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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Posted: Thu Oct 10, 2019 10:37 pm
by blindpig
Major Media Bury Groundbreaking Studies of Pentagon’s Massive Carbon Bootprint

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by Joshua Cho

In 2010, Project Censored (10/2/10) found that the

US military is responsible for the most egregious and widespread pollution of the planet, yet this information and accompanying documentation goes almost entirely unreported.

Conversation: US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries – shrinking this war machine is a must
The Conversation (6/26/19) ran a piece by the authors of the Durham/Lancaster study.

Almost a decade later, Project Censored’s observations are still applicable, with two major studies published in June remaining buried by most major media outlets. The first study, “Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War,” by Neta Crawford for Brown University’s Costs of War Project, confirmed previous findings that the US military is “the single-largest producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world,” and that the Pentagon is responsible for between “77% and 80% of all US government energy consumption” since 2001, and that from the beginning of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to 2017, the US military emitted approximately 1.2 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent.

The second study, “Hidden Carbon Costs of the ‘Everywhere War’: Logistics, Geopolitical Ecology, and the Carbon Bootprint of the US Military,” published by Oliver Belcher, Benjamin Neimark and Patrick Bigger from Durham and Lancaster universities in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (6/19), found that if the US military were a country, its “fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, sitting between Peru and Portugal.”

Yet these groundbreaking studies received no coverage in virtually all the US’s biggest newspapers and TV news channels. An initial search in the Nexis news database from June 1 to October 4 of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, NPR, PBS, ABC, MSNBC, CBS and CNN turned up nothing.

A broader Nexis search of all the English-language outlets only confirmed that the biggest media outlets in the country, with much better resources for reporting, are burying the study.

Here’s a list of the outlets, according to the Nexis news database, that mentioned the Costs of War study:

Arab American News (US)
Indian Agriculture News (India)
Yerepouni Daily News (Armenia)
Pressenza International Press Agency (Ecuador)
Washington Examiner (US)
Defense Monitor Worldwide (US)
International Business Times India (India)
The Conversation (US)
Straits Times (Singapore)
The Nation (US)
Defense One (US)
Real News Network (US)
Here’s a list of the outlets, according to Nexis, that mentioned the study published in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers:

Daily Mail (UK)
Asian News International (India)
Science Daily (US)
Forbes: The US Military Emits More CO2 Than Many Industrialized Nations
Forbes (6/13/19) ran a graphic comparing the Pentagon’s greenhouse emissions to those of medium-sized nations.

To be fair, Nexis isn’t able to catch every report or reprints in other outlets. On my own, I found nothing that contradicts the finding that these studies are being buried by most of the biggest media outlets in the US. But these studies were mentioned by Reuters (6/12/19), Grist (6/12/19), Gizmodo (6/13/19), Bloomberg (6/13/19), USA Today (6/14/19), Forbes (6/13/19), GQ (9/13/19), The Hill (6/13/19), New York Post (6/13/19), CNBC (6/13/19), UK Independent (6/13/19), Intercept (9/15/19), TomDispatch (6/23/19) and Mic (6/26/19). The Real News Network (7/10/19) provided exemplary reporting on these two studies by featuring their authors in an interview to discuss their findings.

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Aside from the findings, these studies are also especially significant because they’re the first to use comprehensive data based on the publicly available emissions data from the Department of Energy, and on multiple Freedom of Information Act requests to the US Defense Logistics Agency managing the US military’s supply chains, which includes hydrocarbon fuel purchases and distribution. Most greenhouse gas accounting focuses on how much energy and fuel civilians use, because it has always been difficult to obtain reliable and consistent data on the Pentagon’s carbon bootprint; the Pentagon doesn’t publicly and regularly report its fuel consumption or greenhouse gas emissions.

Despite not signing the 1992 Kyoto Protocol international agreement to fight climate change, the US succeeded in obtaining an exemption for all countries’ militaries from having to report, let alone cut, their carbon emissions, which Congress later locked in. Although that exemption was later removed by the 2015 Paris Accord—despite the Obama administration’s longstanding policy of undermining international climate agreements—the Trump administration has the US due to withdraw from the Paris Accord in 2020 (New York Times, 6/1/17), which would make it harder to collect data and conduct future studies like the ones above. This is why it’s especially important for media outlets to cover studies like this when they’re published.

Although the authors of both studies acknowledge that the US military has been cutting its emissions over the years, they both note how “existing military aircraft and warships” are “locking the US military into hydrocarbons for years to come,” and that the “Pentagon does not acknowledge that its own fuel use is a major contributor to climate change.” That shouldn’t be surprising. Given corporate media’s propagandizing for starting and staying in wars (FAIR.org, 10/23/17, 9/11/19) and for neverending arms races (FAIR.org, 5/17/19, 7/12/19), one should expect corporate media to bury evidence that the US military is a threat to itself and its citizens with its massive carbon output.

https://fair.org/home/major-media-bury- ... 4OY7YR._TQ

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2019 1:47 pm
by blindpig
Militant journalism: The role of journalism in class society and revolution
By Frank González - November 4, 2019 183

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Gloria de la Riva visits Prensa Latina. Havana, Cuba

Frank González is the director of Cuba’s Prensa Latina news agency. This article is based on a December 2006 interview with Gloria La Riva. It provides background on Prensa Latina and the theoretical and practical considerations of revolutionary journalism, including the distinctions between “objectivity” and “impartiality,” top-down and dialogical journalism, and bourgeois and socialist journalism.

For more than 47 years, Prensa Latina has been in the midst of all the important news developments that have taken place in Latin America and the rest of the world. In the 1970s and 1980s, it reached its greatest reach, with global coverage.

We had 40 offices in an equal number of countries with information services in text, radio, television and photography.

At the start of the 1990s, Prensa Latina experienced a very difficult economic situation. We went through the disappearance of the socialist camp in Europe and the Soviet Union, with whom we had a special relationship of exchange and collaboration. We had to reduce our operation from 40 offices worldwide to 14 offices, all operating at a much reduced level of personnel and with a lot of sacrifice.

But the agency survived.

Our recovery began at the end of the 1990s. Today we have 23 offices abroad in addition to our headquarters in Havana. We have plans to expand by two offices per year.

Prensa Latina has a presence in Luanda, Angola, as well as in China and Vietnam. We are in Madrid, Moscow, Paris and Istanbul. And we have 16 offices in Latin America, practically in all parts of the continent. This year we will open in Kiev, Ukraine, where we will cover events in Moldova, Georgia and Poland.

The agency transmits more than 400 daily dispatches and news stories in Spanish, English, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and, most recently, in Turkish. We have a strong presence on the Internet with 12 websites. This year we have had some 14 million visits to our sites.

About 50,000 media institutions and individuals in 147 countries receive Prensa Latina’s news. Our multimedia division has produced more than 150 titles in CD-ROM, DVD and Super DVD formats.

We are currently moving towards the use of open-source software, specifically Linux, to operate within the Intranet, Extranet and Internet.

The reach of our websites is constantly expanding.

‘Objective, but not impartial’
The reasons that motivated the founding of Prensa Latina more than 47 years ago are more relevant today than ever.

Today, the flow of international information is in the hands of five large media conglomerates. If just 20 years ago there were 50 U.S. news organizations that controlled more than 90 percent of the international information flow, today there are only five. And of those five, four are U.S.-controlled and one is German. I say four from the United States because Fox, even though its owner, Murdoch, is Australian, is really a U.S. corporation.

And those five media conglomerates do not only tell us what we should see, read or listen to. They tell us how we should see, read or listen.

Prensa Latina is more important than ever. We are very conscious of that. We journalists at Prensa Latina produce revolutionary journalism, but journalism of a very high quality.

The bourgeois press presents itself as the defender of objectivity. The concept of objectivity arose in the 19th century as a feature of the U.S. elite’s journalism, specifically at The New York Times, as one of the attributes of supposedly independent journalism at that time.

The concept of “objectivity” evolved in the 20th century not just as an attribute but also as a standard. We also defend the concept of objectivity, but not just to defend it. We ourselves say that we are objective.

[Prensa Latina founder Jorge Ricardo] Masetti used to say, “We are objective, but not impartial.” All discourse, including the media’s discourse, implies intent.
In terms of the media, it means an intent that is motivated by the relations of power, by market relations and by other such considerations.

Prensa Latina promotes a journalism that is different from that being produced today [by the media monopolies]. When we speak of alternative communication, we are not talking of just substituting one content for another. It is not simply a matter of journalism that is counterposed to the media monopolies. What we are talking about is creating a new form of journalism.

Interactive journalism
The journalism of domination, of bourgeois journalism, is a top-down, uni-logical and uni-directional journalism, in which an enlightened person becomes a transmitter issuing a message.

But we have reached a point where now everyone recognizes that the persons transmitting and receiving are constantly exchanging their roles in a communicative process, where both interact and enrich each other.

That is the journalism in which we place ourselves. When we speak of journalism that presents an alternative vision of reality, we are talking of a reality that is based on the truth.

It is the truth that José Martí spoke of, but it is also the truth that Bertolt Brecht spoke of. He said, “We have to search for the truth wherever it is, no matter how much they try to hide it. We have to convert the truth into a weapon, and to see in whose hands that truth is placed, so that truth reaches where it should.”

The role of alternative media
For us, the alternative vision of reality is an anti-capitalist vision. What is the capitalist vision? The objective of capitalism is surplus value.

The system and the laws of the market create the institutions that make up capitalist society—the family, the church, the school, the youth and community associations and the means of mass communication.

All of this is meant to provide the system with the ideological support that prepares the citizens from birth to be raised and behave according to the laws of a system and the representation of reality that that system requires those citizens to have.

It would be naïve to think otherwise. The idea of an independent media and an objective press is a fantasy. I am not even referring to Marx in this case, but to Berger and Luckmann’s “The Social Construction of Reality,” to the sociologists who study knowledge, and to the philosophers and theorists of communication.

Therefore, each time that we in Prensa Latina witness the debate about “freedom of the press,” “freedom of expression,” “the independent press” and “objectivity,” in reality these terms are being used in a discourse whose only aim is to conceal the class character of those institutions.

We do not have to conceal the class character of our journalism. What we do oppose and reject is the idea that there is a division between, on the one hand, professional journalism, and on the other, what is called militant or activist journalism.

We believe there is only one type of journalism and that we should defend journalism as a profession. We believe that just posting something on the Internet does not make one a journalist, although it is correct to say that the person who does so is carrying out an act of communication.

But the journalist has to have command of the narrative technique, command of the new technology of information and communication as a professional.

Now, in this struggle to promote an alternative vision of reality, we believe that we cannot be exclusionary. That is why we call it an anti-capitalist vision. All those who are in favor of promoting a vision of reality that is polemical, that develops critical thought, that is a vision of totality, not totalitarian, that embraces all human thought in a general sense, we believe that all of us who believe in this should join together.

And we should make links, because there is something very important that can help us confront the enormous economic power and reach of the large media monopolies, and that is networking.

Information is circulated throughout all the interstices of the Internet. It allows us to establish alliances and exchange with each other, but in a flexible manner, where one does not direct or dominate others.

