Mainstream Media Caught Exploiting Children in Psy-Op to Sell War to America—It Worked

Shameless aptly describes the dirty dealings of modern war, from drone bombing human targets from afar in denial of all due process and invasions into sovereign lands, to pro-armed aggression propaganda — often brazen fabrications disseminated across media to engender support for otherwise untenable conflict — including that exploiting young children, who could not possibly possess the critical thinking necessary to grasp the messages their words send to the world.

And no better example of this puppetry of children for war profiteering and Western imperialist agenda-pushing exists than in the case of seven-year-old Bana al-Abed — proffered as the voice of innocent victims of the Syrian government’s bombardment of Aleppo — whose Twitter following just surpassed 386,000, after she featured in a corporate media-touted video promoting the United States’ goal of deposing Bashar al-Assad.

A child was chosen by propagandists for a reason.

September 2016 marked the creation of the Bana al-Abed Twitter account, which exploded in popularity by tweeting express “calls early on for action against the Syrian president, and Russia, and with a glaring absence of information or mention of the terrorist factions occupying eastern areas of Aleppo,” as independent journalist, Eva Bartlett, points out.

In one since-deleted tweet — a prime example of the supposed seven-year-old’s keenly bellicose thinking — al-Abed (sometimes spelled, Alabed) putatively implored,

“Dear world, it’s better to start 3rd world war instead of letting Russia & Assad commit #HolocaustAleppo”

Then, on December 13, a ceasefire agreement saw the purging and transfer of terrorist factions and their families from eastern Aleppo — an action which also triggered a flurry of tweets from ostensively unrelated accounts claiming to be in such a perilous state, their words should be considered a “last message” from inside the besieged city. al-Abed, among them, tweeted,

“I am talking to the world now live from east #Aleppo. This is my last moment to either live or die. -Bana”

Advertisment

My name is Bana, I"m 7 years old. I am talking to the world now live from East #Aleppo. This is my last moment to either live or die. – Bana

— Bana Alabed (@AlabedBana) December 13, 2016

Of course, the child and her family survived after safely absconding from Aleppo, stopping in Idlib, and ultimately settling in Turkey, where Bana shortly set to work vilifying the Assad regime and its ally, Russia — not exactly typical, seven-year-old, conflict refugee behavior.

Indeed, the child’s tweets appeared so sophisticated in tone and sentence construction, nuanced in idiomatic expression, and generally complex, Fatemah al-Abed, her mother, eventually had to admit to assisting on the first of the year, tweeting,

“For those wondering how can 7 year old tweet, I help her compose the tweets while she’s with me. I let her read all the replies & she enjoys”

For those wondering how can 7 year old tweet, I help her compose the tweets while she"s with me. I let her read all the replies & she enjoys

— Fatemah Alabed (@FatemahAlabed) January 1, 2017

Ultimately, the mother insisted she would allow Bana to compose social media posts, though suspicions remain that has not happened. Some believe, understandably under the circumstances, Bana may never have composed any tweets herself.

Once she arrived in Turkey, Western media ravenously championed the tear-jerking font of propaganda from the obviously-coached little girl, with CNN’s Alisyn Camerota eagerly extending a microphone, camera, and world stage to Bana.

All told, the platform given Bana comprised a potent elixir for anyone harboring misgivings about the continued dropping of bombs in populated areas of Syria — after all, if this small child pled the case for regime change across international air waves, her story had to be credible, right?

Not so much.

About Bana’s interaction with Camerota, independent journalist, Caitlin Johnstone, points out,

“It was scripted, and Bana was phonetically sounding out words that she did not understand in order to manufacture public support for more US interventionism in Syria.

READ MORE:  5 Stories From 2015 That The Government Wants You To Forget About

“The interview was scripted, and what for me is most shocking is that Alisyn Camerota necessarily had the other half of the script. Bana wouldn’t have been able to improvise answers to unscripted questions, so Camerota was necessarily knowingly acting out a staged, scripted scene and deceiving her audience about its nature. She lied to the American people for the most despicable reason imaginable, and exploited a little child to do it.”

