The problem with the Geneva Communique from the first Geneva round on Syria is that the government of Syria never subscribed to it. It was jointly chaired by the League of Arab States for Syria, whatever that may mean. Another problem is that it is, as so many diplomatic documents are, highly ambiguous. It plainly advocates a power sharing executive formed by some of the current government plus the opposition to oversee a transition to democracy. But it does not state which elements of the current government, and it does not mention which elements of the opposition, nor does it make plain if President Assad himself is eligible to be part of, or to head, the power-sharing executive, and whether he is eligible to be a candidate in future democratic elections.
Doubtless the British, for example, would argue that the term transition implies that he will go. The Russians will argue there is no such implication and the text does not exclude anybody from the process. Doubtless also diplomats on all sides were fully aware of these differing interpretations and the ambiguity is quite deliberate to enable an agreed text. I would say that the text tends much more to the “western” side, and that this reflects the apparently weak military position of the Assad regime at that time and the then extant threat of western military intervention. There has been a radical shift in those factors against the western side in the interim. Expect Russian interpretations now to get more hardline.
Given the extreme ambiguity of the text, Iran has, as it frequently does, shot itself in the foot diplomatically by refusing to accept the communique as the basis of talks and thus getting excluded from Geneva. Iran should have accepted the communique, and then at Geneva issued its own interpretation of it.
But that is a minor point. The farcical thing about the Geneva conference is that it is attempting to promote into power-sharing in Syria “opposition” members who have no democratic credentials and represent a scarcely significant portion of those actually fighting the Assad regime in Syria. What the West are trying to achieve is what the CIA and Mossad have now achieved in Egypt; replacing the head of the Mubarak regime while keeping all its power structures in place. The West don’t really want democracy in Syria, they just want a less pro-Russian leader of the power structures.
The inability of the British left to understand the Middle East is pathetic. I recall arguing with commenters on this blog who supported the overthrow of the elected President of Egypt Morsi on the grounds that his overthrow was supporting secularism, judicial independence (missing the entirely obvious fact the Egyptian judiciary are almost all puppets of the military) and would lead to a left wing revolutionary outcome. Similarly the demonstrations against Erdogan in Istanbul, orchestrated by very similar pro-military forces to those now in charge in Egypt, were also hailed by commenters here. The word “secularist” seems to obviate all sins when it comes to the Middle East.
Qatar will be present at Geneva, and Qatar has just launched a pre-emptive media offensive by launching a dossier on torture and murder of detainees by the Assad regime, which is being given first headline treatment by the BBC all morning
There would be a good dossier to be issued on torture in detention in Qatar, and the lives of slave workers there, but that is another question.
I do not doubt at all that atrocities have been committed and are being committed by the Assad regime. It is a very unpleasant regime indeed. The fact that atrocities are also being committed by various rebel groups does not make Syrian government atrocities any better.
But whether 11,000 people really were murdered in a single detainee camp I am unsure. What I do know is that the BBC presentation of today’s report has been a disgrace. The report was commissioned by the government of Qatar who commissioned Carter Ruck to do it. Both those organisations are infamous suppressors of free speech. What is reprehensible is that the BBC are presenting the report as though it were produced by neutral experts, whereas the opposite is the case. It is produced not by anti torture campaigners or by human rights activists, but by lawyers who are doing it purely and simply because they are being paid to do it.
The BBC are showing enormous deference to Sir Desmond De Silva, who is introduced as a former UN war crimes prosecutor. He is indeed that, but it is not the capacity in which he is now acting. He is acting as a barrister in private practice. Before he was a UN prosecutor, he was for decades a criminal defence lawyer and has defended many murderers. He has since acted to suppress the truth being published about many celebrities, including John Terry.
If the Assad regime and not the government of Qatar had instructed him and paid him, he would now be on our screens arguing the opposite case to that he is putting. That is his job. He probably regards that as not reprehensible. What is reprehensible is that the BBC do not make it plain, but introduce him as a UN war crimes prosecutor as though he were acting in that capacity or out of concern for human rights. I can find no evidence of his having an especial love for human rights in the abstract, when he is not being paid for it. He produced an official UK government report into the murder of Pat Finucane, a murder organised by British authorities, which Pat Finucane’s widow described as a “sham”. He was also put in charge of quietly sweeping the Israeli murders on the Gaza flotilla under the carpet at the UN.
