By As`ad ABUKHALIL

The launch of the Aljazeera television network 25 years ago this month in 1996 was a monumental event in the contemporary history of Arab media. One can easily compare it to the rise of Voice of the Arabs, the Egyptian radio broadcast founded by Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt in 1953.

Voice of the Arabs was available on shortwave radio throughout the Arab world, spreading Nasser’s message. No book on that era is complete without a reference to that radio service. It had a tremendous impact on the formation of Arab public opinion for decades until its demise after 1967, when Egyptian media was caught lying to the Arab people about the reality of defeat during the early days of the Arab-Israeli war.

The radio station that articulated the hopes of the Arab nation suddenly stood as a symbol of its incompetence and deception. No media replaced the Voice of the Arabs at the pan-Arab level until the rise of Aljazeera in 1996. Similarity between the two services ends there.

Aljazeera came into existence at a time of regional political instability in the Arabian peninsula. The then emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, came to power in 1995, having overthrown his father. That family coup so disturbed the Saudi royal family that they tried to overthrow al-Thani a year later. Riyadh felt that any deviation from the established line of succession would amount to a betrayal of centuries-old traditions that have been key to stable political succession.

(Of course, Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman has violated those norms and the lines of succession to make himself the sole successor to his father, King Salman).

Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani blamed Saudi Arabia for the 1996 counter-coup attempt and began to chart new foreign and defense policies that were directed at the Saudi threat (he justified his invitation to host U.S. troops as a protection against his powerful neighbor).

Aljazeera, which is owned by the Qatari government, was launched with a wide parameter of expression not seen in Arab media before. To be sure, there were red lines: not much was said about oil and gas policies, nor about the monopolies of royal families and the internal politics of Qatar.

As a guest on Aljazeera many times I can attest that the network does not accommodate views that are critical of the Qatari royal family. (My last appearance a decade ago was after I challenged the network on live TV about its preferential treatment of American officials and its attempt to suppress criticisms of Qatari foreign policy.)

No Competitors

Aljazeera was a huge success and it had no competitors at the time. There was the Saudi-owned media empire, MBC, which was started in London in 1991 by a brother-in-law of King Fahd as the first Arab satellite channel. It was aimed at drawing Arab audiences with silly entertainment and sports shows and with less emphasis on politics: whatever news that was allowed was strictly within the parameters of Saudi foreign policy.

Even TV serials on MBC carry blatant political agendas: either an anti-Shiite message (Al-Faruq, on caliph `Umar Ibn Al-Khattab, for example) or a blatant Zionist message in the serial Um Harun, for example. The latter was the first TV entertainment show to disseminate the Zionist agenda into Arab homes.

Aljazeera gave Arab audiences what they had been waiting for for decades: an Arabic chat and news political channel. A debate show, which brought two opposite political views (Al-Ittijah Al-Mu’akis), was an instant hit. The show was 90-minutes long (Arab audiences don’t suffer from American short attention spans). The presenters became instant celebrities.

Most Arab homes were tuned in to Aljazeera especially when there was a breaking story; the only alternatives to Aljazeera were regime-owned TV stations that were dogmatically propagandistic. It is not that Aljazeera was not serving a propaganda interest of the Qatari regime; but it also provided a wide margin of expression never seen before by Arab audiences.

There was much emphasis in those early years on Saudi Arabia and the channel highlighted human rights abuses there. Not all countries were treated equally, as allies of Qatar received better coverage. But the early managers and editors of the network were secular Arab nationalists and that appealed to many Arabs throughout the world. Even Arab-Americans subscribed to the Dish Network in order to receive Aljazeera broadcasts.

My first appearance on the network in 2001 was to speak about Saudi Arabia. The channel mixed political talk shows and very serious round-ups of news. Experienced and talented correspondents were hired and offices were established around the world. The Arab media scene had never experienced something similar, and themes about Arab unity and nationalism galvanized the audience.

But many Arabs had complaints about the coverage:

• the network hosted a weekly religious show with Yusuf Qardawi, a former Muslim Brotherhood preacher with very conservative views. His version of Islam was appealing to conservative Arab regimes who opposed Nasser—the man who successfully marginalized the Muslim Brotherhood around the Arab world;
• the network was the first to host Israeli guests; officials of the Israeli government and military were regulars on political shows (they did receive tough treatment—unlike on Western shows—but the precedent was appalling to many Arabs whose sensibilities were offended in the extreme);
• the network was increasingly getting defensive about the U.S. government and it gave ample platforms for U.S. officials to spew their propaganda. But the network’s championing of the Palestinian cause and its critical coverage of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 pleased Arab audiences (although the U.S. military responded by simply bombing Aljazeera’s office in Baghdad, which killed their chief correspondent).

U.S. bombing of Aljazeera‘s Baghdad office. (Aljazeera footage in the film Control Room)

The U.S. government and Arab regimes became alarmed over the increasingly important role of Aljazeera. Offices were banned, but the channel’s broadcasts were hard to censor. Saudi Arabia was most concerned because Saudi dissidents (like Sa`d Al-Faqih) would appear on the channel and call for protests on certain days (surprisingly, there were people who responded to such calls under the repressive regime).

The U.S. (in Congress and the media) became more vocal in their attacks on Aljazeera with journalists and politicians calling for its ban from U.S. cable carriers (the U.S. government routinely bans “undesirable” channels from the U.S. without much opposition from U.S. media).

Saudis Respond

The Saudi government quickly scrambled to produce its own political propaganda news channel and in March 2003 – just in time to provide favorable coverage of the U.S. invasion of Iraq — Al-Arabiya TV channel was launched to serve Saudi and U.S. interests. The network had a much narrower margin of coverage and only hosted opposition figures form countries that were not aligned with the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.

Aljazeera remained the leading channel although Al-Arabiya gained ground. The U.S. government was very pleased with the new Saudi channel and senior U.S. officials (including president George W. Bush) were made available for interviews, while many U.S. officials boycotted Aljazeera outright.

It was in 2011 that the story of the decline of Aljazeera began. Prior to that in 2008, the Qatari and Saudi governments reconciled and that resulted in much tamer coverage of Saudi Arabia by the network. The Saudi government requested that Saudi opposition figures not be allowed on the network (The Emir of Qatar in 2010 informed me that the Saudi king asked him to ban me from the network).

But the biggest change in the network’s coverage occurred in 2011, when the channel fell under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood and their affiliates. All secular Arab nationalists were pushed out of the station and new religious-oriented staff was brought in. With the beginning of the Arab uprising that year the network dropped all professional pretenses and adopted a more overtly propaganda line in calling for the overthrow of governments where change was favorable to the Muslim Brotherhood (such as in Egypt and Tunisia).

