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Why The Wall Street Journal amplifies collaborators instead of Palestinian voices

By Ahmed Asnar | MEMO | December 14, 2025

Once again, The Wall Street Journal has chosen to offer its pages not to genuine Palestinian voices, but to figures who align explicitly with Israeli agendas in Gaza. On 11 December, the newspaper published an opinion piece by Hussam al-Astal, an infamous militia leader presented as a potential military – and possible political – alternative in Gaza. His article echoed Israeli talking points almost verbatim, promoting the fantasy of “disarming Gaza” and for being ready to take part in implementing Trump’s so-called “peace plan” for Gaza in accordance with the Israeli objectives from the plan.

What is most troubling is not al-Astal’s rhetoric itself. His views are neither new nor Palestinian, nor do they reflect any authentic constituency among the Palestinian people in Gaza. What demands scrutiny is The Wall Street Journal’s editorial decision to elevate such a figure while systematically excluding real Palestinian scholars, journalists, and intellectuals who articulate the lived reality, aspirations, and internationally-recognised rights of their people.

According to widely reported Palestinian sources, al-Astal escaped from prison in the early days of Israel’s genocide on Gaza in October 2023. He had previously been sentenced to death in connection with serious criminal charges, including being involved in the assassination of a Palestinian scientist in Malaysia in 2018. Following his escape, he reportedly formed an armed gang operating under Israeli military oversight, engaging in the looting of aid convoys and clashes with Palestinian resistance groups. His militia is said to operate in areas under Israeli fire control, often with aerial cover—an arrangement that speaks volumes about whose interests he serves.

This was not an isolated editorial lapse. In June 2025, The Wall Street Journal published a similar opinion piece by another gang leader, Yasser Abu Shabab, who likewise positioned himself as an alternative for ruling Gaza while attacking Palestinian resistance and looting the people’s aid. Abu Shabab, who was later killed in December under circumstances widely linked to his collaboration, had also reportedly been imprisoned for criminal offenses prior to the war. In both cases, the newspaper chose to amplify figures rejected by Palestinian society, elevating them as if they represented a legitimate political alternative.

What these figures share—beyond their alignment with Israeli objectives—is their well-known illiteracy and complete lack of credibility and political thought. This raises an unavoidable question: who actually wrote these polished English-language opinion pieces? The answer is less important than what it reveals about The Wall Street Journal’s editorial standards and political standing.

The deeper issue is structural. The Wall Street Journal has long denied its pages to Palestinian academics, analysts, and journalists who challenge Israeli narratives with facts, law, and lived experience. Palestinian voices are welcomed only when they validate Israeli policy or undermine Palestinian collective resistance. This is not journalism in service of truth; it is gatekeeping in service of a colonial power.

For decades, much of the Western mainstream media has framed the Palestinian struggle through a distorted lens—portraying occupation as self-defence and resistance as aggression. Palestinians are routinely cast as obstacles to peace rather than a people living under military occupation, apartheid conditions, and now genocide. Over time, this bias has hardened into something more dangerous: complicity.

During Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, this complicity became unmistakable. Major Western outlets, including those that once claimed journalistic rigor, uncritically repeated Israeli allegations of mass rape, beheadings, and other atrocities. Many of these claims were later debunked or contradicted by independent investigations, yet they served their purpose: manufacturing moral justification for the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians, the majority of them women and children.

By publishing voices like al-Astal and Abu Shabab while excluding genuine Palestinian perspectives, The Wall Street Journal has crossed from bias into participation. It is no longer merely reporting on power—it is helping shape and legitimize a colonial narrative that seeks to replace a people’s political will with proxies and collaborators.

As for Palestinian voices, they will continue to write, document, and speak—whether Western gatekeepers approve or not. New media spaces, independent platforms, and global civil society have already broken the monopoly once held by legacy outlets like The Wall Street Journal. The truth of Palestine no longer depends on their permission.

History has a way of sorting narratives from propaganda. And when it does, The Wall Street Journal will be remembered not for amplifying the oppressed, but for offering its pages to those who work in service of their occupier.

December 14, 2025 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | Leave a comment

Kremlin responds to Vance’s comment on troops for Ukraine statement

RT | February 15, 2025

The Kremlin has acknowledged that US Vice President J.D. Vance did not threaten the deployment of US troops to Ukraine during his interview with The Wall Street Journal. He has accused the newspaper of misrepresenting his words about what leverage Washington can use in peace talks with Moscow.

“Yes, we have taken note,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told TASS on Saturday.

In a summary of an article on Thursday titled “Vance Wields Threat of Sanctions, Military Action to Push Putin Into Ukraine Deal” the paper stated that the vice president had pledged to impose sanctions and possibly intervene with troops if Russian President Vladimir Putin rejected a peace deal guaranteeing Ukraine’s independence.

Vance’s communications director, William Martin, criticized the article, calling it “pure fake news,” posting a transcript of the vice president’s interview with the newspaper and argued that he had not made any threats. In the transcript, Vance had said that Trump would consider a wide range of options in discussions with Russia and Ukraine. He mentioned that “economic tools of leverage” and “military tools of leverage” exist but did not specify any actions.

“There’s a whole host of things that we could do. But fundamentally, I think the president wants to have a productive negotiation, both with Putin and with [Vladimir] Zelensky,” the transcript read.

“As we’ve always said, American troops should never be put into harm’s way where it doesn’t advance American interests and security,” Vance wrote on X. “The fact that the WSJ twisted my words in the way they did for this story is absurd, but not surprising,” he added.

The Kremlin sought clarification regarding Vance’s comments following the initial report. Peskov told reporters on Friday that the remarks were new to Moscow. “We have not heard such statements before,” he said.

The Wall Street Journal’s report has since received a community note on X, which states: “JD Vance made no explicit pledge to either sanctions or military actions.” The note links to Martin’s post containing the transcript.

February 15, 2025 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Globalist press shifts gear to stifle Trump presidency in its cradle

By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | Indian Punchline | November 13, 2024 

The Wall Street journal, which has a track record of spreading irascible scepticism over Donald Trump’s credentials for re-election as US president, has come out with yet another sensational story that Congressman Mike Waltz is going to be the White House National Security Advisor. 

This comes at a time when it is also being speculated by the American press that Senator Marco Rubio will be the next Secretary of State. 

And it follows a report in the Washington Post about Trump having had a phone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin last Thursday — false news, as it transpired subsequently, compelling Trump’s office to put out a press release listing all the calls Trump made so far as president-elect with foreign leaders where Putin’s name doesn’t even figure. (Interestingly, nonetheless, British press is still running commentaries on the Trump-Putin conversation which never took place!)

Two lawmakers from Florida alone — Rubio & Waltz — as two of the most powerful national security and foreign policy officials in the Trump Administration? It doesn’t gel, prima facie. Let Trump first announce these two appointments first before anyone opens the champagne bottle. 