Latin America and the media
The relation between the United States and Latin America is key. Latin America is emerging as a new pole of attraction. Latin American integration is on a course that is definitive and determined with the new processes taking place in the continental South. It is very important that the alternative U.S. press be aware of what is happening in Latin America and to see it from different angles to avoid stereotypes.

What the so-called “independent press” and “objective press” has tried to do throughout its history is to create stereotypes and make false claims.

For the “objective press,” President Hugo Chávez is not a new Latin American revolutionary leader, inheritor of the best traditions of struggles of the peoples of our continent, but rather a putschist militarist who took power, who presides over a pool of petroleum, and who has a close relationship with Fidel Castro. And they present that relationship not as a great merit, as Chávez describes it, but as a stigma.

There is a very interesting alternative press in the United States that does good things and gives us the key to interpret what is happening in United States society. If you ask me as a journalist, I think that U.S. society is reaching the boiling point.

The political, economic and social conditions are being created that will cause that bubble to burst at some point.

There we see what is happening in Iraq, what is happening in Afghanistan, what is happening in Latin America. The current United States administration insists on creating a false image of prosperity, a false image that the struggle against terrorism has to be fought thousands of miles away from the United States to “prevent them from coming here to attack us.” It is based on the politics of fear and terror.

And within that U.S. society, where there are such a noble and good people, we Cubans and Latin Americans have been able to experience solidarity and affection. We have seen it in concrete causes. If it were not for the solidarity of the people of the United States, Elián González would have not returned to his family as he did in June 2000.

It is the people of the United States who made it possible to stop the war in Vietnam. And it will be the people of the United States who will make it possible to stop the aggression and massacre of the Iraqi people.

A model of dialogue
When we think of alternative communication we do not think of it as substituting one domination for another. It means establishing a model of dialogue that respects multicultural and multi-ethnic diversity, because the wealth of a society lies in its diversity.

In Prensa Latina, there is something we always need to clarify. The dialogue that we advocate is not with all members of society. We call for dialogue with those who are committed to an anti-capitalist vision. Dialogue with those who are committed to a capitalist vision is not dialogue. Such a “dialogue” will always be a struggle for power.

Although we say that the media is a tool of the system to consolidate the hegemony of the ruling class, it is not a simple process. It does not mean that behind each piece of information there is a conspiracy of a small group of millionaires who decide what to publish and how they will do it.

There are very complex processes that have a lot to do with the production routines of the media, that process of “newsmaking” that is so well researched in the United States, within which the hypotheses of “agenda-setting” and “framing” play their part.

Independence and power
There is a generalized idea that the alternative media is an impoverished media, with few resources, not controlled by anyone, with no links to anything official.

Let’s talk about power. Jean-Jacque Rousseau, the French philosopher, wrote of the “natural person.”

The baby, when it is born, is a natural person. But when it relates to its mother and begins to drink milk from the mother’s breast, it becomes a social person. The baby has begun to interact with someone and this creates a dependency on someone else. It is a dependency for food, the primary basic necessity for a human being.

But there also begins a relationship of power. The mother has a certain quota of power, that is, “I will feed you when I can feed you, or when I want to feed you.” The baby cries and demands because it also exercises a quota of power, that is, “You have to feed me now.” The baby becomes a social being.

Therefore, it is not possible to speak of the independence of even small media organizations, tiny ones that are very poor and lacking in resources. You will always depend on the orientation as to where you seek your power.

‘Just doing my job’
One of the things that capitalism tries primarily to present to us or to convince us of is that historical processes do not count. Things are the way they are—simply because that is how it is.

Let’s say I am part of U.S. society. For me the most important thing is me and my family, and that is how it is because it has to be that way. The mentality in the United States that says, “I do this no matter what happens because it is my job.” Your job?

How is it possible that Mrs. Madeleine Albright was the secretary of state of the United States, the sworn enemy of Cuba, and two weeks after leaving that post says the blockade of Cuba makes no sense?

Or Mr. Colin Powell, who stated recently in Dubai that there is a civil war in Iraq and that they committed an error with regard to Iraq. When he was the secretary of state he lied to the world, saying that there were weapons of mass destruction and that there were links between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

I was in New York City once, speaking with an executive of one of the large U.S. media chains. I asked him, “How can that happen?”

He told me, “No, the problem is that they were doing their job.”

Ideology and emancipation
Yes, but what are the roots of that problem? It lies in support for capitalism. I don’t mean a capitalist who literally forces me to work with a whip. Rather, capitalism develops a mentality in the person that the most important thing is work.

But what work? The part they pay me for my support? Of course, the capitalist converted my labor power into a commodity. And for that commodity to be better exploited, I need that mentality inculcated into my consciousness.

We believe that alternative communication has to give the person, the receiver, all the keys to be able to interpret the events. Everything that happens has a historicity, every event has an origin and a process of development. It is not like television, where images overwhelm us but in the end leaves us with nothing, nor does it allow us to interpret events.

It is simply one of the tools that the bourgeois press uses to maintain its rule over the minds of people.

When we in Prensa Latina speak of alternative communication—again, we say alternative communication and not alternative journalism—in our opinion it means critical thought—anti-hegemonic, all-encompassing thought—a liberating and emancipatory thought.

I said earlier that the objective of capitalism is surplus value.

What is the objective of socialism? It is the emancipation of the human being. And we believe that alternative communication should act toward that goal of liberating humanity.

https://liberationschool.org/journalism ... s-society/

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2019 3:52 pm
by blindpig
Social networks and the coup against Evo
@evoespueblo
| More than 4,000 Twitter accounts were created just to legitimize Morales's impeachment - https://pagina12.com.ar/230693-las-rede ... contra-evo
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“There are 3,612 accounts that participated in the #BoloviaNoHayGolpe and have between zero and one follower. And the most scandalous is there are 4,492 accounts that were created between yesterday and today to participate in the hashtag.”

The last from Redfish

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Posted: Thu Nov 21, 2019 2:28 pm
by blindpig
Bolivian resistance will not be transmitted
November 20, 2019 | 1 |

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Illustration: Aldo Cruces / Cuba Domain

Report made for Move Latin America . Prepared on November 20, 2019. To download it in PDF, click here

Presentation
This report proposes to highlight a set of actions that, in a related way, allow us to infer a coordinated action aimed at violating the right to information of both the Bolivian community and the international community in relation to the Coup d'etat in Bolivia; the “induced invisibility” of the events that configured a true “blackout” on the real events in Bolivia, while setting up a “legitimation scene” of the coup, is a fundamental stone to facilitate the action of repression.

According to our analysis, this strategy was mounted on two complementary planes. On the one hand, an infrastructural one “on the ground” attacking journalists and the communicative capacities of the defenders of democracy (community channels, radios etc.) and of Evo Morales; and, on the other hand, a propagation strategy of fake news via false accounts that served to saturate the networks, making noise and eroding any complaint action before a coup that so far has 29 dead and 715 injured.

Methodology
The report is based on the development of a monitoring of the situation of the media in Bolivia, gathering information about attacks on radios, journalists, etc. This information is triangulated with other reports and documents produced in this regard. For the network analysis, we worked with a document provided by Julián Macias Tovar, which uses a series of tools, among which Trendsmap stands out .

Other tools used were: T-Hoarder , to analyze networks; Audiense ; Twitonomy , to analyze specific accounts; BuzzSumo , to check the viral in networks; among other.

Infrastructure Moment, media blackout
Coordinated civil groups attacked communication structures such as radios, channels and journalists related to the Government of Evo Morales with the objective not only to disinform but to weaken the coordination capacity of the communities and their response to the coup. As the “Preliminary report on the situation of human rights in Bolivia” affirms , Bolivia is facing a situation of total media shielding . The antennas of the official channels were burned, tied and tortured hundreds of journalists and communicators who are still being persecuted for communicating the events.

According to this report, the main events unleashed in Bolivia range from the siege of the facilities of the state-owned television station Bolivia TV and the aggression of its workers and workers by far-right groups, forcing them to suspend their information services, threatening them with death; the occupation of the media, silencing them and issuing their call to the fascist coup d'etat, of racial persecution, creating rhetorical propaganda against democracy and falsification of history; the accusation to the national and international press of "misinformation" by the Bolivian Minister of Communication, Roxana Lizarraga; until the expulsion of journalists from Argentina from TN, Chronicle, America and Telefé,

This has drawn the attention of the International Broadcasting Association (AIR), which issued a statement that warned that "observes with grave concern the various acts of violence against journalists and the media" that occurred during these last days in Bolivia.

The AIR called on the interim authorities and security forces to "guarantee the free exercise of journalistic activity and the right to information by the Bolivian people."

On the other hand, the organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF) denounced this week that, since the end of the electoral campaign and the resignation of Evo Morales to the Presidency, the Bolivian press suffered various attacks and aggressions, which forced the interruption of their work to ensure the safety of their journalists.

RSF said that since the October 20 election, about 30 acts against the Bolivian press were recorded, ranging from intimidation, online harassment, threats, physical aggressions, theft of equipment to journalists, as well as fires in various radio stations and TV.

As a recent testimony we can highlight the one of the Argentine journalist Fernando Ortega Zabala ( @F_ortegazabala // Fernando Oz) who was making a coverage in Senkata that denounced that he had to hide in the house of neighbors because he was pursuing a “civilian command”.



This action has a single and clear objective, to hinder the coordination and information of the Bolivians who resist with the objective of demoralizing them, on the one hand, making as invisible as possible what is happening in the face of the international community, on the other. Paying for the creation of a scenario of absolute confusion where repressive order speech prevails.

Virtual moment, mass disinformation
With the support of Julian Macías for the production of this report, it can be confirmed that 252,090 different accounts made more than one million tweets with any of these 14 HTs that were the main ones organized in an organized way:

#BoliviaLibreyDemocratica
#NoHayGolpeEnBolivia
#EvoDictador
#BoliviaUnida
#BoliviaNoHayGolpe
#NoFueGolpeFueFraude
#BoliviaLibre
#EvoEsFraude
#NoHayGolpeEnBolivia
#BoliviaResiste
#EvoNoEresBienvenidoEnMexico
#EvoAsesino
#EvoNoEresBienvenido
#FraudeElectoralBolivia

The resulting graph is as follows. It shows a large community of the coup sector on the left, with greater density and consistency, and a smaller community that confronts the right, with greater dispersion :

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A detailed analysis of the accounts of Luis Fernando Camacho @LuisFerCamachoV and Jeanine Añez @JeanineAnez was carried out , to investigate the unusual participation and interaction of different Twitter users who have publicly manifested the accompaniment to the Coup d'etat of the last November 10 and have influenced favorably to multiply and impose issues , amplifying the sayings of the leaders who have executed the coup and silencing the voices of those who still resist.

The analysis shows that Luis Fernando Camacho's account grew from 3,000 to 130,000 followers in the last 15 days and that more than 50,000 are accounts created recently, in November 2019.

