Editor’s note: Anderson Cooper of CNN specifically says to “Syrian Danny,” “you went there to join the Free Syrian Army, so you’re not pretending to be an impartial journalist,” before admitting, “we have ended up relying on people like you, on people who’ve uploaded these videos and that we can’t independently verify them,” in full admission that everything reported by the Western media in regards to Syria, including from CNN comes from impartial, biased, unverified hearsay from rebels and “activists.” The same can and should be said of the UN and their human rights reports, also admittedly based on mere opposition “hearsay.”
As Paul Joseph Watson points out in the report below, the Arab League was in Syria and when they gave reports that contradicted Western narratives, it was blackballed in the media. Additionally, many true journalists and academics have legally entered Syria and reported their findings, including Dr. Webster Tarpley. One must also ask, why hasn’t CNN given equal airtime to government supporters, who have instead relied on the alternative media to have their voices heard?
CNN Botches Effort To Refute ‘Syria Danny’ Propaganda Scandal: Danny Dayem admits propaganda stunt video should have been deleted.
Paul Joseph Watson Infowars.com
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
CNN’s attempt to refute claims that dubious activist Danny Dayem, known as ‘Syria Danny’, was caught staging sounds of gunfire during a recent interview with the network only resulted in further embarrassment, when Dayem admitted that the suspect video “should have been deleted,” presumably to hide the evidence of his propaganda stunt.
Following our exposé yesterday morning, which documented how Dayem, who has become the establishment media’s poster child for a military invasion of Syria, had ordered staged gunfire sounds to be made off camera during an interview, CNN’s Anderson Cooper invited him to engage in damage control during last night’s show.
During the interview with Cooper, Dayem only succeeds in virtually admitting the fact that the video is suspect. Asked how the footage was leaked, Dayem starts to say ‘we should have deleted it’ before hastily stating, “this has all been deleted.”
“I don’t know how they got it, this is all private, we should have, this has all been deleted, we have to delete all this stuff,” said Dayem.
Why Dayem is so insistent that the footage should be deleted, unless it contains something incriminating, is not explained. The interview from the footage has already been broadcast globally by CNN, so why the need to delete the rest of the footage? Perhaps because Dayem finds it hard to explain why he tells someone off camera during the clip, “Did you tell him to get the gunfire ready?”
This quote is not even addressed during Dayem’s interview with Cooper.
Furthermore, on his official Twitter feed, Dayem claims a different excuse to explain away him being rumbled as staging the gunfire.
“This was camera tricks by the Assad regime helped by Russians,” claims Dayem, citing no actual evidence.
In addition, in the original CNN interview with Cooper, Dayem claims he recovered dead bodies from civilians who had been killed “400 meters” away from his location, yet in last night’s interview he claims the shelling was taking place 15 kilometers away in a different city.
How that squares with Dayem’s previous calls for the United States, Israel, and NATO to launch “an attack, an army attack, a no fly zone, that the UN hit all our air bases,” is anyone’s guess.
Cooper tries to justify the fact that CNN has displayed brazen bias towards the Syrian opposition forces in constantly broadcasting dubious You Tube videos claiming atrocities by the regime, by explaining that Assad’s government will not allow journalists to enter Syria.
However, when independent Arab League observers did enter Syria, their subsequent report confirming the fact that there is indiscriminate violence on both sides of the conflict was universally ignored by CNN and the establishment media as a whole, who have heavily promoted the false narrative that only Assad’s forces are responsible for the bloodshed.
Watch the original video featuring evidence of ‘Syria Danny’s’ propaganda stunt below.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.
US President Barack Obama has dismissed calls from a senior Republican senator to start bombing Syria, saying that President Assad will leave anyway. He also called for a sober approach to dealing with Tehran’s nuclear program.
Lawrence Freeman of the Executive Intelligence Review magazine says that Obama is not the one to praise for America’s U-turn in its recent militaristic rhetoric.
Portrayed as a photojournalist for The Sunday Times, Paul Conroy, who has recently escaped from the Islamic Emirate of Baba Amr, is a British MI6 agent.
In this photo, he can be seen in Libya (in blue bulletproof vest) with, on the right, Al-Qaeda leaders Mahdi al-Harati (in black body armor) and Abdelhakim Belhaj (in camouflaged jacket).
