The Russian Ministry of Defense has summoned military attaches of NATO countries and Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, asking the officials to clarify their countries’ allegations that Russian airstrikes in Syria have hit civilian targets.
“Today we invited military attaches from the US, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the NATO bloc to ask them to give official validation to their statements, or make a rebuttal,” Defense Ministry deputy head Anatoly Antonov said on Tuesday.
It particularly touches upon Western media’s “outrageous accusations” that the Russian Air Force has allegedly bombed hospitals in Syria, the military official said.
Information attacks on Moscow’s anti-terror efforts in the region have intensified recently, Antonov said, adding that the Russian military is “blamed not only for conducting airstrikes on the ‘moderate opposition,’ but also on civilian buildings, such as hospitals, mosques and schools.”
The MoD official stressed that such blame is put upon Russia not only by the media, but also officials and politicians from a number of Western states, including US Secretary of State John Kerry, US Department of Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, NATO’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, and the UK’s Defense Secretary Michael Fallon.
Allegations will be considered “stove-piping” should Russia not receive proof in the next following days, Antonov said, adding that the Defense Ministry “closely monitors and analyzes such statements.”
The MoD deputy head once again called on foreign military officials to join efforts in fighting Islamic State, saying that a wider international coalition should be immediately formed to defeat terrorists in the region.
“We are still waiting… for cooperation in defining concrete targets to be bombed in order to annihilate ISIS bases, or [providing] coordinates of facilities that should not be targeted by the Russian Air Force,” Antonov said.
Reports of a field hospital in northwestern Syria destroyed by Russian airstrikes, killing civilians, emerged last week, based on information provided by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The Russian Foreign Ministry has disputed the media reports, having questioned the credentials of the source, which is based in Britain, has no direct access to the ground in Syria, and is run by one man.
“If there is any doubt concerning the nefarious undertones of subversiveness in these NGO dealings, [National Endowment for Democracy] NED founder reportedly said the following in the 1990s: ‘A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.’ What was once done at night under the cloak of ‘imperialism’ is now done during the day under the guise of ‘humanitarianism.” ~ The Wrong Kind of Green
Hindsight is a generous provider of absolution from the guilt of falling for the Government or State propaganda and media sleights of hand that deceive us into believing the narrative presented to us, designed, in many cases to justify military intervention. Invariably this is a narrative that ensures the massacre of innocent people under the pretext of liberating them or introducing Democracy that promises to erase their perceived grievances by cutting a swathe through their society & culture either via proxy armies of mercenaries under the guise of various terrorist factions or with an onslaught of bombs and assorted mass destruction or chemical weapons that render their land barren for decades and result in birth defects, increased cancer rates and a multitude of devastating side effects for generations after.
Despite such hindsight and the universally accepted knowledge that it was pure fiction that took us to war in both Iraq and Libya there is still a huge degree of cognitive dissonance at play over the Syria commentary.
Disbelief is invariably registered when it is demonstrated that Syria is undergoing the same truth laundering process as Libya and Iraq or that Syria’s resistance of regime change attempts for almost 5 years is the reason for spikes in propaganda or focus on a particular narrative at any given moment, when Syria persistently thwarts the Colonialist vision for the region.
The NGO soft power complex is now one of the most destructive global forces. It is employed as an interface between civilians of a target nation and the Government, economic or military structures of the colonialist force intent on harnessing any given nation’s resources or undermining its geopolitical influence. The Democratization process or the path to regime change is facilitated by these undercover Government proxy employees who, once embedded into a society, set about producing the propaganda that will justify intervention, either economically, politically or militarily.
They know that the general public has an inherent faith in their perceived integrity and this gives them tremendous sway over public opinion. The perception of a “non profit” complex working for the betterment and improvement of Humanity is a hard nut to crack… but it must be done.
Along with military invasions and missionaries, NGOs help crack countries open like ripe nuts, paving the way for intensifying waves of exploitation and extraction” ~ Stephanie McMillan
“The Syrian army relies on loyal soldiers defending their country and their homes from a heavily subsidized, markedly foreign incursion, including many mercenaries paid by the Gulf monarchies and trained by the US. And the army is loyal because they know that although great sacrifices will be asked of them, they will be defending, not sacrificing, their families and loved ones. The rest of the world that supposedly cares about Syria can start by making it unnecessary for them to make such sacrifices.”
Much of the propaganda surrounding Syria and the “conflict” is indeed, mythology. A mythology created and disseminated by the NGO complex working diligently on the ground in Syria and remotely in the labyrinths of power to ensure a steady flow of misinformation designed to alter our perception and drive us towards making the same mistakes in Syria that we made in Iraq and Libya.
It is no error or oversight that the media barely mention Libya these days as it is plunged deeper and deeper into the terror vacuum created by the NATO intervention of 2011. Perhaps if people were confronted by images of the daily horrors endured by the people of Libya they would be more reticent about passive-aggressively re-creating the same scenario in Syria.
The White Helmet Myth
The NGO hydra has no more powerful or influential serpentine head in Syria than the Syria Civil Defence aka White Helmets who, according to their leader and creator, James Le Mesurier, hold greater sway than even ISIS or Al Nusra over the Syrian communities. In a speech given by Le Mesurier in Lisbon June 2015, entitled “ Act 1: Witnesses to history in the making”, Le Mesurier informed his rapt audience that in a recent US Government survey conducted across a “diverse spectrum” of Syrian communities, 67% of those asked, nominated the White Helmets as the most influential community organisation.
This, despite, their non-inclusion in the 15 respondents to the survey, that comprised ISIS, Al Nusra, & other political or armed groups. This is a bizarre claim on two fronts. 1. That the White Helmets should be included, by James Le Mesurier, in group that is obviously politically biased and armed when they promote themselves to be “unarmed”, apolitical and neutral. 2. That the White Helmets can lay claim to this influence, despite the fact that when asked, the majority of Syrian people have never heard of them, except perhaps for those in Al Nusra, ISIS or [the dwindling] Free Syrian Army held territory.
It is important to analyse the White Helmet mythology, all generated by an incredibly slick and high gloss media and marketing apparatus, overseen and driven by Soros partnered PR company Purpose.
“The volunteers save people on all sides of the conflict – pledging commitment to the principles of “Humanity, Solidarity, Impartiality” as outlined by the International Civil Defence Organisation. This pledge guides every response, every action, every life saved – so that in a time of destruction, all Syrians have the hope of a lifeline”
And:
“The White Helmets mostly deal with the aftermath of government air attacks. Yet they have risked sniper fire to rescue the bodies of government soldiers to give them a proper burial”
In fact, the White Helmet members who are repetitively described as “ordinary” people ~ “bakers, tailors, engineers, pharmacists, painters, carpenters, students” are also relentlessly depicted as heroes, miracle workers, saints and super-humans scaling the “mount Everest” of war zones with impartiality and neutrality. “Unarmed and unbiased” they sacrifice themselves for the “Syrian People”. Those same Syrian people who have never heard of them.
“When I want to save someone’s life I don’t care if he’s an enemy or a friend. What concerns me is the soul that might die” ~ Abed, the White Helmets.
“After the bombs rain down, we rush in to dig for survivors. Our motto, “to save one life is to save all humanity,” is what drives us on.” ~ Raed Saleh, White Helmet leader and UN spokesperson.
The Myth exposed
Neutrality
In previous articles we have exposed the White Helmet associations with Al Nusra and their presence in known ISIS strongholds in Syria. We have also explored, in depth, their donor base and demonstrated how impartiality is a hard claim to justify when taking into account that their finance sources consist of hard-line regime changers, hell-bent on removing the Syrian Government and portraying President Bashar al Assad as the devil incarnate. These donors include, the British Government, known US regime change facilitators USAID, and the Syrian National Council a known Syrian opposition entity.
Time now to observe the White Helmets in action and question their impartiality on the ground in Syria.
This video reveals a White Helmet operative describing the “throwing of Shabiha bodies in the trash.”
Shabiha is a derogatory term for Syrian Government militia or security forces but is liberally applied by terrorist aka “rebel” factions to any member of the Syrian military, irrespective of if they are Alawite, Sunni, or Shia.
I remind you: the White Helmets “have risked sniper fire to rescue SAA bodies to give them a proper burial.”
This same neutral White Helmet operative goes on to pledge allegiance to the terrorist forces in the region.
“They are our role models, the best of people and we have the honour to serve them”
“SERVE THEM [armed terrorists, Al Nusra/Al Qaeda]”~ curious turn of phrase for a neutral, impartial humanitarian organisation?
He also congratulates the Mujahadeen for liberating Jisr al Shugour from Assad’s forces.
“Glad tidings have reached us in Jisr al Shugour by the hands of our Mujahadeen brothers. May Allah strengthen them and make them steadfast on the correct way and soon, insh’Allah, the strongholds of the Assad regime in Latakia and Damascus will be liberated.”
Moving on, another video, this time revealing White Helmet operatives standing on the discarded bodies of SAA [Syrian Arab Army] soldiers and giving the victory sign. This display of support for the Al Nusra terrorists who have just massacred these soldiers once again demonstrates where their true allegiances lie.
We also know via reports from within Aleppo city that it was the Al Nusra terrorists who massacred hundreds if not thousands of civilians before dumping their bodies into the River Queiq: The Truth from inside Syria’s Terrorist Underworld rendering the water supply to Aleppo’s civilian population toxic and undrinkable.
Were these SAA bodies, piled unceremoniously one on top of the other and trampled upon by these White Helmet “saints and neutral saviours”, added to others flung before them, into the disease infested waters of the River Queiq?
Where is the neutrality in the White Helmet reporting of the conflict in the areas where they are embedded? We hear incessantly of the “regime barrel bombs”, but we never hear one mention of the flesh tearing hell cannon fired indiscriminately upon Aleppo civilians, the hail of mortars and rockets being rained down upon Damascus civilian areas from suburban terrorist cells. We are never told about the car bombs that have devastated civilian areas in Homs and Lattakia, including schools and hospitals.
When do we hear about the tunnels dug under civilian homes and streets by the terrorists that are detonated as a distraction to lead the SAA into sniper fire or ambush.
Do these neutral humanitarians talk about the terrorist snipers who kill and maim civilians on a regular basis?
Do they even discuss the atrocities committed against the legitimate Syrian army?
A genuinely neutral report or analysis should surely take all of these factors into account, or are these “other” Syrian civilians not to be registered as such in the western electorate minds and hearts? If not, why not?
“The UN estimates 220,000 deaths thus far in the Syrian war. But almost half are Syrian army soldiers or allied local militia fighters, and two thirds are combatants if we count opposition fighters. Either way, the ratio of civilian to military casualties is roughly 1:2, given that the opposition is also inflicting civilian casualties. Compare that to the roughly 3:1 ratio in the US war in Iraq and 4:1 in the Israeli attack on Gaza in 2008-9. (The rate of Palestinian to Israeli casualties was an astronomical 100:1.)” ~ Paul Larudee. Mythology, Barrel Bombs and Human Rights Watch.
