war propaganda

Propaganda is how they got people to go along with the so called 'revolution' in the first place.

What if armed men came to town and the cable TV news stations broadcast that there is a revolution and if you want a place in the new society you have to join now? What if you were poor and living in the ghetto when the announcement arrived and they told you that this was your chance to participate in the government and to become empowered in society? Then, armed checkpoints were set up everywhere, some operated by local people who might be armed and trigger happy, but at least they recognize you; others by strangers who are part of the national army, and they aren't in a good mood. Both sides believe that some of their members have been killed by the other for no good reason and they are angry. You weren't at the protests so you don't really know what happened. You've seen some very polarized 'news' on TV. and a call to battle. What do you do now?

[In North America]I have been introduced to a refugee family from Daraa. They are a young couple with three children between four and eight years old. They are having a hard time here for a number of reasons. They weren't really ready to be in a context with no family support. Mohammed, the husband, is deaf and, so far as I can tell, none of their relatives were killed. Wishan said that religious extremists are haram. She likes to listen to recordings of a man chanting the Quran, but she doesn't wear a hijab. She said that is a small thing in the eyes of Allah. I am pretty sure they were not directly involved in the war or the events that lead to the outbreak in 2011. She complained that her brother had been hassled at checkpoints, but he is alive and well in Europe somewhere at present. Most of the family is still in Daraa.

Wishan showed me photos of her destroyed home in a block of bombed out houses. But she also showed me a photo of the bruised and bloated corpse of an adolescent boy with what looked to be a 22 caliber bullet wound in the area of his heart. Her English isn't good but I think she was trying to tell me that was one of the boys who wrote anti-Assad graffiti and were abused by the government at the beginning of the war. The first thing I thought when I saw the picture is that I'm sure lots of boys have died in this war but there is no evidence in a naked corpse of who shot him, when, where, or why. I also thought that there is a whole world of Internet propaganda out there targeting Syrian civilians in the Arabic language news from the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia.

Its funny how stories spiral out in different directions. The government fired the governor responsible and sent a delegation to chill things out. According to our sources, they didn't come up with any hard information, which makes sense because if people had already got their kids back they might not want to risk any more attention to them. A year ago, Al Jazeera ran an article that focuses on one of the boys supposedly abducted and tortured by the government in Daraa. It was called "The boy who started the Syrian revolution". The article didn't specify the fate of any other boys involved though they noted that several were originally arrested, like maybe three or four. It seems to imply that they were released. This boy, however, is identified as currently a member of the Free Syrian Army and shown sitting at a low table before a laptop computer. An image tailored to liberal western tastes.

But this civilian refugee from the area is still carrying around a horrific photo of a boy she believes to be one of the boys who were tortured and killed by the Syrian government at the beginning of the war. This event has reduced her life to chaos. The eight year old said that he wants to go to Syria and fight against Assad when he grows up. When I told him the war is pretty much over, he was incredulous. I suggested he can go and help rebuild.

It's all very sad. Every war leaves the seeds of another war. And the propaganda is more toxic to those directly affected by the war in every way.

I am still working with Wishan and her family. Mohammed is a carpenter from a relatively well off family. They have gone from being respected members of a community to being beggars here. I am going to give some carpenter work to Mohammed and see if he can get a start building and selling furniture here. I'm thinking that over time we can become friends. Right now they are frightened and rather desperate but hopefully they can become more self sufficient.

I asked about Daraa today and Wishan said that things are calm there but very expensive to live. It is one of the cities where a reconciliation program has been negotiated by the government. There are local people controlling some basic services and running a Sharia court while the government controls the outside parameters and provides power, clean water, salaries for government employees and whatever aid they can. Of course there is little money for rebuilding at this point and Daraa was kind of a working class city to begin with.

The family of a child with appendicitis is in Daraa where they had to pay $500 for his surgery. Apparently medical services there are scarce and costly. He received his surgery in time to survive but he is now partly paralyzed. I don't know if it is from the toxins that must have been released into his abdomen when his appendix ruptured or something went wrong in the surgery. Perhaps the paralysis will improve with time. We can only hope.

This week, congress failed to renew the CHIPS program that has for provided health care for 2 generations of children in families living below the poverty level. They were busy passing a monstrous military budget and a tax bill that provides 'relief' for corporate behemoths already on the government dole. Meanwhile Wishan and Mohammed's children remain at risk due to lack of medical care here in the land of plenty. I think they kind of understand this but they are too desperate to consider it. There is no turning back for them.

