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Christiana’s Howler!

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | December 30, 2019

Don’t worry about facts, Christiana!

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https://twitter.com/CFigueres/status/1211351748847124480

The claim is based on a Silly Jilly article in the Grauniad here. However the Guardian claim is based on electricity only, and not all energy, a distinction that apparently is beyond Christiana.

Furthermore, a third of renewable electricity comes from biomass, which most experts now accept is extremely bad for the environment and will not reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

When we look at total primary energy consumption, we find that Christiana’s much vaunted wind and solar power only contributes a paltry 4% in Q3, even when hydro power is added in. Meanwhile fossil fuels accounted for 77%.

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https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/total-energy-section-1-energy-trends

Meanwhile Mark Carney is trying to get pension funds to divest from fossil fuels, because he is convinced the world will stop using them in the near future.

December 31, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

UK accused of “crimes against humanity” for not allowing people to return to Chagos islands

MercoPress | December 28, 2019

The UK has been accused of committing “crimes against humanity” for refusing to allow people to return to their former homes on the Chagos Islands, despite a ruling earlier this year by the United Nation’s highest court.

Describing Britain’s behavior as stubborn and shameful, the prime minister of Mauritius, Pravind Jugnauth, told the BBC that he was exploring the possibility of bringing charges of crimes against humanity against individual British officials at the International Criminal Court (ICC).

“It is a violation of the basic principle of human rights. I fail to understand why Britain, this government, is being so stubborn,” said Mr Jugnauth.

Elderly Chagossians, living in Mauritius, have echoed that criticism and accused Britain of deliberately dragging its heels on the issue in the hope that the community will simply die out.

Earlier this year, Mauritius won a major victory against Britain when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague ruled – in an advisory opinion – that the Chagos Islands should be handed over to Mauritius in order to complete its “decolonization.”

The United Nations General Assembly then voted to give Britain a six-month deadline to begin that process. Britain has steadfastly refused to comply.

It is half a century since Britain took control of the Chagos Islands from its then colony, Mauritius, and evicted the entire population of more than 1,000 people in order to make way for an American military base – part of a secret deal negotiated behind Mauritius’s back as it was seeking to secure independence from the UK.

“Britain has been professing, for years, respect for the rule of law, respect for international law… but it is a pity the UK does not act fairly and reasonably and in accordance with international law on the issue of the Chagos archipelago,” said Mr Jugnauth.

Philippe Sands, a lawyer representing the Mauritian government, said: “Britain is on the edge of finding itself as a pariah state.

”We now have a situation where Chagossians – a deported population, want to go back and have a right to go back. And the UK is preventing them from going back.

“Question – is that a crime against humanity? My response is that, arguably, it is.”

Britain continues to insist that the ICJ ruling is wrong. But it has apologized for its past treatment of the Chagossians and promised to hand the islands over to Mauritius when they are no longer needed for security purposes.

In a statement, Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) told the BBC: “The defense facilities on the British Indian Ocean Territory help protect people in Britain and around the world from terrorist threats and piracy.

”We stand by our commitment to cede sovereignty of the territory to Mauritius when it’s no longer required for defense purposes.“

The FCO said Britain had pledged more than £40m to improve the livelihoods of Chagossians living in Mauritius, the Seychelles and the UK.

The UK has also begun to take small groups of Chagossians back to the archipelago for brief ”heritage“ visits. But in Mauritius, those tours have been condemned as a crude attempt to ”divide and rule“ the Chagos community.

”I boycott those trips. The British are trying to buy our silence. That’s why we say our dignity is not for sale,“ said Olivier Bancoult, who heads the Chagos Refugees Group.

In a graveyard in the Mauritian capital, Port Louis, the graves of several Chagossians are marked with headstones mourning their failure to return to the islands.

”I fear my wish will not come true before I die – to see my motherland again,“ reads the script beside the grave of Mr Bancoult’s mother, Marie Rita Elysee Bancoult.

”Every day, one by one, we’re dying. I believe the British are waiting for us to die so there will be no one to claim the islands,“ said Liseby Elyse, 66, who was 20 when she left the archipelago.

”We’re like birds flying over the ocean, and we have nowhere to land. We must keep flying until we die,” said 81-year-old Samynaden Rosemond

December 29, 2019 Posted by | Illegal Occupation | , , , | Leave a comment

Britain’s Security Services Granted License to Kill

By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | December 27, 2019

In a landmark ruling last week, a panel of five senior British judges ruled that a secret government policy of granting immunity to its state security service was “legal”. Below is an interview with one of the human rights groups which challenged the murky policy demanding that it be banned.

First though, some background to the issue. British government policy holds implicitly that agents or informants operating for the state’s security service, MI5, are permitted to commit crimes without fear of prosecution if those crimes are committed in the line of duty to protect national security.

This is tantamount to the British state granting its agents and proxies a “license to kill”. The judges in the panel of the so-called Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) have formally recognized this hitherto secret government policy as “legal”. The panel voted by 3 to 2 in favor. The two dissenting judges expressed deep concern that the ruling was “opening the door to future abuses” of power by British state agents.

