Tag Archives: corporate media

WikiLeaks and whistleblowers condemn new allegations against Julian Assange

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By James Cogan

Source: WSWS.org

WikiLeaks has announced it will sue the British Guardian over the scurrilous allegations it made on May 15 that Julian Assange “hacked” the communication system of the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he has been confined since he sought political asylum in June 2012.

The only and obvious motive behind the unsubstantiated, “anonymous” allegations is to provide the Ecuadorian government with a pretext to renege on Assange’s asylum and force him out of the embassy. Upon doing so, he would be arrested by waiting British police for breaching bail conditions. Once in British custody, the WikiLeaks editor would face the prospect of extradition to the US to stand trial on charges of espionage, which could lead to his protracted imprisonment or, potentially, even his execution (see: “Conspiracy emerges to push Julian Assange into British and US hands”).

In a tweet issued shortly after the publication of the Guardian articles, WikiLeaks denounced the assertions as an “anonymous libel” made on behalf of the “current UK-US government onslaught against Mr Assange’s asylum—while he can’t respond. You’ve gone too far this time. We’re suing.”

Assange cannot respond because on March 28, more than seven weeks ago, the Ecuadorian government of President Lenín Moreno cut off all his communications with the outside world and has blocked him from even receiving visitors. Ample indications exist that Ecuador did so on the demand of Washington, as part of the price for improved relations with the US.

WikiLeaks ended its tweet with a link to the scathing review that Assange wrote of the Guardian-published 2014 book, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man. The author of the book was Luke Harding, the same Guardian journalist who co-wrote the May 15 attack on Assange and WikiLeaks.

In the first sentence of his review, Assange described Harding’s work as a “hack job in the purest sense of the word” and more than substantiated that characterisation. He condemned the Guardian for having “caved to government pressure” over the publication of leaked material and for leaving Edward Snowden “in the lurch” when the NSA whistleblower fled to Hong Kong in June 2013. It was a representative of WikiLeaks who organised for Snowden to escape to Russia, where he was eventually granted political asylum.

Harding and the Guardian did not have credibility in 2014 and they do not today.

Beside WikiLeaks and the World Socialist Web Site, only a handful of other websites and individuals have stepped forward to denounce the Guardian for serving as the conduit for the anti-Assange vendetta of the US government and intelligence agencies. In the main, there is a complicit silence on the part of the pro-imperialist establishment media and no less pro-imperialist pseudo-left organisations.

Former British whistleblower Craig Murray, who has vocally defended Assange from the outset, wrote on his blog yesterday that the Guardian articles included “outright lies.” Murray exposed, for example, the false claim by the newspaper that Sweden was “unable to question Assange” over allegations he may have committed sexual offences in 2010. The reprehensible attempt to slander Assange as a “rapist” has been relentlessly used to try and undermine the immense international support for WikiLeaks and its editor.

In fact, Assange was questioned before he left Sweden for Britain and a prosecutor deemed he had no case to answer. A second prosecutor, however, reopened the case and pursued it aggressively, gaining an arrest warrant to force Assange to return to Sweden to answer “questions.” The warrant was issued under conditions in which US and allied governments were baying for Assange’s blood because WikiLeaks had published vast amounts of damning evidence of war crimes and intrigues that had been courageously leaked by then Private Bradley [now Chelsea] Manning.

Assange correctly refused to submit to the politically-motivated warrant and challenged it in the British courts. He sought asylum in June 2012 only when his legal avenues ran out to prevent his extradition to Sweden, and likely rendition on to the US.

When Swedish authorities finally agreed to Assange’s longstanding offer to answer any questions, from Britain, he was interviewed by prosecutors and police for two days in November 2016. In May 2017, Sweden completely dropped the case. After more than six years of persecution, Assange was never charged with any crime.

Craig Murray characterised the May 15 Guardian articles as a “new low… in a collaboration between long term MI6 mouthpiece Luke Harding and the CIA financed neo-con propagandists of Focus Ecuador”—the right-wing Spanish-language site which was also provided the “anonymous” information that Assange “hacked” the embassy.

Murray opined: “I would bet any money that these anonymous ‘sources’ are as always Harding’s mates in the British security services.”

The Intercept website featured today an interview conducted by Glenn Greenwald, its editor and former whistleblower, with previous Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, whose administration granted Assange asylum in 2012.

Correa denounced his protégé and successor Lenín Moreno for cutting off Assange’s communications and visitors, labelling it as “basically torture and “a clear violation of his rights.” He declared the Ecuadorian government “is attacking Julian’s mental health.” He reviewed the closer relations between Moreno’s administration and Washington that had been developed immediately prior to the attack on Assange

Correa stated that the Guardian allegations that Assange hacked the embassy were “absurd” and that it had “presented no evidence for this, just an anonymous source.”

The ex-president stated that if Moreno allowed the WikiLeaks’ editor to be forced out of the London embassy without an iron-clad guarantee he would not be extradited to the US, it would be a “terrible betrayal, a violation of the rules of asylum and a breach of Ecuador’s responsibility to protect the safety and welfare of Julian Assange.”

The almost universal hostility towards Assange and indifference to his fate on the part of the establishment press and self-styled “left” is in stark contrast to mass popular sentiment. On Facebook, Twitter and other social media, every defence of Assange is being responded to with a stream of supportive comments, retweets and shares, and sharp and informed rebuttals of all those who attempt to attack Assange and WikiLeaks with pro-state propaganda and lies.

