International Syria Conflict: Bombs away boys. (Israel openly admits to bombing Iranian bases in Syria)

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Lol, well atleast you arent one of these posters who have been talking about trump like he is the bond villain stroking a cat, for the past year. Then this happens and they put on MAGA hats.

Of course you believe their was WMD in iraq, so your judgement on evidence is suspect
Never said shit about iraq
Nor is iraq even comparable .....the bushes wanted iraq and they got a pretext for regime change
By contrast assad gives us regime changing pretexts every other week and nowt
He gasses his own civilians and trump barely spanks him twice despite previously established 'red line' talk

Side note : And lets not forget the russian goverment is wayyyyyy more untrustworthy than the u.s
 
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Why do we keep prodding in the Syrian war if we know the only way to topple Assad would be a direct clash with Russia? Why would we keep looking for excuses to get involved if our main goal was to get rid of Assad, when we know it is impossible?

We just want to muck up the situation for the Russians.
Not even remotely true a weekend of non stop tomahawks would topple assad nor could russia do shit given how comicaly outmatched they are
 

It was interesting to hear France say they consulted with Russia before launching missiles, while USA said they did not. Interesting that America was willing to allow France to negotiate its on their behalf.
 
Like usual, you take one example, and use it to debunk everything you disagree with.

Is that the only evidence you have ever seen that the white hats aren't what they appear to be?
No, I'm citing an example that I already knew existed before I'd even looked it up.

Why? Because we went through this very same thing the last few times. In fact, even the MSM has covered this numerous times in the past several years due to the ongoing Facebook "fake news" saga. This is it. This is the actual fake news. The bonafide thing.

Finally, spare me your nonsense about "one thing". I fucking unloaded on you the past two times we got into this, with a dizzying array of dozens of sources, and dozens of points of sources for each one, and you came back with "Seymour Hersh" (who couldn't substantiate his claims and hid behind "protecting" his anonymous sources as a refusal to do so). You are singularly the most culpable person on this forum of ignoring all contradictory evidence and tunneling on the tiniest splinter of indication reinforcing your pre-existing belief about who did it; a bias I've already gotten you to explicitly concede in this thread.
 
Lol snopes is on the case.

i-checked-snopes-my-research-is-complete-this-is-snopes-3575849.png

Snopes and Elliot Higgins, the lingerie salesman, trying to drown dissenting voices by discrediting them by association with random twitter trolls. Funny that everything is now boiled down to "nefarious russian disinfo"; seems to be the latest fad to use when you are trying to wrest back control over the narrative. You can never try to have an honest discussion about the facts at hand.
Damn. How will I ever survive weakass ad hominem counterpunches like this?

Oh, yeah, that's right, I'm not a Rusbot who ignorantly presumed that was it...
How Syria's White Helmets became victims of an online propaganda machine
The Guardian said:
The Russia-backed campaign to link the volunteer rescuers with al-Qaida exposes how conspiracy theories take root: ‘It’s like a factory’
by Olivia Solon
Mon 18 Dec 2017 03.01 ESTLast modified on Sat 14 Apr 2018 13.53 EDT



The Syrian volunteer rescue workers known as the White Helmets have become the target of an extraordinary disinformation campaign that positions them as an al-Qaida-linked terrorist organisation.

The Guardian has uncovered how this counter-narrative is propagated online by a network of anti-imperialist activists, conspiracy theorists and trolls with the support of the Russian government (which provides military support to the Syrian regime).

The White Helmets, officially known as the Syria Civil Defence, is a humanitarian organisation made up of 3,400 volunteers – former teachers, engineers, tailors and firefighters – who rush to pull people from the rubble when bombs rain down on Syrian civilians. They’ve been credited with saving thousands of civilians during the country’s continuing civil war.

They have also exposed, through first-hand video footage, war crimes including a chemical attack in April. Their work was the subject of an Oscar-winning Netflix documentary and the recipient of two Nobel peace prize nominations.

Despite this positive international recognition, there’s a counter-narrative pushed by a vocal network of individuals who write for alternative news sites countering the “MSM agenda”. Their views align with the positions of Syria and Russia and attract an enormous online audience, amplified by high-profile alt-right personalities, appearances on Russian state TV and an army of Twitter bots.

The way the Russian propaganda machine has targeted the White Helmets is a neat case study in the prevailing information wars. It exposes just how rumours, conspiracy theories and half-truths bubble to the top of YouTube, Google and Twitter search algorithms.

