How the Press Serves the Deep State
By Daniel Lazare | Consortium News | March 1, 2017
The New York Times has made it official. In a Sunday front-page article entitled “Trump Ruled the Tabloid Media. Washington Is a Different Story,” the paper gloats that Donald Trump has proved powerless to stop a flood of leaks threatening to capsize his administration.
As reporters Glenn Thrush and Michael M. Grynbaum put it: “This New York-iest of politicians, now an idiosyncratic, write-your-own-rules president, has stumbled into the most conventional of Washington traps: believing he can master an entrenched political press corps with far deeper connections to the permanent government of federal law enforcement and executive department officials than he has.”
Thrush and Grynbaum add a few paragraphs later that Trump “is being force-fed lessons all presidents eventually learn – that the iron triangle of the Washington press corps, West Wing staff and federal bureaucracy is simply too powerful to bully.”
Iron triangle? Permanent government? In its tale of how Trump went from being a favorite of the New York Post and Daily News to fodder for the big-time Washington news media, the Times seems to be going out of its way to confirm dark paranoid fears of a “deep state” lurking behind the scenes and dictating what political leaders can and cannot do. “Too powerful to bully” by a “write-your-own-rules president” is another way of saying that the permanent government wants to do things its way and will not put up with a president telling it to take a different approach.
Entrenched interests are nothing new, of course. But a major news outlet bragging about collaborating with such elements in order to cripple a legally established government is. The Times was beside itself with outrage when top White House adviser Steve Bannon described the media as “the opposition party.” But one can’t help but wonder what all the fuss is about since an alliance aimed at hamstringing a presidency is nothing if not oppositional.
If so, a few things are worth keeping in mind. One is that Trump was elected, even if only by an Eighteenth-Century relic known as the Electoral College, whereas the deep state, permanent government, or whatever else you want to call it was not. Where Trump gave speeches, kissed babies, and otherwise sought out the vote, the deep state did nothing. To the degree this country is still a democracy, that must count for something. So if the conflict between president and the deep state ever comes down to a question of legitimacy, there is no doubt who will come out ahead: The Donald.
A second thing worth keeping in mind is that if ever there was a case of the unspeakable versus the inedible (to quote Oscar Wilde), the contest between a billionaire president and billionaire-owned press is it.
Both sides are more or less correct in what they say about the other. Trump really is a strongman at war with basic democratic norms just as innumerable Times op-ed articles say he is. And giant press organizations like the Times and the Washington Post are every bit as biased and one-sided as Trump maintains – and no less willfully gullible, one might add, than in 2002 or 2003 when they happily swallowed every lie put out by the George W. Bush administration regarding Iraqi WMDs or Saddam Hussein’s support for Al Qaeda.
Riveting TV
Trump’s Feb. 16 press conference – surely the most riveting TV since Jerry Springer was in his prime – is a case in point. The President bobbed, weaved, and hurled abuse like a Catskills insult comic. He threw out pseudo-facts, describing his victory, for instance, as “the biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan” when in fact George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all got more votes. But commentators who panned the display as a “freak show” or simply “batshit crazy” didn’t get it. It wasn’t Trump who bombed that afternoon, but the press.
Why? Because reporters behaved with all the intelligence of a pack of Jack Russell terriers barking at a cat up a tree. Basically, they’ve been seized by the idée fixe that Russia is a predator state that hacks elections, threatens U.S. national security, and has now accomplished the neat trick of planting a Kremlin puppet in the Oval Office. It doesn’t matter that evidence is lacking or that the thesis defies common sense. It’s what they believe, what their editors believe, and what the deep state believes too (or at least pretends to). So the purpose of the Feb. 16 press conference was to pin Trump down as to whether he also believes the Russia-did-it thesis and pillory him for deviating from the party line.
More than half the questions that reporters threw out were thus about Russia, about Mike Flynn, the ex-national security adviser who got into trouble for talking to the Russian ambassador before the new administration formally took office, or about reputed contacts between the Trump campaign staff and Moscow. One reporter thus demanded to know if anyone from Trump’s campaign staff had ever spoken with the Russian government or Russian intelligence. Another asked if Trump had requested FBI telephone intercepts before determining that Flynn had not broken the law.
“I just want to get you to clarify this very important point,” said a third. “Can you say definitively that nobody on your campaign had any contacts with the Russians during the campaign?” A fourth wanted to get the President’s reaction to such “provocations” as a Russian communications vessel floating 30 miles off the coast of Connecticut (in international waters). “Is Putin testing you, do you believe, sir?” the reporter asked as if he had just uncovered a Russian agent in the Lincoln Bedroom. “… But do they damage the relationship? Do they undermine this country’s ability to work with Russia?”
When yet another journalist asked yet again “whether you are aware that anyone who advised your campaign had contacts with Russia during the course of the election,” Trump cried out in frustration: “How many times do I have to answer this question?” It was the most intelligent query of the day.
The press played straight into Trump’s hands, all but providing him with his best lines. “Well, I guess one of the reasons I’m here today is to tell you the whole Russian thing, that’s a ruse,” he responded at one point. “That’s a ruse. And by the way, it would be great if we could get along with Russia, just so you understand that. Now tomorrow, you’ll say, ‘Donald Trump wants to get along with Russia, this is terrible.’ It’s not terrible. It’s good.”
The prose may not be very polished, but the sentiments are unassailable. Ditto Trump’s statement a few minutes later that “false reporting by the media, by you people, the false, horrible, fake reporting makes it much harder to make a deal with Russia. … And that’s a shame because if we could get along with Russia – and by the way, China and Japan and everyone – if we could get along, it would be a positive thing, not a negative thing.”
If the Washington Post and the Times do not agree that bogus assertions about unauthorized contacts with Russia are not poisoning the atmosphere, they should explain very clearly why not. They should also explain what they hope to accomplish with a showdown with Russia and why it will not be a step toward World War III.
But they won’t, of course. The media (with encouragement from parts of the U.S. government) are working themselves into a fit of outrage against Vladimir Putin just as, in past years, they did against Daniel Ortega, Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein (again), Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, and Viktor Yanukovych. In each instance, the outcome has been war, and so far the present episode shows all signs of heading in the same direction as well.
Reporters may be clueless, but working-class Americans aren’t. They don’t want a war because they’re the ones who would have to fight it. So they’re not unsympathetic to Trump and all the more inclined to give the yapping media short shrift.
This is a classic pattern in which strongmen advance on the basis of a liberal opposition that proves to be weak and feckless. Today’s liberal media are obliging Trump by behaving in a way that is even sillier than usual and well ahead of schedule to boot.
A Fragile Meme
The anti-Russia meme, meanwhile, rests on the thinnest of foundations. The argument that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee and thereby tipped the election to Trump is based on a single report by CrowdStrike, the California-based cyber-security firm hired by the DNC to look into the mass email leak. The document is festooned with head-spinning techno-jargon.
