MOSCOW – The Kremlin on Monday declined to comment on media reports that Russia planned to soon supply Syria with S-300 missile systems, but said a Western missile strike on Syria had soured the atmosphere in the region. Russia’s daily Kommersant newspaper, citing unnamed military sources, reported earlier on Monday that Russia might start supplying S-300 anti-aircraft missile systems to Syria in the near future. It said experts believed that Israel would react negatively to the development and might bomb the area where the missile systems would be deployed. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday that Western military strikes on Syria this month had removed any moral obligation Russia had to withhold the missile systems from Syria. Dmitri Peskov told reporters on a conference call on Monday when asked about the possible S-300 delivery:
The missile strike badly worsened the atmosphere around Syria and the Syrian peace process. Great damage was done to international law and the spirit of international law in terms of cooperation.
Russian embassy regrets British parliament being drawn into ‘Russophobic campaign’ TASS, Apr 23 2018
LONDON – The Russian Embassy in London regrets that the British parliament is being sucked into a “Russophobic campaign,” which, according to the diplomatic mission, will only erode relations between the countries, the embassy’s press secretary reported on Monday, commenting on information about an interparty group on Russia that is being created in the House of Commons. According to British media, this group will deal with combating purported threats that Russia allegedly poses to the UK. the embassy noted:
We heard the decision to establish the new “Russia Coordinating Group” that will be headed by Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee Tom Tugendhat and will involve other senior parliamentary members. The group’s goal is to coordinate efforts of the House of Commons to find a solution to Russian ‘hybrid threats.’ The fact that this group was created on an anti-Russian basis is regrettable. Instead of searching for ways to restore Russian-British relations or at least preserve communication channels, the parliament has once again allowed itself to be drawn into a new Russophobic campaign that was launched by the conservative government. Bilateral relations between our two countries have reached their lowest point since the British government began to blame Russia for thew Skripals’ poisoning. Political contacts were frozen at the initiative of the British side. Russia is being threatened with new sanctions. Unfortunately, the creation of such a group on a clearly unconstructive anti-Russian basis will not change this situation. Instead, it will lead to a further deterioration in our relations.
Bezalel Smotrich on Ahed Tamimi: “‘She should have been kneecapped, at the least!” RT.com, Apr 23 2018
Female Palestinian protester Ahed Tamimi, who is currently serving an eight-month jail term for slapping an IOF soldier, should have been shot in the knee and placed under house arrest for life, believes Bezalel Smotrich, MK. Tamimi, 17, has a long record of protesting as a youngster against Israeli policies in the occupied Palestinian territories, and was sentenced last month to eight months behind bars for verbally and physically confronting armed IOF in her home village. Her imprisonment has been highlighted amid the violence at Israel’s border wall with the Gaza Strip, where dozens of Palestinians have been reported killed and hundreds injured by IOF fire. Palestinian children involved in protests against Israel should be dealt with in the harshest possible way, Bezalel Smotrich, an MK from the right-wing Tkuma party, which is part of the country’s ruling coalition, appeared to signal. In a tweet on Sunday, he lamented that Ahed Tamimi was not injured or sentenced to a longer term. The tweet was a comment to a video showing the girl and other people confronting Israeli soldiers a few years ago. he wrote in Hebrew:
I am actually sad that she is in jail. She should have gotten a bullet, at least in her kneecap. I would have put her under house arrest for life.
אני דווקא ממש עצוב ינון שהיא במעצר. לדעתי היא היתה חייבת לחטוף איזה כדור, לפחות בפיקה של הברך. זה היה מכניס אותה למעצר בית לכל החיים. https://t.co/sdXBHQWMqf
Coming after the killing of Ayoub, the tweet drew public attention and criticism for inciting violence against minors, although Smotrich was adamant in his position. In a follow-up post on Facebook, he defended his words, branding Palestinian children involved in anti-Israeli protests “terrorists.” He argued that when Palestinian children confront IOF soldiers and are filmed on camera, this undermines the soldiers’ resolve to meet violence from Palestinians with force and thus hurts deterrence against such violence. He claimed:
Ahed Tamimi is not an innocent girl I want to be shot. She is a terrorist, whose actions hurt our security and put the citizens of Israel in danger. I care about the lives of people of Israel, not the lives of my enemies. Those who criticize cruelty end up being cruel to the merciful.
Smotrich, 38, has been serving as a legislator since 2015. A scion of a religious settler family and a married father of six, he currently lives in a settlement in the West Bank. Smotrich is a staunch supporter of a shoot-to-kill policy towards stone-throwing Palestinian teens, and on several occasions has proposed segregation of Jews and Arabs. He infamously tweeted that it was natural for his wife not to share a maternity ward with “someone who just gave birth to a baby might want to murder her baby in another 20 years.”
WATCH: 16-year-old Palestinian Ahed Tamimi hasn’t seen a day of freedom. The teen’s relatives have been killed and her village's land has been taken over by settlers. Now she's in Israeli jail. Imagine if this was your reality. #عهد_التميمى#ahd_tamimipic.twitter.com/CO01fQtA5D
Pres Trump has praised Ukraine many times. According to him, things there are “coming along pretty well.” Those two countries are cultivating nothing less than a “lasting strategic partnership,” built on common security interests and shared principles. Pindostan emphasizes the fact that it places great significance on the success of Ukraine’s transition to Ukraine’s becoming a modern democratic state. Faschingstein is backing Ukraine’s bid for NATO membership. It supports Kiev militarily, including by supplying weapons and providing training. Indeed, the two countries’ officials never forget to mention that they are close friends and partners. A man is known by the company he keeps. On Apr 20, the State Dept published its annual report on human rights practices. The document mentions alleged human rights violations by the SBU secret police. That list includes torture, arbitrary detention, and enforced disappearances, among other crimes, all of which seem to have become somewhat routine occurrences in Ukraine. Media outlets are under pressure, facing censorship. Websites are routinely blocked. The perpetrators of violence against journalists are never brought to justice. Human rights violations in Ukraine have been in the crosshairs of international organizations since 2014. It makes one wonder what took the State Dept so long to include them in its annual report. Perhaps it is hard for them to admit that gross human rights violations are routinely occurring in an allied country. But there was no way to hide from the truth, as the UN and international human rights organizations have been sounding the alarm. The UN OCHA’s report of March tells dire stories about human rights abuses, violations of fundamental freedoms, and crimes that have been committed in Ukraine. The Ukrainian government has backtracked on its human rights pledges, claims the HRW’s World Report 2018, which says:
The authorities are carrying out some deeply undemocratic practices and proposing new laws that that undermine Ukrainians’ fundamental freedoms.
