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Where there is no fear of God, there is no respect for truth.
Chinese citizen journalist under 'constant torment' after Wuhan, lawyer says
By Elizabeth Shim
Citizen journalists arrested in Wuhan, China, during the early stages of the pandemic have gone missing or remain in detention. File Photo by Stephen Shaver/UPI | License Photo
Dec. 11 (UPI) -- A Chinese citizen journalist who took to the streets of Wuhan in February is being tortured while on hunger strike, according to her lawyer.
Zhang Zhan, 37, a former lawyer being detained near Shanghai, has had feeding tubes forcibly inserted and her arms restrained, The Guardian and CBS News reported.
"In addition to headache, dizziness, and stomach pain, there was also pain in her mouth and throat. She said this may be inflammation due to the insertion of a gastric tube," said Zhang Keke, Zhang's lawyer, according to The Guardian.
Zhang Keke also said in his blog post his client complained of "constant torment" when he visited her Tuesday.
"She was wearing thick pajamas with a girdle around the waist, her left hand pinned in front and right hand pinned behind," he said.
Zhang Zhan was arrested in May and charged with "picking quarrels and stirring up trouble" after sharing videos of Wuhan during the first coronavirus outbreak. In November, she was formally indicted on charges of spreading false information and could face five years in prison.
The first known outbreak of the novel coronavirus occurred in Wuhan in a seafood market in late December, but China's central government denied human-to-human transmissions for four weeks. During that time, Wuhan residents traveled domestically and abroad.
Another journalist missing
Zhang began to report from Wuhan after the lockdown, criticizing the government. A lawyer who spoke to CBS News on Friday said Zhang's decision to go to a police station to look for Fang Bin, a Wuhan resident who went missing while reporting, may have played a role in her arrest.
Fang remains missing after filming inundated hospitals. Fang's footage also captured police knocking on his door shortly before his disappearance.
Other Chinese citizens who were arrested for reporting from Wuhan include Chen Qiushi, a former attorney, and Li Zehua.
Like China, Iran treats truth-tellers as traitors. But then, most corrupt countries do the same, and most countries are corrupt. In western societies, journalists with a real heart for the truth are not usually killed but are shunned as being conspiracy theorists.
Iran executes journalist by hanging
By Sommer Brokaw
Iran executed journalist Rouhollah Zam Saturday by hanging. Photo by MojNews/Wikimedia Commons
Dec. 12 (UPI) -- Iran executed Amad News journalist Rouhollah Zam by hanging Saturday sparking international outcry.
Authorities targeted Zam in connection with his opposition news channel Amad News, which they linked to January 2018 protests against the establishment, according to Amnesty International. They also publicly accused Zam in court documents of "espionage" for Israel and France, "cooperation with the hostile state of the United States," "crimes against national security," and "spreading propaganda against the system."
"We are shocked and horrified to learn that the Iranian authorities executed dissident journalist Rouhollah Zam at dawn today," Amnesty International said in a statement.
Zam was sentenced to death in June on the charge of "corruption on earth," a charge that doesn't specify the crime, but the Iranian government has used for alleged attempts to overthrow it.
The Supreme Court upheld Zam's death sentence Tuesday.
"The authorities rushed to execute Rouhollah Zam a mere four days later, in what we believe was a reprehensible bid to avoid an international campaign to save his life," Amnesty International's statement said, adding that the hanging was "strictly prohibited under international law."
Reporters Without Borders, an international press freedom organization, called the trial was "grossly unfair."
The group said Zam was "illegally kidnapped and arrested" in October 2019 during a visit to Iraq by Iraq Revolutionary Guards and forcibly returned to Iran after living in exile in France.
Zam was held without any contact with his family or lawyers for nine months, according to a letter his father wrote to the Iranian head of the judiciary.
In July, Iran's state TV aired a propaganda program appearing to show Zam confessing to his crimes.
Iran has been one of the most oppressive countries for journalists for the past 40 years, according to Reporters Without Borders. At least 860 journalists and citizen-journalists have been imprisoned and executed since 1979.
NYT - that great institution seems to have no commitment to its once-revered integrity
NYTimes retracts ‘Caliphate’ podcast & reassigns reporter,
admitting star ‘ISIS executioner’ likely never went to Syria
18 Dec 2020 17:17
The NY Times has finally retracted its award-winning podcast about a Canadian-born Islamic State executioner, months after Ottawa discovered he’d made it all up, admitting their fact-checking was “not sufficiently rigorous.”
The ‘paper of record’ has come clean about the festering hoax at the center of its 2018 hit podcast ‘Caliphate,’ officially retracting the series on Friday and reassigning lead reporter Rukmini Callimachi off the terrorism beat.