War is terrible thing regardless of which side you are on. The physical war kills people and destroys resources while the propaganda war is waged to divide people against their neighbors and fuel hatreds. Refugees come to the United States, or Europe, or to Turkey, all countries who have fed the war with weapons and propaganda, countries that have profited, or at least hoped to profit, from the war that has beggared a relatively stable nation and disrupted an ancient culture built on religious and ethnic diversity. Unfortunately, refugees who come to the US from US engineered war zones face continued poverty, isolation and confusion.

About Judith Bello: Judith is a member of Administrative Committee at United National Antiwar Coalition, the Middle East Task Force at Fellowship of Reconciliation and Webmaster at Upstate Coaltion to Ground the Drones and End the Wars. She lives in New York and has visited Syria on anti-war projects.

John Pilger and Vanessa Beeley talk about the amazing growth in mass-media supported war propaganda in our times, including the grotesque fantasies manufactured about Russian intervention in US elections and the creation of a false cold war. Vanessa Beeley describes how, when she was in Aleppo, she was witness to the absolute fabrication of what was happening there. And now, the almost complete silence on what seems like American ethnic cleansing of Arabs in Raqqua - where the US is using depleted uranium, phosporos weapons and not providing any humanitarian corridors.

Don't mention the role of war in climate change and economic devastation. Why we shouldn't believe that the US military establishment is sincere on its warning to Trump (and the rest of us) on climate change. I would once have swallowed this whole. A bunch of military men from prior US administration proselytise about climate change on this 4Corners program. Of course they totally ignore the role of war in carbon emissions which is probably the greatest contributor to carbon emissions. This is my reaction to the Australian 4Corners program of 20 March 2017.

They talk about a three year drought in Syria as a major cause of the 'unrest', population movement and the 'civil war' in Syria. They don't mention how Israel and Turkey annexed parts of a major river from Syria. They talk about how the consequent 'unravelling of Syrian society' opened up an opportunity for ISIS which. they say, had been born itself from the 'civil war' in Iraq.

They don't mention the US/NATO funding of the so-called rebellion/rebels in Syria, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya. They don't mention their role in war and climate change.

This story serves as a cover for current and future wars in the Middle East, for the destruction of the Middle East. It also serves as an excuse for mass immigration and creates a perceived need for more military defense.

By occasionally mentioning war as having other causes alongside climate change the film attempt to sound even-handed. But the whole thing comes from the CIA, is politically biased against the current US administration, is politically rather than scientifically founded. With regard to the science of climate change, it is just used here as a cover for war-propaganda.

The major message of this 'documentary' is that 'you need the US military to protect you from mass immigration and terrorism due to climate change provoking civil wars in the Middle East.

The film also gets in some anti-Russian propaganda, blaming Russia for blocking wheat to Egypt on one occasion, presumably to designate the Enemy for future wars.

The film tells us how Africans need more land but points out that Africa has lots of potential agricultural land, but China is grabbing that land. Doesn't mention that there is global investment in those Chinese agribusinesses nor that US and European investors are in competition for that land. Africans themselves continue to be turfed off their traditional land and disorganised, driven to seek their fortunes in megacities where child labor laws are either non-existent or not enforced, making children a source of income for families which have lost their traditional land and incomes.

Overpopulation accompanies urbanisation and 'development'. In third world countries it is not a consequence of better medical care lowering the death rate, since, by definition, these 'improvements' are lacking in such countries, which suffer from untreated Acquired Immunity Deficiency, associated turberculosis, and various delocalised viruses like ebola and parasitic infestations, such as schistosomiasis.

The film calls for greater international cooperation on climate change, but gives little power to people over their local situations, which is the first base to fight climate change or any other environmental ill. It is probably the only base, since the power-elite base that controls armies has no intention of resiling from weapons and war industry and has forced exception from climate change protocol for the military.

So, it's all rhetoric and propaganda: PR for the industrial-military-media machine. Repackaged for Australians in their most trusted investigative program.

The publication of this film by 4Corners shows how the people who select for this show are either incapable of analysing pure propaganda or unable to avoid showing it.

Who is choosing these propaganda programs for the ABC?

In a 27 January talk for the Edinburgh SNP Club former UK ambassador Craig Murray appears to reveal that contacts within the BBC have admitted to him that events featured in Ian Pannell and Darren Conway's 29 August 2013 BBC News report about an incendiary attack on a Syrian school were "exaggerated" and that some parts were "filmed again".

"I think there’s been an awful lot on the BBC that’s simply been deliberate propaganda and when they had the debate on bombing Syria – the idea that bombing Syria would help stop people dying – in the run up to that debate you remember we were having almost
every BBC news bulletin was full of stories of the Syrian government forces killing civilians, whereas our own bombs never do, apparently, and I think that push for war by the BBC was really very worrying.

