By Kit KLARENBERG

This December, The Grayzone exposed how a shadowy communications firm, Valent Projects, enlisted a prominent YouTube influencer to front a covert state-sponsored influence operation designed to undermine critics of London’s pandemic policies. That company was founded by Amil Khan, a veteran of long-running and lavishly funded UK Foreign Office information warfare operations in Syria.

The overriding objective behind Khan’s involvement in the Syrian dirty war was destabilizing the government of Bashar Assad, while convincing Syrians and international bodies that the militant groups rampaging across the country were a “moderate” alternative. Media across the world was subsequently flooded with pro-opposition propaganda.

In fact, Khan ran communications for armed opposition gangs in the Syrian dirty war – the same militias that Amnesty had previously condemned for perpetrating egregious human rights abuses. He did so while maintaining a personal and professional connection with a top staffer at Amnesty International’s UK branch, Kristyan Benedict.

Amnesty had once covered the atrocities committed by those armed Syrian gangs, but as Khan entered its orbit by way of a UK government intelligence cutout, Amnesty became a dependable organ of regime change propaganda.

Though Amnesty recently infuriated the US Department of State and Israel lobby by accusing Israel of the crime of apartheid, The Grayzone can reveal that Amnesty International has been subverted and made a part of the malign effort to destabilize Syria – a key objective of NATO states and the government of Israel.

‘Shameful disregard for human life’

Though Amnesty International has become known for a steady supply of flashy, heavily promoted reports drumming up regime change narratives against Syria, it once highlighted atrocities committed by the violent gangs sponsored and armed by the West.

In May 2016 for instance, it published an excoriating report exposing how a number of terror groups had “repeatedly carried out indiscriminate attacks that have struck civilian homes, streets, markets and mosques, killing and injuring civilians and displaying a shameful disregard for human life” in militia-occupied Aleppo.

Between February and April, indiscriminate artillery shelling, rocket and mortar strikes targeting the Kurdish People’s Protection Unit (YPG) killed 83 civilians, including 30 children, and injured over 700 civilians in residential areas. On the “bloodiest day” ever witnessed by residents of the Sheikh Maqsoud suburb, one man alone lost seven members of their family, including his 18-month-old daughter, two sons aged 15 and 10, and eight-year-old nephew, when an improvised rocket struck his home.

Not long after, Amnesty followed up with another lengthy investigation documenting how armed groups – including terrorist factions such as al-Nusra – were responsible for widespread abductions, torture and summary killings throughout Aleppo. Ignored by mainstream media, these unprecedented exposés represented the first time a Western human rights source highlighted the daily misery and danger in which residents of the contested city had been forced to live for the past four years.

Rather than highlight how Aleppo was reduced to a hazardous wasteland overtaken by warring foreign-backed militias, major news outlets instead focused exclusively on attacks by government forces, while hailing the supposed heroism of opposition activists.

This warped portrayal of the reality on the ground was the result of a massive propaganda effort waged by a host of UK Foreign Office-sponsored intelligence cutouts, financed to the tune of millions.

A key component of this constellation was InCoStrat, a firm founded by ex-Foreign Office political officer Emma Winberg and UK military intelligence journeyman Paul Tilley. Winberg left in 2017 to join Mayday Rescue, the parent “charity” of the bogus humanitarian group known as the White Helmets. She later married Helmets’ founder James Le Mesurier, who died in mysterious circumstances two years later.

In leaked files reviewed by The Grayzone, InCoStrat boasted of training and maintaining an “extensive network” of citizen journalists and activists in Syria, totaling over 120 figures who provided the company  “distribution capabilities into the majority” of the country, producing documentaries, talk shows, movies, public service announcements, and radio serials which were “successfully placed” in Arabic-speaking media.

The firm also claimed its team was in “weekly contact with a network of over 1,600 journalists and people of influence related to Syria” internationally, outlining a wide range of on-and-offline methods it exploited to “to achieve influence in Syria and the region.” For instance, it spearheaded an “innovative” two-pronged “guerrilla campaign” and “guerrilla tactics” strategy, “[using] the media to create [an] event” and “[initiating] an event to create media effect.”

One notable example of this subterfuge was “[exploiting] the concentrated presence of journalists” during the Geneva II conference in January 2014 “to put pressure on the regime.” The company additionally produced “postcards, posters and reports” to “draw behavioural parallels” between the Assad government and ISIS, dishonestly furthering the baseless conspiracy theory that “a latent relationship exists between the two.”