No one has been brought to justice for torturing detainees or other war-related abuses. The AI’s latest annual report echoes these complaints. There was a good reason the entire country erupted in public protests in February. The people want Poroshenko to go. Discontent is growing. And it’s no wonder. Widespread corruption has taken root in that country, literally killing its economy. Ukraine is the image of a kleptocracy. It’s an open secret that those in power have made a mockery of the economic and financial assistance provided by the West. Ukraine was ranked 130th out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index for 2017. The country topped the 2017 fraud survey conducted at the direction of Ernst & Young. EC Pres Juncker believes that corruption is undermining all the efforts to rebuild Ukraine in line with EU standards. Ukraine, along with Moldova, tops the list of the poorest European nations. The country’s politicians are increasingly embracing extremist rhetoric. Far-right views are popular in the ranks of the military. When he presented the State Dept’s report, Acting Sec State John Sullivan said:
Promoting human rights and the idea that every person has inherent dignity is a core element of this administration’s foreign policy.
Sounds great but is Pindostan putting its money where its mouth is? With all the universally recognized problems mentioned above, Ukraine remains a darling of Pindostan. With Pindo help, the discussion of NATO membership has been revived. Last month the nation was granted an official status in the bloc, as an aspirant country. The Pindo media have reported about the widespread corruption throughout the Ukrainian military, but nobody seems to care. The sale of Javelin anti-tank systems has been approved by the State Dept. Hundreds of Pindo, British, Canadian, and Lithuanian military instructors are training Ukrainian military personnel at the Yavorov firing range. The Pindo Navy operates a facility in Ochakov and its ships routinely drop anchor in Ukrainian ports. Pindo trade rep Kurt Volker is openly biased, blaming Russia for every ill while never saying anything critical about Kiev. For instance, he ignores the obvious fact that Ukraine has failed to comply with its obligations under the Minsk-2 accords. A blind eye is turned to all these facts. The reason is obvious. Ukraine “is an SOB but it’s our SOB.” It is firmly in the anti-Russia camp and ready to dance to the Pindo tune, whatever the issue. It allows foreign forces on its territory. Last month, it joined a new anti-Russia, pro-NATO alliance comprising three former Soviet republics that are always ready to bow to Pindo pressure. That’s enough to earn forgiveness for such minor matters as human rights violations. One could hardly find a better illustration of the fact that democracy and freedom the focal point of Pindo foreign policy. The truth is, Faschingstein does not care about such things. Pindostan’s duplicity on Ukraine is an obvious confirmation of the fact that hypocrisy and double standards, camouflaged by harangues about “democratic values,” prevail in its foreign policy. The recent State Dept report removes any lingering doubts about this.
RT talks Douma ‘CW attack’ & allegations it was a set-up or never happened at all RT.com, Apr 23 2018
RT’s Murad Gazdiev highlights a number of eyewitness accounts from Douma, Syria that people directly involved in the notorious “chemical attack” video actually had no idea about the alleged use of chemicals there. Amid growing suspicions that the “chemical attack” in Douma was actually staged, Gazdiev looked into some of the remarkable statements made by local residents and Western journalists who travelled to the war-ravaged area. The claims range from the whole thing being set up by Daesh to it being completely staged. Gazdiev comments:
It’s remarkable how these scenes convinced three countries to launch cruise missiles at Syria.
An interesting facet of Theresa May’s “hostile environment” policy, aka institutionalised racism, is that Yulia Skripal will have to pay for her NHS emergency treatment because she was admitted to hospital. When the government announced its clampdown on use of the NHS by foreigners, including migrants and overseas students, it ended the provision of free emergency treatment for non-citizens in the UK, at the point of hospital admission, which in a real emergency is often required. I could see the argument for charging “aliens” for attending A & E with a broken thumb, but not charging them for a massive heart attack. But the Tories do it the other way round. It is worth noting that in Scotland the Scottish government, which controls the Scottish NHS, has not implemented this Tory policy, which was instituted in Apr 2015 directly as a considered part of the “hostile environment” for migrants. Reciprocal public healthcare agreeements with Russia and sixteen other countries were cancelled unilaterally by the Tory government in 2016. Of course, I do not doubt Yulia Skripal, whose whereabouts and freedom of action are unknown and who patently did not write the police statements issued in her name, will not be charged for her treatment, unlike others admitted in life-threatening situations. But think for a moment of the dreadful cases of heartache to other individuals and families that must have been caused by this cruel policy, all in the name of “discouraging” migrants. As with the case of the Windrush generation, I do not doubt there are scores of unheard stories of the effects of Tory callousness waiting to come to light. I am glad the Skripal case gave me the chance to highlight the issue. Meanwhile in Salisbury we are going to have a great propaganda theatre of destruction, as places which people were allowed to frequent for weeks after the attack are demolished, to eradicate a strange liquid that is ten times more deadly than VX but at the same time ineffective, and is liquid but cannot be diluted, except its dilution was why it did not kill anybody, and which cannot be washed away, except if you got it on your clothes you are perfectly safe if you wash them, and which made hundreds of people sick except there were only three of them. All of those contradictory statements are from the official government narrative on Salisbury as delivered over the last couple of months through the state and corporate media. It is beyond me how they expect anyone to believe their utterly incoherent nonsense.
