Robert Mackey of The Intercept is a Spook

Proof that The Intercept, funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and featuring the work of Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, is a platform for government-sponsored chicanery can be found in Robert Mackey's "Russia Says It Has 'Irrefutable Evidence' U.K. Staged Chemical Attack in Syria. Let’s See It."

Mackey is a spook along the lines of Eliot Higgins (whom Mackey admiringly quotes in the story), a cyber-savvy sleuth of social media who works to uphold Langley's world view. Mackey asserts that

Russian diplomats and pundits on state-controlled news outlets have, for years, promoted unverified conspiracy theories about the White Helmets working with Islamic extremists and foreign intelligence agencies. Attempting to discredit the rescue workers, who often film in the immediate aftermath of bombings by government forces or Russian jets, has been a central concern for supporters of the Syrian government since the protest movement of 2011 turned into an armed conflict.

What will Mackey say of Robert Fisk's exclusive from Douma "The search for truth in the rubble of Douma – and one doctor’s doubts over the chemical attack"?

Mackey alleges that  

Given that Douma is now under the control of the Assad government, Russia’s ally, and thus off-limits to independent journalists, the Russian claims are impossible to verify or debunk — a situation Russian and Syrian officials have taken advantage of throughout the war to cast doubt on claims that atrocities have been committed by forces loyal to Assad.

Well, debunk Fisk does, not only that there was a chemical weapons attack in Douma, but that the White Helmets are legitimate, independent rescue workers. As Fisk notes

The White Helmets – the medical first responders already legendary in the West but with some interesting corners to their own story – played a familiar role during the battles. They are partly funded by the Foreign Office and most of the local offices were staffed by Douma men. I found their wrecked offices not far from Dr Rahaibani’s clinic. A gas mask had been left outside a food container with one eye-piece pierced and a pile of dirty military camouflage uniforms lay inside one room. Planted, I asked myself? I doubt it. The place was heaped with capsules, broken medical equipment and files, bedding and mattresses.

Of course we must hear their side of the story, but it will not happen here: a woman told us that every member of the White Helmets in Douma abandoned their main headquarters and chose to take the government-organised and Russian-protected buses to the rebel province of Idlib with the armed groups when the final truce was agreed. 

The Intercept should disavow Mackey's story, or at least request that Mackey write another one, explaining some of Fisk's revelations. Are all the people Fiske spoke to Russian plants? Are the White Helmets not associated with Jaysh al-Islam?

It's the White Helmets

This is the best The New York Times can do close to a week after the alleged chlorine attack in Douma that has led the U.S., France, Britain and sundry Gulf monarchies to threaten war against Syria:

While much about the attack remains unclear, a New York Times review of more than 20 videos of its aftermath, an examination of flight records compiled by citizen observers, and interviews with a dozen residents, medics and rescue workers suggest that during a military push to break the will of Douma’s rebels, pro-government forces dropped charges bearing some kind of chemical compound that suffocated at least 43 people and left many more struggling to breathe.

"In a Syrian Town, People Started Shouting: ‘Chemicals! Chemicals!’" by Ben Hubbard

In other words, the White Helmets.

It is interesting to note that the mainstream media will no longer cite the organization by name, preferring the innocuous "medics and rescue workers," because the group has been repeatedly outed as a front for jihadists and Western intelligence agencies.

Hillary Sews Up the Election + Podesta Email Hack an Answer to Panama Papers?

Last night's presidential debate was the worst of the three: a petty, redundant, ugly exchange where the Hillary we had grown accustomed to in the primary -- imperious, arrogant, a specialist in subterfuge -- reappeared, while Trump, bereft of the adrenaline provided by his "grab them by the pussy" bombshell, sleepwalked through the show. All in all a dud.

Fox's Chris Wallace dashed Trump's hopes for a comeback on November 8 by early on, I think it was the second question, asking about the candidates' position on abortion and their commitment to Roe v. Wade. Trump said that for all intents and purposes Roe v. Wade would be overturned if he were to become president. He danced around it a little, didn't want to come out and articulate a simple declarative sentence because he knows the issue locks in place the enormous gender gap Hillary enjoys in the polls, but the damage was done. The election was essentially decided right then and there,

The highlight for The New York Times is that "Trump Won’t Say if He Will Accept Election Results," which I suppose is the right headline given how bad the debate was and the status of the paper as a Clinton campaign organ. But the idea that Trump will lead some sort of insurrection after election day is ludicrous; like so much that Trump does, it is all petulance and bluster.

For me, the big takeaway from last night was Hillary's lunatic rant on Russia, as follows:

WALLACE: Secretary Clinton, I want to clear up your position on this issue, because in a speech you gave to a Brazilian bank, for which you were paid $225,000, we’ve learned from the WikiLeaks, that you said this, and I want to quote. “My dream is a hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders.” So that’s the question...

