,” is the most common reply.
Okay. So? Where’s the threat there? We know for a fact that we’ve been lied to by those institutions. Iraq isn’t just something we imagined. We should be skeptical of claims made by western governments, intelligence agencies and mass media. How specifically is that skepticism dangerous?
When you try to get down to the brass tacks of the actual argument being made and demand specific details about the specific threats we’re meant to be worried about, there aren’t any to be found. Nobody’s been able to tell me what specifically is so dangerous about westerners being exposed to the Russian side of international debates, or of Russians giving a platform to one or both sides of an American domestic debate. Even if every single one of the allegations about Russian bots and disinformation are true (and they aren’t), where is the actual clear and present danger? No one can say.
No one, that is, except the Atlantic Council.
In an absolutely jaw-dropping article that you should definitely read in its entirety, Elizabeth Braw took it upon herself to finally answer the question of why Russian propaganda is so dangerous, using the following hypothetical scenario:
What if Russia suddenly announced that its Baltic Fleet had dispatched an armada towards Britain? Would most people greet the news with steely resolve in the knowledge that their governments would know what to do, or would constant Kremlin-influenced reports about the incompetence of British institutions make them conclude that any resistance was pointless?
I mean, wow. Wow! Just wow. Where to even begin with this?
Before I continue, I should note that Braw is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, the shady NATO-aligned think tank with ties to powerful oligarchs whose name comes up when you look into many of the mainstream anti-Russia narratives, from the DNC hack to the discredited war propaganda firmBellingcatto Russian trolls to the notorious PropOrNot blacklist publicized by the Washington Post. Her article, published by Defense One, is titled “We Need a NATO for Infowar”, and it argues that westerners need to be propagandized by an alliance of western governments for our own good.
Back to the aforementioned excerpt. Braw claims that if Russian propaganda isn’t shut down or counteracted, Russia could send a fleet of war ships to attack Britain, and the British people would… react unenthusiastically? Wouldn’t cheer loudly enough as the British Navy fought the Russians? Would have a defeatist emotional demeanor? What exactly is the argument here?
That’s seriously her only attempt to directly address the question of where the actual danger is. Even in the most cartoonishly dramatic hypothetical scenario this Atlantic Council member can possibly imagine, there’s still no tangible threat of any kind. Even if Russia was directly attacking the United Kingdom at home, and Russian propaganda had somehow magically dominated all British airwaves and been believed by the entire country, that still wouldn’t have any impact on the British military’s ability to fight a naval battle. There’s literally no extent to which you can inflate this “Russian propaganda” hysteria to turn it into a possible threat to actual people in real life.
It gets better. Check out this excerpt:
Such responses to disinformation are like swatting flies: time-consuming and ineffective. But not addressing disinformation is ineffective, too. “Western media still have this thing where they try to be completely balanced, so they’ll say, ‘the Russians say this, but on the other hand the Americans say this is not true,’ They end up giving a lie and the truth the same value,” noted Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the former president of Estonia.
I just have so many questions. Like, how desperate does a writer have to be for an expert who can lend credibility to their argument that they have to reach all the way over to a former president of Estonia? And on what planet are these people living where Russian narratives are given the same weight as western narratives by western mainstream media? How can I get to this fantastical parallel dimension where western media “try to be completely balanced” and give equal coverage to all perspectives?
Braw argues that, because Russian propaganda is so dangerous (what with the threat of British people having insufficient emotional exuberance during a possible naval battle and all), what is required is a “NATO of infowar”, an alliance of western state media that is tasked with combatting Russian counter-narratives. Because, in the strange Dungeons & Dragons fantasy fairy world in which Braw penned her article, this isn’t already happening.
And of course, here in the real world, it is already happening. As I wrote recently, mainstream media outlets have been going out of their minds churning out attack editorials on anyone who questions the establishment narrative about what happened in Douma. A BBC reporter recently admonished a retired British naval officer for voicing skepticism of what we’re being told about Syria on the grounds that it might “muddy the waters” of the “information war” that is being fought against Russia. All day, every day, western mass media are pummeling the public with stories about how awful and scary Russians are and how everything they say is a lie.