It says of Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, the hackers who allegedly penetrated the DNC in behalf of Russian intelligence: “Their tradecraft is superb, operational security second to none, and the extensive usage of ‘living-off-the-land’ techniques enables them to easily bypass many security solutions they encounter. In particular, we identified advanced methods consistent with nation-state level capabilities including deliberate targeting and ‘access management’ tradecraft – both groups were constantly going back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command & Control channels, and perform other tasks to try to stay ahead of being detected. Both adversaries engage in extensive political and economic espionage for the benefit of the government of the Russian Federation and are believed to be closely linked to the Russian government’s powerful and highly capable intelligence services.”
Impressive? Not to independent tech experts who have already begun taking potshots. Sam Biddle, The Intercept’s extremely smart tech writer, notes that CrowdStrike claims to have proved that Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear are Russian because they left behind Cyrillic comments in their “metadata” along with the name “Felix Edmundovich,” also in Cyrillic, an obvious reference to Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, as the Soviet political police were originally known.
But, Biddle observes, there’s an obvious contradiction: “Would a group whose ‘tradecraft is superb’ with ‘operational security second to none’ really leave behind the name of a Soviet spy chief imprinted on a document it sent to American journalists? Would these groups really be dumb enough to leave Cyrillic comments on these documents? … It’s very hard to buy the argument that the Democrats were hacked by one of the most sophisticated, diabolical foreign intelligence services in history, and that we know this because they screwed up over and over again.”
Indeed, John McAfee, founder of McAfee Associates and developer of the first commercial anti-virus software, casts doubt on the entire enterprise, wondering whether it is possible to identify a hacker at all. “If I were the Chinese,” he told TV interviewer Larry King in late December, “and I wanted to make it look like the Russians did it, I would use Russian language within the code, I would use Russian techniques of breaking into organizations. … If it looks like the Russians did it, then I can guarantee you: it was not the Russians.” (Quote starts at 4:30.)
This may be too sweeping. Nonetheless, if the press really wanted to get to the bottom of what the Russians are doing, they would not begin with the question of what Trump knew and when he knew it. They would begin, rather, with the question of what we know and how we can be sure. It’s the question that the press should have asked during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but failed to. But it’s the question that reporters should be asking now before the conflict with Russia spins out of control, with consequences that are potentially even more horrendous.
It’s not easy making Donald Trump seem like a peacenik, but that’s what the billionaire’s press has done.
Women’s Protection in Syria: Disinformation Is No Help
By Tim Hayward | March 1, 2017
A ‘new report by the London School of Economics’ (LSE), so announced the British press – The Times, The Daily Mail and The Daily Mirror – describes sexual crimes against women in Syrian prisons. It alleges these to be a matter of state policy. Published just ahead of Geneva talks about a political settlement in Syria, the press interpreted it as supporting renewed calls for regime change.
The paper provides no new grounds for that conclusion, however. In fact, its sweeping allegations obscure good reasons why, under present circumstances, a responsible approach to the problem of sexual violence in Syria would involve supporting the government against the terrorist insurgents.
Syrian Christians
Some reasons can be gleaned from United Nations research into the problem. The UN found (in 2015 and again in 2016) that while some conflict-related sexual violence was perpetrated by state personnel, ‘non-State actors account for the vast majority of incidents’.[1] The UN made clear that efforts to defeat groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda, as the Syrian government is committed to, ‘are an essential part of the fight against conflict-related sexual violence.’ Such groups use sexual violence as part of their strategy to spread terror among those that oppose their ideology. They engage in trafficking of women and slavery. They drive the displacement of women who, then, ‘remain at high risk, even when they reach the supposed refuge of neighbouring countries.’
Marie Forestier, the LSE paper’s author, complains that the UN paid ‘disproportionate attention’ to the terrorist groups as perpetrators of sexual violence in Syria. She wants to highlight crimes on the government side, and she relays some horrific allegations about some individual cases. This illustrates specific experiences of a problem that the UN had signaled. However, while harrowing in themselves, these testimonies cannot speak to the comparative scale of the problem.[2] Forestier therefore does not show the UN’s concerns about the egregious sexual violence of the terrorist insurgents to be disproportionate. Furthermore, her interviews relate to experiences from a period – 2012 and 2013 – that is earlier than covered by the UN reports of 2015 and 2016. Forestier herself admits that accusations of sexual violence on the government’s side were ‘most frequent from late 2011 to 2013, in disputed areas such as the Damascus suburbs, and in central and coastal governorates … with a peak in 2012, and comparatively fewer cases in 2014.’ She thereby shows the situation was worse in places where the government had to fight insurgents and improved when the government regained control. In light of her own admissions, it seems perverse to cite limited older evidence in criticizing considered conclusions of fuller and more up-to-date reports.
The perversity is heightened with unwarranted generalizations in the present continuous tense. Press coverage has, unsurprisingly, transmitted the message that the most shocking details of individual allegations from up to five years ago capture what is occurring on a general and continuing basis today. Forestier herself even makes demonstrably false general claims in the present tense. For instance, she says: ‘According to an estimate by United Nations investigators, Syrian security forces detain tens of thousands of people at any one time.’ However, the source she cites for this claim says no such thing.[3]
Some of her most damaging claims are simply inexplicable, as when she says: ‘According to testimony, the overwhelming majority of men committing rapes have been State forces.’ This extraordinary claim flies in the face of the palpable evidence and reports of the UN. Bizarrely, the source Forestier cites for it is an article on ‘general data on sexual violence by state forces’ attained for 129 other conflicts, not including Syria, and during a period (1989-2009) prior to the outbreak of war in Syria.[4]
The LSE paper’s headline message thus misrepresents what is actually shown regarding the extent of the government’s responsibility for sexual violence. Buried within its text are admissions that the paper should only ‘be considered as a starting point for further research’ and that ‘it is impossible to conclude that sexual violence by regime forces is a mass phenomenon.’ Yet this did not stop Forestier making such damaging accusations as that ‘rape can be considered as part of a general policy from the authorities’ (p.12).[5]
Regardless of lack of evidence, she seems determined to convey a message of rape and sexual violence being state policy approved at the highest levels.[6] Yet she admits: ‘The decision to resort to sexual violence (or tolerate it) seems to have fallen under the regional level or even the branch and military unit level’. ‘No information indicates that high-level officials in Damascus ordered rapes’ and ‘the President or high level security officials probably didn’t give explicit orders’.