The WSJ was viscerally opposed to Trump. This is how the paper presented Trump’s election victory on November 5:

“Former President Donald Trump cleared a path to the White House by doubling down on the very things that Democrats said made him unfit to return to the Oval Office.

“Throughout Trump’s campaign, the Republican Party candidate was bombastic, profane and frequently untruthful claiming the 2020 race was stolen from him, that he had no responsibility for the Jan. 6 2021 attack on Congress and that President Biden had orchestrated his criminal indictments and felony convictions.” 

Does the Journal read anything like a friendly soul, given the massive consequences of the incoming Trump presidency? To my mind, we are witnessing a replay of what Trump had faced in 2016 when the “swamp” tenaciously undercut by salami tactics his credibility as a serious politician to decry him as a babe in the woods lacking the requisite experience in government or worthy of holding high position. 

Trump took a thousand cuts. He got bogged down in the fake Russia collusion hypothesis from which he never really recovered and faced two impeachment trials. Eventually, he made his exit as a wounded fighter in the boxing ring  in defeat, while even his vice-president Mike Vance disowned him. 

Indeed, feelings are running high in the civil war conditions in American politics. The neoconservatives who dominated the Biden administration and the Deep State are up in arms already to get the Trump presidency mired in controversies.

Trump must be well aware of it, too. Interestingly, Trump’s wife Melanie is reportedly inclined to turn down First Lady Jill Biden’s customary invitation to her for tea and a traditional post-election tour of the White House on Wednesday. 

Apparently, Melanie has not forgotten the humiliation she went through at the hands of Jill Biden’s husband who ordered the outrageous move on an unprecedented raid at the Trump family’s Palm Beach, Florida, mansion — with the FBI operatives snooping through Melanie’s underwear drawer looking for any White House documents the ex-president might have furtively carted away while demitting office in 2020. (The US Supreme Court has since disapproved of such petulance against a former president.) 

Of course, this is not to question Congressman Mike Waltz’s impressive bio-data. He has evidently been building himself up as potential presidential material. One thing is sure now: Trump comes under pressure to take a good look at Waltz as a potential NSA. 

After all, the globalist American press linked to the Deep State had influenced Trump’s impressionable mind in such a direction in his first term as well by planting fellows like John Bolton, James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, et al. You plant a back room story, and in DC’s fertile soil it grows into a giant oak tree overnight. 

Plainly put, the issue here is whether Trump wants as NSA someone who is, frankly speaking, a cross-breed of Mike Pompeo, the ex-CIA boss and state secretary whose name to the swamp was mooting, till the other day for a key position in the new administration  compelling Trump, finally, to issue a pointed disclaimer underscoring that the likes of Pompeo — or Nikki Haley, for that matter — will have no place in  the incoming administration. 

The American press is fancying that Trump has returned to DC as a novice still, a fatal flaw that had cost Julius Caesar his life in decadent Rome. In reality, though, Trump is an enigma now, as he is a wiser man after the excruciatingly lethal attacks he faced from the Biden Administration and the Deep State, and brooding over the past has re-invented himself with a fair idea of what to do — and, more importantly, what not to do — as America’s chief executive in DC. 

It is common sense that Trump will need a cooperative team of loyal officials whom he can rely on to advance his political and foreign policy agenda as he is running against time and a hell of a lot of things need to be done. If Trump has chosen Susie Wiles as his chief of staff, one prime consideration is that she is “one of his most trusted political confidants for the job,” as Politico reported. 

The paper wrote, “In Trump’s third bid for the White House, Wiles succeeded at minimising infighting, leaking and other types of drama that characterised both of Trump’s previous campaigns and his tenure in the White House…

“Historically the first appointee named by the president-elect, the chief of staff is charged with overseeing all policy and day-to-day White House affairs. In his first term, Trump burned through four chiefs of staff — former Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus, Gen. John Kelly, former South Carolina Rep. Mick Mulvaney and former North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows — who bore the brunt of the infighting and turbulence that defined his tenure.”

Again, Trump announced yesterday that he’s tapping SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to head up a new “Department of Government Efficiency.” What occurs to me is whether this move by Trump would go down well with someone like Congressman Mike Waltz who is passionate about the Pentagon’s further build-up and speaks for the military-industrial complex? 

I don’t think so. 

By the way, Wiles is also from Florida! The million dollar question is whether his NSA and state secretary will also now be from Florida? So, the question to be asked is, why is Wall Street Journal doing this by floating highly speculative reports attributing to unnamed sources.   

November 13, 2024 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | 3 Comments

WSJ admits no proof of UNRWA staff collaborating with Hamas

Al Mayadeen | August 5, 2024

The chief editor of The Wall Street Journal Elena Cherney has admitted to not having evidence to back up its January claims that numerous UNRWA employees in Gaza were involved in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, Semafor news reported.

The Wall Street Journal stated in January, citing Israeli intelligence, that at least 12 UNRWA employees were personally involved in the events of October 7.

“The fact that the Israeli claims haven’t been backed up by solid evidence doesn’t mean our reporting was inaccurate or misleading, that we have walked it back or that there is a correctable error here,” Cherney said at the time.

Sources told Semafor that since the WSJ article was published, its writers have attempted to validate the information several times but have failed at doing so.

They also divulged that WSJ journalists covering the war on Gaza have frequently expressed worry about the newspaper’s biased coverage of “Israel”.

In March, Reuters reported that following weeks of a nonstop Israeli-targeted campaign against the UN agency, UNRWA said in an unpublished report that some of its staffers were coerced into falsely stating that they had ties with the Palestinian Resistance movement – Hamas and that they took part in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7

The occupation entity alleged in January that 12 of the 12,000 UNRWA members in Gaza participated in the October operation.

According to the news agency, UNRWA’s report dated February said that its workers were subjected “to threats and coercion” by the Israeli authorities “while in detention and pressured to make false statements against the Agency,” including that it has affiliations with Hamas and that “UNRWA staff members took part” in the Resistance operation in October 2023.

The Israeli allegations prompted over 15 countries, including the United States, to suspend almost half a billion dollars in UNRWA funding. The agency warned of the catastrophic repercussions of this decision on the humanitarian situation in Gaza, already in shatters due to “Israel’s” ongoing genocide and starvation policy.

Since then, several countries resumed their funding as none of the Israeli allegations were corroborated.

‘Israel’ passes bill in first reading to label UNRWA ‘terrorist org.’

Last month, the Israeli parliament granted initial approval to a bill that aims to label UNRWA as a “terrorist organization” and suggests severing ties with the humanitarian agency.

The bill received approval during its first reading in the Knesset. It was set to be sent back to the Israeli “Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee” for additional review and discussion before the final decision is made.

Commenting on the Knesset’s measure, UNRWA spokesperson Juliette Touma warned that this is “another attempt in a wider campaign to dismantle the agency,” adding that “such steps are unheard of in the history of the United Nations.”