The second half of my life has been a continual process of disillusionment with the institutions I used to respect. I suppose it started with the FCO, where I went from being Britain’s youngest ambassador to being sacked for opposing the use of intelligence from torture, at the same time having an insider view of the knowing lies about Iraqi WMD being used as a pretext for invasion and resource grab. I still had some residual respect for the BBC, which respect disappeared during the Scottish independence referendum where BBC propaganda and disregard for the truth were truly shameless. My love of the universities was severely tested during my period as Rector of Dundee University, when I saw how far the corporate model had turned them from academic communities developing people and pursuing knowledge, to relentless churners out of unconsidered graduates and financially profitable research, with nearly all sense of community gone. My respect for charities vanished when I discovered Save the Children was paying its chief executive £370k and had become a haven for New Labour politicos on huge salaries, which was why it was so involved in pushing a pro-war narrative in Syria. When Justin Forsyth and Brendan Cox, both massively salaried employees who came into Save the Children from the revolving door of Gordon Brown’s office, were outed over sexual predation, that seemed a natural result of “charities” being headed by rich party hacks rather than by simple people trying to do good. As for respect for parliament, well the massive troughing expenses scandal and all those protected paedophiles. It has become difficult to hang on to respect for any institution, and that is unsettling. Which brings me to last week’s annual awards from Index on Censorship. The winners of the awards , from Cuba, the DRC, Honduras and Egypt, all seem worthy enough, and there is even some departure from the neocon narrative in recognising a human rights problem in Egypt. But the Chairman of Index on Censorship is, incredibly, Rupert Murdoch lead hack David Aaronovitch, and he presided over the awards, in the very week in which the newspaper for which he writes produced this appalling attack on freedom of expression:
Inside there was a further two page attack on named academics who have the temerity to ask for evidence of government claims over Syria, including distinguished Professors Tim Hayward, Paul McKeigue and Piers Robinson. The Times also attacked named journalists and bloggers and, to top it off, finished with a column alleging collusion between Scottish nationalists and the Russian state. That the Chairman of “Index on Censorship” is associated with this kind of attack on freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of research is sadly unsurprising. The guest list of the Index ceremony had a distinct right wing tinge including A C Grayling and Sara Khan, as well as a good smattering of the BBC, which was also represented on the judging panel. The irony of the state broadcaster being part of a panel on freedom of expression is plainly lost. I realised something was very wrong with Index on Censorship when I contacted them over a decade ago, when Jack Straw attempted to ban the publication of my book Murder in Samarkand, after it had passed successfully through the exhaustive FCO clearance process over a time-consuming year. I tried to interest them again when my second book The Catholic Orangemen of Togo was dropped by my publisher following libel threats from mercenary commander Tim Spicer of Aegis/Executive Outcomes/Sandline. On both occasions, I was told that John Kampfner, then Chief Executive of Index, did not regard these attempted book bannings as incidents of censorship. Presumably because they weren’t somewhere like Cuba or Zimbabwe. The truly appalling Times attack on academics was part of a coordinated and government-led campaign to delegitimise anybody doubting the official narrative on Salisbury and Syria. The BBC weighed in with this horrible effort:
The government then issued a ridiculous press release branding decent people as “Russian bots” just for opposing British policy in Syria. In a piece of McCarthyism so macabre I cannot believe this is really happening, an apparently pleasant and normal man called Ian was grilled live on Murdoch’s Sky News, having been named by his own government as a Russian bot.
The Guardian uncritically published the government’s accusations in full, and astonishingly seemed proud that it had made no attempt to investigate their veracity but had merely published what the government wished them to publish:
It's not my analysis – as the piece makes quite clear – it's the government's. https://t.co/50C7Ozhv8m
The Guardian naturally was just as reliable as the BBC in driving home the message that anybody who doubted the government’s word on Syria was a flat-earth denier of the truth:
Mr Freedland is of course a perfect representation of an interesting fact. Those who are most active in telling us that we must attack Syria, and that anybody who questions the government’s pretexts is insane or evil, are precisely the same individuals who supported the war in Iraq and attacked those who doubted the existence of Iraqi WMD. indeed these people, Jonathan Freedland, David Aaronovitch, Oliver Kamm, Alan Mendoza, Andrew Rawnsley, John Rentoul, Nick Cohen, are the leaders of the tiny, insignificant number of people who still believe that the invasion of Iraq was both justified and beneficial in its result. Yet these people of proven terrible judgement, they and others of their media class, are the arbiters who are allowed to dictate the terms of what is and what is not an acceptable public utterance on the situation in Syria. When Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the opposition, one of two things had to happen. Either the Overton window had to shift to allow for the reflection of views held by the leader of the official opposition and his myriad supporters, or the leader of the opposition had to be castigated and humiliated as an unreasonable lunatic. Corbyn’s rational scepticism on British involvement in the conflict in Syria is a key moment in this process. Despite the fact Corbyn’s scepticism is supported by a wide swathe of diplomatic and military opinion within Britain, it has to be portrayed as fringe, extreme and irrational. We thus have the extraordinary spectacle of a coordinated government and media onslaught on anybody who doubts their entirely fact-free narratives. Those who were demonstrably completely wrong over Iraq are held up as infallible and given full control of all state and corporate media platforms, where they deride those who were right over Iraq as crackpots and Russian bots. Meanwhile public trust in the state and corporate media hits new lows, which is the happy part of this story.
A gathering in London last week of government leaders from the former British Empire became a forum for intrigues and diplomatic bullying directed against Russia and the growing influence of China in the Indo-Pacific and Africa. In particular, Australia, one of the Commonwealth’s imperialist powers, brought intense pressure to bear against small Pacific member states that have received aid or financial assistance from China. The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) saw a concerted drive to turn the 53-member grouping of ex-British colonies, long regarded as an imperial relic, into a vehicle for confronting Moscow and Beijing. There were even suggestions in the media of extending the Commonwealth’s membership, for this purpose, to include former French colonies. The summit assembled amid the escalating global tensions generated by the FUKUS missile strikes on Syria, the Trump administration’s trade war moves and the Pentagon’s recent National Defence Strategy, which openly accused Beijing and Moscow of seeking to challenge the hegemonic power of Pindostan. On the eve of the summit, the British & ANZaC leaders held a meeting as 4 of the 5-Eyes Pindocentric worldwide intelligence network, to stridently back the illegal attack on Syria and pledge to intensify their collaboration with Pindostan and each other. Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull told reporters the 5-Eyes partners showed “total solidarity” with Britain and “provided real support and endorsement” of the missile strikes. He said:
It is vitally important that we work more closely together than ever! No countries work more closely together in intelligence and security matters than the 5-Eyes!
While the CHOGM event saw a line up behind the Pindocentric militarism, the dominant members of the Commonwealth used various side meetings to assert their own predatory interests. This was most notable in regard to the South Pacific, where ANZ exert influence with the military backing of Pindostan. There are nine small Pacific ex-colonies in the Commonwealth: Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. With China’s activities in aid and infrastructure projects growing in the region, its two middle-ranking imperialist powers are stepping up their relations with Britain, whose Pacific colonies they inherited, and France, which still holds significant territories in New Caledonia and French Polynesia and maintains a sizeable military presence. In the lead-up to the summit, intelligence and military think-tanks declared that Australian governments had lost ground to China. Australian Strategic Policy Institute executive director Peter Jennings said:
We’ve kind of lost a lot of those connections, particularly on the military side where for the last 12 or 13 years we’ve been heavily involved in Afghanistan and the Middle East and really taken our eye off the ball as far as the Pacific is concerned.
Citing unnamed “intelligence and security” sources, Australian media outlets fuelled an ongoing anti-China propaganda campaign, alleging that China and the tiny island nation of Vanuatu were in talks about establishing a Chinese naval base on one of the country’s islands. During a meeting held on the sidelines of CHOGM, Australian PM Turnbull reportedly secured an assurance from Vanuatu PM Charlot Salwai that he would never allow such a base. Turnbull informed reporters:
Well, the PM of Vanuatu has made it very clear, quite unequivocally, that media reports about Chinese interest in establishing a military base in Vanuatu have no basis in fact.
