Foxes Guard Facebook Henhouse
By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 22.12.2016
The latest mantra of CIA-linked media since the “Pizzagate” leaks of data alleging that Hillary Clinton Campaign Manager John Podesta and other highly influential political persons in Washington were connected to an unusual pizza place near the White House run by a 41-year old James Achilles Alefantis called Comet Ping Pong, is the need to crack down (i.e. censorship) on what is being called “Fake News.” The latest step in this internet censorship drive is a decision by the murky social media organization called Facebook to hire special organizations to determine if Facebook messages are pushing Fake News or not. Now it comes out that the “fact check” private organizations used by Facebook are tied to the CIA and CIA-related NGO’s including George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
In the last weeks of the US Presidential campaign, Wikileaks released a huge number of emails linked to Clinton Campaign Manager, John Podesta. The contents of thousands of emails revealed detailed exchanges between Podesta and the oddly-influential Comet Ping Pong pizza place owner, Alefantis, as well as the Clinton campaign, which held fundraisers at Comet Ping Pong.
The Pizzagate scandal exploded in the final weeks of the US campaign as teams of private researchers documented and posted Facebook, Instagram and other data suggesting that Alefantis and Comet Ping Pong were at the heart of a pedophilia ring that implicated some of the most prominent politicians in Washington and beyond.
The New York Times and Washington Post moved swiftly to assert that the Pizzagate revelations were Fake News, quoting “anonymous sources” who supposedly said the CIA “believed” Russia was behind hackers who exposed emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. Former NSA senior intelligence expert William Binney claimed the Podesta and Clinton campaign data were leaked, not hacked. The NSA, he pointed out, would immediately identify a hack, especially a foreign hack, and they have remained silent.
The uncovering and release to Wikileaks of the Podesta emails were immediately blamed on Russian intelligence by the CIA, and now by the US President, with not a shred of proof, and despite the fact that NSA. Wikipedia, whose content is often manipulated by US intelligence agencies, rapidly posted a page with the curious title, “Pizzagate (Conspiracy Theory).”
To make certain the neutral interested reader gets the message, the first line reads, “Pizzagate is a debunked conspiracy theory which emerged during the 2016 United States presidential election cycle, alleging that John Podesta’s emails, which were leaked by WikiLeaks, contain coded messages referring to human trafficking, and connecting a number of pizzerias in Washington, D.C. and members of the Democratic Party to a child-sex ring.”
‘Fake News’ Mantra Begins
My purpose in mentioning Pizzagate details is not to demonstrate the authenticity of the Pizzagate allegations. That others are doing with far more resources. Rather, it is to point out the time synchronicity of the explosive Pizzagate email releases by Julian Assange’s Wikileaks web blog, with the launch of a massive mainstream media and political campaign against what is now being called “Fake News.”
The cited New York Times article that Wikipedia cites as “debunking” the Pizzagate allegations states, “None of it was true. While Mr. Alefantis has some prominent Democratic friends in Washington and was a supporter of Mrs. Clinton, he has never met her, does not sell or abuse children, and is not being investigated by law enforcement for any of these claims. He and his 40 employees had unwittingly become real people caught in the middle of a storm of fake news.” The article contains not one concrete proof that the allegations are false, merely quoting Alefantis as the poor victim of malicious Fake News.
That New York Times story was accompanied by a series of articles such as “How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study.” Another headline reads, “Obama, With Angela Merkel in Berlin, Assails Spread of Fake News.” Then on November 19, strong Clinton supporter, Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg is quoted in a prominent article titled, “Facebook Considering Ways to Combat Fake News, Mark Zuckerberg Says.”
Facebook uses CIA Censors
Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of the world-leading social media site, Facebook.com, the world’s 5th wealthiest man at an estimated $50 billion, has now established a network of “Third Party Fact Checkers” whose job is to red flag any Facebook message of the estimated one billion people using the site, with a prominent warning that reads, “Disputed by Third-Party Fact Checkers.”
Facebook has announced that it is taking its censorship ques from something called The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). This IFCN, a new creation, has drafted a code of five principles for news websites to accept, and Facebook will work with “third-party fact checking organizations” that are signatories to that code of principles.
If we search under the name International Fact-Checking Network, we find ourselves at the homepage of something called the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Florida.
