Obama's gift to al-Qaida, support for tyranny, and FBI monitoring of dissent

The Guardian
Glenn Greenwald

Numerous individual events from this week alone signify important trends in US government policy

A Bahraini Shia boy takes part to a demonstration in solidarity with political prisoners in the village of Malikiya, south of Manama. Photograph: Mohammed Al-Shaikh/AFP/Getty Images

This week will likely entail light posting, but here are several items worthy of note:

(1) I can't recall any one news article that so effectively conveys both the gross immorality and the strategic stupidity of Obama's drone attacks as this one from Monday's Washington Post by Sudarsan Raghavan. It details how the US-supported Yemeni dictatorship lies to its public each time the US kills Yemeni civilians with a drone attack, and how these civilian-killing attacks are relentlessly (and predictably) driving Yemenis to support al-Qaida and devote themselves to anti-American militancy:

"Since the attack, militants in the tribal areas surrounding Radda have gained more recruits and supporters in their war against the Yemeni government and its key backer, the United States. The two survivors and relatives of six victims, interviewed separately and speaking to a Western journalist about the incident for the first time, expressed willingness to support or even fight alongside AQAP, as the al-Qaeda group is known.
"'Our entire village is angry at the government and the Americans,' Mohammed said. 'If the Americans are responsible, I would have no choice but to sympathize with al-Qaeda because al-Qaeda is fighting America.'

"Public outrage is also growing as calls for accountability, transparency and compensation go unanswered amid allegations by human rights activists and lawmakers that the government is trying to cover up the attack to protect its relationship with Washington. Even senior Yemeni officials said they fear that the backlash could undermine their authority.

"'If we are ignored and neglected, I would try to take my revenge. I would even hijack an army pickup, drive it back to my village and hold the soldiers in it hostages,' said Nasser Mabkhoot Mohammed al-Sabooly, the truck's driver, 45, who suffered burns and bruises. 'I would fight along al-Qaeda's side against whoever was behind this attack.'"

Similarly, the LA Times has a long article on drone attacks in Yemen and quotes Ahmed al Zurqua, an expert on Islamic militants, explaining the obvious: "The drones have not killed the real Al Qaeda leaders, but they have increased the hatred toward America and are causing young men to join Al Qaeda to retaliate."

History will surely record that one of the most moronic collective questions ever posed is "Why do they hate us?" - where the "they" are: "those we continuously bomb and kill and whose dictators we prop up." Noting the two US drone attacks on December 24 in his country, the 23-year-old Yemeni writer Ibrahim Mothana asked: "Two US drone strikes in Yemen today. Should we consider them a Christmas gift?!" That's exactly what al-Qaida undoubtedly considers them to be.

(2) Speaking of the "why-do-they-hate-us?" question, the Bahraini democracy activist Zainab al-Khawaja has a powerful Op-Ed in the New York Times detailing the extreme brutality and repression of the regime against its own citizens, and explaining the self-destructive though steadfast support for that regime by the US and its close Saudi allies:

"But despite all these sacrifices, the struggle for freedom and democracy in Bahrain seems hopeless because Bahrain's rulers have powerful allies, including Saudi Arabia and the United States.

Russian Military Experts Say The US Patriot Missiles On The Syrian Border Are Actually Pointed At Iran

Business Insider
Sergel Stroken
Yelena Chernenko

Russia is categorically opposed to the Turkey’s installation of Patriot anti-aircraft missiles along its border with Syria. Most have assumed that the Moscow's opposition was driven by its friendship with embattled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

But Russian military experts tell Kommersant that Moscow is actually concerned that the missiles will be used in military action against Iran.

In spite of the fact that the planned location of the missiles is relatively far from the Iranian border, they could be easily deployed to any place in Turkey, and be used against Iranian rockets.

The experts Kommersant spoke with said that having the Patriot missiles in Turkey seriously increases the risk of armed conflict with Iran, which would not be able to strike back if the Patriot missiles are deployed.

“Turkey has explained its request to NATO to put the Patriot missiles on its border with Syria as exclusively related to its need to defend itself from a possible attack from the Syrian army.

"But according to our information, there could be a second motivation for this actions, which is a preparation for military action against Iran,” said one diplomatic source in Moscow.

Russia has reacted extremely negatively to Turkey’s plans to install the Patriot missiles. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that this “increases the risk of military conflict,” and evoked Chekhov’s gun syndrome: if there is a gun on the stage in the first act, then it will be shot in the third act.