The social force that must be politically mobilised in defence of democratic rights is the international working class. It must be alerted and educated as to the tremendous dangers posed by the steadily escalating efforts to censor the Internet, suppress free speech and railroad whistleblowers and principled journalists like Julian Assange into prison or worse.

 

The author also recommends:

Ecuador hints it may hand over Julian Assange to Britain and the US
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Freedom for Julian Assange!
[11 January 2018]

Social Media Behemoths Sweep Alternative News into the Memory Hole

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By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Another Day in the Empire

The squabbling between self-identified progressives and conservatives continues as social media transforms itself into a news, information, and opinion gatekeeper.

All information that contradicts the establishment narrative will either be downgraded into obscurity or excluded outright on social media.

Take for instance ThinkProgress, the Soros-financed news website, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund welded to the infrastructure of the Democrat party. On May 2, it complained that a bias study at Facebook will be run by conservatives, that is to say establishment Republicans, notably former Arizona Congress critter Jon Kyl.

ThinkProgress believes there is no such thing as bias aimed at conservatives—it’s the liberals who are routinely downgraded at Facebook while so-called conservatives are free to post what progressives characterize as an evil and poisonous ideology.

According to Libby Watson at Splinter News, conservatives are involved in “grift,” flimflamming poor Mark Zuckerberg with untrue claims of bias against the likes of Breitbart News.

It’s all part of a never ending and hugely counterproductive “culture war” that has raged between the ostensible right and left going on thirty years now. Ms. Watson manages to squeeze identity politics into her screed.

“The conservative movement has done a remarkable job over the last half century to bellow and bully its way into having its most ridiculous and reality-divorced concerns taken seriously,” she writes. “It lies about and distorts everything: about tax cuts, about Benghazi and her emails, about immigration, about healthcare, about Diamond and Silk. The further Facebook descends down the path of letting that screaming white face of faux outrage dictate how they run their platform, the harder it’s going to be for them to get away from them.”

The progressive news website Common Dreams complains it has weathered “significant drops in traffic since Google and Facebook began changing algorithms and talking openly about their new attempts to control the kind of news content users see. According to internal data and Google Analytics, traffic to Common Dreams from Google searches fell by 34 percent after the powerful search giant unveiled its new search protocol in April 2017.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the yawning divide, Brent Bozell, founder of the Media Research Center, rallied around 60 conservatives and fired off an open letter to the social media giants demanding transparency, clarity on the definition of hate speech, equality for conservatives, and respect for the First Amendment.

“Social media censorship and online restriction of conservatives and their organizations have reached a crisis level,” the open letter states. “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s hearings on Capitol Hill only served to draw attention to how widespread this problem has become. Conservative leaders now have banded together to call for equal treatment on tech and social media.”

Both liberals and conservatives are missing the point.

Facebook and Google will continue and enlarge the effort to gatekeep information that does not jive with the establishment narrative, be it from the right or left.

The internet and web upended the establishment’s carefully constructed propaganda machine—the CIA’s “Mighty Wurlitzer” under its Operation Mockingbird beginning in the early 1950s—deeply embedded within corporate media.

Beginning with Friendster, MySpace, and like projects in the early 2000s and eventually morphing into the corporate behemoths Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, social media platforms have extended the reach of alternative media, much to the displeasure of the establishment. Its preferred propaganda conduits have withered and this has seriously hampered its ability to control the narrative.

Both the right and left need to nurture their own social media platforms and drive traffic there.

Of course, this will not be as effective as plugging into the massive matrix of social connectivity provided by the corporate tech giants, but the alternative is to be marginalized and eventually swept into the memory hole as the context of “extremism” narrows and constricts expression, excluding all but the most token disagreement with the establishment narrative.

However, I’m not sure we’re up to it.

The elite has done a remarkable job of using the time tested divide and conquer concept, endlessly pitting the so-called right against the amorphously defined left and vice versa. Liberals and conservatives continue to fight over frivolous ideological points as the funny money asset-driven economy prepares to implode and the mission of infinity war expands to the point where it endangers life on planet Earth.

US Collapse – the Spectacle of Our Time

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By Finnian Cunningham

Source: Axis of Logic

May you live in interesting times, goes the Chinese proverb. Few can doubt that we are indeed living in such an interesting time. Big changes are afoot in the world, it seems.

None more so than the collapsing of the American Empire.

The US is going through an historic “correction” in the same way that the Soviet Union did some 30 years ago when the latter was confronted with the reality of its unsustainable political and economic system. (That’s not meant to imply, however, that socialism is unviable, because arguably the Soviet Union had fatally strayed from its genuine socialist project into something more akin to unwieldy state capitalism.)

In any case, all empires come to an end eventually. History is littered with the debris of countless empires. Why should the American Empire be any different? It’s not. Only arrogant “American exceptionalism” deludes itself from the reality.

The notable thing is just how in denial the political class and the US news media are about the unfolding American crisis.

This is partly where the whole “Russiagate” narrative comes into play. Blaming Russia for allegedly destabilizing US politics and society is a cover for denial over the internal rot facing the US.

Some may scoff at the very idea of an “American Empire”. That’s something Europeans did, not us, goes the apologist for US power. The quick retort to that view is to point out that the US has over 1,000 military bases in more than 100 countries around the world. If that is not a manifestation of empire then what is?

