"Propaganda, Facts and Fake News" - Page 30 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15131419
The MSM can try rewriting the dubious history of White Helmets’ founder James Le Mesurier, but the truth is there for all to see
A fetishistic Guardian article seeks to rehabilitate the life and death of the former British soldier turned ‘humanitarian’, but cannot explain away his lavish lifestyle, missing money, and all the other financial irregularities.

On the morning of November 11, 2019, James Le Mesurier, founder of Syria’s controversial White Helmets, was found dead in Istanbul. Since then, the Western establishment has struggled to get its story straight on the man, his professional history, the group he founded, and how he died.

The latest example of mainstream media narrative management in the ever-mysterious case came in the Guardian on October 27, in the form of a 6,000-word hagiography of Le Mesurier, authored by its veteran Middle East reporter Martin Chulov.

Many at this point will be familiar with the idolatrous portait it paints of its subject – a heroic humanitarian committed to benevolent causes who saved untold lives, tragically driven to suicide by a “disinformation campaign led by Russian and Syrian officials and peddled by pro-Assad bloggers, alt-right media figures and self-described anti-imperialists.” Nonetheless, it marks the first time the significant controversy surrounding his financial dealings has ever been explored, let alone mentioned, by a British news outlet.

In July this year, the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant published a long-read of its own, explosively revealing how, three days prior to his death, Le Mesurier ‘confessed’ via email to the White Helmets’ many international donors, who’d funded the group to the tune of hundreds of millions over the years, that he’d committed fraud.

The disclosure was prompted by an internal audit by a Dutch accountant of the finances of Mayday, the foundation started by Le Mesurier to find, train, and support the White Helmets. The audit found, among other things, that he had been paying himself and his wife, long-time UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) operative Emma Winberg, “excessive” salaries and supplementing the totals with unjustifiably vast cash bonuses; that his employment of his wife represented a potential conflict of interest; and that he might be guilty of tax evasion.

While claiming this malfeasance wasn’t intentional, Le Mesurier took full and sole responsibility, and expressed fears that further investigation could expose yet more “mistakes and internal failures.”

Monetary misconduct
Damning stuff indeed, but De Volkskrant’s seismic disclosures have been curiously ignored by all other Western media outlets until now. The Guardian’s article deals with the damning revelations, both directly and indirectly – Le Mesurier, whom Chulov knew personally, and with whom he clearly maintained an intense affinity, is acquitted on all charges. Indeed, the White Helmets founder is said to have simply “unravelled under the weight of claims that would later prove to be false.”

The author is at pains throughout to frame “disinformation” as fundamental to Le Mesurier’s untimely demise, in terms of causing him immense “stress,” which led to him “disintegrating” mentally, damaging his reputation and that of the White Helmets in the eyes of world opinion, and, in turn, stoking erroneous suspicions in donor countries that he and his company were engaged in various improper activities.

The question of how a battle-hardened military veteran could be so deleteriously impacted mentally and emotionally by “attacks on Russian television and social media,” particularly if they were entirely without substance, is unasked and unanswered.

There’s little doubt Le Mesurier wasn’t in a good state during his final weeks. It’s been widely reported he was taking sleeping pills and psychiatric medication. Less well amplified were Turkish news reports alleging he and his wife had “fought violently” while dining out together the day before his death.

Chulov alleges “a distressed Le Mesurier” told friends just before he died that claims of Mayday’s monetary misconduct “seemed to come from nowhere.” In fact, questions about what purpose the vast sums donated to the company were put to, and where they all ultimately ended up, had long circulated.

While his article states that donor countries maintained their support for the White Helmets “despite the disinformation surrounding the group’s work,” this isn’t true. In September 2018, the Dutch government ended its backing, after a damning Ministry of Foreign Affairs report outlined serious concerns about Mayday’s financial practices, including an almost total lack of oversight over, and even awareness of, how its money entered Syria, and precisely whose pockets it eventually lined.

However, Chulov feels confident dismissing any and all suggestions of embezzlement, for he’s in possession of a report by forensic auditors Grant Thornton, conducted at the request of Mayday’s donors, which concluded there was “no evidence of misappropriation of funds” by Le Mesurier and Winberg.

Except that he isn’t, because it hasn’t been made public, at donors’ express request. Instead, he relies on the claims of a nameless “source familiar” with the report – which could conceivably, of course, be Winberg herself.