Western countries have reacted extremely skeptically to Russia’s concern. NATO General Secretary Anders Fogh Rasmussen called it “baseless,” and Turkish premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that Turkey’s self-defense plans was none of Russia’s business.

The Syria Chemical Weapons Saga: The Staging of a US-NATO Sponsored Humanitarian Disaster?

Global Research
Prof Michel Chossudovsky

Modeled on the Saddam Hussein WMD narrative, the propaganda ploy concerning the alleged threat of Syria’s chemical weapons has been building up over several months.

Iskander Mach 6-7

The Western media suggests –in chorus and without evidence– that a “frustrated” and “desperate” president Bashar al Assad is planning to use deadly chemical weapons against his own people. Last week, U.S. officials revealed to NBC News that “Syria’s military has loaded nerve-gas chemicals into bombs and are awaiting final orders from al-Assad”.

Western governments are now accusing Syria of planning a diabolical scheme on the orders of the Syrian head of State. Meanwhile, the media hype has gone into full gear. Fake reports on Syria’s WMD are funneled into the news chain, reminiscent of the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The evolving media consensus is that “the regime of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad appears to be entering its twilight” and that the “international community” has a responsibility to come to the rescue of the Syrian people to prevent the occurrence of a humanitarian disaster.

“... Fears are growing in the West that Syria will unleash chemical weapons in a last-ditch act of desperation”

Recent reports that the embattled government of Syria has begun preparations for the use of chemical weapons [against the Syrian people] . After two years of civil war and more than 40,000 deaths, events in Syria may be heading to a bloody crescendo. (WBUR, December 11, 2012)

The antiwar critics have largely underscored the similarities with the Iraq WMD ploy, which consisted in accusing the government of Saddam Hussein of possessing Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

The alleged WMD threat was then used as a justification to invade Iraq in March 2003. The WMD Iraq ploy was subsequently acknowledged in the wake of the invasion as an outright fabrication, with president George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair actually recognizing that it was a “big mistake”. In a recent statement Nobel Peace Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu called for ‘lying’ Blair and Bush to face trial in the Hague`s International Criminal Court

Syria versus Iraq

The Syria WMD saga is in marked contrast to that of Iraq. The objective is not to” justify” an all out humanitarian war on Syria, using chemical weapons as a pretext.

An examination of allied military planning as well as the nature of US-NATO support to the opposition forces suggests a different course of action to that adopted in relation to Iraq (2003) and Libya (2011).

The purpose is indeed to demonize Bashar Al Assad but the objective at this stage is not the conduct of an all out “shock and awe” war on Syria, involving a full fledged air campaign. Such an action would, under present conditions, be a highly risky undertaking. Syria has advanced air defense capabilities, equipped with Russian Iskander missiles (see image) as well as significant ground forces. A Western military operation could also lead to a response from Russia, which has a naval base at the port city of Tartus in Southern Syria.

Moreover, Iranian forces from its revolutionary guards corps (IRGC) are present on the ground in Syria; Russian military advisers are involved in the training of the Syrian military.

In recent developments, Syria took delivery of the more advanced Russian Iskander missile system, the Mach 6-7, in response to the deployment of US Made Patriot missiles in Turkey. Syria already possesses the less advanced E-Series Iskander. Syria is also equipped with the Russian ground to air defense missile system Pechora-2M. (see video below)

Iskander Mach 6-7

Description

The Pechora-2M is a surface-to-air anti-aircraft short-range missile system designed for destruction of aircraft, cruise missiles, assault helicopters and other air targets at ground, low and medium altitudes.

US Recognition of Opposition Syrian Coalition Contradicts Geneva Statement

Beware the Anti-Anti-War Left: Why “Humanitarian Interventionism” is a Dead End

Global Research

Jean Bricmont

Ever since the 1990s, and especially since the Kosovo war in 1999, anyone who opposes armed interventions by Western powers and NATO has to confront what may be called an anti-anti-war left (including its far left segment). In Europe, and notably in France, this anti-anti-war left is made up of the mainstream of social democracy, the Green parties and most of the radical left. The anti-anti-war left does not come out openly in favor of Western military interventions and even criticizes them at times (but usually only for their tactics or alleged motivations – the West is supporting a just cause, but clumsily and for oil or for geo-strategic reasons).

But most of its energy is spent issuing “warnings” against the supposed dangerous drift of that part of the left that remains firmly opposed to such interventions. It calls upon us to show solidarity with the “victims” against “dictators who kill their own people”, and not to give in to knee-jerk anti-imperialism, anti-Americanism, or anti-Zionism, and above all not to end up on the same side as the far right. After the Kosovo Albanians in 1999, we have been told that “we” must protect Afghan women, Iraqi Kurds and more recently the people of Libya and of Syria.