MI5 is the branch of state intelligence that deals specifically with internal security. The other branch, MI6, deals with overseas activities. The disturbing implication is that MI5 can act with impunity, including acts of murder, against British citizens in the name of national security. The powers granted to it are secret and beyond public scrutiny in the courts. That means Britain’s secret services are now officially untouchable and above the law. This is a description fitting for a police state, not a supposed democracy which proclaims to be under the rule of law.

Four British-Irish human rights groups challenged the policy of immunity but they were over-ruled last week by the five-judge panel. These groups are to further appeal the decision in the courts. One of them, the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ), based in Belfast, has considerable expertise in investigating the abuse of state power during the armed conflict in Northern Ireland (1969-1998). CAJ has documented the extensive involvement of British military intelligence in waging a dirty war in Northern Ireland where its agents colluded with and directed paramilitary agents and informants to carry out assassinations. Hundreds of such extra-judicial killings remain “unsolved” and represent a painful legacy for citizens across Northern Ireland.

One of the most notorious killings was that of Belfast human rights lawyer Pat Finucane (39) in 1989. British agents smashed into his home while he was having dinner with his wife and three young children. The attackers shot him in the head 12 times as he lay prone on the floor in front of his family. The British government has previously acknowledged “shocking collusion” by its agents in Finucane’s murder. But the British authorities have pointedly refused to hold a full public inquiry, thereby blocking any prosecution.

Thirty years after the murder of Pat Finucane and hundreds of other Irish citizens by British counterinsurgency operations, Britain is now formally granting the same license to kill citizens anywhere in the United Kingdom – under the pretext of national security. The development has grave implications for human rights in Britain. It also casts a sinister cloud over what kind of Britain the new Conservative government under Boris Johnson is creating post-Brexit.

Strategic Culture Foundation conducted the following interview with Daniel Holder, the deputy director of the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ), based in Belfast.

INTERVIEW

Question: Is CAJ concerned that the Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruling last week will lead to serious human rights abuses by British security services in the future?

Daniel Holder: We are very concerned that this ruling for now permits MI5 to continue to authorize informant or agent involvement in serious crime. This could include crimes that constitute human rights violations. There were such experiences during the Northern Ireland conflict of informant-based paramilitary collusion, with agents of the state involved in acts as serious as murder and torture. Far from the so-called “intelligence war” helping bring the conflict to an end we consider that such practices by covert units of the security forces as having prolonged and exacerbated the conflict.

Question: On Brexit impact, will leaving the EU and its human rights standards add to concerns of abuse of power by the British state?

Daniel Holder: Although the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is part of the Council of Europe system and not the EU, those advocating for Brexit often confuse the two and hostility to the EU also manifests itself in hostility to the ECHR and its court in Strasbourg. Being an EU member state, however, does mean ECHR membership is obligatory, and that will go with Brexit. Although the ECHR being incorporated into Northern Ireland law is also a key part of the 1998 peace deal known as the Good Friday Agreement it is deeply concerning that the new British government is already advocating breaching this commitment by stating it will change the domestic ECHR law (the Human Rights Act) so it does not apply to acts before the year 2000. They are quite open that the reason for doing this is to impede investigations into the security forces during the Northern Ireland conflict – and top of the list as to what the UK does not want a light shined on is precisely the issue of the crimes of agents of the state within paramilitary groups, practices often referred to as “collusion”.

Question: Are British government claims justified that undercover work by security services and their agents may require freedom for agents to participate in unlawful activities in order to protect national security?

Daniel Holder: All police and security services the world over use informants. They are a vital policing tool, but they have to be used lawfully, and the question always is: where do you draw the line as to what they are allowed to do? On occasions where absolutely necessary this may involve informants being involved in crimes like conspiracies with a view to thwarting them; but the bottom line is that informants can never lawfully be “authorized” to be involved in serious crimes that constitute human rights violations, such as kidnap, killings and false imprisonment, nor can they act as agent provocateurs. All of that is illegal.

Question: The narrow majority in the five-judge high court granting immunity to MI5 from prosecution for crimes suggests there is concern among state judges that the existing policy is dubious and treacherous. Do you perceive deep misgivings among the authorities?

Daniel Holder: Yes, but not just now, going back some of the archival documents and investigations that have taken place into the Northern Ireland conflict have revealed significant misgivings at that time, about just such a policy. Take the government-approved De Silva review published in 2012 into the murder of human rights lawyer Pat Finucane, where “shocking” levels of collusion were admitted. This report conceded that that officers were being asked to do things that could not be done lawfully, which is another way of saying the policy and practice was unlawful. We now have a secret policy, the limits of which are unknown, on the basis of a power that does not exist in law, that tries to continue to place agents of the state above the law. The concern is that the errors of our past could be repeated if the same circumstances arise again, here or elsewhere.

Question: The British judges’ ruling last week seems contradictory. On one hand the ruling claims MI5 agents are not immune from prosecution, but on the other hand it says they can act unlawfully if it is done in the public interest?