She rightly notes that ‘commanders may be prosecuted where they know or should have known of the abuses and failed to take action to stop them.’ She also correctly observes that ‘ending impunity is central in preventing sexual violence.’ I would add that ending impunity, like bringing the problem itself under control, requires well functioning institutions. The Syrian government is evidently aware of this, and, under difficult conditions, has sought to improve its systems for the protection of women and children, as welcomed by the UN OHCHR. But the good functioning of institutions is favoured by peaceful conditions rather than by war.
One does not have to be an enthusiast for the present government to recognize its legitimacy and the simple fact that it is uniquely well-placed as things stand now, and foreseeably, to protect ordinary men, women and children against violent threats.
Freed from ISIS
A realistic general presumption has to be that rape and sexual violence tends be more common in war than in peacetime.[7] That is a reason – on top of so many others – why war should be avoided. A country that finds its territory turned into a battleground has to reckon with sexual violence being more prevalent than in peacetime, while its resources to tackle the problem are diverted and diminished. A government that has to defend its people against armed insurgents, particularly when these routinely engage in sexual violence, faces extraordinary challenges. That does not absolve it of responsibility for ensuring good conduct by its own forces. The practical ability of a government to maintain discipline, however, is not enhanced by having to engage on many fronts with ruthless opposition.
Realistically, and morally, the best way to avoid rape in war is to avoid war itself. I cannot believe that Marie Forestier would disagree on this general point, but I am less sure what she thinks with regard to the specific case of Syria, or even whether she has fully thought it through.[8] The thrust of her argument would support continued efforts by foreign powers, exercised through terrorist proxies on the ground, to depose the government of Syria, something that could only worsen further still the problem of sexual violence.
By contrast, it may be instructive to consider the approach taken by the Kurds in the north of Syria. In 2011, Kurds were among the groups fighting against the Syrian government. Since then, however, they have become pragmatic allies of the government in a common drive to eliminate ISIS from Syrian territory. The Kurds also have a particularly enlightened appreciation of women’s central place in society.[9] Consistent with their political philosophy, about a third of their fighting force is women. The Women’s Protection Unit or YPJ, is an all-female Kurdish military organization of about 8,000 volunteers, and growing.[10] Meanwhile the Syrian Arab Army has emulated the Kurds by creating all women battalions along similar lines.[11] Already, though, the Syrian army prominently featured all female units, including the famed Lionesses for National Defence unit of the elite Republican Guard.[12] Western commentators who note the propaganda value of this also grant that its success reflects the wider social solidarity that has made the Syrian Arab Army so resilient. As a French commentator observes, ‘The war in Syria is a face-off between two societal structures and Assad is showing that, in his system, women have an important role, even in the defence forces’.[13] If the Syrian government sees the propaganda value of promoting women’s equality, we might reasonably suppose it would see the irrationality of undoing such reputational gains by pursuing a delinquent policy of the kind Forestier alleges.
The fact is that what people widely believe throughout Syria – in Arab areas as in Kurdish – is that the overwhelming problem of sexual violence, like that of extremist violence more generally, comes from ISIS and other terrorists that violate, torture, enslave, traffic and oppress women. This is consistent with the UN findings. Forestier’s allegations are consistent only with the foreign drive for ‘regime change’.
For anyone genuinely concerned to deal with sexual violence occurring in – and occasioned by – conflict situations, a central preventive strategy is not starting a war in the first place, and not prolonging a war needlessly once started. It certainly means not intervening in a war on the side of those inflicting by far and away the most extensive and egregious sexual crimes.
In short, if the government had been supported in its efforts to defeat the insurgents, a great deal of sexual violence would have been avoided. Forestier’s claims, seen in this light, in being unfounded, are counterproductive and irresponsible. The view she opposes has a coherence hers lacks. It also has basic morality on its side. The problem with Forestier’s paper is not simply that it is poor research and writing.[14] The real concern is that, in being publicly promoted, it has been fed into the narrative beyond academia that would continue seeking to destabilise Syria (and the wider Middle East) and to prolong conflict against the Syrian government. One effect of this would be to prolong the circumstances in which sexual violence continues unabated on that territory.
Civilians freed by Syrian Army
[1] United Nations Security Council, Conflict-related sexual violence Report of the Secretary-General 23 March 2015: https://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/2015/203. United Nations Security Council Report of the Secretary-General on Conflict-Related Sexual Violence, 20 April 2016, S/2016/361 http://www.peacewomen.org/node/94106.
[2] I do not take propose to take issue with any of Forestier’s reporting of testimonies, even though her methodology is unclear. (For instance, she mentions that three interviews with survivors ‘were excluded because they seemed exaggerated or false’ yet she does not explain how she decided whose word to give how much credence to, particularly in cases where she was speaking through a translator via phone to someone she hadn’t met.)
[3] The source she cites is UN Human Rights Council, Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, A/ HRC/31/68, 11 February 2016, http://www. ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/ CoISyria/A-HRC-31-68.pdf. (Having checked that source I find the only mention of thousands of people refers to ISIS crimes. I could not find any statement remotely resembling her claim, and I would readily correct the record here if she can direct me to it with a page reference.)
[4] Dara Kay Cohen and Ragnhild Nordas, “Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict: Introducing the SVAC dataset, Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict: Introducing the SVAC dataset, 1989−2009”, Journal of Peace Research 51(3) (2014), 418-428.
[5] This assumption is manifest, too, in her claim – made much of in the press reporting of her paper – that sexual assault in detention was so routine that contraception was supplied. Damning as this may be, assuming it is true, it does not self-evidently suggest that those assaults were part of a policy as distinct from an atrocious practice. It could in fact be taken to suggest a desire of perpetrators to prevent evidence of violations coming to light. A related claim involves the testimony of a victim that her attacker used Vaseline. Forestier takes this, along with the contraception, to ‘indicate that rapes followed a regular pattern that involved some degree of organisation and were part of a broader state policy of widespread repression against the civil population.’ Since the organization required is that of a visit to a pharmacy, and we can have no idea how widespread the practice was, we cannot simply infer what Forestier claims about a ‘broader state policy’.
[6] At one point she asserts that ‘when soldiers or militiamen raped women during military operations, this was part of the attack against their adversaries and their relatives. Thus, rape can be considered as part of a general policy from the authorities.’ But the inference stated after her ‘thus’ is a non sequitur: she provides no reason to think such attacks follow from a policy rather than opportunism or vindictiveness.
[7] The presumption has to be defeasible, but it seems clear that simply to presume the contrary would be imprudent. For a discussion see e.g. Doris E. Buss, ‘Rethinking “Rape as a Weapon of War, Feminist Legal Studies (2009) 17.2: 145-163.
