John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO A STORY IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

A lovely little girl, and obviously it is extremely unpleasant to think she is dead.

But that’s just part of why this is such shabby piece of reportage by The Independent.

The Russians have been extraordinarily careful in their targeting, all targets being double-checked. I don’t think anyone could do a more careful job, and certainly the United States in places like Afghanistan and Iraq never even tried.

So the Russians should be credited with the care they’ve taken.

What most bothers me in your story is the complete lack of perspective The Independent displays, and it really is perspective that determines when a story is propaganda, effective propaganda always starting with something true.

A couple of years ago, Israel killed more than 500 children in Gaza plus another 1,700 people. There were streams of blood in the streets. You did not have pictures – let alone endearing pictures like this one – of any of Israel’s victims.

An estimated 250,000 people have died in the outsider assault (it is not a civil war) underway on Syria. In an Arab country with a young population, a great portion of them had to have been children. Where are your pictures there?

Especially in light of the fact that the people doing all that killing are paid and supported by Britain’s friends and allies – Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and America.

Where are your pictures of the children in Yemen killed regularly by David Cameron’s friend and business associate, the senile and vicious King of Saudi Arabia? What about pictures of those killed in Saudi attacks on two Doctors Without Borders’ hospitals in Yemen recently? And again, Yemen being a country with a young population, many of Saudi Arabia’s victims just have to be children.

 

John Chuckman

COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

I think we all instinctively knew this, but it is always nice to have hard supporting evidence.

Blair is so clearly an extreme narcissist, perhaps even a full-blown psychopath.

His personal ambitions could only be fulfilled in partnership with the United States, Britain not truly having any longer sufficient weight to throw around in the world.

George Bush offered Tony Blair, given Blair’s personality, the opportunity of a lifetime: be a genuine war prime minister, get to portray yourself as an opponent of tyrants, experience the gratitude afterwards of America and its satraps (millions flowing in still), hear your name rung out with praise, and feel very consequential.

The dark eccentricity of Tony Blair seems as though it should have been obvious to the public from the start.

He and his wife are genuinely bizarre figures. But we all have political systems full of glitches which do not serve genuine democracy, Mr. Cameron for example now serving with 35% of the vote.

To see good examples of the weird Blairs:

http://chuckmangrotesques.blogspot.ca/2010/10/blairs-tony-and-cherie-looking.html

http://chuckmangrotesques.blogspot.ca/2008/09/blog-post_7098.html

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Response to another comment about being time to look into Doctor Kelly’s mysterious death in those days:

Doctor Kelly, indeed.

But I doubt that was Blair’s work, although he certainly helped cover it up.

Kelly made the mistake of being honest with BBC and others. Recall how BBC got its wings clipped, essentially for telling some truth, a commodity with which Tony Blair was never comfortable. These events suggested to other parties that Kelly might spill some seriously embarrassing additional knowledge.

Israel certainly is a possible candidate for his murder, because Kelly, the arms expert, knew where the nuclear bodies were buried, including what happened to the fissile material from South Africa’s small nuclear arsenal after apartheid’s collapse, which some speculate covertly went to Israel.

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Response to a reader comment:

 

“…murderous regimes like Saddam’s”?

You condemn yourself out of your own mouth for lack of knowledge and meaningful perspective.

Saddam was a nasty piece of work, but the world has many such men including the often overlooked, blood-drenched Netanyahu, and Saddam’s acts were nothing compared to Tony and George’s handiwork.

The invasion of Iraq murdered about a million people, destroyed the most advanced society in the Arab world, created two or three million refugees, has close to split the country into rump states, and left millions for years without jobs, electricity, and even clean water.

It also left countless long-lived dangers behind like tons of depleted uranium dust and cluster-bomb bomblets. The invasion of Iraq was horror on a colossal scale.

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

COMMENT WRITTEN TO CBC NEWS

CBC radio news has been in serious decline for years, but in your recent coverage of events in Syria, you have touched bottom.

In every newscast and every news-oriented show, the subject dominates. Even on fluff shows like Mary Ito or Bret Banbury we hear about Syria from people who know nothing about it. The problem all this “coverage” is that you investigate nothing and simply repeat the official American view, endlessly.

You have not one qualified reporter on site. No one interviews Syrian officials. No one interviews Russian officials who include many experts on the region. No one talks to good independent reporters or observers, people such as Robert Fisk.

Your broadcasts would not differ in substance if you simply read press releases from the White House and Pentagon.

Even when you report facts upon which people might agree – as for example the number of refugees from Syria, recently cited at one million – you offer no vitally-important perspective, so the end result is effectively CBC joining the tireless American drumbeat to war.