“This is the heart of Russian propaganda. In the old days they would try and portray the Soviet Union as a model society. Now it’s about confusing every issue with so many narratives that people can’t recognise the truth when they see it,” said David Patrikarakos, author of War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the 21st Century.


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The first page of results for ‘White Helmets’ on YouTube shows how the conspiracy theories bubble to the top of search engines. Photograph: YouTube

Hybrid warfare


The campaign to discredit the White Helmets started at the same time as Russia staged a military intervention in Syria in September 2015, supporting President Bashar al-Assad’s army with airstrikes bombarding opposition-held areas. Almost immediately, Russian state media such as RT and Sputnik started falsely claiming that Isis was the only target and throwing doubt on the bombings of infrastructure and civilian sites.

The same propaganda machine scooped up fringe anti-American activists, bloggers and researchers who believe the White Helmets are terrorists, giving them a platform on state TV and amplifying their articles through social media.

There is no evidence to suggest that these activists and bloggers are knowingly spreading disinformation, although the stories are often thinly sourced.

Scott Lucas, professor of international politics at the University of Birmingham, describes the overall campaign as “agitation propaganda” but said that some of its participants don’t realise they are being used as pawns.

“The most effective propaganda is when you find someone who believes it then give them support – you don’t create them from scratch,” he added.


Why the White Helmets?
The White Helmets play two roles within Syria. The first is their rescue work: providing an ambulance service, fire service and search and rescue in conflict areas where infrastructure has been decimated.

The second role is the documentation of what is taking place within the country via handheld and helmet cameras.

“This is the thing that has annoyed not just the Assad regime and Russian authorities but a lot of the propagandists who work in their orbit,” said Amnesty International’s Kristyan Benedict, a crisis response manager who specialises in Syria.

Their footage has helped organisations like Amnesty and the Syria Justice and Accountability Center corroborate testimony they receive from people in Syria via phone, Skype and WhatsApp. It allows them to check the aftermath of airstrikes to see whether civilians were targeted and whether there was any military presence or checkpoints.

“That’s really been damaging to the war narrative of Syria and Russia,” said Benedict.

Raed al-Saleh, head of the White Helmets. Photograph: Bernd von Jutrczenka/AFP/Getty Images


It was the White Helmets’ footage that documented the chemical attack in Khan Sheikhoun in April, which killed at least 83 people, a third of them children. UN war crimes investigators later concluded the attack was carried out by the Syrian regime against its own people. Russian state media and a network of supportive alternative news sites continue to cast doubt on investigators’ findings, describing it as “illogical” and “deliberately staged” by militants. The alt-right site Infowars repeated the conspiracy theory, describing the attack as staged by the White Helmets, who were described as an “al-Qaida affiliated group funded by George Soros”. The White Helmets have never received funding from George Soros or any of his foundations.

Some of the most vocal sceptics of the UN’s investigation include the blogger Vanessa Beeley, the daughter of a former British diplomat who visited Syria for the first time in July 2016; a University of Sydney senior lecturer, Timothy Anderson, who described the April chemical attack as a “hoax”; and Eva Bartlett, a Canadian writer and activist who said the White Helmets staged rescues using recycled victims – a claim that’s been debunked by Snopes and Channel 4 News.

“They are basically excusing the inexcusable,” said Lucas.

“They have a range of websites that will publish whatever nonsense and Russia Today will have them on TV,” he added.

The Russian strategy has been very successful at shaping the online conversation about the White Helmets. By gaming the social media algorithms with a flood of content, boosted by bots, sock puppet accounts and a network of agitators, propagandists are able to create a “manufactured consensus” that gives legitimacy to fringe views. Even Russia’s official channels, such as its UK embassy Twitter accounts, post memes discrediting the organisation.

View image on Twitter


Russian Embassy, UK

✔@RussianEmbassy


Russia welcomes #Oscars award for “White Helmets” film. Indeed, they are actors serving an agenda, not rescuers. #OscarMistake

4:40 AM - Feb 28, 2017

“If you scroll through tweets about the White Helmets, pretty much every other conversation is equating them with Isis, calling them terrorists. It looks like they are the bad guys,” said Sam Woolley, who studies computational propaganda at the University of Oxford.

“It’s all part of an effort to delegitimise western efforts to stabilise Syria,” he said.