This is because western mass media outlets are owned by western plutocrats, and those plutocrats have built their empires upon a status quo that they have a vested interest in preserving, often to the point where they will form alliances with defense and intelligence agencies to do so. They hire executives and editors who subscribe to a pro-establishment worldview, who in turn hire journalists who subscribe to a pro-establishment worldview, and in that way they ensure that all plutocrat-owned media outlets are advancing pro-plutocrat agendas.
The western empire is ruled by a loose transnational alliance of plutocrats and secretive government agencies. That loose alliance is your real government, and that government has the largest state media network in the history of civilization. The mass media propaganda machine of the western empire makes RT look like your grandmother’s Facebook wall.
In that way, we are being propagandized constantly by the people who really rule us. All this panic about Russian propaganda doesn’t exist because our dear leaders have a problem with propaganda, it exists because they believe only they should be allowed to propagandize us.
And, unlike Russian propaganda, western establishment propaganda actually does pose a direct threat to us. By using mass media to manipulate the ways we think and vote, our true rulers can persuade us to consent to crushing austerity measures and political impotence while the oligarchs grow richer and medicine money is spent on bombs. When we should all be revolting against an oppressive Orwellian oligarchy, we are instead lulled to sleep by those same oligarchs and their hired talking heads lying to us about freedom and democracy.
Russian propaganda is not dangerous. Having access to other ways of looking at global geopolitics is not dangerous. What absolutely is dangerous is a vast empire concerning itself with the information and ideas that its citizenry have access to. Get your rapey, manipulative fingers out of our minds, please.
If our dear leaders are so worried about our losing faith in our institutions, they shouldn’t be concerning themselves with manipulating us into trusting them, they should be making those institutions more trustworthy.
Don’t manipulate better, be better. The fact that an influential think tank is now openly advocating the former over the latter should concern us all.
In my last piece, I wrote that one of the downsides of the probable D-Notice slapped on the Skripal Case was that we may well be deprived of our daily dose of farcical nonsense, such as whether the poison was administered in the restaurant, the car, the cemetery, the flowers, the luggage, the bench, the porridge, the door handle or – and I’m surprised nobody has thought of it yet – perhaps the cat. There is no doubt an FSB manual waiting to be found which explains how cats can be safely used as conduits for “Novichok”, and it has almost certainly been put together by the dashingly handsome, astonishingly intelligent, but inexplicably bitmapped ruthless ex-KGB assassin, “Gordon”, who was apparently a suspect a couple of weeks ago, but is no longer deemed a person of interest.
But despite the D-Notice, on the morning of 5th May it seemed that the torrent of patent absurdities was actually not about to cease anytime soon. In an interview with the New York Times, the Director General of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Ahmet Uzumcu, said the following:
“For research activities or protection you would need, for instance, five to 10 grams or so, but even in Salisbury it looks like they may have used more than that, without knowing the exact quantity, I am told it may be 50, 100 grams or so, which goes beyond research activities for protection.”
My immediate reaction was to ask why only 50-100 grams (which the New York Times helpfully tells its readers is between about a quarter-cup to a half-cup of liquid)? Why not a whole bucketful of Novichok, splashed indiscriminately over the front door of Mr Skripal’s house?
It is testimony to the truly uninquisitive minds of the dutiful stenographers at the New York Times and the rest of the media which ran with the same story, that none of them appear to have wondered to themselves something along these lines:
“Huh? 100 grams of military-grade nerve agent? Of a type said to be 5-8 times more lethal than VX, which itself has a median lethal dose of 10 milligrams. And we’re now apparently talking about 100,000 milligrams! And yet not only are the Skripals alive (well at least they were when last Yulia got hold of a phone) but the population of Salisbury seems to be doing okay as well. In fact no-one died (apart from the cat and the guinea pigs). Does Mr Uzumcu know what he’s talking about?”
