Monday, February 10, 2020
Did Washington use a false pretext for its bloody escalation in Iraq?
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/07/washington-false-pretext-escalation-iraq/
Iraqi officials indicate that ISIS – not Ketaib Hizbullah – attacked a US military base in Iraq, setting off the escalation that led to the US attacking the latter group and killing Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Were we lied to again?
By Helena Cobban
This originally appeared at Just World Books
In a key piece of actual extensive, on-the-ground reporting, the New York Times’sAlissa Rubin has raised serious questions about the official US account of who it was that attacked the K-1 base near Kirkuk, in eastern Iraq, on December 27. The United States almost immediately accused the Iran-backed Ketaib Hizbullah (KH) militia of responsibility. But Rubin quotes by name Brig. General Ahmed Adnan, the chief of intelligence for the Iraqi federal police at the same base, as saying, “All the indications are that it was Daesh” — that is, ISIS.
She also presents considerable further detailed reporting on the matter. And she notes that though U.S. investigators claim to have evidence about KH’s responsibility for the attack, they have presented none of it publicly. Nor have they shared it with the Iraqi government.
KH is a paramilitary organization that operates under the command of the Iraqi military and has been deeply involved in the anti-ISIS campaigns throughout the country.
The December 27 attack killed one Iraqi-American contractor and was cited by the Trump administration as reason to launch a large-scale attack on five KH bases some 400 miles to the west which killed around 50 KH fighters. Outraged KH fighters then mobbed the US embassy in Baghdad, breaking through an outside perimeter on its large campus, but causing no casualties. On January 2, Pres. Trump decided to escalate again, ordering the assassination of Iran’s Gen. Qasem Soleimani and bringing the region and the world close to a massive shooting war.
The new evidence presented by Rubin makes it look as if Trump and his advisors had previously decided on a broad-scale plan to attack Iran’s very influential allies in Iraq and were waiting for a triggering event– any triggering event!– to use as a pretext to launch it. The attack against the K-1 base presented them with that trigger, even though they have not been able to present any evidence that it was KH that undertook it.
This playbook looks very similar to the one that Ariel Sharon, who was Israel’s Defense Minister in summer 1982, used to launch his wide attack against the PLO’s presence in Lebanon in June that year. The “trigger” Sharon used to launch his long-prepared attack was the serious (but not fatal) wounding of Israel’s ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov, which the Israeli government immediately blamed on the PLO.
Regarding London in 1982, as regarding K-1 last December, the actual identity of the assailant(s) was misreported by the government that used it as a trigger for escalation. In London, the police fairly speedily established that it was not the PLO but operatives of an anti-PLO group headed by a man called Abu Nidal who had attacked Argov. But by the time they had discovered and publicized that fact, Israeli tanks were already deep inside Lebanon.
The parallels and connections between the two cases go further. If, as now seems likely, the authors of the K-1 attack were indeed Da’esh, then they succeeded brilliantly in triggering a bitter fight between two substantial forces in the coalition that had been fighting against them in Iraq. Regarding the 1982 London attack, its authors also succeeded brilliantly in triggering a lethal conflict between two forces (one substantial, one far less so) that were both engaged in bitter combat against Abu Nidal’s networks.
Worth noting: Abu Nidal’s main backer, throughout his whole campaign against the PLO, was Saddam Hussein’s brutal government in Iraq. (The London assailants deposited their weapons in the Iraqi embassy after completing the attack.) Many senior strategists and planners for ISIS in Iraq were diehard remnants of Saddam’s formerly intimidating security forces.
Also worth noting: Three months in to Sharon’s massive 1982 invasion of Lebanon, it seemed to have successfully reached its goals of expelling the PLO’s fighting forces from Lebanon and installing a strongly pro-Israeli government there. But over the longer haul, the invasion looked much less successful. The lengthy Israeli occupation of south Lebanon that followed 1982 served to incubate the birth and growth of the (pro-Iranian) Hizbullah there.
Today, Hizbullah is a strong political movement inside Lebanon that commands a very capable fighting force that expelled Israel’s last presence from Lebanon in 2000, rebuffed a subsequent Israeli invasion of the country six years later, and still exerts considerable deterrent power against Israel today.
Very few people in Israel today judge the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to have been a wise move. How will the historians of the future view Trump’s decision to launch his big escalation against Iran’s allies in Iraq, presumably as part of his “maximum pressure” campaign against Tehran?
Helena Cobban
Media darling Pete Buttigieg was in unit that worked with the CIA in Afghanistan
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/07/pete-buttigieg-cia-afghanistan/
While Buttigieg’s campaign denies allegations he was a CIA asset, military records reveal Mayor Pete was in a unit that worked with the spy agency in Afghanistan.
By Alex Rubinstein
After The Grayzone published an article about Pete Buttigieg’s roster of endorsements from CIA veterans and coup plotters, and another about his mysterious trip to Somaliland alongside a friend who now works for a US government regime-change agency, Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign issued a public statement denying that he ever worked for the CIA.
“We hate to break the news to Twitter, but no, Pete was not in the CIA,” Buttigieg’s national press secretary Chris Meagher derisively told The Daily Beast, which directly referenced both Grayzone reports. “As for the Somaliland trip, it was not related to his work anywhere.”
