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all the king's stalking horses .....

all the king's stalking horses .....

In a July 12 article for the Guardian’s “Comment is Free” section, Charlie Skelton poses the fundamental question the world’s media does not want asked.

“The Syrian opposition: who’s doing the talking?” is a devastating exposé of the intimate connections between the Syrian opposition and the US, British and French intelligence services, along with top US neo-cons. It traces the formation of the Syrian National Council and the appointment of its leading personnel to long-standing and well-funded plans for regime change in Syria and more generally in the Middle East. These plans date back to at least 2005, and have been funded by Washington in an effort to secure political control of the oil-rich region.

Skelton does not attempt to be comprehensive. He focuses on a few of the most prominent members of the SNC and identifies some of the most vociferous proponents of military intervention as being paid representatives of the Western powers.

Among those routinely cited as “official spokesmen” or “pro-democracy campaigner” is the Paris-based Syrian academic Bassma Kodmani, a member of the executive bureau and head of the SNC’s foreign affairs.

Kodmani is a repeated visitor to the Bilderberg group conference, an organisation of top political figures dedicated to strengthening the links between US and European imperialism and securing their collective global interests under the banner of promoting “Atlanticism.”

In 2005, she worked for the Ford Foundation in Cairo. That year saw a marked deterioration in US-Syria relations, with President George W. Bush contemplating military intervention against Damascus alongside Israel.

In September, Kodmani was made the executive director of the Arab Reform Initiative, funded by the US Council on Foreign Relations and its US/Middle East project—chaired by former national security adviser General Brent Scowcroft.

“Financial oversight” of the project was given to the Centre for European Reform (CER), a British think-tank headed by Lord Kerr, deputy chairman of Royal Dutch Shell.

Kodmani is also a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, functioning as the executive director of its Arab Reform Initiative.

Radwan Ziadeh, the SNC’s director of foreign relations, is a senior fellow at the US Institute of Peace and a signatory to a letter calling for US military intervention alongside former head of the CIA James Woolsey, Karl Rove and other prominent neo-cons. He has acted as an intermediary between the White House and the Syrian opposition since 2005.

Najib Ghadbian, a University of Arkansas political scientist, is a member of the general secretariat of the SNC and is on the advisory board of a Washington-based Syrian Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, along with Ziadeh.

Ausama Monajed of the SNC is the founder of Barada Television, a pro-opposition satellite broadcaster and the former “director of public relations for the London-based Movement for Justice and Development” (MJD). Both are heavily funded by the US State Department, according to WikiLeaks.

Skelton cites some of the many hundreds of millions of dollars channelled into the Syrian opposition from the US and the Gulf States.

Among Monajed’s services to Washington was his publishing an official policy statement of the SNC, a document drafted by Michael Weiss of the Henry Jackson Society calling for intervention in Syria. The society is backed by top neo-cons such as William Kristol and Richard Perle.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, whose inflated figures on casualties are constantly cited by the media, turns out to be one man, Rami Abdul Rahman, based in Coventry and a clothes retailer.

Another Henry Jackson Society luminary is Hamza Fakher, described by Nick Cohen of the Observer as “one of the most reliable sources on the crimes the regime’s news blackout hides.”

The stories he has initiated have been routinely cited as eye-witness reports.

Fakher is the communication manager of Monajed’s London-based Strategic Research and Communications Centre and an employee of Barada TV.

Skelton deserves credit for writing so honestly on the network of connections between the Syrian opposition and the US/European military security apparatus. But the fact is that what he exposes will be well known to the research departments of the Guardian, the New York Times, BBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, et al.

None of them are being hoodwinked by anyone. They are willing conduits for imperialist war propaganda who ask no questions of the sources they cite because they do not want to undercut the drumbeat for war.

It is this that accounts for the scathing denunciation of Skelton in the next day’s edition of the Guardian by diplomatic editor Julian Borger “US manipulation of news from Syria is a red herring,” the headline declares, “The big picture is clear.”

Accusing Skelton of “innuendo,” a heavy use of quotation marks to denote skepticism, “banal prose” and other literary crimes, Borger defends the various intelligence assets identified by Skelton as “people who have devoted a substantial share of their working life studying Syrian society and politics.”

This is a definition so value-free that could be applied to any number of imperialist strategists and spies.

The clear importance of Bassma Kodmani in the SNC hierarchy is simply dismissed, while Skelton is even derided for describing the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) as “a powerful US lobby group,” for being “needlessly sinister”. It is “America’s most prestigious foreign policy talking shop and research centre”, Borger insists.

