Secret Affairs: Britain’s collusion with radical Islam

By Jean Shaoul
wsws.org

In 1998 Mark Curtis published The Great Deception: Anglo-American Power and World Order, a work whose stated goal was to shed light on various myths of Anglo-American power in the post-Cold War era.

Mark Curtis, in his Secret Affairs: Britain’s collusion with radical Islam, has investigated how Britain worked with state sponsors of terrorism as well as radical Islamic groups in the post-World War II period in the energy-rich Middle East and Central Asia.

Curtis’ book presents a devastating indictment of the criminality of successive governments in the post-war period, whose dirty wars, covert operations, attempted coups, collusion with the US “extraordinary renditions,” kidnappings and torture, assassinations and “special operations” illustrate the bloody role of British imperialism.

Britain’s collusion with Islamist fundamentalist forces, prepared to use atrocities to achieve their objectives, is in sharp contrast to the official line that Britain is conducting a “war on terror.”

Curtis, a former research fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and former Director of the World Development Movement (now called Global Justice Now), has written other useful books, including Web of Deceit and Unpeople, which expose the lies put out by successive governments to cover for Britain’s imperialist depredations. His own purpose is to explain the rise of “home grown terrorists” in Britain, in the context of the coordinated bombings on London transport on July 7, 2005 (7/7) that killed 52 people and injured more than 700; and British intelligence claims that they prevented 12 terrorist plots in Britain during the 2000s and knew of the existence of 2,000 terrorists organised in 200 networks.

Curtis argues, using evidence from declassified files from the National Archives, Hansard reports, leaks and government statements, that this is not simply the result of Britain’s wars and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, but of two further factors.

Frequent ceremonies with the British royals maintain the aura of a benevolent empire that has only spread civilization among the savages. Same can be said for innumerable books and films—from James Bond to Kipling classics like the Man Who Would be King—that sell the self-serving notion that Britain represents enlightened rule and cultural superiority.

First, Britain’s decades-long support for some of the most noxious regimes on the planet, such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia that have sponsored Islamist groups for their own purposes. Second, the willingness of successive British governments to work with reactionary right-wing forces, including radical Islamists and terrorist groups, to prop up authoritarian regimes allied to Britain, undermine unstable regimes perceived as hostile to British interests and install more pliant regimes.

While the US’ role in sponsoring Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden is well known. Britain’s part in fostering Al Qaeda and similar groups and/or working with them, sometimes in cooperation with Washington as a junior partner or sub-contractor, sometimes on its own account, has generally been omitted.

Britain’s broader strategy has been to keep the people of the region tied to a capitalist perspective and the Middle East divided so that no single power dominates oil supplies. Its purpose was twofold: to preserve the commercial position of its oil giants Shell and BP, which controlled one-sixth of the world’s oil and 40 percent of the Gulf’s oil, mostly in Iran and Kuwait; and to retain the financial benefits derived from the “substantial Arab foreign exchange reserves in sterling” that accrued from oil.

Operations against bourgeois nationalist governments in the 1950s

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]or decades, Britain has worked with Jihadi groups on an ad hoc basis, switching sides as the need arises.

Iran premier M. Mossadegh greeted by Dean Acheson at Union Station, DC, circa 1951. The man-—judged to be an annoyance by the Anglo-American oil mafia—was soon deposed in a CIA/UK coup led by Kermit Roosevelt. We have been paying for that sin ever since.

In the early 1950s, Britain’s spy agency MI6 worked with the CIA to topple the nationalist regime of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq, who planned to nationalise BP’s Iranian oil operations. A key ally in the early stages of their plans were Shi’ite clerical forces loyal to Ayatollah Kashani, later to become the mentor to Ruhollah Khomeini, who was among the MI6/CIA sponsored-crowd protesting against Mosaddeq in 1953. The British dropped Kashani as being too hostile to British interests, but not before using his forces as shock troops to pave the way for the return of the Shah, who imposed a dictatorial regime subservient to his patrons.

Britain cooperated with the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in a bid to undermine Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser’s newly installed and fiercely nationalist regime. It was after a failed assassination attempt that Britain, along with France and Israel, invaded Egypt at the end of October 1956 to overthrow Nasser, even though British officials feared that the political beneficiaries would be the Brotherhood.

Britain again used the Brotherhood to foment dissent in Syria during the late 1950s and provide the basis for two abortive coups, with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan authorising the assassination of key government and military officials and the leader of the Syrian Communist party.

Britain’s backing for the House of Saud

[dropcap]A[/dropcap] key element in London’s efforts to contain secular Arab nationalism in the late 1950s was its backing for Saudi Arabia’s theocratic and authoritarian regime, which controlled the region’s largest oil reserves. The Saudi royal family, which uses and exports its own brand of Islamism, Wahhabism, to legitimise its tyrannical rule, welcomed the Brotherhood, recently expelled from Egypt, and, along with the CIA, poured money into their religious seminaries and enterprises. This was part of its broader strategy of promoting the rise of right-wing political Islam, and countering and suppressing the growth of any progressive political tendencies within the working class. The House of Saud is believed to have spent $50 billion since the 1970s promoting Wahhabism around the globe, in what one US think tank describes as the “largest worldwide propaganda campaign ever mounted.”

While the US’ role in sponsoring Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden is well known. Britain’s part in fostering Al Qaeda and similar groups and/or working with them, sometimes in cooperation with Washington as a junior partner or sub-contractor, sometimes on its own account, has generally been omitted.

Israel’s destruction of the Arab armies, in the space of six days in June 1967, played a major role in politically discrediting the secular nationalist regimes of Egypt and Syria, and their backers in the Soviet Union. They had proved incapable of reconciling their differences and taking even the most elementary precautions to protect their equipment and installations from surprise attacks by Israel, much less defeating Israel.

Disillusionment with bourgeois nationalism enabled the revival, during the 1970s, of the Muslim Brotherhood and similar forces throughout the Middle East and North Africa. The Islamist groups were able to fill the political vacuum created by the insistence of some leading left political tendencies that the working class had no independent political role to play.

A further defeat of the Arab powers in the October 1973 war and the quadrupling of oil prices in 1973 served to enrich the feudal states of the Arabian Peninsula and to enhance their influence.

As Curtis explains, this led Britain to make frantic and obsequious efforts to ensure that this newfound wealth was recycled through the City of London. Following the loosening of controls on the movement of capital in 1979 and especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the City became a major centre for the promotion of “Islamic banking” and “Islamic finance” across the world.

Militant Islamic groups benefited from the new-found wealth of the oil-rich states both directly and indirectly.

Popular support for Islamic groups began to grow throughout the region, particularly among the most impoverished layers and the rural poor, due to their provision of basic social services funded by the religious authorities in the Gulf. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, Arab nationalism—with the possible and temporary exception of Palestinian nationalism—was largely a spent force.

In Iran, the errors of the Tudeh party paved the way for the establishment of an Islamic theocracy following the popular uprising in 1979 against the Shah’s tyrannical regime. This inspired and promoted a network of Shi’ite groups, including Amal and Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shi’ite opposition elements to the Iraqi regime, and Shi’ite minorities in the Gulf States. And it encouraged the growth of other Islamist tendencies, including Sunni groups, which both Washington and London promoted in collaboration with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

The imperialist powers viewed Sunni groupings as a mechanism for countering Moscow’s influence in the Middle East and internationally; as a political weapon against radical nationalists, such as the Ba’ath Parties in Syria and Iraq; ballast for the reactionary monarchs of Jordan and Saudi Arabia; and as an anti-Communist force through which to divert the oppressed masses with radical sounding rhetoric.

Britain’s role in the Afghan war

Al Qaeda and its former leader Osama bin Laden, who had direct links with Saudi intelligence from the early years of the anti-Soviet Jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s, was a vital element of that policy. It was only one of a number of such groups that Riyadh bankrolled during the Afghan war.

As Curtis explains, while the British government, in public, denied any military involvement in the war, in reality it had been providing covert assistance to Afghani Islamists even before the war started and authorised MI6 operations in the first year of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. MI6 activated its longstanding network of spies and coordinated training alongside the CIA and Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI.

Britain’s SAS played a direct part in the war, unlike its US counterparts, because it was subject to far less oversight. It trained and supported various Islamist groups and directed them in covert guerrilla operations against the southern Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

The end of the Afghan war in 1989 left the Islamists as the dominant political force in the country, vying among themselves for control of Afghanistan. Foreign Jihadis who received military training at the hands of the British went home to set up organisations to fight their own governments and mount terrorist attacks.

Britain continued to support some of these groups in the 1990s, using them as proxy forces in Bosnia, Azerbaijan, Kosovo and Libya. They launched terrorist attacks, first in Muslim countries and then in the US and Europe.

Britain’s support for Pakistan

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ritain also backed a second state sponsor of terrorist groups, Pakistan, after General Zia ul-Haq’s seizure of power in a coup in 1977, supplying it with arms. Lacking a political base, Zia sought the support of the mullahs, promoted the rise of Islamism and backed the Jamaat-i-Islam, which was the main conduit for Saudi aid to the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan. He also supported the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (Assembly of Islamic Clergy), which ran a massive network of religious schools.

Thatcher: Guilty as suspected. Photo by roberthuffstutter

Zia and the Islamists’ aim was to channel the increasing discontent of the masses with the corrupt bourgeois parties away from left politics. In this, they had the whole-hearted support of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and successive British governments which provided Pakistan with diplomatic cover, arms, military training, aid and foreign direct investment.

Two major terrorist groups were established. The first was Harakat al-Jehad al-Islami. One of its split-offs was trained by the British-funded Haqqani faction in Afghanistan and went on to recruit thousands of volunteers to fight there, including thousands of Britons of Pakistani descent, and later became active against Indian forces in Kashmir. Kashmir has now become a major flashpoint that could trigger a war between two nuclear-armed states.

The second developed out of a Sunni missionary organisation reportedly established with seed money from Bin Laden that joined the Afghan Jihad. It too mounted attacks on Indian-administered Kashmir, becoming Pakistan’s largest jihadist organisation with which the 7/7 London bombers had close links.

Britain supported Pakistan’s use of Islamist terrorist groups for covert operations in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Chechnya, the location of the huge energy resources of Central Asia, thereby facilitating British energy corporations’ access to the region. At the very least, it acquiesced in Islamabad and Riyadh’s funding and arming of the Taliban, which emerged victorious after a brutal civil war in Afghanistan in 1996, thereby entrenching Al Qaeda.

Secret Affairs: Britain’s collusion with radical Islam

A revealing insight into political criminality and warmongering—Part 2

By Jean Shaoul, wsws.org
6 March 2017

This is the second of a two-part series. Part 1 was posted March 4. (See above)

“Londonistan” as a centre for terrorist groups

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his sordid and cynical relationship positioned Britain as a leading arms exporter, second only to the US, and the City of London as an international financial centre. It also turned London into a major centre in the 1990s for Islamist groups organising terrorism abroad—earning it the sobriquet of “Londonistan.”

Groups such as Algeria’s Armed Islamic Group (GIA), the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Al Qaeda all had offices in London. Al Qaeda considered London the nerve centre of its operations in Europe.

These groups raised millions of pounds to fund and recruit militants to fight around the world. Thousands of young men went from Britain to train in camps overseas, particularly in Pakistan and Afghanistan, with the knowledge, if not encouragement, of the British government, despite the fact that it was an offence to aid a group proscribed under the 2000 Terrorism Act. British authorities ignored numerous complaints, both domestic and overseas, about extremism, and dragged their feet over requests for the investigation or extradition of terrorist suspects.

