For decades, pretentious wonks have declared that we live in “The Information Age,” as if information were a commodity unique to our time. Inanity aside, the claim is patently false, notwithstanding the advent of computers and virtually instant communication.
We do not live in an “Information Age” because “information” connotes data that is beneficial and objectively valid. Information can help solve problems, educate, and generally improve life. This was true of written language, movable type, the radio and the telephone, but look around today—do you see problems being solved, people becoming smarter, or life getting better? I thought not.
A more accurate expression for our time is “The Disinformation Age.” Though it is also not unique to our time, it at least captures the pervasive abuse of information that has made our society the opposite of an “informed” rational society: dissent is a subversive act; citizens are enemies of the state; the media conceal evidence; and the police enforce police-state edicts.
If these dystopian qualities were the basis for a movie or TV show, we could take comfort in the knowledge that justice would eventually prevail.
We’d be able to cheer for a rebellious anti-hero like John Connor (Terminator series), Det. Del Spooner (I, Robot), or Insp. Harry Callaghan (Dirty Harry series) to bring down the system. We would see detectives or scientists analyzing evidence (Columbo, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Bones) instead of destroying or ignoring it. We might be treated to the sight of the police treating a suspect humanely and reading him his rights (Kojak, Hill Street Blues, Dragnet). We might even see a dogged investigator exposing a cover up or government corruption (All The President’s Men, Erin Brockovich), instead of scheming to keep it hidden from the public.
This world of scripted entertainment, unreal though it may be, is able to depict healthy relationships between authorities and the truth, and between authorities and citizens. Such shows do not depict an idealized future; they give us fading afterimages of our society before the Military-Israel Complex and neo-conservative sociopaths gave us the “War on Terrorism” and declared justice obsolete. Here’s how the Boston Marathon bombing was scripted to serve the expanding surveillance state and stoke the “War on Terrorism.”
• Stage a lethal attack against a civilian U.S. target;
• Blame Arabs or some other Middle Eastern-looking types for the crime;
• Have FBI agents in place to ensure containment and control of the investigation;
• Justify their existence by having a “bomb drill” going on at the same time;
• Keep the public ignorant of the drill;
• Make sure the scapegoats are killed or otherwise kept away from the media;
• Stage conspicuous displays of gratitude for police agencies to reinforce the illusion that they are needed to fight “terrorism”; and
• Ensure that evidence is ignored or destroyed, and dissenting voices are harassed into submission so that the pre-established cover story can be marketed to a gullible public.
Like the 2001World Trade Centre Attack, which followed the same basic script although on a much larger scale, the Boston Marathon bombing story has come completely unraveled. Every couple of days it seems that some other detail comes out that demands to be investigated:
• No credible motive was ever given for the Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaerv to have made the bombs.
• The FBI failed to disclose knowing the brothers; the agency had had a relationship with them going back at least two years.
• The FBI had to know them because the boys’ uncle Ruslan Tsarni (formerly Tsarnaev) is an ex-contractor for Halliburton, and was married to the daughter of Graham Fuller, a former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA and senior political scientist at RAND.
• Boston Police claim Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was shot in a gunfight, but video footage shows that he was unarmed.
• Dzhokhar was accused of leaving his bomb-laden backpack at the race, but a surveillance pic clearly shows him leaving with it.
• No explanation was given for the sudden appearance of Israeli police who just happened to be there to lend assistance.
• The public was not told that several members of a private security kill squad were on site.
This last omission, combined with the FBI’s immediate refusal to consider other suspects, clearly suggests a false-flag scenario. The following table identifies this kill squad.
To date, no news agency will touch this angle, even though these and other pics have been available on the Internet for weeks. Nevertheless, New Hampshire State Senator Sheila Tremblay correctly said that a black ops team was behind the bombing and even cast doubt on the claims of injury since one amputee did not look as if he were in pain. This was undoubtedly true because many of the amputees were paid actors who had already lost their limbs. Tremblay was pressured into issuing a political apology.
If this were part of a movie script, I guarantee there would be a crusading detective or journalist examining the evidence, interviewing people like Tremblay honestly, and asking intelligent questions like:
What was Craft International doing at the Marathon?
Why were they even needed?
How many Craft mercenaries were on site?
Who hired them—FBI, DHS, Boston police?
Why were amputee actors in the crowd, and who hired them?
What are the names of the two agents in pic #1?
Have these agents been interviewed regarding the missing backpack?
Has anyone proved that the exploded backpack even belonged to the Tsarnaev brothers?
For an excellent example of how justice triumphs over police corruption in the world of entertainment, the 1997 movie L.A. Confidential has thematic elements in common with the Boston bombing. [CAUTION SPOILER ALERT]
The film, centres around the culture of violence and corruption that pervades the L.A. Police Department in the 1950s. The catalyzing event is a multiple murder that takes place late one night in a seedy diner. A car belonging to “three negroes” was seen in the area at the time, and so the precinct captain makes them the sole focus of police inquiries.
Under interrogation, a career-minded but idealistic lieutenant realizes the story doesn’t wash, and starts looking for answers. He finds unlikely support from a thuggish officer and a sergeant who works on a TV show.
If you’re wondering what an honest investigation into the Boston Marathon bombing might have looked like, here are a few scenes for your entertainment. Shows like this accurately reflect our police-state but they can inure us to disinformation. This kind of entertainment has to be seen not as a comforting, nostalgic escape, but the basis for a new reality script since the one we have is transparently indefensible.
London-based human rights group Amnesty International has got a bashing from anti-war initiative RootsAction that says Amnesty is applying double standards on human rights and war with a bias in favor of the US-led military interventions.
RootsAction has launched an online petition saying Amnesty is reporting a one-sided story from Syria, refusing to make any mention of the Syrian anti-government terrorists’ crimes apparently because they are backed by the US and its allies.
“We are concerned that you seem to have forgotten to oppose all violations of human rights — by all sides — in war,” the online petition read.
“You are highlighting war-making in Syria’s civil war by one side only. This one-sided treatment by a group avowedly dedicated to all human rights is fueling the fires of a wider war from which the people of Syria can only suffer,” it added.
The group called on Amnesty to report all instances of human rights violations in the conflicts and avoid whitewashing the situation in favor of the US.
“We urge you to assertively expose and condemn all wartime violations of human rights — without downplaying or ignoring the violations committed by the U.S. government and its allies,” it said.
Amnesty has a record of making things easier for the US.
It promoted the false reports that the Iraqi soldiers removed 312 babies from their incubators and left them to die on the fold hospital floors of Kuwait city before the Persian Gulf war in 1991.
Recently, it has been also campaigning to pretend the US-led invasion of Afghanistan had to do with upholding women’s rights.
The group has, however, refused to condemn the killing of civilians by the US and its allies in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya.
“We have been very clear to the Assad regime but also to other players on the ground that a red line for us is, we start seeing a whole bunch of weapons moving around or being utilized.” — Obama Threatens Force Against Syria, The New York Times, August 21, 2012
When President Obama spoke these words last August he might have dug himself a hole twice as deep as the one he was in last week.
As four NYT journalists reported on Sunday’s front page article “Off-the-Cuff Obama Line Put U.S. in Bind on Syria”: “Confronted with evidence that chemical weapons have been used in Syria, President Obama now finds himself in a geopolitical box, his credibility at stake with frustratingly few good options.”
If there will be any effort to hold Mr. Obama’s feet to the fire the heat just got hotter.
The United Nations independent commission of inquiry on Syria has not yet seen evidence of government forces using chemical weapons, which are banned under international law, said Carla Del Ponte, a commission member.
“Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals,” Ms. Del Ponte said in an interview with Swiss-Italian television. “According to their report of last week, which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated.”
“This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities,” she added, speaking in Italian.
Question: Will President Obama hold the rebels accountable for crossing his red line?
In his own words he did say that he has “been very clear to the Assad regime but also to other players on the ground” [emphasis added] that the use of chemical weapons is a red line that even the Times saw last summer as a threat of force.
The question is not likely to be answered in the affirmative. This is the politics of war. For more than two years the rebels have been carrying out terrorist bombings, grisly executions, and other assorted attacks that would likely have had Washington and its allies foaming at the mouths were it the Assad regime who was the perpetrator.
Washington has failed to join the Syrian government in their own War on Terror, even though al Qaeda is active in the country. And it just goes to show as one more example: when al Qaeda is used as a boogeyman for war we should not take the pretext seriously, as in the case of Mali. If al Qaeda is on the same side as Uncle Sam, as they were in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Balkans in the 1990s, Libya in 2011, and now Syria, then there will be no drone attacks on the terrorists.
And now we see al Qaeda-linked terrorists suspected of using chemical weapons. Don’t look for the U.S. to come to the defense of the Syrian government.
Already we can see the change of attitude reflected at The New York Times.
From that moment the story became a sensation. It fit well into the parameters of the propaganda system. An official enemy who we are actively trying to overthrow may have used chemical weapons and provided a clear pretext for force. Here comes the march to war.
But when UN investigators looked into the matter and reported that “Syrian Rebels May Have Used Sarin,” the story fell from grace and was pushed to page A9.
This differential treatment signals the death of the “red line” story, which is too bad because it would have been interesting to see The New York Times, or anyone in the mainstream media, investigate how Syrian rebels could have gotten a hold of sarin, especially considering a former Bush official has openly considered the idea of Israel being behind the attack.
