SYRIA: US War Crime in Jabal Al Tharda, Deir Ezzor and the Implausible Denials
By Prof. Tim Anderson | 21st Century Wire | December 17, 2017
On 17 September 2016 a carefully planned US-led air raid on Jabal al Tharda (Mount Tharda), overlooking Deir Ezzor airport, slaughtered over 100 Syrian soldiers and delivered control of the mountain to DAESH / ISIS. After that surprise attack, the terrorist group held the mountain for almost a year, but did not manage to take the airport or the entire city. US-led forces admitted the attack but claimed it was all a ‘mistake’. However uncontested facts, eye witness accounts and critical circumstances show that was a lie. This article sets out the evidence of this crime, in context of Washington’s historical use of mercenaries for covert actions, linked to the doctrine of ‘plausible deniability’.
Syrian eyewitness accounts from Deir Ezzor deepen and confirm this simple fact: the US-led air raid on Syrian forces at Jabal al Tharda on 17 September 2016 was no ‘mistake’ but a well-planned and effective intervention on behalf of the terrorist group ISIS (DAESH in Arabic). After days of careful surveillance a devastating missile attack followed by machine gunning of the remaining Syrian soldiers helped ISIS take control of the strategic mountain, that same day.
Colonel Kanaan on the mountain. October 2017. (Photo: Tim Anderson)
Mercenary forces – like ISIS and the other jihadist groups in Iraq and Syria – were a staple of US intervention during the early decades of the cold war, deployed in more than 25 conflicts, such as those of the Congo, Angola and Nicaragua. Whatever their claimed aims and ideologies, they allowed for the ‘multiplication’ of US power and were associated with the doctrine of ‘plausible deniability’, where the ‘formal’ denial of the mastermind role in covert operations minimised damage to domestic public opinion and international relations (Voss 2016: 37-40).
That doctrine was discussed during the 1976 Church Committee hearings into CIA covert operations (especially assassinations and coups) and resurfaced during the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s (Hart 2005; Dorn 2010). The key idea behind the doctrine is to be able “to use violence without directly incriminating the [contracting out] regime” (Ron 2002). The use of terrorist proxy armies in Iraq and Syria, both overtly and covertly supported by US forces, is thoroughly consistent with this history.
By September 2016 a US-led coalition had been active in both Iraq and Syria for more than two years, supposedly to help Iraq fight ISIS, but without permission to enter Syria. The foreign powers tried to side-step that legal problem by claiming the invitation from Iraq allowed them to conduct cross border raids against ISIS (Payne 2017). By this time the Russian air force had been assisting Syria for almost a year against multiple terrorist groups, all of them, as senior US officials would admit (Biden in RT 2014 and Usher 2014; Dempsey in Rothman 2014), armed and financed by the US and its allies.
Syrian solider at the front line against ISIS, on the Euphrates. (Photo: Tim Anderson)
Contrary to the stated aims, there is little evidence the US-led group did anything to fight ISIS in Syria. Washington’s group sat back and watched ISIS twice take over Palmyra (in 2015 and 2016), then did nothing to help the Syrian Army take back Palmyra and Deir Ezzor. Most US activity focused on bombing Syrian infrastructure and helping a Kurdish-led separatist force (the SDF) replace ISIS in the city of Raqqa. On the other hand, the 17 September air raid positively helped ISIS in attempts to wrest the remaining parts of Deir Ezzor from the Syrian Army.
US, Australian, British and Danish forces quickly admitted their role in that attack, but claimed the slaughter of over 100 Syrian soldiers was a ‘mistake’. Now mistakes in war do happen. However they are usually associated with a single, unprepared incident. This attack was well-planned, sustained and achieved a key objective in the attempt to drive ‘the Syrian regime’ from Deir Ezzor. Assisting extremists create an ‘Islamic State’ in eastern Syria, US intelligence wrote back in August 2012, was “exactly” what Washington wanted so as “to weaken the regime in Damascus” (DIA 2012).
One year later, as Syrian forces re-took the whole of Deir Ezzor city from ISIS, I spoke with the commanding officer at Jabal al Tharda on that day, Colonel Nihad Kanaan, one of 35 survivors of the US-led attack. He confirmed US admissions that surveillance aircraft had overflown the mountain days before. He also said that the Syrian Army had held the mountain for many months and that their position was clearly marked with Syrian flags. One year later he still showed shock at recalling attack aircraft return to finish off his wounded comrades, with line-of-sight machine-gunning (Kanaan 2017).
That Washington could block most western media from serious study of this treacherous attack, simply by saying ‘sorry, mistake’, is testament to the near absence of critical media voices, at a time of war. The surprise attack was treacherous, not only to the Syrians whom the US had promised to not attack, but to the western populations who mostly believed what their governments said: that they were in Iraq and Syria ‘to fight ISIS’.
It was not that the denials over the crime at Jabal al Tharda were particularly ‘plausible’, just that they had been made. Formal denial was enough, it seems, to stop the western corporate and state media in its tracks. The practice of ‘plausible deniability’ was never so much intended to fool those familiar with the facts, as it was to set up a shield of formal denial which might be used to deflect or discredit ‘potentially hostile’ investigations (Voss 2016: 40; Bogan and Lynch 1989: 205). In past and present propaganda wars, less importance is given to independent evidence than to insistent repetition, denunciation and distraction.
This paper is a prosecuted case, not reportage where one side says this and the other side says that. I have announced my conclusion at the outset and intend to demonstrate that case with evidence. I also support the idea that readers are entitled to see all evidence, including the cover story of the criminals. However in this case the crime and its authors, I suggest, can be convincingly established by uncontested facts. Review of the Syrian perspective simply helps deepen our understanding of the conflict.
1. Uncontested facts
There are eight elements of this massacre where the facts are virtually uncontested:
1: First, the attack was on the forces of a strategic opponent, whom the US wished to overthrow, weaken or ‘isolate’;
2: Second, there was no semblance of provocation;
3: Third, this was a well-planned operation, with days of advance surveillance;
4: Fourth, the attack was sustained and effective, meeting conventional military objectives;
5: Fifth, there was both immediate and longer term benefit to ISIS;
6: Sixth, the US gave false locality information to the Russians before the attack, and their ‘hotline’ to Russia was defective during the attack;
7: Seventh, the US made false claims about being unable to identify Syrian troops;
8: Eighth, the US ‘investigation’ was hopelessly partisan, self-serving and forensically useless; there was no attempt to even contact the Syrian side.
Let’s look at each element in a little more depth
ONE: the attack was on a strategic opponent
Syrian forces were seen as adversaries. This was no ‘friendly fire accident’. The political leadership of the US-led operation had called for the dismissal or overthrow of the Syrian Government and had provided material support to armed opponents of the Government since mid-2011. The terrorist group ISIS had a campaign to create an Islamic State in the region and that objective was shared by Washington. US intelligence, in August 2012, had expressed satisfaction at extremist plans for a “salafist principality” (i.e. an Islamic State) in eastern Syria, “in order to isolate the Syrian regime” (DIA 2012).
The US had not admitted providing finance and arms to ISIS / DAESH, but several senior US officials acknowledged in 2014 that their ‘Arab allies’ had done so (Anderson 2016: Ch.12). After the attack US and Australian officials referred to their victims as forces aligned with the ‘Syrian regime’ (Johnston 2016; Payne 2017), reinforcing the fact that the assailants did not recognise Syrian soldiers as part of a legitimate national army.
TWO: no suggestion of provocation
There was no suggestion of any provocation, as had happened in previous ‘mistakes’; for example where a pilot had mistaken gunfire or fireworks for a hostile attack. This attack was premeditated.
THREE: a well-planned operation, with substantial surveillance
All sides agree this was a carefully planned operation, with surveillance days in advance. Colonel Nihad Kanaan, the Syrian Arab Army commanding officer on ‘Post Tharda 2’ (a military post on the second of three peaks of Tharda mountain range) that day, told this writer that US-coalition surveillance aircraft were seen “repeatedly circling” the area on 12 September, 5 days before the attack (Kanaan 2017). US reports confirm this. On the day of the attack the New York Times cited US Central Command saying that “coalition forces believed they were striking a DAESH fighting position that they had been tracking for a significant amount of time before the strike” (Barnard and Mazzetti 2016). A US military report, some weeks after the attack, said a “remotely piloted aircraft” (RPA) was sent to “investigate” the area the day before and two RPAs revisited the same area on the 17th, identifying two target areas with tanks and personnel (Coe 2016: 1).
General Aktham at the bridge to Raqqa, one of many destroyed by US planes. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)
Australian Defence Minister Marise Payne wrote that “target identification was based on intelligence from a number of sources”, and that the US-led group had “informed Russian officials prior to approving air strikes on the DAESH position” (Payne 2017). Australian Chief of Joint Operations Vice-Admiral David Johnston pointed out that his country’s contribution to the attack had included “an Australian E7 Wedgetail airborne early warning and control and 2 FA-18 hornet strike fighters” (Johnston 2016). The Wedgetail E-7 is based on a Boeing 737 and came into operation in 2015. It is an intelligence and control aircraft said to have “tonnes of electronic wizardry” (Military Shop 2014) and to be “the most advanced air battlespace management capabilities in the world” (RAAF 2017). All this speaks of a well-planned and technologically capable operation.
Further, surveillance of the area over two years meant the US group were well aware of the strategic troop placements. Kuwait based Journalist Elijah Magnier, who had followed the battles around Deir Ezzor, said that defence of the airport depended on ‘four interconnected Syrian army positions on the Thardah mountain range. Largely because of these elevated fire power positions the “daily attacks’ by ISIS on the airport had failed (Porter 2016: 6). Fabrice Balanche, a leading French expert on Syria, adds that the Syrian Army had held positions along the Tharda range “from March 2016 until the US air strikes”, when ISIS took control (in Porter 2016: 6).
FOUR: the attack was sustained and effective, meeting conventional military objectives
The attack was carried out for an extended period and destroyed the Syrian Arab Army post, killing more than 100 soldiers and destroying tanks and all heavy equipment (O’Neill 2016; Kanaan 2017). The Syrian commander says the attack “continued for 1.5 hours, from 5.30 to 7pm”, as night fell (Kanaan 2017). There is some disagreement over exact times. Syrian Army Command said the attack began at about 5pm while US CentCom said the attack began earlier but “was halted immediately when coalition officials were informed by Russian officials that it was possible the personnel and vehicles targeted were part of the Syrian military” (Barnard and Mazzetti 2016). However the US military confirms that this sunset attack was extended, lasting for just over an hour (Coe 2016: 1).