His colleague Samantha Bradshaw adds: “The more confusion there is, the easier it is to manipulate people.”


The research that shows the link

The Guardian spoke to several researchers studying the spread of disinformation and propaganda online who have found evidence of a targeted Russian influence campaign against the White Helmets.

Fil Menczer, a computer science professor at Indiana University, has developed a tool called Hoaxy to chart the spread of misinformation online. Searching for “White Helmets” reveals a handful of sources generated hundreds of stories about the organisation. “It’s like a factory,” he said.

The same handful of people are quoted as “experts” in articles that are repackaged and interlinked to create a body of content whose conspiracy claims gain a semblance of legitimacy.

The analytics firm Graphika has spent years analysing a range of Russian disinformation campaigns including those around the Macron leaks and the Russian doping scandal. In research commissioned by the human rights group the Syria Campaign, it found that the patterns in the online network of the 14,000 Twitter users talking about the White Helmets looked “very similar” and included many known pro-Kremlin troll accounts, some of which were closed down as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the US election. Other accounts appeared to generate more than 150 tweets per day (more than 70 is seen by scholars studying bots as suspicious).


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A Graphika map of the online conversation about the White Helmets. Photograph: Graphika

Graphika also found evidence of coordination of timing and messaging around significant events in the news cycle relating to the White Helmets.

Separately, both Graphika and Menczer’s Hoaxy tool identify Beeley, the British blogger, as among the most influential disseminators of content about the White Helmets.

Their findings also correlate with work done by Kate Starbird from the University of Washington in Seattle, who asserts that Beeley and the alternative news site 21st Century Wire have dominated the Twitter conversation about White Helmets over the last few months, along with Sputnik and RT.com.

Kate Starbird(@katestarbird)
Created a domain network graph for “white helmets” tweets May-Aug 2017. These are websites connected by users (who tweet to both). pic.twitter.com/5j0YkmF7D1

September 21, 2017
Beeley frequently criticises the White Helmets in her role as editor of the website 21st Century Wire, set up by Patrick Henningsen, who is also a former editor at Infowars.com.

In 2016, Beeley had a two-hour meeting with Assad in Damascus as part of a US Peace Council delegation,which she described on Facebook as her “proudest moment”. She was also invited to Moscow to report on the “dirty war in Syria”; there, she met senior Russian officials including the deputy foreign minister, Mikhail Bogdanov, and Maria Zakharova, director of information and press at Russia’s foreign ministry.

The mannequin challenge
To understand the propaganda machine in action, you only have to look at what happened when the White Helmets posted their version of the mannequin challenge, a viral internet video trend where people would film themselves frozen mid-action. The rescue group filmed themselves in a staged rescue and shared the video on social media with the hashtag #MannequinChallenge.

The video, posted in November 2016 by the Revolutionary Forces of Syria Media Office, was immediately stripped of its context and reshared as evidence that the organisation uses “crisis actors” in staged rescues designed to make the Russian and Syrian armies look bad.

ms_knowital(@ms_knowital)
Here is the White Helmets caught faking a rescue after a fake attack. https://t.co/T8xzX6kKtM

April 9, 2017
One Twitter user, retweeted hundreds of times, stated: “Unbelievable! Must watch video showing White Helmets fakery.”

RT reported on the incident, including some of the tweets, and cited Beeley as an independent researcher asserting that the video fuelled suspicion around the “already questionable credibility” of the organisation. The following day Beeley wrote a story on 21st Century Wire in which she argued that the video caused “widespread doubt, even among diehard supporters, as to the veracity of their much edited slick video reports”.

The White Helmets later issued an apology, saying they had hoped the viral video would create a connection between the horror or Syria and the outside world, but acknowledged it was an “error of judgement”..

“It was a stupid thing to do,” said Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative reporting collective Bellingcat, “but it was then completely misused by people who have an agenda.”

A year on and the White Helmets’ mannequin challenge video is still widely circulated as evidence that they stage rescues.

There have, however, been isolated rogue actors within the White Helmets who are used to discredit the entire group. One former White Helmet was fired after he was filmed assisting armed militants in disposing of the mutilated corpses of pro-Assad fighters, and others have been photographed with guns despite marketing themselves as unarmed. There is also footage of White Helmets taking a body away from an execution carried out by rebel militants, which critics claim shows they are “assisting” executions.

