So now Amnesty International (AI) has published a report, Human slaughterhouse: Mass hangings and extermination at Saydnaya prison, Syria that was picked up yesterday by the Associated Press and practically every mainstream news outlet on the planet.
By the time the sharp-eyed intelligence analyst "b" at Moon of Alabama (a former German military officer who was attached to NATO, according to one source) finished fisking the report (Hearsay Extrapolated - Amnesty Claims Mass Executions In Syria, Provides Zero Proof), there wasn't much left of it but mincemeat.
But years earlier another sharp-eyed intelligence analyst, an American named Tony Cartalucci who is based in Thailand, went to the heart of the matter in his August 2012 investigative report, Amnesty International is US State Department Propaganda: Amnesty, run by US State Department representatives, funded by convicted financial criminals, threatens real human rights advocacy worldwide.
In the report Tony points up the lie that AI is an independent organization:
[BEGIN QUOTES]
... In its most recent 2012 annual report (page 4, .pdf), Amnesty reiterates one of the biggest lies it routinely tells:
"Amnesty International is funded mainly by its membership and public donations. No funds are sought or accepted from governments for investigating and campaigning against human rights abuses. Amnesty International is independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion."This is categorically false. Amnesty international is indeed funded and run by not only governments, but also immense corporate-financier interests, and is not only absolutely entwined with political ideology and economic interests, it is an essential tool used for perpetuating just such interests.
Amnesty International's Funding
Finding financial information on Amnesty International's website is made purposefully difficult -- specifically to protect the myth that the organization is "independent." Like any organized criminal operation, Amnesty separates compromising financial ties through a series of legal maneuvers and shell organizations. At Amnesty's website it states:
"The work carried out through Amnesty International's International Secretariat is organised into two legal entities, in compliance with United Kingdom law. These are Amnesty International Limited ("AIL") and Amnesty International Charity Limited ("AICL"). Amnesty International Limited undertakes charitable activities on behalf of Amnesty International Charity Limited, a registered charity."And it is there, at Amnesty International Limited, where ties to both governments and corporate-financier interests are kept. On page 11 of Amnesty International Limited's 2011 Report and Financial Statement (.pdf) it states (emphasis added):
"The Directors are pleased to acknowledge the support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Oak Foundation, Open Society Georgia Foundation, the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Programme, Mauro Tunes and American Jewish World Service. The UK Department for International Development (Governance and Transparency Fund) continued to fund a four year human rights education project in Africa. The European Commission (EuropeAid) generously awarded a multi-year grant towards Amnesty International’s human rights education work in Europe."Clearly, then, Amnesty does take money from both governments and corporate-financier interests, one of the most notorious of which, Open Society, is headed by convicted financial criminal George Soros.
[...]
Amnesty's leadership is also telling of its true agenda. Suzanne Nossel, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, for instance was drawn directly from the US State Department -- again, utterly contradicting Amnesty's claims of being "independent" of governments and corporate interests. Nossel continued promoting US foreign policy, but simply behind a podium with a new logo, Amnesty International's logo, attached to it.
Amnesty International's website specifically mentions Nossel's role behind the US State Department-backed UN resolutions regarding Iran, Syria, Libya, and Cote d'Ivoire. ...
[END QUOTES]
Study the rest of Tony's report to learn standard tricks of the human rights advocacy "racket," as he justifiably terms it.
The ugly truth is that AI, founded in 1961 for the noblest of intentions, fell prey to funding needs that turned the organization into a propaganda conduit for governments. AI is not alone in this, as Tony pointed out. Government use of non-governmental organizations (ngos) for propaganda became so well known there's an acronym for the practice: gongo, or "government non-governmental organization." Which of course is a contradiction in terms.
But to return to the latest anti-Assad propaganda, here is a too-true-to-be funny comment from a 'confused' Moon of Alabama reader and another MoA reader who helpfully replied:
Whoa, whoa there!
So what happens to [this] Obama-approved factoid used by the early regime-change apologists:
"Assad emptied the prisons of jihadists so they could infiltrate the Syrian democracy movements, thereby turning them into the wahhabist terror groups Assad wanted to barrel bomb."
Do I need a new administration [talking] points sheet?
How will Warisboring.com excuse actions taken against the Syrian gov. now?
Posted by: Wwinsti | Feb 7, 2017 2:14:47 PM | 53
Wwinsti 53:
Good point! Assad cannot catch a break. Keep and execute some prisoners and he's guilty of being a brutal inhuman dictator. If he releases prisoners, he's guilty of creating jihadist groups.
http://www.newsweek.com/how-syrias-assad-helped-forge-isis-255631
http://s.telegraph.co.uk/graphics/projects/isis-jihad-syria-assad-islamic/index.html
Interesting to read about two of those released [prisoners]:
"Upon their release, they emerged as leaders of two groups of armed fighters that were to become the most powerful actors of all in the Syrian uprising.