The Syrian command said at first that 62 soldiers had been killed and 100 injured (RT 2016). Within a short time the numbers killed had been raised to “at least 80” (Killalea 2016). In addition, three T-72 tanks, 3 infantry vehicles and anti-aircraft gun and 4 mortars were destroyed (MOA 2016). A surviving solider said he saw planes “finishing with machine guns our soldiers who tried to take refuge … I saw with my own eyes the death of about 100 soldiers” (SFP 2016).
Colonel Kanaan puts the final number of dead at 123, with 35 survivors (Kanaan 2017). The US side did not bother reporting numbers killed, with General Richard Coe at first mentioning “15 dead regime loyalists” (Watkinson 2016) then late simply saying “Syrian regime/aligned forces were struck” (Coe 2016: 2). There is no report of ISIS forces on the mountain being struck by the coalition aircraft that day; nor any day over the next year.
FIVE: the attack created immediate and longer term benefit to ISIS
The Syrian side made it clear that the massacre had allowed an almost simultaneous ISIS attack on and takeover of the hill. After planes had pounded the Army position on the mountain, ISIS quickly moved in and took full control of the mountain range (FNA 2016a). Within hours they had posted video of themselves standing on the bodies of the Syrian soldiers, killed by the air strikes (Charkatli 2016). The US side failed to comment on the immediate consequence of their attack, but they did not contradict the Syrian and Russian reports. Colonel Nihad Kanaan confirms that, as the US strikes were being carried out, ISIS attacked the Syrian Army post at Thardah 2. Survivors had to flee, as they did not have time to repel the DAESH attack (Kanaan 2017). Syrian Army defences meant that ISIS did not manage to take the airport, but Syrian forces did not retake the mountain until early September 2017, when the Syrian Army broke the siege and began to liberate the entire city (Brown 2017).
Victory! Father and son at Deir Ezzor markets. October 2017. (Photo: Tim Anderson)
SIX: false information to and delayed communications with Russia
The US military report admits that “incorrect information [was] passed to the Russians” about the locale of the attack. They said:
“the strikes would occur 9 kilometres south of DAZ ‘airfield’. However this information was incorrect, as the strikes were planned approximately 3 to 6 kilometres south of the airfield and 9 kilometres south of Dayr az Zawr city. This may have affected the Russian response to the notification and caused considerable confusion in the DT process” (Coe 2016: 3).
Brigadier General Richard Coe agreed with reporters that this misleading information prevented a Russian intervention: “had we told them accurately, they would have warned us”, he admitted (Porter 2016: 4). Providing false information to Russia was quite consistent with a plan to protect the attack from any unwanted interference.
After that, there was yet another ‘mistake’. The US military admits there was a half hour delay in responding to a Russian alarm (that the US was striking Syrian forces) on their specially constructed ‘hotline’. The US military tried to shift blame for this delay to the Russian caller:
“when the Russians initially called at 1425Z, they elected to wait to speak to their usual point of contact (POC) rather than pass the information immediately to the Battle Director. This led to a delay of 27 minutes, during which 15 of the 37 strikes were conducted” (Coe 2016: 3).
The less benign view of this event was that the ‘hotline’ was left unattended during the attack. Haddad (2017) reported that: “During the attack, a hotline between Russia and US forces was reportedly left unattended for 27 minutes” (Haddad 2017). Certainly Russia had to ring twice to pass on the urgent message (McLeary 2016) and, by that time, the attack was virtually complete.
SEVEN: the US made false claims about non-identification of Syrian forces
The US military apologia relies heavily on claims that, despite their several days of surveillance, they identified “irregular forces” on the mountain. US General Coe claims that “in many ways, the group looked and acted like the (Islamic State) forces we have been targeting for the last two years” (Dickstein 2016). Echoing this story, Australian Vice-Admiral David Johnston, Chief of Joint Operations said
“in many ways these forces looked and acted like DAESH fighters the coalition has been targeting for the last 2 years. They were not wearing recognisable military uniforms or displaying identifying flags or markings” (Johnston 2016).
Colonel Kanaan said they had flags flying. The US military confirms this, admitting that they received a report about sighting a “possible [Syrian] flag … 30 minutes prior to the strike”, but did nothing about it (Coe 2016: 2). Could ‘doing nothing’ have been just another ‘mistake’, in such a well-planned operation? It tends to corroborate the case for a deliberate strike, with some attempt at cover up, for “plausible deniability”.
EIGHT: the US ‘investigation’ was hopelessly partisan
A brief report issued in November exonerated US forces of any wrong doing. It did admit some critical facts, as noted above. But this was the US military investigating itself. US General Richard Coe said:
“We made an unintentional, regrettable error, based on several factors in the targeting process” (Watkinson 2016).
The ‘errors’ relied upon were a series of random or ‘human’ mistakes and misidentification of the Syrian troops, supposedly because they were dressed in an irregular way. No attempt was made to contact the Syrian side (Coe 2016; Dickstein 2016). By reference to principles of criminal law some admissions made in this report are important and would be admissible evidence in a criminal trial. But the conclusions of the US report are entirely ‘self-serving’ and ‘recent inventions’ after the event. For that reason they are forensically worthless.
Summing up, the US-led air attack was a pre-meditated, brutal and effective massacre of the armed forces of a declared opponent. It gave an immediate and longer term advantage to one of the terrorist groups the US and its allies (as Biden and Dempsey admitted) were covertly supporting.
Even before we consider the Syrian perspective, uncontested facts destroy the feeble claim that this well planned and treacherous crime was a ‘mistake’. The US military admits that it gave false information to its Russian counterparts, then admits that its ‘hotline’ did not function properly during the attack. Despite all their sophisticated technology and days of surveillance, they pretend they could not distinguish between entrenched Syrian troops and terrorist ISIS gangs. They admit they had a report of a Syrian flag, but claim they just neglected it.
Having carried out a devastating attack on Syrian forces that day, allegedly by ‘mistake’, they did not return even once over the following year to attack the ISIS encampment on the mountain. This is as flimsy a cover story as any criminal has ever presented in court. If the commanders of this appalling massacre ever faced criminal charges, no independent tribunal could fail to convict.
Syrian soldiers at the Eurphrates, October 2017. (Photo: Tim Anderson)
2. The cover story
The ‘defence’ case centres around three matters.
First, they say that the 2014 request for assistance against ISIS from the Government of Iraq gave authority to the US coalition to venture into Syria.
Second, they insist that there was no intent to kill Syrian soldiers.
Third, they argue that their slaughter of soldiers was due to poor intelligence and mistaken identification.
Other aggravating factors were random ‘errors’. Then, by way of general excuse, and alluding to the supposed bases of human error, there was reliance on the ‘complexity’ of the situation. US CentCom, in its apologia, said ‘Syria is a complex situation’ (RT 2016); a phrase echoed by Australian Prime Minister Turnbull who said “it is a very complex environment” (Killalea 2016). None of this is compelling but, as was mentioned at the outset, the history of ‘plausible deniability’ rests not so much on its actual plausibility as on formal denials; that is thought sufficient to distract, intimidate and raise doubts.
The US apologia was repeated by its collaborators. Australian involvement in Syria had already been criticised at home (Billingsley 2015). After the attack on Jabal al Tharda, this writer wrote to ask Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull about the massacre and the legal basis for Australian air force presence in Syria. Defence Minister Marise Payne responded on 4 May 2017, addressing the legal question in the following way. Australia’s presence in Syria, the Minister claimed, came from a request made by the Government of Iraq for international assistance against DAESH/ISIS:
“The legal basis for ADF operations against DAESH in Syria is the collective defence of Iraq … The Government of Syria has, by its failure to constrain attacks upon Iraqi territory originating from DAESH bases within Syria, demonstrated that it is unable to prevent DAESH attacks” (Payne 2017).
Indeed, two Iraqi ministers of foreign affairs had made requests to the UN Security Council in June 2014 (Zebari 2014) and again in September 2014 (al Ja’fari 2014). Those requests referred to “thousands of foreign terrorists of various nationalities” coming across the border from eastern Syria (Zebari 2014). Both requests also stressed the need to respect national sovereignty. So the US-led forces might have relied on this argument, had they helped Syria reclaim its eastern cities and regions from ISIS. However, as discussed above, they did not.
On the general legal authority question there is one relevant matter. The Australian side was not so confident about its own law, before the strike. Two weeks before the attack it was said that the chief of the Australian Defence Forces Mark Binskin had “fears that Australian Defence Force members could be prosecuted in Australian courts for military actions that are legal internationally [sic]” (Wroe 2016). It is not clear why they were considering this matter at that time, two years after they had committed forces to Iraq and Syria.
The general apologia for the massacre relied on a supposed lack of intent. “We had no intent to target Syrian forces,” said Air Force Brigadier General Richard Coe. He blames, in part, the soldiers’ form of clothing. “The group looked and acted like the (Islamic State) forces we have been targeting for the last two years” (Dickstein 2016). In addition, Coe claimed, the soldiers displayed “friendly” interactions with other groups in an Islamic State “area of influence.” He blamed the massacre on “human factors,” including miscommunications and an optimistic view of the intelligence (Dickstein 2016).
Taking the ‘mistake’ cover story at face value (i.e. assuming that the attack was aimed at ISIS, and defending Syrian forces), some western commentators quickly suggested the massacre of Syrian soldiers represented an alarming turn to US coalition air support for the ‘Syrian regime’. Time magazine said “the location of the strike in Deir al-Zour suggested the raid could have been a rare, even unprecedented attempt to assist regime forces battling ISIS”. Similarly, Faysal Itani, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council tweeted: “U.S. airstrikes on ISIS in such close proximity to regime positions are unusual. Arguably constitute close air support for regime” (Malsin 2016). Following the same logic, but in open disbelief, Russia’s UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin asked:
“Why would, all of a sudden, the United States chose to help the Syrian Armed forces, defending Deir Ezzor? After all they did nothing when ISIL was advancing on Palmyra … All of a sudden the United States decides to come to the assistance of Syrian armed forces defending Deir Ezzor?” (Hamza 2016).
Of course, they did not decide to do that, nor did they ‘assist’ Syrian forces. Nor did Russia believe the attack was a mistake. Damascus was also under no such illusions. President Bashar al Assad, invoking the wider antagonistic role of the US, said the surprise attack “was a premeditated attack by the American forces … the raid continued more than one hour, and they came many times” (Haddad 2017).
The US report of November 2016 became the core of explanations from US collaborators in the attack. Australian Vice-Admiral David Johnston gave more detail on Australian involvement in the Jabal al Tharda attack before he presented the official US version of events (Johnston 2016). The coalition air contingent, which included Australian aircraft, had “conducted multiple air strikes against what was believed to be DAESH fighters near Deir Ezzor”, he said. The Australian contingent had included “an Australian E7 Wedgetail airborne early warning and control and 2 FA-18 hornet strike fighters”, along with aircraft from the US, UK and Denmark. These planes carried out the attack “under the coordination and control of the US combined air operations centre” (Johnston 2016). The Australians were thus deeply involved in intelligence and coordination.
