February 7, 2020
(rough)
Amnesty International, UK branch at least, has a very serious problem. Its mission statement is clear:
We are independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion.
Yet their director, Kristyan Benedict, behaves like an attack dog for the Western Powers and their allies and their shared economic-political agenda. To be fair, he also passes on whatever the actual investigators at Amnesty come up with, be it politicized propaganda or some of the genuine humanitarian work it seems they're still allowed to do. But to be fair, he seems to be using that as cover for his main activity of pushing the West's political agenda and attacking any who oppose it.
Benedict's world of human rights concerns, for example, from his 14 most recent tweets (when I checked at https://twitter.com/KreaseChan and this is just how it reads across the surface without clicking through): Two on Syria doctors/hospital attacks, one opposing "Assad's political cleansing campaign" to re-take Idlib, 2 on China coronavirus coverup, poss. murder of whistleblowing doctor, 2 on Saudi Arabia legal repression, one about Putin being on Trump's re-election team, one to attack Jeremy Corbyn as a racist conspiracy theorist, and FIVE to attack criticism of the OPCW and/or the White Helmets. (one to echo management damage control as truth, TWO new retweets of Chris York's article, and two sleazy sermons from Eliot Higgins). Other recent tweets seems to argue that Syria has no right to reclaim its sovereign territory, to urge tougher sanctions on Syria, and to deny reconstruction funds after years of a foreign-backed insurgency (to make Syria more livable would "reward" a "monster" - we might help them rebuild after they stop supporting Assad and get rid of him for us). Other tweets seem to laud the death of Russian soldiers in Syria, Turkish forces claiming to have killed 76 Syrian soldiers, also in Syria, and Erdogan's threats of war if Syria's legitimate government pushes further into Turkey's illegal protectorate in Idlib, Syria.
One tweet addresses freedom of the media. So he's heard of the concept, and gets how it can become ironic in a supposedly free society, even as he encourages the silencing and smearing of voices that are out of step with the UK foreign policy he seems quite IN-step with.
https://twitter.com/KreaseChan/status/1224353178612895747/photo/1
The Chris D. York article Benedict so heavily promotes also cites him:
The 'Useful Idiots':
How These British Academics Helped Russia Deny War Crimes At The UN
How These British Academics Helped Russia Deny War Crimes At The UN
Lecturers from the Universities of Edinburgh, Leicester and Bristol have accused rescue workers the White Helmets of mass murder in Syria – to condemnation from Amnesty International and others.
Kristyan Benedict, Amnesty International UK’s Syria campaign manager, told HuffPost UK: “Discrediting the White Helmets is partly about discrediting war crimes evidence. The White Helmets’ filming at attack sites has meant they’ve built up a significant body of evidence of potential war crimes by pro-Assad and Russian forces – something neither Damascus nor Moscow views kindly."
The article is about British and other people who doubt the "evidence" - partly originating with the WH, but more importantly laundered in a corrupt "investigation" by a politicized OPCW. He explains this by claiming Russia and Syria's governments want the White Helmets (and the OPCW) discredited, to weaken the truth of their message. In context, he suggests their motive motivates us, with no mechanism explained. Are we paid? Maneuvered by clever Russian plots? He doesn't say. It sounds like some kind of conspiracy he doesn't quite have the theory for yet.
But either way, he acts certain that the accepted claims are true, so differing views make for "squalid propaganda," and people who spread that are doing a great disservice to “the millions of Syrians whose lives have been devastated by years of barrel bombing, chemical weapons attacks, imprisonment, torture and killing." Strong words from this mumble-mouthed failed conspiracy theorist.
