Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Will the Democratic Party Give Bernie Sanders a Fair Shot in 2020?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIAxF4ecTTI
Sec. of State Says U.S. Should Celebrate Starving People
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlQNcjZu2RU
A SHOCKING Number Of Americans Believe God Made Trump President
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejyRAIftnq4
Saturday, January 27, 2018
Lubitsch in the Time of Political Correctness. Saturday, 27.1.2018
Volker Schlöndorff & Slavoj Žižek will open:
LUBITSCH FROM BERLIN/LUBITSCH AUS BERLIN
The first international conference on #Lubitsch in Germany
Die erste internationale Konferenz zu #Lubitsch in Deutschland
26.-28.01.2018
LUBITSCH FROM BERLIN/LUBITSCH AUS BERLIN
The first international conference on #Lubitsch in Germany
Die erste internationale Konferenz zu #Lubitsch in Deutschland
26.-28.01.2018
Konferenz-Teilnehmer: Volker Schlöndorff, Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič, Jela Krečič Žižek, James Harvey, Robert Pfaller, Aaron Schuster, Yuval Kremnitzer, Ivana Novak, Udi Aloni, Gregor Moder, Mladen Dolar
Filme im Babylon: Die Puppe, Die Austernprinzessin, Trouble in Paradise, Ninotchka, To Be Or Not To Be, Cluny Brown
| IM BABYLON: | |
| LUBITSCH | |
| LUBITSCH FROM BERLIN/LUBITSCH AUS BERLIN | |
| 26.-28.01.2018 | |
| Die erste internationale Konferenz zu Lubitsch in Deutschland | |
| The first international conference on Lubitsch in Germany |
Why humans are so bad at thinking about climate change
We know it, but we don't know that we know it...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkZ7BJQupVA
War On Terror OVER, Puerto Rico Privatized, Germany Done With Our Shit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBdZbL7c4U4
Without Election Fraud, Bernie Would Have Won By Landslide
WHAT HAPPENED
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MomZmfd2sDM
Centrist Democrats Are Undermining Progressive Candidates
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4QBJ0I7IBA
Sunday, January 7, 2018
Color prejudice and the growing market for skin whitening
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjzvvgmg1NU
Protests in Iran should be taken seriously
6 Jan 2018
The demonstrations that
took Iran and
the world by surprise remain undefined, leaderless and unprecedented in the mix
of messages and geographical locations. Yet they are extremely significant, as
they portray the depth of anger at the lack of economic and political progress
in the Islamic republic 39 years on.
President Hassan
Rouhani has taken four courageous steps over the past two years all of
which have infuriated the hardliners: Against all odds he completed the Iran
nuclear deal; stood up directly to the hardliners siding instead with the
reformists; took the recommendations of the International Monetary Fund and
implemented fiscal restraints policy; and finally took steps to tackle
high-level corruption.
Yet, none of these steps have
reached fruition and, as such, they have caused immense public resentment and
hardship.
Despite that, the thrust of
the political slogans at the protests were not directed at Rouhani. Initially
aimed against high prices, the anti-government protests quickly turned against
the regime as a whole and in an unprecedented level against the Supreme Leader
Ali Khamenei.
Last Saturday, December 30,
was the national day of "Alliance with the Supreme Leader". Instead,
the day turned into one of burning the flag of the Islamic republic and tearing
photos of Ayatollah Khamenei. Much anger was expressed at the clerical
establishment, its repressive measures at home and its political and financial
focus on Syria, Iraq and Palestine, rather than on the needs of the Iranians.
Encouraged by hardliners
Many blame the hardliners for
starting the protests in Mashhad.
And some hardline clerics were reportedly summoned to the
National Security Council and reprimanded.
Mashhad is the stronghold of
Rouhani's hardline rival, Ebrahim Raissi, who was the preferred candidate of
the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC). He is the chief custodian of the powerful
religious foundation Astan Ghods Razavi and as such holds the largest
pot of public funds. Together with his ultra-hardline father-in-law, Ayatollah Ahmad Alamalhoda, he is accused of having
turned Mashhad into a key location for opposing Rouhani and his policies.
Mashhad was also at the centre
of the high-profile fraud case of Padideh Shandiz Construction. The $35bn
fraud case which revealed unprecedented corruption at the highest levels dating
back to the hardline government of Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad. The chief executive of the firm was jailed in 2016. Investors
shares dropped drastically in value and there was no state-owned enterprise
control. Since then investors have regularly protested in Mashhad and Tehran.
Protests turn political
The surprise came only when
the protests spread to some 70 more remote towns and provincial cities where
police stations and security forces were directly targeted.