Of all the pro-war propaganda justifying the military-industrial machine’s mere existence, the exploitation of Bana al-Abed and the tellingly similar manipulation of Omran Daqneesh — child victims of conflict championed by the U.S., with goals having next to nothing to do with humanitarianism as so proclaimed — could arguably be deemed the most abominable use of innocents for imperialist purposes in morass in Syria.

Bana’s CNN appearance led to others — including TIME Magazine, which named her one of the top 25 most influential people; the advocacy of CNN journalist, Jake Tapper, who suggested Bana as a viable news source; and, recently, a book deal with Simon & Schuster — despite her inability to form reliably coherent sentences in English.

Another keen example of these discrepancies between written words ostensively belonging to Bana and her statements on video — a collection of misspelled basic words and sophisticated syntax even the casual observer could theorize issued from two, separate people — surfaced in January, when the BBC republished what was said to be her letter to President Donald Trump.

“I lived in Syria my whole life before I left from besieged East Aleppo on December last year. I am part of the Syrian children who suffered from the Syrian war,” Bana al-Abed — a seven-year-old child, putatively writing in her second language — wrote to the president, with bolding added to highlight the more glaringly adult syntax.

“I am very sad about them and wish they were with me because we would play together by right now. I couldn’t play in Aleppo, it was the city of death. …Right now in Turkey, I can go out and enjoy. I can go to school although I didn’t yet. That is why peace is important for everyone including you. …However, millions of Syrian children are not like me right now and suffering in different parts of Syria. They are suffering because of adult people.”

READ MORE:  Putin Calls Out Assassination of Ambassador as "Clearly Provocative" to "Undermine Peace in Syria"

But if the pro-regime change propaganda in the supposed authentic letter weren’t off-putting enough, the BBC implores Trump to consider succumbing emotionally to the child’s pleas to depose Assad — albeit without explicitly stating as much.

“Turkey, where Bana and her family now live, supports the Syrian opposition. But President Trump’s position is not yet clear,” the BBC notes, suggesting that, were the president not to support the U.S.-armed, funded, and trained ‘moderate Syrian rebels’ in opposition to the elected administration of Assad, he would be acting single-handedly against Syria’s war-weary children.

Simple manipulation by the media, a refined vocabulary, and disparities in written and spoken comprehension of the English language obviate only superficially something amiss with the story of Bana al-Abed.

Leery of the niggling details, Bartlett, the journalist, previously interviewed Syrian colleague, Khaled Iskef, on the exploitation of Daqneesh — and revisited the topic in reference to Bana al-Abed. She writes:

“For his research, Iskef did more than look at the social media accounts of the family. He went to their home, which happened to be just meters around the corner from an al-Nusra (Al-Qaeda) headquarters, and less than 400 meters down the street from the main Al-Qaeda headquarters in Aleppo.”

Iskef learned Ghassan al-Abed, Bana’s father, describes himself on Twitter as an “Independent lawyer, Activist against terrorism and ISIS” — but that, as well as any pretense the family randomly became the face of pro-interventionist policy, falls apart upon inspection. Bartlett writes,

“In the al-Abed home, Iskef found a notebook documenting Ghassan’s work with terrorists over the years. According to the notebook (and coinciding with photos formerly on his social media pages) Ghassan Al-Abed was a military trainer for the Islamic Sawfa Brigade, and worked in the Shariah Council in the occupied state Eye Hospital, under the control of ISIS for a time until 2014, and al-Nusra for all of the time that al-Abed was there. The Shariah Council which al-Abed worked with passed decisions on imprisonment and assassination of the captured civilians being tried.”

From the location near vital al-Qaeda headquarters where photos were taken of Bana to her father’s and grandfather’s direct ties to the terrorist group, nothing about this little Syrian girl with massively popular social media accounts is as simple as made to appear.