According to internal Incostrat files, a “credible, Arabic-English speaking Syrian spokesperson” then toured major media outlets to spout talking points likening Assad to ISIS.

This particular psy-op was specifically intended to focus maintain media attention on alleged state atrocities, the firm stated, “at a crucial time when media attention has shifted almost exclusively towards ISIS and some influential voices are calling for co-operation with the Syrian regime.”

Khan “established relationships with, and embedded himself into terrorist organizations”

At precisely the same time Amnesty International was reporting on atrocities of armed opposition groups inside Damascus, InCoStrat was providing extensive “strategic communications support” to those same militias. Recipients of this support included armed gangs situated in “some of the most impenetrable areas in the country,” such as Syria’s “eastern front,” which at that time was predominantly occupied by ISIS.

Five “official spokesmen” for these groups were said in Incostrat documents to “appear several times a week on international and regional TV” thanks to the UK contractor. Incostrat also revealed its trained reporters “have had access to a variety of groups,” including Al Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra.

Further, the company claimed to have “strong relationships” with 54 brigade commanders in Syria’s southern front, “involving daily, direct engagement with the commanders and their officers,” regular contact with “defected officers in Irbid and Amman who coordinate with local military councils,” established ties with “FSA brigades in Aleppo, Idlib and parts of northern Latakia,” and even “indirect engagement with small FSA units inside regime-held Damascus.” This was said to produce “added value all round” for the Foreign Office.

“[We] developed, and currently project manage three Syrian media offices across Turkey and Jordan,” InCoStrat wrote. “Campaigns from this office not only target domestic and international audiences via traditional and social media to promote the moderate armed opposition, but also focus on the placing of products to influence pro-regime audiences internally.”

Valent Projects founder Amil Khan was central to efforts to cultivate fanatical, Al Qaeda-aligned armed gangsters as pro-Western information warriors.

In a document detailing InCoStrat’s ability to “[develop] contacts in Arabic-speaking conflict affected states,” the company specifically drew attention to how, “in his previous career as a journalist,” he had “established relationships with, and embedded himself into terrorist organizations in the UK and the Middle East,” gaining “unique insight into their narratives, communication methods, recruitment processes and management of networks.”

An official profile of Khan from a December 2015 event at the House of Lords hosted by the elite Franco-British Society, where he spoke beside former MI5 head Eliza Manningham-Buller, notes he was at that time “providing political and media support to opposition political and military groups fighting the regime.”

The disclosure of Khan’s role in managing brutal armed gangs makes his simultaneous work on Amnesty’s Syria initiatives a scandalous conflict of interest – and another blight on the internationally esteemed human rights group.

More shockingly still, in a file outlining InCoStrat’s “experience of managing communications influence campaigns,” developing Amnesty International’s “media and communication strategy for Syria” is cited prominently in a numbered list of “supporting evidence” for the company’s prowess in the field.

“Lots to plot” between regime change operative Khan and Amnesty’s Benedict

In August 2020, Amnesty’s official Twitter account promoted an Amazon Watch webinar featuring Roger Waters among others, intended to raise awareness both of Chevron’s pollution of an indigenous region of Ecuador, and the energy giant’s ruthless persecution of crusading environmental lawyer Steven Donzinger.

However, the endorsement was deleted within hours without warning or explanation, despite its sharing having been coordinated directly with Waters himself.

As The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal revealed two months later, this retraction was orchestrated by Kristyan Benedict, Amnesty’s Syria campaign manager, due to the famed musician’s criticism of the White Helmets, and publicly declared skepticism over the alleged April 2018 Douma chemical weapons attack.

By that point, Benedict had established himself as a central figure among the online Syria regime change echo chamber, calling for sanctions to be imposed on Damascus – which came to pass in 2020, depriving citizens of food and crucial medical supplies in the process – and sponsoring a 2016 demonstration in London demanding NATO forces impose a ‘No Fly Zone’ over the country, a move which Hillary Clinton admitted would “kill a lot of Syrians.” It was not always this way though.

Back in August 2012, when Whitehall announced it was sending lethal aid to the opposition, Benedict demanded officials “be crystal clear with the commanders of Syria’s armed opposition that they have a duty to prevent war crimes.” He reiterated this point several times, telling The Daily Telegraph armed actors were subject to the Geneva Conventions and thus guilty of war crimes, while lashing out at the “gross hypocrisy” of those who cheered the FSA’s unconscionable violence despite claiming to support human rights.

All such concerns evaporated around May 2013, when the aggressive push for Western intervention against Damascus was beginning to escalate. That month, Benedict took to Twitter to denigrate former British lawmaker George Galloway as “cartoonish” for suggesting London was financing “cannibals” in Syria.