There was one particular thing that I blogged about myself and on which other people have done a lot of work where I just happened to notice that on two different news bulletins, a female - an item the BBC had  done about a chemical weapons attack on a school in Syria, it was extremely emotive, on two different news bulletins the doctor speaking had said different things, ostensibly the same sentence, ostensibly filmed at exactly the same time, but with different words in it, one said “napalm” and one said “chemical weapons” and her mouth was hidden by her doctor’s mask so you couldn’t actually see her lips move, it was kind of voice over going on and yet it appeared to be a “breaking news” news item of everything happening before you almost live - and dug down into that quite a lot and the footage was used again on a Panorama programme the BBC did, which was very much, undoubtedly it was designed to stoke an emotive appeal to British military intervention in Syria, that was the purpose of it and it became plain that there just were a number of things in that video that weren’t right.

Now I have friends in the BBC and in Panorama itself in fact and what I’m told happened, which I think I believe is the truth - I mean there’s some people who believe that the whole thing was, the entire thing was a setup, that the whole bombings and things never happened at all and the whole thing was just set up with actors - I don’t think that is true I think what happened was that they were filming when something had happened, they rather exaggerated how bad the incident was and bits of it they filmed again because they didn’t get it clearly or it wasn’t exactly as they wanted and it seems to me that there’s a line here that’s been crossed because if you’re doing something that’s supposed to be news and you’ve got someone bringing in someone on a stretcher you can’t say “right, sorry, can we have another take?” and get them to bring him in on the stretcher again and that’s what was happening, so no matter how real the incident on which the thing was based what we were seeing was a fictionalised account posing as real life and that, to me the BBC has been crossing that kind of line quite regularly in its coverage in Syria."

In a blog post of 9 March 2016 Mr Murray stated: “Let me pin my colours to the mast and say that I am absolutely convinced that the BBC did deliberately and knowingly fake evidence of chemical attacks”.

In a March 2014 email to One World Media, when Ian Pannell and the "Chemical School Attack" report were nominated for awards, Mr Murray wrote: “I am obliged to say, having personally been in my career in rather similar conflict situations, I was struck by the strange absence of panic and screaming both by patients and surrounding family - I have seen people in that sort of pain and situation and they are not that quiet and stoic, in any culture." (Mr Murray has previously granted permission for me to publish his email online and the extract above is now copied on my blog).

Parts of my March 2016
presentation for Frome Stop War on BBC Panorama 'Saving Syria's Children' have been featured on Syrian television:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqGmLlbVBHo&feature=youtu.be 

Newly-discovered images of alleged BBC "napalm victim": In June 2014 a Netherlands resident contacted me, expressing anxiety about being recognised in a frame from 'Saving Syria's Children' which I had posted on Facebook. Although the woman was not among the group of alleged napalm/thermite victims in the frame in question, I subsequently recognised her in a You Tube video shot at Atareb Hospital, Aleppo on 26 August 2013, apparently in the guise of a victim of the same alleged events portrayed in Ian Pannell and Darren Conway's BBC reports. This is the latest report in Robert Stuart's extraordinary investigation into BBC war propaganda.

1. In June 2014 a Netherlands resident contacted me, expressing anxiety about being recognised in a frame from 'Saving Syria's Children' which I had posted on Facebook. Although the woman was not among the group of alleged napalm/thermite victims in the frame in question, I subsequently recognised her in a You Tube video shot at Atareb Hospital, Aleppo on 26 August 2013, apparently in the guise of a victim of the same alleged events portrayed in Ian Pannell and Darren Conway's BBC reports. I have written about this here and here.

A number of images currently viewable on the Facebook account of one of the woman's relatives would appear to make it plainer still that the person who contacted me is indeed the same person who appears in the You Tube footage of the aftermath of the alleged Aleppo incendiary bomb attack. Details here.

2) My attempts to secure documents relating to Saving Syria's Children from the BBC through a Freedom of Information request appear, somewhat inevitably, to have run aground.

Following a decision notice from the Information Commissioner's Office upholding the BBC 's rejection of my request, I had argued in an appeal to the First-tier Tribunal (General Regulatory Chamber) that the evidence set out in my blog:

...clearly demonstrates that the BBC has committed the greatest betrayal of audience trust imaginable by a news broadcaster – the fabrication of an atrocity for the purposes of war propaganda. Such an egregious transgression is quite possibly unique in the history of broadcasting.

