Against Ignorance

"Peaceful Protesters" well-paid by Masters of War

 
It seems that the "Peaceful Protesters" we hear so much about in our masked media have a "long and lucrative relationship" with ZATO militarists:

Though it is not yet stated US government policy to oust Assad by force, these spokespeople are vocal advocates of foreign military intervention in Syria and thus natural allies of well-known US neoconservatives who supported Bush's invasion of Iraq and are now pressuring the Obama administration to intervene. As we will see, several of these spokespeople have found support, and in some cases developed long and lucrative relationships with advocates of military intervention on both sides of the Atlantic.

-- Charlie Skelton, "The Syrian opposition: who's doing the talking?", Guardian (UK), 12 Jul 2012

Bassma Kodmani, the "Peaceful Protester" who attends Bilderberg meetings

 
The article addresses the various "Syrian" opposition groups -- the SNC, for example. It turns out that the lead SNC spokesperson, Bassma Kodmani, is a Paris-based Syrian academic who attended this year's Bilderberg conference in Chantilly, Virginia. Does she represent Syrians? -- or the Bilderbergers? Let's see:

Kodmani is a member of the executive bureau and head of foreign affairs, Syrian National Council. Kodmani is close to the centre of the SNC power structure, and one of the council's most vocal spokespeople. "No dialogue with the ruling regime is possible. We can only discuss how to move on to a different political system," she declared this week. And here she is, quoted by the newswire AFP: "The next step needs to be a resolution under Chapter VII, which allows for the use of all legitimate means, coercive means, embargo on arms, as well as the use of force to oblige the regime to comply."

This statement translates into the headline "Syrians call for armed peacekeepers" (Australia's Herald Sun). When large-scale international military action is being called for, it seems only reasonable to ask: who exactly is calling for it? We can say, simply, "an official SNC spokesperson," or we can look a little closer.

This year was Kodmani's second Bilderberg. At the 2008 conference, Kodmani was listed as French; by 2012, her Frenchness had fallen away and she was listed simply as "international" – her homeland had become the world of international relations.

Back a few years, in 2005, Kodmani was working for the Ford Foundation in Cairo, where she was director of their governance and international co-operation programme. The Ford Foundation is a vast organisation, headquartered in New York, and Kodmani was already fairly senior. But she was about to jump up a league.

Around this time, in February 2005, US-Syrian relations collapsed, and President Bush recalled his ambassador from Damascus. A lot of opposition projects date from this period. "The US money for Syrian opposition figures began flowing under President George W Bush after he effectively froze political ties with Damascus in 2005," says the Washington Post.

In September 2005, Kodmani was made the executive director of the Arab Reform Initiative (ARI) – a research programme initiated by the powerful US lobby group, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

-- Charlie Skelton, "The Syrian opposition: who's doing the talking?", Guardian (UK), 12 Jul 2012

More "Peaceful Protesters": George Soros, Lord Kerr, etc.

 
Kodmani's resume continues for another whole page. Among her associates, one finds George Soros, Lord Kerr, the deputy chairman of Royal Dutch Shell, and Peter Sutherland, the chairman of Goldman Sachs International. Charles Grant of the European CFR, and Jean-Claude Cousseran, a former head of the DGSE – the French foreign intelligence service.

When we here "Syrian National Council" and "Syrian Opposition", we expect to find ordinary Syrians. Instead, we find George Soros and Goldman Sachs.

And, as Skelton shows, Kodmani is not the exception. The SNC director of foreign relations, Radwan Ziadeh, turns out to be a senior fellow at the "US Institute of Peace" The USIP, funded by the U.S. government, headed by Richard Solomon, former adviser to Kissinger at the NS, is packed with NSC and Defense Department apparatchiks). Ziadeh is a "bluechip insider" in the U.S. War Establishment, according to Skelton:

SNC's Radwan Ziadeh: senior fellow at U.S. Institute for Peace

 

Ziadeh is a relentless organiser, a blue-chip Washington insider with links to some of the most powerful establishment thinktanks. Ziadeh's connections extend all the way to London. In 2009 he became a visiting fellow at Chatham House, and in June of last year he featured on the panel at one of their events – "Envisioning Syria's Political Future" – sharing a platform with fellow SNC spokesman Ausama Monajed (more on Monajed below) and SNC member Najib Ghadbian.

