Friday, July 13, 2012

US manipulation of news from Syria is a red herring

The big picture is clear. A slaughter is under way in Syria, largely carried out by government forces and militias

Julian Borger
guardian.co.uk, Friday 13 July 2012

AN IMPORTANT POST

".....If you are of a conspiratorial turn of mind you could do a bit of research on me after reading this article and find that I spent more than eight years in Washington (aha!) and about 18 months in Jerusalem (the Mossad connection) and you may well find pictures of me with Ratko Mladic, and Radovan Karadzic, where I maintain I was conducting interviews but which could have had a much more underhand connection.

You would be wasting your time. Even if I had been paid or programmed to falsify everything I write about Syria, my controllers would be powerless to alter people's perceptions of what is going on there. The news is streaming out by Skype, emails and satellite phones, and in the testimony of refugees. We rely heavily on our correspondents on the ground to gather information directly inside Syria. They do not spend much if any time on the phone to SNC spokespeople in Washington. Likewise most of the reports on the latest butchery in Tremseh came not from the SNC, but from rebels and activists in the area, and are treated for the time being as unconfirmed.

The bigger picture, however, is abundantly clear. A slaughter is under way, largely carried out by government forces and allied militias. Whether this should mean western military intervention is quite another question. It is hard to see how air strikes could stop the killing, but authorising the international criminal court to start a full investigation into who is responsible would seem like a step in the right direction.

Nothing could be more important than working out how to respond to the brutality in Syria. We ought to be having that debate. Investigating the pedigrees of cherry-picked individuals on each side is not the way to arrive at the right answer."

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