It cannot be denied that the anti-anti-war left has been extremely effective. The Iraq war, which was sold to the public as a fight against an imaginary threat, did indeed arouse a fleeting opposition, but there has been very little opposition on the left to interventions presented as “humanitarian”, such as the bombing of Yugoslavia to detach the province of Kosovo, the bombing of Libya to get rid of Gaddafi, or the current intervention in Syria. Any objections to the revival of imperialism or in favor of peaceful means of dealing with such conflicts have simply been brushed aside by invocations of “R2P”, the right or responsibility to protect, or the duty to come to the aid of a people in danger.

The fundamental ambiguity of the anti-anti-war left lies in the question as to who are the “we” who are supposed to intervene and protect. One might ask the Western left, social movements or human rights organizations the same question Stalin addressed to the Vatican, “How many divisions do you have?” As a matter of fact, all the conflicts in which “we” are supposed to intervene are armed conflicts. Intervening means intervening militarily and for that, one needs the appropriate military means. It is perfectly obvious that the Western left does not possess those means. It could call on European armies to intervene, instead of the United States, but they have never done so without massive support from the United States. So in reality the actual message of the anti-anti-war left is: “Please, oh Americans, make war not love!” Better still, inasmuch as since their debacle in Afghanistan and in Iraq, the Americans are leery of sending in ground troops, the message amounts to nothing other than asking the U.S. Air Force to go bomb countries where human rights violations are reported to be taking place.

Of course, anyone is free to claim that human rights should henceforth be entrusted to the good will of the U.S. government, its bombers, its missile launchers and its drones. But it is important to realize that that is the concrete meaning of all those appeals for “solidarity” and “support” to rebel or secessionist movements involved in armed struggles. Those movements have no need of slogans shouted during “demonstrations of solidarity” in Brussels or in Paris, and that is not what they are asking for. They want to get heavy weapons and see their enemies bombed.

The anti-anti-war left, if it were honest, should be frank about this choice, and openly call on the United States to go bomb wherever human rights are violated; but then it should accept the consequences. In fact, the political and military class that is supposed to save the populations “massacred by their dictators” is the same one that waged the Vietnam war, that imposed sanctions and wars on Iraq, that imposes arbitrary sanctions on Cuba, Iran and any other country that meets with their disfavor, that provides massive unquestioning support to Israel, which uses every means including coups d’état to oppose social reformers in Latin America, from Arbenz to Chavez by way of Allende, Goulart and others, and which shamelessly exploits workers and resources the world over. One must be quite starry-eyed to see in that political and military class the instrument of salvation of “victims”, but that is in practice exactly what the anti-anti-war left is advocating, because, given the relationship of forces in the world, there is no other military force able to impose its will.

Of course, the U.S. government is scarcely aware of the existence of the anti-anti-war left. The United States decides whether or not to wage war according to the chances of succeeding and to their own assessment of their strategic, political and economic interests. And once a war is begun, they want to win at all costs. It makes no sense to ask them to carry out only good interventions, against genuine villains, using gentle methods that spare civilians and innocent bystanders.

For example, those who call for “saving Afghan women” are in fact calling on the United States to intervene and, among other things, bomb Afghan civilians and shoot drones at Pakistan. It makes no sense to ask them to protect but not to bomb, because armies function by shooting and bombing.[1]

A favorite theme of the anti-anti-war left is to accuse those who reject military intervention of “supporting the dictator”, meaning the leader of the currently targeted country. The problem is that every war is justified by a massive propaganda effort which is based on demonizing the enemy, especially the enemy leader. Effectively opposing that propaganda requires contextualizing the crimes attributed to the enemy and comparing them to those of the side we are supposed to support. That task is necessary but risky; the slightest mistake will be endlessly used against us, whereas all the lies of the pro-war propaganda are soon forgotten.

NATO Appears to be Rushing for Syria Conclusion

Patrick Henningsen: Syrian Internet Shutdown Could Have Been American-Influenced

Gruesome footage has emerged apparently showing Syrian rebels executing loyalists while their victims pleaded for their lives. One of the gunmen is heard referencing an al-Qaeda-linked group behind several terrorist attacks in Syria.

News analyst Patrick Henningsen says the nationwide internet shutdown, that's now ended, could have been American-influenced.