The Palestinian Resistance group Hamas condemned the approval of the bill, saying that the bill seeks “to end the Palestinian cause, foremost the refugee issue.”

Hamas called on the international community and the United Nations to “take firm stances against Israel” and protect UNRWA from the occupation’s attempts to “eliminate it.”

Similarly, the Palestinian al-Mujahideen Movement condemned the bill, describing it as a “Zionist attempt to eliminate one of the legal witnesses to our people’s tragedy and their displacement in 1948,” asserting that the decision is a “precursor to a new policy of starvation and siege” against the Palestinian people.

August 5, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , | Leave a comment

“We Owned the News… We Were the Gatekeepers” – WSJ Editor-in-Chief Laments Mainstream Media Power Loss

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | January 22, 2024

In a year marked by dwindling public trust in key institutions and heralded by the theme “Rebuilding Trust” at the World Economic Forum’s annual Davos assembly, Emma Tucker, the Wall Street Journal’s Editor in Chief, has called for a reevaluation of how traditional media operates. Recalling a point when the mainstream press was the chief adjudicator of information and facts, she highlighted its demise that came with the rise of alternative media platforms.

Tucker, during a Davos panel supposedly dedicated to the preservation of truth, offered a lament for the era when the press held exclusive dominance over news and facts.

“If you go back not that long ago, We owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well,” Tucker said.

“If it said it in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, then that was a fact. Nowadays, people can go to all sorts of different sources for the news, and they’re much more questioning about what we’re saying.”

Not only do her comments reveal a lot about how mainstream media figures see their role in society, her comment painted a clear picture of the power shift that has marked the recent history of the media landscape.

“So it’s no longer good enough for us to say this is what happened, or this is the news. We almost have to explain our working. So readers expect to understand how we source stories, they want to know how we go about getting stories,” she continued.

“We have to sort of lift the bonnet as it were in a way that newspapers aren’t used to doing, and explain to people what we’re doing. We need to be much more transparent about how we go about collecting the news,” Tucker added.

January 22, 2024 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Video | | 2 Comments

Wall Street Journal Sets Standard for Irresponsible Journalism in Ukraine

By Ted Snider | The Libertarian Institute | January 10, 2024

Recently, The Wall Street Journal joined the flood of American mainstream media outlets, including The New York TimesPolitico and several others, in preparing the American public for a Russian victory.

After nearly two years, over $113 billion of U.S. taxpayers’ money spent at horrendous cost in life and limb has put Ukraine in a worse bargaining position than they were at the start of the war. As many as 50,000 Ukrainians are now amputees. And though statistics on Ukrainian casualties are a tightly sealed state secret, the most plausible sources suggest casualties and fatalities as staggering as 400,000-500,000. These numbers fit with internal Ukrainian communications that suggest that maintaining their numbers on the field would require replacing 20,000 soldiers a month. The same figure has been given in a New York Times article that quoted a former battalion commander who “estimated that Ukraine will need to enlist 20,000 soldiers a month through next year to sustain its army, both replacing the dead and wounded.” 20,000 over an approximately two year war puts the figure well over 400,000. Most recently, Yuriy Lutsenko, the former prosecutor general and ex-head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, has said that 500,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or seriously wounded. Interestingly, it is Moscow that provides the most conservative figures. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu recently said that Ukraine has lost over 215,000 soldiers in 2023 with over 383,000 killed or wounded since the war began.

The 400,000-500,000 figure for Ukrainian soldiers lost to the battlefield by casualties and deaths also matches the 450,000-500,000 number that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says the military has requested in a new mobilization. In another sign of a battle between Zelensky and Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Valery Zaluzhny, after Zelensky assigned responsibility to the military for requesting the unpopular draft, Zaluzhny placed the responsibility back on the government, denying that the military had ever formally requested the mobilization or provided the number.

The Wall Street Journal laid the psychological groundwork preparing the American public for defeat in Ukraine, despite the loss of Ukrainian lives and American dollars, with the line “Even if aid for Ukraine is renewed, it is essential to consider a realistic ending for the war.” It goes on to say that, though “Ukraine’s insistence on regaining all the territory Russia has seized since 2014 is understandable…events over the past year have made it clear that this goal can’t be achieved anytime soon.” The article concludes with the prescription that “Western leaders should explore” negotiations to end the fighting, calling it “a bitter pill” but “the only realistic path to a lasting peace in Europe.”

But it is in two short paragraphs near the end of the article that The Wall Street Journal does its readers a disservice by leaving out more information than it gives them, challenging the standards for responsible journalism.

The first of the two paragraphs state, “Recent reports, which Mr. Putin hasn’t denied, suggest that he is ready to agree to a cease-fire along the current battle lines. Although he is unwilling to retreat, these reports indicate that he had shelved his aim to dominate all of Ukraine.”

Though The Wall Street Journal is free to speculate that Vladimir Putin aimed to “dominate all of Ukraine,” it is also obliged to clarify that there is nothing on the documented historical record to indicate that Putin ever had dominating all of Ukraine as an objective. Scholar John Mearsheimer has pointed out, “There is no evidence in the public record that Putin was contemplating, much less intending to put an end to Ukraine as an independent state and make it part of greater Russia when he sent his troops into Ukraine on February 24th.” That has also never been one of Putin’s stated goals of the military operation. His list of goals has consistently been that Ukraine cannot join NATO, that NATO won’t turn Ukraine into a heavily armed anti-Russian country on its border, and that the rights of ethnic Russian Ukrainians be protected. Russia has clearly stated that it “support[s] Ukraine’s territorial integrity” if Ukraine returns to the promise of permanent neutrality upon which Russia first recognized Ukrainian independence in 1991.

In the next paragraph, the article insists that “there are good reasons to be skeptical” that Putin is serious about negotiating a peace that would abandon his ambition to dominate Ukraine. But, though the author has the right to be skeptical, he needs to set out what those “good reasons” are because, once again, they ignore the historical record.

An overwhelming host of people who were present at the Istanbul talks have testified to just how close Russia and Ukraine came to a negotiated peace in the early days of the war. But in questioning Putin’s seriousness about negotiating a peace, The Wall Street Journal ignores reporting that came out several days before its own reporting that former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Oleksandr Chalyi, who was a member of the Ukrainian delegation in Istanbul, says that Putin was very serious about negotiating.

After reminding his audience at a debate in Geneva that he was actually there, Chalyi says that during the Istanbul talks “in March and April,” they “concluded [the] so called Istanbul Communique. And we were very close in the middle of April, in the end of April to finalize our war with some peaceful settlement.” Chalyi reports that Putin personally decided to accept the text of the Communique and that Putin “demonstrated a genuine effort to find a realistic compromise and achieve peace.”