Daniel Holder: The system and policy are contradictory. The policy says that MI5 informants are in theory not immune from prosecution, but MI5 will know about their crimes – and indeed authorize them – but conceal this from police and prosecutors, despite legal duties that apply to everyone in Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom to promptly inform the police when you are aware someone is committing a crime. Again, this is the security service placing itself above the law.

Question: Is this the kind of policy that leads to rampant lawlessness seen elsewhere, for example in Brazil and The Philippines where police officers and state agents are killing thousands of people extrajudicially with impunity? Northern Ireland’s past conflict of rampant British state collusion in killings is surely a warning too?

Daniel Holder: The practices by covert elements of the security forces of tolerating, facilitating and even directing informants in paramilitary groups involvement in serious crime, including killings, and assisting their evasion from justice, in our view was one of the most serious patterns of human rights violations that prolonged and exacerbated the Northern Ireland conflict and has left a deeply poisoned legacy that we are still struggling to deal with today. There have been significant reforms to the Police Service in Northern Ireland since the peace process to prevent recurrence, but the UK security and intelligence agencies also need to bring their practices within the law, otherwise somewhere, history could repeat itself.

December 27, 2019 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , | Leave a comment

Senior OPCW official ordered deletion of ‘all traces’ of dissenting report on ‘Douma chemical attack’ – WikiLeaks’ new leak

RT | December 27, 2019

The leadership of the chemical weapons watchdog took efforts to remove the paper trail of a dissenting report from Douma, Syria which pointed to a possible false flag operation there, leaked documents indicate.

In an internal email published by the transparency website WikiLeaks on Friday, a senior official from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) ordered that the document be removed from the organization’s Documents Registry Archive and to “remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever.”

The document in question is a technical assessment written by inspector Ian Henderson after a fact-finding mission to Douma, a suburb of Damascus, in the wake of an alleged chlorine gas attack. Western politicians and media said at the time that the government forces had dropped two gas cylinders as part of an offensive against jihadist forces, killing scores of civilians.

The OPCW inspector said evidence on the ground contradicted the airdropping scenario and that the cylinders could have been placed by hand. Considering that the area was under the control of anti-government forces, the memo lends credence to the theory that the jihadists had staged the scene to prompt Western nations to attack their opponents.

The final report of the watchdog all but confirmed that Damascus was behind the incident, but in the past months an increasing number of leaked documents and whistleblower testimonies have emerged, pointing to a possible fabrication. The OPCW leadership stands accused of withholding opinions contravening the West-favored narrative and using misleading language to report what the inspectors found on the ground.

The alleged email was written by Sebastien Braha, Chief of Cabinet at the OPCW. Its authenticity is yet to be confirmed, but the organization never said any of the previously leaked documents were not real.

Another document published on Friday outlines a meeting with several toxicology experts and their opinions on whether symptoms shown and reported in alleged victims of the attack were consistent with a chlorine gas poisoning. “The experts were conclusive in their statements that there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure,” the document said, adding that the chief expert suggested that the event could have been “a propaganda exercise.”

The Douma incident in April 2018 spurred Western governments into action, with the US, the UK and France delivering a barrage of missiles at what was dubbed chemical weapons sites in Syria days after. This didn’t prevent the government from seizing control over the neighborhood, but put the reputations of the three governments at stake. The OPCW report gave credence to the Western show of force.

December 27, 2019 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Guardian corrects article about Julian Assange embassy ‘escape plot’ to Russia… a year later

RT | December 24, 2019

The Guardian has corrected an article describing a “plot” to “smuggle” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange out of London, more than a year after publication. Russia called the article “disinformation and fake news” from the outset.

Assange is currently languishing in London’s Belmarsh Prison, awaiting a hearing on his extradition to the US where he is facing espionage charges. However, in the run-up to Christmas 2017 he was still safe inside the city’s Ecuadorian embassy. At the time, Assange had become a thorn in the side of Ecuador’s new president, Lenin Moreno, and Moreno was reportedly mulling a plan to offer him a diplomatic post in Russia, shifting him out of the UK and away from the threat of extradition.

When The Guardian reported on the story in 2018, it turned up the drama. Citing anonymous sources, the newspaper described a “plot” to “smuggle” Assange out of London on Christmas Eve, speeding the fugitive publisher away in a diplomatic vehicle and onwards to refuge in Russia. Ultimately, the report claims, the plan was deemed “too risky” and called off.

Though the report painted a picture of a Kremlin-instigated cloak-and-dagger operation, Ecuador would have been well within its rights to grant Assange diplomatic status, had the UK Foreign Office signed off on it. However, plots and plans sell better than backroom diplomatic wrangling, and the paper went with the spy-movie version of events.

It even shoehorned in a paragraph on Assange’s “ties to the Kremlin,” and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ‘Russiagate’ investigation, for good measure.

The Russian embassy in London called the article a clear example of “disinformation and fake news by British media.”

On Sunday,  the Guardian itself issued a correction. “Our report should have avoided the words ‘smuggle’ and ‘plot’ since they implied that diplomatic immunity in itself was illicit,” read a statement from the paper.

The correction was made after a complaint from Fidel Narvaez, who served as Ecuador’s London consul at the time of the alleged “plot.” The paper described Narvaez as a middleman between Assange and the Kremlin. Narvaez outright denied any discussions with Moscow.