Johnston repeated the self-exonerating conclusions of the US report: “The air strikes were conducted in full compliance with the rules of engagement and the laws of armed conflict”. The investigation found that the decisions that identified the targets as DAESH fighters were supported by the information available at the time … [there was] no evidence of deliberate disregard of targeting procedures or rules of engagement” (Johnston 2016). He repeated the line that situation on the ground in Syria was “complex and dynamic. In many ways these forces looked and acted like DAESH fighters … They were not wearing recognisable military uniforms or displaying identifying flags or markings” (Johnston 2016).
A typical shallow Australian media review of the incident would admit that “something went badly wrong”; but then asserted, based more on loyalty than anything else: “no credible person suggest the RAAF pilots committed war crimes; everyone knows things go wrong in war” (Toohey 2016). Yet some independent, more detailed western commentaries expressed stark disbelief at the cover story. David MacIlwain complained about the failure of media scrutiny of Australia’s role in Iraq and Syria, asking why US coalition forces had not returned immediately to the mountain to correct their “mistake” (Macilwain 2016). Lawyer James O’Neill said, far from a mistake, “what happened at Deir Ezzor is entirely consistent with the long-standing American aim of regime change in Syria” (O’Neill 2016).
This “error” which killed over 100 soldiers who were defending Deir Ezzor from ISIS, was the only serious attack on what US coalition forces “believed to be DAESH fighters” near Deir Ezzor city. US-led forces would do nothing to help liberate Deir Ezzor. The ‘innocent massacre’ story just does not accord with known facts
3. The Syrian Perspective
For those not bound by wartime propaganda attempts to demonise or prohibit the ‘enemy’ media (a demand which results in reliance on US, British and French media), a Syrian perspective on the crime at Jabal al Tharda helps deepen our understanding. Sources in this section are Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi, Iranian and Russian. We can speak of a Syrian perspective from the wider view, concerning the particulars of the attack and of events after that attack.
In the wider view the Syrian side has seen the US as the mastermind of all terrorist groups in Syria, making use of regional allies in particular Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel and Turkey. The Syrian armed forces make little distinction between ISIS and the western jihadist groups, which collaborate from time to time and whose members pass from one to the other, depending mainly on pay rates (Lucente and Al Shimale 2015). When Aleppo was liberated ISIS flags were seen alongside those of the al Nusra led coalition (RT 2016). Both international terrorist groups fought together for many years with the other jihadist groups which western governments had tried to brand as ‘moderate rebels’ (e.g. Paraszczuk 2013; Mowaffaq 2015).
The Syrian Government has regularly expressed ‘strong condemnation’ of US attacks on civilians and infrastructure, calling the group a “rogue coalition” which had added “new bloody massacres” to its record of “war crimes and crimes against humanity” (RT 2017).
US forces mounted several direct attacks on Syrian forces, over 2015-2017. An online investigative group has compiled information of four such attacks, between mid-2015 and mid 2017: on Saeqa airbase in Deir Ezzor (December 2015); on Jabal al Tharda (September 2016); on Shayrat Airbase (April 2017) and an attack on an SU-22 aircraft near Tabqa (June 2017) (MMM 2017). In June 2017 the US group also attacked Syrian forces near the southern al Tanf border crossing (Islam Times 2017). All attacks had different pretexts.
US bombing in Deir Ezzor at the time of the Jabal al Tharda attack (in the name of anti-ISIS operations) was notable for its destruction of infrastructure, in particular the destruction of seven bridges across the Euphrates in September and October 2016 (Syria Direct 2016; SANA 2016). Syrian Army sources told Iranian media that the US aimed to extend its influence in the region and stop the Syrian Army’s advance, as also to cut supply routes between the provinces and separate Deir Ezzor’s countryside from the city’ (FNA 2016a). Syrian General Aktham told me that the US bombing of bridges was to isolate Deir Ezzor, when the city was under siege from ISIS (Aktham 2017).
Direct US support for ISIS had been reported many times in Iraq, over 2014-2015. This was mainly to do with arms drops and helicopter evacuation assistance, as Iraqi forces struggled to contain a strong ISIS offensive. Iraqi MP Nahlah al Hababi said in December 2014 that the US coalition was “not serious” about air strikes on ISIS; she added that “terrorists are still receiving aid from unidentified fighter jets in Iraq and Syria” (FNA 2015a).
In February 2015 there were multiple and more specific reports. The Salahuddin Security Commission said that “unknown planes threw arms … to the ISIL” in Tikrit city (FNA 2015c). Majif al Gharawi, an Iraqi MP on the country’s Security and Defence Commission said that the US was “not serious” in its anti-ISIS fight, and that it wanted to prolong the war to get its own military bases in Mosul and Anbar (FNA 2015b). Jome Divan, member of the Sadr bloc in the Iraqi parliament, said the US coalition was “only an excuse for protecting the ISIL and helping the terrorist group with equipment and weapons” (FNA 2015b). Khalef Tarmouz, head of the al Anbar Provincial Council, told Iranian media that his Council had discovered weapons that were made in the USA, Europe and Israel, in areas liberated from ISIS in the al Baghdadi region (FNA 2015b). Hakem al Zameli, head of the National Security and Defence Committee, reported that Iraqi forces had shot down two British planes carrying weapons for ISIS, and that US planes had dropped weapons and food for ISIS in Salahuddin, al Anbar and Diyala provinces (FNA 2015b).
In other words, within a few months of the US military re-entering Iraq in late 2014, on a ‘fight ISIS’ pretext, there were several reports of exactly the reverse, from senior Iraqi figures. Although these reports were in English, none of them reached the western media. Apparently those channels had no interest in listening to those actually affected by ISIS, or perhaps they just saw it as unthinkable that their own governments were lying to cover up their support for terrorism.
On the Jabal al Tharda massacre, the Syrian Government immediately said that the strike was no mistake but “a very serious and flagrant aggression” which had aided DAESH (Barnard and Mazzetti 2016). President Assad said the troops were deliberately targeted, pointing out that there had been an hour of bombing (Watkinson 2016). “It was a premeditated attack by the American forces, because ISIS was shrinking”, said the Syrian President (Haddad 2016). Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested the attack must have been deliberate:
“Our American colleagues told us that this airstrike was made in error. This ‘error’ cost the lives of 80 people and, also just ‘coincidence’, perhaps, ISIS took the offensive immediately afterwards … [But] how could they make an error if they were several days in preparation?” (Putin in RT 2016).
Russian spokesperson Maria Zakharova said the attack showed the world that “The White House is defending ISIS” (FNA 2016a). More detail was hinted at. President of the Syrian Parliament, Hadiya Khalaf Abbas, said that Syrian intelligence had intercepted an audio recording between the US and ISIS before the airstrike on Deir Ezzor (Christoforou 2016). Syrian UN Ambassador Bashar al Jaafari denounced the attack as a movement from proxy aggression to “personal aggression”, lamenting the US renunciation of the Russian-US agreement of 9 September to combat al Nusra and ISIS (Mazen 2016).
Col Kanaan at the attack site, at Jabal al Tharda. (Photo: Tim Anderson)
The detail of eye-witness evidence gives a fuller picture. In October 2017, as the Syrian Army was liberating Deir Ezzor city, Syrian film-maker Sinan Saed and I interviewed Colonel Nihad Kanaan at Jabal al Tharda, where the attack took place. He told us they had seen US coalition surveillance aircraft on 12 September. On the day of the attack:
“Five Coalition aircraft began attacking the site. The fifth aircraft had a synchronized [line of sight] machine gun … I had 2 T-72 tanks, 2 BMP tanks, a 57mm gun on its base, and a 60mm mortar on a base. The aircraft first began attacking the arsenal. They did this by circling the site at very close distance. Once they were done targeting the arsenal, they began targeting the soldiers with perfect precision” (Kanaan 2017).
Col Kanaan at the attack site, at Jabal al Tharda. (Photo: Tim Anderson)
He says the raid continued for 1.5 hours, using missiles, bombs and machine guns. As the attack took place, ISIS launched “a very heavy attack” from the north-west shoulder of the mountain, using:
“all types of weapons- 14.5 mm, mortars, BKC machine guns and every other weapon they had. This was happening at the same time. They [ISIS] were attacking the post while the aircraft were bombing from above” (Kanaan 2017).
ISIS was using the US-coalition air strikes as cover as they advanced on the army posts, showing “connection and coordination between the US Coalition and ISIS”. The post fell and the airport was then cut off from the Maqaber road. “Then 2 aircraft bombed the actual airport from the Tharda 2 post” (Kanaan 2017).
Col Kanaan at the attack site, at Jabal al Tharda. (Photo: Tim Anderson)
Colonel Kannan’s group was flying Syrian flags, as the US military would later admit:
“When the Coalition aircraft attacked the post, the post had 3 Syrian flags up – one at the entrance, one in the middle and one at the forefront, and the soldiers were wearing the official military uniforms of the Syrian Arab Army … It is not true what the media reported, that the attack was a mistake. It was very clear that their target was the Syrian army and the Syrian soldiers. The Syrian flags were there, and the Syrian army uniforms were showing, and the site was so obviously belonging to the Syrian army. At the same time, ISIS were attacking us under their cover; the Coalition aircraft didn’t even shoot one bullet at them” (Kanaan 2017).
Eyewitness to the attack, Dr al Abeid in surgery at Deir Ezzor hospital. October 2017. (Photo: Tim Anderson)
There were other eye witnesses. A wounded solider saw dozens of his comrades being finished off with aircraft machine gunning (SFP 2016). Two days before speaking with Colonel Kanaan I had met Doctor Abd al Najem al Abeid, surgeon and head of Deir Ezzor health. As he rushed to the surgery from a group meeting I asked him a question about which I was embarrassed:
‘have you seen any sign of the US coalition helping remove DAESH [ISIS] from Deir Ezzor?’
I asked it this way because I wanted the answer to an open question for a western audience. But as I asked I also apologised, because I knew that the question, to an educated Syrian, would be rather insulting. He immediately said that the US forces had only helped ISIS and that he had seen the attack on Jabal al Tharda. He watched in shock for more than half an hour, as the aircraft attacked the strategic mountain base he knew was guarding the city (Abeid 2017). After that he rushed off to surgery to dig ISIS drone shrapnel from the abdomen of a young boy.
