Dr. Tim Anderson: The Dirty War on Syria, Chapter 3: Barrel Bombs, Partisan Sources and War Propaganda

Support for res. Assad remains surpassingly strong, giving the lie, once again, to the Western media fallsifications and nonstop innuendo.

Support for Pres. Assad remains surprisingly strong, giving the lie, once again, to the Western media falsifications and nonstop innuendos designed to isolate him.

INTRODUCTION BY DANIEL WIRT

The rise of ISIS and the presence of al-Qaida, this time both used by the US and its western allies to topple Assad, shows that the global war on terror is a sham.

dirty The Orwellian disinformation and lies about the situation in Syria and the Middle East and its causation have been chronically disseminated by the presstitutes in the mainstream media and the pro-imperialist “left” (referred to by some wags as the “Left Boots of NATO”) in alternative media.

Thankfully, there are several exemplary exceptions in the alternative media —analysts, journalists and researchers doing careful, intellectually honest, evidence-based work. Dr. Tim Anderson, a Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Sydney is an epitome in this regard, clearly one of the world’s experts on the recent history of Syria.

Dr. Anderson is compiling many of his excellent, heavily-researched but highly readable articles on Syria (http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/tim-anderson) into an upcoming book, “The Dirty War on Syria.” These articles (chapters) are vitally important for anti-imperialists, and thus The Greanville Post will republish all of them serially, chapter-by-chapter. We urge The Greanville Post readers to read them and use them to counter the Orwellian disinformation campaign against Syria.

Please click below to review the chapters being planned for The Dirty War on Syria. This is essential for your proper comprehension of this topic.

The Dirty War on Syria—Examine the Contents Outline Here

Chapter 1: the Introductory Chapter of Dr. Anderson’s upcoming book, “The Dirty War on Syria” is republished here: https://www.greanvillepost.com/2016/01/10/dr-tim-anderson-on-syria-countering-the-pressitution-of-the-mainstream-media-and-the-pro-imperialist-left-media/

Chapter 2: ‘Syria and Washington’s ‘New Middle East’’ puts Syria in context of the US plans for a ‘New Middle East’, the latest chapter in a longer history of US attempts to dominate the region. (http://www.globalresearch.ca/syria-and-washingtons-new-middle-east/5491908).

In the near future, The Greanville Post will republish additional chapters as follows:

See Below for Chapter 3: ‘Barrel Bombs, Partisan Sources and War Propaganda’ addresses the problem of reporting and reading the Syrian crisis. Media channels have shown a hyper-reliance on partisan sources, committed to the war and denigrating the Syrian Army. This is the key barrier to understanding the controversies around chemical weapons, civilian massacres and the levels of support for or opposition to President Assad.

Chapter 4, ‘Daraa 2011: Another Islamist Insurrection’ reconstructs, from a range of sources, the Saudi-backed Islamist insurrection in Daraa in March 2011. Those armed attacks were quite distinct from the political reform rallies, which the Islamists soon drove off the streets.

Chapter 5, ‘Bashar al Assad and Political Reform’ explains the political reform movement from the time Bashar assumed the presidency in the year 2000 to the beginning of the crisis in 2011. From this we can see that most opposition groups were committed to reform within a Syrian context, with virtually all opposing attacks on the Syrian state. The chapter then reviews the role of Bashar as a reformer, and the evidence on his popularity.

Chapter 6, ‘The Empire’s Jihadis’ looks at the collaboration between Salafist political Islam and the imperial powers in the Middle East. Distinct from the anti-imperial Islamic currents in Iran and south Lebanon, Salafist political Islam has become a sectarian force competing with Arab nationalism across Egypt, Palestine and Syria, and drawing on longstanding collaborative relations with the big powers. This history provides important background to the character of Syria’s Islamist ‘revolution’, and its various slogans.

Chapter 7, ‘Embedded Media, Embedded Watchdogs’ identifies the propaganda techniques of media channels and the network of ‘human rights’ bodies (Human Rights Watch, Avaaz, etc) which function as megaphones and ‘moderators’ for the Washington agenda. Many have become fierce advocates for ‘humanitarian war’. A number of newer western NGOs (e.g. The Syria Campaign, The White Helmets) have been created by Wall Street agencies specifically for the dirty war on Syria. A number of their fabrications are documented here.

Chapter 8, ‘The Houla Massacre Revisited’ considers in detail the evidence from the first major massacre designed (following success of the technique over Libya) to influence UN Security Council consideration of military intervention. While the first UN inquiry group, actually in Syria, found contradictory evidence on this massacre, a second UN group outside Syria and co-chaired by a US diplomat, tried to blame the Syrian Government. Yet more than a dozen witnesses blamed Farouq FSA Islamists, who killed pro-government villagers and took over the area, holding it for some months. Several other ‘false flag’ massacres are noted.

Chapter 9, ‘Chemical Fabrications: the East Ghouta Incident’ details the second major ‘false flag’ incident of international significance. This incident in August 2013, which nearly sparked a major escalation involving US missile attacks on Syria, was used to accuse the Syrian Government of killing hundreds of civilians, including children, with chemical weapons. Within a fairly short time multiple sources of independent evidence (including North American evidence) disproved these accusations. Nevertheless, Syria’s opponents have repeated the false accusations, to this day, as though they were fact.

Chapter 10, ‘A Responsibility to Protect and the Double Game’ addresses a recent political doctrine, a subset of ‘humanitarian intervention’ popularised to add to the imperial toolkit. The application of this doctrine in Libya was disastrous for that little country. Fortunately the attempts to use it in Syria failed.

Chapter 11, ‘Health and Sanctions’ documents the NATO-backed Islamist attacks on Syria’s health system, linked to the impact of western economic sanctions. These twin currents have caused great damage to Syrian public health. Such attacks carry no plausible motive of seeking local popular support, so we must interpret them as part of an overall strategy to degrade the Syrian state, rendering it more vulnerable to outside intervention.

Chapter 12 ‘Washington, Terrorism and ISIS: the evidence’, documents the links between the big powers and the latest peak terrorist group they claim to be fighting. Only evidence can help develop informed opinion on this contentious matter, but the evidence is overwhelming. There is little ideological difference between the various Salafi-Islamist groups, and Washington and its allies have financed and armed every one of them.

Chapter 13, ‘Western Intervention and the Colonial Mind’ discusses the western cultural mindset that underlies persistent violations of the rights of other peoples.

Chapter 14 ‘Towards an Independent Middle East’, considers the end-game in the Syrian crisis, and its implications for the Middle East region. At tremendous cost the Syrian Arab Republic, its army and its people, have successfully resisted aggression from a variety of powerful enemies. Syria’s survival is due to its resilience and internal unity, bolstered by support from some strong allies. The introduction of Russian air power in late September 2015 was important. So too were the coordinated ground forces from Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, in support of an independent Syria.

The following text is Chapter 3 of Professor Tim Anderson’s forthcoming book entitled The Dirty War on Syria

“Barrel Bombs, Partisan Sources and War Propaganda”

War propaganda often demands the abandoning of ordinary reason and principle, and the Dirty War on Syria demonstrates this in abundance. A steady stream of atrocity stories – ‘barrel bombs’, chemical weapons, ‘industrial scale’ killings, dead babies – permeate the western news on Syria. They all have two things in common: they paint the Syrian President and the Syrian Army as monsters slaughtering civilians, including children; yet, when tracked back, all the stories come from utterly partisan sources. We are being deceived.

Normal ethical notions of avoiding conflicts of interest, searching for independent evidence and disqualifying self-serving claims from belligerent parties have been ignored in much of the western debate. This toxic atmosphere invites further fabrications, repeated to credulous audiences, even when the lies used to justify previous invasions (of Iraq in 2003) and dirty wars (in Libya, 2011) are still relatively fresh in our minds. As in previous wars, the aim is to demonise the enemy, by use of repeated atrocity claims, and so mobilise popular support behind the war (Knightley 2001).

Yet in circumstances of war adherence to some key principles is necessary when reading contentious evidence; at least if we wish to understand the truth of the matter. A belligerent party always has a vital interest in discrediting and delegitimising its opponent. For that reason, we must always view belligerent party ‘evidence’ against an opponent with grave suspicion. It is not that a warring party is incapable of understanding its opponent, rather what they say will always be conditioned by their special interest. We must assume bias. If there is no way to check the origin of that evidence, and if it is partisan and ‘self-serving’, it should be rejected as forensically worthless. This exclusion of ‘self-serving’ evidence follows broad principles applied in civil and criminal law. Such evidence only has value when it goes against the interest of the warring party, as with admissions, or when it says something about the mentality of the party putting it forward.

