Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch: Imperial Tools

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch disgracefully blamed Syria for what appear to be a CIA-orchestrated April 4 CW false flag, killing dozens, injuring many more.

The attack was carried out as a pretext for Trump’s aggression – planned before the incident occurred, readied to be launched in short order – an act of war against a sovereign state.

AI urged Security Council action to hold Assad responsible for Trump’s high crime, deplorably saying:

“Security Council members, and in particular Russia and China, have displayed callous disregard for human life in Syria by repeatedly failing to pass resolutions that would allow for punitive measures to be taken against those committing war crimes and other serious violations in Syria” – meaning Assad and government officials, even though they had nothing to do with what happened.

“The Security Council must immediately vote to investigate this attack and help bring those responsible to justice. Failure to do so would be catastrophic, risking further emboldening governments and armed groups in Syria to target civilians in war crimes with banned and conventional weapons alike,” AI added, wanting victims prosecuted for perpetrators’ criminality.

HRW’s remarks were just as bad, disgracefully accusing “government forces (of) carrying out chemical attacks (on a) regular” basis.

It lied, claiming “Syrian government helicopters dropp(ed) canisters filled with chlorine in dozens of cases,” citing no credible evidence. None exists.

Plenty indicts US-supported terrorists for attacking defenseless civilians with sarin, chlorine gas and other toxic agents – elements trained in their use by Pentagon contractors in Jordan and Turkey.

HRW criticized Russia and China for vetoing Security Council resolutions – instead of praising them for doing the right thing, blocking measures intending to justify Libyan-type aggression.

In March 2011, Obama launched war on Syria, using ISIS and other terrorist fighters as imperial foot soldiers – aided by US-led terror-bombing since 2014.

America and its rogue allies are aggressors, Syria, its government and people victims of imperial lawlessness – Trump continuing what his predecessor began.

Survival of the Syrian Arab Republic is up for grabs unless Russia, Iran, government forces, and supportive popular ones can save it.

Up to 13,000 Secretly Executed in Syrian Prison According to Amnesty International

February 7, 2017   |   admintam

(MEE) As many as 13,000 people were hanged in five years at a notorious Syrian government prison near Damascus, Amnesty International said on Tuesday, accusing the government of a “policy of extermination”.

Titled Human slaughterhouse: mass hangings and extermination at Saydnaya prison, Amnesty’s damning report is based on interviews with 84 witnesses, including guards, detainees and judges.

“Saydnaya military prison is where the Syrian state quietly slaughters its own people. The victims are overwhelmingly ordinary civilians who are thought to oppose the government. Since 2011, thousands of people have been extrajudicially executed in mass hangings, carried out at night and in the utmost secrecy,” read the report.

The rights group interviewed dozens of people, including former prisoners, guards, judges, lawyers and experts.

It found that at least once a week between 2011 and 2015, groups of up to 50 people were taken out of their prison cells for arbitrary trials, beaten and hanged “in the middle of the night and in total secrecy”.

“Throughout this process, they remain blindfolded. They do not know when or how they will die until the noose was placed around their necks,” the rights group wrote.

Most of the victims were civilians believed to be opposed to the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

“They kept them (hanging) there for 10 to 15 minutes,” a former judge who witnessed the executions said.

“For the young ones, their weight wouldn’t kill them. The officers’ assistants would pull them down and break their necks,” he said.

Amnesty said the practices amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity, but were likely still taking place.

Thousands of detainees are held in the military-run prison, one of the country’s largest detention centres located 30km north of Damascus.

Amnesty accused the Syrian government of carrying out a “policy of extermination” there by repeatedly torturing detainees and withholding food, water and medical care.

Prisoners were raped or forced to rape each other, and guards would feed detainees by tossing meals onto the cell floor, which was often covered in dirt and blood.

According to the report, between 5,000 and 13,000 inmates died in Saydnaya alone.

‘Hidden, monstrous campaign’

A twisted set of “special rules” governed the facility: detainees were not allowed to speak and must assume certain positions when guards enter their cells.