“These are isolated incidents at the volunteer level – there has never been any kind of incident involving anyone in the leadership,” added Saleh, the White Helmets leader, looking down at his phone as he received a breaking news notification about a British politician resigning over sexual harassment allegations. “No one is saying that the government of the UK is a predatory organisation just because of this one incident.”

Meanwhile, Beeley’s influence continues. In April 2017, she gave a talk at a conference alongside ministers in Assad’s cabinet (who spoke via video conference) titled “White Helmets: Fact or Fantasy?” Her briefing paper and slides on the topic were then submitted to the UN security council and UN general assembly by the Russian government as “evidence” against the White Helmets.


The White Helmets have been credited with saving thousands of lives. Photograph: Depo Photo/Rex/Shutterstock

“These leaked documents offer cast-iron proof that the Russian government is doing what it can to elevate Vanessa Beeley as a key player in its propaganda campaign,” said James Sadri, executive director of the Syria Campaign. “A blogger for a 9/11 truther website who only visited Syria for the first time last year should not be taken seriously as an impartial expert on the conflict.”

The Guardian contacted Beeley several times asking for comment and she declined to respond to specific queries, saying that the questions put to her were “a disgrace” containing “no relevant facts and are reminiscent of a McCarthyite interrogation”.

The Guardian also contacted Eva Bartlett, who said she had “no interest in participating in your quite evidently already-decided ‘story’ (an odd term for a journalist to use for an article)”.

Shortly after the requests for comment, Beeley appeared on a 40-minute-long YouTube programme in which she discussed the emailed requests for comment and criticised the Guardian’s coverage of Syria, alleging “faux reporting” based on footage provided by “al-Qaida affiliates” the White Helmets. Beeley said that the “majority consensus” was that the White Helmets were a fraudulent terrorist organisation.


• This article was amended on 21 December 2017. An earlier version said that Patrick Henningsen is an editor at Infowars.com. Henningsen is a former editor.
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Signature Russian propaganda.
 
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@Fawlty
@whougonnacall

Friendly bookmark for the sane on this issue:
https://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/

Hamilton 68 said:
Top Themes
Updated on April 16, 3:05 PM
The Hamilton 68 dashboard has tracked a concerted campaign to present alternative narratives to sow doubt about the evidence that Assad was responsible for the Douma chemical attack. On the Saturday after the strike (4/14), 7 of the top 10 URLs being shared by accounts tracked by Hamilton 68 were towing the Kremlin line on the Syria strikes: including two separate articles (including one by Sputnik) that claimed the U.K. was behind the chemical attack. Four other top URLs were from RT. As of Sunday morning (4/15), Hamilton 68 showed Russian-linked accounts pushing a mix of disinformation narratives about both the Skripal poisoning in the U.K. and the Syria chemical attack. The Skripal case has been a consistent point of focus for the past month, with no fewer than 20 different alternative explanations (including shellfish positioning) promoted by monitored accounts. Both the Skripal case and the chemical attack in Syria show the Russian disinformation strategy of undermining the idea of truth, not actually presenting a real alternative case.
 
One, you say, @VivaRevolution. Just one, my boy? Okay, let's bring a key footnote this time, one with a face on it, to add to the four different sources I've already cited (each which is itself citing multiple instances of debunked social media and photos indicating a "staged" attack):
Assad claims iconic photo of bloodied Syrian boy is fake
afp_f76jn.jpg

“We have real pictures of children being harmed, but this one specifically is a forged one,” Assad said during an interview with Swiss TV SRF1.
Yeah. This is the guy you're in bed with. This is the narrative Russia is slinging.

This poor kid was just one more "staged" Western puppet.
 
Fantastic post. Why was I quoted in it?
Sorry, removed. Gunny was, too, from a previous quote selection I didn't roll out, I'm guessing. Didn't intend to quote either of you.
 
Lol yeah hes also got ' no reason ' to barrel bomb civilians ,snipe em, starve em ,tortue them en masse etc etc
theres ' no reason' hospitals , food markets and schools are priority targets for the regime
Hes got no reason bar the obvious one ... to break the populace and make the local rebels surrender to end their suffering!
To ensure no alternative local goverment structure can exist ....you can have freedom or freedom from hunger/barrel bombs etc but you cannot have both!

Fronk you arent retarded we both know thats the strategy and its been sucessful "assad or we burn the country!"