In a separate meeting with Solomon Islands PM Rick Houenipwela, Turnbull insisted that Australia would substantially fund an underwater Internet cable between the two countries, as well as Papua New Guinea. This effectively blocks a rival bid by Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei, which has also been banned from major operations in Pindostan and Australia on “national security” grounds. Turnbull issued a media statement emphasising:
Australia has a long-standing commitment to peace and stability in the region, with Australia having led the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) over its 14 years of existence. We will continue to work together to sustain the gains made under RAMSI and support long-term stability and growth in Solomon Islands, such as through our bilateral security treaty.
This was a blunt reminder that in 2003 Australia sent more than 2,000 troops and police, backed by naval warships and air force support, to virtually take over Solomon Islands in order to reassert Australian domination over the country. In yet another meeting, Turnbull held talks with Fiji PM Frank Bainimarama, who has “looked north” to China for financial support. According to the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation, “various issues were discussed, including the strengthening of bilateral relations and cooperation between the two countries.” New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern was as active as Turnbull, having stopped off in Paris for a meeting with French Pres Macron. She and Macron agreed to “confirm our friendship” and work together on a range of issues, especially “defence” in the Pacific. Macron accepted an invitation to visit NZ, which would make him the first French president to do so. Macron is already making a three-day visit to Australia, starting May 1. These developments mark a sharp shift from the 1960s to 1990s, when French nuclear testing in the Pacific was denounced by governments in ANZ, which regarded France as a rival in their Pacific “spheres of influence.” Hosting the CHOGM summit, PM Theresa May’s government vowed to work in tandem with Australia and New Zealand. Murdoch’s Australian newspaper reported:
Britain is about to dramatically expand its trade, aid and diplomatic presence in the South Pacific to counter China’s growing influence in the region as part of a global refocus ahead of its departure from the EU.
Events have gathered pace since January, when the Australian government provoked a diplomatic row with China by condemning Beijing’s aid programs in the Pacific. Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, Australia’s minister for international development and the Pacific, accused China of “duchessing” politicians in the Pacific, lending funds on unfavourable terms and financing worthless construction projects. China’s involvement in the South Pacific is bound up with its response to Washington’s aggressive military and strategic “pivot” to the Asia-Pacific to confront China, which began under Obama and has intensified under Trump. The Pacific was a major battlefield in World War II. Like other parts of the world, is again becoming a cauldron of geo-strategic conflict, primarily between the US and China, in which other powers are scrambling for alliances and jostling to assert their neo-colonial interests.
The British government responds to each exposure of its fabrications regarding the Skripal affair by concocting and promoting additional ones. Any evidence or argument that points to the ludicrous nature of the official line is denounced as the work of a dupe or a traitor. On Mar 4, Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were taken to hospital after being found unconscious on a bench in Salisbury. They have now recovered, with Yulia already discharged from hospital before being spirited away to a secret location, despite having supposedly been poisoned with one of the most fatal military-grade nerve agents. Without revealing any evidence, Britain accused Russia of being responsible for an “attempted murder.” While failing to provide any convincing explanation as to why Russia would target a superannuated ex-spy and his daughter, the resulting hysterical anti-Russian campaign played a critical role in preparing the FUKUS bombing of Syria. As the Skripal Campaign unravelled, the British authorities have stepped up their claims. At an emergency meeting of the OPCW on Apr 18, British ambassador to the OPCW, Peter Wilson, accused Russia of “multiple narratives” and of having “no credibility.” Wilson demanded that Russia “end its offensive CW programme” and “declare its programme of novichoks.” He accused Russia of a “brazen disinformation campaign” to “attack the reputation and expertise of the OPCW” and “distract and brazenly misrepresent facts.” The May government continues to refuse to adhere to basic international standards in depriving Russia of any information about the investigation into how two of its citizens became ill. This deliberate ratcheting up of tensions on the part of the British authorities is aimed at diverting from its own campaign of disinformation, misrepresentation and outright lies. Central to this has been the willingness of the official media to regurgitate without hesitation, the latest propaganda from the government, intelligence agencies and police. The summary findings of the OPCW made no mention of Novichok, the Russian name for a family of nerve agents whose incessant repetition is meant to provide irrefutable proof of Moscow’s involvement. Nor did it mention Russia. The one time the OPCW referenced a “nerve agent,” it was prefaced with the caveat “allegedly.” The term used throughout is “toxic chemical.”
The OPCW report was thrown even further into question by Sergei Lavrov, who reported that the Swiss state Spiez Laboratory had conducted tests, Lavrov said, and contrary to claims that the Skripals were poisoned by a novichok nerve agent, it found the “substance used on Sergei Skripal was an agent called BZ” ( BZ or 3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate). BZ is a hallucinogenic incapacitating agent that afflicts both the peripheral and central nervous systems. Lavrov said this information was not included in the OPCW report. The OPCW subsequently rebutted Lavrov’s claim, asserting the non-presence of BZ and its precursors in the Mar 23 blood samples taken from the Skripals. Russia has demanded full disclosure of all information related to the Skripal case. The full OPCW report was made available to all governments who are signatories to the CWC. There is no prohibition on any of those governments from publishing the full report or parts thereof. If Lavrov’s statement accurately reflects the scientific findings and if the Skripals encountered BZ in some form, this could account for both the state in which they were discovered on March 4, and the fact that they have now recovered. It would also seem to explain Yulia’s disorientation, which she mentioned in a statement, supposedly issued on her behalf by the Metropolitan Police. On Saturday, the Russian Embassy in London said it asked the British government to explain a statement from private individuals as to the origins of claims they made about the case. The Embassy’s press secretary said:
Yesterday we learned from the BBC that the self-proclaimed inventor of the so-called “Novichok,” Mr Vladimir Uglev, was sure that the Skripals had been poisoned with A-234. He comes to this conclusion “from all the spectrum data I was sent recently.” This is quite an extraordinary statement. It essentially means that a private citizen has been provided with the information that the Russian side has not been able to obtain from the British authorities for weeks.
The Embassy also pointed out that Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, former CO of Britain’s CBRW Regiment, had made statements attributing blame to Russia based on access to “intelligence data.” He wrote:
Of course, these allegations cannot be verified. But if we are to believe them, it looks like the British authorities share highly confidential data with private individuals. This is another gross violation of the OPCW rules. We have asked the FCO to confirm or deny this, and to provide us access to the files that these gentlemen refer to.
