Fallony

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By Daniel Margrain

It’s credit to the Daily Mail for leading with their report about the leaked dossier concerning Alexander Blackman, the Royal Marine serving life for murder. The dossier contains crucial evidence withheld from Alexander Blackman’s court martial into the killing of a mortally wounded Taliban insurgent in Afghanistan.

Military chiefs solely blamed the seargent for the killing. However, the report into the incident says that Blackman’s over-stretched unit was being pushed to be too aggressive, his senior officer was not prepared for the demands of the war zone and that there were signs that Blackman’s unit was cracking up. All these things, the leaked report says, were missed by commander’s.

If not for the investigative work of the Daily Mail who unearthed these details, none of the MOD’s censoring of the admission of command failings in Helmand province would have come to light. What the Mail revealed, in other words, is the fact that the MOD conducted a report into their own actions and put a black line through anything that didn’t make them look good.

It’s report said that the supervision of the commanding officer where Blackman and his men were based was insufficient to identify a number of warning signs that could have indicated that they were showing evidence of moral regression, psychological strain and fatigue. I think you and I would show evidence of moral regression if somebody was shooting at us while we were at work.

The Mail says that this shows that officers were partly responsible for the extreme state that Blackman was in when he pulled the trigger. The report is now going to form a major plank of his battle for justice which was debated in Parliament two days ago. The Mail’s discovery of the full executive summary of the report was followed by minsters’ caving in to demands from Blackman’s lawyers to have confidential access to all its 50 pages. Who is the MOD protecting?

It’s not for the benefit of the country that this report was blacked out. It’s surely for the benefit of pen-pushers in the MOD. “Blackman and his troops were at breaking point”, says the Mail after a “tour from hell in Hellmand province that had seen comrades tortured and killed.” But the Mail investigation discovered that Blackman’s court martial was blocked from hearing the truth about these mitigating circumstances. Had this not been the case, he might of faced a manslaughter charge instead of murder.

The executive summary of the Navy’s report into the shooting that was leaked to the Mail is marked “official-sensitive”. It lays bare how commanders were blind to the psychological strain and fatigue endured by Blackman and his men. The fact that the damning conclusion is blotted out with censors’ black ink illustrates how the UK government refuse to acknowledge that there are any systemic problems within the corridors of power. On the contrary, they have shifted criticism towards how the leak got into the hands of the media in the first place.

Meanwhile, in response to a question from Green Party MP Caroline Lucas about the number of airstrikes undertaken ostensibly against ISIL by the British over the past year. Fallon said the estimated number of ISIL fighters killed as a result of UK strikes from September 2014 to 31 August 2015 is around 330. “This figure is highly approximate, ”he said, not least given the absence of UK ground troops in a position to observe the effects of strike activity.” He added that he believed that no civilians had been injured or killed by such strikes. 

This announcement follows the extrajudicial murder of two British citizens in Syria justified on the highly implausible grounds that the alleged terrorists presented an imminent threat to the population in Britain thousands of miles away. It’s hence an absurdity that the government acted in self-defense. What Fallon’s announcement and the conviction of Blackman for murder highlight is a major contradiction.

Michael Fallon effectively admits that the British government doesn’t have the faintest idea how many people have been killed by British airstrikes in the year up to 31 August 2015. If he doesn’t know how many have been killed, it follows that he doesn’t know who has been killed and in what circumstances. Therefore he is unable to conclude, as he did, that it’s his belief that “no civilians had been injured or killed by such strikes”.

Logically, it’s only possible to claim you are under imminent threat from terrorists if you are able to identify the nature of the said threat and the only way to do that is to be able to identify those who are allegedly threatening you. How then, can the government claim self defense under such vague circumstances? Dropping bombs from a great height in order to supposedly ‘target’ terrorists can never be precise despite the propaganda claims to the contrary. Killing in this way is necessarily indiscriminate.

How can it be justified that officers’ who were partly responsible for the extreme state of mind of one of their underlings and a foreign secretary who oversees them all, get a free pass for murder (in terms of the latter, mass murder), while the guy at the bottom who pulled the trigger as a result of the actions of the said officers that led to his conviction, gets life imprisonment?

It’s reasonable to assume that there are certain circumstances in which somebody on the battlefield who is showing evidence of moral regression, psychological strain and fatigue and whose life would almost always be under imminent threat could be justified in killing an enemy combatant. But it’s impossible to envisage the mitigating circumstances by which it could be justified for others higher up the chain of command who oversee or give orders to somebody else to press a button on a computer screen in order to release bombs from a great height that would, by their very nature, kill large amounts of innocent people indiscriminately within the vicinity of the intended “target”.