[8] Her puzzling take on the situation is illustrated by a claim like this: ‘the Syrian government has sought to increase antagonism between communities’ and ‘to frame the conflict as a fight between Alawites and Sunnis instead of a struggle for democracy.’ Yet the government owes its resilience precisely to a longstanding and conscious strategy of defusing sectarian tendencies. (The government has consistently framed the conflict as an attack on the secular multi-faith state by primarily Islamist jihadists.) Furthermore, however much a desire for greater democracy may originally have motivated the political opposition, the conflict that has ensued was taken over by jihadists committed to imposing the most anti-democratic regime imaginable.
[9] A fundamental tenet of Kurdish nationalism, as articulated by PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) founding leader Abdullah Öcalan, is that ‘a country can’t be free unless the women are free’. This political philosophy – given the name ‘jineology’– is embraced by the movement and its fighters, about a third of whom in the Kurdish region of Syria are women.
[12] Daily Mail 26 March 2015 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3011838/Syria-s-female-tank-drivers-Battalion-800-women-commandos-fierce-clashes-rebels-line-Damascus.html#ixzz4ZnIjB3tT
[13] Fabrice Balanche, quoted by France 24, 2 April 2015: http://www.france24.com/en/20150402-syria-women-soldiers-assad-army-propaganda
[14] Given its status as a Working Paper, the academic community is aware that Forestier’s claims have not been peer-reviewed. The wider world does not observe such niceties. The Daily Mirror, The Daily Mail and The Times did not. Most tweeters do not. They all present it as coming from the prestigious LSE. Which is fair enough, given that it features conspicuously on the LSE website. Since LSE has promoted this paper, there is a case for saying they should own it and answer for it. If my argument in this post is correct, there is a case for suggesting they should retract it.
Mainstream Media’s ‘Victimhood’
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | February 28, 2017
It’s heartwarming that The New York Times and The Washington Post are troubled that President Trump is loosely throwing around accusations of “fake news.” It’s nice that they now realize that truth does not reliably come from the mouth of every senior government official or from every official report.
The Times is even taking out full-page ads in its own pages to offer truisms about truth: “The truth is hard. The truth is hidden. The truth must be pursued. The truth is hard to hear. The truth is rarely simple. The truth isn’t so obvious. …” On Sunday, those truth truisms ran opposite an alarmist column by Jim Rutenberg entitled, “Will the Real Democracy Lovers Please Stand Up?” Meanwhile, The Washington Post launched its own melodramatic slogan, “Dies in Darkness.”
Yet, it was only weeks ago when the Post and Times were eagerly promoting plans for silencing or blacklisting independent news sites that didn’t toe the line on what the U.S. government and its allies were claiming was true.
On Nov. 20, the Times published a lead editorial calling on Facebook and other technology giants to devise algorithms that could eliminate stories that the Times deemed to be “fake.” The Times and other mainstream news outlets – along with a few favored Internet sites – joined a special Google-sponsored task force, called the First Draft Coalition, to decide what is true and what is not. If the Times’ editorial recommendations were followed, the disfavored stories and the sites publishing them would no longer be accessible through popular search engines and platforms, essentially blocking the public’s access to them. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “What to Do About ‘Fake News.’”]
On Thanksgiving Day, the Post ran a front-page story citing an anonymous group, called PropOrNot, blacklisting 200 Web sites, including Consortiumnews.com and other important sources of independent journalism, because we supposedly promoted “Russian propaganda.”
Although PropOrNot and the Post didn’t bother to cite any actual examples or to ask the accused for comment, the point was clear: If you didn’t march in lockstep behind the Official Narrative on, say, the Ukraine crisis or the war in Syria, you were to be isolated, demonized and effectively silenced. In the article, the Post blurred the lines between “fake news” – stories that are simply made up – and what was deemed “propaganda,” in effect, information that didn’t jibe with what the U.S. State Department was saying.
Back then, in November, the big newspapers believed that the truth was easy, simple, obvious, requiring only access to some well-placed government official or a quick reading of the executive summary from some official report. Over the last quarter century or so, the Times, in particular, has made a fetish out of embracing pretty much whatever Officialdom declared to be true. After all, such well-dressed folks with those important-sounding titles couldn’t possibly be lying.
That gullibility went from the serious, such as rejecting overwhelming evidence that Ronald Reagan’s Nicaraguan Contra rebels were deeply involved in drug trafficking, to the silly, trusting the NFL’s absurd Deflategate allegations against Tom Brady. In those “old” days, which apparently ended a few weeks ago, the Times could have run full-page ads, saying “Truth is whatever those in authority say it is.”
In 2002, when the George W. Bush administration was vouching for a motley crew of Iraqi “defectors” describing Saddam Hussein’s hidden WMDs, Iraq’s purchase of some “aluminum tubes” must have been for building nuclear bombs. In 2003, when Secretary of State Colin Powell showed some artist drawings of “mobile chemical weapons labs,” they must really exist – and anyone who doubted Powell’s “slam-dunk” testimony deserved only contempt and ridicule.
When the Obama administration issued a “government assessment” blaming the Syrian military for the sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013, there was no need to scrutinize its dubious assertions or ask for actual proof. To do so made you an “Assad apologist.”
When a bunch of U.S. allies under the effective control of Ukraine’s unsavory SBU intelligence service presented some videos with computer-generated graphics showing Russians supplying the Buk missile that shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, there was no need to examine the holes in the evidence or note that the realistic-looking graphics were fictional and based on dubious assumptions. To do so made you a “Moscow stooge.”
In other words, when the U.S. government was gluing black hats on an “enemy” and white hats on a U.S. “ally,” the Times never seemed to object. Nor did pretty much anyone else in the mainstream media. No one seemed to note that both sides usually deserved gray hats. With very few exceptions – when the State Department or other U.S. agencies were making the charges – the Times and its cohorts simply stopped applying responsible journalistic skepticism.
Of course, there is a problem with “fake news,” i.e., stories that are consciously made up for the purpose of making money from lots of clicks. There are also fact-free conspiracy theories that operate without evidence or in defiance of it. No one hates such bogus stories more than I do — and they have long been a bane of serious journalism, dating back centuries, not just to the last election.
But what the Times, the Post and the rest of the mainstream media have typically ignored is that there are many situations in which the facts are not clear or when there are alternative explanations that could reasonably explain a set of facts. There are even times when the evidence goes firmly against what the U.S. government is claiming. At those moments, skepticism and courage are necessary to challenge false or dubious Official Narratives. You might even say, “The truth is rarely simple. The truth isn’t so obvious…”
A Tough Transition
During the transition from the Obama administration to the Trump team, the Times, the Post and other mainstream media outlets got caught in their own transition from trusting whatever the outgoing officials said to distrusting whatever the incoming officials said. In those final days, big media accepted what President Obama’s intelligence agencies asserted about Russia supposedly interfering in the U.S. election despite the lack of publicly available evidence that could be scrutinized and tested.