My next reaction was to wonder whether actually he knows exactly what he’s talking about. But I’ll come back to that in a moment.
“In response to questions from the media, the OPCW Spokesperson stated that the OPCW would not be able to estimate or determine the amount of the nerve agent that was used in Salisbury on 4 March 2018. The quantity should probably be characterised in milligrams. However, the analysis of samples collected by the OPCW Technical Assistance Visit team concluded that the chemical substance found was of high purity, persistent and resistant to weather conditions.”
As an aside, I’d love to know which media asked the questions. My guess is that it wasn’t any of those organisations who had repeated the claims made in the New York Times.
But what of the statement itself? Taken at face value, along with Mr Uzumcu’s original statement, it is very odd for a number of reasons:
1. Firstly, it says that the OPCW would not be able to estimate or determine the amount of the substance used. But of course this is exactly what Mr Uzumcu did appear to say, when he mentioned the quantities 50 and 100 grams.
2. Secondly, the statement says that the quantity should probably be characterised in milligrams. Not bucketfuls then? But of course the problem with this is that it does appear to leave Mr Uzumcu looking rather stupid, as if he:
a) Doesn’t know his grams from his milligrams and
b) Doesn’t realise that a cupful of military grade nerve agent 5-8 times more toxic than VX would kill people – like, lots and lots and lots of people
3. And thirdly, the milligrams for grams exchange completely undercuts the whole point Mr Uzumcu was making. He was saying that it appeared from the amount used that it could not have been produced in any old laboratory, as he had admitted a week before when he had said it could be produced “in any country where there would be some chemical expertise.” Rather, the point he was making was that quantities like 50-100 grams could only point to military production of the agent, rather than simply for research purposes.
This is all very bizarre. That’s hardly surprising, though, since there is almost nothing about this case that has not been extremely odd. From what I can tell, there are only really two possible explanations for this latest bout of strangeness.
One possible explanation is that Mr Uzumcu is simply incompetent, and so lacking in knowledge that he doesn’t know his grams from his milligrams, nor that half a cup of deadly nerve agent would wipe out hundreds, if not thousands, of people (not to mention being impossible to put on a door handle in the first place, at least not without the kind of protection that might just draw attention). However, this seems to me fairly unlikely. I assume that you don’t become Director General of the OPCW and remain in the position for eight years if you really are that inept.
But is there another more revealing explanation?
If you go back and read Mr Uzumcu’s statement, it is very noticeable that he does not actually state that he personally believes the quantity of the poison used in Salisbury was 50 or 100 grams. What he actually said is:
“For research activities or protection you would need, for instance, five to 10 grams or so, but even in Salisbury it looks like they may have used more than that, without knowing the exact quantity, I am told it may be 50, 100 grams or so, which goes beyond research activities for protection” [my emphasis].
It looks likethey may have used more than that? From what does it look like that? From the months long, multi-million pound clean up job being undertaken, by any chance?
And of the quantity, he says he was told this. But the question is, who told him?
I can’t be sure, but my hunch is that he does know his grams from his milligrams; that he is well aware that 50-100 grams of the stuff would be enough to have killed the Skripals outright, along with hundreds or possibly thousands of others in the surrounding area; and also that he understands full well that the current multi-million pound clean up operation in Salisbury, which is precisely intended to give the impression that there was so much of the stuff that it might make up half a cupful, or perhaps even a whole bucketful, is something of a farce.
And so even though his original statement at first seems absurd, I’m fairly convinced that it was not a display of incompetence on his part. Rather, together with the subsequent clarification, it was very likely a signal that he believes his source for the claim to be either incompetent or – shall we say – economical with the actualité. And it may be that his real aim was – as diplomatically as possible – to let certain folks in Britain know that he’s not as convinced by some of their claims as they might like him to be.
By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
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