'Propaganda Organization': White Helmets 'Engage in Anti-Assad Activities' – Author Sy Hersh

Seymour (Sy) Hersh is an American who has won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism.

He has also won two National Magazine Awards and five George Polk Awards.

In 2004, he received the George Orwell Award.

White Helmets member walks on the rubble of destroyed buildings in Eastern Ghouta

© Abdulmonam Eassa / AFP

Although some members of the Western-supported White Helmets may be in the business of saving lives, the group is also a "propaganda organization," author Sy Hersh has told RT's 'Going Underground.'

"Too many times we've seen the same child in photographs, year after year, always covered in dust," Hersh said, adding that the White Helmets "do engage in anti-Assad [activities]." He added that such a tactic is "very easy" because Assad is "hated" by so many.

Hersh went on to explain that, when a chemical attack took place in Syria under the Obama administration in 2013, it was well known then that Damascus had sophisticated chemical weapons. Because of this, it was clear that the substance used in the attack "was not the same as in the Syrian military."

He explained that, in June 2013, there was a "very important" intelligence report put out by the US government. That report said there was "tremendous concern" in the intelligence community because Saudi Arabia and Turkey were providing chemicals to Al Nusra in Syria that, when mixed together, make a nerve agent referred to as "kitchen sarin."

"The government knew from this very important intelligence report...that there were two suspects – Al Nusra had the stuff and Syria had the stuff. Forget about having it analyzed – they knew right away and they only talked about one," Hersh said.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist also spoke to RT about reporting in the United States and how it changed under the Obama administration, as well as the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, UK.

Watch Hersh's full interview here:

The interview that follows may be very disturbing to some as Hersh levels the truth and it is often not pretty. It's about 28 minutes long but flies by in a hurry. He touches on My Lai, Viet Nam, and many stories including very enlightening stories about chemical weapons in Syria, and touches on the Skripal poisoning. It's fascinating stuff.

UK Taxpayers Hand £200mn to Syrian Opposition & White Helmets, Journalist Tells RT

£200mn worth of propaganda. What the British paid to keep the war going in Syria and ensure many Muslim migrants continue to infiltrate Europe.

White Helmets in Syria © Abdalrhman Ismail / Reuters

Almost £200 million of British taxpayers’ money has gone to supporting Syrian opposition groups, independent journalist Vanessa Beeley told RT. One of the groups to benefit from the funds are the White Helmets, which are alleged to have links with terrorists.

Speaking to George Galloway on his RT show Sputnik, Beeley said the funds were released from the UK’s Conflict, Stability and Security Fund (CSSF) to support the Syrian opposition. She said part of that money was used by the White Helmets to feed media outlets that are rarely in Syria and offer a false narrative of what is happening there.

“If we look at the narrative produced from Aleppo… it never came from the 1.5 million majority in West Aleppo that was government-held and government-protected, but who lost over 11,000 civilians from mortar fire from East Aleppo - so from the Western-backed terrorists in East Aleppo.

“The narrative came from East Aleppo and it came from affiliates of Nusra Front, which included the White Helmets and from citizen activists that had been produced in Gaziantep [in Turkey], with money coming in from the UK government,” she added.

“[The UK government] actually admitted very recently that almost £200 million [US$260 million] has gone from this public fund into funding the Syrian opposition inside Syria.

“So in other words, all of these journalists, media activists, who were trained in Turkey and then infiltrated back into Syria, to produce the propaganda, and that includes the White Helmets."

The White Helmets have been hailed by the Western media as “peace-bearing heroes” who save lives. A Netflix documentary film praising the group as “unarmed and neutral civilian volunteers” even won an Oscar for best documentary short feature in February.

However, the group has long been plagued by allegations of having ties with terrorist groups. Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said in April that the White Helmets are involved in covering up terrorist crimes.

“The White Helmets not only feel at home on territories controlled by Al-Nusra Front and Islamic State, but also openly express positive attitudes towards them, providing them with information and even financial assistance,” she said at the time.

Beeley has previously told RT that Aleppo residents, who have lived under terrorist rule for five years, “witnessed the White Helmets working alongside Al-Nusra Front as well as participating in executions and torture and working as an Al-Nusra Front civil defense unit.”

She went on to say that the “White Helmets is a major construct funded by the UK, the US, the EU and the Gulf States that promulgates the propaganda against the Syrian government and the Syrian Arab Army,” and that this can partly explain the media silence when such scandals emerge.

In June, a member of the White Helmets was caught on camera helping a group of unidentified militants disposing of bodies of beheaded Syrian Army or pro-government soldiers in Daraa province.

In another incident in May, footage emerged showing several members of the group’s rescue team helping to remove a body of a man shot dead by rebels in the town of Jasim, also in Daraa province.

Then there was the fact that several White Helmets videos featured the same girl.