The insult arrived shortly after footage emerged of an FSA brigade commander cutting out and eating the heart of a government soldier. Coincidentally, Benedict tagged his pal, Amil Khan, in that post. It was the first public evidence of their connection.

In January 2015, Benedict shared a “thoughtful” article written by Khan in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacres in Paris, to which the latter responded that Al Qaeda strategy would be part of his “next training curriculum.” His interest clearly piqued, Benedict commented, “we should get on that” as he was “planning out 2015 training dates now,” inviting his pal to email him an outline so “we can take [this] forward.”

@KreaseChan #AlQaeda strategy is gonna be in my next training curriculum

— Amil Khan (@Londonstani) January 17, 2015

At this time, Douma was occupied by Jaish al-Islam, a Saudi Arabia-backed jihadist group responsible for multiple monstrous crimes against humanity, including kidnapping, imprisoning, torturing and executing innocent civilians – including children – for even mild infringements of strict Sharia code, attacking Kurdish enclaves with chemical weapons, and parading caged Alawite families in the streets of areas before placing them in public squares in a bid to deter airstrikes.

These heinous practices were criticized by some Western rights groups, including the pro-rebel Syrian Observatory for Human Rights – but Amnesty never once issued any condemnation. The organization’s silence is rendered all the more suspect given that throughout 2015, Benedict tweeted extensively about Douma, although his exclusive focus was on the impact of the Syrian government’s blockade of the city, rather than horrors inflicted on the local population by Jaish al-Islam.

In fact, in November 2015, Benedict slammed Syrian government forces for continuing to bomb the city, “despite the use of human shields,” seemingly justifying this barbaric strategy – or at least letting its perpetrators off the hook and then some. At this precise time too, InCoStrat was producing slick propaganda videos for Jaish al-Islam, designed to portray the brutal militia as a unified, well-equipped, fearsome professional fighting force.

It is unclear if Benedict was aware that his friend and colleague was concurrently engaged in such propaganda activities. In November 2015, however, the Amnesty staffer journeyed to Boston, Massachusetts to “[develop] strategies with Syrian nonviolence activists,” declaring it “an insult to say all those against Assad are ‘extremists’.” Khan was there as well – presumably training attendees in the art of communicating with the media.

Evidently, the information warrior’s expertise in the field is greatly valued by Benedict, and his employer. In September the next year, he again reached out to Khan, who’d briefly returned to London from the Middle East, suggesting they urgently “try and grab a coffee,” as there was “lots to plot for 2017.”

Ignore professionals, listen to spooks

On August 21st 2013, two opposition-controlled areas in Ghouta, the suburban area surrounding Damascus, were allegedly struck by rockets fired by government forces containing the chemical agent sarin. Estimates of the death toll vary wildly, from at least 281 to over 1,700 – and questions about whether the entire incident was a fabricated false flag, designed to precipitate Western military intervention, abound to this day.

Numerous Western intelligence officials openly acknowledged that the case against the Syrian government was far from a “slam dunk.” Communications intercepted by German spies suggested the Syrian president did not order or have any knowledge of the attack, while subsequent articles by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh framed the incident as a covert action carried out by al-Nusra, designed to push Washington “over the red line.”

However, Amnesty rejected any critical detachment and instantly amplified the narrative of regime change-hungry Western governments.

Within mere hours of the purported strike, Amnesty issued a strident press release demanding the UN be granted full access to the supposed crime scenes and its Security Council “refer the situation to the International Criminal Court.” It further declared the attacks to be war crimes if proven, and indicated it was “in contact with individuals and organizations in Syria to try and gather further information about the current medical condition of people in the area.”

It would be entirely unsurprising if Khan was involved in connecting Amnesty with those “individuals and organizations.”

A leaked file names him as one of the key managers of the media office of the Syrian National Coalition, a parallel puppet government controlled by London’s assorted intelligence cutouts, while another refers to the Coalition specifically receiving “media handling advice” around the Ghouta incident. Benedict has frequently shared statements issued by the body over the years, which his friend likely wrote.

Amil Khan went on to publicly admit to “working with the Syrian opposition” at the same time, as well as during the alleged April 2017 Khan Sheikhoun poison gas attack – another curious incident which bore clear hallmarks of staging and justified another US-led missile attack on Syria.