The channel passionately urged the toppling of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, but refrained from advocating the overthrow of the King of Bahrain next door. If anything, the network supported the Saudi invasion of Bahrain to crush its rebellion.

Reasons for Decline

It was around that time that Arabs started to abandon the channel in droves.

There are no reliable figures to document the decline of Aljazeera and the channel still claims to have a leading position among Arab media. But many factors have brought about the decline of Aljazeera:

• the control by the Muslim Brotherhood of the network drastically undermined its professionalism;
• U.S. pressure on Qatar softened the coverage of the U.S. The director-general of Aljazeera told me how the U.S. embassy in Doha submitted regular critical reports about the coverage of Aljazeera demanding that changes be made. In 2009, Haim Saban, the Israeli-American media mogul, tried to purchase the channel.
• the use of Aljazeera either to first offend and then appease Saudi Arabia turned the network away from journalism and towards propaganda.
• the rise of local channels in Arab countries damaged the ratings of all pan-Arab channels, like Al-Arabiya, Aljazeera and MBC.
• the resort to sectarian agitation by some personalities on Aljazeera, and the pro-Taliban, pro-al-Qa`ida sympathies of some Aljazeera correspondents (like Ahmad Zaidan), hurt the image of the network with the larger Arab audience and narrowed the appeal and audience share of the channel.

Aljazeera was one of the most interesting cases of a new Arab media in the 21^st century; it promised a break from traditional stale and rigid Arab news broadcasts but eventually failed in its mission. The early years of the network showed more professionalism in news than is seen on U.S. TV networks.

But the Qatari government’s control of the channel would inevitably cause a conflict between its professional mission and its propaganda role. Propaganda won and the Arab public is the worse for it.

consortiumnews.com

When a UK Prime Minister, such as the Conservative David Cameron, does the work of a foreign power, working for that foreign power and against UK’s democratic ideals, and also against the interests and values (such as equal-rights, and UK’s sovereign independence) which are held by the UK public, then that UK Prime Minister is perpetrating treason, whatever else it might also be called. This has happened, and yet no one pays attention to it: no one is even pointing out that it is treason. (Whether it is, in every sense of the word, we’ll get to, after the story here has been told, but that story must come first; only afterward can it be discussed.)

Following are highlights from the shocking and uncontested (though confusingly written) original Al Jazeera investigative news report published on January 8th, which had mentioned this treachery only in passing (but without calling it that). These excerpts will make clear the severity of what has actually been happening here — and of what is continuing to happen.

I shall add [in brackets] clarificatory adjectives etc., so as to help make instantly clear who is who, in this confusingly written story, and thus speed and ease a reader’s comprehension of the stunning narrative that’s being told here:

8 January 2017, Al Jazeera Investigative Unit

Israel apology after plot against UK politicians

Al Jazeera reveals discussions of Israeli diplomat and UK civil servant to ‘take down’ anti-settlement politicians.

The Israeli embassy has apologised to UK deputy foreign secretary [Conservative] Sir Alan Duncan for comments made by one of its staff members [Mr. Shai Masot] on plans “to take [him [Duncan]] down” due to his [Duncan’s] criticism of Israel’s settlement activity in the occupied [Palestinian] West Bank.

The comments, made by a senior political officer at the Israeli embassy [Mr.] Shai Masot, were secretly captured on film during a six-month undercover operation by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit, which reveals plots by the Israeli diplomat [Masot] and a British civil servant [Duncan] to destroy the careers of senior politicians [whom Israel wanted to be downed].

In a conversation with Maria Strizzolo, who was then chief of staff to MP [Member of Parliament] Robert Halfon, the deputy chairman of the ruling Conservative Party, [Israel’s Mr.] Masot asked her [the Conservative Strizzolo] if he [Masot] could give her some names of MPs [whom] he [Masot] would suggest she “take down” [on behalf of Israel].

[See it at 2:14 in this video, where his actual phrase was “Can I give you some MPs that I would suggest you take down?”]

Masot named [recommended to Strizzolo] Duncan, who in 2014 said that while he fully supports Israel’s right to exist, he believes [Jewish] settlements on occupied Palestinian land represent an “ever-deepening stain on the face of the globe”. He [Duncan] also likened the situation in Hebron in the occupied West Bank to apartheid…

Strizzolo… revealed that she had a strategy of manipulation to ensure Israel remains at the top of the UK’s foreign policy agenda.

“If at least you can get a small group of MPs that you know you can always rely on, when there is something coming to parliament and you know you brief them, you say: ‘You don’t have to do anything, we are going to give you the speech, we are going to give you all the information, we [the office of MP Robert Halfon] are going to do everything for you’,” she said.

She also advised trying to infiltrate Prime Minister’s Questions, a weekly session in which the leader of the country answers questions from MPs. The debate is televised live.

“If they already have the question to table for PMQs [Prime Minister’s Questions], it’s harder to say: ‘No, no, no, I won’t do it’,” she said.

Strizzolo then boasted how her own efforts once made an immediate effect on the national debate. …

In 2014, she [had] persuaded MP Halfon to question the prime minister in public over three missing teenagers believed to have been kidnapped and murdered “to get a response from the government”, Strizzolo said.

Halfon took the request and called on former prime minister David Cameron to support the Israeli government. …

In response, Cameron promised that Britain would “stand by Israel”.

Cameron there was a pushover for Halfon, who clearly was an agent for Israel. But was this treason only by Halfon, and not also by his boss and fellow-Conservative, Cameron?

To say that Cameron, as the principal decision-maker, who was a pushover for a foreign power’s stooge — the traitor who was acting on behalf of a foreign power — wasn’t himself acting treasonously here, would be to say that, for example, there is no such thing as criminal negligence, which is a criminal liability for failure to have done due diligence in carrying out one’s duties to the public as the nation’s chief of state.

Cameron, not Halfon, was the actual decision-maker here, the responsible party in the matter: as Harry Truman had said of the U.S. Presidency, “The buck stops here.”

This is comparable to the Inspector General of the TARP bailout of the megabanks, Christy Goldsmith Romero, recommending (and the U.S. government ignoring):

A PROPOSAL TO BRING ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE “INSULATED CEO”

I propose that Congress remove the insulation around Wall Street CEOs and other high-level officials by requiring the CEO, CFO and certain other senior executives to sign an annual certification that they have conducted due diligence within their organization and can certify that that there is no criminal conduct or civil fraud in their organization.