The contradictions continue to mount. On Apr 17, the Britain government’s Dept of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs announced that the nerve agent supposedly used to poison the Skripals was delivered “in a liquid form” with only “a very small amount” used. Only days earlier, police said the nerve agent had been deployed by smearing it on the front door handle of Sergei’s house. No explanation was offered as to how this amateurish and unsophisticated ruse remained undiscovered for weeks or why no one other than the Skripals and a police officer had been apparently affected. But the claims about front door handles and “liquid form delivery” are contradicted by the OPCW report summary on the case, which notes that there were no additives in the substance they analysed, which would have been necessary for it to adhere to the Skripal’s front door. More inconsistencies are revealed in the details of the cleaning of nine sites in Salisbury on Saturday to supposedly decontaminate them. There is no explanation as to why this is taking place six weeks after the Skripals were found. Stories in the media of how the deadly poison was washed off the Skripals’ door and diluted by the rain, just another of the implausible attempts to explain how the Skripals managed to survive a potentially deadly attack, have been shelved. Now it is claimed that, far from it being diluted, there are potentially still “toxic” levels of the poison in isolated “hot spots.” The government has mobilized 200 military personnel, who will be involved in a “decontamination” operation that could last months. Moving swiftly over to the new narrative, the BBC reported:
The nerve agent does not evaporate or disappear over time, experts have said, and intense cleaning with caustic chemicals is required to get rid of it.
This was after DEFRA’s chief scientific adviser, Ian Boyd, had told a public meeting that the nerve agent remained in high concentrations in “very specific locations” and could still be harmful. However, Boyd’s remark was contradicted by a DEFRA spox who insisted that the city “is safe for residents and visitors.” Residents have complained about the mixed messages. Although the government was quick to claim that a military nerve agent had been used against the Skripals, it was almost a week before Public Health Britain issued any safety advice to those who had visited the pub or the restaurant that the Skripals had visited. Even then Public Health England stated only that people who had visited those places should wash their clothes and merely:
Wipe personal items such as phones, handbags and other electronic items with cleansing or baby wipes and dispose of the wipes in the bin (ordinary domestic waste disposal).
The lawsuit filed by the DNC, naming WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange as co-conspirators with Russia and the Trump campaign in a criminal effort to steal the 2016 presidential election, is a frontal assault on democratic rights. It tramples on the First Amendment to the Pindostani Constitution, which establishes freedom of the press and freedom of speech as fundamental rights. Neither the Demagog Party lawsuit nor the media commentaries on it acknowledge that WikiLeaks is engaged in journalism, not espionage; that its work consists of publishing material supplied to it by whistleblowers seeking to expose the crimes of governments, giant corporations and other powerful organizations; and that this courageous campaign of exposure has made both the website and its founder and publisher the targets of state repression all over the world. Assange himself has been effectively imprisoned in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for the past six years, since he fled there to escape a criminal conspiracy by the British & Swedish governments to engineer his extradition to Pindostan, where a secret grand jury has reportedly indicted him on espionage and treason charges that could bring the death penalty. Since the end of March, the Ecuadorian government, responding to increasing pressure from Pindo and British imperialism, has cut off all outside communication with him (except for his lawyers – RB). The DNC on Friday filed a 66-page complaint that reeks of McCarthyism, with overtones of the Wisconsin senator’s demagogy about “a conspiracy so vast… ” After detailing a long list of supposed conspirators, ranging from the Russian government and the GRU to the Trump campaign and Julian Assange, the complaint declares:
The conspiracy constituted an act of previously unimaginable treachery: the campaign of the presidential nominee of a major party in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the Presidency.
Such language has had no place in public life since the right-wing political gangster McCarthy left the scene in the late 1950s. Ultra-right groups like the JBS kept alive such smear tactics in ensuing decades, but they were relegated to the fringes of the political system. Now the Demagog Party has sought to revive these methods as the central focus of its bid for power in the 2018 elections. In the targeting of WikiLeaks, the antidemocratic content of this campaign finds its foulest expression. The DNC suit asserts, without the slightest evidence:
WikiLeaks and Assange directed, induced, urged, and/or encouraged Russia and the GRU to engage in this conduct and/or to provide WikiLeaks and Assange with DNC’s trade secrets, with the expectation that WikiLeaks and Assange would disseminate those secrets and increase the Trump Campaign’s chance of winning the election.
According to Assange and WikiLeaks, however, the material from the DNC and from Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta that it made public in 2016 was provided by an anonymous whistleblower whose identity WikiLeaks does not know because it observed its normal security practices to preserve secrecy and protect its sources. Not a shred of evidence has been presented to prove otherwise. The DNC legal complaint cites the negative consequences of the WikiLeaks revelations in passages worth quoting:
135. The illegal conspiracy inflicted profound damage upon the DNC. The timing and selective release of the stolen materials prevented the DNC from communicating with the electorate on its own terms. These selective releases of stolen material reached a peak immediately before the DNC and continued through the general election.
136. The timing and selective release of stolen materials was designed to and had the effect of driving a wedge between the DNC and Demagog voters. The release of stolen materials also impaired the DNC’s ability to support Demagog candidates in the general election.
But the DNC lawsuit does not explain why the WikiLeaks material was so damaging. On the contrary, it says nothing about the actual content of what was leaked, other than claiming that it included “trade secrets” and other proprietary information of the Demagog Party leadership. The material published by WikiLeaks about the Demagogs fell into two main categories. First were internal emails and documents of the DNC showing that DNC Chair Debbie Schultz and her top aides were engaged in a systematic effort to block Bernie Sanders and make sure Clinton received the Demagog Party nomination. In other words, while complaining that Russia was engaged in rigging the 2016 campaign, the DNC was seeking to rig the outcome of the Demagog primary contest. The second batch of documents came from Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta and included the transcripts of speeches delivered by Hillary Clinton to financial industry groups for fees as high as $300k per appearance. In these remarks, she reassured the bankers that they need not be alarmed by any campaign rhetoric about punishing them for the financial skullduggery that triggered the 2008 Wall Street crash and destroyed the jobs and living standards of millions of working people. She made clear that a Clinton government would continue the pro-Wall Street policies of the Obama administration. The DNC suit is a deepening of the effort by the Demagog Party to become the premier party of the CIA and the military intelligence apparatus as a whole.