When extenuating circumstances shred the thin semblance of innocence from an innocent child’s plea, the pro-war propaganda is working precisely as designed — precisely to engender your support for continued Western intervention in a sovereign nation’s conflict.

To propagandists, a child’s lips can do more to rile public outrage against nebulous geopolitical conflicts than any studied presentation on the merits of an aggressive military campaign ever could.

This is not a condemnation of Bana al-Abed. Rather, that condemnation is reserved for the unscrupulous adults eagerly proffering an innocent, photogenic face of the Syrian war — when they know the contrary to be true — to enjoin support for yet more bombs to be dropped on countless other innocent children who will never know the perks of a timely book deal.

10 Years Ago Today, US Military Filmed Themselves Murdering Journalists and then Covered it Up

With a bird’s eye view of the battle-ravaged streets of suburban Baghdad, two U.S. Apache helicopters unleashed a relentless barrage of 30 mm bullets on a group of people the Pentagon claimed were insurgents — injuring two children and killing Reuters photojournalist Namir Noor-Eldeen, camera assistant Saeed Chmagh, their driver, Saleh Matasher Tomal, and at least nine others on July 12, 2007 — the entire incident captured on appallingly stark video.

U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning leaked the abominable footage to Wikileaks, whose publication of this blatant and — judging from blithe cockpit narration among American troops carrying out the attack — zealous murder, gut-checked the entire planet for its glib casualness in meting death from above.

All of the victims seen slaughtered in the video Wikileaks titled Collateral Murder were innocent. Not one person has been held accountable for the slayings.

On the day of the attack exactly ten years ago, the U.S. affirmed the deaths of the two journalists along with the group of “insurgents,” describing the incident as a combat operation against a “hostile force” — and that, in the murkiness of battle, the Reuters reporters might even have been killed by Iraqi militants instead of the American military.

Multiple Freedom of Information Act requests by Reuters for further disclosure on the suspicious deaths of its employees and circumstances surrounding the killings were submitted — to no avail.

Further, the lack of details and information — as well as that the killings had occurred in one of the U.S. empire’s many theaters of war — effectively erased the deaths from the media’s spotlight. Truth that the incident had in actuality comprised an insufferable atrocity remained shielded from public purview.

Advertisment

An inquiry by the U.S. military — which incidentally did not address shooting the driver’s children — found the service members had acted justly, and cleared all of wrongdoing in the matter.

That was the end of it. Case closed. Nothing to see here — trust your government.

Or, it would have been — until the April 2010 publication by Wikileaks of Collateral Murder and an enormous cache of documents covertly leaked by Manning smashed through the closet door secreting one of the U.S.’ nastier skeletons.

Worse, Josh Stieber, a member of the U.S. military company responsible for the killings, claimed the incident didn’t depart from standard operating procedure, stating plainly,

“When I started to see the discussion flowing from [the video], I was surprised at how extreme it was made out to be. What was shown in the video was not out of the ordinary in Iraq. One policy we had that was even more extreme was if a roadside bomb went off, we were supposed to shoot anyone standing in that area. We were told that we needed to make the local population more afraid of us.”

Anyone watching this video, now, a decade removed, in time only, knows U.S. boots still echo all over Iraq and Middle East — and must also know, given the criminal lack of punishment for gross human rights transgressions, that inexcusable violations of human rights continue to be committed with normalized regularity.

Arrested and charged under the notoriously broad Espionage Act, Manning garnered a 35-year sentence in August 2013 for blowing the whistle. After three years in solitary confinement — rightly called torturous for the whistleblower by her supporters — Manning’s remaining sentence was commuted by President Obama and she was released in May.

Christian Christensen wrote for Common Dreams five years after Baghdad attack,

“In a statement by Manning made during her 2013 trial she outlined her motivations for the leak, stating (in relation to Collateral Murder) that one of the most disturbing aspects was the ‘bloodlust’ exhibited by the US military. At one point we can hear members of the aerial weapons team begging a wounded Iraqi to pick up a weapon so that they would have a reason open fire on him once again. This, as Manning put it, was ‘similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass.’ The violence in the video is both dehumanizing and grotesque, and serves to remind viewers of the perversity of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, as well as the subsequent deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.”