Several Islamists refer to Whitehall having given them a “green light” as long as they only carried out terrorist activities overseas, including Abu Hamza, the former cleric at Finsbury Park mosque, Khaled al-Fawwaz, the head of Bin Laden’s London operation and Omar Bakri Mohammed, who established the militant al-Muhajiroun group that sent fighters to Kashmir, Chechnya and Kosovo.

There is evidence that the security services collaborated directly with some of these organisations and their leaders, including Abu Hamza. Abu Qatada, the Jordanian cleric sentenced in absentia for terrorist activities who became known as Al Qaeda’s spiritual leader in Europe, reportedly worked as a double agent for MI5.

Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), who fought in the Soviet-Afghan war and subsequently joined Al Qaeda, claims that MI6 sponsored (unsuccessful) assassination attacks by LIFG on Libya’s then leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Subsequently, following Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair’s infamous “deal in the sand” with Gaddafi in 2004, Britain cooperated with the CIA in Belhaj’s kidnapping, rendition to Libya and interrogation under torture.

After Belhaj’s release in 2009 by Gaddafi under a general amnesty, Britain again made use of the LIFG as a proxy force in 2011 to topple the Libyan leader in the NATO-led intervention. The British authorities have sought to suppress court cases brought by Belhaj in order to prevent the exposure of its links with such forces.

9/11 and the “global war on terror”

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in 2001 were in part the product of Saudi Arabian and Pakistani support for Jihadi groups.

Curtis points to a possible British connection. Omar Saeed Sheikh, a Briton of Pakistani origin found guilty in 2002 of orchestrating the beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, acted as a conduit for ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service, and wired funds to the leader of the 9/11 plotters.

Daniel Craig as the latest James Bond, a spy franchise that has burnished the image of British intel agents, hiding the far more complex and uglier realities. Pop culture heroes play a huge role in the enormous propaganda apparatus justifying Anglo-American crimes.

Sheikh admitted being an ISI agent, while Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf later accused him of also being an MI6 agent. It seems that London offered him an amnesty in 1999, after his release from an Indian prison for kidnapping four British and American tourists in 1994, in return for acting as an informant. At the very least, this implies that the ISI and therefore probably US and British officials, had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attack. The UK has not investigated Sheikh’s links to 9/11 to avoid jeopardising its relations with Pakistan.

Following 9/11, these same terrorist groups provided another useful service to the imperialist powers: as justification for a new series of wars for the domination of energy-rich regions in Central Asia and the Middle East. While the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq ostensibly targeted the groups Washington and London had previously supported, their key allies were Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the key sponsors of these groups.

Prime Minister Blair seized on the “global war on terror” to piggyback Washington’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in pursuit of Britain’s own imperialist interests. Following the Strategic Defence Review in 1998, the Labour government reconfigured its military forces so that they could intervene as a “pre-emptive” military force in an offensive capacity to “project power overseas” with “expeditionary forces” to support “political objectives,” including countering international terrorism.

Britain’s close support for Saudi Arabia dovetailed its need for oil and gas, as Britain became a net importer of energy by the mid-2000s. Blair even intervened to stop a Serious Fraud Office investigation of bribery by Britain’s largest arms corporation BAE to secure a massive Saudi arms deal.

Similarly, Blair supported Musharraf, ostensibly because Pakistan was a “frontline state” in the war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. As the Blair government well knew, Musharraf backed Pakistan’s domestic radical Islamists in his twin-pronged war against Indian-controlled Kashmir and his own secular nationalist opponents. He did little if anything to end Pakistan’s support for the Taliban and Al Qaeda, allowing Bin Laden to take up residence in Abbottabad, near the Pakistan Military Academy.

The London bombings

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he coordinated bombings on July 7, 2005 (7/7) on London transport was the worst terrorist atrocity in Britain. The perpetrators were five British Islamists, three of whom had links to a terrorist infrastructure established by Pakistan, which in turn benefited from British support, and were possibly trained by Pakistan’s security service.

The security forces had predicted the rise of “home-grown terrorists.” Three months before the 7/7 attacks, a classified government report noted that the wars and on-going occupation of Iraq had exacerbated the threat of international terrorism. Several of the bombers had visited Pakistan where they received training in making explosives from groups that received support from Britain during the Afghan war in the 1980s.

This in turn raises the question of British state involvement in the London bombings, something Curtis ignores. There are numerous indications that a section of the state or intelligence apparatus allowed the terrorists to carry out the 7/7 operation. These include reports that several of the bombers were known to the authorities and had been under surveillance for two years as a result of their links to Pakistan and Al Qaeda; the Israeli embassy received a warning about the bombings; Israel’s security service Mossad and the Saudi government alerted MI5, Britain’s domestic spy agency, of a possible attack; military explosives appear to have been used; and the fact that the national security threat was downgraded despite a G8 summit in Scotland.

In every similar case—September 11, 2001 in New York City, April 15, 2013 in Boston, November 13, 2015 in Paris and the December 2016 Christmas market attack in Berlin—the security services had the attackers under surveillance for a lengthy period of time and did not intervene to stop them carrying out their plots.

Despite government claims that most of the known terrorist plots against British targets involved groups with links to Pakistan-based Jihadi groups, and a Ministry of Defence think tank’s report that the ISI supported terrorism and extremism—leaked to the media in 2006—the Blair government continued to support Musharraf until he resigned in 2008 to avoid impeachment.

This leads to the fundamental drawback of Curtis’ review: his inability to explain Britain’s covert collusion with these Islamist forces and their political purpose. He concludes that the various operations are a blot on Britain’s democracy, having caused various types of “blowback” and having been largely ineffectual in terms of their stated foreign policy objectives.

One could read much of the book and conclude that the British government was merely hypocritical and cynical, that its policies were mistaken and could therefore be changed. But Britain’s foreign policy was no mistake. Its foreign policy record testifies to its fear of the working class and the oppressed internationally, nowhere more than in the resource-rich Middle East, leaving it with no choice but to support the most foul forces to preserve its interests.

In the aftermath of World War II, the imperialist powers, whose wars, local stooges and subsequent intrigues had impoverished the region, faced the undying hatred of the masses, dominated politically by the old-style Communist parties of the region. Following Moscow’s line, those parties and their leftist supporters insisted that the working class had no independent political role to play, dragooning it behind nationalist leaders who sought to supplant Britain and exploit the region’s wealth for their own benefit.

When direct rule became impossible, the imperialist powers ruled via their clients, and supported any and all political tendencies that would divide the working class and rural poor along sectarian and ethnic lines and so prevent a unified struggle to overthrow capitalism. After the national bourgeoisie, riding on the back of mass opposition to indirect colonial rule, took power, Britain and other major powers again colluded with these forces, switching sides and alliances as circumstances changed. As Lord Palmerston famously told the House of Commons in 1848, “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow…”

At home, Britain has used these groups as the justification for a raft of anti-democratic measures, which gets little attention in Curtis’ book.

The Labour government used the 9/11 attack in New York, and the terrorist atrocity of 7/7 and other attacks, actual and planned, on British soil, to strengthen police powers to detain suspects, codified in the 2001 Terrorism Act; overturn long-standing democratic rights, including the legal principle of presumption of innocence in the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005; criminalise the “encouragement” and “incitement” of terrorism in 2006; and position Britain as a leading player in a global spying network in alliance with the US National Security Agency (NSA). The Tories, for their part, introduced legislation ostensibly targeting “extremists” that in effect enables the authorities to criminalise speech and political opposition to the government’s policies of aggressive militarism abroad and austerity at home.

The government and state machinery have eviscerated the entire framework of legal and democratic rights fought for in the course of hundreds of years. The target is not primarily the reactionary Islamist network, but opposition from the working class to the government’s policies of austerity, war and the assault on democratic rights.

Despite its political limitations, Curtis’ book is a valuable piece of investigative journalism, particularly given the extraordinary level of secrecy surrounding UK foreign policy.

Concluded

The author also recommends:

UK documentary exposes Saudi role in global terror operations

NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS • PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE

Prof. Jean Shaoul, associated with the University of Manchester, is a frequent contributor to wsws.org.

MAIN IMAGE: British military spectacles like this one, the ” trooping of the colors” on the occasion of the Queen’s Birthday, have long kept an approving patina of pride in imperial “achievements” and contributed a hefty income in tourism’s revenues.

Washington’s Benevolent Mask Is Disintegrating

Paul Craig Roberts

Dateline: March 7, 2017

The few weeks of Trump’s presidency suffice to make clear that there will be no change this time either. Normal relations with Russia are on the back burner, if not off the stove. The material needs of the military/security complex for an enemy in order to justify its budget and police state powers, and the ideological needs of the neoconservatives for US world hegemony, are deemed to be more important than trust between thermo-nuclear powers. As for the liberal/progressive/left, they regard working to preserve life on earth as merely a pretext for being soft on Russians and those who commit treason by favoring friendly relations with Russia.

The American working class has discovered that it has among Trump’s government no larger a constituency than have the Russians. Having been told by corporations, which are spending billions of dollars buying back their own stock, that they are too poor to pay US wages, Trump has found that the path to economic security for the work force lies in corporate tax reduction. Identity politics marches for open borders for Muslims and Hispanics and for transgendered toilet facilities, not for bread and peace, and wants Trump impeached because he is not yet at war with Russia.

Trump’s Russophobic appointments, such as McMaster, Mattis, and Fiona Hill are actually worse than Obama’s Victoria Nuland, Samantha Power and Susan Rice. Just as Hillary and Nuland brought regime change to Ukraine, Tillerson at the State Department has signaled regime change of the democratically elected government in Venezuela. Ecuador and Bolivia won’t be far behind.

Washington has never supported governments that put the interests of their peoples ahead of the interests of those who rule the US. From Africa to South America to Indonesia to Cuba to Vietnam to Iran to Egypt, Washington has always misrepresented the forces for change as communist. Washington overthrew the first democratically elected government in Iran http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/cia-assisted-coup-overthrows-government-of-iran , the first in the Congo https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/17/patrice-lumumba-50th-anniversary-assassination , the first in Egypt http://www.timesofisrael.com/announced-as-president-of-egypt/ , and a large numbers of others. Read Stephen Kinzer’s The Brothers. Read General Smedley Butler who said that he and the US Marines made South America safe for the United Fruit Company and investments of the New York Banks. Read John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

Washington opposes democratic change with an iron fist. Now Marine Le Pen, the favored candidate for the presidency of France in the upcoming election, is in the process of being destroyed by Washington.

Washington has never supported governments that put the interests of their peoples ahead of the interests of those who rule the US. From Africa to South America to Indonesia to Cuba to Vietnam to Iran to Egypt, Washington has always misrepresented the forces for change as communist. (This after braiwashing the American people for generations against communism.)

Marine is not on Washington’s approved list. The reasons are: (1) she speaks to French interests, not to Washington’s or the EU’s, (2) she opposes the Trans-Atlantic Partnership, which gives US global corporations immunity to French laws against GMOs, and French labor, safety, and environmental standards, (3) she supports French opinion that the French are French and not “European” and wants out of the European Union, and (4) she wants France out of NATO, which uses France as a tool for American aggression.

Washington first attacked Marine via its surrogates in the French press and government, who managed to nullify her parliamentary immunity. With this achieved, she is now accused of “misuse of EU funds.”

The charge, of course, is a hoax, a frame-up. The charge, if it proves effective, will rely on the French presstitute media’s portrayal of Marine as a “fascist” for representing French nationalism. Today, if a European person is loyal to his or her own country and not to the EU, the person is considered to be a “nationalist,” a term that has been merged with “fascist.” The consequence is that anyone in France who wants to represent the French is a “fascist.”

