A tale of two cities: Aleppo and Mosul

or how news organisations - in this case principally the BBC - modify their output to fit government policy objectives here and abroad.


(7) https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=863336524369281662#editor/target=post;postID=2401424053249420836;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=0;src=link


“I have never seen an official report greeted with such universal praise as that accorded the Warren Commission’s findings when they were made public on September 24, 1964,” recalls investigative reporter Fred Cook. “All the major television networks devoted special programs and analyses to the report; the next day the newspapers ran long columns detailing its findings, accompanied by special news analyses and editorials. The verdict was unanimous. The report answered all questions, left no room for doubt. Lee Harvey Oswald, alone and unaided, had assassinated the president of the United States.” Fred J. Cook, Maverick: Fifty Years of Investigative Reporting, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1984, 276."

Quote taken from this article by James F. Tracy on the 1 Dec. 2016 detailing how in the USA from its inception, the CIA sought to infiltrate and control the major news networks.  It is clear that in the UK MI5/6 have followed similar objectives here: http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-cia-and-the-media-50-facts-the-world-needs-to-know/5471956 

I don't think we heard about this either? What are the Americans up to in Mosul? Apparently 90-plus crack Iraqi troops killed by USAF attack! http://katehon.com/news/us-air-forces-attack-iraqi-army-under-mosul



Introduction.

This piece is about two cities and how what is happening in them is treated differently by western media. It is a case study in how our supposedly free press is nothing of the sort but in fact acts as a conduit for the preferred policy of western government. It is practical proof of the subtle bias to which the British people are subject. It is done by describing essentially the same activity in a different light and even reporting as fact what is known to be false. By giving publicity to emotionally charged events and laying blame in one instance, whilst in the other failing to do either, depending on what forces are involved. 

The two cities of Aleppo and Mosul - the former in Syria the latter in Iraq - are subject to major military operations to rid them of ISIS insurgents or terrorists. In other words in both the objective is ostensibly the same. However in Aleppo the forces are comprised of Russian and Syrian units; in Mosul it is units of the Iraq and Peshmerga forces, supported by American and British 'advisors' and specialists. 

This means that in the former we are apparently 'against' the military action, whilst in the latter we are 'for' it, despite the enemy being one and the same!

Aleppo

Here is a very recent story publicised by the BBC and all major outlets. It concerns the death of a very attractive young man, Anas al-Basha, 24, who has devoted his life to bringing some light relief to a very desperate humanitarian catastrophe. If true, what could be more tragic or designed to evoke an emotional response from whoever reads it? The accompanying photograph hammers home the message. Sadly Mr Basha died in an air strike on Tuesday (27/11/16) in the Mashhad neighbourhood. How helpful then that within less than 48 hours, not only the story of his death but also the photogenic and colourful portrait should be generally published and given great prominence in western media as in the BBC (below). 

Am I the only one who finds this a tad contrived and manipulative?


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-38167190  AHMAD AL-KHATIB/AP



Here is the actual article:

BBC: 

Syria conflict: Clown of Aleppo 'dies in air strike'

• 1 December 2016

"Anas al-Basha, 24, was a centre director for the civil society group, Space of Hope. Government forces have been pounding rebel-held eastern districts of Aleppo as they continue an all-out assault to regain full control the city. About 250,000 people are living under siege, among them 100,000 children. "He lived to make children laugh and happy in the darkest most dangerous place," Mahmoud al-Basha, who identified himself as Anas' brother, wrote on Facebook. "Anas who refused to leave Aleppo and decided to stay there to continue his work as a volunteer, to help the civilians and give gifts for the children in the streets to bring hope for them."" 

In the accompanying FB text the blame is placed fairly and squarely on the Russians and the Assad governments.

And here is a very professional 'promotional' video regarding his philanthropic 'mission': https://www.facebook.com/NowThisNews/videos/1247914071965381/?hc_ref=NEWSFEED

If you have the opportunity compare the images. If you do I would suggest there is some grounds for believing these are two different people. 

First it is recognised that established clowns stick to the same facial make-up. This differs in at least two respects: the red lips in the video are much more crudely applied; and the orange 'eyebrows' are absent. The glasses are distinctly different in design and have darkened lenses in the video and the orange wig is completely missing. (Strangely however there is a neck-tie of the same colour) (Orange by the way has certain recognised associations apparently) But far more important is the shape of the nose and face. I would suggest that the video person's nose and face are noticeably slimmer. See what you think? 

Of course, if the two men are different it does not rule out the possibility that Mr al-Basha was in fact killed, but it does mean there is interference with the creation and dissemination of the story, and that it cannot be trusted.