Though The Guardian corrected its choice of words, the bulk of its story remains as is. The identity of the anonymous sources cited remain a mystery, as does the level of awareness the Russian government had about the plan at any stage in its formation.

As events transpired, Assange was bundled out of the embassy by Metropolitan Police in April, after Ecuador revoked his asylum. He has remained in prison since, with medics and UN observers sounding the alarm over his deteriorating physical and mental health, and comparing the conditions of his confinement to “torture.”

December 24, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

License to kill for Britain’s secret service makes UK a police state

By Finian Cunningham | RT | December 23, 2019

A ruling by British judges declaring it legal for Britain’s state security service – MI5 – to shield agents or informers from prosecution for crimes committed in the line of duty is a hugely sinister development.

The ruling by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) last week represents a formalizing of secret British government policy of affording its internal security service unlimited powers and immunity from prosecution in the execution of activities. The policy was legally contested by four British human rights groups, calling on the IPT to ban such powers.

However, the tribunal of five judges concluded it was lawful for MI5 agents to be permitted to commit crimes if, by doing so, they were acting in the public interest of national security. Two of the judges dissented. They explicitly raised concerns that the policy sets a “dangerous precedent” and “opens the door to abuse of power”.

Daniel Holder, deputy director of the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ), one of the four groups protesting the existing policy, said the narrow-majority ruling shows there is deep misgivings even within the state about the sinister potential of such unlimited power for Britain’s security forces. CAJ and the other groups are to appeal the ruling in the courts.

“We are very concerned that this ruling for now permits MI5 to continue to authorize informant or agent involvement in serious crime,” said Holder in comments for this article. “This could include crimes that constitute human rights violations. There were such experiences during the Northern Ireland conflict of informant-based paramilitary collusion, with agents of the state involved in acts as serious as murder and torture.”

During that conflict (1969-98), British military intelligence are known to have been involved in systematic levels of collusion with paramilitary agents and informers as part of a counterinsurgency campaign. The outcome was hundreds of extra-judicial killings carried out with the covert consent of British state agencies. One of the most notorious was the murder of Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane in 1989. Former British Prime Minister David Cameron admitted before parliament in 2012, following the publication of a government report into the Finucane killing, that the collusion in the case represented “shocking” abuse by Britain’s military intelligence.

What the latest ruling by the five-judge tribunal demonstrates is that there is still a policy of impunity for British state agents and their informants if their criminal activities are deemed to be essential in the service of national security. That is an insidiously low bar of subjectivity which allows for a modus operandi of “any means necessary”.

The British government is arguing that for agents and informants to carry out their covert work effectively, then they must have the power to lawfully participate in criminal activities for the sake of maintaining their cover. In short, they have a license to kill. But what makes the British state policy disturbingly sinister is that it is a secret policy that is off limits to legal and public scrutiny.

Says CAJ’s Daniel Holder: “All police and security services the world over use informants. They are a vital policing tool, but they have to be used lawfully, and the question always is: where do you draw the line as to what they are allowed to do? On occasions where absolutely necessary this may involve informants being involved in crimes like conspiracies with a view to thwarting them; but the bottom line is that informants can never lawfully be ‘authorized’ to be involved in serious crimes that constitute human rights violations, such as kidnaping, killings and false imprisonment, nor can they act as agent provocateurs, all of that is illegal.”

Northern Ireland serves as a grim case study where military police powers ran amok. Independent local human rights groups, such as CAJ and Relatives for Justice, contend that the so-called secret intelligence war waged by the British state was not only unlawful, it also prolonged the conflict and exacerbated the death toll.

Many of the killings suspected to have involved British agents or informers remain unsolved. Those murders have left a poisonous legacy for the citizens of Northern Ireland to deal with.

Rather than being restrained by this nefarious episode, it seems the British authorities are more determined than ever to extend the powers of their security services to act with impunity. If such a policy cannot be scrutinized or challenged in the courts by prosecution of alleged offenders then that leaves one to conclude that Britain is not a state of law but rather one ultimately run like a police state.

If British security agencies are above the law to commit any crime deemed necessary for their function, that opens a Pandora’s Box of baleful consequences.

We only have to look at countries where police forces more openly operate with impunity to see where the lawless direction leads to. A notorious example is Brazil, where police units are estimated to kill on average 17 people every day in supposed crackdowns on organized crime. The rampant use of extra-judicial assassination is largely a result of widespread immunity afforded to police officers.

Today’s Britain may seem like a million miles away, figuratively, from somewhere like Brazil or The Philippines where police forces also wield extensive lethal violence with impunity. However, once the rule of law is discarded for state forces, there is no longer a safeguard against abuse of power. It’s a slippery slope towards systematic violence and corruption.

Earlier this year, there was a public outcry in Britain when it emerged that Eton College – one of Britain’s elite private schools and Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s alma mater – had set an exam question for entrant students asking them to justify the use of lethal force to kill rioters.