“In April and June 2014, I spent a cumulative month in Syria, in various areas of Damascus, with visits to Latakia, Homs, and Ma’aloula. At the time, Damascus was being intensely shelled by mortars, frequently in my vicinity, including just behind the hotel housing the Peace Delegation which I accompanied for the first week (photo). This attack killed three civilians and one Syrian soldier. We saw some of the 60 plus children injured in the April 15 shelling of a school, not an isolated occasion, an attack which also killed one child. Mortars rained down at close-proximity on many occasions in different areas of the Old City where I had then found lodging.” ~ Eva Bartlett
This is a statement from an Aleppo citizen. Another Syrian civilian who has never heard of the White Helmets.
“The terrorists are using mortars, explosive bullets, cooking-gas cylinders bombs and water-warming long cylinders bombs, filled up with explosives and shrapnel and nails, in what they call “Hell Canon”. Google these weapons or see their YouTube clips. The cooking-gas cylinder is made of steel, and it weighs around 25 kg. Imagine it thrown by a canon to hit civilians? And imagine knowing that it’s full with explosives?… Yet, the media is busy with the legendary weapon of “barrel bombs”! They came to spread “freedom” among Syrians! How dare they say that Syrian army shouldn’t fight them back?” ~ from Syria, welcome to Hell.
How can the White Helmets make a claim of neutrality while providing simplistic, largely unverified, biased and prejudicial reports that reflect only a percentage of the reality of this complex conflict and blatantly further the objectives of their donors in the region while ignoring the sacrifice being made by the Syrian Arab Army to defend their families and homeland from the invading NATO death squads.
“Aleppo city has shrunk to a fifth of its original size, and became so crowded with refugees that fled their areas after they fell into terrorist hands. I walk everyday in the city. I see children, young girls without limbs because of a terrorist mortar or shrapnel that targets them randomly and causes terrible wounds and horrific memories that will never leave them. The girl who lost one leg is standing on her good leg and selling bread, while the little boy who lost one arm is selling chewing gum. Those are the “injured” people who are mentioned fleetingly in the news, just numbers in one line of a report, after each attack from the terrorists. “Injured” doesn’t mean scratched or having a bleeding finger; it means someone lost his eyes or her limbs.”
Finally, this photo was taken shortly after Russia had legally entered the conflict in Syria at the request of the Syrian Government. Does it not seem a strange message to be conveyed by a neutral, unbiased humanitarian organisation with a self- proclaimed mandate to protect ALL Syrian people? The White Helmets will not kneel? They are neutral are they not, to whom would they kneel or not kneel if indeed they serve all Syrians regardless of “race, religion, gender or political affiliation”
White Helmets: Execution facilitators
There is an entire library of White Helmet propaganda images that have been proven to be recycled, fake or at best, inaccurate but perhaps the most shocking and most widely publicised was the footage of their suspected participation in an Al Nusra execution of a civilian in Hreitan, Northern Aleppo.
This video was wiped from most channels by the White Helmets immediately after its release, however Liveleak managed to keep a protected copy which has escaped censorship.
Sequence of events on the day, 5th May 2015. Al Nusra called the White Helmets 25 minutes prior to the execution. White Helmets arrived on the scene at 11.35 am, 5 minutes BEFORE the execution was carried out at 11.40. These impartial humanitarian workers did NOTHING to prevent this execution, they appear a full 5 minutes prior to this murder at the behest of the executioners and they are ushered into shot immediately after the victim is shot twice at close range in the head, to collect the body. These are the neutral humanitarians at work saving every Syrian civilian “irrespective of race, religion, gender or political affiliation.”
“We unequivocally condemn the killing of civilians no matter who the perpetrator.”
So where is their condemnation of this and countless other executions of civilians by Al Nusra in their reports to the UN?
“The discussion over the video from Hreitan has highlighted the absence of a published code of conduct to which civil defence volunteers can be held accountable. The leaders of Syria Civil Defence commit to the development and publication of a code of conduct for members and its public posting on the www.SyriaCivilDefence.Org website in English and Arabic within one month.”
We are now coming up to November and there has still been no amendment to their “Execution code”. These Humanitarians upon whose testimony, hangs the entire Western intervention policy in Syria, have not been officially investigated or even questioned over their suspected role in the “clean up” of a summary execution of a Syrian civilian by terrorist groups in Syria.
“The White Helmets are unpaid and unarmed, and they risk their lives to save others…….. Wearing simple white construction helmets as feeble protection from those “double-tap” bombings, the White Helmets are strictly humanitarian. They even have rescued some of the officers of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad who are bombing them.”
Video clearly showing armed White Helmets on the streets of Aleppo:
It appears that Agha plays a dual role in Syria’s conflict, White Helmet by day and Al Nusra armed terrorist by night, posing on board an Al Nusra tank, gun in hand. Here is a very clear case of the lines between unarmed humanitarian and armed mercenary being more than a little blurred. In one photo Agha is seen clearly celebrating with Al Nusra wearing his White Helmet tabard. In the stills taken from the alleged Russian hospital bombing in Sarmine, Idlib, he is spotted emerging from the “bombed” building. His association with Al Nusra and his brazen show of armed affiliation leaves no doubt as to his role in this conflict and it is far removed from that of an impartial, unarmed Humanitarian.
In fact, the immortal words of Russian Foreign Minsiter, Sergei Lavrov, spring to mind:
“If it looks like a terrorist, if it acts like a terrorist, if it walks like a terrorist, if it fights like a terrorist, it’s a terrorist, right?”
A very cursory scroll down Agha’s Facebook page also reveals very recent photos of SAA corpses accompanied by a number of celebratory comments.
I have only touched on a tiny percentage of the available archives of White Helmets deception and prejudiced propaganda campaigns, but the examples I have presented should begin to confront the highly effective Purpose built marketing campaign that has portrayed these paid mercenaries, impostors and agents for regime change as benign, unprejudiced saviours of beleaguered civilians in areas known to be terrorist strongholds and often, virtually devoid of civilian populations. As Mother Agnes Mariam stated unequivocally, in her recent interview, 90% of IDPs [internally displaced persons] in Syria have taken refuge in Government held areas.
The success of the White Helmet and NGO complex propaganda is dependent upon the skewing of our moral compass by the media and government institutions that are experts at “nudging” public opinion. If we really want to support Syria in this battle against such a complex array of interventionist forces, we must locate that compass and allow it to point us squarely towards the truth, however hard that truth is to assimilate and however remote it is from the mainstream narrative. In fact I would go as far as to say, the further away you get from the mainstream, the closer you get to the truth.
One final example of White Helmet propaganda at work:
“White Helmets claim to have rescued an SAA soldier who had in reality been captured by Al Nusra terrorists 10 days previously. In the Al Nusra version, this soldier is described as a “Shia pig” and was most probably summarily executed as an apostate according to Wahabi doctrine. Hard to imagine how the White Helmets then rescued him, unless of course they dug up his body for publicity purposes.”
END OF PART II
In Part III we will analyse the recent speeches given by the White Helmet leaders, James Le Mesurier, Raed Saleh and Farouq al Habib, in particular, who has been doing the rounds of Western media trying to regain lost propaganda ground, including guest speaker spot at the prestigious Frontline club last week.
As if Americans didn’t already have enough to worry about in regards to the recently resurrected Red Menace, we can now add the fear that those devious Russians are threatening to–horror of horrors–bring down the Internet.
As the New York Times‘ David Sanger and Eric Schmitt report, “Russian submarines and spy ships are aggressively operating near the vital undersea cables that carry almost all global Internet communications, raising concerns among some American military and intelligence officials that the Russians might be planning to attack those lines in times of conflict.”
As Navy spokesman Cmdr. William Marks adds, “It would be a concern to hear any country was tampering with communication cables.”
Indeed. Well, unless those tampering with international communication cables happen to be working on behalf of the “good guys” in the National Security Agency, or their equally good partners in Britain’s GCHQ. In that case, don’t consider it “tampering,” but rather something more akin to protecting the homeland from 21st century threats.
Of course whenever official Washington warns of a looming foreign cyber threat (China and Iran being the other favorite punching bags of the Times in this regard), it’s worth remembering that it was in fact the U.S., in partnership with Israel, that was the first state to actually launch a major offensive cyber attack on a sovereign nation. The attack being the Stuxnet virus set loose back in 2009 on Iran’s peaceful nuclear program. Such aggression was codified earlier this year when the Pentagon formally unveiled a cyber warfare doctrine sanctioning the use of preemptive strikes. But down the memory hole, it appears, with all that.
And so with all that out of mind, it’s back to Russia’s rising “aggression.” At least as the paper of record would have it.
As Sanger and Schmitt continue, “American concern over cable-cutting is just one aspect of Russia’s modernizing Navy that has drawn new scrutiny.”
Adm. Mark Ferguson, commander of American naval forces in Europe, speaking in Washington this month, said the proficiency and operational tempo of the Russian submarine force was increasing.
Citing public remarks by the Russian Navy chief, Adm. Viktor Chirkov, Admiral Ferguson said the intensity of Russian submarine patrols had risen by almost 50 percent over the last year. Russia has increased its operating tempo to levels not seen in over a decade. Russian Arctic bases and their $2.4 billion investment in the Black Sea Fleet expansion by 2020 demonstrate their commitment to develop their military infrastructure on the flanks, he said.
Left unmentioned by either Adm. Ferguson or the Times is the fact that the U.S. Navy’s fiscal year 2016 budget comes in at an astounding $161 billion. (For comparison, the entire Russian military’s FY 2016 budget is projected to come in just over $90 billion.) If scrutiny then is to be applied, one would think that the U.S. Navy’s budgetary windfall would offer plenty of fodder. For starters, it’s worth considering just how many food-insecure American children could be fed with $161 billion.
Capturing the essence of the official propaganda campaign seeking to depict Russia as some sort of dangerously revisionist power, Sanger and Schmitt go on in their piece to quote Adm. James Stavridis, NATO’s former top military commander and current dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. As Stavridis puts it, Russia’s supposed stepped up surveillance of undersea cables offers “yet another example of a highly assertive and aggressive regime seemingly reaching backwards for the tools of the Cold War, albeit with a high degree of technical improvement.”
Russia has indeed deployed its military forces in the last year to both Ukraine and Syria. (A fact Times readers are certainly well aware of.) But if that is a sign of a “highly assertive and aggressive regime,” what are we to make of a regime that in the past decade alone invaded and toppled governments in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya? What shall we call a regime that has bombed Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan? What about a regime that unleashed a preemptive cyber attack on Iran? How about a regime with over 800 foreign military bases? Or one that exported nearly $50 billion in arms in the last year alone?
Global public opinion has of course already settled on what we are to call such a regime. According to a 2013 WIN/Gallop poll surveying the opinions of individuals from 65 nations around the world, it is the U.S. that constitutes “the greatest threat to peace in the world.” Russia didn’t register in the poll.
The recent historical record, then, reveals the latest Russian hit piece offered by the Times to be little more than Washington projection. The Russian Navy, all propaganda aside, hardly poses much of a noteworthy threat to the U.S. Navy, let alone global Internet communications. To find the greatest threat to global Internet communications we must once again heed global public opinion and come face to face with the menace within.
