{"id":33646,"date":"2018-04-23T06:39:10","date_gmt":"2018-04-23T11:39:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33646"},"modified":"2018-04-23T06:39:10","modified_gmt":"2018-04-23T11:39:10","slug":"beware-of-white-helmets-bearing-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33646","title":{"rendered":"Beware Of White Helmets Bearing News"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Beware Of White Helmets Bearing News<\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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The celebrated White Helmets of Oscar fame appeared to have made their own feature film in Duma on the night of the alleged chemical attack…<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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At the center of the controversy over an alleged chemical attack in the Damascus suburb of Duma on April 7 are the White Helmets, a self-described rescue operation about whom an Oscar-winning documentary was made.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Reporter and author Max Blumenthal has\u00a0tracked<\/a>\u00a0the role of the White Helmets in the Syrian conflict. He reported that the White Helmets were created in Turkey by James Le Mesurier, a former British MI5 agent. The group has received at least $55 million from the British Foreign Office and $23 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development as well as millions from the Kingdom of Qatar, which has backed a variety of extremist groups in Syria including Al Qaeda.<\/p>\n

Blumenthal writes, \u201cWhen Defense Secretary James Mattis\u00a0cited<\/a>\u00a0\u2018social media\u2019 in place of scientific evidence of a chemical attack in Duma, he was referring to video shot by members of the White Helmets. <\/strong>Similarly, when State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert sought to explain why the US bombed Syria before inspectors from the OPCW could produce a report from the ground, she\u00a0claimed<\/a>, \u2018We have our own intelligence.\u2019 With little else to offer, she was likely referring to social media material published by members of the White Helmets.<\/strong>\u201d<\/p>\n

The reference to social media as evidence in the most serious decision a leader can make\u2014to engage in an act of war\u2014is part of a disturbing trend. Then Secretary of State John Kerry pointed to \u201csocial media\u201d as evidence of the Syrian government\u2019s guilt in a 2013 chemical attack in the same Damascus suburb. But as Robert Parry, the late founder and editor of this site,\u00a0pointed out<\/a>\u00a0in numerous reports, Syrian government guilt was far from a sure thing.<\/p>\n

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…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Beware Of White Helmets Bearing News The celebrated White Helmets of Oscar fame appeared to have made their own feature film in Duma on the night of the alleged chemical attack… At the center of the controversy over an alleged chemical attack in the Damascus suburb of Duma on April 7 are the White Helmets, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[15268,2928,6963,17069,655,1169,776,19890],"class_list":["post-33646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","tag-ann-wright","tag-chemical-weapons","tag-consortium-news","tag-duma","tag-propaganda","tag-social-media","tag-syria","tag-white-helmets"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33646"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33647,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33646\/revisions\/33647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}