These principles apply whether speaking of the nature of wartime violence, of public opinion or political allegiance. So, for example, when Islamist armed groups and their associates claim that their mortal enemy the Syrian Arab Army is slaughtering civilians (e.g. AP 2015), that claim by itself is next to meaningless. We expect armed opponents to attack each other, with words as well as weapons. False stories of Government atrocities were in play from the beginning of the conflict. The head of a monastery in Homs, Mother Agnes-Mariam, denounced ‘false flag’ crimes by ‘Free Syrian Army’ groups back in 2011, where the images of murder victims were recycled in media setups by sectarian Islamists (SANA 2011). Similarly, US journalist Nir Rosen wrote of ‘dead opposition fighters … described as innocent civilians killed by security forces’ (Rosen 2012). What is the lesson here? Beware of partisan atrocity stories. They might at best serve as a flag, an accusation which might set in train a search for independent evidence.

For the same reason, when the Qatari monarchy (which has invested billions of dollars in the armed attacks on Syria) presents an anonymous, paid witness ‘Caesar’, with photos of numerous dead and tortured bodies, blaming the Syrian Army for ‘industrial scale killing’ (O’Toole 2014; Jalabi 2015), it should be plain that that ‘evidence’ is partisan and unreliable (Smith-Spark 2014; MMM 2014). The fact that this story was presented by a belligerent party just before a Geneva peace conference should give further cause for suspicion. But without genuinely independent evidence to corroborate the witness we have no way of verifying in which year, circumstance or even which country the photos were taken. Those who finance and arm the sectarian groups have slaughtered hundreds of thousands in recent years, in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. There is no shortage of photos of dead bodies. The fact that western media sources run these accusations, using lawyers (also paid by Qatar) to provide ‘bootstrap’ support (Cartalucci 2014; Murphy 2014), merely shows their limited understanding of independent evidence. [Or malicious and self-conscious adherence to Western propaganda memes.—Ed]

“We must always view belligerent party ‘evidence’ against an opponent with grave suspicion. It is not that a warring party is incapable of understanding its opponent, rather what they say will always be conditioned by their special interest. We must assume bias. If there is no way to check the origin of that evidence, and if it is partisan and ‘self-serving’, it should be rejected as forensically worthless…”

Similar principles apply to claims over legitimacy. Assertions by US Government officials, openly (and contrary to international law) seeking ‘regime change’ in Syria, that President Assad has ‘lost all legitimacy’ (e.g. Hillary Clinton in Al Jazeera 2011) should be seen as simply self-serving, partisan propaganda. In the case of Washington’s claims about the August 2013 chemical weapons attack in East Ghouta, the US Government and some of its embedded agencies attempted to use telemetry and some other circumstantial evidence to implicate the Syrian Army (Gladstone and Chivers 2013; HRW 2013). However, after those claims were destroyed by a range of independent evidence (Lloyd and Postol 2014; Hersh 2014; Anderson 2015), Washington and its media periphery simply kept repeating the same discredited accusations. In the climate of war, few were bold enough to say that the emperor ‘had no clothes’.

We might pay a little more attention when evidence from belligerent parties goes against their own interest. For example, in 2012 western media interviewed three Free Syrian Army (FSA) commanders in Aleppo. They all admitted they were hated by the local people and that the Syrian President had the loyalty of most. One said President Assad had about ‘70 percent’ support (Bayoumy 2013) in that mainly Sunni Muslim city. A second said the local people, ‘all of them, are loyal to the criminal Bashar, they inform on us’ (Abouzeid 2012). A third said they are ‘all informers … they hate us. They blame us for the destruction’ (Abdul-Ahad 2012). Although this is simply anecdotal evidence, because it runs against the interests of its sources it has greater significance than self-serving claims. Similarly, while NATO heads of government were claiming President Assad had ‘lost all legitimacy’, an internal NATO report estimated that 70% of Syrians supported the President, 20% were neutral and 10% supported the ‘rebels’ (World Tribune 2013; BIN 2013). While there is no public detail of the method behind this estimate, it has some significance in that it also runs against self-interest. It also roughly matches the outcome of the June 2014 Presidential elections, where Bashar al Assad gained 65% support from all eligible voters, that is, 88.7% of the vote from a 73.4% participation rate (Idea International 2015).

Rami Abdul Rahman: His lies —wittingly disseminated by the West—carry a high cost in human lives and the literal destruction of an entire region.

[dropcap]P[/dropcap]erhaps the most common and profound error of the western media, reporting on the Syrian crisis, has been the extraordinary reliance on a single person, a man based in Britain who calls himself the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). Many of the stories about Syrian body counts, ‘regime’ atrocities and huge collateral damage come from this man. Yet Rami Abdul Rahman has always flown the flag of the Muslim Brotherhood led ‘Free Syrian Army’ on his website (SOHR 2015). He claims to collect information from a network of associates in and around Syria. It is logical to assume these would also be mostly anti-Government people. Media channels which choose to rely on such an openly partisan source undermine their own credibility. Perhaps they don’t care? The fact that western governments generally support the Muslim Brotherhood line on Syria (a sectarian narrative against the secular state) may make them less concerned. They regularly present the SOHR stories, often with impressive-sounding casualty numbers, as though they were fact (e.g. AP 2015; Pollard 2015). A ‘regime’ denial may be added at paragraph 7 or 8, to give the impression of balanced journalism. Abdul Rahman’s occasional criticism of rival Salafist groups (such as DAESH-ISIL) perhaps adds a semblance of credibility. In any case, the unthinking adoption of these partisan reports has been important in keeping alive the western myth that the Syrian Army does little more than target and kill civilians.

Images of the purported chemical weapons attack by the Syrian army. The incident was later shown to have been organized by the Saudis, and carried out by the rebels. The truth however never reached American public opinion and the damage was done—as intended.

Images of the purported chemical weapons attack by the Syrian army in Ghouta. The incident was later shown to have been organized by the Saudis, and carried out by the rebels. The truth however never reached Western public opinion and the damage was done—as intended.

Much the same problem can be seen in the campaigns over 2014-2015 against ‘barrel bombs’, where it has been said that a particular type of Syrian Air Force bomb (which includes fuel and shrapnel) has been responsible for massive civilian casualties. Robert Parry (2015) makes the point that any sort of improvised bomb ‘dropped from helicopters’ would be far less devastating and indiscriminate than most missile attacks, not to speak of the depleted uranium, napalm, white phosphorous and cluster munitions used by Washington. However the point here is not to do with the technology, it is simply a new way to generate horror and backing for the war, by claiming that the Syrian Army only ever kills civilians. The supposedly ‘indiscriminate’ nature of this ‘new’ weapon is merely suggested by repetition of the slogan.

“We know from independent evidence that earlier claims of massacres were fabricated by the sectarian groups, then backed by Washington. This has been documented with respect to mass killings at Houla, Aqrab, Daraya, and East Ghouta. After these exposures, there were no apologies or admissions either from the White House or the western media channels which ran the initial stories…”

[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]et the great majority of sites of these alleged ‘barrel bomb’ attacks, over 2014-2015, have been places occupied for years by sectarian Islamist gangs: north-eastern Aleppo, Douma in north-eastern Damascus and Raqqa in the eastern desert. The Washington-based Human Rights Watch (tightly linked to the US foreign policy body, the Council on Foreign Relations) published a map showing the sites of literally hundreds of these barrel bomb attacks in ‘opposition held’ north-east Aleppo (HRW 2014). The ‘opposition’ in these areas has been the official al Qaeda franchise in Syria, Jabhat al Nusra, allied with the Saudi-backed Islamic Front (a merger of former Free Syrian Army groups Harakat Ahrar as-Sham, Suqur as-Sham, Liwa at-Tawhid, Jaysh al-Islam, Jabhat al-Kurdiyya, Liwa al-Haqq and Ahrar as-Sham), then later the ‘Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’ (ISIL), the Turkistan Islamic Party and the Army of Conquest. Virtually all of these groups are internationally proscribed terrorist organisations responsible for multiple atrocities in Syria. It is hardly surprising, then, that the Syrian Army regularly bombs the armed groups in these areas.