The question set by the Eton examiners read: “The year is 2040. There have been riots in the streets of London after Britain has run out of petrol because of an oil crisis in the Middle East. Protesters have attacked public buildings. Several policemen have died. Consequently, the Government has deployed the Army to curb the protests. After two days the protests have been stopped but twenty-five protesters have been killed by the Army. You are the Prime Minister. Write the script for a speech to be broadcast to the nation in which you explain why employing the Army against violent protesters was the only option available to you and one which was both necessary and moral.”

There you have it: “necessary and moral” means anything goes in the name of national security. Just like the legally approved license to kill granted to MI5.

Evidently, Britain’s ruling class is wary of civil unrest sometime in the future. It could be sparked by Brexit or economic austerity. The use of lethal force to quell public protests is an option. The ruling by British judges endorsing an existing secret government policy of impunity for MI5 shows that Britain is but a step from being a police state. If not there already.

December 23, 2019 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

Boris Johnson Appoints Climate Sceptic To His New Government

Monmouth MP David TC Davies has been made a minister in the Wales Office, and assistant government whip.

By Alex Garcia

On the 10th of June 2015, UK Member of Parliament, David TC Davies MP rose to tell the Government The Truth about Climate Change, during the debate. The Government refused to deny his well founded assertions, even though he asked the Climate Minister to correct him if he was mistaken, and if she knew any different.

A red faced Labour Party MP was embarrassed to hear that his own fatuous assertions were actually contradicted by the UNIPCC itself, in documents read out by Mr. Davies.

This video clip, of the proceedings is copied as officially licenced, but this does not mean that the UK Parliament approves or endorses this video User, or indeed anything else. This message is required to comply with the terms of the official licence.

Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0.

December 21, 2019 Posted by | Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | | Leave a comment

Why Western Media Ignore OPCW Scandal

Strategic Culture Foundation | December 20, 2019

The credibility of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is on the line after a series of devastating leaks from whistleblowers has shown that the UN body distorted an alleged CW incident in Syria in 2018. The distortion by the OPCW of the incident suggests that senior directors at the organization were pressured into doing so by Western governments.

This has grave implications because the United States, Britain and France launched over 100 air strikes against Syria following the CW incident near Damascus in April 2018. The Western powers rushed to blame the Syrian government forces, alleging the use of banned weapons against civilians. This was in spite of objections by Russia at the time and in spite of evidence from independent investigators that the CW incident was a provocation staged by anti-government militants.

Subsequent reports by the OPCW later in 2018 and 2019 distort the incident in such a way as to indict the Syrian government and retrospectively exculpate the Western powers over their “retaliatory” strikes.

However, the whistleblower site Wikileaks has released more internal communications provided by 20 OPCW experts who protest that senior officials at the organization’s headquarters in The Hague engaged in “doctoring” their field reports from Syria.

Copies of the doctored OPCW reports are seen to have suppressed important evidence casting doubt on the official Western narrative claiming that the Syrian government was to blame. That indicates the OPCW was engaged in a cover-up to retrospectively “justify” the air strikes by Western powers. This is a colossal scandal which implies the US, Britain and France wrongly attacked Syria and are therefore guilty of aggression. Yet, despite the gravity of the scandal, Western media have, by and large, ignored it. Indicating that these media are subordinated by their governments’ agenda on Syria, rather than exposing the truth as independent journalistic services.

An honorable exception is Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson who has given prominence to the scandal on US national TV. So too has veteran British journalist Peter Hitchens who has helped expose the debacle in the Mail on Sunday newspaper.

Apart from those sources, the mainstream Western media have looked away. This is an astounding dereliction of journalistic duty to serve the public interest and to hold governments to account for abusing power.

Major American news outlets have been engrossed in the Trump impeachment case over his alleged abuse of power. But these same media have ignored an arguably far more serious abuse of power with regard to launching missiles on Syria over a falsehood. That says a lot about the warped priorities of such media.

However, their indifference to the OPCW scandal also reflects their culpability in fomenting the narrative blaming the Assad government, and thereby setting up the country for military strikes. In short, the corporate media are complicit in a deception and potentially a war crime against Syria. Therefore they ignore the OPCW scandal.

That illustrates how Western news media are not “independent” as they pompously claim but rather serve as propaganda channels to facilitate their governments’ agenda.

An enlightening case study was published by Tareq Haddad who quit from Newsweek recently because the editors censored his reports on the unfolding OPCW scandal. Haddad explained that he had important details to further expose the OPCW cover-up, but despite careful deliberation on the story he was inexplicably knocked back by senior editors at Newsweek who told him to drop it. There is more than a hint in Haddad’s insider-telling that senior staff at the publication are working as assets for Western intelligence agencies, and thus able to spike stories that make trouble for their governments.

Given the eerie silence among US, British and European media towards the OPCW scandal it is reasonable to posit that there is a systematic control over editorial policies about which stories to cover or not to. What else explains the blanket silence?

The scandal comes as Western powers are attempting to widen the powers of the OPCW for attributing blame in such incidents. Russia has objected to this move, saying it undermines the authority of the UN Security Council. Given the scandal over Syria, Russia is correct to challenge the credibility of the OPCW. The organization has become a tool for Western powers.