“The Ivy League bourgeoisie who sit at the helm of the non-profit industrial complex will one day be known simply as charismatic architects of death. Funded by the ruling class oligarchy, the role they serve for their funders is not unlike that of corporate media. Yet, it appears that global society is paralyzed in a collective hypnosis – rejecting universal social interests, thus rejecting reason, to instead fall in line with the position of the powerful minority that has seized control, a minority that systematically favours corporate interests.” ~ Cory Morningstar
In his recent speech Hezbollah leader, Sayyed Nasrallah, alluded to a multi-phase “soft war” which relies upon the mass media complex to disseminate propaganda and bias, propelling the Middle East into, primarily, a sectarian crisis before descending even further into regionalism and finally a devastating individualism.
Cory Morningstar’s body of work does more than any other to expose the bare bones of the non-profit propaganda industry that governs both our reactions – and inactions, through a network of multi-layered and multi-faceted media manipulation campaigns, of which the end result is mass thought control. She explains:
“The 21st century NGO is becoming, more and more, a key tool serving the imperialist quest of absolute global dominance and exploitation. Global society has been, and continues to be, manipulated to believe that NGOs are representative of “civil society” (a concept promoted by corporations in the first place). This misplaced trust has allowed the “humanitarian industrial complex” to ascend to the highest position: the missionaries of deity – the deity of the empire.”
In a paper entitled, Foreign Aid and Regime Change: A Role for Donor Intent, written just prior to NATO intervention in Libya, Prof. Sarah Blodgett Bormeo describes the “democratization” process for target nations. Unwittingly or wittingly, Bormeo perfectly outlines the role played by NGOs in this process. Bormeo even goes so far as to pinpoint the lack of impartiality rife among NGOs large and small, the majority of whom, receive their funding directly from western government and major corporation sources – all of whom have a vested interest in the outcome of their NGO’s activities and ‘intervention’ in a particular location. Bormeo emphasises the importance of “picking winners” in this scenario, as opposed to respecting and supporting the will of the people in any sovereign nation.
“Thus, it is possible that aid donors, in an effort to avoid further entrenching an “authoritarian” [my edit: this status is decided by donor] regime and perhaps increase the likelihood of democratization, channel funds through NGOs and civil society organizations in authoritarian states.”
In this short video below, we are introduced to the US military’s symbiotic relationship with NGOs in countries [in this instance, Iraq] where the policy is to Induce Pacification & Advance Western Ideologies. NGOs are cynically used to “soften” cultures and render entire communities dependent upon foreign aid in order to facilitate “Democratization”.
In this role, and dependent upon their donor support, NGOs cease to be the neutral, unbiased ‘humanitarian’ organisations they publicly purport to be, and instead become actual covert tools for foreign intervention and regime change. By default, they are assimilated into the Western modus vivendi of “waging war by way of deception” and their purpose is to alter public perception of a conflict via a multitude of media and “marketing” channels.
Following this formula, let’s examine, once more, the role of the Syria Civil Defenceaka,’The White Helmets’ currently operating in Syria and take a closer look at their financial sources and mainstream media partners in order to better determine if they are indeed “neutral” as media moguls proclaim these “humanitarians” to be.
White Helmets: Follow the Money
The White Helmets were established in March 2013, in Istanbul, Turkey, and is headed by James Le Mesurier, a British “security” specialist and ‘ex’ British military intelligence officer with an impressive track record in some of the most dubious NATO intervention theatres including Bosnia and Kosovo, as well as Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine. Le Mesurier is a product of Britain’s elite Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, and has also been placed in a series of high-profile pasts at the United Nations, European Union, and U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
The origins of The White Helmet’s initial $300k seed funding is a little hazy, reports are contradictory but subsequent information leads us to conclude that the UK, US and Syrian opposition [Syrian National Council] are connected. Logistical support has been provided by given by Turkish elite natural disaster response team, AKUT.
A further $13 million was poured into the White Helmet coffers during 2013 and this is where it gets interesting. Early reports suggest that these “donations” came from the US, UK and SNC with the previously explored connections to George Soros in the US.
However, subsequent investigations reveal that USAID has been a major shareholder in the White Helmet organisation.
The website for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) claims that “our work supports long-term and equitable economic growth and advances U.S. foreign policy objectives by supporting: economic growth, agriculture and trade; global health; and, democracy, conflict prevention and humanitarian assistance.”
In a USAID report update in July 2015 it is clearly stated that they have supplied over $ 16m in assistance to the White Helmets.
The USAID track record as a primary US Government/CIA regime change facilitator is extensively documented. From South America to the Ukraine and in the Middle East, USAID serve a malevolent and ultimately destructive role in the dismantling of sovereign nations and their reduction to Western hegemony vassal states, as always, all in the name of freedom anddemocracy.
“The United States does not lack institutions that continue to conspire, and that’s why I am using this gathering to announce that we have decided to expel USAID from Bolivia” ~ Bolivian President Evo Morales
“USAID and NED are in the business of “Democracy Promotion” which uses public money (from U.S. taxpayers) for secretive operations with the intention to support pro-U.S. governments with the help of political and social movements abroad. The goal is regime change.” ~ Timothy Alexander Guzman
With recent developments in Syria and as a consequence of the Syrian Government requested Russian intervention, we have seen a scramble to justify the shambolic US foreign policy and its clandestine terror operations in Syria. We have previously established the White Helmet connections to this US regime change operation and their undisputed exclusive integration into the Al Nusra and Free Syrian Army [Muslim Brotherhood] and even ISIS networks and strongholds.
After RT and Sott.net among others, exposed the gaping holes in White Helmet propaganda over recycled photographs tweeted even before the alleged Russian bombing had occurred, the propaganda “war” ramped up. The Russian involvement in Syria, did not only betray the US military deception, it also brought some heavyweight media giants of its own into the fray who set about de-constructing the Western media and NGO indoctrination that had, for so long, been largely unchallenged.
At this point the London Telegraph went into damage limitation mode. It published an article expounding the White Helmet humanitarian role in Syria but with admissions of UK Government “majority” funding and that the White Helmets are embedded with ISIS (“in at least one ISIL held area”), claims previously vehemently denied but rendered indisputable after discovery of the photo showing an ISIS mercenary posing directly in front of a White Helmets depot located deep in ISIS held territory south of Yarmouk.
“The Foreign Office is currently the largest single source of funding. It is an irony that if Britain does effectively become an ally of Assad, and starts raids against Isil in Syria, it will be bombing from the air and paying for the bodies to be dug out on the ground. The White Helmets are also operating in at least one Isil-held area.”
Interestingly, the Telegraph stated clearly that the UK Foreign Office is the “largest single source of funding” for the White Helmets which may be perceived as an attempt to draw fire away from the USAID funding which still outstrips official figures released by the British Gov’t who “gifted” £ 3.5 million in equipment to “civil defence teams” in Syria [Report March 2015]. However, the British Government also committed to an additional £ 10m to “increase coordination between the Syrian Interim Government and civil defence teams” to be funded by: UK Government’s Conflict, Security and Stability Fund (CSSF).
It should also be noted here that although cries of ‘regime change!’ from both Washington and London have been muted since Russia entered the Syria conflict, both Washington and London have been supporting their own parallel, hand-picked ‘interim government’ for Syria since at least 2012.
So, with millions in hard cash and equipment being invested into the White Helmets by US & UK donors who have a very clear regime change objective in Syria, it becomes increasingly difficult to perceive their role as anything other than donor-biased propaganda merchants and a ‘humanitarian’ extension of a clandestine terror operation allied to the NATO proxy armies in the region.
White Helmet Leadership
James Le Mesurier:James Le Mesurier has been portrayed as a Humanitarian maverick hero, miraculously in the right place (Istanbul) at the right time, just as the need arose for the formation of a Syria Civil Defence team, perhaps coincidentally, only a few months prior to the now infamous and universally (except for a few diehard propagandists) discredited Ghouta ‘chemical weapon’ attack in August 2013, an event which has already been proven beyond a doubt to be a false flag attack, as well as subsequent accusations levied at the Syrian Government which narrowly failed to precipitate the NATO desired ‘No Fly Zone’.
However, when we delve deeper into the life and times of Le Mesurier we see that it was no happy accident that he was in Istanbul at this juncture. As Sandhurst Military Academy’s top student and recipient of the Queen’s Medal, his chequered career took him from OHR [Office of High Representative] in Bosnia to intelligence co-ordinator in NATO’s newly won prize, Kosovo. We’re told that Le Mesurier left the British Army in 2000 and joined the UN serving as deputy head of the Advisory Unit on ‘Security and Justice’, and Special Representative of the Secretary General’s security policy body within the UN mission in Kosovo. His career then took him to Jerusalem where he worked on implementing the Ramallah Agreement, then to Baghdad as a special advisor to Iraqi Minister of Interior, and to the UAE to train their gas field protection force, and later to Lebanon during the 2006 war. In 2005 he was made Vice President for Special Projects at private mercenary firm Olive Group, and in January 2008 he was appointed as Principal for Good Harbour International, both based in Dubai.
Le Mesurier is also the founder of Mayday Rescue, a “non profit” organisation providing SAR [search & rescue] training to civilians enduring conflict. According to Mesurier’s own biography on the website, Mayday Rescue was founded in 2014, after he had established Syria Civil Defence/White Helmets.
A quick flick through the other Mayday team members reveals some very interesting connections.
Mosab Obeidat, previous Assistant Chief of Mission with the Qatar Red Crescent, one of whose officials, Khaled Diab was accused of supplying $ 2.2 m to secure arms for the terrorist groups in Syria. Details of this transaction and its exposure can be found in this Al Akhbar article from June 2013.
At least three other members of the team were a part of the Syrian “revolution” including Farouq al Habib, one of the 3 most prominent White Helmet leaders who was also a leader of the Homs uprising against the Syrian government and according to his testimony, was tortured by the Syrian “regime” security forces in 2012 for smuggling a journalist into Syria to “cover” the “peaceful protests”. Habib was a founder member of the ‘Homs Revolutionary Council’ (the CIA have been linked to nearly all ‘Revolutionary Councils in Syria) before fleeing to Turkey in 2013 (A more in-depth analysis of his anti-Syrian government testimony will be presented in Part II of this article).
Le Mesurier is heavily involved in several organisations not mentioned in this article, but for the purposes of demonstrating that the White Helmets should not be considered impartial or neutral as they claim, we will focus on those that best substantiate that argument.
Both Olive Group and Good Harbour International are experts in private “security”. Taken from Sourcewatch on Olive Group:
“Olive Security was founded in 2001 by Harry Legge Burke. Olive lends their quick success to strong relations in the government and military industry. Harry Legge-Burke is an ex-Welsh Guard, and a former aid to chief of defence staff Sir [Charles Guthrie]. He can claim Prince William as a skiing partner and his sister was a nanny to the royal children.