OK. If we look a bit deeper we find that the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network in turn, as its website states, gets money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Omidyar Network, the Open Society Foundations of George Soros.
Oh my, oh my! Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation who partners with Soros in numerous nasty projects such as convincing African countries to accept Genetically Modified or GMO seeds? Google, whose origins date back to funding by the CIA and NSA as what intelligence researcher Nafeez Ahmed describes as a “plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority‘ “?
The Omidyar Foundation is the foundation of eBay founder and multi billionaire, Pierre Omidyar, which finances among other projects the online digital publication, The Intercept, launched in 2014 by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill.
And the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US Government-financed “private” NGO behind every Color Revolution CIA regime change from the Ukraine Color Revolutions to the Arab Spring? The NED was a CIA project created in the 1980’s during the Reagan Administration as part of privatizing US intelligence dirty operations, to do, as Allen Weinstein, who drafted the Congressional legislation to establish the NED, noted in a candid 1991 Washington Post interview, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
And if we dig even deeper we find, lo and behold, the name George Soros, convicted hedge fund insider trader, tax-exempt philanthropist and giga-billionaire who seems to fund not only Hillary Clinton and virtually every CIA and US State Department Color Revolution from Russia to China to Iran through his network of Open Society Foundations including the 1990’s Jeffrey Sachs Shock Therapy plunder of Russia and most of former Communist East Europe.
Another one of the media working with Zuckerberg’s Facebook censorship of Fake News is the Washington Post, today owned by Amazon billionaire founder Jeff Bezos. Bezos is a major media business partner of…. The US Central Intelligence Agency, a fact he omitted to inform about after taking over ownership of the most important newspaper in Washington.
Bezos’ Washington Post recently published a bizarre list of 200 websites it claimed generated Fake News. It refused to identify who gave them the list. Veteran Washington investigative reporter, Wayne Madsen, exposed the source of the McCarthy-style taboo list of so-called Fake News. It was a “website called PropOrNot.com that has links to the CIA and George Soros.”
It’s not merely the Pizzagate revelations that have triggered such a massive attack on independent Internet websites. It seems that back in January 2014 at the Davos World Economic Forum control of information on the Internet was a top item of discussion. At the time, Madsen noted, “With the impending demise of World Wide Web ‘net neutrality,’ which has afforded equal access for website operators to the Internet, the one percent of billionaire investors are busy positioning themselves to take over total control of news reporting on the Internet.”
It’s not even the foxes who are guarding the Internet Henhouse. It’s the werewolves of CIA and US Government censorship. Whether the explosive Pizzagate Podesta revelations merely triggered a dramatic acceleration in the timetable for the CIA’s planned “Fake News” operation as the successor to their 1980’s “Conspiracy Theory” linguistic discrediting operation, it’s clear this is no unbiased, objective, transparent public service to protect the Internet public from harmful content.
And, besides, who are they to tell me or you what you are allowed to read, digest and form your independent ideas about? This is a 21st Century reincarnation of the Spanish Inquisition, one by the real fake newsmakers–Washington Post, AP, ABCNews, Snopes.com, FactCheck.org, the CIA and friends. I would say it’s an alarming development of cyber warfare, not by Russia, but by those CIA-run networks that are fomenting Fake News to demonize any and everyone who opposes Washington intelligence propaganda.
NY Daily News Joins Daesh in Celebrating Assassination of Andrey Karlov
Sputnik | December 21, 2016
As world leaders and ordinary people expressed their horror following the assassination of Russian Ambassador to Turkey Andrey Karlov, New York Daily News (NYDN) writer Gersh Kuntzmann openly celebrated the public execution, calling it an example of ‘justice [being] served.’
“As Vladimir Putin’s man in Turkey, Karlov was the public face of that murderous dictator’s war crimes around the globe and of oppression at home,” Kuntzmann wrote. “I, for one, am shedding no tears for Andrei Karlov.”
Kuntzmann also repeatedly compared the assassination of Karlov to the killing of Ernst vom Rath, a Nazi German embassy official shot dead in 1938 by Jewish teenager Herschel Grynszpan, while also likening Vladimir Putin, the leader of the government that Karlov served, to the infamous dictator Adolf Hitler. “Like Karlov, Rath was the public face of atrocity — in this case, Adolf Hitler’s genocide, anti-Semitism and coming global aggression… [history] has vindicated Grynszpan — and, indeed, vindicated others who have fought against aggression and fought for freedom.”