Marine Le Pen lost her parliamentary immunity because she posted photos of ISIS victims on Twitter. The photos she posted were accurate and correct, simply the truth. But the charge is that to tell the truth about ISIS means that you are anti-Muslim, which today is like being anti-Jew, anti-black, anti-homosexual and anti-transgendered. The protection of Identity Politics now extends not only to the Muslim refugees from America’s wars who are overrunning the Western world but also to ISIS. The accurate and truthful photos violated Identity Politics.

The consensus of those few in Europe who reside outside the Matrix created for them by Washington and the American presstitutes is that the CIA will not permit Le Pen to become President of France. She is a threat to Washington’s empire. If she cannot be destroyed with scandal and false charges, like Dominique Strauss-Kahn, she will be assassinated.

Democracy cannot function without an honest media. Nowhere in the Western world does an honest media exist. There are a relatively few sites on the Internet media, such as this one, your site, that are independent of ruling elites and speak the truth to the extent that they can find it. But the very shadowy PropOrNot website, likely a product of the CIA or George Soros, has declared those who understand that good relations between thermo-nuclear powers are essential to be “Russian agents.”

One dozen Russian Satan 2 ICBMs are sufficient to destroy the United States. One is sufficient to destroy France, the UK, or Texas. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/25/russia-unveils-satan-2-missile-powerful-enough-to-wipe-out-uk-fr/ Why is Washington and Washington’s European, Canadian, and Australian puppets inviting such an outcome with continuous false accusations against Russia (and China). No person with any intelligence can possibly regard the thrice elected president of Russia as “the new Hitler,” “a Mafia Don,” “ a thug.”

By orchestrating Russophobia in the West, Washington has put all of humanity at risk. The Russians have watched Washington’s false accusations against Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Yeman, Pakistan, Iran and against Russia herself—“invasion of Ukraine.” False accusations have in the 21st century always been Washington’s set-up of the target country for invasion or bombing.

These provacations issued daily by the idiot Western press, the idiot Western governments, and the idiot commentators have prepared the groundwork for a misunderstanding that can result in thermo-nuclear war and the end of life on earth.

When you read the New York Times, the Washington Post, or listen to CNN, NPR, or MSNBC or the British, Canadian, German, French, and Australian media, you are being indoctrinated with war with Russia (and China) and, thus, you are being prepared for your funeral.

Accustomed to looking for hope from within their own country, Americans become depressed when faced with these facts. Whereas the American Oligarchy is too strong for change, the situation in Europe is more hopeful. The EU is a collection of countries that have little in common. The British have concluded that submerging their identity into something called “Europe” is not in their interest. Other countries—Hungary, the Czech Republic, Greece and Portugal—are realizing that capitalists are more rapacious than commissars and might seek salvation in reclaiming their sovereignty. The exit from the European Union, a CIA-sponsored organization, could gain momentum.

NATO also could come unglued as European populations realize that it is not Russia that is the threat. The threat is that Washington is forcing Europe into conflict with Russia, a conflict in which Europe has nothing to gain. For Europe, conflict with Russia means the death of Europe. A few Europeans have gained sufficient awareness to begin asking: “Why die for Washington’s hegemony?”

This is Marine Le Pen’s question, and it is now being asked by a few in Germany. As Europeans gain awareness of Washington’s insanity, the question will grow. The millions of Muslim refugees from Washington’s wars who are flooding Europe with problems are bringing home to insouciant Europeans the price of accepting Washington’s overlordship.

The privatizations, which have wrecked the prospects for Latvia, Ukraine, and Greece, and that have raised costs and lowered living standards in Britain and France while concentrating income and wealth at the top of the income distribution, are a European lesson that the partial socializations of social democracy are more livable than the system of plunder that now rules.

Washington’s mask of benevolence is falling away, revealing the face of greed and evil that is its true face. This face is far more terrifying than the orchestrated “Russian threat.” If more Europeans can gain awareness, the threat of thermo-nuclear war will crumble with Washington’s empire.

NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS • PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.

MAIN IMAGE: Marine Le Pen: Old-fashioned rightwing nationalism could prove a huge obstacle to Washington’s plans for Europe and its grander designs to destroy Russia.

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India becomes “frontline” state in US war plans against China

Deepal Jayasekera and Keith Jones

Dateline: 7 March 2017

India is to become a major service and repair hub for the US Seventh Fleet—the armada that is at the center of US war preparations against China. Last month the Pentagon awarded a contract, said to be worth up to $1.5 billion over the next five years, to a shipyard in Gujarat to maintain the Seventh Fleet’s warships and patrol and service vessels.

This is a strategic move aimed at giving flesh and blood to last August’s agreement opening India’s military bases and ports to routine use by the US military for the resupply and repair of its warplanes and warships.

The transformation of India into a hub for the Seventh Fleet marks a new stage in India’s integration into US imperialism’s military-strategic offensive against China.

The Seventh Fleet is at the very center of US plans to wage war on China. It has responsibility for the western Pacific and the eastern stretches of the Indian Ocean up to the India-Pakistan border. US strategy calls for the Seventh Fleet to impose an economic blockade on China by seizing control of the Straits of Malacca and other Indian Ocean/South China Sea chokepoints and to spearhead a massive bombardment of Chinese military installations, cities and infrastructure in what the Pentagon calls its “Air-Sea Battle” plan.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, Washington has worked assiduously to harness New Delhi to its predatory agenda and to build up India as a counterweight to China. The Pentagon and US military-intelligence think tanks have long coveted India as a geopolitical prize because of its size, its large nuclear-armed military and its strategic location. India, or so the strategists of US imperialism calculate, can serve as China’s “soft southern underbelly.” It also provides the best vantage point from which to dominate the Indian Ocean, China’s and the world’s most important commercial waterway.

Under Narendra Modi and his Hindu supremacist BJP government, New Delhi has dramatically expanded its already extensive military-strategic cooperation with Washington. In addition to the basing agreement, India has expanded bilateral and trilateral military-strategic ties with America’s principal Asian-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia. In January, the head of the US Pacific Command, Admiral Harry Harris, revealed that the Pentagon and Indian military are sharing intelligence on Chinese submarine and ship movements in the Indian Ocean.

The grave threat the Indo-US alliance represents to the people of Asia and the world is underscored by the advent of the Trump administration. It has denounced China as a “currency manipulator,” dismissed the Obama administration’s anti-China “Pivot to Asia” as weak and ineffective, and threatened to deny Beijing access to Chinese-controlled islets in the South China Sea—an act that would be tantamount to a declaration of war.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, Washington has worked assiduously to harness New Delhi to its predatory agenda and to build up India as a counterweight to China. The Pentagon and US military-intelligence think tanks have long coveted India as a geopolitical prize because of its size, its large nuclear-armed military and its strategic location.

Trump has criticized Obama’s foreign policy on many fronts. But when it comes to India, Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis has vowed that the Trump administration is determined to “build upon” the recent “tremendous progress” in Indo-US “defense cooperation.”

The Indian government, opposition and corporate media are all complicit in keeping India’s workers and toilers in the dark as to the extent to which India is being transformed into a frontline state in Washington’s drive to thwart China’s rise and assert US hegemony over Eurasia. This drive, if not stopped through the revolutionary mobilization of the international working class, leads inexorably to war between the world’s nuclear-armed great powers.

India’s emergence as a hub for the US Seventh Fleet is so striking a change, however, that even Indian media reports could not avoid mentioning that during the Cold War, the Seventh Fleet was used by Washington to bully and threaten New Delhi on several occasions. The Times of India wrote, “The US Seventh Fleet, which was sent to the Bay of Bengal in December 1971 by then-American President Richard Nixon … to pressure India during the Bangladesh liberation war, will now ironically be maintained by an Indian company.”

Because of New Delhi’s strategic and commercial ties with Moscow, Washington treated India as an adversary for most of the Cold War.

Newly independent India had been eager to establish warm relations with Washington. But New Delhi balked at US imperialism’s attempts to bully it into subordinating its foreign policy to Washington’s strategic offensive against the Soviet Union.

Washington responded by recruiting Pakistan, the rival state created through the communal partition of the subcontinent that had accompanied independence, to serve as a linchpin of its Cold War alliance system. With the US arming Pakistan, India turned to the Soviet Union for arms purchases and strategic support. It also became one of the founders and the principal leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement.

Soviet support also helped New Delhi counter the economic pressure the US exerted on India because of its use of import substitution and state ownership to strengthen the Indian bourgeoisie’s position vis a vis international capital. Jawaharlal Nehru and his Congress Party government were also mindful of the assistance the Soviet Stalin-style regime’s support could play in integrating the Stalin-style Communist Party of India (CPI) into bourgeois politics so as to use it to contain working class opposition.

India’s non-alignment policy had nothing to do with genuine opposition to imperialism. It was a stratagem of the Indian bourgeoisie to strengthen its class rule. When the rug was pulled out from under its state-led capitalist development strategy by globalization and the Stalin-style bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, it quickly junked its anti-imperialist rhetoric and began to fashion a more direct and slavish relationship with Washington.

This shift was spearheaded by Nehru’s Congress Party heirs. It was a Congress-led government that forged the “global Indo-US strategic partnership” that served as the antechamber for India’s transformation under Modi into a veritable frontline state in Washington’s anti-China offensive.

Yet the CPI, its Stalin-style sister party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and their Left Front continue to promote “non-alignment” as “anti-imperialism” and claim that the Indian bourgeoisie can play a progressive role in world politics.

The Stalinists maintain that the imperialist world order can be pacified and the interests of the Indian bourgeoisie best advanced if New Delhi curtails its strategic ties with Washington and opposes US “unilateralism” by advocating “multi-polarity”—i.e., a greater role in regulating world affairs for the other imperialist ruling elites, the Indian bourgeoisie and the oligarchs who now rule Russia and China.

That the Stalinists openly support the great power ambitions of the Indian bourgeoisie is underscored by their support for the expansion of India’s military and nuclear arsenal.

And for all their claims to oppose Modi’s embrace of Washington, they have failed to alert the working class to how the Indian bourgeoisie’s alliance with US imperialism is emboldening New Delhi in its drive to impose itself as South Asia’s regional hegemon.

The Stalinists applauded when India carried out illegal, cross-border military raids inside Pakistan last September, plunging South Asia’s nuclear-armed rivals into their most serious war crisis since at least 2003.

Pakistan’s reactionary elite has responded to India’s increasingly menacing posture by threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons in the event of a larger Indian attack and by deepening its longstanding strategic partnership with Beijing.

US imperialism’s reckless drive to harness India to its offensive against China has transformed South Asia into a geopolitical powder keg. The Indo-Pakistani and Sino-Indian conflicts have become enmeshed with the US-China confrontation, adding to each a massive new explosive charge, with potentially calamitous implications for the people of the region and the world.

South Asia is thus a pivotal front in the development of a working class-led global movement against imperialist war and the capitalist system out of which it arises. Such a movement, uniting workers and toilers in India, Pakistan and across the subcontinent with the Chinese, American and international working class, will emerge only through a merciless exposure of the criminal role being played by the Stalin-style CPM and CPI.

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The authors are analysts with WSWS.org, a Trotskyist organization. While we find their analysis often spot on, and much of this essay is written with characteristic insight, their knee-jerk anti-Stalinism muddles up the waters, diminishing some of the major arguments.

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Oscars Award to ISIS-Connected White Helmets Exposed by 21st Century Wire

Forget Oscar: Give The White Helmets the Leni Riefenstahl Award for Best War Propaganda Film

Patrick Henningsen | 21st Century Wire

This has to be a historic low for Hollywood and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

In your average lifetime, everyone will get their share of war propaganda films. In America, it’s a kind of sacred tradition, where Hollywood does the job of revisionism, paving over an otherwise uncomfortable history with a new coat of stain. It’s necessary – not just to make us feel better about ourselves, but also to cover-up any inconvenient truths and high crimes of the state.