The differential treatment may possibly throw a wrench in the drive to war . . . for now. Because, also on page A9 of Monday’s edition of The New York Times is “Attacks on Syria Fuel Debate Over U.S.-Led Airstrikes,” a report of an Israeli attack in Syria:
WASHINGTON — The apparent ease with which Israel struck missile sites and, by Syrian accounts, a major military research center near Damascus in recent days has stoked debate in Washington about whether American-led airstrikes are the logical next step to cripple President Bashar al-Assad’s ability to counter the rebel forces or use chemical weapons.
That option was already being debated in secret by the United States, Britain and France in the days leading to the Israeli strikes, according to American and foreign officials involved in the discussions. On Sunday, Senator John McCain, who has long advocated a much deeper American role in the Syrian civil war, argued that the Israeli attacks, at least one of which appears to have been launched from outside Syrian airspace, weakens the argument that Syria’s air defense system would be a major challenge.
“The Israelis seem to be able to penetrate it fairly easily,” Mr. McCain said on “Fox News Sunday.”
While attacks in Syria might be easier than previously suspected, the justifications for war received a setback. But if history is any guide this is only a minor and temporary one.
Thirteen years ago I knew very little about Israel-Palestine. Like most Americans, this seemed to be a distant, confusing conflict that had little to do with me. I was unaware –again, like most Americans – that American taxpayers give Israel over $8 million per day, more than we give to any other nation.
I was unaware that our nation has vetoed numerous United Nations efforts to reign in Israeli aggression; resolutions that were supported by almost every other country around the world. I was unaware that US actions were enabling a massive land theft and ongoing ethnic cleansing that has caused profound tragedy in the Middle East, deep damage to our own nation and endangered American lives.
My personal awakening to these facts and others began in the autumn of 2000 when the Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada began and was, for a while at least, in the American news. I grew curious about this conflict, determined to follow the news on it, and noticed quickly how one-sided the news coverage appeared to be. While we heard from and about Israelis frequently, the Palestinian side seemed to be largely glossed over at minimum, and was sometimes completely hidden.
I began searching for additional information on the Internet and was astounded at what I learned. Israeli forces were killing hundreds of largely unarmed Palestinian men, women and children; many of the children were being killed by gunshot wounds to the head.
While some Israelis were also being killed during this period, these deaths were far fewer and virtually invariably occurred after Palestinian deaths. Over 90 Palestinian children were killed before a single Israeli child. Over 140 Palestinian men, women and children living on their own land were killed before anyone in Israel was.
As I learned the nature of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the true history of the region, it began to seem to me that this was the longest and possibly most significant cover-up I had ever come across. I finally decided to quit my job as the editor of a small community newspaper in northern California and go and see for myself what was going on, travelling to Israel-Palestine as a freelance reporter in February and March of 2001.
When I returned I created an organisation called “If Americans Knew” to provide the full facts to my fellow citizens and to study why and how US news coverage was failing to do this.
Israel-centrism and patterns of distortion
We have conducted a number of statistical studies on this issue and found that US media were covering Israeli deaths in far greater detail than they were covering those of Palestinian.
For example, the New York Times was reporting on Israeli children’s deaths at a rate seven times greater than they were covering Palestinian children’s deaths; this didn’t even include the far larger number of words and amount of personal information given about Israeli victims compared to Palestinians. We also found that primetime network news programmes were covering Israeli children’s deaths at rates up to 14 times greater than the coverage given to Palestinians.
I discovered a system of reporting from the region in which a violent conflict between an officially “Jewish state” and the Muslims and Christians it had dispossessed (and was in the process of dispossessing further) was being covered most of the time by journalists with legal, familial or emotional ties to Israel. A great many are Israeli citizens (though this is almost never disclosed) or married to Israelis, their children also being Israeli.
I discovered that the Associated Press control bureau for the region, from which virtually all news reports that appear in US newspapers were transmitted, was located in Israel and was staffed almost entirely by Israeli and Jewish journalists (many of whom had served in the Israeli military).
I learned that the son of the New York Times bureau chief was serving in the Israeli military while his father was reporting on the conflict. In fact, I discovered that it was common for journalists in the region reporting for American media to have close personal ties to the Israeli military; that at least one staff member had been serving in the Israeli military even as he was reporting for the NY Times; that US News & World Report’s senior foreign correspondent, who had covered and written about the Middle East for more than 40 years, had a son serving in the Israeli army during the time he was reporting there; that Middle East “pundit” Jeffrey Goldberg, whose commentary pervades both the print and broadcast media, is an Israeli citizen who served in the Israeli military.
I learned that CNN anchorman Wolf Blitzer lived in Israel for many years, at one point travelled around the US as the “voice of Israel” and had worked for an Israel lobby publication.
I learned that Time magazine’s bureau chief was an Israeli citizen, and that NPR’s long-time correspondent from the region had an Israeli husband who had served in the military and may be an Israeli citizen herself.
I also discovered that this pattern of Israel-centrism went beyond the regional reporting. In fact, the regional filtering of the news may not even be the most significant factor in the broken media reporting on this issue that Americans receive.
Within US-based journalism per se I discovered patterns of Israel-centrism that were deeply troubling. In some cases I personally experienced the intentional suppression of information on Palestine. Following are a few examples.
San Francisco Chronicle
While I was on my first trip to the Middle East I had met with a managing editor at the San Francisco Chronicle before I left and told him of my intention to report from the region. He had been quite interested and asked me to send him my first-hand reports.
During my trip, despite the difficulties in doing this, I sent him several reports at a time when almost no other American journalists were in the West Bank or, especially, Gaza. None were printed.
Finally, he sent me an email saying that he might be able to publish some of my reports, but that this would be “political”. This was unusually honest but quite troubling. It should not be “political” to publish on-the-scene reporting.
While he never explained the obstacles confronting such reports, I suspect they had to do with the fact that the top editor at the time, Phil Bronstein, tilts toward Israel; that numerous advertisers were pro-Israel; that the pro-Israel power structure is extremely strong in California; that pro-Israel organisations in the US invariably mount protests and boycotts if newspapers stray too far from their preferences; and that others are frequently afraid of being called “anti-Semitic” and of the potential damage honest journalism on this topic could do to their careers.
A few years later a journalist who had worked for the Chronicle for many years, Henry Norr, was fired by Bronstein. While a different rationale was put forward for Norr’s termination, Norr himself believes that the real reason was his activities related to Palestine. He had written a column about an Intel factory constructed illegally on Palestinian land and had also given a lunchtime briefing to staffers about a trip he had taken to the West Bank.
Still another former Chronicle journalist has described the inner workings related to news coverage of Israel-Palestine; that most of those editing wire copy were Israel partisans, that this journalist was largely kept away from editing reports on the issue; and that there was an atmosphere in which anti-Arab cartoons were sometimes posted on a bulletin board.
In 2004 our organisation conducted a statistical study of the Chronicle’s coverage during the first six months of the Second Intifada and discovered that the Chronicle had covered 150 per cent of Israeli children’s deaths and only 5 per cent of Palestinian children’s deaths. Before releasing it to the public I phoned Bronstein to meet with him to present it in person, the normal protocol. He failed to return my phone calls. At a public forum I again requested such a meeting. In front of a large audience Bronstein promised to meet. Yet, he later again refused to return phone calls and this meeting never transpired.
We then released our report publicly and distributed it as widely as possible. In addition, some groups and individuals disseminated thousands of fliers containing some of our key charts and statistics, headlined “What Children Matter?” These activities, of course, received considerable attention, and I feel were far more valuable than a meeting.
Gannett Newspapers
Gannett is one of the top news chains in the US. According to its website, it consists of 82 daily newspapers, including USA TODAY, and it reaches 11.6 million readers every weekday and 12 million readers every Sunday. USA TODAY is the nation’s top newspaper in print circulation, reaching 6.6 million readers daily.
In addition to its newspapers, Gannett owns 23 TV stations, which reach 21 million households, covering 18.2 per cent of the US population. It also delivers news on 9,500 video screens located in elevators of office towers and select hotel lobbies across North America.
In 2001 a Gannett reporter who was writing a series of articles in the wake of the 9-11 attacks, heard about my trip to the region six months before the attacks and phoned me for an interview. He was extremely interested in my story and ended up calling me several more times for follow-up interviews, asked me to send him all my reports from my trip, and upon receiving them he was quite complimentary about their quality.
The reporter then sent a photographer to take pictures of me in my home for the article, had her express mail them to him, and said the story would be coming out soon.
We were in the process of creating the If Americans Knew website at the time and hurried to make this live, since this would be major exposure.
A little later I went on a speaking tour and a reporter from a community newspaper in a tiny newspaper chain in New York State interviewed me for his paper. A few days later he wrote to me saying that the newspaper owner had killed his article. He said this was the first time this had ever happened to him.
I then realised that I had never seen the Gannett newspaper article on me and If Americans Knew. I emailed the reporter, told him about this incident, and asked him if I had missed his article or whether the same thing had happened to him. I hadn’t missed it. He said that his editor had similarly killed the story.
I later saw an article by this reporter about Americans visiting Iraq who were highly critical of the US government. It is interesting that this subject matter was permissible, but not a feature on someone critical of Israel.
National Public Radio – Vermont and Michigan
Several years later I was on a speaking tour in Vermont and New Hampshire and was to be interviewed on a local affiliate of the influential National Public Radio network. When I arrived at the radio station it turned out that the radio host who had agreed to do this was not available and another person was going to do the interview, someone called Neal Charnoff.
Charnoff and the programme producer took me back to the studio where they would record the interview for later broadcast. Oddly, the regular sound engineer was told he could go outside and take a break, and the producer took over.
