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The BBC Has Legal Protection to Spread Fake News: the Curious Case of ISIS, Andrew Neil and Jeremy Corbyn

November 27, 2018

The BBC Has Legal Protection to Spread Fake News: the Curious Case of ISIS, Andrew Neil and Jeremy Corbyn

Photo Source Edwardx | CC BY 2.0

The BBC spreads fake news. We all know that. From the uncritical parroting of the British government’s Iraqi weapons of mass destruction claims to the unchallenged lies spouted by war-mongering politicians, that Libya’s dictator (who was armed and trained by Britain, incidentally) was going to commit a “bloody massacre” in Libya’s Benghazi region. (A postwar British government report confirmed that the “ethnic cleansing” claim was based on what they cautiously called poor intelligence. The cruel irony is that after the BBC helped whip up support for the invasion, it reported on a real ethnic cleansing of black Libyans committed by the Islamist terrorists organized by the US and Britain to topple Gaddafi.)

But what if the BBC had legal protection to tell and spread lies? As I document in my book Real Fake News, the answer to a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that, as an arts, literature, and news organization, the BBC has no legal obligation to give its audience any information about its sources. Often, journalists cannot and should not name their sources, for obvious reasons; the main one being that no one will tell them anything in confidence ever again. However, when general claims that contradict the customary understanding of things are made, and without supporting evidence, it’s only fair to ask where the person making the claim obtained their information.

ISLAMIC STATE IN IRAQ BEFORE 2003? GET OUTTA HERE!

During an interview with the antiwar leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, BBC presenter Andrew Neil claimed that ISIS existed in Iraq beforethe 2003 invasion by the US and Britain. Corbyn stated, in gentle terms, that US-British foreign policy had smashed up Iraq and Libya.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Pompeo’s Albright Moment Arrives

November 13, 2018

Pompeo’s Albright Moment Arrives

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is not a very bright guy. He is, like his boss, a thin-skinned bully with a narrow view of the world focused on US righteousness. With the sanctions going into place on Iran this week he gave an interview with the BBC which laid bare what happens when you scratch Pompeo just a hair beneath the polished surface.

Pompeo will be happy to see the people of Iran starve to achieve his ends. And those ends are purely in service of not only Israel and Saudi Arabia but the military contractors who back him and direct so much of the policy coming out of D.C.

Pompeo: Yeah, we’re going to work to do two things: that things that are sanctioned don’t happen, and things that are permitted to happen are permissible, and can in fact happen. [Speaking of food and medicine flowing unimpeded]

Well, remember, just so you remember, the leadership has to make a decision that they want their people to eat. They have to make a decision that they want to use their wealth to import medicine, and not use their wealth to fund Qasem Soleimani’s travels around the Middle East with – causing death and destruction. That’s the Iranian Government’s choice on how to use Iranian wealth. If they choose to squander, if the Iranian leadership chooses to spoil it, if they choose to use it in a way that doesn’t benefit the Iranian people, I’m very confident the Iranian people will take a response that tries to fix that themselves as well.

Aside from the fact that Pompeo has no idea how commerce works, this is a horrific statement. We’re going to destroy your economy and if you don’t overthrow your government you will starve.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Listening In to Killings – and Everything Else

October 25, 2018

Listening In to Killings – and Everything Else

It was intriguing that the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2 was apparently recorded in some fashion. The BBC reported that “A Turkish security source has confirmed to BBC Arabic the existence of an audio and a video recording. What is not clear is if anyone other than Turkish officials has seen or heard them. One source is cited by the Washington Post saying men can be heard beating Mr Khashoggi; it adds that the recordings show he was killed and dismembered.”

It seemed pretty much an open-and-shut case. There was evidence that the despotic regime of Saudi monarchy, as always regarding themselves as being above decency, law and civilisation in general, had been so annoyed with a Saudi journalist that they killed him. It was an amateur operation, and Mossad (for example) would have done a better and more discreet job (although their assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai was a bit botched), but it achieved the Saudis’ objective and sent the message round the world that any of their nationals daring to speak out against the Trump-supported boy dictator in Riyadh, the ruthless Mohammed bin Salman, would pay the ultimate price.