You should well know that when America invaded Iraq, breaking all international law and humanitarian agreements, it killed at least half a million people and created four million refugees. It then refused to take almost any of the refugees, while Syria took a massive two million. Very heartless of Assad, don’t you think?

You keep repeating the American accusations about Assad using sarin gas. In fact, the only certain use of that horrible stuff has been by the violent rabble called the Free Syrian Army. They used small quantities more than once, material either captured from overrun military posts or supplied by American intermediaries such as Israel, which is known to have stockpiles.

And what is the “evidence” you blindly refer to over and over? I can tell you. It is a supposed recording of Syrian officials supplied by Mossad.

Yes, Mossad, the very people who pride themselves at deception and who have a long track record of expertly using it, even in several cases successfully against the United States.

And the recording, even if it could be proved authentic, is ambiguous as to meaning.

You do not kill thousands of people and destroy a country’s infrastructure citing rubbish like that.

The truth is that the entire Syrian “civil war,” as I cannot but believe some of your better journalists must know, is an American black-operation, part of a long series of violent efforts to create a huge cordon sanitaire around Israel. And this particular induced-civil war employs many of the same unsavoury characters typically grouped under the rubric “al Qaeda.”

Recently, this massive covert effort has been failing, despite even more American and Israeli weapons being smuggled to the murderous opposition through Turkey, owing to the successes of Assad’s army. So, now a new casus belli is needed to allow American bombing of Assad’s forces.

The “formula” for this kind of operation was worked out in the invasion of Afghanistan where Americans used everything from Tomahawk missiles to B-52s (with hideous cluster bombs as well as “block-busters”) while locals – the Northern Alliance in that case, including such blood-thirsty creatures as General Dostum – did most of the fighting on the ground. The formula was successfully and cynically repeated in Libya.

The cynics running the induced-horror in Syria for America have gone to the extent now of supplying the rabble with small quantities of sarin to generate a tipping point so Libya can be repeated. It is brutal cynicism with absolutely no regard for Syria’s people.

And remember, if you associate America’s impulses in Syria with either the rule of law or humanitarianism, it was Americans who employed white phosphorus, flame throwers, depleted-uranium (cancer-inducing) ammunition, and cluster bombs in Iraq. Some great defenders of humanitarian principles to be judging what anyone else does.

I realize you cannot present all these underlying realities (after all, your president would be called into Stephen Harper’s office immediately for a chair-throwing meeting), but you do not need to sink to the contemptible level of just repeating every American fabrications with no authority of on-site journalism and no expert opinion.

Shabby, simply shabby.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Turkey is acting as stalking horse for the United States and Israel in their desire to topple Assad and dismember Syria.

Here Syria legitimately downed a warplane either within or on its frontiers.

Yet when Israel murdered about ten Turkish citizens during its high-seas piracy of a humanitarian ship, Turkey took no such action with NATO.

This entire business is a set-up.

The Free Syrian Army is a fraud, an American-Israeli creation, and there too Turkey plays a role in providing refuge for what a group fairly characterized as terrorists.

America and Israel simple do not think any international laws or conventions apply to them when they want something outside their territory.

It is a world governed by bullies they are creating.
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“According to Reuters news (I know, I know….not very reliable), Syria announced that it has killed several Turks who have infiltrated into Syrian space.
In other news….Iran is asking both parties to cool down.

“Will we ever find out the truth about this plane incident?”

Reuters of course has a well-earned reputation as part of the CIA’s “mighty Wurlitzer,” the intelligence agency’s name for the set of news outlets it manipulates in planting of stories.

We’ve had one story that the plane was not a warplane.

One story that it was a warplane.

One story that it was indeed in Syrian airspace and Turkey was sorry.

And now we have a story that it was in international air space.

Good God, we no longer can get reliable news on anything of importance.

Our entire sense of reality, at least in international affairs, is today reduced to a fantasy creation, a few facts hung, here and there like a few nasty-looking ornaments on an ugly Christmas tree, just enough to make the created story seem plausible.

This is because there is so much concentration in the ownership of news outlets, the hands into which it is concentrated are huge corporations sharing interests with governments, and governments like the United States and Israel view it as their God-given right to constantly play with the lives of others.

In effect, the West today, in such matters, is governed by lies in pursuit of goals without ethics or morality.

“Democracy” and “rights” and “law” are words used in Orwellian fashion by these governments and their loyal followers, words without any genuine meaning, resembling the suggestive and untruthful words used in advertising.