RT LIVE http://rt.com/on-air

Syrian government not to use chemical weapons

Times of India

DAMASCUS: The Syrian government on Monday said it would never use chemical weapons "even if they existed" against its people under any circumstance, Xinhua reported.
 
The Syrian foreign ministry's statement came in response to recent remarks made by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who Monday warned President Bashar al-Assad against using chemical weapons and said the Washington was prepared to act if he ignored the warning.

"Syria has repeatedly stressed to the American side directly, or through the Russian friends, that it will not use such weapons, even if they existed, against its people under any circumstance," the ministry said.

The ministry said the US was known for fabricating such issues as it did in Iraq before the 2003 invasion.

Clinton, earlier in the day, said the use of chemical weapons " is a red line for the US," adding that "I am not going to telegraph in any specifics what we would do in the event of credible evidence that the Assad administration has resorted to using chemical weapons against their own people.

"But suffice it to say we are certainly planning to take action if that eventuality were to occur."

Syria Has Just Been Taken Offline

Wired
Noah Shachtman

Updated 1:37 pm.

Syria has been largely cut off from the rest of the internet — just as rebel forces are making some of their biggest advances yet against the Assad regime.

“From what we are seeing,” information security specialist Chris Ginley tells Danger Room, “Syria is offline.”

The network monitoring group Renesys reported on Thursday that 77 networks — 92% of the country’s total — began experiencing outages at 10:26 Greenwich Mean Time.
But Syria’s apparently systematic disconnection from the internet actually began at least a week earlier, according to research by the SecDev Group internet analytics firm. Around the middle of the month, Syria’s ordinary handful of daily requests to withdraw from Syria’s BGP [Border Gateway Protocol] routes started to grow to a few hundred per. These connections are what enables one national network to interface with the broader internet. On November 22, the withdrawals suddenly jumped to more than 2000. An even greater spike occurred on November 29.

“When a country withdraws itself from the internet using BGP such as Syria has, it means that on a technical level no one knows how to get there anymore, because there are no longer any paths, effectively shutting off the internet in the region,” SecDev explains in a draft report.

“On some networks there are still some paths in place,” Ginley adds. “But this could be to maintain some limited communication or perhaps it’s just an error on their side.”
The communications blackout — which, according to some local reports, also briefly included cell and landline phone service – is hugely important to the war effort in Syria.

 The rebels don’t just use these networks to share information with one another. They train their forces and document regime atrocities with YouTube clips. The government has been known to shut down internet service in a particular city in advance of a major attack.

“But this is the first time are seeing it centralized (from what I can tell),” emails SecDev CEO Rafal Rohozinski, who has been working with Syrian opposition groups. “We are trying to ascertain whether this is a deliberate pulling of the plug, a technical error, or something else.”

Damascus International Airport has also reportedly disappeared from some flight radars.
“I would be a bit surprised if this was a long-lasting outage,” Rohozinski adds. “The Syrian government and security forces rely alsp on the internet as a means of coordination, propaganda, and ensuring a degree of satisfaction among its constituency. Also, Syria has seen increase in cell phone and internet subscribers during the period of the conflict. In other words, it’s a source of revenue for the economy and government, as well as a vital lifeline for most people.”

Syria’s information minister claims that the Damascus government had nothing to do with the shutdown. “It is not true that the state cut the internet. The terrorists targeted the internet lines, resulting in some regions being cut off,” Reuters quotes him as saying. One regime-friendly website calls the cutoff a NATO “psychological operation.”

Perhaps. But one thing is for certain: the communications clampdown comes as Syrian rebels are enjoying some of their most important gains of the war. They seized a major hydroelectric dam on Monday. And “in the past month,” the New York Times reports, “fighters have overrun a half-dozen [military] bases around Damascus, Syria’s capital; two in the country’s eastern oil-producing area; and the largest military
installation near the country’s largest city, Aleppo.” The AP reports that American officials are preparing to recognize the opposition as Syria’s legitimate government.

A chart from Akamai shows the drop-off of Syrian internet traffic.

The regime is continuing to bombard rebel-controlled bases and towns from the air. On Tuesday, the regime warplanes bombed an olive press factory near the Turkish border, killing at least 20 people. A day prior, air attacks on two rebel bases reportedly sent hundreds of people fleeing into Turkey. These attacks came just before a NATO team arrived in Turkey to scout potential sites for Patriot missile batteries, which could be used to defend against a regime attack across the border.