Same statement on Twitter and my 4 responses - pretty reasonable questions he could have addressed:
Of course the victims deserve the truth. Future victims are best protected by truth and measures guided by it. Whoever's findings they prefer, does Chan or anyone else still deny there might be a problem with the accepted truth of the Douma incident and a review may be in order?
https://twitter.com/CL4Syr/status/1222855886281904130
I had to ask because from here it seems you're promoting a lowbrow politicized hit-piece full of baseless smears, perhaps thinking that will help the cause of human rights. Fighting actual lies can help the public stay on board w/a true cause, but that's not CLEARLY the case here
https://twitter.com/CL4Syr/status/1222857560165736450
I will be citing a reply, or lack thereof, from Amnetsy UK, news from, Krease Chan. Implicitly, they stand by the challenged FFM Douma findings and associated sides in various debates to the extent that divergent views now SHOULD be attacked in dishonest + uncivil ways. Right?
https://twitter.com/CL4Syr/status/1223254379349733377
Kristyan Benedict @KreaseChan I gather you already disproved every claim against the WH (sarcasm), so moving forward, why do you think the WGSPM is interested in pushing those lies and "discrediting war crimes evidence." Money? Evil? Just duped by clever Russian plots? best guess.
https://twitter.com/CL4Syr/status/1225157408630001664
(I only got who "Chan" was by this last tweet)
Of course he didn't respond. He's not in the business of having legitimate reasons that can be explained. He's just there to make certain political points that gain credibility coming from a supposedly non-political source, and to then go make some more.
The purpose of our work, as I see it anyway, is to explain how the accepted narrative he defends might just be the "squalid propaganda," that the Syrian government has been falsely accused of many crimes that were actually by the foreign-backed militants. Our intent is not to cover-up actual regime crimes - we seriously do NOT believe the allegations we challenge, on the basis of best evidence - no matter how big the rubber stamp that's put on them. And the only confusion we mean to sow is the initial kind you encounter after an illusion dies and before you re-sort your new truth. Attack dogs paint it differently, but they lie, and they're on leashes, and follow orders.
Fernando Arias can stand by the public findings of the FFM, jump up and down next to them, whatever. They're flawed and downright stupid in points, and so they might well be covering up the truth more than revealing it. That was always worth considering, and wound up having tons of supporting clues and red flags on investigation. Several OPCW employees have now put themselves on the line to let the world know what many of us already suspected. We have an almost complete paperwork narrative showing just how the investigation was warped into another weapon against Syria. Meaningless mantras issued as damage control do nothing but reinforce that that's all they have in return. Of course we're not turning back. We're not "ashamed." Glad to disappoint, Eliot:
"So congratulations to those "journalists" and "academics" who used a couple of disgruntled OPCW employees personal crusades to attack the work of an organisation investigating horrific war crimes, again I hope you're ashamed of yourself."
https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/1225487897698152448
When do we get to hear about their suspected pedophilia?
Make no mistake - intentionally or not, Mr. Benedict is right there with this Higgins fool, fighting hard to prevent people finding the truth. Those getting too close to it should be smeared with baseless drive-by accusations boosted by powerful allies. That's a humanitarian imperative for him. Such attacks could cost some people their jobs, maybe get them harassed or even killed. But it seems the main idea is to limit their ability to engage in the ongoing discussion of world events, while sending a chilling signal to anyone else who might try. This could help narrow the discussion further yet so eventually nothing but sanitized, establishment-sanctioned views will be allowed anywhere.
Because of human rights? No. Benedict fights only for the White Helmets' universal right to a sterling public image, despite the facts he calls lies. He fights for the OPCW's universal right to a sterling public image, despite the facts he calls lies. He fights for Western geopolitical interests, regardless of the facts, the impunity and prepetition patterns installed, and the ensuing cost to innocent lives. There are no such rights. They were made up, and they're only enforced by paid enforcers and "useful idiots," to borrow a phrase.
Looking ahead, further moves towards Benedict/Amnesty UK's vision of a just world might include: those speaking ill of the WH or promoting other Russian-like views could be detained in "re-education" camps where they could just disappear from the Earth for all we care. That would be a sadly poetic note for Amnesty International's candle to burn itself out on. Exaggeration aside, that's the nature of risk they run putting a guy like this in charge of steering things. And it does not serve Human Rghts, in Syria or anywhere.