Excessive salaries plus bonuses
It’s clear Grant Thornton’s report isn’t an unalloyed clean bill of health, either – the auditors found “significant gaps in the administrative organization and internal control environment of Mayday” and “identified significant cash transactions that have not been (fully) recorded in the cash books and/or general ledger.”

Moreover, due to Mayday’s “informal” working environment, many key discussions took place “orally and over WhatsApp,” meaning auditors “had to reconstruct a number of financial events and are unable to provide certainty in those cases.”

Chulov is quick to dismiss the significance of these failings as nothing more than “shoddy” bookkeeping, contending “auditors found nothing to support the far more serious allegations made” against Le Mesurier – despite apparently not having actually read the report himself.

Likewise, he concedes Mayday’s executive salaries had been “higher than industry standards”, although his anonymous source familiar with the report is on hand to reassure him, and readers, “they were not off-the-scale high.”In 2017, Le Mesurier informed the Netherlands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs he was paying himself a salary of €24,000 per month, before bonuses – several orders of magnitude higher than the designated salary ceiling at other Dutch government-funded enterprises. And considerably more than the $150 a day the White Helmet rescuers on the ground received.

References to Le Mesurier founding three separate companies named ‘Mayday Rescue’ – Mayday Rescue FZ-LLC in Dubai, Mayday Search and Rescue Training and Consultancy Services Ltd in Turkey, and Stichting Mayday Rescue Foundation in the Netherlands – are predictably absent from the Guardian’s article.

Accounts aren’t publicly available for any of them – the Dutch entity, while not registered as a charitable organisation, is characterised as being ‘without commercial enterprise’, so doesn’t have to file accounts at all. Dutch ‘stichtings’, or foundations, are openly advertised by Dutch law firms as ideal ways for wealthy individuals and corporations to minimize tax liabilities and distribute funds internationally.

The company nonetheless complied with governance and transparency requirements, appointing a Secretary and Treasurer. As such, the UK government could plausibly claim that Mayday Rescue, to which London funneled £43 million between 2015 and 2018, was, to the best of its knowledge, fully above board.

Tax havens and tangled webs
Except the £43 million actually went to Mayday Rescue FZ-LLC in Dubai – something only begrudgingly admitted by the FCO in March 2019, in response to a Freedom of Information request, after much heel-dragging and obfuscation.

Dubai is a notorious tax haven, and FZ-LLCs – Free Zone Limited Liability Companies – aren’t subject to any taxes on dividends, so they can be used to easily and opaquely repatriate profits. The entities are required to maintain accounting records, which can be inspected by authorities, but aren’t required to file accounts of any kind.

It may be significant that one of Stichting Mayday Rescue Foundation’s three directors, alongside Le Mesurier and Winberg, was a British Army veteran, Rupert Davis, who, in April 2016, founded the company Chameleon Global. Dissolved in October 2020, it was categorised as dormant – that is, non-operational – for the duration of its existence. Despite this apparent inactivity, it was linked to two entities implicated in the Panama Papers leaks, including a firm founded by Mossack Fonseca & Co, which, until its role in global tax evasion was exposed in 2016, had been the world’s fourth-largest provider of offshore financial services.

Davis was also, until April 2019, connected to Sisu Global BV, a company in the Netherlands founded by Le Mesurier in April 2017. It has never filed accounts, in breach of Dutch law. Le Mesurier himself resigned from it in November 2018. Winberg apparently remains a director.

Chulov also, again predictably, dismisses as “disinformation” allegations that the White Helmets were “created by governments determined to remove Assad from power”; that Le Mesurier was “an agent of western intelligence, using a rescue organisation as a Trojan horse for regime change”; and that the organization was in any way affiliated to violent extremist groups.

What are matters of public record, however, is that the White Helmets were funded by the very governments avowedly committed to ‘regime change’ in Syria via covert and overt means; that Le Mesurier’s professional history included spells as a military intelligence operative; and that the group has openly collaborated with the Al-Nusra Front, among other jihadist elements, and engaged in violent activity.

In a June 2015 speech discussing his founding of the White Helmets, Le Mesurier cited a market research agency study which found that, in fragile environments, security forces garner low levels of public trust while first responders have the highest as a key motivating factor in his decision to establish a “humanitarian aid group.”

Untold millions for propaganda
That the White Helmets’ benevolent image was very carefully constructed and promoted by a government attempting to achieve ‘regime change’ is amply underlined by FCO documents leaked by hacktivist collective Anonymous.