The host began his first question with a statement that my articles contained “anti-Semitic” overtones. I interrupted him immediately, said this was untrue, and asked him what he was talking about – which specific articles or statements that I had written did he claim were “anti-Semitic”?
He could not answer. I wondered if he had even read anything I had written or whether he was simply repeating the unfounded accusations by the Anti-Defamation League, a fanatically pro-Israel organisation that has been implicated in a vast spying operation on Americans.
Flustered at the embarrassment at having made a statement based on no evidence, he began the interview again in a more normal fashion. I told him about my trip to the West Bank and Gaza Strip and what I had found.
Within a few minutes, and sooner than the scheduled end of the interview, he stopped it. He turned off the equipment and said they would not be airing it.
I was shocked and asked him why not. There was then a brief conversation in which he, and to a lesser extent the producer, defended Israel against the statement of facts I had made about what I had seen. The producer, who seemed to be more reasonable – and who also may have realised that Charnoff’s intention to kill the interview so publicly would reflect badly on the station – said that she was sure they would be able to broadcast something.
They eventually did so. They did not, however, include information on my upcoming talks in the area, information that would normally have been included. I noticed later that Charnoff’s interviews frequently seem to focus on the Jewish experience and that a disproportionate number of the authors, musicians, etc., that he highlights on his programme are Jews.
Another incident took place in another NPR affiliate, this one in Ann Arbor, Michigan, location of the University of Michigan, one of the top public universities in the United States.
One way that we and other groups try to get around the media’s reluctance to report fully and accurately on Palestine is through the placement of paid advertising. Sometimes even this is censored.
WUOM, the largest NPR affiliate in the state of Michigan, apparently at the direction of its head, Steve Schram, refused to run a spot giving the name of our organisation. Then, when we challenged this censorship, the station supplied a number of fraudulent and ever-changing explanations. Only after fighting this over a year and involving the university administration and a small sit-in in the WUOM office were we able to force them to include our name in a paid advertisement.
American History Magazine/Weider History Group
Still another incident occurred when we tried to buy an advertisement in American History magazine. The ad was to promote the autobiography of CNI’s founder, former US Congressman Paul Findley. We were told that the magazine would not publish the advertisement because CNI was “anti-Israel”. In fact, they informed us that none of their other 10 magazines would run the ad either.
We were amazed to learn that almost all the national popular history magazines in the United States are published by the Weider History group; American History, World War II, Military History, Vietnam, Armchair General, the Civil War, etc.
According to its website, the Weider History Group is the largest chain of history magazines in the world, making its pro-Israel bias particularly important. George Orwell’s words suggest the significance of the Weider censorship within its history magazines: “Who controls the past controls the future.”
As their censorship of our ad because they considered us “anti-Israel” would suggest, the Weiders are very close to Israel. The co-founder of the Weider empire is one of six North American chairmen of the Jerusalem Fund of Aish HaTorah, which takes political leaders, corporate executives, investors and entertainment personages on private trips to Israel to increase their support for the country.
A Weider foundation has given large grants to another Aish HaTorah-connected organisation, the Los Angeles-based American Friends of Aish Hatorah, a nationalistic Israeli organization that promotes Israel in the United States and has a programme to create and equip advocates for Israel on American campuses. Aish has been connected to the production of pseudo-documentaries promoting Islamophobia that were distributed in America.
The Weiders originally brought future movie star and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to the US and played a major role in building both his personal and political career. Weider patriarch Joe Weider once proclaimed proudly, “We created Arnold.” As California governor, Schwarzenegger promoted Israel, stating, “I love Israel. When I became governor, Israel was the first country that I visited.”
The Media role in US policy formation
Thirteen years ago when I grew curious about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I had no idea that my questions would lead me to discover such an extraordinary pattern of influence on behalf of a foreign country in the US media.
This influence, I believe, may be the single most significant factor in creating America’s uniquely massive support for Israel. If American news organisations had been reporting fully and accurately on the region; if they had exposed the pro-Israel lobby’s power and manipulation in the United States; if they had covered the damage done to Americans by policies centred on what would “benefit” Israel rather than Americans (though not, I believe, those Israelis dreaming of peace), I have no doubt that US policies would be vastly different than those we see today.
Moreover, I feel that it is US support for Israel that has supplied the economic, military and diplomatic support for Israel to continue with astoundingly aggressive and oppressive policies. As such, exposing and overcoming pro-Israel power over information in the US about Israel-Palestine may, I believe, be the most important activity that those seeking justice and peace in the Middle East can undertake.
Providing Americans with the full facts on the region; on the determining influence on our media, our government and our country by Israel and its partisans; and on the devastating, wide-ranging damage created by the current situation, will eventually, I have no doubt, bring the momentous change that is so urgently needed. In fact, given that the US has a history of being a very changeable country, if enough resources are devoted to this effort, such a transformation could occur in less time that some long-time observers might expect.
~
Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew and president of the Council for the National Interest. She is the author of Against our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of how the United States was used to create Israel. For copies write to contact@ifamericansknew.org.
For nearly a quarter century, Howard Kurtz has served as hall monitor for Washington’s conventional wisdom, handing out demerits to independent-minded journalists who don’t abide by the mainstream rules. So, there is some understandable pleasure seeing Kurtz face some accountability in his ouster as bureau chief for Newsweek and The Daily Beast.
However, the more salient point is that Kurtz, who continues to host CNN’s “Reliable Sources” show, should never have achieved the level of influence in journalism that he did. Throughout his career, he has consistently – and unfairly – punished journalists who had the courage to ask tough questions and pursue truly important stories.
When one looks at the mess that is modern journalism in the United States, a chief culprit has been Howard Kurtz. Yet, his downfall did not come because of his smearing of fellow journalists – like Gary Webb and Helen Thomas – but rather from a blog post that unfairly criticized basketball player Jason Collins after he revealed that he was gay.
Kurtz faulted Collins for supposedly not revealing that he had once been engaged to a woman, but Collins had mentioned those marriage plans. Twitter exploded with comments about Kurtz’s sloppy error. On Thursday, The Daily Beast retracted the post, and the Web site’s editor-in-chief Tina Brown announced that Kurtz would be departing.
However, Kurtz has committed far more serious offenses during his years destroying the careers of journalists who dared make life a bit uncomfortable for Official Washington’s powerful elites. For instance, Kurtz played a key role in the destruction of investigative reporter Gary Webb, who had the courage to revive the long-suppressed Contra-cocaine story in the mid-1990s.
Working at the San Jose Mercury-News, Webb produced a multi-part series in 1996 revealing how cocaine that was smuggled into the United States by operatives connected to the Nicaraguan Contra war of the 1980s had contributed to the “crack cocaine” epidemic that ravaged U.S. cities. Webb’s articles put the major U.S. news media on the spot because most mainstream outlets had dismissed the Contra-cocaine allegations when they first surfaced in the mid-1980s.
My Associated Press colleague Brian Barger and I wrote the first story about the Contra-cocaine scandal in 1985 and our work was met with a mix of condescension and contempt from the New York Times and the Washington Post, where Kurtz worked for many years. Even after an investigation by Sen. John Kerry confirmed – and expanded upon – our work, the big newspapers continued to dismiss and downplay the stories.
It didn’t matter how much evidence was developed on the Contra-cocaine smuggling or on the Reagan administration’s role covering up the crimes; the conventional wisdom was that the scandal must be a “conspiracy theory.” Journalists or government investigators who did their job, looking at the problem objectively, risked losing their job.
Career Consequences
Journalistic up-and-comers, such as Michael Isikoff (then at the Washington Post), advanced their careers by focusing on minor flaws in Kerry’s investigation rather than on major disclosures of high-level government complicity with drug trafficking. Newsweek’s “conventional wisdom watch” mocked Kerry as “a randy conspiracy buff.”
So, when Gary Webb revived the Contra-cocaine scandal in 1996 by pointing out its real-world impact on the emergence of crack cocaine that ravaged inner cities across the United States in the 1980s, his stories were most unwelcome.
At first, the mainstream news media tried to ignore Webb’s work, but African-American lawmakers demanded investigations into the scandal. That prompted a backlash from the major news organizations. Webb’s articles were dissected looking for tiny flaws that could be exploited to again discredit the whole issue.
On Oct. 4, 1996, the Washington Post published a front-page article knocking down Webb’s series, although acknowledging that some Contra operatives indeed did help the cocaine cartels.
The Post’s approach was twofold: first, the Post presented the Contra-cocaine allegations as old news — “even CIA personnel testified to Congress they knew that those covert operations involved drug traffickers,” the Post sniffed — and second, the Post minimized the importance of the one Contra smuggling channel that Webb had highlighted in his series, saying that it had not “played a major role in the emergence of crack.” A Post sidebar dismissed African-Americans as prone to “conspiracy fears.”
Next, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times weighed in with lengthy articles castigating Webb and his “Dark Alliance” series. The big newspapers made much of the CIA’s internal reviews in 1987 and 1988 — almost a decade earlier — that supposedly had cleared the spy agency of any role in Contra-cocaine smuggling.
But the CIA’s cover-up began to unravel on Oct. 24, 1996, when CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz conceded before the Senate Intelligence Committee that the first CIA probe had lasted only 12 days, and the second only three days. He promised a more thorough review.
Sealing Webb’s Fate
By then, however, Webb had already crossed over from being a serious journalist to an object of ridicule. Washington Post media critic Kurtz effectively sealed Webb’s fate with a series of articles confirming Webb’s new status as a laughable pariah.