Even something as squirrelly as the attack on Trump’s National Security Adviser Michael Flynn – with Obama holdovers citing the never-prosecuted Logan Act from 1799 as the pretext for ginning up some kind of criminal-sounding case that scared Trump into firing Flynn – was treated as legitimate, without serious questions asked. Since Obama officials were doing the feeding, the no-skepticism rule applied to the eating. But whatever statements came from Trump, even his few lucid moments explaining why war with nuclear-armed Russia wasn’t such a great idea, were treated as dangerous nonsense.
When Trump scolded the mainstream press for engaging in “fake news” and then applied the phrase “enemy of the people,” the Times, the Post and the rest went into full victimization-mode. When a few news companies were excluded from a White House news briefing, they all rushed to the barricades to defend freedom of the press. Then, Trump went even further – he rejected his invitation to the White House Correspondents Dinner, the black-tie/evening-gown event where mainstream media stars compete to attract the hottest celebrity guests and hobnob with important government officials, a walking-talking conflict-of-interest-filled evening, an orgy of self-importance.
So, the Times, the Post and their mainstream-media friends now feel under attack. Whereas just weeks ago they were demanding that Google, Facebook and other powerful information platforms throttle those of us who showed professional skepticism toward dubious claims from the U.S. government, now the Times, the Post and the others are insisting that we all rally around them, to defend their journalistic freedom. In another full-page ad on Sunday, the Times wrote: “Truth. It’s more important now than ever.”
I would argue that truth is always important, but especially so when government officials are leading countries toward war, when lives are at stake, whether in Iraq or Syria or Ukraine or the many other global hotspots. At those moments in the recent past, the Times did not treat truth – in all its subtlety and nuance – as important at all.
I would argue, too, that the stakes are raised even higher when propagandists and ideologues are risking the prospect of nuclear war that could kill billions and effectively end human civilization. However, in that case, the American people have seen little truly professional journalism nor a real commitment to the truth. Instead, it’s been much more fun to demonize Russian President Vladimir Putin and paint black-and-white pictures of the evil Russians.
At such moments, those New York Times’ truisms about truth are forgotten: “The truth is rarely simple. The truth isn’t so obvious. …”
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
The Clinton system to discredit Donald Trump
By Thierry Meyssan | Voltairenet | February 28, 2017
This article is a warning – in November 2016, a vast system of agitation and propaganda was set up in order to destroy the reputation and the authority of President Donald Trump as soon as he arrived in the White House. It is the first time that such a campaign has been scientifically organised against a President of the United States, and with such resources. Yes, we are indeed entering a post-Truth age, but the distribution of roles is not what you may think it is.
David Brock is considered to be one of the masters of agit-prop (agitation & propaganda) in the 21st century. A personality devoid of scruples, he is able to defend a cause as well as destroy it, according to the needs of his employer. He is at the head of an empire of mass manipulation.
The campaign waged against the new President of the United States by the sponsors of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the destruction of the Greater Middle East is on-going. After the Womens’ March on 22 January, a March for Science is scheduled to be held not only in the USA, but also throughout the Western world on 22 April. It’s goal is to show that Donald Trump is not only a misogynist, but also an obscurantist.
The fact that he is the ex-organiser of the Miss Universe pageant, and that his third wedding was to a model, is apparently enough to prove that he holds women in contempt. The fact that the President contests the role played by Barack Obama in the creation of the Chicago Climate Exchange (a long time before his Presidency) and rejects the idea that climatic disturbances are caused by the expulsion of carbon into the atmosphere attest to the fact that he understands nothing about science.
In order to convince US public opinion of the President’s insanity – a man who says that he hopes for peace with his enemies, and wants to collaborate with them in universal economic prosperity – one of the greatest specialists of agit-prop (agitation & propaganda), David Brock, set up an impressive system even before Trump’s investiture.
At the time when he was working for the Republicans, Brock launched a campaign against President Bill Clinton which would eventually become Troopergate, the Whitewater affair, and the Lewinsky affair. Having changed his colours, he is today in the service of Hillary Clinton, for whom he has already organised not only the demolition of Mitt Romney’s candidacy but also her riposte in the affair of the assassination of the US ambassador in Benghazi. During the first round of primaries, it was Brock who directed the attacks against Bernie Sanders. The National Review qualified Brock as «a right-wing assassin who has become a left-wing assassin».
It is important to remember that the two procedures of destitution of a serving President initiated since the Second World War were set in motion for the benefit of the deep state, and not at all for the benefit of democracy. So Watergate was entirely managed by a certgain «Deep Throat» who, 33 years later, was revealed to be Mark Felt, the assistant of J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI. As for the Lewinsky affair, it was simply a way of forcing Bill Clinton to accept the war against Yugoslavia.
The current campaign is organised in secret by four associations:
Media Matters is tasked with picking up on Donald Trump’s mistakes. You read his bulletin every day in your newspapers – the President can’t be trusted, he got this or that point wrong.
American Bridge 21st Century has collected more than 2,000 hours of videos showing Donald Trump over the years, and more than 18,000 hours of other videos of the members of his cabinet. It has at its disposition sophisticated technological equipment designed for the Department of Defense – allegedly not in working order – which enables it to look for contradictions between their older declarations and their current positions. It should be extending its work to 1,200 of the new President’s collaborators.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington — CREW is a firm of high level lawyers tasked with tracking anything that could create a scandal in the Trump administration. Most of the lawyers in this association work pro bono, for the cause. These are the people who prepared the case for Bob Ferguson, the Chief Prosecutor of the state of Washington, against the immigration decree (Executive Order 13769).
Shareblue is an electronic army which has already connected with 162 million internauts in the USA. It’s job is to spread pre-ordained themes, for example:
• Trump is authoritarian and a thief.
• Trump is under the influence of Vladimir Putin.
• Trump is a weak and quick-tempered personality, he’s a manic-depressive.
• Trump was not elected by the majority of US citizens, and is therefore illegitimate.
• His Vice-President, Mike Pence, is a fascist.
• Trump is a billionaire who will constantly be faced with conflicts of interest between his personal affairs and those of state.
• Trump is a puppet of the Koch brothers, who are famous for sponsoring the extreme right.
• Trump is a white supremacist and a threat to minorities.
• Anti-Trump opposition just keeps growing outside Washington.
• To save democracy, let’s support the democrataic parliamentarians who are attacking Trump, and let’s demolish those who are co-operating with him.
• Overthrowing Trump will take time, so don’t let’s weaken in our resolve.
This association will produce the newsletters and 30-second videos. It will base itself on two other groups – a company which makes documentary videos, The American Independent, and a statistical unit, Benchmark Politics.
The whole of this system – which was set up during the transitional period, that is to say before Donald Trump’s arrival at the White House – already employed more than 300 specialists to which should be added numerous voluteer workers. Its annual budget, initially calculated at 35 million dollars, was increased to the level of about 100 million dollars.