HOW Amnesty Might Wind up Covering for Islamist Massacres
Amnesty/Benedict won't say how Russia and Syria get people to echo their lies according to their agends, because it's a made-up smear. But I can explain the first part of how THEY get duped into covering for the other side's atrocities, when and if that happens (it does). That's because it manifests in actual events I've studied.
Amnesty/Benedict firmly believe the alleged witness accounts from the Douma incident (including both contradictory sets considered here?). They must have established somewhere that Islamist militants (like the extremist "Army of Islam" that ruled Douma), or civilians under their authority and possible duress, would never give false testimony, deny a crime of their own side, or worse yet blame it on the other side. If that happened ever, you'd think AI would have reported on it at least once, somewhere on Earth like ... say, Myanmar aka Burma.
Following the 2017 "Rohingya crisis" in Rakhine state, Amnesty generally followed the established line of accepting all claims against the government and denying any (significant) alleged crimes of the other side, the militants of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA). It's admitted ARSA's 24 August attacks on security posts were illegal, but that didn't excuse the genocidal crackdown believed to have followed. There were many stories told of massacres committed by the Burmese military with Buddhist civilians assisting. These were widely credited. And there were a few claims of abuses by the Rohingya Muslim side, largely dismissed. For example, Human Rights Watch belittled "government allegations" of a story told by survivors of an ARSA massacre at Kha Maung Seik. They said the claims were not "independently" verified by anyone (including the survivors?) and considered such counter-accusations "playing politics with the dead" and urged it to stop. They said if there was evidence, someone should investigate, then apparently made their case by refusing to look into it.
But Amnesty found enough evidence to warrant a thorough investigation and concluded in May, 2018 that ARSA militants raided the village of Kha Maung Seik and abducted well over 100 Hindu villagers from Ah Nauk Kha Maung Seik and Ye Bauk Kyar. Eight women survived by agreeing to become Muslims and "marry" some of the militants, and had about ten of their children and some siblings spared in the deal. The rest of the villagers - 99 of them, by Amnesty's tally, and about half of them young children - had their throats slit, and their bodies dumped in well-hidden pits, only four of which with 45 of the bodies,have ever been found, based on the women's recollection (the remainder of 99 are only presumed dead, but it seems a good presumption - no one was spared from that batch). The Amnesty press release notes an interesting phenomenon they encountered during their study:
"Together, the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that ARSA was responsible for the massacre, and that it has actively tried to cover up the crimes by forcing the surviving women to appear on camera implicating other perpetrators and through more general intimidation aimed at distorting the story."
Does that happen? What an alarming possibility. Is it common enough to bother watching for? Does anyone know? Here they are telling that false story to save their own and their children's lives. This was briefly THE story to outsiders, and consider this: if they hadn't escaped their captivity to tell the truth, Amnesty would have no choice but to class this as one more atrocity by the Burmese state and its Buddhist allies, one where they killed Hindus besides Muslims, widening their genocide, perhaps getting India more on board with sanctions, etc.
Interestingly, the "discredited" Indicter magazine (per Mr. York) had already exposed about the same story of the "Kha Maung Seik massacre" (for shorthand), three months before Amnesty reported it, just from open-source evidence and an open mind (mine - and I did most of the research back in December as soon as I first stumbled across the story). My false-flag conspiracy theory mindset is predictive! It gets the true story! In this case at least.
https://theindicter.com/men-in-black-at-kha-maung-seik-a-massacre-by-rohingya-part-ii-of-the-series-fake-news-massacre-marketing-in-the-rohingya-crisis/
That's an evil but powerful trick if it works - kill one infidel, lie to another infidel (the West) about it by blaming your main local infidel and (shared) enemy, get the infidels killing each other. AI acts as if no other Islamists there or anywhere - at least in Syria - has used this technique. Of course they know such brutality and deception is at least possible, but Amnesty seems willing to run the risk of enabling the perpetrators by helping them to distort the record about it.