For instance, Kurtz mocked Webb for saying in a book proposal that he would explore the possibility that the Contra war was primarily a business to its participants. “Oliver Stone, check your voice mail,” Kurtz chortled.
However, Webb’s suspicion was no conspiracy theory. Indeed, White House aide Oliver North’s chief Contra emissary, Robert Owen, had made the same point in a March 17, 1986, message about the Contras leadership. “Few of the so-called leaders of the movement . . . really care about the boys in the field,” Owen wrote. “THIS WAR HAS BECOME A BUSINESS TO MANY OF THEM.” [Emphasis in original.]
In other words, Webb was right and Kurtz was wrong. Even Oliver North’s emissary had reported that many Contra leaders treated the conflict as “a business.” But accuracy had ceased to be relevant in the media’s bashing of Gary Webb.
While Webb was held to the strictest standards of journalism, it was entirely all right for Kurtz — the supposed arbiter of journalistic standards — to make judgments based on ignorance. Kurtz faced no repercussions for disparaging an embattled journalist who was factually correct. (Kurtz’s sloppiness regarding Webb was similar to Kurtz’s cavalier approach to Collins’s brave announcement as the first player in a major U.S. team sport to declare that he is gay.)
Yet, with Kurtz’s imprimatur, the Big Three’s assault on Webb — combined with their derogatory tone — had a predictable effect on the executives of the Mercury-News. By early 1997, executive editor Jerry Ceppos, who had his own corporate career to worry about, was in retreat.
Webb was forced out of his job to the satisfaction of Kurtz and many in the mainstream media. Webb’s humiliation served as a vindication to their longstanding dismissive treatment of the Contra-cocaine story.
Even when CIA Inspector General Hitz determined that, indeed, the Contra movement had been permeated with cocaine traffickers and that the CIA had shielded them from law enforcement, the mainstream media’s focus remained the alleged shortcomings in Webb’s journalism. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Lost History.]
So, while Kurtz and other Contra-cocaine “debunkers” saw their careers soar, Webb couldn’t find decent-paying work in his profession. Finally, in December 2004, despondent and in debt, Webb took his own life. Even after his death, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and other major news outlets continued disparaging him. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Warning in Gary Webb’s Death.”]
Hooting at Democracy
As the 1990s ground to a close with the Washington news media obsessing over “important” issues like President Bill Clinton’s failed Whitewater real-estate deal and his sex life, Kurtz and his fellow-travelers were setting the sorry standards for modern U.S. journalism. Many were swooning over the manly man George W. Bush and happily hazing the wonky Al Gore.
Though Gore won the national popular vote in Election 2000 and would have prevailed in the swing state of Florida if all the legal ballots had been counted, five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court stopped that counting and installed George W. Bush in the White House – with little protest from the national news media.
That pro-Bush/anti-Gore attitude grew stronger after the 9/11 attacks when a group of news organizations completed an unofficial tally of the ignored Florida ballots, which showed that Gore would have carried that key state. Yet, instead of simply telling the American people that the wrong guy was in the White House, the major U.S. news outlets twisted their own findings to protect Bush’s fragile “legitimacy.”
Out front defending that journalistic malfeasance was Howard Kurtz. He rallied behind the decision of the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN and other heavy-hitters to focus on hypothetical partial recounts rather than what the Florida voters actually voted for, i.e., a Gore victory.
On Nov. 12, 2001, the Post’s headline was “Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush” and Kurtz backed that judgment up by dismissing anyone who actually looked at the statistical findings of the recount as a kook. Kurtz’s sidebar – headlined, “George W. Bush, Now More Than Ever” – ridiculed as “conspiracy theorists” those who thought Gore had won.
“The conspiracy theorists have been out in force, convinced that the media were covering up the Florida election results to protect President Bush,” Kurtz wrote. “That gets put to rest today, with the finding by eight news organizations that Bush would have beaten Gore under both of the recount plans being considered at the time.”
Kurtz also mocked those who believed that winning an election fairly, based on the will of the voters, was important in a democracy. “Now the question is: How many people still care about the election deadlock that last fall felt like the story of the century – and now faintly echoes like some distant Civil War battle?” he wrote.
After reading Kurtz’s dismissive tone, it was a bit jarring to examine the actual results of the statewide review of 175,010 disputed ballots. “Full Review Favors Gore,” the Washington Post admitted in a box buried on page 10, showing that under all standards applied to the ballots, Gore came out on top. The New York Times’ graphic revealed the same outcome.
However, based on the “journalism” promoted by Howard Kurtz, any reporter who actually read and reacted to the real findings would be risking his or her career. Thus, millions of Americans continued to believe that Bush was the legitimate winner in Florida when the facts showed otherwise. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Sandra Day O’Connor’s ‘Maybe’ Regret.”]
Demonizing Helen Thomas
Given Kurtz’s history as hall monitor for the conventional wisdom, it surely should come as no surprise that he would join in the demonization of longtime White House correspondent Helen Thomas, known for her courage in asking uncomfortable questions and for her critical views toward Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
When Thomas made an impolitic remark about Israelis leaving what had been Palestine, her mainstream media colleagues joined the loud calls for her career to be brought to an ignominious end, her apology notwithstanding.
Kurtz penned a harsh retrospective on Thomas’s sudden retirement from journalism, giving Thomas’s critics a free shot at denouncing her for an alleged lack of “objectivity” and her supposedly off-the-wall questions to politicians.
“She asked questions no hard-news reporter would ask, that carried an agenda and reflected her point of view and there were some reporters who felt that was inappropriate,” CBS correspondent Mark Knoller was quoted as saying. “Sometimes her questions were embarrassing to others.”
“She’s always said crazy stuff,” added National Review Online columnist Jonah Goldberg, whose “journalism” career was launched as a defender of his mother, Lucianne Goldberg, after she advised disgruntled federal employee Linda Tripp to tape her conversations with President Clinton’s girlfriend Monica Lewinsky and to save the semen-stained blue dress.
“I did my bit in the trenches of Clinton’s trousers,” Goldberg once wrote. So, in the funhouse-mirror world of today’s Washington news media, Goldberg parlayed his time in Clinton’s trousers into a slot as a frequent guest on high-profile TV news shows, such as ABC’s “Good Morning America,” “Nightline,” MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” CNN’s “Larry King Live,” and, of course, many Fox News programs.
As examples of Helen Thomas’s “crazy stuff,” Kurtz cited some of her questions as if the very words proved her unfitness to work as a national journalist. For instance, he wrote: “In 2002, Thomas asked [White House press secretary Ari] Fleischer: ‘Does the president think that the Palestinians have a right to resist 35 years of brutal military occupation and suppression?’”
Apparently, no further comment was needed for Washington Post readers to understand how outlandish such a question was. Kurtz continued: “Four years later, Thomas told Fleischer’s successor, Tony Snow, that the United States ‘could have stopped the bombardment of Lebanon’ by Israel, but instead had ‘gone for collective punishment against all of Lebanon and Palestine.’ Snow tartly thanked her for ‘the Hezbollah view.’”
Praise for Critics
Kurtz also praised some of Thomas’s colleagues who alerted the world to the dangers of Helen Thomas earlier. He wrote: “A handful of journalists questioned her role over the years. In a 2006 New Republic piece, Jonathan Chait accused Thomas of ‘unhinged rants,’ noting that she had asked such questions as: ‘Why are we killing people in Iraq? Men, women, and children are being killed there … It’s outrageous.’”
Again, Kurtz appeared to believe that the absurdity of Thomas’s statement was self-evident.
Yet, as President George W. Bush’s unprovoked invasion and bloody occupation of Iraq claimed the lives of thousands of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, perhaps the greater absurdity was that Helen Thomas was often alone in asking such impertinent questions.
Thomas also had the integrity to refuse to allow her name and reputation to be used by South Korean theocrat (and right-wing funder) Sun Myung Moon when he took over United Press International in 2000. Then the best-known journalist at UPI, she resigned as an act of principle.
Though Moon was a notorious propagandist who had founded the Washington Times in 1982 as a vehicle for supporting some American politicians (such as Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush) and for tearing down others (such as John Kerry, Bill Clinton and Al Gore), much of the “objective” Washington press corps tolerated and even promoted Moon’s curious newspaper.
In the mid-1980s, after Moon’s newspaper signed up for the Associated Press wire service, AP executives told AP staffers, including me, that we were no longer allowed to mention Moon’s connection to the newspaper when we cited the Washington Times’ reporting in AP copy. That policy change meant that readers of AP stories around the world wouldn’t be alerted to the propaganda element of Moon’s operation.
Other respected Washington news figures, such as C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb, actively promoted Moon’s newspaper by hoisting up its articles before viewers, many of whom had no idea that the Times’ owner was a religious cult leader with mysterious ties to foreign intelligence services and to international crime syndicates. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]
So, while Moon’s newspaper was influencing the U.S. political debate with propagandistic articles – and while Moon was spreading around money for political and journalism conferences – Helen Thomas was one of the few prominent figures in the Washington press corps to object. (After resigning from UPI, she took a job as a columnist for the Hearst newspapers.)
Nevertheless, at the end of her long and groundbreaking career as one of the first women to operate in the male-dominated Washington press corps, Helen Thomas was the one pilloried as crazy and unprofessional by the arbiter of all that is good in journalism, Howard Kurtz.
~
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Former BBC broadcaster Stuart Hall has admitted assaulting 13 girls as young as nine years old between 1967 and 1986.