The Journal article then goes to claim that Putin’s Ukraine ambitions are merely part of a larger “plan to reconstitute the Soviet empire.” As evidence, the writer cites Putin’s 2005 statement that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”

Putin did say that. But like other quotations made by Putin, it is employed misleadingly by omitting its context. First of all, he did not call it “the greatest” catastrophe but “a major” disaster. But the catastrophe after the fall he is referring to is not the absence of the Soviet Union but, primarily, the economic hardship that followed in the wake of its break up. He bemoaned that “individual savings were depreciated” and oligarchs “served exclusively their own corporate interests.” He remembered that “mass poverty began to be seen as the norm.”

The misleading strategy employed here is similar to the one frequently employed when Putin is quoted as having said, “Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart,” without adding that his next words were, “Whoever wants it back has no brain.” The first part refers to the same events Putin bemoans in the statement quoted in the Journal article; the second part entirely changes the claimed meaning by restoring the first to its context.

The Wall Street Journal article seems to be part of a media psychological campaign to prepare Americans for a Russian victory in Ukraine despite the massive expense in American aid, American weapons, and Ukrainian lives. But it could better prepare them for the inevitable negotiations that it predicts by honestly preparing them with the truth about the causes of the war and about the demonstrated possibility of negotiations, an understanding of which will be necessary if those negotiations are to succeed.

January 10, 2024 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

WSJ, Citing Exclusively Anonymous Sources, Claims ‘Iran Helped Plot Attack on Israel’

By Chris Menahan | InformationLiberation | October 8, 2023

The Wall Street Journal on Sunday, citing anonymous “sources” in Hamas and Hezbollah in addition to “a European official and an adviser to the Syrian government,” claimed Iran helped plot Hamas’ attack on Israel but the only Hamas official they cite on the record denied anyone else was involved in the attack.

From WSJ, “Iran Helped Plot Attack on Israel Over Several Weeks”:

Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group.

Officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land and sea incursions–the most significant breach of Israel’s borders since the 1973 Yom Kippur War–those people said.

Details of the operation were refined during several meetings in Beirut attended by IRGC officers and representatives of four Iran-backed militant groups, including Hamas, which holds power in Gaza, and Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group and political faction in Lebanon, they said.

U.S. officials say they haven’t seen evidence of Tehran’s involvement. In an interview with CNN that aired Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: “We have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship.”

“We don’t have any information at this time to corroborate this account,” said a U.S. official of the meetings.

A European official and an adviser to the Syrian government, however, gave the same account of Iran’s involvement in the lead-up to the attack as the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members.

Asked about the meetings, Mahmoud Mirdawi, a senior Hamas official, said the group planned the attacks on its own. “This is a Palestinian and Hamas decision,” he said.

There was a mea culpa after the media lied America into the war in Iraq with most agreeing that anonymous sources should not be used in such crucial matters but all those rules are now being broken two decades later to expand this war to Iran.

Why can’t these anonymous sources go on the record?

“Senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah” will brag about working with Iran but only anonymously to the WSJ ?

“A European official and an adviser to the Syrian government” could be one or two people — a European official who is also an adviser to the Syrian government or a European official as well as an adviser to the Syrian government. Why would they know the ins and outs of Hamas’ strategic plans which caught the Mossad and Western intelligence completely off guard?

This report is total garbage and should be thrown in the trash but instead it could be used to set policy the same way Judith Miller’s lies about WMDs in the NY Times were used to justify the war in Iraq.

Miller was rewarded for her lies when she was hired by Fox News in 2008 (which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp along with the WSJ ) and the WSJ actually ran a column from Miller 2015 where she made all manners of excuses for lying us into war.

October 9, 2023 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | 1 Comment

Journalists Should Be Mad At Evan Gershkovich For Exploiting His Profession To Spy On Russia

By Andrew Korybko | April 9, 2023

Western journalists are furious at Russia for arresting their colleague from the Wall Street Journal, Evan Gershkovich, on charges of espionage. They’re now wildly fearmongering that all journalists in that country are at risk of being arrested on that pretext after he became the first one to experience this since the dissolution of the USSR. In reality, “Russia Had Every Right To Arrest That Wall Street Journal Employee For Espionage”, and journalists should therefore be mad at Gershkovich and not the Kremlin.

What he did violated the top principle of his profession, which isn’t supposed to ever be exploited for espionage since doing so could place genuine journalists at risk if the spied-upon government or others overreact to this by arbitrarily detaining others on that pretext. Russia has no intention to do this since those journalists who remain faithful to their profession’s top principle don’t pose a security threat, unlike Gershkovich, who tried to obtain secret information about its military-industrial capabilities.

That said, it can’t be taken for granted that other countries might not harass journalists on this pretext, whether those working for the Wall Street Journal or other Western outlets. The US crossed the unspoken red line related to exploiting this profession for espionage, which can be concluded with a very high degree of confidence since Russia wouldn’t have arrested Gershkovich if it didn’t have irrefutable proof of his crimes.

The Kremlin knew very well what sort of information warfare narratives would follow its first arrest of a journalist since the Old Cold War, but it took this step in order to defend its legitimate national security interests and expose the US’ dirty game that was just explained. It’s with this in mind that Western journalists should be furious at Gershkovich for agreeing to this intelligence assignment, since he could simply have refused it.

By spying on Russia under the cover of journalism, he betrayed his profession’s top principle and put his colleagues at risk all across the world. He doesn’t deserve any of their sympathy, but some of those rallying around him have ulterior motives and aren’t just misled by fake news about the reason for his arrest. These figures might also be operating as spies under the cover of journalism, hence their interest in lying that it’s impossible for anyone in their profession to ever carry out such crimes.

Genuine journalists should remember that Russia wouldn’t have taken this step with the expectation of all the weaponized information warfare narratives that would follow if it didn’t have irrefutable proof that Gershkovich was exploiting his profession for espionage. He and his handlers are the ones who deserve everyone’s ire, not Russia for defending its legitimate national security interests. Gershkovich put journalists at risk all across the world, which he should be condemned for, not shown sympathy.

April 9, 2023 Posted by | Deception | , | 1 Comment

NY Times Latest to Mislead Public on New Ivermectin Study

The NEJM study chose a much lower dose, 400mcg per day for only three days, less than half the total dose that has been shown to be effective

By Madhava Setty, M.D. | The Defender | March 31, 2022

The New York Times on Wednesday sent an email blast to subscribers with the subject line: “Breaking News: Ivermectin failed as a Covid treatment, a large clinical trial found.”

The Times was referring to a study I wrote about, that same day, for The Defender.

My article called out the Wall Street Journal for its March 18 reporting on the same study — before the study was even published — for its failure to provide an accurate, critical assessment of the study.

The study in question — “Effect of Early Treatment with Ivermectin among Patients with Covid-19” — was officially published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

In it the authors concluded:

“Treatment with ivermectin did not result in a lower incidence of medical admission to a hospital due to progression of Covid-19 or of prolonged emergency department observation among outpatients with an early diagnosis of Covid-19”

The Times did not critique the study itself, but quoted the opinion of Dr. David Boulware, an infectious-disease expert at the University of Minnesota:

“There’s really no sign of any benefit. Now that people can dive into the details and the data, hopefully that will steer the majority of doctors away from ivermectin towards other therapies.”