Contrary to the myth of the ‘moderate rebel’, the terrorist groups most often work together. For example, a top US-backed leader of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), Abdel Jabbar el-Okaidi, is quite open about the fact that he works closely with ISIL-Daesh (see Eretz Zen 2014). The FSA has worked closely with the other main al Qaeda group, Jabhat al Nusra, from the beginning.

The source of the ‘civilian’ death claims comes almost exclusively from the Islamist groups themselves, or ‘activists’ embedded with them. Those claims are then magnified by the western media and by some human rights NGOs which are effectively ‘embedded’ with western governments’ foreign policies. Casualty numbers are typically provided by the British-based ‘Syrian Observatory on Human Rights’ (SOHR 2015), the British-based Syrian Network for Human Rights (SN4HR 2015), or the Istanbul-based Violation Documentation Center in Syria (VDC 2015; Masi 2015). All these centres are allied to the Islamist gangs, but usually maintain some public distance from ISIL. The VDC has listed some ISIL causalities in Syria as ‘martyrs’ for the revolution (see Sterling 2015b.); but the key point is that they are all partisan voices, sectarian Islamists committed to overthrow of the Syrian state and thus highly motivated to vilify and lie about the Syrian Army.

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate. The Empire outdoes Orwell.

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate. The best we can say about this man is that he shamelessly engages in “crude and deceptive propaganda”.

Commander in Chief of the propaganda war, US President Obama, leads the way, claiming his Syrian counterpart ‘drops barrel bombs to massacre innocent children’ (Obama in Mosendz 2015). As there has never been any evidence that President Assad had any such intent, Parry (2015) is right to call this statement ‘crude and deceptive propaganda’. The White House is backed up by ‘embedded watchdog’ Human Rights Watch, whose boss Kenneth Roth obsessively repeats the words ‘barrel bombs’, and has even been exposed posting photos of devastated Gaza and Kobane, falsely claiming that both showed Aleppo after ‘Assad’s barrel bombing’ (MOA 2015; Interventions Watch 2015). In fact those photos showed the results of Israeli, US and ISIL bombing. The recycling of war dead photos seems to have become routine. Yet the foundation of western war propaganda is the consistent reliance on partisan sources. The ‘barrel bomb’ campaign is clearly designed to delegitimise the Syrian Government and the Syrian Army, and also perhaps to deter or slow the attacks on Islamist groups. However the Syrian Army does not apologise to anyone for bombing terrorist held areas.

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]ost civilians in the areas said to have been ‘barrel bombed’ left a very long time ago. In January 2015 Reuters (2015a) showed video of some of the last large evacuations of Douma by the Syrian Army. Several months later the same agency decried a massacre of ‘civilians’ in Douma, using the ‘activists’ of the SOHR as their source (Reuters 2015b). Repetition of these fake claims by the Islamists, their associated ‘activists’ and their western backers (for information on Avaaz, The White Helmets and the Syrian Campaign, see Sterling 2015a and Mint Press 2015) has led to headlines like: ‘The Syrian Regime’s Barrel Bombs Kill More Civilians than ISIS and Al Qaeda Combined’ (Masi 2015). Such stories suggest the need for more war on Syria. The photos of dead and injured women and children in the ghost towns inhabited by the armed groups are simply borrowed from other contexts. Amnesty International (USA) largely adopted the barrel bomb story, along with the invented ‘civilian’ casualty numbers. Yet Amnesty shares that same weakness in method: relying on partisan sources like the VDC, the SN4HR and the SOHR. Amnesty’s pro-western bias has led it into repeating NATO-contrived falsehoods in other conflicts, such as those in Kuwait and Libya (see Sterling 2015b).

None of this is to say that the Syrian Army has not killed civilians, particularly those embedded with the terrorist groups. However many Syrians, whose families have been directly affected by the terrorist attacks, question why the Government has not carpet-bombed areas like Douma, north-east Aleppo and Raqqa. They say the only civilians remaining there are those that support the throat-cutting gangs. The US certainly did not hesitate to carpet bomb the Iraqi resistance in Fallujah (Iraq), back in 2004 (Democracy Now (2005). Yet in Syria, as one former Russian-Syrian member of the Government militia said, things have been different:

‘Islamists [do] hide behind civilians. But if we really killed everyone who supported the enemy, the Douma district would have been destroyed long ago – simply leveled with tanks in a single day, like some [Syrian] hotheads have been [demanding] for a long time already. But Assad doesn’t want that … our task is to reunite the country. Therefore, before each mission, we were told that we should not shoot at civilians under any circumstances. If a civilian dies, there is always an investigation and, if necessary, a court-martial’ (Mizah 2015).

Such concerns are simply ignored in the self-obsessed and reckless western debate.

Great care is also needed with the claims of outsiders who run opinion polls in war-turn Syria. For example, although the British-based ORB International is not a government agency, it is financed within a hostile state and engages with debates of concern to the belligerent parties. Case in point: its mid-2014 poll suggested that ‘Three in Five Syrians Support International Military Involvement’ (ORB 2014: Table 1). This proposal is an issue that only really preoccupies western governments and the figure is implausible. First of all, those Syrians who support the government (by most accounts a strong majority of the population) have always opposed foreign intervention.

Second, most of the Syrian Opposition also opposes foreign intervention. The most comprehensive Syrian opposition document, the Damascus Declaration (2005), opposed both armed attacks on the government and foreign intervention. Only the Muslim Brotherhood, some exile figures and some of the Kurdish groups later split from this position. The suggestion that, after three years of war and tremendous suffering, which has already involved high levels of NATO and Gulf Monarchy intervention, 60% of Syrians want more of that sort of foreign intervention just does NOT sit with the known facts. It does fit with an unrepresentative poll which elevates the voices of those backing the armed groups. We need to look at the way ORB collects information.

Their methods are rather opaque. The British group carries out polls in Syria by employing small numbers of Syrians with whom they communicate by phone and internet. These local agents are then trained to select and interview small groups of people across Syria. ORB provides little information on how they select their agents or on how those people, in turn, select their interviewees.

They simply assert that their poll was representative. The mid-2014 poll claimed to have found that 4% of Syrians said the [Saudi Arabia-backed Islamist group] ISIS/Daesh ‘best represented the interests and aspirations of the Syrian people’ (ORB 2014). ISIL was, by then, the most prominent armed anti-Government group. That result (4% support) does seemed plausible, and not inconsistent with other information. But its reliability is undermined by the implausibly high level of support for foreign military intervention. A further anomaly is that the ORB poll of July 2015 showed ISIL to be viewed positively by 21% of Syrians (ORB 2015: Table 3). Although this was not exactly the same question, the difference between these figures (4% and 21%) is huge and hardly explicable by anything that had occurred between 2014 and 2015. No-one else has suggested that the fanatics of ISIL-Daesh are anything close to that popular. The 35% ‘net positive view’ of the terrorist group Jabhat al Nusra (ORB 2015), notorious for its suicide truck bombings and beheadings is also implausible. Indeed, how could one third of any society view ‘positively’ these terrorist organisations, best known for their atrocities? Something is very wrong here.

The only reasonable explanation is that serious bias affects the ‘representativeness’ of the ORB surveys. ORB was previously criticised by an academic paper for its opaque and ‘incomplete disclosure’ of method and ‘important irregularities’ in their estimates of deaths from the war in Iraq (Spagat and Dougherty 2010). That unreliability is present in their Syrian data. Despite what seems like highly inflated support for the al Qaeda groups, the 2015 poll still shows President Assad as the most positively viewed force in the country, although at only 47% (ORB 2015: Table 3), a figure much lower than that of any other poll (Syrian or non-Syrian) during the crisis. Interestingly, the ORB 2015 poll says 82% of Syrians believe ISIL was created by the US (ORB 2015: Table 20). However given the other anomalies of the survey it is not possible to place any reliance on this figure. It seems plain that the ORB polls, through their mostly undisclosed selection processes, have given an enhanced voice to anti-government people. That is perhaps not surprising, for a British company, and it may help reinforce popular discussion in western countries. However it does not help foreign understandings of Syria.

While it is important to recognise the sources of bias, the repetition of anti-Syrian stories based on partisan sources cannot be a matter of simple bias. We know from independent evidence that earlier claims of massacres were fabricated by the sectarian groups, then backed by Washington. This has been documented with respect to mass killings at Houla, Aqrab, Daraya, and East Ghouta (see Anderson 2015a and 2015b). After these exposures, there were no apologies or admissions either from the White House or the western media channels which ran the initial stories. This pattern means that other fabrications are likely. So while genuine students of the crisis must revert to principled study of claims and counter-claims, we should also recognise this industrial scale propaganda machine, which is likely to maintain its production into the foreseeable future.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr Tim Anderson is a Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He researches and writes on development, rights and self-determination in Latin America, the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. He has published many dozens of chapters and articles in a range of academic books and journals. His last book was Land and Livelihoods in Papua New Guinea (Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2015).