TRUMP: Thank you.

WALLACE: That’s the question. Please quiet, everybody. Is that your dream, open borders? 

CLINTON: Well, if you went on to read the rest of the sentence, I was talking about energy. You know, we trade more energy with our neighbors than we trade with the rest of the world combined. And I do want us to have an electric grid, an energy system that crosses borders. I think that would be a great benefit to us.

But you are very clearly quoting from WikiLeaks. And what’s really important about WikiLeaks is that the Russian government has engaged in espionage against Americans. They have hacked American websites, American accounts of private people, of institutions. Then they have given that information to WikiLeaks for the purpose of putting it on the Internet.

This has come from the highest levels of the Russian government, clearly, from Putin himself, in an effort, as 17 of our intelligence agencies have confirmed, to influence our election.

CLINTON: So I actually think the most important question of this evening, Chris, is, finally, will Donald Trump admit and condemn that the Russians are doing this and make it clear that he will not have the help of Putin in in this election, that he rejects Russian espionage against Americans, which he actually encouraged in the past? Those are the questions we need answered. We’ve never had anything like this happen in any of our elections before.

WALLACE: Well?

TRUMP: That was a great pivot off the fact that she wants open borders, OK? How did we get on to Putin?

WALLACE: Hold on — hold on, wait. Hold on, folks. Because we — this is going to end up getting out of control. Let’s try to keep it quiet so — for the candidates and for the American people.

How is Hillary's sidestep of the WikiLeaks material by invoking the Putin bogeyman any different from Tailgunner Joe McCarthy's "I have here in my hand a list . . ." of known communists?

When Trump kept repeating that Putin does not respect Hillary, that Putin is her better, I thought Hillary would go lupine. Her cheeks reddened, her eyes moistened, her mouth opened -- did her snout start to protrude?

This of course is no laughing matter. Hillary once again repeated her Syria no-fly/safe zone mantra. When Wallace reminded Clinton of Joint Chiefs Chairman Dunford's assessment that a no-fly zone in Aleppo Province means war with Russia, she absurdly sidestepped and said that, well, of course there would be negotiations first.

It came to me in an incandescent moment last night that if it is true that a Russian state agency is behind the hacks of Democrats that have ended up with WikiLeaks it is a proportional response to The Panama Papers, which like the White Helmets, has CIA written all over it.

Say what you will about Russia, good or bad, the pattern we have seen over the last several years is that the nation is mostly reactive -- Syria and Ukraine being prime examples. It is not instigating all this mayhem. That would be the United States and its various allies in the Middle East.

"Need That Poison Gas" Redux

For the states -- Turkey, Saudi Arabia, as well as other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council -- that came tantalizingly close to pulling off the Ghouta sarin gas scam in August 2013 the temptation to pluck the note again and again until the desired result is finally achieved -- the exit of the Baathists from power in Syria -- never ends.

Not long after Syria started dismantling its arsenal of chemical weapons in a deal brokered by Russia, reports started to emerge of chlorine bombs being dropped from helicopters. These reports usually originated with "activists" aligned with the "opposition" to the Syrian state, and they were summarily dismissed as crude propaganda by representatives of the Assad government. But the stories have remained a regular feature as the months roll along.

Today's offering is a fine example. In "Syria Is Using Chemical Weapons Again, Rescue Workers Say" Anne Barnard and Somini Sengupta earn their pay as propagandists for the USG by filing another fallacious story about Syria's use of chemical weapons; fallacious because it is sourced to a "civilian defense" NGO called White Helmets. An inspection of the group's web site -- Barrel Bombs! -- linked to in the Barnard-Sengupta article, leaves one with the distinct impression that it is a CIA front. The allegations of White Helmets are then amplified by USG officials. This is the old familiar propaganda pattern. You have an "Astro-Turf" organization, an ersatz citizen group of some sort that has been mocked up by a foreign intelligence agency, make a specious charge, and then that charge is taken up by the United States in the United Nations Security Council:

Two years after President Bashar al-Assad agreed to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, there is mounting evidence that his government is flouting international law to drop jerry-built chlorine bombs on insurgent-held areas. Lately, the pace of the bombardments in contested areas like Idlib Province has picked up, rescue workers say, as government forces have faced new threats from insurgents. The Assad government has so far evaded more formal scrutiny because of political, legal and technical obstacles to assigning blame for the attacks — a situation that feels surreal to many Syrians under the bombs, who say it is patently clear the government drops them.

“People are so used to it, they know from the sound,” said Hatem Abu Marwan, 29, a rescue worker with the White Helmets civil defense organization, a note of exasperation creeping into his voice when asked to explain. “We know the sound of a helicopter that goes to a low height and drops a barrel. Nobody has aircraft except the regime.”