A rational actor weighs potential consequences vs gains.....his gamble has paid off hugely as previous actions and the current politcal landscape strongly hinted it would.
You see, I don't necessarily disagree with your main point here which is that the goverments campaign to not let rebel areas become "normalised" involves indiscriminate bombings. It's not like they have the resources of the US, they make use of cold-war era jets and dump dumb bombs from helicopters, the goverment have no access to an endless supply of multimillion dollar JDAMS. It's a poor middle eastern country, surrounded by now, mostly hostile, countries that let an endless stream of arms,manpower and capital into to the hand of fanatical islamists through their borders. It's a scramble for survival. From both sides of the conflict.

The potential consequences of using CW far outweighs the risks. I guess we just have to agree to disagree here. It's not like high-explosives isn't an efficient way to bring down a building and kill people. CW is harder to produce, make munitions of, transport etc. and most importantly it doesn't bring the worlds biggest superpower breathing down your neck. I just don't see it. There is no way the goverment would be able to use it consistently anyway, all it does is rally the world against it. It gives every sort of pretext, a casus for western intervention, something that killing a few people in a Damascene suburb wouldn't come close to outdo.
 
Damn. How will I ever survive weakass ad hominem counterpunches like this?

Oh, yeah, that's right, I'm not a Rusbot who ignorantly presumed that was it...
How Syria's White Helmets became victims of an online propaganda machine

718.png


Signature Russian propaganda.

"muh russian propaganda"

The mere fact that the White Helmets is allowed to operate in areas controlled by Al-Qaeda implies collusion. The White Helmet is an obvious propaganda tool, that in itself doesn't mean they do no good.
 
One, you say, @VivaRevolution. Just one, my boy? Okay, let's bring a key footnote this time, one with a face on it, to add to the four different sources I've already cited (each which is itself citing multiple instances of debunked social media and photos indicating a "staged" attack):
Assad claims iconic photo of bloodied Syrian boy is fake
afp_f76jn.jpg


Yeah. This is the guy you're in bed with. This is the narrative Russia is slinging.

This poor kid was just one more "staged" Western puppet.

Well that kid was bombed with regular bombs so there is nothing wrong with it, im pretty sure the boy knows that its not a war crime to bury civilians under rubble.
 
You see, I don't necessarily disagree with your main point here which is that the goverments campaign to not let rebel areas become "normalised" involves indiscriminate bombings. It's not like they have the resources of the US, they make use of cold-war era jets and dump dumb bombs from helicopters, the goverment have no access to an endless supply of multimillion dollar JDAMS. It's a poor middle eastern country, surrounded by now, mostly hostile, countries that let an endless stream of arms,manpower and capital into to the hand of fanatical islamists through their borders. It's a scramble for survival. From both sides of the conflict.

The potential consequences of using CW far outweighs the risks. I guess we just have to agree to disagree here. It's not like high-explosives isn't an efficient way to bring down a building and kill people. CW is harder to produce, make munitions of, transport etc. and most importantly it doesn't bring the worlds biggest superpower breathing down your neck. I just don't see it. There is no way the goverment would be able to use it consistently anyway, all it does is rally the world against it. It gives every sort of pretext, a casus for western intervention, something that killing a few people in a Damascene suburb wouldn't come close to outdo.
Nice attempt to rationalise what amounts to non combatant people being targetted and slaughtered for one mans illegitimate throne

What conquequences are there for the last few times
Again with everything we know of the conflict the risk vs gain was a shrewd move on assads part and perfectly in keeping with past behaviour
 
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Thanks, I'm impressed by the work people are doing to try to salvage the truth and expose the lies in all of this.

I'm glad you brought up game theory and the lack of rational actors. There isn't a rational set of actions/motives available to explain either of the competing theories. At the same time, I sympathize with the ages-old desire to explain the inexplicable, and the traps people fall into when they bring bias to that game. In this case basically all Americans have a strong bias against intervention in the region due to Iraq. They don't want the conflict, and they don't trust our government (and they're being bombarded with clever propaganda). All of that makes sense, it just doesn't help people evaluate what the hell is happening here.

I haven't gotten even one of the CTers to acknowledge how irrational it would have been for the rebels to randomly attack those people in the moments before they surrendered. I think that if they acknowledge how irrational that is, their own argument about Assad's irrationality will crumble. Because when we look at means and motives, those are overwhelmingly against the case for Assad. When we bring witness accounts in, the case gets even worse. And finally, when we admit the actions of the Syrian and Russian governments in the aftermath, the argument goes down for the count.