The Daily Beast article appeared in response not only to factual reporting by The Grayzone, but to a wave of allegations spread online through hashtags like #CIAPete which accused Buttigieg of being a CIA asset.
Following the fiasco in Iowa, in which voting results were blocked thanks to faulty technology produced by a dark money outfit linked to Buttigieg – and Mayor Pete inexplicably took to himself the victor – the hashtag trended nationally.
Alex Rubinstein
✔@RealAlexRubi
· Feb 4, 2020
Buttigieg getting ratio'd on every tweet he has put out since he proclaimed victory with 0% of precincts reporting. Not to mention #MayorCheat & #PeteTheCheat trending throughout the night
Alex Rubinstein
✔@RealAlexRubi
#CIAPete now trending at number 20 in the US
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Neither article published by The Grayzone accused Buttigieg of working for the CIA. However, according to military documents that have gone mostly under the media’s radar, it does appear that the former mayor worked alongside the CIA while serving as a high-ranking Naval intelligence officer during his short stint in Afghanistan.
Moreover, the unit Buttigieg supervised was a subset of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the US agency responsible for the disastrous war on drugs that has spawned humanitarian catastrophes throughout Latin America and much of the world.
‘We were working with everybody across the civilian spectrum in the intelligence community’
Early on in his military career, Pete Buttigieg worked as an intelligence analyst at US European Command, where he “conduct[ed] research and analysis of information to create accurate, timely intelligence products in support of USEUCOM theater operations,” according to mostly redacted military records released under the Freedom of Information Act.
Under a section labelled “command employment and command achievements,” Buttigieg’s papers indicate that intelligence was provided to “USEUCOM, NATO, Deployed Units and other commands, including operations in Africa and the former Yugoslavia.”
Buttigieg would eventually return to EUCOM, where he was promoted to team leader, supervising one officer and four intelligence analysts.
Two years into Buttigieg’s time as mayor, in 2014, he was called for duty again, this time to serve with the US Navy in Afghanistan.
Pete Buttigieg
✔@PeteButtigieg
I did not carry an assault weapon around a foreign country so I could come home and see them used to massacre my countrymen.
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Contrary to Buttigieg’s portrayal of himself as a gun-toting, freedom-fighting soldier, he enjoyed an immediate high rank during deployment. Just into his first term as mayor, Buttigieg “made sure my chain of command knew that I would rather go sooner than later, and would rather go to Afghanistan than anywhere else,” he wrote in his book.
Buttigieg was apparently shuttled over quickly, and left soon after.
He spent his six months in Afghanistan in 2014 with a little-known unit that operated under the watch of the Drug Enforcement Administration. It was the Afghanistan Threat Finance Cell (ATFC), according to his appointment papers. The job description in his discharge papers is blank.
Founded by US Central Command leader-turned-CIA chief General David Patreaus, this unit was credited with the destruction of Kabul Bank, the first private bank founded in Afghanistan after the US invasion. ATFC reportedly exposed the financial institution as a giant “ponzi scheme.”
Mayor Pete would join this now illustrious outfit as an “Officer in Charge.” In a 2016 interview with the Harvard Crimson, Buttigieg described himself as an ATFC Liaison Officer to the Combined Joint Interagency Task Force.
ATFC’s primary task was to bust up the Taliban drug trade with the help of law enforcement and intelligence agencies. In Buttigieg’s papers, the ATFC is said to “identify and disrupt Taliban, Al-Qaeda and other insurgent financial/material support networks in Afghanistan by bringing to bear on these groups the full spectrum of interagency and government tools and authorities.”
Ben Norton
✔@BenjaminNorton
Pete Definitely-Not-A-CIA-Agent Buttigieg has in his living room a huge map of the natural resources and minerals in Afghanistan, a country he helped militarily occupy (which has trillions of dollars worth of minerals, by the way)
Extremely normal thing to have in your house https://twitter.com/UrOrientalist/status/1225171433761972224 …
Heshmat Alavi's Trenchcoat@UrOrientalist
This most disturbing thing about Pete 100%
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While official records linking the ATFC to the CIA do not appear widely in available government documents, their collaboration is an open secret. One early report by the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, an advocacy organization for the US intelligence community, noted “the cell has about two-dozen members drawn from the Drug Enforcement Administration, US Central Command, the Treasury Department and the CIA. The FBI is expected to join soon.”
Global news wire Agency France-Presse characterized ATFC as “a multi-agency organization currently comprising about 30 specialists on loan from the Department of Drug Enforcement, Department of the Treasury, Department of Justice, Department of Defense’s CENTCOM, the CIA and the FBI.”
The Grayzone@TheGrayzoneNews
The spook's choice: Coup plotters and CIA agents fill Mayor Pete's list of national security endorsers@Cancel_Sam looks at Buttigieg's new roster of endorsements from high-ranking spies, regime-change architects, and global financiershttps://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/30/coup-plotters-cia-agents-mayor-pete-endorsers/ …
The spooks’ choice: Coup plotters and CIA agents fill Pete Buttigieg’s list of national security...