Children in Deir Ezzor, after liberation by the Syrian Arab Army. October 2017. (Photo: Tim Anderson)
After the massacre, reports of US forces providing logistic and intel support to ISIS, aiding regroupings and evacuations came from all along the Euphrates in late 2017, as Syrian forces took back Deir Ezzor. In September Press TV reported that the US had evacuated 22 DAESH commanders from Deir Ezzor.
This writer was in the city for 4 days in late October, as it was being liberated. On 26 August a US air force helicopter was reported as taking two DAESH commanders “of European origin” with family members. On 28 August another 20 DAESH field commanders were also taken by US helicopters from areas close to the city (Press TV 2017a). Then in November Muhammad Awad Hussein told Russian media he had seen US helicopters evacuate more DAESH fighters, after an airstrike outside al Mayadin, a city south of Deir Ezzor (Press TV 2017b). The anti-Syrian Government and British-based ‘Syrian Observatory for Human Rights’ confirmed that US helicopters were transferring DAESH fighters out of eastern Syria. Four DAESH members, including three Egyptians, and a civilian were taken from a house in Beqres, a suburb of Deir Ezzor which had been used as an arms depot (UFilter 2017).
Lebanese and Iranian media corroborated these reports. US forces were backing up ISIS with intelligence during the Syrian Army troops’ operation to liberate the town of Albu Kamal in Southeastern Deir Ezzur, according to the Secretary-General of Iraq’s al-Nujaba Resistance Movement Sheikh Akram al-Ka’abi. The al-Mayadeen news network quoted Sheikh al-Ka’abi saying that the US forces tried hard to push the Syrian army’s operation in Albu Kamal towards failure, and that US forces were targeting pro-government resistance forces before the AbuKamal battle, in ultimately unsuccessful attempts to block their advances (FNA 2017).
In late 2017 the Russian Defence Ministry announced it had evidence that “the US-led coalition provides support for the terrorist group Islamic State”. The US military had twice rejected Russian proposals to bomb identified ISIS convoys retreating from al Bukamal, saying that they enjoyed the protection of international law. That shielding of the terrorist group and its heavy weapons allowed them to regroup and carry out new attacks (TNA 2017). At the same time the US backed deals by the Kurdish-led SDF militia to allow ISIS fighters and their families to leave Raqqa for other parts of the region (Paterson 2017).
A senior Syrian General in Deir Ezzor confirmed to me helicopter evacuations from three points on the east bank of the Euphrates: south Deir Ezzor, east al Mayadeen and al Muhassan. He also spoke of US satellite intelligence being passed to ISIS. From this catalogue of US coordination and collaboration I asked him: ‘you must feel that you are fighting a US command?’ “100%” he responded (General SR 2017).
4. Assessment
As the Syrian Army liberated eastern Syria, over 2016-2017, the US military tried to slow its advance by a series of covert and overt actions. The massacre of more than 100 soldiers at Jabal al Tharda was one of five direct US attacks on Syrian forces, since 2015. Mistakes do happen in war, but this was no isolated mistake. The US-led attack on this strategic anti-ISIS base, protecting Deir Ezzor city, was a pre-meditated slaughter of Syrian forces which allowed ISIS to advance its plan to take the city. As it happened, Syrian Army defences meant that they did not do that. A series of uncontested facts make it clear this was a well-planned and deliberate strike, in support of ISIS. The US military gave false information to its Russian counterparts about the attack, left their ‘hotline’ unattended and hid evidence that showed they knew Syrian forces held the mountain. Having destroyed Syrian forces on that base, they did not return to attack ISIS on the mountain. Their cover story was weak and, while it served to block investigation by the western media, does not hold up to any serious scrutiny.
No independent tribunal would fail to convict US coalition commanders of this bloody massacre.
US and Australian denials over their responsibility for the 17 September 2016 massacre at Jabal al Tharda are not credible, on any close examination. However they did serve their immediate purpose. Most of the western corporate and state media was stopped in its tracks. Yet the crime was “entirely consistent with the long standing American aim of regime change in Syria … [and] the Australian Government provided a willing chorus to the regime change demands of the Americans” (O’Neill 2016).
North American, British and Australian arms sales to the chief ISIS sponsors, the Saudis, could proceed without interruption or scrutiny (Begley 2017; Brull 2017). The cold war doctrine of ‘plausible deniability’, as on many previous occasions, helped deflect ‘potentially hostile’ investigations. Nevertheless, I urge closer examination of this crime, using conventional principles of criminal law, considering the uncontested evidence and ignoring the intimidation of war propaganda. Particularly adventurous western observers might even read the Syrian perspective, drawing on Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi, Iranian and Russian sources. That would help deepen their understandings of the conflict.
Watch video with Prof Tim Anderson in Deir Ezzor, made by Sinan Saed and Nisreen Al Khadour:
…
Bibliography
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Butterflies And Junk Science
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | December 16, 2017
Camille Parmesan
Climate scientist, Camille Parmesan, is one of the recipients of President Macron’s largesse in awarding $70 million to US scientists.
I wonder whether the French public realise how much junk science they will be paying for.
Parmesan is famous for her studies on butterflies, which she argues are being forced polewards, and even being extinguished, because of climate change.
However, Jim Steele, Director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University was not convinced by her work, and decided to take a closer look.
Here is his account, as published at WUWT in 2013:
Guest essay by Jim Steele, Director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University
The pioneers of chaos theory coined the term “butterfly effect” to suggest that a hurricane’s formation could be affected by such unpredictable influences as the flap of a distant butterfly’s wings that changed the winds’ direction weeks before. Ironically, it was Dr. Camille Parmesan’s 1996 seminal Edith’s checkerspot butterfly paper titled “Species and Climate Range”1 that became the model for future peer-reviewed papers that blamed climate change for driving species northward and upward and causing species extinctions. Featured on the Union of Concerned Scientists’ website, Parmesan echoed Dr. Jim Hansen’s catastrophic predictions that global warming was already forcing global ecological collapse, “The latest research shows clearly that we face the threat of mass extinctions in coming years,” she says.
“My hope is that we will be able to reduce emissions enough so that assisted colonization efforts can be successful, because at the higher ranges of scientists’ projections of warming trends, frankly, we’re sunk.” For promoting global warming theory, she subsequently earned an invitation to speak at the White House and became one of just four biologists to partake in third global climate assessment by the United Nations’ Nobel-Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). By 2009, Parmesan ranked as the second-most cited author of papers devoted expressly to global warming and climate change.2
Euphydryas editha in Olympic National Park Image: Wikipedia
Einstein said, “A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?” and the fanfare given Parmesan drove me hazy. Detailed studies by butterfly experts and conservationists dedicated to saving the butterfly from extinction had all blamed habitat destruction and sought habitat restoration. In contrast Parmesan blamed global warming and argued for reduced carbon emissions. She had blamed “global” warming even though most maximum temperatures in California had not risen significantly.3 More disconcerting the butterflies never migrated northward or upward, as claimed. Yet she now seeks funding to support an ecologist’s worst nightmare, assisted colonization. Parmesan wants to create her own Noah’s ark shuttling animals northwards and upwards so they can escape the supposed rising tide of warmth predicted by models, despite the fact that introducing species into new habitat brings disease and disrupts the established ecological balance.
To her credit Parmesan had diligently spent four years of extensive and laborious fieldwork revisiting locations where the butterfly had been observed earlier in the century. However after verifying that more populations had gone extinct in the southern extremes and at the lowest elevations of the butterfly’s range, Parmesan enthusiastically claimed her results were consistent with global warming theory. In 2010 she summarized her work: “it was a bloody obvious change. These butterflies were shifting their entire range over the past century northward and upward, which is the simplest possible link you could have with warming. I was expecting some incredibly subtle, sophisticated response to warming, if at all. What I got was 80% of the populations in Mexico and the Southern California populations were extinct, even though their habitats still looked perfectly fine.”2 But as I discovered later Parmesan always knew the butterflies had never migrated further north or to higher elevations.
Hansen’s global warming theory had predicted that the increasing maximum temperatures would push animals northward and upward, however Parmesan failed to mention that most of California’s maximum temperatures had never exceeded the highs of the 1940s as seen in Yosemite National Park. In fact her paper never analyzed local temperatures at all.
Parmesan relied on the political global warming bias. Parmesan was speaking globally, but butterflies always act locally. Ask any university ecology professor. They would not hesitate to harshly criticize an undergraduate term paper that used a “global average” to explain a local event; yet that was her only climate “evidence”.
Furthermore Parmesan failed to address the fact that higher temperatures enhanced the butterfly’s survival. Warm microclimates are critical for its survival. Caterpillars living in cooler microclimates develop more slowly, while those actively basking in the direct sunlight digest their food more quickly and grow more robustly. Cool rainy years often extirpated local populations.
Since the 1950s, Stanford University’s Paul Ehrlich and his colleagues had made detailed observations throughout the checkerspot’s habitat on the Jasper Ridge Preserve. They determined that the caterpillars must raise their body temperature an additional 18-21°F above ambient air temperatures. To raise their body temperature, caterpillars shuffled across the hillsides seeking life‑giving hotspots.4,5,6 Any global warming, natural or anthropogenic, should have been a benefactor, not an executioner.
Parmesan’s observations of extirpated populations were not new. Conservationists had sounded the extinction alarm years before her “global warming study”. Butterfly populations had diminished so quickly that the checkerspot’s apparent fate was compared to the rapid ruination of the extinct passenger pigeon. Scientists working to prevent extinction had always warned that the suburban sprawl from Los Angeles to San Diego had devoured the butterfly’s critical habitat and extirpated most populations.7,8 When the checkerspot’s southern California Quino subspecies was finally listed as endangered, conservation scientists wrote, “The basis for the listing was habitat loss, degradation, and fragmentation, recognizing additional negative effects from fire management practice. All factors are the results of intensive human economic development of ever diminishing resources.”60
The conservationists’ detailed studies also reported that most extinctions observed in southern California had already transpired by the 1970s, before any purported CO2 warming had significantly developed and furthermore populations were now recovering. In 2003 researchers wrote, “although we now know that the butterfly likely disappeared from Orange County thirty years ago, it was rediscovered in Riverside County in the early 1990s, and in San Diego County at several formerly occupied sites soon after.”8
Nor were extinctions limited to the southern end of the butterfly’s range. Rapid urban development entirely extirpated the Canadian subspecies (the Taylor checkerspot) from the coldest northern end of the butterfly’s range. But because there was a greater preponderance of extinctions in southern California, the “average statistical center” for the species migrated northward. There was never any evidence of any real migration due to warming. There was never an apocalyptic flight to cooler lands. Parmesan’s climate claim was solely a statistical fairy tale. Still Parmesan’s unscientific climate claim was published in one of the most prestigious scientific journals with one of the highest rejection rates, Nature.