But, in the case of a head-of-state — a nation’s CEO — the obligation to do due diligence and to take full responsibility, for everything that one does and says that actually affects the public, and responsibility for the nation’s relationships with other nations: this due-diligence obligation for a head-of-state, is even more severe than it is for a private CEO.

A country that tolerates such negligence or worse (evil intent) from its rulers, cannot be a democracy, because that country’s international relations are being manipulated by a foreign power — placing another nation’s leadership above one’s own. That’s subversion, of the given nation. It is treason, for any public official.

In the United States, the aristocracy are trying to fool the public into believing that the incoming President Donald Trump is such a traitor (‘Russian agent’) (and no evidence has been presented to the public for that, except ‘evidence’ concocted by a former British spy); but in this case involving Israel and the Prime Minister of UK, there is even video of the Israeli agent Masot communicating to Strizzolo, who then communicates to MP Halfon, and who brags that she had formerly communicated to Halfon who then communicated to the Prime Minister, who then acted in accord with the Israeli government’s back-channel instruction. Was it really an “instruction,” though — or was it instead some type of international deal, a trading-of-favors between allied countries? Precisely what favors are being performed by Israel, to UK? Really? And would that secret international agreement — without any democratic approval by the domestic public — be something that a democracy would allow?

In any case, even if there was some secret deal that induced Cameron to fulfill upon Israel’s instruction, that secret treaty (the deal) had not been entered into by the Constitutionally authorized process. This alone would be violation of oath-of-office — on behalf of a foreign power. It would be treason.

Secret deals, unauthorized treaties (in effect), ended up producing World War I. They are exceedingly dangerous. Doing international relations this way is inconsistent with democracy.

But that’s what happened here in UK’s Party on the ‘right’, the Conservatives. However, Israeli attempts at subversion of the UK government happen also in UK’s Party of the ‘left’, Labour; and, the video that was linked-to is devoted primarily to that — to the Labour Party.

Like happens in the United States, the main Party on the ‘left’ is being torn between viewing things mainly in terms of tribal conflicts (‘Palestinians’ versus ‘Jews’), or else viewing things mainly in terms of conflicts between the government and the public — the rulers versus the ruled (irrespective of their ‘tribe’). In Israel, the rulers are, essentially, only the Jews who hold power; and the ruled include many people (the “Palestinians”) who are excluded from many rights that all “Jews” in Israel enjoy. The current leader of Britain’s Labour Party, Jeremy Corben, rejects the Jewish state’s tribal values; and, consequently, he is being called ‘anti-Semitic’ by his opponents, both within and outside his Party. In today’s Israel, to oppose racism is to be ‘anti-Semitic’. A certain type of racism is policy in today’s Israel. Adolf Hitler, a supreme European tribalist, is thus now retrospectively a paragon of Israeli values: tribalism (racism). The current Israeli government is in Hitler’s image, only less consistently, and choosing a different tribe to reward, and a different tribe to punish (and, of course, far less certain than he was of the ultimate morality of their cause, and thus also far less intense about their application of the resulting punishment than he was, in his blinding hatred; but, after all, he was the paragon of bigotry) — differing with him, on those things. The current Israeli government equates nazism (the ideology, not Germany’s particular nazi party) with good, and equality with bad: they say that to be opposed to the current state of Israel is to be an ‘anti-Semite’. And this type of value-system is being worked secretly upon the UK’s government, in Britain’s back rooms, with alien (in particular, Israeli) lobbyists.

That video, which I linked to at its 2:14, continues on for a full 26 minutes, and mainly presents there the conflict within UK’s Labour Party, over these two mutually incompatible views of Israel and the Palestinians: one view, championed by the anti-Tony-Blair and anti-Iraq-War, progressive, new leader of the Labour Party, Corben, is a view which refuses to take sides with Israel against its Palestinians; and the other view, the one which is championed by Israel’s apartheid government, identifies that equalitarian position with “anti-Zionism,” and then promptly identifies ‘anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism’, meaning that every Jew (or at least ones who aren’t themselves ‘anti-Semitic’) endorses the current apartheid Israeli government. This ridiculous lie, equating equalitarianism with ‘anti-Semitism’, assumes that any Israeli who rejects Israel’s current, apartheid, government, hates Jews, instead of hates racists. It’s “Big Brother” thinking: a conviction that bad is good, white is black, up is down, peace is war, etc.

Israel works secretly in America’s back rooms, too. Some people worry that President Trump will be a Russian agent. Some people worry more realistically that he will be an Israeli agent. And some people worry that he will be a Saudi agent (because the royal Saud family hate Iran, and Trump seems to believe that the Saudi royal family, who are Saudi Arabia’s government, are allies not enemies of America, and that Iran is America’s eternal enemy). Others worry whether Trump will be intelligent enough, or even honorable enough, to avoid being any foreign agent at all. But whereas there is strong reason to consider Britain’s David Cameron to have been an Israeli agent, there is no reason, yet, to think that Trump is any foreign agent at all. Only time will tell.

In UK, time already has told the reality on this; and another and much briefer al-Jazeera video, which was posted on January 7th by UK’s Guardian, presents a conversation between Masot and Strizollo, in which Masot tells Strizollo that the Israeli government isn’t satisfied with the extent to which UK’s Conservative Party has silenced the Conservative Foreign Minister Boris Johnson’s insistence upon a “two-state solution”: his insistence upon a situation in which Palestinians will be freed from domination by Israel’s ‘Jews’ — freed from the aristocrats (many of whom live in America, actually) who, in reality, control and determine Israel’s apartheid government.

Yet another brief al-Jazeera video shows that Strizzolo’s immediate response when Masot asked her “Can I give you some MPs that I would suggest you take down?” might have been to think of that assertion — the question he posed — as being an attractive invitation by Israel to, perhaps, help her boss by blackmailing some of his opponents: she said, “Well, I know that if you look hard enough, I’m sure that there is something that they’re trying to hide.” But, whether she was thinking there, of that question as representing Israel’s Mossad, intelligence agency, and what help it might be able to offer to the Conservative cause, isn’t entirely clear. However, this video opened with Masot’s telling Strizzolo that his career-aspiration “is to be the head of the Foreign Affairs Department of the Intelligence Department in Israel — I’m not a career diplomat.” So, maybe it’s in the context of his being an aspiring spy, that she was considering the ways in which she might be able to be of help to both her boss, and also the young and rising Israeli agent who was, perhaps, propositioning her.