While giving a welcome speech at the Ankara Center for Contemporary Art on Monday December 19, Karlov was shot nine times in the back by Mevlüt Mert Altıntaş, a Turkish police officer. The 62-year-old father of one was unarmed and unguarded, and died soon after. Altıntaş’s motivations are not yet clear, but after the murder he yelled “Don’t forget Aleppo, don’t forget Syria!”
The 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which nearly every country has signed and ratified, places the safety of diplomats as sacrosanct. Even in wartime, a diplomat’s task of providing reliable means of communication between nations is thought to be apolitical and crucial.
Kuntzmann, however, disagrees. “Karlov’s job in Turkey was to ease tensions over Russia’s atrocities in Syria and its incursions inside Turkey itself — meaning his job was to enable and normalize Vladimir Putin. Given that role, he wasn’t a diplomat, but a soldier, and his death is the same whether it came on a battlefield outside Aleppo or in an art gallery in Ankara.”
Kuntzmann’s comments have been met primarily with outrage on NYDN’s Facebook page. “Shouldn’t we be sad based on the fact he was a human being who was killed on camera? For the whole world & his family? Ridiculous headline. Learn some empathy instead of selling propaganda against Russia over this tragic death,” reads one comment.
“Oh Gersh, do you just stay awake at night trying to figure out ways to be ‘controversial’ or are you really that stupid. Regardless of what he was ‘the face of’, being assassinated by an Islamic terrorist is a bad thing,” reads another.
Many readers were fast to remind the author that the US is also participating in Middle East conflicts, and American diplomats have been killed in the line of duty as well.
“I’m sure there are many in the dung pile who would have said the same about Chris Stephens.. way to “go high”, sickos,” Lynn Peterson reflected.
Others went further. “You have got to be kidding me… the United States has committed human atrocities all over the place… seriously Kuntzman are you oblivious to The American war machine and what it has been doing to innocent lives for decades,” Gord Jacquie Clance charged.
The international response to the death of Andrey Karlov was a combination of outrage and support for Russia, as one of their public servants was horrifically gunned down. Besides Turkey, figures such as US Secretary of State John Kerry, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, French President Francois Hollande, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and countless others have offered Russia condolences.
Others celebrated Karlov’s death. Most prominent among them were Ukrainian nationalist politician Volodymyr Parasiuk, as well as Daesh. They have now been joined by NYDN. Gersh Kuntzmann, who joined NYDN in 2012, is best known for a July 2016 article about AR-15 assault rifles in which he claimed that firing the weapon “gave me a temporary form of PTSD. For at least an hour after firing the gun just a few times, I was anxious and irritable.” It seems, however, that Kuntzmann may have still not recovered from his trauma, as one reader summed up after reading his article: “ Annnnnnd Kuntzman has PTSD again.”
Syria, Russia and American Desperation
By Margaret Kimberley | Black Agenda Report | December 21, 2016
It is no coincidence that anti-Russian propaganda is being ramped up at the same moment the Syrian government is poised to retake its country from terrorists. Barack Obama and the rest of the war party are left to sputter nonsensical statements because their grand plan to realize the neocon Project for a New American Century is in very big trouble.
The American corporate media ignored the suffering of Syrians in the city of Aleppo until their captivity was broken by the Syrian Arab Army. Ever since 2012 ISIS and other terrorist groups sponsored by the United States, NATO, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar have held thousands of people hostage there. Turks picked the region apart, raiding Syrian factories and transporting them piece by piece back to their country.
Now that the Syrians are retaking the city with the help of their Russian and Hezbollah allies, there is a steady stream of news about Aleppo. All of it is meant to pull at the heart strings of uninformed people as the human rights industrial complex reliably goes about its dirty work. Human Rights Watch and other groups who work to promote United States foreign policy speak endlessly about war crimes. They didn’t say much when America’s allies were terrorizing Syrians but now they suddenly point fingers and always at the people who run afoul of regime change plans.