Regarding the Jeanine Añez account , the analysis shows that during the last 15 days it grew from 8,000 followers to almost 150,000 followers and that more than 40,000 are accounts with fake profiles created November 2019.
Both accounts also provide other information that allows to pay to a series of conjectures of the present report. Among them it is recorded that:

68,000 accounts were created in the month of November 2019
47% use Spanish as the default language.
80% use "Avatar . "
98% are accounts whose profiles are "Public".
45% are female accounts while 25% are male.
Almost 100% of accounts have between 0 and 50 followers .
They are also accounts that feed back and follow each other .
All accounts have been active between the last week and yesterday.
More than 90% have tweeted less than 5 times per day .
Only 7% put more than 5 tweets per day.
They are mostly accounts created in Bolivia.
In the "biographies" three words stand out: BOLIVIA - BOLIVIANA - GOD
Luis Fernando Camacho is mostly the most benefited account in these campaigns as it is the account that most RTs usually receive.

This true Blitzkrieg of misinformation was mounted as we said about 252,090 different accounts, which made more than a million tweets. As particular feature has been detected the case of the @suarezluis account , whose owner would be a web developer, with withdrawal status from the United States Army, which would have developed its own software for launching retweets of all coup hashtags.

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Luis Fernando Suárez Harasic, user of the @suarezluis account that had almost 14,000 tweets using hashtags in favor of the coup.


Some data allow, in turn, link the US Army and the use of special software to automate retweets of all hashtags launched. As noted, he has been able to give more than 1500 retweets per day to the coup leaders.

Within this framework, it can be inferred that at the same time that the media blackout was developed, there is a growing movement and interaction in the networks in favor of the coup instrumenters and the communities in which they interact.

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Likewise, it can be inferred that the use of Twitter by the coup plotters aims to saturate the networks in relation to Bolivia, since it operates as a news generator in a context where the activity of journalists has become a risky task. Power a distorted message outward and combat Evo Morales' strategy, through his @evoespueblo account , which he has chosen as a tool to communicate.

Regarding Facebook, taking into account that in Bolivia, according to available information, 90% of the interactions occur in this network, and that it is the one that best allows the production of senses and interaction between people, you can observe:

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Civic - military - police coup, social networks and media blackout, faces of the same strategy?
As Matías Caciabue argues in "Technological revolution and network warfare", soft coups, information manipulation and legal warfare (law-fare) are instruments of a military strategy defined as soft-power . According to the author , soft-power and hard power make up what is known as "Hybrid War" or "Network War."

In Bolivia, soft-power is the counterpart of the military - police coup suffered by President Evo Morales on November 10.

In the Internet networks, not only is a new form of relationship built between people, but also the link between individuals and the reality they live is foreshadowed, says Caciabue.

People are organized and monitored in the virtual territory based on what we might call "tribes", that is, homogeneous communities of interests. Waterfalls of false information - or "fakenews" - are thrown into virtual territory, where its correlation with reality does not matter, but how each of these tribes reacts.

In a conflict scenario such as the one unleashed in Bolivia and the consolidation of the Coup d'état with the self-proclamation of Añez, the perception of citizenship about what is happening in the country is of a central nature.

Impressions and perceptions of events become the battlefield. The minds of Bolivians, Bolivians and the rest of the world's eyes on events are transformed into a land of dispute for imposing a conception of the conflict.

Regarding the Senkata massacre, a sense dispute can be observed between the MASACRE and TERRORIST ATTACK avoided by the Bolivian armed forces.

Final thoughts
The civil-military-police-religious coup d'etat that is lived in Bolivia is not an isolated event.

At the continental level we are in the reissue of a “New Condor Plan” with coordinated actions . Latin America has ceased to be a territory of peace and not by the decision of the peoples, but by definition of imperialism and local colonial oligarchies.

This report tries to expose the violation of regional democratic life, exposing how the region is part of a theater of operations that combines a coup d'etat with a communication blackout that makes it difficult to denounce the violation of Human Rights to the who are being subjected, as well as the persecution of the main opposition leaders.

The current situation merits an immediate regional and global popular response, not only because of the duty to exercise the broadest internationalist solidarity but also in a clear sense of self-defense.

We need, then, to increase the network of the popular, to shape and strengthen a social force with a political initiative based on a program of the subaltern sectors with full awareness and a will to defend dignity. Connect in the virtual and deploy in the social, generating a greater capacity for influence to intervene successfully in the process of developing all the social and political struggles of our continent in defense of the region as a zone of peace.

...

AUTHORS:
Lic. Betiana Vargas
Lic. Santiago Hernández
Lic. Julian Macias
Lic. Martín Radics

Contact:

betianaevargas@gmail.com

543385436451

http://www.cubadebate.cu/noticias/2019/ ... dac9tVKiM9
Google Translator

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Posted: Wed Dec 04, 2019 12:18 pm
by blindpig
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After His Mysterious Death, the Media Scrambles to Get its Story Straight About White Helmets Founder James Le Mesurier

December 02nd, 2019

By Vanessa Beeley

On November 11, 2019, the British founder of the notorious White Helmets, James Le Mesurier, died in Istanbul, Turkey. The circumstances surrounding his death immediately elicited a flurry of Turkish and corporate media reports, many of them contradictory, as the details of his final hours came to light.

Mark Urban, the diplomatic editor at BBC Newsnight, immediately tweeted that “a former colleague” had told him it was impossible to “fall from that balcony,” referencing Le Mesurier’s reported cause of death and intimated that there may have been “state involvement.” Urban did not identify his mysterious “former colleague” or explain what made him sufficiently qualified to conclude that Le Mesurier’s death may have been a state-sanctioned hit.

Urban, declaring ignorance over Le Mesurier’s suspected ties to Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency, then suggesting that a “black propaganda campaign by Russian and Syria media and their social media acolytes” against Le Mesurier was “a prelude to murder” (emphasis added). Extraordinary claims for a journalist to make prior to the publication of any official autopsy.

Urban deleted his tweets soon after, maintaining that “there is a good deal of suspicion it may be murder by a state actor, but others suggest he may have taken his own life.” Did Urban jump the gun? Was he instructed to delete the tweets, and if so, by whom?

In the tangle of media reports that ensued, a pattern of denials and misdirection became apparent. The overriding response from the narrative curators in corporate media was to blame Russia for everything. Russian Foreign Office spokesperson Maria Zakharova was vilified for her description of Le Mesurier as a British intelligence agent and for condemning his previous association with al-Qaeda in Kosovo in 1999. The author and investigative journalist, Whitney Webb, previously exposed those connections for MintPress News.

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One of the many headlines blaming Russia for Le Mesurier’s death

Part one of this series will attempt to bring a greater degree of transparency and context to the Le Mesurier affair by examining his role in Syria and his financial responsibility as founder of Mayday Rescue, an NGO he established in 2014 to act as the UK Foreign Office’s (UK FCO) implementing partner, responsible for the management of the White Helmets. Suspected collusion between Le Mesurier, his Mayday Rescue colleagues and UK state media to crush dissent or questioning of the establishment narrative on Syria will also be examined.

As the corporate media rushed to file reports on Le Mesurier’s death, two narratives emerged that effectively attempt to revise his career history.

Disconnecting Le Mesurier from the White Helmets
Raed Saleh is the “chairman” of the White Helmets. Saleh has connections to extremist armed factions and individuals inside Syria. In fact, he was refused entry into the United States in April of 2016 because of these “extremist connections.” Saleh writes for The Guardian, although he does not speak a word of English. His appearances at UN-sponsored events and in the corporate media appear heavily scripted and managed. So, when Saleh announced that Le Mesurier was not the founder of the White Helmets, alarm bells rang. Why would a spokesperson for the White Helmets deny something that Le Mesurier himself had admitted many times? That he founded the group while contracted to Analysis Research and Knowledge Group (ARK), even Le Mesurier’s Wikipedia entry doesn’t dispute the fact.

In April of 2017, the online news outlet The Middle Ground interviewed Le Mesurier. In its background for the interview, they described the founding of the White Helmets thusly:

The White Helmets was started by Mr Mesurier when he was working for ARK, a for-profit international contracting firm based in Turkey.”

Le Mesurier confirmed his role in founding the organization in the interview, stating:

ARK was funded by Friends of Syria, “a coalition of about 35 different countries who provide support to those that are in opposition to the Assad Government.”



Le Mesurier not connected to “any” British intelligence
Chris York of the Huffington Post sprang to the defense of the White Helmets immediately after Le Mesurier’s demise. York, who prior to 2017 had written a number of superficial commentaries about the Syrian conflict, began a campaign of attacking anyone exposing the White Helmets’ links to terrorist groups and their criminal activities alongside those groups.

York’s campaign gathered momentum in 2017 and continued in 2018, attacking, smearing and attempting to discredit independent journalists and academics who were countering the state-established narratives on Syria coming mostly out of Washington and London.

One of York’s articles, published three days after Le Mesurier’s death, bore the title, This is why James Le Mesurier’s White Helmets are the target of a Russian disinformation campaign. Beyond the multiple inaccuracies in the report, York’s heavy-handed blame Russia approach effectively disappeared the voices of those Syrians who reject the White Helmets and who have accused them of organ trafficking, child abduction and abuse, torture, murder, theft, and collaboration with the armed groups that persecuted civilians in the areas they occupied.

In reality, Russia’s role has been to provide those voices with a media platform and to give them a chance to speak. But York would prefer they keep quiet. If he really were interested in truth or impartiality, he would support a public inquiry into the White Helmets to allow evidence against them to be legally reviewed.

There is one point in York’s article that curiously echoes a statement made by the UK representative to the UN, Karen Pierce. Under the subheading, “James Le Mesurier was a spy”, York writes:

Russian authorities have never provided any evidence that Le Mesurier was a spy or worked for any intelligence agencies and have only repeated unsubstantiated claims made by bloggers that write about the White Helmets.” (emphasis added)

One day before York’s article was published, The Guardian quoted Karen Pierce’s statement that (Russian) claims that he worked for British Secret Services were “categorically untrue.”

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The amendment by the Guardian walking back a claim that Le Mesurier worked for British intelligence.

Apart from the fact that Le Mesurier was active in various areas of NATO intervention, suggesting he had links with British intelligence agencies, The Guardian itself previously stated categorically that Le Mesurier was working for British military intelligence during his time in Kosovo in 1999.

Almost immediately after Le Mesurier’s alleged plunge to his death from the window of his Istanbul apartment, reports began to emerge of tampering with video reports and of the removal of links to articles detailing the career of the controversial “private security” operative. A Men’s Journal article which detailed Le Mesurier’s career path was removed from the Mayday Rescue website as well as the White Helmets Wikipedia page. The Men’s Journal article opens with the following description:

Sweating in the 104-degree heat in Adana, Turkey, former British infantry officer James Le Mesurier is training a group of average Syrians to become members of the U.S.-funded Syria Civil Defense (SCD) team”

@Marwa__Osman
Russia-24 news channel:
"Since the announcement of the death of #WhiteHelmets founder in Istanbul, suspicious activity has been taking place on the org's website, which is run by #JamesLeMesurier personally.
Old news is being deleted & some modified by changing narratives &words"

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But the whitewashing of Le Mesurier’s past was not confined to traditional media. RT’s Murad Gadziev reported on the frantic cleaning of controversy from Le Mesurier’s Wikipedia page by the notorious Philip Cross. Cross has a history of obsessively stalking and editing Wikipedia pages belonging to journalists or academics challenging influential Syria narratives.