The question any decent journalist should be asking him is “Sir Desmond De Silva, how much did the government of Qatar pay you for your part in preparing this report? How much did it pay the other experts? Does your fee from the Government of Qatar include this TV interview, or are you charging separately for your time in giving this interview? In short how much are you being paid to say this?”
That is what any decent journalist would ask. Which is why you will never hear those questions on the BBC.
BlackJelly
The question I put remains valid whichever Lithuanian (your code for Lithuanian Jew)) you were referring to. Feel free to answer.
BlackJelly
You sound like an anti-semite. You’ll feel in good company with some of the other commenters.
PS – don’t be too open about it though, otherwise Craig Murray will (rightly) tell you to fuck off.
The dreaded page 5 is now in use!……
Palestinians in Israel: Trapped in the ghetto
Jonathan Cook:
1 February 2014
Salah Sawaid remembers when this huddle of shacks was surrounded by open fields. Today, his views from the grassy uplands of the central Galilee are blocked on all sides by luxury apartments – a new neighbourhood of the ever-expanding city of Karmiel, here in northern Israel.
“We are being choked to death,” said Sawaid, Ramya’s village leader. “They are building on top of us as though we don’t exist. Are we invisible to them?”
/..
http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2014-02-01/palestinians-in-israel-trapped-in-the-ghetto
~~~
KUNG HEI FAT CHOI to everyone. It’s the year of the horse!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/expd/12164655475/in/photostream/
Guano, due to my upbringing, I think about my relationship with an Abrahamic-type God quite a bit. One conclusion I’ve come to is that this relationship is down to myself and this God, and no one else. We all come to this life with a moral substrate already in place; we see this in children, who have a keen sense of what is fair and what isn’t. In adults, all the exceptions prove the rule; whenever someone has suspended their sense of fairness in some area, it is always driven by an emotional attribute that we find ugly – selfishness, bitterness, misplaced self-pride, etc.. Most of these ‘faults’ were not originally their owner’s fault. They are like wear-and-tear, dents and blemishes inflicted by the inevitable knocks experienced in life. The real culpability of their owner is in failing to recognise the need to perform regular emotional maintenance, and just as with mechanical maintenance, failure to maintain can lead to a rapid downward spiral.
But I’ve digressed. I was brought up to follow a particular, fairly rigid set of rules, and it wasn’t long before some of those rules started contradicting my conscience. That got me thinking about rules in general, and I decided that there was no rule that was universally applicable, and that some problems have no perfectly right answer; sometimes it’s not a case of ‘right or wrong’, and one only has a choice between one flavour of wrong and another. One has to apply judgement. Of course, an all-powerful creator could have built a ‘robotic’ sort of world had He so chosen, a world where right and wrong could always be decided by rules and individual judgement was unnecessary, but what a boring world that would be! We would basically have no decisions to make; we could refer to the rule book whenever necessary and we would never need to choose for ourselves. Nothing would actually matter to us; we would never experience regret, hope, shame, ambition, etc.. No, in this sense, whether our world evolved or was created, we are indeed ‘made in God’s image’; we have to decide, we need to be personally creative, i.e. like the creator.
My own conscience, which is an important aspect of my “relationship with God” (in scare quotes for the atheists), has effectively excluded me from full adherence to any set of rules, religious or otherwise. So I find it sad and misguided when groups of (imperfect) people try to force their rules upon others, though at the same time I have to accept that they may have good intentions in doing so.
An all-powerful God, I am sure, would require no guardians to protect His emotional well-being. God’s sense of humour must be as vast as His creation, and when God sees some mistaken humans worshipping beetles or asking dead people to help them, I’m sure He must snort into His metaphorical tea cup. On the other hand, if wrong actions have consequences upon others, if they inflict damage that necessitates additional maintenance and thus risks inducing the downward spiral, that detracts from creativity and must be a cause for sadness.
I didn’t know that Sufism was more widespread in Africa, but it makes sense. As Islam spread from the north it will have encountered, interacted with and begun transformation of many tribal beliefs. Many of these are based more upon story-telling, memories passed down by word of mouth rather than written material such as is central to the Abrahamic religions. Of course such word-of-mouth traditions place more emphasis upon ancestors, whose very names will be in the stories that are told. Those stories will be concerned with moral decisions those ancestors were faced with, they will be stories about decisions of conscience, and thus about the ancestors’ relationships with God.