The five year-long effort to destroy the Syrian state has produced many victims in that country and it always threatened to spark a larger international conflict. The assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey could be such a moment. The gunman’s last words and obviously his actions were a call to jihad. Even one hundred years later the 1914 assassination in Sarajevo is not far from memory.
But the United States is the principal actor in this drama. None of the other nations involved in this crime would have acted absent American direction. All of the casualties, the sieges, the hunger and the frantic search for refuge can be placed at America’s feet. So too the death of the Russian ambassador. This international tangle is covered with American finger prints.
The Syrian government is determined to take back its country and the Americans and their allies are equally determined to thwart it. The recent successes of the Syrian army explain part of the desperation coming from Obama, the Democratic Party and corporate media. Blaming Russia kills several birds with one stone. It continues the propaganda war against a country that will not knuckle under and accept American hegemony. The hyper Russophobia was also an attempt to make the unpalatable and incompetent Hillary Clinton more appealing. And its continuation is being used by Democrats and Republicans to stop the incoming president from having any chance to improve relations with that country or curtail the regime change doctrine. The war party never sleeps.
Barack Obama’s last press conference was replete with lies and insults aimed at Russia and Vladimir Putin. He should have been embarrassed to say that Russia was “smaller,” “weaker” and “doesn’t produce anything that anybody wants to buy except oil and gas and arms.” He completed his bizarre rant by saying that Putin was “the former head of the KGB.” He was no such thing and of course Obama knows that. It isn’t clear if he expected anyone to believe him or if facing his failure carried him away to heights of rhetorical foolishness.
Obama thought that Hillary Clinton would win and complete his regime change plans. Not only did she lose and deprive him of his third term but the hollowness of his legacy is clear. Obviously “hope and change” was a marketing tag line meant to hide his commitment to the world wide neoliberal project.
Donald Trump will be president of the United States in just four weeks. That is a short period of time in which to pull off a soft coup. He will be inaugurated but team Obama want to make sure he cannot upend the status quo they work so hard to uphold.
While the Democratic Party rank and file are anxious about racism, immigration, Islamophobia, judicial appointees and voter suppression their leaders only care about maintaining imperialism. Obama and the rest of the democratic party are unworthy of the loyalty they engender. On January 20th thousands of people will head to Washington to protest Trump while the Democrats will be making last ditch efforts to help jihadists destroy Syria.
Some of the protesters ought to target their ire at Obama and the Democrats and not just because of their electoral failure. They ought to pledge an end to support for warmongering Democrats altogether. If it is true that Trump is a fascist he won’t be the first one in the White House. His predecessor fits that description just as well. But events may have spun out of his control. The fate of Syria may not be in American hands any longer. And that is why the desperation is so evident.
Margaret Kimberley can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.
Is the CIA editing your newspaper?
By Jonathan Cook | Dissident Voice | December 20, 2016
Here is a great overview by Ed Jones of why corporate media are the arch-exponents of “fake news”. The media are overwhelming owned and controlled by billionaires and gargantuan corporations, who depend on the support of other corporations for ad revenue, and employ journalists from a narrow, privileged class whose careers depend on maintaining access to elite sources. It would be simply astounding in these circumstances if we had anything resembling a pluralistic media.
The data concerns UK outlets, but the same principles apply in the US.
One section makes especially disturbing reading. It is the little-discussed matter of the intelligence services’ deep penetration of most western, and in some cases non-western, media organisations. In short, US intelligence services – and to a lesser extent British ones – have for many decades fed information to sympathetic journalists in key positions inside the “free” media, working with them hand in glove. Additionally, the CIA has sought to put its own people into publications to shape directly editorial content and influence public opinion. In some cases, these people may have reached very senior positions.
Nick Davies, of the Guardian, dedicated a whole chapter of his book Flat Earth News to documenting these practices. Strangely, that chapter is rarely mentioned. Journalists who praise the book instead concentrate on his less revealing concept of “churnalism” – journalism compromised by constraints of time and resources.
Jones adds other sources who make much the same point:
Richard Keeble, professor of journalism at the University of Lincoln, … has written on the history of the links between journalists and the intelligence services. … He quotes Roy Greenslade, who has been a media specialist for both the Telegraph and the Guardian [and is a former editor of the Mirror newspaper], as saying: “Most tabloid newspapers – or even newspapers in general – are playthings of MI5 [Britain’s FBI].”