She should be reassigned off the journalism beat, along with her editors.
The podcast’s central narrative thread, purporting to be an “eye-opening account” of one man’s journey from Canada into the ranks of Islamic State in Syria, was largely fabricated, the New York Times admitted, acknowledging the central character had probably never been to Syria at all, let alone committed the grisly atrocities he described in detail on the podcast.
The paper’s statement explained that Shehroze Chaudhry – the Canadian 25-year-old who presented himself as a fearsome IS executioner named Abu Huzayfah – was not only not a terrorist, but during the years he claimed to have spent slaughtering Syrians he was actually working at his family’s kebab shop in Toronto or living with his grandparents in Pakistan.
Canadian authorities charged him in September with perpetrating a terrorist hoax, a crime that carries a maximum sentence of five years’ imprisonment, after a four-year investigation. Ottawa claims it had knowledge Chaudhry was making the whole thing up even as Caliphate launched in 2018 - but could not share the information at the time because the investigation was ongoing. Among the more obvious pieces of evidence for the “terrorist”’s tall tales were the photos he posted, supposedly featuring his partners in crime, that were actually shot by news photographers and activist groups.
The NYT tried to spin its failure to dig into the details of ‘Huzayfah’s story as responsible journalism, claiming that “significant falsehoods” had been discovered even while the series was being produced but that it nevertheless opted to continue instead of pulling the plug. The paper did a full episode “devoted to exploring major discrepancies” and highlighting the Times’ (abysmally flawed) fact-checking process.
Chaudhry reportedly changed his story more than once when confronted with some of those “discrepancies,” a fact that failed to set off alarm bells among Callimachi’s superiors.
But according to an internal investigation by senior investigative editor Dean Murphy, Callimachi and the rest of the podcast’s producers deliberately looked the other way when inconsistency after inconsistency arose in Chaudhry’s story. Indeed, it wasn’t until Canadian officials filed the charges against him that the New York Times even publicly acknowledged there might be a problem – and even then, its writeup of the charges was dripping with skepticism.
Even as Chaudhry was telling Canadian investigators he had never participated in any of the killings he’d bragged about in such lurid detail on the podcast, the Caliphate series was pulling down award after award, being named as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winning a Peabody in 2019. Callimachi herself has been nominated for a Pulitzer four times for her terrorism reporting, a trend editor Dean Baquet acknowledged would have to come to an end.
In what seems to be a last-ditch effort to save face, the NYT still insisted it was possible Chaudhry at least went to Syria - even though examination of his financial and travel records and social media posts leaves an impossibly brief window for the wannabe terrorist to have joined, trained with, committed atrocities on behalf of, and plotted attacks on the West with IS.
The New York Times has a long history of falling for “too good to be true” false narratives, from the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ hoax that helped launch the Iraq War to the never-ending stream of bogus Russiagate “revelations.” Like the reporters responsible for those falsehoods, Callimachi has defended her reporting by pointing out that “multiple” US intelligence agents backed some of the dodgiest parts of her narrative.
Is the NYT being used and/or manipulated by US Intelligence. It appears Bellingcat is a mouthpiece for US and British Intelligence. The Canadian military has been trying to get funding for a propaganda department. Undoubtedly, there are many such media outlets that are being used by Deep State / The Military-Industrial Complex.
Western oligarchs learned in the First and Second World Wars that war was extremely profitable. That is the root of the Military-Industrial Complex and Deep State!
Discredited Steele dossier was ‘intended to influence’ media, ex-FBI agent Strzok says in newly released text message
18 Dec 2020 12:14
FILE PHOTO: Former FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok © REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
A report filled with unverified claims about Donald Trump that prompted a probe into his alleged ties to Russia, was tailored to score points with the press, ex-FBI agent Peter Strzok suggests, in a recently declassified message.
Senate Republicans on Thursday released a new batch of text messages from Strzok, who was fired by the FBI in 2018 after internal communications showed that he wanted to use the agency’s investigation into Russian collusion as an “insurance policy” to attack Trump if he won the White House.
In one newly revealed message dated September 23, 2016, Strzok appears to acknowledge that the dodgy dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, and later used by the FBI to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, could at the very least be used to create a media narrative. Referring to a Yahoo article based on an unnamed source that alleged Trump campaign adviser Carter Page attended a secret summit in Moscow with two Kremlin insiders, Strzok wrote: “I would definitely say at a minimum Steele’s reports should be viewed as intended to influence as well as to inform.”
The FBI ended its relationship with Steele after it became clear that he was leaking information to the press. However, the agency failed to inform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that Steele had been a source for the Yahoo article, which was used to corroborate the dossier and obtain a warrant to spy on Page. In January 2020, a court ruled that two of the four warrant applications submitted by the FBI to snoop on Page were “invalid.”