To be honest, when I first heard about this film being promoted by Netflix, I wasn’t surprised at all because ever since the Syria conflict began in 2011, the establishment media has gone out of its way to falsely promote it as a “civil war”, and have used the NGO known as the White Helmets which calls itself the ‘Syria Civil Defense’, as its primary media protagonist in furthering that narrative.

The fact that a documentary about The White Helmets received an Oscar Award simply confirms what a glorious bubble the entertainment industry resides in, and how easy it is these days for a documentary film to be used for the purposes of propaganda and made to reinforce a mainly US-UK foreign policy project.

To Hollywood, it’s a feel-good documentary, designed to make us feel good about a dirty war in Syria. But this is a level of distortion and spin that would make even Joseph Goebbels’ head spin.

In his essay published at Global Research, Dr. T.P. Wilkinson explains the liberal obsession with cosmetic revisionism:

“The “wrong war” thesis is elemental to what Carroll Quigley called “liberal imperialism” in his history of the Anglo-American establishment.[2] Liberal imperialists, to which the faux gauche (the descendants of Fabianism) also belong, do not oppose empire. They simply want it to be more aesthetically appealing, and lost wars are most un-aesthetic. So what is the liberal imperialist’s answer to unappetizing military defeats? It is cosmetic surgery.”

Expensive war propaganda in Hollywood is nothing new. High profile films like Zero Dark Thirty, American Sniper and Argo were all released to much fanfare. Each of them fulfilled a role in forming a more perfect American narrative, and in some cases completely rewrote history altogether. But these were meant to be theatrical releases so naturally there’s a generous dose of artistic license taken by the director. Nothing unusual there. It’s what Hollywood does. These films also had some distance between the present day and wars which had already lapsed.

A veneer of integrity is always important. Hollywood still purports to put a lot of currency in the truth. During this year’s Oscars, The New York Times ran a TV ad (below) for the first time since 2010 entitled, “The truth is. . .”

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This campaign is meant to decry fake news and its ugly cousin ‘alternative facts’ to show what high standards the mainstream media has – which demonstrates the delusional world in which the establishment exists. Earlier this month, I wrote an exposé showing exactly how the New York Times has been America’s perennial leader in running fake news for the purposes of advancing a war agenda. It’s ironic that this advertisement would run on a night when an Oscar would be given to one of the most egregious propaganda films of all time.

And this is the WaPo’s own ludicrous ad.

Last Sunday night, The White Helmets, directed by Orlando von Einsiedel and Joanna Natasegara, took home an Academy Award for best documentary short. Unlike Argo, or American Sniper, this was a film about a war which is happening now, but this was not a conventional documentary film. The footage was provided by a terrorist-affiliated NGO based in Turkey, operating in Syria, and which is primarily funded by the US State Dept, the British Foreign Office, the Netherlands, and other NATO member and Gulf states to the tune of over $150 million and whose chief remit is producing US-led Coalition propaganda images for mass media consumption. The film, funded and distributed by Netflix, seems to be an extension of that remit.

Watch the film’s trailer here.

Normally we think of documentaries as films that are supposed to speak truth to power, but this film does the opposite. It reinforces an Anglo-American establishment power structure responsible for one of the most violent, dirty wars in modern history. It reinforces a collection of lies placed on heavy rotation by the political and media establishments since the conflict began.

In every way, Syria is the wrong war. For the US and the UK, there’s much at stake – the legacies of two paradigmatic political figures, Barack Obama and David Cameron, along with the reputations of other architects of the west’s dirty war on Syria, like former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and British Foreign Minister William Hague. Back when the war was getting started, both Clinton and Hague were busy front-running their “Friends of Syria” whistle stop tour around the Middle East and Europe, securing Gulf cash commitments while grooming their hand-picked ‘opposition’ government in exile, holding court in various 5 star hotels in Paris, London and Istanbul. The US had tried this only a year earlier with Libya, and at the time in 2011-2012, they had every reason to believe that the Libyan formula could be repeated in Syria. Those hopes were dashed by early 2013, when it became apparent that Libya was officially a failed state. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of extremist foreign fighters and jihadi soldiers of fortune began pouring into Syria. It was an invasion. This was the West’s proxy army, ready to decapitate the government, dismember the state and destabilize the region – with the full blessing of Washington DC and its partners.

The documentary The White Helmets reinforces an Anglo-American establishment power structure responsible for one of the most violent, dirty wars in modern history. It reinforces a collection of lies placed on heavy rotation by the political and media establishments since the conflict began.

The Troika of Washington-London-Paris then doubled down by pouring billions of dollars in lethal weapons to various fighting groups laying in waiting in Turkey and Jordan, as well as those already active in Syria. There were a number of well-documented arrangements, but one of the most successful working models was for the CIA and its European NATO partners illegally supplying the weapons funnelled through Jordan and Turkey – and all paid for by Saudi, Qatari cash. All the while, the public were told by the US-led Coalition all of this was for the “moderate rebels” in Syria. These were meant to be the “freedom fighters” that Ronald Reagan referred to back in the 1980’s. As it turned out, these freedom fighters in Syria were a chip of the old block from the violent, psychopathic US-backed and CIA-trained paramilitary death squads which would wreak havoc and terrorise El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras. In Syria, they are much worse in fact, as they employed a potent brand of warped, radical Salafi and Wahabist religious fervour as the central axis of their self-styled, Medieval nihilistic raison d’etre. Yes, these are the moderates, backed by the US, UK, France, Turkey, Germany, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, every other NATO member state, and of course, Israel, who has skillfully stayed out of the media firing line. It’s a collective project. Their mission: ‘regime change’ in Syria – to overthrow by force – the government in Damascus.

As dirty wars go, none is more filthy than this one. As the US and the UK are running point on public relations for this criminal enterprise, their big challenge has been selling it to their electorates. In order to justify the dirty war, a narrative has to be constructed and maintained. This requires a relentless negative public relations campaign demonizating the Syrian government and all of its agencies. The following talking points are therefore reinforced:

Syria’s peaceful ‘Arab Spring’ uprising happened in 2011, and was violently squashed by the government.
Assad is a brutal dictator, and is illegitimate.
The Syrian government and its armed forces are deliberately killing their own people.
The US-NATO and Gulf-backed armed ‘rebel’ opposition is legitimate.
Syrian and Russian Airforce are only killing civilians, and not militant and terrorists.
Terrorists do not exist in Syria, only “moderate rebels” and Syrians ‘fighting for freedom’.
Therefore, Assad must be removed from power and replaced with a US-approved government.

Add to this, the entrance of Russia in the fall of 2015 at the lawful invitation of Damascus, and Russia can now be added to the demonization campaign.

These talking points are then repeated and recycled, over and over, and held up as justification for US-led, crippling economic and diplomatic sanction against the Syrian state, and the destructive policy of flooding the region with arms. In the summer of 2014, an added bonus for the US was inserted into the mix – the emergence of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Sham). The appearance of ISIS allowed the US to fly air sorties over Syria, allegedly to fight ISIS, although after 3 years the US has produced little if any verifiable progress in ‘defeating’ ISIS. In truth, the US had hoped that ISIS, along with the other al Qaeda affiliates, would somehow do the job of destabilizing Syria and overthrowing the government of President Bashar al Assad in Damascus. Meanwhile, on-script western media operatives and politicians alike still referred to them as “rebels” and “armed opposition” – violent radical terrorist groups like Jabbat al Nusra (Nusra Front), Arar al Sham, Nour al-Din al-Zinki, Jaish al-Fatah (The Army of Conquest), along with some radical remnants of John McCain’s ‘Free Syrian Army’. This was all part of the public relations con.

But that wasn’t enough. Washington and London needed a face for the evening news. They needed to personalize the conflict in order to help maintain the illusion of a “civil war” in Syria. This is where the White Helmets come in. A merry band of men, comprised of “ordinary citizens, from bakers to teachers to painters,” all donning the White Helmets to save humanity in this moment of turmoil. Raed Saleh, the group’s spokesman says his organization is guided by a verse in the Qu’ran: “To save one life is to save all of humanity.” No doubt a beautiful line, but like so many aspects of the White Helmets – it’s been applied cosmetically. Who would dare be so insensitive as to challenge such a perfect story? For war planners in Washington and London, the White Helmets provided the PR cushion they needed to help sell a filthy proxy war to western audiences. By creating and managing their own ‘first responder’ NGO, the US, UK and its stakeholder partners have been able to leverage public sympathies – enough to keep the project going, until the war was either won or lost, or until someone caught on to the scam.

In his article in Counterpunch back in April 2015, Rick Sterling summarized the White Helmet roll-out and basic agenda:

“In reality the White Helmets is a project created by the UK and USA. Training of civilians in Turkey has been overseen by former British military officer and current contractor, James Le Mesurier. Promotion of the program is done by “The Syria Campaign” supported by the foundation of billionaire Ayman Asfari. The White Helmets is clearly a public relations project which has received glowing publicity from HuffPo to Nicholas Kristof at the NYT. White Helmets have been heavily promoted by the U.S. Institute of Peace (U.S.IP) whose leader began the press conference by declaring “U.S.IP has been working for the Syrian Revolution from the beginning.”

For the last 3 years, the White Helmets have existed for the singular purpose of producing thousands of propaganda segments – videos and images which reinforce the US-led foreign policy narrative for Syria. The brutal dictator Assad using his airforce against his own people, along with his evil Russian partners. Both are callously snuffing-out the fledging and therefore, the White Helmets’ primary financiers – the US State Dept (via USAID), the British Foreign Office, The Netherlands, along with other EU member states and Qatar. Since at least 2011, each of these nation stakeholders has had a vested interest in overthrowing the Syrian government and destabilizing Syria. In 2014, a number of independent researchers in the west began to catch the White Helmets’ unmistakable stench of dupery. Cory Morningstar’s article, “SYRIA: AVAAZ, PURPOSE & THE ART OF SELLING HATE FOR EMPIRE” (April 2014), and Rick Sterling’s piece for Counterpunch, “About Those Chlorine Gas Attacks in Syria,” and also the work of researcher Petri Krohn’s notable wiki site ‘A Closer Look at Syria‘ – first cracked the facade. They were followed by extensive investigations by Vanessa Beeley who has since produced a formidable volume of research and analysis on the White Helmets and other similar NGO projects, all of which are readily available on 21st Century Wire.

Any researcher working on a White Helmets documentary would have had access to all of this information, through a simple key word search.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]nterestingly, mainstream media defenders of the White Helmets such as Michael Weiss, a senior fellow at NATO’s own propaganda think tank the Atlantic Council, as well as editor at the dubious Daily Beast, claim that criticism of the White Helmets is a Russian plot organized by Putin himself. Weiss’ conspiracy theory is expected considering his employer’s affiliation, but such typical hyperbolic accusations belie the fact that the first individuals to expose this pseudo NGO are not Russian, but rather independent writers and researchers from the US, Canada and Great Britain and why not – because it’s their tax dollar that is funding the White Helmets. It’s also worth noting that in December 2016 when the Nusra terrorist hold over East Aleppo was collapsing, it was Michael Weiss who was responsible for circulating bogus reports, including that women in East Aleppo were committing ‘mass suicide’ to avoid ‘mass rape’ by Assad’s soldiers. “Seventy-nine of them were executed at the barricades. The rest — everyone under 40 — were taken to warehouses that look more like internment camps. They face an unknown fate,” he said. “This morning 20 women committed suicide in order not to be raped.”

Weiss’ source for these sensational reports: terrorists in East Aleppo. This was just one of many fake news stories disseminated in the mainstream media. Weiss then went on to repeat the fabricated story to a global mainstream audience on CNN’s Don Lemon Show.