The slogans became overtly
anti-establishment: "Death to the Khamenei," "Down with the dictator,"
"Have shame, you mullah," "I don't want an Islamic
republic," and "O Shah, rest in peace," or "Let go of
Palestine, not Gaza, not Lebanon, I'd give my life [only] for Iran".
On January 5, the hardline
Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami hit back before Friday prayers in Tehran:
"The slogans chanted on
behalf of Trump and Netanyahu in the recent riots that said Neither Gaza, Nor
Lebanon are the voices of outsiders, and should be stifled".
IRGC chief Mohammad-Ali
Jaffari also blamed "the US, Zionists and Al Saud" for
acts of "sabotage and blasts".
This showed the regime's
nervous disposition after reports of joint efforts by the US, Israel and Saudi
Arabia for exerting pressure on Iran. And it was exasperated when both the US
president, Donald
Trump, and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin
Netanyahu, praised "the brave demonstrators".
Scepticism increased when some
prominent Iranian figures such as the former crown prince, Reza
Pahlavi, and the Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi asked the US to
increase pressure on Iran. Many wondered whether there was a foreign ulterior
motive to fan the flame of the protests.
Whoever started the protests
or fanned its flames with whatever ulterior motive, one thing is clear that the
public outcry against Islamic republic's repressive methods and the economic
malaise cannot be written off as a mere conspiracy, or whitewashed with mass
pro-regime demonstrations.
Iranians are frustrated by the
inability of the establishment to create any meaningful change whether at the
economic or political level. This was the third time Ayatollah Khamenei was
hearing the call for his downfall and it was stronger than 2009 and 2013.
And the establishment was
unusually apprehensive. IRGC said it had not been called to take action. Its
involvement was very limited. The Supreme Leader did not speak for five days.
The hardline Kayhan newspaper acknowledged: "the nation has risen in
protest," and the president promised to create more jobs and improve the
credit oversight.
The question now is whether
Rouhani can use the protests to his benefit and convince the supreme leader of
the need to implement the "major economic corrective surgery" to
which he referred to in his speech. This may be difficult while US sanctions hover over
Iran's economy. The hardliners are likely to put all the blame on the president
and push for the need to project a more military image of Iran to the
world.
Whatever the outcome, a new
benchmark has now been set for future protests and some past taboos have been
broken. They should be taken seriously.
Saturday, January 6, 2018
Other Countries Have High-Speed Trains. We Have Deadly Accidents and Crumbling Infrastructure
Saturday, January 06, 2018By Mike Ludwig,
Truthout | News Analysis
Japan's high-speed bullet
train system carries 1 million riders
every day and has a remarkable safety record, at least compared to passenger
trains in the United States. Passengers have taken billions of rides on
Japanese bullet trains since the system was established 50 years ago, but not
one passenger has died due to a derailment or collision.
In the US commuters and
travelers use trains less than the Japanese, but US passenger train lines
have suffered five major wrecks that killed or injured passengers over the past
decade, including the recent derailment of an Amtrak passenger train that
killed three people and injured more than 50 others in DuPont, Washington on
December 18. Among the dead were two active members of the Rail Passengers
Association, a group that pushes for greater access to passenger rail services.
A "constellation of
factors" contributed to this spate of deadly train accidents, including
train companies' habit of cutting corners to save money and a national failure
to fund railroad and transportation infrastructure, according to Railroad
Workers United, a national union representing railroad workers.
President Trump has used the
DuPont crash to tout an infrastructure proposal due out later this month.
However, critics say Trump's plan would leave struggling state and local
government on the hook for repairing crumbling roads, bridges and railroads as
Congress looks for ways to pay for the GOP tax cut package that Trump signed
into law last month.
US Railroads -- Underfunded
and Unsafe
Railroads around the world
have made significant advances in safety, efficiency and infrastructure over
the past century, and passengers in Japan, Europe and beyond enjoy affordable,
high-speed transportation between many major cities. This is not the case in the
US, where high-speed rail service is limited in most parts of the country. Most
US railroads still operate on gradients laid in the 19th century that are
"full of curvature, steep grades and other impediments to safe and
efficient operation," according to Railroad Workers United.
"When upgrades are made,
they are often inadequately funded, leading to unsafe conditions for employees,
passengers and those living trackside," the union said in a collective
statement released on Wednesday. "Unless and until this nation can make a
commitment to advancing modern passenger train transportation through adequate
and necessary funding, we will continue to lag behind the rest of the world,
and continue to suffer tragedies like the one in Dupont, WA."