The latest chemical weapons drama prompted an even more robust response from Amnesty, with the group openly asserting that “evidence [points] to an air-launched chemical attack” by the Syrian government. Amnesty’s US director, Margaret Huang, went as far as writing an op-ed calling for “immediate action” against Damascus. Her piece was published in the esteemed foreign journal Teen Vogue.

Immediate action did swiftly arrive in the form of 59 cruise missiles launched by Washington at the country. Amnesty’s Secretary General criticized the move, although in the most mealy-mouthed language possible, declaring “it’s one thing to have some airstrikes by the US on a one-off basis, but it’s not going to address this problem.”

Fiery condemnation and widespread uncritical coverage of alleged Syrian government atrocities by ostensibly unimpeachable rights groups such as Amnesty has consistently been fundamental to directly and indirectly bolstering the West’s protracted dirty war against Damascus, framing the horrendous saga as a humanitarian effort. And shady deep state actors such as Khan have deliberately over many years exploited the organization for this precise purpose.

In the case of Ghouta, Khan’s then-employer ARK – yet another UK intelligence cutout – was clearly planning for all out war to erupt in the aftermath. A leaked document shows that the company “accelerated” its production of personal safety booklets to schoolchildren at that time, “to ensure that the message had been disseminated before any international intervention.”

Following the April 2018 Douma false flag, Amnesty published a blog on how the organization has increasingly relied on “open source information” such as “videos and photographs posted on the internet or shared on social messaging networks…to support our research and campaigning,” and was constantly “[working] as hard as we can” to get first-hand interviews from victims and eyewitnesses the ground.

Dependence on dubious anti-regime activists and Western-funded groups in official investigations is a growing trend across international institutions focused on conflict – including major intergovernmental bodies like the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

None other than Amil Khan unwittingly exposed the ominous rationale for this push following Douma. Noting the OPCW would not assign responsibility for chemical weapons attacks to “a specific country,” those seeking a “better and quicker idea of who is to blame” should consult the work of the NATO-backed “open source” journalism cartel known as Bellingcat. In other words, the media should dismiss academics, experts, and official verification mechanisms, and instead rely on laptop jockeys fiddling with Google Earth images.

As a longtime Bellingcat advocate, Kristyan Benedict has repeatedly amplified character attacks on OPCW inspectors who have leaked internal documents and made public statements attesting to how the Douma incident was staged. In doing so, Benedict reinforced the disturbing narrative that credentialed professionals should be ignored if their findings and perspectives contradict official narratives, and that testimony and evidence supplied by anti-government elements trained and funded by Western intelligence should be accepted instead.

For its part, Amnesty International seems to have consolidated its support for Western-backed regime change operations. The website of Amil Khan’s Valent Projects reveals his company “trained activists facing brutal authoritarian regimes [to] be more effective on social media” on its behalf. There are, to say the least, no prizes for guessing where in the world these “activists” are situated.

It can only be considered an indictment of Amnesty’s integrity, objectivity and credibility that it maintained such a close relationship with Khan, a professional propagandist who contracted with the British state, while he whitewashed the image of armed actors guilty of the very crimes Amnesty was supposed to expose.

Amnesty and Amil Khan have refused to issue any comment on questions submitted by The Grayzone. Perhaps no amount of spin can explain away the scandalous conflict of interest in which they were engaged.

thegrayzone.com

Alan MACLEOD

Australia’s 18 million Facebook users woke up yesterday to find that, without warning, local and global news sites were unavailable, meaning that they could not view or share news at all. Facebook users across the world were also unable to read or access any Australian news publications. The tech giant had taken the step of essentially shutting down its site and “unfriending” an entire nation in response to the government’s proposals to tax them.

Lawmakers in Canberra had drawn up plans to “level the playing field” between social media giants and the traditional press. In practice, this would mean Facebook and Google handing over a sizable chunk of their advertising profits to the government to subsidize struggling news outlets, on whom they depend for content.

In choosing the nuclear option, Facebook appears to have hoped to trigger a public outcry that would force the government into a U-turn. However, it seems to have miscalculated, as the action drew widespread condemnation, even from human rights groups. Elaine Pearson, Human Rights Watch’s Australia Director condemned the company for “severely restricting the flow of information to Australians,” not just for news, but also information on government health and emergency services. “This is an alarming and dangerous turn of events,” she concluded.

“It is extremely concerning that a private company is willing to control access to information that people rely on. Facebook’s action starkly demonstrates why allowing one company to exert such dominant power over our information ecosystem threatens human rights,” said Tim O’Connor of Amnesty International Australia. “Facebook’s willingness to block credible news sources also stands in sharp distinction to the company’s poor track record in addressing the spread of hateful content and disinformation on the platform,” he added.