• Mahdi al-Harati married an Irish woman and lived in Dublin. Paul Conroy is from Northern Ireland and was raised in Liverpool.
According to former Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, Mahdi al-Harati is still wanted in Spain for his involvement in the Madrid bombings of March 11, 2004.
In 2010, with a well-groomed beard and an NGO cover, Mahdi al-Harati was planted by MI6 in the “Freedom Flotilla,” which was on a mission to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Mahdi al-Harati led the Al Qaeda brigade who besieged the Rixos Hotel in Tripoli in August 2011. According to Khamis Gaddafi, he was overseen by French instructors. According to a high-level foreign military source, NATO had given al-Harati the assignment of capturing the Libyan leaders who sheltered in a secret facility of the hotel, and of murdering former congressman and Martin Luther King assistant, Walter Fauntroy, who was staying in the hotel. He was also to eliminate two Voltaire Network collaborators, Thierry Meyssan and Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, who were based at the Radisson Hotel, whence al-Harati operated his torture center. This decision had been made at a meeting restricted to the NATO command in Naples a few days earlier. The meeting minutes mentioned the presence of Alain Juppé. When questioned, his secretariat denied any involvement by the French Foreign Minister, saying that he was on vacation at that time.
In October 2011, Mahdi al-Harati organized a model village in Syria located in the mountains on the Turkish border. For two months, he hosted Western reporters singing them the praises of the Syrian “revolution.” The village is inhabited by a tribe that was paid to stage demonstrations and pose for the press. Al-Harati was visited in particular by Paul Moreira of Canal Plus and Edith Bouvier of Le Figaro.
• Abdel Hakim Belhaj is Ayman al-Zawahiri’s right-hand man, and currently Al Qaeda’s number two commander. Although officially still one of most wanted criminals in the world, NATO named him military governor of Tripoli.
Abdel Hakim Belhaj holds a Qatar residence permit.
Abdel Hakim Belhaj has recently made several trips to Turkey, where he was given an office on the NATO base at Incirlik, and to Syria where he built up several groups comprising up to 1,500 combatants. According to Ayman al-Zawahiri, it was his men who perpetrated the attacks in Damascus and Aleppo.
His organization, the Islamic Fighting Group in Libya, has merged with Al-Qaeda but still figures on the terrorist list of the U.S. State Department and the British Home Office.
By associating with renowned terrorists, Conroy falls within the scope of the law of both in United States and Great Britain for complicity or association with a terrorist group. He faces 15 years in prison, unless he pleads immunity as an agent of the Crown.
Benghazi declares autonomy, raises Al-Qaeda flag. McCain seeks to spread terrorist empire to Syria. by Tony Cartalucci
March 7, 2012 – “I have met with these brave fighters, and they are not Al-Qaeda. To the contrary: They are Libyan patriots who want to liberate their nation. We should help them do it.” – Senator John McCain in Benghazi, Libya April 22, 2011.
Image: And yet, the very courthouse McCain uttered his lies in front of is now flying the flag of Al Qaeda, while crowds have been photographed in the streets of Benghazi carrying it aloft since the fall of Qaddafi. Clearly, the senator from Arizona was “mistaken.” (click images to enlarge)
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Even as McCain deceived the world with his comments in pursuit of overthrowing and destroying the sovereign nation-state of Libya, it was already a matter of record, according to America’s own West Point Combating Terrorism Center, that Benghazi, and much of eastern Libya known as Cyrenaica, served as an epicenter for global Al Qaeda recruitment. Militants hailing from the eastern region’s Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) would end up in both Afghanistan and Iraq fighting Western troops and participating in sectarian violence.
This included LIFG leader Abdul Hakim Belhaj aka Abdul Hakim Hasadi, who first fought alongside the CIA against the Soviets in Afghanistan, then against US and British troops before eventually being captured by the US and handed over to Qaddafi who imprisoned him for 7 years. Upon his release, he would promptly be sponsored by NATO and the likes of John McCain, given arms, money, and training just as he was by the CIA during the Soviet Afghan-invasion, with the addition of NATO close air support in his bid to overthrow the Libyan government.
Video: McCain can’t plead ignorance – international news has covered Al Qaeda’s involvement in Libya, and now in Syria for well over a year.
