Page 2 of
3 COMMENT Covering Syria: The information
war By Aisling Byrne
You
won't read how Saudi Arabia and Qatar have bullied
satellite hosting channels in the region to stop
broadcasting "pro-regime" public and private
Syrian television channels; or that the Syrian
opposition has set up 10 satellite channels, all
with an Islamist orientation and which take a
strong sectarian line - calling on the FSA to
"kill Iran's mice" and "the rats of the Lebanese
devil's party" (Hezbollah); or how Russia has been
attempting to facilitate a political process of
reconciliation with the internal opposition since
the onset of the crisis.
There is clear duplicity in
the deliberate unwillingness of the Western
mainstream media to acknowledge the nature of
those who are the West's allies in the
regime-change project - particularly Saudi Arabia
and Qatar - and the danger they pose in
the
region through their arming and firing up of
jihadist Salafist groups in Syria and across the
region. Rare are articles in the mainstream
Western press that highlight this hypocrisy.
A
critical piece in the British press by Peter
Oborne, The Daily Telegraph's chief political
correspondent, was an exception: "Washington never
ceases to complain about the connection between
the Pakistani intelligence services and the
Taliban. But we never hear a whisper of concern
about the connection between Saudi intelligence
and Salafi movements across the Middle East, of
which al-Qaeda is the best-known offshoot."
The
essential components of what we do see daily in
the Western press have changed little during the
conflict: in effect, all violence and terror are
apportioned to one side only - the Syrian
government and its purported "ghostly shadowy" shabiha forces.
Any
violence committed by the "peaceful protesters"
and the Free Syrian Army is purely for defensive
purposes - all of which comes straight out of the
color-revolution/regime-change text book; daily
figures for those killed are based almost
exclusively on "reports by activists and YouTube
footage" (unverifiable, it is claimed, because the
Syrian government does not allow free movement of
journalists) and are described simply as "people"
- dead insurgents do not appear; Al-Qaeda-type
jihadist groups are played down (reports in
leading media outlets like The Guardian continue
to question whether they exist at all); and any
weapons or equipment supplied to the "opposition"
is, according to Saudi leaders, to help Syrians
"defend themselves".
Embedding journalists on
their side is an asset that the FSA, activists and
their Western and regional partners have clearly
learned from the experience of the US Army in the
wake of its attacks on Fallujah in 2004. A US Army
intelligence analysis leaked by WikiLeaks revealed
that "in the military's opinion, the Western press
are part of the US's propaganda operation. This
process was facilitated by the embedding of
Western reporters in US military units". In their
second attack on Fallujah in November 2004, the US
Army "got many reporters ... to embed with US
troops, so that they could act, as the
intelligence report calls for, as the propaganda
arm of US forces".
The fundamental pillar of
this Western narrative relies almost exclusively
on claims and "evidence" provided by "activists"
and opposition-affiliated groups, particularly the
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Are we
seriously to believe that this outfit, reportedly
run from Coventry by a man who, according to
Reuters, part-time runs a clothes shop with his
wife, then "sits with a laptop and phones and
pieces together accounts of conflict and rights
abuses before uploading news to the Internet", is
the primary source of daily casualty statistics on
the 14-month Syrian conflict - the key
geo-strategic conflict of the time?
It
is clearly the front office of a large-scale
(dis)information project - when Russian diplomats
asked to meet with the organization, they were
refused. Senior political figures in the region
have told me, as other reports indicate, that the
Observatory is in fact funded from a Dubai-based
slush fund and is a key component of the
regime-change project.
Russian Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov noted that it was in the
opposition's interest "to provoke a humanitarian
catastrophe, to get a pretext to demand external
interference", so it is not surprising that
analysis of the Observatory's figures, including
claims of "massacres", consistently show a
significant inflation in numbers of casualties,
sometimes wildly so.