Prodded by the United States, the United Nations Security Council is discussing a draft resolution that would create a panel, reporting to the secretary general, to determine which of the warring parties is responsible for using chlorine as a weapon, according to Council diplomats.

“The Security Council must address the need to determine who is responsible for using chlorine as weapons in Syria,” said an American official, who declined to offer specifics and requested anonymity to discuss continuing negotiations. “Doing so is critical to getting justice for the Syrian people and accountability for those who have repeatedly used chemical weapons in Syria.”

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Syrian state media dismiss the allegations as propaganda, and the Council remains divided and hamstrung. That leaves people like Mr. Abu Marwan, who has responded to nine suspected chlorine attacks, feeling abandoned. “There is no law to defend us as human beings, this is what we understand from the Security Council,” said Mr. Abu Marwan, a law school graduate, weeping as he recalled holding a dying child in Sarmeen. “I didn’t see in humanitarian law anything that says ‘except for Syrians.’ ”

You have the propaganda all there in a nutshell: the nefarious Assad; the hamstrung UNSC; the devoted, virtuous law-school graduate weeping with a dead gassed baby cradled in his arms. It is crass, and, at this point, tapped so often as it has been, it is ineffective. But the propaganda machine must extrude its product regardless of quality.

The "smoking gun" in the Barnard-Sengupta story is the helicopter. The chlorine gas is dropped in barrels by low-flying helicopters. We are supposed to baldly accept that only the Syrian government possesses helicopters. What the propagandists are attempting to capitalize on is the "barrel bombs" meme that the Western mainstream media has invested so robustly in. The reader has been conditioned to accept that the Syrian government and only the Syrian government bombs its people from the air by rolling barrels packed with explosives out of helicopters.

Hence, the conclusion to the Barnard-Sengupta piece:

A video taken Sunday in the town of Khansafra shows a barrel dropping from a helicopter and rescue workers holding up a portion of a canister labeled in English. The camera shakes, blurring all but a few words: “hazard,” “may cause irritation,” “caution,” “breathing.”

The obvious question is, Whose helicopter is it? Are there any markings? If it is a black helicopter, is there evidence that the Syrian government uses such helicopters?

An obvious question is, Why couldn't one of the Islamist jihadi groups, which have captured much Iraqi and Syrian military equipment, have piloted the helicopter?

The fact that Barnard and Sengupta give hardly a hint of the Iraqi Kurd reports from March that Islamic State used chlorine gas in attacks against its peshmerga is a strong tell that the two Gray Lady reporters are singing for their supper. Any open-minded reporter would explore the possibility that Nusra or ISIS could stage chlorine attacks. There is only this pro forma mention:

Frustrated with the Security Council’s impasse over the issue, rescue workers and doctors are now working to bring evidence of chlorine gas attacks directly to the French, British and American governments for testing. The aim is to give states a solid basis for action against the attacks, in the Security Council or through quieter diplomatic pressure, said James Le Mesurier, the British director of a nonprofit group, Mayday Rescue, that trains and equips the White Helmets, Syrian volunteers supported by the British, Danish and Dutch governments. 

Going directly to governments that have pushed for Mr. Assad’s ouster creates its own challenges. His allies may dismiss their evidence as politically tainted and can point to recent chlorine attacks in Iraq for which the government there blamed insurgents, not to mention the discredited American claims of an Iraqi chemical weapons program that were used to justify invading Iraq.

All we need to know about the recent spate of chlorine bomb attacks is that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which set up a special mission last spring to look into the use of chlorine gas in Syria, won't endorse the claims that the Syrian government is to blame:

But investigators face difficulties. Chlorine dissipates quickly in the atmosphere and does not last in blood or urine, and residue stays in soil for just 48 hours, leaving little time to transport samples across borders. Also, Mr. Le Mesurier said, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons differentiates evidence it collects itself from evidence collected by rescue workers, categorizing the latter as circumstantial.

Emergency workers said they met recently with investigators from the organization, but Dr. Tennari called the body’s response “poor and slow.” Mr. Le Mesurier remarked, “No one showed up on a white steed.”

Three other Syrian doctors said the organization’s rules resulted in valuable evidence they collected going unexamined. 

One, who protects his identity with the nickname “Chemical Hazem” for his safety, said he reached one of the April 2014 attack sites, Tal Minnes, within hours, smelling bleach in the air. He smuggled samples from two victims to Turkey without waiting for border clearances. But he said the O.P.C.W. refused to accept an unexploded canister, which remains in Syria. 

“The ultimate evidence of the regime’s use of chemical weapons is gone,” he said, adding that no one seemed interested in getting samples out of Syria. “We can’t blame anyone who wants to follow the legal channels — but do any exist?”