Why are so many intelligence veterans throwing their weight behind a young Indiana mayor with such a thin foreign policy resume? By Samuel D. Finkelstein These questions continue to loom large over...thegrayzone.com
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At the ATFC, Buttigieg “oversaw the analysis and operations conducted from ATFC Kabul HQ.” He also “coordinated intelligence sharing and targeting deconfliction with multiple organizations and represented ATFC at high level briefings.”
In a 2019 interview with Newsweek, Buttigieg said “we were working with everybody across the civilian spectrum in the intelligence community.” Newsweek listed those agencies as the CIA, the NSA, and Defense Intelligence Agency.
The Grayzone@TheGrayzoneNews
The insider: How national security mandarins groomed Pete Buttigieg and managed his future@MaxBlumenthal explores how a network of military interventionists placed Buttigieg on the fast track to power well before he was known as "Mayor Pete"https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/17/national-security-mandarins-groomed-pete-buttigieg/ …
The insider: How national security mandarins groomed Pete Buttigieg and managed his future
Pledging to "end endless wars," Pete Buttigieg claims he has "never been part of the Washington establishment." But years before he was known as Mayor Pete, an influential DC network of military...thegrayzone.com
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The program was not exactly a smashing success, however. During the year of Buttigieg’s deployment in Afghanistan, the United Nations found that opium production skyrocketed and that “Afghanistan produces some 90 percent of the world’s illicit opiates.”
While Mayor Pete Buttigieg waxes humble about his Midwestern upbringing and touts his outsider story, his work alongside the CIA and DEA halfway around the world was a highly unusual task that helped set the stage for his rise to national prominence.
Alexander Rubinstein
HuffPost UK editor works with gov’t censorship program while smearing anti-war scholars as tools of Russia
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/03/huffpost-uk-editor-censorship-dsma-russia-jess-brammar/#more-20070
HuffPost UK ran yet another hit piece smearing academic critics of the dirty war on Syria as Russian stooges. The outlet’s editor-in-chief Jess Brammar assists a British government program that censors journalism that may “compromise UK military and intelligence operations.”
By Ben Norton
The Huffington Post has relied on Western government officials and organizations funded by Western governments to viciously smear anti-war academics as “useful idiots” of Russia, claiming they are being “used” by the Kremlin.
Ironically, HuffPost UK has done this while its own editor-in-chief actively collaborates with the British Ministry of Defense in a program that censors journalism on behalf of “UK military and intelligence operations,” in order to protect “national security” interests.
HuffPost UK published a hit piece by reporter and senior editor Chris York on January 29 that hearkens back to the era of McCarthyite witch hunts. Titled “The ‘Useful Idiots’: How These British Academics Helped Russia Deny War Crimes At The UN,” York’s hatchet job is dedicated to destroying the reputations of several anti-war scholars who have done extensive research exposing the lies and regime-change propaganda spread by Western governments in their hybrid war on Syria.
It was York’s 12th piece attacking this small group of academics. From the perspective of the British public, a group of semi-obscure professors is an unusual source of such intense interest. However, it appears that the UK regime-change apparatus that has dumped untold millions of pounds into overthrowing Syria’s government feels threatened by their research.
York’s article relies almost entirely on the unsubstantiated opinions of European government officials and groups that are bankrolled by the United States and European governments. It also features some glaring omissions, leaving out key details and misleading readers.
HuffPost UK editor-in-chief Jess Brammar took to Twitter to promote the hit piece, claiming it shows “how a group of British academics have been used by Russia to help them deny war crimes by the Assad regime at the UN.”
(UPDATE, February 4, 2020: Mere hours after this article was published, Brammar was promoted from executive editor to editor-in-chief of HuffPost UK. This piece has been updated to reflect her promotion.)
“It’s quite a tale – please give it a read,” Brammar wrote on Twitter. The article is indeed a tale — and a tall one at that, given it dabbles in fiction with unsubstantiated hyperbolic claims based on Cold War-era propaganda tropes.
Brammar shared a quote from the piece that is attributed to an anonymous “European diplomat,” who claimed anti-war British scholars are “unwittingly and naively acting as agents of propaganda for the Russians, or actively support[ing] Russian disinformation.”
Jess Brammar
✔@jessbrammar
· Jan 29, 2020
We are leading on this fascinating and important story from @ChrisDYork today about how a group of British academics have been used by Russia to help them deny war crimes by the Assad regime at the UN. It’s quite a tale - please give it a read. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/the-useful-idiots_uk_5e2b107ac5b67d8874b0dd9d …
The 'Useful Idiots': How These British Academics Helped Russia Deny War Crimes At The UN
Lecturers from the Universities of Edinburgh, Leicester and Bristol have accused rescue workers the White Helmets of mass murder in Syria – to condemnation from Amnesty International and others.huffingtonpost.co.uk
Jess Brammar
✔@jessbrammar
A European diplomat told us these lecturers from UK universities were either “unwittingly and naively acting as agents of propaganda for the Russians, or actively support[ing] Russian disinformation”.
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While HuffPost UK’s editor-in-chief smears dissenting academics as “agents of propaganda for the Russians,” she herself actively collaborates with a British government censorship program — as writer Caitlin Johnstone first pointed out.