In reality, and according to countless first-hand on the ground eyewitness testimonies collected by 21WIRE and other media outlets, as the Syrian Army began liberating East Aleppo, the so-called ‘moderate rebels’ promoted by Weiss and other western media operatives were using residents as human shields, and in some cases shooting residents who attempted to flee terrorist enclaves prior to government forces liberating the eastern half of the city.

With direct funding to the White Helmets from US-led Coalition countries already well in excess $150 million – international stakeholders expect a return on their investment. That return comes in the form of dramatic ‘search and rescue’ videos, some of which may have even been produced in Turkey, and which were then sent in a highly coordinated fashion to the editorial desks of CNN, NBC, BBC, Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian and others. At no time have any of these western or GCC-based ‘journalists’ ever queried the authenticity of the staged video and photographic productions supplied by the White Helmets. Mainly, their videos have been produced to promote a No Fly Zone, or ‘Safe Zones’ in Syria by creating the false impression that somehow Syrian and Russian air forces are targeting civilians in a Blitzkrieg fashion, using crude “barrel bombs”. Outside of the White Helmets propaganda, there is scant evidence of these ‘barrel bombs’ supposedly dropped by the ‘Assad Regime’ every day according to the White Helmets.

In the run-up to the White Helmets’ failed Nobel Peace Prize bid in October, CNN even went so far as to plant a fake story about a barrel bomb hitting a “White Helmets Center” in Damascus. Increasing attention has also meant that some people are beginning to question the group’s incredible claim at the time that it had somehow saved 60,000 lives since it started in late 2013. In one letter first published at Canadian Dimension, retired academic John Ryan, PhD, a retired professor of geography and senior scholar at the University of Winnipeg, challenged this narrative, saying:

“It is the White Helmets themselves who have claimed that they have rescued 60,000 civilians; this has not been verified by any other source. Despite such a classic conflict of interest, searching for independent evidence and disqualifying self-serving claims from belligerent parties in Syria has been ignored in much of the western media. As such, this claim by the White Helmets without any verification is next to meaningless.”

Despite the questions, the group continued to raise this figure by about 10,000 every two months. They now claim to have “Saved over 82,000 lives” since they were formed in 2013. Where are the list of names, dates, times, locations and medical reports – so as to corroborate and cross-reference the casualties with the alleged Syrian and Russian airstrikes? What’s the problem – can’t $150 million buy a little bit of administration for the White Helmets? At no point have they ever been able to produce any data to back up there outlandish numbers claims – so we can only conclude that this claim, like so many other claims by the group, are fraudulent. But when has Hollywood ever let facts and data get in the way of a good war propaganda story?

In addition, the White Helmets claim that they have trained some 3,000 ‘volunteers’ throughout Syria, and yet their training facility is actually located in neighboring NATO member state Turkey, on the outskirts of the city of Gaziantep. This is the same Gaziantep that’s been described in reports as “the home to ISIS killers, sex traders…”

‘CIVIL DEFENSE’ FRAUD

[dropcap]V[/dropcap]anessa Beeley’s investigation eventually took her to Syria, where she was able to track down the REAL Syria Civil Defense organization. The US and UK creation of the “White Helmets” required that they steal the name “Syria Civil Defense” from a real existing civil defense group based in Syria. Unlike the fraudulent western construct, the REAL Syria Civil Defense was founded 63 years ago and is a registered member of the International Civil Defense Organization (ICDO) based in Geneva. For the REAL Syria Civil Defence you dial “113” inside Syria. The White Helmets have no such number because they are not a real ‘search and rescue’ organization. Their whole existence is a fraudulent construct. Beeley spoke at length to the REAL Syria Civil Defense and what the crew told her was shocking. During the ‘rebel’ (terrorist) invasion in 2012 of East Aleppo, future members of the White Helmets arrived accompanied by armed terrorists to attack the real Syria Civil Defense headquarters. They stole equipment, killed and kidnapped real civil defense volunteers as part of their operation to loot and destroy the existing institution.

Real civil defense workers also detailed how terrorist ‘Hell Cannon‘ attacks had besieged the Old City of Aleppo, which lies right on the border with the Al Nusra front lines and was a regular target for the ‘rebels’ continuous indiscriminate attacks against residents. Resident testimonies have echoed the same story: while Hell Cannons terrorized the civilians of Aleppo, the White Helmets did nothing – probably because they were with the terrorists who were launching these attacks. Terrorist Hell Cannons use an assortment of containers – gas canisters, water heater tanks packed full of explosives, glass, metal and any other limb-shredding materials – these were fired indiscriminately into civilian neighborhoods throughout Aleppo. These crude artillery guns also just happen to have the exact destructive footprint as the alleged “barrel bombs” which the White Helmets and western media are repeatedly saying are being fired by the “The Regime” (Assad) against civilians. If the White Helmets are to be believed, Assad’s Barrel Bombs have an impact the equivalent of 7.6 on the Richter scale. This outrageous claim was actually made by White Helmets founder James Le Mesurier on CNN. In fact, 7.6 on the Richter scale is the equivalent of a hydrogen bomb, we begin to get a picture of the scale of the lies which the western narrative has spinning and which they have come to reply on in order to prosecute this dirty war. Preserving this and other key pieces of fiction is central to the US, UK and George Soros funded public relations management of the White Helmets – and essential to their entire Syria narrative which has been described by American writer Rick Sterling as something akin to a “Feel Good Hoax.”

ALWAYS LOOKING UP: ‘Waiting for the next barrel bomb.’

Forget about actual ‘search and rescue’. That’s not the primary function of this ‘NGO’. If you need to know one thing about the White Helmets it’s this: marketing. A central part of the marketing campaign is images of men with beards looking up at the sky – presumably waiting for the next barrel bomb, or the media’s favorite term – the “double tap” (apparently, this is when a sinister Assad or Putin pilot returns immediately after an airstrike just to have another crack at the White Helmets).

In most of their videos, you will also see a large number of bearded men in jeans and T-shirts just standing around on the sidelines, always watching the camera, or looking busy – as if they are cognisant that filming is taking place. When we showed some of these videos to real first responders we were normally met with shoulder shrugs and cynical laughs. People who actually work in this trade will tell you that filming on a first responder call is a luxury no worker really has – aside from maybe a GoPro helmet cam. It’s just not something anyone in their right mind would think about very much if there were really people in need of assistance – and yet, this is all the White Helmets do, all day, every day. They film and produce well-edited emotive videos. Another aspect real first responders will point out to us is that most of the time, the White Helmets often look like they don’t know what they are doing – indicating either a lack of training or experience – which seems to at least contradict their lofty claims of rescuing 82,000 people in three and half years – certainly that would provide more experience for 2,900 ‘volunteers’ than any other search and rescue worker on the planet. In other words, the White Helmets mythology and pantomime is not very credible to any serious observer. But it seems to be good enough for a Netflix audience, and sadly, good enough for the Academy, too.

AWARD-WINNER: “We got the shot! No need for any first aid spinal procedure here.”

1 members-of-the-white-helmets-rescue-children-from-an-attack-in-june__939593_

STAGED: Many of the White Helmets’ child ‘rescue’ images are simply ridiculous.

The other mandatory feature in the White Helmets marketing imagery where men with beards are running to or from a scene, they’re always carrying children over their shoulder. Again, when we showed many of these images to actual rescue workers, we were met with puzzled looks. Firstly, why does 99% of the White Helmets marketing imagery only feature small children? Are there not any adults out of the “82,000 saved” to be rescued from the rubble? The White Helmets claim they were only operational in early 2014, so that’s an average of 75 persons per day, everyday. Considering the amount of people they claim to have trained, spread out over Syria, and where actual air sorties have been flown – it seems like a near mathematical impossibility. As the White Helmets provide no incident data for the alleged 82,00 persons saved, there is no way to validate their sensational narrative. Also, you will rarely, if ever, see the $150 million British-trained rescue crew use a spinal injury backboard – opting instead to just yank the children by the arm and throw them over the shoulder. When we showed these images to real first-responder workers, they were deemed not credible. So it’s safe to conclude that the White Helmets only care about one thing: pictures and videos – wired via satellite to CNN, the New York Times, or the BBC’s news desk.

SMART POWER & THE NGO COMPLEX

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]till, despite the group’s obvious links to the US and UK governments, and to known extremists and terrorists – the western media continues to entertain this NGO as if it were a legitimate ‘Civil Defense’ organization. The pseudo NGO strategy is part of an over-arching western strategy which is related to the term “Smart Power“ (following on from Soft Power) where western governments create shadow state organizations designed to co-opt and ultimately usurp actual state agencies – in effect weakening the real civil body by replacing it with a fake version of the original.

DECEPTION: Early on, the White Helmets used images of women in order to market crowdfunding campaigns to gullible western audiences.

In the calculus of war planners in the US, UK and France, even if they were unsuccessful in toppling the Assad government in Damascus, these fake NGOs would still be operation in “rebel” areas in the hopes that they might be viewed as legitimate civil organizations and would then replace the real ones.

After 5 years, the US or European authorities could then cite these organizations as legitimate deliverers of public service, thus giving western governments a much-needed foothold in governorates inside the target nation, in this case, Syria. Similar projects have been undertaken to replace municipal police forces with the “Free Syrian Police“, as well as western and GCC-sponsored projects in terrorist-held Idlib to create uniformed civil cleaning staff, and so on. Why doesn’t Netflix make a documentary exposing that? If they did, that would be real filmmaking; instead what we get is more public relations promotion for a failed Western foreign policy.

LA LA LAND: White Helmet filmmakers Joanna Natasegara and Orlando Von Einsiedel basking in the glory of a job well done.

By now, it should be obvious how this propaganda cycle has been functioning, although apparently, not obvious enough for Netflix’s award-winning filmmakers Joanna Natasegara and Orlando Von Einsiedel. The fact that their beloved White Helmets stole their name from an existing, legitimate and internationally recognized first-responder agency should be cause for alarm. For any journalist researching the White Helmets, you would think the first port of call would be to speak to the official certified civil defense body. This is what 21WIRE and Beeley did. Why didn’t Natasegara and Von Einsiedel bother to check this obvious line of inquiry? The fact they didn’t might be proof that the intention on their film was not to make a legitimate documentary, but rather to glorify to US-led narrative of the ‘moderate opposition’. By definition, Natasegara and Von Einsiedel’s work cannot rightly be called journalistic but propagandist. By promoting a pseudo ‘NGO’ funded by western governments, and by giving succor to extremists, their film is directed against the Syrian people – which exactly characterizes the US and UK foreign policy in Syria since 2011.

If Natasegara and Von Einsiedel deserve any reward today it should really be the Leni Riefenstahl Award for Best Propaganda Film.

But even Nazi war propaganda filmmaker Riefenstahl could hardly imagine propaganda on this scale – a third sector NGO and integrated media arm, attached to dozens of governments, paramilitary military units, intelligence agencies, hundreds of corporate media outlets, and with a multi-million dollar crowd-funding facility. If nothing else, the White Helmets operation is impressive in its scope. It’s the West’s template for building a Shadow State in target nations. If it’s successful in Syria, this formula will be recreated in other marginal hot zones around the globe. That’s why the White Helmets are being guarded so closely by the western establishment.