Here’s to tolerance and peace. Due to advances in technology, humans are now confronted with taking responsibility for their own vastly increased physical power. We have to start getting it right, and pretty damn quick by the look of things. We have to put down the weapons and start talking, really talking. This means that whenever we seem to be at disagreement, we must move the discussion to a higher perspective. At some level, we all agree, because we are all “made in God’s image” in that we all prefer creation and advancement over destruction and regression. We differ only in our beliefs about the means to achieve those ends.
The spam filter seems to disagree that five – 4 = one. Ho hum. Let’s see if it agrees that two x four = 8
Black Jelly
I believe there is a case for putting a little Lithium in the Black jelly and serving it up to the trolls. They’re not going to take their medicine by logical argument. Or you could do what the US was doing to the gunman in the Washington Naval Yard, radiate their brains with microwaves. We’re probably all getting a dose of both from Fukushima anyway.
I think a tie in the House of Lords about the gagging of the people is pretty impressive. I had no idea they were so highly principled as to manage 50 – 50. There are three additives compulsorily added to the water now, Chlorine, Fluoride and Boring. i.e. the time it takes for the criminal state to admit to its crimes, longer than the half-life of radioactive plutonium.
Clark,
I think the spam filter thinks that: five – 4 = “1” not “one”.
Thanks for that gentle sensitive tolerant insight into your “relationship with God”
A Node, my spam-filter box to fill in was in its second possible place, not the third. I could have tried telling it ‘four’ rather than ‘4’, I duppose. Oh, I think I’ll leave that typo uncorrected.
German TV Snowden interview……http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f93_1390833151
Clark,
My interpretation of the spam filter is that it presents you with two of the three parts of the equation, one a numeral the other a word and regardless of the position of the third part, you fill it in with a numeral.
At least, that’s what I’ve always dupposed.
I appreciate your short essay too Clark.
Duh, sorry Clark, I’ve just understood what you were saying about the spam filter. My explanation was irrelevant. The true explanation is mystical.
Clark – that moral substrate is poisoned by a society conditioned by commerce and a false incentive called reward or compensation for our efforts. Children are satisfied for ‘good’ behaviour and punished for bad, an original and primitive approach.
The building blocks of a better approach are I believe, autonomy, mastery and purpose. To me this approach is essential to our survival in the rubble of a collapsing world, economically and morally.
Financial reward has served the purpose of automation designed to make our lives easier. We now have machines that can fabricate anything, much like the replicators in Starwars. Machines that can print a car or a house that previously required a large work-force. Critical thinking and cognitive skills by a small group of dedicated scientists and people is key to this development, this human advancement. That group has been proven to be motivated by autonomy, mastery and purpose. I call this a right-brain revolution. It is the urge to direct our own lives, to get better in something that matters and a yearning to do what we do in a service much larger than ourselves.
I myself believe these are the fundamentals of ‘getting it right’ for now and our future generations.
Clark
You might not think God snorting into His tea cup was so funny if you lived on the Somerset Levels. (For those of limited imaginations this is a joke, not a statement of my Aqeeda/doctrinal beliefs).
On a long mission sometimes the spam filter seems to forget the original equation. If you copy and paste to a fresh page you can give it another chance. Have you tried Turkish Halal chicken and olive spam in a sausage? Delicious from Tesco. Don’t know about other brands. Don’t want to know about the contents. Civilisation starts in Istanbul seems a great deal more moderate a statement in my book that wanting to come out of the European Union because they want to swindle the exchange rates..
The hound of the Baskervilles was just stranded mad Tories like Boris howling because they didn’t dredge the rivers. Next Tory rolling eyeball plan: pollute our beautiful water with fracking oils. Mad mad mad mad and bad.
Some are getting the message about creeping fascism. This is Margo from South Africa on a Medialens thread entitled The Snowden Files – Luke Harding replying to ‘JMC’.