Cameron defended the imprisonment of Blackman prior to an intended visit to see the Afghan president, So it would appear that Blackman is the political fall guy in this sorry saga whilst his friend, Fallon, gets off the hook. Blackman was prosecuted so why not Fallon?

Disrespectful

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By Daniel Margrain

Jeremy Corbyn’s apparent hesitancy to appear at the annual Remembrance Sunday commemorations at the cenotaph in Whitehall seems to be his way of making a stand against the disrespectful way the government treats the military. But ironically he is the one the establishment is accusing of being disrespectful.

The real disrespect would seem to me to be the way the government send our troops into harms way with Land Rovers that don’t have the proper armour to protect them from road-side explosives or sending them into battle with communication devices that don’t work, with guns that jam in the sand, with boots that melt in the heat, and with food that’s so inedible that troops are forced to trade anything they have with the American’s so as to get a decent meal.

I would also suggest that it’s disrespectful for “our boys” having to get food sent over to places like Afghanistan and Iraq by their families or having to buy bits of their own kit because the MOD don’t provide enough of it.

I would suggest that it’s disrespectful to send soldiers to war and then ignore their suffering when they got back from duty injured.

I would say it’s disrespectful for troops to have to go abroad in order to get prosthetic legs because the substandard ones they get on the NHS hurt too much.

I would say it’s disrespectful to insist that the injured pay thousands of pounds of their own money to get their limbs from abroad only to find that when they got back to Britain, the NHS refuse to treat them because they had private medical work undertaken.

Back in 2007, the British Armed Forces Federation, said the Military Covenant which says soldiers should always expect fair treatment for the rights they forgo isn’t being upheld and is “now a dead letter”. And the Royal British Legion, known for its poppy appeal, launched a campaign demanding that the government upholds the covenant and provides the armed forces and their families with proper care in return for asking them to risk their lives in making the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

I would say that was pretty disrespectful too.

A former soldier, Philip Wesley, launched an attack on David Cameron for failing to support war veterans. He said to his MP that Cameron was happy to send soldiers into battle but has given them nothing back. Wesley said “Since leaving the army, it’s been a life of food banks, low paid work, soaring energy bills and expensive housing.”

He spent five years in the army including two tours of Afghanistan but had to leave in 2012 to look after his little daughter. On returning to his home city of Birmingham, he found it was impossible to get a council house to live in. “I was laughed at”, he said. “I waited two years for social housing. In the end the British Legion gave me the money for a deposit so I could rent privately.”

I would say that was disrespectful.

Also, this year the Tories were accused of letting down forces’ veterans who hit hard times and ended up in prison. A Tory-led review into the issue failed to find solutions to prevent people turning to crime on leaving the forces. Labour’s shadow justice minister Dan Jarvis, an ex Para, was ditched as an adviser to the inquiry and said the “report was barely worth the paper it was written on”. He continued, “Our veteran’s have been thoroughly let down.”

The civil liberties group, Liberty, have recorded so many cases of mistreatment of forces personnel that they have an entire campaign dedicated to upholding the rights of the armed forces. Why should that be necessary?

I would say all of that was pretty disrespectful and failed miserably to support our troops.

But it seems that the media are more interested in the fact that Jeremy Corbyn didn’t do the top button up of his shirt up and didn’t sing a dumb song about a woman who has enriched herself through the arms industry.

Labour’s shadow Cabinet is more representative of Britain than the Tory Cabinet. So why is Corbyn being demonized?

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By Daniel Margrain

Does it matter that Labour’s new shadow cabinet has minimal experience in the posts that they have been handed? Does it matter that the Tory cabinet is overly represented by millionaires? Does it matter that they have no experience of ordinary people’s lives or do we just trust their best judgement?

Jeremy Corbyn, who yesterday selected his shadow cabinet, said he was going to make it 50 percent women. He did better than that by making it 51 percent. But one would never have got that impression after having listened to the continual carping throughout the day by the Tories and their metropolitan elite mouthpieces’ in the media.

In media interview after media interview, journalists emphasised the negative as opposed to the positive. This forced Corbyn on to the defensive. It should be noted that for his first nine years as Prime Minister, Tony Blair appointed NO women to any of the “Great offices of state”. He also appointed less women to his shadow cabinet and cabinet than Corbyn. But contextual analysis is not permitted within media circles. It’s true that we did hear Corbyn briefly outline his rationale but the media tone throughout was one of incredulity as opposed to sober analysis.

The suggestion was that none of the important jobs Corbyn had allocated went to women. But the shadow cabinet jobs within, for example, health and education, are arguably far more important for our society than a post like Foreign Secretary is. Corbyn and McDonnell alluded to this in the interviews that they did. The media failed to mention that, unlike Corbyn’s cabinet, the Tory cabinet does not reflect British society one iota. For instance, 55 percent of the latter went to Oxbridge but only 0.5 percent of the general public did. Furthermore, 45 percent of the Tory cabinet went to private schools but only 7 percent of the general public did.