Such statecraft, in the seedy real world, was repeatedly condemned by the people who wrote America’s Constitution. They thought of it as being the type of international relations that the nation they were starting should avoid, at all costs. They could hardly imagine that “it comes with the territory” (as the vernacular might phrase the matter).

It’s dangerous to democracy in any country.

countercurrents.org

Shai Masot (right, with the Israeli Ambassador at the British Labour Party Conference in 2016)

In one of the exchanges between Ms Strizzolo and Mr Masot, he is recorded as asking her ‘Can I give you some [names of] MPs [Members of Parliament] that I would suggest you take down?’ to which Ms Strizzolo replied that all MPs have ‘something they’re trying to hide.’ (The expression ‘take-down’ is defined as ‘a wrestling manoeuvre in which an opponent is swiftly brought to the mat from a standing position,’ but in this context has more disturbing connotations.)

Mr Masot speaking with Ms Strizzolo

Mr Masot then told her ‘I have some MPs’ and specified ‘the deputy foreign minister,’ Sir Alan Duncan, who has been critical of the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians. According to transcripts of the meeting, Strizzolo implied that ‘a little scandal’ might result in Duncan being dismissed, and added ‘don’t tell anyone about this meeting,’ which was clear indication that she knew it was clandestine and involved sensitive matters.

It was not surprising that Ms Strizzolo resigned her position following disclosure of her agenda — but first she tried to lie her way out of the affair, as is usual for such people.

In answer to a reporter’s questions she claimed her conversation with Masot was ‘tongue-in-cheek and gossipy… Any suggestion that I could exert the type of influence you are suggesting is risible.’ She declared that Mr Masot ‘is not someone with whom I have ever worked or had any political dealings beyond chatting about politics, as millions of people do, in a social context.’ This was strange, coming from a person who was recorded as saying she could help Israel because ‘If at least you can get a small group of MPs that you know you can always rely on… you say: ‘you don't have to do anything, we are going to give you the speech, we are going to give you all the information, we are going to do everything for you’.’

Pronouncements of innocence did not end with Ms Strizzolo’s assertion of virtue, and the Israeli Embassy declared that ‘the comments were made by a junior embassy employee who is not an Israeli diplomat, and who will be ending his term of employment with the embassy shortly.’

This so-called ‘junior embassy employee’ describes himself as ‘a Senior Political Officer’ on his business card, and his social media page states he is ‘the chief point of contact between the embassy and MPs and liaising with ministers and officials at the Foreign Office’ which indicates that he is responsible for dealing with influential representatives of his host country.

It is bizarre to state that Mr Masot would explore methods of ‘taking down’ British government ministers without authorisation from a very high level.

Masot told Joan Ryan, a Member of Parliament and Chair of Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), that he had plans for ‘another delegation of LFI activists’ to visit Israel and Ms Ryan said ‘That’d be good. What happened with the names we put in to the embassy, Shai?’ To which Masot replied ‘We’ve got the money, more than a million pounds, it’s a lot of money… I have got it from Israel. It is an approval.’

Israelis don’t spend a million pounds for nothing.

Predictably, Ms Ryan said the filmed revelations are ‘rubbish,’ but the Al Jazeera recording provides undeniable evidence of her involvement in chicanery as well as an Israeli scheme to interfere even more directly in the domestic politics of the United Kingdom.

It cannot be denied that an official of the Israeli Embassy in London collaborated with a British government employee who worked for a pro-Israeli Member of Parliament in order to attempt to destroy the reputation of a British government Minister. Yet the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office — the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whose Minister of State (in effect the deputy foreign minister) was the person specifically targeted for a campaign of Israeli-British denigration — quickly stated that ‘The Israeli Ambassador has apologised and is clear these comments do not reflect the views of the embassy or government of Israel. The UK has a strong relationship with Israel and we consider the matter closed.’

And that is that. There will be no action by the British government, in spite of Mr Masot reflecting amusingly, and no doubt to the approval of Ms Strizzolo and much of the British public, that the Foreign Minister himself, Mr Boris Johnson, ‘is an idiot with no responsibilities.’

The Prime Minister, Theresa May, is entirely pro-Israel, as demonstrated by her criticism of departing US Secretary of State John Kerry who described the Israeli government as the ‘most right-wing in Israeli history, with an agenda driven by the most extreme elements.’ He was perfectly correct, but Mrs May scolded him and pleased the Israeli government by stating that she does ‘not believe that it is appropriate to attack the composition of the democratically elected government of an ally.’

The Conservative and Labour and all the other Friends of Israel have worked their magic in Britain, as does the enormously powerful Israeli lobby in the United States, and the Al Jazeera revelations were only a one-day-wonder in the West.

The Matter is Closed.

But imagine the outcry if there had been reports concerning such actions in London (or Washington) by a representative of any nation other than Israel.

If a Russian diplomat in the capital of any Western country had tried to engage in underhand antics like Israel’s ‘Senior Political Officer’ in London there would be massive journalistic fandangos in American and British media. The West’s television channels would be near meltdown with hysterical condemnation of the threat to democracy and there would be prolonged and frenzied anti-Russian outbursts in their halls of government.

But when Israel schemes to ‘take down’ a respected British Government minister with the assistance of a British government official, and the Israeli ambassador apologises for being found out, the British ignore insult, injury, contempt and condescension, and declare that ‘The UK has a strong relationship with Israel and we consider the matter closed.’

It is amazing what money can buy.

* * *

Afterword: The first of four Al Jazeera Investigative Unit's ‘The Lobby’ will go on air at 10.30 pm GMT on Wednesday 11 January. This will be followed by episodes at the same time for the next three days.

Foto: Aol

In fact, Iraq had no such weapons, there was no evidence of Iraq trying to procure uranium from Niger or any other African country, and that the biological weapons mobile laboratory information was disinformation provided by a professional Iraqi con artist who the CIA called «Curveball».

Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair eagerly went along with America’s ruse about Iraq. In the end, the false information was used to justify a deadly and costly invasion and occupation of Iraq by Western nations, chiefly the United States and Britain.

Now, over a decade later, the Obama administration is dusting off the Bush administration’s playbook and using it on the government of Bashar al Assad of Syria… The Obama administration first showed its neo-conservative traits when it justified NATO and Gulf Arab intervention in the Libyan rebellion against Muammar Qaddafi as falling under its «responsibility to protect» civilians being attacked by Qaddafi’s forces.