There certainly appears to be a concerted campaign to remove specific data from the public domain and to obfuscate, omit and redirect information regarding a valuable asset for British intelligence agencies – whether Le Mesurier was directly working for them or not.



Disregarding details of Le Mesurier’s death
In its reporting on Le Mesurier’s death, certain details were released in the Turkish media that do not appear to have been picked up or emphasized by corporate media. Some of those details provide insight into the possible reasons for Le Mesurier’s death.

One week before he died, Le Mesurier allegedly told his colleagues in the White Helmets: “in Turkey, we’re done, we are leaving.” Le Mesurier and his wife, Emma Winberg, Chief Impact Officer at Mayday Rescue since January 2017, had also allegedly “fought violently” while they were dining in Beyoglu, an upscale Turkish cafe and bar, one day before his death.

In the week before the incident, another Turkish media outlet reported that deliveries made to the offices of Mayday Rescue, a White Helmets partner organization that even shares its headquarters, addressed to Mary Salvatore were returned to sender because nobody was available to take delivery. The same thing had allegedly been happening to previous deliveries for a few weeks according to the report. Salvatore was the office manager at Mayday Rescue, her contact details appear on a 2016 employment advertisement for a chief operating officer position at Mayday Rescue, as well as other positions in the organization based in Ankara, Turkey.

Another Turkish media report stated that Mayday Rescue is now “persona non grata in Turkey” and that the White Helmets have “distanced” themselves from Mayday, “the building remains closed despite the fact that both organisations share offices in the same building” (emphasis added). One article reiterates how Le Mesurier informed his White Helmet colleagues that he would be leaving Turkey. Another quotes him as saying, “our business in Turkey is over.”

Among the other significant, yet overlooked facts reported by Turkish media was that “research maps and sketches” belonging to James Le Mesurier were removed from his home by investigators from the Istanbul Homicide Bureau and Anti-Terrorism and Intelligence Branch Directorates and that Emma Winberg was questioned by police regarding seven electronic devices, including PCs, tablets and mobile phones that were found and seized for examination at the home she shared with Le Mesurier.

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Forensic officials work the site where Le Mesurier’s body was found in Istanbul, Nov. 11, 2019. Emrah Gurel | AP

Yet perhaps the most damning report that graced the pages of Turkish media came from the pro-Erdogan Daily Sabah. That piece stated that:

According to recent information, the source of Le Mesurier’s stress was him not being able to pay back a large amount of financial aid he had received. It was also found that Le Mesurier planned to leave Turkey just before his death.” (emphasis added)

These details paint a very different, and much more intriguing, picture of the possible drivers for Le Mesurier’s allegede suicide and certainly render claims that Russia was behind the death both questionable and precipitative.



Former UK Ambassador to Syria weighs in
Peter Ford, the United Kingdom’s former ambassador to Syria and Bahrain, doubts the official narratives over the mysterious death of Le Mesurier. Ford told MintPress the following when asked to weigh in on the burgeoning controversy.

It is sad for anyone to be so stressed that they take their own life. But if Le Mesurier was stressed, how do we know it wasn’t because he was afraid that the truth about financial irregularities he was suspected of was beginning to leak out? Fear of being uncovered in impropriety has sent many over the edge. Le Mesurier’s company Mayday Rescue was coming under the microscope.

Last year the Dutch government stopped funding Mayday because they weren’t sure what Mayday were doing with the money. That’s in the public record.

Le Mesurier sat at the centre of a tangled web of money laundering companies. The wheels were beginning to come off his operation.

With so much money passing through his hands – Western governments sent upwards of $200 million to the White Helmets – and such lax controls the temptation to defraud must have been immense.

Are we sure Le Mesurier was not under investigation by the British authorities? The British Foreign Office statement following his death was strangely tight-lipped:

“We are deeply saddened by the news of the death of James Le Mesurier. Our condolences go out to his family and friends at this difficult time.”

Why no mention of his wonderful work? Funny, that.”

Considering that Le Mesurier was awarded an OBE (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in 2016 for his “life-saving work,” it is a strange statement, bereft of the plaudits one might expect under the circumstances.



Emma Winberg and the UK-funded PR machine for terrorists
Some may consider it harsh to include Le Mesurier’s grieving widow in an investigation over her own husband’s death, but exploring Emma Winberg’s role in Mayday Rescue and its associated organizations provides much-needed context to such a complex and convoluted case.

According to her LinkedIn profile, Winberg worked as a political officer for the UK’s FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) for seven years, until 2014. In January of 2015, she co-founded a company called Incostrat, presumably with Paul Tilley, who like Le Mesurier, had a British military background.

Incostrat was effectively established as an outsourced public relations contractor for the “moderate armed opposition” in Syria and was funded by the UK FCO Conflict Stability and Security Fund (CSSF) – which also heavily funds both Mayday Rescue and the White Helmets.

An Incostrat contracting document seen by The Guardian named the Saudi-backed Jaish Al Islam (JAI) as one of the “suitable moderate opposition” groups to have received media advice and guidance on promotional strategies from Incostrat.

JAI was one of the most brutal extremist groups to occupy Syria’s Eastern Ghouta. The group, alongside the al-Qaeda affiliated Nusra Front, was responsible for the 2013 massacre of civilians in Adra that included burning prisoners alive in huge bread furnaces. In 2015, JAI caged religious minorities in Douma and paraded them through the streets as human shields. I previously covered some of the many atrocities that the group committed against civilians in Douma during their occupation of the Damascus suburb. In that article, I also explore the close collaboration between the White Helmets and JAI.

One video circling the internet was ostensibly a part of the JAI’s foreign-funded media blitz. It was a promotional short made to showcase the military prowess of the group, which at the time was occupying areas of Eastern Ghouta, Damascus – including Douma, the scene of an alleged chemical weapon attack in 2018.

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Winberg leaves after being questioned by Turkish police in Istanbul, Nov. 13, 2019. Photo | AP

In January of 2017, according to her Linkedin page, Winberg became chief impact officer of Mayday Rescue. Her Skoll Foundation profile presents her as a Director of Mayday Rescue. Winberg describes her role as “developing new solutions for building upstream grassroots community resilience in the context of global threats from issues such as forced migration, violent extremism and climate change” (emphasis added)

She describes her background in the familiar “security, stabilisation and peace building”. Her postings “have been in Kabul, Damascus, East Jerusalem, Istanbul and Erbil with shorter postings in Yemen and East Africa” – a very similar posting map to Le Mesurier – while Winberg was employed as a political officer for the UK FCO.

Political officers can be described as UK FCO scouts, information gatherers and community networkers tasked with identifying “opportunities for UK engagement,” a euphemism for political, economic or proxy military intervention under the faux pretext of humanitarian war known as the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, particularly when taking into consideration the specific nations prospected by Winberg.

Peter Ford described political officers as follows:

The most famous ‘political officers’ were Lawrence (of Arabia) and Gertrude Bell. A term redolent of imperialism it has been brought back into use by the [UK] FCO for its agents who control, in the field, the UK’s various local proxies in Syria. Mostly based in Turkey they act as handlers for armed groups and their auxiliaries such as the White Helmets and local councils.”

The integration of the Skoll Foundation into the complex network of billionaire financing and directing the promotion of the White Helmets and driving the war in Syria has been investigated extensively by this author and journalist Whitney Webb.

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Winberg’s other connections to the NATO alliance include appearances alongside Eliot Higgins, an activist and publisher of the Atlantic Council-aligned Bellingcat blog, at an Atlantic Council DFR Lab event called, “Archiving atrocities in Syria.”

The DFR Lab is also a recipient of UK FCO funds and clearly included in the British government’s drive to silence diverging views and undermine genuine anti-war movements or individuals when it comes to Syria.
vanessa beeley
@VanessaBeeley
Fascinating! UK FCO paid a whopping £ 450,000 to Ben Nimmo DFR (troll) Lab in October 2018! Seems 'Global Britain' govt is on major drive to silence dissent & to destroy anti-war movements & leadership https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/s ... sv/preview … @RenieriArts @Malinka1102 @DerbyChrisW

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5:51 AM - Dec 15, 2018
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During her talk, Winberg makes scant reference to the atrocities carried out by the extremist armed groups working alongside the White Helmets in the areas they occupy. This policy of revisionism and whitewashing of the terrorist threat facing Syria extends to the White Helmets, a group that has reported on atrocities by the Nusra Front only once out of its 4,354 tweets according to research carried out by author Mike King.
Mike Ralph King
@MikeKingWriter
The White Helmets promote the fiction of a single belligerent in the war: Assad. In 4,354 White Helmet tweets the military powers controlling rebel-held Syria are mentioned this often:

ISIS = 18
FSA =3
Nusra = 1
Al-Qaeda = 0
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) = 0
Jaysh al-Islam = 0

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Instead, Winberg focuses on the White Helmet “high profile” work with the OPCW (Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) and their role in the burial of the dead and “maintaining records and identities of those who have been killed.” Again, this claim does not seem to be evidenced by the White Helmets themselves:
Richard Hall

@_RichardHall
· Nov 17, 2019
Co-founder of White Helmets besieged by funding worries and Russian propaganda campaign against him https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 04896.html
Co-founder of White Helmets besieged by funding worries and Russian …
The British founder of the Syrian White Helmets civil volunteer group who was found dead in Turkey this week had received prolonged medical treatment for stress and depression, his family and friends

independent.co.uk

Mike Ralph King
@MikeKingWriter
James Le Mesurier might also have been worried that despite the White Helmets' headline claim of over 115,000 lives saved they had documented only 625 to end Oct '19, of which only 88 are supported by plausible video evidence, of which only 9 are named of which 3 have surnames.

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More will be examined on the role of the White Helmets in producing evidence and the staging of events that were then utilized by the OPCW in part two of this series.

Winberg also presents evidence of a “sustained disinformation campaign” waged against the White Helmets by Russia, independent journalists and academics. This is important because of the apparent connection between Winberg joining Mayday Rescue in January 2017 and the subsequent campaign of disinformation waged in the media against journalists and academics who expose the inner workings of the White Helmets and their affiliation with extremist groups in Syria.



A propaganda campaign against researchers and journalists
In January of 2017, three months after Winberg arrived at Mayday Rescue, Chris York of the Huffington Post launched a media campaign to attack the critics of the White Helmets. York produced a series of articles attempting to discredit this author and other independent journalists. York rarely engaged in any constructive debates on social media, instead favoring the Russia-centric or “Assadist” tropes that have become the hallmark of attacks on dissidents and genuine anti-war activists alike.

Times headline Douma
A Times headline following the now-discredited Douma chemical attack

York’s attacks were soon reinforced by Olivia Solon at The Guardian, The UK’s Times newspaper, former Guardian correspondent, Brian Whitaker, Bellingcat, the BBC, journalist Nafeez Ahmed, academic Idrees Ahmad, and a 48-page report from the White Helmet PR agency, Syria Campaign.

The Syria Campaign report appeared to be in direct response to this author’s presentation on the White Helmets at the Geneva Press Club that received unprecedented threats of censorship and disruption. These are not the only attempts to smear and discredit dissenting voices, but they are the most notable.