I also came across this image and post here: http://cdn3.swordandscale.com/files/2016/09/ClownClannTwitter.png 

You may consider there are certain similarities?

It is accompanied by this text: "It’s a modern case of mass hysteria in the making. At least 12 states across the U.S. have been invaded by reports of terrifying clowns. While some reports simply state that pranksters have been walking around in clown costumes scaring people, other reports are no laughing matter. Dozens of claims about the menacing clowns have poured in from across the nation since August 2016." Souce: http://swordandscale.com/clown-hysteria-sweeps-the-nation/

Another 'source' that is given huge coverage is this little girl called Bana Alabed, who it is said on the same day (Tuesday 27th) posted this picture on Twitter saying she was "happy to be alive".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-38148922

It is said she tweets in English "with the help of her mother" and that her family has come under fierce bombardment. 

All this may be true of course but the choice of a little girl to report from a war zone and so widely advertised, is highly questionable and suggestive of involvement by persons or organisations for emotional impact. And is it pure coincidence that Arab names seem to fortuitous portray good or bad western meanings depending who they are projected to be?

Her mother Fatamah it transpires, "has studied journalism and politics, has been active on Twitter with her daughter since September and has posted details of daily life in the besieged city. In a conversation with the BBC, she explained that she had taught her daughter English and that Bana's tweets were genuine."Bana wants the world to hear our voice," she said."

Here is the BBC headline on the 30th November, 2016:

"Syria war: Aleppo risks becoming giant graveyard - UN"

And this from the 1st December, 2016:

"So who is currently laying siege to whom in Aleppo?"
(My italics)

Then presumably to ensure animal lovers are not forgotten (a major public opinion cohort) there is this emotional story about a cat lover who has remained behind to look after them. It appears here on Facebook "via the BBC": https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews/videos/795546620585833/  A Jackie Northey responds thus:  

"This man is a true hero. With everything happening in the world and the hatred overflowing it truly touches my heart to see him stay in a war zone to help the animals left behind. I for one would love to hug and thank this man for showing the world there is still hope for a better future if we love and embrace each other whatever our views. Any man that shows this care for animals is inspirational for all our youngsters."

It would appear the story has had its desired effect in at least one reader then?

The Victoria Derbyshire programme appears to have taken an interest in the plight of the people of Aleppo and particularly the doctors and medical staff as here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-37047690

Again children are used to good effect. The headline image is of a frightened child and a video sits behind it of an air raid. The headline is:

"Aleppo medics tell of despair

11 August 2016 Last updated at 14:30 BST

The last doctors in the rebel-held east of the Syrian city of Aleppo have urged US President Barack Obama to come to the aid of the 250,000 civilians there."

The policy direction being proposed is clear although what this means in practice is not. 

However to project a certain aspect of conflict is one thing. To knowingly create and distribute fraudulent images is quite another. Researchers suggest this is exactly what the BBC has been up to.

The most notable of these was the alleged chemical attack in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta on the 21 August 2013 that the West pinned on the Assad regime, whilst the Russians blamed on (Israel-backed) Jihadist rebels.  Independent 'Global Research' had this to say:

"The UK, the US and France have all released their own intelligence studies blaming Assad for the incident and calling on the “international community” to increase pressure on the Syrian government. The reports, however, contradict each other in numerous places, with wildly different estimates of casualties in the events suggesting that the intelligence agencies that produced the report cannot even agree on the most basic details of the attack.

Now, new evidence is emerging that the attacks were used and manipulated by the terrorists in order to provoke the US and its allies into armed intervention in Syria. This evidence suggests that the videos used by the US and its allies to conclude what happened in Ghouta were in fact carefully stage managed to portray a narrative that would pin the blame for the attacks on Assad.

The first indications of this plot emerged early on, when expert analysis of the videos suggested inconsistencies in the footage itself.

That analysis was later expanded on by a report from ISTEAMS, a Syria-based human rights group working in conjunction with the International Institute for Peace, Justice and Human Rights. In this thorough report, published on GlobalResearch.ca on September 16th, numerous discrepancies and inconsistencies in the footage are documented." http://www.globalresearch.ca/how-the-syrian-chemical-weapons-videos-were-staged/5350471

A 'Russia Today' analysis of how the BBC subtly changed "napalm" to "chemical" without saying so, in an a event that lacks credibility throughout is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p54hHhlLjRk

Ofcom apparently did not uphold the complaint that it had faked the programme because it said it was not competent to look into them although it did decide "that elements of the programme were "materially misleading"."  