DANIEL WIRT serves as Associate Editor with the Greanville Post. See more about Daniel here.

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Mizah, Michel (2015) ‘A Russian-Syrian volunteer talks about his experience in the “Shabiha” pro-Assad paramilitary’, interviewed by Arthur Avakov, Live Leak, 15 September, online: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=992_1442362752

MOA (2015) ‘Human Rights Watch Again Accuses Syria Of “Barrel Bomb” Damage Done By Others’, Moon of Alabama, 9 May, online: http://www.moonofalabama.org/2015/05/human-rights-watch-again-accuses-syria-of-barrel-bomb-damage-done-by-others.html

Mosendz, Poll (2015) ‘The Full Transcript of President Obama’s Speech at the United Nations General Assembly’, Newsweek, 28 September, online: http://www.newsweek.com/read-full-transcript-president-obamas-speech-united-nations-general-assembly-377504

MMM (2014) ‘Fail Caesar: Exposing the Anti-Syria Photo Propaganda’, Monitor on massacre marketing’, 8 November, online: http://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/fail-caesar-exposing-anti-syria-photo.html

Murphy, Dan (2014) ‘Syria ‘smoking gun’ report warrants a careful read’, Christian Science Monitor, 21 January, online: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/Backchannels/2014/0121/Syria-smoking-gun-report-warrants-a-careful-read

ORB (2014) ‘Three in Five Syrians Support International Military Involvement’, ORB International, July, online: http://www.opinion.co.uk/article.php?s=three-in-five-syrians-support-international-military-involvement

ORB (2015) ‘ORB/IIACSS poll in Syria and Iraq gives rare insight into public opinion’, ORB International, July, online: http://www.opinion.co.uk/article.php?s=orbiiacss-poll-in-iraq-and-syria-gives-rare-insight-into-public-opinion

O’Toole, Gavin (2014) ‘Syria regime’s ‘industrial scale killing’, Al Jazeera, 22 January, online; http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/01/syria-regime-industrial-scale-killing-2014122102439158738.html

Parry, Robert (2015) ‘Obama’s ludicrous ‘barrel bomb’ theme’, Consortium News, 30 September, online: https://consortiumnews.com/2015/09/30/obamas-ludicrous-barrel-bomb-theme/

Pollard, Ruth (2015) ‘Assad regime’s barrel bomb attacks caused many civilian deaths in Syria: UN Envoy’, Sydney Morning Herald, 23 July, [the headline suggests the UN envoy is the source of the ‘barrel bomb’ kills civilians story, in fact the SOHR is the source] online: http://www.smh.com.au/world/assad-regimes-barrel-bomb-attacks-caused-many-civilian-deaths-in-syria-un-envoy-20150722-giihvw.html

Reuters (2015) ‘Over 1,000 Syrian civilians evacuated from near Damascus’, Youtube, 17 January, online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-DstETWlTY

Reuters (2015b) ‘Air strikes near Damascus kill at least 80 people: activists’, 16 August, online: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/16/us-mideast-crisis-syria-idUSKCN0QL0E320150816

Rosen, Nir (2012) ‘Q&A: Nir Rosen on Syria’s armed opposition’, Al Jazeera, 13 Feb, online: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/02/201221315020166516.html

SANA (2011) ‘Mother Agnes Merriam al-Saleeb: Nameless Gunmen Possessing Advanced Firearms Terrorize Citizens and Security in Syria’, Syrian Free

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2015/05/human-rights-watch-again-accuses-syria-of-barrel-bomb-damage-done-by-others.html

Parry, Robert (2015) ‘Obama’s ludicrous ‘barrel bomb’ theme’, Consortium News, 30 September, online: https://consortiumnews.com/2015/09/30/obamas-ludicrous-barrel-bomb-theme/

Reuters (2015) ‘Over 1,000 Syrian civilians evacuated from near Damascus’, Youtube, 17 January, online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-DstETWlTY

Reuters (2015b) ‘Air strikes near Damascus kill at least 80 people: activists’, 16 August, online: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/16/us-mideast-crisis-syria-idUSKCN0QL0E320150816

Rosen, Nir (2012) ‘Q&A: Nir Rosen on Syria’s armed opposition’, Al Jazeera, 13 Feb, online: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/02/201221315020166516.html

SANA (2011) ‘Mother Agnes Merriam al-Saleeb: Nameless Gunmen Possessing Advanced Firearms Terrorize Citizens and Security in Syria’, Syrian Free Press Network, 19 November, online: http://syrianfreepress.wordpress.com/2011/11/19/mother-agnes-merriam-al-saleeb-nameless-gunmen-possessing-advanced-firearms-terrorize-citizens-and-security-in-syria/

Smith-Spark, Laura (2014) ‘Syria: Photos charging mass torture by regime ‘fake’’, CNN, 23 January, online: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/22/world/meast/syria-torture-photos/

SN4HR (2015) Syrian Network for Human Rights, online: http://sn4hr.org/

Sterling, Rick (2015a) ‘Humanitarians for war on Syria’, Counter Punch, 31 March, online: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/31/humanitarians-for-war-on-syria/

Sterling, Rick (2015b) ‘Eight Problems with Amnesty’s Report on Aleppo Syria’, Dissident Voice, 14 May, online: http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/05/eight-problems-with-amnestys-report-on-aleppo-syria/

SOHR (2015) ‘Syrian Observatory for Human Rights’, online: http://www.syriahr.com/en/

Spagat, Michael and Josh Dougherty (2010) ‘Conflict Deaths in Iraq: A Methodological Critique of the ORB Survey Estimate’, Survey Research Methods, Vol 4 No 1, 3-15

VDC (2015) ‘Violation Documentation Center in Syria’, online: https://www.vdc-sy.info/index.php/en/

The original source of this article is Global Research

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The Syrian Story: Imperial Disinformation Dept., the presstitutes at work

CBS' Scott Pelley gravelly reciting the reasons to hate Assad. Except he's got the wrong guy. The people who caused this child's tragedy are not in Damascus but Washington, London, Tel Aviv, Paris—and Ryadh, of course. But the corporate media will never admit that basic fact.

CBS’ mouthpiece Scott Pelley somberly reciting the reasons why we must all hate Assad. Except he’s got the wrong guy. The people who caused this child’s tragedy are not in Damascus but Washington, London, Tel Aviv, Paris—and Ryadh, of course. But the corporate media will never admit that basic fact.

eye on the media
The presstitutes at work

We note with disgust but no surprise the degree of coordination achieved by the Western media these days, with almost metronomic precision one major outlet (BBC) replicating what the other(s) are saying.

The case of Syria and Ukraine are by now classic examples of complete disinformation. In Syria the empire, with its obsessive, unrelenting and robotic tenacity continues to press for the toppling of Bashir al-Assad. Thus what these channels disseminate about that tortured nation, which the US and its vassals plunged into infernal chaos, is all Orwellian lies, most of them outrageous distortions of the truth, if not outright staged events prepared by the empire’s Hollywood assets. The object is as usual to prop up Washington’s criminal agenda across the planet, and defeat the anti-imperialists efforts to set the record straight. They also need to spread constant lies to push back against the emerging multipolar world represented by Russia and China.

Thus, the reports, almost uniformly, while sounding complete and trustworthy, and pulling all the right emotional strings, are routinely lacking in context and avoid mentioning the most essential facts, like:

• WHO the hell started this catastrophe?
• Who really benefits from this and similar catastrophes?

Since the answers to those questions would lead directly to an indictment of Washington and Wall Street, as global supra-governmental entities, the very heart of the Anglo-Zionist empire, there is never any such mention. After all, the mass media belong to them, the global plutocracy, and they use it cynically and hypocritically every single day as an ideological bludgeon, or better still, drug, to keep the masses from understanding contemporary reality.

How abject can they get? Watch the below and ponder. There are apparently no limits.

The “reporters” and presenters of such “news” are of course pathetic, defined by their appalling ignorance and/or whorishness (read: dedication to their own careers and self-aggrandisement).

As antidote against these toxins, read any of our articles on this topic to get a real grasp of the situation in Syria and the Middle East.