But then the story about a recording of the torture and killing of Jamal Khashoggi underwent modification. Perhaps there wasn’t a Turkish audio and video recording, after all. CNBC broadcast that “The Turkish newspaper Sabah reported that Khashoggi recorded audio of the alleged killing using an app on his Apple Watch and was able to upload the recording to his iPhone and iCloud account,” but the conclusion was that “It would have been nearly impossible for Khashoggi to record audio and upload it to his iPhone or the internet, and it raises questions as to how Turkish officials obtained the audio and video evidence of the alleged killing.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

World’s “Worst Famine In 100 Years” Will Hit Yemen, U.N. Warns

October 16, 2018

World’s “Worst Famine In 100 Years” Will Hit Yemen, U.N. Warns

For a Saudi and Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) update that’s not directly related to the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a United Nations official on Sunday warned Yemen is now facing what could be “the worst famine in the world in 100 years” which is set to put “12-13 million innocent civilians at risk of starving,” according to the BBC.

Yemen’s war, which has involved intense Saudi-UAE-US coordinated airstrikes on civilian population centers going back to 2015 has been popularly dubbed “the forgotten war” due to its general absence from headlines and front page stories over the years.

As a few analysts and war reporters have pointed out in recent days, it took the murder of one Washington Post contributor — who was one of the mainstream media’s own — for MbS to actually face any level of scrutiny, and yet the tens of thousands killed under Saudi coalition bombs is still largely taboo for the same mainstream to touch.

*Saudi-led coalition airstrike on an arms depot in Sanaa in 2015. Image source: AFP*

A top United Nations official who monitors Yemen, Lise Grande, told the BBC: “We predict that we could be looking at 12 to 13 million innocent civilians who are at risk of dying from the lack of food.”

She explained, “I think many of us felt as we went into the 21st century that is was unthinkable that we could see a famine like saw in Ethiopia, that we saw in Bengal, that we saw in parts of the Soviet Union, that was just unacceptable. Many of us had the confidence that that would never happen again and yet the reality is that in Yemen that is precisely what we are looking at.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“We Now Have Urban Ebola” In Congo, WHO Warns Of “Potentially Explosive Increase” In Cases

May 18, 2018

“We Now Have Urban Ebola” In Congo, WHO Warns Of “Potentially Explosive Increase” In Cases

Experts fear an “explosive increase” in Ebola cases after an outbreak in Congo entered a “new phase” and spread from the countryside to a city.

The BBC reports that Health Minister Oly Ilunga Kalenga confirmed a case in Mbandaka, a city of a million people about 130km (80 miles) from the area where the first cases were confirmed earlier this month.

The city is a major transportation hub with routes to the capital Kinshasa.

Forty-four people have been infected and 23 people are known to have died.

Senior World Health Organization (WHO) official Peter Salama said the spread to Mbandaka meant there was the potential for an “explosive increase” in cases.

“This is a major development in the outbreak,” he told the BBC. “We have urban Ebola, which is a very different animal from rural Ebola. The potential for an explosive increase in cases is now there.”

Mr Salama, the WHO’s deputy director-general for emergency preparedness and response, said Mbandaka’s location on the Congo river, widely used for transportation, raised the prospect of Ebola spreading to surrounding countries such as Congo-Brazzaville and the Central African Republic as well as downstream to Kinshasa, a city of 10 million people.

“This puts a whole different lens on this outbreak and gives us increased urgency to move very quickly into Mbandaka to stop this new first sign of transmission,” he said.

The BBC adds that the WHO said it was not recommending any trade or travel restrictions either within DR Congo, for example between Mbandaka and Kinshasa, or internationally.