The former It’s A Knockout presenter was branded as an “opportunistic predator” by prosecutors after admitting he had carried out a series of attacks on girls, from whom the youngest aged just nine.
The 83-year-old, however, had previously denied the allegations against him, saying the charges were “pernicious, callous” and “cruel”.
Hall entered the guilty pleas last month at Preston Crown Court but they can only be revealed now after reporting restrictions were lifted.
Nazir Afzal, the Chief Crown Prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in the North West said no explanations could be offered for Hall’s unlawful behavior.
Hall’s confession was another blow to the British state-run broadcaster BBC, which recently came under pressure over sexual abuse allegations involving former broadcaster Jimmy Savile.
The investigation into Savile scandal has been running since late October. Since that time, Scotland Yard has been contacted by more than 500 alleged victims.
Over at The Daily Beast‘s Cheat Sheet, which serves as a news aggregator, a post went up today with the eye-catching headline: “Iranian President Ahmadinejad Arrested.”
The blurb accompanying the post claims:
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was arrested Monday while on a visit to a book fair in Tehran, where he was held for seven hours and questioned by the Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence unit. According to a source within the guards’ unit, Ahmadinejad was intercepted while on his way to a meeting at the supreme leader’s office. His security team was stripped of communication devices and Ahmadinejad was questioned about documents that may be detrimental to the regime. He was warned, essentially, to keep his mouth shut about all matters that could harm the regime going into the upcoming presidential election.
How positively scandalous! The infamous Iranian bogeyman, along with his entourage, accosted, interrogated, threatened and silenced by the very security forces the hysterical Western media and political pundits would have you believe he himself commands and wields with an iron fist!
At the bottom of its short post, the Beast sources the information to The Guardian and links to the original article. But following the link, something doesn’t feel right. Or look right.
Because it isn’t right.
The link leads to a site called “The Guardian Express” at the URL guardianlv.com. ‘Hey, what’s the “lv” stand for?,’ one might ask if one cared about such things as accuracy. It stands for “Las Vegas,” because the website is actually a local community news forum in Nevada, not the prestigious British news outlet.
The article found on “The Guardian Express” site – posted by a forum member who goes by the moniker “randy77” – is a nearly completely plagiarized story stolen from the latest piece of nonsense published Tuesday by the pseudonymous neocon darling “Reza Kahlili,” a serial liar and propagandist beloved by the Bomb Iran crowd who wears a surgical mask in public for absolutely no reason. “Kahlili” claims he is a former CIA agent who infiltrated the highest echelons of the Iranian intelligence apparatus and apparently some people believe him. He may also be a San Francisco Giants fan, but that might actually be a clever ruse to throw the pursuing mullahs off his trail.
Yes, he does this.
“Kahlili” is a regime change enthusiast who wants Iran attacked by the United States and Israel yesterday. He consistently publishes scoops on the right-wing loony-toon website WorldNetDaily that contain no factual information, save that a country called Iran does actually exist.
A few years ago he insisted that there is “no doubt” the Iranian government is “going to commit the most horrendous suicide bombing in human history. They will attack Israel, European capitals and the Persian Gulf region at the same time, then they will hide in a bunker [until a religious prophecy is fulfilled]… and kill the rest of the nonbelievers.” He also said Iran had already enriched uranium to 90%, that is, weapons-grade, and that “they have missiles that they have not publicly shown, because that would verify their intention of carrying out nuclear warheads,” whatever that means.
He’s also warned of an “Iranian dominated worldwide terror network that now reaches the United States” and said that the Iranian government has planted sleeper cells in the U.S. that are ready to strike if Iran is attacked. Impending terrorist acts carried out in the United States by Iranian agents is a recurring theme in his creative writing.
Wondering about “Kahlili”‘s bona fides and impressive associates? “I thought I knew a lot about Iran until meeting with him,” admitted racist Islamophobe Peter King, who is also somehow a U.S. Congressman. He was a featured guest of the AIPAC-affiliated Washington Institute on Near East Policy in 2010. This insane interview with leading lunatic Pam Geller might also be useful.
In 2011, “Kahlili” claimed both that Iran was planning an EMP attack on the United States and wrote, “Not only does the Islamic Republic already have nuclear weapons from the old Soviet Union, but it has enough enriched uranium for more. What’s worse, it has a delivery system,” because, hey why not?
He likes suggesting that the Iranian government is both messianic and genocidal, that it’s planning to “annihilate the Jews” and wage an apocalyptic war to hasten the end times. Last fall he declared that “a three-person delegation of the Obama administration led by a woman engaged in secret negotiations with a representative of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,” and cut a sanctions-alleviating deal before the 2012 presidential election.
Earlier this year, “Kahlili” repeated the claim that Iran had “successfully… built a nuclear bomb with the help of Russia and North Korea and has enough weapons-grade uranium and plutonium for more.” Soon thereafter, he pretended that there had been a massive explosion at the Iranian enrichment facility at Fordo, even though it wasn’t true.
Just a couple months later, however, he claimed his super secret sources revealed that “Iranian scientists are working on nuclear warheads – and trying to perfect them – at an underground site unknown to the West,” adding that Iran had, as yet, only “succeeded in enriching uranium to 20 percent, which is 80 percent of the way to weapons grade.”
Perhaps the most ridiculous allegation “Kahlili” has made in recent memory was when, on April 22, he stated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps was responsible for the bombings at the Boston Marathon a week earlier and that the Tsarnaev brothers were devoted followers of Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei.
Needless to say, the claim that Ahmadinejad was arrested has not been corroborated by any other sources and should be taken with a grain of salt the size of Atlantis.
That The Daily Beast would promote such silliness, with false attribution that lends the tale the imprimatur of a real news story, no less, is a testament to both its own lack of fact-checking and willingness to believe whatever nonsensical stories pop up about Iran are floating around in cyberspace. A glimpse at the Beast‘s own “Xtra Insight” link on that same post, which brings the reader to an asinine article by shameless self-promoter, staunchZionist and self-described “public intellectual” Bernard-Henri Lévy about regime change in Iran only drives the point home.
With “insight” like that, it’s no wonder The Daily Beast has troubling seeing clearly.
As some of you know, my film EXILE, A MYTH UNEARTHED, which examines the myth of the Jewish EXILE and its political impact on both Israeli Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East, was going to be shown on the BBC Thursday April 25th. It was pulled out of the schedule only a few days earlier.
Since then I was flooded by dozens of emails of angry and concerned viewers asking what happened. To be honest I debated whether to tell the story of what I think had happened. I have worked with the BBC in the past on some programs that were deemed controversial and I never had any political censorship. On the contrary I was impressed by the integrity and fairness of the people I dealt with.
So based on my past experience, I was going to wait patiently until the BBC programming executives would solve the internal drama that apparently has begun to brew inside the BBC. “The film is gorgeous, courageous and fresh, “ I was told several times by the programming executives. I was promised that the cancellation was temporary: “Given the short timescale and your workload, we have decided to delay transmission until we’ve had the chance you’ve had the chance to go through it in detail”.
I naively believed and decided to wait quietly. But things have their own momentum and as I learned more, I realized that the story of “EXILE” in the BBC is far more complex.
Among the dozens of emails I received one caught my attention. It included the official email response from the BBC to the inquiry/complaint sent to irate viewers who contacted the BBC asking why the program was pulled out of the schedule. This email contradicted a private email sent to me by the programming executives. I was intrigued.
I discovered after quick research that while I was contacted by the BBC barely a week before the broadcast asking for my comments about the cut, the BBC have had the film for almost 6 months. So why was this sudden rush which supposedly was the excuse given to me as to why the film was pulled out? Why was I contacted so late in the game? And why was there a discrepancy between what was told to me and the “official” version . I started to dig a bit deeper and to put my findings in a blog, rather than answer the dozens of people who wrote to me privately.
This is not a personal issue. This is ultimately a sad saga of what I believe is a mixture of incompetence, political naiveté, conscious or subconscious political pressure and ultimately, I believe, a lack of courage of broadcasters when they are faced with the complexity of the Middle East issue and the intense emotions, fears and aggression it generates. Once you indeed depersonalize this incident, you gain a fascinating insight into how subtle and complex is the process by which our understanding of the Israeli Palestinian conflict is being shaped and what happens when one dares to raise questions about issues deemed by some as taboos. It is this insight that I think is worth sharing and detailing.
The story begins for me with the name. I discovered only 3 days before the broadcast that the BBC has been using a different name for the film: Jerusalem – An Archeological Mystery Story. It struck me as an odd choice that seems to camouflage the film’s real subject and repackages it as a neutral archeological mystery of sort- like the hundreds of hours one can see on cable and Satellite channels throughout the world.
“ Exile” of course is not about a mystery, neither it is limited to archeology or to Jerusalem. The name and the illusion that one can pretend that this film is just about archeology and its mysteries are at the core I believe of Thursday’s fiasco.
Digging deeper I also learned that this title was established back in November 2012 in the agreement between the National Film Board of Canada (one of the film’s co producers and its int’l distributor) and the BBC. I was approached by the distributor to see if I would agree for the BBC to cut down the program. I agreed to it on the condition that I would be consulted so the integrity of the longer version (104 min) would be preserved. I also said that if I was not to be consulted my name should be removed from the program and the cut down will be listed as an “adaptation from a film by Ilan Ziv”. From my access to some internal documents, it is obvious now that the BBC was not genuinely interested in my getting involved. As the documents suggest, they already announced that the cut down version would be an adaptation.