I would love nothing more than to levitate above my soapbox, screaming about how Trump is trying to distract us from the investigation and drag us into another neocon war (and Bolton joining the team makes that even more tempting). I would love to say that Trump shed crocodile tears over the use of chemical weapons. I'd love to rail against war, our foreign policy, and the money we are wasting. It's the easiest, laziest concession to cynicism I could fucking hope for. So I'm a little surprised by how readily people accuse me of supporting warmongers. It is entirely in my shallow self-interest to oppose the American role and Trump's role in this on every level.
 
"muh russian propaganda"

The mere fact that the White Helmets is allowed to operate in areas controlled by Al-Qaeda implies collusion. The White Helmet is an obvious propaganda tool, that in itself doesn't mean they do no good.
Lol at all the tinfoil hat brigade that cant see the obvious propaganda value in russia slandering men who drag human beings from rubble
Its an indirect way of pretending there is no barrel bombing etc and that all the footage of assads attrocities is 'fake news'

Are we pretending russia isnt punping out vast amounts of propaganda to counter the free press (when they cant kill journalists that is) ?
Look at this incident alonr
First there was no sarin
Then it was the uk
Now its rebel flase flag
 
Nice attempt to rationalise what amounts to non combatant people being targetted and slaughtered for one mans illegitimate throne

What conquequences are there for tge laat few times
Again with everything we know of the conflict the risk vs gain was a shrewd move on assads part and perfectly inkeepingbwith past behaviour

Throne isnt illegitimate, its still the internationally recognized government of Syria.

Maybe the US shouldnt had blown its wad to oust Assad early on so that there would be things to actually negotiate with him, but since the US already did all it could to topple Assad without a serious alternative to his government his leverage outside of bombing is zero.

But then again you are the guy who called ISIS the lesser of two evils.
 

If you read nothing else I urge everyone in this thread to read the incredible investigative reporting below.

The Intercept (Robert Mackey) > Russia Sows Doubts Over Chemical Attack in Syria, Aided by Pro-Trump Cable Chan
r_3eMQ-M_400x400-1523651274.jpg


As accusations continue to swirl nearly two weeks after the attack, international experts on chemical weapons deployed to Syria to settle the matter, by gathering scientific evidence and unearthing bodies in hidden graves, have spent six days trying, and failing, to gain access to the site of the suspected attack, which is now under the control of Russian military police.

Russia has chalked the delay up to security concerns in Douma, which seems odd, given that foreign journalists were taken on a government-run tour of the town on Monday, when they were able to wander freely along streets close to the site of the reported attack.

When those journalists filed their reports, it became clear why Syrian and Russian officials might have preferred to give limited access to reporters rather than unfettered access to inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
While there was no way of knowing if any of the medical personnel who spoke to the reporters in the presence of government minders had been coerced into making those statements by threats to harm their families from Assad’s secret police, the mukhabarat — as the head of the largest medical relief agency in Syria told The Guardian they were — critics of Western military intervention seized on credulous reports from the British writer Robert Fisk, the French news agency AFP, Dirk Emmerich of Germany’s RTL and Pearson Sharp of One America News, a San Diego cable channel known for its full-throated backing of Donald Trump and its hiring of alt-right conspiracy theorists.

Two enterprising reporters, Seth Doane of CBS News and Stefan Borg of TV4 Sweden, slipped away from their government minders and managed to find the building where the attack took place and interview a man who said that he had survived the attack but lost his wife, mother and brothers to gas.

“We need permission for everything we do here,” Doane told The Intercept in an online message. “We were with other journalists in Douma but weren’t taken to the site. We had the satellite coordinates and found it on our own.” In Doane’s report, a man could be seen watching him interview the attack survivor outside the building who was also seen in another part of town in Stefan Borg’s report, observing the work of the Swedish journalist.
Bassem Mroue, an Associated Press correspondent who posted images from the press tour on Instagram, interviewed another man who said that he had survived what he described as a gas attack and gave a harrowing account of how his pregnant wife and two young daughters had died with foam coming from their mouths. That witness and two others, who spoke to Mroue not far from government troops, blamed the gas attack on the Islamist rebels who retreated from the town the following day.
Oh, looky looky what asshole showed up to shill for the Russians?
On Tuesday, Ed Schultz, the prime-time news anchor for Russia Today’s RT America channel in Washington, introduced a segment on Sharp by claiming, incorrectly, that chemical weapons inspectors had entered Douma that day, even though “American journalists who have visited the area have found no traces of poisonous substances.”