Sadly, it seems pro-war propaganda, often subtle in delivery, has so fully inundated American popular culture as to make opposing or criticizing the military — and Washington’s bellicose foreign ‘policy’ — somewhat of a rebellious act. War, thus, continues unimpeded with nary a blip on the mainstream’s apathetic radar.

In fact, just this month the U.S. patted itself on the back for its coalition’s successful wrest of control of Mosul from the terrorist group it played a hand in creating: the Islamic State. Self-congratulatory rhetoric aside, however, human rights advocates paint a far less rosy portrait of the military actions undertaken to effect that victory — one hauntingly reminiscent of Collateral Murder’s chilling revelations.

Amnesty International asserts,

“The scale and gravity of the loss of civilian lives during the military operation to retake Mosul must be publicly acknowledged. The horrors people have witnessed and the disregard for human life by all parties to this conflict must not go unpunished. Entire families have been wiped out, many of whom are still buried under the rubble today. The people of Mosul deserve to know, from their government, that there will be justice and reparation so that the harrowing impact of this operation is duly addressed.”

But that isn’t likely to happen.

It has, after all, been ten years since journalists and innocents were mowed down in the street by the U.S. military, as if the gunmen played a video game; seven years since public release of the Collateral Murder video; and mere months since the person courageous enough to blow the whistle on this disgusting behavior — and more — walked relatively free.

And we are still at war.

CBS Caught Twisting Reality in Fake News Broadcast to Stoke Racial Tensions

In the midst of the ongoing war on dissent disguised as a battle against Fake News, corporate media’s already notorious reputation for publishing false and misleading information has begun spiraling to a new nadir — and, although the Washington Post leads this wretched race to the bottom, CBS News just reported one of the most deceptive whoppers in recent memory.

In fact, it’s an open question whether the CBS News radio report sought to stoke the ever-deepening chasm splitting the nation.

“The viral video of a beating and knife attack in Chicago suggests the assault had racial overtones,” the announcer states. “CBS’ Dean Reynolds tells us the victim is described as a mentally challenged teenager.”

At that point, the broadcast replays audio from footage of the attack, before Reynolds reports,

“In the video, he is choked and repeatedly called the ‘n’ word,” Reynolds says of the victim. “His clothes are slashed and he is terrorized with a knife. His alleged captors repeatedly reference Donald Trump.”

Had listeners not already viewed the video or seen truthful reports of the horrific torture, it would easily be inferred the four attackers were white — and the victim, African American.

But that isn’t the case — indeed, the opposite is true.

Three 18-year-olds, Tesfaye Cooper, Brittany Covington, Jordan Hill, and 24-year-old Tanishia Covington, who are black, have now been charged with hate crimes by Cook County Circuit Judge Maria Kuriakos Ciesil for the malicious assault — during which the young people repeatedly yelled, “Fuck white people” and “Fuck Donald Trump.”

While the attackers did, indeed, scream ‘n****r’ while torturing, brutalizing, and abusing their victim, they are indeed African Americans.

Put simply, CBS mangled the truth — eschewing integrity in favor of Fake News — the same Fake News the organization and the rest of the corporate press falsely accuse independent media of of producing. How ironic.

As media critic Mark Dice notes, “So far CBS hasn’t issued a correction. They haven’t named the editor — haven’t fired the editor — just completely ignored this unbelievably deceptive story.”

What would be CBS’ motive to atrociously relay the assault as the polar opposite of reality remains unclear.

Police weren’t immediately certain of the attackers’ motivations; however, the blatant ‘racial overtones’ CBS suggested — altogether inaccurately — led to the hate crime charges on Friday.

Amid a spate of Fake News published haplessly or intentionally by corporate presstitutes — and the offshoot war on dissent undertaken by the U.S. government over wholly unproven allegations Russia meddled in the election — denouncing errant reporting when it occurs is of the utmost imperative.