Russian envoy to the OPCW and ambassador to the Netherlands Alexander Shulgin says that Moscow categorically objects to expanding the OPCW’s functions and its powers of attributing blame. The extension of powers is being recommended by the US, Britain and France – the three countries implicated in abusing the OPCW in Syria to justify air strikes against that country.

The Russian envoy added: “The OPCW’s attribution mechanism is a mandate imposed by the US and its allies, which has nothing to do with international law and the Chemical Weapons Convention’s provisions. Any steps in this direction are nothing more than meddling in the UN Security Council’s exclusive domain. We cannot accept this flagrant violation of international law.”

Thus, the OPCW – a UN body – is being turned into a rubber-stamp mechanism by Western powers to legalize their acts of aggression. And yet despite the mounting evidence of corruption and malfeasance, Western corporate media studiously ignore the matter. Is it any wonder these media are losing credibility? And, ironically, they have the gall to disdain other countries’ media as “controlled” or “influence operations”.

December 20, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

US Democratic Party Warns Supporters of ‘Disinformation’ from Russia’s RT and Sputnik

Sputnik – December 20, 2019

The US Democratic National Committee has published a list of recommendations on how to combat online disinformation.

This list of “tips and additional resources” mentions Russian “propaganda outlets like RT & Sputnik.”

“Don’t let yourself be manipulated. Be aware of Russian propaganda outlets like RT & Sputnik and educate yourself on Russian propaganda lines,” the text on the committee’s website says.Apart from this, the recommendations include “reading longer works documenting disinformation and propaganda”, such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election by the US Department of Justice.

The authors of this list of recommendations name what they believe to be reliable sources of information: the Senate Intelligence Committee, reports on disinformation by Harvard and Oxford, and some others.

Earlier this month, the European Values Centre for Security Policy think tank unveiled a report headlined Kremlin Watch Strategy for Countering Hostile Russian Interference, calling on European countries not to view RT and Sputnik as “free press” outlets and to ban its journalists from attending press conferences.

In October 2017, the organisation published a list of 2,327 US, British and European politicians, diplomats and military officials who had previously talked to RT. The list features Donald Trump, John McCain and Boris Johnson. According to Sputnik and RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan, the publication of that list changed absolutely nothing. She added that the organisation was founded in the Czech republic and receives donations from different sources, including the British Foreign Ministry and the US embassy in Prague.

December 20, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

The beginning of the end of the United Kingdom

By Johanna Ross | December 20, 2019

Thursday was a busy news day, what with Trump’s impeachment and the Queen’s speech in Westminster, but another item given less coverage in UK mainstream media was arguably more significant than anything else making the headlines. Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s speech, formally asking the UK Prime Minister to transfer the powers to hold a referendum on independence from Westminster to the Scottish parliament, may well go down in history as the beginning of the end of the United Kingdom.

Having bagged a landslide election victory, winning 48 out of the 59 seats in Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon has wasted no time in confronting Boris Johnson with what is, for him, an uncomfortable truth: that Scotland wants a second referendum on independence, and it’s not going to go away. Sturgeon’s rhetoric so far has been bold, saying that Scotland would not be ‘imprisoned’ inside the Union and that the UK government had to ‘confront reality’. On Thursday in her speech from Bute House she said her government now had an ‘unarguable mandate by any standards of democracy’ to hold another referendum on independence.

Alongside her letter to Boris Johnson requesting the powers to legally hold a second referendum under Section 30 of the 1998 Scotland Act, she published a 38 page document detailing proposed amendments to the statute, which would devolve the right to vote on leaving the UK to the Holyrood parliament. Entitled Scotland’s Right to Choose, the paper outlines her argument that there has been a “material change of circumstances” since the 2014 referendum, based on “the prospect of Scotland leaving the EU against its will and what EU exit has revealed about Scotland’s position within the UK”.

The Nationalists’ leader has a fair point. For we can debate about voters’ motivations till the cows come home, but facts are facts, and the fact remains that on 12th December the majority of Scots put their support behind a party which stands on an independence platform. Brexit hit Scotland twofold: it wasn’t simply the issue of leaving the EU itself which Scotland was against, but moreover this proud, northern nation has taken great exception to its views not being taken into account whatsoever in negotiations. In the draft Withdrawal Agreement there are umpteen mentions of Northern Ireland, but very little about how Scotland’s interests will be protected. The attitude has been something along the lines of ‘Scotland voted to remain in the UK in 2014 so it just has to put up with whatever Westminster decides’.

Indeed to say that Westminister is reluctant to grant another referendum is an understatement. Boris Johnson made it clear to Sturgeon in a telephone conversation last week that he was against it. This was reiterated by his minister Michael Gove this week when he said that there was ‘absolutely’ no prospect of the UK government ‘allowing’ another vote in the next five years. And herein lies the problem. For Westminster is always going to protect the Union, and oppose Scotland breaking away at all costs, as Spain has with Catalonia. Thinking that the EU would support Scotland when it hasn’t offered any help to Catalonia is futile.