Despite the fact that women make up 51 percent of the general population, within the Tory cabinet the figure is just 29 percent. This contrasts starkly with amount of women in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet where the figure is representative of the population of women within the country as a whole. In terms of ethnic composition, only one person in the Tory cabinet is from an ethnic minority background representing just 4.5 percent of the total. This compares with an ethnic minority population of 13 percent within the country as a whole.

There’s not much I agree with Hilary Benn on, but on this issue he was absolutely correct when, in response to a journalist’s criticism of Corbyn’s so-called failure to appoint a sufficient amount of women to top positions said, “It depends how one defines what a ‘top post’ is”. Indeed. The Tories’ emphasis on conflating the notion of status and power with war and finance, as opposed to say, health and education, is indicative of where the priorities of both the government and their echo chambers’ within the media lie.

It’s telling that the former jobs are regarded by the government as “important” whereas the latter are somehow deemed as being of less importance. The duplicity and double standards within the Tory ranks and their failure to look themselves in the mirror, is simply breathtaking. But more importantly, it’s the media’s lack of any critique that’s the most breathtaking aspect of all.

Why we’re bombing Iraq and Syria: Obama and Cameron clear up any confusion

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You may be confused about why we are bombing Iraq and Syria. So we will make ourselves very clear.

We support the Iraqi government in the fight against ISIS.

We don’t like ISIS, but ISIS has been supported by Saudi Arabia, whom we do like, and Saudi Arabia is now supporting us in bombing ISIS.

We don’t like President Assad in Syria. We support the fight against him, but not ISIS, which is also fighting against him.

We don’t like Iran, but Iran supports the Iraqi government against ISIS.

So some of our friends support our enemies and some of our enemies are our friends, and some of our enemies are fighting against our other enemies whom we want to lose, but we don’t want our enemies who are fighting our enemies to win.

If the people we want to defeat are defeated, they might be replaced by people we like even less.

And all this was started by us invading Iraq to drive out terrorists who weren’t there until we went to drive them out.

We hope you now understand.

Originally posted by Audrey Bailey

 

Corbyn’s Victory

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By Gilad Atzmon

Jeremy Corbyn’s victory yesterday is a clear message to the British political world. You politicians had better start listening to the people, otherwise you will be out.

But his victory goes has ramifications beyond British politics. In recent weeks an alliance made up of British Jewish leadership (BOD, Jewish Chronicle etc.) and heavily supported by their caretakers within the British establishment, have waged a brutal yet counter effective campaign against Corbyn.  The campaign abused and slandered the last gentleman in British politics and probably the nicest man in the parliament.

Prior to the election, as it became clear that Corbyn was well ahead of his rivals and destined to become the next Labour leader, the Jewish and Zionist media used all of their tricks to destroy him. The Labour leadership contest was subjected to the full range of ‘Jewish sensitivities’: Corbyn was associated with and then accused of Arab and Muslim ‘terror’, ‘treason’ and ‘holocaust denial.’  The British media failed to discuss Corbyn’s politics, his anti austerity plan or even his take on foreign affairs.  But, miraculously, none of that damaged Corbyn’s campaign. Quite the opposite, the more dirt they slung in his direction, the more people rushed to support him.

Before it happened, would anyone have believed that Corbyn would survive the ‘holocaust denial’ slur, or his supposed comradeship with Hamas and Hezbollah? Corbyn’s achievement yesterday was a political earthquake that delivered a clear message to the Jews and their Sabbos Goyim — beware, the Brits are going through a transition. They don’t buy into the primacy of Jewish suffering anymore, they have had enough of it and no sane person can blame them.

The hundreds of thousands of young people who joined the dysfunctional Labour party wanted to make a change. They are frustrated with austerity, Zio-con wars, the Jewish Lobby, the loss of manufacturing and the cost of education. Those who joined the Labour party are patriots as is Corbyn. They want to live in a country with a prospect of a future – a place where justice, equality, peace and tolerance correspond with reality instead of existing only as empty political slogans.

Those who continue to convince themselves that Corbyn is ‘unelectable’ may want to refresh their memories. Just three months ago the same Corbyn was unknown to most Brits and his candidacy was portrayed in the media as a radical left stunt. Yesterday the man won an unprecedented victory and proved to be, by far, the most popular political figure in Britain for generations. But in truth, it doesn’t really matter whether Corbyn makes it to 10 Downing Street. At the moment, this country badly needs a real feisty opposition. And I have no doubt that Corbyn is the right man in the right place.