Iraq: Olive were on the ground since the invasion began in 2003, and were able to deploy 38 former SAS employees within two days of the invasion’s completion in 2004
Jonathan Allum, Olive’s former director and co-owner, is also the son of Tony Allum, who is the chairman of the engineering company Halcrow and also the head of the UK government’s Iraq Industry Working Group. It was in the latter position that Tony Allum went to Washington to meet with Bechtel leaders, where he suggested, among other UK companies, Halcrow and Olive as companies worth considering for subcontracted work, all stemming from Bechtel’s $680 million contract with USAID. They were considered and contracts followed, though both Legge-Burke and Allum deny one had anything to do with the other”
In May 2015 Olive Group merged with Constellis Holdings, in whose portfolio we can also find Academi, previously the notorious Blackwater Group [ Nisour Square massacre, Iraq 2007]. Taken from The AtlanticJuly 2012: Post 9/11, Bush enabled the CIA to subcontract assassinations allegedly targeting Al Qaeda operatives. Blackwater was awarded this contract.
“Running operations through Blackwater gave the CIA the power to have people abducted, or killed, with no one in the government being exactly responsible.”
The CIA can no longer hide its Blackwater/Academi connections, especially after this week’s Wikileaks data dump of CIA director John Brennan’s emails, whose contact list included now spy chief Robert Richer at his Blackwater contact address.
The outsourcing of intelligence operations was in full-swing. What Bush initiated, Obama ran with, awarding Blackwater/Academi a $ 250m contract in 2010 to offer “unspecified” services to the CIA, thus maintaining the apparatus for “unaccountable” covert assassinations.
It is true that James Le Mesurier only joined Olive Group in 2005 and left them in 2008, but his involvement with them and their subsequent merger with Constellis and by default, Blackwater/Academi, gives a degree of valuable insight into the elite intelligence and Pentagon circles that Le Mesurier moved in prior to working for Good Harbour International and creating Syria Civil Defence (not forgetting the USAID funding & influence that underpins both Olive and SCD/White Helmets).
In 2008, Le Mesurier joined Good Harbour International, another private “security” expert organisation, whose CEO is none other than former terror advisor to the Bush administration, the Terror Czar himself, Richard A Clarke.
The jury is still out on whether Clarke was indeed the “whistleblower” he fashioned himself as, post 9/11, or a merely a high-level gatekeeper who aided in preventing a full and detailed investigation into Bush and Rumsfeld’s roles in 9/11.
Patrick Henningsen, a political analyst and writer for 21st Century Wire believes the latter is more likely:
“On first glance, one might buy into the mainstream media’s characterization of him, but it’s more likely that Richard Clarke is not a whistleblower at all. While appearing to oppose the Bush administration from a safe enough distance, I believe his role was inserted into the mix in the period of 2004-2005 in order to VALIDATE the bin Laden mythology and help to portray al Qaeda as an organic, independently run terror organization. He also claimed that Bush and Rumsfeld committed war crimes, but this means nothing because everyone knows that no US official will ever face ‘war crimes’ charges in any court of law anywhere on the planet. It’s effectively a straw man narrative that distracts from the real scandal in the US which is that the entire premise of the war on terror is completely contrived. Clarke’s ‘whistleblower’ status gives him brilliant cover from too much public scrutiny. I remain skeptical of his whole public narrative. He was, is, and always will be an insider.”
What is perhaps even more telling, is Clarke’s reported close ties with Israeli-US operative Rita Katz of the SITE Intelligence Group, another supposedly independent, albeit ‘private’ intelligence firm located in Bethesda, Maryland, a stone’s throw away from CIA headquarters. SITE are said to be responsible for the media release of the harrowing ISIS execution videos, al Qaeda videos, and their credibility has been extensively questioned.
Katz’s long term working relationship with Clarke began before 9/11 when she and her research associate Steve Emerson were commissioned by Clarke to identify Islamic radicals within the US. Over time, Katz’s relationship with Clarke blossomed into a much more extensive one that included regular briefings at both the Clinton and Bush White Houses.
“One of SITE’s founders, Rita Katz, is a government insider with close connections to former terrorism czar Richard Clarke and his staff in the White House, as well as investigators in the Department of Justice, Department of the Treasury, and the Department of Homeland Security, according to SourceWatch. Her father was executed in Iraq as an Israel spy, a fact that suggests a connection to Israeli intelligence.” ~ Mark Taliano
This background on Le Mesurier should at least make us question the media portrayal of an affable, debonair and philanthropic leader of a civilian humanitarian mission. His military & intelligence roots, the fact that despite working for OHR in Bosnia, no visible record of his employment can be found there, his private security-centric career path, his appearance in Istanbul at just the right moment to partner USAID, the UK government & Syrian opposition in creating just the sort of “democratization” enabling NGO as described in our introduction, MUST at least cause us to doubt the transparency and neutrality of the White Helmets in Syria.
In addition, the White Helmet leadership consisting of known Syrian opposition protagonists such as Raed Saleh and Farouq al Habib must make us more cynical about the claims of impartiality and lack of bias and for those who will defend the “peaceful” revolution narrative upheld by Habib and Saleh, please take the time to read Professor Tim Anderson’s in depth analysis of events in Syria pre NATO intervention.
“I have seen from the beginning armed protesters in those demonstrations … they were the first to fire on the police. Very often the violence of the security forces comes in response to the brutal violence of the armed insurgents” – Jesuit priest Father Frans Van der Lugt, January 2012, Homs Syria
“The claim that armed opposition to the government has begun only recently is a complete lie. The killings of soldiers, police and civilians, often in the most brutal circumstances, have been going on virtually since the beginning.” – Professor Jeremy Salt, October 2011, Ankara Turkey
Our presentation of the White Helmets as regime change propagandists & terrorist allies in this article will be further explored and verified in Part II.
“Existing soft power initiatives and agencies, particularly those engaged in development and strategic communications, must be reinvigorated through increased funding, human resources and prioritization. Concurrently, the U.S. government must establish goals, objectives and metrics for soft power initiatives. Furthermore, the U.S. government can better maximize the effectiveness of soft power instruments and efforts through increased partnerships with NGOs. By providing humanitarian and development assistance in areas typically inaccessible to government agencies, NGOs are often able to access potential extremist areas before the government can establish or strengthen diplomatic, developmental or military presence, including intelligence.” — Joseph S. Nye, former US assistant secretary of defence, June 2004
Western think tanks have been working relentlessly to try and counter Russia’s geopolitical masterstroke in Syria, which has clearly taken most strategists in the West by complete surprise. Reading through the analysis by these think tanks on Russia’s role in Syria, one is starkly reminded of how immoral Western foreign policy actually is, when you remember that these organisations are freaking out because Russia is bombing terrorists! Obviously, the reason why they are so distraught is because Russia is bombing the West’s terrorists, which they have been using as proxy armies to try and force regime change in Damascus (a strategy that has completely failed).
Potential countermeasures are the subject of a recent article for the Brookings Institution written by Pavel K. Baev, a nonresident senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings, titled: Russia’s Syrian entanglement: Can the West sit back and watch? Baev suggests that “the decision to withdraw the batteries of Patriot surface-to-air missiles [from Turkey] must be cancelled”,before arguing that the US and its allies could bomb “Hezbollah bands around Damascus”:
“Finally, the United States and its allies could deliver a series of airstrikes on the Hezbollah bands around Damascus. That would be less confrontational vis-à-vis Russia than hitting Assad’s forces. Hezbollah has already suffered losses in the Syrian war and is not particularly motivated to stand with Assad to the bitter end, away from [its] own home-ground in Lebanon. (Israel would appreciate such punishment, too.)”
Striking Hezbollah may not have the desired effect Baev seems to envisage however, as this belligerent action is as likely to galvanize the group and ensure it will fight “to the bitter end” with the Syrian army, than encourage it to scale back its involvement in Syria. Airstrikes on Hezbollah could also potentially provoke a response against the perpetrators of the violence, further escalating a conflict that already involves a plethora of regional and international powers. Furthermore, many people would consider an attack on Hezbollah to be essentially an attack on Iran, as the Lebanese based group is funded by Tehran and closely aligned with the country.
Brookings recommendations once again highlight the fact that large sections of the US establishment have absolutely no focus on defeating ISIS in the region, as Brookings is advocating bombing a major group that has been fighting ISIS for years now. Rather, many within the US are still focused on toppling the regime in Damascus (which is never going to happen) in addition to weakening the forces that are battling ISIS. If the West was serious about defeating ISIS, they would support and cooperate with the forces that are truly fighting against this new so-called caliphate.
TTIP is an Geoeconomic Tool against Russia
Western strategists are terrified of Europe moving closer to the East, and an EU-Russian (especially a German-Russian) alliance arising. Merging Russia and the EU in the future is an objective of some US strategists, but Washington only desires this if both Russia and the EU are completely subservient to US dictates. Today however, Russia is a sovereign, independent nation which is not controlled by the US, and some within the EU are increasingly tiring of being vassals of Washington. This means closer relations between Russia and the EU is a geopolitical disaster for the US at the present moment, as Washington’s power will be severely diminished if this tectonic shift occurs.
By understanding this reality, it is now obvious how essential the trade deal between the US and the EU – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) – is to US geostrategy. As well as being a corporate fascist deal that empowers multi-national corporations at the expense of citizens, TTIP is a geoeconomic weapon against Russia to cement the transatlantic alliance between the US and the EU.
Ensuring TTIP passes was a recommendation of another Western organisation that has been working on potential counter strategies to Russia, namely the Washington-based Atlantic Council (AC). In a testimony before the US Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington on October 8, 2015, Gen James L. Jones, Jr., the Chairman of the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security and a former National Security Advisor, Jones emphasises the importance of TTIP “successfully concluding” for the West:
“Energy security is instrumental for transatlantic growth, prosperity, and security. The same can be said of successfully concluding TTIP. Europe and the US have the largest trading partnership in the world. Strengthening it serves our mutual interests and reaffirms the centrality of the transatlantic alliance in the 21st century. TTIP also affords the U.S. a unique opportunity to author the rulebook and roadmap for 21st century advanced economies.”
Jones other recommendations include working to diversify the EU’s energy supply to “undermine Putin’s use of energy as a political weapon”, continuing to impose sanctions on Moscow, in addition to admitting Montenegro into NATO next year and working to pull Macedonia into the military alliance. The retired General also asserts that the US should provide the government in Kiev with “anti-tank missiles, intelligence support, training and counter-electronic warfare capabilities”.
Russia of course is well aware of the importance of TTIP to Washington’s long-term agenda. In Vladimir Putin’s speech at the United Nations at the end of September, Putin appeared to confront some of the US-led trade deals which we have seen being negotiated in recent years, most probably referring to TTIP and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) (from 18.45 into the speech):
“I would like to point out another sign of a growing economic selfishness. Some countries have chosen to create closed and exclusion economic associations, with the establishment being negotiated behind the scenes in secret from those countries own citizens, the general public [and] the business community. Other states whose interests may be effected are not informed of anything either. It seems we are about to be faced with an accomplished fact that the rules of the game have been changed in favour of a narrow group of the privileged, with the WTO having no say. This could imbalance the trade system completely and disintegrate the global economic space. These issues affect the interests of all states and influence the future of the world economy as a whole.”