Yes. Let us dive into the details and the data and see where it “steers” us, shall we?

A closer look at the details

The NEJM study took place in Brazil between March 23 and Aug. 6, 2021.

The study examined 1,358 people who expressed symptoms of COVID-19 at an outpatient care facility (within seven days of symptom onset), had a positive rapid test for the disease and had at least one of these risk factors for severe disease:

  • Age over 50
  • Hypertension requiring medical therapy
  • Diabetes mellitus
  • Cardiovascular disease
  • Lung disease
  • Smoking
  • Obesity
  • Organ transplantation
  • Chronic kidney disease (stage IV) or receipt of dialysis
  •  Immunosuppressive therapy (receipt of ≥10 mg of prednisone or equivalent daily)
  • Diagnosis of cancer within the previous 6 months
  • Receipt of chemotherapy for cancer.

Young and healthy individuals were not part of this study.

Both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals were included in the study. The percentage of vaccinated participants in each group was not specified. Note that by choosing not to identify vaccination status as a confounding variable the authors are implying that vaccines are playing no role in preventing hospitalization.

The 1,358 subjects were divided into two equally sized groups that were relatively well-matched and randomized to receive either a three-day dose of placebo or a three-day course of ivermectin at 400 mcg/kg.

The primary outcome was hospitalization due to COVID-19 within 28 days after randomization or an emergency department visit due to clinical worsening of COVID-19 (defined as the participant remaining under observation for >6 hours) within 28 days after randomization.

How researchers were able to conclude ‘no benefit’ despite signs to the contrary

The study’s authors wrote:

“100 patients (14.7%) in the ivermectin group had a primary-outcome event (composite of hospitalization due to the progression of COVID-19 or an emergency department visit of >6 hours that was due to clinical worsening of COVID-19), as compared with 111 (16.3%) in the placebo group (relative risk, 0.90; 95% Bayesian credible interval, 0.70 to 1.16).”

In other words, a greater percentage of placebo recipients required hospitalization or observation in an emergency department than those who received Ivermectin.

The authors of the study broke it down by subgroups here:

As is demonstrated in nearly every subgroup, the Ivermectin recipients fared better than those who received the placebo.

However, these data were not statistically significant given the size of the study.

This is how the authors were able to conclude there was no benefit to ivermectin use in preventing hospitalization in high-risk patients in their study.

Patients were under-dosed, some didn’t follow instructions

As it stands, the study The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal declared as proof of the uselessness of ivermectin in treating COVID-19 is actually quite promising —  contrary to what their headlines told readers.

The dosing protocol advised by the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) includes a five-day course of ivermectin at 600 micrograms per kilogram of body weight for people with risk factors such as those possessed by participants in the study.

Instead, the investigators behind the NEJM study chose a much lower dose, 400mcg per day for only three days. This represents less than half of the total dose that has been shown to be effective in practice.

Furthermore, despite acknowledging that studies have shown some indication that the bioavailability of ivermectin increases when taken with food, especially a fatty meal, participants in the trial were instructed to take the medicine on an empty stomach.

In other words, the patients were significantly under-dosed — and yet a positive effect of the drug was emerging, though not statistically significant given the size of the study.

Also of note, the investigators chose to include emergency room visits with hospitalizations for COVID. Clearly, six hours of observation in an ER is a significantly different outcome than a hospitalization that may last a night or much longer.

When excluding the ER visits from the primary outcome and examining only hospitalizations, the ivermectin cohort had even less risk of an outcome, i.e. the relative risk was 0.84 vs 0.9 when ER visits and hospitalization were grouped together.

Perhaps the most glaring deficiency of the study is the low number of placebo recipients who actually followed the study’s protocol:

Only 288 of 679 participants randomized to receiving the placebo reported 100% adherence to the study protocol. Nearly 400 didn’t.

Why not? We asked Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist and member of the Children’s Health Defense scientific advisory committee.

Nass told The Defender :

“Presumably they knew the difference between ivermectin and placebo, and the placebo subjects went out and bought ivermectin or something else … but whatever they did, they didn’t bother with the pills they were given.

“So, it was not actually a double-blinded trial. Yet the 391 people who didn’t take the placebo but did something else were included in two of the three calculations of ivermectin efficacy anyway.”

So, was this the definitive answer proclaimed by mainstream sources? Nass thinks otherwise:

“I would say that instead, it was a failed trial due to the 391 placebo recipients who admitted they did not follow protocol versus the 55 in the ivermectin arm.”

More questions than answers

Rather than pounding the final nail in the coffin around ivermectin’s utility in treating COVID, the NEJM study raises more questions.

  • What would the effect have been if a higher dose shown to be effective were administered?
  • What would be the benefit of this medicine in patients with no risk factors?
  • How statistically significant would the results have been if more participants were enrolled?
  • Why weren’t more participants enrolled as the study progressed given the emerging benefit of the drug and the absence of adverse events?
  • Why did the investigators define a primary outcome with such different real-world implications (ER visits vs hospitalizations)?
  • With less than 50% of the placebo arm adhering to the study protocol, why were their outcomes included in the analysis?
  • What effect did vaccination status have on outcome? If this is the primary means endorsed to prevent hospitalization, why wasn’t vaccination status mentioned as a confounder?
  • Did the investigators choose to limit the study as it became clear that an Ivermectin benefit would be too big to ignore?

Given these obvious issues with the study, it is becoming even more clear where the real story is: Neither The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times are willing to pursue startling details around how corporate interests are corrupting scientific opinion as reported here.

Instead, these iconic journals chose to report on a scientific study on or prior to the day of publication using misleading headlines backed up by flimsy investigations conducted by journalists with no capacity to dissect the analysis or data.

Here’s a bigger question: Are they incompetent, or complicit, too?

© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.

April 1, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

WSJ Misleads Public on Ivermectin, Ignores Latest Revelations About ‘Hidden Author’ Who Undermined Its Efficacy

By Madhava Setty, M.D. | The Defender | March 30, 2022

New revelations surfaced this month around the suppression of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19.

The Frontline Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) Community on March 8 lauded  Phil Harper, a documentary director and producer, for his efforts to identify the unnamed individual responsible for influencing leading expert opinion on the safety and efficacy of ivermectin in treating COVID early in 2021.

The actions of this hidden hand resulted in the systematic and tragic dismissal of a powerful remedy that could have saved millions of lives across the world.

Before we dig deeper into Harper’s discovery, let’s look at the latest attempt by a mainstream media outlet to discredit ivermectin’s utility in treating COVID.