How did Parmesan deal with the multitude of contradictory factors? Instead of a more detailed study, she simply argued, “the predicted effects of climate change will come, not from attempts to analyze all possible confounding variables in single studies such as this one, but from replication of this type of study.”1 In essence, by arguing that confounding factors were no longer important, she suggested we throw out the foundation of good scientific analyses. To demonstrate the negative impacts of climate change, all anyone needed to do was demonstrate that populations were dwindling in the south more than in the north, or dwindling more at lower elevations than at higher elevations. Implausibly, the prestigious journal Nature supported this “new climate science.”
Defying the Experts
The evidence against any CO2 connection was overwhelming, but I was no butterfly expert. Needing a reality check, I talked with my friend Dr. Paul Opler, one of North America’s top butterfly experts. If you have ever spent any time with Paul, you quickly realize that no one has a greater love for butterflies. If there was the smallest threat, he would be the first to speak out. In 1974, he was hired as the first invertebrate specialist for the United States Federal Endangered Species program. Virtually every butterfly species now listed as endangered was listed under his watch. To my great good fortune, he agreed to teach a course, “Butterflies of the Sierra Nevada” (which he still teaches), for my environmental education program each year. When he visited, I expressed my doubts about the legitimacy of Parmesan’s claims and my bewilderment at all the media hype, and I asked if he had seen any supporting evidence.
He carefully stated that from all the data he had perused, he had seen absolutely no evidence that any butterflies had ever moved northwards, nor had they been pushed to higher elevations. He added the checkerspot has now been discovered further south in Baja, Mexico. He too couldn’t understand the public fanfare and echoed my thoughts that “only her statistical averages moved, not the butterflies”. Due to his expertise, Opler had been invited by the Fish and Wildlife Service to comment on the proposed recovery plans for the subspecies in southern California and wrote:
The lengthy space given to Camille Parmesan’s study and the suggestion that newly found colonies are the result of global warming is highly speculative. Her study did not find new northern, or higher populations of the species. Her results were a statistical artifact of the purported loss of low-lying southern populations (emphasis added). Her surveys that showed the absence of butterflies in some population areas could have been carried out in relatively bad years when the species was present only as diapausing larval clusters. (Diapause is a period of dormancy similar to hibernation)
Opler was not the only expert to dissent. Other scientists, armed with detailed studies aimed at insuring the butterfly’s recovery and survival, also disagreed. “Our observation that human impacts were almost always involved in local extirpations in southern California (even for those areas that may seem to still have “suitable habitat”), the role of global warming as the proximate cause of extinction must be carefully evaluated. We suspect that warming is perhaps an exacerbating factor, but that increased extinction rates in southern California are primarily caused by more direct anthropogenic forces.”7
So I decided Parmesan’s landmark climate study needed to be replicated with a more critical eye on the contributing land use factors. However, when I looked for her methods section there was none. Her study had been published as a correspondence, and in Nature, a correspondence doesn’t require a methods section that allows for independent verification. That also explained how her paper survived a gauntlet of disagreement by leading experts. A correspondence is not typically peer reviewed. It is published simply based on the advocacy of Nature’s editors.
Withholding the Evidence
“We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.” -Dr. Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize in Physics
I emailed Dr. Parmesan and asked for the locations of the extinct populations. After months without reply, I called. Caught off guard, she initially refused to share any data, but after more discussion offered the possibility of collaboration. She said she needed to hang up but promised to send some data. More than three years later, I am still waiting. So much for Feynman’s good scientist “trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible.”
Her husband eventually responded to a follow-up email I sent a year later in which I expressed my frustration with their failure to allow independent verification. Her husband, Dr. Michael Singer, is a checkerspot expert who had shared in her research. Singer unintentionally confirmed Opler’s criticisms, “Her study did not find new northern, or higher populations of the species…There are no ‘new’ northern populations in Parmesan’s study. The study consisted entirely of re-examining populations known from past records and assessing which of them was currently extant or extinct. No ‘new’ populations were sought or found (emphasis added).” Trying to discourage my replication efforts Dr. Singer wrote, “But I do remember writing to you to say that E. editha has been increasing through the 2000s and that many of the populations that Camille and I recorded as extinct in the 1990s have been recolonized….So, any new census of Sierra Nevada populations would show a reduced correlation between elevation and population status, perhaps no longer a significant correlation.” Singer and Parmesan illustrate a glaring problem when limiting debate to peer-reviewed journals. Contradictory evidence is simply never published.
So why haven’t they published this good news of the butterfly’s recovery? Why did only her erroneous climate gloom and doom bring worldwide acclaim? Despite a wealth of evidence that contradicted global warming predictions, her faulty “Climate and Species Range” went viral and is now cited by over 580 articles. In contrast just 17 have cited the paper detailing conservationists’ efforts that actually saved the butterfly, “The Endangered Quino Checkerspot Butterfly”. Parmesan wrote subsequent papers blaming extreme weather and climate change for population extinctions and again withheld evidence of the species’ success. Likewise her half-truths were immediately embraced and published by our leading climate scientists and then cited by more than a thousand articles. That deception however requires a future essay.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/14/fabricating-climate-doom-part-1-parmesans-butterfly-effect/
This really is a stunning account of malpractice, but it is not the only example that Jim Steele found.
He also identified serious problems with another Parmesan paper in 2000:
How the American Meteorological Society Justified Publishing Half-Truths
Background: In 2000, the Bulletin of the Meteorological Society published “Impacts of Extreme Weather and Climate on Terrestrial Biota” by Camille Parmesan, Terry Root, and Michael Willig. The paper introduced to the peer-reviewed literature analyses by Parmesan that extreme weather events had caused an extinction event in California’s Sierra Nevada and advocated the extreme weather was the mechanism by which global warming was driving animals northward and upward as Parmesan claimed in her first controversial paper discussed here. According to Google Scholar, the BAMS paper has been cited by 324 consensus articles. Thomson Reuter’s Essential Science Indicators report that by December 2009, Parmesan went on to be ranked #2 among highly cited authors for papers devoted expressly to global warming and climate change.
Below is a map of Parmesan’s study site first published in Singer, M., and C. D. Thomas (1996) Evolutionary responses of a butterfly metapopulation to human and climate-caused environmental variation. American Naturalist, vol. 148, p. S9–S39. I have added call out boxes. Notice how surgically “climate changed” supposedly killed individuals on the annual plant Collinsia (Xs) in the logged clearling while just a few feet away the same species was originally reported to be thriving on its normal host plant in undisturbed habitat. The observations of those thriving populations were later “amputated” from Parmesan’s extinction story that she spun in “Impacts of Extreme Weather and Climate on Terrestrial Biota
Parmesan et al biased their conclusion by omitting observations that all other individuals in the surrounding natural habitat had survived better than had ever been observed during the same weather events. Only the butterflies that had recently colonized a novel plant species in a highly disturbed logged area had been extirpated. If all observations were honestly presented, it would have been both an example of nature’s resilience and an example of the effect of landscape changes on microclimates. By omitting half of the data, their paper manufactured an illusion of extreme climate catastrophe as discussed here. So I requested an official retraction. It was no more honest than Enron officials leaving half the data off their books.
http://landscapesandcycles.net/American_Meterological_Society_half-truth.html
Needless to say, the AMS refused to retract.
With a track record like this, it is little wonder Parmesan has to go abroad for funding.
The Polar-Bear-Gate Saga: How a picture is worth a thousand lies – Paul Nicklen and Michael Mann vs Susan Crockford
By Jim Steele | Watts Up With That? | December 16, 2017
What oddly seems to surprise so many people, reality can quickly disagree with the hypotheses and speculative models of scientists. The polar bear is a rich case in point. In 2008, the polar bear was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act as a result of the Center for Biological Diversity’s (CBD) petition. Due to hypotheses regards future effects of increasing CO2 on sea ice and polar bear health, CBD argued polar bears were endangered. However then Interior Secretary Kempthorne made it clear that “the ESA will not be used as a tool for trying to regulate the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for creating climate change.” But as seen in other memos and petitions, such as for the bearded seals, the CBD ultimately wants to use the ESA as a tool to regulate CO2.
So the CBD stepped up their demands and petitioned the Obama administration to list the bears as endangered. Climate scientists Ken Caldeira and Michael Mann co-authored a 2010 letter to Interior Secretary Salazar supporting CBD efforts. They warned “sea ice has been projected to disappear in the 2030s or before” and lost sea ice was both a future and “current threat to this important habitat of the polar bear.” The Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) led by researchers like Andrew Derocher, Steve Amstrup and Ian Stirling warned the world that “two thirds of the world’s bears will be lost by mid-century due to climate change”. The PBSG published a status table for all the polar bear sub-populations showing in the best studied populations, 8 were declining.
However, since 2010 those predictions have been unraveling. All the evidence now reveals polar bears are thriving and increasing, and the PBSG’s recent status tables show just that. Research by Chambellant and Stirling determined it was heavy springtime ice that was most detrimental to bears and their main prey, the ringed seal. The loss of Arctic summer sea ice was happening faster than CO2 driven models had predicted, suggesting flawed models. Research revealed that in response to the natural Arctic Oscillation, thick sea ice had been blown into the warmer Atlantic due to a directional shift in freezing winds. Further loss of Arctic sea ice has recently been shown to be caused by cycles of intruding waters from the Pacific and the Atlantic resulting in heat that gets stored in the subsurface of the Arctic Ocean, dynamics that have not been accurately incorporated into global climate models. Accordingly, the loss of sea ice has not accelerated. Instead the loss has slowed considerably.
Skeptics argued such evidence challenges prevailing hypotheses about the polar bears’ demise, and question the contention that greenhouse gases are the primary cause of sea ice fluctuations. Driven by the hubris of scientists like Michael Mann whose careers are totally invested in the “dire predictions” of rising CO2, the normal scientific process of challenging a hypothesis was framed as an “attack on science”.
Again in 2010, in the paper Climate Change and the Integrity of Science Peter Gleick wrote, “We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular. Accompanying his paper (below) was a photo-shopped picture of a polar bear stranded on a shrinking piece of ice. A deception that skeptics quickly pointed out.
So the following correction was placed in the paper’s online version.
“Due to an editorial error, the original image associated with this Letter was not a photograph, but a collage. The image was selected by the editors [of Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science], and it was a mistake to have used it. The original image has been replaced in the online HTML and PDF versions of the article with an unaltered photograph from National Geographic.”