For a multitude of reasons, defeating TTIP would be a colossal achievement for the world. Many European’s are diametrically opposed to this deal, with hundreds of thousands protesting TTIP in Germany a recent illustration of this sentiment. Stop TTIP!
An ideologue is someone who sees the world in the limiting terms of a doctrine or dogma. It is limiting because the human world does not operate or evolve according to any one dogma. Therefore ideologues must wear blinders that result in tunnel vision – a tunnel which, like a Procrustean bed, tries to force the world to fit their chosen ideology.
There are hundreds of ideologies out there, both religious and secular, and in every case the resulting tunnel vision eventually results in absurdities – claims about the world that, seen from outside of the ideology, make little or no sense. So it is with the ideology of Zionism and the doctrinaire interpretations its adherents make about their own behavior and the behavior of others who oppose them.
One such proponent of Zionist ideology is David Harris, the Executive Director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC). The AJC describes its mission as “to enhance the well-being of the Jewish people and Israel.” This is a point of dogma for the Zionists – that the well-being of the Jewish people and Israel are bound together. I am often confronted with Harris’s ideological take on events because, curiously, he has me on his mailing list.
David Harris’s View of Ongoing Violence in Israel
On 11 October 2015 Harris posted an essay on the ongoing violence in Israel-Palestine. It is entitled “Attacks Against Israelis: The World’s Silence Is Deafening” and the entire piece can be found both on the Huffington Post and The Times of Israel. The essay seeks to promote a picture of Israeli victimhood. As such it opens up a clear window on the Zionist’s view of the present situation and therefore is worth taking a look at.
What I am going to do is take representative segments from Harris’s essay and show how the grievances he reserves for Israelis seem somehow wrong when considered from outside the Zionist perspective. Indeed, as Harris’s complaint about the “world’s silence” in the face of violence against Israelis suggests, for many people his picture of Israeli victimhood is quite untenable. Because his ideology will not allow him to consider the possibility of Israel’s responsibility for the present violence, the world’s “silence” leaves him aggrieved and bewildered.
Here then are some representative parts of Mr. Harris’s essay.
Harris starts this way: “For days now, I have been watching in dismay as Israeli citizens face random attacks, some deadly, by Palestinian assailants on the streets of their cities and towns. Children have been orphaned, parents have lost children, and some survivors are doubtless scarred for life.”
It is true that individual Israelis have been hurt or killed in the recent past in apparently random attacks by Palestinians. Unfortunately, this is as far as Harris’s understanding goes. Thus, his tunnel vision renders invisible other perspectives, such as the possibility that dead and injured Israeli Jews, like the Palestinians themselves, are victims of the aggressive Zionist society and culture they live in, the government and laws they obey, and the racist policies they tolerate.
Given this perspective the present Palestinian violence becomes understandable as a product of anger and frustration caused by Israeli occupation and long-standing discrimination against Israeli Arabs. There has been no need for an indoctrination of hate by Hamas or any other religiously inspired group (a favorite red herring of Zionist ideologues) to explain Palestinian actions. Israeli policies and practices in and of themselves are quite sufficient.
Harris cannot perceive, much less understand, this perspective. Yet, in ever greater numbers, the people outside of Israel can see that any portrayal of Israeli victimhood is in conflict with an objective reading of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.
David Harris continues, “And I’ve been wondering, not for the first time, what it would take for the world to wake up and acknowledge … that Israel, the lone liberal democracy in the Middle East, is facing violence that must be condemned unequivocally, and that it, like any other nation, has the obligation to defend itself.”
This “wondering” is also a product of Mr. Harris’s constricted view. There have never been any Zionist complaints, from Harris in particular, about the world’s silence while the Palestinians experience “liberal” Israel’s ethnic bias and occupation. Nor did he and his fellows take note of the world’s silence when Palestine’s own 2006 democratic election was suppressed by Israel and its American ally. It is exactly this silence in the face of Palestinian suffering that has left Israeli power in place and allowed for its oppressive use. Yet this particular silence has no place in Harris’s ideologically constructed world.
Harris goes on, “It’s striking how … some otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people in government, media, or think tanks, just shut down their critical faculties. Instead, they resort to a Pavlovian response mechanism that essentially rejects any possible legitimacy for the Israeli position and blindly defends whatever Palestinian narrative comes along.”
As noted above, an ideological outlook usually leads to absurdities. The truth is that until recently the Zionist narrative on Israel-Palestine held a monopoly in the West. Now, finally, Israel’s consistent apartheid-like practices are being noticed and as a result that monopoly is crumbling. The best Harris can do is evoke a fictional “Pavlovian mechanism” to explain the responses to Israeli policies. Nonetheless, the weakening of the Zionist narrative is at an early stage, which means that, even now, it is often not the Israeli narrative that has to fight its way into the media, think tanks and government councils. It is the Palestinian one.
There is much more to Harris’s missive, and almost every paragraph is shaped by the doctrinal demands of his ideology. The ersatz victimhood he claims for the Israelis is in fact a measure of the resulting distortion. For he, and his fellow Zionists, have stolen that depiction of suffering from their own victims, the Palestinians. Such is the power of ideological blinders.
Conclusion
To pull off this reversal of roles and posit the Israelis as victims of the Palestinians, Harris’s essay must leave out the seminal fact that for the past 67 years Israel has possessed overwhelming power. With this power Israel has oppressively controlled almost every aspect of Palestinian life. The inevitable result is the violence of resistance. Israelis who suffer from that violence should take this reality into consideration. But, few of them can do this.
The explanation for this inability brings us back to the problem of tunnel vision. Consider the following: many Palestinians can understand Western Jewish history, including the Holocaust, and recognize how it shapes, though ultimately cannot excuse, Zionist behavior. This ability to understand is facilitated by the fact that the Palestinians were not responsible for the suffering of Western Jewry. Unfortunately, the Zionists can’t reciprocate by understanding the history that drives Palestinian behavior. They cannot do so because their ideology precludes the possibility that they are in fact responsible for Palestinian suffering. Ideologues are not known for their skill at self-criticism.
One of the most renowned Jewish journalists, I. F. Stone, once said, referring to his own Jewish brethren, “how we act toward the Arabs will determine what kind of people we become: either oppressors and racists in our turn like those from whom we have suffered, or a nobler race able to transcend the tribal xenophobias that afflict mankind.” Well, the verdict is in, at least for those Jews who adhere to the Zionist ideology. For them “oppression and racism” has won out. And so has denial – just read David Harris.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has disputed Western media reports accusing Russia of hitting a field hospital in northwestern Syria and killing 13 people. The reports cited “sources” provided by the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).
Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, stressed that such reports show tremendous bias towards Russia’s military efforts in Syria.
“There are so-called mass media reports which allege that Russian aircraft bombed a field hospital in the Idlib Governorate in northwestern Syria and reportedly killed 13 people. I cannot say that these reports are written by journalists but their ingenuity delights,” Zakharova, told reporters.
She questioned the credentials of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, pointing out that it is based in Britain and has no direct access to the ground in Syria.
“This information appears with reference to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights based in London. As we all understand, it is very ‘convenient’ to cover and observe what is happening in Syria without leaving London and without the ability to collect information in the field,” Zakharova added.
She said that Russia’s role in the Syrian conflict is aimed “primarily” at “protecting civilians,” while “terrorist groups” continue to receive “reinforcements of people” and “equipment from abroad,” which is a “very dangerous tendency.”
“These facts raise a question as to whether parties involved in the Syrian conflict are really interested in a peaceful settlement and how this goal is reconciled with financial and technical support for anti-government armed groups, including those who directly cooperate with terrorists,” she said during a briefing.
MSM attacks on Russia
Since joining the fight against Islamic State, Russia’s efforts in Syria have been repeatedly attacked by the Western mainstream media, which have published many unconfirmed reports employing scaremongering tactics.
AFP, a French media outlet, was responsible for publishing a piece titled 13 Dead as Russia strike hits Syria field hospital: monitor. The source in the story was identified as the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is run by one man – Rami Abdulrahman. Just recently, Abdulrahman told RT that the last time he had been in Syria was 15 years ago and that all the information for his reports is taken from “some of the Observatory activists” who he knows “through common friends.”
In the past, Rahman has said he relies on sources on the ground, who are among the US funded Syrian rebels.
Shortly after the report appeared, a video emerged showcasing the exact moment of the alleged Russian hospital strike. The video was uploaded by activists known as White Helmets – a rebel group which has already been caught faking evidence of civilian deaths supposedly caused by Russian strikes.
Meanwhile, Russia said it struck a meeting place of terrorist leaders in northwestern Syria. The Russian Defense Ministry specified that it had used a KAB-500 bomb.
“A Sukhoi Su-34 bomber attacked the installation with a guided KAB-500 air bomb, which wiped the target out with everything that was inside,” MoD’s spokesman, Major General Igor Konashenkov said on Wednesday.
Despite the power of the explosion, a cameraman in the posted video runs through only a small cloud of dust.
Experts have questioned the authenticity of the video posted by the rebels, stating that it is physically impossible to film such a powerful explosion from a few meters away and survive.
“It didn’t look like an aerial bomb dropped from an airplane. It appeared to come from an angle and the angle of the explosion appeared to be more like artillery,” a former policy analyst for the US Defense Department, Michael Maloof, told RT.
This kind of unreliable reporting is just one of the latest examples. Earlier, the Turkish military released a statement saying that it had downed an unidentified drone in Turkish airspace after issuing the aircraft 3 warnings.
It was not long before reports suggested it was Russian and being used to collect information. However, a Russian drone manufacturer denied the reports, calling the photos of the allegedly downed drone part of a poorly-staged “informational provocation.”
Other baseless accusations quickly followed, including British newspapers speculating that Royal Air Force Tornado jets operating in Iraq were to be equipped with air-to-air missiles and that their pilots had been cleared to fire on “Vladimir Putin’s jets” in the case of an imminent threat.
Moscow issued a formal request to the British Foreign Office, demanding an explanation. The answer came in a news blog, when the UK’s MoD’s spokesperson wrote that “There is no truth in this story.”
Another CNN story suggested that several Russian cruise missiles targeting Islamic State positions in Syria had landed in Iran. Citing two unnamed “top US officials,” the American broadcaster reported that four Russian missiles had crashed somewhere in Iran after being launched from vessels in the Caspian Sea.
The Russian Defense Ministry refuted the report, stating that missiles had hit their intended targets. “Unlike CNN, we don’t distribute information citing anonymous sources, but show the very missile launches and the way they hit their targets almost in real time,” Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said.
On October 2, 2015, speaking during the course of a general policy discussion at the 70th session of the General Assembly of the United Nations, Lee Su Yong, North Korean Foreign Minister, stated that “the government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is willing to engage in constructive dialogue for the prevention of wars and conflicts in the Korean peninsula as soon as the United States agrees to replace the Korean Armistice Agreement with a full-fledged peace treaty and stops pointing fingers at “someone’s” “provocations” in the mass media.” “This is the best option available to us and the best solution that we can propose at this UN forum,” he added.