The above article was originally posted by Gilad Atzmon on September 13, 2015 

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

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By Daniel Margrain

The momentous nature of Jeremy Corbyn’s landslide victory should not be underestimated. It has to go down as one of the most sensational and politically earth shattering events in modern British political history – the impacts of which are sending tremors throughout the entire establishment. After the announcement was made that Corbyn had won, it was obvious that the smiles, handshakes and applause of the vast majority of the calculating and opportunistic labour elite were as a fake as Blair’s claim that Saddam was about to attack Britain within 45 minutes.

A pointer to the overwhelming inspiration underlying Corbynism was the fact that no less than 160,000 volunteers who seemingly emerged out of nowhere, were recruited to the cause. The grass roots support that Corbyn engendered – by far the biggest of its kind in history – was almost certainly the catalyst that propelled him to victory. Although the activists were mainly young people, they were by no means exclusively so. In fact the demographic was wide ranging.

Corbyn’s straight talking, lucidity, and unambiguous commitment to a programme of anti-austerity brought many older activists who had felt betrayed by the direction the party had gone under Blair, back into the fold. To put Corbyn’s victory into context, he secured a higher percentage of votes than Blair got in 1994  Even more significant, the 554,272 votes he achieved was more than double Blair’s, and no less than 76 per cent of them actually voted, a higher percentage turnout than Blair received.

This would indicate that Corbynmania is no flash in the pan, but on the contrary, represents a new optimism that things really can be better given the right circumstances. Decades where nothing happens can all of a sudden transform into the possibility where decades happen all within the blink of an eye. Neoliberal ideology, which for many was perceived to have been fixed and immutable has, with the rise of Corbynism ,the potential to be swept away.

The excitement that surrounds Corbyn in 2015, therefore, marks a more significant change within the labour movement than the superficial controversy of ‘third way’ Blairism in 1994. Blair’s subsequent general election victory in 1997 cemented the ideological coming together of the Red-Tory axis that this writer hopes Corbynism will shatter to the dustbin of history. What is certain is that September 12, 2015 will be remembered as the day in British political history that Blairism officially died.

When Corbyn was first nominated, he was seen by his opponents both inside and outside the party as a joke candidate. But an indication of how they are now taking him seriously is the extent to which the mainstream media are unanimously attacking him. The Tories, who apparently voted for him because they thought it would enhance their future electoral prospects, are the ones now claiming he is a danger to national security.

But the more they attack, the greater is his support. Justice Secretary, Michael Gove, Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, Prime Minister David Cameron, Chancellor, Gideon Osborne and MP, Priti Patel have all made exactly the same public statements attacking Corbyn. Clearly, all of them have read the same memo issued from Whitehall. The fear mongering and demonizing propaganda, intended for news bulletin soundbites, is so transparent that it’s comical.

The Tories got this tactic from the Republican Party in America who repeat the same propaganda over and over again hoping that some of it sticks which it invariably does. Of course, the media play their part by uncritically reporting it. An example was the way Fox News repeated the lie that President Obama was a Muslim who was born outside of America.

The phrase repeated in the UK media is that “hard-left” Jeremy Corbyn is a danger to the security of our country, economy and every UK family. In the interest of consistency, why don’t the media who describe security-risk, Corbyn as “hard-left”, apply the euphemism “hard-right” to Cameron whose illegal wars greatly increase the risk of domestic terrorist activity? Gove said:

Jeremy Corbyn’s victory is a deadly serious demand from her majesty’s opposition that we put the future of this country in the hands of the MP for Islington North…There can be no room for doubt or ambiguity about what Jeremy Corbyn would do if he formed the next government. He would pose a direct threat to the security of our country, the security of our economy and the security of every family…. He would weaken our defenses and make Britain less safe. By choosing Jeremy Corbyn over his rivals, the party have now endorsed deserting our allies like Norway. He proposes leaving the NATO alliance just as the growing threat from Islamist extremists requires international solidarity.

Or to put it another way, Corbyn wants Britain to stop trailing after America to launch another war that got us into this mess in the first place. Gove continues:

“Corbyn would also reduce our armed forces further unilaterally, scrapping our nuclear deterrent whilst terrorists and state sponsors of terror seek to develop nuclear weapons of their own.”

Just think about that for a moment. In the unlikely event that terrorists get hold of a nuclear weapon, they are not going to put it on the back of a rocket and send it from where they are living because they will be easily detectable from space and consequently we would be able to respond in kind. Terrorists are insane but they are not stupid.

What they are more likely to do is Fed Ex some kind of small device in the hope that it would be undetectable which, therefore, totally mitigates against the effectiveness of a state like Britain to be able to use nuclear weapons as a targeted response.