Posted by JMC on February 1, 2014, 9:08 am, in reply to “Re: ‘The Snowden Files’ – Luke Harding”
Thanks for these links margo. They raise pretty much the point that I was making in this recent post http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/msg/1391160876.html . People are getting all het up and distracted by the details that in many cases are totally UNsurprising and not focusing on the bigger questions about loss of privacy and the impact of that on organising dissent, or how it is being used to further undemocratic and at times utterly destructive aims (eg the derailing of the COP15 talks) etc – and as you say the spoon-feeding is facilitating exactly that response by not providing the big shocking event that is talked about in Mayer’s book “They Thought they were Free” that is the thing that is needed to mobilise people http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11845.htm
ie
Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow…
“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked, if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
Thanks for all your work in staying on top of this issue and posting the links. Appreciate it.
Posted by margo on February 1, 2014, 10:18 am, in reply to “Re: ‘The Snowden Files’ – Luke Harding”
Thanks, JMC. Also for refreshing my memory about Mayers’s excellent piece: “They Thought They Were Free”.
“Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, “regretted,” that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these “little measures” that no “patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.” ”
We lived this, growing up in apartheid South Africa. The misinformation was so brazenly and continually transmitted, so easily absorbed, so effectively utilised by those who stood to benefit. The lies of omission grew so overarchingly huge they could no longer be seen from ground level and only heard if you really, really paid attention, which most people didn’t want to do because to pay too much attention took it out of you and felt scary. I cannot adequately explain here the apathy of the misinformed white population of that era (1960s to 1990s) and how the media-delivered anaesthetic facilitated the surgically engineered apartheid state.
S.African apartheid was starkly black and white and thus harder to ignore, luckily. Economic apartheid, which bedevils the entire world, is grey and shadowy and harder to discern, which does not bode well. Unless people (very busy, weighed down or caught up in their own lives) are able to visualise or ‘see’ what is actually going on (through all-at-once, catalysing information) they will blunder on in denial for decades, tut-tutting over ‘sadly regrettable measures’.
http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/thread/1391232827.html
This is the Wikipedia page about the author of ‘They Thought They Were Free’.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Mayer
Mary.
Between an anarchist society and a fascist state what do you perceive as the point when a autonomous people can best serve each other. As Mark says Best master their purpose; of which is still open for debate and hope will reach a conclusion on merely planetomical realities eg building 3d printer houses. (Mud huts)
Every time I hear/read the words “Al Qaida inspired terrorist group” or one of its variations, I internally rant at an imaginary news editor:
Who says they were inspired by Al Qaida? What does that phrase even mean? Why does that phrase crop up so regularly? Does the media receive instructions to keep Al Qaida in the public consciousness?
So I mentally girded my loins when I read the Guardian headline: “Egypt faces new threat in al-Qaida-linked group Ansar Beyt al-Maqdis” today.
Sure enough, it began “An al-Qaida-inspired group has emerged as Egypt’s biggest terrorist threat in a decade….” and went on with the usual nobody-can-sleep-safely-in-their-beds crap.But then towards the end, this sentence: “But in reality no one knows exactly who runs [this so-called terrorist group], or how centralised its operations are, nor its relationships with local tribes, other smaller militant groups in Sinai, or al-Qaida itself.”
No one knows except the Guardian, apparently.
link to above
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/31/egypt-alqaida-terrorist-threat-ansar-beyt-almaqdis
Agreed – Fear, power and control ‘A Node’ is the obvious agenda. Al-qaeda; the ‘Jairmans; Communists; pandemics; anthrax et.al are all in the witch doctors err -sorry, -government’s cauldron.
I guess if we are running away we are not fighting back…
Mary and A Node, thanks for the compliments.
Mary, I thoroughly agree about creeping fascism. There’s some quote, I can’t remember of whom, something like: if you wish to avoid totalitarianism, it’s best not to build the necessary infrastructure in the first place. Our UK government applied pressure on the media to try to silence Snowden’s revelations. If our government had nothing to hide, what did they have to fear, eh?
Mark Golding, I agree that commercial pressure is a corrupting influence. Look at how much the political consensus has moved in our lifetimes. Nearly everyone, Left or Right, used to agree that capitalism could only operate acceptably if confined and regulated by a democratic system. These days, enormous companies who’ve successfully avoided paying tax on massive profits obtain a large proportion of their labour force without having to pay them! It seems that the Right-wing principle that you ‘shouldn’t get something for nothing’ applies only to the poorest, and certainly not to these mega-companies. The public pay for the services, and through taxation pay for the ‘benefits’ that barely keep these companies’ unpaid workforce from starving and freezing to death.