The deadly derailment of
Amtrak Train 501 in DuPont occurred at a sharp curve in the track that state
officials have hoped to restructure as part of an effort to expand high-speed
rail to the Seattle region, according to The Seattle Times. However, adequate
funding for rail infrastructure projects has not surfaced in Washington State,
and the Times recently called the curve "a symbol of unsteady
political support in the United States for rapid-rail infrastructure."
"The tragedy in
Washington State highlights what everyone already knows, that so much of
America's infrastructure is teetering on the edge of disaster," said
Donald Cohen, director of the public services policy group In the Public
Interest, in an email to Truthout.
The government's investigation
of the accident is ongoing, but an initial review by the National Transportation and
Safety Board found that the conductor of the Amtrak train hit the curve at a
much higher speed than he was supposed to. The accident occurred during the
first day of higher-speed service on the line, and Amtrak workers and their
unions have expressed concern that operators were not properly
trained during nighttime trial runs prior to the change.
John Risch, the legislative
director for the SMART Transportation Division, a union of engineers and train
technicians, said US railroad companies "do not require training like they
should" due to cost-cutting measures.
"Time and time again we
have urged the railroads to allow more training trips before they go out, and
they will say one or two trips is enough," Risch said in a statement.
"It's a cost issue.... That's something that has been a problem."
Railroad Workers United points
out that all five major train wrecks in the past decade occurred with only one
trained engineer controlling the main cab of the locomotive. (There were two
engineers in the cab during the DuPont crash, but only one was trained on the
route, and was in the process of training the other for future runs.) The union
has long advocated that two qualified engineers be present on every train, as
is the case for commercial airliners, which are required to have two pilots in
the cockpit.
However, train companies have
pushed back on these demands, citing the costs of hiring extra workers. They
have also dragged their feet on installing automated braking technology
mandated by Congress after a major crash in 2008. Congress extended the
deadline for installing the technology from 2015 to the end of 2018 after train
operators threatened to shut down the rail system in 2015.
Railroad Workers United said
the automated braking technology, known as Positive Train Control, has been
around for a century and could have prevented several deadly wrecks, including
the crash in DuPont. In the past, Positive Train Control protected thousands of
miles of mainline train tracks, but the union said railroad companies have
largely dismantled this infrastructure to save money "while government
regulators turned a blind eye."
"As rank and file
railroad workers, we experience day-in-and-day-out the carriers' cynical view
of safety, the push for profit, the demand for increased stock prices, the
budget cutting, the recklessness and the total disregard for workers'
lives," the union said. "This is why Train 501 wrecked."
All Eyes on Trump's
Infrastructure Proposal
This most recent railroad
accident has renewed calls for federal investment in transportation and other
infrastructure, including from President Trump, who released this tweet shortly
after the DuPont crash:
The train accident that just
occurred in DuPont, WA shows more than ever why our soon to be submitted
infrastructure plan must be approved quickly. Seven trillion dollars spent in
the Middle East while our roads, bridges, tunnels, railways (and more) crumble!
Not for long!
Of course, the Trump
administration has done nothing to scale back US involvement in
expensive and bloody military entanglements in the Middle East, and Trump
recently authorized a massive $700 billion defense budget. In contrast,
the White House's 2018 budget proposed cutting programs
that fund transportation services and infrastructure by $1.7 billion, including
$630 million in cuts to Amtrak alone.
Trump campaigned on promises
to rebuild crumbling roads, bridges, railroads and other infrastructure in the
US, but his administration's first attempt at rolling out an infrastructure
proposal last year failed to generate any excitement in the media or Congress.
The Trump administration's $1
trillion infrastructure blueprint released last spring only includes $200
billion in actual government spending, with the rest coming from unnamed
private investors incentivized by a "mixture of loans and grants" and
Trump's deregulatory agenda. Other ideas proposed in the plan include allowing
more tolls on interstate highways and opening roadside rest areas to private
investment.
The White House has promised
to release a more detailed infrastructure proposal by the end of January.
However, it's still a $1 trillion plan -- about half of what the American
Society of Civil Engineers says is needed to fix the nation's infrastructure --
and preliminary reports indicate it would still only allocate $200 billion in
federal spending. The remaining $800 billion would be shifted to state and
local governments, forcing them to make difficult deals with private companies.
"The hard truth is that
we need nothing short of a Marshall Plan level of direct federal investment in
our roads, bridges, broadband, and transit and water systems," Cohen said.
"What we know of Trump's infrastructure plans is that he wants to do just
the opposite and put more burden on city and state governments, essentially
forcing them to sell off or lease our infrastructure to Wall Street and global
corporations."