Syrian rebels have fought back with captured anti-aircraft missile launchers, days ago shooting down a regime helicopter. It’s all part of an increasing array of heavy weapons captured from army bases overrun by the rebels. Earlier in November, rebels seized a major military base near the northern city of Aleppo, capturing several tanks, multiple armored vehicles and long-range artillery guns. Perhaps more vital for the war against Assad is the situation near the capital of Damascus, which is now seeing signs of a “rebel siege,” opposition activist Fawaz Tello told Reuters. Rebel forces captured at least two military bases near Damascus in this month, and are are reportedly coming close to cutting off the city’s airport.

Syria’s networks have also become a central battlefield in the conflict. In recent months, pro-regime hackers are trying to gain access to activists’ machines — by tricking them into downloading fake security software. Once installed, the surveillance programs will “take screenshots of target machines, turn on the computer’s microphone or camera, log all your keystrokes — and then send it all back to Damascus,” Eva Galperin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation tells Danger Room. As Renesys notes, it may be no coincidence that one of the few networks to survive the Syrian blackout was implicated the May malware attacks targeting activists.

Both sides have leaked embarrassing emails belonging to the other. In August, pro-regime hackers broke into the Reuters news service, posting a fake news story about the crumbling of rebel support in Aleppo. In September, the Al-Jazeera news network had its websites defaced with messages calling the rebels “terrorists.”

Meanwhile, several hundred Syrian activists have traveled to Istanbul for training in secure communications, funded by the U.S. State Department. The rebel leaders received tips on how to leapfrog firewalls, encrypt their data, and use cellphones without getting caught, as Time magazine recently reported. Then they returned to Syria, many of them with new phones and satellite modems in hand.

In response, perhaps, the regime has detained tech activists like the open source advocate Bassel Khartabil. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has “launched a letter-writing campaign, hoping to flood Syrian officials and diplomats with physical mail demanding that Khartabil be formally charged and given access to a lawyer or released immediately.” Given the state of Syria’s networks, it may be the only kind of mail that gets through.

Petraeus Switches Up His Story on the Benghazi Attacks

Wired
Spencer Ackerman

Former Gen. David Petraeus at a Fourth of July ceremony in Kabul, 2010

Former CIA Director David Petraeus knew all along that the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was attacked by al-Qaida-aligned terrorists this past September. Only he wasn’t so certain when he first briefed Congress on the Libyan disaster, just days after it occurred. And even the most Petraeus-friendly legislators find it odd that the former CIA director is retroactively editing his testimony.

Petraeus emerged from his compounding week-long fall from grace to testify behind closed doors to the House and Senate intelligence committees about what the CIA knew about the hours-long assault as it unfolded. The overarching and highly politicized question hanging over Benghazi is whether the Obama administration misrepresented the disaster by initially pointing to an anti-Islam video as the catalyst, rather than the complex terrorist attack that actually occurred. What’s begun to leak out of the Petraeus hearings is this: the former four-star general and spymaster was convinced from jump that this was the work of terrorists.

In his Friday testimony. Petraeus claimed “he thought all along that he made it clear there was terrorist involvement,” according to Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.). But, King said, “That was not my recollection” of Petraeus’ testimony.

Nor is it what Petraeus’ old boss was saying at the time. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, publicly explained on Sept. 28 that contemporaneous — and ultimately incorrect — intelligence reporting “led us to assess that the attack began spontaneously following protests earlier that day at our embassy in Cairo,” and “we provided that initial assessment to Executive Branch officials and members of Congress.”


Confusing matters further, Petraeus indicated to lawmakers that the “talking points” the CIA initially gave to the Obama administration and members of Congress omitted early references to terrorism. Those talking points, published on Thursday by CBS, say that the attack on the consulate was “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the US Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault.” They hold open the possibility that the intelligence picture will change — as, indeed, it did, significantly. Those talking points do not indicate the certainty that Petraeus now says he possessed to attribute the attack to Libyan militant group Ansar al-Sharia.

According to King, Petraeus couldn’t explain the discrepancy. King said the talking points went through an “interagency” review, but the CIA ultimately “said, ‘Okay for it to go.’”
The Obama administration’s explanation of the assault on Benghazi evolved from emphasizing an ultimately incorrect connection to the anti-Islam video to blaming Benghazi on a terrorist assault. Its defense is that the intelligence shifted; critics believe that Obama was covering up a terrorist attack to ensure his reelection. There are numerous unanswered questions about what happened in Benghazi: for instance, why security at the consulate was so light despite numerous precursor attacks that summer.