Jess Brammar is a member of the Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) Committee, a government initiative overseen by the Ministry of Defence (MOD) that, according to its official website, exists “to prevent inadvertent public disclosure of information that would compromise UK military and intelligence operations and methods” or potentially challenge “national security” interests.
In other words, the DSMA Committee is a group of media elites who voluntarily agree to collaborate with the British government to censor stories and information the UK military and spy operations deem inconvenient or too dangerous for the public to see.
The DSMA Committee is chaired by the director of general security policy for the UK Ministry of Defense. It includes four more government officials: the directors of national security at the MOD, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Home Office, and the Cabinet Office. They are joined by three military officials in secretarial positions, along with a government assistant.
Rounding out the committee are 17 media elites, representing major publishers such as the Huffington Post, the Times, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, Sky News, ITV, the BBC, the Press Association, Harper Colins UK, and more.
Brammar was one of the only two members of the committee to be nominated directly by the chair and vice-chairs. In other words, the director of general security policy for the UK Ministry of Defense personally approved her seat on the DSMA Committee — a clear stamp of approval for her editorial judgment from the British military establishment.
In a report entitled, “How the UK Security Services neutralised the country’s leading liberal newspaper,” journalists Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis demonstrated how the military-intelligence apparatus cultivated The Guardian as its tool. The process began in earnest after the Guardian embarrassed Western governments by publishing secret documents leaked by National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.
The DSMA Committee was previously called the Defence Advisory Notice (DA-Notice) and Defence Notice (D-Notice) Committee, and purports to be voluntary. Kennard dug through officials minutes of meetings held by the committee and found that the secretary implied otherwise, insisting, “The Guardian was obliged to seek … advice under the terms of the DA notice code,” and “This failure to seek advice was a key source of concern and considerable efforts had been made to address it.”
Periodically, the MOD-led committee sends out a private message to British media outlets called a D-Notice, which warns the ostensibly independent press against publishing information that would “jeopardise both national security and possibly UK personnel.”
Kennard outlined how these D-Notices have been used to muffle journalists, and prevent the publication of stories that threatened to embarrass the British government.
HuffPost UK editor Jess Brammar is at the heart of this government effort to silence critical media.
Jess Brammar
✔@jessbrammar
· Jan 29, 2020
Replying to @jessbrammar
Amnesty International told us: “The millions of Syrians whose lives have been devastated by years of barrel bombing, chemical weapons attacks, imprisonment, torture and killing deserve genuine truth and justice, not this squalid propaganda.”
Jess Brammar
✔@jessbrammar
Every time @ChrisDYork reports on this group of individuals he is subject to abuse online, including being called complicit in war crimes, something I am also accused of by their supporters. We won’t stop reporting on stories like this when they need to be told.
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War stenography for Western governments
But it is not just Brammar’s ongoing, willing participation in a British military-led censorship program that makes her attempts to portray Huffington Post and her reporter Chris York as noble truth-tellers fending off attacks by a baying mob of Kremlin-sponsored abusers so hypocritical.
HuffPost UK smearing independent thinkers and critical-minded academics as Russian puppets while actively peddling regime-change talking points from Western government officials is astoundingly ironic.
In his wildly misleading article, York describes the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (WGSPM), a collective of dissident British scholars, as “agents of propaganda for the Russians.”
The thrust of this smear piece is the unsubstantiated opinion of an unnamed “European diplomat,” who is quoted in five paragraphs viciously maligning the scholars, and whose personal partisan views are presented as absolute fact.
The HuffPost UK hatchet job provides no actual evidence that these scholars have been working with or for the Russian government. The only links to the Kremlin that York could find are hilariously thin: one Russian official praised the group, and another tweeted a link to their work.
Moreover, some of the so-called experts cited by York happen to work for pro-war organizations funded directly by Western governments.
York relies on pundit Shadi Hamid to depict WGSPM as crazy loons. Hamid works at the hawkish think tank the Brookings Institution, which is funded by the Qatari monarchy and US governments.
Hamid is also a vocal advocate for Western military intervention who has gone to absurd lengths to defend NATO’s regime-change war on Libya, which destroyed the most prosperous country in Africa and left behind a failed state that turned into a massive ISIS base and a hub for trafficking and enslavement of African refugees.
Another purported “expert” cited by York is the “open source” reporter Eliot Higgins, who smears the WGSPM as “useful idiots.”
Higgins is the founder of the pro-NATO blog Bellingcat, which is funded directly by the US government’s regime-change arm the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a notorious CIA cutout. Bellingcat is also part of a UK government-financed program backed by the British Foreign Office. And Higgins’ former employer is the Atlantic Council, NATO’s unofficial think tank, also bankrolled by Western governments as well as Gulf monarchies and the arms industry.
Kit Klarenberg@KitKlarenberg
Further confirmation UK gov's 'Open Information Partnership' is the 'Expose Network' from the latest #IntegrityInitiative file dump - so @EliotHiggins was indeed lying when he said @bellingcat hadn't received "funding or information" from the FCO.
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While HuffPost UK’s in-house regime-change cheerleader Chris York treats the Bellingcat founder as an expert, even the New York Times acknowledged in a puff piece that Higgins has no real expertise. “Higgins attributed his skill not to any special knowledge of international conflicts or digital data,” the paper noted, “but to the hours he had spent playing video games, which, he said, gave him the idea that any mystery can be cracked.”