Destroying the image – and thus the authority – of the President of the United States, before he has had the time to do anything at all, can have serious consequences. By eliminating Saddam Hussein and Mouamar Kadhafi, the CIA plunged their two countries into a long period of chaos, and the «land of Liberty» itself may suffer severe damage from such an operation. This type of mass manipulation technique has never before been levelled at a head of state in the Western world.
For the moment, the plan is working – no political leader in the world has dared to celebrate the election of Donald Trump, with the exception of Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Translation
Pete Kimberley
Germany to help Baltic states establish Russian-language media
Press TV – February 28, 2017
Germany plans to help Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania establish Russian-language media outlets to counter the “disinformation” allegedly being spread by Russian channels broadcasting in the region.
The plan was announced by German Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer, RT reported on Tuesday.
The announcement came ahead of German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel’s trip to the Baltic states and Sweden, which is due to take place this week.
“During his trip, Mr. Gabriel will also employ what we already started last year in the Baltic states, which is — as we say in new German — handling Russian ‘fake news’ together with appropriate partners,” Schaefer said on Monday.
He added that the main goal of the initiative was to launch Russian-language radio and TV channels, which will be “attractive to Russian speakers living in the three Baltic states” in order to produce news “in a different way” from the Russian media.
The United States, too, recently announced plans to launch a Russian-language television news channel. The US has long accused Russian media of propagating “fake news.” Such allegations have also been leveled by European governments, which are concerned about alleged Russian attempts to influence their elections in much the same way as the US has said Moscow influenced its recent presidential vote.
Western ties with Russia have plummeted significantly in recent years, particularly following Crimea’s separation from Ukraine and reunification with the Russian Federation after a referendum not authorized by Kiev.
Military build-ups close to the Russian borders, including in the Baltic countries, have also been a major source of tension.
US in Deep Turmoil as Trump Confronts the Establishment
By Salman Rafi Sheikh | New Eastern Outlook | 28.02.2017
With the departure of the Trump’s national security adviser, political crisis in the US has only depended and is likely to exacerbate into a full-fledged struggle for power and control between Trump and what some call ‘deep-state.’ While Donald Trump is an elected president of the United States of America, he doesn’t seem to be able to exercise power in actual terms. This is evident from the way a so-called ‘pro-Russian’ adviser has been forced to resign. Following this resignation an intense debate has emerged in the US, leading a considerable number of people, 48 per cent according to a recent poll, to reject the way Trump has performed in the first month of his presidency. Already Trump has retracted on Crimea. Accordingly, he is in no hurry to engage Russia in Syria nor does he consider NATO to be “obsolete.” In the same vain, his U-turn towards China is something that nobody could foresee during his election campaign. As of now, a great deal of Trump’s election rhetoric is dead and lies buried deep inside the rubric of deep structures of power, marking the very first instance of its sort when an American president has found himself deeply at odds with the system. And, there is no certainty that he can or may overcome this tussle and emerge as the American ‘knight in shining armour.’
While this may or may not happen, a lot of questions about Trump’s ability to steer the course of American foreign and domestic policies have emerged following Flynn’s resignation and with it the so-called crisis of legitimacy has deepened, leaving minimum to no space for Trump to freely determine the course of American policy making.
The crisis, or the power struggle, has deepened to an extent where an American elected president has been forced to publicly blame American intelligence agencies for feeding the media with information against him and claimed that today’s America was `just like Russia’.
The Russophobia campaign is, indeed, being fed to the American public and the declining support for Trump is more a direct result of this spread of false information than an outcome of actual ‘bad performance.’
The media leaks have already led to Michael Flynn’s resignation. The Washington Post has recently reported that Flynn had “discussed sanctions” with a Russian official during the transition period, although Flynn had assured Vice President Mike Pence that this did not happen.
In turn, The New York Times noted on February 14, 2017, that other officials of the Trump administration and his election campaign have had contacts with Russian intelligence agents as well.
Flynn’s departure just three weeks after Trump’s inauguration as president has allowed the media to claim that the White House was in total disarray.
The media’s propagandist claim has certainly irked Trump who went to his favourite medium of communication, Twitter, to fire off a series of tweets, attacking the media as well as the intelligence agencies. In at least two tweets, Trump named the agencies the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and National Security Agency (NSA) that he said were `running a campaign against him’.
`The real scandal here is that classified information is illegally given out by `intelligence’ like candy. ‘Very un-American’, he tweeted. `Information is being illegally given to the failing New York Times and Washington Post by the intelligence community.
The crisis that has thus ensued and which is being fanned out by the mainstream US media is asking for changes in the policies, particularly towards Russia about Crimea and co-operation in Syria, that Trump had advocated during his election campaign.
We have already seen that some of it has already changed. What this retraction implies, in political terms, is that the establishment has also shown that it has the ability and the grit to undermine Trump if he were to deviate from their script—a script that is premised on the existence of an enemy (Russia) and which the establishment and the deep-state can use to protect, enhance and materialize its own political and economic interests in both domestic and global political and economic arenas.
The “Russophobia” based containment of Donald Trump is, however, not going to remain exclusive to the US’ domestic political circles. On the contrary, it is likely to, and already has, expanded into international political arena and is going to define and shape Trump’s relations with the US’ European allies, who in turn are neither comfortable with Trump’s foreign policy nor are going to allow him to retract the US-NATO security system (read: NATO is no longer “obsolete”).
Interestingly enough, this ‘trans-Atlantic Russophobia’ is being transformed into a new Cold War. The NATO defence ministers have been recently been discussing the presence of their fleets in the Black Sea in a closed summit in Brusells. Clearly, the western bloc on the whole loathes Trump, creating an unprecedented disequilibrium within the Western alliance wherein Trump leads the alliance, but the partners do not know how far he is to be taken seriously due to his inability to control things (read: establishment’s course of action is more appealing to the NATO allies for its anti-Russia, pro-sanctions commitments).
The Trump administration has lost, by losing Flynn, its authority and the ability to guide the American public to its vision. On the contrary, the media-establishment nexus has hijacked Donald Trump’s own vision, forcing him to forget his election rhetoric promises and come out in the open to fight for his political survival through social media.
Just as Trump’s confrontation with the American establishment is causing unease in the domestic and European political arena, Trump’s fight with the establishment is being equally fought in both domestic and European arenas. Whereas Trump has resorted to twitter to fight back against a sustained media campaign, in the European arena he has hit back by re-casting doubts over the US’ commitment to NATO.
That is to say, while he no doubt has willy-nilly accepted NATO as the “bedrock” of American security, Mattis’ remarks at NATO defence ministers’ meeting show that the crisis is not yet over and that it will remain unsettled unless the dust of the tussle between Trump and American establishment remains in the air—something that may not happen overnight—and unless the all-powerful American establishment succeeds in modifying Trump into a typical Neo-Con hawk.