As Al-Jazeera journalist Nir
Rosen, who spent some months embedded with the
Free Syria Army, explained: "Every day the
opposition gives a death toll, usually without any
explanation of the cause of the deaths. Many ...
reported killed are in fact dead opposition
fighters, but the cause of their death is hidden
and they are described ... as innocent civilians
killed by security forces, as if they were all
merely protesting or sitting in their homes."
Analysis I did of what was
reported to be the "deadliest day of the
nine-month uprising" (December 20, 2011), with the
"organized massacre" of a "mass defection" of army
deserters widely reported by the international
press, and opposition Syrian National Council
claims of areas "exposed to large-scale genocide",
showed that figures differed so significantly
(between 10 and 163 armed insurgents, nine to 111
unarmed civilians and zero to 97 government
forces), that the "truth" was impossible to
establish. Similarly, analysis of The Guardian's
data blog on casualties as of December 2011, based
solely on press reports largely from opposition
sources, contained basic inaccuracies and made no
reference to any killings of armed insurgents
during the entire 10-month period.
So
the Observatory and "activists" provide doctored
figures, the Western media report these figures
uncritically, and the UN provides reports on the
basis of opposition and activist sources alone.
The December 2011 UN Human Rights Commissioner's
report was based solely on interviews with 233
alleged "army defectors"; similarly, the first UN
report to accuse the Syrian government of crimes
against humanity was based on 369 interviews with
"victims and witnesses". The spokesman for the UN
Office of the High Commission for Human Rights
explained that while "getting evidence from
victims and defectors - some who corroborated
specific names", the UN "is not in a position to
cross-check names and will never be in a position
to do that ... The lists are clear - the question
is whether we can fully endorse their accuracy."
British public-service
broadcaster Channel 4 has championed the cause of
Syrian "video journalists" who it claims are
leading a "Syrian media revolution". The channel's
foreign-affairs correspondent Jonathan Miller
wrote: "Each report is datelined; exact location
and date, [which] doesn't in itself necessarily
authenticate the report, but combined with other
reports from other districts of the same attack
filmed from a different location, the reports have
the effect of corroborating each other." The
channel even made a documentary of activists
exaggerating the "truth" - "even if it means
embellishing events".
During the early months of
the Syrian conflict, activists like the
now-notorious Danny and Khaled Abou Salah were
regularly interviewed in the Western media - that
is until footage found by the Syrian army in Homs
after the attack on insurgents showed them, among
other things, preparing child "victims" for
interviews and until their "witness statements"
lost all credibility. The New York Times' Neil
MacFarquhar, reporting from Beirut, almost
exclusively bases his reports on "activists
speaking by Skype" and "video posted on YouTube".
Described as "the most
horrific video" yet by Britain's Daily Mail, a
YouTube clip of an opposition member being "buried
alive" was found most likely to be fake. Perhaps
more telling than the use of the actual photo by
the British Broadcasting Corp of hundreds of body
bags from Iraq in 2003 that was used for the story
of the al-Houla massacre three weeks ago was the
caption beneath the photo: "Photo from Activist.
This image - which cannot be independently
verified - is believed to show bodies of children
in Houla awaiting funeral."
Nevertheless,
activist-supplied videos and statements continue
to provide the basis for unquestioned reports in
the mainstream press: in the wake of the Houla
massacre, for example, The Guardian ran a
front-page story - "among the most important of
the testimonies" from an army defector reportedly
on leave at the time. From his house 300 meters
away, the man saw and heard the massacre, despite
there being persistent shelling at the time. He
claimed to have seen men "he knew to be shabiha "riding into
Taldous village in cars, motorbikes and army
trucks, shouting: 'Shabiha forever, for your
eyes, Assad.'"
This is not to argue that
Syrian security forces and some supporters of the
Syrian government have not committed abuses and
killings; they have admitted this to be the case.
"Don't put me in a position of defending brutality
and knifing people," former US national security
adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski said about Syria
recently. "Frankly that is not the issue. We do
know these things happened, and they are horrible.
They also happened on a much larger scale in many
other countries in which we have not intervened."
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