“Every day there would be two or three dead people in our wing… I remember the guard would ask how many we had. He would say, ‘Room number one – how many? Room number two – how many?’ and on and on,” said Nader, a former detainee whose name has been changed.

After one fierce day of beating, Nader said, 13 people died in a single wing of the prison.

One former military officer said he could hear “gurgling” as people were hanged in an execution room below.

“If you put your ears on the floor, you could hear the sound of a kind of gurgling,” said Hamid, who was arrested in 2011.

“We were sleeping on top of the sound of people choking to death. This was normal for me then,” he told Amnesty.

The group has previously said that more than 17,700 people were estimated to have died in government custody across Syria since the country’s conflict erupted in March 2011.

“The horrors depicted in this report reveal a hidden, monstrous campaign, authorised at the highest levels of the Syrian government, aimed at crushing any form of dissent within the Syrian population,” said Lynn Maalouf, deputy director for research at Amnesty’s Beirut office.

“The cold-blooded killing of thousands of defenceless prisoners, along with the carefully crafted and systematic programmes of psychological and physical torture that are in place inside Saydnaya prison cannot be allowed to continue,” she said.

A probe by the United Nations last year accused Assad’s government of a policy of “extermination” in its jails.

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This article (Up to 13,000 Secretly Executed in Syrian Prison According to Amnesty International) by MEE and agencies originally appeared on MiddleEastEye.net and was used with permission. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.

If You Think ‘Fake News’ Is A New Phenomena, You’re Wrong

January 12, 2017   |   admintam

(MPN) The “fog of war” erupts in the confusion caused by the chaos of war. And in the media, it’s an intentional phenomenon that makes it difficult to separate fact from fiction.

While the battles over war narratives evolve, they all have a common goal: to distort reality on the ground.

Such is the case on the crisis in Syria, the new cold war with Russia, and even the buildup for President Bush’s support for Kuwait’s “humanitarian” war against Iraq.

On Oct. 10, 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl identified only as “Nayirah” told the Congressional Human Rights Caucus that she witnessed Iraqi soldiers removing babies from incubators and leaving them on a cold floor to die.

Her testimony was cited numerous times by senators and even President George H.W. Bush as  justification for backing Kuwait in the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein, which erupted just three months later.

However, it was later revealed that “Nayirah” was the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States, and her testimony was arranged by a PR firm representing a Kuwaiti-sponsored group lobbying Congress for military intervention.

More recently, during the “Arab Spring” uprisings that swept the Middle East in 2011, Libyan media claimed that Moammar Gadhafi loyalists carried out mass “Viagra-fueled rapes,” and that the Libyan leader had ordered rape as a weapon of war. When Luis Moreno-Ocampo, a prosecutor with the International Criminal Court, opened an investigation into these allegations, it grabbed international headlines, appearing in Al-Jazeera, the BBC, and Reuters, among many others.

Even as Amnesty International questioned the legitimacy of the allegations, other supposedly humanitarian groups hit a loggerhead on the veracity of the claims. One top U.N. official said he believed the claims were meant as a scare tactic to invoke “massive hysteria” even as another top U.N. official defended them, creating a distraction from the war itself.

And today the fog of war is obscuring realities on the ground in Syria.

Major news outlets frequently cite unnamed sources, a convenient way to manipulate public perception. From CNN to Reuters, these outlets are publishing unverifiable claims and providing minimal evidence to support them, and readers are supposed to drink it all up

The crisis in Syria has attracted international attention and concern, and the corporate media is using the tragedies of war to push an agenda and boost its audience. This push for content — no matter what — has serious consequences. On Dec. 20, for example, Egyptian police arrested five people for making videos they claimed were set in Aleppo, but were actually filmed at a demolition site.

Social media further distorts reality on the ground, presenting a fragmented image of war as the media promotes only those accounts that align with the goals of the United States and its allies.