This issue was raised again on October 7 when an official representative of the North Korean Foreign Ministry stated that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (via official channels) had again proposed the signing of a peace treaty to the US and expected it to be conscientiously considered and endorsed by the American party.
It was noted that more than 60 years had passed since the signing of the cessation of hostilities agreement, but peace has still not been achieved in the Korean peninsula. The US and the Republic of Korea continuously conduct military exercises of various scales contributing to the escalation of the risk of casual incidents and unpredictable events.
In the author’s opinion, this problem is indeed serious, and this issue was actually discussed a few years ago: absence of a hotline between the North and South, bilateral demonization, insufficient competence combined with the peculiarities of bureaucracy can easily lead to an aggravation of the situation resulting from a misunderstanding or the desire to blame one’s opponent for one’s own problems, as happened just recently.
In North Korea’s opinion, the only radical measure that can prevent future incidents would be the termination of the Korean Armistice Agreement and the signing of a peace treaty as well as the creation of a robust system of peace guarantees in the Korean peninsula: if the American party will be brave enough to change its policy, the security situation in the Korean peninsula would significantly improve.
The dialog proposed by North Koreans would address two important aspects. Number one—the necessity to formalize the results of the Korean War. Number two—diplomatic relations between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the US, which have never been established.
The 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement is perceived as an agreement signed by all the parties to the conflict. But in reality, the situation was much more complicated. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the (Chinese) People’s Volunteer Army signed it as representatives of the North because officially the People’s Republic of China did not participate in this war. The US was also fighting there as a representative of the UN and the Agreement is, in fact, signed by the UN Force Commanders. As for South Korea, the regime of Syngman Rhee, which at that time was far more villainous in comparison with that in the North, had intentions to fight till final victory, hindering the negotiations and refusing to sign the final document. Thus, although North Korea recently pulled out of the Korean Armistice Agreement, the South never even signed it.
Besides, technically speaking, this Agreement ceased to be effective back in 1957-58. There was a clause prohibiting the deployment of new types of armaments in the peninsula in the Agreement. So, when the US deployed nuclear weapons in the peninsula, the agreement formally ceased to be effective since all its clauses had equal legal force.
In addition, since both Koreas are members of the UN, this circumstance further complicates the situation because it is not quite clear how the peace treaty based on the results of the Korean War should be articulated and what countries must participate in it. Pyongyang traditionally regards the US as a full-fledged war participant and believes that the signing of a peace treaty would promote closer diplomatic relations between the two countries.
The matter is that an absence of diplomatic relations between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the US is more of an exception than a rule. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is by no means in complete international isolation. As of June 2012, North Korea had established diplomatic relations with 165 states that are currently standing members of the UN. Only about 20 countries, including the USA, Japan and Ukraine do not have diplomatic relations with it. Actually, at the beginning of the 1990s, the United States and Japan were supposed to recognize the North pursuant to the “cross-recognition” doctrine in accordance with which Russia and China had opened diplomatic relations with South Korea. But it was not concluded.
Diplomatic recognition of the two countries was set out as one of the clauses of the 1994 agreement–the Agreed Framework. This was one of the terms under which the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea later froze its nuclear program. However, due to a number of reasons the American side executed neither this nor other, more important, obligations set out in the Agreed Framework.
Today the embassy of Sweden represents interests of the US in Pyongyang. This causes many inconveniences compelling the parties to resolve the situation, especially in light of the improving relations between the US and Cuba, a country, which had been demonized by the US as much as North Korea.
Here is one more important thought. The “democratic press” painstakingly molds an image of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as a country incapable of achieving agreements and unwilling to negotiate with anyone. All its proposals are inevitably renounced as demagogical and meaningless. However, analyses of both the inter-Korean and regional crises involving the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea show that in the majority of cases North Korea was the one to make settlement proposals. A recent example is the August 2015 crisis, which was settled by way of negotiations between the North and the South initiated by North Korea.
Konstantin Asmolov, Ph.D, Chief Research Fellow of the Center for Korean Studies, Institute of Far Eastern Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences.
Recently CounterPunch published an article Obama’s Legacy: An Abyss Gazing Backwards by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad. It exemplifies the faulty analysis and conclusions of those advocating direct U.S. intervention in Syria, from far right wing neoconservatives to liberals and even some self-styled Marxists.
Because of the dangerous consequences of these assumptions and conclusions, it is important that they be critically examined. We can use the above mentioned article as an example.
The same article with different title was published one week earlier in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) paper The National. The title was “Obama’s legacy is tarnished as Putin fills the vacuum in Syria”.
The Syrian “vacuum” is a popular myth promoted by those who want the U.S. to become more aggressive in Syria. In reality the U.S. has very actively aided and abetted the violent opposition in Syria from the start. The Defense Information Agency report from August 2012 confirms that weapons were flowing to the Syrian armed opposition after the overthrow of the Libyan government in Fall 2011. The claim that the U.S. was only supplying communications equipment and other non-lethal supplies in 2012 and 2013 was for public consumption and ‘plausible deniability’. In reality the U.S. was supplying great quantities of weapons. The ‘dark side’ included a huge budget for CIA operations including training and arming the Syrian armed opposition. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and UAE were spending billions annually in support of mercenaries and fanatics trying to overthrow the secular Damascus government. Contrary to what Ahmad says, the US-backed rebels were largely a fiction. Apart from the Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL or ISIS), the most effective fighting force was the official Al Qaeda franchise, Jabhat al Nusra. Out of the public view, to the extent it existed, FSA was working closely with Nusra/Al Qaeda.
In a confusing use of terms, Ahmad contrasts “counter-terrorism” with “counter-insurgency”. What he means by “counter-insurgency” is regime change via direct intervention or invasion. What he means by “counter-terrorism” is regime change via coup or proxy army.
Pakistan-born Muhammad Idrees Ahmad suggests that Obama is spineless because he has opted for “counter-terrorism” (proxy armies, drone strikes, etc) instead of “counter-insurgency” (direct U.S. Attacks). This is short-sighted and ahistorical. There is no public desire for another US invasion of another country. This is partly because the Iraq invasion and disaster is still fresh in the public mind. It also follows a pattern from the past: after the defeat of the US invasion of Vietnam, the US reverted to using a proxy army (the Contras) against Nicaragua in the early 1980s.
But warmongers in the media, such as Ahmad, are not the public. More often than not, they reflect the views of their sponsors. It’s no surprise that Ahmad’s article was first published by UAE’s The National. The United Arab Emirates is closely allied with Saudi Arabia and vigorously promotes conflict with Iran. A recent expose on the UAE Ambassador to Washington shows the level of corruption in Washington, how easy it is to win influence throwing money around, and the core policy of the United Arab Emirates. This policy is aligned with Israel and opposed to Iran, Syria, Russia. The celebrity ambassador, Yousef al Otaiba, is vigorously campaigning for the U.S. to intervene or attack Syria directly. The subtitle of the article succinctly describes the UAE Ambassador:
“Yousef Al Otaiba is the most charming man in Washington: He’s slick, he’s savvy and he throws one hell of a party. And if he has his way, our Middle East policy is going to get a lot more aggressive.”
What connects Otaiba and Ahmad is the tiny wealthy monarchy known as the United Arab Emirates and promotion of U.S. aggression against Syria.
Ahmad says “Obama betrayed his hand long ago when he failed to match hot rhetoric with even modest action …. [when] Assad brazenly breached his ‘red line’ by using chemical weapons” . This assertion is standard fare for journalists promoting war. In reality the accusation has been largely disproved. The Human Rights Watch “vector” analysis was dubious from the beginning and then entirely discredited. The most thorough investigation concludes the weapons were launched from territory held by the armed opposition. American investigative reporters Seymour Hersh, Robert Parry and Gareth Porter, plus former CIA officer Ray McGovern, have all concluded the attacks were likely by the armed opposition trying to trap the U.S. into bombing Syria. Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, like nearly all mainstream journalists promoting the war, ignores the contrary evidence.
In tandem with “Obama is weak” goes “Russia is strong” or “Russia looks strong” or “Putin looks strong because Obama is weak”. The media warmongers are like kids on a school playground, trying to egg on a fight. Except in this case it’s not a bloody nose at stake; it’s the lives of tens of thousands of Syrians and potentially millions in World War 3.
Ahmad outdoes himself in the charge for war by claiming “Russian actions in Syria are an act of aggression against the country’s beleaguered people.” In contrast with his fantasy, virtually the entire Syrian population are hugely relieved and happy that Russia has started providing air support, modern laser guided weapons and satellite information to help reverse the tide. An American Syrian friend who lives in Latakia recently reported that people in the city were extremely worried in August through mid September with increasing car bombs and jihadi fired missiles coming into the city. They are now starting to feel safe again. The mood has dramatically changed for the better. Another Syrian friend reported that in his home village near Homs, women were ululating in happiness when Russian jet fighters attacked nearby ISIS and Nusra camps.
Those seeking direct US/NATO intervention in Syria describe the conflict as “weak Obama vs strong Putin”. They are unhappy and critical because the proxy army has failed to overthrow the Syrian government. They want direct invasion even if it risks world war. It’s a very dangerous and deluded mindset. Above all it profoundly ignores or distorts the wishes of the Syrian people who have consistently and increasingly made clear they do not support the violent opposition. Two years ago a poll commissioned by NATO revealed that 70% of the population supports the government.
The conflict in Syria shows what happens when international law is ignored with impunity. Both the UN Charter and customary international law prohibit one country using force, directly or by proxy army, against another.
The Syrian conflict shows what happens when the “rule of the jungle” prevails. The “abyss” is not Syrians getting support from Russia and starting to prevail over mercenaries and sectarian fanatics. The “abyss” is the death and destruction of the cradle of civilization caused by clear aggression. The Obama legacy significantly depends on whether he resists or caves in to warmongers such as Muhammad Idrees Ahmad and the Ambassador from UAE.
Rick Sterling is a co-founder of Syria Solidarity Movement. He can be contacted at rsterling1@gmail.com
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has attracted criticism for an incendiary speech in which he accused the Palestinian grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, of “inspiring the Holocaust”. Critics accuse Netanyahu of trivialising the Holocaust by attributing the impetus for Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe to the grand mufti.
In his speech Netanyahu described a meeting between Haj Amin al-Husseini and Hitler in November 1941. “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said: ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here [to Palestine].’” According to Netanyahu, Hitler then asked: “What should I do with them?” and the mufti replied: “Burn them.” Netanyahu chose not to reveal how he had uncovered the transcript of the conversation.
This shift in Israeli historical perspective, illuminated by Netanyahu, is timely and welcome. In recent days it has become clear that Palestine is not willing to accept the Zionist presence on its land any longer and this feeling is more than understandable. Time is overdue for the Jews to move on and invent a new phantasmic promised land. Germany is obviously the ideal candidate. Angela Merkel loves immigration and she is probably willing to take a few million Israeli humus eaters to balance the victims of Ziocon wars who are fleeing into her Germanic haven.