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Belhaj and other militant factions constituting the “Libyan rebels” would go on a genocidal rampage throughout the country, encircling cities like Bani Walid and Sirte, cutting off food, water, electricity, and emergency aid while NATO mercilessly bombed populated city centers for days, weeks, and in the case of Sirte, months.
Belhaj is now the military commander of Tripoli and has been reported to be working with Syrian militants to repeat NATO’s campaign of atrocities, destabilization, and Balkanization in Syria, where he is said to be importing weapons and funds as well as LIFG fighters.
There is no doubt that the men McCain was defending were LIFG fighters, terrorists linked directly with Al Qaeda according to West Point reports (.pdf), and listed to this day by the US State Department and the UK Home Office (.pdf) as a “foreign terrorist organization.” McCain was not only rhetorically supporting listed terrorists, but providing material support including weapons, funds, training, and airsupport in direct violation of USC § 2339A & 2339B, “providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations.”
Video: McCain can easily be considered one of the founding fathers of the autonomous Al Qaeda terror-emirate of Benghazi, a distinction that makes a mockery of the 6,000+ US troops that gave their lives for the fraudulent “War on Terror” McCain is so fond of promoting.
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In a recent turn of events, it has been reported that the city of Benghazi has declared autonomy from Tripoli, raising the Al Qaeda flag and becoming in effect, a terror-emirate, one whose capital McCain had stood in, praising men who had American blood on their hands and were in the process of (and still are) carrying out racist genocide. Thanks to McCain’s support, the forces of Al Qaeda have achieved in one year what Qaddafi had prevented them from doing for decades. They now have a vast region, rich in oil resources gladly siphoned by Western corporations, to use as a base of terror – one of the very supposed scenarios McCain helped send 6,000+ US troops to their graves in Iraq and Afghanistan to prevent.
But McCain’s treason, national, and international crimes don’t begin or end there. His International Republican Institute (IRI) was mentioned by name in the New York Times as being behind the supposedly “indigenous” “spontaneous” “Arab Spring” unrest in the first place. In an April 2011 article published by the New York Times titled, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” it was stated:
“A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington.”
After helping overthrow the Egyptian government, McCain would lead representatives from Wall Street’s Fortune 500 corporations on a tour of Cairo like conquerors surveying their new dominion. He would also taunt the heads of state of both Russia and China, revealing the final destination of the chaos and destabilization he has been helping along by claiming, “I would be a little less cocky in the Kremlin with my KGB cronies today if I were Vladimir Putin. I would be a little less secure in the seaside resort [of] President Hu and a few men who govern and decide the fate of 1.3 billion people.”
The work of McCain’s IRI more recently manifested itself when it was caught meddling in Russia’s elections late last year and again just this month. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US government funded umbrella organization under which the IRI falls and the IRI itself, were behind several US-backed NGOs, particularly GOLOS, seeking to “expose voting irregularities.” The purpose of this was of course to cast doubts on the validity of the elections and justify street mobs brought out by the Russian opposition groups the IRI had been cultivating in an attempt to trigger an “Arab Spring” in Russia.
Image: Screenshot taken of McCain’s messages regarding unrest he and his IRI have prepared and are now trying to trigger in the streets of Russia. (click to enlarge.)
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And just this week, echoing his frothing warmongering over Libya, McCain called for US airstrikes on Syria. Promoting the use of America’s military while being unable to cite any credible or imminent threat to US territorial security would seem like a punishable offense or at least a sign of mental instability and grounds for dismissing the aged Senator. Instead, McCain represents the public face and voice of the corporate-financier agenda of Wall Street and London which has plotted a premeditated blitzkrieg from Tunisia to Thailand, and eventually to the doorsteps of both Moscow and Beijing.
On the eve of possible Western intervention in Syria, and with warmongers like John McCain, fellow IRI chairman Lindsey Graham, and Senator Joseph Lieberman calling for a repeat of Libya, it is essential that Americans look at the Al Qaeda flags waving over Benghazi and recognize McCain’s role helping hoist them aloft.
Thousands of American troops have shed their lives in a war they believed was meant to fight these very men now being handed nation after nation by US senators like McCain, who in fact were the principle proponents of the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq. We are not witnessing a wave for liberation and democracy sweeping the globe, but rather a sinister deception paved in blood, terror, and betrayal of all kinds crafting a world not for ‘we the people’ to thrive in, but for Wall Street and London to feed on.