Indeed it would seem mainstream media has relinquished all journalistic integrity to manipulate the public mind to fit the narrative deemed acceptable by the U.S. government.

Although the majority of the corporate press’ Fake News has centered around theoretical Russian hackers — aligning with a recent CIA report devoid of any evidence backing the claim — CBS News’ embarrassingly disingenuous characterization of this race-motivated attack still fits a crucial, unstated governmental agenda.

If the American populace is divided along racial lines — and refuses to converse honestly about issues of race — we’re too distracted blaming one another to pay attention to rampant government corruption and rife collusion by the mainstream press.

It is this exact divisive tactic — deft manipulation of the blame game — which has brought us the war on Fake News, the Fake News Russia somehow hacked Democratic Party systems, and Fake News Russians hacked into the electrical grid.

If we’re all pointing fingers at truthful reports as being Fake News, rather than at actual Fake News reported as truth, a general atmosphere of suspicion takes hold, and — as is currently the case — those who deserve blame in this mess escape notice.

CBS’ foray into Fake News with this unethically deceitful report — and the outlet’s failure to retract and clarify — is thus nothing short of inexcusable.

Popular Show “Breaking the Set” Listed as One of the Justifications for Russia Punishment

Washington, D.C. – In what amounts to nothing more than a speculative assessment — which contains no actual evidence of Russian hacking — the much anticipated “Declassified Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections” report from the Intelligence Community was released yesterday.

The report is sorely lacking in any hard evidence, providing nothing new to support their dubious politicized claims of “Russia hacking the election,” and instead devoting a majority of the report to speculative claims about Russian motives and criticism of the Russian television station RT.

As Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity succinctly noted:

What’s the $80-plus billion dollar per year US Intelligence Community’s big beef with RT? One of its big complaints is that RT undermined US democracy when it “broadcast, hosted, and advertised third-party candidate debates…” We are to believe that Russia undermined our political system by giving voice to official yet minor US political parties? Democracy is undermined when the democratic process is highlighted?

The Intelligence Community report also blamed two RT programs, “Breaking the Set” and “Truthseeker” for undermining Americans’ confidence in US electoral processes. One problem: these programs have not been on television for more than a year.

RT is guilty of undermining US democracy, found the report, because an RT reporter traveled to the Ecuadorian embassy in London to interview Wikileaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange, who has received asylum there since 2012. Presumably this report was prepared before conservative Fox News personality Sean Hannity did the exact same thing this past week…or Hannity is going to have some explaining to do.

Abby Martin, former host of “Breaking the Set,” took to social media shortly after the report was released to express the absolute absurdity of the claims in the report, noting that the show had actually ended 2 years ago – significantly prior to the DNC and GOP presidential candidates even being nominated — let alone affecting the election results.

Taking the IC report to task, McAdams went on to note:

The Kremlin funds RT to the tune of $190 million per year, states the report, and its audience keeps growing. The report does not mention that the US government spends vastly more — $780 million for 2017 — on its worldwide propaganda effort through the government-funded Broadcasting Board of Governors. Do what we say but not what we do…

Another problem the US spy agencies have with RT is that it reports on the surveillance state created by those same spy agencies. The Report states, “RT’s reports often characterize the United States as a ‘surveillance state’ and allege widespread infringements of civil liberties.” So RT is guilty of being a Kremlin plot to undermine our freedom because it points out that the US government has already undermined our freedom?

RT is on the US Intelligence Community’s bad list because, “Some of RT’s hosts have compared the United States to Imperial Rome.” Is this really such a shock to the delicate American viewer? According to a recent survey conducted by the Charles Koch Institute, most Americans oppose Washington’s interventionist foreign policy. Are the Kochs also on the Kremlin payroll?

And RT is evil because it points out that the neocon project to import jihadists into Syria to overthrow that secular government was not such a great idea. Writes the Intelligence Report: “RT is a leading media voice opposing Western intervention in the Syrian conflict.”

