Yes, you need a whole lot of info from a lot of people and then you pick and
choose. However, that whole lot of people, all those sources from which we pick
and choose, we need to be paranoid about them. I look back at how naïve I was
in the early 90's when I thought that Bill Clinton was a good president. Back
then, my main source of information was NPR. In the 90's, one could, more or
less, trust NPR, but less than I realized. After all, it began being
underwritten by corporations at some point, as did PBS, and that was the end of
an expecdtation of real journalism. So now I listen to specific people whom I
find on The Grayzone Project, Mint News, Consortium News, Truthdig, Loud and
Clear which is on the Sputnic network, Flashpoints from Pacifica, and all those
independent podcasts and The Real News Network. I don't listen to NPR, except
that it wakes me up each day, and I don't have a TV nor would I listen to those
pretend presidential debates if I had one. But I certainly hear enough of them
and about them from all of the podcasts. The more I hear, the more horrified I
become. But being informed about what is happening is like an addiction. And
that reminds me, someone on Flashpoints said that we don't have the winner
takes all system in our electoral college anymore in many states. He was
talking about California. There was a law that I signed a petition about for
New York that asked that the electoral college votes in each state be
apportioned according to the percentage of the popular vote that each
presidential candidate receives. I don't know whether that law was passed in
New York, or in the State of Washington, for that matter. But if it was, I
won't have the luxury of writing in Bernie's name if he's not the Democratic
candidate or of voting for a third party candidate because there is no way that
I would risk contributing to Trump getting a second term by casting a vote that
made me happy, but that might be vital to oppose him.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, February 11, 2020 2:40 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: HuffPost UK Editor Works with Censorship Program
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_5e2b107ac5
b67d8874b0dd9d
…
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.”
142
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 Twitter
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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.
