The GCHQ listening post on Mount Troodos in Cyprus is arguably the most valued asset which the UK contributes to UK/US intelligence cooperation. The communications intercept agencies, GCHQ in the UK and NSA in the US, share all their intelligence reports (as do the CIA and MI6). Troodos is valued enormously by the NSA. It monitors all radio, satellite and microwave traffic across the Middle East, ranging from Egypt and Eastern Libya right through to the Caucasus. Even almost all landline telephone communication in this region is routed through microwave links at some stage, picked up on Troodos.
Troodos is highly effective – the jewel in the crown of British intelligence. Its capacity and efficiency, as well as its reach, is staggering. The US do not have their own comparable facility for the Middle East. I should state that I have actually been inside all of this facility and been fully briefed on its operations and capabilities, while I was head of the FCO Cyprus Section in the early 1990s. This is fact, not speculation.
It is therefore very strange, to say the least, that John Kerry claims to have access to communications intercepts of Syrian military and officials organising chemical weapons attacks, which intercepts were not available to the British Joint Intelligence Committee.
On one level the explanation is simple. The intercept evidence was provided to the USA by Mossad, according to my own well placed source in the Washington intelligence community. Intelligence provided by a third party is not automatically shared with the UK, and indeed Israel specifies it should not be.
But the inescapable question is this. Mossad have nothing comparable to the Troodos operation. The reported content of the conversations fits exactly with key tasking for Troodos, and would have tripped all the triggers. How can Troodos have missed this if Mossad got it? The only remote possibility is that all the conversations went on a purely landline route, on which Mossad have a physical wire tap, but that is very unlikely in a number of ways – not least nowadays the purely landline route.
Israel has repeatedly been involved in the Syrian civil war, carrying out a number of illegal bombings and missile strikes over many months. This absolutely illegal activity by Israel- which has killed a great many civilians, including children – has brought no condemnation at all from the West. Israel has now provided “intelligence” to the United States designed to allow the United States to join in with Israel’s bombing and missile campaign.
The answer to the Troodos Conundrum is simple. Troodos did not pick up the intercepts because they do not exist. Mossad fabricated them. John Kerry’s “evidence” is the shabbiest of tricks. More children may now be blown to pieces by massive American missile blasts. It is nothing to do with humanitarian intervention. It is, yet again, the USA acting at the behest of Israel.
Herbie 31 Aug, 2013 – 4:13 pm
“The point ultimately, Phil, is that very obviously Kerry is talking total bollocks anyway….Surely you know that already.”
FFS I have said nothing to suggest that I believe anything kerry says. I am saying that I do not believe what jones says. He has even lied in the article being discussed today!
I can see three explanations for this conversation.
* I am fucking mental
* I unable to explain myself
* You lot are fucking mental
I hope it is the middle one. Who’s gonna make the shout?
On Alex Jones: Why is it in respectable discussions, like Craig Murray, anyone linking to Jones or Icke, eg, is mocked as a nutter, while linking to know well known, long-time liars such as the BBC, NYT, WaPo, LA Times, Time, Fox, etc. is considered acceptable?
Especially now that major news is attributed to dozens of sources, unnamed because they are unauthorized to speak on record, or bits grabbed from social media that they can’t verify. For example Assad’s kid’s Facebook, where he mocked Obama. They couldn’t verify it was his page, or if it was whether he’d written it.
Not to mention the execrable HuffPo, examiner.com, and such, which are mostly copy/pastes slightly rewritten, or unpaid writers pushing their personal agenda, often involving kittens.
Or the changeable Wikipedia. (US Senate staffer recently caught changing Snowden’s descriptor from “dissident” to “traitor”.)
Wikipedia itself has a changeable list of acceptable sources,
At one time DM was not but UK Sun was, eg. Blogs are not, except when written by a mainstream published author, so Craig himself qualifies as a Wikipedia source, but not we barnacles, hanging off the bottom.
Aside from the main stories in question, are the old MSM media not as full of peripheral BS as Alex Jones; stories on snake oil cures, “new studies suggest fillers,” hyping movies/music from studios owned by their parents, bad investment advice, etc?
WRT Alex Jones or Godlike Productions; even a blind hog finds a truffle occasionally. You don’t get cooties when you visit. Like all info, it needs to be corroborated.