Keeble goes on to say:
Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of ‘one of Britain’s most distinguished journals’ as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll [the British equivalent of the CIA – my emphasis]. And in 1991, Richard Norton-Taylor revealed in the Guardian that 500 prominent Britons paid by the CIA and the now defunct Bank of Commerce and Credit International, included 90 journalists.
Keeble has given many more examples in his book chapter of the intelligence services infiltrating the media and changing the politics of the time, including around the miners strikes and Arthur Scargill in the 1980s and during the lead-up to the Iraq war in 2003. …
David Leigh, former investigations editor of The Guardian, wrote about a series of instances in which the secret services manipulated prominent journalists. He claims reporters are routinely approached and manipulated by intelligence agents and identifies three ways – providing examples for each in his article – in which they do it:
• They attempt to recruit journalists to spy on other people or themselves attempt to go under journalistic “cover.”
• They allow intelligence officers to pose as journalists “to write tendentious articles under false names.”
• And “the most malicious form”: they plant intelligence agency propaganda stories on willing journalists who disguise their origin from readers.
Remember that those who should be exposing the intelligence services’ manipulation of the mainstream media are the very same mainstream media that are already compromised. In other words, this story of systematic “fake news” planted by our intelligence services is almost impossible for the media to tell because it would expose a very uncomfortable reality: that they are not, as they claim, watchdogs on power, but rather the lapdogs of the powerful.
If all this still seems hard to believe, please watch this video of a senior German journalist admitting that he was recruited by the US intelligence services (h/t Antonio Nascimento). Udo Ulfkotte covered the Middle East for the Frankfurter Allgemeine for 12 years, and says he regularly acted as a conduit for CIA propaganda. He adds that many of his colleagues were doing the same, willingly promoting CIA disinformation.
Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, Israel is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.
CIA is misrepresenting FBI’s and Clapper’s doubts on CIA’s Russian hacking claims
By Alexander Mercouris | The Duran | December 20, 2016
Four days ago on 16th December 2016 the Washington Post, the newspaper which has been the most zealous in spreading the story that Russian hacking influenced the outcome of the US Presidential election, published a report that claimed that ODNI and the FBI – which had previously appeared to express doubts – had fallen into line with the claims concerning the hacking being made by the CIA.
This report follows earlier reports that not just the FBI but more critically ODNI, Director of Intelligence James Clapper’s Office, have expressed doubts about the CIA’s claims of Russian hacking.
The Washington Post article that ODNI and the FBI have fallen into line behind the Russian hacking claims stems from a private memorandum circulated to officials of the CIA by CIA Director John Brennan.
The memorandum, which was obviously leaked to the Washington Post by officials of the CIA, reads as follows
Earlier this week, I met separately with (Director) FBI James Comey and DNI Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election. The three of us also agree that our organisations, along with others, need to focus on completing the thorough review of this issue that has been directed by President Obama and which is being led by the DNI. In recent days, I have had several conversations with members of Congress, providing an update on the status of the review as well as the considerations that need to be taken into account as we proceed. Many — but unfortunately not all — members understand and appreciate the importance and the gravity of the issue, and they are very supportive of the process that is underway.
(bold italics added)
The first thing to say about this memorandum is that it originates from within the CIA, not from ODNI or the FBI. The media asked ODNI and the FBI to comment on the memorandum but as is their invariable practice they refused to do so.
The second point to make about this memorandum is that – as the memorandum implicitly admits – the CIA’s claims have not gone uncontested within the US political world, and that there have been some complaints from some Republicans and from Donald Trump and his transition team that the CIA is politicising the issue. In light of this reports of doubts on the part of ODNI and the FBI are dangerous for both the CIA and for CIA Director Brennan personally, giving them a strong reason to play the existence of these doubts down.
The third point to make is that Brennan’s memorandum and its leaking to the Washington Post came immediately following US President Obama’s own public endorsement of the CIA’s claims of Russian hacking, and his threats to take retaliatory action against Russia.
In light of the President’s public statement, it is a certainty that ODNI and the FBI have been under intense pressure from the Obama administration and the CIA to endorse what is now the US government’s official line. Brennan’s memorandum is almost certainly a product of that pressure.