That replacement picture (below) was from National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklin, who would become infamous for specializing in dead and skinny polar bear photos. If Gleick or his editors were pulling photos from an archive (National Geographic ?) of photographs, then the question arises if the fake collage was also the work of the same photographer. And if so, for what purpose were they creating such a dishonest photo? The timing of the article and fake photo also raised suspicions from skeptics as it coincided with the Center for Biological Diversity’s campaign to up-list the polar bear from threatened to endangered,
Despite having “carelessly” used a fake photo, Gleick was anointed the Chairman of the new task force on “scientific ethics and integrity” for the American Geophysical Union in 2011. Leading by example, in 2012 Gleick was outed in a flagrant attempt to anonymously smear the Heartland Institute’s climate skepticism by disseminating documents dishonestly obtained, including a damning but forged memo. Quickly identified by internet skeptics, Gleick finally confessed. Although the forged document was only being disseminated by Gleick, he denied any hand in forgery, and there was not enough evidence to convict him of forgery. In a KQED interview, Michael Mann, likely motivated by self-protection, downplayed Gleick’s underhanded actions as “poor judgement”. Mann then argued the release of the climate-gate emails, emails that had exposed Mann’s own underhanded methods, was a more dastardly deed. To this day, it is still unknown if the release of climate gate emails were the work of a whistle-blower or a hacker.
However, consistent with Mann’s efforts to promote polar bears as an icon of catastrophic global warming, Mann expressed no concern about Gleick’s fake polar bear picture. Indeed Mann was actively trying to pull on heart strings by mewing in the CBD release, “When I ventured up to Hudson Bay in mid-November and saw the undernourished polar bears with their cubs, sitting around at the shore of the Hudson Bay, waiting for the then month-overdue sea ice to arrive so they could begin hunting for food, it suddenly came home for me. For the first time in my life, I actually saw climate change unfolding before my eyes. It was a sobering moment, and one I’ll never forget.” In contrast to such storytelling, the unpublished research data from Stirling and Lunn, determined polar bear’s Body Condition Index for Hudson Bay bears had been improving since 1998 (in Landscapes and Cycles, p. 217). Improving body condition was also consistent with the increasing number of Hudson Bay bears estimated in subsequent surveys.
Susan Crockford runs the website polarbearscience.com, that aggregates the most up-to-date, peer-reviewed science and media releases by polar bear researchers. For example, Crockford reported the latest survey showing a healthy rebounding Western Hudson Bay population, months before the Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) researchers publicized the increase. The PBSG had incorrectly predicted a dramatic decline in Hudson Bay bears, so their tardiness to expose their own shortcomings is understandable. Crockford also reported the lack of consensus among polar bear researchers. While Enviornment Canada agreed with the latest survey that estimated a healthy 1,030 Western Hudson Bay bears, PBSG alarmist Andrew Derocher was actively pushing a much lower estimate of 800 bears to the media and suggesting the bears were doomed. This too is understandable as Derocher was invested in his earlier predictions that “by the middle of this century, two-thirds of the polar bears will be gone from their current populations”
Nonetheless despite multiple surveys suggesting polar bear abundance was and is increasing, others tried to deny the evidence and suggest bears were starving and still on the brink of extinction. In 2015, photos by Kerstin Langenberger and once again by Paul Nicklin were pumped on social media, suggesting bears were suffering from a climate catastrophe. Who were these photographers?
The dying bear above was put on Facebook by Kerstin Langenberger whom internet articles referred to as just a German photographer. But a little digging revealed she is a Greenpeace activist, which is consistent with her catastrophic narratives that accompanied her photo and contradicted our best science. She stated, “With the pack ice retreating further and further north every year, they tend to be stuck on land where there’s not much food,” and “many times I have seen horribly thin bears, and those were exclusively females – like this one here” and “Only once I have seen a bear getting a big fat ‘5,’ but several times I have seen dead bears and bears like this one: a mere ‘1’ on the scale, doomed to death.” [polar bears’ body condition is often rated from 1(dangerously thin) to 5 (fat)].
However contradicting Langenberger’s narrative, Norwegian Polar Institute researcher Kit Kovacs stated there’s reason to question claims that the number of animals experiencing such hardships is increasing. Our monitoring work indicates that (on-average) bears in the Svalbard population have NOT declined in condition over the last two decades – based on male body masses and fat levels”. Similarly, in the South Beaufort Sea population, female body condition had improved despite reduced summer ice.
Also in 2015, Nicklin posted his photo of a dead bear that went viral. Journalist Andrew Freedman promoted the picture in Mashable writing, “Global warming may have led to the death of this polar bear.” Presenting a thin veneer of objectivity, he quotes polar bear researcher Ian Stirling who suggested that Nicklen’s photo shows a bear that most likely, but not certainly, died as a result of starvation related to sea ice melt. But Stirling’s remarks must be taken with a grain of salt as there is absolutely no evidence to support why the bear died. Furthermore, Stirling has appeared slightly schizophrenic lately as has been detailed. For example despite his research showing cycles of heavy spring ice had been most detrimental to seals and bears, Stirling and Derocher’s review of polar bear “science” used the very same research to falsely imply that less summer ice was the problem.
In contrast to those 2015 photos, Crockford’s website was one of the few places where scientific reports of a healthy bear population could be found. Contradicting Langenberger and Nicklin’s story-telling of dead bears strewn across Svalbard due to climate change, Crockford posted links to actual researchers from the Norwegian Polar Institute who reported fat bears in Svalbard.
Researchers were reporting:
“The polar bears on Svalbard is round and full, thanks to a good [ice year] and good hunting opportunities.” And “… Polar bears were fat, many looked like pigs”, says polar researcher at the Norwegian Polar Institute, Jon Aars to the High North News. Furthermore the Svalbard bears are part of the Barent Sea population and in 2017 Crockford relayed the most recent survey data showing Barent Sea Bears have been increasing. But such facts don’t have the emotional appeal as Nicklin’s fanciful pictorial story telling.
The Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) had created a status table in 2009 to illustrate the trends of each polar bear population. Above is their 2010 version. The trends are boldly shown in red for declining and green for stable or increasing populations. Eight populations were believed to be declining of which 6 were considered very likely to decline further. Only 3 populations were considered stable and only 1 was increasing. These declining PBSG estimates also went viral, and websites such as the one run by psychologist John Cook, who is now part of the well-funded Center for Climate Change Communication, posted an article concluding, “Current analysis of subpopulations where data is sufficient clearly shows that those subpopulations are mainly in decline” and thus support the ESA listing of polar bears as threatened. In contrast in Landscapes and Cycles I documented how bear populations since 2010 were definitely increasing based on latest research. That analysis has been confirmed while earlier PBSG hype of declining populations and speculation of coming extirpations have not survived the test of time.
Fortunately Susan Crockford’s Polar Bear Science blog has continuously discussed population trends as reported by bear experts plus PBSG’s status updates. While the PBSG removes their old tables, Crockford’s website serves as an archive that allows the public to readily witness how the bears have been increasing. For example the 2014 table (below) revealed the good news that only 3 of the past 8 populations were still declining, one was still increasing, and the stable populatons had doubled to 6.
Oddly in 2017 the PBSG eliminated the trends from their population table. The most likely reason for this omission would be that none of the bear populations are currently declining. Every population would be green or data deficient. Despite rising CO2 and reduced summer sea ice, polar bears are doing quite well and that contradicted the their predictions.
Of the 3 previously declining populations listed in their 2014 status report, the Baffin Bay population has now increased from 1,546 in 2004 to 2,826 in the most recent survey. The Kane Basin bears, that suffer from heavy ice, were estimated at 167 in 1997 but rose to 357 in 2014. The South Beaufort Sea population estimation remained unchanged but this population has been heavily criticized for poor analyses of mark and recatpure data.
In the face of rapid increases in the Baffin Bay bear population, a social media splash of Nicklin’s starving bear on Baffin Island appears to be another orchestrated attempt to resuscitate the failing claim that climate change is killing bears. National Geographic who sponsored Nicklin reports by “telling the story of one polar bear, Nicklen hopes to convey a larger message about how a warming climate has deadly consequences.” The NY Times pushed the video with similar headlines: Video of Starving Polar Bear ‘Rips Your Heart Out of Your Chest’. The Washington Post hyped the bear as evidence of an environmental disaster with the headlines, ‘We stood there crying’: Emaciated polar bear seen in ‘gut-wrenching’ video and photos. If you searched the internet for an objective scientific examination, oddly no matter how many variations of “starving polar bears” are queried Google’s first link brings up the WWF’s plea for money to save the bears, and perhaps a violation of net neutrality.
Snopes who advertises itself as a fact-checker of truth, rated Nicklin’s starving bear video as “TRUE”. But Snopes’ bias is revealed by its discussion on the photo’s relevance, which pushes catastrophic climate change speculation. Snopes quotes polar bear researcher Steve Amstrup, who has flip flopped on several bear issues over his career and whose “expertise model” has been severely criticized by colleagues in released emails. Amstrup promotes the starving bear photo on his website, again with the obligatory thin veneer of objectivity stating, “we cannot say, from the footage captured here, that this bear’s malnutrition was caused by global warming and its associated sea ice loss”. He then launches his speculative catastrophic message, “The problem is that an ever-warmer future means polar bears will have less and less access to their seal prey, so the rate at which bears die from malnutrition/starvation will increase. So, regardless of the proximate cause of this bear’s condition, this heart-wrenching footage provides us with a warning about the future.” Yet not a word about the survey of Baffin Bay bears robustly increasing from 1,546 in 2004 to 2,826 today.
Amstrup and Mann are facing an embarrassing professional dilemma. With all the polar bear populations increasing or stable, their predictions that two-thirds of the polar bears will be gone by the middle of this century appears destined for utter failure. They had to do something. Otherwise who would trust a doctor whose past diagnoses were absolutely wrong. So, Harvey, Stirling, Amstrup, Mann and a professor of psychobabble Stephan Lewandowsky, banded together as coauthors of the paper Internet Blogs, Polar Bears, and Climate-Change Denial by Proxy that fortuitously gets publicized alongside Nicklin’s starving bear hype.
Their paper acknowledges observations that polar bears have yet to be harmed writing, “Although the effects of warming on some polar-bear subpopulations are not yet documented and other subpopulations are apparently still faring well.” But they then confuse speculation with proven facts by suggesting “the fundamental relationship between polar-bear welfare and sea-ice availability is well established.” Clearly the growing bear populations present an undeniable challenge to any belief in the “requirement” of summer ice.
Their paper argued, “a growing body of scientific research reports the wide array of negative effects of AGW on biodiversity” by citing Parmesan whose bogus claims about the negative effects of climate change on wildlife are well documented. Harvey, Stirling, Amstrup and Mann confuse speculative hypotheses with “fundamental relationship”. Published observations have shown heavy springtime ice is more harmful for seals and bears. Observations by Arrigo determined that reduced ice, whether natural or anthropogenic, has increased phytoplankton productivity and bolstered the Arctic food web, while fishery researchers find that less ice and warmer temperatures increase Arctic cod abundance that is required to sustain the seals that sustain the bears.