Mark, you may find this interesting, though I really should rewrite it:
http://www.killick1.plus.com/corporate-behaviour.html
Guano, thanks for making me laugh, again. Atlas Shrugged and God snorted, eh? I had a holiday on the Somerset Levels once. I stayed at a place near Burtle, five metres above sea level. About two kilometres up the dead straight road was Burtle Hill… seven metres above sea level. Heat haze created mirages on the tarmac road; it wasn’t unusual to see a car apparently flying towards you above the road, upside down. What a wonderful world we inhabit.
We seem to be living in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil; the media constantly warn us about some incredibly dangerous ‘terrorist threat’, but no one seems to know who these ‘terrorists’ really are. Maybe they’ll all turn out to be just wayward heating engineers who refuse to fill in Central Services’ forms. It’s a shame that Information Retrieval tortured Mr Buttle to death, but that’s the price of safety and his wife did get a receipt and a refund.
Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!
1 Feb, 2014 – 1:10 pm
BlackJelly
“You sound like an anti-semite. You’ll feel in good company with some of the other commenters.
PS – don’t be too open about it though, otherwise Craig Murray will (rightly) tell you to fuck off.”
Habbabkuk, Black Jelly is obviously a Zionist Troll pretending to be an anti-Jewish racist with the purpose of undermining this blog.
Perhaps you know each other.
A Node
1 Feb, 2014 – 6:26 pm
“Who says they were inspired by Al Qaida?”
The security services/media
“Why does that phrase crop up so regularly?”
The security services/media
“[Do] the media receive instructions to keep Al Qaida in the public consciousness?”
Yes.
Of course what an independent and honest media would say is that Al Qaida is a CIA inspired terrorist group.
A Node, I think we might have coined a new Internetism – duh’position, slang for daft unchallenged assumption, a phenomena without which propaganda would be much more difficult.
Douglas writes:
“Black Jelly is obviously a Zionist Troll pretending to be an anti-Jewish racist with the purpose of undermining this blog.”
I doubt it, Doug. Genuine anti-Semites do exist and, for whatever reason, they may be attracted to comment on this blog.
I further doubt that a “Zionist troll pretending to be an anti-Jewish racist” would bother expending his energies on page 5 of a blog that virtually nobody is reading apart from those commenting on it.
Sometimes you need to accept that, however uncomfortable it may be, there are people who will come straight out and say things which you are prepared only to cowardly allude to.
Casting aside any anti-semitic argy bargy digress, what I was alluding to was the fact that our Lithium (sorry Guano) has some shame and is lying low, the same cannot be said of John Kohn or the blogsters here – nary a mention of 400 CHILDREN KILLED AS PROPS in a false flag project supported by bibi satanyahu with fake 8200 intercepts. It was only Craigs post about the Trodos listening post questioning the intercepts that awoke people to the deception. I can well imagine the stink in the zio MSM if 400 “yiddos” of N London had been gassed instead, the ragheads would have been crucified.
@Black Jelly
While not disagreeing entirely with what you say I have to disagree with the way you say it.
Your words would be seen as offensive by many and I don’t think it’s right to offend people that haven’t asked for it.
“[T]rampling the rights of the Palestinians in the name of our exclusive right to the country and by dint of a divine decree is an ineradicable stain on Jewish history. Anyone who becomes entrenched in these views will end up bringing about the international ostracism of all of Israel, and if that happens, it won’t be anti-Semitism.” – Zeev Sterhnell
My friends must be forever rolling their eyes cos i’m always fighting with Human Rights Watch on facebook…over HRW war crimes… And the west’s illegal wars, and war crimes….the wee fuckers are at it again Re syria –
Syria: ‘Human Rights Watch’, Key Player in the Manufacture of Propaganda for War and Foreign Intervention
by Tim Anderson and Mazen al-Akhras
The Washington-based group ‘Human Rights Watch’– controlled by the US foreign policy elite – has released another volley in its campaign to back the ‘humanitarian war’ being waged against the independent nation of Syria.