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-34316047

A similar question of reliability arises in respect of a more recent alleged 'chlorine gas attack' in Aleppo. The BBC headline here (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-36957579)  is as follows: 

Robert Stuarts reaction to this is is here: http://www.globalresearch.ca/fake-images-bbc-admits-switching-syria-footage-on-grounds-of-taste-and-decency/5452883

"Syria conflict: Video appears to show gas attack aftermath

2 August 2016 Last updated at 17:07 BST

A Syrian rescue service in rebel-held territory has posted this video on social media apparently showing the aftermath of a toxic gas attack in Saraqeb in Idlib province.

The Syrian Civil Defence group, which describes itself as a neutral band of volunteers, said barrels of what they suspected was chlorine were dropped from a helicopter overnight, affecting 33 people, mostly women and children.

Their video shows several men struggling to breathe and being given oxygen masks.

Both the government and rebel groups in Syria's civil war have been accused of, and denied, using chemical agents."

Saria Hasoun school, in the al-Farqan district in Government-held West Aleppo http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-21/syria-unrest-aleppos-children-slaughtered-on-both-sides/8041258

10.8.2016 Gas attack 

Mosul
Now compare their treatment of almost exactly similar circumstances - a large urban area under attack by heavy armaments and munitions-dropping aeroplanes to dislodge armed opposition fighters on the ground - in Mosul. Here is their report for the 2nd December, 2016:

"A long-awaited military offensive to reclaim the northern Iraqi city of Mosul from so-called Islamic State (IS) is under way, forcing tens of thousands of Iraqis to flee their homes.

"Iraqi security forces, Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, Sunni Arab tribesmen and Shia militiamen, assisted by US-led coalition warplanes and military advisers, are involved in the operation. The offensive was launched on 17 October, more than two years after Jihadists overran the city before seizing control of much of northern and western Iraq."

Do you notice the subtle difference of tone and content? Here it is a combined 'operation' (suggesting a wider consensus that the action is necessary and desirable) and here the 'jihadists' (nasty evil people) are being removed. Where is there any hint of that in Aleppo? And in Mosul there is no civilian casualties or suffering, no destruction of homes and hospitals. No tweeting nine year old girls, colourful clowns or rescuers of vulnerable pets. For this is "A Battle for Mosul".

Oh my god just look at the air pollution in this image:

It reports as follows: "The International Committee for the Red Cross has warned that the offensive to retake Mosul could take months, prompting more and more civilians to leave to avoid becoming trapped between front lines.

More than 77,000 people have now fled their homes in and around Mosul and UN officials are warning this figure is likely to rise as the Iraqi-led forces press further into the city. Civilians now have only unsafe water to drink and in just November nearly 2000 members of the Iraqi security forces were killed plus about a 1000 civilians. Although from a UN source one wonders if that takes any account of civilian casualties within the besieged (though the adjective is not applied in this case!) city itself let alone question the rightness of the suffering being imposed on the people of that place, against jihadists supplied with arms and material by the West!

In a worst-case scenario, the crisis could displace up to one million people, the UN's refugee agency (UNHCR) says, and 700,000 could need emergency shelter." Yet we are spared sight of the horrors unfolding on our TV screens. All the horror you notice is in Aleppo committed by Assad and his Russian backers. 

It is clear that the innocent people of Mosul are terrified of the advancing troops taking it out on them as they are of the arguably fleeing ISIS units allowed to escape to the West. Who knows what is really going on there or what "regaining the city" really means for the poor inhabitants caught in this endless geo-political war game, in which individual humans matter little or nothing at all.

Discussion

One of the most vaunted differences between democratic societies and totalitarian ones, is the concept of a "free press". It is defined by the Oxford dictionary as:

"A press having the freedom to operate without interference or censorship." 

It is naive to think that during the 'Cold War' the press in the west was 'free', whilst that in the USSR was not. What we know now is neither were, although it may be agreed the West was better at concealing the fact. 

Could it be that the west was merely more sophisticated in the way it carried it out? Effectively just a better illusion. It was channelled through state secret agencies such as the CIA. Recent articles such as that quoted above show what a misnomer a 'free press' actually was and the extract in respect of the Warren Commission Report illustrates how successful and pernicious it could be.

In all western countries the press was infiltrated and influenced to act as conduits for the western perspective of things and in the capitalist interest. It may be argued that certain blunders (such as Suez) or embarrassments (such as Profumo) may never have been revealed had it not been for the press, but they were managed and massaged to contain the damage, whilst much else never was allowed to see the light of day. 