The documents reveal that ARK, a firm founded by FCO veteran Alistair Harris where Le Mesurier worked between 2011 and 2014, played a pivotal role in promoting the White Helmets, developing“an internationally focused communications campaign to raise global awareness” of the group to “keep Syria in the news.”

Along the way, ARK, among many other endeavors, produced a documentary on the White Helmets, and ran its various social media accounts, among them the Facebook page for Idlib City Council, at one time mooted as a potential interim government to replace Bashar Assad. When Al-Nusra took the city, the White Helmets were filmed celebrating the ‘victory’ with the group’s fighters in its main square.

ARK profited to the tune of untold millions of pounds from these and other information-warfare efforts. The same illicit file tranche also reveals InCoStrat, founded by none other than Emma Winberg, also reaped large bounties for manipulating public perceptions about Syria, within and without the country. In one file, the firm boasted of surreptitiously “initiating events to create media effect” and of “using media to create events.”

One example of the former strategy saw InCoStrat produce mock Syrian currency, in three denominations, imploring Syrians to “be on the right side of history.” It was intended to ensure that international opinion remained arrayed against Assad, at a time “media attention has shifted almost exclusively towards ISIS and some influential voices are calling for co-operation with the Syrian regime to combat ISIS.”

The file states: “The notes are due to be smuggled into regime-held parts of Syria once formal clearance has been authorized by HMG officials … We will engage the international media to create a story around the event … The message to the regime [is] covert but active resistance continues.”

Another document indicates that Winberg’s InCoStrat also established Basma – “a media platform providing human interest stories and campaigns that support [UK government] policy objectives” – and engaged in propaganda operations in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, training and maintaining a network of journalists who were “instrumental in reporting on events in Basra.”

On the subject of propaganda, establishment efforts to rehabilitate Le Mesurier are scheduled to continue apace in future.

Starting on November 9, the BBC will transmit a 15-part radio documentary on Mayday Rescue. Over the summer, Chloe Hadjimatheou, a reporter on the project, approached a number of journalists and researchers who’d publicly raised questions about the White Helmets, asking if they wished to contribute to the program.

Several of the individuals targeted subsequently published their correspondence with Hadjimatheou, showing that the program’s preordained agenda and objectives couldn’t be more blatant.

What is clear is that any suggestion Le Mesurier was a British intelligence operative surreptitiously attempting to foster regime change in Syria, or that the White Helmets weren’t an entirely benevolent, independent humanitarian organization will be rubbished, and all voices critical of the group will be smeared as witting or unwitting agents of the Russian and Syrian governments.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/505028-white-h ... emesurier/
#15131664
Image

I was at a jewelery shop yesterday, getting the battery changed and inside of my watch cleaned.

While I was there, the jeweler opened my watch to do a diagnostic for me.

While he was gazing inside, commercial radio was playing, like it always is in his shop. But during the minute or so that he was silently focussed on my watch, there was a car company ad playing so I noticed it.

In the ad, a sexy female voice (pleasant, satiated-sounding) was uttering pleasant thoughts like "return to the country," "back to school or work," and "enjoy your freedom" to the sound of upbeat electronic jazz. Between pleasant "confinement-neutralizing" memes, she uttered the car company's name, and several of its products:

"Back to school! Car company brand! Return to the countryside! Car company brand! *smiles and glistening eyes*"

This is brain-washing. Especially when you listen to it sub-consciously like this at work because:

1. You hear it repeatedly all day

2. You are usually focussed on other things, and are thus responsive to the sub-conscious musical and vocal effects on your brain.

What remains from a brain-washing campaign like this, is a vaguely "pleasant and satiated" feeling from the "voice inside your head" whenever you see or visualize their products or cars in general.
#15131668
skinster wrote:An interesting discussion with journalist, Whitney Webb, about what we can expect in upcoming months:

Election Meddling Psyop & Trump Admin Uses “Combating Anti-Semitism” To Disguise Big Tech Censorship


Last American Vagabond(Whitney and Ryan) was just banned off YouTube by our google overlords.

They got a channel up on BitChute:
https://www.bitchute.com/channel/24yVcta8zEjY/
#15134074
Rancid wrote:Very Bourgeois of you.


I've only been in one jewelry store in my whole life and I only went in there because my cousin's douchebag boyfriend needed to fence some jewelry he got from a crackhead burglary ring.
#15134309
Rancid wrote:Very Bourgeois of you.