It does happen. Just one extra-clear and undeniable example from Syria will serve for now to prove the precedent only, not the prevalence. August, 2012: 16 "Douma youths" were "slaughtered with knives" by "Assad's thugs." Six of the bodies are shown on video with throats cut, dumped somewhere in Harasta. If Amnesty had weighed in on this small incident (it's possible they did somewhere), they'd almost surely credit the opposition's claims and demand Syrian military forces must stop detaining and murdering civilians, and they would in the process cover up the true crime while blaming the victims. The men in this image were Syrian military and police members (kidnapped from home?) held by the Muslim Brotherhood linked "Capitol Shield Brigade" in Harasta, at about the same time those bodies were found. Undeniable matches in clothing and features prove the men here numbered 3,4,5,6,7, and 15 are the same six people seen after being executed "by Assad's militia." From the similar clustering on the right side, they were likely marched out and killed right after this video was shot. 16 men appear, and it's said 16 were killed. (the captive video's publication seems to be some kind of accident - a lucky break for truth-seekers, a peek into something that could be rare or quite common, for all anyone really knows). (details + sources are linked from the article linked above)
That Capitol Shield Brigade was based in Harasta, right next to Douma. Douma and its surroundings were dominated - especially from mis-2012 and forward - by a different group, the Saudi-backed "Army of Islam" (Jaish or Jaysh al-Islam). They swiftly absorbed or crushed rival factions, imposed sharia law with no tolerance for dissent, etc. They almost surely kidnapped and murdered prominent opposition activists (Razan Zaitouneh, et al.), and also kidnapped hundreds of Alawite civilians at once in Adra, in partnership with Jabhat al-Nusra, and kept them prisoner, using many for slave labor, etc. (both of those came in a few day span in December, 2013, shortly after changing their name from Liwa al-Islam)
If a rebel faction rebelled against the repressive rule of "Army of Islam", as the Douma Martyr's Brigade did in 2014, might they kill its leader and kidnap his family? If so he the prisoners would largely be named Bakriyeh, and not many people are; the VDC lists an average of about one Bakriyeh per year dying in the conflict prior to 2018, almost all of them in Douma. But at least 12 people from this family are listed as dying at once in the 2018 chemical attack (11 with the name plus unclear number of wives and children who would have different names). (see here) That's at least 1/3 of the 35 (publicly) identified victims, out of 43 accepted as killed by the chlorine gas attack.
That 43 was an exact total with 43 names compiled by the "White Helmets" and given to the OPCW's investigators. But the same White Helmets had earlier reported 70, 85 and then more than 150 people were killed, while SAMS chief Dr, Zaher Sahloul passed on similar rising tolls up to 180 dead. The revision down to 42 or 43 was never adequately explained, and knowledgeable insiders later claimed 187 people were killed in several basements, and that might be true - it was a "sarin attack" at one point, but only chlorine was arranged at the one site, so the death toll might have been adjusted to fit that, somewhat better...).
The circumstances of their deaths have been kept deliberately murky. The OPCW's trusted final report ignores real and fundamental problems with the chlorine attack hypothesis, some of which were known and included in a draft report that left the case sounding quite unsolved. All the editors did was remove the troubling specifics - along with any mention of the June, 2018 consultations that produced them - and act as if it all lined up somehow. (see Douma toxicology: erasing and replacing the correct answers) Otherwise, the best answer (not the only) for so many dying, with the unique symptoms observed, their condition otherwise, and arrangement and re-arrangement at the scene, is a scenario people seem to enjoy giggling about that probably includes all of the following:
* the victims were likely prisoners kept somewhere with poor laundry and bathing access,
* they were finally murdered in some kind of gas chamber(s) the evening of 7 April.
* The specific clues suggest most of them were bound upside-down (or so that their faces were), and left to slowly suffocate on some pulmonary irritant, similar in effect to chlorine but with specific effects it doesn't have - primarily a yellow to brown staining of the skin (to explain and show this is graphic, but see Douma's mask of death, and the recent presentation of the WGSPM's prof. Paul McKiegue. Work continues on getting the clearest possible answer to this open, festering question the OPCW has failed to adequately address.