The media and public both accept the accounts of the White Helmets as gospel. Yet that group, which purports to serve as volunteer first responders in Aleppo, receives training from British mercenaries and funding from a PR firm with ties to George Soros.

Not only are the White Helmets making fake videos, but they’ve even been exposed as agents embedded in the Nusra Front and ISIS.. Armed and far from impartial, the White Helmets are a recipient of millions in USAID funding.

Whether the White Helmets are the apolitical first responders they claim to be or not, one thing is clear: The narrative being weaved by and about them supports U.S. intervention in the war in Syria.

The narrative is built around activists frequently cited by the media, like Bilal Abdul Kareem, who is embedded with the Nusra Front and recently glorified suicide bombers as revolutionaries.

Or Lina Shamy, the young Syrian activist who promotes sectarian terrorists from Jaysh al-Sham, who threaten genocide against religious minorities as revolutionaries.

It’s time to put a critical lens to the propaganda in the news and social media. It’s time to demand more than reporting that toes the government line and makes claims without real evidence.

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This article (If You Think ‘Fake News’ Is A New Phenomena, You’re Wrong) by Mnar Muhawesh  originally appeared on MintPressNews.com and was used with permission. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.

The Rutherford Institute, Wikipedia, ACLU et al. Rebut the Obama Administration’s claim that no harm is caused by the NSA’s unprecedented mass surveillance

A recent study shows that knowledge of government surveillance causes people to self-censor their dissenting opinions online

Rejecting as blatantly false the Obama administration’s contention that its mass surveillance program has inflicted no harm on American citizens, attorneys for The Rutherford Institute, ACLU, Wikipedia, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers will appear in court today to argue in favor of reinstating a First and Fourth Amendment lawsuit against the National Security Agency (NSA), the U.S. Department of Justice and their directors.

In arguing before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, the broad coalition of educational, legal, human rights and media organizations will point out that the NSA’s surveillance program—which is unprecedented in its scope and intrudes on the privacy of Americans’ internet communications and impairs their expressive and associational rights—has chilled lawful First Amendment expression and given rise to self-censorship. The coalition’s arguments are reinforced by a recent study published by the Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly showing that knowledge of government surveillance causes people to self-censor their dissenting opinions online. A Maryland federal court had dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that the coalition of national and international groups does not have standing to bring the lawsuit against the government.

“On any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Revelations about the NSA’s spying programs only scrape the surface in revealing the lengths to which government agencies and their corporate allies will go to conduct mass surveillance on Americans’ communications and transactions. Senator Ron Wyden was right when he warned, ‘If we do not seize this unique moment in our constitutional history to reform our surveillance laws and practices, we are all going to live to regret it.’”

The lawsuit brought by The Rutherford Institute, the ACLU, Wikipedia, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and other educational, legal, human rights and media organizations arises from efforts by the U.S. government since the 9/11 terrorist attacks to increase the surveillance and monitoring of U.S. citizens and foreign nationals. Although Congress had previously authorized the issuance of orders for electronic surveillance of foreign agents for intelligence purposes under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in October 2001, President George W. Bush secretly authorized warrantless interception of emails and telephone calls involving persons within the United States if NSA personnel had a “reasonable basis” to believe one party was connected with al Qaeda. When a judge refused to authorize the continuation of this program, the Bush administration obtained amendments to FISA in 2008 authorizing the acquisition without individualized suspicion of the international communications of U.S. citizens that are with or are about foreigners who the NSA chooses to target.

In carrying out this broad authority under the 2008 law, the NSA has engaged in so-called “Upstream surveillance,” which according to the complaint “involves the NSA’s seizing and searching the internet communications of U.S. citizens and residents en mass as those communications travel across the internet ‘backbone’ in the United States—the network of high-capacity cables, switches and routers that facilitates both domestic and international communications via the internet.” Upstream surveillance encompasses the copying of virtually all international text-based communications, review of the content of those communications by the NSA, and the retention of the copied communications for future use and analysis.

Via Rutherford Institute

Featured Image: Mike Mozart/Flickr

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