Cohen and other critics say Trump should have put "America
first" and rolled out a robust infrastructure funding package before
signing the GOP tax bill, which gives tax breaks to the rich and adds $1.5
trillion to the federal deficit over the next 10 years. Republicans in Congress
are already eyeing cuts to domestic safety net and health
care programs to pay for the tax package, which largely benefits corporations
and the wealthy.
Meanwhile, the deficit created
by the tax package coupled with Congress's self-imposed spending limits could
force deep cuts to the trust funds that support railroad workers who are laid
off or miss work due to illness, according to the SMART Transportation Division. As the
rash of recent rail accidents suggests, this is a workforce that is already
stretched too thin.
Ghosts in the Propaganda Machine
JANUARY 5, 2018
“When I use a word,”
Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it
to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice,
“whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty
Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
— Lewis Carroll, Through
the Looking Glass
Is this what online journalism
looks like in the era of Russiagate fever? A fake writer (read Alice Donovan) catfishes CounterPunch and a dozen other
online websites. A handful of her articles are published over a two-year
period. The FBI is tracking her and believes this writer, whoever is behind the
moniker, has some ties to Russia. What kind of ties and how deep do they go? We
aren’t sure. No evidence is presented, perhaps because there isn’t much, or
perhaps because the NSA and the FBI are also spying on actual journalists and
editors right along with the alleged imposters. The Washington Post calls
for a quote on the FBI’s allegation and runs an article a month later on Kremlin operatives
“burning across the internet”.
More panic ensues.
But only one troll was named
in the Washington Post piece, Alice Donovan — our suspected
interloper. Prior to the Post’s article, we found out Donovan likely was
not who she claimed to be and was a plagiarist to boot. We apologized for our
screw-up and issued a lengthy investigation into the whole Donovan ordeal and the
challenges of vetting writers in the fast-paced world of cyber-journalism. The
story ends there, or does it?
For the record, what you are
about to read isn’t typical fare here at CounterPunch. We aren’t in the
business of investigating the legitimacy of other independent media outlets,
their editors, their contributors or even their motives. In the muddy trenches
of online journalism, we often find sympathy and camaraderie with others
trudging the same difficult terrain. We strongly believe in the tenets of a
free and unfettered press. We’d much rather save our energy to cover the issues
we face day in and day out; environmental degradation, corporate and political
corruption, war, abuses of power and all those brave souls fighting back. Even
so, for better or worse, we are still journalists, and when a story begins to
reveal itself, we have no choice but to dig deeper and follow the trail where
it leads us.
In our quest to unravel the
identity of the now infamous Alice Donovan, we realized she wasn’t only a
fraud, she was also a quack journalist. Many of Donovan’s stories were in part
plagiarized, none more flagrantly than an article titled “US-led Coalition
Airstrike On Assad’s Forces Was Not Accidental.” It took a few quick searches
to uncover the original source of the piece, which was ripped off entirely from
a writer named Sophie Mangal, whose article by the same title was published
at The International Reporter on the exact same day
Donovan submitted the piece to CounterPunch under her own byline.
We were slightly familiar with
Mangal, who claimed to be an “investigative correspondent” and editor at an
obscure site called Inside
Syria Media Center (ISMC), which publishes both in Arabic and English.
Mangal occasionally goes by Sophie with an “e”, yet her Medium author page lists
her name as “Sophia”, and at ISMC, often simply “S. Mangal”.
Emails from Mangal had arrived
two or three times a week over the past twelve months, piling up in our
inboxes. Nearly every piece she wrote, it seemed, was submitted to us for
publication. We passed on all of them, but many were picked up by Global
Research, International
Reporter and Veterans Today. The piece Donovan stole, however, was never
submitted to CounterPunch by Mangal. No doubt the same article pitched by two
different authors on the same day would have raised a red flag.
When we realized Donovan had
plagiarized Mangal we immediately reached out to her via email to 1) confirm
she indeed wrote the piece in question and 2) apologize for making such a big
mistake.
Mangal quickly responded to
our query. “For sure, it’s my article. It was originally published on the
website of Inside Syria Media Center. Actually, I don’t know Alice Donovan and
who this person is,” asserted Mangal. “Besides, I wonder why my article was
published on CounterPunch by that name though copyrights belong to me. I would
be quite grateful if you publish my articles with the reference to me in future
instead of others suspicious persons who steal my intellectual property.”
We decided to remove the
article entirely from our site and issue an apology to Mangal for the error. By
now Alice Donovan had vanished, so all we could do was assume she was a
plagiarist, if not something more sinister. Mangal accepted our apology and
even continued soliciting her work to us in the weeks to follow.