DOUBTS OVER AUTHENTICITY

Boston Globe columnist Stephen Kizner was one of many journalists who expressed disappointment over the Academy’s selection:

There is also the problem of obvious staging in many of the White Helmets’ supposed video rescues. The following is perhaps one of the most ridiculous. As with so many of their videos, the editing is highly misleading. In the following “Rag Doll” clip, we first see two separate views of the three men working on the rescue site – and then the edit suddenly cuts to the miraculous rescue of charming little 4 year old girl – supposedly emerging from under tons of concrete and rubble from a collapsed building. Miraculously, she is not crying and looks immaculate, while holding an equally clean rag doll. Then the edit cut jumps, and a little 3 year old boy suddenly appears from the exact same spot. Both children appear to have sustained no injuries, nor any visible cuts or bruises, and no dust. Not bad for being buried under tons of concrete, gravel and dust. Incredible, but par for the course in the completely improbable “first-responder” reality show that is the White Helmets. Watch:

Video Player

See the original video posted to the White Helmet’s official YouTube channel.

After reviewing this video, it’s difficult to deny that it has all the hallmarks of a staged production piece, designed to tug at the hearts of a western public – conditioned to accept this ‘first responder’ narrative as sacrosanct, for fear of appearing callous in the face of this media-driven, multi-million dollar ‘No Fly Zone’ public relations campaign. This is not the only fraudulent video released by the White Helmets, but even the existence of one fraudulent rescue video should be grounds to question all the group’s material.

Again, the whole purpose of these video and photos is to influence public opinion against the Syrian and Russian governments. Therefore the core mission of the White Helmets media campaign is influence western and Gulf audiences. Its objectives are as follows:

To create public disfavour against the Syrian government.
Maintain crippling western sanctions against Syria.
Gain sympathy for jihad, recruit new fighters from Europe, GCC, Asia and other regions.
Fabricate ‘evidence’ used to implicate the Syrian government and its allies in war crimes.
Reinforce the narrative that Syrian and Russian Forces are deliberately targeting civilians, hospital and schools – and not terrorists.
Blame Syria and Russia for war crimes (when in actuality, these crimes are committed by rebel-terrorists, White Helmets).

SYRIAN CURVE BALLS

Back in 2003, one man was responsible for delivering the WMD lies that helped to fabricate the US and UK case for invading Iraq. His name was “Curveball”. His motives weren’t exactly straight forward: “My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime’s oppression.”

In Syria, the West have been constantly farming a series of curve balls – on call and ready to deliver whatever the US State Dept or the British Foreign Office need in order to grandstand in front of the UN Security Council or on the floor of Parliament.

The New York Times reported that during March and April on 2015, the White Helmets claimed that at least 20 ‘barrel bombs’ containing chlorine were dropped in six towns in northwestern Syria. It almost sounded as if the the US and UK were so desperate to establish Assad as crossing the Red Line, that they would go so far as to fabricate a case that chlorine bombs were used by “the regime”:

James Le Mesurier: accessory to Nuremberg-class war crimes.

“Frustrated with the Security Council’s impasse over the issue, rescue workers and doctors are now working to bring evidence of chlorine gas attacks directly to the French, British and American governments for testing. The aim is to give states a solid basis for action against the attacks, in the Security Council or through quieter diplomatic pressure, said James Le Mesurier, the British director of a nonprofit group, Mayday Rescue, that trains and equips the White Helmets, Syrian volunteers supported by the British, Danish and Dutch governments.”

At the time, White Helmet founder Le Messerier was heavily involved in trying to fashion together a chemical weapons case against the Syrian government. In 2015. The NYT stated:

“Going directly to governments that have pushed for Mr. Assad’s ouster creates its own challenges. His allies may dismiss their evidence as politically tainted and can point to recent chlorine attacks in Iraq for which the government there blamed insurgents, not to mention the discredited American claims of an Iraqi chemical weapons program that were used to justify invading Iraq. To deter allegations of tampering or falsification, Mr. Le Mesurier and three Syrian doctors involved said they systematically documented the chain of custody from collection to handover. They have plenty of cases to work with. Since March 16, in Idlib alone, the White Helmets have documented 14 attacks with 26 suspected chlorine barrels that sickened scores of people.”

In the end, none of this stuck, most likely because the White Helmets’ ‘evidence’ was either fabricated, or the ‘rebels’ (terrorists) themselves were the actual perpetrators of chlorine, mustardor sarin attacks – a fact which was born out through multiple investigations already. Once again – more fraud perpetrated by the White Helmets on behalf of the US and UK governments.

In September 2016, the White Helmets were also instrumental in trying to assign blame for an incident where a UN Aid Convoy was attacked outside of the town of Urm al-Kubra, west of Aleppo. The West were quick to blame it on the Russian and Syria militaries – despite the fact there was no evidence to implicate them.

As if by magic, the White Helmets were the first on the scene videoing among the flames. A Syrian Arab Red Crescent warehouse was also said to have been hit. 21WIRE later reported that indeed, the White Helmets had helped to stage the said ‘Russian Bombing’ scene outside of Aleppo – which was automatically accepted by the western mainstream media, John Kerry, Samantha Power and others, as ‘proof’ of Russian and Syrian guilt.

HOLLYWOOD ‘CHANGE AGENTS’

George Clooney has been fronting for imperialism for a long time. He obviously does not need the money that much, so why does he do it? At best he represents Hollywood liberal dupes at their meddling worst. At worst, he is a cynical propagandist for wars he knows to be crimes.

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ne of the White Helmets documentary’s biggest advocates is none other than Hollywood actor George Clooney (image, left). In the run-up to the Oscars, Clooney, along with his wife – celebrity human rights lawyer, Amal Clooney, personally campaigned on behalf of the film. It turns out, Clooney’s interest is more than just that of an liberal activist. AP reported that Clooney is in the process of producing a feature-film version of the “White Helmets.” He stated:

“The White Helmets are the heroes. So if I can help them out at all, and people can know about it, in any way possible, that’s a good use of celebrity, I think.”

As a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Clooney seems to relish his role of celebrity humanitarian. Unfortunately, fellow members of the Council include an impressive line-up of war criminals and other dignitaries, like Dick Cheney and Henry Kissinger, as well as a chief architect of the collapse of Libya and the dirty war in Syria, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

However, judging by Clooney’s devotion to the White Helmets, it’s pretty clear that he is either ignorant of what he is supporting, or worse – he is using his public profile to push a Deep State agenda. In September 2016, Clooney managed to get an audience with John Kerry and the US State Department in order to promote his new “anti-corruption” NGO called, The Sentry. Not surprisingly, the establishment’s globalist information outlet the Daily Beast was on hand (along with a prime segment which aired on CNN) to get the word out. Editor John Avlon writes:

“Getting Americans to care about human-rights atrocities half-a-world away is hard. Getting them fired up about confronting the corruption that fuels those slaughters is an order of magnitude harder. But that’s what actor George Clooney and human-rights activist John Prendergast are aiming to do with their new project, The Sentry.”

The Sentry, is supposed to help the poor people of South Sudan by ‘taking aim at government corruption.’ Clooney goes on to demonize the South Sudan government as utterly corrupt and redeemable only by way of the international community’ – presumably through the International Criminal Court in the Hague. What Clooney will not tell his fawning public is the CIA’s role in fomenting unrest in Sudan prior to its rather convenient partition in 2010. We say convenientbecause splitting the country effectively cut-off port access and therefore oil pipeline access for South Sudan of which China has been a major partner on the exploration of energy. This was followed by a dirty war in South Sudan with much of the evidence pointing to the CIA. TeleSur English reports:

“The CIA is using a mercenary warlord named Riek Machar, who has a long history of ethnic massacres and mass murder to his credit, to try and overthrow the internationally recognized government of President Salva Kiir for the crime of doing business with rivals of Pax Americana, the Chinese.”

Again, we hear the familiar tropes about ‘child soldiers’ and ‘mass rape’, and how, “we must act now” – all part and parcel of the neocolonial “helpless Africa” narrative. Clooney’s partner John Prendergast delivers emotive plea:

“The war erupted, it was a fire that just raged across the land…They’ll use attack helicopters. They’ll use rape as a tool of war. They’ll recruit child soldiers and go in and send them as cannon fodder into villages to kill people. The worst human-rights abuses being committed in the world. And this is what South Sudan has dealt with because of this fallout between these thieves over the last 2½ years.”

Watch global policeman Clooney, flanked by his celebrity friend Don Cheadle, unveiling his “forensic investigation” implicating the government of South Sudan:

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Interestingly, Clooney’s Sentry Project is nested under the globalist think tank, the Center for Advanced Defense Studies and bankrolled by John Podesta’s Center for American Progress – a Washington DC-based think tank with ties to the military industrial complex. Peace activist and author David Swanson outlined Sentry’s precarious connections to America’s defense industry here.

Here, we can point out that the policy of ‘evicting Chinese influence’ from Africa was included in the military directives outlined in US AFRICOM immediately after its official launch in 2007-2008. Similarly, billions in direct Chinese investment in Libya was thwarted by NATO’s illegal abuse of UN Resolution 1973 which led to the complete collapse of the Libyan state. Very quickly, we can see that Clooney’s celebrated “crusade against corruption” is very likely part of a public relations smoke screen to conceal US clandestine efforts to isolate Chinese interests in the Sudans, while nudging forward US and transnational corporate policy in South Sudan, with the ultimate goal of regime change in that country.

You can’t help but be reminded here of another similar Deep State public relations ploy centered around the exact same location back in 2012. There’s no better example of how Hollywood’s do-gooder war is waged than Kony 2012, described in Atlantic Magazine as a viral video campaign which “reinforces a dangerous, centuries-old idea that Africans are helpless and that idealistic Westerners must save them.” Like with Clooney’s Sentry Project, KONY 2012 leveraged the power of media and celebrity to manufacture public consent through an emotive public appeal, and collected millions in public donations in the process. In this case, the antagonist was the illusive warlord Joseph Kony, leader of the Lords Resistance Army. The only problem was, at the time in 2012 no one had actually seen Kony in 6 years. Still, the campaign lobbied president Obama to deploy US forces to Uganda “find Kony” in order to “saving the children”. Despite the collapse of the project following a very public meltdown by the charity’s founder, Jason Russell, the US still went and deployed US military assets to Uganda under an expansion of US AFRICOM operations in Africa. Mission accomplished. The genius of this was that it concealed the genocide and crimes against humanity carried out by President Obama’s good friend and Uganda’s ‘President for Life’ Yoweri Museveni, whose crimes have since been well-documented in powerful independent non-CIA film production called a Brilliant Genocide. It turns out that Museveni is guilty of all the things and more – which the west had laid on the ghost of Kony. A brilliant deception. Of course, the irony of this is mostly lost on Hollywood’s humanitarian jet-set, all of whom thought KONY 2012 was such a great idea when it was first launched.

What Kony 2012 achieved on a ‘activist’ and public relations level is exactly what The White Helmets documentary is doing – an expensive smokescreen to hide the real horrors of a conflict, namely, the destructive policies of western governments and their local ‘partners’ which foment trouble and strife. In the case of Syria, it’s the US, UK, Turkey, France, and GCC support of violent, armed extremists – who the White Helmets are exclusively embedded with. The cynical use of the classic American gospel hymn, “When the Saints Go Marching In” as the documentary’s theme song by filmmakers Natasegara and Von Einsiedel speaks to level of manipulation of the narrative (see the bottom of this article, with numerous photographs of White Helmet ‘saints’).

Regarding the White Helmets project, Clooney revealed something else in his rhetoric when he remarked:

Clooney said that as a celebrity, “I can’t change policy … but I can make things louder.”

This is an example of the power-activist political set in Hollywood.

