US Turns Blind Eye to Lugansk Massacre

Daniel McAdams

On June 2, a missile screamed through downtown Lugansk, in eastern Ukraine, leaving a trail of craters in a city park before slamming into a regional administration building. At least eight people were killed in the blast, as it struck in a busy pedestrian area. Blood and body parts were strewn throughout the blast zone.

Eyewitnesses said the missile was fired from one of the military jet fighters that had been circling the area.

Security camera footage from nearby seemed to confirm this. The jets had been sent in from Kiev to put down an autonomy movement in eastern Ukraine that followed a US-backed coup in Kiev in February.

An Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) monitoring team on the ground in Lugansk concurred with other eyewitnesses:

"On 2 June, shortly after 15:00 hrs, rockets hit the occupied regional administration building. Based on the SMM’s limited observation these strikes were the result of non-guided rockets shot from an aircraft. "

The US-backed government in Kiev, however, denied firing on civilians and blamed the blast on the anti-Kiev self-defense forces. The self-defense units, Kiev claimed, had blown up the administration building themselves with a heat-seeking missile that went awry. The US mainstream media dutifully reported the Kiev government line as fact. The anti-Kiev forces had blown up their own headquarters, they wrote. Just as several weeks ago they wrote that the anti-Kiev forces in Odessa had set themselves on fire.


Voices of Rationality on U.S. – Russian Ties Rise to the Surface

Wayne Madsen

To listen to the endless cacophony from American global interventionists who are regularly booked on the major American news networks to spew their neo-Cold War rhetoric, one might think that we are back in the 1960s during the dark days of fractious U.S.-Soviet relations. However, there are a growing number of voices in the United States who do not want to play the game of the neo-conservatives and «set back» the clock of Washington-Moscow relations to the Cold War era.

One of the voices of sanity is Dr. Stephen F. Cohen of New York University and Princeton and a veteran expert on Russian affairs. Although he has faced charges from the neo-con right and the Obama media sycophants, primarily the Daily Beast and New Republic, that he is a witting tool of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Cohen undauntedly continues to make the case for American understanding of Russia’s position with regard to Crimea and Ukraine.

Cohen has echoed Russia’s fear of being encircled and squeezed by NATO and the United States. In an interview with CNN, Cohen said, «What if, suddenly, Russian power showed up in Canada and Mexico and provinces of Canada and Mexico said they were going to join Putin's Eurasian economic union and maybe even his military bloc? Surely the American president would have to react at least as forcefully as Putin has».

Individuals like Cohen, who oppose a fracture in U.S.-Russian relations, are considered by the U.S. corporate media of being mouthpieces for the Kremlin. These voices of sanity are also facing another vestige of America’s past that is steadily but assuredly creeping into the American body politic: McCarthyism.


British Press Shills for Syria War With 'Baby Snipers' Story

Daniel McAdams

The Times of London yesterday [October 19, 2013] published a sensational Syria story "Assad’s snipers target unborn babies" based on an interview with British doctor David Nott, who had volunteered his medical expertise in Syria over the past several weeks. Dr. Nott said that he had seen several pregnant women come in with abdominal wounds. He speculated that snipers must have been playing some sort of game where they would target the fetuses of pregnant women -- a grisly business to be sure. Said Dr. Nott:

It seemed to me that it was some sort of a game they (the snipers) were having with each other... One day we'd have pregnant women being brought in with gunshot wounds to the uterus. Not just one or two, but seven or eight, which meant to me they (the snipers) must be targeting pregnant women.

Nott "heard local rumors" that these snipers, who seemed were playing a game, were Chinese or Azeri mercenaries fighting with Assad's government forces. None of this was confirmed in any way. Speculation.

But how did Rupert Murdoch's Times of London report this very imprecise bit of speculation on the part of Dr. Nott -- in a huge dramatic spread? How is that for thorough journalism?


Human Rights Watch is a propaganda agency for the US government

Daniel McAdams

Mother Agnès-Mariam Attacked...By Human Rights Watch!

Since when does a human rights organization take to arguing the case for a military attack that will kill scores of innocent civilians? If you are Human Rights Watch, it's all in a day's work. The US regime's favorite "human rights " organization, which once praised the Obama Administration's continuation of its predecessor's torturous CIA "extraordinary rendition" program, pulled out all stops to bolster Obama's claims that the Syrian government was responsible for the August 21st chemical attack near Damascus.

As Obama was ready to teach Syria a lesson via Tomahawk cruise missiles, Human Rights Watch stood virtually alone in the world on the president's side. The human rights group was not busy trying to help the victims or promote international diplomatic efforts to end the crisis. They were instead feverishly engaged in a convoluted effort to prove that the missiles that purportedly carried the poison gas could only have come from Syrian government positions. They had no investigators on the ground, yet they determined independent of facts that the Syrian government must have been responsible. This is the job for a human rights group? To help a president make the case for war?


BBC world news editor: Houla massacre coverage based on opposition propaganda

Chris Marsden

Russ Baker: Syria: The Dangers Of One-Sided Reporting
Daniel McAdams: Implosion of The Houla Massacre Story
Stephen Lendman: Stepped Up Media War on Syria

As quietly as possible, BBC world news editor Jon Williams has admitted that the coverage of last month’s Houla massacre in Syria by the world’s media and his own employers was a compendium of lies.