It may also be that Winberg joined Mayday Rescue after Russian media finally intervened to platform voices that were critical of the White Helmets. Contrary to the “blame Russia” memes circulated by the majority of state-aligned media in the West – the first RT program to give a platform to any such criticism was Cross Talk in October of 2016.

Prior to that, Russia had not paid much attention to the White Helmet operating in ever-dwindling areas of Syrian territory. Perhaps Winberg was drafted by her UK FCO colleagues to counter the perceived threat to the supremacy of the established narratives in the Syrian information war.

The most compelling evidence that this campaign may have been orchestrated by Le Mesurier and Winberg came from Oliver Kamm, a Times newspaper columnist and online bully with a history of endorsing and protecting British neo-colonialism and globalist policies worldwide, including in the former Yugoslavia and Libya.

Two days after Le Mesurier died, Kamm tweeted that, in 2018, Le Mesurier had “reached out to this newspaper to urge us” to keep on the case of “academics at UK universities” who were confronting Le Mesurier with the inconvenient facts surrounding the alleged chemical attacks in Syria. Kamm later deleted those tweets.

https://twitter.com/Malinka1102/status/ ... 02945?s=03

Le Mesurier’s White Helmets were the primary producers of evidence to corroborate the UK FCO and U.S.-led narratives that the Syrian government was “gassing its own people.” Notably, this “gassing” was taking place at the same time that Syrian Arab Army soldiers were sacrificing their lives to liberate those same Syrian civilians from the clutches of extremist groups, most recently in Douma, Eastern Ghouta in March of 2018.

The academics that Le Mesurier was referencing were members of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media who have been instrumental in exposing the gaping holes in the chemical weapon narratives disseminated without question or deviation by the majority of corporate media outlets.



Were Mayday Rescue funds diverted to extremists in Syria?
In September of 2018, the Dutch government withdrew funding from Mayday Rescue, and by default, the White Helmets.

A comprehensive review of Mayday Rescue and White Helmets monitoring systems was carried out by an IOB evaluation team which concluded that the payment system used to transfer donor funds to the White Helmets was “problematic.” The IOB team also identified the close collaboration between Mayday Rescue and the White Helmets already mentioned in this article:

The White Helmets are formally an independent organisation registered in Turkey, but in practice they are closely tied to Stichting Mayday Rescue Foundation (Mayday), the implementing partner for the majority of the White Helmets’ donors. Both organisations have their headquarters in the same office building.”

The use of the “Hawala” system to move money around raised concerns over the amounts of money involved and the lack of systematic monitoring of the funds’ recipients. A worrying lack of transparency was identified which led to the Dutch government’s withdrawal of funding, as there were no guarantees that funding was not being funneled to armed extremist groups inside Syria.

The Hawala system relies on personal connections between various agents in different locations and in different countries. Because the various agents manage cash pools in these different locations, there is no need for physical border crossings. Transactions therefore cannot be viewed in isolation, but are part of the wider system. Single transactions are managed by various layers of agents, and because the system is based on trust, it does not leave a paper trail. [..]

There exists a risk of diversion of funds by armed groups, since it does not provide insight into who receives payments and taxes along the way or how the money is used. In addition, by using the wider system, organisations may indirectly facilitate harmful or illicit trade.”

Systems in place to detect terrorist infiltration were not adequate and the report concluded that the existing automated screening could not pick up on false information that would be used by terrorists or “non-sanctioned” individuals.

Donors were dealt with separately, with no overlap of financial information (in other words each donor had no idea who the other donors were, how much they were donating, or where the money was being assigned). Furthermore, there were no real insights into the White Helmet’s “achievements”.

“Reports only include progress on activities directly funded by the separate donors, and donors seem to have little insight into who else finances which other parts of the project.”

While the Dutch government was concerned about the misdirection of funding into the pockets of terrorist groups, perhaps Peter Ford has identified another reason to be concerned about the lack of transparency in Mayday Rescue’s system of accountability. Certainly, the IOB report identified loopholes that could just as easily be exploited by dishonest brokers elsewhere within the organization.

Emma Winberg’s former associate at Incostrat, Paul Tilley, has branched out into a new venture that appears to be connected to the financial dealings of Mayday Rescue and the White Helmets, a possibility that will be explored in part two of this series.



Many questions remain unanswered
To date, no official autopsy has been completed on Le Mesurier. Many questions remain unanswered. Why was his body repatriated so quickly to the UK while the Turkish investigation was presumably still ongoing?

James Le Mesurier Death
Airport workers load the body of former Le Mesurier onto a cargo plane prior to his repatriation at Istanbul Airport, Nov. 13, 2019. Photo | IHA via AP

The media clamor to hold Russia, independent journalists and academics responsible for Le Mesurier’s death has been strident but has largely failed. How can anyone be held responsible for the death of a former British military intelligence officer when the cause of death is not yet known?

No amount of media spin is going to make the questions go away. There is an apparent effort to disconnect the White Helmets from Le Mesurier, perhaps because the results of a possible UK FCO investigation will come to light, as Peter Ford suggests. Under such circumstances, the UK FCO would be able to protect its propaganda construct while distancing it from any further loss of reputation as a result of potential financial misdemeanors committed by the primary implementing partner, and from its own founder.

A survey of the UK FCO’s monthly funding in excess of £25,000 ($32,000) revealed that Mayday Rescue has received only one payment of £1.8 million ($2.32 million) in July of 2019 while other related organizations, including Incostrat, have received regular payments throughout 2019. In fact, Incostrat received £4.76 million ($6.1 million) between January and September of 2019. This may suggest a throttling back of funding for Mayday Rescue, pending, perhaps, an investigation into their financial practices.

The United Nations, for its part, has funded the Mayday Rescue Foundation to the tune of $607,311 according to its own financial tracking services analysis. Ford suspects that Mayday Rescue may have been a money-laundering hub receiving donor contributions and distributing them with very little internal or external monitoring or transparency, a theory that is becoming increasingly feasible as the facts trickle out.
Chris York

@ChrisDYork
· Nov 14, 2019
A conspiracy theorist's guide to the White Helmets http://bit.ly/2Kne84p


This Is Why James Le Mesurier's White Helmets Are Targets Of A Russian Disinformation Campaign
The founder of the group was accused of being a spy by the Kremlin shortly before he died.

huffingtonpost.co.uk

David Miller
@Tracking_Power
Maybe you forgot this? Was it not also the case that Len Phillips (@LenP91535865) leader of OPCW Team Alpha from 2015-17, met regularly in Turkey with James Le Mesurier. The purpose of the meetings was - amongst other things - to provide 'witnesses' to alleged CW attacks?

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9:46 AM - Nov 14, 2019
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Le Mesurier played a pivotal role in organizing the witnesses used in OPCW inquiries into the alleged chemical attacks blamed on the Syrian government. As British academic, David Miller pointed out, “the process of ‘witness’ selection was contaminated by an operative (JLM) paid by several of the belligerents in the conflict most obviously the UK government.”

As details continue to emerge, the possibility of a correlation between recent revelations of OPCW corruption and Le Mesurier’s demise is becoming increasingly plausible, a possibility that will be covered further in part two of this series. Certainly, the pressure was building and Le Mesurier must have been feeling the heat as the Douma chemical attack narratives were collapsing under the weight of the exposure of manipulation, obfuscation, and staging by the White Helmets.

White Helmets Douma
An image published in March 2018 by the White Helmets in Douma depicts an alleged Syrian government-instigated chemical attack. Photo | White Helmets

One very important question remains and perhaps it was haunting Le Mesurier. Who murdered the children and civilians who were used as macabre props in the White Helmet “chemical weapon” scenes in Douma? Where are the bodies? White Helmets leader Raed Saleh claimed that he disclosed their location to the OPCW. Where are they and how were they killed if indeed there was no chemical attack?

Claims of organ trafficking have been levied against the White Helmets by Syrian civilians and the death of Le Mesurier appears to have been exploited to redirect blame to the Turkish proxies now occupying areas of north-east Syria, a possibility that will be explored in part two of this series.

Le Mesurier’s death may well be an important watershed. What happens next will determine the future of the White Helmets and other important elements of the war against Syria. Le Mesurier’s creation, the White Helmets, has been instrumental in maintaining the propaganda that underpins the U.S. Coalition’s military adventurism in Syria. And as that narrative, carefully constructed over the course of a nine-year-long propaganda war, begins to crumble, governments and corporate media alike are circling the wagons in a last-ditch effort to save face.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/mysteriou ... iQ.twitter

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Posted: Tue Dec 10, 2019 12:16 pm
by blindpig
Newsweek Journo Quits After Editors Kills Report On Syria Chemical Attack Scandal
“I have collected evidence of how they [Newsweek] suppressed the story in addition to evidence from another case where info inconvenient to US government was removed, though it was factually correct.”

by Alan Macleod
December 09th, 2019

Image

By Alan Macleod

Atop journalist has resigned from his post after management killed his report on the bombshell news that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) suppressed a mountain of evidence suggesting that the 2018 Douma Chemical Weapons Attack in Syria was staged.

Newsweek’s Tareq Haddad announced on Twitter that, rather than accepting top-down censorship on an important issue, he was publicly walking away from his job at the New York-based magazine.

Image

“I have collected evidence of how they suppressed the story in addition to evidence from another case where info inconvenient to US government was removed, though it was factually correct,” Haddad said, adding that he will publish full details about the event shortly but that “I was threatened with legal action” from his employers, who had inserted a confidentiality clause into his contract for just such an occasion as this.

He also stated that he is seeking legal advice from specialists in whistleblowing and that, “At the very least, I will publish evidence I have without divulging the confidential information.”



Silence on Syria
The shocking news that the OPCW fixed its own report in order to frame the Syrian government for a chemical weapons attack that likely did not even happen, according to its own expert investigators, has been roundly ignored by corporate media, but not by MintPress News, who has covered the news in depth.

Members of the OPCW team have come forward, expressing their “gravest concern” about the “selective representation of the facts” and the “intentional bias” “undermining the credibility of the report.” Even former OPCW Director-General Dr. Jose Bustani stated that the whistleblowers’ testimonies have “confirmed the doubts and suspicions” he already had about the organization and Syria.

The alleged chemical weapons attack was immediately used as a justification for foreign intervention in the conflict. Within days, the U.S., France and the United Kingdom launched bombings campaigns on the country, risking a potential nuclear conflict with Russia to the great approval of corporate media. Not one of the top 100 American newspapers by circulation opposed the extremely hasty actions.



Tareq Haddad: Not your average mainstream journalist
Haddad is a rare reporter in today’s corporate media landscape; one who insists on covering important issues such as the OPCW report, police killings of citizens, and the treatment of Julian Assange. He was also literally the only journalist across the entire mainstream spectrum to cover the astonishing news that a senior Twitter executive was unmasked as a British army psychological operations officer from their propaganda and online warfare battalion, something that MintPress News covered, but the New York Times, CNN, Fox News, CNBC nor any other national outlet did not.



I Interviewed Haddad in October about the Twitter scandal for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and The Canary, asking him why this story was not front-page news given the concern over foreign interference online that has dominated the corporate news cycle for years now. He downplayed the possibility of malevolence, suggesting, perhaps naively, that the entirety of the U.S. press missed the story because it was revealed by a small British publication.