We find similar language in an interview with White Helmets director Joanna Natasegara in 2016, at the International Anti-Corruption Conference (IACC) in Malaysia while promoting her Oscar nominated film Virunga and its new foundation. Natasegara refers to herself as an “Impact Producer” (aka Change Agent) using documentaries to make a big impact by reinforcing or pushing a narrative. In many ways, this is antithetical to the whole process of filmmaking, especially in the research and discovery stages, and in the investigative aspects of historical documentary filmmaking – which is about documenting events but also about looking below popular political narratives to gain deeper insights, and not pushing political or policy outcomes. Power-activism is personified by numerous online marketing campaigns calling for a No Fly Zone in Syria. At the Oscar ceremony, both Natasegara and Von Einsiedel called for ‘an end to the war in Syria’ which everyone can agree on, but it rings hollow next to the words of persons like US Congresswomen Tulsi Gabbard and Tima Kurdi, the aunt of 3 yr old Alan Kurdi who washed-up on a beach to become the face of the tragic face of the migrant crisis. Both Gabbard and Kurdi appeared on global media this week calling for the US and its Coalition allies to STOP sending arms, cash and support to extremists and terrorist ‘rebels’ in Syria. Only this can bring an end to the war and allow refugees to to return to Syria said both Gabbard and Kurdi. This plea is real and reflects the facts on the ground, as opposed to the fake narrative constructed by Natasegara and Von Einsiedel, which carefully whitewashes all clandestine involvement by US, UK and its partners (who created and are funding the White Helmets) which has aided in the systematic destruction of Syria over the last 6 years, not to mention the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands. It is no coincidence that many members of the White Helmets have extremist ties, and the fact that this is being covered-up by Natasegara and Von Einsiedel who are literally portraying the group as “saints” – speaks to the level of deception involved in this story. Now we can see Natasegara’s modus operandi with making the White Helmets film; it’s not so much about documenting history in the conventional sense, so much as it is about ‘making an impact’ politically – on behalf of the governments who created the White Helmets, which veers into the area of propaganda again.

Watch Joanna Natasegara in an interview here from the 2016 IACC Conference:

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On the surface, Natasegara appears to be waging the classic international liberal crusade by fighting against mining, oil, and poaching, in the poor, permanently ‘developing’ countries like the Congo. No one will argue that the level of corruption in African countries can be extreme in some cases, but what are the real causes of institutional corruption in those lands? Indeed, “Stopping” them (corrupt officials) in Africa, but doing little to stop them at the actual corporate level in London, Belgium, New York or Washington DC will solve nothing. In fact, many of the biggest corporate donors to these ‘good causes’ projects are connected to the very same corporate behemoth that activists purport to be fighting against. This cycle of power activism feeds into the cycle of neocolonialism – in what researcher Cory Morningstar so rightly refers to as “the wrong kind of green.” As it turns out, the IACC is funded by none other than Transparency International (T.I.), one of the main players in the globalist “anti-corruption” syndicate, which is very much linked to the work of Hollywood activists like Clooney. In the past, T.I. has been accused of cooking its own books in its anti-corruption investigations, including an incident in 2008 where the organization used falsified data to try and frame the Chavez government in Venezuela during one of its anti-corruption investigations. This is a good example of NGO smart power being used to undermine a target nation. Clooney and Natasegara are just two of the many public faces who represent this network.

Back in 2016, when the Panama Papers story broke, seemingly out of nowhere, the mainstream media utterly failed in analysing what they were really looking at. Yes, there’s plenty of corruption and shady shell companies in Panama (but no word of the giant offshore corporate maze located in Delaware), but was the endgame of that supposedly independent ‘investigation’? Amid all the mainstream media hype and ‘anti-corruption’ grandstanding, researcher James Corbettwas one of the only people who asked the right question: “So why does this new mega-leak seemingly only expose those in the State Department crosshairs or expendable others and not a single prominent American politician or businessman? And what does this have to do with the OECD’s plan for a global taxation grid?” (LISTEN to my full interview last year with James Corbett here)

Nazi propaganda filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl.

Natasegara also goes on about using “activists” and “citizen journalists” to achieve the desired ‘impact.’ Here she is alluding to the scores of Syrian “activists” and the White Helmets, who have supplied western media outlets with the images our governments want in order to reinforce the official narrative. Natasegara is promoting the exact tool she utilized in the deceptive Netflix project where all of the alleged stock ‘rescue’ footage was supplied to producers by the White Helmets themselves. Natasegara claims to have trained 21 year old White Helmet ‘activist’ Khaled Khatib in Turkey before sending him into Syria to shoot much of the footage. NPR claims that he ‘risked his life’ to shoot the film for Netflix. Khatib was later blocked from entering the US to attend the Oscar ceremony in Los Angeles. So the Netflix producers had no way of independently verifying what they’ve been given – effectively relying on al Qaeda affiliated individuals to supply them with made-to-order ‘rescue’ footage.

How can they call this a documentary?

In this case, it didn’t seem to matter to Joanna Natasegara and her co-producer Orlando Von Einsiedel whether its real or staged, so long as the White Helmets narrative was achieved.

Despite the claims by Netflix producers, Natasegara and Von Einsiedel – purpose was to reinforce the US-led Coalition fake narrative on Syria which has never resembled the facts on the ground. The US-UK establishment could not have hand-picked better tools for this job than Natasegara and Von Einsiedel. If they were real filmmakers interested in the truth, they would have paused to question why this group was founded by a senior British Military intelligence officer, James Le Mesurier, why it is based in Turkey and not Syria, and why the group only operated exclusively in Al Nusra (al Qaeda in Syria), Arar al Sham (al Qaeda affiliate) and ISIS-held areas in Syria, why are White Helmets members routinely pictured with weapons, and with terrorists. The answer is simple to anyone with half a brain and who is being honest: the White Helmets are composed of mainly partisan extremists. That’s a fact.

Still, all of this is noticeably missing from Natasegara and Von Einsiedel’s storybook version of the White Helmets, which is inexcusable considering how there’s no shortage of readily available evidence pointing directly to White Helmets’ ties to terrorists. One has to assume that the filmmakers knew about the extremist links and the US-NATO funding of the group but chose to ignore this in favor of producing their expensive piece of propaganda, and as we saw this week, both were all too happy to lap up the awards – even though the fiction they created has aided in giving political cover to illegal weapons transfers by the west and GCC states and has also been instrumental in wrongly demonizing the Syrian government while further legitimizing US-led Coalition-backed terrorism in Syria.

Concealing the White Helmet fraud under the seemingly innocuous guise of “Free Speech”, “Free Press” or “Citizen Journalism” is the absolute dereliction of any journalistic inquiry or responsibility in vetting the footage supplied by the White Helmets.

“Freedom for journalists has to be absolute. There is no such thing as restrictions on media that work,” said Natasegara.

Apparently, Oscar winner Natasegara was not too keen on free speech after Youtube artist Tyranny Unmasked posted a video critical of the Netflix White Helmets trailer. It appears that Natasegara used YouTube’s communitarian censorship system to take down the video critical of her film. Watch:

Being British, one might hope that Natasegara could apply these lofty polemics to the UK – and ask why the government still controls journalists and press through the archaic practice of issuing D-Notices, or the government’s aggressive stance towards whistleblowers with UK authorities threatening imprisonment for simply handling leaked material, or perhaps even the Leveson Inquiry’s attempt at allowing state control over what’s left of the UK’s free press. Similarly, the anti-corruption crowd might consider challenging Barack Obama’s war on whistleblowing which saw freedoms roll back at a record clip over the last 8 years. Certainly, that’s no shining city on the hill, or a role model for the seemingly lowly, poor and hopelessly “corrupt” developing world nations that the globe-trotting Natasegara is after. Only last year, we learned how the Pentagon hired elite UK public relations firm Bell Pottinger, paying them $540 million to produce, among other items, fake al Qaeda propaganda videos – to further prop-up a failed US and UK foreign policy facade. Perhaps Natasegara, or Clooney could do an “anti-corruption” film explaining how many starving children could be fed for a month or how many schools could be built, or how many water wells could be drilled – with $540 million dollars of US taxpayer money.

That’s only one example to demonstrate how the NGO operatives ignore the mountains of institutional corruption in the US and Europe, and the destructive murderous military industrial juggernaut – in favor of trying to yank the rug out from under a government located in some poor African, Asian, or Middle Eastern country which the US and its partners have their eye on for regime change.

CROWD-FUNDING TERROR

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ne of the saddest parts of this whole story is also that the power of marketing and propaganda means that tens of thousands of unwitting members of the public have been duped into donating their hard-earned money for this dubious NGO. If the wider public knew what Aleppo residents already know – that the White Helmets function as a support group alongside known terrorists groups like Al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham, Nour al-Din al-Zinki & ISIS and others (all known extremist groups operating inside of Syria), the White Helmets would not be celebrated as humanitarian, but rather, they’d be condemned as a multimillion fraud, customized by the West in order to give cover to the illicit practice of arming and supporting ‘rebel’ terrorists by the US, UK, France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others.

By all accounts, White Helmets video and photo propaganda has been instrumental in aiding in the recruitment of new terrorists – new fighters from the West, Middle East and Asia – who see the contrived news reports in their countries of origin and believe the false narrative being portrayed by mainstream media news agencies. In this way, you could say that because the media are not vetting any of this material and are defaulting into a Western foreign policy bias by spinning all of their stories into emotive productions that reinforce a NATO and GCC-led ‘regime change’ and completely contrived “moderate rebel” narrative – the media are complicit in helping to drive the recruitment of terrorists internationally. By anyone’s definition, they are providing material support and comfort to known violent, religious extremists terrorists. When you break it right down, that’s exactly what is happening here. Undoubtedly, Hollywood is guilty of this.

Lastly, to see the White Helmets fundamental terrorist connection, one need look no further than to its ‘President’ Raed Saleh.

raed-and-mustafa2

TERRORIST CENTRAL: Raed Saleh photographed with his close associate Mustafa al-Haj Yussef, leader of White Helmet Centre in terrorist-held Idlib province (Photo: al-Haj Yussef Facebook page)

Last month, 21WIRE investigative journalist Vanessa Beeley reported on White Helmet leader Raed Saleh’s close partner, Mustafa al-Haj Yussef, leader of the White Helmets centre in the Al Nusra-occupied city of Khan Shaykhun, Idlib. The photo, above, clearly demonstrates the close relationship that Saleh shares with his friend and colleague Yussef, and apparently with the armed militant seen standing behind the two White Helmet leaders. On the 1st June 2014, White Helmet deputy Yussef called for the shelling of civilians during elections in Damascus. He declares that this murderous act would be the “greatest declaration of revolution” .

Is this the words of a “neutral, impartial, humanitarian”? Here we can see the White Helmets calling for direct violence against civilians who are doing nothing more than exercising their right to vote – in their own country. See the full story here.

So to even suggest that the White Helmets are “unarmed and neutral civilian volunteers” is tantamount to fraud. The fact that filmmakers Natasegara, Von Einsiedel and Netflix are using this false statement in their film and public relations material demonstrates outright deception on their part.

It crucial to reiterate that the White Helmets are not a Syrian creation, but rather a product of US, British and NATO intelligence special project to use western conceived and western-funded NGO organizations to assist in the stated US-led Coalition foreign policy of ‘regime change’ for Syria by producing western and GCC-oriented propaganda designed to undermine the Syrian government and state. Founded by British military intelligence officer James Le Mesurier, a graduate of Sandhurst Military Academy. It is believed that all totalled including undisclosed funding and solicited donations, that the group has received well in excess of over $250 million dollars since coming online in late 2013.

The following is list of known funding sources for the White Helmets as of October 2016:

To anyone who bothers to look, the White Helmets extremist links are undeniable. Watch as Al Nusra and jihadi spokesman acknowledges the White Helmets as “Mujahadeen”:

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Based on the evidence presented, and the images inserted below, one can safely conclude that at the very least, filmmakers Joanna Natasegara and Orlando Von Einsiedel and Netflix did zerodue diligence when researching this multimillion dollar film production. Of course, that’s being generous. It seems more likely that they were fully aware that the White Helmets are attached to the multitude of extremist and terrorist groups – and conveniently ignored this fact in favour of constructing their propaganda narrative. Hence, a case could be made that these filmmakers and their distributor have knowingly provided promotion and political support to known terrorists – which is in direct violation of numerous US, European and International laws.

