NATO plans for dirty tricks in Syria and a global disinformation campaign
According to a report on VoltaireNet.org, at two recent meetings in Qatar and a further meeting in Riyadh, operatives of the Arab dictatorships and NATO met to coordinate a disinformation campaign including interference with satellite broadcasts to conceal a coup against the Syrian Government. As the article notes, the actions proposed, including the planned complicity of the international newsmedia violate intentional law. Nazi German propagandists were tried at Nuremburg for committing similar crimes.
Previously published in Land Destroyer as URGENT: Expose NATO Dirty Tricks in Syria BEFORE They Happen and originally on Voltaire.net as NATO preparing vast disinformation campaign on 11 June 2012.
Source of cartoon: www.historians.org/projects/giroundtable/Propaganda/Propaganda3.htm Another, better source for discussion on the nature of war propaganda is http://www.globalissues.org/article/157/war-propaganda-and-the-media#PropagandaandWar.
In a few days, perhaps as early as Friday, June 15, at noon, the Syrians wanting to watch their national TV stations will see them replaced on their screens by TV programs created by the CIA. Studio-shot images will show massacres that are blamed on the Syrian Government, people demonstrating, ministers and generals resigning from their posts, President Al-Assad fleeing, the rebels gathering in the big city centers, and a new government installing itself in the presidential palace.
This operation of disinformation, directly managed from Washington by Ben Rhodes, the US deputy national security adviser for strategic communication, aims at demoralizing the Syrians in order to pave the way for a coup d'etat. NATO, discontent about the double veto of Russia and China, will thus succeed in conquering Syria without attacking the country illegally. Whichever judgment you might have formed on the actual events in Syria, a coup d'etat will end all hopes of democratization.
The Arab League has officially asked the satellite operators Arabsat and Nilesat to stop broadcasting Syrian media, either public or private (Syria TV, Al-Ekbariya, Ad-Dounia, Cham TV, etc.) A precedent already exists because the Arab League had managed to censure Libyan TV in order to keep the leaders of the Jamahiriya from communicating with their people. There is no Hertz network in Syria, where TV works exclusively with satellites. The cut, however, will not leave the screens black.
Actually, this public decision is only the tip of the iceberg. According to our information several international meetings were organized during the past week to coordinate the disinformation campaign. The first two were technical meetings, held in Doha (Qatar); the third was a political meeting and took place in Riyad (Saudi Arabia).
The first meeting assembled PSYOP officers, embedded in the satellite TV channels of Al-Arabiya, Al-Jazeera, BBC, CNN, Fox, France 24, Future TV and MTV. It is known that since 1998, the officers of the US Army Psychological Operations Unit (PSYOP) have been incorporated in CNN. Since then this practice has been extended by NATO to other strategic media as well.
They fabricated false information in advance, on the basis of a "story-telling" script devised by Ben Rhodes's team at the White House. A procedure of reciprocal validation was installed, with each media quoting the lies of the other media to render them plausible for TV spectators. The participants also decided not only to requisition the TV channels of the CIA for Syria and Lebanon (Barada, Future TV, MTV, Orient News, Syria Chaab, Syria Alghad) but also about 40 religious Wahhabi TV channels to call for confessional massacres to the cry of "Christians to Beyrouth, Alawites into the grave!."
The second meeting was held for engineers and technicians to fabricate fictitious images, mixing one part in an outdoor studio, the other part with computer generated images. During the past weeks, studios in Saudi Arabia have been set up to build replicas of the two presidential palaces in Syria and the main squares of Damascus, Aleppo and Homs. Studios of this type already exist in Doha (Qatar), but they are not sufficient.
The third meeting was held by General James B. Smith, the US ambassador, a representative of the UK, prince Bandar Bin Sultan (whom former U.S. president George Bush named his adopted son so that the U.S. press called him "Bandar Bush"). In this meeting the media actions were coordinated with those of the Free "Syrian" Army, in which prince Bandar's mercenaries play a decisive role.
The operation had been in the making for several months, but the U.S. National Security Council decided to accelerate the action after the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, notified the White House that he would oppose by all means, even by force, any illegal NATO military intervention in Syria.
The operation has a double intent: the first is to spread false information, the second aims at censuring all possible responses.