But Mr Salama said that 13 countries in the region were boosting border screening measures and said DR Congo itself was increasing exit screening measures.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

BBC Reporter Discourages Syria Questions Due To “Information War” With Russia

April 18, 2018

BBC Reporter Discourages Syria Questions Due To “Information War” With Russia

A BBC interview is making the rounds today among opponents of western interventionism in Syria. The subject of the interview, Admiral Alan West, voiced some much needed skepticism about the establishment narrative around the alleged gas attack in Douma. Everybody’s talking about it because West is an empire loyalist that nobody in their right mind would accuse of being an “Assad apologist” or “useful idiot of the Kremlin”, as anyone else who doesn’t swallow the official story hook, line and sinker is uniformly labeled.

West made some sensible comments about the White Helmets and the fact that Jaysh al-Islam had far more incentive to stage such an attack than Assad had to perpetrate it. Even more helpful was his personal account of having been aggressively pressured to make false reports about the success of the British bombing campaign in Bosnia, suggesting that those pressures can lead to bad intelligence and erroneous military responses.

“I just wonder, you know we’ve had some bad experiences on intelligence,” West said. “When I was chief of defense intelligence, I had huge pressure put on me politically to try and say that our bombing campaign in Bosnia was achieving all sorts of things which it wasn’t. I was put under huge pressure, so I know the things that can happen with intelligence.”

So that’s a very significant addition to the dialogue. For me, though, the most interesting comments made in that interview came not from West, but from the BBC reporter who was interviewing him.

In the latter half of the interview, BBC’s Annita McVeigh asked the following questions after West’s comment about Bosnia:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Unanswered questions

March 22, 2018

Unanswered questions

Not so fast, Mr Bond…

So the truth is finally out. Russia poisoned the ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter on British soil using the Russian-made nerve agent Novichok. The Russian ambassador to Britain has been given until the end of today to explain his country’s degree of guilt (not whether Russia is guilty or not, just how guilty it is) following which unspecified sanctions will be imposed. The BBC says so, so it must be true:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43381880

So that’s it then: case closed. Or is it? There are several things about this case which I find deeply troubling. Let’s start by looking at the facts, insofar as they can be established.

According to the BBC, “Colonel Skripal is a retired Russian military intelligence officer who was convicted of passing the identities of Russian intelligence agents working undercover in Europe to the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. He was jailed for 13 years by Russia in 2006. In July 2010, he was one of four prisoners released by Moscow in exchange for 10 Russian spies arrested by the FBI as part of a swap. He was later flown to the UK.” Since then, he has lived in relative obscurity in Salisbury, England until last week when he was found in a critical condition on a bench outside a shopping centre, together with his daughter. They had just been to a nearby pub/restaurant, and traces of the Novichok poison were also found there, suggesting that it may have been administered there.

Some of these facts are disputed – for example, Skripal’s family say that he was not a double agent and that the allegations against him were fabricated. But let’s suppose that all of the above is true. Here are my problems with it:

Firstly, where is Russia’s motive for killing him? They had him in their custody between 2006-2010 and presumably, if they wanted to kill him, they could easily have done it then, and just made him disappear quietly, and few people would have known or cared. But they didn’t. So why wait until now, 8 years later, and attempt to kill him in the full glare of international publicity?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Declaration Of War”: Trump Jerusalem Decision Sparks Outrage, Warning Of “A Fire With No End In Sight”

December 6, 2017

“Declaration Of War”: Trump Jerusalem Decision Sparks Outrage, Warning Of “A Fire With No End In Sight”

Today at 1pm, president Trump will announce the U.S. recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, but will sign a waiver delaying the relocation of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to there for 6 months. Trump’s decision to unilaterally recognize Jerusalem upends decades of American policy in the Middle East and risks inflaming violence in an already-tense region. And sure enough, the announcement prompted an immediate – and furious – response sparking Arab, Muslim and European opposition to a move that would upend decades of U.S. policy and risk potentially violent protests.