Another newly-released Strzok message, from January 12, 2017, shows that the FBI recorded a phone call between former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and an unnamed executive at Fox News. Notably, the Justice Department never obtained a warrant to spy on Papadopoulos or Fox, and likely used a so-called National Security Letter to carry out the surveillance.
Steele’s infamous dossier, which was part of an opposition research campaign commissioned by the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, has been widely discredited since it first appeared in the media four years ago.
In September, it was revealed that the FBI knew that Steele’s primary source for the document had been flagged as a national security threat and was investigated in 2009 as a possible Russian agent.
John Pilger: The Most Lethal Virus is Not Covid-19. It is War.
December 14, 2020
Covid-19 has provided cover for a pandemic of propaganda, says John Pilger.
Armed Services Memorial. (Geograph/David Dixon)
By John Pilger
Britain’s Armed Services Memorial is a silent, haunting place. Set in the rural beauty of Staffordshire, in an arboretum of some 30,000 trees and sweeping lawns, its Homeric figures celebrate determination and sacrifice.
The names of more than 16,000 British servicemen and women are listed. The literature says they “died in operational theatre or were targeted by terrorists”.
On the day I was there, a stonemason was adding new names to those who have died in some 50 operations across the world during what is known as “peacetime”. Malaya, Ireland, Kenya, Hong Kong, Libya, Iraq, Palestine and many more, including secret operations, such as Indochina.
Not a year has passed since peace was declared in 1945 that Britain
has not sent military forces to fight the wars of empire.
Not a year has passed when countries, mostly poor and riven by conflict, have not bought or have been “soft loaned” British arms to further the wars, or “interests”, of empire.
Empire? What empire?
The investigative journalist Phil Miller recently revealed in Declassified that Boris Johnson’s Britain maintained 145 military sites – call them bases — in 42 countries. Johnson has boasted that Britain is to be “the foremost naval power in Europe”.
In the midst of the greatest health emergency in modern times, with more than 4 million surgical procedures delayed by the National Health Service, Johnson has announced a record increase of £16.5 billion in so-called defence spending – a figure that would restore the under-resourced NHS many times over.
But these billions are not for defence. Britain has no enemies other than those within who betray the trust of its ordinary people, its nurses and doctors, its carers, elderly, homeless and youth, as successive neo-liberal governments have done, Conservative and Labour.
Exploring the serenity of the National War Memorial, I soon realised there was not a single monument, or plinth, or plaque, or rosebush honouring the memory of Britain’s victims — the civilians in the “peacetime” operations commemorated here.
Strechters Bearer Sculpture. (Geograph/David Dixon)
There is no remembrance of the Libyans killed when their country was wilfully destroyed by Prime Minister David Cameron and his collaborators in Paris and Washington.
There is no word of regret for the Serbian women and children killed by British bombs, dropped from a safe height on schools, factories, bridges, towns, on the orders of Tony Blair; or for the impoverished Yemeni children extinguished by Saudi pilots with their logistics and targets supplied by Britons in the air-conditioned safety of Riyadh; or for the Syrians starved by “sanctions”.
There is no monument to the Palestinian children murdered with the British elite’s enduring connivance, such as the recent campaign that destroyed a modest reform movement within the Labour Party with specious accusations of anti-Semitism.
Two weeks ago, Israel’s military chief of staff and Britain’s Chief of the Defence Staff signed an agreement to “formalise and enhance” military co-operation. This was not news. More British arms and logistical support will now flow to the lawless regime in Tel Aviv, whose snipers target children and psychopaths interrogate children in extreme isolation. (See the recent shocking report by Defense for Children, Isolated and Alone).
No thanks. I think you're a bit over the edge on this.
Perhaps the most striking omission at the Staffordshire war memorial is an acknowledgement of the million Iraqis whose lives and country were destroyed by the illegal invasion of Blair and Bush in 2003.
ORB, a member of the British Polling Council, put the figure at 1.2 million. In 2013, the ComRes organisation asked a cross-section of the British public how many Iraqis had died in the invasion. A majority said fewer than 10,000.
How is such a lethal silence sustained in a sophisticated society? My answer is that propaganda is far more effective in societies that regard themselves as free than in dictatorships and autocracies. I include censorship by omission.
Our propaganda industries – both political and cultural, including most of the media – are the most powerful, ubiquitous and refined on earth. Big lies can be repeated incessantly in comforting, credible BBC voices. Omissions are no problem.
A similar question relates to nuclear war, whose threat is “of no interest”, to quote Harold Pinter. Russia, a nuclear power, is encircled by the war-making group known as Nato (NATO), with British troops regularly “maneuvering” right up to the border where Hitler invaded.