The hampering of TV satellites for military purposes is not new. Under pressure from Israel, the USA and the EU blocked Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi, Libyan and Iranian TV channels, one after the other. However, no satellite channels from other parts of the world were censured.
The broadcast of false news is also not new, but four significant steps have been taken in the art of propaganda during the last decade.
- In 1994, a pop music station named "Free Radio of the Thousand Hills" (RTML) gave the signal for genocide in Rwanda with the cry, "Kill the cockroaches!"
- In 2001, NATO used the media to impose an interpretation of the 9/11 attacks and to justify its own aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq. At that time already, it was Ben Rhodes who had been commissioned by the Bush administration to concoct the Kean/Hamilton Commission report on the attacks.
- In 2002, the CIA used five TV channels (Televen, Globovision, ValeTV and CMT) to make the public in Venezuela believe that phantom demonstrators had captured the elected president, Hugo Chávez, forcing him to resign. In reality he was the victim of a military coup d'etat.
- In 2011, France 24 served as information ministry for the Libyan CNT, according to a signed contract. During the battle of Tripoli, NATO produced fake studio films, then transmitted them via Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, showing phantom images of Libyan rebels on the central square of the capital city, while in reality they were still far away. As a consequence, the inhabitants of Tripoli were persuaded that the war was lost and gave up all resistance.
Nowadays the media do not only support a war, they produce it themselves.
This procedure violates the principles of International Law, first of all Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights relating to the fact of receiving and imparting information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." Above all, the procedure violates the United Nations General Assembly resolution, adopted after the end of World War II, to prevent further wars. Resolutions 110, 381 and 819 forbid "to set obstacles to free exchange of information and ideas" (like cutting off Syrian TV channels) and "all propaganda provoking or encouraging threats to peace, breaking peace, and all acts of aggression". By law, war propaganda is a crime against peace, the worst of crimes, because it facilitates war crimes and genocide.
#WarPropaganda" id="WarPropaganda">Appendix: War propaganda from Australian newspapers which violate international law.
The misreporting of the Syrian conflict in order to overcome public opposition to NATO's planned war against Syria, examples of which are shown below, are no less violations of Interntional law than was Nazi Propagandist Hans Fritzsche who was tried at Nuremburg for his crimes.
From The Age newspaper
Syria escalation worries UN, US
More than 100 people have been killed in violence across Syria, as international mediator Kofi Annan says he is "gravely concerned" by the ...
Syrian army using kids as human shields of 9 June 2012
The Syrian army has killed at least 23 civilians in two protest cities, a watchdog says, as international outcry mounts over a massacre in a central village. ...
Syrian army using kids as human shields of12 June 2012
Syrian troops have tortured children, executed them and used children as young as eight as "human shields" during military raids against ...
Murder of children tops UN's shame list of 12 June 2012
Syrian troops have tortured children, executed them and used children as young as eight as "human shields" during military raids against rebels, according to a UN report to be released today.
The United Nations named the Syrian government one of the worst offenders on its annual "list of shame" of conflict countries where children are killed, tortured and forced to fight.
The Syrian army has killed at least 17 civilians, including nine women and three children, in the flashpoint southern town of Daraa, the Syrian ...
From The Australian newspaper
Syrian army 'uses kids as human shields' of June 12, 2012
SYRIAN troops have tortured children, executed them and used children as young as eight as "human shields" during military raids against rebels, according to a UN report.
The United States voiced fears that Syria's government is planning a new massacre, as regime helicopters fired on rebel stronghold towns and raging violence killed over 100 people. ...
Syrians suffer - UN paralysed of June 11, 2012
As the bloodbath in Syria continues, with grotesque new atrocities being committed on a daily basis, the international community must not allow itself to be frozen into inaction or acquiescence by the veto wielded at the United Nations by President Bashar al-Assad's two protectors, Russia and China.
Tyrants the world over - be they Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, Sudan's Omar al-Bashir, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or North Korea's Kim Jong-un - rest easier knowing that when it comes to human rights and decency, they can count on support from Moscow and Beijing. Mr Assad is no exception. ...
Further editorial comment: The contents of all the items listed above are demonstrable fabrications of which their authors cannot be unaware. These lies are certain to be paid for in coming days with Syrian lives. In a fair trial those who authored and edited these lies would almost certainly be convicted and jailed for violating international law.
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