The Western media portrayed Libyan civilians being attacked mercilessly by Qaddafi’s troops just as it has hyped the «brutality» of Assad’s forces against Syrian civilians. Neither in the Libyan example nor the Syrian case, did the Western media, save for a few isolated examples, report on the crimes against humanity committed by Libyan and Syrian radical Sunni Islamist rebels. Documented cases of genocide of black African guest workers in Libya went unreported just as are current cases of wanton killing of Syrian Shia’s, Alawites, Christians, and Kurds being committed by radical Islamists, including Al Qaeda-linked rebels.

Rather than report on Syrian rebel massacres of Syrian civilians and Iranian nationals and foreign Christian clerics, the Western media is promoting the unverified story that a Syrian government chemical attack on "thousands" of civilians in the Ghouta suburb outside of Damascus. Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) ratcheted down the number of dead civilians from «neurotoxic symptoms» to 355.

One of the West’s chief fabulists, British Foreign Secretary William Hague, who lied about Qaddafi's presence in Venezuela after Islamist rebels seized power in Libya, claimed that Syrian rebel-supplied video tape footage of dead Syrian civilians from a government-ordered chemical attack was authentic. After questions arose as to the veracity of the Syrian rebel video «evidence» of a nerve gas attack on civilians in Ghouta, Hague backtracked by claiming the Syrian government destroyed the evidence of their attack. Syrian forces had uncovered chemical weapons-related equipment and supplies in a tunnel in the Damascus suburb of Jobar, which had been used by rebel forces. Syrian state television reported that Syrian soldiers who discovered the chemical weapons cache began suffocating.

The Obama administration cynically stated that it was too late for the Syrian government to invite UN weapons inspectors into the suburbs of Damascus where chemical weapons were reportedly used. It was more déjà vu. All of Saddam Hussein’s entreaties to the U.S. that his weapons sites were open to full UN inspection were also called too little and too late. Nothing Saddam could do in 2003 or Assad can do in 2013 could or would dissuade the United States and its allies from launching an attack on an Arab country.

Obama’s final preparations for war with Syria, using a dubious Syrian rebel report of the crossing of a «red line» in the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war, have their origins early on in the Bush administration. Former NATO Commander General Wesley Clark was quoted as saying that in the weeks after the 9/11 attack, he was told by a general serving on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff that the United States was going to take out seven countries in five years. The general who told Clark cited a classified memorandum, which described «how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran». Although it is now twelve years later, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran are the only countries remaining on the target list which have not been completely taken over by the United States.

In January 2013, a hacker obtained emails from a British private security company called Britam Defence, which is headquartered in London, which referred to a planned false flag chemical weapons attack to be staged in Syria with financing from Qatar. The attack would be blamed on Assad and use Russian-speaking Ukrainian personnel in a video that would then be disseminated to prove Russian involvement with Assad’s forces.

The email from Britam’s David Goulding to the firm’s Philip Dougherty, stated:

«Phil

We’ve got a new offer. It’s about Syria again. Qataris propose and attractive deal and swear that the idea is approved by Washington.
We’ll have to deliver a CW [chemical weapon] to Homs, a Soviet-origin g-shell from Libya similar to those that Assad should have. They want us to deploy our Ukrainian personnel that should speak Russian and make a video record.

Frankly, I don’t think it’s a good idea but the sums proposed are enormous. Your opinion?

Kind regards,

David»

Some eight months before the Syrian rebels disseminated a video showing dead civilians in Ghouta, there is evidence that the Obama administration, working with the Qataris and a British private military contractor, planned to use a chemical weapon in Homs and make a video showing the involvement of Russian-speaking personnel. In simple terms, Washington, Doha, and London were planning a «false flag» chemical weapons terrorist attack in Homs and blame Assad’s forces for crossing the «red line» in using chemical weapons against civilians. It is exactly the template that was used in Ghouta.

Western intelligence maintained a longstanding meme of suggesting that Al Qaeda was trying to procure weapons of mass destruction, including chemical weapons. During the U.S. occupation of Iraq, Al Qaeda units used chlorine gas on civilians. In June of this year, Al Qaeda was found by Iraqi authorities to be producing mustard gas and other chemical weapons, including sarin gas, at two facilities in Baghdad. The weapons were said to be for use outside of Iraq. Around the same time, the Turkish media reported that the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, the Al Nusra Front, was in possession of sarin gas for attacks inside Syria and Turkey. In March, Al Nusra used chlorine gas in an attack on civilians in Syria.

Al Qaeda has obtained weapons of mass destruction and their use in Syria is countenanced by Barack Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and his foreign policy mouthpiece Hague, the Syrian rebels headquartered in Istanbul, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.

After the dubious report of the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons was hyped by the Western corporate media, Al Nusra said it reserved the right to strike at Alawite civilians in Syria. Obama and his British allies remained silent.

The Syrian false flag chemical attack is also déjà vu in another respect. Once again, we find Al Qaeda and its proxies on the same side as Israel and its intelligence services. There were reports in the Western media that it was Israel’s signals intelligence agency, Unit 8200, which intercepted communications between Syrian government military commanders ordering the chemical weapons attack. At the same time, Syrian rebel leaders in Turkey were calling on Israel to pressure Western countries to militarily attack Assad’s government. The coordination of propaganda between Israel and the Syrian rebels on the Ghouta incident is prima facie evidence of wider overall cooperation between Wahhabists and Zionists in the Middle East, from Libya and Egypt to Yemen and Lebanon.

The proffering of the Syrian rebel video of dead Syrian children from an alleged government chemical attack suspiciously coincided with the debut of Al Jazeera America on four major U.S. cable television systems. Al Jazeera, wholly funded by the Qatari emir, a Muslim Brotherhood adherent and supporter of Syrian rebel forces, provided its new American viewing audience with non-stop coverage of the chemical attack, repeatedly re-broadcasting the rebel video. It is not secret where Al Jazeera’s sympathies lie in the region. In 2006, Gideon Ezra, the former deputy chief of the Israel Shin Bet intelligence service, was quoted in Foreign Policy as saying, «I wish all Arab media were like Al-Jazeera».

It is rare when Israel and Al Qaeda surface in full agreement with one another and coordinating their efforts out in the open during a covert operation. The last major time that happened, it was not Syrian civilians who were caught in the bloody maelstrom of a Wahhabist-Israeli joint false flag operation but Americans at work and traveling on September 11, 2001.
 

The fairytale appeared to become reality in the year 2006 when the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar set up the English-language news broadcaster, Al Jazeera. Qatar’s ruler Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, one of the richest men in the world owing to his tiny country’s immense natural gas wealth, put up the money to found the corporation… To go head-to-head with well-established global media giants was no mean feat, requiring a multi-billion-dollar investment. Pretty soon, however, Al Jazeera proved to be media heavyweight and appeared to offer news consumers a fresh perspective from the Western-centred corporations, especially when it came to Middle East affairs. 