This is what the powerful CBS bullhorn is saying….
Dateline: 1.7.16

The CBS official blurb accompanying this release:

“Graphic Images: Syrian government forces are blockading rebel-controlled towns in Syria, and residents are starving as a result. One resident said they are “dying in slow motion” due to a lack of food, water, and medicine. Ellizabeth Palmer reports.”

And this is what the “respectable” (and ever self-impressed and soi-disant “authoritative”) BBC is saying. Any wonder why the people are bamboozled?

The official BBC blurb:

Published on Jan 7, 2016

“The situation in three besieged villages in Syria is “extremely dire”, the International Committee of the Red Cross has warned. Activists (read: al Qaeda and other terrorist groups) say civilians have died because of a lack of food and medicine in rebel-controlled Madaya, near Damascus, or have died trying to escape. Jim Muir reports.”

And the Gulf kleptocrats that include Qatar (which controls Al Jazeera) add their own megaphone to the chorus of lies:

“Published on Jan 3, 2016

Fighting from within, bombed from above, and now starvation. Syria’s struggling population continues to dwindle, as lives are lost to both war and hunger.

More than half of all Syrians are in need of humanitarian assistance.

The United Nations says it is unable to help around two million children because they’re blocked by fighting or siege.

In some areas the price of food has skyrocketed so that a kilo of rice now costs $100.

While civilians are starving in Syrian towns, the international community is stalled on a political solution.

Opposition groups are meeting in the Saudi capital Riyadh this week. They are trying to determine who will be included in negotiations scheduled for later this month – talks aimed at preventing Syria’s civil war from going into a sixth year.

Inside Story takes a look at the besieged towns of Zabadani and Madaya, once popular resorts which are now in ruins. And asks, who will ease the suffering of civilians still trapped in Syria?

Presenter: Sami Zeidan

Guests:

Meantime, the lies spread by other “news channels” controlled by Washington, like HBO’s VICE NEWS, do their job, too, in building and fortifying the Big Lie.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he case of Vice News is instructive. This is a program that has produced some very interesting shows. However, like good liberals, they concentrate on digging up the perennial abuses of the system—endemic poverty, attacks on immigrants, racism, corporate abuses, etc.—but always presenting such horrors as products of bad politicians, bad corporate executives, or aberrations to an otherwise functioning, democratic system. In that manner they never inform the public that such flaws are SYSTEMIC, and inherent in “free enterprise”, and that they will not cease until the system itself is overhauled or tossed out.

Meantime, in the area of foreign policy, as these videos illustrate, Vice News, like all American and Western media, follows the Washington line 100%. The upshot is that, if in domestic news there’s a slim measure of honesty, in international news, where the interests of imperialism are at stake, there’s none. All mass communications channels fall in, become stenographers for the State Department and the empire of chaos’ top politicians.

Notice that in these VICE reports, the anti-Assad rebels, who obviously welcomed the American tv crews—brutal terrorists of the most extreme and lunatic sort—are congenially described as fighters for democracy. Haven’t we heard that canard before?

Below, text and presentation by Vice News.

Machine Guns and Barrel Bombs: The Battle for Syria’s South (Part 1)
Published on Sep 9, 2015

Daraa is where Syria’s revolution began four years ago. Now it’s the scene of a forgotten war, in which largely secular Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebels — marginalized elsewhere in Syria — continue to lead the struggle against Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

The FSA are fighting a bitterly hard battle under a virtual media blackout to change the course of Syria’s civil war. If they can take Daraa, they will stand at the beginning of the road to Damascus, the seat of Assad’s government.

VICE News follows the Fallujah Horan brigade of the FSA and their charismatic commander Abu Hadi Aboud as they fight to push the regime out of Daraa’s eastern suburbs.

In part one of a two-part series, Abu Hadi shows VICE News how his men take the fight to the regime on the frontlines east of Daraa, and we also meet the volunteers trying to save locals from the barrel bombs that rain down daily on the city.

And, naturally VICE News could not fail to file its “report” on Russia’s putative invasion of Ukraine, as per script from NATO commanders and other lying sources. Incidentally, if any power has the right to be in Ukraine, it is Russia, where the Russian nation was born, and in a territory expressly created by Moscow in the mid-20th century. Declares VICE News sanctimoniously, as if Washington and the West had nothing to do with he Ukraine mess:

Published on Mar 6, 2015

“The bitter conflict in Ukraine has cost thousands of lives, but the Russian government has continuously denied sending its soldiers to the frontlines, despite accusations to the contrary from NATO and Western officials….”

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[huge_it_slider id=”1″]

A Tangled Web: How the Media Misleads the Public on Terrorist Threats

//

Media Spin Cycle

=By= Madhi Darius Nazemroaya

Public perception about the so-called “Global War on Terror” is manipulated in various ways by a trail of misinformation and disinformation.

This article is a case study on the October 22, 2015 lone gunman rampage of Parliament Hill in Ottawa that was used by the government of Steven Harper to justify the Canadian entry into the US war in Iraq and, later, the US-led war on Syria. Despite being proven otherwise, the attack by Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was reported as being linked to the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/DAESH/ISIS/IS).

How and Why Facts Get Lost or are Ignored

On the day that Michael Zehaf-Bibeau went on his rampage, a tangled web of information was erected. In all the reporting by the media, the sources were lost. What resulted from this was the perception that Canada was under a foreign-planned attack led by the ISIL/DAESH.

One important source, @ArmedResearch, a US-based Twitter account that presents itself as a microblog for military studies, claimed that the Ottawa attack on October 22 was connected to an attack which took place two days earlier at Saint Jean-sur-Richelieu, Québec (October 20).

According to @Armed Research, Martin Couture-Rouleau (who called himself Ahmad LeConverti, which means “Ahmed the convert” in French), who was behind the Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu car ramming attack, and Michael Zehaf-Bibeau were in some way connected. Couture-Rouleau had killed a Canadian soldier two days before Zehaf-Bibeau went on his rampage on October 22.

Presented subsequently in various media reports, the two incidents were said to be interconnected. They were portrayed as a coordinated and orchestrated attack. Additionally, the same Twitter account which posted a picture of Zehaf-Bibeau at the Canadian National War Monument starting his rampage within hours of the attack in Ottawa, namely @ArmedResearch, claimed that the photographs came from an ISIL/DAESH source. These were the first pictures of Zehaf-Bibeau and were widely reproduced by the Canadian and international media.

@ArmedResearch, which was instrumental in disseminating the photograph, claimed that the source of the photograph was an ISIL/DAESH or ISIS linked Twitter account named @Breaking3zero. In league with the webpage Heavy.com, @ArmedResearch implied that “Martin Couture-Rouleau followed the same Canadian-based pro-ISIS Twitter account.”

Complicating the matter is the existence of another Twitter account, @V_IMS. @V_IMS which was reported to be an ISIL/DAESH account. Ottawa Citizen journalist Shaamini Yogaretnam reported on October 23 that @V_IMS was suspended within an hour after it began circulating the same pictures.

Maybe it was because most of the entries and posts on @Breaking3zero were in French and @ArmedResearch could not understand, but what Heavy.com claimed was categorically false. The person behind the post was French-Canadian writer William Reymond.

On October 25, Reymond even sent a Tweet message to Fox News about its faulty reporting in a Fox News article misleadingly titled “Citizen Jihadists: ISIS uses ‘lone wolves’ to mount cheap, effective attacks on US soil” by Pierre Chiareamonte.

Fox News not only misleadingly insinuated that the ISIL/DAESH was behind the Ottawa attack, but also claimed that the picture of Zehaf-Bibeau was posted by the ISIL/DAESH, meaning that @Breaking3zero was an ISIL/DAESH Twitter account. Likewise, @Breaking3zero sent a message to Suzanne Wilton’s account stating: “We ARE NOT a pro ISIS account ! That’s outrageous ! [sic.]”

William Reymond even wrote an article about it on his personal blog in both French and English on October 22, 2014. To set the record straight, on November 1, 2014 he reproduced the same text on Huffington Post. He starts his text by saying:

Take a good look at this photo. If you haven’t seen it yet, you’re bound to come across it in the next couple of hours. This picture is going around the world right now. It shows Michael Zehaf-Bibeau during his attack in Ottawa.

This photo was first published and identified on my 100% news twitter feed @Breaking3zero several hours before the traditional media got ahold [sic.] of it.