Gove then goes on to criticise Corbyn for his apparent economic incompetency by suggesting that his policy of printing money would be inflationary, overlooking the fact that his own government flooded the bankers with money. The stated aim was that the banks would lend the money back to us with interest so that they would make more profit. But the bankers went one better than that by using the money to buy shares in their own companies thereby increasing the value of those shares and hence the amount of bonuses they were able to award themselves. Conversely, Corbyn’s stated aim is to give the money to the people as a means of generating growth.

Gove then misquotes Corbyn as saying that the death of Osama Bin Laden was a tragedy. But what Gove failed to mention, was that Corbyn was not describing the death as a tragedy, but the fact that Bin Laden wasn’t put on trial, imprisoned and therefore punished for longer.

Will there be a Blairite coup to unseat citizen Corbyn?

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By Daniel Margrain

Fantastic result. Now the hard work begins to purge the party hierarchy of the pro-war, pro-big business red Tory Blairites. The opinions of a reinvigorated party membership who propelled Corbyn into the spotlight will be respected so long as Corbyn remains leader. I heard Ken Livingston on LBC say that under Corbyn the party will unify and there will be little signs of any attempts to undermine him.

No sooner had Corbyn’s victory based on clear and unambiguous principles been announced, then a Shadow Frontbencher resigned in protest over those principles. This was shortly followed with threats to resign by other “modernising” Frontbencher’s who vowed to do so on the basis that Corbyn refuses to moderate his “extreme” policies.

Of course, not being a friend of Israel, supporting the nationalisation of the railways and utilities, opposing nuclear weapons and war, opposing the growing wealth gap and supporting the need for a massive affordable house building programme that benefits the mass of the population, are all extreme measures, but bailing out bankers that benefits nobody, is not.

How stupid can Corbyn supporters be?

According to the Daily Mail, among those refusing to serve in his team are current shadow chancellor Chris Leslie, shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt, shadow communities secretary Emma Reynolds and shadow defence secretary Vernon Coaker. Others include shadow transport secretary Michael Dugher, shadow chief secretary to the Treasury Shabana Mahmood, shadow international development secretary Mary Creagh and shadow Cabinet Office minister Lucy Powell.

I’m sure the Tories will welcome these unscrupulous careerists with open arms. It will be interesting to see how the triangulated Tory-lite views of the vast majority of designer suited robots in the hall where the result was announced who follow to the letter the scripts of their paymasters and who believe nothing whatsoever in the views espoused by their leader, can be reconciled with Corbyn’s own long-standing principled outlook.

It’s precisely these kinds of principles that has resulted in the regurgitation of the official/media meme which criticises Corbyn for voting against his party 500 times. This is represented as disloyalty. The notion that he might have voted against the Tories, while most of his Blairite colleagues, many of whom are war criminals, voted with them, is quietly forgotten.

Never before have I witnessed such a disconnect between the beliefs of the labour hierarchy on the one hand and those of its leader who carries with him the aspirations and hopes of the people who voted for him on the other. This is not the kind of euphemistic and disingenuous understanding of “aspiration” trotted out by Blairites in which neoliberal economic policy allows the super rich to get even richer, but one in which the basis of policy can give rise to the potential for everybody to get where they want without demonizing those who for whatever reason, don’t.

My fear is that the gap between the ideology represented by the elite within the hierarchy of the party and the multitude of its members is so vast that the void is irreconcilable unless the party is purged of this clique. I suspect that something will have to give as the party moves forward but we will see.

As I type this, Corbyn is protesting on a rally about the terrible treatment of refugees created by Cameron and Blair’s wars. Could, you dear reader, have ever imagined any of his predecessors post-Michael Foot doing that?

The idea that a highly principled leader of a party who espouses peace and reconciliation at every given opportunity, can reconcile two diametrically opposing forces seems to me to be a bridge too far. I hope I’m proven wrong.

Labour are still a bunch of crooks

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UPDATE

36,000 people voted for swizzler Tessa Jowell to be Labour candidate for London’s mayor. If you consider the facts below, that says something very scarey about a substantial portion of Labour Party membership, even if she didn’t win.

The fact that it is still a serious possibility that a substantial number of Labour members will vote for Tessa Jowell to be the party’s candidate for London Mayor – which Labour electorate includes the new membership – should be a serious jolt to anybody who believes the Labour Party is transformed. The Labour Party is still full of crooks, and Tessa Jowell is one of the biggest crooks.

As I wrote in 2009:

Tessa Jowell actively participated in the laundering of the corrupt payments from Silvio Berlusconi, given to her husband David Mills in return for false testimony in court to cover up some of Berlusconi’s endless crooked dealings. Tessa Jowell participated as a full partner in the three time remortgaging of her home, paying off the mortgage with cash and then remortgaging. She has stated that there was “Nothing unusual” in this.