Hassan Abboud’s group Ahrar al-Sham won backing from Qatar. Zahran Alloush’s Jaish al-Islam is backed by Saudi Arabia, where Alloush’s father Abdullah is a practising cleric."
And what of the question of support by Saudi Arabia and Qatar? Where is AI and HRW [Human Rights Watch] calling for actions against those two?
Posted by: Curtis | Feb 7, 2017 4:13:40 PM | 58Also from the same comment thread:
On the more general topic of information operations in Syria, some new material has recently come to light that helps us to understand the relationship between these operations and the alleged chemical attacks in 2013-2014. Some of this material is covered in detail, with links to original sources, on a page on the ACLoS wiki.
In March and April 2013 there were reports in the British press that soil samples from alleged chemical attacks in Syria were being smuggled out of Syria in an "MI6 operation" for analysis at Porton Down (the UK's CW detection lab).
From comments on various media by Hamish de Bretton-Gordon (HBG), a former colonel in the British army's chemical defence regiment, it's clear that he had a key role in this operation at the same time as he was contributing as an "independent expert" to BBC and [other] press reports.
Several interesting conclusions can be derived from matching HBG's comments to press coverage and official UK government statements:
1. The MI6 operation to collect samples from Syria appears to have been set up in April 2012 with an injection of capital into HBG's companies, before there had been any suggestion that the regime was likely to use CW agents.
2. The soil samples collected by HBG were reported by Porton Down in April 2013 to contain sarin, but probably low-quality "kitchen sarin" similar to that reported by the Russian lab on samples collected at the same time. To cover this up, the official version was changed in May 2013 so that the soil samples became "physiological samples" (which don't reveal anything about sarin quality).
3. In Ian Pannell's BBC report on the Saraqeb incident in May 2013, HBG was presented as an independent commentator who had not visited the scene, but HBG's later comments make it clear that he and Pannell were present together. This ties the MI6 operation to the work of a BBC journalist whose report of an alleged napalm attack near Aleppo in August 2013 appears (from Robert Stuart's painstaking investigation) to have been fabricated.
All this is consistent with other evidence that the UK, and specifically MI6, has had a pivotal role in the information operations associated with the Syrian civil war, including the alleged CW attacks. From the Litvinenko poisoning (most likely the accidental result of opening a container of polonium used as a prop) to the Trump dossier, MI6's information operations appear to have become increasingly bizarre and reckless.
Posted by: pmr9 | Feb 7, 2017 4:41:53 PM | 60The "Trump Dossier," for readers who weren't paying attention at the time, included an accusation that Donald Trump hired prostitutes to urinate on a hotel-room bed used by the Obamas while they were in Moscow. The accusation, as with the one about assassination by polonium poisoning and the accusation that Assad unleashed chemical warfare against the Syrian populace, says much about the character of the accusers. So, "increasingly" bizarre doesn't quite describe it.
However, the gross-out aspect of the accusations also serves a practical purpose. Many people will recoil from closely examining gruesome or grotesque situations. For example, it takes a strong stomach to study the photographs of mutilated and decomposing corpses in the Caesar file. MI6 and other highly unethical "information" purveyors are certainly aware of this, so the grosser the better in order to discourage the public and even journalists and politicians from giving close attention to the details of the story.
Working against this tactic is the modern era in communications, which allows millions of people around the world to examine situations of all kinds that are reported in the press. The predictable consequence is that there's always somebody out there who is noticing what others aren't at the moment.
A friend still chuckles at my 'catch,' when I took one look at photographs of an incident during an Olympic torch-carrying parade in 2008 and asked sardonically, "Where are the boys in blue?"
The boys in blue were hulking Chinese guards wearing powder-blue athletic suits who were closely accompanying the torch. Over protests from Western host governments they'd been literally hurling demonstrators out the way of the parade.
The guards had inexplicably disappeared when a Tibetan made a show of trying to grab the torch from a pretty wheelchair-bound Chinese, who'd been maneuvered by her handlers into a convenient corner along the parade route. She'd bravely kept hold of the torch.
Photographs and video of the incident were played over and over on Chinese state TV, giving Beijing a propaganda victory on the home front.
When I posted my question at this blog, a reader in an East Asian country wrote to exclaim that he'd known there was something wrong with the torch-grabbing incident but hadn't realized what it was until I'd asked about the missing guards.
The point is that this huge world has been turning into Agatha Christie's village of St. Mary Mead, where there is always a sharp-eyed villager watching every move made in public by the other villagers.
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