While Israel naturally welcomed the news, Palestinian officials declared the Mideast peace process “finished”, calling it a declaration of war, and Turkey announced it would host a meeting of Islamic nations next week to give Muslim countries’ leaders an opportunity to coordinate a response.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Jordan’s King Abdullah II, warned him the announcement would have “dangerous” repercussions for regional stability. Separately, the Palestinian delegate to the United Kingdom said on Wednesday that President Trump’s move to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel signals “a declaration of war” in the region. “He is declaring war in the Middle East, he is declaring war against 1.5 billion Muslims, hundreds of millions of Christians that are not going to accept the holy shrines to be totally under the hegemony of Israel,” Manuel Hassassian told BBC 4 Radio’s “Today.”

The Palestinians seek east Jerusalem as the capital of a future independent state and fear that Trump’s declaration essentially imposes on them a disastrous solution for one of the core issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “There is no way that there can be talks with the Americans. The peace process is finished. They have already pre-empted the outcome,” said Palestinian official Hanan Ashrawi. “They cannot take us for granted.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How A Dubious BBC Report Gave Israel The “Green Light” For Last Night’s Attack On Syria

December 2, 2017

How A Dubious BBC Report Gave Israel The “Green Light” For Last Night’s Attack On Syria

Syrian state television has confirmed that Israel attacked a military base outside of Damascus overnight on Friday, which Israeli media reports involved both surface-to-surface missiles and airstrikes, while Syria says its air defense systems were engaged and intercepted two missiles. Like other recent strikes inside Syria, the Israeli jets reportedly fired from over Lebanese airspace, in order to avoid both Syrian anti-aircraft missile systems and provoking a Russian response. Though the extent of the damage or casualties is not yet known, Syrian media has confirmed material damage to the base, and other reports indicate mass power outages in some of parts of Damascus occurred immediately after the attack, which SANA says happened at 12:30am local time.

It appears the base is likely the same one featured in a November BBC report which showed satellite images detailing the purported construction and renovation of an “Iranian military base” near El-Kiswah, which lies 14 km (8 miles) south of Damascus. As we’ve noted before, the BBC report was dubiously sourced to “a Western intelligence source” and the story was quickly utilized by Israeli leaders to ratchet up rhetoric in preparing its case before the international community for further attacks on the supposed Iranian targets. Israel has long justified its attacks inside Syria by claiming to be acting against Hezbollah and Iranian facilities and arms depots.

Image source: SANA

#Syria Another Video allegedly showing Syrian Anti Air Defense intercepting one of the Israeli Missiles launched towards the countryside of Damascus pic.twitter.com/xIeS4MTjJI

— Ivan Sidorenko (@IvanSidorenko1) December 1, 2017

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Record surge in atmospheric CO2 seen in 2016

November 3, 2017

Record surge in atmospheric CO2 seen in 2016

Last week the BBC carried another scare story on climate change, this time citing a report on CO2 from the World Meteorological Organisation:

“Concentrations of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere surged to a record high in 2016, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

Last year’s increase was 50% higher than the average of the past 10 years.

Researchers say a combination of human activities and the El Niño weather phenomenon drove CO2 to a level not seen in 800,000 years.

Scientists say this risks making global temperature targets largely unattainable.”

Since this reporting is from the BBC, my default reaction is to treat it with a good deal of scepticism. So I decided to check out the numbers.

To my surprise the “50% higher than the average of the past 10 years” appears to be correct (Figure 1). The mean dCO2 2006-2015 was 2.1 ppm. The 2016 figure of 3.4 ppm is indeed 62% higher than the prior 10 year mean. We need to ask the serious question if this is a cause for concern?

Figure 1 Annual dCO2 from Mauna Loa based on monthly data downloaded from WoodForTrees. Annual means were calculated and annual dCO2 equals arithmetic difference from year to year.

The arrows on Figure 1 point to strong to very strong El Niño events. The very strong El Niño of 1982 / 83 does not register a CO2 spike, but the CO2 spike of 1988 does coincide with a strong El Niño. We are on fairly safe ground saying that the three marked and one unmarked CO2 spikes are linked to El Niño. We know that ocean surface warming will lead to reduced capacity to absorb CO2.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

d surge.