When Al Jazeera English entered the global scene, the American-led military occupation of Iraq was at full throttle with disturbing evidence of rampant NATO violations against civilians, such as the mass murder of families in Haditha by a platoon of US marines, and the full-scale onslaught on the city of Fallujah involving use of banned weapons like White Phosphorus. Al Jazeera provided critical coverage of these events in a manner that often outshone likes of the BBC, CNN, Reuters and Sky. 

On events in the occupied territories of Palestine and Afghanistan, the Qatar-based network seemed to offer ground-breaking independent reportage. Al Jazeera was judged by many viewers, including Western audiences, to be more independent than the Western media outlets who were often considered “too soft” on Israeli violations and too deferential to foreign policy of their respective governments. In the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq, which was viewed as an illegal war based on criminal deception over spurious claims about 9/11 and non-existent weapons of mass destruction, the credibility of the major Western media corporations had slumped in the public eye. These outlets were seen as compromised, having uncritically indulged the fabrications and lies that emanated from Washington and London with regard to the Saddam Hussein regime and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Al Jazeera was not encumbered with this propaganda baggage and was therefore viewed as a more reliable source of international news.

There were, of course, skeptical voices about Al Jazeera even at its inception. How could a news broadcaster owned by an unelected absolute ruler be independent? After all, the Persian Gulf Arab oil sheikhdoms are a byword for repression and benighted medieval obscurantism, with Saudi Arabia’s House of Al Saud taking the laurels for that unenviable reputation. Qatar’s House of Al Thani was not far behind in the oppression stakes. Emir Hamad came to power in 1998 after he led a coup against his own father. 

However, the Qatari ruler had a vision of promoting his kingdom as a global media hub. In some ways it was a radical initiative, setting the emirate apart from its Arab neighbours and bestowing global kudos on a mini-state of less than four million population. Al Jazeera English was central to realizing that vision. International celebrity journalists, such as Britain’s Sir David Frost, were recruited to give the corporation star appeal and household brand recognition. Qatar’s capital, Doha, became an international forum for high-profile media debates on weighty matters of the day. Glamorous news presenters, such as the BBC’s Zainab Badawi, were called up to host the Doha Debates on such issues as global poverty and ecological sustainability. 

American and European prestigious universities, such as Cornell and the Paris Sorbonne, have been partnered with Qatari oil and gas money to boost the newfound international reputation of Qatar as an intelligence hub and seat of learning. 

But cracks in Qatar’s carefully crafted façade began to appear with the advent of the Arab Spring. Qatar’s rulers, along with the House of Saud, have nailed their political colours to the American and Western mast in relation to the region’s momentous upheavals. Qatar has emerged as a strident Arab voice backing the Western geopolitical agenda of shoring up the conservative Muslim Brotherhood parties in Egypt and Tunisia that have served to blunt the revolutions on Western government terms. Whereas in Libya and Syria, Qatar has joined the Western fray in demanding regime change. 

The increasingly interventionist role of Qatar in promoting the Western geopolitical agenda towards the Arab Spring has been accompanied by an increasingly overt propaganda role of Al Jazeera in covering these events. The broadcaster’s erstwhile reputation as an independent, critical news media outlet has rapidly dissipated to reveal an information service that is more propagandist than objective, serving the political ambitions of its royal owner, rather than functioning as a reliable journalistic source. 

Al Jazeera has come under scrutiny for dumbing down on the popular uprising against the Western-backed Khalifa regime in neighbouring Bahrain, while at the same time giving saturated coverage to the Western-fomented insurgency in Syria. As with Western mainstream news media, Al Jazeera has given scant coverage to the brutal repression against civilians in Bahrain – where there is an undoubted genuine popular revolt – but, in contrast, the Western and Qatari/Saudi-backed covert, criminal campaign of subversion in Syria is distorted to appear as a noble struggle for democracy against the government of Bashar Al Assad. On more than one occasion, the Doha-based broadcaster has been caught red-handed peddling disinformation about the Damascus government with unfounded allegations of human rights abuses, while covering up rampant atrocities committed by the Western-backed and Qatari-armed so-called Free Syrian Army.

The Arab Spring has shot through the putative reputation of Al Jazeera as an independent news outlet. Several of its journalists and bureau chiefs have resigned in disgust at the nakedly political agenda of Al Jazeera, where the organization has come to be seen as a propaganda tool serving the geopolitical interests and ambitions of its owner, the Qatari monarch.

Perhaps the final nail in the coffin for the emirate’s pretensions of supporting independent journalism and free speech was delivered last week with the fate of a young Qatari poet. University student Mohammed Al Ajami was sentenced to life in prison by a secret court in Doha for the “crime” of writing a poem that was deemed to be critical of the emir. 

Ajami’s poem, entitled Tunisian Jasmine, was inspired by the popular uprisings that sparked off in Tunisia at the end of 2010 with the self-immolation of a young street vendor. The student poet lamented how the people of the region “were all Tunisians now” and he deprecated the region’s autocratic rulers who were deaf to the cries of freedom and democratic rights among the masses. He was first detained by the Qatari rulers in November 2011 after his poem was posted on the internet and he was kept in solitary confinement for 12 months before being sentenced to life imprisonment last week. Ajami’s lawyer told media how he was not allowed to represent his client in court and that the young poet was not even given the chance to defend himself from the charges laid against him in secret by an Al Thani appointed judge. 

Rights group Amnesty International said of the verdict: “It is deplorable that Qatar, which likes to paint itself internationally as a country that promotes freedom of expression, is indulging in what appears to be such a flagrant abuse of that right.”

This was the barbaric fate of a Qatari youth who mildly spoke his mind and expressed a heartfelt desire for human freedom and dignity. The barbarity was perpetrated by a megalomaniac ruler who professes concern for human rights and democratic freedom in Gaza and Syria; the same ruler who owns Al Jazeera English – the self-styled independent global news broadcaster. This fairytale just ended in cruel tears with poetic justice of a very barbarous kind.

«The time has come to go by the suggestion calling for Arab-international forces to be sent to Syria», said Qatar's Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr al-Thani during the 137th meeting of the Ministerial Council of the Arab League which convened on March 10. Qatar lacks the independent potential to take a key role in the intervention, but calls for it are voiced on a regular basis by the leaders of the country relatively small in terms of the population and territory. 