Salman Rafi Sheikh, research-analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs.
No Evidence of Trump Team’s Ties With Russia – US House Intel Committee Chair
Sputnik – 27.02.2017
WASHINGTON – The US House Intelligence Committee did not find any evidence so far proving that President Donald Trump’s advisers had any contacts with Russian officials during the 2016 US presidential campaign, Committee Chair Devin Nunes said in a press conference on Monday.
On February 15, The New York Times reported, citing phone records and intercepted calls, members of Trump’s presidential campaign team and several associates allegedly contacted Russian intelligence and government officials prior to the 2016 US elections. Both Washington and Moscow have repeatedly refuted the allegations.
“Nor there [were] any evidence presented about Trump advisers speaking to Russians,” Nunes stated. “I don’t have any evidence of any phone calls. It does not mean that they do not exist, but I don’t have that. And what I have been told by many folks that there is nothing there. But we are still looking into that.”
The US House Intelligence Committee will publicly release findings of its ongoing investigation into alleged Russia’s interference in 2016 US presidential election, Nunes said.
“They will be public, they will be publicized,” Nunes stated when asked whether the committee’s findings would be released. “Likely what will happen is we will probably have just an interim report of some kind that we will put out on what we have.”
“At this point what are we going to appoint a special prosecutor to do exactly?” Nunes stated. “If at some point we have serious crimes committed, it would be something that we would consider, but at this point we don’t have that.”
The Republican lawmaker added that right now the only serious crimes committed were the leaking of documents to the press.
The tensions between Trump and a number of US news outlets has intensified since the inauguration of the politician in January.
Earlier in the month, the president slammed “fake news” reports that kept citing anonymous White House sources alleging chaos in his administration as well as contacts with Russian intelligence services.
The soft coup against Jeremy Corbyn is under way
By John McDonnell | Labour Briefing | February 26, 2017
WE HAVE TO ALERT PARTY MEMBERS and supporters that the soft coup is underway. It’s planned, co-ordinated and fully resourced. It is being perpetrated by an alliance between elements in the Labour Party and the Murdoch media empire, both intent on destroying Jeremy Corbyn and all that he stands for.
The coup is not being waged up front in public but strictly behind the scenes. Having learned the lesson of the last coup attempt – that a direct attack on Jeremy and his policies will provoke a backlash from many party members – the coup perpetrators are this time round pursuing a covert strategy.
The aim of these covert coup plotters is to undermine the support Jeremy has secured among Labour Party members, and also importantly to undermine support from Labour voters.
Undermining support for Jeremy from Labour voters is important to the plotters because their objective is to ensure Jeremy trails in the polls and can’t win elections. In this way they can destroy morale among party members and their confidence in him.
The tactics include daily and constant behind-the-scenes non-attributable briefings against Jeremy and his Shadow Cabinet every time he or his shadow ministers make a statement, intervene in Parliament or launch a policy. The plotters use every opportunity to chip away at Jeremy’s standing to seek to demean him and undermine support for him in the Labour Party and among Labour supporters. This constant barrage of negative briefings also crowds out any positive initiatives or narrative from Jeremy and his team. It also feeds and confirms in the public’s mind that the Labour Party is split.
The plotters are effective in distorting the media coverage because they have extensive contacts and allies in the media, many inherited from Mandelson’s days. The professional planning of interventions in which attacks to undermine Jeremy are framed evidences an exceptionally well resourced ‘dark arts’ operation of the old spin school. The coup plotters are willing to sacrifice the Party at elections just to topple Jeremy and prevent a socialist leading the Party. It is more important to them that they regain control of the Party than it is to win elections.
The irony is that they are willing to go so far in denigrating Jeremy that they endanger their own parliamentary seats and endanger the very existence of the party they want to use to get into power. We saw the methods they use with the leaking of the Party’s internal polling. This was a carefully planned and executed operation. Let’s use it as a case example.
Both quantitative and qualitative polling is undertaken by the Party regularly under the direction of Jon Trickett, the Party’s National Campaign Co-ordinator. Jon arranged for one focus group to be carried out by the Party’s polling agency in Manchester to assess how our frontbench members appearing on television programmes at the time were being perceived in the north west. This polling took place back in November and its results were only accessible to a small number of party officials, Jon Trickett and the polling agency. To this day I have still not seen the results. The polling was leaked by someone to James Lyons, a Times journalist who has regularly received leaks from within the Labour Party – usually used to attack Jeremy and his team.
The Murdoch media had already run earlier in the week fake news stories in The Times and Sun alleging that Jeremy was planning to stand down as leader of the Party. No matter how many times it was explained that this story was completely untrue and absolute fiction, the The Times and Sun continued to run it – and the BBC and other broadcast media took it up and reported it extensively. The media then invented the story that the polling on the perception of Shadow Cabinet members in the north west was the Party testing the perceptions of potential successors to Jeremy.
This was a classic negative story framing and transmission exercise. It is just one example of what we confront on a weekly and at times almost daily basis. It is vitally important that our supporters understand and appreciate what we are facing. What we are experiencing is completely predictable and expected. Spreading that understanding of what we are up against enables us all to organise how we can fight back and overcome the soft coup strategy.
We all have an important role to play in explaining what we are facing and how, by standing together, we can defeat the plotters again. This is the testing time for the Corbyn transformation. The challenges are great and the times are tough – but we all know that this is the socialist opportunity of a lifetime.
John McDonnell is Shadow Chancellor, MP for Hayes and Harlington, Chair of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs and Chair of the Labour Representation Committee.
contact – office@labourbriefing.org
© Labour Briefing 2017
Hollywood Honors Terrorism
By Stephen Lendman | February 27, 2017
Hollywood Academy Awards are all about film promotion for profits, unrelated to the industry’s best, way too little of it around.
They also reflect longstanding Tinseltown ties to Washington. Scripts feature pro-Western propaganda.
Studio bosses are well compensated for colluding in glorifying America’s wars and demonizing its enemies – including “Islamic terrorists” and Russia.
Washington has final say on content and characters in propaganda films. It wants its agenda promoted, most people none the wiser.
History is reinvented. The state-sponsored 9/11 event is exploited. Rogue CIA agents are portrayed as heroes. Supporting America’s imperial agenda is more important than truth.
In 2013, Argo was chosen Hollywood’s top film. It should have been denounced instead of honored – reinventing a 1979/1980 Iranian hostage crisis episode.
The film was malicious, unjust and one-sided, Hollywood propaganda at its worst, ignoring what should have been featured, stereotypically portraying Iran according to Western misinformation.