End Games: the Apocalyptic Trope That Swallowed the World

September 6, 2017

End Games: the Apocalyptic Trope That Swallowed the World

Photo by Mikey | CC BY 2.0

Everywhere you look these days, you see the trope: the “end of the world” is nigh from a nuclear war. You see it in somber headlines, in weighty punditry, even in throwaway jokes in the middle of, say, a TV review: “Looks like the BBC finally has a comedy hit — just as the world is about to blow up!” Ha ha. The current situation with North Korea is being portrayed as if it’s a reboot of the Cuban Missile Crisis, with two massively armed superpowers on the brink of all-out global conflagration.

But putting aside the entirely context-less hype and fear-mongering of our media and political elites, even if there were some kind of war between the US and North Korea, it would not remotely lead to anything like the “end of the world.” The US has thousands of immediately launchable nuclear weapons; North Korea has, er, none. And even if you believe Pyongyang’s propaganda (and if you swallow it about their nuclear weapons program, why not believe their BS about the happy workers’ paradise they have there?), you’re still left with the fact that North Korea might be able to put a weapon on a missile at some point in the future. OK, then they could possibly lob this missile (or heck, two or three of them, maybe) in the direction of the United States – which, we assume, would just stand back and watch this happen, despite having North Korea absolutely blanketed with surveillance and having the ability to destroy any launcher the instant it reared skyward. And then North Korea would be obliterated by a US retaliation.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Something is Broken in the UK Intellectual Sphere.

August 8, 2017

Something is Broken in the UK Intellectual Sphere.

The BBC did some kind of educational cartoon on Roman Britain and represented “diversity” in terms of someone looking African in the show as representative of “diversity” at the time. The BBC was effectively applying quotas retroactively (I mean, really retroactively). Any dissent from the statistical errors made by the politically correct police is treated as apostasy. Effectively, scholarship is dead in the U.K.

What was meant to be a “typical” of Roman Brittain by the BBC: flowing quotas of political correctness backward in time.

Representativeness heuristic. The picture was portrayed as representative (playing on the representativeness/availability heuristic in the minds of children). Some people backtracked later by saying it is was not common but not impossible, which is where I shout “BS!” (More technically, calling events that fall in the tails of the distribution, beyond 2 standard deviations “typical” and, as Mary Beard describe it “accurate” is a lunacy. “Typical” is within one STD).
Anecdotal vs Statistical. The backup is mostly anecdotal from cherry picked stories. We find nothing beyond traces of sub-Saharan genes in areas where Roman legions were located (France, Gaul, and even Spain, where most of it came much later from the Arab trade) — but we find genes of other Roman occupiers. Show the picture to a French or Italian person and tell him “this is the typical…” and wait for the insults.
Fuzzy classification. Even the researchers who deal with physical remains miss the point that people from North Africa looked no different from Spaniards, S. Italians, and Greeks. Punics/Phoenicians we now know, looked Canaanite, just like Southern Europeans. Berbers looked like mountain berbers today. So representing “diversity” should focus on the difference between locals and Romans (Northern European vs Mediterranean), not within Romans (in other words, Butter vs Olive Oil ).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Qatar May be Turning Its Back on the US Dollar — and We All Know What That Means

June 29, 2017

(ANTIMEDIA) — Late last week, Saudi Arabia and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) that are involved in attempting to isolate Qatar sent the tiny Gulf nation a list of 13 demands. They are insisting that Qatar meet these demands within ten days or face unspecified further action.The list of demands includes Qatar shutting down Al-Jazeera and its affiliate stations; shutting down other news outlets that Qatar funds, including Middle East Eye; curbing diplomatic ties with Iran and expelling members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard; terminating the Turkish military presence in Qatar; consenting to monthly audits for the first year following acceptance of the demands, and aligning itself entirely with the other Gulf and Arab countries militarily, politically, socially, and economically – to name but a few.