Most people would think it was very unusual to be able to pay off a large mortgage with cash at all. To do it twice and remortgage again each time would strike most of us as very weird indeed.

Tessa Jowell claimed she did not read the mortgage documents before signing them or know where the money was coming from. David Mills was eventually acquitted on a technicality by the Italian legal system, but it is not in dispute that the money came from Berlusconi or that he lied in court. Jowell claimed she did not read the documents and had no idea where the money came from or what her husband was doing. She then “left” him and went through a sham “separation” which the whole London establishment knew was a fake, (but the media obligingly did not publish), until the heat died down and the couple could get together again.

Revelations about Labour crookedness constantly make you gasp, such as the meetings Cherie Blair set up with Hillary Clinton on behalf of the Qatari royal family. Blair’s free holidays on Berlusconi are well remembered. Labour can claim that the Corbyn election is a defeat for Blairism and a new leaf. But if today Jowell gets more than a derisory vote, we will all know Labour are still a bunch of crooks at heart.

Article written by Craig Murray and published on his blog on September 11, 2015.

Is the BBCs Ian Pannell complicit in crude anti-Syrian propaganda?

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By Daniel Margrain

This is Ian Pannell’s latest BBC report on Syrian chemical weapon use (September 10) allegedly by the Syrian government. Apparently this is yet more evidence of chemical attacks.

I want to declare from the outset that I am not a conspiracy theorist. That’s not to say, historically, there have not been genuine conspiracies’ undertaken by the state against adversaries that have served the political agendas of their protagonists.These have come in many guises from false flag attacks such as the Russian apartment bombings in 1999, the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 and the nurse Nayirah affair in 1990.

After having studied the contents of Robert Stuart’s blog in which he has meticulously and tenaciously examined the September 30, 2013 edition of the BBC Panorama documentary, ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ and other related BBC news reports by presenter Ian Pannell and cameraman Darren Conway, Stuart has attempted, without much success, to negotiate around its Orwellian complaints procedure.

Pannell’s reports’ appeared peak time on BBC TV a few days after the attack in Ghouta and were seemingly intended as a propaganda tool in the prelude to war. After having studied Pannell’s work and Stuart’s detailed analysis, it’s impossible to disagree with journalist Jonathan Cook who said that we, the news consumers, “are being constantly spun by the media machine that’s the modern equivalent of “soma”, the drug in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World that its citizens were fed to keep them docile and happy.” 

What the Panorama documentary and related reports actually illustrate, in line with Chomsky and Herman’s Propaganda Model, is the media’s apparent ability to be able to keep many of us in a state of perpetual hypnosis. Stuart contends that sequences filmed by BBC staff and others at Atareb Hospital, Aleppo on 26 August 2013 purporting to show the aftermath of an incendiary bomb attack on a school in Urm Al-Kubra are largely, if not entirely, staged.

Scenes from the documentary were shown as part of a brief BBC News at Ten broadcast report by Pannell and Conway which contained harrowing scenes of teenage boys and young men, their skin apparently in tatters, racing into what the report describes as “a basic hospital funded by handouts” to be treated for burns. In one particularly disturbing scene a tableau of young men writhe, drool and groan, seemingly in great distress.

My first impression after having seen the film was that it was totally contrived and staffed by actors. What initially led me to this conclusion were the actions of the central figure, Mohammed Asi, who looked directly into the camera for several moments before raising his arm, at which point the group around him instantly became animated before moaning in unison.

Many other anomalies and contradictions too numerous to mention here in detail were evident throughout the Panorama documentary and the related reports’. These included conflicting and contradictory accounts, a “victim” who appeared to be grinning, implausible demeanours’ of alleged victims, questions as to the authenticity of the alleged burns to victims by experienced doctors, apparent choreographed behaviour, unconvincing injuries and testimonies’ that challenge the BBC version of events.

But perhaps the most controversial aspect of all was the participation of Dr. Rola Hallam who appeared anonymously to report on the aftermath of another attack in Syria. Her emotional call for humanitarian intervention in the shape of bombs drew parallels with “Nurse Nayirah“‘s lies to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in the run up to the US vote on the 1990-91 Gulf War.

But arguably most significantly of all, in a report headlined BBC Crew returns to Aleppo on 30 September 2013, rehashed footage from the original programme was aired again. The BBC explains “In a special edition, Panorama travels with British doctors inside Syria to exclusively reveal the devastating impact of the war on children caught in the conflict”  It is a heart-rending report of the suffering of the Syrian people, made so as to demonise the Syrian government.

Close inspection of the two different versions reveals that there were actually two or more takes of this scene.  The easiest tell is the arm position of the man in the fluorescent jacket next to the doctor.