For seven decades since the Second World War, “Pax Americana” was the grandiose name given to US imperial design for the global order. The period was far from peaceful as the vainglorious name suggests. Dozens of wars, proxy conflicts and violent subversions were carried by the US on every continent in order to maintain its empire. The so-called “global policeman” was more often a “global thug”.

That US empire is now teetering at the cusp of an emerging multipolar world order led by China, Russia and other rising powers.

When US leaders complain about China and Russia “reshaping the global order” to reflect their interests what the American leaders are tacitly admitting is the coming end of Washington’s presumed hegemony.

Rather than accepting the fate of demise, the US is aggressively resisting by denigrating China and Russia’s power as somehow illegitimate. It’s the classic denial reaction of a sore loser.

So, what are the telltale signs that the US is indeed undergoing a seminal “correction” — or collapse?

The heyday of American capitalism is well passed. The once awesome productive system is a skeleton of its former self. The rise of massive social poverty alongside obscene wealth among a tiny elite is a sure sign that the once mighty American economy is chronically moribund. The country’s soaring $20 trillion national debt is another symptom of chronic atrophy.

Recent self-congratulatory whooping by President Trump of “economic recovery” is like the joy felt from looking at a mirage. The roaring stock market is an elite phenomenon which can just as easily slump over night.
What the champagne bubbles can’t disguise is the structural failing of US capitalism to reverse exploding inequality and endemic poverty across America. The national prowess of US capitalism has been superseded by global capitalism where American corporations among others scour the planet for cheap labor and tax havens. There is no going back to a supposed golden age, no matter how much Trump crows about “America First”.

The other side of the coin from historic US economic demise is the concomitant rise in its militarism as a way to compensate for its overall loss of power.

It is no coincidence that since the end of the Cold War following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, US military interventions around the world have erupted with increased frequency and duration. The US is in a veritable permanent state of war actively deploying its forces simultaneously in several countries, particularly in the oil-rich Middle East.

Washington of course gives itself a fig leaf cover by calling its surge in militarism a “war on terror” or “defending allies”. But, increasingly, US war conduct is seen for what it plainly is — violation of international law and the sovereignty of nations for the pursuit of American imperial interests.

In short, the US is patently lashing out as a rogue regime. There’s no disguising that fiendish fact.

In addition to waging wars, bombing countries, sponsoring terrorist proxies and assassinating enemies at will with drones, Washington is increasingly threatening others with military aggression. In recent months, North Korea and Iran have been openly threatened based on spurious claims. Russia and China have also been explicitly warned of American aggression in several strategic documents published by the Trump administration.

The grounds for American belligerence are baseless. As noted, the real motive is to do with compensating for its own inherent political, economic and social crises. That then amounts to American leaders inciting conflicts and wars, which is in itself a grave violation of international law — a crime against peace, according to Nuremberg principles.

The American Empire is failing and flailing. This is the spectacle of our time. The Western mainstream news media are either blind, ignorant or complicit in denying the historic collapse. Such media are indulging reckless fantasies of the US political class to distract from the potential internal implosion. Casting around for scapegoats to “explain” the deep inherent problems, the political class are using Russia and alleged Russian “interference” as a pretext.

World history has reached a foreboding cross-roads due to the collapsing of the American Empire. Can we navigate a safe path forward avoiding catastrophic war that often accompanies the demise of empires?

A lot, it seems, depends on ordinary American people becoming politically organized to challenge their dysfunctional system run by and for the elites. If the American people cannot hold their elites to account and break their corrupt rule, overhauling it with something more equitable and democratic, then the world is in peril of being plunged into total war. We can only but wish our American brothers and sisters solidarity and success.

Why America’s Major News-Media Must Change Their Thinking

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

America’s ‘news’-media possess the mentality that characterizes a dictatorship, not a democracy. This will be documented in the linked-to empirical data which will be subsequently discussed. But, first, here is what will be documented by those data, and which will make sense of these data:

In a democracy, the public perceive their country to be improving, in accord with that nation’s values and priorities. Consequently, they trust their government, and especially they approve of the job-performance of their nation’s leader. In a dictatorship, they don’t. In a dictatorship, the government doesn’t really represent them, at all. It represents the rulers, typically a national oligarchy, an aristocracy of the richest 0.1% or even of only the richest 0.01%. No matter how much the government ‘represents’ the public in law (or “on paper”), it’s not representing them in reality; and, so, the public don’t trust their government, and the public’s job-rating of their national leader, the head-of-state, is poor, perhaps even more disapproval than approval. So, whereas in a democracy, the public widely approve of both the government and the head-of-state; in a dictatorship, they don’t.

In a dictatorship, the ‘news’-media hide reality from the public, in order to serve the government — not the public. But the quality of government that the regime delivers to its public cannot be hidden as the lies continually pile up, and as the promises remain unfulfilled, and as the public find that despite all of the rosy promises, things are no better than before, or are even becoming worse. Trust in such a government falls, no matter how much the government lies and its media hide the fact that it has been lying. Though a ‘democratic’ election might not retain in power the same leaders, it retains in power the same regime (be it the richest 0.1%, or the richest 0.01%, or The Party, or whatever the dictatorship happens to be). That’s because it’s a dictatorship: it represents the same elite of power-holding insiders, no matter what. It does not represent the public. That elite — whatever it is — is referred to as the “Deep State,” and the same Deep State can control more than one country, in which case there is an empire, which nominally is headed by the head-of-state of its leading country (this used to be called an “Emperor”), but which actually consists of an alliance between the aristocracies within all these countries; and, sometimes, the nominal leading country is actually being led, in its foreign policies, by wealthier aristocrats in the supposedly vassal nations. But no empire can be a democracy, because the residents in no country want to be governed by any foreign power: the public, in every land, want their nation to be free — they want democracy, no dictatorship at all, especially no dictatorship from abroad.