Petraeus, finally out the door of the administration and under investigation by his own former agency, just added a few more, rather than clearing up the existing ones.
We’ll update this post as more information from Petraeus’ testimony leaks out.

Update, 4:52 p.m.: According to the Associated Press, the CIA excised mentions of terrorist groups from the talking points “so as not to alert them that U.S. intelligence was on their trail.” Pentagon spokesman George Little had said the day following the attack that the U.S. would retaliate, but did not give any specifics as to who was responsible.

From Fantasy To Fact: Four Ways The Fake Media Creates A False Reality

The Excavator
Saman Mohammadi

1. Hyper-attention On A Particular Event, Issue, and Mantra.
The mainstream media exclusively focuses on a single storyline about an event or an issue, which has the effect of marginalizing other points of view that are equally valid, if not more so. Narratives, not facts and objective data, have taken center stage in the aspiring journalist's mind. Journalists and editors who oversee the making of the news play the same role as screenwriters in the filmmaking process. Their power stems from the fact that the public looks at news as "real," whereas they know movies are totally fake. But news in the United States and the West is the farthest thing from being real.

Journalists who are in the service of the U.S. intelligence community and other government intelligence agencies are messengers for power. Their job is to repeat government narratives and government mantras. For example, Al-Qaeda is a mantra, not an international terror organization that is at war with America. Read, "Al Qaeda And Human Consciousness: Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda. . . . An Incessant And Repetitive Public Discourse," by Prof Michel Chossudovsky. The "Arab Spring" is another mantra that Washington has used to fulfill its foreign policy objectives in the Middle East.

The latest mantra that the mainstream media is using in a domestic context is the "fiscal cliff." Media messengers for the tyrannical establishment do not discuss how the Federal Reserve's private money machine, Wall Street bailouts, and the military-industrial complex's wars have caused the skyrocketing of U.S. debt. They just keep repeating "fiscal cliff," and then offer bipartisan solutions that will benefit the banksters in power while destroying the living standards of middle class taxpayers and workers.

By focusing on the "fiscal cliff," rather than the Grand Canyon of Deception that is the unconstitutional Federal Reserve system, the mainstream media legitimizes the looting and pillaging of the American people by the transnational banksters.

2. Production of Fake News Reports.

War propaganda is not a new feature of warfare, but the modern Western mass media has taken this art to its highest technological development. What the American, Israeli, and Western media accomplished on the day of September 11, 2001, is simply astonishing. 9/11 was a riveting Hollywood production, from start to finish, from morning to nightfall. It made Hitler's propaganda team weep from the beyond. But the official 9/11 story is just one example of how news is manufactured by the government in tandem with the press.

Examples abound in Syria. Propaganda stations like CNN, Al Jazeera, and BBC have reported on fake massacres by the Syrian government, made up the size of anti-Assad protests, and generally exaggerated the intensity of the hatred for Assad within Syria. We cannot rely on the official number of the people who have died in the conflict because the malicious media routinely makes up figures and repeats them until they become accredited as facts.

Up to now, the Western media has painted a very rosy picture of the anti-Assad "rebels" who are foreign-funded Jihadist terrorists, while minimizing the suffering and needless deaths of Assad's supporters like Syrian-Palestinian actor Mohamad Rafea.

We can clearly see that the revolution in Syria is an imagined revolution and not a real revolution. The Arab Spring is not like an organic plague that spreads from country to country. The U.S., Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia transported the Arab Spring into Syria, and it met resistance from the politically aware Syrian people and the powerful Syrian state. This is natural because there was never a demand for a violent Jihadi revolution in Syria. The anti-government sentiments in Syria never reached the level of despair, unlike in Egypt, Bahrain, and other countries in the region.

3. Omission of Facts and Alternative Opinions.

Bashar Al Assad Interview: ‘Syria faces not a Civil War, but Terrorism by Proxies’

Global Research

Sophie Shevardnadze

Assad: Erdogan thinks he’s Caliph, new sultan of the Ottoman

In an exclusive interview with RT, President Bashar Assad said that the conflict in Syria is not a civil war, but proxy terrorism by Syrians and foreign fighters. He also accused the Turkish PM of eyeing Syria with imperial ambitions.

Assad told RT that the West creates scapegoats as enemies – from communism, to Islam, to Saddam Hussein. He accused Western countries of aiming to turn him into their next enemy.

While mainstream media outlets generally report on the crisis as a battle between Assad and Syrian opposition groups, the president claims that his country has been infiltrated by numerous terrorist proxy groups fighting on behalf of other powers.