Even so, we believed something
in Mangal’s awkward response to us was fishy. First, the English in most of her
submissions was fractured, especially for someone who claims to have attended
the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a “Media and Journalism” major. Second,
as noted, Donovan’s pilfered piece was emailed to us around the very same time
that Mangal’s story was being posted to the International Reporter site. How
had Donovan seen it, cribbed it and sent it to us so quickly? Breaking her
normal pattern of submitting her pieces to multiple venues, Donovan sent the
plagiarized piece only to us and not to some of her other typical
outlets. Why? Had someone screwed up? Hit the wrong send button on the wrong
email account? In search of answers, we began looking more closely at Mangal’s
blizzard of submissions, dating back to December 22, 2016.
It didn’t take long before we
realized why we had passed on them. Most of Mangal’s writings embraced a
rigidly narrow view of the war in Syria. The crux of her works read like
regime-sponsored press releases. There was no nuance to the writing and few
told the story from a war victim’s perspective. Virtually all exalted Russia’s
military prowess and the tenacity of the Assad regime, as if she was embedded
within the Syrian Army. Embedded reporting has its place, naturally, but were
Mangal’s numerous dispatches from inside Syria actually “reported”? And how was
it being done? Who were the nameless “Inside Syria Media Center sources,” which
were referenced in so many of her pieces? Moreover, Mangal’s prose was
unusually brittle and dull. Even if you are open about your bias, why render your
war reporting in such boring sentences?
We receive submissions from
writers from across the globe, so we are used to awkward sentence structures,
but this was something different. Wasn’t Mangal an English-speaking editor?
Wasn’t she a reporter who attended a top-tier journalism program in the United
States? What was this Inside Syria Media Center all about? We had never heard
of it before. The site claims to be an “independent medium that contributes to
peace in Syria,” but would a truly independent outlet openly express their
admiration for Assad with a #WeLoveYourBashar and #StillMyPresident on
its Twitter
page? You don’t hear that kind of unbridled sycophancy from Sputnik and RT.
Idlib-authorities Are in Their
Struggle for Power #WeLoveYouBashar #StillMyPresident #Idlib… http://en.insidesyriamc.com/2017/12/25/idlib-authorities-are-in-their-struggle-for-power/ …
Fortunately, we thought,
Mangal wasn’t exactly a ghost, like our friend Donovan. She was an editor at an
actual news site, no matter its agenda, and was widely published across the
web, with over 55 articles at Global Research alone. She had an active Facebook
page. She even interviewed one of our writers via email about the
prospects of a Syrian constitution. Most importantly, we thought, she was
communicating with us.
As we noted in our piece on
Alice Donovan, something else struck us as odd with Mangal. Both writers used a
MAIL.com account for their initial emails to us. Out of the past 3,000
submissions to CounterPunch only four writers used MAIL.com accounts, that
includes Donovan and Mangal. What this proves isn’t clear, but MAIL.com is
notorious for providing a service where one can quickly
produce a number of email accounts without any verification on one
platform from one location. It is also one of the few email services which
masks the IP address of the sender. A hacker’s delight.
By now we suspected something
was up with Alice Donovan and we became suspicious of how Donovan had
interacted with Mangal. Donovan had plagiarized verbatim an entire piece by
Mangal and lifted passages from another. In both instances, Donovan’s submissions
to CounterPunch arrived shortly after Mangal’s pieces had appeared on other
sites. How did she have access to Mangal’s stories so quickly? Was Syria the
key to unlocking the ultimate mystery of Alice Donovan? Couldn’t we just talk
to Mangal and figure this all out? Were we just being paranoid?
We repeatedly attempted to
schedule a chat with Mangal via Skype. Four times to be exact. Mangal initially
emailed to say she couldn’t speak via Skype because she was in the mountains of
Syria with a bad internet connection — hey, but thanks for the gesture, she
said.
Yet, here she was, emailing us
and dispatching her work across the web. She was even sending photos along with
her pieces. How poor could her internet connection be? Activist and scholar Dr.
Hawzhin Azeez spoke with CounterPunch Radio host Eric Draitser for an
hour from war-torn Syria last year and we have writers in
Syria who are able to communicate with us when needed.
We weren’t buying Mangal’s
evasions. In the midst of the Donovan saga, Mangal had somehow sparked our
intrigue.
Snapshot of Mangal’s Facebook
page, which was deleted sometime in mid-December 2017.
