Thirsting for War, CNN's Jake Tapper Turned to Strange and Shady Syria Sources
Tapper promoted a little girl and a shady Syrian opposition lobbyist as his
go-to regime change talking heads.
By Max Blumenthal / AlterNet
September 7, 2017, 1:23 PM GMT
Photo Credit: Screenshot
While posing as one of the most dogged critics of the Trump administration in
cable news, CNN's Jake Tapper has emerged as one of the American national
security state's most loyal conduits. Tapper broke into the media covering
politics for the progressive outlet, Salon.com, where his editor, David Talbot,
described him in part one of this series as a cynical careerist and a "groupie"
of the Senate's most militaristic member, Sen. John McCain. These days,
scarcely a single episode of Tapper's "The Lead" goes by without an extended
segment promoting regime change in one of the countries in Washington's
crosshairs.
In the final months of the Obama administration, as the Syrian government and
its Russian allies appeared poised to retake eastern Aleppo from a collection
of Salafi and Salafi-jihadist insurgents, Tapper became a one-man Mighty
Wurlizter for the Syrian opposition and interventionists seeking war against
Damascus. For months, the CNN host spouted off a stream of half-truths,
deceptions and straight up falsehoods, while leaning on a 7-year-old girl and a
shady opposition lobbyist as his go-to regional experts.
Tapper launched his first salvo in support of a US-led war on Syria on Sept. 8,
2016, in a segment mocking the marginal Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson
for not knowing what the city of Aleppo was.
The segment began with Tapper claiming the entire city of Aleppo had been
destroyed, when, in fact, the majority of its population of 1.2 million
inhabitants lived outside the five eastern neighborhoods taken by force by
Islamist rebels, in areas controlled by the government that were still fully
intact. Tapper next claimed that “300,000 [people] were trapped in that hell
with no way out,” overstating the population of rebel-held eastern Aleppo by at
least 250,000. (The population of eastern Aleppo was at most 40,000, with most
original inhabitants having fled the rebel onslaught.)
Finally, the CNN personality asserted without evidence that the Syrian
government had carried out a chemical attack in September against Aleppo, an
uncorroborated claim transparently aimed at ramping up pressure on the U.S. to
intervene. (Serious allegations by international monitoring bodies of chemical
attacks by the Syrian government against armed opposition took place in August
2013 and April 2017, and neither occurred in Aleppo).
At no point did Tapper mention the dominance of the Al Qaeda-allied rebels that
had taken over sections of Aleppo -- "It's primarily al-Nusra who holds
Aleppo," Pentagon spokesman Col. Steven Warren said at the time -- nor did he
present a single piece of history on the Syrian civil war. Context like this
might have complicated an interventionist narrative centered on a cartoon
villain dictator irrationally slaughtering his own people.
Tapper closed his segment not by citing any accredited expert on Syria, but by
quoting Greg Gutfeld, the right-wing satirist who hosted a late-night talk show
for Fox News: “What’s worse? Not knowing about Aleppo, or knowing all along and
not acting on it?”
But “acting” in Aleppo indisputably required the enforcement of a no-fly zone.
Gen. Joseph Dunford, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that
such a policy would “require war with Syria and Russia” — a hot war with a
nuclear power. As usual, Tapper failed to provide his viewers with inconvenient
details like these, painting military intervention instead as a cleanly
exercise in freedom spreading, and the U.S. military as a savior of the world’s
oppressed.
Three months later, as Aleppo was being cleared of Salafi-jihadi insurgents,
paving the way for the Syrian and Russian militaries to take on ISIS across the
country, Tapper launched into a tirade against the Obama administration and
Congress for refusing to authorize an Iraq-style invasion with American boots
on the ground. Describing the Syrian civil war as “a genocide by another name,”
Tapper claimed that Obama is “going to have to reckon with” the legacy of his
refusal to intervene “in the way that President Clinton had to reckon with an
action in Rwanda.” (Outside of a handful of radical neoconservatives and
Islamists, almost no one has repeated this accusation about Obama since he left
office.)
“There are not a lot of profiles of courage on the other side of Pennsylvania
Ave when it comes to Syria,” Tapper lamented. “We didn’t see a lot of members
of Congress saying, ‘We need to send troops and this is why we need to do it.’”
According to Tapper, “courage” flowed from the impulse to authorize wars of
choice against countries that posed no threat to the U.S., not to resist the
overwhelming tide to plunge another Middle Eastern state into chaos. In the
rare instances when he has challenged lawmakers on issues of war and peace,
they have not been McCain clones like Rep. Kinzinger, but iconoclastic figures
like Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, the Democrat and Iraq war veteran who introduced a
bill that would have cut off covert US support for extremist rebels in Syria.
Tapper's 7-year-old Syria expert
When Tapper hosted Gabbard following her trip to Syria in January, he prepped
the interview with a lengthy segment on a little Syrian girl named Bana Alabed.
“She has become the face of innocent civilian suffering in Syria,” Tapper
intoned before reciting a tweet from the girl’s Twitter account beseeching
Trump to “do something for the children of Syria.” (Tapper then read off a
tweet by Kinzinger slamming Gabbard for engaging with the Syrian government.)
Bana Alabed was a seven-year-old who gained international celebrity by
publishing video messages and pleas for intervention from her Twitter account
in Aleppo (“it’s better to start 3rd world war,” read one of her tweets).