So back in November 2012, everything seemed to be on track to produce a cut down of the film without having to deal with the director, broadcast the film under a neutral title and hopefully avoid any serious political debate. A perfect solution! So what went wrong?
Fast forward to Saturday April 20th 2013 when I received an email from a friend in the UK who saw that “my” film Jerusalem; An Archeological Mystery Story was going to be broadcast on BBC 4. He even read a preview of it in the Guardian. The preview promised that the film “ will ruffle some feathers”. Two days earlier I did receive from the editor who cut the film a copy of the cut for me to comment on, but there was no mention of an impeding broadcast date!
On Monday, 3 days before the broadcast, I fired an email to the BBC programming executives complaining that it is unfair to expect me to spend time reviewing the cut and coming up with suggestions of a re cut, when I was given only a few days before a broadcast date that no one bothered to inform me about. I pleaded for more time. It was only when one of the programming executives called me, I realized that there were much bigger issues for her than my complaint about being pushed into an impossible schedule.
The program executive seemed genuinely shocked that a freelance employee hired by the BBC to take part in the re-versioning process called the film “propaganda”. When I asked if this unnamed person had specific examples to support such a sweeping charge, I was told that she claimed that , “Everything was propaganda”. And there was more.
An “unnamed” BBC insider who I was told “liked the film,” claimed that the film props up the myth of Exile “ which we all know did not happen, in order to support his political analysis”. I learned that the cut I was given was now irrelevant, since some internal review deemed one scène with the Palestinians to be “too emotive” and they were asked to cut it down. Realizing that a mini political storm was brewing around the film and attacks lodged against its integrity, I asked and was promised that I would be given at least a summary of the essential charges so I could answer them in length. I am obviously very familiar with some of them and could easily and in detail refute them. I told the programming executive that my reply would help them to defend the film in the Channel. After all, they professed to love the film and seemed genuinely interested to show it. I told them it was very easy for me to prepare a detailed rebuttal with citation of sources for every word of the narration, the overall analysis and for every scene. I told them that some of the academic participants in the program who saw the cut and are reputable scholars in their field did not find any factual errors or misrepresentations of facts or of the historical narrative. In other words, I argued that such a detailed and substantial defense would convince any objective reader and observer of the editorial integrity of the film. I repeated the request several times yet I never got a reply. Instead, I received an email telling me that they decided to pull it out of the schedule, citing the “ short timetable and my work load “( !) A few days later I saw the “official” version that went to the public:
“We originally acquired ‘Jerusalem: An Archaeological Mystery Story’ to supplement BBC Four’s season exploring the history of archaeology. However, we have decided that it doesn’t fit editorially and are no longer planning to show it as part of the season. Plans to broadcast the program are currently under review” So Exile, A myth unearthed has begun its own exile within the BBC.
I do believe it is ultimately a sad saga. A saga of well meaning programming executives who acquired the “courageous “ film they claim to love, believing that they can sneak it by with a “neutral title”. When they were “caught”, rather than face the criticism and be helped by the mountains of documents and data I was ready to send them, they panicked like deer in the headlights not knowing what to do and eventually raised their hands in resignation.
The truth of the matter is that the reaction outside and inside the BBC surprised me too. The film by now has been shown in a Jewish Festival in Toronto, playing in a screening room there for a week. It was shown on Canadian TV with a second broadcast planned for June. Another version of the film is scheduled to be shown in France and the original version in Switzerland ,with hopefully screenings in the US later in the year. The response in all the public screenings, some of which I attended, was overall extremely positive. Nowhere did the film generate such a reaction as that of the few individuals inside and outside the BBC.
The temporary success to “exile” the film might prove I believe to be a Pyrrhic victory.
EXILE does not deal with contemporary politics in the Middle East, rather, it proposes to examine their ideological and historical underpinnings. EXILE has not contributed to the political stalemate in the region nor to the continued bloodshed, occupation and violence. It is a film born out of the continued violence. Rather than propose a simplistic solution or an aspirational political program , it tries to suggest a possible way out by re examining the historical narratives we all grew up on, suggesting that in this tormented land there are historical models of co existence and tolerance that could replace the dominant conventional nationalist ones. Silencing this film is silencing a possibility of discussion, debate and re examination not of the current political stalemate but of the intellectual stalemate that contributes to it.
I hope that somewhere in the BBC someone will rise above the hysteria and the attempts at self censorship to take a cooler look at the film and realize how it has been profoundly mis-characterized , -viewing it through partisan glasses instead of looking at it for what it is: a film that can and has already in its public screenings generated dialogue and positive, thinking rather than perpetuating divisions and polarization.
So for me this is not the end of EXILE in the UK but only the beginning. I will show the film publicly throughout the UK and will challenge the BBC to either broadcast the film or relinquish its rights. I have offered to buy these rights so I could place the film elsewhere in the UK.
EXILE , A MYTH UNEARTHED has finally found a home on the BBC . The hour version of the film ( I supervised and authored the cut down) is going to be broadcast under a new title SEARCHING FOR EXILE – TRUTH OR MYTH? on BBC 4 November 3rd, at 9pm . to be followed by a debate with my participation at 10pm
There will be a press screening on Thursday October 31st at 18.30 hrs. I will attend the Q&A after the screening. From what I understand attendance is restricted to a list of invitees. Please get in touch with me if you want to attend and I see what I can do.
As you all know it has been a long journey which many of you followed. I am eternally grateful for your support!
I am happy that the film finally found a home in the United Kingdom.!
As you remember I promised to hold screenings of the long version of the film throughout Britain( schedule permitted). I will be in Manchester on Monday Nov.5 th. Please write me for details. Since this time I can not stay in the UK any longer I will try to come again if there is interest in showing and discussing the film in other cities.
Below is the billing for the press.
SEARCHING FOR EXILE – TRUTH OR MYTH?
This authored documentary by Ilan Ziv sets out to explore the historical and archaeological evidence for the Exile of the Jews after their defeat in Jerusalem at the hands of the Roman Empire, and its relevance to today.
Tracing the story of Exile from the contemporary commentator Josephus, to 1960s Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin, to the modern city of Rome and finally to the ruins of a Palestinian village, Ziv asks where the roots of this story lie and what evidence there is for it.
At the centre of the film is the ancient town of Sepphoris (on whose ruins stood the Palestinian village of Saffuriya until 1948) and the lessons its multi-layered history may have to offer.
A film by Ilan Ziv
Produced by Amit Breuer, Serge Gordey, Colette Louméde, Ilan Ziv
The Syrian opposition is made up of young men with little education, brainwashed into fighting President Assad, journalist Anhar Kocheva told RT. Kocheva spoke about her time as a hostage, describing a ragtag group of men devoid of tangible ideals.
Anhar Kochneva, a Ukrainian citizen and Palestinian national, spent 153 days as a hostage in the custody of Syrian opposition guerilla fighters. She paints an altogether different picture of the rebel fighters to the one in Western media – young men in their twenties conned into fighting for the opposition by the farfetched stories of sheiks.
RT: Can you describe these rebel fighters? What kind of people are they?
Anhar Kochneva: The ones that held me captive were Syrians, Sunnis. There are no foreigners in that particular group. Most of them are former neighbors or relatives from a southern Homs district – Baba Amr. Their apartments and houses were destroyed a year ago, because they were fighting against the army there and, as they put it, they made a tactical decision to withdraw. The withdrawal basically meant crossing the Homs-Tartus highway, moving from its northern to its southern side. They moved into the empty houses in the village and paid some rent to the owners – $50-100. Rent is getting higher, because the demand for housing is growing, since there are more and more refugees. And it is impossible to live in summer houses. In some houses, there are over 30 refugees. Electricity is scarce; there is a schedule for when it comes on. Those who have a generator are considered very lucky. My kidnappers didn’t have a generator.
RT: What kind of guerilla activities are they involved in? Are they constantly attacked by the Army?
AK: The army didn’t really do anything to them. There were occasional shootings. These are just small groups in rural areas. So the army doesn’t really target their residences. They attacked the government forces and their checkpoints every once in a while, kidnapped people.
RT: What is the relationship between the guerilla fighters and the locals?
AK: They try to co-exist peacefully with the people who surround them and give them shelter.
They are mad at the Christian community of El Quseir though. Some time ago there were reports about kidnappings of Christians [in September 2012, almost 300 Catholics, half of them women and children, were kidnapped, when they were picking apples in Rehle, on the border with Lebanon – RT]. But it was not mentioned anywhere that by doing that the rebels tried to bring back four of their friends, who were captured by the Christian community – so it was the Christians who upset the peaceful co-existence.
According to many accounts, this is what happened. Four rebels were kidnapped by the Christians. I was told that these four people were kidnapped when they were not doing anything against this Christian community. They were just going about their business.
In order to set their people free, opposition fighters took almost 100 Christians hostage. The guerilla fighters returned all the hostages alive, whereas their people came back in body bags, cut into pieces.
They were offended by that, saying that these people didn’t harm the Christians in any way.
All this happened during my first days in captivity – and they kept talking about this. I overheard some things. They are mad, because their people were brutally killed, but nobody in the West is saying anything about it. They were ordered not to kill Christians, otherwise the West would stop helping them. These cases have to be brought to light and investigated. Maybe because these four people were killed, a chance to achieve a truce was missed… Now the residents of this Christian suburb don’t go anywhere, they don’t go to Sunni villages to buy groceries.
‘They believe most insane stories’
RT: Who are these people, these Syrian guerilla fighters?