Misleading ‘reporting’ that leaves out crucial information
In recent months, the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media published leaks from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) revealing that at least two whistleblowers complained that the UN-created organization had become politicized, accusing the management of suppressing and even reversing scientific findings under US government pressure.
The apparent OPCW suppression concerns the allegations that the Syrian government used chemical weapons in the city of Douma in April 2018, in an area occupied by Salafi-jihadist insurgents.
The US, British, and French governments claimed without evidence that Damascus had launched a gas attack in this Islamist extremist-occupied area. In response, Washington and its allies launched missile strikes against the Syrian government in violation of international law.
Numerous leaks from the OPCW have cast doubt on the unsubstantiated allegations of Western governments. Along with the WGSPM, WikiLeaks has published several batches of leaks from the OPCW, including internal emails that show signs of high-level suppression of inconvenient scientific findings about the incident in Douma.
HuffPost UK’s Chris York did not even mention WikiLeaks in his wildly misleading article. Instead, York falsely asserts that there “is no reliable evidence to support the theory” that the alleged Douma gas attack was staged by the Salafi-jihadist insurgents on the ground.
Conspicuously absent from York’s article was the smoking gun that arrived in the form of testimony at the United Nations Security Council by former OPCW inspection team leader and engineering expert Ian Henderson.
In January, Henderson told the UN via video that OPCW management had suppressed the fact-finding mission (FFM) team’s findings on the ground in Douma. (Henderson had wanted to testify in person at the UN, but the US government did not give him a visa.)
“We had serious misgivings that a chemical attack had occurred,” Henderson explained. The former OPCW expert added that his months of research “provided further support for the view that there had not been a chemical attack.”
The Grayzone@TheGrayzoneNews
A former OPCW inspection team leader and engineering expert told the UN Security Council that their investigation in Douma, Syria suggested no chemical attack took place. But their findings were suppressed and reversed
Read more here: https://thegrayzone.com/2020/01/22/ian-henderson-opcw-whistleblower-un-no-chemical-attack-douma-syria/ …
via @BenjaminNorton
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In his article, York completely avoided mention of Henderson and UN testimony, in a very egregious and misleading oversight. And this striking omission appears to be intentional, because on Twitter, York later condemned Henderson, along with the other OPCW whistleblower who goes by Alex, claiming they are “wrong.”
The fact that York would conveniently leave out Henderson’s UN testimony — the most important, and scandalous piece of evidence yet of OPCW chicanery — while publicly smearing him on Twitter shows that the methodology of the reporting itself is clearly biased, sloppy, and unprofessional.
Citing dubious regime-change activist ‘Leila al-Shami’ as an ‘expert’
Chris York’s attack piece is also self-referential. In one especially dubious sentence, he claims the WGSPM “has previously been accused of ‘whitewashing war crimes.'” To support this grave accusation, York links to an article he himself wrote in 2018, which is essentially a mimeograph of his latest attack.
This 2018 smear piece accusing the WGSPM academics of “whitewashing war crimes” attributes the outrageous accusation not to a legal expert on war crimes but rather to Leila al-Shami, who has spent years lobbying for foreign intervention to violently overthrow the Syrian government.
Al-Shami is, in fact, the pen name for a mysterious British activist whose credentials are impossible to validate. According to Robin Yassin-Kassab, the co-author of her book “Burning Syria,” Leila al-Shami “is the pseudonym of another British Syrian who worked in Syria in the human rights field before the” war broke out in 2011.
For years, al-Shami has refused to show her face on camera. Hosts routinely ask the audience not to take photos, and during a 2016 event at NYU’s Kevorkian Center, attendees were forbidden from filming al-Shami’s talk “for security reasons.”
In a June 2017 interview with Spain’s El Nacional (in which she and Yassin-Kassab wrongly forecasted a partition of Syria), al-Shami was photographed turning away to hide her face. She claimed that she could not be seen publicly “for security reasons.”
However, during an April 2016 event at New York City’s New School, al-Shami was photographed and filmed while on stage. Video of the talk was published by Flatiron Hot News, a local culture publication.
One of the only known images of regime-change activist Leila al-Shami (on left)Al-Shami is best known for marketing the cause of regime change in Syria to the Western left, painting it as a glorious grassroots struggle for participatory democracy, while branding its leftist opponents as crypto-fascists and “idiots.”
Her book, “Burning Country,” contains no on-the-ground reporting, relying instead on reports by and about opposition activists largely funded by the US government and Gulf monarchies such as the White Helmets and Raed Fares.
While al-Shami claims to have “been involved in human rights and social justice struggles in Syria,” the human rights group she supposedly co-founded, Tahrir-ICN, appears to be an empty shell that consists of a few barely active social media pages and a dormant blog.
Chris York’s reliance on a shady figure like this further highlights his misleading tactics. By citing regime-change activists as credible experts while heaping scorn on his subjects with passive-voice phrases like “have been accused of,” he disguises his own opinions as objective reporting.
Under the leadership of editor-in-chief and British security state collaborator Jess Brammar, York’s brand of dubious, highly partisan reporting is not only tolerated at HuffPost UK; it is encouraged.