In order for the elite to change, a revolution is required, even if it’s only to a different elite, instead of to a democracy. So, if there is no revolution, then certainly it’s the same dictatorship as before. The elite has changed (and this happens at least as often as generations change), but the dictatorship has not. And in order to change from a dictatorship to a democracy, a revolution also is required, but it will have to be a revolution that totally removes from power the elite (and all their agents) who had been ruling. If this elite had been the nation’s billionaires and its centi-millionaires who had also been billionaire-class donors to political campaigns (such as has been proven to be the case in the United States), then those people, who until the revolution had been behind the scenes producing the bad government, need to be dispossessed of their assets, because their assets were being used as their weapons against the public, and those weapons need (if there is to be a democracy) to be transferred to the public as represented by the new and authentically democratic government. If instead the elite had been a party, then all of those individuals need to be banned from every sort of political activity in the future. But, in either case, there will need to be a new constitution, and a consequent new body of laws, because the old order (the dictatorship) no longer reigns — it’s no longer in force after a revolution. That’s what “revolution” means. It doesn’t necessarily mean “democratic,” but sometimes it does produce a democracy where there wasn’t one before. The idea that every revolution is democratic is ridiculous, though it’s often assumed in ‘news’-reports. In fact, coups (which the U.S. Government specializes in like no other) often are a revolution that replaces a democracy by a dictatorship (such as the U.S. Government did to Ukraine in 2014, for example, and most famously before that, did to Iran in 1953). (Any country that perpetrates a coup anywhere is a dictatorship over the residents there, just the same as is the case when any invasion and occupation of a country are perpetrated upon a country. The imposed stooges are stooges, just the same. No country that imposes coups and/or invasions/occupations upon any government that has not posed an existential threat against the residents of that perpetrating country, supports democracy; to the exact contrary, that country unjustifiably imposes dictatorships; it spreads its own dictatorship, which is of the imperialistic type, and any government that spreads its dictatorship is evil and needs to be replaced — revolution is certainly justified there.)

This is how to identify which countries are democracies, and which ones are not: In a democracy, the public are served by the government, and thus are experiencing improvement in their lives and consequently approve of the job-performance of their head-of-state, and they trust the government. But in a dictatorship, none of these things is true.

In 2014, a Japanese international marketing-research firm polled citizens in each of ten countries asking whether they approve or disapprove of the job-performance of their nation’s head-of-state, and Harvard then provided an English-translated version online for a few years, then eliminated that translation from its website; but, fortunately, the translation had been web-archived and so is permanent here (with no information however regarding methodology or sampling); and it shows the following percentages who approved of the job-performance of their President or other head-of-state in each of the given countries, at that time:

China (Xi)          90%

Russia (Putin)      87%

India (Modi)        86%

South Africa (Zuma) 70%

Germany (Merkel)    67%

Brazil (Roussef)    63%

U.S. (Obama)        62%

Japan (Abe)         60%

UK (Cameron)        55%

France (Hollande)   48%

In January 2018, the global PR firm Edelman came out with the latest in their annual series of scientifically polled surveys in more than two dozen countries throughout the world, tapping into, actually, some of the major criteria within each nation indicating whether or not the given nation is more toward the dictatorship model, or more toward the democracy model. The 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer survey showed that “Trust in Government” (scored and ranked on page 39) was 44% in Russia, and is only 33% in the United States. Trust in Government is the highest in China: 84%. The U.S. and Russia are the nuclear super-powers; and the U.S. and China are the two economic super-powers; so, these are the world’s three leading powers; and, on that single measure of whether or not a country is democratic, China is the global leader (#1 of 28), Russia is in the middle (#13 of 28), and U.S. ranks at the bottom of the three, and near the bottom of the entire lot (#21 of 28). (#28 of 28 is South Africa, which, thus — clearly in retrospect — had a failed revolution when it transitioned out of its apartheid dictatorship. That’s just a fact, which cannot reasonably be denied, given this extreme finding. Though the nation’s leader, Zuma, was, according to the 2014 Japanese study, widely approved by South Africans, his Government was overwhelmingly distrusted. This distrust indicates that the public don’t believe that the head-of-state actually represents the Government. If the head-of-state doesn’t represent the Government, the country cannot possibly be a democracy: the leader might represent the people, but the Government doesn’t.)

When the government is trusted but the head-of-state is not, or vice-versa, there cannot be a functioning democracy. In other words: if either the head-of-state, or the Government, is widely distrusted, there’s a dictatorship at that time, and the only real question regarding it, is: What type of dictatorship is this?

These figures — the numbers reported here — contradict the ordinary propaganda; and, so, Edelman’s trust-barometer on each nation’s ‘news’-media (which are scored and ranked on page 40) might also be considered, because the natural question now is whether unreliable news-media might have caused this counter-intuitive (in Western countries) rank-order. However, a major reason why this media-trust-question is actually of only dubious relevance to whether or not the given nation is a democracy, is that to assume that it is, presumes that trust in the government can be that easily manipulated — it actually can’t. Media and PR can’t do that; they can’t achieve it. Here is a widespread misconception: Trust in government results not from the media but from a government’s having fulfilled its promises, and from the public’s experiencing and seeing all around themselves that they clearly have been fulfilled; and lying ‘news’-media can’t cover-up that reality, which is constantly and directly being experienced by the public.

However, even if trust in the ‘news’-media isn’t really such a thing as might be commonly hypothesized regarding trust in the government, here are those Edelman findings regarding the media, for whatever they’re worth regarding the question of democracy-versus-dictatorship: Trust in Media is the highest, #1, in China, 71%; and is 42% in #15 U.S.; and is 35% in #20 Russia. (A July 2017 Marist poll however found that only 30% of Americans trust the media. That’s a stunning 12% lower than the Edelman survey found.) In other words: Chinese people experience that what they encounter in their news-media becomes borne-out in retrospect as having been true, but only half of that percentage of Russians experience this; and U.S. scores nearer to Russia than to China on this matter. (Interestingly, Turkey, which scores #7 on trust-in-government, scores #28 on trust-in-media. Evidently, Turks find that their government delivers well on its promises, but that their ‘news’-media often deceive them. A contrast this extreme within the Edelman findings is unique. Turkey is a special case, regarding this.)

I have elsewhere reported regarding other key findings in that 2018 Edelman study.

According to all of these empirical findings, the United States is clearly not more of a democracy than it is a dictatorship. This particular finding from these studies has already been overwhelmingly (and even more so) confirmed in the world’s only in-depth empirical scientific study of whether or not a given country is or is not a “democracy”: This study (the classic Gilens and Page study) found, incontrovertibly, that the U.S. is a dictatorship — specifically an aristocracy, otherwise commonly called an “oligarchy,” and that it’s specifically a dictatorship by the richest, against the public.

Consequently, whenever the U.S. Government argues that it intends to “spread democracy” (such as it claims in regards to Syria, and to Ukraine), it is most-flagrantly lying — and any ‘news’-medium that reports such a claim without documenting (such as by linking to this article) its clear and already-proven falsehood (which is more fully documented here than has yet been done anywhere, since the Gilens and Page study is here being further proven by these international data), is no real ‘news’-medium at all, but is, instead, a propaganda-vehicle for the U.S. Government, a propaganda-arm of a dictatorship — a nation that has been overwhelmingly proven to be a dictatorship, not a democracy.

How The Guardian Fulfills George Orwell’s Prediction of ‘Newspeak’

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

On Sunday April 15th, Britain’s Guardian bannered “OPCW inspectors set to investigate site of Douma chemical attack” and pretended that there was no question that a chemical attack in Douma Syria on April 7th had actually occurred, and the article then went further along that same propaganda-line, to accuse Syria’s Government of having perpetrated it. This ‘news’ story opened [and clarificatory comments from me will added in brackets]:

UN chemical weapons investigators were set on Sunday to begin examining the scene of a chemical attack in the Syrian city of Douma, which had prompted the joint US, French and British strikes against military installations and chemical weapons facilities near the capital, Damascus.

The arrival of the delegation from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) came as the Syrian military announced that it had “purified” [no source provided, but this — from 7 March 2018 — is the only source that existed prior to the April 14th missiles-invasion of Syria, and its meaning is very different: the region of eastern Ghouta, of which Douma is a part, after a two-month campaign that killed nearly 2,000 civilians [no source provided as regards either the number, or that all of them were ‘civilians’ and that none of them were jihadists or “terrorists”], following years of siege.

The propaganda-article continued directly:

“Units of our brave armed forces, and auxiliary and allied forces, completed the purification of eastern Ghouta, including all its towns and villages, of armed terrorist organisations,” the general command statement said.

No source was provided for that, but this sentence is a sly mind-manipulation, because here is what the Syrian Government’s General Command had actually said: “Statement of the Army General Command declaring Eastern Ghouta clear of terrorism” as headlined by the Syrian Government itself. In other words: the Guardian’s ‘journalist’ had substituted the word “clear” by the word “purify” and did this after having already asserted but not documented, that the Government had just completed “a two-month campaign that killed nearly 2,000 civilians.” When the Syrian Government announces that an area has been “cleared of terrorists (or of terrorism),” the US-allied propagandist uses the word “purify,” such as “purified the region of eastern Ghouta” or “the purification of eastern Ghouta, including all its towns and villages, of armed terrorist organisations.” But by the time that the reader gets there to “purification … of armed terrorist organisations,” the reader has already been indoctrinated to believe that Syria’s Government is trying to “purify” land, or perpetrate some type of ethnic-cleansing.

Later, the article asserts that, “The OPCW mission will arrive in Douma eight days after the chemical attack, and days after the area fell to the control of Russian military and Syrian government forces. That delay, along with the possibility of the tampering of evidence by the forces accused of perpetrating the attack, raises doubts about what the OPCW’s inspectors might be able to discover.” However, a fierce debate is being waged over whether this was not any real “chemical attack” but instead a staged event by the jihadists in order to draw Trump back into invading Syria. In other words: any journalistic reference yet, at this time, to the event as “the chemical attack” instead of as “the alleged chemical attack” is garbage, just as, prior to the guilty-verdict in a murder trial, no journalistic reference may legitimately be made to the defendant as “the murderer,” instead of as “the defendant.” That is lynch-mob ‘journalism’, which Joseph Goebbels championed.

The Joseph-Goebbels-following ‘journalist’ has thus opened by implying that the Russia-allied Syrian Government is trying to crush a democratic revolution, instead of the truth, that the US-allied Governments are trying to overthrow and replace the Russia-allied Syrian Government. It’s a big difference, between the lie, and the truth.

Another story in the April 15th Guardian was “Pressure grows on Russia to stop protecting Assad as US, UK and France press for inquiry into chemical weapons stockpiles” and this one pretended that the issue is for “Russia to stop protecting Assad,” who is the democratically electedand popular President of Syria, and not to stop the invasion of Syria since 2011 by US and Saudi backed foreign jihadists to overthrow him. Furthermore, as regards “press for inquiry into chemical weapons stockpiles,” the real and urgent issue right now is to allow the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) into Douma to hold an independent and authoritative investigation into the evidence there. Russia pressed for it at the U.N. Security Council and the US and its allies blocked it there. But the OPCW went anyway — even after the US-allied invasion on April 14th — and this courageous resistance by them against the US dictatorship can only be considered heroic.

That type of ‘news’-reporting is virtually universal in The West, among the US and its allied governments, which refer to themselves as ‘democracies’ and refer to any Government that they wish to overthrow and replace by their own selected dictator, as ‘dictatorships’, such as these regimes had referred to Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, Syria forever, and Ukraine in 2014.

 

Coincidence? Every Time the US Threatens to Pull Out of Syria, Assad Uses Chemical Weapons

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For the second time in a year, immediately after the US says they are going to pull out of Syria, Assad conveniently gasses his own people to make sure that won’t happen.

By Matt Agorist

Source: Free Thought Project

Late Saturday night, the mainstream media began spreading the news of an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria. It was reported that the tragic attack has claimed the lives of some 70 innocent civilians. Immediately after the unconfirmed reports, President Donald Trump began threatening Russia, Iran and “Animal Assad,” and blamed them for the attack.

The report of the alleged attack is unconfirmed and reported only by the known ISIS sympathizers, the White Helmets.

There has been no independent verification of the chemical attack and it is only being reported by a group who was caught multiple times staging fake attacks.

“Seventy people suffocated to death and hundreds are still suffocating,” said Raed al-Saleh, head of the White Helmets. This was their second tweet as the first one—now deleted—which claimed 150 people were killed, was apparently too big of an exaggeration to be believable.

Indeed, less than a month ago, the Russian military predicted this exact scenario. As CNBC reported last month, the threat, by Chief of Russia’s General Staff Valery Gerasimov, was widely reported by Russia media sites such as state news agency RIA and Tass. It said Gerasimov said Russia had “reliable information” about militants preparing to falsify a government chemical attack against civilians.

In spite of the fact that Syria and Russia are decrying the allegations as false, referring to them as a “fabrication,” the US has begun the pretext to provoking more war in Syria and potentially Russia and Iran.

The US state department said Russia – with its “unwavering support” for Syria’s government – “ultimately bears responsibility” for the alleged attacks.

There has been zero investigation, and the US government is already pointing fingers and implicating a world power in a massive war crime. Irresponsible indeed.

However, it was entirely predictable as these alleged gas attacks all follow a similar scheme.

For those who don’t remember, below is a timeline showing how conveniently timed this gas attacks are for the military-industrial complex.

On March 30, 2017, Reuters reported that Syria was no longer a US priority and that the government is no longer focused on “getting Assad out.” Conveniently, only 5 days after trying to de-escalate the situation, an alleged gas attack takes place to which Trump responds with 59 Tomahawk missiles.

Three days after the missile attack, the US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, issued a statement that regime change in Syria is inevitable.

As TFTP reported at the time, a leading weapons academic, and one of the foremost experts in the field, came forward in a series of reports noting his opposition to the official story in regards to the Khan Sheikhoun nerve agent attack in Syria. According to the expert, that Syrian gas attack was staged.

Fast forward to March 29, 2018 and Trump put many people to ease when he said that the US would “be coming out of Syria like very soon,” just hours after the Pentagon highlighted the need for US troops to remain in the country for the immediate future. “We’re knocking the hell out of ISIS. We’ll be coming out of Syria like very soon. Let the other people take care of it now,” Trump told supporters at an Ohio event on infrastructure, as CNN reported.

Days later, on April 7, 2018, the White Helmets report that Assad gassed his own people — again — and no one, other than the people known for staging videos, is the source.

On April 8, 2018, Trump then blames Russia, Iran, and Syria and issues “Big price to pay” threats to all of them.

“Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria. Area of atrocity is in lockdown and encircled by Syrian Army, making it completely inaccessible to outside world. President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad. Big price……to pay. Open area immediately for medical help and verification. Another humanitarian disaster for no reason whatsoever. SICK!” wrote Trump.

No one here is claiming that Assad is some hero, but for him to make this move—knowing the end result—is entirely preposterous and would not happen.

This alleged chemical attack is in spite of the Syrian regime successfully defeating ISIS in over 90 percent of the county. Just as Assad hears that Trump is considering pulling out of the country—which would have been a massive win for the Syrian regime—he gases his own people ensuring the exact opposite of this would happen. Sure thing.

But, we are supposed to believe this. According to the official narrative, every time Syria is on the verge of a military victory in their own country, Assad then randomly gases his own people to thwart this victory and gives the US a reason to invade and turn what’s left of Syrian infrastructure into rubble.

And, the American mainstream is eating it up and ramming it down the throats of US citizens who couldn’t point to Syria on a map, yet demand we spend billions bombing brown people in a country that has never done a single thing to them.

As Finian Cunningham notes, “this weekend’s alleged chemical-weapon attack on civilians in Syria has all the hallmarks of a false-flag propaganda stunt. Only people who have had their critical senses numbed by saturated Western media distortion could possibly believe otherwise.”

Indeed, if you are one of these people who believes this most preposterous story, please consider turning off your television and opening a book instead. Being uninformed is far better than being misinformed.

 

Related Video:

The Skripal Poisonings and the Ongoing Vilification of Putin

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By Gary Leupp

Source: CounterPunch

Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned by a nerve agent on March 4 on a park bench in Salisbury, England.

Skripal had been a Russian double agent, a spy who turned over 300 names of Russian spies to British intelligence from 1995 to 2004. He was (not so surprisingly) arrested in Russia in 2004 and sentenced to thirteen years in prison. He was released in a spy-swap in 2010, settled in the UK and became a British citizen.

I see no reason to judge his moral character, although some might reflect that in Kantian general terms what he did was rather bad. (In precisely the same sense that it would be bad for a British citizen to become a double agent for Russia.) Double agents are often punished harshly; this is the way of the world.

Skripal posed no further threat to the Russian state. There is at least one report that he sought to return to Russia recently. It’s hard to comprehend why at this time Moscow would poison him and his young daughter visiting from Russia with a nerve agent (Novichok) created in the USSR from the 1970s but subsequently banned and destroyed under international supervision. Cui bono? Who profits from these poisonings?

In all the outrage, expressed in Britain and elsewhere, about this attack, there is precious little analysis. The Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has said, “This is nonsense. This has nothing to do with us.” The group of military-grade nerve agents called Novichok have been described in academic literature such that many different actors could produce Novichok. The Russians say they have long since destroyed their stocks and suggest the Czech Republic could be the source of the substance used.

But this attack on Skripal and his 33-year-old daughter (by somebody) is highly useful to those who want to vilify Vladimir Putin, just as the use of chemical weapons in Syria last April (by somebody) was useful for those wanting to further vilify Bashar Assad and justify a U.S. missile strike. Have you noticed that we live in an age of constant disinformation, misinformation and “fake news”?

The most annoying thing is, once these unproven causal relations are posited, embraced by cable news directors, such that they become Truth, discussion centers solely on how the U.S. and allies should respond. Why, pundits ask, didn’t Trump raise the issue in his last chat with Putin? Why is Britain’s Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn skeptical about the Russia link, suggesting the Novichok could have been possessed by East European mafia? Why isn’t everyone on board the obvious conclusion that Russia did it?

Which would mean: Putin—facing no threat from this traded ex-spy or his innocent daughter—ordered their killing, not because they threatened him, but rather to manifest his deep cruelty and evil to the world and his willingness to invite more and more sanctions against Russia. It doesn’t make much sense.

Putin is ex-KGB. Very rational and calm. He knows all about agents and double agents. I doubt that he is morally judgmental; he understands why people do what Skripal did. He made a deal for the man’s release eight years ago. His only motive to kill him at this point would be to punish Skripal for past sins and warn others not to ever sell secrets. But why would such a rational person incur global outrage by using a banned agent to attempt to murder a British citizen and his Russian daughter, for no compelling reason?

There are international legal processes for investigating charges of use of chemical weapons. Russia has asked Britain to observe them, providing evidence, samples, details. It urges adherence to rules established by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to establish the facts. But London has merely announced it knows Putin was responsible for the state of these two on that park bench.

So the grand narrative now includes: Russian invasions of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 (somehow becoming in the process “adversaries” of the U.S.); alleged “threats” against the Baltic states; multiple political assassinations; dictatorial control of the Russian polity, economy and media; the accumulation of billions in illicit wealth. To say nothing of his brash exposure of his naked chest to his fandom, his judo, his hunting, his annoyingly high approval ratings.

I don’t know who attacked these two who now struggle for their lives in hospital. But I know that the response means nothing good for Russia, or the world. It is just another short chapter in the new Cold War, and like the old war, basically irrational. What is Putin’s motive? Fareed Zakaria says he’s trying to “undermine democracies” although why anyone would want to do that in principle puzzles me. Putin is not the Heath Ledger’s Joker in the Dark Knight Batman film, just spreading chaos for its own sake.

Putin is not interested in heading a European movement towards isolationist nationalisms but rather in thwarting NATO expansion plans, which any rational Russian leader would want to do. To use the strange Skripal incident as a rationale for further Cold War-type confrontation is more than sad.  Yet in a supposed display of solidarity with Britain, which has kicked out Russian diplomats in response, the U.S. has suddenly expelled 60 Russian diplomats and closed down the Russian consulate in Seattle. Trump, under constant criticism for not criticizing Putin, and not bringing up election meddling or the Skripal affair in his recent phone call, has approved the move without commenting on it.

If Trump planned for better relations with Russia to be a hallmark of his presidency, he has been stymied by his foes’ insistence that he express the traditional knee-jerk hostility. Why, they keep asking, when he criticizes his own cabinet members, does he never say anything bad about Putin? And from there, they proceed to the conclusion that the Russians have stuff on Trump and are blackmailing him…into not being default-mode hostile.

Trump is an ignorant man, uninterested in the world intellectually, unable to invest time in reading, clueless about the historical context of current crises. Part of his candidate persona was opposition to recent U.S. wars (not so much because they’ve killed hundreds of thousands of people, but because they have been expensive and not resulted in the U.S. taking the oil). But he loves men in uniform, surrounds himself with them, relies on them. These are men who grew up during the Cold War and can’t kick it from their minds. Baby-sitting what they surely see (with McMaster) as a “moron,” “idiot,” “dope,” “kindergartner” they see their minimal task the responsibility to remind him that Russia is an adversary.

And so without even ascertaining the facts of the Skripal incident, Washington expels all these diplomats. TV pundits applaud: “absolutely the right thing to do, to defend western values” etc. , the system succeeds in maintaining, even strengthening, Cold War Russophobic mentality. The Skripal incident was a blessing to Trump’s critics, who want him with his child-mind to embrace this mentality. We have to support Theresa May in Britain, they told him. This was the first offensive use of  a nerve agent in Europe since World War II, they told him; very, very serious. A Russian attack on the UK.

Whoever administered that agent triggered a wave of sanctions on Russia, adding to those earlier imposed after the 2014 coup in Ukraine and the Russian response. Russia will respond proportionately. Whoever did this forces Trump to harden a political line against Russia. As his presidency teeters in the winds of scandal, he is prone to more crazy moves like the appointment of John Bolton. Trump’s sole saving grace in his campaign was his advocacy of better ties with Russia. This immediately upon his election became his chief fault. Pundits  demand that he  abandon any hope for cordial relations with Putin’s Russia and properly denounce him for multiple crimes.

Maybe that’s what’s in store. Trump’s unpredictable. He agrees to meet Kim Jong Un then appoints Bolton (advocate of war with North Korea, removed from negotiations with the DPRK  after Pyongyang called him “human scum”) as national security advisor. And why follow up that cordial call to Putin with the expulsion of so many diplomats? What the hell. Doesn’t make sense.

Had Hillary won, I would probably have found some logic and predictability in her evil. With Trump the evil unfolds erratically. He drops a MOAB on Afghanistan (or his generals do, without necessarily consulting). He attacks a Syrian army base in response to an unproven sarin attack. His cabinet members contradict him, espousing the gospel truth that Russia and its allies such as Syria are threats to U.S. national security, whatever that is. One feels that as his personal situation deteriorates, the president will be more prone to lean on his generals, and listen to their advice while also heeding the horrific Bolton. This is a very bad situation.

4/05 Update:
Double miracle as BOTH Skripals are now said to be recovering from deadly nerve agent attack. How?

American Public Troubled by ‘Deep State’

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By John V. Walsh

Source: ConsortiumNews.com

“Public Troubled by Deep State” is the headline that the Monmouth University Polling Institute tags to its recent poll.  Acknowledging that polling about the term “Deep State” is problematic because “few Americans (13%) are very familiar with the term ‘Deep State,’” the pollsters at Monmouth defined the term as follows for their interviewees: “The term Deep State refers to the possible existence of a group of unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy.”

Then they asked whether such a group exists.

Monmouth reports the results as follows: “Nearly 3-in-4 (74%) say they believe this type of apparatus exists in Washington. This includes 27% who say it definitely exists and 47% who say it probably exists. Only 1-in-5 say it does not exist (16% probably not and 5% definitely not).”

These opinions do not follow a partisan divide. The report explains that belief in the Deep State’s existence “comes from more than 7-in-10 Americans in each partisan group, although Republicans (31%) and independents (33%) are somewhat more likely than Democrats (19%) to say that the Deep State definitely exists.”

This leads the director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, Patrick Murray, to volunteer: “We usually expect opinions on the operation of government to shift depending on which party is in charge. But there’s an ominous feeling by Democrats and Republicans alike that a ‘Deep State’ of unelected operatives are pulling the levers of power.”

In addition, there are some significant but not drastic racial and ethnic differences on this question. Says the report, “Americans of black, Latino and Asian backgrounds (35%) are more likely than non-Hispanic whites (23%) to say that the Deep State definitely exists.”

The report also asked about government surveillance of the citizenry and here again there is widespread concern: Fully 8-in-10 believe that the U.S. government currently monitors or spies on the activities of American citizens, including a majority (53%) who say this activity is widespread and another 29% who say such monitoring happens but is not widespread. Just 14% say this monitoring does not happen at all. There are no substantial partisan differences in these results.

This too causes the director of the Institute to be concerned.  “This is a worrisome finding. The strength of our government relies on public faith in protecting our freedoms, which is not particularly robust. And it’s not a Democratic or Republican issue. These concerns span the political spectrum,” says director Murray.

We can add to the concern about a manipulative unelected apparatus at work in the government the widespread distrust of the press summarized in this recent Gallup/Knight poll:

“*Today, 66% of Americans say most news media do not do a good job of separating fact from opinion. In 1984, 42% held this view.

“*Less than half of Americans, 44%, say they can think of a news source that reports the news objectively.

“*On a multiple-item media trust scale with scores ranging from a low of zero to a high of 100, the average American scores a 37.”

This paints a pretty grim picture of trust in both our government and our media.  Perhaps “Deep Media” should be a term added to “Deep State.”

But perhaps it is cause for optimism. It seems that people are waking up and thinking for themselves. This is, perhaps, good news for those who are trying to end U.S. wars being ginned up by the Deep State.

 

John V. Walsh can be reached at john.endwar@gmail.com