Borger in fact argues against his own faux-naïf pose. No other foreign policy think tank is more influential than the CFR, and Kodmani is there as a trusted representative of US imperialist interests in the Middle East.

It must be added that Britain’s Socialist Workers Party and its global co-thinkers, the Pabloite United Secretariat, and other pseudo-left outfits demonstrate a similar politically motivated blindness to the true character of the Syrian opposition and its aims.

In June, Khalil Habash complained in the United Secretariat’s International Viewpoint, “The Syrian revolutionary process has since the beginning been met by circumspection by some on the left…accusing it of being a conspiracy of Western imperialist and reactionary regional countries such as Saudi Arabia. This trend has unfortunately continued….”

The SWP’s Simon Assaf was blunter still at the annual Marxism 2012 event. He said that he did not want to dwell on those alleging “conspiracy” due to the involvement of Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia or the US because “it would take me too long to calm down”.

It is not simply that these groups refuse to take a critical stance towards the opposition movement and the diverse social forces it represents—as would be necessary for anyone seeking to lay the basis for the development of an independent working class oppositional movement in Syria. Like the Guardian and other mainstream media, they very deliberately conceal the bourgeois, Sunni-sectarian and pro-imperialist character of the movement’s current leadership to conceal great-power imperialist intrigues, the end result of which will be more disastrous than even NATO’s war against Libya.

A Revealing Exposé Of The US Assets Leading The Syrian Opposition

 

Two groups have claimed

 

Two groups have claimed responsibility for the explosion.

Liwa al-Islam, an Islamist rebel group whose name means The Brigade of Islam, said in a statement on its Facebook page that it "targeted the cell called the crisis control room in the capital of Damascus".

A spokesman for the group confirmed the claim by telephone.


But the Free Syrian Army (FSA) also claimed responsibility for the attack, according to spokesman Qassim Saadedine.

"This is the volcano we talked about, we have just started," he said.

A FSA statement later announced "the good news of the outstanding operation this morning that targeted the National Security headquarters and the killing" of the officials "responsible for barbaric massacres".

 

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-07-18/security-meeting-targeted-in-damascus-blast/4139260?WT.svl=news0

 

---------------------------

 

And of course we the west are supporting these terrorist organisations....???

 

Syria rebels kill top chiefs of Assad regime in Damascus bomb strike


Three key figures reported dead amid mass troop defections and rumour of flight to Russia of Bashar al-Assad wife

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/18/syria-rebels-kill-elite-damascus

In any other place and time the heading would have read "terrorists kill..."

 

blame the russians for the CIA giving weapons to al qaeda...

The United States has said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was losing control of his country and urged Russia and the international community to get behind a political transition plan to avert sectarian civil war.

"The window is closing, we need to take action in a unified way to help bring about the transition that the Syrian people so deserve," said Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, to reporters in Wednesday. 

President Barack Obama called Russian President Vladimir Putin, Assad's main international supporter, after a Damascus bomb blast reportedly killed Syria's defense minister and Assad's brother-in-law, throwing the 16-month old rebellion onto an unpredictable path.

The White House said Obama discussed the deteriorating Syrian situation with Putin, whose government has repeatedly blocked efforts to rally the UN Security Council behind tough measures against Damascus.

But while the two leaders agreed on the need to stop the violence, both Russian and US officials said they ended the call divided over the best way forward.

"They noted the differences our governments have had on Syria, but agreed to have their teams continue to work toward a solution," the White House said in a statement.

 

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/07/201271901412429234.html

 

All have dirty bloody hands...

creating a crime scene .....

New details emerging Saturday about what local Syrian activists called a massacre of civilians near the central city of Hama indicated that it was more likely an uneven clash between the heavily armed Syrian military and local fighters bearing light weapons.
The United Nations observers still on the ground in Syria sent a team in 11 vehicles to the village of Tremseh on Saturday to investigate what had happened, said Sausan Ghosheh, the spokeswoman for the monitors in Damascus, the capital.

Their initial report said the attack appeared to target "specific groups and houses, mainly of army defectors and activists," Ms. Ghosheh said in a statement. It said a range of weapons had been used, including artillery, mortars and small arms.

The report seemed to indicate that some people had been killed at close range - it said there were pools of blood and blood spatters in several houses along with bullet cases. The team also found a burned school and damaged houses.

The number of casualties remains unclear, it said, but the United Nations team planned to return on Sunday to continue investigating.

Before the United Nations team entered the town, a combination of videos, televised confessions of numerous captured fighters and reports from activists outside the area all indicated that a battle on Thursday between the military and local fighters in Tremseh, a village of 11,000 people about 22 miles northwest of Hama, resulted in a slaughter of rebel forces.