Myanmar: digital accessory to a genocide

One particularly shocking example of Facebook’s complicity in spreading hate is in Myanmar, where thousands of Rohingya Muslims have been killed and more than 700,000 have fled to neighboring countries.

A United Nations human rights investigation found that the platform, which is virtually ubiquitous in Myanmar, had been used to spread fake news about Muslim atrocities in order to spark a genocide. “I’m afraid that Facebook has now turned into a beast, and not what it originally intended,” said UN investigator Yanghee Lee.

Facebook admitted that played a role in the violence. However, it resisted calls for it to suspend its service inside the country. “Facebook does a good deal of good — connecting people with friends and family, helping small businesses, surfacing informative content. If we turn it off we lose all of that,” said a company executive.

Facebook when its platform is a driving force for genocide vs Facebook when it faces possible regulation pic.twitter.com/XrA8uHzuDY

— Max Fisher (@Max_Fisher) February 17, 2021

In 2018, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg said that he felt “fundamentally uncomfortable sitting here in California at an office, making content policy decisions for people around the world.” This discomfort apparently disappeared when the company’s bottom line was threatened with regulation.

A media behemoth

Facebook can certainly afford to pay a levy to help journalism. The Silicon Valley giant recently announced it had taken in over $84 billion in advertising revenue in 2020 (a 21% increase from 2019) and posted a spectacular total post-tax profit of $29 billion. 71% of Australians use the company’s services, making it by far the most widely used social media platform in the country, ahead of YouTube, Instagram, and WhatsApp respectively.

Unlike traditional media, Facebook and Google do not produce any reporting of their own, nor do they employ any journalists. Together, the two companies bear significant responsibility for the decline of journalism across the developed world, as advertisers have ditched the traditional press in favor of targeted advertising offered online. Together, the two companies account for over three-quarters of all online advertising revenue in Australia. Facebook’s marketplace has also largely made small advertising — a key source of income for print media — obsolete. From a high of over $49 billion in 2006, advertising revenue for U.S. newspapers has decreased by over two-thirds, with a corresponding drop in the number of journalists employed. It is clear that, if old media is to be saved, something must be done. Whether this is the solution is up for debate.

Behind closed doors, Google has already signed a number of deals with Australian outlets, promising to cut them in on their advertising revenue. Facebook, however, has chosen to up the ante, participating in a direct standoff against the Australian government. Other nations, such as Canada, are already promising to give the social media giants the Australia treatment, meaning that the outcome of the conflict will likely have global repercussions for the future of the press and of social media.

Perhaps this explains why Facebook was comparatively uninterested in shutting itself down to stop a genocide in Myanmar but chose the nuclear option when it came to government regulation of its business model.

mintpressnews.com

Max BLUMENTHAL

The campaign manager of Amnesty International UK, Kristyan Benedict, appears to have removed an Amnesty International tweet announcing an Amazon Watch webinar to raise awareness both of Chevron’s pollution of an indigenous region of Ecuador and the company’s ruthless persecution of environmental lawyer Steven Donzinger.

A hardline advocate of Western intervention in Syria, Benedict apparently deleted the announcement because of the participation of Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters in the event.

Besides being Donzinger’s most prominent public supporter, Waters is an outspoken opponent of US and UK regime-change policy toward Syria.

Donzinger, for his part, is a self-described “corporate political prisoner” whose persecution began in 2011 after he won a multi-billion dollar legal judgment against Chevron over the oil giant’s toxic dumping in Ecuador’s indigenous Lago Agrio region. He is charged with contempt of court for refusing a federal judge’s order to turn over his cellphone and computer to Chevron. With the order still under appeal on constitutional grounds, Donziger has refused to obey it

Chevron has never paid the $9.5 billion it owes in damages. Instead, it has retaliated with a multimillion-dollar campaign to demonize Donzinger, hiring a massive team of corporate lawyers to oversee an attempt to disbar the environmental lawyer and freeze his personal bank accounts.

In August 2019, a federal judge ordered Donzinger placed under house arrest pending a contempt of court hearing, and confined him to his New York City apartment.

“I’m like a corporate political prisoner,” Donzinger told reporter Sharon Lerner this January. “They are trying to totally destroy me.”

Roger Waters has worked since 2012 to draw attention to Donzinger’s persecution, as well as to the suffering of the victims of Chevron’s toxic practices in Ecuador. The Amazon Watch webinar which Amnesty was supporting was to have been one of the most important events on the issue this year. Though the event itself was not canceled, its attendance was undoubtedly limited thanks the censorship campaign initiated by regime-change fanatics incensed by Waters’ views on Syria.