The defamation of all things Russian, not least the historical truth that the Red Army largely won the Second World War, is percolated into public consciousness. The Russians are of “no interest”, except as demons.
The centrepiece of the Memorial comprises two large bronze sculptures, the work of Ian Rank-Broadley, representing loss and sacrifice. (Geograph/David Dixon).
China, also a nuclear power, is the brunt of unrelenting provocation, with American strategic bombers and drones constantly probing its territorial space and – hooray – HMS Queen Elizabeth, Britain’s £3billion aircraft carrier, soon to sail 6,500 miles to enforce “freedom of navigation” within sight of the Chinese mainland.
Some 400 American bases encircle China, “rather like a noose”, a former Pentagon planner said to me. They extend all the way from Australia, though the Pacific to southern and northern Asia and across Eurasia.
In South Korea, a missile system known as Terminal High Altitude Air Defense, or THAAD, is aimed point-blank at China across the narrow East China Sea. Imagine Chinese missiles in Mexico or Canada or off the coast of California.
A few years after the invasion of Iraq, I made a film called The War You Don’t See, in which I asked leading American and British journalists as well as TV news executives – people I knew as colleagues — why and how Bush and Blair were allowed to get away with the great crime in Iraq, considering that the lies were not very clever.
Their response surprised me. Had “we”, they said – that is journalists and broadcasters, especially in the US — challenged the claims of the White House and Downing Street, investigated and exposed the lies, instead of amplifying and echoing them, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 probably would not have happened. Countless people would be alive today. Four million refugees would not have fled. The grisly ISIS, a product of the Blair/Bush invasion, might not have been conceived.
You have to ask yourself, 'Isn't that the point?' It's mostly about selling weapons systems, but how much of it is also about decreasing the surplus population, as Scrooge would say.
When there is incredible stress on global economies, governments are spending absurd amounts of money on absurd things. Britain's £3 billion aircraft carrier, Canada's bazaar expenditures on climate hysteria, including dramatically raising taxes and the cost of living. I wonder what other countries are spending stupid amounts of money on stupid projects?
David Rose, then with the London Observer, which supported the invasion, described “the pack of lies fed to me by a fairly sophisticated disinformation campaign”. Rageh Omah, then the BBC’s man in Iraq, told me, “We failed to press the most uncomfortable buttons hard enough”. Dan Rather, the CBS anchorman, agreed, as did many others.
I admired these journalists who broke the silence. But they are honourable exceptions. Today, the war drums have new and highly enthusiastic beaters in Britain, America and the “West”.
Take your pick among the legion of Russia and China bashers and promoters of fiction such as Russiagate. My personal Oscar goes to Peter Hartcher of The Sydney Morning Herald, whose unrelenting rousing drivel about the “existential threat” (of China/Russia, mostly China) was illustrated by a smiling Scott Morrison, the PR man who is Australia’s prime minister, dressed like Churchill, V for Victory sign and all. “Not since the 1930s ….” the pair of them intoned. Ad nauseum.
Covid has provided cover for this pandemic of propaganda. In July, Morrison took his cue from Trump and announced that Australia, which has no enemies, would spend A$270 billion on provoking one, including missiles that could reach China.
That China’s purchase of Australia’s minerals and agriculture effectively underwrote the Australian economy was “of no interest” to the government in Canberra.
The Australian media cheered almost as one, delivering a shower of abuse at China. Thousands of Chinese students, who had guaranteed the gross salaries of Australian vice-chancellors, were advised by their government to go elsewhere. Chinese-Australians were bad-mouthed and deliverymen were assaulted. Colonial racism is never hard to revive.
Some years ago, I interviewed the former head of the CIA in Latin America, Duane Clarridge. In a few refreshingly honest words, he summed up “Western” foreign policy as it is ordained and directed by Washington.
The super-power, he said, could do what it wanted where it wanted whenever
its “strategic interests” dictated. His words were: “Get used to it, world.”
I have reported a number of wars. I have seen the remains of children and women and the elderly bombed and burned to death: their villages laid to waste, their petrified trees festooned with human parts. And much else.
Perhaps that is why I reserve a specific contempt for those who promote the crime of rapacious war, who beckon it with bad faith and profanities, having never experienced it themselves. Their monopoly must be broken.
John Pilger is an Australian-British journalist and filmmaker based in London. Pilger’s Web site is: www.johnpilger.com. In 2017, the British Library announced a John Pilger Archive of all his written and filmed work. The British Film Institute includes his 1979 film, “Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia,” among the 10 most important documentaries of the 20thcentury. Some of his previous contributions to Consortium News can be found here.
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