The Wall Street Journal misleads the public

The Wall Street Journal on March 18 published an article with this headline: “Ivermectin Didn’t Reduce Covid-19 Hospitalizations in Largest Trial to Date.”

Headline readers will easily reach the seemingly obvious conclusion: Drs. Anthony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky, along with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were right all along.

However, for those who read beyond the headline and first few paragraphs, the story begins to morph.

The headline clearly states the trial in question was the largest to date. However, this is not the case — as the article’s author, Sarah Toy, explains early in the piece:

“The latest trial, of nearly 1,400 Covid-19 patients at risk of severe disease, is the largest to show that those who received ivermectin as a treatment didn’t fare better than those who received a placebo.”

This wasn’t the largest trial to date — it was only the largest trial to date among the subset of trials that have shown no benefit of ivermectin.

Was this an oversight? Or was it a deliberate attempt to confuse the 42 million readers of The Wall Street Journal’s digital content?

Putting aside the possible intention to mislead, it is impossible for a study to definitively prove that no effect exists. This is what is referred to in science as the null hypothesis, meaning an intervention has no effect.

It is entirely possible that a study may demonstrate no measurable effect. It is quite a different thing to prove that that same intervention will not have an effect under any circumstances.

To put it flatly, one cannot prove that something doesn’t exist.

Toy chose not to mention the 81 separate studies — involving a combined 128,000 participants — that demonstrated an average efficacy of 65% for several different outcomes.

She also did not mention the 22 studies — involving nearly 40,000 people — around the outcome in question, hospitalization. Those studies showed an average efficacy of 39%.

The Wall Street Journal did not cite the study that was the focus of its article, because the study hasn’t yet been published. Yet Toy assured readers the study has been “accepted for publication in a major peer-reviewed medical journal.”

With no paper to cite, the journal instead quoted Edward Mills, one of the study’s lead researchers and a professor of health sciences at Canada’s McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario:

“There was no indication that ivermectin is clinically useful.”

Of note, all participants in this prospective study were drawn from one of 12 clinics in the Minas Gerais region of Brazil. All were at risk for severe disease due to underlying comorbidities.

The dosing regimen was unspecified and COVID diagnosis was made through rapid testing only.

The real story behind ivermectin and COVID-19

The Wall Street Journal article is yet another widely read piece that cherry-picks studies that purportedly show no benefit while categorically ignoring the mounting evidence to the contrary.

The systematic suppression of ivermectin’s efficacy against COVID has been well documented by The Defender here, and in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s New York Times bestselling book, “The Real Anthony Fauci.”

However, as mentioned at the outset of this article, FLCCC this month shed more light on the mystery behind Dr. Andrew Hill’s stunning decision early in 2021 to recommend that more research would be required to support the use of ivermectin to treat COVID patients — despite the enormous amount of data suggesting otherwise.

It was Hill’s so-called systematic review that effectively scuttled the World Health Organization’s (WHO) acceptance of ivermectin as a potent COVID remedy.

Other governing medical bodies, including the NIH, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency immediately fell in line behind the WHO’s stance.

Hill had been a strong advocate for ivermectin in the closing months of 2020. In October 2020, he was tasked by the WHO to present the findings on ivermectin.

Hill, Dr. Tess Lawrie, director of The Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy, Ltd. and other researchers were collaborating to publish their findings in early 2021. Those findings would definitively conclude that ivermectin could and should be used to treat COVID at all stages of the disease.

On Jan. 18, 2021, days before the planned publication of this joint effort, Hill chose to independently release his findings on preprint servers. He concluded the opposite of what he and others had found through their research:

“Ivermectin should be validated in larger appropriately controlled randomized trials before the results are sufficient for review by regulatory authorities.”

His shocking reversal of opinion drew immediate consternation from members of FLCCC and Lawrie. Soon after Hill released his paper, he spoke with Lawrie in a recorded zoom meeting that raised more questions.

Oracle Films released an informative and succinct video that contextualizes the pivotal conversation between Hill and Lawrie.

When Lawrie confronted a squirming Hill, Hill eventually admitted the conclusions in his analysis had been influenced by Unitaid, a quasi-governmental advocacy organization funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and several countries — France, the UK, Norway, Brazil, Spain, the Republic of Korea and Chile — to lobby governments to finance the purchase of medicines from pharmaceutical multinationals for distribution to the African poor.

As Kennedy, chairman and chief legal counsel for Children’s Health Defense, writes in his book:

“Unitaid gave $40 million to Andrew Hill’s employer, the University of Liverpool, four days before the publication of Hill’s study. Hill, a Ph.D., confessed that the sponsors were pressuring him to influence his conclusion.

“When Dr. Lawrie asked who was trying to influence him, Hill said, ‘I mean, I, I think I’m in a very sensitive position here …’”

Who was the Unitaid member who impelled Hill to change his tune?

Thanks to the sleuthing by Phil Harper, producer, director and author of a Substack newsletter under the moniker “The Digger,” we may have an answer.

The hidden hand that muzzled ivermectin

Harper explained his remarkable discovery, writing:

“Sometimes information can be sitting right underneath your nose. Many suspected that ‘persons unknown’ had altered the paper, but we didn’t know who. Who are these people who nudge science into profitable shapes?!”

In another Substack article, Harper explained how he was able to identify crucial changes made in the days prior to the study’s distribution by comparing it to a previous version that was emailed to Lawrie. This original version was not made public.

The changes were subtle but clearly designed to weaken the conclusions of the analysis. Even more suspicious was the deletion of Unitaid’s financial contribution in the form of an “unrestricted research grant” from the funding declaration portion of the paper.

By examining the metadata attached to the PDF document Hill submitted to several preprint servers, Harper discovered that the author (as indicated in the metadata) of the paper was Andrew Owen, a professor of pharmacology & therapeutics and co-director of the Centre of Excellence in Long-acting Therapeutics (CELT) at the University of Liverpool.

Harper continues:

“His authorship is tied programmatically to the document, meaning a device or software programme registered to the name Andrew Owen saved off the document as a PDF.  When exporting a PDF, Microsoft Word automatically adds title and author information.

“Unless someone used his computer, Andrew Owen has his digital fingerprint on the Andrew Hill paper. A paper we have very strong reason to believe was altered by ‘people’ at Unitaid.”

Owen is also a scientific advisor to the WHO’s COVID-19 Guideline Development Group. Just days before Hill’s original paper was to be published, a $40 million grant from Unitaid, the paper’s sponsor, was given to CELT. Owen is the project lead for that grant.

According to Harper:

“The $40 million contract was actually a commercial agreement between Unitaid, the University of Liverpool and Tandem Nano Ltd (a start-up company that commercializes ‘Solid Lipid Nanoparticle’ delivery mechanisms) — for which Andrew Owen is a top shareholder.”

Owen is not listed as an author of the analysis, yet his digital fingerprint is on its last-minute revisions.