* Other possibilities may exist, but ones that explain all of the actual details … also may not exist. I haven't thought of or heard one. (some possibilities explain parts of the evidence, but not all of it).
* Then their bodies were brought to the scene and manually arranged as if they had lived there and just died there from the chlorine cylinder that - the best analyses agree - was manually placed on the roof to badly impersonate an aerial attack.
Human Rights Watch, the others: same shame. Human lives deserve more respect than this, and you all know it. The truth matters enough to bring skepticism into the investigation, and NOT JUST when it comes to "disinformation" from Russia and Syria. Justice for the victims of course requires actual truth. But that part is not important enough to warrant a bit of skepticism or fact-checking of the claims you're handed. It's a rather flippant attitude, really.
And you know about accountability-impunity-repetition, as you watch "Assad's" crimes pile up while never holding the Islamists to account for anything except a few crimes they openly admit (eg the late 2012 al-Nusra executions in Aleppo they freely showed images of, all kinds of open atrocities by ISIS). Not a moment can be spared to wonder if this latest "Assad" crime in some area held by "moderate rebels" might not be what they claim. And so the evil trick would work on these infidels, if they ever tried it - once, twice, or 700 times.
So, yeah. That's a problem.
Postscript 1, for example:
Syria, chemical weapons, untrue and even illogical stories, militant sources, White Helmets helping with the deception, no skepticism or double-checking, the regime is blamed. It does happen, and it's not watched for. This is a more light-hearted case. There was AFAIK no false-flag massacre, no deaths at all.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/02/syria-witness-testimony-reveals-details-of-illegal-chemical-attack-on-saraqeb/
Now that wouldn't justify it, but would reality even allow it?
And why WERE no actual civilians reported as effected? Only a couple of reports mention a wider spread, and these seem to be relatives of the militants, one of whom was probably Haithan Amad Kafrtouni (age 53, died in "another strike as he was stacking sacks of grain in a truck" just "days later") and/or "Abo Ziad" (VDC's best fit, from Idlib somewhere, died on Feb. 10 from unattributed IED (usually encountered in or planted in vehicles like trucks))
https://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-nonsense-gassing-of-militants-in.html
Postscript 2, loss of life - I had to write this just then, but it doesn't belong here - to be moved:
It's said we (WGSPM, "Douma deniers" in general) don't care about the victims, or deny there were any. eg. Alistair Bunkall of Sky News: "40-50 people died in the Douma chemical attack. Many of them young children. You’ll never see @PiersRobinson1 or his supporters acknowledge this awful loss of innocent human life. That was utterly debunked tonight by the OPCW but they continue to push conspiracy theories." https://twitter.com/AliBunkallSKY/status/1225539496063774725
This is bullshit. This guy don't even know what's going on, but something pushed him out into the fray to pile it on us, embarrassingly ignorant of just WHAT we've said and what proves us wrong. He just knows we are and SHAME on us. So who or what mob mentality told him to go out and loudly know that?
For my part anyway, those horrified faces drive me to continue after the truth - to keep this terrible blame being left where it doesn't belong, and make it available for the real killers - human scum who deliberately chose those babies, women and boys to stay in the poisoned air until they were dead. That to me is unforgiveable, AND it's just what the best evidence suggests. A lot of paid people say otherwise, but listening to people jabbering from their agendas is not how you do an investigation. You listen to the evidence, when it screams and when it whispers. Even when all this rented establishment noise starts to grind me down with a feeling of despair, those glazed eyes still stare from behind a brown mask of mystery and say "you've got nothing to complain about." I remain intent to solve that mystery and try my best to help secure any kind of justice, so long s it's based on the reality of what happened. Hate that if you must, but all your blind faith and hollow mantras mean nothing in comparison.
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