York’s hit piece on the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media was, in fact, his 12th attack on the small band of dissident academics. Desperate to suppress inconvenient facts about the dirty war on Syria, some powerful forces have found reliable stenographers at the HuffPost UK.
Ben Norton
Billionaire pro-Israel Buttigieg backer Seth Klarman funds group behind Iowa’s disastrous voting app
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/04/pro-israel-buttigieg-seth-klarman-iowas-voting-app/
Behind the app that delayed Iowa’s voting results is a dark money operation funded by anti-Bernie Sanders billionaires. Its top donor Seth Klarman is a Buttigieg backer who has dumped money into pro-settler Israel lobby groups.
By Max Blumenthal
At the time of publication, 12 hours after voting in the Democratic Party’s Iowa caucuses ended, the results have not been announced. The delay in reporting is the result of a failed app developed by a company appropriately named Shadow Inc.
This firm was staffed by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaign veterans and created by a Democratic dark money nonprofit backed by hedge-fund billionaires including Seth Klarman. A prolific funder of pro-settler Israel lobby organizations, Klarman has also contributed directly to Pete Buttigieg’s campaign.
The delay in the vote reporting denied a victory speech to Senator Bernie Sanders, the presumptive winner of the opening contest in the Democratic presidential primary. Though not one exit poll indicated that Buttigieg would have won, the South Bend, Indiana mayor took to Twitter to confidently proclaim himself the victor.
Pete Buttigieg
✔@PeteButtigieg
Iowa, you have shocked the nation.
By all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious. #IowaCaucuses
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The bizarre scenario was made possible by a mysterious voting app whose origins had been kept secret by Democratic National Committee officials. For hours, it was unclear who created the failed technology, or how it wound up in the hands of Iowa party officials.
Though a dark money Democratic operation turned out to be the source of the disastrous app, suspicion initially centered on former Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook and his Russiagate-related elections integrity initiative.
Leveraging Russia hysteria into lucrative election opportunities
While Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price refused to say who was behind the failed app, he told NPR that he “worked with the national party’s cybersecurity team and Harvard University’s Defending Digital Democracy project…” Price did not offer details on his collaboration with the Harvard group, however.
The New York Times reported that this same outfit had teamed up with Iowa Democrats to run a “drill of worst-case scenarios” and possible foreign threats, but was also vague on details.
Robby Mook, the former campaign manager for Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, was the co-founder of Defending Digital Democracy. His initiative arose out of the national freakout over Russian meddling that he and his former boss helped stir when they blamed their loss on Russian interference. Mook’s new outfit pledged to “protect from hackers and propaganda attacks.”
He founded the organization with help from Matt Rhoades, a former campaign manager for Republican Mitt Romney whose public relations company was sued by a Silicon Valley investor after it branded him “an agent of the Russian government” and “a friend of Russian President, Vladimir Putin.” Rhoades’ firm had been contracted by a business rival to destroy the investor’s reputation.
As outrage grew over the delay in Iowa caucus results, Mook publicly denied any role in designing the notorious app.
Franklin Leonard
✔@franklinleonard
· Feb 3, 2020
You know it’s bad when... https://twitter.com/RobbyMook/status/1224555538790395904 …
Robby Mook
✔@RobbyMook
Sorry, folks. I did NOT have anythjng to do with building the Iowa caucus app. I dont know anything about it, had no role in it, and dont own a company that makes mobile appa. Please contact @iowademocrats with questions about it.
Franklin Leonard
✔@franklinleonard
.@RobbyMook, you may not have built the app, but the @nytimes is reporting that you were involved in stress testing it.
Any comment? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/us/politics/iowa-caucuses-hacking-security.html …
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11:20 PM - Feb 3, 2020
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Hours later, journalist Lee Fang reported that a previously unknown tech outfit called Shadow Inc. had contracted with the Iowa Democratic Party to create the failed technology. The firm was comprised of former staffers for Obama and Clinton as well as the tech industry, and had been paid for “software rights” by the Buttigieg campaign.
FEC filings show the Iowa Democratic Party and Pete Buttigieg campaign paid Shadow Inc., which developed the flawed app used in the Iowa caucusAn Israel lobby moneyman’s path to Mayor Pete’s wine cave
Shadow Inc. was launched by a major Democratic dark money nonprofit called Acronym, which also gave birth to a $7.7 million Super PAC known as Pacronym.
According to Sludge, Pacronym’s largest donor is Seth Klarman. A billionaire hedge funder, Klarman also happens to be a top donor to Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.
Though he has attracted some attention for his role in the campaign, Klarman’s prolific funding of the pro-settler Israel lobby and Islamophobic initiatives has gone almost entirely unmentioned.
Seth Klarman is the founder of the Boston-based Baupost Group hedge fund and a longtime donor to corporate Republican candidates. After Donald Trump called for forgiving Puerto Rico’s debt, Klarman – the owner of $911 million of the island’s bonds – flipped and began funding Trump’s opponents.
The billionaire’s crusade against Trump ultimately led him to Mayor Pete’s wine cave.
By the end of 2019, Klarman had donated $5,600 to Buttigieg and pumped money into the campaigns of Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris as well.