Berlin has recently become the new Jerusalem for the Israelis. Thousand of young Israelis have moved to Berlin in recent years in a migration wave that in Hebrew is called, ‘Olim le-Berlin’ (Ascending to Berlin). Yesterday PM Netanyahu joined the call of the Israeli youth, and he has finally vindicated Hitler and the Germans. It seems that actually it is the Palestinians who should be blamed for the Shoah. In the Hebraic sphere they like to keep the equation simple – the eternal victim (the Jew) is the constant factor, the anti-Semite is the variable element. The anti Semite keeps changing, it never stops changing.
Some boring Israeli historians are not yet willing to follow Netanyahu’s revisionist shift. They still insist that maintaining German guilt is essential. Professor Dan Michman, head of the Institute of Holocaust Research at Bar-Ilan University said, “while Hitler did indeed meet the mufti this happened after the Final Solution began.” I am always confused by Jewish scholarship and the way Jewish scholars fiddle with facts to make them fit ever-changing Jewish interests. According to the Zionist Holocaust religion, the “Final solution” was first established in the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. But Hitler met the Mufti in November 1941.
Alternatively, try to follow to the depth of Israeli scholarship. Professor Dina Porat, told the Israeli news website Ynet, that Netanyahu’s claims were “incorrect”. Her profound argument: “You cannot say that it was the mufti who gave Hitler the idea to kill or burn Jews. It’s not true. Their meeting occurred after a series of events that point to this.” As I pointed out in ‘The Wandering Who?’, there is no such a thing as Jewish history. Instead its history is the institutional concealment of Jewish shame that results in an unabashed, inconsistent, kosher zigzag.
MK Itzik Shmuli called on Netanyahu to apologise to Holocaust victims. “This is a great shame, a prime minister of the Jewish state at the service of Holocaust deniers.” Thankfully we now possess a very effective litmus tests for Holocaust deniers. If Netanyahu is the Holocaust denier that MK Shmuli suggests, he will soon express his support for Jeremy Corbyn and our revolutionary Labour party. I am not actually holding my breath.
The first thing any thinking person learns about the Internet is not to trust everything you see there. While you can find much well-researched and reliable material, you’ll also encounter disinformation, spoofs, doctored photographs and crazy conspiracy theories. That would seem to be a basic rule of the Web – caveat emptor and be careful what you do with the information – unless you’re following a preferred neocon narrative. Then, nothing to worry about.
A devil-may-care approach to Internet-sourced material has been particularly striking when it comes to the case of the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014. It has now become de rigueur on the part of the West’s mainstream news outlets to tout the dubious work of a British Internet outlet called Bellingcat, which bases its research on photographs and other stuff pulled off the Internet.
Bellingcat’s founder Eliot Higgins also has made journalistic errors that would have ended the careers of many true professionals, yet he continues to be cited and hailed by the likes of The New York Times and The Washington Post, which have historically turned up their noses about Internet-based journalism.
The secret to Higgins’s success seems to be that he reinforces what the U.S. government’s propagandists want people to believe but lack the credibility to sell. It’s a great business model, marketing yourself as a hip “citizen journalist” who just happens to advance Official Washington’s “group thinks.”
We saw similar opportunism among many wannabe media stars in 2002-03 when U.S. commentators across the political spectrum expressed certitude about Iraq’s hidden stockpiles of WMD. Even the catastrophic consequences of that falsehood did little to dent the career advancements of the Iraq-WMD promoters. There was almost no accountability, proving that there truly is safety in numbers. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Through the US Media Lens Darkly.”]
New Recruits
But there’s always room for new recruits. Blogger Higgins made his first splash by purporting to prove the accuracy of U.S. government claims about the Syrian government firing rockets carrying sarin gas that killed hundreds of civilians on Aug. 21, 2013, outside Damascus, an incident that came close to precipitating a major U.S. bombing campaign against the Syrian military.
Those of us who noted the startling lack of evidence in the Syria-sarin case – much as we had questioned the Iraq-WMD claims in 2002-03 – were brushed aside by Big Media which rushed to embrace Higgins who claimed to have proved the U.S. government’s charges. Even The New York Times clambered onboard the Higgins bandwagon.
Higgins and others mocked legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh when he cited intelligence sources indicating that the attack appeared to be a provocation staged by Sunni extremists to draw the U.S. military into the war, not an attack by the Syrian military.
Despite Hersh’s long record for breaking major stories – including the My Lai massacre from the Vietnam War, the “Family Jewels” secrets of the CIA in the 1970s, and the Abu Ghraib torture during the Iraq War – The New Yorker and The Washington Post refused to run his articles, forcing Hersh to publish in the London Review of Books.
Hersh was then treated like the crazy uncle in the attic, while Higgins – an unemployed British bureaucrat operating from his home in Leicester, England – was the new golden boy. While Higgins was applauded, Hersh was shunned.
But Hersh’s work was buttressed by the findings of top aeronautical scientists who studied the one rocket that carried sarin into the Damascus suburb of Ghouta and concluded that it could have traveled only about two kilometers, far less distance than was assumed by Official Washington’s “group think,” which had traced the firing position to about nine kilometers away at a Syrian military base near the presidential palace of Bashar al-Assad.
“It’s clear and unambiguous this munition could not have come from Syrian government-controlled areas as the White House claimed,” Theodore Postol, a professor in the Science, Technology, and Global Security Working Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, toldMintPress News.
Postol added in the MintPress interview that Higgins “has done a very nice job collecting information on a website. As far as his analysis, it’s so lacking any analytical foundation it’s clear he has no idea what he’s talking about.”
In the wake of the Postol-Lloyd report, The New York Times ran what amounted to a grudging retraction of its earlier claims. Yet, to this day, the Obama administration has failed to withdraw its rush-to-judgment charges against the Syrian government or present any verifiable evidence to support them.
This unwillingness of the Obama administration to fess up has served Higgins well, in that there is still uncertainty regarding the facts of the case. After all, once a good propaganda club is forged for bludgeoning an adversary, it’s not something Official Washington lays down easily. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Collapsing Syria-Sarin Case.“]
The MH-17 Mystery
So, Higgins and Bellingcat moved on to the mystery surrounding MH-17, where again the Obama administration rushed to a judgment, pinning the blame on the Russians and ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine who were fighting the U.S.-backed regime in Kiev.
Though again hard evidence was lacking – at least publicly – Official Washington and its many minions around the world formed a new “group think” – Russia’s President Vladimir Putin was responsible for the 298 deaths.
On July 20, 2014, just three days after the MH-17 shoot-down in an article with the definitive title “U.S. official: Russia gave systems,” The Washington Post reported that an anonymous U.S. official said the U.S. government had “confirmed that Russia supplied sophisticated missile launchers to separatists in eastern Ukraine and that attempts were made to move them back across the Russian border.”
This official told the Post that there wasn’t just one Buk battery, but three. The supposed existence of these Buk systems in the rebels’ hands was central to the case blaming Putin, who indeed would have been highly irresponsible if he had delivered such powerful weapons – capable of hitting a commercial airliner flying at 33,000 feet as MH-17 was – to a ragtag rebel force of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.
But there were problems with this version, including the fact that – as reflected in a “government assessment” from the Director of National Intelligence released on July 22, 2014, (or five days after the crash) – U.S. intelligence listed other weapons allegedly provided by the Russians to the ethnic Russian rebels but not a Buk anti-aircraft missile system.
In other words, two days after the Post cited a U.S. official claiming that the Russians had given the rebels the Buks, the DNI’s “government assessment” made no reference to a delivery of one, let alone three powerful Buk batteries.
And that absence of evidence came in the context of the DNI larding the report with every possible innuendo to implicate the Russians, including references to “social media” entries. But there was no mention of a Buk delivery.
The significance of this missing link is hard to overstate. At the time eastern Ukraine was the focus of extraordinary U.S. intelligence collection because of the potential for the crisis to spin out of control and start World War III. Plus, a Buk missile battery is large and difficult to conceal. The missiles themselves are 16-feet-long and are usually pulled around by truck.
U.S. spy satellites, which supposedly can let you read a license plate in Moscow, surely would have picked up these images. And, if – for some inexplicable reason – a Buk battery was missed before July 17, 2014, it would surely have been spotted on an after-action review of the satellite imagery. But the U.S. government has released nothing of the kind – not three, not two, not one.
Different Account
Instead, in the days after the MH-17 crash, I was told by a source that U.S. intelligence had spotted Buk systems in the area but they appeared to be under Ukrainian government control. The source who had been briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts said the likely missile battery that launched the fateful missile was manned by troops dressed in what looked like Ukrainian uniforms.
At that point in time, the source said CIA analysts were still not ruling out the possibility that the troops were actually eastern Ukrainian rebels in similar uniforms but the initial assessment was that the troops were Ukrainian soldiers. There also was the suggestion that the soldiers involved were undisciplined and possibly drunk, since the imagery showed what looked like beer bottles scattered around the site, the source said. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “What Did US Spy Satellites See in Ukraine?”]
Subsequently, the source said, these analysts reviewed other intelligence data, including recorded phone intercepts, and concluded that the shoot-down was carried out by a rogue element of the Ukrainian government, working with a rabidly anti-Russian oligarch, but that senior Ukrainian leaders, such as President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, were not implicated. However, I have not been able to determine if this assessment was a dissident opinion or a consensus within U.S. intelligence circles.
Another intelligence source told me that CIA analysts did brief Dutch authorities during the preparation of the Dutch Safety Board’s report but that the U.S. information remained classified and unavailable for public release. In the Dutch report, there is no reference to U.S.-supplied information although the report reflects sensitive details about Russian-made weapons systems, secrets declassified by Moscow for the investigation.
Into this propaganda-laced controversy stepped Eliot Higgins and Bellingcat with their “citizen journalism” and Internet-based investigation. The core of their project was to scour the Internet for images purportedly of a Buk missile system rumbling through the eastern Ukrainian countryside in the days before the MH-17 crash. After finding several such images, Bellingcat insistently linked the Buk missiles to the Russians and the rebels.
Supposedly, this investigative approach is better than what we traditional journalists do in such cases, which is to find sources with vetted intelligence information and get them to share it with us, while also testing it out against verifiable facts and the views of outside experts. Our approach is far from perfect – and often requires some gutsy whistle-blowing by honest officials – but it is how many important secrets have been revealed.
A central flaw in the Internet-based approach is that it is very easy for a skilled propagandist in a government dirty-tricks office or just some clever jerk with Photoshop software to manufacture realistic-looking images or documents and palm them off either directly to gullible people or through propaganda fronts that appear as non-governmental entities but are really bought-and-paid-for conduits of disinformation.
This idea of filtering propaganda through supposedly disinterested – and thus more credible – outlets has been part of the intelligence community’s playbook for many years. I was once told by Gen. Edward Lansdale, one of the pioneers of CIA psychological operations, that his preference always was to plant propaganda in news agencies that were perceived as objective, that way people were more believing.
Lost Credibility
After the Pentagon Papers and Watergate scandals of the 1970s, when the American people were suspicious of whatever they heard from the U.S. government, the Reagan administration in the 1980s organized inter-agency task forces to apply CIA-style techniques to manage the perceptions of the U.S. public about foreign events. The architect was the CIA’s top propaganda specialist, Walter Raymond Jr., who was transferred to the National Security Council staff to skirt legal prohibitions against the CIA manipulating Americans.