In fact, many of the mainstream media videos of shocking suffering in Syria are fake and many were not even shot in Syria.

‘Lies are Their Agenda’: Canadian Journalist Blasts MSM Syria Coverage at UN Event

‘No One Shot at Evacuees’: Filmmaker Who Witnessed Aleppo Liberation

Another international journalist discredits MSM reporting in Aleppo. Admittedly, this comes from RT with it's built-in bias, but most of the words come from the Bolivian documentary maker herself. You won't see this on western MSM because that would insinuate that they were fooled by the fake news and guilty of very sloppy journalism.

Media & Establishment Push for Regime Change but Ignore Consequences – Tulsi Gabbard

One of the very few sane and reasonable voices in Congress regarding Syria

U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard © Mike Segar / Reuters

Most media outlets and politicians often ignore the deadly consequences of US regime change policy, including the rise of Islamic State, according to Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii).

“I think that there has been a concerted effort both on the part of some in the media, as well as many in politics, and many in our foreign policy establishment seem to have been advocating for a continuance of these regime change wars, really ignoring the fact of what has been the consequence of these wars in countries like Iraq and Libya and Syria, where each time we have waged these wars, [it] has resulted in the strengthening of terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda or the creation of ISIS, and it has resulted in a tremendous amount of suffering and death for the people of these countries,” said Gabbard at a press conference, answering a question from RT’s Caleb Maupin.

Gabbard’s remarks come as the Hawaiian representative, who is a former Iraq war veteran herself, tries to build support for the Stop Arming Terrorists Act that she introduced in Congress in January of this year. The bill would prohibit the US from backing armed factions linked to terrorist groups such as IS, Al-Qaeda, and the Al-Nusra Front. It is based on legislation from the 1980s that aimed to stop the CIA from illegally arming the Contra rebels during Nicaragua’s civil war.

“We must stop this madness,” Gabbard said speaking before Congress back in December, stressing, “We must stop arming terrorists.”

The bill has only been supported by 14 other lawmakers so far, however – six Democrats and eight Republicans. A companion bill has also been put forward in the Senate by Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Can there be any doubt that arms manufacturers are lobbying hard against the bill? Arms dealers don't care who they sell to as long as they sell. They are quite happy to sell to all sides of a complex war, even if American soldiers are being killed or maimed because of it.

This bill is the most sane and decent of its kind in decades, but it will never get through Congress. 

In January, Gabbard set out on a fact-finding mission in Syria, where she visited Damascus and Aleppo. While there, she met with Syrian students, entrepreneurs, academics, aid workers, religious leaders and members of the opposition. She said some of them told her they felt that the originally peaceful anti-government protests in 2011 were hijacked by jihadists “funded and supported by Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, the United States.”

There is no question that Syria is a proxy war between the USA and Shea and Salafist Muslims. As evil as Assad is, things could easily get much worse if he is toppled.

“Their message to the American people was powerful and consistent: There is no difference between ‘moderate’ rebels and Al-Qaeda (Al-Nusra) or ISIS — they are all the same,” Gabbard wrote in a blog post, describing the essence of the Syrian conflict as “a war between terrorists under the command of groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda and the Syrian government.”

To help Refugees, Stop Arming Terrorists – Rep. Tulsi Gabbard

US Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) © / RT

Representative Tulsi Gabbard called again for the US to stop aiding terrorists like Al-Qaeda and ISIS, while her guest at the presidential address to Congress, a Kurdish refugee activist, called for an end to the US policy of “regime change in Syria.”

While many Democrats invited immigrants as their guests for President Donald Trump’s speech to the joint session of Congress on Tuesday, Gabbard, a Democrat from Hawaii, hosted Tima Kurdi, whose 3-year-old nephew drowned on the shores of Turkey in September 2015. Photos of Alan Kurdi’s body quickly became the symbol of Syrian refugees’ plight – and led the US to step up efforts to overthrow the Syrian government, actually magnifying their suffering.

On Wednesday, Tima Kurdi joined Gabbard at a press conference on Capitol Hill and called on Trump “to end the regime change in Syria.”

“The most important question is, how do we address the cause of these people fleeing their homes,” said Gabbard, pointing to the bill she submitted in this session of Congress. Her “Stop Arming Terrorists Act,” or HR 608, would ban the use of US taxpayers’ funds to aid terrorist groups affiliated with Al-Qaeda or Islamic State.

“For years, our government has been providing both direct and indirect support to these armed militant groups, who are working directly with or under the command of terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS, all in their effort and fight to overthrow the Syrian government,” Gabbard told RT.

Gabbard traveled to Syria in January on a fact-finding mission, meeting with President Bashar Assad. She also visited Aleppo, liberated in December from Islamist rebels led by Jabhat Fatah Al-Sham, a re-branded Al-Qaeda affiliate formerly known as Jabhat Al-Nusra.