I further argued that Saving Syria’s Children and related BBC News reports had breached Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which states that “Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law”.

In response the Tribunal has issued a Case Management Note (3 May) observing that:

"Mr Stuart’s rights under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights may be capable of being litigated and remedy given to him if a Court finds there was a breach of those rights. The question of whether reports are genuine or fabricated may also be capable of being independently investigated."

However the Tribunal "is unable to grant Mr Stuart a remedy for what he says is a contravention of his rights under that Covenant" and directs that I must provide it with reasons why the information I have requested from the BBC was or is “not held for the purposes of journalism, art or literature”.

The deadline for submitting a response is 24 May.

3) A high quality copy of Saving Syria's Children is currently available on Vimeo. The section which forms the focus of my blog commences at 30:38. As BBC Worldwide has long since blocked all You Tube postings of the documentary, please consider downloading the Vimeo copy while it is available. This version is the highest quality I have seen to date and has already yielded a number of interesting new details, such as an apparent glimpse of the Dutch woman pictured above (see update here).

4) Further to my submission of shocking images of a staff member of UK registered charity Hand in Hand for Syria's "flagship medical facility", Atareb Hospital, Aleppo, posing with an array of weapons and munitions, an officer of the Charity Commission's Investigations Monitoring and Enforcement department has responded (12 April):

"I am currently considering the information that you have provided in order to determine what regulatory action, if any, is required. I confirm that I will provide a more detailed response once I have completed my assessment."

5) A reminder of the two sets of graphics highlighting some very startling inconsistencies in accounts of the alleged events of 26 August 2013 by BBC International Correspondent Ian Pannell and BBC 'Trust Me I'm A Doctor' presenter Dr Saleyha Ahsan and my recent presentation on Saving Syria's Children for From Stop War.

Robert Stuart
https://bbcpanoramasavingsyriaschildren.wordpress.com

Allegations by Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott against Russia may have no solid basis, but could escalate world tensions. Many people view these allegations as propaganda to provide a platform for eventual NATO aggression. These allegations have recently been reinforced by Julie Bishop, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, as a reason for applying sanctions against Russia. See "Russia Sanctions based on False Statement by Julie Bishop, Australian Foreign Affairs and Trade Minister"http://candobetter.net/node/4437".

12 May 2015

The Prime Minister,

Dear Mr Abbott,

Would you please let me know the evidence and documentation the Prime Minister or the person who wrote this statement has used to make the serious allegations highlighted in yellow below about the Russian Government, which I also cite below in case the highlighting does not come through.

I am concerned that they may actually have no solid basis and that this and similar press releases will escalate hostilities and the threat of nuclear war by misleading public and politicians.

Allegations:

My inquiry is for a freelance article in the public interest which will be published on candobetter.net among other outlets.

sincerely,

Sheila Newman
03 97835047

01 September 2014

Prime Minister

EXPANDED SANCTIONS AGAINST RUSSIA

The Government is deeply concerned by escalating events in Ukraine.

Russia has been engaged in a campaign to destabilise Ukraine for months. As a consequence, 38 people who called Australia home were brutally murdered, along with many others, when

The situation has recently worsened as Russia steps up its persistent and deliberate violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty.

in defiance of Ukraine’s sovereignty, the international community and international law.

As Russia refuses to heed the international community’s call to de-escalate the crisis and instead is further fuelling it, the Government will expand Australia’s autonomous sanctions and travel bans relating to Russia.

This is being done in coordination with our partners in the US, Canada and Europe.

Australia’s expanded sanctions will include:

restrictions on arms exports;
restrictions on the access of Russian state-owned banks to Australian capital markets;
preventing the export of goods and services for use in Russia’s oil exploration or production;
restrictions on Australian trade and investment in Crimea; and
targeted financial sanctions and travel bans on an additional 63 Russian and Ukrainian individuals and 21 entities (taking the total number of financial sanctions and travel bans to 113 individuals and 32 entities).

These measures build on Australia’s existing financial sanctions and travel bans, announced in March this year.

They reaffirm Australia’s clear and unequivocal support for the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine.

Australia stands with countries around the world in urging Russia to de-escalate tensions, pull back its military, and engage in genuine dialogue with Ukraine.

We remain determined to see the perpetrators of the cowardly attack on Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 brought to justice. We owe this to the innocent victims and their families.

The Government does not rule out further sanctions in the future.

Russia must understand that if it does not act to defuse the current situation, the cost to its economy and international standing will grow.

1 September 2014
Source: https://www.pm.gov.au/media/2014-09-01/expanded-sanctions-against-russia