If Dr Rola was as “overwhelmed” as the video claims, why take time off to do multiple almost identical takes of an interview?

The BBC portrayed this as a live action piece with casualties being rushed in. But clearly this is nonsense given that it must of been rehearsed because several takes were done. Furthermore, nobody else in the courtyard is wearing a face mask. One would have thought that if the doctor had time for various takes she would also have time to take her mask off to talk to camera.

Both Panorama programmes talk of two British female doctors, “volunteers for the Charity Hand-in-Hand-for Syria“, suspected to be Dr Rola Hallam and Dr Saleyha Ahsan. The BBC did not mention the backgrounds of either of the “charitable volunteers”. Dr Rola’s connections to the SNO and FSA and the fact that she was shilling for military action under medical/charitable/ altruistic volunteer credentials, all of which the BBC clearly understood but deliberately witheld from the viewer.

Her father is Dr Mousa al-Kurdi, a senior SNO member – who actually taught Assad at university; the Dep leader of the FSA is Col Malik al-Kurdi. Her on-site colleague is a former Captain in the British Army Medical Corps. There is plenty of other clear corroborating evidence of her support for the rebellion too.

All of it was hidden by the BBC who gave the impression she is just an ordinary doctor with selfless humanitarian concerns and plays to the Western interventionist agenda perfectly.

The BBC has not addressed any of the legitimate issues raised. All of the anomalies and contradictions call into question the authenticity of the entire alleged attack. George Galloway said:

The Bush-Blair Corporation as it became known leading up to the Iraq war has lost almost all journalistic integrity. A full inquiry must be launched into why the BBC used a piece of material that was not just wrong but was falsified…for the purpose of propelling our country into war. That’s not what the British public pays its TV license for so that it can be tricked into a war

It’s my view that it’s probable some kind of chemical attack did indeed take place but in a different location to the one depicted but the BBC embellished, fabricated and falsified the aftermath for propaganda purposes. The claims made throughout were that the Assad regime was responsible for the alleged attack despite the fact that there is no evidence supporting the assertion that he was responsible for the chemical attacks in Ghouta in the suburbs of Damascus on September 16 prior to the BBC documentary.

What both Pannell’s latest BBC report and Jonathan Rugman’s recent piece for Channel 4 News before that highlight, is that once again, the British public is being conditioned for war. Two years ago, when the majority of MPs voted against intervention in Syria, would seem to suggest that MPs were sensitive to the views of a highly sceptical and hostile public. But Cameron’s cynical exploitation of the little boy found washed up dead on a Turkish beach, might change all that.

Daniel Bethlehem, ‘The Propaganda Model’ and drones.

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By Daniel Margrain

In their book ‘Manufacturing Consent The Political Economy of the Mass Media’ (Pantheon, 1988), Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky set out their “propaganda model of media control” to examine the structural factors that lead to systematic behaviour and performance patterns within the media that are largely predicated on restricted assumptions and the dependence on an uncritical use of elite information sources helpful to elite interests.

In identifying these “structural factors”, Herman and Chomsky list five news “filters” through which “money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public” (p.2).

Herman says:

“The crucial structural factors derive from the fact that the dominant media are firmly imbedded in the market system. They are profit-seeking businesses, owned by very wealthy people (or other companies); they are funded largely by advertisers who are also profit-seeking entities, and who want their ads to appear in a supportive selling environment. The media are also dependent on government and major business firms as information sources, and both efficiency and political considerations, and frequently overlapping interests, cause a certain degree of solidarity to prevail among the government, major media, and other corporate businesses.

“Government and large non-media business firms are also best positioned (and sufficiently wealthy) to be able to pressure the media with threats of withdrawal of advertising or TV licenses, libel suits, and other direct and indirect modes of attack. The media are also constrained by the dominant ideology, which heavily featured anticommunism before and during the Cold War era, and was mobilized often to prevent the media from criticizing attacks on small states labelled communist. 

“These factors are linked together, reflecting the multi-levelled capability of powerful business and government entities and collectives (e.g., the Business Roundtable; U.S. Chamber of Commerce; industry lobbies and front groups) to exert power over the flow of information.”

Notice that the propaganda model is not a conspiracy theory. Herman and Chomsky write:

“We do not use any kind of ‘conspiracy’ hypothesis to explain mass media performance. Our treatment is much closer to a ‘free market’ analysis, with the results largely an outcome of the workings of market forces.” 

The lack of any meaningful political opposition from a legal standpoint to the killing by the UK government of two British citizens, Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin on,August 21 by an unmanned aerial drone in Syria, highlights the relevance of the Chomsky/Herman model in terms of the establishment acceptance of the consensus around the reconfiguration of international law that serves elite interests.