AK: Most of them are in their early twenties. Some have served in the army. Twenty-seven-year-olds are considered very mature. Most of them are single. Some didn’t even graduate from high school. Their parents told them, “You know the alphabet, so go work now.”
They don’t have any clear ideology. They don’t really think about things, don’t discuss anything. At least, they didn’t have any such talks with me, they said right away – it’s impossible to argue with them.
Their logic really suffers – and you can see that in everyday life. They believe the most insane stories, if they hear them from some religious teachers.
My guard’s name was Ahmad, 27 years old, finished four grades in school. He told me that he had heard in a sermon that in 1990, Soviet scientists drilled a tunnel to the center of the Earth, saw fire there and recorded the screams of sinners in hell. He believes in that story, because it supports his worldview.
I tried to argue that in 1990 this was the last thing on Russia’s mind, that there is no recording device that can work in such temperature, that spirits don’t have voices – I couldn’t convince him. Most of them have never been outside the country, and didn’t travel around Syria much either. But they remember the blessed times of low prices, somebody even managed to go to the seashore, which is not far from there. But they cannot draw connections between the current situation and their actions.
They talk about how they used to go to restaurants, to cabaret.
RT: Does religion play any role in their life? Do they pray?
AK: They try, but not always succeed. They might fall asleep or fail to wake up. Some other excuses: “I am cold, I am hungry.” I did not see them pray together, they prayed individually. They don’t quote the Koran, don’t say Bismillah or Insha’Allah all the time. These are simple people, who were thrown into some new circumstances, but it didn’t change who they are.
RT: We read all the time that mercenaries are paid “huge money”. What can you say about that?
AK: They don’t consider themselves mercenaries. They are guerilla fighters, volunteers. They made a conscious decision to be part of the unit, to follow this commander, whom they respect. They are not paid salaries, they only get an allowance.
My captors got $100 per month – they spent 40-50 per cent of that on cigarettes.
Fighters in other units get twice as much, or even more. But those who held me didn’t mind staying on the allowance, as long as Ammar was their leader.
RT: Who is this commander? What sets him apart?
AK: He turned 40 recently. Before the war, he used to be a house painter in Homs. He’s single. His father was a well-known Sufi sheik who could talk to snakes. My guards knew and respected him.
‘Simple provincial folk’
RT: And how do these things go together – their respect for a Sufi sheik and brainwashing the public that this unrest is the Salafist doing?
AK: They are neither radical Muslims nor Salafists, they are simple provincial folk that have been told by sheiks about freedom and democracy.Ammar has been in the guerilla force for over a year.
RT: What made him join?
AK: He saw what he thought to be a major injustice taking place. Both the opposition and the army kept firing, and innocent people kept dying in the crossfire. In his circle, the perception was that it was army’s and the regime’s fault.
I asked him once, “What would you do if this civil war never happened and instead Israel attacked Syria?” He replied, “I would join the army and fight for Syria.”
But there’s no going back for him now.
RT: Any war ends in a truce.
AK: He’s gone way too far. He is the enemy of the state. He is a leader and head of the military council of the Farouq Brigades in Homs area. He supervises attacks on checkpoints, they have partly killed and expelled all the Shia, and all the Alawites. He led the resistance to the army taking over Homs from Bab-Amr. I believe this is the man it would be worth running negotiations with – that’s of course if he chose to resort to a dialogue. He is not beyond compassion and understanding. He can let people free. During my time there, he let two Sunni fighters, professors with Homs University free.
He is a very simple man, he doesn’t require much, and strives to deliver justice. He gave over his room and bed to me and slept on the floor. People often send him gifts of nice clothes and he gives them away to his fighters. He has no material ambition to get rich.
RT: Did he mention what goals the guerilla forces pursue?
AK: No. They thought it wouldn’t take long and hoped to get support from abroad. He believes they have been decoyed and used, as they didn’t receive the help they had been promised and now it’s obvious they are not going to receive it at all.
He is not a bigot or radical – he is a civilized person with that Syrian conception that everybody has the right to have its own idea of how to follow their religion. I was forced to put on a headscarf only for the time of filming [a video about the terms of release – RT].
People respect him as he is reasonable and has no material ambition to get rich.
The man who kidnapped me behaves differently and people notice such things. For instance, when they [people from the 1st detachment – RT] attacked the village of al Haidaria, not only did they steal people’s belongings from the abandoned houses, but they knocked down the walls, pulled out electrical boxes, removed windows and doors, plug sockets and switchers in order to sell them all.
Those who kept me hostage disapproved of that.
Many told me that if I had gotten in hands to some other field commander, I would have had a far harder time.
RT: The rebels’ hatred is focused on Bashar Assad – can you say why?
AK: They hold him responsible for everything. They even say the carrot crop failure is his fault. It’s a trend to hate him. And they get brainwashed to believe that the majority of people think the same. They don’t want to know that the majority actually does not support them.
The brainwashing techniques are quite primitive. For example, their fatigues have been manufactured in Turkey, with each set numbered, and the numbers they used exceed 11 million. But that’s nonsense. Syria doesn’t have that many men. Its entire population is 23 million people, and children account for more than a half of this number. This is the way they’re trying to support the myth that the FSA has the majority on its side. And you know what happens in those small areas they control? Many are forced to keep their real attitude secret.
RT: What about Hafez Assad? Did their parents hate him, too?
AK: They don’t talk about him. I never heard anything. They don’t even need that kind of logical argument.
RT: Do they hate Russia?
AK: They plan to celebrate their victory by blasts in Chechnya and Moscow – these are their exact words. My guards happily assured me this will happen. It’s possible they just said it to dispirit me, and use other words with other people.
RT: You said that the commander of the detachment would have joined the army if Israel had attacked Syria. What do rank-and-file guerrillas think about Israel?
AK: According to some rumors, the Qataris and Saudis became regular visitors to Israel, and their visits were quite friendly. That’s why the command of the opposition ordered to be kind to Israel. As for the Palestinian people, there is another directive – they should treat them with disdain. They say that the Palestinians were selling their own land, and the Jews, on the contrary, are good people. I heard several people saying such things, and it sounds like an echo of some programs, conversations and opinions someone had instilled in them. I repeat that there is no mindset there.
Speaking of the Palestinians, Kurds, coastal population and the population of the regions – they believe that they are all traitors, because they haven’t taken the side of the revolution.
Turkey is not respected either – they don’t get anything essential from them, although some useful small items come from Turkey from time to time. For example, there were book series dedicated to the “Blessed Syrian Revolution” published in Turkey, and they read them. These books include quotes from the Koran and say that God welcomes the events in Syria.
RT: Is hatred towards Alawites religious in character?
AK: No, there’s nothing about religion, although some statements about incorrect believing did take place. But this is not the key point. They have some way stronger emotions. For example, I heard them complaining that the houses of Alawite scum were the only ones that were heated. The thing is they were offered big multi-dwelling units with heating, but they refused saying they wanted to live in their private homes.
RT: And what do they think of the Christians?
AK: They are regarded as wayward, but they don’t dare mess with the Christians fearing Europe would turn away from them. Moreover, we shouldn’t forget there are a lot of Christians in Syria, as well as plenty of different communities and sects. They all live side-by-side with the Muslims and regard them as neighbors, without paying extra attention to what they believe in.
RT: How do they regard the Americans?
AK: They criticize them, claiming the Americans have decoyed them. The guerrillas are told that the Americans might be spies. There was an American man who had pretended to be a journalist and he had been caught before me. According to the guerrillas, he was leaking some information about locations, so he was caught and accused of espionage. I heard he was bartered – there was a grand operation.
‘They are hostile towards opposition groups abroad’
RT: Do they realize how the opposition can represent them abroad? Does anybody monitor and evaluate their activities?
AK: They don’t like the opposition members settled in Europe, Istanbul and Moscow, and have promised to slaughter them if they come back to Syria. Regular fighters say they have been shedding blood and those people just want to get everything for free. So they are quite hostile towards the opposition that settled down abroad.
RT: What arms do guerillas use?
AK: Russian hand grenades, Kalashnikov guns – both Russian and Chinese. As they said themselves, they have got lots of Belgian weapons.
RT: Did you see if they had money?
AK: Two bundles of $8,000. And they were speaking of such sums like pocket change. They were counting money before my own eyes. What’s more, after I had already been released, I ran into a video in which Ammar was counting a huge bundle of money. It is clear they don’t keep this money to themselves – they buy weapons with it.
RT: Did you see anybody get wounded?
AK: Lots of wounded people. I saw about nine people bandaged and loads of murdered. There is a field hospital, but I’d rather call it a regular clinic. The chief doctor is a pharmacist, who – according to my experience – doesn’t know what is what even in terms of pharmacy. There was some wounded man delivered from Homs – he begged to be handed over to the army, as he knew he wouldn’t get proper medical treatment and would die.
RT: What do the rebels think of volunteers from abroad?
AK: They are at odds with Jabhat al-Nusra. There is some killing list with the names of al-Faruk Brigades’ leaders on it, and about five people have already been killed – they try to eliminate the lead figures. Moreover, there are ongoing serious wrangles among the rebels themselves. There were no foreigners in the areas I have been to. To say the least, they are not welcomed and regarded as competitors.
‘People are exhausted’
RT: How do people feel over there?
AK: People are exhausted. Most of them have lost everything. Those who had wanted to take part in the revolution already joined – so human resources inside the country ran out. Still the Syrian people are not used to living in such conditions. They don’t leave their homes after 7pm: any noise and you may be shot.