Instead, Hill listed all the authors of the studies that his systematic review was critiquing as co-authors of the review itself. This is a striking departure from standards of a systematic review, as it undermines the purpose and objectivity of such an analysis.

Conclusion

It is difficult to summarize this situation without diluting the impact of what has been presented here.

Mainstream media sources such as The Wall Street Journal continue to publish unbalanced and poorly researched articles while enormous stories are unfolding behind the wall of corporate-funded propaganda.

Hill’s own opinion, when untrammeled by hidden influence, suggested 75% of COVID deaths could have been prevented by using ivermectin as treatment.

The “hidden hands” of profit-driven operatives are taking an enormous toll on humanity through their manipulation of public and scientific opinion.

In the end, the public must decide when enough is finally enough.

© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.

March 31, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | 1 Comment

WSJ ‘investigation’ of aggregator that dared include RT scares other members into ditching the network

By Helen Buyniski | RT | October 8, 2020

After social media censorship failed to zero out RT’s web traffic, an establishment US media outlet has revealed it reached out to sites in the same link-exchange network as RT, spooking them into backing out.

The Wall Street Journal has launched an investigation into a link aggregator that includes RT.com, publishing the names of participants and the network itself in an effort to shame them into kicking the site off, in a hit piece on Wednesday. If this thinly-veiled intimidation is the behavior of a democratic country’s media, one shudders to imagine what an authoritarian nation might have done.

RealClearPolitics – a mostly-nonpartisan site that reports poll results and political news – is held up as an example, guilty of wrongthink through its association with Mixi.Media, a web-ring that links to headlines from news sites of various political persuasions (including RT) at the bottom of partners’ webpages. Mixi doesn’t show the source of the headlines right away, no matter where they come from, which –in the eyes of the Journal– proves it’s up to something nefarious.

The pearl-clutching pseudo-exposé made it clear that even unwitting association with RT is beyond the pale in this paranoid day and age. “If [readers] see RT, they are going to freak out,” Mixi founder Alex Baron is quoted as saying. Asked whether he agrees with RT’s “politics,” he answers in the negative, of course. However, the implication is made that he’s a Kremlin agent at heart through his past association with a Russian private equity firm – never mind that he’s suing that firm after being fired in 2018. Merely working for a company owned by a Russian executive initiates an irrevocable cootie-transfer.

The Journal doesn’t illustrate exactly how they approached the web-ring participants for the piece, but at least five sites were sufficiently intimidated –including The Blaze, Newser, and AccuWeather– that they fled Mixi’s network after being asked about the Russian intruder in their midst. Presumably the dialogue went something like “Gee, that’s a nice news outlet you’ve got there, sure would be a shame if it got shut down for Russian collusion.”

If that sounds like an exaggeration, one need only refer to the New York Times’ warning that merely reporting a story RT has covered is actually “sowing discord” and “creating division.” As far back as 2016, the Washington Post was accusing US-based, US-run alt-media websites of being Russian “useful idiots” merely for disdaining to go along with Washington’s neoliberal warmongering agenda, laundering its smears through the anonymous Ukrainian front “PropOrNot.”

The WSJ’s “don’t click that link – there might be Russians in it” scare story is just the latest in a long string of efforts to pressure friendly networks into giving RT the cold shoulder. The same outlet bemoaned RT’s seeming invincibility to TV censorship back in January 2017 as part of a multi-pronged media blitz ginned up by the US intelligence community’s attempt to implicate RT in “meddling” in the 2016 election – an allegation that has never been remotely substantiated yet has become part of the narrative wallpaper for the American establishment, assumed to be true even in the absence of evidence.

The dubious allegations of hacking the Democratic National Committee were followed by a lengthy screed against programs RT no longer even aired – but that was enough for the New York Times and other “papers of record” to pile on a competitor they didn’t know they had, treating the uninspired smear like a smoking gun. Breaking precedent set by other state-owned foreign media, the Justice Department forced RT to register as a “foreign agent.” The designation was subsequently held up, bizarrely, as “proof” it was foreign propaganda, as officials insisted it was voluntary, even though the network was threatened with criminal charges if it refused.

And the UK Sunday Times pulled a similar stunt to the WSJ’s back in 2017, phoning up RT’s British advertisers – many of whom were spooked by the probing questions into pulling their ads – and misrepresenting their vanishing act as motivated by the channel’s “propaganda and fake news.”

Efforts to sideline RT have only increased since then, with first YouTube and more recently Facebook and Twitter labeling it as state-run foreign media and burying its content. WSJ’s report glossed over the obvious follow-on effect from such a move, crowing gleefully that social media traffic to the site dropped 22 percent from 2018 to July and web traffic in general dropped 14 percent.

But until it drops to zero, the US’ propaganda mill will never be satisfied. Having coasted for decades with a virtual monopoly on viewers’ eyeballs, its quality declined accordingly, and the rise of the internet saw Americans hungrily lapping up any alternative source of information. When they’re presented with the sight of rioters burning businesses, bibles, or people and told these are peaceful democratic protesters who must be supported, they recoil not because they are propagandized by RT or some other outlet, but because they’re aware they’re being lied to.

With the 2020 election looming on the horizon, social media platforms and news outlets alike are renewing their fatwa against all things Russian. That reliable “enemy” ensures they will never have to answer for the many holes in their own one-sided coverage, the flagrant falsehoods regularly passed off as gospel, and the unrelenting fear porn that keeps too many Americans glued to their TV set. Heaven forbid they change the channel – they might trip over the truth.

Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23

October 8, 2020 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , | 1 Comment

Washington’s tall tale of Iranian-Al Qaeda alliance based on questionably sourced book ‘The Exile’

A disinformation campaign aimed to justify the assassination of Qassem Soleimani by painting him and Iran as willing enablers of al-Qaeda. The propaganda operation relied heavily on a shoddily sourced book, “The Exile.”

By Gareth Porter | The Grayzone | May 19, 2020

The U.S. assassination of Qassem Soleimani in January touched off a new wave of disinformation about the top Iranian major general, with Trump administration allies branding him a global terrorist while painting Iran as the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism. Much of the propaganda about Soleimani related to his alleged responsibility for the killing of American troops in Iraq, along with Iran’s role in Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen.

But a second theme in the disinformation campaign, which has been picked up by mainstream outlets like the Wall Street Journal and National Public Radio, was the claim that Soleimani deliberately unleashed al-Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s campaign to kill Shiites in Iraq. That element of the propaganda offensive was the result of the 2017 publication of “The Exile,” a book by British journalists Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, which spun a new version of the familiar U.S. propaganda line of a supposed Iranian terror alliance with al-Qaeda.

Levy and Scott-Clark introduced the theme of secret collusion between the two open adversaries with an article in the The Sunday Times in early 2018, dramatically entitled “Tehran in devil’s pact to rebuild al‑Qaeda.” Soleimani, they claimed, “first offered sanctuary to bin Laden’s family and al-Qaeda military leaders,” then proceeded to “build them a residential compound at the heart of a military training center in Tehran.”