Alex is a stuffed owl trying to scare crows. He’s harmless in context.
I do remember the only time Craig has addressed me. I made an oblique reference to Nostradamus, and he apparently sprayed his keyboard with afternoon tea.
It is no coincidence that Qatar is leading the charge, its Pars gas field (shared with Iran 35%) from which it extracts 80m tons of gas annually, has almost LIMITLESS reserves. The US CENTCOM puppet hamad with a Syria/saud pipeline to the Mediterranean could help wean off Europe from Soviet gas/oil dependency. Bandar went to Moscow to allay Russian fears over this but was rebuffed.
The truth will set you free.
Access to ‘news’ online is a game changer.
The ordinary person like myself now laughs at the state news.
“The ordinary person like myself now laughs at the state news.”
Ain’t that the truth? I remember the Dewey Decimal system with much hatred. Going to the card file, finding the section, going to the section, finding the book..gone.
The internet is the most incredible library. It does provide sensory overload, but if you can filter and are good at key-word searches, you can find almost anything. i love it.
The new online editor for the BBC News ME page is Raffi Berg.
BBC editor urged colleagues to downplay Israel’s siege of Gaza Amena Saleem
08/30/2013 – 13:34
The new Middle East online editor for BBC News has been praised by a pro-Israeli website for being “willing to listen to his critics” after he sent internal emails guiding BBC staff to write more favorably about Israel.
Raffi Berg was promoted to head the BBC website’s Middle East desk earlier this month, having already worked as a journalist with that desk. His emails, which have been posted on a pro-Israeli site, were sent during Israel’s eight day assault on Gaza in November 2012, which killed nearly 200 Palestinians.
/..
http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/amena-saleem/bbc-editor-urged-colleagues-downplay-israels-siege-gaza
He joins James Purnell and James Harding who have two of the top jobs.
Apologists for Israel take top posts at BBC
Amena Saleem
23 April 2013
http://electronicintifada.net/content/apologists-israel-take-top-posts-bbc/12395
Many are commenting elsewhere that the BBC is still in full propaganda mode, pushing the narrative for war, a narrative we already know is cobblers.
The UK sovereign Parliament has come out against it. The people of the UK are against it.
To whom does the BBC answer? It’s certainly not Parliament nor the UK people.
We pay them, but they clearly work to other interests.
Who is it?
And where did they find this Dr Rola. They seem to be pushing her quite hard, which only raises further suspicions.
O/T They have wheeled out Jane Corbin of Death on the Med infamy to cover the story of the Algerian hostages. She is on TV tonight @ BBC 2 – Terror in the Desert 21.15-22.15
Also a piece here
Algeria siege: “I wore a necklace bomb”.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23878183
@CM – that was quite a passionate speech at Trafalgar Square today, but to no avail, there will be war, we will be gazumped by the gaju ! With millipede voting for war too, just watch as the signals start to be sent beforehand to allow a “free and secret” second vote.
@Phil “(Alex)Jones exagerrates, extrapolates, misrepresents and lies. He has even lied in the article being discussed today. Jeeesh. He seems to have become slightly more spohisticated with his money making paranoia machine but it wasn’t so long ago that he was claiming the illuminati were lizards dancing around midnight bonfires at bildeburb shindigs. It is not snobbery to not take the word of a liar”
exagerrates, extrapolates for sure – that’s probably needed these days to keep us, the public zombies’ attention. Disagree with the rest of your statement though. He never claimed they were lizards dancing around midnight – as far as I know he was showing the highly dubious rituals that the elite fruitcake elites like to take part in.
Anyways – are you able to provide definitive proof of his own deliberate lying as you’ve alleged?
WILKERSON: Absolutely. I do not see any way, as General Dempsey pointed out, any way that you get anything other than what, for example–and we just walked right over this–what we have in Libya today, which is a haven for al-Qaeda, which has transferred al-Qaeda into the northern part of Mali and caused that state to become unstable, caused us to have to place a drone outfit in that region, for example, widening the so-called war on terror, not narrowing it, not eliminating it, keeping us in a constant state of warfare. So Libya is no example to use.
For that matter, people are throwing Kosovo out. Kosovo is no example to use.