Over the course of 2016 to
2017, we published a total of five
articles by the intruder Alice Donovan. We aren’t proud we didn’t
catch on and realize she wasn’t the living and breathing New Yorker she claimed
to be. But despite the Washington Post’s assertion that Kremlin trolls are
invading, by all accounts Alice was a rather insignificant and benign presence.
Before the Post and our own exposé dropped, Donovan enjoyed fewer
than 50 Twitter followers. Her articles weren’t widely read or shared.
However, Mangal, unlike
Donovan, had a much larger online footprint. She had published dozens of more
pieces and was an editor of an outlet with nearly 13,000 Twitter followers. In
virtually every way she seemed more relevant than Donovan as an online
journalist.
While it’s nearly impossible
to prove who’s really behind an ambiguous online persona like Mangal’s, it is
rather easy to break down one’s text and check for accuracies, influences,
patterns and quirks. We couldn’t prove Alice Donovan was or was not a Russian
huckster (we didn’t take the FBI’s word for it, see the ordeal of Wen
Ho Lee), but we were able to unmask her as a plagiarist, which in
journalistic quarters, at least, is a more grievous offense.
Could we accomplish something
similar with Mangal?
***
On various websites, Sophia
Mangal has been described as “a woman with a
passion for Syria, the Church and justice,” as an “American
patriot,” and as “a
young University of North Carolina media and journalism grad.” But was she
any of these things?
Mangal, much like Alice
Donovan, seemed to have appeared out of thin air. There are no tracks of her
days as a college student. There are no podcast appearances, radio or video
interviews promoting her work as a reporter, almost de rigeuer activities for
contemporary journalists. ISMC, which maintains its own YouTube
channel, has posted many videos from Syria, yet none feature any of their
writers, either interviewing anyone or being interviewed. In the Age of the
Selfie, there’s only the one noirish photograph of Mangal, much of her face
obscured behind large sunglasses. In her bio, Mangal claims to have
“monitored” the European refugee crisis after leaving UNC, where she drew
“parallels between the Syrian conflict and the Balkan problem.” If so, there is
no evidence of her reporting on these issues, either before or after joining
ISMC.
The first online trace of
Mangal we could find is from November 2016, when she authored an article titled
“Syria ISIS-Daesh Terrorists’ Financing Schemes Unveiled”,
which was published at ISMC and Global Research, among others. That’s a pretty
eye-popping story to break for your debut as an international correspondent.
Even Seymour Hersh started out as a lowly beat reporter for the City News
Bureau in Chicago.
CounterPunch did not receive
the “terrorist financing” submission, but we were approached by Mangal on
December 21, 2016, with a piece that attempted to discredit Bana al-Abed, an
eight-year-old Syrian girl, who, with the help of her English speaking mother,
became a Twitter
sensation during the battle for Aleppo. Assad-friendly writers were quick to push back against
al-Abed’s version of events and her growing popularity. Mangal’s piece mimicked
these talking points and wasn’t exceptionally groundbreaking, so we passed.
No doubt there were grounds to
be suspicious of al-Abed’s overnight rise, but the counter-propaganda campaign
was equally as shallow. In retrospect, the fact that Mangal was
writing about the alleged fake identity of al-Abed (she had a habit of trying
to expose fakers) — who is a very real girl now living in New York — is a bit
comical. It seems Mangal has done her best to vanish, while al-Abed is still
promoting herself and her family’s plight in Syria.
***
It’s unclear to us when Mangal
became an editor at ISMC. Her first submission to CounterPunch that identified
her as co-editor landed in February 2017. She appeared to remain an editor
until we attempted to talk to her via Skype. After our last attempt to schedule
a conversation on December 15, her name was suddenly removed from ISMC’s contact page, though it
remains on the contributors page (see below.) Around this time, Mangal also
deleted her Facebook page. Soon after our piece on Alice Donovan was published
on Christmas Day, which named Mangal as the victim of Donovan’s
cut-and-paste theft, Mangal’s name was scrubbed from the bylines at ISMC for
every article she had written. Over the course of 2017, Mangal regularly
published one or two pieces a week. Then the submissions and publications on
other sites abruptly stopped. Her last published story at Global Research
appeared on December 15.
What was going on? Mangal’s
pieces weren’t being removed, just reassigned to a simple “ISMC” byline. But
wasn’t Mangal the one who had been wronged by Donovan? We were confused. Rare
for a “media center,” ISMC lists no physical address or phone number on their
contact page. Were ISMC’s offices located in Chapel Hill? London? the
Netherlands? Austria? Virginia? Damascus? There’s no clue. So we were forced to
drop an email to the site’s chief-editor, Mariam Al-Hijab. After several
attempts and days of waiting, we threw in the towel. No response.