I agree.

I bought a watch on sale seven years ago, and it has lasted longer than any watch I've ever owned (good for enviroment), but the downside is that normal people can't open it up and change the battery.

So I got to listen to all those psychologically manipulative taunts from commercial radio.

It's too bad you weren't more interested in the public brainwashing going on at the time. Really, there's nothing more bourgeois than what YOU did - ignoring the destruction of ordinary people in the name of commerce.
#15134346
QatzelOk wrote:I bought a watch on sale seven years ago, and it has lasted longer than any watch I've ever owned (good for enviroment), but the downside is that normal people can't open it up and change the battery.


The right to repair is something lots of large companies are pushing to destroy.
#15135134
Rancid wrote:The right to repair is something lots of large companies are pushing to destroy.

I'm wondering why "layman can't take off the backing without damaging the watch" was really a useful design feature for anyone except watch repairmen - a dying breed, no doubt in 5-dollar watch era we live in.

Propaganda relevance: The narrative attached to the design. "It's such a good watch, you need to pay someone ten dollars to do something that you have enjoyed doing yourself all your life."

When you have something fragile and expensive, an entire industry of repairs, insurance, and updates.... begins to fritter away at your resources. And it's all because... constant repairs equals loving your extensions.

Some people spend their entire weekends picking at their lawns and automobiles. So worth it for all the freedom they give you (of spending your entire free time doing maintenance of your crap)
#15159073
The Grayzone reported on leaks on the propaganda campaign against Russia which included the U.K. government and others, blah blah blah. Twitter was upset about the report so started doing this thing they've never done before, which is to put a marker whenever the story was posted on Twitter, claiming it came from "These materials may have been obtained through hacking" (as if that wasn't an endorsement for some of us).

Anyway, that kind of backfired when people started putting all kinds of pics alongside the article that was stating it came from hacking; pictures of savage humans like Epstein and the Clintons :D for instance. I can't post any of the amusing stuff because Twitter posts hurt people's feelings here so.... here is an interview all about it by the reporter of the article.
#15164414
Thomas Klikauer and Catherine Link wrote:...Perhaps German philosopher Theodor Adorno was right when outlining that capitalism creates pathologies and to camouflage these pathologies, capitalism depends on ideologies.

Yet, capitalism also depends on an apparatus to transmit these ideologies.

Adorno called it “The Culture Industry”.

Under capitalism, the culture industry has one task. It is to engineer what Adorno calls “mass deception”.

This is what large section of the media do – every day.

In this article, the authors do a nice job of dissecting the daily newsfeed of average people, and expose it as ideological programming from Capitalist Dictators.
#15167644
Godstud wrote:Hannity is OPINION, not news.

The big problem is that so many people think that the opinions of news people are facts. No. The people who report news are reporting facts. The people COMMENTING on it, are not.

Hannity spreads propaganda, not news. Just because he's no a news channel, does not mean that he actually reports the truth. The Conservative delusion is strong.



The big problem is actually that EVERYONE reports opinion. Opinion columnists like Hannity and Matthews are simply open and honest about it. Omitting or adding things to a story is every bit as much of an attempt to frame the issue as editorializing, regardless of the lack of "I think" or "in my opinion" statements. By pretending that newscasters give only objective fact, this distorts the perception of reality.
#15167760
@Wolvenbear Many news stations do not insert personal opinion into every news story. Fox News is simply the worst of the MSM outlets, in this regard. The difference between Fox News and BBC World News is like night and day, in this regard.
#15167803
Godstud wrote:@Wolvenbear Many news stations do not insert personal opinion into every news story. Fox News is simply the worst of the MSM outlets, in this regard. The difference between Fox News and BBC World News is like night and day, in this regard.


Fox News doesn't do it either, and it is not the worst of the MSM outlets.

But this doesn't change the fact that everyone, including the BBC, has bias in their reporting. And that they pretend they are impartial when they are not.
#15167808
Wolvenbear wrote:Fox News doesn't do it either, and it is not the worst of the MSM outlets.

But this doesn't change the fact that everyone, including the BBC, has bias in their reporting. And that they pretend they are impartial when they are not.

There's bias in doing op-ed stuff that FOX and MSNBC/CNN does, but there's also bias in the other seemingly objective reporting, choosing which stories to cover and not cover.
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