White Helmet operative, seen here at a “moderate” extremist, Free Sryian Army, meeting in Idlib, clearly demonstrating political affiliation to a widely proclaimed non “moderate” militant group, unable to function without support from better armed & funded terrorist factions such as Nusra Front. (Photo: Screenshot from video)

Not only are the White Helmets embedded exclusively with extremists – they ARE extremists. Certainly, it is the choice of White Helmets members to also join extremist terrorist fighting groups, but by doing so, the White Helmets cannot rightly claim that their members are either neutral, nonpartisan, or ‘unarmed’. To claim otherwise constitutes cunning and deception on the part of the White Helmets and their promotional agents, including Netflix corporate marketing, and the film’s producers Joanna Natasegara and Orlando Von Einsiedel. If Netflix were to take this issue seriously, after reviewing readily available evidence they would remove this film from their distribution chain, and Natasegara and Von Einsiedel should return their award to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The following are a series of over 50 visual exhibits which clearly indicate that the White Helmets are not neutral, and whose ranks are in fact filled with extremists, including those with memberships in US-Coalition-backed internationally recognized terrorist fighting groups operating throughout Syria…

White Helmet members are clearly pictured together with violent terrorists, and also taking part in heinous terrorists acts, as well as war crimes under the Geneva Convention:

White Helmet-Terrorist fighting group dual membership:

White Helmet-Terrorist group dual membership:

As shown previously, a White Helmet speaking on behalf of the Western-backed ‘Opposition” pseudo state, in front of the “moderate” militant, Free Syrian Army, French colonial, “Syrian” flag:

White Helmets with armed opposition acting in the role of ‘victim’ in the notorious staged “Mannequin Challenge” video:

White Helmet-Terrorist group dual membership:

White Helmet are armed:

White Helmet with Terrorist disposing of mutilated bodies of Syrian National Army soldiers:

White Helmet are armed and embedded with “rebel” (terrorist) fighters:

White Helmet-Terrorist group dual membership:

White Helmet with TerroristAl Nusra Front flying the terrorist flag:

White Helmet-Terrorist group dual membership:

US-UK funded White Helmets operatives gloating while taking part in kidnapping, torture and execution of Syrian National Army soldiers, a violation of Geneva Convention on war crimes:

White Helmets pictured here working alongside with Nusra-ISIS terrorists:

“Hand in Hand with Al Nusra” (al Qaeda in Syria):

White Helmets -Terrorist dual membership:

Possible White Helmets involvement of the Terrorist (by Nour al-Din al-Zinki) execution and beheading of 12 year-old Abdulla Issa:

White Helmets -Terrorist dual membership:

White Helmets embedded exclusively in ISIS and Terrorist-held areas:

White Helmets -Terrorist dual membership:

White Helmets ARE militants:

White Helmets -Terrorist dual membership:

Rebel media operative demonstrates support for ISIS in Syria:

Here is a “opposition” media operative pictured together with 7 year-old Bana Alabed, the girl at the center of a highly coordinated agit-prop Twitter-media hoax where it was claimed Bana could speak English in 2016 when clearly she could not and her Twitter account was being run by adults for “anti-Regime”, “Anti-Russian” and “No Fly Zone” propaganda – all of which was blindly promoted by nearly every western media outlet including the BBC, CNN, NBC, New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian and UK Telegraph, to name only a few. The Washington Post even went so far as to run the outrageous headline, “How a 7-year-old Aleppo girl on Twitter became our era’s Anne Frank“ in a clear attempt to equate the liberation of Aleppo with the Jewish Holocaust of World War II.

Maybe filmmakers Joanna Natasegara and Orlando Von Einsiedel and Netflix will make their next documentary about Twitter sensation ‘Bana of Aleppo’? It certainly ticks all the same US-UK narrative boxes as the White Helmets…

By blindly promoting the White Helmets, Hollywood celebrities like George Clooney and Ben Affleck are helping the terrorist cause in Syria…

Special thanks to Clarity of Signal for collating White Helmets extremist evidence.

Watch this video of White Helmets clearly alongside AL-QAEDA, torturing and carrying civilian to an untimely demise in Aleppo, Syria:

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Watch this short documentary entitled, “The White Helmets – al Qaeda with a Facelift” by Steve Ezzedine for HANDS OFF SYRIA, drawing on research by Vanessa Beeley:

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Watch this video presentation featuring Vanessa Beeley showing the White Helmets’ extremist links and criminality, and also eye witness reports of White Helmets abusing residents in East Aleppo:

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LINKS & MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE WHITE HELMETS:

Original investigative report:
The REAL Syria Civil Defence Exposes Fake White Helmets as Terrorist-Linked Imposters

White Helmets: ‘A Pseudo NGO’
CrossTalk: ‘White Helmets, Really?’ with Vanessa Beeley, Eva Bartlett & Patrick Henningsen

Report by Patrick Henningsen
AN INTRODUCTION: Smart Power & The Human Rights Industrial Complex

Open Letter by Vanessa Beeley
White Helmets Campaign for War NOT Peace – Retract RLA & Nobel Peace Prize Nominations

Staged Rescue Videos
(VIDEO) White Helmets: Miraculous ‘Rag Doll Rescue’

Mainstream Media: Fake News
CNN’s Claim That ‘White Helmets Center in Damascus’ Was Hit by a Barrel Bomb

White Helmets and Mayday Rescue:
The Syrian Civil Defence: Wikipedia

21st Century Wire compilation of key information on the White Helmets:
Who are the Syria White Helmets?

21st Century Wire article on the White Helmets:
Syria’s White Helmets: War by Way of Deception ~ the “Moderate” Executioners

Cory Morningstar report:
Investigation into the funding sources of the White Helmets, Avaaz, Purpose, The Syria Campaign

Report by Scott Ritter:
The ‘White Helmets’ and the Inherent Contradiction of America’s Syria Policy

Open letter to Canada’s NDP Leader on Nobel Prize:
Letter to NDP from Prof. John Ryan protesting White Helmet nomination for RLA and Nobel Peace Prize

White Helmets: Bogus Claims:
‘We Saved 60,000’ – Bogus Claim by Syria’s White Helmets Raises Even More Questions

READ MORE WHITE HELMET NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire White Helmet Files

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21wire

Is a North American and European-based, grass-roots, independent blog offering geopolitical news and media analysis, working with an array of volunteer contributors who write and help to analyse news and opinion from around the world.

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Patrick Henningsen is an American-born writer and global affairs analyst; founder of the independent news and analysis site 21st Century Wire as well as a regular guest commentator for RT International; host of the SUNDAY WIRE weekly radio show broadcast globally over the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR), and ‘Patrick Henningsen LIVE’ on Independent Talk 1100 KFNX in Phoenix. His work has appeared in a number of international publications including The Guardian, Consortium News, UK Column and also on channels like ITN, Edge Media (SKY 200 UK), and Al Jazeera English.

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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.

Crusader-in-Chief: the Strange Rehabilitation of George W. Bush

by CHIP GIBBONS

ABOVE: Standing on the south lawn of the White House just days after 9/11, Bush told the nation—and the world—that “[t]his crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take awhile.” Photo by Bureau of Land Management | CC BY 2.0

Rise to Power

War On the World

Bush’s Crusade

Thanks, Obama!

Secret Affairs: Britain’s collusion with radical Islam

By Jean Shaoul
wsws.org

In 1998 Mark Curtis published The Great Deception: Anglo-American Power and World Order, a work whose stated goal was to shed light on various myths of Anglo-American power in the post-Cold War era.

Operations against bourgeois nationalist governments in the 1950s

Britain’s backing for the House of Saud

While the US’ role in sponsoring Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden is well known. Britain’s part in fostering Al Qaeda and similar groups and/or working with them, sometimes in cooperation with Washington as a junior partner or sub-contractor, sometimes on its own account, has generally been omitted.

Britain’s role in the Afghan war

Britain’s support for Pakistan

A revealing insight into political criminality and warmongering—Part 2

By Jean Shaoul, wsws.org
6 March 2017

“Londonistan” as a centre for terrorist groups

9/11 and the “global war on terror”

The London bombings

Washington’s Benevolent Mask Is Disintegrating

Paul Craig Roberts

India becomes “frontline” state in US war plans against China

Deepal Jayasekera and Keith Jones

The authors are analysts with WSWS.org, a Trotskyist organization. While we find their analysis often spot on, and much of this essay is written with characteristic insight, their knee-jerk anti-Stalinism muddles up the waters, diminishing some of the major arguments.

Oscars Award to ISIS-Connected White Helmets Exposed by 21st Century Wire

Forget Oscar: Give The White Helmets the Leni Riefenstahl Award for Best War Propaganda Film

The documentary The White Helmets reinforces an Anglo-American establishment power structure responsible for one of the most violent, dirty wars in modern history. It reinforces a collection of lies placed on heavy rotation by the political and media establishments since the conflict began.

‘CIVIL DEFENSE’ FRAUD

SMART POWER & THE NGO COMPLEX

DOUBTS OVER AUTHENTICITY

SYRIAN CURVE BALLS

HOLLYWOOD ‘CHANGE AGENTS’

CROWD-FUNDING TERROR

.
LINKS & MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE WHITE HELMETS:

21wire

Crusader-in-Chief: the Strange Rehabilitation of George W. Bush

by CHIP GIBBONS

ABOVE: Standing on the south lawn of the White House just days after 9/11, Bush told the nation—and the world—that “[t]his crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take awhile.” Photo by Bureau of Land Management | CC BY 2.0

Rise to Power

War On the World

Bush’s Crusade

Thanks, Obama!

Secret Affairs: Britain’s collusion with radical Islam

By Jean Shaoul wsws.org

In 1998 Mark Curtis published The Great Deception: Anglo-American Power and World Order, a work whose stated goal was to shed light on various myths of Anglo-American power in the post-Cold War era.

Operations against bourgeois nationalist governments in the 1950s

Britain’s backing for the House of Saud

Britain’s role in the Afghan war

Britain’s support for Pakistan

A revealing insight into political criminality and warmongering—Part 2

By Jean Shaoul, wsws.org 6 March 2017

“Londonistan” as a centre for terrorist groups

9/11 and the “global war on terror”

The London bombings

Washington’s Benevolent Mask Is Disintegrating

Paul Craig Roberts

India becomes “frontline” state in US war plans against China

Deepal Jayasekera and Keith Jones

The authors are analysts with WSWS.org, a Trotskyist organization. While we find their analysis often spot on, and much of this essay is written with characteristic insight, their knee-jerk anti-Stalinism muddles up the waters, diminishing some of the major arguments.

Oscars Award to ISIS-Connected White Helmets Exposed by 21st Century Wire

Forget Oscar: Give The White Helmets the Leni Riefenstahl Award for Best War Propaganda Film

The documentary The White Helmets reinforces an Anglo-American establishment power structure responsible for one of the most violent, dirty wars in modern history. It reinforces a collection of lies placed on heavy rotation by the political and media establishments since the conflict began.

‘CIVIL DEFENSE’ FRAUD

SMART POWER & THE NGO COMPLEX

DOUBTS OVER AUTHENTICITY

SYRIAN CURVE BALLS

HOLLYWOOD ‘CHANGE AGENTS’

CROWD-FUNDING TERROR

. LINKS & MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE WHITE HELMETS:

21wire

By Jean Shaoul
wsws.org

By Jean Shaoul, wsws.org
6 March 2017

.
LINKS & MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE WHITE HELMETS: