Bob, Miriam and all lovers of truth and the fabled American Way of Life.
Blind democracy is a mainstay of mine insofar as a quick overview of
the happenings in the past 24 hours. I also gain from many of the
news segments during the remainder of the hour. But most of my "in
depth" news comes from a wide number of email posts, both from a large
number of Progressive sources and from people like Miriam, who
sometimes posts more than what I can barely scan. NPR gives me a more
Middle of the Road overview, and I listen to the news on the Free TV
channel. I used to listen to RTV for news, but drifted away after
Thom Hartmann left. But even the most reliable sources must be read
carefully. I maintain that all of us, individuals and news
organizations alike, are contaminated by the constant hammering from
the Establishments propaganda Media. Whenever I want a dose of Black
Humor, I tune into the TV networks and listen to Donald Trump and his
Trumpsters. I was able to take only a small dose of Donald Trump's
Network Performance, called "The State of the Union". I could just
imagine all the "Billy Bobs" sitting in front of their TV's in their
underwear, scratching their...itches, and slugging down another bottle
of beer, while they cheered a man who would sell them to the highest
bidder.
Butt I got off track. I set out to say that even our most trusted
sources must be viewed with a critical eye. Just because my current
hero Chris Hedges tells me it's so, doesn't mean that he has all the
facts straight. In the final say, it is not what Chris Hedges says,
as it is what Carl Jarvis thinks.
Carl Jarvis, the sound of a thoughtful man.
On 2/11/20, Bob Hachey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Sad to see that HoffPost is yet another purveyor of the War Halk sham. The
only thing worse than a war hawk from the right is a more hypocritical war
hawk on the left.
I LOVE DEMOCRACY NOW!!!
Bob
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, February 10, 2020 9:32 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] HuffPost UK Editor Works with Censorship Program
HuffPost UK Editor Works with Censorship Program February 10, 2020 • 2
Comments Amid Jess Brammar’s collaboration with the British Ministry of
Defence, Ben Norton delves into the smears she has been running against
dissenting academics.
By Ben Norton
The Grayzone
The Huffington Post has relied on Western government officials and
organizations funded by Western governments to viciously smear anti-war
academics as “useful idiots” of Russia, claiming they are being “used” by
the Kremlin.
Ironically, HuffPost UK has done this while its own editor-in-chief actively
collaborates with the British Ministry of Defense in a program that censors
journalism on behalf of “UK military and intelligence operations,” in order
to protect “national security” interests.
HuffPost UK published a hit piece by reporter and senior editor Chris York
on Jan. 29 that hearkens back to the era of McCarthyite witch hunts. Titled
“The ‘Useful Idiots’: How These British Academics Helped Russia Deny War
Crimes At The UN,” York’s hatchet job is dedicated to destroying the
reputations of several anti-war scholars who have done extensive research
exposing the lies and regime-change propaganda spread by Western governments
in their hybrid war on Syria.
It was York’s 12th piece attacking this small group of academics. From the
perspective of the British public, a group of semi-obscure professors is an
unusual source of such intense interest. However, it appears that the U.K.
regime-change apparatus that has dumped untold millions of pounds into
overthrowing Syria’s government feels threatened by their research.
York’s article relies almost entirely on the unsubstantiated opinions of
European government officials and groups that are bankrolled by the United
States and European governments. It also features some glaring omissions,
leaving out key details and misleading readers.
Jess Brammar.
HuffPost UK Editor-in-Chief Jess Brammar took to Twitter to promote the hit
piece, claiming it shows “how a group of British academics have been used by
Russia to help them deny war crimes by the Assad regime at the UN.”
“It’s quite a tale – please give it a read,” Brammar wrote on Twitter. The
article is indeed a tale — and a tall one at that, given it dabbles in
fiction with unsubstantiated hyperbolic claims based on Cold War-era
propaganda tropes.
Brammar shared a quote from the piece that is attributed to an anonymous
“European diplomat,” who claimed anti-war British scholars are “unwittingly
and naively acting as agents of propaganda for the Russians, or actively
support[ing] Russian disinformation.”
Jess Brammar
✔
@jessbrammar
We are leading on this fascinating and important story from @ChrisDYork
today about how a group of British academics have been used by Russia to
help them deny war crimes by the Assad regime at the UN. It’s quite a tale -
please give it a read.
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/the-useful-idiots_uk_5e2b107ac5b67d8874b0dd9d
…
The 'Useful Idiots': How These British Academics Helped Russia Deny War
Crimes At The UN Lecturers from the Universities of Edinburgh, Leicester and
Bristol have accused rescue workers the White Helmets of mass murder in
Syria – to condemnation from Amnesty International and others.
huffingtonpost.co.uk
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2:27 AM - Jan 29, 2020
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While HuffPost UK’s editor-in-chief smears dissenting academics as “agents
of propaganda for the Russians,” she herself actively collaborates with a
British government censorship program — as writer Caitlin Johnstone first
pointed out.
Jess Brammar is a member of the Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA)
Committee, a government initiative overseen by the Ministry of Defence (MOD)
that, according to its official website, exists “to prevent inadvertent
public disclosure of information that would compromise UK military and
intelligence operations and methods” or potentially challenge “national
security” interests.
In other words, the DSMA Committee is a group of media elites who
voluntarily agree to collaborate with the British government to censor
stories and information the U.K. military and spy operations deem
inconvenient or too dangerous for the public to see.
The DSMA Committee is chaired by the director of general security policy for
the U.K. Ministry of Defense. It includes four more government officials:
the directors of national security at the MOD, the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office, the Home Office and the Cabinet Office. They are joined by three
military officials in secretarial positions, along with a government
assistant.
Rounding out the committee are 17 media elites, representing major
publishers such as The Huffington Post, The Times, The Telegraph, The Daily
Mail, Sky News, ITV, the BBC, the Press Association, Harper Colins UK, and
more.
Brammar was one of the only two members of the committee to be nominated
directly by the chair and vice-chairs. In other words, the director of
general security policy for the U.K. Ministry of Defense personally approved
her seat on the DSMA Committee — a clear stamp of approval for her editorial
judgment from the British military establishment.
Jess Brammar DSMA British government HuffPost UK
In a report entitled, “How the UK Security Services neutralised the
country’s leading liberal newspaper,” journalists Matt Kennard and Mark
Curtis demonstrated how the military-intelligence apparatus cultivated The
Guardian as its tool. The process began in earnest after The Guardian
embarrassed Western governments by publishing secret documents leaked by
National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.
The DSMA Committee was previously called the Defence Advisory Notice
(DA-Notice) and Defence Notice (D-Notice) Committee, and purports to be
voluntary. Kennard dug through officials minutes of meetings held by the
committee and found that the secretary implied otherwise, insisting, “The
Guardian was obliged to seek … advice under the terms of the DA notice
code,” and “This failure to seek advice was a key source of concern and
considerable efforts had been made to address it.”
Periodically, the MOD-led committee sends out a private message to British
media outlets called a D-Notice, which warns the ostensibly independent
press against publishing information that would “jeopardise both national
security and possibly UK personnel.”
Kennard outlined how these D-Notices have been used to muffle journalists,
and prevent the publication of stories that threatened to embarrass the
British government.
HuffPost UK editor Jess Brammar is at the heart of this government effort to
silence critical media.
Jess Brammar
✔
@jessbrammar
· Jan 29, 2020
Replying to @jessbrammar
A European diplomat told us these lecturers from UK universities were either
“unwittingly and naively acting as agents of propaganda for the Russians, or
actively support[ing] Russian disinformation”.
Jess Brammar
✔
@jessbrammar
Amnesty International told us: “The millions of Syrians whose lives have
been devastated by years of barrel bombing, chemical weapons attacks,
imprisonment, torture and killing deserve genuine truth and justice, not
this squalid propaganda.”
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2:30 AM - Jan 29, 2020
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War Stenography
But it is not just Brammar’s ongoing, willing participation in a British
military-led censorship program that makes her attempts to portray
Huffington Post and her reporter Chris York as noble truth-tellers fending
off attacks by a baying mob of Kremlin-sponsored abusers so hypocritical.
HuffPost UK smearing independent thinkers and critical-minded academics as
Russian puppets while actively peddling regime-change talking points from
Western government officials is astoundingly ironic.
In his wildly misleading article, York describes the Working Group on Syria,
Propaganda and Media (WGSPM), a collective of dissident British scholars, as
“agents of propaganda for the Russians.”
The thrust of this smear piece is the unsubstantiated opinion of an unnamed
“European diplomat,” who is quoted in five paragraphs viciously maligning
the scholars, and whose personal partisan views are presented as absolute
fact.
The HuffPost UK hatchet job provides no actual evidence that these scholars
have been working with or for the Russian government. The only links to the
Kremlin that York could find are hilariously thin: one Russian official
praised the group, and another tweeted a link to their work.
Moreover, some of the so-called experts cited by York happen to work for
pro-war organizations funded directly by Western governments.
York relies on pundit Shadi Hamid to depict WGSPM as crazy loons. Hamid
works at the hawkish think tank the Brookings Institution, which is funded
by the Qatari monarchy and U.S. government.
Hamid is also a vocal advocate for Western military intervention who has
gone to absurd lengths to defend NATO’s regime-change war on Libya, which
destroyed the most prosperous country in Africa and left behind a failed
state that turned into a massive ISIS base and a hub for trafficking and
enslavement of African refugees.
Another purported “expert” cited by York is the “open source” reporter Eliot
Higgins, who smears the WGSPM as “useful idiots.”
Higgins is the founder of the pro-NATO blog Bellingcat, which is funded
directly by the U.S. government’s regime-change arm the National Endowment
for Democracy (NED), a notorious CIA cutout. Bellingcat is also part of a
U.K. government-financed program backed by the British Foreign Office. And
Higgins’ former employer is the Atlantic Council, NATO’s unofficial think
tank, also bankrolled by Western governments as well as Gulf monarchies and
the arms industry.
Kit Klarenberg
@KitKlarenberg
Further confirmation UK gov's 'Open Information Partnership' is the 'Expose
Network' from the latest #IntegrityInitiative file dump - so @EliotHiggins
was indeed lying when he said @bellingcat hadn't received "funding or
information" from the FCO.
View image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on
51
8:18 AM - Apr 16, 2019
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While HuffPost UK’s in-house regime-change cheerleader Chris York treats the
Bellingcat founder as an expert, even The New York Times acknowledged in a
puff piece that Higgins has no real expertise. “Higgins attributed his skill
not to any special knowledge of international conflicts or digital data,”
the paper noted, “but to the hours he had spent playing video games, which,
he said, gave him the idea that any mystery can be cracked.”
Crucial Ommissions
In recent months, the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media published
leaks from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)
revealing that at least two whistleblowers complained that the UN-created
organization had become politicized, accusing the management of suppressing
and even reversing scientific findings under U.S. government pressure.
The apparent OPCW suppression concerns the allegations that the Syrian
government used chemical weapons in the city of Douma in April 2018, in an
area occupied by Salafi-jihadist insurgents.
The U.S., British, and French governments claimed without evidence that
Damascus had launched a gas attack in this Islamist extremist-occupied area.
In response, Washington and its allies launched missile strikes against the
Syrian government in violation of international law.
Numerous leaks from the OPCW have cast doubt on the unsubstantiated
allegations of Western governments. Along with the WGSPM, WikiLeaks has
published several batches of leaks from the OPCW, including internal emails
that show signs of high-level suppression of inconvenient scientific
findings about the incident in Douma.
HuffPost UK’s Chris York did not even mention WikiLeaks in his wildly
misleading article. Instead, York falsely asserts that there “is no reliable
evidence to support the theory” that the alleged Douma gas attack was staged
by the Salafi-jihadist insurgents on the ground.
Conspicuously absent from York’s article was the smoking gun that arrived in
the form of testimony at the United Nations Security Council by former OPCW
inspection team leader and engineering expert Ian Henderson.
In January, Henderson told the UN via video that OPCW management had
suppressed the fact-finding mission (FFM) team’s findings on the ground in
Douma. (Henderson had wanted to testify in person at the UN, but the US
government did not give him a visa.)