Ghadbian was identified by the Wall Street Journal as an early intermediary between the US government and the Syrian opposition in exile: "An initial contact between the White House and NSF [National Salvation Front] was forged by Najib Ghadbian, a University of Arkansas political scientist." This was back in 2005. The watershed year.

These days, Ghadbian is a member of the general secretariat of the SNC, and is on the advisory board of a Washington-based policy body called the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies (SCPSS) – an organisation co-founded by Ziadeh.

-- Charlie Skelton, "The Syrian opposition: who's doing the talking?", Guardian (UK), 12 Jul 2012

Skelton describes a 2008 War Party confab held in a government building in the U.S. capital. In a mini-conference titled "Syria In-Transition", Ziadeh shared a panel with Joshua Muravchik, the rabidly militaristic author of a 2006 op-ed titled "Bomb Iran". The topic was "The Emergence of Organized Opposition". Was the "opposition" organized -- or manufactured?

Ausama Monajed's tales of horror

 
The panel included another leading SNC spokesman: Ausama Monajed.

Monajed frequently crops up as a commentator on TV news channels. Here he is on the BBC, speaking from their Washington bureau. Monajed doesn't sugar-coat his message: "We are watching civilians being slaughtered and kids being slaughtered and killed and women being raped on the TV screens every day."

Meanwhile, over on Al Jazeera, Monajed talks about "what's really happening, in reality, on the ground" – about "the militiamen of Assad" who "come and rape their women, slaughter their children, and kill their elderly".

Monajed turned up, just a few days ago, as a blogger on Huffington Post UK, where he explained, at length: "Why the World Must Intervene in Syria" – calling for "direct military assistance" and "foreign military aid". So, again, a fair question might be: who is this spokesman calling for military intervention?

Monajed is a member of the SNC, adviser to its president, and according to his SNC biography, "the Founder and Director of Barada Television", a pro-opposition satellite channel based in Vauxhall, south London. In 2008, a few months after attending Syria In-Transition conference, Monajed was back in Washington, invited to lunch with George W Bush, along with a handful of other favoured dissidents (you can see Monajed in the souvenir photo, third from the right, in the red tie, near Condoleezza Rice – up the other end from Garry Kasparov).

At this time, in 2008, the US state department knew Monajed as "director of public relations for the Movement for Justice and Development (MJD), which leads the struggle for peaceful and democratic change in Syria".

-- Charlie Skelton, "The Syrian opposition: who's doing the talking?", Guardian (UK), 12 Jul 2012

Follow the money trail

 
According to a 2011 cable released by Wikileaks, there is a "remarkable flow of money" -- as much as $6,000,000 -- from the U.S. State Department to the British-based Movement for Justice and Development (MJD).

Today, the money flowing to the "Opposition" from abroad is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The same old PNAC gang: Bombing for Democracy

 
Other "Opposition" figures and groups on the Saudi-U.S. payroll include:

• Wael Merza (SNC secretary general)
• Ambassador Dennis Ross (calls for the creation of "an aura of inevitability about the SNC as the alternative to Assad.")
• Michael Weiss (U.S. journalist, Daily Telegraph blogger, author of "Blueprint for a Military Intervention in Syria")
• NOW Lebanon (set up in 2007 by Saatchi & Saatchi executive Eli Khoury)
• Henry Jackson Society (rabidly militaristic think-tank)
• James "World War IV" Woolsey
• Michael "Homeland Security" Chertoff
• William "PNAC" Kristol
• Robert "PNAC" Kagan
• Joshua "Bomb Iran" Muravchik
• Richard "Prince of Darkness" PerleA
• Hamza Fakher (co-author, with Michael Weiss, of Henry Jackson Society strategic briefings)
• Strategic Research and Communication Centre (founded and directed by Ausama Monajed)
• Murhaf Jouejati (SRCC board member, professor at the National Defence University in DC)
• The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (the masked media's primary source for news about Syria)

It turns out that this "Observatory" is a one-man two-room shop in London. So most of our "news" about Syria comes from one man: Rami Abdul-Rahman, the "Observatory" director.