Though she faked it as best as she could, Bana had no ability to understand
English; her mother and a collection of helpers appeared to be writing her
tweets and scripting her video soliloquies. (Bana’s father, a former insurgent
named Ghassan Alabed, carefully avoided the spotlight.)
After Aleppo was taken from the insurgents, Bana was passed through Al
Qaeda-controlled Idlib and into Turkey, where she became a centerpiece of state
propaganda and was made a citizen following a bizarre photo-op with its
Islamist premier, Tayyip Recep Erdogan. She was also granted an audience at
Erdogan’s palace with American actress Lindsay Lohan, who spoke in a bizarrely
put-on Arabic accent. Though Bana could not read, write or speak English, Simon
and Schuster granted the girl a major book contract following dealings with the
literary agency of J.K. Rowling, who had helped promote Bana’s Twitter account
and cultivated the child as a global celebrity.
Tapper had not only been taken in by an elaborate and obviously contrived
propaganda stunt, he has even taken to Twitter to recommend Bana as a source of
information on Syria: “For more on Syria, follow @AlabedBana,” Tapper tweeted
this April. After a deluge of mockery and criticism, he deleted the tweet. But
another Tapper tweet promoting Bana from last October remains live.
As I previously reported, Tapper offered his show as a platform for his
colleague, CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward, to present a nakedly pro-opposition
special report that was produced with the paid assistance of a top Al Qaeda
"media man" in Syria, an American named Bilal Abdul Kareem. CNN has yet to
comment on its employment of a jihadist propagandist who was accused by
Abdullah Abu Azzam, a Syrian rebel activist, of direct membership in the Al
Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra.
Tapper's Syrian "activist" friend
Ironically, it was Tapper’s sworn nemesis, Trump, who fulfilled his wishes for
a U.S. strike on the Syrian government. When Trump authorized a cruise missile
strike on the Shayrat airbase near Damascus in April, Tapper joined in the
festival of elation that erupted inside liberal interventionist circles in the
Beltway.
Hours after the U.S. attack on April 6, Tapper tweeted, “Syrian activist texts
me: "Finally thank God!!!!"
The following day, Tapper revealed the identity of the activist by inviting him
on for an interview: He was Mouaz Moustafa, the State Department-funded
opposition lobbyist who took Sen. John McCain on his illegal 2013 boondoggle
into Syria, where the senator posed for an embarrassing photo-op with two
rebels accused of kidnapping Shia pilgrims. In an unintentionally revealing
documentary that was supposed to be a self-promotional vehicle called "Red
Lines," Moustafa was filmed smuggling fighters into Homs, attempting to
negotiate with international arms dealers to arrange weapons shipments to the
rebels, and returning to Washington to lobby politicians like McCain for a war
of regime change.
After arranging a July 2013 meet and greet with Syrian rebels for Rep. Ed Royce
and his then-aide, Evan McMullin, Moustafa complained that the State Department
had classified Al Qaeda's Syrian affiliate as a terrorist group. "It was a
mistake," Moustafa told Foreign Affairs. "The feeling among Syrian fighters
was, ‘Why are you telling us what we can or can not do when you should be doing
so much more to help us?’"
This Syrian opposition operative's apparently friendly relationship with Tapper
raises serious questions about what role he played in shaping CNN’s one-sided,
hyper-interventionist coverage of Syria.
De-escalation and network frustration
Despite Trump’s one-off strike on Syria, the situation on the ground has
stabilized. According to the International Organization for Migration, 603,000
Syrian refugees returned home in 2017, with 67 percent heading back to
liberated Aleppo. Since the city was cleared of Salafi rebels, even the Qatari
state media organ AJ Plus has reported, “Signs of life are returning to Aleppo,
as residents start rebuilding Syria’s war-torn city. The sound of shells and
gunshots has been replaced with music.” The AJ Plus report highlighted the
joyous reaction of local residents as Aleppo’s historic citadel hosted its
first concert since the start of the civil war.
The story of Syria recovering from years of war assisted by Western powers was
not one CNN was eager to tell. An August 4 segment on Tapper’s "The Lead"
demonstrated the lengths that the network would go to frame the war’s
de-escalation as a new crisis. Frederik Pleitgen, the network’s correspondent,
appeared live from Damascus to report that Russia was “brokering local
ceasefires with rebels” in Syria. Pleitgen then explained that the ceasefire in
the Syrian city of Homs “frees up some of those Syrian army forces” and the
Lebanese Shia militia Hezbollah “to go on and fight ISIS, where they Syrian
army has been making some significant gains over the past couple of weeks…with
the help of Russian airpower.”
The news of the Syrian and Russian governments engaging in a peace process with
rebels while crushing ISIS across the country was so inconvenient to the
narrative Tapper had spun out for at least a year that his producers framed the
report behind a banner that read, “Russia's Growing Influence.” CNN thus
undermined its own correspondent, couching his factual, on-the-ground reporting
within a propagandistic and hyper-partisan narrative of Russian interference.
Syrians might have been celebrating the end of the civil war, but for Tapper
and his employers, the country’s stabilization was a frustrating, even
depressing development. Luckily for the corporate media's war party, there were
other evildoers on the regime change target list, new countries to sanction and
more governments to subvert.
Max Blumenthal is a senior editor of the Grayzone Project at AlterNet, and the
award-winning author of Goliath and Republican Gomorrah. His most recent book
is The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza. Follow him on Twitter at
@MaxBlumenthal.
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