The use of the plural by Schultz appears to have been prompted by the false assertion later in the report that Sharp, who works alone, was accompanied by “other journalists of the One America News Network” when he “visited the site of the alleged gas attack.”
The Sharp guy didn't even visit the correct area. Either he was too stupid to realize this, or he was lying. This is the guy that all you Rusbots have a crush on. So who is stupid, here? You, or him?
When his report was broadcast, however, it revealed that he had mistakenly described the location of the suspected gas attack as a town square and interviewed people close to it who said they had not been exposed to any chemicals. Since the attack in fact took place on a residential street some distance from the square, those accounts are not surprising.

One part of Sharp’s report from Douma — in which he incorrectly describes himself as being “basically at what would be ground zero if the attack happened, right now it’s not clear if it even did” — is remarkable for what it accidentally reveals about the shallowness of his work.
Wait for it...
“I’ve interviewed 20 people so far who live here in this area and who say they were there that day and they didn’t see anything,” Sharps says. “They didn’t hear anything, they didn’t smell anything, they don’t know anyone who was injured, they’ve never heard of that. They did see it on TV, they heard about it on TV, but from personal eyewitness accounts, no one has seen anything, so far.”

At the very moment that the American reporter was making this declaration that he could find no evidence of a gas attack, the Swedish journalist Stefan Borg, wearing a blue shirt, could be seen on the street behind Sharp, with a man in a red shirt who was seen in the TV4 correspondent’s own report guiding the journalist to the actual location of the suspected chemical attack, where he interviewed a witness who described being gassed.
He poured scorn on the idea that any of those victims had been suffering from chemical exposure. Yet an Associated Press photographer who took part in the same government-organized tour of Douma on Monday showed a witness standing right outside the medical center who described suffering during the gas attack.
Sharp has not explained how he managed to convince the Syrian government to give him a visa to report in the country, but his reporting on Syria before his trip had hewed closely to Syrian and Russian government talking points about the conflict....

“But Washington isn’t letting a lack of evidence stand in its way,” he continued. “Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov points out that not only has the White House offered no proof for their latest claims, but that U.S. officials aren’t interested in investigating their previous accusations of a chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhoun.” (In fact, the same day that Sharp quoted Lavrov’s remarks, the OPCW had debunked them, reporting that the nerve agent sarin had been used in an attack that killed nearly 100 people in the rebel-held village of Khan Sheikhounin in northern Syria.)
LOL, Russia "suddenly" changes its story. This is now the-- what?-- fifth or sixth time they've done this throughout these episodes?
On Tuesday, after CBS News broadcast images of a yellow gas cylinder its correspondent Seth Doane had come across in the building where the attack took place — matching video posted online by the White Helmets right after the attack — the Russian military suddenly revealed to state television that it had discovered exactly the same kind of cylinder in what a military expert described as a fully stocked chemical weapons lab left behind by the rebels.

The yellow canister looked identical to what experts from Human Rights Watch identified as gas cylinders filled with chlorine that were dropped on rebel-held areas on Aleppo from Syrian government helicopters in 2016.


Finally, he gets to your kid:
Later on Tuesday, a security detail for the chemical weapons inspectors was taken to Douma under Russian military escort and met with protesters at one site, and a bomb and gunfire at another.

But while the chemical weapons inspectors remained stranded in Damascus, waiting for safe passage to Douma, journalists for Russia’s state-owned news channel continued to work freely in the town. On Wednesday, Evgeny Poddubnyy of Russia-24 filed a report in which he claimed to have discovered that an 11-year-old boy who was seen among the attack survivors in footage of the Douma medical center on the night of the attack had been coerced into acting in the the video.



Following the broadcast of that report — which was, again, made without any way of knowing whether or not pressure had been put on the family to lie — Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry’s spokeswoman, suggested that the boy should be brought to the United Nations to testify.


But not his family or extended family, surely. They'll be left in Douma where these noble Russians can oversee and guarantee their safety.


Propaganda, propaganda, propaganda.
 
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