A security operation in Homs reveals Mossad, CIA and Blackwater are involved in the military violence in this part of Syria, as over 700 Arab and Western gunmen and Israeli, American and European-made weapons were detained in Baba Amr district.
Syrian security forces got yet further proof of Western powers’ military involvement in Syria’s internal conflict, reports Al-Manar, a news agency, affiliated with Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based militant group and political party.
Around 700 gunmen were recently arrested in the former rebel stronghold of Babar Amr.
“The captured gunmen held Arab nationalities, including Gulf, Iraqi, and Lebanese. Among them were also Qatari intelligence agents and non-Arab fighters from Afghanistan, Turkey, and some European countries like France,” the agency quotes Syrian expert in strategic affairs Salim Harba as saying.
Harba also confirmed to the agency that “a coordination office was established in Qatar under American-Gulf sponsorship. The office includes American, French, and Gulf – specifically from Qatar and Saudi Arabia – intelligence agents, as well as CIA, Mossad, and Blackwater agents and members of the Syrian Transitional Council.”
The Syrian expert also added the security forces have also seized Israeli-, European- and American-made weapons.
“The Syrian army also uncovered tunnels and equipments there,” he told to the agency, “advanced Israeli, European, and American arms that have not yet been tested in the countries of manufacture, in addition to Israeli grenades, night binoculars, and communication systems were confiscated by the security forces.”
Salim Harba however said the Syrian authorities are not planning to reveal all the obtained information now, but assured all the evidence is of high value.
“The Syrian security forces have documents and confessions that could harm everyone who conspired against Syria, and could make a security and political change, not just on the internal Syrian level, but also on the regional level,” he said.
The recent Stratfor leak and hacked email of the company’s director of analysis also suggest undercover NATO troops are already on the ground in Syria.
There have been previous allegations of a Western presence on the side of the rebels as 13 French officers were reportedly captured by the loyalist forces earlier in March.
President Bashar al-Assad has repeatedly claimed his regime is fighting not with peaceful protesters as claimed by the West, but with the military gangs supported by the West.
Western powers however have categorically denied any military involvement in Syrian internal conflict.
Syria has a long history of peaceful coexistence among diverse religious and ethnic communities. But with ongoing violence in the country, more and more people fear this pillar of secularist regimes might end up crumbling.
With a predominantly Sunni Muslim population, Syria is also home to many ethnic and religious minorities – Shia, Druze and Christians included.
President Bashar al-Assad and his family are Alawite – the Shia Islam minority – and Alawites dominate the government, holding key military positions.
For years his regime has protected the interests of the country’s diverse religious population by enforcing its strictly secular program and curbing the influence of radicalism.
But for the past year the country has been embroiled in a political conflict which is now threatening to break this fragile balance.
RT’s Maria Finoshina traveled to one of the last resorts of peace and stability in the country – the village of Maaloula. It is the only place in the world where Aramaic – the language believed to have been spoken by Christ – is still used as a living language.
Away from the battles in this long-running conflict, it has troubled neighbors – the village of Yabroud, the alleged center of weapon smuggling in Syria is just 20 minutes away. The beleaguered city of Homs is less than a hundred kilometers away. The residents therefore are afraid the violence can now reach their place and ruin their peaceful life.
“We are afraid that these people [[anti-government protesters – RT]] will come here to try to disturb us and destroy our peaceful life, as they did in Homs and many cities, but we trust army and security and state,” one of the residents told the RT crew.
For years the regime kept all the religious groups in unity with President al-Assad, more than just the head of state, but kind of a symbol of this harmony.
“Our country before the crisis was developing now – we are all losing. Jesus said any kingdom that split will die fast. These people are receiving money, and listening to the orders. They want to ruin this country. What else [do] you think?” Pelagia Sayaf from St. Thekla Monastery explained to RT.
As sectarian violence over Syria between Sunnis and Alawites has already been seen in neighboring Lebanon, Syrian minorities now scared it will bleed over across the border.
And with increasing calls for foreign intervention and the arming of the opposition people fear a no-win fight would be tragic.
PN 