In the event the memorandum stops well short of giving either the Obama administration or the CIA the strong endorsement they were looking for, which is why news of it had to be given in such an indirect way – through the leaking of a private internal memorandum of the CIA to the Washington Post – rather than in a public statement.
That ODNI and the FBI have fallen well short of providing the endorsement the Obama administration and the CIA were looking for is also shown by the language of the memorandum itself. It speaks of “consensus” rather than “agreement”, a word that leaves open the possibility for disagreement, especially in light of the review which is now underway.
There is in fact nothing in the memorandum that contradicts the doubts passed on to Reuters by the three ODNI officials who were speaking on behalf of both ODNI and the FBI, and whose comments I have discussed previously.
It is hardly plausible that in the few days since those officials spoke to Reuters the US’s various intelligence agencies have learnt anything new that would cause ODNI or the FBI to change their views. If anything new had come to light, we would certainly have heard about it, and it is a certainty Brennan would have mentioned it in his memorandum.
As to why ODNI and the FBI doubt the CIA’s claims, as the ODNI officials told Reuters it is because they are inferential
[The CIA conclusion] was a judgment based on the fact that Russian entities hacked both Democrats and Republicans and only the Democratic information was leaked. (It was) a thin reed upon which to base an analytical judgment.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose evidentiary standards require it to make cases that can stand up in court, declined to accept the CIA’s analysis – a deductive assessment of the available intelligence – for the same reason.
Note in particular the point made by one ODNI official to Reuters
ODNI is not arguing that the agency (CIA) is wrong, only that they can’t prove intent. Of course they can’t, absent agents in on the decision-making in Moscow.
(bold italics added)
Reading this last comment, it is easy to see what has happened.
Brennan is misrepresenting ODNI’s and the FBI’s negative point – that they are not arguing that the CIA is wrong – by presenting it as a positive – that they accept (“strong consensus”) that the CIA is right.
Affirming a positive from a negative is of course a well known debating trick, even though it is a logical fallacy. That however is what CIA Director Brennan has done.
I would repeat a point here that I made in my previous article discussing the comments by the three ODNI officials to Reuters : not only were those officials acting on DNI Clapper’s instructions, but it is very likely that DNI Clapper was one of them. Indeed it is quite possible that he was the one who made the point to Reuters about ODNI “not arguing that the CIA is wrong”.
If Clapper used the same words to Brennan, then it becomes even easier to see how Brennan might be misrepresenting Clapper’s words. Of course Brennan would be acting in a grossly insubordinate way. However since both he and Clapper are about to retire, and since Brennan knows he has Obama’s backing, it is doubtful Brennan cares very much about it.
Fewer than one third of Americans agree that Russia is responsible for US election hacks
Sputnik – 20.12.2016
Almost half of American voters do not agree with the conclusion of US intelligence agencies that the government of Russia is responsible for cyberattacks related to the 2016 election, a new Morning Consult/Politico poll revealed on Tuesday.
When asked which statement came closest to their views, 46 percent said, “We cannot be sure about who is primarily responsible for hacking and cyber-attacks that may have impacted the US election.”
Respondents said tracing cyber-attacks is complicated and the intelligence groups now claiming Russian meddling “are the same ones that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”
Twenty-nine percent of respondents agreed with the statement, “We know with near certainty that Russia is responsible for hacking and cyber-attacks that impacted the US election.”
Those respondents said that US intelligence agencies have used advanced techniques to determine who is responsible for the cyberattacks “and we are only playing into an unfriendly country’s hand when we deny this.
A quarter of respondents said they were not sure or had no opinion on the election hacking.
In general, the responses followed opinions along party lines, with 63 percent of Republicans and 28 percent of Democrats saying the United States cannot be sure about the origin of the attacks, according to the poll.
Outgoing President Barack Obama suggested during his last news conference on Friday that the cyberattacks were likely initiated at the highest levels of the Russian government.
Russian officials have repeatedly denied Washington’s claims of election-meddling, characterizing them as absurd and an attempt to distract Americans from domestic issues.
Bana Al-Abed’s Last Tweet
Inside Syria Media Center – December 20, 2016
Hashtag #lasttweet began to appear in Twitter frequently after government troops engaged the final phase of Aleppo’s liberation in recent weeks.