It was certainly strange.
First, Mangal wasn’t responding and now her co-editor wasn’t communicating
either. So we reached out to ISMC’s other most prolific writer, Anna
Jaunger, who is so astoundingly productive that she regularly churns
out 3 or 4 stories a day. We noticed her pace of filing dispatches increased
after Mangal faded away.
Again, we heard nothing. We
sensed a pattern developing.
We decided to analyze a report
Mangal had just dropped titled, “New Trends of A Resurgent Syrian Economy”, which claimed to
have been written in collaboration with a writer named Anan Tello.
Coincidentally, Tello wrote a similar article with a few of the same
paragraphs for Arab News. Tello’s was certainly the better of the two pieces,
but whole sections appeared in Mangal’s version as well. Fortunately, it didn’t
take long to realize Tello was an actual human being. She’s widely published
and has an active, personal online presence. She was willing and eager to talk.
When asked if Tello knew
Mangal, or had worked with her on the piece, she was emphatic, “I spent more
than a week working on [that piece] for Arab News, and I worked on it all
alone.” Tello explained, “The people I interviewed, as well as my editors, know
that I worked on the piece alone … What [Mangal] did is outrageous and
unacceptable. How could I have ‘cooperated’ with someone I’ve never spoken to
in any way, never heard of and with whom I never had any kind of
correspondence?”
Alice Donovan plagiarized
Sophie Mangal and now Mangal ripped off Anan Tello? What the hell are we
dealing with here? It compelled us to take a closer look at Mangal’s work, even
though we had never published it. Sure enough, like Donovan, she had lifted
lede grafs from other writers, most recently from a piece in The New
Yorker.
Here’s Mangal’s lede in a
piece at ISMC on December 12, in “WH Recognized Assad as the Only Power Capable to Restore Syria?”
(Mangal’s byline has since changed to ISMC):
“The Trump Administration is
now prepared to accept President Bashar al-Assad’s continued rule until Syria’s
next scheduled Presidential election, in 2021, according to U.S. and European
officials. The decision reverses repeated U.S. statements that Assad must step
down as part of a peace process.”
Here’s Robin Wright for The
New Yorker one day earlier on December 11, 2017, in “Trump to Let Assad Stay Until 2021, as Putin Declares Victory
in Syria” (Mangal’s theft in bold):
“Despite the deaths of as many
as half a million people, dozens by chemical weapons, in the Syrian civil
war, the Trump Administration is now prepared to accept President Bashar
al-Assad’s continued rule until Syria’s next scheduled Presidential election,
in 2021, according to U.S. and European officials. The decision reverses
repeated U.S. statements that Assad must step down as part of a peace process.”
It was obvious. Mangal, like
Donovan, was a journalistic klepto. The plagiarized was herself a plagiarizer.
Mangal also collaborated with
journalist Sarah Abed, who writes for Mint
Press News and edits The Rabbit Hole. Abed tells CounterPunch she never met
Mangal in person and only communicated with her by email during their various collaborations. Mangal and Abed never spoke on the
phone or via Skype and Abed says she hasn’t heard from Mangal for at least six
months.
We also looked into Anna
Jaunger’s work. She is even more prolific than Mangal. Jaunger’s first story
for ISMC, “The
Strange Logic of US Coalition Mistakes in Syria,” was published on October
27, 2016. Over the next 14 months, Jaunger’s byline appeared
on more than 500 hundred stories–or about 1.25 stories every day. The
ISMC archive for her articles is 56 pages long, at 8 to 10 articles per page.
That’s an impressive clippings file for many journalists to amass over a
decade, but Jaunger produced that many pieces in little over a year’s time.
While many of the pieces are short rudimentary reports, others are more
in depth. Her articles detailed troop movements, battle casualties, weapons
shipments to rebel forces and intelligence estimates; they charted secret
money networks, exposed covert operations, and analyzed US and European
political debates and strategies. Stories that would take seasoned war
correspondents days, even weeks, to report, flew off of Jaunger’s keyboard almost
daily. How did she keep it up? Where was the information coming from?
On her Twitter page, Jaunger
describes herself as an Austrian journalist working (“I love my job!”) for
ISMC. Her work has been published by Global
Research, Off Guardian, Information
Clearinghouse, Dissident
Voice and many other media outlets. We discovered she presents
something of a façade as well. The profile photo on Jaunger’s
Twitter page is actually a photograph of a woman named Anna Buxton
from London, which was lifted directly from an employee
directory at a company called LaSalle Investment Management.