I want to tell you the story behind this picture. How it landed on my computer screen and how I was able to identify it before sharing it.

The following day, the RCMP told the public they did not know who could have taken the picture of the incident. This kept Canadians in suspense and made them wonder if the ISIL/DAESH had really been behind the attack. It was later revealed that the source for the photograph was the local Ottawa Police Services.

Reymond disclosed this about the originally source being the local police in Ottawa:

Around 2pm, one of my followers informs me of its existence, asking me if this really is the shooter. At this point in time, information on the Ottawa attack is still very vague and contradictory.

My first reflex is to ask him about the source. He points to the responses to a tweet posted by the Ottawa police.

Not just any tweet. But a tweet asking the witnesses of the attack to share with the police any information allowing to identify the shooter. And there, among the first responses, is the photo of a man holding a rifle.

Don’t bother looking, this tweet doesn’t exist anymore. It was deleted almost instantly. Posted from an anonymous account and for just a few short moments, this picture found itself in the huge virtual haystack called Twitter.

I don’t know who deleted it. The rate at which it was taken off makes me think that it was probably the author himself. Maybe he thought he was sending a private message. Maybe it took it down after talking to the police, following their advice

Whatever the reason, thanks to a screenshot, I find myself with a copy in hands in the early afternoon.

The media and news agencies have failed to even correct their mistakes. Instead they have just moved on, leaving many Canadians in a blanket of ignorance and misconception. Many Canadians still believe that the photograph of Zehaf-Bibeau was released by the ISIL/DAESH when in reality it was a photograph taken by an Ottawa police constable using their Blackberry cellular telephone to replicate an earlier photographer taken on the same day by the camera of a tourist at the National War Monument.

Screen shots from Ottawa Citizen, October 23, 2014

At its worst, the failure of the mainstream media to report the facts is intentional. At its best, it is the negligence of sloppy journalists and media outlets. Whatever the case, it is malfeasance and a form of misconduct that has misinformed the public about the reach of the ISIL/DAESH and the danger that the public faces.

The RCMP also misrepresented the facts, because it reported that Zehaf-Bibeau was planning on going to fight in Syria. He was never planning on going to fight in Syria. The RCMP made this claim, saying that its source was his mother. She, however, angrily spoke out and said that she had even asked the RCMP to correct their mistake after they made the claim.

The Echo Chamber and the Misleading of the Public

There is an echo chamber of misinformation and disinformation where misinformed reports and conjecture feed other reports, leading to the construction of a distorted picture of the news and world. After a Globe and Mail article on the day of the attack speculated that Zehaf-Bibeau’s adopted father appeared “to have fought in 2011 in Libya,” it was reported as a fact in other media, including the state-owned British Broadcasting Corporation.

Zehaf-Bibeau was never even on the national terrorist watch list in Canada. Based on what an unnamed US law enforcement official told the reporter Susan Candiotti, CNN wrongly reported that Zehaf-Bibeau’s “passport had been confiscated by Canadian authorities when they learned he planned to go fight overseas.”

US law enforcement officials also released information about Zehaf-Bibeau before Canadian law enforcement officials did. This includes the release of his widely circulated picture from the day of his rampage on Parliament Hill. “The working Ottawa police theory is that the photo, regardless of where it first appeared on Twitter, was shared not just internally but with other law enforcement agencies and may have been leaked by police outside the country,” according to Yogaretnam.

Governments and a cross-section of the mainstream media are societal actors that have what can be described as “role setting agendas.” In other words, both governments and their affiliates and allies in the mass media are involved in branding campaigns that manage societal perceptions. This includes the deliberate creation of hysteria and panic, which is why there was a fixation on the Saint-Denis and Bataclan attacks (November 13, 2015) in France while the terrorist attacks on Beirut’s southern Dahiyeh area (November 12, 2015) that took place a day earlier were virtually ignored.

These branding campaigns have been at work to sell specific perspectives aimed at framing or re-framing the views of the public and the way that audiences understand or perceive the policy shifts in national security and foreign policy that justify war and the looting of national resources. It is within this context that it should be noted that the Canadian media has decided to focus on the case of an underage boy from the Lachine area of Montréal being found guilty in 2015 of committing terrorist-related crimes (for robbing a store when he was fifteen in October 2014 and trying to use the credit card of his parents to fly to Turkey to join the ISIL/DAESH in February 2014) while the Canadian government sells massive amounts of weapons to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The focus and gaze of the public is being misdirected towards a misguided schoolboy through an illusion that ignores the real backers of terrorism. Aside from being an oppressive dictatorship, major violator of human rights, and committing war crimes against the people of Yemen in an aggressive bombing campaign, the Saudi regime is undeniably supporting the ISIL/DAESH and other terrorist organizations in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen.

Here lies the irony. While an adolescent Canadian schoolboy is being jailed as a terrorist threat for foolishly wanting to join the ISIL/DAESH or other terrorist organizations fighting in Syria and Iraq, the Canadian government is actually supporting and arming Saudi Arabia, one of the widely recognized backers of the terrorists that Ottawa itself claims to be fighting inside Iraq and Syria.

Click here to read a detailed analysis of how the Canadian government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper misled Canadians in 2014 about the attack on Parliament Hill while it was being blamed itself for supporting the terrorists inside Iraq and Syria.

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya An award-winning author and geopolitical analyst, Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is the author of The Globalization of NATO (Clarity Press) and a forthcoming book The War on Libya and the Re-Colonization of Africa. He has also contributed to several other books ranging from cultural critique to international relations. He is a Sociologist and Research Associate at the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), a contributor at the Strategic Culture Foundation (SCF), Moscow, and a member of the Scientific Committee of Geopolitica, Italy.

Source
Article: Global Research
Lead Graphic: Gyroscope – public domain

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Exposed: Academics-for-hire agree not to disclose fossil fuel funding

//

Exposé
=By=
Lawrence Carter and Maeve McClenaghan

Penn State “Old Main” by George Chriss (CC BY 2.5).

Leading climate skeptic who will testify at Ted Cruz senate hearing today agreed to write pro-fossil fuel paper secretly funded by oil company.

A Greenpeace undercover investigation has exposed how fossil fuel companies can secretly pay academics at leading American universities to write research that sows doubt about climate science and promotes the companies’ commercial interests.

Posing as representatives of oil and coal companies, reporters from Greenpeace UK asked academics from Princeton and Penn State to write papers promoting the benefits of CO2 and the use of coal in developing countries.

The professors agreed to write the reports and said they did not need to disclose the source of the funding.

Citing industry-funded documents – including testimony to state hearings and newspaper articles – Professor Frank Clemente of Penn State said: “In none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is published as an independent scholar.”

Leading climate-sceptic academic, Professor William Happer, agreed to write a report for a Middle Eastern oil company on the benefits of CO2 and to allow the firm to keep the source of the funding secret.

Happer is due to appear this afternoon as a star witness in Senate hearings called by Republican Presidential candidate Ted Cruz.

In emails to reporters he also revealed Peabody Energy paid thousands of dollars for him to testify at a separate state hearing, with the money being paid to a climate-sceptic think tank.

Read the emails with Professor Frank Clemente

Read the emails with Professor Happer and the Donors Trust

The investigation also found:

US coal giant Peabody Energy also paid tens of thousands of dollars to an academic who produced coal-friendly research and provided testimony at state and federal climate hearings, the amount of which was never revealed.

The Donors Trust, an organisation that has been described as the “dark money ATM” of the US conservative movement, confirmed in a taped conversation with an undercover reporter that it could anonymously channel money from a fictional Middle Eastern oil and gas company to US climate sceptic organisations.

Princeton professor William Happer laid out details of an unofficial peer review process run by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a UK climate sceptic think tank, and said he could ask to put an oil-funded report through a similar review process, after admitting that it would struggle to be published in an academic journal.

a senior figure in the organisation.

The findings echo the case of Willie Soon, who was the subject of an investigation published in the New York Times earlier this year. The investigation revealed that Soon had accepted donations from fossil fuel companies and anonymous donors in return for producing climate-sceptic scientific papers. He described his studies as “deliverables” and failed to declare who paid for the research.

The revelations also follow a series of reports showing fossil fuel companies burying the truth about climate change, while funding flawed research to cast doubt on the scientific consensus.

Academics for hire

[dropcap]R[/dropcap]eporters approached the academics claiming to be representatives of unnamed fossil fuel companies – one, a Middle Eastern oil and gas exploration company, the other a coal mining firm based in Indonesia – looking to commission “independent” research.