Opponents are currently arguing that in fact, Sturgeon only won 45% of the vote last week, echoing the 2014 referendum result, and therefore, they suggest that there is no more appetite now than there was before. But one has to take into account the turnout for these two elections, and demographics. Many more people voted in the 2014 referendum than in last week’s election – 84% compared to 68%, and in particular, voters aged 16 and 17 were allowed to vote, as Scotland passed a law in 2014 allowing young people to do so in Scottish matters. Sturgeon knows that independence is popular amongst Scotland’s youth and therefore with the right campaign strategy, she must believe she can persuade young people to get out and vote for independence.

Sturgeon is careful. Independence activists have been calling on her for years now to demand a second referendum and she is regularly accused of even secretly not wanting independence herself. But clearly she has just been biding her time and her patience has paid off. She could not have chosen a better time now to call for indyref2, the momentum is behind her after the election, with the political divide between Scotland and England more stark than ever before. And Westminster’s obstinance could just play into her hands, as the more reluctant they are to grant the referendum, the more resentment towards them will build up north of the border. Johnson should be advised to grant Sturgeon’s wishes now, or risk fostering such levels of antagonism towards him and his government in Scotland, from which there would be no way back…

Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

December 20, 2019 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

Brexit Could See the Return of the Falkland Islands to Argentina

By Paul Antonopoulos | December 19, 2019

The Islas Malvinas, or more commonly known as the Falkland Islands, archipelago was invaded by the United Kingdom in 1833 and its occupation has continued to date. Argentina’s claim for sovereignty through diplomatic means has been a state policy since the failed liberation attempt through military means in 1982. Although it lost intensity during the Mauricio Macri government, President Alberto Fernández of the leftist Justicialist Party, reinforced in October his commitment to “renew the claim of sovereignty” of the 750 islands of the archipelago. In a patriotic tone, the then presidential candidate criticized the relations Macri had with the United Kingdom during a debate that took place on October 13.

“In these years the government has been very busy doing business with the United Kingdom and has forgotten sovereignty [over] the Falklands. Over 700 soldiers have died there. In memory of them all I will make things different,” Fernández said during the first Argentine presidential debate.

Fernández will re-establish a Secretariat for the ​​Malvinas, demonstrating that he is taking the issue against the British very seriously. During his swearing in speech before the National Congress on December 10, the new president informed that he will create a Secretariat, with the participation of “all political forces,” the southern province of Tierra del Fuego that is closest to the Malvinas, representatives of the academic world and former fighters of the 1982 war, to concentrate on the reclamation of the occupied archipelago.

Fernández included the claim by the Falkland Islands in his speech when he assumed the presidency and said “there is no more place for colonialism in the 21st century.”

“We know that for this task it does not reach the mandate of a Government, but a medium and long-term State policy, so I will convene a Congress where all political forces participate,” he announced.

Fernández decision to re-establish the Malvinas Secretariat and to convene a Council on the subject restores confidence and firmness in Argentina’s demand against the British after complete servitude by Macri. The importance the new president has given to Argentina’s demand for sovereignty over the islands is a good sign and it is the first time a new president has spoken with such depth to the Malvinas issue when they first take office.

Fernández’s stance demonstrates that the Malvinas do not belong to any president, they are a state matter in which it is necessary to work as a state policy for not only the present, but also looking to the future. The establishment of the Secretariat is aimed to positively re-establish consensus on the basis of and essential demand for sovereignty, leaving the differing approaches in Argentina to the cause and the 1982 war conflict in the past with the aim of looking only towards the future.

It must be remembered that a new Sao Paulo-Malvinas flight opened on Argentine National Sovereignty Day on November 20, a massive slap in the face to the Argentinian veterans from the 1982 war, who did not hesitate to go out protest. LATAM inaugurated the flight which has a stop in the Argentine city of Córdoba. War veterans protested in front of the Foreign Ministry in Buenos Aires against what they described as treachery by Macri. Fernández has an opportunity to gain even more popular support by forcing the cancellation of flights by LATAM to the Malvinas and by ensuring the islands have no lifeline except with their colonial masters in London approximately 13,000 kilometers away.

Conservative Boris Johnson won the British election on December 12, which put the South American islanders on alert. The possibility of the definitive implementation of Brexit will harm the local economy, whose production has the European Union as one of its main markets. Brexit is a favorable situation for Argentina because in the view of the European Union, the Malvinas are an extracontinental territory, something that will complicate the local economy, just as what will happen with British-occupied Gibraltar on the Iberian Peninsula and areas in Cyprus.

In this context Argentina must start seeking new alliances with European countries and condemn the maintenance of a British colony on the complete opposite side of the Atlantic and with total impunity. With Spain wanting the return of Gibraltar and Cyprus wanting the return of Akrotiri and Dhekelia, Argentina can very easily find new allies in the European Union willing to cooperate efforts to reclaim sovereignty over territory occupied by the British. Brexit therefore not only threatens the breakup of the United Kingdom with a push for Scottish independence and Irish unification, but it could potentially see the return of the Malvinas to Argentina.

Paul Antonopoulos is a Research Fellow at the Center for Syncretic Studies.