But those two sentences represented a grotesque distortion of Iran’s policy toward the al-Qaeda personnel fleeing from Afghanistan into Iran. Virtually every piece of concrete evidence, including an internal al-Qaeda document written in 2007, showed that Iran agreed to take in a group of al-Qaeda refugees with legal passports that included members of bin Laden’s family and some fighters and middle- and lower-ranking military cadres – but not Zarqawi and other al-Qaeda military leaders — and only temporarily and under strict rules forbidding political activity.

The crucial fact that Levy and Scott-Clark conveniently failed to mention, moreover, was that Iranian officials were well aware that al-Qaeda’s leadership figures, including military commanders and with their troops, were also slipping into Iran from Afghanistan, but Iranian security forces had not yet located them.

Keeping the legal arrivals under closer surveillance and watching for any contacts with those illegally in the country, therefore, was a prudent policy for Iranian security under the circumstances.

In addition, having bin Laden’s family and other al-Qaeda cadres under their surveillance gave Iran potential bargaining chips it could use to counter hostile actions by both al-Qaeda and the United States.

Al-Qaeda documents undermine narrative of cooperation with Iran

Careful study of the enormous cache of internal al-Qaeda documents released by the U.S. government in 2017 further discredited the tall tale of Iranian facilitation of al-Qaeda terrorism.

Nelly Lahoud, a senior fellow at the New American Foundation and former senior research associate at the West Point Combating Terrorism Center, translated and analyzed 303 of the newly available documents and found nothing indicating Iranian cooperation with, or even knowledge about the whereabouts of Zarqawi or other al-Qaeda military leaders prior to their detentions of April 2003.

Lahoud explained in a September 2018 lecture that all actions by al-Qaeda operatives in Iran had been “conducted in a clandestine manner.” She even discovered from one of the documents that al-Qaeda had considered the clandestine presence of those officials and fighters so dangerous that they had been instructed on how to commit suicide if they were caught by the Iranians.

Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark were well aware that those al-Qaeda operatives living in Tehran’s military training center were under severe constraints, akin to a prison.  Meanwhile, senior figures like Zarqawi and Saif al-Adel, the head of the al-Qaeda shura council, were far away from Tehran, planning new operations in the region amid friendly Sunni contacts. These plans included Zarqawi’s campaign Iraq, which he began organizing in early 2002.

Nevertheless the authors declared, “From [the Iranian training center], al-Qaeda organized, trained and established funding networks with the help of Iran, co-ordinated multiple terrorist atrocities and supported the bloodbath against Shi’ites by al-Qaeda in Iraq….”

Anti-Iran think tanker Sadjadpour jumps on the conspiracy bandwagon

Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a reliable fount of anti-Iran spin, responded within days of the Soleimani assassination with an article in the Wall Street Journal’s right-wing editorial section that reinforced the budding disinformation campaign.

Entitled “The Sinister Genius of Qassem Soleimani,” Sadjadpour’s op-ed argued that in March 2003, before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, “Soleimani’s Quds Force freed many Sunni jihadists that Iran had been holding captive, unleashing them against the U.S.” He cited “The Exile” as his source.

Levy and Scott-Clark did indeed spin a tale in the book of Zarqawi’s troops — and Zarqawi himself — being rounded up and locked to the same prison as those al-Qaeda members who entered with passports in March 2003. The authors claimed they were released within days. But the only sources they cite to support their claims were two people they interviewed in Amman, Jordan in 2016.

So who were these insider sources? The only identifying characteristics Levy and Scott-Clark offer is that they were “in Zarqawi’s group at the time.” Furthermore, neither of these sources is quoted to substantiate the claim that Zarqawi was arrested and then released from prison, and they are mentioned only in a footnote on the number of Zarqawi’s troops that had been sent to the prison.

Sadjadpour offered his own explanation — without the slightest suggestion of any evidence to support it — of why Soleimani would support an anti-Shiite jihadist to kill his own Iraqi Shiite allies. “By targeting Shiite shrines and civilians, killing thousands of Iran’s fellow Shiites,” he wrote, “Zarqawi helped to radicalize Iraq’s Shiite majority and pushed them closer to Iran—and to Soleimani, who could offer them protection.”

In late January, on National Public Radio’s weekly program “Throughline,” Sadjadpour pushed his dubiously sourced argument, opining that Soleimani had figured out how to “use the al Qaeda jihadists of Zarqawi … to simply unleash them into Iraq with the understanding that you guys do what you do.”

The BBC promotes “The Exile” as the book’s narrative crumbles

In a BBC radio documentary broadcasted in late April, titled “Iran’s Long Game” (an allusion to Iran’s alleged long-term plan for domination of the entire Middle East), Cathy Scott-Clark told a story intended to clinch the case that Iran had helped Zarqawi: Other prisoners “heard conversations in the corridors” in which Iranian authorities allegedly assured Zarqawi, “You can do whatever you want to do … in Iraq.”

That story does not appear in her book, however. Instead, Adrian Levy and Scott-Clark related a comment by Abu Hafs al-Mauritani, a spiritual adviser to bin Laden, on hearing about the arrest and subsequent release of Zarqawi from another prisoner who eavesdropped by tapping the pipes leading into his room.

That narrative had already been definitively contradicted long before, however, in an account provided by Saif al-Adl, the most senior member of the al-Qaeda top leadership in Iran. Al-Adl had fled with Zarqawi from Afghanistan across the border into Iran illegally in late 2001 or early 2002 and was apprehended in April 2003 — weeks after the alleged events portrayed in al-Mauritani’s story.

In a memoir smuggled out of Iran to Jordanian journalist Fouad Hussein, which Husayn published in 2005 in an Arabic-language book (but available online in an English-language translation), Saif al-Adl described an Iranian crackdown in March 2003 that captured 80 percent of Zarqawi’s fighters and “confused us and aborted 75 percent of our plan”.

Because of that round-up, al-Adl wrote, “[T]here was a need for the departure of Abu-Mus’ab and the brothers who remained free.” Al-Adl described his final meeting with Zarqawi before his departure, confirming that Zarqawi had not been caught prior to his own apprehension on April 23, 2003.

Levy and Scott-Clark cited Saif al-Adl’s memoir on other matters in “The Exile,” but when this writer queried Scott-Clark about al-Adl’s testimony – which contradicted the narrative that underpinned her book – Scott-Clark responded, “I know Fuad Hussein well. Most of his information is third hand and not well sourced.”

She did not address the substance of al-Adl’s recollections about Zarqawi, however. When asked in a follow-up email whether she challenged the authenticity of Saif al-Adl’s testimony, Scott-Clark did not respond.

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist who has covered national security policy since 2005 and was the recipient of Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012.  His most recent book is The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, just published in February.

May 20, 2020 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | 1 Comment