Apparently, Jaunger’s seven lucky followers didn’t question the authenticity of
the snappy photo.
Anna Jaunger’s Twitter page.
The real Anna, photo from
LaSalle Investment Management’s staff page.
Of course, it goes without
saying that all of this absurdity raises serious questions about the legitimacy
of ISMC. Who is behind the project? We aren’t certain, exactly. But it’s been a
fruitful endeavor. Altogether, Mangal and Jaunger have published hundreds of
articles that have appeared all over the web. How do they pay for the site and
ISMC’s three staffers, who supposedly travel frequently to Syria and back from
Europe and the States? We couldn’t tell. Unlike most independent media outlets,
they don’t ask for donations, don’t list an address or phone number and offer
no biographical information about their editors and writers.
Tom
Ginsberg, a respected international law professor at the University of
Chicago participated
in an interview with ISMC last February on the proposed Syrian
constitution. We reached out to see what he knew about the site.
“I had not heard of them
before,” explains Ginsberg, whose interview with ISMC was conducted via email.
“When the interview came out, a friend from the region told me they had some
kind of pro-Assad bias … I never actually spoke to a human being on the phone.”
We attempted to look under the
hood of the operation to see if we could find a leak. The
url “insidesyriamc.com” was registered to Barna
Robert from Noord-Brabant, Netherlands on September 16, 2016. Who is
Barna Robert? We couldn’t track him down through the email or phone number
listed on the site’s registration page. (Like Donovan and Mangal, Robert used
GMX.com as his email client, which functions the same as MAIL.COM, both of
which are owned by United Internet.) It’s an unusual name. There just aren’t
that many Barna Roberts in the world. (Or Robert Barnas for that matter.) We
were only able to a locate a handful online, including a Hungarian
body-builder who died in 2013, a Romanian
soccer player and a Hungarian
mathematician.
But a now-deleted Facebook
page listed a Barna Robert as being from Aleppo, Syria, currently living in
Carolina Beach, North Carolina. If that’s the same Barna Robert who registered
the ISMC website, he lives just a two-hour drive from Sophie Mangal’s purported home in Wake County, NC. We searched for
phone and property records for Mr. Robert in Carolina Beach and came up empty.
***
Inside Syria Media Center
appears to have initially shown up as a Facebook group called “Syria:
Look Inside!”, which is now also called Inside Syria Media Center. It is
unclear when the name was changed. The group was created in February 2016,
about a month before ISMC was operating online as a media project. Once ISMC
went live, it was hosted on WordPress and later transferred to
“insidesyriamc.com”, as noted above. One of the first individuals to promote
the Facebook group was a journalist named Said Al-Khalaki, who also wrote some
of the earliest content for ISMC and is an administrator for the Facebook
group. Al-Khalaki did not respond to a request for comment.
Strangely, after we attempted
to reach out to Al-Khalaki, his bylines at Inside Syria Media Center
were also changed to the generic “ISMC”. (Here’s a piece by Al-Khalaki that appeared at
Veteran’s Today and also at ISMC. Note the byline discrepancies.) Al-Khalaki’s
online work dates
back to at least 2013.
***
A records inquiry at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Mangal’s alleged stomping grounds,
could not verify that either a “Sophie” or “Sophia” Mangal had ever graduated
from or even attended the university. A search of the UNC
General Alumni Association rolls also proved fruitless. We also
searched the archivesof The
Daily Tar Heel, UNC’s school paper, and found no trace of Mangal. As
far as we can tell, she’s never written for the paper. Erica Beshears Perel,
General Manager of The Daily Tar Heel, says after a quick search she
couldn’t find a record of Mangal over the past ten years but cautioned that
hundreds of students join her staff every year.
A month ago, we plunged down a
rabbit hole in pursuit of Alice and emerged in a house of mirrors, populated by
at least one phantom writer (Donovan), vanishing bylines and stolen texts that
had proliferated across the web. Why does it matter? From bitter experience,
we’ve learned that the price of the deception will be paid by the anti-war
media, not the ghostwriters. The architects of COINTELPRO themselves
couldn’t have devised a more insidious way to discredit the anti-war movement.
This time, however, the wounds may be largely self-inflicted.
More articles by:JEFFREY ST. CLAIR -
JOSHUA FRANK
Jeffrey St. Clair is
editor of CounterPunch. His new book is Killing
Trayvons: an Anthology of American Violence (with JoAnn Wypijewski and
Kevin Alexander Gray). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net. JOSHUA FRANK is managing
editor of CounterPunch. He can be reached at brickburner@gmail.com. You can follow
him on Twitter@brickburner.