Datelined 16:23, June 7, Williams chose a personal blog to make a series of fairly frank statements explaining that there was no evidence whatsoever to identify either the Syrian Army or Alawite militias as the perpetrators of the May 25 massacre of 100 people.

By implication, Williams also suggests strongly that such allegations are the product of the propaganda department of the Sunni insurgents seeking to overthrow Bashar al-Assad.

After preparatory statements of self-justification noting the “complexity of the situation on the ground in Syria, and the need to try to separate fact from fiction,” and Syria’s long “history of rumours passing for fact,” Williams writes:

“In the aftermath of the massacre at Houla last month, initial reports said some of the 49 children and 34 women killed had their throats cut. In Damascus, Western officials told me the subsequent investigation revealed none of those found dead had been killed in such a brutal manner. Moreover, while Syrian forces had shelled the area shortly before the massacre, the details of exactly who carried out the attacks, how and why were still unclear.”

For this reason, he concludes somewhat belatedly,

“In such circumstances, it’s more important than ever that we report what we don’t know, not merely what we do.”

“In Houla, and now in Qubair, the finger has been pointed at the Shabiha, pro-government militia. But tragic death toll aside, the facts are few: it’s not clear who ordered the killings—or why.”

No trace of such a restrained approach can be found at the time on the BBC, or most anywhere else.


Syria: The Dangers Of One-Sided Reporting

Russ Baker


Rosemarie Colvin holds a picture of her daughter, Marie
Colvin, who was killed in Syria reporting on crimes against
humanity.
(Photo: Rashed Mian/Long Island Press)

Daniel McAdams: Implosion of The Houla Massacre Story
Stephen Lendman: Stepped Up Media War on Syria

The news out of Syria gets more and more appalling. But so does the quality of the journalism. Here’s an example, from the BBC dated May 26:

At least 90 people, including many children, have been killed in Syria’s restive Homs province, opposition activists say, calling it a “massacre”.

They said scores were wounded in the violence in Houla, as government forces shelled and attacked the town.

Shocking footage has emerged of the bodies of children killed as part of one the bloodiest attacks in one area since a nominal truce began in April.

The UN said international monitors were heading to the area.

BBC then quotes the wire service AP:

An activist in Houla told the Associated Press news agency that troops began the assault on Houla after an anti-regime demonstration following Muslim prayers on Friday.

The assault began with artillery shelling which killed 12, he said – but scores more were butchered when pro-regime thugs known as “shabiha” then stormed the area.

And here’s UPI:

DAMASCUS, Syria, May 26 (UPI) — At least 88 people, many of them children, were killed in a town in the restive province of Homs in Syria in an attack by government forces, activists said.

All these reports were based almost entirely on the word from activists on one side in the conflict, not from journalists or neutral observers. That is not journalism. Why are there not more journalists actually in these places reporting? In the past, reporters always managed to get into conflict zones. And, notwithstanding Syrian government controls on access to these areas and the obvious physical dangers attendant to work in such places, news organizations should be able to hire Syrians who will be diligent, careful and precise.


Implosion of The Houla Massacre Story — Is Anyone Paying Attention?

Daniel McAdams

A respected mainstream publication, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung(FAZ), has reported that the infamous Houla massacre in Syria, which the US and NATO hoped would be the casus belli for their planned invasion, was in fact carried out by rebel forces.

Highlighted in the National Review (of all places), the FAZ investigation was exhaustive and convincing. NRO reports on the original FAZ story:

According to the article’s sources, the massacre occurred after rebel forces attacked three army-controlled roadblocks outside of Houla. The roadblocks had been set up to protect nearby Alawi majority villages from attacks by Sunni militias. The rebel attacks provoked a call for reinforcements by the besieged army units. Syrian army and rebel forces are reported to have engaged in battle for some 90 minutes, during which time “dozens of soldiers and rebels” were killed.

“According to eyewitness accounts,” the FAZ report continues,

"the massacre occurred during this time. Those killed were almost exclusively from families belonging to Houla’s Alawi and Shia minorities. Over 90% of Houla’s population are Sunnis. Several dozen members of a family were slaughtered, which had converted from Sunni to Shia Islam. Members of the Shomaliya, an Alawi family, were also killed, as was the family of a Sunni member of the Syrian parliament who is regarded as a collaborator. Immediately following the massacre, the perpetrators are supposed to have filmed their victims and then presented them as Sunni victims in videos posted on the internet.

For weeks, alternative media analysts and even eyewitnesses had been poking enormous holes in the suspiciously convenient Western narrative that Assad's forces slaughtered the villagers, cutting and killing at close range. No one paid attention, as usual.

The NRO piece continues with a fascinating story from a Christian monastery in the vicinity:

"Already at the beginning of April, Mother Agnès-Mariam de la Croix of the St. James Monastery warned of rebel atrocities’ being repackaged in both Arab and Western media accounts as regime atrocities. She cited the case of a massacre in the Khalidiya neighborhood in Homs. According to an account published in French on the monastery’s website, rebels gathered Christian and Alawi hostages in a building in Khalidiya and blew up the building with dynamite. They then attributed the crime to the regular Syrian army. 'Even though this act has been attributed to regular army forces . . . the evidence and testimony are irrefutable: It was an operation undertaken by armed groups affiliated with the opposition,' Mother Agnès-Mariam wrote."

Either Mother Agnès-Mariam is a liar or Hillary Clinton is a liar. You decide.


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