They eat pigeons and sparrows that they shoot, pluck and roast, which is clearly caused by hunger and distress, but there are some unmotivated actions taking place, too. They can shoot a dog or a little puppy kids have been playing with. I have never seen the soldiers of the regular army turning their guns on living beings.
RT: Which mass media is popular?
AK: They watch Al Jazeera, Orient TV – all in all about eight opposition channels. They use the internet as well. There is an information center where correspondents of Al Jazeera Mohammad Arabi and Hale dabu Saleh worked.
At the second annual Jerusalem Post Conference, held in New York City on Sunday April 28, a number of former and current Israeli officials offered new estimates about Iran’s nuclear progress, issued threats of war and pretended Israel is more powerful and militarily capable than it really is.
In other words, it was just another day of shameless and shameful Israeli propaganda; pathetic, jingoistic bluster meant to appeal to hawkish American donors, puff up Israel’s inflated sense of self, and attempt to boost its already non-existent credibility.
Former IDF intel chief Amos Yadlin said, “Even though Iran is on the way to crossing the line of Netanyahu, that doesn’t mean that they have the bomb,” which might be the most tediously self-evident comment made in recent memory, despite also relying on fact-free speculation. He also said that Israel could weather the consequences of a potential unilateral military assault on the Islamic Republic, but that, before that happens, “we must give more time for the other strategies that nobody takes credit for,” an apparent reference to Israeli-led covert murder operations and cyberwar.
Meanwhile, former IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi also told the mouth-breathing attendees that Israel can effectively attack Iran and sustain the inevitable blowback. “We cannot allow this regime to have the bomb,” he said, before insisting that a recent multi-billion dollar U.S. arms sale to Israel “sends a signal” to Iran about Israel’s military capabilities and intentions.
The best comments of the day, however, were made by Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz. Calling an Iran with an atomic arsenal “equal to 30 nuclear North Koreas,” Steinitz’s stand-up routine didn’t disappoint. Not only was a “nuclear Iran” an “existential threat” to Israel, he said, it would also pose a “terrible threat” to all of the Middle East, Europe and the United States. Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, Africa, Australia and Antarctica would apparently be spared the devastating scourge, however.
“Iran is problem number one of our generation,” Steinitz declared. He then launched into an embarrassingly repetitive rant about how Iran is the new Nazi Germany, an analogy so stupid and played out that even its most ardent champion Netanyahu hasn’t used it in a while. After praising Winston Churchill for his actions in the 1930s (which garnered a healthy round of applause from the crowd), Steinitz implicitly condemned other powers and political leaders for their past follies and failures, evoking the tired bromide equating diplomacy with appeasement.
“We shouldn’t repeat the same mistakes again,” he said, continuing:
This was Nazi Germany, a secular regime with a fanatical ideology. And here we are speaking about the Shiite Ayatollahs of Iran. Totally [religious] fanatical regime. There it was Europe, here it’s Iran. The Nazis spoke about the final solution for the Jewish people in Europe. They [Iranian leaders] are speaking about destroying the Jewish State in the Middle East. There are some differences. We have to learn from history. And so it never repeats itself exactly. And if there’s a lesson to learn from history, it’s not to repeat the same mistake again. And not to allow, come what may, the nuclearization of Iran.
He wasn’t finished.
Once at full capacity, the Iranian nuclear program, he claimed, will be able to produce 20 to 30 nuclear bombs each year and somehow decided that, “if Iran gets the first few bombs, in a decade or so they will have 100 nuclear bombs.”
This was “not an intelligence estimate,” he was quick to note, but rather was based on statements by the Islamic Republic itself, which makes literally no sense since Iran has never once stated any intention to build or acquire a single nuclear weapon.
For good measure, Steinitz also tossed around phrases like “global ambitions” and “a new era of Islamic hegemony,” because things like that – regardless of their sheer stupidity – play well with ignorant, racist audiences like the one assembled Sunday at the Times Square Marriott.
Dismissing sanctions as insufficient “to achieve our goal,” Steinitz demanded that “a very clear military threat” be made to Iran (ignoring, of course, that this is an undeniable violation of the UN Charter), “a credible threat that will make it crystal clear that they are paying something for nothing.”
“If there is a chance to resolve this problem without military action,” he said, it will only be because opponents of Tehran’s nuclear program “choose a big enough stick and wave it in their faces,” appealing to the Orientalist conception that Middle Eastern leaders only understand the language of force and will only kowtow to Western and Israeli demands when sufficiently fearful of potential violence.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who also spoke at the conference, tried to temper such alarmist rhetoric and dispel the notion that Iran poses an existential threat to Israel, one worthy of constant hysteria and attention.
“I think that we have exaggerated, for a long time, the potential threat of Iran possessing nuclear power,” he told the crowd.
Predictably, Olmert’s comments did not receive a positive reception; instead, he was heckled and booed.
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman doesn’t understand how on earth the Boston bombers could rationalize their act of violence–and believes that some aspects of Muslim culture must answer for it.
According to reports of the interrogation of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the brothers were motivated in part by the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And this has the Times columnist scratching his head about the problem with Muslims:
This is a popular meme among radical Muslim groups, and, to be sure, some Muslim youths were deeply angered by the U.S. interventions in the Middle East. The brothers Tsarnaev may have been among them.
But what in God’s name does that have to do with planting a bomb at the Boston Marathon and blowing up innocent people? It is amazing to me how we’ve come to accept this non sequitur and how easily we’ve allowed radical Muslim groups and their apologists to get away with it.
A simple question: If you were upset with U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, why didn’t you go out and build a school in Afghanistan to strengthen that community or get an advanced degree to strengthen yourself or become a math teacher in the Muslim world to help its people be less vulnerable to foreign powers? Dzhokhar claims the Tsarnaev brothers were so upset by something America did in a third country that they just had to go to Boylston Street and blow up people who had nothing to do with it (some of whom could have been Muslims), and too often we just nod our heads rather than asking: What kind of sick madness is this?
Friedman goes on to claim that we “must ask a question only Muslims can answer,” which is: “What is going on in your community that a critical number of your youth believes that every American military action in the Middle East is intolerable and justifies a violent response?”
It is worth asking questions about how different communities or societies react to violence. After the 9/11 attacks, the United States bombed and occupied Afghanistan, based on the argument that the government of that country had tolerated the presence of Al-Qaeda and thus must bear the retribution. As a result, many thousands of people who had nothing to do with terrorism were killed.
Or on to the invasion of Iraq, which was sold as part of a “Global War on Terror” following the 9/11 attacks as well, even though there was never a connection between Iraq and the terrorist attacks. So why did the United States invade Iraq? Tom Friedman explained it to Charlie Rose on May 30, 2003.
To Friedman, there was a “terrorist bubble” in that part of the world, and “we needed to go over there and take out a very big stick…and there was only one way to do it.” He added:
What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying: “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This.” That, Charlie, is what this war is about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia; it was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.
Syrian Ambassador to the United Nations Bashar al-Jaafari says Britain and France are trying to undermine Damascus’s official request from the United Nation to investigate chemical weapons use in Aleppo.
Al-Jaafari said in an interview with the Lebanese NBN TV channel that the western governments seek to repeat the Iraqi scenario in Syria through questioning its sovereignty by opening its borders to undisciplined inspections by the UN under the pretext of chemical weapons use.
Al-Jaffari said the western sides do not want an investigation to take place suggesting they know full well that the anti-government militants used chemical agents in the town of Khan al-Asal, near Aleppo, and elsewhere.
The Syrian official said the comparison with Iraq is pretty clear as the UN also sent an inspection team to the country to examine weapons of mass destruction claims, but Iraq was occupied despite the fact that the inspection team did not find any WMDs.
He also rejected claims by Britain and France that chemical weapons were used in Homs four months before the Khan al-Asal incident saying they would have reported it earlier if any such attack ever existed.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry has written to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon calling on the body to explain the details of a likely inspection in Khan al-Asal.
However, Britain and France have demanded the team to be also sent to other areas of the country to investigate the use of chemical weapons.
The request has been rejected by the Syrian government that says inspectors cannot have unlimited access to all regions of the country without coordination with Damascus.
The Syrian government has also called for an independent inspection of Khan al-Asal saying Damascus and the UN could discuss the details on other alleged chemical weapons uses separately, though the UN has so far refused to do so.
Russia’s allegations that the US funded clandestine biological laboratories near its borders – claims denied until recently by Washington – have remained a persistent flashpoint in the steadily deteriorating relationship between Russia and the West for nearly a decade.
The biolabs affair was revealed in a 2017 exposé by RT that questioned a shady US military tender seeking the genetic material of living Russians. Over the years, Moscow has raised allegations against Washington of conducting clandestine bio-research, including potential WMD development and illicit human testing, in a network of labs located across multiple nations, the bulk of which operated in Ukraine. The claims were met with a blanket denial in the West, which repeatedly dismissed them as “Russian propaganda.”
This abruptly changed the past week when US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said that her department had identified more than 120 US-funded biological laboratories in 30 countries, with over a third of them located in Ukraine. The agency is now working to “identify where these labs are, what pathogens they contain, and what ‘research’ is being conducted to end dangerous gain-of-function research that threatens the health and wellbeing of the American people and the world,” according to Gabbard.
RT looks back at the timeline of the biolabs saga and the US denial of its existence until now. … continue
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For an excellent example of how justice triumphs over police corruption in the world of entertainment, the 1997 movie L.A. Confidential has thematic elements in common with the Boston bombing. [CAUTION SPOILER ALERT]
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