In the event of a foreign invasion of Syria, Assad warned, the fallout would be too dire for the world to bear.

‘My enemy is terrorism and instability in Syria’

RT: President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, thank very much for talking to us today.

Bashar Assad: You are most welcome in Damascus.

RT: There are many people who were convinced a year ago that you would not make it this far. Here again you are sitting in a newly renovated presidential palace and recording this interview. Who exactly is your enemy at this point?

BA: My enemy is terrorism and instability in Syria. This is our enemy in Syria. It is not about the people, it is not about persons. The whole issue is not about me staying or leaving. It is about the country being safe or not. So, this is the enemy we have been fighting as Syria.

RT: I have been here for the last two days and I had the chance to talk to a couple of people in Damascus. Some of them say that whether you stay or go at this point does not really matter anymore. What do you say about this?

BA: I think for the president to stay or leave is a popular issue. It is related to the opinion of some people and the only way can be done through the ballot boxes. So, it is not about what we hear. It is about what we can get through that box and that box will tell any president to stay or leave very simply.

RT: I think what they meant was that at this point you are not the target anymore; Syria is the target.

BA: I was not the target; I was not the problem anyway. The West creates enemies; in the past it was the communism then it became Islam, and then it became Saddam Hussein for a different reason. Now, they want to create a new enemy represented by Bashar. That’s why they say that the problem is the president so he has to leave. That is why we have to focus of the real problem, not to waste our time listening to what they say.

‘The fight now is not the president’s fight – it is Syrians’ fight to defend their country’

RT: Do you personally still believe that you are the only man who can hold Syria together and the only man who can put an end to what the world calls a ‘civil war’?

BA: We have to look at it from two aspects. The first aspect is the constitution and I have my authority under the constitution. According to this authority and the constitution, I have to be able to solve the problem. But if we mean it that you do not have any other Syrian who can be a president, no, any Syrian could be a president. We have many Syrians who are eligible to be in that position. You cannot always link the whole country only to one person.

RT: But you are fighting for your country. Do you believe that you are the man who can put an end to the conflict and restore peace?

BA: I have to be the man who can do that and I hope so, but it is not about the power of the President; it is about the whole society. We have to be precise about this. The president cannot do anything without the institutions and without the support of the people. So, the fight now is not a President’s fight; it is Syrians’ fight. Every Syrian is involved in defending his country now.

RT: It is and a lot of civilians are dying as well in the fighting. So, if you were to win this war, how would you reconcile with your people after everything that has happened?

BA: Let’s be precise once again. The problem is not between me and the people; I do not have a problem with the people because the United States is against me and the West is against me and many other Arab countries, including Turkey which is not Arab of course, are against me. If the Syrian people are against me, how can I be here?!

RT: They are not against you

BA: If the whole world, or let us say a big part of the world, including your people, are against you, are you a superman?! You are just a human being. So, this is not logical. It is not about reconciling with the people and it is not about reconciliation between the Syrians and the Syrians; we do not have a civil war. It is about terrorism and the support coming from abroad to terrorists to destabilize Syria. This is our war.

RT: Do you still not believe it is a civil war because I know there are a lot who think that there are terrorist acts which everyone believes take place in Syria, and there are also a lot of sectarian-based conflicts. For example we all heard about the mother who has two sons; one son is fighting for the government forces and the other son is fighting for the rebel forces, how this is not a civil war?

'Assad is completely demonized by the press' – RT’s interviewer

Russia Today



The Syrian conflict is exponentially more complicated than portrayed in the press – and as for President Bashar Assad, he is a well-educated man who has fallen victim to media demonization, says RT’s Sophie Shevardnadze.

RT: You were there, just returned. First of all, he is painted as such an evil, evil man really in the situation, so clean-cut really. What was your impression, first of all?

Sophie Shevardnadze: Of the man, or the situation?

RT: Both. Of the man – is he really who most of the media says he is? And then, of the country, the people.

SS: The first thing that really marked me is that everything is so much more complicated than people portray it to be in the press. In any press, actually. And I will overemphasize that over and over again – it’s way too complicated. As far as Assad goes, I had a chance to talk to him 15 minutes before the interview, and he is completely demonized by the press, because he is a very educated man, he is a very pleasant man. He doesn’t seem to have, you know, this sickness of being a president and everything else. He is a very down-to-earth guy.