If the situation then was bad, it is probably much worse now, where local Independence has virtually disappeared and major news networks and outlets have been monopolised by a limited number of international corporations pursuing their own very similar agendas. Television news seems to be similarly affected, and no longer credible for independent, objective reporting. 

If the press had done its job, would we have invaded Iraq or bombed Libya and Syria ? Would Jimmy Savile been allowed for so long to get away with his criminal activity? Would we have taken the same view of the bombing of Gaza or the events in the Ukraine or the American presidential elections? Would widespread and systematic company fraud based at a property in East Finchley Road have gone unreported or the institutionalised abuse of children? 

Despite its manifold failings, government wants to limit the freedom of the press even more and has used a greatly inflated issue of bugging celebrity phones to pursue it, devoting huge police resources to its investigation, whilst other serious crime was given scant attention. (1)

Old-school investigative reporting appears to have become an extinct species - with a few notable exceptions such as C4 "Unreported World" - and all media outlets just act as channels for 'official sources' without examination or challenge. This is why the Internet has become such a problem for government and subject to its veiled threats and more direct pressure on outlets such as Facebook and You tube, the latest being its propaganda campaign against "fake news". 

So we have the rather ironic situation, such as in this Guardian article (2) promoting yet again a thinly disguised government attempt to persuade the public that it is being deceived by these alternative news sources, as a prelude to controlling and banning them. You will note it makes the case that this is not just a little local matter, but affects many countries. 

Indeed that this rather fits with a globalist agenda to clamp down on news sources that have somehow escaped the established outlets. At the same time it has increased its own powers of surveillance with the Investigatory Powers Act against which a huge petition has been organised. (5)

Unfortunately the charge of "fake news" may backfire on those who have come up with it (it stinks of CIA ad agency) as it might equally apply to elements of television and press itself. For example the reporting of the Ghouda Massacre and Aleppo attacks have both been shown to be fake in some aspect by Robert Stuart and others. (See above and 3 & 4)

So now I want to concentrate on the subject of how just three topics have been dealt with by the media and pose the question, does this give the lie to the western 'free press' or are we still being lied to, either by act or omission, to further a certain agenda formulated in those corridors of power, to which the public is denied access?

9/11 Un-truth

A classic and still relevant example of how the BBC and other outlets here and in America have intentionally deceived their audiences both by act and censorship, relates to the cataclysmic events of 9/11. 

The truth has been systematically purloined, ridiculed and obstructed to ensure that it complies with the "official" but criminally fraudulent version of events. Clearly in its objective it has been successful as it is alleged around 70% of the population are still, despite fifteen years of revelations, still taken in by it. 

If these organs of information cannot be relied upon to tell the truth about such an important event as this, nothing it purports to reveal can be any longer relied upon. The credibility of the BBC and other outlets by virtue of just this one 'stress test', is in tatters. Its word - and I am sad to say it - is not worth the paper it is written on!

https://sites.google.com/site/censorshipbythebbc/bbc-censors-dr-alan
  

"A search of the BBC for “Sabrosky” yields ZERO (0) reportage. Yet former US Marine and US Army War College Director Dr Alan Sabrosky says that “It is 100% certain that 9/11 was a Mossad operation”. It should be noted that numerous science, engineering, architecture, aviation, military and intelligence experts say that the US did 9-11, with some (like Dr Alan Sabrosky) implicating Apartheid Israel in the atrocity"

http://israeli-connections-to-911.com/2015/08/28/part-1-4/  In an interview in December 2007 with Italy’s most respected newspaper, Corriere della Sera, ex-Italian President Francesco Cossiga stated (Italian to English translation), “While all the [intelligence services] of America and Europe….now know that the disastrous 9/11 attack had been planned and realised by the CIA and the Mossad with aid of the Zionist world in order to put under accusation the Arab countries in order to induce Western Powers to take part…in Iraq and Afghanistan wars.” [1]

Although Cossiga’s interview and his accusations were covered in the press in many European countries, not a word of Cossiga’s interview found its way into the U.S. mainstream media. 

1.  https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/nov/25/met-police-heavily-criticised-over-child-protection-failings
2.  Fake news: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/dec/02/fake-news-facebook-us-election-around-the-world
3.  http://www.globalresearch.ca/how-the-syrian-chemical-weapons-videos-were-staged/5350471
4.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p54hHhlLjRk
5. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/11/28/petition-repeal-uks-new-surveillance-powers-reaches-100000-signatures/
6.  mosul https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20161201-iraq-us-general-says-mosul-op-will-last-another-2-months/?platform=hootsuite
7.  http://yournewswire.com/cia-create-fake-news/