The Pentagon’s $500 million effort to train and equip “moderate” Syrian rebels to fight against IS and Damascus met with disaster in 2015, as the majority of the fighters either surrendered or defected to Al-Nusra, with all of their US-funded weaponry. In the end, the program produced only “five or six” trainees, to the consternation of Congress.

Of course, there were way more than 5 or 6 trainees, most of those who were trained and equipped ended up fighting the American supported groups. Another example of America providing weapons to both sides of a war.

With that fiasco in mind, Gabbard proposed the first draft of her bill in December 2016. Her subsequent trip to Syria was met with outrage from the US foreign policy establishment and in the mainstream media, who denounced her as “Assad’s mouthpiece.”

Of course, the US establishment likes war - it keeps the inventory of death moving.

Representative Tom Garrett (R-Virginia), a US Army veteran, spoke out in support of HR 608 and said that the goal of US policy in Syria should be peace.

Iconic photo of little Alan Kurdi changed everything

“Tulsi understands that arming the so-called ‘rebels’ in Syria has only led to more bloodshed, more suffering, and created more refugees,” Tima Kurdi said in a statement on Tuesday. “A military solution in Syria is not the answer. I hope that President Trump will stop arming terrorists and commit to a political solution in Syria—it is the only way to restore peace.”

Supporting this bill is so easily the 'right thing to do' but with Congress in the pockets of arms merchants, its likelihood of passing seems pretty remote.

video 5:40

Life After Daesh; Even More Evil Groups are Lurking in the Shadows

As I mentioned in my previous post, new

extremist Islamic cells are popping up.

Here are a few you should know about.

Jordanian security vehicles seen near the General Intelligence directorate offices near al Baqaa Refugee Camp, north of Amman, Jordan, June 6, 2016 © REUTERS/ Muhammad Hamed

Daesh jihadists, might not actually be the worst evil the world is facing, there are other, potentially even more dangerous cells emerging in different places around the world, and no country is immune from the threat of one emerging on its territory, Nabil Naim, an expert in the Islamic Movements told Sputnik Arabic.

Commenting on the recent terrorist attacks in Jordan and Turkey and earlier attacks in Europe, in Brussels and Paris, Nabil Naim noted that there are potentially even more dangerous terrorist groups operating on the territories of these countries and that no country is safe from one emerging on its territory.

“Nowadays, the most dangerous group that the Jordanian government and security forces face is a group called Khorasan, a group of professional engineers in the electronic, electrical and chemical affairs, which was once affiliated to Al-Qaeda, which later joined Daesh,” he told Sputnik.

What makes this group even more dangerous, the expert explained, is that it makes bombs and explosives which cannot be detected.

And it is an international group which targets all countries that they think are involved in fighting against them with the help of specific intelligence forces.

And these groups exist in Arab and European countries, the expert warned.

With regards to the recent terrorist attacks in Turkey, the expert noted that there are two types of groups that Recep Tayyip Erdogan is currently facing.

First, he said is the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) which is based in Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan, which is in constant conflict with Erdogan, and whose goal is to create an autonomous Kurdish region from Turkish territory.

The second type of groups are those based in Syria, similar to Daesh, Al-Nusra Front and others.

These groups started hitting back at the Turkish government in the same way “al-Qaeda” did when it hit America in September 11, the expert noted, after Turkey began pressuring them under an international pressure.

“Brussels is a stronghold for radical groups in Europe,” Nabil Naim noted.

The attack on Charles Hebdo was planned and prepared, and done with weapons brought from Belgium, he explained.

“The “Charles de Gaulle” incident is linked to a group in Brussels, which are composed of Moroccans and Algerians, calling themselves “Min Ajl Asharia fi Oroba” (for the Sharia in Europe) and they depend on suicide bombers,” he said.

Many Takfiri extremists exist in France, located in Marseille. As to Belgium, there are Islamic centers controlled by extremists, where they recruit people from the European community, the expert said.

“These groups’ basic approach is: those who don’t believe in Allah are non-believers. I had a discussion with their Mufti and according to them other communities are non-believers, as well as the ruler (governor) and his followers (police, army, the court, and media); all these must be eliminated. These groups can’t make a militant group unless they find someone to sponsor them,” he said.

Many countries that are involved in the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East relied on these groups in order to segment the region of the Middle East, he further explained.

“The reason behind the spread of terrorism in the world is unemployed poor and marginalized or oppressed people… which is a result of a corrupt regime in the countries they live in. Young poor people do not have culture or awareness about these groups and are recruited, precisely when financial support is provided,” he told Sputnik.

What makes these terrorist organizations even worse is that they choose the so-called “soft targets”, which neither the government nor the security body can protect.

He cited as an example an exploding bus or car, or a football stadium, places which are always crowded and where many casualties are expected.

Just as it happened with tourism in Egypt – the financial costs borne by the country are huge, especially considering that the price of the dollar has doubled there, he finally stated.