The thing that really marked me most is how really much more complicated the situation inside Syria is from what we see in the media, because I talked to people… yes, the country is divided, and even the people who didn’t like Assad before this conflict started are now so scared that fundamentalists will come to power – fundamentalists who are fighting on the side of the Free Syrian Army. And the Syrian people are not about that. And this is like the only secular Arab country that had a lot of different religious groups always living in peace with each other, whether it’s Sunni, or Shia, or Alawis, or Christians – and they’re really scared that if Assad goes, the army will fall apart and then, you know, you’d have these extremist Muslims coming to them and asking them to basically be just like them. And we actually saw a Twitter for the Free Syrian army, and they had the targets, the people that they want to target to kill… Basically, they’re targeting also famous people who don’t want fundamentalists in power. So it’s not just about Assad – I think people feel, whether he goes or stays, it all it can get worse if he goes because it will get… I mean, the terror attacks will continue and the fundamentalists will come to power, so they’re very scared of that.

RT: Did you feel like you were – I assume you took the interview in the presidential palace – that you were in the place of the man who is losing power? SS: No. Once you are in the palace, you don’t really see that. But once you go outside the palace, you obviously see that things are pretty bad, and once, we thought there’s a situation starting to escalate even more, because there were terrorist attacks, let’s say, once every two weeks or once a month in Damascus. Then, we had like two or three terrorist attacks each day, that they were there in the center of the city. And you could just hear the bombings, I mean the rebels and the government forces fighting each other in Damascus suburbs day and night. I would wake up at seven and eight in the morning. Especially for someone who is not a war reporter – I am not used to hearing bombs and falling asleep to the sound of bombs. That really marked me. But people there are used to it, and life goes on – and that really struck me. I think what struck me the most is that there's no way out for the people there. They are in a dead-end situation.

When you walk in those streets, it doesn’t really faze you that you could be targeted or die in a terrorist attack, because that really sort of puts you in a state of cognitive dissonance – because from one hand life goes on, because people really have no choice. I mean, they have nowhere to go, no one gives them visas. Even if they wanted to go, they couldn’t.

Hillary Clinton’s “Democracy” for Syria

Global Research
Bill Van Auken

US imperialism has a long and sordid record of bloody military interventions and interference in the affairs of other countries for the purpose of securing the interests of Wall Street and corporate America.

Ever since William Howard Taft declared that “our little brown brothers” of the Philippines would need “50 to 100 years of close supervision” to develop functioning self-government, these interventions have been justified with assertions of Washington’s unique role in bringing democracy to less fortunate peoples of the world, generally at the point of a gun.

Seldom, however, has this pretense been proclaimed so shamelessly as in the announcement last week by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that Washington had decided to appoint a new leadership for the “Syrian revolution.”

Clinton unceremoniously dismissed the former leadership, the Syrian National Council, a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated outfit that Washington had proclaimed little more than a year ago as the “legitimate representative” of the Syrian people. Now she says they are just a bunch of out-of-touch exiles who haven’t set foot in Syria for decades.

The problem is, Clinton declared, the SNC is insufficiently representative of the Syrian people. So the US State Department has handpicked a new group of individuals and organizations that is to form the basis of a transitional government. “We have recommended names and organizations that we believe should be included in any leadership structure,” Clinton told a press conference in Zagreb, Croatia on October 31.

Here one has a text-book example of democracy “made in the USA,” or, more precisely, neocolonialism.

To qualify for inclusion in Washington’s handpicked roster of “representative” leaders, one must “be on record strongly resisting the efforts by extremists to hijack the Syrian revolution,” Clinton decreed.

The aim is clear. The State Department wants a “respectable” face for the grisly conflict that Washington has fomented in Syria, elevating the pro-US businessman Riad Seif and similar figures as a government in waiting, even as the fighting is being carried out more and more by Al Qaeda-linked Islamist militias receiving covert US backing.

When it comes to hijacking dissent, however, no one can compete with Washington. This is precisely what it has done in Syria, just as it did earlier in Libya.

Having seen two of its longest-standing and most trusted stooges in the region—Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Mubarak—toppled by uprisings of the working masses, Washington decided to seize the initiative by using the “Arab Spring” as a cover for promoting regime-change.

First in Libya, it exploited popular protests and a trumped-up claim that the population of Benghazi was in imminent danger of annihilation as the pretext for launching a US-NATO war to topple Muammar Gaddafi. Now, in Syria, it has helped turn similar protests into a vicious sectarian civil war through which it seeks the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad.

In Syria, US imperialism has relied more heavily on proxy forces, including Islamist foreign fighters, which have been aided and armed by US allies in the region, principally Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, with the CIA orchestrating the operation from a newly created station in southern Turkey.