Haddad came across as somebody who was not overtly political but was simply a rare true believer in the clichéd myths of journalism about speaking truth to power and scrutinizing those with it, claiming that editors would always support journalists opposing the government as long as they had their facts straight, an ironic statement given the recent news.

He revealed that the coverage of the weapons of mass destruction saga, where the media refused to be skeptical of the Bush administration’s claims, was the spark that made him want to become a reporter. Since then he has maintained an admirable skepticism of the powerful.

Whether Haddad knew exactly the risks he was taking or whether he was blithely skipping over all the untouchable third rails of modern journalism (like Assange, the Twitter story or the OPCW report), unaware of the danger he was in, is something of a moot point. But it is rare that the world gets to see so publicly the myth of a free and independent press busted.

Feature photo | A journalist looks on during a media tour of a damaged house where OPCW inspectors are believed to have visited in Douma near Damascus, Syria April 23, 2018. Ali Hashisho | Reuters

Alan MacLeod is a MintPress Staff Writer as well as an academic and writer for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. His book, Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting was published in April.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/newsweek- ... cw/263292/

Video at link

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Posted: Fri Dec 13, 2019 3:32 pm
by blindpig
A Reddit AMA Claiming To Be A Uiyghur Quickly Exposes A CIA Asset Slandering China

R S Ahthion

Dec 12 · 5 min read

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Rushan Abbas an Uyghur “activist” who has worked for a long list of US regime change organisations from US State Dept, Dept of Justice, Radio Free Asia, Homeland Security and even worked at Guantanamo Bay during the Bush Administration

Image
A map of the countries that support and denounce Chinas handling of it’s Uiyghur security problem. Doesn’t take much of a glance to realise that muslim countries support China and the people that denounce China are the same ones that have been bombing, murdering and torturing muslims for the last 2 decades straight. In fact if you overlaid the countries that denounce Chinas policy you basically have a map of Nato.

Last night an AMA started on Reddit claiming: “Hi, I’m Rushan Abbas. I’m one of the Uyghur People of central Asia, and the Chinese Government has locked up many of my friends and relatives in concentration camps.”
For those not sure what any of the above words mean Reddit is a social media site. And an “AMA” stands for Ask Me Anything. Many celebrities have done AMA’s as well as regular folk (if you wanted to ask a doctor/farmer etc. what their daily life entails). The format (unsurprisingly) is one of people asking them questions and the celebrity/person responding.
This AMA was, quite predictably, a long list of propaganda aimed at China and Rushan Abbas advising further trade war against China could be “something Western Countries can do”

Image

Also plugging a narrative that China is some kind of nazi Germany. This kind of atrocity propaganda being a staple of US regime change. We need not forget the faked Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify the Vietnam war. Hilary Clinton claiming Ghaddaffi handed out viagra to soldiers to rape to justify destroying the most successful country on the continent of Africa (Libya).
Anyone else remember WMDs in Iraq and 45 seconds to launch?
Incubator babies in Iraq? (to justify the first invasion in the 1990s).
She also bandies about “3 million Uyghurs in camps”.
The original number was “1 million” which has since been disproved by the excellent Grayzone.
This seems to be a staple of shitlibs. To just say an outlandish ridiculous and easily disprovable claim but hope it sticks. However the fake news media (from WaPo to NYTimes) are more than happy to run with it. Just a coincidence a trade war between US and China is on, right?
However using the Archive.org website which holds archives of other websites someone discovered a page with a Rushan Abbas on. And what we learn there is she’s essentially a US intelligence asset
Rushan Abbas brings over 15 years of experience in global business development, strategic business analysis, business consultancy and government affairs throughout the Middle East, Africa, CIS regions, Europe, Asia, Australia, North America and Latin America. She also has extensive experience working with U.S. government agencies, including Homeland Security, Department of Defence, Department of State, Department of Justice, and various U.S. intelligence agencies. In her role at ISI Consultants, Ms. Abbas leads the business development activities of the firm, which includes developing and leveraging international relationships to serve our clients. She also acts as the firm’s key liaison with US and foreign government departments, agencies and embassies in support of international business efforts. Before joining ISI Consultants, Ms. Abbas was the Director for International Business at Leo A. Daly, an internationally recognized leader in the design of the built environment that is consistently ranked among the top design firms in the world. Prior to that, she ran her own consulting firm, working with companies on the set-up, development and implementation of their international business and providing market intelligence and consumer insight to capitalize on new business opportunities in international markets. Ms. Abbas also served as International Marketing Liaison at Pelco (a subsidiary of Schneider Electric) and as International Business Development Manager at Perity Land Inc. the largest commodity exporter in North America. She was also employed at L-3, as a consultant at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, supporting Operation Enduring Freedom during 2002- 2003 and as a news reporter at Radio Free Asia. Ms. Abbas has also worked as a linguist and translator for several federal agencies including work for the US State Department in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and for President George W. Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush. Ms. Abbas holds a Bachelor of Science from Xinjiang University in China and completed a graduate program in International Business from California State University in Fresno. Outside of work Ms. Abbas has been an active campaigner for human rights and works closely with members of U.S. Senate, Congressional Committees, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, the U.S. Department of State and several other US government departments and agencies.
In a surreal read she has worked for almost every arm of the US regime change machine: from Radio free Asia, US State department, Homeland Security, Department of justice and “various US intelligence agencies”.
So tied to the United States she even worked at Guantanamo Bay during the Bush administration.
Given she worked at Guantanmo Bay it would be interesting to find out her role there. Was she a translator while the CIA torturers beat, shackled, sleep deprived and water boarded detainees against the Geneva convention?
As displayed in a recent article in how the West is ramping up hybrid warfare against China, the NED ( a regime change arm of the United States) proudly displays the fact they pour 22 million US dollars into the Xinjiang region to fuel separatism.
Apparently this is enough to get you an AMA on reddit.

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A screenshot of Rushan Abbas’s page when she was an ISI consultant.

https://medium.com/@rsahthion/a-reddit- ... 667c098b77

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2019 11:35 pm
by blindpig
December 15, 2019
Media Suppressed Evidence Of The OPCW's 'Chemical Attack' Manipulations - There Is Now More Of It
A journalist describes why he resigned when his outlet suppressed his reporting about manipulations within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

Meanwhile Wikileaks published additional evidence that the OPCW Manufactured A Pretext For War By Suppressing Its Own Scientists' Research:

Leaks from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) prove that the OPCW management ignored or manipulated reports its Fact Finding Mission had written about the April 2018 Douma incident in Syria.
...
The OPCW management ignored that the technical, chemical and medical analysis of its own specialists exculpated the Syrian government from the allegation that it poisoned some 40 people in Douma by dropping Chlorine canisters from a helicopter.
The new documents published by Wikileaks include the original Interim Report written by members of the Fact Finding Mission of the OPCW who were on the grounds in Douma to investigate that case. The original Interim Report was suppressed by the OPCW management and a rewritten Interim Report and manipulated Final Report were published. They made it look as if the Syrian government was guilty of a chemical attack. At least two whistleblowers have gone public and some 20 OPCW inspectors have internally protested to their management.

From Wikileaks' introduction:

WikiLeaks is also releasing the original preliminary report for the first time along with the redacted version (that was released by the OPCW) for comparison. Additionally, we are publishing a detailed comparison of the original interim report with the redacted interim report and the final report along with relevant comments from a member of the original fact finding mission. These documents should help clarify the series of changes that the report went through, which skewed the facts and introduced bias according to statements made by the members of the FFM.
The well respected Mail of Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens reports of additional details of the case:

The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a senior official at the Organisation for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) demanded the ‘removal of all traces’ of a document which undermined claims that gas cylinders had been dropped from the air – a key element of the ‘evidence’ that the Syrian regime was responsible.
...
The original interim report also mentioned for the first time doubts about the origin of the cylinders, saying: ‘The FFM [Fact-Finding Mission] team is unable to provide satisfactory explanations for the relatively moderate damage to the cylinders allegedly dropped from an unknown height, compared to the destruction caused to the rebar-reinforced roofs.
The videos from the Douma incident showed the undamaged pressure vessel 'sleeping' on a bed.

Image

Those who said 'Assad did it' never explained this. A highly pressurized cylinder was allegedly dropped from a helicopter flying at considerable height to escape the 'rebels' air defenses. It then allegedly crashed through a re-enforced concrete roof, bounced off the floor and landed on the bed. How did the cylinder end up with having nearly no damage to itself? My learned engineering 'feel' on this says that any pressurized vessel dropped from more than 500 meters (1,640 ft) height would either have ruptured on impact, or it would have bounced off (vid) and not penetrated through the roof. It would have been severely damaged. This is the primary reason why I never considered the alleged Douma 'chemical attack' to be a truthful story. There are many additional facts and indications (see our previous reports linked at the end) that make it obvious that the Douma incident was staged.
Hitchens also reports of more shenanigans at the OPCW. The impact analysis of the cylinder by the FFM engineering member Ian Henderson, published by Wikileaks, was not only suppressed by the OPCW management but eradicated from its records:

But perhaps most shocking of all were the actions of a senior OPCW official whose name is known to The Mail on Sunday and who is known to some of the organisation’s staff as ‘Voldemort’.
Mr Henderson tried to get his research included in the final report, but when it became clear it would be excluded, he lodged a copy in a secure registry, known as the Documents Registry Archive (DRA).

This is normal practice for such confidential material, but when ‘Voldemort’ heard about it, he sent an email to subordinates saying: ‘Please get this document out of DRA … And please remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever in DRA’.

Next to the Mail on Sunday the Italian newspaper la Repubblica is the only other 'western' mainstream outlet that reported on the manipulated OPCW reports. The author of its two pieces says that the OPCW is blocking all requests for comments:

stefania maurizi @SMaurizi - 10:40 UTC · 15 Dec 2019
3. unfortunately, @OPCW has NOT provided any clarification. Throughout the last 18 years of our journalistic profession, we've worked on another important international agency: @iaeaorg, they have always been cooperative. We find the lack of clarifications by @OPCW unacceptable

Other mainstream media have been silent on the OPCW fraud.

A journalist at Newsweek, Tareq Haddad, wrote and tried to publish a piece about the OPCW manipulations. The piece was suppressed by the editors of Newsweek. Haddad, who resigned in protest, now published a recommendable long-read which explains what happened:

Lies, Newsweek and Control of the Media Narrative: First-Hand Account.

The piece is remarkable for what it provides on the working process in today's media. Discussing a different piece he wrote for Newsweek Haddad writes:

[This] raises another serious problem at the publication: editors tell journalists what to report.
This article was assigned to me by Alfred on Newsweek’s internal messaging system, as is commonplace for editors to do, and I felt obliged to report the story, although I had concerns and it is not one I personally would have chosen to do. I raised these concerns with Alfred—whose background is in video editing, not journalism—but instead of ditching the story, a new angle was suggested and a new headline was provided too. Feeling that I couldn’t challenge his authority any further without being rude, I proceeded as best as I could, ...
...
This practice of editors telling journalists what to write, with what angle and with headlines already assigned is completely backwards and is the cause of numerous problems. How can journalists find genuine newsworthy developments if what to write has already been scripted for them?