“In none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is published as an independent scholar.” – Professor Frank Clemente

The individuals approached have previously been linked to fossil fuel companies or climate sceptic organisations that have received fossil fuel funding.

Professor Frank Clemente, a sociologist from Penn State university, was asked if he could produce a report “to counter damaging research linking coal to premature deaths (in particular the World Health Organization’s figure that 3.7 million people die per year from fossil fuel pollution)”.

He said that this was within his skill set; that he could be quoted using his university job title; and that it would cost around $15,000 for an 8–10 page paper. He also explained that he charged $6,000 for writing a newspaper op-ed.

When asked whether he would need to declare where the money came from, Professor Clemente said: “There is no requirement to declare source funding in the US.”

Clemente is a favourite of the coal industry and particularly Peabody Energy, which regularly uses his research as evidence of the need for an expansion of coal power in developing countries.

(From Left to Right) Dr Will Happer Dr Richard Lindzen & Dr Patrick Moore

In the exchange Clemente disclosed that for another report on “the Global Value of Coal” he was paid $50,000 by Peabody Energy – the sponsorship was mentioned in the small print of the paper, but the amount has not been disclosed until now.

Following the report Clemente produced an op-ed arguing against the coal divestment movement in universities, which was picked up by over 50 newspapers across the US. But as Clemente told undercover reporters: “In none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is published as an independent scholar.”

Professor Clemente failed to respond to requests for comment.

Investigators also approached Professor William Happer of Princeton University, who is chairman of the climate sceptic George Marshall Institute and a former Director of Energy Research at the US Department of Energy under the first President Bush where he “supervised all of DOE’s work on climate change”.

Professor Happer, who is a physicist rather than a climatologist, told Greenpeace reporters that he would be willing to produce research promoting the benefits of carbon dioxide for $250 per hour. He asked that the money be paid to climate sceptic campaign group, the CO2 Coalition, of which he is a board member.

Happer described his work on carbon dioxide as a “labor of love” and said that while other pollutants produced by burning fossil fuels are a problem, in his opinion “More CO2 will benefit the world”, adding “The only way to limit CO2 would be to stop using fossil fuels, which I think would be a profoundly immoral and irrational policy.”

When reporters asked if it would be possible for the fossil fuel client’s role in commissioning the research to remain hidden, in order to give the work more credibility, Happer replied that: “If I write the paper alone, I don’t think there would be any problem stating that ‘the author received no financial compensation for this essay.’”

Happer also disclosed that Peabody Energy paid $8,000 in return for his testimony in a crucial Minnesota state hearing on the impacts of carbon dioxide. This fee was also paid to the CO2 Coalition.

“I am trying get [sic] another mysterious client to donate funds to the CO2 Coalition instead of compensating me for my writing something for them.” – Professor Happer

The academics’ willingness to conceal the source of funding contrasts strongly with the ethics of journals such as Science, which states in its submission requirements that research “should be accompanied by clear disclosures from all authors of their affiliations, funding sources, or financial holdings that might raise questions about possible sources of bias”.

Late last month Happer appeared at a climate sceptic summit in Texas. There he defended CO2 production saying: “Our breath is not that different from a power plant.” He went on to say, “If plants could vote, they would vote for coal”.

Hiding the money trail

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he investigation has also revealed a system by which oil and gas companies can anonymously fund US climate-sceptic scientists and organisations.

When asked to ensure that the commissioning of the report could not be traced back to the Middle East oil and gas company, Professor Happer contacted his fellow CO2 Coalition board member, Bill O’Keefe, explaining: “I am trying get [sic] another mysterious client to donate funds to the CO2 Coalition instead of compensating me for my writing something for them.”

O’Keefe, a former Exxon lobbyist, suggested channelling it through the Donors Trust, a controversial organisation that has previously been called the “Dark Money ATM” of the US conservative movement.

The organisation has a long history of channelling funding to US climate sceptics, including controversial professor Willie Soon, and some of the most influential organisations in the US conservative movement, including Americans for Prosperity, the Heartland Institute and the American Enterprise Institute.

When investigators asked Peter Lipsett of the Donors Trust if the Trust would accept money from an oil and gas company based in the Middle East, he said that, although the Trust would need the cash to come from a US bank account, “we can take it from a foreign body, it’s just we have to be extra cautious with that.”

He added that: “I’ll double check everything and make sure I’m wording things correctly after chatting with our CFO [Chief Financial Officer], but what he’s told me before is that the preference is to have it in US dollars, and the ideal preference is to have it originate from a US source, but the US dollars is the important bit”.

Peter Lipsett is director of growth strategies at the Donors Trust and has worked in a senior position for Charles Koch, and before that Koch Industries for almost a decade. When contacted for on the record comment, Mr Lipsett said:

“We only accept donations in U.S. currency and drawn from U.S. banks. Donors Trust has never accepted secret donations from foreign donors. We have supported over 1,500 organizations representing the arts, medicine and science, public policy, education, religion, and civics. We are no more a “middle man” between donors and their causes than any other community or commercial donor-advised fund sponsoring organization”.

Mr O’Keefe said: “As a matter of personal policy, I do not respond to requests such as yours.”

Peer review

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s well as exposing how fossil fuel companies are able to anonymously commission scientific research, Greenpeace can reveal details of a so-called “peer review” process being operated by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK climate sceptic think tank.

Sense About Science, a UK charitable trust, describes peer review as the process by which “scientists submit their research findings to a journal, which sends them out to be assessed for competence, significance and originality, by independent qualified experts who are researching and publishing work in the same field (peers).” The process usually involves varying degrees of anonymity.

Professor Happer, who sits on the GWPF’s Academic Advisory Council, was asked by undercover reporters if he could put the industry funded report through the same peer review process as previous GWPF reports they claimed to have been “thoroughly peer reviewed”. Happer explained that this process had consisted of members of the Advisory Council and other selected scientists reviewing the work, rather than presenting it to an academic journal.

He added:

“I would be glad to ask for a similar review for the first drafts of anything I write for your client. Unless we decide to submit the piece to a regular journal, with all the complications of delay, possibly quixotic editors and reviewers that is the best we can do, and I think it would be fine to call it a peer review.” Professor Happer

GWPF’s “peer review” process was used for a recent GWPF report on the benefits of carbon dioxide. According to Dr Indur Goklany, the author of the report, he was initially encouraged to write it by the journalist Matt Ridley, who is also a GWPF academic advisor. That report was then promoted by Ridley, who claimed in his Times column that the paper had been “thoroughly peer reviewed”.

Sense About Science, which lists Ridley as a member of its Advisory Council, has warned against such review processes, saying: “sometimes organisations or individuals claim to have put their studies through peer review when, on inspection, they have only shown it to some colleagues. Such claims are usually made in the context of a campaign directed at the public or policy makers, as a way of trying to give scientific credibility to certain claims in the hope that a non-scientific audience will not know the difference.”

The organisation also says that: “reporters or advocates citing these sources as peer reviewed would show themselves to be biased or uninformed”.

Professor Happer claimed that the review of the paper was “more rigorous than the peer review for most journals”. But he also told undercover reporters that he believed most members of the Academic Advisory Council had been too busy to comment on the paper:

“I know that the entire scientific advisory board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) was asked to submit comments on the first draft. I am also sure that most were too busy to respond,” he said.

Professor Happer also noted that submitting a report on the benefits of carbon dioxide to a peer-reviewed scientific journal would be problematic.

“That might greatly delay publication and might require such major changes in response to referees and the journal editor that the article would no longer make the case that CO2 is a benefit, not a pollutant, as strongly as I would like, and presumably as strongly [as] your client would also like,” he said.

When asked about the review process behind Dr Goklany’s report, GWPF explained that the report had gone for review to other chosen scientists beyond just those in their Advisory Council and that: “the quality of Dr Goklany’s report is self-evident to any open-minded reader.”

Peabody Energy

The investigation raises further questions for coal giant Peabody Energy, which earlier this year was investigated by New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman over accusations that they violated New York laws prohibiting false and misleading conduct, in relation to misleading statements on the risks it could face from tightening climate change laws. Peabody have now agreed to change the way it reports the risks posed to investors by climate change.

Professors Clemente and Happer were both employed by Peabody to provide testimony favourable to the company in state and governmental hearings. The company paid $8,000 for Professor Happer to make the case on the social costs of carbon.