Qatar tends to maintain a fairly high profile on the international stage. Brookings Doha Center director Salman Shaikh cites as an example the fact that in May, 2011 the country brokered a peace deal in Darfur where the government forces were clashing with insurgents. In May, 2008, Doha was instrumental in bringing about an agreement which marked the end of a protracted standoff in Lebanon and paved the way for the presidential elections in the country. Qatar similarly contributed mediation to the internal conflicts in Yemen, Somalia, and Chad, as well as to the Djiboutian–Eritrean border dispute. An array of factors prop up Doha's ambition to handle geopolitical complexities:

1. Qatar's gas export revenues are surging (the sales of natural gas from Qatar have grown by 500% since the early 1990ies).

2. Al Jazeera, Qatar's global broadcaster, provides powerful propaganda support for the foreign policies pursued by Doha.

3. Qatar hosts two US military bases1 and, overall, enjoys a strong political partnership with Washington.

At the moment the economic growth posted by Qatar is among the world's highest. According to Earnst&Young, the annual increase in Qatar's GDP averaged 13% in 2000-2012 and held on at the healthy 9.5% level even at the peak of the global crisis. Notably, Qatar is a world champion with the highest per capita income and investments. All of the impressive macroeconomic readings are sustained by Qatar's natural gas export. In a bid to put to work the geographic centrality of the country, its energy minister Abdullah al-Attiyah switched a large part of the national energy sector to natural gas liquefaction, and as of today Qatar runs the world's biggest fleet of LNG tankers. The strategy helped decouple Qatar from gas transit countries, while its LNG output rose from 13 million tons in 2003 to 75 million tons in 2011. 

Along with natural gas holdings, mass media are a pillar of Qatar's emerging regional leadership. The emirate is home to Al Jazeera, an information heavyweight with the audience estimated at 50 million as of 2011. Established by David and Jean Friedman in 1995, it was at the early phase patronized by Sheikh Hamad bin Thamir Al Thani who had recently seized power in Qatar. Al Thani poured a handsome $150m into the media outlet, plus, in a lucky coincidence, Al Jazeera was able to absorb nearly the whole former BBC Arabic language TV station which used to exist in the form of a joint venture with Saudi Arabia's Orbit Communications Company and fell apart due to disagreements with the Saudi authorities. Al Jazeera owes much of its acclaim to the focus on Arab affairs and to risky live reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Al Jazeera had become a big gun in the information warfare by the time the Arab Sprig commenced. Sheik Ahmad bin Jasem bin Muhammad Al-Thani, a Qatari businessman and member of the royal family, took charge of the company when its original chief Wadah Khanfar resigned and the ruling dynasty gained direct control over the outlet. 

In addition to contacts with the African Union leadership, in the early 2000 Qatar started to connect to various Middle Eastern opposition groups, occasionally sheltering political refugees from their ranks. Qatar is known to be a sponsor of Hamas, whose emissaries it sent to feed armaments to rebels in Libya. Doha also seeks to persistently influence the situation in Yemen, offering mediation to the country and, as a parallel process, infusing financial resources into the protest movement. 

At the moment, Qatar's official international agenda features democracy and liberalization, which is a somewhat paradoxical position for a country where the political system happens to be absolute monarchy and the dominant school of thought is a Wahhabi brand of Islam also found as the official ideology in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. 

The civil war unleashed in Libya is to a considerable extent attributable to Qatar's efforts. The emirate provided financial support to the rebels and even covered part of the costs of the NATO air raids against Libya to help sustain the intensity of bombings. 

It is an indispensable trait of Middle Eastern societies that the advent of democracy in the respective countries imminently translates into the Islamists' rise to power. Libya's National Transitional Council has on board several individuals with the reputations of protégées of the Qatar ruling dynasty, one of them being Mahmoud Jibril, the former Libyan interim premier linked to Doha via the Jtrack company and Al Jazeera. 

Qatar is reinforcing its political positions in the countries immediately neighboring it. The moderately Islamist Justice Party won 80 of the 395 seats in the Tunisian parliament, and in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood in concert with Al-Nur, a Salafist party, currently holds 152 of the 270 seats in the lower chamber of the national legislature. With the «moderate» image of the above political forces on public display, Qatar which actually assists the West and the international grands in destabilizing the region need not feel embarrassed about dealing with Islamists as acceptable partners.

In October, 2011, N. Sarkozy secretly met with the emir of Qatar to ask him, from the name of NATO, to agree to tighter coordination in Libya with the National Transitional Council. Doha could not bluntly brush off the suggestion considering that the US is the guarantor of Qatar's security (the personnel at the two US military bases in the country compares in numbers to a third of its own army) but will hardy take it too seriously. First, the relationship between the West and Qatar, the supplier with a 43% share on the European LNG market, is by all means a two-way traffic. Secondly, neither the West nor Qatar can afford to put their friendship to a test as a potential deadline for Syria may be drawing closer. 

Struggling for greater sway over Maghreb and Levant, Qatar entered a race with with Washington's other Wahhabi ally – the Saudi Arabia. The visible difference in the approaches adopted by the two players is that Qatar's elite is open to contacts with any forces regardless of their ideological leanings, while the Saudi Arabia mostly engages with extremist groups sharing its ideological perceptions. Doha, for example, maintains a steady relationship with Algeria, a country fairly similar to Syria politically. The emir of Qatar does not shy away from regularly visiting Algeria which also attracts massive investments from Qatar. The above may be a feasible explanation behind Algeria's relative stability contrasted by the slide of Libya into Muslim radicalism skilfully managed by the West and its Middle Eastern satellites.

On the whole, Qatar's foreign policy reflects a plan to convert the country into a regional center of power with the backing from its Western partners. The design must be credited with certain realism considering the combination of the financial resources Doha is building based on natural gas export and the aggressive potential of Qatar's ideological mix of Wahhabi Islam and pan-Arabism. Doha seems to have sensed a novel model of expansion blending a generally pro-Western orientation with rigid traditionalism in the form of reliance on fundamentalist groups or even openly terrorist organizations. A seizable benefit of this line of conduct for Qatar is that it guarantees to the country's investors the admission to the Arab and African markets where they successfully rival the EU and China. 

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1. Six B-1B bombers are deployed at the Al-Ubayyid base. The site's aerial photos available in the media also show numbers of other types of planes including the C-17 and C-130 transports, the KC-135 and KC-10 aerial refueling aircrafts, the P-3 Orion anti-submarine and maritime surveillance aircrafts, and the E-8 Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar Systems (http://www.vz.ru/news/2012/2/2/558460.html)

The United States was never really happy with Al Jazeera’s Arabic service, having militarily attacked the network’s office in Kabul in November 2001 and its Baghdad bureau in April 2003. A leaked 10 Downing Street memorandum from 2005 indicated that President George W. Bush wanted to bomb Al Jazeera’s broadcast center in Doha in 2004. 