Raymond, who counseled his subordinates in the art of gluing black hats on U.S. adversaries and white hats on U.S. friends, recommended that U.S. propaganda be funneled through organizations that had “credibility in the political center.” Among his favorite outlets were Freedom House, a non-governmental “human rights” group that was discreetly funded by the U.S. government, and the Atlantic Council, a think tank led by former senior U.S. government officials and promoting strong NATO ties. [For more background, see “How Reagan’s Propaganda Succeeded.”]
The same process continues to this day with some of the same trusted outlets, such as Freedom House and Atlantic Council, but requiring some new fronts that have yet to be identified as propaganda conduits. Many receive discreet or backdoor funding from the U.S. government through the National Endowment for Democracy or other U.S. entities.
For instance, the U.S. Agency for International Development (along with billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Institute) funds the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, which targets governments that have fallen into U.S. disfavor and which are then undermined by reporting that hypes alleged ties to organized crime and corruption. The USAID/Soros-funded OCCRP also collaborates with Bellingcat.
Higgins has become a favorite, too, of the Atlantic Council, which has partnered with him for a report about Russian involvement in the Ukraine conflict, and he wins praise from the Soros-financed Human Rights Watch, which has lobbied for U.S. military intervention against the Assad government in Syria. (Like Higgins, Human Rights Watch pushed discredited theories about where Syrian sarin-gas attack originated.)
Yet, because Higgins’s claims dovetail so neatly with U.S. government propaganda and neoconservative narratives, he is treated like an oracle by credulous journalists, the Oracle of Leicester. For instance, Australia’s “60 Minutes” dispatched a crew to Higgins’s house to get the supposed coordinates for where the so-called “Buk getaway video” was filmed – another curious scene that appeared mysteriously on the Internet.
When “60 Minutes” got to the spot near Luhansk in eastern Ukraine where Higgins sent them, the location did not match up with the video. Although there were some billboards in the video and at the site in Luhansk, they were different shapes and all the other landmarks were off, too. Still, the Australian news crew pretended that it was at the right place, using some video sleight-of-hand to snooker the viewers.
However, when I published screen grabs of the getaway video and the Luhansk location, it was clear to anyone that the scenes didn’t match up.
Yet, instead of simply admitting that they were in error, the “60 Minutes” host did a follow-up insulting me, asserting that he had gone to the place identified by Higgins and claiming that there was a utility pole in the video that looked something like a utility pole in Luhansk.
At this point, the Australian program went from committing an embarrassing error to engaging in journalistic fraud. Beyond the fact that utility poles tend to look alike, nothing else matched up and, indeed, the landmarks around the utility poles were markedly different, too. A house next to the pole in the video didn’t appear in the scene filmed by the Australian crew. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “A Reckless Stand-upper on MH-17.”]
An Enduring Aura
But Higgins’s aura was such that objective reality and logic no longer seemed to matter. That two utility poles looked somewhat alike when nothing else in a video matched up at all somehow proved you were at the right location simply because the Oracle of Leicester had sent you there.
I’ve known many excellent journalists who saw their careers ended because they were accused of minor slip-ups on difficult stories when they were clearly correct on the big picture. Think, for instance, of the harsh treatment meted out to Gary Webb on Nicaraguan Contra drug trafficking and Mary Mapes on George W. Bush’s shirking his National Guard duty. But different rules clearly apply if you make serious errors in line with U.S. propaganda. For example, think of virtually the entire mainstream news media buying into the false Iraq-WMD claims and facing almost no accountability at all.
The second set of rules apparently applies to Higgins and Bellingcat, who have the mainstream U.S. media on bended knee despite a record of journalistic misfeasance or malfeasance. In editorials about the Dutch Safety Board report last week , both The New York Times and The Washington Post hailed Bellingcat – as if they were recognizing that the old mainstream media had to rub shoulders with supposedly “new media” to have any credibility. It was a moment that would have made the CIA’s Lansdale and Raymond smile.
The Post’s neocon editorial writers, who have backed “regime change” in Iraq, Syria and other targeted countries, viewed the Dutch Safety Board report as vindicating the initial rush to judgment blaming the Russians and praised the work of Bellingcat – although the Dutch report pointedly did not say who was responsible or even where the fatal missile was launched.
“More forensic investigation will be necessary to identify precisely where the missile came from, but the safety board identified a 123-square-mile area mostly held by the separatists,” the Post wrote, although a different way of saying the same thing would be to note that the launch area identified by the report could suggest the firing by either Ukrainian forces or the rebels.
The Post did observe what has been one of my repeated complaints — that the Obama administration is withholding the U.S. intelligence evidence that Secretary of State John Kerry claimed three days after the shoot-down had identified the precise location of the launch.
Yet, the subsequent U.S. silence on that point has been the dog not barking. Why would the U.S. government, which has been trying to pin the shoot-down on the Russians, hide such crucial evidence – unless perhaps it doesn’t corroborate the desired anti-Putin propaganda theme?
Yet, the Post sought to turn this otherwise inexplicable U.S. silence into further condemnation of Putin, writing: “A Dutch criminal investigation is underway that may identify the individuals who ordered and carried out the shootdown. We hope the prosecutors will have access to precise data scooped up by U.S. technical means at the time of the shootdown, which made clear the responsibility of Russian-backed forces.”
So, the Post sees nothing suspicious about the U.S. government’s sudden reticence after its initial loud rush-to-judgment. Note also the Post’s lack of skepticism about what these “technical means” had scooped up. Though the U.S. government has refused to release this evidence – in effect, giving those responsible for the shoot-down a 15-month head start to get away and cover their tracks – the Post simply takes the official word that the Russians are responsible.
Then comes the praise for Bellingcat : “Already, outside investigations based on open sources and social media, such as by the citizen journalist group Bellingcat, have shown the Buk launcher was probably wheeled into Ukraine in June from the Russian 53rd Air Defense Brigade, based outside Kursk. The criminal probe should aim to determine whether Russian servicemen were operating the unit when it was fired or helping the separatists fire it.”
No Skepticism
Again, the Post shows little skepticism about this version of events, leaving only the question of whether Russian soldiers fired the missile themselves or helped the rebels fire it. But there are obvious problems with this narrative. If, indeed, the one, two or three Russian Buk batteries were rumbling around eastern Ukraine the month before the shoot-down, why did neither U.S. intelligence nor Ukrainian intelligence notice this?
And, we know from the Dutch report that the Ukrainians were insisting up until the shoot-down that the rebels had no surface-to-air missiles that could threaten commercial airliners at 33,000 feet. However, the Ukrainians did have Buk systems that they were positioning toward the east, presumably to defend against possible Russian air incursions.
On July 16, 2014, one day before MH-17 was hit, a Ukrainian Su-25 fighter-jet was shot down by what Ukrainian authorities said was an air-to-air missile, according to the Dutch report. Presumably the missile was fired by a Russian fighter patrolling the nearby border.
So, if the Ukrainians already believed that Russian warplanes were attacking along the border, it would make sense that Ukrainian air defense units would be on a hair-trigger about shooting down Russian jets entering or leaving Ukrainian airspace.
Even if you don’t want to believe what I was told about U.S. intelligence analysts suspecting that a rogue Ukrainian military operation targeted MH-17, doesn’t it make sense that an undisciplined Ukrainian anti-aircraft battery might have mistakenly identified MH-17 as a Russian military aircraft leaving Ukrainian airspace? The Ukrainians had the means and the opportunity and possibly a motive – after the shoot-down of the SU-25 just one day earlier.
The Dutch Safety Board report is silent, too, on the question raised by Russian officials as to why the Ukrainians had turned on their radar used to guide Buk missiles in the days before MH-17 was shot down. That allegation is neither confirmed nor denied.
Regarding Bellingcat’s reliance on Internet-based photos to support its theories, there is the additional problem of Der Spiegel’s report last October revealing that the German intelligence agency, the BND, challenged some of the images provided by the Ukrainian government as “manipulated.” According to Der Spiegel, the BND blamed the rebels for firing the fateful Buk but said the missile battery came not from the Russians but from Ukrainian government stockpiles. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Germans Clear Russia in MH-17 Case.”]
However, a European source told me that the BND’s information was not as categorical as Der Spiegel reported. And, according to the Dutch report, the Ukrainian government reported that a Buk system that the rebels captured from a Ukrainian air base was not operational, a point where the rebels are in agreement. They also say they had no working Buks.
Yet, even without the BND’s warning, great caution should be shown when using evidence deposited often anonymously on the Internet. The idea of “crowd-sourcing” these investigations also raises the possibility that a skillful disinformationist could phony up a photograph and then direct an unwitting or collaborating reporter to the image.
Though I am no expert in the art of doctoring photographs, my journalism training has taught me to approach every possible flaw in the evidence skeptically. That’s especially true when some anonymous blogger directs you to an image or article whose bona fides cannot be established.
One of the strengths of old-fashioned journalism was that you could generally count on the professional integrity of the news agencies distributing photographs. Even then, however, there have been infamous cases of misrepresentations and hoaxes. Those possibilities multiply when images of dubious provenance pop up on the Internet.
In the case of MH-17, some photo analysts have raised specific questions about the authenticity of images used by Bellingcat and others among the “Russia-did-it” true-believers. We have already seen in the case of the “Buk-getaway video” how Higgins sent a reporting team from Australia’s “60 Minutes” halfway around the world to end up at the wrong spot (but then to use video fakery to deceive the viewers).
So, the chances of getting duped must be taken into account when dealing with unverifiable sources of information, a risk that rises exponentially when there’s also the possibility of clever intelligence operatives salting the Internet with disinformation. For the likes of psy-ops innovator Lansdale and propaganda specialist Raymond, the Internet would have been a devil’s playground.
Which is one more reason why President Barack Obama should release as much of the intelligence evidence as he can that pinpoints where the fateful MH-17 missile was fired and who fired it. [For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT Plays Games with MH-17 Tragedy.”]
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
The recent Frankie Boyle article in the Guardian contained his usual mix of dark humour and on-point political satire. However, most people who follow the Syrian situation closely know his summary of the “civil war”, and assertion that “nobody likes Assad”, to be inaccurate.
Unfortunately efforts to point this out in the comments were met with the Guardian’s usual response to fact-based constructive criticism:
As you can see, Mr Purkayastha’s comment is civil, constructive, on topic and backed up with sources. And yet…
Seems like question the agenda doesn’t abide by their “community standards”. Thanks to Bill Purkayastha for bring this to your attention. If you have had similar experiences at the Guardian, or any MSM web-site, please let us know.
An Open Letter to Terry Allen, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, David Corn, Chris Hayes, George Monbiot, Matthew Rothschild, and Matt Taibbi.
[1]According to several left-leaning critics of the 9/11 Truth Movement, some of its central claims, especially about the destruction of the World Trade Center, show its members to be scientifically challenged. In the opinion of some of these critics, moreover, claims made by members of this movement are sometimes unscientific in the strongest possible sense, implying an acceptance of magic and miracles. … Full article
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