The most ludicrous of the demands is that Qatar must end its interference in sovereign countries’ internal affairs. Qatar does interfere in a number of countries, including Libyaand Syria, but as the German Foreign Minister explained, this list of demands directly challenges Qatar’s sovereignty. Who is interfering with whose sovereignty, exactly?

Unsurprisingly, Qatar has dismissed the list of demands as neither reasonable nor actionable. Surely, the Saudi-led anti-Qatar alliance is aware of this. It would be tantamount to asking Great Britain to shut down the BBC and expel American troops – it just wouldn’t happen. All of the world’s major newspapers are complicit in running state-sanctioned propaganda, and singling Al-Jazeera out is hardly fair or practical.

In that context, Saudi Arabia and its friends have given Qatar a list of demands they cannot conceivably meet and imposed a ten-day deadline to concede or face unspecified further action. Qatar was essentially doomed from the start of this rift, and it’s only just beginning. As Newsweek lamented, “the demands are designed to be impossible to comply with.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Western civilisation could collapse

April 18, 2017

How Western civilisation could collapse

Some possible precipitating factors are already in place. How the West reacts to them will determine the world’s future, says Rachel Nuwer.

The political economist Benjamin Friedman once comparedmodern Western society to a stable bicycle whose wheels are kept spinning by economic growth. Should that forward-propelling motion slow or cease, the pillars that define our society – democracy, individual liberties, social tolerance and more – would begin to teeter. Our world would become an increasingly ugly place, one defined by a scramble over limited resources and a rejection of anyone outside of our immediate group. Should we find no way to get the wheels back in motion, we’d eventually face total societal collapse.

Such collapses have occurred many times in human history, and no civilisation, no matter how seemingly great, is immune to the vulnerabilities that may lead a society to its end. Regardless of how well things are going in the present moment, the situation can always change. Putting aside species-ending events like an asteroid strike, nuclear winter or deadly pandemic, history tells us that it’s usually a plethora of factors that contribute to collapse. What are they, and which, if any, have already begun to surface? It should come as no surprise that humanity is currently on an unsustainable and uncertain path – but just how close are we to reaching the point of no return?

A South African police van is set on fire following protests about inequality in 2016 (Credit: Getty Images)

While it’s impossible to predict the future with certainty, mathematics, science and history can provide hints about the prospects of Western societies for long-term continuation.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

China Prepares Countermeasures Against South Korea Missile Shield

March 14, 2017

China Prepares Countermeasures Against South Korea Missile Shield

The recent deployment by South Korea of the controversial US-made Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) anti-missile system in response to potential ballistic threats from North Korea, has led to a furious response by China, whose first-strike ability would be compromised under the existing military configuration. And as BBC reports, “the deployment in South Korea of the US Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system has been slammed by Beijing. Now the Chinese Communist Party is calling on its people to embrace their ill will towards their neighbours” and notes that as anti South-Korea fever sweep China, local school students chant “Boycott Sth Korea!”, and smash South Korean appliances as the “communist Party unleashes anti-Korea spirit.”

However, while eliciting up a traditional nationalistic response by China was to be expected, what is more troubling is that according to the South China Morning Post, China is set to deploy anti-radar countermeasures which will neutralize the South Korean THAAD. The THAAD system consists of a sophisticated radar and interceptor missiles designed to spot and knock out incoming ballistic missiles.

Speaking to retired PLA general Wang Hongguang, the SCMP reports that China knew it might not be able to stop Seoul deploying a US anti-missile system “and was prepared to counter with its own anti-radar equipment.” The comments came as a South Korean court’s decision to uphold the impeachment of former president Park Geun-hye had fanned hopes Seoul might put plans for the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence system on hold. Park supported the installation of the system to help protect South Korea against threats from North Korea, which Beijing says can peer through China’s defences. However, such a de-escalation does not appear to be imminent.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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