Bana al-Abed, an alleged seven-year resident of the largest city in Syria, was the first who created an Internet hysterical fit designed to discredit the process of recapturing Aleppo. Her Twitter account was registered in September, 2016, amid intensified fighting in Aleppo. There are many details of the horrors of war on her page. And the girl blames not the terrorists but the Syrian government and its allies. Tweets are actively retweeted and not only by the Syrian opposition, but also by the mainstream Western media. For example, The Washington Post called Bana the Syrian Anne Frank (who wrote a diary in Nazi-occupied Netherlands).
At the same time, no one draws attention to the strange nuances. First, tweets appear very often. It seems that the little girl posts the information about the situation in the city 24/7. Aleppo is a city of constant fighting, with no constant energy source and water supply, and there is often lack of food and medicine. The more so, no one can easily access the Internet and cellular network due to damaged infrastructure. Second, her account looks perfect it terms of English language. Third, celebs, Western journalists and popular opposition bloggers contribute to the viral dissemination of Bana’s posts. It took just three hours to collect more than 3,700 likes and more than 5,000 retweets after the publication of one of the first tweets of Bana. According to Social Rank website, the request “Who was your first follower?” shows the first subscriber of Bana was an Al-Jazeera journalist Abdul Aziz Ahmed.

Social Rank website shows the results of the request
Moreover, J.K. Rowling promised to send the girl a Harry Potter book and by doing so the writer made a very good ad and emphasized the problem of Bana. Despite the fact that Syria has always been at a high level of literacy of the population (more than 90 percent in fact), Aleppo has been involved in the civil war for four years. At the same time we are forced to believe that the seven-year-old child has such a good command of a foreign language that she is ready to read a book of several hundred pages in the original language.

Speaking of the language it should be noted that a Syrian activist Maytham Al Ashkar who is originally from Al-Zahraa in northern Syria, currently in Beirut, but often travelling to Damascus and Aleppo contacted the 7-year-old Twitter star, Bana Alabed, on November 27, offering to evacuate her family from eastern Aleppo. After a month, someone who identified herself as Bana’s mother responded. When he got contacted by Bana’s account, he started to chat in Arabic since they are all Syrians and Arabic is their mother tongue. However, it was obvious that the person behind the account preferred English as a language of communication.
The more so, according to the media, Bana’s mother studied law. This means that she has studied the Syrian curriculum for 12 years, which is all in Arabic, plus 4 years at university, where all the subjects are taught in Arabic
The girl and her mother didn’t arrange the possibility of evacuation which could be provided by the journalist. So, Maytham Al Ashkar decided that the girl is just a face, a tool used by the British intelligence. (British – because of the strong relationship between the Bana’s account and the White Helmets funded and sponsored by the UK)

Twitter conversation between Maytham Al Ashkar and al-Abed’s account
It should be noted that Bana not only writes these tweets but also her mother Fatima al-Abed who is a teacher at a local school. It is she who helps her daughter to write so grammatically correct. Nevertheless, all this raises a number of questions: who is really writing on behalf of Bana and where from? There are a number of other controversial issues. Inside Syria Media Center will try to investigate the Bana project.
On November 27, Bana reported that her home had been destroyed after the shelling. The house is allegedly located in Joured Awaad quarter in the eastern part of Aleppo. Meanwhile, about 20 shellings performed by the anti-government forces were registered in the provinces of Aleppo on November 26. The armed groups of the Syrian Free Army fired multiple launch rocket systems against Bayada and Salah al-Din quarters of the Aleppo city. In addition, terrorists of Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and ISIS fired multiple launch rocket systems, tube artillery, mortars and small arms several times against Shurfa inhabited area, Binyamin, Dahiya al-Assad, Jamaiyah Fahat, Amri, Ashrafiyah, Art Sabah, Akyul, 1070, Hai Zahraa Awwad, Kastello trade center, al-Assad military academy, area of the former military school, and Higma school in the Aleppo city.
At the same time, the activity of the government troops was concentrated in the area to the south of the city of Hanano. So, the question arises: why does the girl insist on her house being fired upon and ruined while none of the parties opened fire near her house.
It is also unclear why the walls and the furniture in Bana’s room are not affected by the attacks, and always look new, despite the fact that the girl is constantly complaining that she frequently has to move into a new house. Moreover, the curtains on her photos are always tightly closed and the girl is always clean dressed.