This is not the first or second fabrication against Syria run by Human Rights Watch. The group was amongst the first to falsely blame the Syrian government for the East Ghouta chemical weapons incident of August 2013. The ‘moral panic’ from that accusation almost sparked a major escalation of the war.
Several reports have since proven that the accusation was a fraud. A group led by Catholic nun Mother Agnes Mariam produced a report showing the video evidence of the incident had been manipulated and staged; US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh showed that US intelligence implicating the Syrian Government had been fabricated; and the New York Times retracted its support for speculative telemetry evidence, which they had claimed implicated the Syrian Army. On the other side, Syrian witnesses, a Jordanian reporter and a Turkish human rights group (‘Peace Association and Lawyers for Justice in Turkey’) implicated Saudi-backed terrorists. Further, the last UN report on the incident says that, in most instances, chemical weapons were used ‘against soldiers’; that is, against the government. HRW has neither retracted nor apologised for its role in this scam.
The latest HRW story (‘Razed to the Ground’, 30 Jan) is that the Syrian Government over 2012-13 demolished residential buildings in seven areas of Hama and Damascus as ‘punishment’ for certain neighbourhoods supporting ‘the rebels’. Thousands of families lost their homes in this way, yet there have been ‘no similar demolitions in areas that support the government’.
HRW said it ‘has not documented that anybody was injured or killed in the process.’ Nevertheless, the use of home demolition as punishment was ‘a violation … of the laws of war’ and amounts to a war crime. HRW ‘calls on the UN Security Council to refer the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court’.
Of course, this claim will go nowhere, as previous more serious provocations have failed at the UNSC. Yet the HRW report adds to a poisoned climate of vilification and intervention, appearing to add moral logic to arming the sectarian groups. Yet propaganda for war is a war crime, in itself.
Syrian NDF soldier and political analyst Mazen al-Akhras points out that videos associated with the HRW report show the presence of anti-government ‘militants’ as witnesses (just as in East Ghouta), tainting the story at the outset. The HRW report does not observe that areas like Tadamon had been crowded with illegal constructions and, when they were damaged during the conflict, the government decided it mor efficient to demolish and rebuild.
HRW does not mention that the government took the decision, many months ago, to compensate ‘all citizens whose houses were damaged or totally destroyed by the conflict’. Al-Akhras says HRW ignores the compensation already paid, and then pretends to ‘demand’ compensation. His full commentary is below.
The BBC, which has played a key role in relaying and amplifying propaganda for war on Syria, promoted this ‘Razed to the Ground’ story. An earlier notable contribution by the BBC was to help cover up the terrorist murder of Syria’s most senior Muslim cleric, Sheikh Mohamad al Bouti. He and fifty others were murdered inside the al Iman mosque on 21 March 2013 by a suicide bomber from the al Qaeda-linked and Saudi-backed Jabhat al Nusra.
Because Sheikh Bouti had always opposed salafist sectarians, the armed sectarian gangs (‘takfiris’) said he was ‘not a real Sunni’ and called for his death. After they murdered him they celebrated and then, in typical fashion, blamed the Government.
Jim Muir of the BBC picked up the al Nusra scam, based on the fact that the Sheikh did not die instantly, to run claims that he had been killed by some other means. Nevertheless, in December 2013, five members of al Nusra confessed on Syrian television to the murders. Al Nusra cleric, Samir al-Ordoni, had given them religious permission to enter the mosque and kill other Muslims.
Human Rights Watch has been a key player in the manufacture of propaganda for war and foreign intervention. It gets most of its funds from a variety of US foundations, in turn funded by many of the biggest US corporations. HRW Middle East reports often rely on and acknowledge grants from pro-Israel foundations. The group is tightly linked to the US Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a virtual ‘Who’s Who’ of the US foreign policy elite.
HRW has ‘soft-pedalled’ on US-compliant regimes such as Colombia, the worst human rights abuser in Latin America as shown by the murder of trade unionists, journalists and other social activists. By contrast, HRW repeatedly attacked the government of the late Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
The full article on this Story is @
http://www.globalresearch.ca/syria-human-rights-watch-key-player-in-the-manufacture-of-propaganda-for-war-and-foreign-intervention/5366987