I spoke to several Newsweek journalists about this very problem prior to my departure and they shared the same concerns.

In the description of my working process - How Moon of Alabama Is Made - I explained that finding the headline to a piece is one of the very last steps before publishing it:

Then follow the last three tasks - find a headline, write a summarizing intro sentence and formulate the end.
That is simply because serious reporting or analysis of issues can not assume a certain outcome. There are always new aspects to a story which develop only while it is researched and written. To start the writing process with an already assigned headline is not journalism. It is stenography.

Tareq Haddad explains the 'External Control of the Media Narrative' by reflecting on the 'so-called' foreign affairs editor of Newsweek, Dimi Reider:

I glanced at his resume and was honored to be working with such an accomplished foreign affairs journalist. I had genuinely hoped to build a closer relationship to him.
That was why I was so bewildered when he flatly refused to publish the OPCW revelations. Surely any editor worth their salt would see this as big? Of course, I understood that the implications of such a piece would be substantial and not easy to report—it was the strongest evidence of lies about Syria to date—but surely most educated people could see this coming? Other evidence was growing by the day.

But no. As the earlier messages showed, there was no desire to report these revelations, regardless of how strong the evidence appeared to be. Dimi was simply happy to defer to Bellingcat—a clearly dubious organization as others have taken the time to address, such as here and here—instead of allowing journalists who are more than capable of doing their own research to do their job.

It was this realization that made me start to question Dimi. When I looked a little deeper, he was the missing piece.

It turns out that Dimi Reider is a creature trained by the Council of Foreign Relations, the Wall Street's Think Tank, and was the founder and editor of a magazine funded by the Rockefeller Brother's Fund. He is a member of the insider club.

Hadder concludes:

This conflict of interests may be known to other journalists in the trade, but I will repeat: this is unacceptable to me.
The U.S. government, in an ugly alliance with those the profit the most from war, has its tentacles in every part of the media—imposters, with ties to the U.S. State Department, sit in newsrooms all over the world. Editors, with no apparent connections to the member’s club, have done nothing to resist. Together, they filter out what can or cannot be reported. Inconvenient stories are completely blocked. As a result, journalism is quickly dying. America is regressing because it lacks the truth.

Those words are true and they are the very reason why Tareq Haddad will never again be able to work as a journalist in a mainstream 'western' news outlet. Those 'journalists' are not supposed to reveal the truth. It is on us blogger minions to reveal it.



(This is a Moon of Alabama fundraiser week. Please consider to support our work.)

---
Previous Moon of Alabama coverage of the Douma incident and its aftermath:

April 8 2018 - Syria - Timelines Of 'Gas Attacks' Follow A Similar Scheme (Update II)
April 9 2018 - Syria - Any U.S. Strike Will Lead to Escalation
Apr 11 2018 - Syria - A U.S. Attack Would Be Futile - But Serve A Purpose - by M. K. Bhadrakumar
Apr 11 2018 - Trump Asks Russia To Roll Over - It Won't
Apr 12 2018 - Syria - Threat Of Large War Recedes But May Come Back
Apr 13 2018 - Syria - Manipulated Videos Fail To Launch World War III - Updated
Apr 14 2018 - F.U.K.U.S. Strikes Syria - Who Won?
Apr 16 2018 - Syria - Pentagon Hides Attack Failure - 70+ Cruise Missiles Shot Down
Apr 19 2018 - Syria - Who Is Stalling The OPCW Investigation In Douma?
Apr 20 2018 - Syria Sitrep - Cleanup Around Damascus - WMD Rumors Prepare For New U.S. Attack
Jul 6 2018 - Syria - OPCW Issues First Report Of 'Chemical Weapon Attack' in Douma
Jul 7 2018 - Syria - Mainstream Media Lie About Watchdog Report On The 'Chemical Attack' In Douma
May 13 2019 - Syria - OPCW Engineering Assessment: The Douma 'Chemical Weapon Attack' Was Staged
Nov 16 2019 - OPCW Whistleblowers: Management Manipulated Reports - Douma 'Chemical Weapon Attack' Was Staged
Nov 29 2019 - OPCW Manufactured A Pretext For War By Suppressing Its Own Scientists' Research
Nov 30 2019 - OPCW Manipulation Of Its Douma Report Requires A Fresh Look At The Skripal 'Novichok' Case
Dec 2 2019 - As The OPCW Is Accused Of False Reporting U.S. Propaganda Jumps To Its Help
Posted by b on December 15, 2019 at 13:24 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/12/m ... of-it.html

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Posted: Mon Dec 16, 2019 1:23 pm
by blindpig
MILITIAS AND DIGITAL COMBATANTS: THE LABORATORY OF WAR 2.0 IN BOLIVIA
7 Dec 2019 , 3:06 pm .

The coup d'etat against Evo Morales last November 10 combined different elements that served to specify and legitimize it. The instant creation of bots served as an army of virtual mercenaries that contributed to the establishment of a social media narrative that denied the facts.

The specific function of the bots, in the first place, was to position the trend #BoliviaNoHayGolpe on the social network Twitter at the same time in which Morales denounced to the international community the regime change against him.
Luis Assardo

@luisassardo
Luego que Evo Morales @evoespueblo publicó un tuit con la frase "Denuncio ante el mundo" de forma orgánica algunas cuentas empezaron a usar #BoliviaNoHayFraude. En poco tiempo llegaron cuentas con pocos o sin seguidores y se amplificó. Hay un esfuerzo en crear una narrativa.

Video insertado
58
23:59 - 10 nov. 2019
Información y privacidad de Twitter Ads
52 personas están hablando de esto
On the other hand, it was sought to criminalize the Bolivian president by forcing his figure as a dictator, even though he was reelected as president on October 20 with a 10% advantage over his closest contender, Carlos Mesa.

This projection served to justify the establishment of the de facto government of Jeanine Áñez and subsequent actions, including the dismantling of the Plurinational State, persecution against indigenous leaders and the Evo Morales party, repression and the use of military force to contain resistance to coup .

The most scandalous case of the influence of bots in public opinion was the user @suarezluis , a supposed US soldier who issued 69 retuit in favor of the coup, amount of interactions considered as an impossible "record" for a personal account, Julian says Macías Tovar , head of the Podemos networks in Spain.

Image

The table shows the top 10 of the number of retweets of @suarezluis per second, "automation of retweets" (Photo: @ruben_casa)
THE SUDDEN POSITIONING OF ÁÑEZ AND CAMACHO IN THE TWITTER TRENDS
The sudden appearance of Luis Fernando Camacho and Jeanine Áñez in the tendencies as leaders marked an antecedent in the new paradigms of media manipulation.

According to the user @BarriPdm, who also directs the networks of the aforementioned Spanish party, the leadership of these key characters in the coup against Evo Morales was driven through circumstantially created bots to validate the de facto government.

It also highlights that they keep a pattern of interactions with related accounts that mediately supported the forced departure of the Bolivian president.


@BarriPdmx
· 23 nov. 2019
En respuesta a @BarriPdmx
Continuo con el hilo porque como decía Super Ratón... "No se vayan todavía, aún hay más"👇


Barri

@BarriPdmx
Me había centrado en la cuenta LuisFerCamachoV y asociado a la de JeanineAnez por ser las más conocidas, pero resulta ser un entramado donde muchas cuentas mas se beneficiaron de esta inyección.

Image
6
17:24 - 23 nov. 2019
Información y privacidad de Twitter Ads
Ver los otros Tweets de Barri
ANOTHER FORM OF CYBERWAR
These and other forms of unconventional warfare are currently applied in various ways. In general terms, the way to "weaken the enemy through coordinated attacks in the digital space" is sought, says a RT note .

Alejandra Morán, an expert in law and cybersecurity by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), points out to the Russian media that "they are no longer soldiers firing at the enemy face to face, now they are computer criminals operating from the shadow, in which they do not you have no idea who did it, or when they will attack again and that, in addition, they have political and / or military objectives. "

With the development of the field of information technologies in recent years, this space has become vital for the imposition of hegemonic powers, even from the geopolitical point of view.

In the case of Bolivia, an operation that occurred under the complicit look of the administrators of the company Twitter was evident.

SOCIAL NETWORKS AS POLITICAL OPERATORS?
According to the specifications of Twitter, a Twitterbot is a type of authorized software that controls an account on that social network through the API (the acronym in English of Application Programming Interface) of this service. The virtual robot's computer program allows it to perform all the activities of a personal account.

Despite automation, these accounts are subject to the same rules that define their appropriate or inappropriate use. The latter involves circumventing the limits of use, violating the privacy of users, or sending spam. Incurring in violation of this rule entails suspension of accounts.

For the suspension or blocking as spam the frequency of a human user is taken.
That said, the case of the alleged US military account he retweeted 69 times seems to have gone unnoticed for Twitter controls.

DIGITAL MARKETING AT THE SERVICE OF THE COUP
The journalist and digital communication specialist, Luis Assardo, from Guatemala, in an interview with Mision Verdad, said he had noticed two methods of positioning the narrative that there was no coup against Evo Morales, through Twitter trends.

First, it highlights the fact that not all the newly created accounts during the conjuncture were bots, which operate in an automated manner. Those users were also managed by people. The key to detecting this fact, he points out, was that by mentioning in the aforementioned social network the phenomenon of the large volume of accounts without followers supporting the coup, he received a response from some of these arguing that they had opened the account "to support" their political ideal .

However, the Guatemalan noted that they were users created with a purpose and were not ordinary people. This was deduced because someone who has just entered the social network "does not know the dynamics or the forms of publication". Contrary to this, "these accounts knew how to publish, how to track the issue, how to position a hashtag."

Assardo, who was one of the first to point out this phenomenon in networks, explained that there are digital marketing companies or advertising companies that are dedicated to positioning trends. These companies initially engaged in the tasks for which they were intended, but then "began to offer services to business and political groups to generate public opinion or to counteract other politicians."
Luis Assardo

@luisassardo
Les comparto una serie de publicaciones/hilos sobre manipulación en Twitter sobre el caso de Bolivia. Todos aportan algo.
Vale la pena leerlos.
+ @LoQueSigue_ el 10 de noviembrehttps://twitter.com/LoQueSigue_/status/1193761640480673793?s=20 …

LoQueSigue

@LoQueSigue_
#BoliviaNoHayGolpe: Hay un esfuerzo con bots de crear una narrativa sobre que no hubo golpe de estado contra Evo Morales @evoespueblo https://loquesigue.tv/bolivianohaygolpe ... o-morales/

14
16:44 - 22 nov. 2019
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19 personas están hablando de esto
Although it is difficult to verify whether this campaign was paid or not, what is notable is the effort to sustain trends to manipulate real events. Unlike bots, these accounts are difficult to detect and block because they do not have an "automated behavior."

The other method used according to the researcher was the use of bots created automatically to amplify the message. Being easily detectable by the way they operate, they have a short lifespan. That is why companies turn to SoftPuppet, people who manage several accounts to inflate trends.

THE CYBERTROPA
Assardo also points out that another resource to generate a different perception abroad was the use of trolls, which "carry the voice and direct the dynamics" in what they want to influence.