At Hollywood’s 89th Academy Awards on Sunday, the White Helmets propaganda film was honored as the past year’s best documentary short – portraying terrorists as heroes.
The group has nothing to do with civil defense as claimed, everything to do with supporting terrorism against sovereign independent Syria.
Its personnel operate in al-Nusra (al-Qaeda in Syria) controlled areas. Calling themselves volunteer rescue workers responsible for saving tens of thousands of lives is rubbish.
America and Britain support the group. So does the Soros Open Society Foundation and like-minded pro-Western interests.
White Helmets have been photographed and videotaped together with al-Nusra terrorists during beheadings and other atrocities. They support creation of a no-fly zone to prevent Syrian aerial self-defense.
The Syria Solidarity Movement calls them al Qaeda “with a facelift,” fostering terrorism and imperial ravaging on the pretext of humanitarianism.
People associated with the group are enemies of fundamental freedoms – warriors, not peacemakers, foreign-supported dark forces wanting tyranny replacing Syrian sovereign independence.
They were nominated for the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize. Instead it went to narco-state terrorist Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia’s president. As Alvaro Uribe’s defense minister, he was notorious for massacring “entire population centers,” James Petras explained.
Nobel committee members honored state terrorism. So did Hollywood last night in naming The White Helmets last year’s best documentary short.
Stephen Lendman can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book as editor and contributor is titled Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.
‘White Helmets helping rebrand terror groups to create Syrian no-fly zones’ – Vanessa Beeley
RT | February 27, 2017
Increased terrorist attacks during the peace talks put pressure on the US to divide the militant factions inside Syria to determine who are terrorists and who are not. A terrorist rebranding process comes into play at that point, says researcher Vanessa Beeley.
A spokesman for the terror group which claimed responsibility for Saturday’s deadly attack on military facilities in the Syrian city of Homs has appeared on the Al Jazeera TV channel.
The attacks happened at the same time as Syria peace talks were underway in Geneva. During the broadcast, the terrorist claimed the attack was planned well in advance and wasn’t aimed at disrupting the talks.
Tahrir al-Sham is an Al-Qaeda-linked terror group, formed in January. The majority of its members were part of a group widely known as al-Nusra.
RT: What do you think about Al Jazeera giving a platform to a terrorist?
Vanessa Beeley: This is not that unusual for Al Jazeera in the sense that although they have not overtly given a platform to terrorists throughout their reporting on the NATO and Gulf State war that is being waged against a sovereign nation, Syria, we’ve seen them consistently produce reports from terrorist affiliates, particularly during the time of the Al-Nusra Front-led occupation of East Aleppo.
We saw them allegedly broadcast from East Aleppo via citizen journalists and activists that we’ve later discovered have clear affiliations to extremist groups, like Nour al-Din al-Zenki, like Nusra Front themselves, for example, Lina al-Shami and other such affiliates who were embedded inside East Aleppo and were producing the NATO-aligned narrative and propaganda to ensure the continued incarceration of the civilians in East Aleppo.
So, this is not unusual for Al Jazeera to be giving a platform so to speak to terrorist organizations, to terrorist operatives. And again, this renaming of Tahrir al-Sham is another rebranding process that is becoming very familiar now.
RT: The militants are rebranding themselves quite often. What’s the purpose of this?
VB: I think they have two aspects to this. I think you have the aspect that we have now gangs and counter-gangs throughout Syria – we see splinter groups upon splinter groups particularly in Idlib, we are seeing them fighting among themselves, the various extremist and militant factions. But as regards Nusra Front – we had it already – the last name was Fateh al-Sham, it is a little hard to keep up with it and in fact, I think, the US administration, both under Obama and under Trump, is struggling to keep up with their own rebranding process of Al-Qaeda in Syria.
And what I think we are really seeing is an intensification of that during peace talks when, of course, there is going to be pressure upon the US administration to basically segregate the militant factions inside Syria and to determine those that are terrorists and those that are not. And we always see this rebranding process coming into play at that point.
RT: The group denies the attack on the Syrian military facilities in Homs was designed to disrupt the Geneva peace talks. Do you believe the timing is just a coincidence?
VB: I think the timing is far from a coincidence. I don’t think any of these attacks are ever coincidental, particularly when they come in parallel with the various peace talks that have been held over the last few years. But this one in particular, what is very important to know that for the last four days to a week there has been an intensification of the Syrian Arab Army campaigns against the terrorist factions in Homs and in the surrounding countryside.
What I did notice, which was very interesting, is in the corporate media reporting of this incident, we saw the appearance of actually the White Helmets and their video footage was used by the majority of corporate media. This is interesting because it is one of the few times that I have seen them actually inside Homs and filming a terrorist operation, so to me this demonstrates the fact that the White Helmets will be used alongside with the rebranding of this terrorist group to basically protect the terrorist group by calling in for the ‘no-fly zone’ and in an attempt to derail the Syrian Arab Army activity that is effectively to cleanse the area of the terrorist factions.
RT: What are your thoughts about the documentary on the White Helmets having been nominated for an Oscar?
VB: I think it will be a victory for propaganda, basically. They should be congratulated maybe on their acting skills rather than their humanitarian skills. Myself, and actually Lizzie Phelan of RT were actually in East Aleppo at pretty much the same time during its liberation from Nusra Front-led occupation. And afterward for the many celebrations of liberation leading up to Christmas. And both of us independently in different districts of East Aleppo, as they were being liberated, were speaking to civilians as they were emerging from four and a half years of imprisonment, we were both asking these civilians what they knew of the White Helmets. Now the first point to make was, when I used the term the White Helmets, which is the label that is given to them by their marketing campaign managers and by the corporate media in the West, most of the civilians didn’t have a clue who we were talking about. When we then expanded on the theme, we mentioned that they were civil defense, then almost immediately, the response was: “Oh, you mean Nusra Front civil defense.” And that was entirely unprompted by these Syrian civilians, literally as they were leaving the liberated districts. We also accrued a number of testimonies that basically attested to the fact that they worked alongside the terrorist organizations inside East Aleppo, they worked in facilitating and sometimes even participating in the various terrorist atrocities that were carried out both at East Aleppo and in the Aleppo countryside and then in Idlib…
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A low-fat, high-carb diet has been the largest public health experiment in history. It’s past time for a rethink.
By Malcolm Kendrick | RT | November 25, 2020
New research suggests that four billion people globally will be overweight in 2050. This trend can be traced back to the ‘low-fat, high-carb’ guidelines first issued in the 70s, and should prompt a major U-turn on dietary advice.
A recent report from the Potsdam Institute predicts that by 2050 there will be four billion overweight people in the world, with one-and-a-half billion of them obese. This is not entirely surprising. The world has been getting fatter for years, and things do not seem to be slowing down.
Why is this happening? … continue
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