The billionaire’s support for centrist candidates appears to be not only about his own financial interests, but also his deep and abiding ideological commitment to Israel and its expansionist project.
As I reported for Mondoweiss, Klarman has been a top funder for major Israel lobby outfits, including those that support the expansion of illegal settlements and Islamophobic campaigns.
Klarman was the principal financier of The Israel Project, the recently disbanded Israeli government-linked propaganda organization that lobbied against the Iran nuclear deal and backed the Israeli settlement enterprise.
Klarman has heaped hundreds of thousands of dollars on the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) and the American Jewish Committee. And he funded The David Project, which was established to suppress Palestine solidarity organizing on college campuses across the US and battled to block the establishment of a Muslim community center in Boston.
Through his support for the Friends of Ir David Inc., Klarman directly involved himself in the Israeli settlement enterprise, assisting the US-based tax-exempt arm of the organization that oversaw a wave of Palestinian expulsions in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan.
Other pro-Israel groups reaping the benefits of Klarman’s generosity include Birthright Israel, the AIPAC-founded Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), a neoconservative think tank that helped devise Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign of economic warfare on Iran.
Klarman is the owner of the Times of Israel, an Israeli media outlet that once published a call for Palestinian genocide. (The op-ed was ultimately removed following public backlash.)
In recent weeks, Buttigieg has sought to distinguish himself from Sanders on the issue of Israel-Palestine. During a testy exchange this January with a self-proclaimed Jewish supporter of Palestinian human rights, the South Bend mayor backtracked on a previous pledge to withhold military aid to Israel if it annexed parts of the West Bank.
IfNotNow
@IfNotNowOrgNEW: The day after Trump unveiled his plan green-lighting Israeli annexation and Netanyahu’s announcement of a cabinet vote on annexation this Tuesday, @PeteButtigieg backtracked on his repeated promise that the "U.S. will not foot the bill for annexation." #StopFundingOccupation
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8:23 AM - Jan 30, 2020
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Another recipient of Klarman’s funding, Amy Klobuchar, has taken a strongly pro-Israel line, vowing to support Trump’s relocation of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Klarman’s interest in Israel has apparently led him to support regime change in Syria. In 2017, the pro-Israel billionaire’s foundation donated $100,000 to the Syrian American Medical Society, a US-based non-profit that has lobbied aggressively for US intervention in Syria while partnering on the ground with foreign-backed extremists that occupied large swaths of the country.
The Klarman Family Foundation 2017 990 form shows it funds the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS)Back home in the US, Klarman has contributed heavily to funding the CIA Memorial Foundation. He is listed alongside former CIA Director George Tenet as a top individual contributor to the group.
Billionaire Seth Klarman is listed as a top donor to the CIA Memorial FoundationKlarman’s support for Buttigieg, The Grayzone previously reported, has been complimented by a surprisingly long roster of former high-ranking CIA officials, regime-change architects, and global financiers.
Battling Bernie with hedge fund money and sexism claims
Like Klarman, Donald Sussman is a hedge funder who has channeled his fortune into Pacronym. He has given $1 million to the Super PAC and was also top donor to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Sussman’s Paloma Partners operates through a series of offshore shell companies, and received tens of millions of dollars in the 2009 federal bailout of the banking industry.
His daughter, Democratic operative Emily Tisch Sussman, declared on MSNBC in September that “if you still support Sanders over Warren, it’s kind of showing your sexism.”
Ibrahim@ibrahimpols
MSNBC pundit says if you support Bernie Sanders over Elizabeth Warren it’s “showing your sexism.”
4,356
5:00 PM - Sep 27, 2019
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As Democratic elites like the Sussmans braced for a Bernie Sanders triumph in Iowa, a mysterious piece of technology spun out by a group they supported delayed the vote results, preventing Sanders from delivering a victory speech.
And the politician many of them supported, Pete Buttigieg, exploited the moment to declare himself the winner.
In such a strange scenario, the conspiracy theories write themselves.
Max Blumenthal
Right-wing Nicaraguan opposition boasts of support from US and EU in campaign to oust Sandinista gov’t
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/07/nicaragua-opposition-support-us-eu-coalition/
The US embassy and European Union are meeting with right-wing Nicaraguan opposition leaders and pressuring them to unite against elected leftist President Daniel Ortega in the lead-up to the 2021 election.
By Ben Norton
A far-right opposition figure in Nicaragua has boasted that the country’s unpopular opposition forces are meeting with representatives from the US embassy and European Union, who have pledged them support in their bid to oust the ruling leftist Sandinista Front government.
According to this rightist Evangelical leader, the US government and EU are pressuring Nicaragua’s badly divided opposition to unite in the lead-up to the 2021 election, with the goal of unseating the Sandinistas.
This frank admission of foreign meddling in Nicaragua’s democracy comes after a violent coup attempt in 2018, in which right-wing groups funded and supported by the US government failed to overthrow the elected president, Daniel Ortega.
The Donald Trump administration has declared the small nation of Nicaragua to be a supposed “national security threat,” and has imposed several rounds of aggressive sanctions on the country, with the aim of destabilizing its economy.
The violence and economic warfare has failed to weaken the popularity of the ruling FSLN party, however. A survey released this January by a mainstream polling firm found that 63.5 percent of Nicaraguans plan to vote for the Sandinistas in the upcoming election, while the opposition really only has the dedicated support of around 11.5 percent of the population.