In a journalistic work by Sebastián de Toma it is delineated that these characters in social networks are characterized by hate campaigns, driven through a violent discourse that, with "the dissemination of false information ( fake news ) seeks to distort the legitimacy of the debate based on facts and, at the same time, discredit those who defend the rights of citizens and publicly warn about their threat or violation, "says an Amnesty International report cited by Toma.

In the case of Bolivia, a caricatured figure of Evo Morales was created to de-legitimize 13 years of management . On the other hand, in one of the periods of greatest conflict in the Andean country, in which the greatest number of deaths were generated, through Twitter, an attempt was made to blame the indigenous movement and the followers of Morales for causing the excesses, to try to mitigate the impact of these.
This is how Evo's paramilitary troops use indigenous brothers @aristeguicnn @soyfdelrincon @lopezobrador_ @evoespueblo #BoliviaDijoNo #NoCoupInBolivia #NoHayGolpeEnBolivia #GolpeDeEstadoEnBoliva #BoliviaMasacre #EvoDictador #EvoEvitovo #EvoEditto #EvoEditto #EvoEditto #EvoEditto #EvoEditto #EvoEditto #EvoEditto #EvoEditto #EvoEditto #EvoMotter #EvoEditto #EvoEditto #EvoMotter #EvoMotto #EvoEbito #EvoEbito #EvoEbito #EvoEbito_EvoEbito #EvoEbito #EvoEbito_EvoEbito

- Nel (@ Nelsoncastelo11) November 16, 2019
According to Assardo, the dynamics of the trolls is generally the same: a real character with many followers appears who throws a message and then the replicators who give it volume, either by retuit or response, arrive to make it a trend.

After the coup d'etat, a narrative was fixed that was artificially validated. This does not deny that a sector of Bolivians was in favor of the coup. However, the fact that social networks constitute a reality in itself cannot be excluded; They have a psychological impact that can exacerbate or dent the mood.

Media and digital manipulations in Bolivia leave another precedent in the use of social networks and their impact on the 21st century regime changes, with the corporate footprints behind the manipulation of the 2.0 consensus.

http://misionverdad.com/trama-global/bo ... en-bolivia
Google Translator

Obviously manipulation, but to what effect irl? To what degree does 'online' affect doings in 'material world'? How does this work?

PS - Twitter has banned me for a week for posting "death to the fascists", a video flew all over me & I got sloppy.

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Posted: Thu Dec 19, 2019 6:12 pm
by blindpig
How the Global North’s Left Media Helped Pave the Way for Bolivia’s Right-Wing Coup
LUCAS KOERNER

Image
Image of anti-Morales protest from Toward Freedom (cc photo: Paulo Fabre, Wikimedia Commons)

In our brave new age of hybrid warfare, corporate media play the role of ideological heavy artillery within the arsenal of Western imperialist powers. Day in and day out, “reputable” establishment outlets bombard progressive and/or anti-imperialist governments in the Global South with endless salvos of smears and libelous misrepresentations (e.g., FAIR.org, 5/23/18, 8/23/18, 4/11/19, 7/25/19).


The cumulative effect is to delegitimize any government that does not abide by Western dictates, justifying coups, murderous economic sanctions, proxy wars and even full-scale invasions. The recent US-sponsored coup d’etat in Bolivia is an instructive case study. In the leadup to Evo Morales’ military ouster, Western media routinely impugned the indigenous president’s democratic credentials, despite his having won re-election by a sizeable margin (FAIR.org, 11/5/19).

But corporate outlets have not been alone in attacking Morales. Progressive and alternative media in the Global North have long portrayed Bolivia’s deposed Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) government as repressive, pro-capitalist and anti-environment—all in the name of “left” critique. Regardless of the stated intention, the net result was to weaken already anemic opposition within Western imperial states to the destruction they inflict abroad.

Equivocating around the coup
In the wake of the November 10 coup, corporate journalists predictably played their part in gaslighting the public, presenting the fascist putsch as a “democratic transition” (FAIR.org, 11/11/19, 11/15/19).

Truly astonishing, however, was the response of Western progressive media, whom one might have expected to unequivocally denounce the coup and demand the immediate reinstatement of Evo Morales.

A dismaying number did not.

Toward Freedom: "Demonstrations in La Paz, Bolivia against electoral fraud and the government of Evo Morales. Photo: Paulo Fabre, Wikimedia Commons."
Image in Towards Freedom accompanying “Bolivia: New Elections are Not Enough” (11/10/19).

In the immediate aftermath of Morales’s ouster, Towards Freedom (11/11/19, 11/15/19, 11/16/19) published the perspectives of several Bolivian and Latin American intellectuals playing down the reality of a coup d’etat and drawing false equivalences between the Morales government and the fascist right. Other articles posted in days prior accused the government of fraud, justifying the coup to come (Towards Freedom, 11/8/19, 11/10/19). The Vermont-based outlet, with historic ties to the Non-Aligned Movement, declined to publish any alternative Bolivian points of view unambiguously opposing the coup.

Other progressive outlets correctly identified Morales’ overthrow as a coup, but felt compelled to question the indigenous leader’s democratic legitimacy for the sake of “nuance.”

While condemning the coup and rightly dismissing the baseless electoral fraud allegations, the editorial board of NACLA Report on the Americas (11/13/19) nevertheless refrained from voicing solidarity with Morales and the MAS party. Instead, the publication took MAS to task for the “slow erosion of progressive aspirations” and its failure to transform the “patriarchal and prebendal political system.” Even NACLA’s denunciation of the coup was at best lukewarm, citing “MAS’s own role and a history of political miscalculations,” before noting that “the unfolding pattern of rightist revanchism, the role of oligarchic forces and external actors, and the final arbitrating role played by the military, suggests that we are witnessing a coup.”

A subsequent article published by NACLA (10/15/19) preferred to debate whether Morales’ military ouster constituted a coup, failing to note the baseless character of the OAS’s fraud allegations and attributing the fascist right’s “racialized violence” to “polarization.” The authors, Linda Farthing and Olivia Arigho-Stiles, actually made the outlandish claim that assessing if Morales’ ouster was bad for democracy was “complicated.”

Meanwhile, a Verso Blog interview (11/15/19) with Forrest Hylton and Jeffrey Webber made no call for Morales’ democratic mandate to be respected, instead urging international leftists to “insist on the right of Bolivians to self-determination” without “refrain[ing] from criticism of Morales.”

Far from outliers, these editorial positions are very much par for the course in progressive media coverage of Bolivia over the past months and years.

The making of an ecocidal murderer
In the leadup to the October 20 election, many outlets drew or otherwise insinuated false equivalences between Morales and Brazilian ultra-right President Jair Bolsonaro in response to the tropical forest fires in both nations.

Despite rejecting such an equivalence, NACLA (8/30/19) nonetheless blamed the policies of both “extractivist governments” for “stoking destruction in the Amazon and beyond,” while casting Global North countries as having a responsibility to exert effective “pressure” in lieu of paying their historically accrued climate debt.

Others were less subtle. Writing for UK-based Novara Media (8/26/19), Claire Wordley explicitly compared the Morales government to Bolsonaro in Brazil, calling MAS policies “every bit as extractivist and damaging as those of the capitalists Morales claims to hate.” More damning, she cites Jhanisse Vaca-Daza, a Western-backed regime change operative, to disparage the Morales government’s handling of the fires.

Truthout: Bolivian President Evo Morales’s Ecocide Is a Genocide Image
Manuela Picq (Truthout, 9/26/19) charges Evo Morales with “genocide.”

A piece in Truthout (9/26/19) took hyperbolic slander to new heights, likening Morales to Bolsonaro and accusing the Bolivian leader of “genocide.” “Evo Morales played green for a long-time, but his government is deeply colonial…like Bolsonaro in Brazil,” Manuela Picq wrote, going on to cite unnamed “Bolivians” who brand the indigenous president a “murderer of nature.” Picq offered no analysis concerning how Western leftists’ failure to shift imperialist political-economic relations has contributed to Global South countries’ ongoing dependence on extractive industries.

The “extractivist” critiques of Morales are hardly new, going back to his government’s controversial 2011 plan to build a highway through the Isiboro Secure Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS). As Federico Fuentes pointed out in Green Left Weekly (republished in NACLA, 5/21/14), the dominant extractivism/anti-extractivism frame of the conflict served to obscure the political and economic dimensions of imperialism.

While the highway did indeed engender important endogenous opposition—which was largely centered on the route, rather than the project per se—the main organization behind the protests, the Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas de Bolivia, was being financed by Washington and backed by the right-wing Santa Cruz oligarchy.

Although the USAID’s funding of the Confederación is publicly notorious, many progressive outlets prefer to omit it from their reporting (NACLA, 8/1/13, 8/21/17, 11/20/19; ROAR, 11/3/14, 3/11/14; In These Times, 11/16/12; Viewpoint Magazine, 11/18/19). When foreign interference is mentioned, it is generally presented as an unsubstantiated allegation from the Morales government.

In a particularly revealing case, ROAR (11/3/14) detailed, among its laundry list of “authoritarian” MAS abuses, “obstructing the free functioning of…several NGOs that have sided with the TIPNIS protests,” but avoided any mention of foreign and local right-wing ties to those same NGOs.

This whitewashing of imperialist structure and agency ultimately allows Morales to be vulgarly caricatured as a two-faced “strongman” who “gives to the poor but takes from the environment” (In These Times, 8/27/15).

Passive solidarity?
The “extractivist” critique circulated by many progressive outlets foregrounds a more generalized reproach of the MAS for failing to live up to its socialist discourse.

Jacobin: Bolivia’s Passive Revolution Image
Jacobin (10/29/15) saw in Morales’ administration “disquieting new forms of class rule and domination.”

Writing in Jacobin (1/12/14; also see 10/29/15), Jeffrey Webber accused the MAS of running a “compensatory state,” whose legitimacy “conferred by relatively petty handouts runs on the blood of extraction.” Under this top-down “passive revolution,” the “repressive” state “co-opts and coerces…opposition…and builds an accompanying ideological apparatus to defend multinationals.”

Webber’s long-running argument that the legacy of Bolivia’s MAS government is “reconstituted neoliberalism” has been challenged by critics, who point to the shifting terrain of class forces under Morales.

Bracketing the empirical veracity of Webber’s claims, it is striking that he dedicates virtually no space to exploring the role Western imperial states play in reproducing Bolivia’s extractive model and constraining possibilities for its transcendence.

Rather, the focus is always on MAS’s allegedly insidious agency “on behalf of capital,” and scarcely ever on Western leftists’ own anti-imperialist impotence, which never appears as an independent variable in explaining the Global South’s revolutionary failings.

The political effect of such one-sided analysis is to effectively equate the “neoliberal” MAS with its right-wing opponents, given that, as Webber put it, “Morales has been a better night watchman over private property and financial affairs than the right could have hoped for.”

Such lines might come as a surprise to current readers of Jacobin, which has fiercely opposed the coup (e.g., 11/14/19, 11/18/19, 12/3/19), whose fascist brutality has thrown to the wind any notion of left/right equivalence. But by now, the damage is already done.

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https://fair.org/home/how-the-global-no ... oimviXAFzM

Most of ths article accurate, the part I left out liberal pablum.