A crusading anti-war activist, Waters has been a vehement critic of US and British government intervention in Syria, and especially their funding of extremist proxy forces to advance a destabilizing regime-change policy.

At the end of the first week in April 2018, Washington claimed the Syrian government had launched a chemical weapons attack on the Damascus suburb of Douma, which had just been cleared of Saudi-backed extremist forces in a dramatic victory for the national army.

The central piece of evidence bolstering the dubious US claims was a video circulating on social media and produced by a US- and UK-created organization called the White Helmets. Waters told The Grayzone he “smelled a rat, did some research, realized the video was not credible, and decided to speak out.”

From the stage at his “Us and Them” show in Barcelona, Spain, on April 13, the Pink Floyd co-founder denounced the US and UK-funded White Helmets as “a fake organization that exists only to create propaganda for jihadists and terrorists.” By this point, the US, UK and France were signaling their intention to bomb Syria in reprisal for the supposed chemical attack.

Waters pleaded with his audience “to encourage the governments of the USA, UK, and France to properly investigate the alleged attacks before dropping bombs on the Syrian people.”

This August, when US- and UK-based Syria regime-change lobbyists learned of Waters’ participation in the Amnesty International-supported Amazon Watch event with Donzinger, they launched a coordinated campaign to pressure Amnesty into cancelling its support. Within hours, Amnesty’s Twitter announcement of the event mysteriously disappeared.

“Yep – not good at all – it’s been deleted,” Amnesty UK’s Benedict assured several allies after the tweet promoting Waters’ Amazon Watch event with Donzinger was erased.

I would appeal to @amnestyusa not to promote this event given Roger Waters participation because slandered #WhiteHelmets repeating Russian propaganda putting their lives at risk when saved over 150,000 lives & cannot remain silent as know them well as a filmmaker @SyriaCivilDef https://t.co/8e311Xcj2S

— Ronan L Tynan (@RonanLTynan) August 5, 2020

Among those who complained vociferously about Waters’ participation in the Amnesty USA event was Eliot Higgins, the founder of the US- and UK government-backed Bellingcat “open source” media operation, which was among the first major Western outlets to accuse the Syrian government of a chlorine attack in Douma in April, 2018.

In a tweet addressed to Amnesty USA, Higgins denigrated Waters as a “famous war crimes denier.” One minute later, he accused Waters of “spread[ing] conspiracy theories about chemical attacks.”

Benedict responded by assuring the Bellingcat founder that the “tweet was deleted a few hours ago.”

The coordinated attempt at canceling or undermining an event on corporate wrongdoing and the environment was just the latest instance of a tight-knit motley crew of Syria regime-change operatives sabotaging left-wing or social justice organizing.

The same cadre of regime-change fanatics has also sought to divide the Palestine solidarity movement, encouraging the movement to turn against any activist who contradicted the Syrian opposition’s line – which also happens to be the official line of the US State Department that has sponsored it.

This regime-change cadre has also viciously attacked critics of Washington’s hostile policy towards other sovereign nations like Venezuela, Nicaragua, Russia, and China.

Kristyan Benedict, for his part, is a central figure among the echo chamber of regime-change operatives. In recent years, he has helped organize several actions promoting Western military intervention and economic sanctions against Damascus.

Asked on Twitter by this reporter if he was responsible for deleting the tweet advertising the event on Chevron’s abuses, the Amnesty UK staffer declined to respond.

“While Dutch prosecutors prepare war crimes charges against the Syrian government for fighting off the onslaught”

Your man here is justifying torture.

Think what that means to those Syrians the regime tortured.

That should be all you need to know to not share such pieces. https://t.co/YXTfgp8yrI

— kristyan benedict (@KreaseChan) September 26, 2020

The Grayzone has obtained audio of a phone call between Waters and Amnesty International Chief Impact Officer Tamara Draut in which Draut claimed her organization had been lobbied to retract its support for the event by “folks in the White Helmets,” as well as “Syrian human rights activists,” who said they were “hurt by what they saw as [Amnesty’s] promotion” of Waters.

“What on earth has this got to do with a webinar about the plight of rain forest dwellers in northern Ecuador?” Roger Waters asked.

“Because your position on the White Helmets and [Amnesty USA’s] position on the White Helmets is so different from one another,” Draut replied, “people interpreted our promotion of an event where you were speaking as promoting your position on the White Helmets.”