No evidence has been produced that supports the government assertion that these individuals were planning terror attacks in the UK or that they had participated in previous terror attacks. So what is the supposed legal basis for the killings?

Cameron said the UK had taken action in “self-defence”, invoking the right to do so under Article 51 of the UN charter – but Article 51 specifically states that an “armed attack” must take place against a UN member state before any such response. So where did the government base its decision to execute by drone two British men in Syria?

According to former establishment ‘insider’, Craig Murray, the decision was based on “Legal Opinion” from the Attorney-General for England and Wales, Jeremy Wright, a politician, MP and Cabinet Minister. But, as Murray points out, Wright’s legal knowledge comes from an undistinguished first degree from Exeter and a short career as a criminal defence barrister in Birmingham. His knowledge of public international law is virtually nil.

So Jeremy Wright’s role is as a cypher. He performs a charade. Ever since Iraq, whenever the government has needed a legal opinion in order to support a military action it has done so by utilizing the legal opinions of lawyers who are sympathetic to the government position so that the legal case can, if necessary, be adjusted to the policy. When the government don’t get the kind of legal opinion they require in order to justify an action, they ignore it or, as was the case with the Iraq debacle, they dismissed the relevant chief legal adviser which was at that time, Sir Michael Wood for declaring the Iraq war to be illegal.

The consensus from Iraq on has been to appoint legal advisers not from within the Foreign Commonwealth Office (FCO) but to use public international lawyers from outside in order to save any government of the day that happens to be in power from any potential future embarrassment. Thus, Blair and Straw turned to Benjamin Netanyahu’s favourite ‘safe pair of hands’ lawyer, Daniel Bethlehem.

Murray elucidates further on one of the establishments’ most trusted liars:

Daniel Bethlehem had represented Israel before the Mitchell Inquiry into violence against the people of Gaza, arguing that it was all legitimate self-defence. He had also supplied the Government of Israel with a Legal Opinion that the vast Wall they were building in illegally occupied land, surrounding and isolating all the major Palestinian communities and turning them into large prisons, was also legal. Daniel Bethlehem, who was appointed by Blair as the FCO chief legal adviser, is an extreme Zionist militarist of the most aggressive kind, and close to Mark Regev, Israel’s new Ambassador to the UK.

The consensus view among the world’s leading international lawyers is that the Iraq war was illegal. Daniel Bethlehem’s contrary extremist position as outlined in a memorandum where he ‘develops’ the Caroline Principle, is one in which he posits that States’ have the right to use pre-emptive self-defence, is a minority view – the equivalent of a climate scientist arguing that man made climate change is a fraud.

It’s a minority view that’s nevertheless the consensus position within the UK political establishment. A key part of the memorandum states:

“It must be right that states are able to act in self-defence in circumstances where there is evidence of further imminent attacks by terrorist groups, even if there is no specific evidence of where such an attack will take place or of the precise nature of the attack.”

“It was this minority legal ‘opinion’ that formed the basis for the Iraq invasion. Similarly, it’s almost certainly the case that the same doctrine was used as the justification to murder UK citizens by drone in Syria. The notion that men travelling in a car thousands of miles away were imminently able to wreak havoc in the UK thereby necessitating the need for them to be executed on the spot without trial is obviously ludicrous.

Craig Murray reiterates how Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model works in practice within the corridors of power:

It was New Labour, the Red Tories, who appointed Daniel Bethlehem, and they appointed him precisely in order to establish this doctrine. It is therefore a stunning illustration of how the system works, that the only response of the official “opposition” to these extrajudicial executions is to demand to see the Legal Opinion, when it comes from the man they themselves appointed. The Red Tories appointed him precisely because they knew what Legal Opinion would be given on this specific subject. They can read it in Hansard.

So it is all a charade.

Jeremy Wright pretends to give a Legal Opinion, actually from FCO legal advisers based on the “Bethlehem Doctrine”. The Labour Party pretends, very unconvincingly, to be an opposition. The Guardian, apparently the leading “opposition” intellectual paper, publishes articles by its staff neo-con propagandists Joshua Rozenberg (married to Melanie Phillips) and Rafael Behr strongly supporting the government’s new powers of extrajudicial execution. In summer 2012 Joshua Rozenberg presented a programme on BBC Radio 4 entitled “Secret courts, drones and international law” which consisted mostly of a fawning interview with … Daniel Bethlehem. The BBC and Sky News give us wall to wall justification of the killings.

So the state, with its neo-con “opposition” and media closely in step with its neo-con government, seamlessly adopts a new power to kill its own subjects based on secret intelligence and secret legal advice, and a very weird definition of “imminent” that even its author admits to be outside current legal understanding.