Kosovo’s GDP right now is 90 percent criminality–trafficking in humans, in drugs, in arms, much the same way Albania, its sister state over there, is. So these great examples of humanitarian intervention over the last few years are not very positive examples. And Syria, I think, would trump than tenfold. It’d be much worse. We don’t know who’s going to control Syria. And we’re not about to put boots on the ground and occupy that place for ten or 12 years to ensure that whoever controls it, to ensure that their interests are compatible with Israel’s and others’.
http://www.therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=10652
Dr Rola was referred to in the first comment on here earlier today.
http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/thread/1377942849.html
Hand in Hand in Syria is a UK charity registered in Feb 2012, no. 1145862. It was inaugurated in 2011. There is no financial information and no accounts posted. There are three trustees named.
Contact:
FADDY SAHLOUL
30 WHINLATTER DRIVE
WEST BRIDGFORD
NOTTINGHAM
UK
NG2 6QS
Tel: 07512586936
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.handinhandforsyria.org.uk
Trustees
RAZAN SAHLOUL
FADDY SAHLOUL
FADI AL-DAIRI
http://www.charitycommission.gov.uk/find-charities/
It is a well organized set up with collection points for donations, viz
http://handinhandforsyria.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=209:big-aid-drop-for-syria&catid=922
The BBC? Watch it from a Scots independence viewpoint. We are forced by penalty of jail to pay for daily British State propoganda.
The upside is that Scots see the daily misinformation from the BBC for what it is, so now don’t believe their international news.
Putin: US Claims About Syrian Chemical Attack ‘Unimaginable Nonsense’
Last time round, in 2002/3, there was a Kurdish woman who allegedly had lost lots of memebers of her family to Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons at Hallabja in the late 1980s. She seemed to get invited onto all the programmes and invariably would scream and yell in an increasingly high-pitched tone at any panellists on, eg. BBC TV show, Question Time, who demurred from advocating invasion of Iraq, in an attempt to make them seem inhuman and to shut them up. I distinctly recall her screaming at Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, for example, who opposed the invasion. I’d never seen her before and never saw her again (after the invasion of Iraq).
On a perhaps different note, we had the woman who alleged she’d seen Iraqi soldiers tipping pre-term babies out of incubators in Kuwait during Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. That story turned out to be wholly false and the woman in question, it transpired afterwards, was a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family.
Now we have, for example, the so-called grandly-titled, ‘Syrian Observatory on Human Rights’ – which/who, it seems, is just one person.
One expects it. It’s the ‘German soldiers eating Belgian babies’ story, over and over again.
She was an actress, as the data came out later. Although another of the gaggel of women getting paraded around the various studios, who was claiming she was raped by 150 of Saddam torturers is now a minister of the government in Iraqi Kurdistan. Also anyone remember the fat woman who was also claiming rape and torture falling sleep in the studio? That particular sleeping behemoth was duly dropped after getting caught whilst nodding off.
The simple fact is these fucking liars still believe they can fool we the people over and again. Lying bastards, doing their voodoo
How very interesting, Fedup. An actress! That figures. Yes, you’re right, they imagine they can fool everyone, always.
If you look at the BBC’s timeline on Syria:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-14703995
you can see that what the BBC calls, “Opposition organises”, begins in July 2011, just as Syria, Iraq and Iran sign their MOU on the pipeline deal, 25.07.11:
http://www.albawaba.com/main-headlines/iran-syria-and-iraq-sign-mou-major-gas-pipeline-385417
Funny, that.
And of course the humanitarian crisis grows ever greater from that point on.
That’s a very direct link between the increased humanitarian crisis and those who oppose the Iran, Iraq, Syria pipeline deal.
None of this forms any part of the narrative now being used to inflict even more suffering upon Syria.
Thanks for that link Ben, right on topic. Another wise voice of experience speaking out. One forgets how valuable The Real News is.
It is shocking to see what Saudi Arabia is getting away with. I hope Russia and China can put them on the mat
_______
In the same vein, Mary, can we have less TV programme reviews and Companies House search type of data? Why don’t we talk about the dynamics of Saudi Arabian involvement in the whole War on Terror and perhaps their beneficiary Al Nusrah, specifically.
Keep an eye out for a purported Syrian “Dr.” woman who speaks “Street” and supposedly is helping the dying in the Syria. If she has more than two GCSE I will eat hay with a cuddy.