The Grayzone@TheGrayzoneNews
A fringe far-right Evangelical leader in Nicaragua revealed opposition forces are meeting with advisers from the US embassy and EU, who pledged support and are pressuring them to unite to try to oust the elected leftist Sandinista Front.
Read more here: https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/07/nicaragua-opposition-support-us-eu-coalition/ …
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1:24 PM - Feb 7, 2020
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‘We met with political advisers from the US embassy and the European Union’
On January 30, right-wing leaders from a group called the Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy (ACJD) held a press conference to announce their expansion as part of a process of “fortifying.”
The ACJD is a coalition of opposition groups, several of which are funded by the US government and coordinate closely with Washington. It was formed in 2018 during the coup attempt against the Sandinistas.
In the press conference and a subsequent printed statement, the ACJD announced that it is in the process of creating “a National Coalition, wide, pluralist, and committed to the change that Nicaragua needs.”
Among the opposition figures at the presser was Saturnino Cerrato, the fundamentalist Evangelical leader of the rabidly right-wing Party for Democratic Restoration (PRD).
Cerrato, a minor figure in Nicaraguan politics who is barely known outside far-right circles, said his party is eager to become part of the right-wing National Coalition, arguing “there is a total opening” for the opposition.
He revealed that this demand for opposition unity is not only coming from inside the country, but also from powerful foreign actors.
“First it is a national demand, from the national community, and next it is also a demand from the international community,” Cerrato explained.
“In these days — the day before yesterday and today — we met with political advisers from the US embassy and the European Union,” Cerrato said in the January 30 press conference, which was livestreamed on Facebook.
The US embassy and EU told the opposition leaders, “We are ready to support a large movement that is formed in Nicaragua,” he recalled.
“And one of the advisers said, ‘We are surprised that it has taken so much time to form that unity,'” he added.
Cerrato said the pressure both from within and outside convinced his party to join the National Coalition efforts.
Saturnino Cerrato speaking at the Nicaraguan opposition Civic Alliance press conference on January 30, sitting next to Juan Sebastián ChamorroUS and EU backing far-right fringe figures in Latin America
Before the US-backed coup attempt against Nicaragua’s elected Sandinista government in 2018, Saturnino Cerrato was virtually unknown in the country. His PRD party received just over 4 percent in the 2016 general elections.
A 2017 poll by major firm showed that more than 85 percent of Nicaraguans did not even know who Cerrato was or had no opinion of him. Of those who did know the right-wing pastor, they had a mostly negative view of him. (For perspective, this same poll found that 80 percent of Nicaraguans had a positive view of the leftist President Daniel Ortega, and just 11 percent had a negative view.)
A Nicaraguan activist told The Grayzone that figures like Cerrato “don’t have much local influence. But he is an Evangelical pastor who have the ability to influence many Evangelical groups.”
“He does not have a lot of people, he has one of the parties with very few votes,” the activist said. “But after the coup attempt they have tried to become more influential.”
The US government has a long history of elevating fringe far-right figures like these in coup efforts targeting independent leftist governments in Latin America.
In the putsch against Bolivia’s democratically elected leftist government in November 2019, for instance, Washington supported the installation of a Christian extremist with a long and documented history of anti-indigenous racism, Jeanine Añez. Her fringe opposition party also reaped just over 4 percent of the vote in the 2019 general elections.
More US-backed opposition groups leading Nicaragua alliance efforts
The opposition is moving towards greater unity while the Trump administration escalates its pressure campaign against Nicaragua’s government.
On January 31, the acting assistant secretary for the US State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, Michael G. Kozak, tweeted condemnation of the elected Ortega government and expressed support for the major right-wing newspaper, La Prensa.
Owned by the oligarchic Chamorro family, La Prensa is the traditional mouthpiece for the opposition. It has a long history of receiving funding from the US government through the CIA front the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and was indispensable in the US government’s propaganda campaign against Nicaragua during its Contra proxy war in the 1980s.
Michael G. Kozak
✔@WHAAsstSecty
The Ortega regime continues to squeeze free press by blocking #Nicaragua’s @laprensa from importing paper & ink, which will silence Nicaragua’s oldest independent newspaper and its vital work. Ortega, fulfill your commitment from last March and release these supplies.
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1:56 PM - Jan 31, 2020
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The January 30 press conference held by Nicaragua’s Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy featured several other prominent right-wing opposition activists who are backed by Washington.
Among the co-sponsors was Juan Sebastián Chamorro of the powerful Chamorro clan, a wealthy family that has controlled Nicaragua for much of its history. His neoliberal think tank, the Nicaraguan Foundation for Economic and Social Development (FUNIDES), has been bankrolled with millions of dollars by the US government’s soft-power arm the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and used as a conduit for funding smaller opposition groups.
Helping to organize the press conference was the group Blue and White National Unity (UNAB). Like the right-wing Civic Alliance, the UNAB was founded in 2018, in the wake of the failed coup attempt. It is an integral part of the US- and EU-backed efforts to form an opposition alliance. UNAB has even changed its photos on social media to call for a “National Coalition.”
Ben Norton
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