The indispensable Jimmy Dore: Former Employee BLASTS “Democracy Now” For Pushing Establishment Propaganda (0002)

She’s good on some issues, but others…my stars.  H/t to Tony Cartalucci on Twitter (3-parts) for the heads-up.

 “Inside Syria’s Secret Prisons”: A Harrowing Account of How Assad’s Torture Machine Crushed Dissent’, democracynow.org, May 16, 2019 

From the transcript:

‘A shocking exposé by the New York Times looks at how Bashar al-Assad’s government has jailed and tortured tens of thousands of Syrians since the uprising began in 2011. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, nearly 128,000 people have disappeared. They are presumed to be either dead or still in custody. The group estimates almost 14,000 individuals have died under torture. The detentions are continuing even as the fighting winds down. More than 5,600 Syrians were reportedly arbitrarily detained last year in a 25 percent jump from the previous year. While the Syrian government has denied running a secret torture and detention program, more evidence — including internal Syrian government documents — has emerged showing the extent of the torture program. A United Nations panel has said the conditions in the prison —including the paucity of toilet facilities, rampant illness, minimal and rotten food, and the absence of medical treatment — are tantamount to “extermination.” We speak with the report’s author Anne Barnard. She’s a reporter at The New York Times and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.”

CFR?  Okay, Amy; what.ev.er.  You can read or watch the rest for what it’s worth, but cripes, as I’d remembered it the NY Times had been forced to admit that the Syria Observatory for Human Rights (as it was called back in the day) was one guy in the UK who’d never stepped foot into Syria.

But although the name of the Chief Dude has changed, the psyop sure hasn’t.

From RT.com on Oct. 2, 2015:  ‘Who is behind Syrian Observatory for Human Rights? Nimrod Kamer investigates for RT’

“Since the start of the Moscow anti-ISIS campaign Russia has started featuring in its reports as well  – and it was quickly picked up by major Western media outlets. One of the latest wires from the Observatory that “Russian warplanes [killed] 30 civilians in Homs including women and children” quickly made it into major news sources.

“To the degree people choose to believe social media, they can be my guest. But quite contrary to what [US Secretary of State John Kerry] has said, it is a notoriously unreliable tool upon which to base judgments,” former CIA officer, Ray McGovern told RT.

‘I am not a media organization’ – Rami Abdel Rahman

RT decided to investigate who the man behind the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is and why the media outlet is so popular with MSM. Well-known journalist and prankster Nimrod Kamer took up the job.

The two-bedroom Coventry home of Syrian immigrant Rami Abdel Rahman has been the organization’s base and the source of information for major mainstream media on anything Syria-related from the past four years, including the death toll.

Nobody quite knows who Abdel Rahman has on the ground in Syria, but information just keeps flowing on and on, usually in a dramatic fashion and with little detail.”

Here’s the 3-minute+ video. 

On the The Syrian Network for Human Rights’ about us page, the claim is that the agency was started in 2011 ‘upon the initiative’ of Mr. Fadel Abdul Ghany, who is now the chairman of the ‘board of directors’.  As I can’t copy/paste from their site, you may be ticked to learn ‘who and what they depend on’ for their reports, although I’ll volunteer that they seem to be much like bellingcat and other online investigative serices.  Here’s their most recent Tweet; note the White Helmets.

To show how effective agitprop is, especially if it affirms confirmation bias, and remember, this is just days after MSM totally ignored the suppressed OPCW report on ‘the gassing of Duma’ was really faked by the White Helmets:

‘US ‘sees signs’ Damascus ‘may’ have used chlorine in Idlib, threatens ‘quick & appropriate’ response’, RT.com, May 21, 2019

“In a statement on Tuesday, Washington alleged that the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad is likely to be found responsible for allegedly using chlorine to attack civilians in militant-controlled areas of Idlib province.

“We continue to see signs that the Assad regime may be renewing its use of chemical weapons, including an alleged chlorine attack in northwest Syria on the morning of May 19, 2019,” the statement says.

Despite the evident uncertainty, the State Department adopted the habitually threatening stance against Damascus.

“We are still gathering information on this incident, but we repeat our warning that if the Assad regime uses chemical weapons, the United States and our allies will respond quickly and appropriately.”

The State Department’s claims of a ‘new’ chlorine incident, uncorroborated so far, follow a fresh warning by the Russian military of a terrorist plans to stage a false-flag chemical attack in the Idlib de-escalation zone.

In sum, literally everything that Damascus has been accused of doing to justify the American intervention has been shown to be false, a fabrication. But this fact has not stopped the mainstream media from continuing to print such lies as if the evidence, of which they make so much, did not matter when it comes to official enemies of the American elites. 

—The Editor