The drive for war is so sudden and almost frenetic, that beggars the question; why?
Whose time table is running this operation?
“Also anyone remember the fat woman who was also claiming rape and torture falling sleep in the studio? That particular sleeping behemoth was duly dropped after getting caught whilst nodding off.” Fedup.
I don’t remember seeing that one! Sounds hilarious. Did she snore? I’d like to watch it now, if it’s now on Youtube – it was a bit early for that, though, wasn’t it?
Villager; Do you have an opinion on how the Millband/Cameron surprise happened? How is it the USG left that tell-tale ‘evidence’ out of the mix; you know, the one Kerry is so animated about?
This was a major screw-up/ Or a deliberate attempt to derail the entire process; one that seems a hijacked agenda that even Obama cannot control without help in a defeating effort.
Are they all really so incompetent? I’m not so sure.
I’m very glad to see that the focus of attention and scrutiny has shifted from foreign matters to both the British government regime and the BBC British regime state tv. They’ve been rumbled and the pantomine is looking more ridicilous and desperate by the day
Chris Jones 31 Aug, 2013 – 5:46 pm
“exagerrates, extrapolates for sure – that’s probably needed these days to keep us, the public zombies’ attention.”
Chris, I am not a zombie. I do not want exageration, extrapolation, misrepresntation nor lies to counter lies. I want to know what is going on. Not to be motivated by delusion.
“are you able to provide definitive proof of his own deliberate lying as you’ve alleged?”
Well let’s start with the article today. Jones says ““Kerry referenced a photograph used by the BBC”. This is an untruth, a misrepresntation or whatever you want to call it. I call it a lie. Not the biggest lie in the world but still not true.
Before today the last time I even read jones was last century. His conspiracy industry was ground breaking and I was temporarily fascinated. But it soon became apparent he was an entertainer who said whatever got him the hits. One story I clearly remember was exactly what I have described. He presented a distant unclear video of some people in what looked like weird costumes, across a lake, as the illuminati dancing around a midnight fire at a bildeburg meeting. And yes he did mention lizards. Possibly not a view he strongly holds but maybe said to grab the attention of ike followers. But he said it.
I also looked at many other things he wrote. I cannot recall any detail now but I found him lacking whenever he spoke of things I knew about or looked into. I just retain the memory that he is not to be trusted. Sorry I know that is unsatisfactory as an answer.
Maybe he has changed from an entertainer into someone you trust. But that today’s article in not true doesn’t suggest so. Possibly he has simply become more sophisticated as his audience more global. At best he is a propagandist. But I don’t want to listen to propagandists without acknowledging the propaganda even if it is meant to serve a fight I fight.
‘In the same vein, Mary, can we have less TV programme reviews and Companies House search type of data? Why don’t we talk about the dynamics of Saudi Arabian involvement in the whole War on Terror and perhaps their beneficiary Al Nusrah, specifically.’
I will post what I want to, Craig and Jon permitting, thank you.
Ben, on the whole, if you don’t mind my saying so, my long-held observation is that the US audience is generally more gullible and also less prone to blowback on home-turf being an isolated continent.
As for Obama, i think he really has an opportunity here to demonstrate incremental leadership. I really don’t have enough of a feel for US politics to hazard guesses of outcomes. But we’re certainly living in interesting times — lets wait and see.
I expect in the UK, people’s interest in politics will increase as a result of the Commons vote.
“In the same vein, Mary, can we have less TV programme reviews and Companies House search type of data?” (from Villager)
____________________
Yes indeed, and for Heaven’s sake less of the following as well :
“The new online editor for the BBC News ME page is Raffi Berg.”
Are we going to start this association of people of the Jewish faith with all the obsessions of Mary and consorts all over again?
Just for the record, I recommend that everyone take a look at the website I pointed to the other day called “BBC Watch”. That website, as far as I can see, exists to ‘expose’ the ‘anti-Israel bias’ of the BBC (it is, self-evidently, a pro-Israel and even a pro-Zionist website). Read some of the articles and you’ll see that they’re the mirror image of what is written here about the BBC and in my opinion that should give some of you pause for thought….
31 August 2013 Last updated at 18:55
Breaking news
Obama to seek Congress vote on Syria
US President Barack Obama says he is to seek Congressional authorisation for military operations against Syria