Because skeptic websites like Crockford’s polarbearscience.com, Anthony Watts’ WUWT, and many others are the best source for alternative explanations that challenge catastrophic hypotheses, they are denigrated by these supposed objective scientists. As mounting evidence continues to turn against their prior polar bear predictions Harvey, Stirling, Amstrup, Mann and Lewandowsky’s were running low on scientific ammunition. So now they chose to publish a paper, solely aimed at shooting the messengers. They offered no scientific facts about polar bears that contradicted anything Crockford had published. Their arguments were based solely on the fallacy of authority, authorities whose predictions are failing. Their paper is nothing more than a smear campaign hoping to suppress the upwelling call for more debate. Such tactics, tactics that try to obscure any evidence that challenges a failing hypothesis, are the real attacks on the scientific process. That is why Mann has been labeled by some as a disgrace to the profession. And whether or not Nicklin’s latest wretched polar bear photo is part of an orchestrated attempt to resuscitate their failed predictions, the media hype reveals that such photos, taken out of context, are worth a thousand lies.
Jim Steele is Director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University and author of Landscapes & Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism
Is TIME’s Afghan “cover girl” really a victim of mutilation by the Taleban?
Zero Anthropology | August 8, 2010
TIME : What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan (story)
BOING BOING : What Still Happened Despite 10 Years of Occupying Afghanistan (story)
ZERO ANTHRO : What Happens When We Don’t Fix Problems at Home (story)
The August 9th TIME magazine cover story is about a young Afghan woman whose nose and ears have been allegedly “mutilated” by the Taleban. The story has generated widespread self-serving moral indignation and self-righteous clamor in the U.S. propaganda machine supporting the occupation of Afghanistan run by the Israeli-American weapon-making industry. The American culture cleansing project in Afghanistan must be in need of a booster shot from the radical feminist forces that so fervently collaborated with the American war machine in initiating this racist imperial enterprise in 2001. Perhaps the flaunting of this fictitious story is a desperate attempt by the Obama war regime to offset the steep decline of support for this murderous program against unarmed and helpless pre-industrial Afghanistan. Let us recall the production of the picture of the frightened green-eyed Afghan girl on the cover of the National Geographic magazine to justify the United States sponsorship of local anti-government terrorist gangs who currently host the American occupation of Afghanistan.
TIME’s story does not provide its readers with any specific or credible factual text and context about what has really caused the deformity in this young woman’s face. Like much fiction that has been produced in the shadow of the American war machine in Afghanistan, this “story” appears to be a string of hearings and imaginings about women’s life in Afghanistan put together by Aryn Baker and Jodi Bieber, two young American journalists who probably first encountered Afghanistan in the pages of “the kite runner”. Having the readers see the reporters’ pictures (p. 4) in a “Kabul kite shop” speaks to the compelling impact of the untruths about life in Kabul in that “bestseller” book. What is the relationship of kites to a story about a mutilated nose? TIME’s story by Baker and Bieber has no truth value. Let us have a closer look at some of the cultural content and ethnographic claims in this fabricated telltale.
The narrative in which the Taleban single out this young woman for ears and nose mutilation at the instigation of her husband cannot be credible when exposed to the spatial, temporal, and cultural framework provided by the reporters. First, Urozgan province is located in central Afghanistan not “southern” Afghanistan. And if the alleged mutilation took place in central or northern Urozgan, TIME’s tale becomes even less credible for these parts of Urozgan are home to non-Paxtuns, especially Hazaras. What is the victim’s ethnic background? Even if the agency of this “mutilation” were the Taleban, why would they devote this amount of precious human resources in a hostile area to the personal disenchantment of a single Taleb foot soldier with his runaway wife, Aisha? This does not make tactical or strategic sense.
The Taleban dragged Aisha “to a mountain clearing near her village” where “[s]hivering in the cold air and blinded by the flashlights trained on her by her husband’s family, she faced her spouse and accuser… and men moved to deliver her punishment. Aisha’s brother-in-law held her down while her husband pulled out a knife. First he sliced off her ears. Then he started on her nose. Aisha passed out from her pain but awoke soon after, choking on her own blood. The men had left her on the mountaintop to die” (pp. 20-22). If the men wanted Aisha to die, why did they not kill her on the spot, on the mountain? Why give her a chance to live? Why risk her potential recovery and/or rescue?
To receive her punishment, why would Aisha have to be dragged to the mountain clearing (or is it a “mountainside”)? Where is this mountain clearing or side located in Urozgan? However, it must be at a distance from the village. And if TIME’s narrative is valid, the mutilation is a public affair with the husband, his family, and Taleban officials present. Thus, there are witnesses to the mutilation of Aisha’s nose and ears. These witnesses, especially members of her husband’s family, can be located. Did Aisha “pass out” from “pain” or loss of blood? How does a victim whose ears and nose have been mutilated and is choking on her own blood, and left alone “on the mountainside to die” survive such virtually fatal injuries? The human face is heavily irrigated with blood. I am not a medical doctor, but based on common sense, it would not take more than a few minutes of suffering heavy blood loss from open veins around the nose and ears to become fatal? How does a rural 19 year girl in such perilous medical condition, bleeding from open veins around her nose and ears, manage to move from a mountainside in remote Urozgan to a “shelter” in downtown Kabul hundreds of miles away? “A few months after Aisha arrived at the shelter, her father tried to bring her home with promises that he would find her a new husband. Aisha refused to leave. In rural areas, a family that finds itself shamed by a daughter sometimes sells her into slavery, or worse, subjects her to a so-called honor killing—murder under the guise of saving the family’s name” (p. 26). Now, what are the prospects (or practical feasibility) for marriage of a woman who has her ears and nose mutilated for having dishonored her own family, husband, and in-laws in patriarchal Afghanistan or for that matter in patricentric United States? What would be the market value of Aisha’s labor? What kind of labor could a severely mutilated woman like this produce as a slave? Only total ignorance of the Afghan cultural plane and complete disregard for the intelligence of the audience by the American popular media would allow such fabricated prattle to see the light of public print.
Aisha’s disposition could be congenital. It could be caused by a bacterial or viral infection such as cancer, a malady not rare in Afghanistan among both men and women. Or it could be related to an injury caused by firearms or explosives. Harelips and other deformities in the mandible, although rare, occur in the population of Afghanistan. Incidents of human body deformities in Afghanistan have steadily increased with the expanding military interference of the United States going back to the 1980s. These incidents have soared since 2001 with the American occupation and experimentation with weapon systems designed for “population centered wars” in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The non-Paxtun Northern Alliance warlords and their inner circles are the only Afghans that pray and beg for the American military presence in Afghanistan. It was these anti-Paxtun American trained and subsidized terrorist gangs who scouted and pimped for the American occupation of Afghanistan. And it is the Northern Alliance that opposes a political solution in Afghanistan because any such solution would remove them from power and expose and punish their criminal deeds. Amrullah Saleh, a known psychopath and a leading member of this criminal gang who headed Afghanistan’s intelligence services, recently expatiated: “I have killed many of them (Taleban) with pride”, killing “them is part of my blood” (Lara Logan interview on “60 Mintes”, August 1, 2010). The informants for TIME’s reporters of this story are the female dependents of the Northern Alliance criminal clique one of whom is credited with this rabid hateful lie “I go running in the stadium where the Taliban used to play football with women’s heads” (p. 24). This woman is pictured standing in Kabul stadium with three Kabuli teenagers in the background clearly running-in-place! There is not a shred of evidence for a football game played with human heads anywhere at any time in Afghanistan. TIME magazine has truly stooped to the lowest standards in journalism. During the 1990s the Kabul stadium was used once for the public execution of a woman found guilty of violating a Taleban decree.
The American intimate love affair during the past three decades with the various gangs of terrorists including Al-Qaeda, Hezb-e Islami, Northern Alliance, and sporadically the early manifestation of the Taleban movement during the 1990s has inflicted irreparable damage on the political, economic, and security prospects of Afghanistan. The ethnic and sectarian divisions caused by the American military operations and criminal deeds in South Asia has brought the frail state structure of Afghanistan to the verge of total collapse. It has destabilized the whole region. Tens of thousands of innocent and helpless Afghans have been slaughtered by the American Zionist-controlled killing machine. These are war crimes and crimes against humanity for which history will condemn its perpetrators.
On an ethnographic level, the manipulation of the body of the subject human population by the state has historical roots in several culture areas including Europe, the Middle East and South Asia. To this day in the popular lore of non-Paxtun areas of Afghanistan (especially among the Farsi-speaking population) a person, male or female, who compromises the interests and standards of the larger community, is symbolically labeled “beeni borida” (Farsi, one whose nose has been cut, one who has lost his nose, i. e. one who has lost her/his honor, a person without honor). The equivalent of this linguistic construct and its cultural content does not exist among Paxtuns.
However, no matter the untruths and distortions from which TIME’s August 9th cover story is concocted, we need a proper comparative cultural framework for the understanding of abuse of the human body including the practice of mutilation of body parts. An informed glance at global ethnographic realities connects such practices with a relation of power called patriarchy—male domination of society. As a system of ideas and practices patriarchy “is a threat to public health everywhere” (Laura Nader, Anthropology News, September 2006, p. 7) including Afghanistan and the United States. In principle the socio-cultural ingredients involved in the mutilation of the human body in Afghanistan are not different than the socio-cultural forces that impose industrial “vaginal rejuvenation”, “pussy tightening” (JoAnn Wypijewski, The Nation, 9/28/2009, p. 8), and breast enhancement in Euro-America. In no other culturally constructed space are women, womanhood, and femininity so universally abused, exploited, demeaned, and vulgarized than in the Euro-American industry of internet pornography—the biggest money making enterprise in cyberspace. Comparative studies reveal that American domestic violence is approximately 25%–about the same as in Syria and Bolivia (Nader 2006:7). The extensive system of shelters for abused women throughout the United States is symptomatic of a widely practiced tradition of physical and verbal abuse of women by men that is qualitatively not different than the abuse of women by men elsewhere in the world.
TIME, you are a beeni borida!