Draut has spent her career in liberal non-profits and authored several books on the US economy; she has no apparent record of foreign policy experience or Middle East affairs.

Draut was joined on the call by Amnesty USA’s Head of Artist Relations Matt Vogel, a recruit from the recording industry who also has no notable experience in international affairs.

Without mentioning Benedict by name, Draut appeared to distance herself and the organization from his apparent actions.

“Sometimes staff try and solve problems on their own. I would not have taken down this tweet,” Draut told Waters. “That is not the policy I like to follow on Twitter. Instead, I would have much rather dealt with this directly and honestly, as opposed to disappearing the tweet.”

Draut privately apologized to Waters during the call. Waters responded by requesting a public apology from Draut for Amnesty USA’s withdrawal of support from the Amazon Watch event to free Donzinger and support Ecuador’s indigenous population.

Since the September 25 conversation, neither Draut nor anyone affiliated with Amnesty have expressed regret for the organization’s actions. Further, they have not clarified Benedict’s role in undermining the Amazon Watch event.

The Amnesty staffer lobbying Western governments for regime-change war

While Amnesty International states that its “mission is to undertake research and action focused on preventing and ending grave abuses of human rights,” Kristyan Benedict has engaged in a series of actions designed to pressure Western governments to enact interventionist policies that have demonstrably violated the rights of Syrians.

Amnesty UK’s Benedict has been a leading cheerleader for regime-change and Western intervention in Syria. In fact, his chapter sponsored a 2016 rally in London demanding that NATO forces impose a No Fly Zone over the country.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted in a private 2013 speech that a No Fly Zone would lead to full-scale war and “kill a lot of Syrians.”

Rally for military escalation and regime change, brought to you by @AmnestyUK and @DailyMirror https://t.co/MKEk00u3dL

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) October 22, 2016

Benedict has also advocated for the so-called Caesar Sanctions that the US Congress and Trump administration imposed on Syria, placing the country under an economic blockade that has limited vital medical supplies, including cancer medication, and triggered critical shortages of bread and heating oil.

As the Financial Times acknowledged in a June 24 report, “The first and biggest act of the Caesar act was felt, not by regime insiders, but by ordinary Syrians, who saw prices spike as the threat of sanctions roiled the country’s currency market.”

In 2015, Benedict participated in a London event sponsored by the Saudi- and Qatari-backed National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces, and aimed at promoting the economic blockade against Syria.

Joining the Amnesty UK staffer on stage were two of the key Washington lobbyists behind the sanctions push: Stephen Rapp, then the State Department’s “ambassador at-large for war crimes” presiding over US lawfare efforts against Syria; and Mouaz Moustafa, the Syrian opposition lobbyist who escorted the late Sen. John McCain to his infamous 2013 photo-op inside Syria with CIA-backed insurgents who turned out to be extremist kidnappers.

The so-called Caesar Sanctions were the result of an elaborate propaganda operation in which a still-unknown supposed military photographer was smuggled out of Syria and delivered to the CIA along with thousands of photographs showing casualties of Syria’s proxy war.

A team of lawyers was hired by the government of Qatar – one of the top sponsors of Syria’s armed opposition – to verify and analyze the trove of photos.

While the mysterious “Caesar” figure was shepherded around official Washington by Mouaz Moustafa, invariably covered in a blue shroud to shield his identity from the public, a selected handful of his alleged photos were put on display at events like the one Amnesty’s Benedict participated in in London.

In fact, as The Grayzone reported, nearly half of the photos depicted Syrians who had been killed by anti-government insurgents, inadvertently confirming the violence of the Syrian opposition. This highly inconvenient fact has been concealed from the British and American public by the operatives that brought forth the so-called Caesar file.

As regime-change lobbyists like Benedict pushed intervention in Syria in the name of human rights, they were forced onto the defensive after confidently claiming that an alleged bombing in Douma, Syria on April 7, 2018 was a chemical attack carried out by the Syrian government.

Punishment for sounding the alarm on Douma

The official story of the incident in Douma has since been upended by several Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) investigators, including two of the most important members of the organization’s fact-finding mission to Douma.

In testimony before the United Nations Security Council this January, former OPCW inspection team leader and engineering expert Ian Henderson stated that the organization’s investigation in Douma, Syria indicated in clear terms that no chemical attack took place, and that the incident was likely staged by the Syrian opposition to trigger Western military intervention.

Henderson and three other OPCW investigators have alleged that the organization’s initial report on Douma was censored by management under pressure from the US and UK governments.