The one thing that can be ascertained from this report is that there is scant evidence to directly implicate Russia in doing anything different than what the U.S. does in elections across the globe, including Russia, on a regular basis. The report attempts to bolster the IC assessment by noting that the conclusions are reached with “high confidence” – the same “high confidence” that was given in 2002 on the IC report about suspected Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) – and we all know how that turned out.

The report is severely lacking in any hard evidence, and extremely rife with speculative judgments, such as the following:

We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.

We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment.

But do all three agencies actually agree with this assessment?

While it appears at first glance as if the intel agencies are in agreement, upon closer inspection it becomes obvious that there is disagreement in the IC, as the report notes that while the “CIA and FB have high confidence in this judgment; (the) NSA has moderate confidence.”

So, what do these distinctions of “high” or “moderate” confidence mean?

High confidence generally indicates judgments based on high-quality information, and/or the nature of the issue makes it possible to render a solid judgment. However, high confidence judgments still carry a risk of being wrong.

Moderate confidence generally means credibly sourced and plausible information, but not of sufficient quality or corroboration to warrant a higher level of confidence.

Interesting, the one agency that based their assessment strictly upon hard evidence, and not speculation, only gave a nod of “moderate confidence,” which certainly does not embolden confidence in this highly politicized report.

In fact, William Binney, one of the architects of the NSA’s current domestic spying apparatus, has publicly stated that the NSA should have solid irrefutable evidence of Russian hacking if it were to actually exist — leading him to suspect that the information was not hacked, but rather taken on a thumb drive from someone on the inside and then leaked.

The true insanity contained within this report is that it essentially lays blame on Russia for influencing the election by accusing them of allowing Americans to see truthful information.

Only in some type of strange Orwellian paradigm can a government claim that people having access to actual factual information about political candidates is a threat to democracy.

Ironically, what is taking place is extremely similar to events that unfolded in Russia during their 2012 election cycle. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was forced out of Russia amid accusations of undermining Russian sovereignty and attempting to influence their internal election politics. Of course, when USAID was kicked out over these allegations the U.S. loudly cried foul, as they claimed the organization was simply promoting Western democratic values to strengthen the Russian democracy.

Senior Russian officials claimed that some of the agency’s programs, such as some human rights groups and election monitoring, worked to undermine Russia’s sovereignty, according to the state news agency RIA Novosti.

On election night in Moscow in March 2012, Vladimir Putin capped off his victory speech with a comment directed at foreign influence in Russian elections when he said:

“We showed that no one can impose anything on us — no one, nothing! We showed that our people can distinguish between the desire for renewal and political provocation that has but one goal: to destroy Russia’s statehood and usurp power.”

Prior to that, in December, he had blamed U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for giving a “signal” to Russians protesting his rule to turn out for street demonstrations.

So there you have it.

Essentially, during the 2016 U.S. election cycle, the Russians operated in a similar manner to what the U.S. did in Russia during their 2012 elections.

Perhaps the lesson is that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander – meaning that if we choose to meddle in the internal presidential politics of other states, then the U.S. should expect that same favor to be returned. To feign indignation over claimed interference, when operating in virtually the same manner, is disingenuous and exposes a true lack of legitimacy and leadership of which the American people have largely tired.

With virtually the whole of U.S. military posture over the past 65+ years directed at planning for and mitigating a potential global conflict with the Soviet Union/Russia, there are extremely powerful and entrenched bureaucratic interests that essentially refuse to accept a new paradigm between the Cold War foes.

Make no mistake that what you are seeing is not a legitimate concern to the fabric of our democratic system, but rather a contrived problem, meant to propagandize the American public into accepting a continuation of the Cold War by ratcheting up tensions with Russia – with an intention of creating conditions that won’t allow Trump to proceed with a rapprochement with Russia, as he has stated he plans to do.

For all intents and purposes, this exercise in American propaganda is actually a manifestation of the deep state/military industrial complex attempting to wrestle control back from the American people after they elected a highly divisive President that ran on a platform of peace with Russia.