On November 22, Bana published a video which showed her walking down the street in a terrorist-controlled district. Very few people are seen in the area. Getting into the shot, some of the occasional pedestrians are trying to get out of sight. They don’t really care for a little girl being shot. At 0.59, a head appears from a corner and immediately disappears. This looks really suspicious. The high quality of the footage, professional editing, and a tripod (the video is really smooth) – all these prove that the video was staged.
Bana’s tweets are written in English and the girl keeps alleging that Bashar al-Assad “kills children, bombs schools, shells neighborhoods and hurts Aleppo’s residents”. She constantly accuses the Syrian AF of aggressive actions. The little girl’s account is politically straight with messages including popular hashtags. However, in her interview to BBC, Fatima al-Abed stressed that Bana’s twitter wasn’t a propaganda campaign and wasn’t linked to terrorists.
Meanwhile, there are a lot of photos not connected to Bana. For instance, the photos of children allegedly killed in the airstrike at an Idlib school. It’s unknown how the footage got into the hands of Bana’s parents, and why the family doesn’t want to leave east Aleppo for government-controlled areas.
Everything becomes clear when you see the Facebook page of Ghassan, the girl’s father, with lots of his friends tied to various radical groups fighting in Syria.
Omar al-Amd, a Jabhat al-Nusra sniper, one of Bana father’s friends
Besides, some media reported that Bana’s tweets are written by the popular Syrian opposition blogger Abdel Kafi al-Hamdo (https://twitter.com/Mr_Alhamdo). Creating his account in October, 2016, a teacher and an activist gained as much as 17,000 followers.
The propaganda pouring from Bana’s Twitter was mentioned at a high political level. In his interview to the Danish channel TV2, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad stressed that the terrorists and their allies promoted Bana’s tweets.
The Hollywood-stylish Bana’s “death” should also be mentioned. First, the girl’s Twitter became inactive just after the government offensive on east Aleppo started. But soon BBC reported that the girl and her mother were alive and that they had come to a safe place. The account was restored and a new Tweet appeared: “Under attack. Nowhere to go, every minute feels like death. Pray for us. Goodbye – Fatemah”.
The ban provoked mass hysteria in the social media, the hashtag #whereisBana quickly became trending. At the same time, Bana’s fake accounts started to post messages about her “death”, which were allegedly written by her mother.
As of today, it should be noted that the project is still active. “Last tweets” have been repeatedly appearing. Probably, the world will witness other news from Bana, whose messages remind us of the story of “Aleppo’s last hospital”.
Till now Bana remains a mystery. The city is completely under government control but no proof of Bana and her mother’s existence has emerged. It is possible that the girl left Aleppo for Idlib alongside the most radical militants (as pointed out by a NBC report) or headed to Turkey in the company of other armed groups. The latter suggestion is supported by the call for help directed at Turkish President Recep Erdogan and Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu that Bana published on Twitter.
Locating Bana and showing that she is safe and can start a new, more quiet life, should be of utmost interest for the Syrian authorities. On the other hand, the rumors could be disproved by finding the flat in the eastern quarter of Joured Awwad and proving that exploiting children’s death is nothing but another propaganda plot of the Western media, and that the Bana project is closed.
Egypt Police Bust Staged Photo Shoot of ‘Wounded Aleppo Children’
Al-Manar – December 20, 2016
Egypt’s police detained a man for making staged “wounded children” photos, which he was planning to use to misrepresent on social media as photos of destruction and injured people in Syria’s Aleppo, the Egyptian Interior Ministry said on Monday.
“The shooting team, which included photographer’s assistants and parents of the children, was detained in the Egypt’s province of Port Said,” the Ministry said on Facebook.
According to the Ministry, the police witnessed the shooting process, which was taking place near the vestiges of a building destroyed as illegal under the decision of the local authorities.
A girl standing in a white dress covered in “blood” that later proved to be paint drew attention of a police officer driving by. The girl held a teddy bear covered in the same “blood” and had her arm “bandaged”.
The photographer reportedly admitted that he was going to publish these photos on social media as pictures of Aleppo.




