But when Al Jazeera English began broadcasting in 2006, what was a nuisance to U.S. propaganda efforts on military battlefields abroad became a problem for the United States at home. Although U.S. cable companies did their best to ban Al Jazeera English from cable television offerings, the network was being carried over a television broadcast channels in the Washington, DC area. Moreover, Al Jazeera English’s web site began attracting more and more Internet surfers. Al Jazeera’s independent reporting on the news – which was far and above that of any U.S. news network, including the one-time standard for international cable news broadcasting, CNN – was being referenced by more and more journalists and political leaders. 

By the time the Barack Obama administration took over the reins of power in Washington, a new policy was adopted, one that would seek to co-opt news networks like Al Jazeera rather than attack them on the battlefield and censor them in the corporate news rooms of the United States. 

Obama appointed Walter Isaacson, the former Chairman and CEO of CNN and someone who is as much a cog in the machinery of globalism and the “New World Order” as news manipulators George Soros and Rupert Murdoch, as chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the oversight authority of the U.S. government for such official propaganda outlets as the Voice of America, the Arabic language Al-Hurra television network, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Isaacson said of the burgeoning number of international news networks, including Al Jazeera, RT (formerly Russia Today), and others, “We can’t allow ourselves to be out-communicated by our enemies.” Isaacson, in addition to protecting his own nest egg of U.S. government-financed propaganda networks, which include a much-hyped Radio Free Europe station broadcasting locally in Afghanistan, saw Al Jazeera, RT, and China’s CCTV as threatening the stranglehold his corporate pals at CNN, Fox News, and MS-NBC maintained over news content on the cable networks. 

On March 2, 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton weighed into the debate during testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee. Clinton declared the United States was losing the global information war and cited Al Jazeera, CCTV, and RT as examples of networks besting the United States at televised news. 

Clinton said, “We are in an information war and we are losing that war. Al Jazeera is winning, the Chinese have opened a multi-language television network, the Russians have opened up an English-language network. I’ve seen it in a few countries, and it is quite instructive.”

Although Clinton was arguing for Congress to budget more money for the old tired U.S. propaganda elephants like the Voice of America and Cold War throwbacks like Radio Free Europe, her comments, as well as those of Isaacson, signaled a more aggressive attitude by Washington toward independent news networks.

It was also apparent that some traditional sources for independent news, including the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and France-24, were being heavily influenced by interference from their respective governments, especially in how the networks were covering British and French foreign policy, especially toward the Middle East.

Rather than compete with Al Jazeera English, the Obama administration ensured that its editorial independence was stymied and its reporting on the news took on a more pro-American flavor. After Obama’s Middle East and Islamic “reach out” speeches in Cairo and Istanbul, Al Jazeera began overflowing with praise for Obama policies. In early 2011, as the “Arab Spring” uprisings began toppling dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, and eventually Libya, Al Jazeera began to emulate American networks, the BBC, and France-24, in favorably reporting from the field and taking the side of the revolutionaries and rebels. Nothing was reported by the network on the outside help the uprisings were receiving from the George Soros global non-governmental organization (NGO) contrivances and U.S. CIA-linked funding from the National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

When rebels rose up against Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, Al Jazeera embedded its journalists with the rebels, citing massacre after massacre by Qaddafi troops but silent on grotesque violations of human rights by the rebels. When the Arab Spring moved to Syria, Al Jazeera’s reporting was much the same: massive sympathy for the Western-backed rebels but little in the way of reporting from the perspective of the government in Damascus. Al Jazeera also failed to report on its own conflicts-of-interest in reporting on Libya. Al Jazeera’s chairman is Hamad bin Thamer al Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family, which had committed Qatari military forces to the NATO campaign against Qaddafi and which was reaping the benefits of a Libyan rebel contract to market Libyan oil from rebel-held territory in the North African nation. A leaked U.S. State Department cable from Qatar stated that Al Jazeera served the political interests of the al-Thani family and the Qatari government, which include Qatar’s para-statal natural gas and oil companies.

Al Jazeera in Doha often featured guests from the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution office in the Qatari capital. The Saban Center is funded by Israeli-American Hollywood mogul Haim Saban, an Egyptian-born Israeli-American who touts the uber-Zionist line of Israel and its powerful lobby in the United States. Saban is also a major funder of the Democratic Party and in 2007 he and Steven Spielberg hosted a fundraiser for Mrs. Clinton at the home of Peter Chernin, the President of News Corporation, the parent of Fox News. The interlocking relationship of Clinton, Isaacson, Saban, and other neo-conservative and neo-liberal manufacturers and molders of public opinion are what lies at the heart of the attempts by they and their ilk to limit the public exposure of independent news networks around the world. Their philosophy is “if you can’t beat the competition, don’t compete with them, just co-opt and control them.”

Hillary Clinton and Isaacson were successful in “taming” Al Jazeera and bringing it around to support U.S. and western imperialistic adventures in the Middle East and even outside the region. Al Jazeera’s slanted coverage of anti-government demonstrations in Russia, following parliamentary elections, mirrored the tilted coverage by the network of the events in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria.

China’s CCTV remains at an early stage and has not yet shown itself to be much of a threat. Its reporters seem to know there is a line that they cannot cross in their coverage of events and until CCTV is permitted to become more independent of the authorities in Beijing, it, ironically, will not be a threat to Western interests. In some cases, RT has shown itself to be vulnerable to some of the same forces that ruined the independence of Al Jazeera, for example, having more than a reasonable number of guests who are paid by Soros without citing their ties to the international financier and his anti-Russian playbook. Iran’s Press-TV is being adversely affected by the crippling sanctions being levied by the West on Tehran and its ability to maintain foreign bureaus are suffering as a result.

However, not all is doom and gloom. Some former Al Jazeera correspondents and producers, disgusted how their former network has been co-opted by the West and Israeli interests, are launching a new news network in March, one that will be based in Beirut and free of the political chains and cob webs that have limited the journalistic independence of so many other networks. Al Mayadeen, which means “public squares,” has decided not to invite Israeli spokespeople on the air. Television networks that give Western globalist and Israeli interests more than there fair share of coverage are already too numerous and Al Mayadeen has seen the business and journalistic niche created by those networks that have surrendered to the United States in Clinton’s and Isaacson’s information war.