December 19, 2019 Posted by | Illegal Occupation | , , , | Leave a comment

BBC Director-General Calls for Media Critics to Be Purged From Social Media

By Alan Macleod | MintPress News | December 18, 2019

In the face of a mountain of condemnation over how it provided a key role in helping Boris Johnson win last week’s UK general elections, BBC Director-General Baron Hall of Birkenhead has called for the corporation’s critics to be purged from the internet.

“The conspiracy theories that abound are frustrating… some of the abuse… is sickening. It shouldn’t happen. And I think it’s something social media platforms really need to do more about” he complained. Other BBC employees, who refused to name themselves, also expressed their exasperation to The Guardian over what they called “ludicrous Twitter storms” over “minor errors” in their reporting making it “really tough” working for the corporation.

The BBC is by far the most influential news outlet in the United Kingdom. According to the Media Reform Coalition, its channels account for around 75 percent of all TV news by market share and the company controls over half of the nation’s radio audience. BBC.co.uk is also the number one most visited British media website. 

At no point did anyone quoted in the Guardian article accept that the BBC’s coverage of the recent election was anything other than exemplary, a common sentiment among top BBC employees. Veteran news anchor Huw Edwards, for example, described the idea that the organization was biased against Labour as “risible.”

Baron Hall singled out the criticism of BBC Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg – herself a descendant of the German aristocracy – as particularly unpleasant. “Elections always put the BBC’s impartiality in the spotlight. Social media offers a megaphone to those who want to attack us and makes this pressure greater than ever,” he said.

Yet Kuenssberg has been carrying out a sustained, non-stop attack on Labour since Jeremy Corbyn was elected its leader in 2015. A report from the BBC’s own trust concluded that she was so biased that she breached company regulations, an extraordinary finding from the corporation’s own foundation.

Kuenssberg also flouted strict election laws to reveal, while voting was still open, that postal ballots showed an enormous conservative majority was looming, thereby influencing the election. The UK Electoral Commission is currently investigating her. She also reported fake news in the run-up to the election, claiming that a Labour activist had punched a Conservative advisor visiting a hospital. What makes this particularly insidious is that this was part of a coordinated Tory propaganda campaign to divert attention away from the viral news that a four-year-old child had been pictured being treated on the floor of the underfunded and overcrowded hospital, sleeping, while hooked up to machines, on a pile of old coats rather than a bed. The Conservative government is currently in the process of privatizing the National Health Service.

Biased Broadcasting Corporation

Few of the BBC’s 300 million users are aware that the corporation’s genesis lay in helping the Tory government crush the 1926 general strike that threatened to bring about a socialist revolution to the UK. According to media historian Tom Mills, the BBC became a “vital instrument of propaganda for a government determined to break the strike.” putting out non-stop state propaganda and banning the Labour Party from the airwaves. As the strike was broken, the BBC reported on the “nation’s happy escape.” Its Director-General at the time said that the BBC had “saved” the UK and that if Louis the Sixteenth had had a national broadcaster, the French Revolution would never have happened.

During the 1980s, the BBC put out round-the-clock propaganda for Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in her war against the miners’ strike, doctoring footage to make it seem like miners had attacked the police, when, in fact, it had been the other way around. The failure of the miners’ strike led to the complete re-organization of the UK along neoliberal lines and the end of centuries of industrialization and increases in living standards.

More recently, the BBC proved crucial in propagandizing the public during the Iraq War and the Scottish independence referendum. The BBC’s bias has also spurred a rich tradition of academic critique. Yet those same academics are now facing suspension from social media if Baron Hall gets his way.

A Chilling Blow for Free Speech

The purging of dissent of the corporate state is something MintPress News has covered in depth. While few progressives shed tears at the news that a number of media giants like YouTube, Facebook, Spotify and Pinterest all took the seemingly coordinated decision to ban notorious radio show host and Infowars founder Alex Jones from their platforms, the precedent that it set was immediately used to silence more genuine independent voices. Facebook shut down the pages of Occupy London, the Black Agenda Report and Venezuelanalysis. Others, such as Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and the Ron Paul Institute’s Daniel McAdams were banned from Twitter for trivial reasons.

Furthermore, media giants have, under the guise of fighting hate speech and fake news, attempted to tighten the corporate grip over the means of communication by changing their algorithms to promote official sources like CNN, Fox News and the BBC and demoting, de-ranking or simply deleting alternative media such as MintPress News. As a result, alternative media have seen their traffic, and therefore their influence and income plummet.

Studies have shown that a majority of the world’s population does not trust the media. One survey found that around three-quarters of Americans believe mainstream media intentionally prints false or highly misleading stories for financial or political gain. Yet even as mainstream bias is becoming more evident, those same outlets are calling for the silencing of any criticism of them, good faith or otherwise.

What an upside-down world we live in where an affable pacifist vegetarian like Jeremy Corbyn was turned into a bloodthirsty tyrannical terrorist and where those calling loudest for top-down censorship of speech are precisely journalists working for the West’s most prestigious media outlets.

Alan MacLeod is a MintPress Staff Writer as well as an academic and writer for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. His book, Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting was published in April.

December 18, 2019 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Video | , , | Leave a comment

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