Other prominent climate sceptics who provided testimony in the Minnesota hearing on behalf of Peabody included: Roy Spencer who told Greenpeace he was paid $4,000 by Peabody; Richard Tol who said he was not paid and Richard Lindzen and Robert Mendelsohn who failed to reply to questions. Tol, Lindzen and Mendelsohn are all members of the GWPF Academic Advisory Council.

Both Penn State and Princeton University declined to comment.

The GWPF said:

“Professor Happer made his scientific views clear from the outset, including the need to address pollution problems arising from fossil fuel consumption. Any insinuation against his integrity as a scientist is outrageous and is clearly refuted by the correspondence.

“Nor did Professor Happer offer to put a report “commissioned by a fossil fuel company” through the GWPF peer review process. This is a sheer fabrication by Greenpeace.

“The cack-handed attempt by Greenpeace to manufacture a scandal around Dr Goklany’s report, and to smear Professor Happer’s reputation, only points to the need for the Global Warming Policy Foundation to redouble its efforts to bring balanced, rigorous and apolitical research on climate and energy policy issues to the public’s attention, as counter to the misleading noise and activist rhetoric from groups like Greenpeace.”

Journalist and GWPF Academic Advisor, Matt Ridley, did not respond to requests for comment.

Source: Greenpeace Energy Desk

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The British view: Russia’s shot down jet is sending us a powerful message: keep well out of Syria!

//

=By= Oliver Tickell
The Ecologist
SPOTTER: FELICITY ARBUTHNOT

A Russian Su-24 of the type shot down today in Syria, seen at Welzow, Germany, January 2014. Photo: Rob Schleiffert via Fliclr (CC BY-NC).

Turkey’s shooting down of a Russian jet near its border with Syria has just revealed the real nature of the war, writes Oliver Tickell, and sharply illustrates the dangers of getting involved in a conflict that is driven more by a battle of two gas pipelines than a clash of ideologies. The message for the UK – keep well out! Or if we are serious about crushing IS, best join in with Assad and Putin.

Other key members of the very military coalition that the UK wants to join in bombing IS in Syria are entirely unwilling to do any such thing themselves, indeed they appear to be closely allied to IS both in their actions and their geopolitical motivation

With today’s shooting down of a Russian SU24 by Turkey, the war in Syria just took a new twist – and one that sends a powerful message to the UK as it contemplates joining in bombing raids on Islamic State militants.

And for those who are hard of hearing, that message is: ‘keep well out!’

Up until now, the war in Syria has looked complicated. On the one side the Syrian state led by President Bashar Assad, supported by its long term ally Russia, Iran and Iraq – ‘Them’.

On another side, Islamic State (IS) and allied terrorist groups.

And finally the US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, France and Israel as a silent partner, allied with ‘moderate rebels’ in Syria whom they equip and finance. Very possibly to be joined by the UK, at least if David Cameron gets his way. Collectively, ‘Us’.

Of course there have been well-supported allegations that those last two sides are actually one and the same. Much as the US supported Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan to attack Russia in the 1980s (and has been suffering the blowback ever since), the theory goes, so it is now supporting IS as a proxy force against Syria to advance its geopolitical goals.

Despite the self-righteous, obnoxious propaganda leveled at Putin, everything he says is true, while everything “our” leaders say is a bunch of filthy lies.

But now it really looks like it’s all true. NATO member Turkey’s shooting down of a Russian SU24 that was, so the Russians insist, a full kilometre inside Syrian air space, has been described by Vladimir Putin as “a stab in back” by “terrorist accomplices”.

What is beyond doubt is the many credible accusations that Turkey has long been allied with IS as a proxy force in its own internal and external war against the Kurds – a downtrodden and disenfranchised People in Eastern Turkey, but increasingly empowered in their autonomous regions of Iraq and Syria, where they have been highly effective at the sharp end of the fight against IS.

So what about all that talk from the US, the UK and other governments that IS represents an existential threat that must be destroyed? A rhetoric that has, of course, grown all the stronger since the horrific attacks in Paris of 13th November?

I am reminded of the fabled words of St Augustine: ‘Lord, grant me chastity. But not yet.’ Yes, IS is an evil, even genocidal organisation that represents a long term threat to civilisation everywhere. But for now, it’s serving Us far too well. The time will come to turn against IS – once Assad is finally defeated.

It was all going so well! Until Russia stepped in

And it has to be said, things were all going to plan. Syrian government forces were outnumbered and outgunned by IS which had been gaining ground across the country, seizing key oilfields and associated infrastructure (earning it a reputed $1.5 million a day in oil sales), and armed by sophisticated mainly US weaponry supplied to ‘moderate’ rebels who promptly joined up with IS.

“Much as the US supported Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan to attack Russia in the 1980s (and has been suffering the blowback ever since), the theory goes, so it is now supporting ISIS as a proxy force against Syria to advance its geopolitical goals…”

But then this summer Russia moved into the Latakia air base in western Syria, beefed up its defences, and moved in its military aircraft. Bombing of IS and other rebel positions began in late September and has continued ever since with increasing ferocity and effectiveness.

Suddenly – after IS had somehow survived and flourished after a full year of US bombing raids – IS was suffering serious damage from the air, while re-emboldened Syrian ground forces, working under Russian air support, began to regain territory and key strategic objectives such as the Kweyris military base east of Aleppo which may now form a second base for Russian aircraft.

And for all Our complaints that Russia was mainly attacking ‘moderate’ rebel forces supported by Us, rather than IS, IS was upset enough – or so it seems – to place a bomb in a Russian tourist aircraft returning from Sharm-el-Sheikh to St Petersburg on 31st October and kill all 224 occupants above Egypt’s Sinai desert.

The US was forced to step up to the mark and show that it really was taking the IS threat seriously. For the first time, for example, US aircraft attacked convoys of oil tankers travelling to the Turkish border last week, destroying 116 of them and another 283 over the weekend.

This certainly adds up to a credible military action – but gives rise to the question – why did it take them so long?

Into the cauldron of fire?

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t is into this highly unstable situation that David Cameron wants to commit UK armed forces and get bombing. Last time he sought Parliamentary approval for bombing in Syria, remember, he lost the vote on 30th August 2013. And that time, it was President Assad’s forces he wanted to bomb.

Now, barely two years after that well-earned Parliamentary disaster, he’s even keener to get bombing. Only this time, it’s the other side he’s after destroying – IS. But is it really? Or is the truth that it’s the same old game plan all along?

Barack Obama and the UK’s PM David Cameron: Bosom buddies in war planning. An age of repugnant hypocrisy. Where is that Nuremberg war crimes tribunal now that we desperately need it?

It increasingly looks as if the sudden enthusiasm for bombing IS in Syria has more to do with claiming territory in the west of a broken up and Balkanised Syria for Our so-called ‘moderate’ rebels, and hold Assad and his Russian allies at bay. And that goes not just for the US but for the UK as well.

So what’s going on? One often ignored dimension is the ‘battle of two pipelines‘ to carry natural gas from either Qatar or Iran across Syria to European markets. The Qatari pipeline would transect Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey on its way to Europe. The Iranian pipeline would go across Iraq and Syria before dipping undersea across the Mediterannean to Greece.

As reported on ZeroHedge, “Knowing Syria was a critical piece in its energy strategy, Turkey attempted to persuade Syrian President Bashar Assad to reform this Iranian pipeline and to work with the proposed Qatar-Turkey pipeline, which would ultimately satisfy Turkey and the Gulf Arab nations’ quest for dominance over gas supplies.

“But after Assad refused Turkey’s proposal, Turkey and its allies became the major architects of Syria’s ‘civil war’ … now we’re seeing what happens when you’re a Mid-East strongman and you decide not to support something the US and Saudi Arabia want to get done.”

And it so happens that with a good chunk of western Syria under Our belts, Qatar could have its pipeline up through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey after all – while also blocking Iran’s pipeline route to the Med.

Paddy Ashdown pointed out on the BBC Today Programme this morning, the UK has in fact been singularly reluctant to do either:

“The failure to put pressure on the Gulf states – and especially Saudi and Qatar – first of all to stop funding the Salafists and the Wahhabists, secondly to play a large part in this campaign, and other actions where the Government has refused to have a proper inquiry into the funding of jihadism in Britain, leads me to worry about the closeness between the Conservative Party and rich Arab Gulf individuals.

“Talking about Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular. I’m not saying their governments have been doing it but their rich businessmen have, and in states like Saudi Arabia you’d imagine the government could stop it.”

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

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