_________
Addendum by Max Forte:
[“In 2005, 1,181 women were murdered by an intimate partner. That’s an average of three women every day. Of all the women murdered in the U.S., about one-third were killed by an intimate partner” (source). 17.6 % of women in the United States have survived a completed or attempted rape. Of these, 21.6% were younger than age 12 when they were first raped, and 32.4% were between the ages of 12 and 17. 64% of women who reported being raped, physically assaulted, and/or stalked since age 18 were victimized by a current or former husband, cohabiting partner, boyfriend, or date. Only about half of domestic violence incidents are reported to police. The National College Women Sexual Victimization Study estimated that between 1 in 4 and 1 in 5 college women experience completed or attempted rape during their college years. One out of every six American women have been the victims of an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. Factoring in unreported rapes, about 5% – one out of twenty – of rapists will ever spend a day in jail. 19 out of 20 will walk free. The costs of intimate partner violence against women exceed an estimated $5.8 billion. These costs include nearly $4.1 billion in the direct costs of medical care and mental health care and nearly $1.8 billion in the indirect costs of lost productivity and present value of lifetime earnings. A University of Pennsylvania research study found that domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to low-income, inner-city Philadelphia women between the ages of 15 to 44 – more common than automobile accidents, mugging and rapes combined. In this study domestic violence included injuries caused by street crime (see sources).]
Protecting the Shaky Russia-gate Narrative
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the third presidential debate in 2016, during which Clinton called Trump Vladimir Putin’s “puppet.”
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | December 15, 2017
If Russia-gate is the massive scandal that we are told it is by so many Important People — across the U.S. mainstream media and the political world — why do its proponents have to resort to lies and exaggerations to maintain the pillars supporting the narrative?
A new example on Thursday was The New York Times’ statement that a Russian agency “spent $100,000 on [Facebook’s] platform to influence the United States presidential election last year” – when the Times knows that statement is not true.
According to Facebook, only 44 percent of that amount appeared before the U.S. presidential election in 2016 (i.e., $44,000) and few of those ads addressed the actual election. And, we know that the Times is aware of the truth because it was acknowledged in a Times article in early October.
As part of that article, Times correspondents Mike Isaac and Scott Shane reported that the ads also covered a wide range of other topics: “There was even a Facebook group for animal lovers with memes of adorable puppies that spread across the site with the help of paid ads.”
As nefarious as the Times may think it is for Russians to promote a Facebook page about “adorable puppies,” the absurdity of that concern – and the dishonesty of the Times then “forgetting” what it itself reported just two months ago about the timing and contents of these “Russian-linked ads” – tells you a great deal about Russia-gate.
On Thursday, the Times chose to distort what it already knew to be true presumably because it didn’t want to make the $100,000 ad buy (which is not a particularly large sum) look even smaller and less significant by acknowledging the pre-election total was less than half that modest amount – and even that total had little to do with the election.
Why would the Times lie? Because to tell the truth would undercut the narrative of evil Russians defeating Hillary Clinton and putting Donald Trump in the White House – the core narrative of Russia-gate.
Another relevant fact is that Facebook failed to find any “Russian-linked” ads during its first two searches and only detected the $100,000 after a personal visit from Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a leading legislator on Internet regulation.
In other words, Facebook’s corporate executives dredged up something to appease Warner. That way, Warner and the Democrats could blame Russia for the Trump presidency, sparing further criticism of Clinton’s dreadful campaign (in which she labeled half of Trump’s voters “deplorables”) and her neo-liberal economic policies (and neo-conservative foreign policies) that have alienated much of America’s working class as well as many progressives.
Leaving Out Context
The Times also might have put the $100,000 in “Russian-linked” ads over a two-year period in the context of Facebook’s $27 billion in annual revenue, but the Times didn’t do that – apparently because it would make even the full $100,000 look like a pittance.
Trimming the total down to $44,000 and admitting that only a few of those ads actually dealt with Clinton and Trump would be even worse for the Russia-gate narrative.
Ironically, the Times’ latest false depiction of the $100,000 in ads as designed “to influence” the 2016 election appeared in an article about Facebook determining that other Russian-linked ads, which supposedly had a powerful effect on Great Britain’s Brexit vote, totaled just three ads at the cost of 97 cents. (That is not a misprint.)
According to Facebook, the three ads, which focused on immigration, were viewed some 200 times by Britons over four days in May 2016. Of course, the response from British parliamentarians who wanted to blame the Brexit vote on Moscow was to assert that Facebook must have missed something. It couldn’t be that many Britons had lost faith in the promise of the European Union for their own reasons.
We have seen a similar pattern with allegations about Russian interference in German and French elections, with the initial accusations being widely touted but not so much the later conclusions by serious investigations knocking down the claims. [See, for instance, Consortiumnews.com’s “German Intel Clears Russia on Interference.”]
The only acceptable conclusion, it seems, is “Russia Guilty!”
These days in Official Washington, it has become almost forbidden to ask for actual evidence that would prove the original claim that Russia “hacked” Democratic emails, even though the accusation came from what President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper acknowledged were “hand-picked” analysts from the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency.
These “hand-picked” analysts produced the evidence-lite Jan. 6 “assessment” about Russia “hacking” the emails and slipping them to WikiLeaks – a scenario denied by both WikiLeaks and Russia.
When that “assessment” was released almost a year ago, even the Times’ Scott Shane noticed the lack of proof, writing: “What is missing from the [the Jan. 6] public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. … Instead, the message from the agencies essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’”
But the Times soon “forgot” what Shane had inconveniently noted and began reporting the Russian “hacking” as accepted wisdom.
The 17-Agencies Canard
Whenever scattered expressions of skepticism arose from a few analysts or non-mainstream media, the doubts were beaten back by the claim that “all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies” concurred in the conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered the hacking to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump. And what kind of nut would doubt the collective judgment of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies!
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper talks with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, John Brennan and other national security aides present. (Photo credit: Office of Director of National Intelligence)
Though the 17-agency canard was never true, it served an important purpose in establishing the Russia-gate groupthink. Wielding the “all 17 intelligence agencies” club, the U.S. mainstream media pounded politicians and policymakers into line, making any remaining skeptics seem more out of step and crazy.
So, in May 2017, when Clapper (along with former CIA Director John Brennan) admitted in congressional testimony that it wasn’t true that all 17 agencies concurred in the Russian hacking conclusion, those statements received very little attention in the mainstream media.
The New York Times among other major news outlets just continued asserting the 17-agency falsehood until the Times was finally pressured to correct its lie in late June, but that only led to the Times shifting to slightly different but still misleading wording, citing a “consensus” among the intelligence agencies without mentioning a number or by simply stating the unproven hacking claim as flat fact.
Even efforts to test the Russian-hack claims through science were ignored or ridiculed. When former NSA technical director William Binney conducted experiments that showed that the known download speed of one batch of DNC emails could not have occurred over the Internet but matched what was possible for a USB-connected thumb drive — an indication that a Democratic insider likely downloaded the emails and thus that there was no “hack” — Binney was mocked as a “conspiracy theorist.”
Even with the new disclosures about deep-seated anti-Trump bias in text messages exchanged between two senior FBI officials who played important early roles in the Russia-gate investigation, there is no indication that Official Washington is willing to go back to the beginning and see how the Russia-gate story might have been deceptively spun.
In a recently released Aug. 15, 2016 text message from Peter Strzok, a senior FBI counterintelligence official, to his reputed lover, senior FBI lawyer Lisa Page, Strzok referenced an apparent plan to keep Trump from getting elected before suggesting the need for “an insurance policy” just in case he did. A serious investigation into Russia-gate might want to know what these senior FBI officials had in mind.
But the Times and other big promoters of Russia-gate continue to dismiss doubters as delusional or as covering up for Russia and/or Trump. By this point – more than a year into this investigation – too many Important People have bought into the Russia-gate narrative to consider the possibility that there may be little or nothing there, or even worse, that it is the “insurance policy” that Strzok envisioned.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
Why America’s Law Enforcement Empire Resembles Secret Police in a Dictatorship
By Philip M. GIRALDI | Strategic Culture Foundation | 14.12.2017
Secret police are characteristic of dictatorships, or so goes the conventional thinking on the subject. Police in democracies operate for the most part transparently and within a set of rules and guidelines that limits their ability to gratuitously punish citizens who have done nothing wrong. If a policeman operating under rule-of-law steps out of line, he can be held accountable. That is also conventional thinking.
But what happens when an ostensibly “democratic” police force becomes corrupted and starts doing things that are outside its zone of responsibility, and does so to benefit a political relationship that will in turn protect those who have broken the law under cover of carrying out their official duties? That is the characteristic of what we have been calling a “deep state,” where forces drawn generally from the political class and security services conspire together to control what the public is allowed to know while also manipulating nuisances like elections to make sure that the “correct” outcome emerges.
Indeed, deep state operating in a democracy or republic is far more dangerous that the secret police in a dictatorship. That is because in a system where the forces of the state are all-powerful, nearly everyone expects that what they read and what the government says is all a lie. In a democratic system there is what intelligence officers would refer to as plausible denial, which means that even when the government is behaving very badly much of the public will believe that it is acting honorably because they want to trust that the system works. And when the deep state includes management of the media, many citizens will likewise believe what they are reading or hearing is honest reporting, even when it is not.
Due to the events of the past year in particular, many Americans have become convinced that there now exists something like a secret police operating in the United States that is a fusion of some political dealmakers with certain politicized elements in the intelligence and security services. However one regards President Donald Trump and his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, there is nevertheless something odd in terms of how they have been investigated and, in the case of Flynn, legally entrapped to convict him of lying to the FBI to force him to cut a deal with the Special Counsel inquiry headed by Robert Mueller.
Consider how, even though meeting with Russians is not illegal, Trump and his associates have been subjected to secret investigation of their Russian ties for nearly two years without any revelations apart from the fact that it was Israel, not Russia, that colluded to undermine White House policy. FBI Director James Comey’s antics during the primaries and electoral campaign, in which he first exonerated and then complained about Hillary Clinton while at the same time validating a dossier full of largely questionable information about Donald Trump’s dealings with Russia provides clear evidence of an organization that has lost its bearings and has become a politicized agent of an incumbency that has itself become corrupted and believes itself to be above the law. And then there is the Central Intelligence Agency’s own John Brennan working with the FBI to undermine the Trumps, illegally digging up dirt from the liaison intelligence partners in Europe and the Middle East.
America’s law enforcement empire has all the characteristics of secret police in a dictatorship. It is not transparent in its actions, has a history of bending the rules to obtain convictions, and its officers are rarely held accountable. It has also been politicized. And to be sure, one should recognize that there are two additional factors driving the growth and transformation of the national security state in the U.S. First is the intense dislike that the top levels of the American intelligence and police agencies have for Donald Trump personally, a contempt that Trump himself has largely earned by his scorn for much of the government that he inherited. Second is the “trust the authorities” culture that has grown up since 9/11, reinforced by fearmongering on the part of the government to justify executive overreach and enabled through anti-terror legislation that has unleashed the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) to act with impunity while suffering no consequences whatsoever.
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