Meanwhile, Sky News’ Dominic Waghorn, on December 13, 2016, referred to Western and Saudi-backed Salafist terrorists in the city who began flooding into Syria in 2011-12, as a “popular uprising against the Assad regime”.

On the same day, commentator Brian Becker cited a New York Times headline which described the driving out by Syrian forces of al-Qaeda and their affiliates from eastern Aleppo as “A Complete Meltdown of Humanity.”

UN Genera Secretary Ban-Ki Moon conceded that the report which the New York Times had based its headlines were unverified. But that didn’t prevent the paper from publishing them predicated on the regime change imperatives of Western governments’ that have subsequently been put on hold.

As one commentator put it:

“Articles like that in the New York Times, express the frustrations and anger of those in Washington and elsewhere who are angry with the failure of the regime change agenda.”

Major blow

The anti-Syria propaganda campaign was dealt a major blow on December 20, 2016 after it was reported that the Egyptian police had arrested five people for fabricating images in a factory in Cairo that would be passed off as scenes of suffering in Aleppo for the purpose of molding public opinion. The suspects revealed that they had shot numerous scenes in the city that were intended to be spread on social media as if they were filmed from Aleppo.

The subsequent controversy is not that fake images and the staging of suffering is unique to Syria, but rather that there is demand for them within the corridors of imperial power and their proxies who have shared vested interests.

Patrick Cockburn made the point that many of the pictures and films allegedly coming out of Aleppo never show armed groups, even though a war zone is what is supposedly depicted. He points out that there is a lack of knowledge about the provenance of these images and that there is every chance they are the work of professional PR companies and opposition media specialists funded by foreign governments.

Cockburn relates how a journalist of partly Syrian extraction in Beirut told him how he [the Syrian journalist] had been offered $17,000 a month to work for such an opposition media PR project backed by the British government.

Suspicions that surround UK-US motives in relation to Syria are not restricted to commentators on the left of the political spectrum. Peter Hitchens, on December 18, 2016, for example, wrote:

“In the past few days we have been bombarded with colourful reports of events in eastern Aleppo, written or transmitted by people in Beirut (180 miles away and in another country), or even London (2,105 miles away and in another world). There have, we are told, been massacres of women and children, people have been burned alive.

The sources for these reports are so-called ‘activists’. Who are they? As far as I know, there was not one single staff reporter for any Western news organisation in eastern Aleppo last week. Not one.

This is for the very good reason that they would have been kidnapped and probably murdered. The zone was ruled without mercy by heavily armed Osama Bin Laden sympathisers, who were bombarding the west of the city with powerful artillery. That is why you never see pictures of armed males in eastern Aleppo, just beautifully composed photographs of handsome young unarmed men lifting wounded children from the rubble, with the light just right.”

Hitchens continued:

“For reasons that I find it increasingly hard to understand or excuse, much of the British media refer to these Al Qaeda types coyly as ‘rebels’… But if they were in any other place in the world, including Birmingham or Belmarsh, they would call them extremists, jihadis, terrorists and fanatics. One of them, Abu Sakkar, famously cut out and sank his teeth into the heart of a fallen enemy, while his comrades cheered.”

Interwoven web

The above illustrates the existence of a complex interwoven web that connects the various government departments, NGOs, opposition groups and activists with the corporate media who facilitate and amplify negative stories in relation to Syria in order to help achieve the ultimate objective of regime change in the country.

The evidence that the British Foreign Office and other governments are pursuing such a policy by gaining public acceptance through propaganda that “demonises the Syrian government and glorifies the armed opposition as essential to achieving that goal”, is compelling.

Dr Barbara McKenzie highlights how the British foreign office, working with the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office and the Prime Minister’s Office formed contracts companies for the express purpose of creating ‘targeted information’ in relation to the war on Syria.

In effect, the British government is funding a comprehensive top of the range advertising campaign to promote sectarian extremists in Syria who function as units of al Qaeda and ISIS. This involves the production of videos, photos, military reports, radio broadcasts, print products and social media posts branded with the logos of fighting groups by contractors hired out by the Foreign Office and overseen by the MOD.

Lack of scepticism

One might reasonably assume that the recent history of UK government deception in relation, for example, to the issue of Iraq weapons of mass destruction, would have been the wake-up call needed for the mass media to question the veracity of government claims. Not so.

Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian, wrote a day after the alleged April 4 Syrian gas attack: “We almost certainly know who did it. Every sign points to the regime of Bashar al-Assad.” What these ‘signs’ are were not specified in the article.

Even the usually cautious Guardian journalist George Monbiot appears to be eager for regime change. On Twitter (April 7, 2017) the writer claimed: “We can be 99% sure the chemical weapons attack came from Syrian govt.”

Three days later, media analysts Media Lens challenged Monbiot by citing the views of former UN weapons inspectors, Hans Blix and Scott Ritter, both of whom contradicted Monbiot’s assertion. “What do you know that Hans Blix and Scott Ritter don’t know?”, inquired the analysts. Monbiot failed to reply.

Apparently it hadn’t occurred to these, and practically all the other mainstream journalists (with the notable exception of Peter Oborne and Peter Hitchens), that Assad’s motive for undertaking such an attack was weak. As investigative reporter Robert Parry, who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories, argued:

“Since Assad’s forces have gained a decisive upper-hand over the rebels, why would he risk stirring up international outrage at this juncture? On the other hand, the desperate rebels might view the horrific scenes from the chemical-weapons deployment as a last-minute game-changer.”

Then there has been the willingness of the media to cite what is clearly an untrustworthy source, ‘British doctor’, Shajul Islam. Despite having been struck off the British medical register for misconduct in March 2016, the media have quoted or shown Islam in their reports where he has been depicted as a key witness to the alleged gas attack and hence helped augment the unsubstantiated media narrative. In 2012 Shajul Islam was charged with terror offences in a British court.

While the media are prone to readily cite unreliable sources, they largely ignore highly credible ones. The US physicist and missile expert Theodore Postol, emeritus professor at MIT, provided a detailed critique of an April, 2017 US intelligence report of the alleged chemical attack. Postol’s critique was ignored by the vast majority of the Western mass media.

Professor Postol argued that physical evidence strongly suggested the delivery system for the nerve gas was a mortar shell placed on the ground, not a bomb dropped from a warplane. The professor added: “The situation is that the White House has produced a false, obviously misleading and amateurish report.”

Elaborating on his argument in a television interview, the MIT professor said:

“The US report, quite frankly, doesn’t meet the laugh test. As an American citizen I want to know who signed it off….I think this is an indication that there is something extremely problematic in the American national system with regard to the use of intelligence.”

Postol added:

“It indicates a willingness on the part of high level people in the White House to distort and to use intelligence claims that are false to make political points and political arguments….I think this report was almost certainly politically-motivated… This is a serious and intolerable situation.”

The inability of mainstream journalists to undertake basic fact-checking illuminated by the examples described, reinforce the veracity of a respected German journalist who, in March, 2016 claimed that corporate journalists are “educated to lie, to betray, and not to tell the truth to the public.”

But more than that, it amounts to a stark admission that the corruption at the heart of the elite media and political establishment is systemic. As Mark Doran on Twitter put it: “Our corrupt politics, our international crime, and our ‘free media’ form a seamless whole.”

The goal of this consolidation of power is to secure yet another middle east resource grab.

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