“We had serious misgivings that a chemical attack had occurred,” Henderson
explained. The former OPCW expert added that his months of research
“provided further support for the view that there had not been a chemical
attack.”
The Grayzone
@TheGrayzoneNews
A former OPCW inspection team leader and engineering expert told the UN
Security Council that their investigation in Douma, Syria suggested no
chemical attack took place. But their findings were suppressed and reversed
Read more here:
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/01/22/ian-henderson-opcw-whistleblower-un-no-chemical-attack-douma-syria/
…
via @BenjaminNorton
Embedded video
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In his article, York completely avoided mention of Henderson and UN
testimony, in a very egregious and misleading oversight. And this striking
omission appears to be intentional, because on Twitter, York later condemned
Henderson, along with the other OPCW whistleblower who goes by Alex,
claiming they are “wrong.”
The fact that York would conveniently leave out Henderson’s UN testimony —
the most important, and scandalous piece of evidence yet of OPCW chicanery —
while publicly smearing him on Twitter shows that the methodology of the
reporting itself is clearly biased, sloppy and unprofessional.
Citing Regime-Change ‘Expert’
Chris York’s attack piece is also self-referential. In one especially
dubious sentence, he claims the WGSPM “has previously been accused of
‘whitewashing war crimes.’” To support this grave accusation, York links to
an article he himself wrote in 2018, which is essentially a mimeograph of
his latest attack.
This 2018 smear piece accusing the WGSPM academics of “whitewashing war
crimes” attributes the outrageous accusation not to a legal expert on war
crimes but rather to Leila al-Shami, who has spent years lobbying for
foreign intervention to violently overthrow the Syrian government.
Al-Shami is, in fact, the pen name for a mysterious British activist whose
credentials are impossible to validate. According to Robin Yassin-Kassab,
the co-author of her book “Burning Syria,” Leila al-Shami “is the pseudonym
of another British Syrian who worked in Syria in the human rights field
before the” war broke out in 2011.
For years, al-Shami has refused to show her face on camera. Hosts routinely
ask the audience not to take photos, and during a 2016 event at NYU’s
Kevorkian Center, attendees were forbidden from filming al-Shami’s talk “for
security reasons.”
In a June 2017 interview with Spain’s El Nacional (in which she and
Yassin-Kassab wrongly forecasted a partition of Syria), al-Shami was
photographed turning away to hide her face. She claimed that she could not
be seen publicly “for security reasons.”
However, during an April 2016 event at New York City’s New School, al-Shami
was photographed and filmed while on stage. Video of the talk was published
by Flatiron Hot News, a local culture publication.
Leila al Shami Robin Yassin Kassab Syria One of the only known images of
regime-change activist Leila al-Shami (on left).
Al-Shami is best known for marketing the cause of regime change in Syria to
the Western left, painting it as a glorious grassroots struggle for
participatory democracy, while branding its leftist opponents as
crypto-fascists and “idiots.”
Her book, “Burning Country,” contains no on-the-ground reporting, relying
instead on reports by and about opposition activists largely funded by the
U.S. government and Gulf monarchies such as the White Helmets and Raed
Fares.
While al-Shami claims to have “been involved in human rights and social
justice struggles in Syria,” the human rights group she supposedly
co-founded, Tahrir-ICN, appears to be an empty shell that consists of a few
barely active social media pages and a dormant blog.
Chris York’s reliance on a shady figure like this further highlights his
misleading tactics. By citing regime-change activists as credible experts
while heaping scorn on his subjects with passive-voice phrases like “have
been accused of,” he disguises his own opinions as objective reporting.
Under the leadership of editor-in-chief and British security state
collaborator Jess Brammar, York’s brand of dubious, highly partisan
reporting is not only tolerated at HuffPost UK; it is encouraged.
York’s hit piece on the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media was, in
fact, his 12th attack on the small band of dissident academics. Desperate to
suppress inconvenient facts about the dirty war on Syria, some powerful
forces have found reliable stenographers at the HuffPost UK.