In targeting WikiLeaks and Assange, the Demagogs are embracing the smear by DCI nominee Pompeo that WikiLeaks is a “non-state hostile intelligence service” physically allied with Moscow. If, moreover, Assange is a traitor because he exposes the lies and crimes of the Pindo government, then by implication all those publications, websites and individuals who defend him and challenge the government propaganda disseminated by the corporate media are themselves complicit in treason and should be dealt with accordingly. As the WSWS has previously explained, the anti-Russia campaign mounted by the Demagogs is a reactionary concoction, backed by no factual evidence, aimed at pushing the Trump administration to sharply escalate the war in Syria and adopt a more aggressive policy against Russia. At the same time, it has been used as the justification for a massive and coordinated campaign to censor the Internet. The manipulation of search and news feed algorithms by Google and Facebook will be followed by more direct efforts at the suppression of left-wing, anti-war and socialist publications. The campaign has also served to position the Demagog Party as the party that stands up for the “intelligence community” in its conflict with the Trump White House. This is now being supplemented, in advance of the November mid-term elections, by an influx of candidates for Demagog congressional nominations in competitive districts drawn heavily from the ranks of the CIA, the military, the NSC and the State Dept. The conduct of the DNC demonstrates the reactionary and bankrupt character of the claims by liberal and pseudo-left groups, all of whom have maintained a complete silence on the isolation and persecution of Assange, that the election of a Demagog Party-controlled Congress is the way to fight back against Trump and the Thugs. The truth is that the working class confronts in these parties two implacable political enemies committed to war, austerity and repression.
Julian Assange has been gagged and isolated from visitors and communications after heightened pressure. This is on top of his six years without access to sunlight and arbitrary detention in violation of two UN rulings. Account now run by his campaign. https://t.co/cbM33Ng42Cpic.twitter.com/LLeERI5knj
Julian Assange’s twitter account has started tweeting again, but not because Ecuadorian authorities have restored his access to the Internet. Instead, his Twitter account has been taken over by a group of supporters leading the campaign to #ReconnectJulian. In late March, the Ecuadorian government decided to suspend Assange’s Internet access due to his controversial tweets in support of Carles Puigdemont, the Catalan leader who had been detained in Germany. Ecuador’s new government, according to RT, was facing intense diplomatic pressure from its European ally, Spain. Assange’s supporters announced their takeover in a tweet above. Here’s a translation of a statement released by the government of Ecuador late last month when it decided to suspend Assange’s Internet access, phone access and ability to receive visitors because Assange had refused to stop commenting on the political affairs of other nations.
The Government of Ecuador suspended the systems that allow Julian Assange to communicate with the outside world from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where the citizen remains in an international protection situation for six years due to the risk to his life and integrity. The measure was adopted in the face of Assange’s failure to comply with the written commitment it assumed with the Government at the end of 2017, for which it was obliged not to issue messages that implied interference with other States. The Government of Ecuador warns that the behavior of Assange, with its messages through social networks, puts at risk the good relations that the country maintains with Britain, with the rest of the States of the EU and other nations. Therefore, to prevent potential damage, the embassy in London interrupted this Mar 27 communications abroad to which Assange has access. The Executive also keeps open the way to the adoption of new measures in the face of breach of commitment by Assange.
Shortly after the statement was released, supporters of Assange gathered in front of the embassy in London where they stood in solidarity for hours. In the weeks that followed, the campaign to restore Assange’s Internet access has picked up many high-profile supporters including Brian Eno, Yanis Varoufakis, John Pilger and Noam Chomsky. A petition demanding an end to Assange’s isolation has garnered more than 65,000 signatures. Assange has been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since he sought asylum there in 2012. Assange entered the embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden which had wanted him for questioning in regard to an alleged sexual assault. Assange feared that if he was brought into custody in Sweden, it would only be a matter of time before he was extradited to Pindostan, where he would face charges over Wikileaks’ publishing of Pindo diplomatic cables and other sensitive information, per RT. Ecuador had granted him citizenship in December in a failed attempt to allow him to leave under diplomatic immunity. However, Ecuador’s new president, Lenin Moreno, is less sympathetic to Assange’s cause, considering him an “inherited problem” from the government of Rafael Correa. The fate of Assange will become an especially sensitive issue once DCI Pompeo, with whom Assange has repeatedly clashed, becomes Trump’s new Sec State following his imminent confirmation.
DNC head Tom Perez refuses to say whether lawsuit against @WikiLeaks was really Hillary Clinton's idea and how much it is going to cost Democrats https://t.co/whrfnl9Ned
WikiLeaks has hit back against the multimillion-dollar lawsuit filed by the DNC, announcing over Twitter that they are seeking donations for a counter-suit and noting “We’ve never lost a publishing case and discovery is going to be amazing fun,” along with a link which people can use to donate to the organization.
The Democrats are suing @WikiLeaks and @JulianAssange for revealing how the DNC rigged the Democratic primaries. Help us counter-sue. We've never lost a publishing case and discovery is going to be amazing fun:https://t.co/E1QbYJL4bB
Discovery is a pre-trial process by which one party can obtain evidence from the opposing party relevant to the case. The Trump campaign, which is also named in the DNC filing, says the lawsuit will provide an opportunity to “explore the DNC’s now-secret records.” Hours after the WaPo broke the news of the lawsuit, Pres Trump tweeted:
Just heard the Campaign was sued by the Obstructionist Democrats. This can be good news in that we will now counter for the DNC Server that they refused to give to the FBI, the Debbie Wasserman Schultz Servers and Documents held by the Pakistani mystery man and Clinton Emails.
In a statement which goes into the various items they’ll be pursuing in court, the Trump campaign said the following:
While this lawsuit is frivolous and will be dismissed, if the case goes forward, the DNC has created an opportunity for us to take aggressive discovery into their claims of ‘damages’ and uncover their acts of corruption for the Pindo sheeple,”If this lawsuit proceeds, the Trump Campaign will be prepared to leverage the discovery process and explore the DNC’s now-secret records about the actual corruption they perpetrated to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Everything will be on the table, including:
How the DNC contributed to the fake dossier, using Fusion GPS along with the Clinton Campaign as the basis for the launch of a phony investigation;
Why the FBI was never allowed access to the DNC servers in the course of their investigation into the Clinton e-mail scandal;
How the DNC conspired to hand Hillary Clinton the nomination over Bernie Sanders;
How officials at the highest levels of the DNC colluded with the news media to influence the outcome of the DNC nomination.
Management decisions by Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Donna Brazile, Tom Perez and John Podesta, along with their e-mails, personnel decisions, budgets, opposition research and more.
What’s interesting is that of all the sources the DNC cites in their massive lawsuit, the Steele dossier they paid for isn’t one of them. The DNC suit has drawn criticism from prominent Demagogs who would like to restore dignity to the party such as Claire McCaskill, Jackie Speier and former Obama White House adviser and CNN commentator David Axelrod, who suggested in a Friday tweet that the “ill-timed” combination of “Comey’s flamboyant roll-out” and the DNC lawsuit are playing into Trump’s strategy of portraying the investigation against him as a “partisan vendetta.”
All of these sideshows—Comey’s flamboyant roll out; this @DNC lawsuit—seem spectacularly ill-timed and abet @POTUS strategy of portraying a sober and essential probe as a partisan vendetta. Everyone should chill out and let Mueller do his job.https://t.co/e1edkIcrmr
DNC Chair Tom Perez defended the lawsuit on Sunday, saying:
The DNC filed the suit in a timely manner under the statue of limitations. … I don’t know when Director Mueller’s investigation is going to end, nor would I ever ask him, because I want him to do a good, thorough job.
Perez added that he’s confident the lawsuit will get a jury trial. He told ABC News This Week on Sunday:
If they think they can relitigate all their wild theories, they will be sadly disappointed. There’s this thing called Rule 11, where you get sanctioned for trying to do things like that. That’s why we have a civil justice system. You can’t fire this judge who will preside over the case. You can’t pardon defendants in a civil case. I think it’s so important for the Pindo creeple to see the truth here.
When asked on NBC Meet the Press Sunday whether the lawsuit was Hillary Clinton’s idea, he responded:
You’ll have to ask Secretary Clinton. … The Party can’t afford not to continue, though I don’t know how much money the lawsuit will cost. It’s hard to put a price tag on preserving democracy.
The British government shared what was supposedly a dossier containing sensitive intelligence to convince allies and EU member states to support its accusation of Russian culpability in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England on Mar 4. But like the infamous 2003 “dodgy dossier”, the intelligence dossier on the Salisbury poisoning turns out to have been based on politically-motivated speculation rather than actual intelligence. British boxtops used the hastily assembled “intelligence” briefing to brief the North Atlantic Council on Mar 15, the European Foreign Affairs Council on Mar 19 and the European summit meeting in Brussels on Mar 23. When Theresa May and Boris Johnson ordered the production of an intelligence dossier to be used to convince allies and EU member states to join Britain in expelling Russian diplomats, they had a problem: they were unable to declare that nerve agent from a Russian military laboratory had been verified as the poison administered to the Skripals. As Craig Murray learned from a FCO source, the British government military laboratory knoiwn as DSTL Porton Down had been put under strong pressure by Johnson to agree that they had confirmed that the poison found in Salisbury had come from a specific Russian laboratory. Instead Porton Down would only agree to the much more ambiguous formula that it was nerve agent “of a type developed in Russia.” So May and Johnson needed some dramatic claims to buttress their argument to allies and EU member states that the Salisbury poisoning must have been a Russian government assassination attempt. A letter from British national security adviser Mark Sedwill to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg released publicly on Apr 13, refers to two key claims in the dossier of a Russian program to research ways of delivering nerve agent, including smearing it on door handles, and of Russian production and stockpiling of nerve agent during the past decade. But closer analysis of these claims, based in part on information provided by official British sources to the press, makes it clear that the government did not have any concrete “intelligence” to support those Government claims in the intelligence brief. The Sedwill letter referred to a Russian “investigation of ways of delivering nerve agent, including by application to door handles” as being part of a broader alleged Russian government program of CW research and military training.” The letter was obviously implying that it had some secret intelligence on which to base the charge, and some in the British press pitched in to support the claim. The first paragraph of the The Guardian story on the intelligence dossier said:
Russia had tested whether door handles could be used to deliver nerve agent.
It attributed the information to “previously classified intelligence over the Salisbury attack made public Friday.” In another story about the evidence on the Salisbury poisoning, the Guardian, apparently reflecting its understanding of what government boxtops had conveyed, wrote:
Such an audacious attack could have been carried out only by trained professionals familiar with CW.
That statement hinted that the alleged Russian “investigation of ways of delivering nerve agents, including by application to door handles” was actually a speculative inference rather than a fact established by hard evidence. A report in the Daily Mirror, evidently intended to support the government line, actually showed quite clearly that what was being presented as intelligence on alleged Russian research on delivering nerve agent via a door handle was in fact nothing of the sort. It quoted a “security source” as explaining how that claim in the intelligence paper was linked to the belief of counter-terrorism investigators that the Skripals first came in contact with nerve agent on the handle of Skripals’ front door. The unnamed source told the Daily Mirror:
The door handle thing is big! It amounts to Russia’s tradecraft manual on applying poisons to door handles! It’s the smoking gun!
The source was not saying that British intelligence had firsthand information about a Russian tradecraft manual. It was suggesting that one could somehow deduce from the assumed application of nerve agent to the door handle of the Skripal house that this was a sign of Russian intelligence tradecraft. The source then appeared to confirm explicitly that this inference was the basis of the specific claim in the intelligence brief:
It is strong proof Russia has in the last 10 years researched methods to administer poisons, including by using door handles.
Now the cock & bull story of Mirzayanov & Rink again:
The idea that only intelligence operatives with formal training could have applied nerve agent to a door handle was not based on objective analysis. MI6 knows very well that a 1995 murder committed in Moscow with a nerve agent developed by Soviet-era scientists was carried out by a private individual, not a government intelligence unit. Court documents in the 1995 murder of banker Ivan Kivelidi, reported by the Novaya Gazeta, show that in 1994 a Russian criminal syndicate had acquired Novichok nerve agent, which had been synthesized by Soviet scientists, and that it was used the following year to kill Kivelidi and his secretary by applying some of the nerve agent on his telephone receiver. Boris Kuznetsov, a dissident Russian lawyer involved in the Kivelidi murder case, who fled Russia in 2007 with copies of all the relevant documents, turned them over to the British government after the Skripal poisoning. The knowledge of that episode would account for PM May’s otherwise surprising acknowledgement on Mar 12 of the possibility that the poisoning might not have been a Russian government action, but the consequence of the Russian government allowing nerve agent to “get into the hands of others.”
End of cock & bull interlude – the whole first part of this was devoted to those confabulating defectors Mirzayanov & inexplicably – RB
The Sedwill letter made another sweeping claim of covert Russian production of the line of nerve agent that had been dubbed Novichok. It said:
Within the last decade, Russia has produced and stockpiled small quantities of Novichok under the same programme.
If true, that would have been major evidence bearing on the Skripal poisoning, since such a program would be both covert and illegal under the CWC. But neither the Sedwill letter nor any other statement from the British government has referred to the possession of any evidence for that claim, even in the most generic way. In fact, PM May said merely that Russia “had previously produced Novichoks and would still be able to do so.” In contrast to its silence about any kind of information supporting its claim of Russian production and stockpiling of Novichok program in the past decade, the Sedwill letter cited “a combination of credible open-source reporting and intelligence” on the existence of the Russian program that developed the Novichok line of nerve agents in the 1970s and 1980s. If British possessed actual evidence of such a Russian nerve agent program at Shikhany, the former military CW facility, it presumably would have informed the OPCW of the fact and presented its evidence to the 41-member Executive Council, the governing body of the organization. It clearly has not done so, and it has not suggested that it was prevented from doing so by the fear of compromising an intelligence source within the Russian government. The British government could also demand a “challenge inspection” at the facility. Any member of the CWC can call for an immediate inspection, and Russia would have had no option but to permit it. But it has not done so, signifying that it does not have the information necessary to identify the location of the alleged production and stockpiling of such a weapon, nor does it have the name of anyone who has worked on such a project. Another claim in the British “intelligence” dossier is an intercepted Russian communication that allegedly supports the Russian nerve gas operation accusation. The Daily Express reported its sources saying such an intercept had been “a key part of Britain’s intelligence evidence.” The sources revealed that on Mar 4, a message from Damascus to Moscow intercepted by a listening post in Southern Cyprus contained the words:
The package has been delivered.
And the same message was said to have reported that two named individuals had “made a successful egress,” meaning that they had left. But without knowing the context in which either statement was made, such quotes are meaningless. And one must ask how often something like those exact words would be communicated to Moscow from a diplomatic or military outpost somewhere in the world every single day. Furthermore, the second message to which the dossier is said to have referred actually revealed the names of the two men who had departed, so it clearly had nothing to do with a covert operation. The May government was able to convince 29 other states, including the United States, to take action against Russia by expelling its diplomats, representing a deliberate step toward higher tensions with Moscow. But the intelligence dossier it deployed in that effort, as reflected in the Sedwill letter and media reporting, was far from being the kind of information one might expect to provoke such a major diplomatic move. It was instead, like the original 2003 “dodgy dossier” on WMD in Saddam’s Iraq, essentially a collection of misleading claims based on politically-skewed logic.
This article is almost entirely comprised of arguments which depend on the assumption that something being a "conspiracy theory" or contradicting establishment orthodoxy is intrinsically invalidating. You're not going to dupe us into another war that easy.https://t.co/jPDXemOA4u
No, it relies on clear and methodical explanations of why the arguments are based on false and unreliable information. You're the one obsessed with "establishment orthodoxy".
A journalist who was a finalist in 2017 for the Martha Gellhorn Journalism award…Chris York is a Twitter lurker and shoddy researcher as I will demonstrate when I am home after 5 weeks working on the ground in #Syria. In 7 years York has failed to go to #Syria.
I write a lot about how, in a political environment that is saturated in disinformation and propaganda, it’s important to ignore people’s words and watch their actions instead to get a clear picture of what’s really happening. You could not ask for a better illustration of this than the recent behavior of the mass media with regard to Syria. The always excellent Moon of Alabama put out a piece yesterday detailing the immense deluge of attack editorials disguised as information that have been churned out recently about anyone who questions the establishment Syria narrative, including a single day in which no less than seven smear pieces were issued by prominent publications. Seven. In one day. If you look at the words within these smear pieces, you will gather that there has been a sudden disturbing emergence of evil bloggers, tweeters and activists who are hell bent on deceiving you into falling in love with Bashar al-Assad and pledging allegiance to the Russian flag. If you look at what these outlets are actually doing, however, you see a very different picture indeed: an aggressive, spurious campaign to inoculate the English-speaking world against the influence of anyone who disagrees with yet another war against yet another Middle Eastern country. And people are noticing. It’s getting too blatantly obvious, like a stranger coming up to you and talking about climate change while openly masturbating; what he is doing would eclipse interest in whatever he is saying. The frenetic publication of hit pieces against anyone who fails to fall in line with the establishment Syria narrative is fast becoming the real story here.
Many of these recent hit pieces are coming out of Britain, which is interesting given the way a BBC reporter recently admonished her interviewee for questioning the official story about the alleged Douma chemical attacks because his words could hurt the “information war” effort against Russia. If this view is widespread among British journalists (and recent headlines by the Times, the Independent and the Telegraph suggest that it may be), this means we’re looking at an environment wherein reporters aren’t even pretending it’s their job to be truthful, tell all sides of a story and hold power to account, but rather to manufacture support for escalations against Russia and undermine anyone who resists.
Today yet another mainstream smear piece has been published about Vanessa Beeley, an investigative journalist who has done extensive work on the ground in Syria, which Britain’s HuffPost branch hilariously titled “How An Obscure British Blogger Became Russia’s Key Witness Against The White Helmets.” Its author, senior Huffpo editor Chris York, doesn’t explain how we’re meant to see an investigative journalist practicing the definition of investigative journalism on the ground in a war-torn nation as “an obscure blogger,” but he has said that he has two more such articles on the way. Who do these people think they’re kidding? Are we truly meant to believe that people expressing skepticism about the authenticity of a “civil defense group” in a distant Middle Eastern country is suddenly the most dangerous thing in the world? Are we really meant to think it’s normal for all these mass media corporations to suddenly start ferociously attacking anyone who expresses skepticism about the military agendas of western forces that have an extensive and well-documented history of using lies, propaganda and false flags to manufacture support for military agendas? Are we really meant to believe that Syria, a nation for which Pindostan & Britain have been plotting regime change for many years, is just now in sore need of humanitarian regime change? And that anyone who says otherwise just loves Assad, Putin and dead babies? Please. We’re being lied to, aggressively and relentlessly. And it’s backfiring on them.
SO @CNN is so scared of Youtube news channels that they R creating a fake crisis so that youtube will now fully demonetize independent news. My show goes against the Pro Syrian War narrative being uniformly pushed by Est. news, so they smear me hard. https://t.co/qCTEZ4EKko
Propaganda and censorship only work if they’re invisible. Once it becomes obvious that propagandists are propagandizing, public attention moves from the material being presented to the people who are doing the presenting. And this is exactly what we are seeing with the establishment Syria narrative. In martial arts you learn never to overextend and reach for your opponent, because leaning into striking range with your arm outstretched leaves you exposed to a devastating knockout counterstrike. Do that in a boxing match and you’ll eat an uppercut that leaves you staring into a ringside doctor’s pen light and questioning your life choices. By losing control of the Syria narrative and making such a strained effort to regain it, the establishment propaganda machine has overreached, and now we have only to point at what they’re doing to cripple their Syria warmongering. Let’s make a lot of noise about this blatant, ham-fisted propaganda campaign. When people are looking straight at them and what they are doing, the psyops can’t take root. Turn the lights on full blast in this kabuki theater and shatter the illusion for everyone.