The videos that have emerged so far online, the source of much of the information on any fighting that is available outside Syria, have shown the victims to be young men of fighting age. One showed 15 bodies. Another one, said to show a group of reinforcements being sent to Tremseh, also showed a group of young men in civilian clothes carrying their personal weapons.

There were also new questions about the death toll, with initial figures from activists of more than 160 and other reports putting the toll at more than 200. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group based in Britain that has a network of contacts in Syria, said that it had been able to confirm only 103 names, and 90 percent of them were young men. There were no women's names on the list of 103 victims obtained from activists in Homs.

An initial roster of 20 names published by the Syrian National Council, the main umbrella opposition group in exile, was mostly a list of men between 19 and 36, although it included the name of a 6-year-old boy. Activists from the area contacted Saturday stuck to the narrative that there had been a massacre in Tremseh.

In previous massacres, however, like the one in Houla in late May, there was the immediate synchronization between the long lists of civilian names, the gruesome videos of dead women and children, and corroboration by United Nations observers who faulted the Syrian Army for using tank shells and other heavy weaponry against a civilian area. That is missing in the case of Tremseh.

After the high toll was announced from Tremseh, as was the case with Houla and other similar episodes, Western leaders lined up to condemn the mass killings of civilians. Col. Riad al-Assad, based in Turkey as the ostensible leader of the loose coalition of fighters called the Free Syrian Army, told the Arabic television network Al Jazeera on Thursday that there had been no opposition fighters in the town.

Although what actually happened in Tremseh remains murky, the evidence available suggested that events on Thursday more closely followed the Syrian government account.

Details of a Battle Challenge Reports of a Syrian Massacre

hands off syria .....

HANDS OFF SYRIA!

Time: 12 noon
When: Sunday 5 August 2012
Where: Sydney Town Hall

Say NO to US-NATO/Foreign Intervention
Condemn the war propaganda & malicious media lies
Support PEACE in Secular Syria

March to Dept of Foreign Affairs & Trade in Pitt St, and then to US Consulate in Martin Place.

For more information access: http://www.australiansforsyria.wordpress.com
http://www.facebook.com/events/259415104169311/
http://www.facebook.com/groups/325039527571295/

For truth & Justice

Marlene Obeid
Mob. 0401 758 871
c/o PO Box 109, Glebe 2037, Australia

imperial hypocrisy ....

from antony loewenstein …..

Medialens ask the questions most in the media aren’t:

When is an act of terrorism not terrorism? When the victims are officially sanctioned state enemies. This was clear from the political and media response to the assassinations of senior ministers of the Syrian ‘regime’.

On 18 July, a bomb attack on the national security headquarters in Damascus killed three top Syrian ministers: Defence Minister Daoud Rajiha, President Bashar al-Assad’s brother-in-law Assef Shawkat and General Hassan Turkomani.  Two days later, Syria’s national security chief, Hisham Ikhtiari, died from injuries he received in the attack.

Reuters reported U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta saying that the situation in Syria was ‘spinning out of control’. For good measure, he added that President Bashar al-Assad’s government would be held responsible if it failed to safeguard its alleged chemical weapons sites. The brazen echoes of the propaganda campaign against Iraq a decade ago could be heard reverberating around the world’s news media.

…

One of our messageboard visitors posted an extract from a New York Times article on the apparently increasingly effective use of improvised explosive devices by the Syrian ‘insurgency’:

‘Joseph Holliday, a former American Army intelligence officer who is now an analyst covering Syria for the Institute of the Study of War, in Washington, said the changes were not in the rate of attacks, but in a rapidly evolving prowess . . .

‘ . . . The exact means by which anti-Assad fighters have improved their manufacture and use of bombs, and who trained them, is not clear.

‘Mr. Holliday said the capability “comes in part from the expertise of Syrian insurgents who learned bomb-making while fighting U.S. troops in eastern Iraq“‘. 

The poster, Peter, then made the point that:

‘while they were “fighting U.S. troops in eastern Iraq”, we were told in no uncertain terms that they were evil, terrorist bad guys. Islamo-fascist, Al Qaeda linked, Saddam sympathisers who had to be mercilessly slaughtered.’

Now apparently similar forces in Syria using similar tactics to attack an ‘enemy regime’ are cast as ‘rebels’ or ‘freedom fighters’ helping to foment a ‘revolution’ as part of the latest stage of the ‘Arab Spring’.

Peter concludes of the bomb attack in Damascus:

‘the tenor of the coverage clearly has nothing to do with moral or logical consistency, and everything to do with the reported act’s utility to Western power.’

How Do We Define Terrorism - Anybody Who's Opposed To Us