Roger Waters has emerged as the most high-profile supporter of the OPCW whistleblowers, using his public platform to demand accountability for what appears to have been a cynical deception designed to justify a military assault on Syria and nearly led to another disastrous regime-change war.

But well before the OPCW staffers went public with evidence that US-aligned organization leadership censored their factual report, Waters issued his dramatic statement on stage in Barcelona condemning the White Helmets organization that spearheaded the apparent deception in Douma.

Marketed as peaceful heroes, designed to trigger military intervention

So who are the White Helmets, and why were they worthy of so much suspicion?

The White Helmets were established thanks to $55 million in funding from the British Foreign Office, $23 million or more from the United States Agency for International Development (USIAD) Office of Transition Initiatives — the State Department’s de facto regime-change arm — and untold millions from the Kingdom of Qatar, which has also backed an assortment of extremist groups in Syria including Al Qaeda.

A British former military officer-turned-mercenary named James Le Mesurier founded the White Helmets in southern Turkey in 2014. Le Mesurier would go on to die in an apparent suicide at his home in Istanbul on November 11, 2019. The Dutch paper NL Times revealed that he had stolen millions donated from Western governments to the White Helmets to finance a lavish lifestyle, and that some of the donor governments apparently looked the other way as the money disappeared into a web of accounts.

Marketed as a band of selfless rescuers, Le Mesurier’s White Helmets members operated exclusively in areas controlled by Salafi insurgents, including the local Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS. Its members have been filmed participating in several documented public executions, and helped extremists dispose of beheaded corpses of those they’ve killed.

Throughout the Syrian proxy war, footage and testimony by the White Helmets provided the basis for the West’s accusations of government chemical attacks on civilians and other war crimes. When Defense Secretary James Mattis cited “social media” in place of scientific evidence of a chemical attack in Douma, he was referring to the now-infamous video shot by members of the White Helmets.

Similarly, when State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert sought to explain why the US bombed Syria before inspectors from the OPCW could produce a report from the ground, she claimed, “We have our own intelligence.” She, too, appeared to be referring to social media material published by members of the White Helmets.

However, the accounts by White Helmets members of a chlorine attack in Douma in April, 2018 were immediately challenged by Western journalists on the ground as well as by Syrian eyewitnesses. As the dust cleared, it became increasingly apparent that the armed extremists that had been driven out of Douma by the Syrian army had staged a bogus chemical attack in hopes of inviting military intervention by Western governments.

The White Helmets’ attempt to recruit Roger Waters backfires

During his Barcelona concert, Waters implored his audience to exercise critical thinking: “If we were to listen to the propaganda of the White Helmets and others, we would encourage our governments to start dropping bombs on people in Syria. This would be a mistake of monumental proportions for us as human beings.”

As The Grayzone reported days later, an eccentric French photojournalist had been lobbying Waters in the days ahead of his concert to allow him to deliver a message on behalf of the White Helmets and the “children of Syria” from the stage in Barcelona. He claimed to Waters that he represented a “powerful Syrian network.” It was in response to this appeal that Waters said he made his public statement.

Over a year earlier, in October 2016, a London-based public relations firm representing the White Helmets called The Syria Campaign attempted to recruit Waters by inviting him to a lavish dinner organized by a Saudi-British billionaire, Hani Farsi. The Pink Floyd founder was told that by signing on to the organization’s mission, he could help “elevate the voices of Syria’s peaceful heroes.”

Rather than signing on to a humanitarian interventionist public relations scheme as so many other celebrities had, Waters stood on stage in Barcelona on the eve of war and encouraged his audience to see through the wall of misinformation.

“What we should do is go and persuade our governments not to go and drop bombs on people,” Waters proclaimed, inspiring applause from the crowd. “And certainly not until we have done all the research that is necessary so that we would have a clear idea of what is really going on. Because we live in the world where propaganda seems to be more important than the reality.”

With his anti-interventionist jeremiad in Barcelona, Waters made himself the most prominent critic of the West’s catastrophic regime-change campaign in Syria – and a top target of the forces behind it.

He told The Grayzone that he saw the undermining of his Amazon Watch human rights event as part of a much wider phenomenon of censoring and smearing of public figures who challenge the official narrative on Syria. He pointed to the US, UK and French governments blocking the OPCW’s first Director-General, Jose Bustani, from delivering testimony to the United Nations on the organization’s cover-up of its own original Douma investigation, as a recent and especially disturbing example.

“What’s happened with Jose Bustani going public and The Grayzone having to publish the statement he wanted to make in person to the UN Security Council because the US and its allies blocked him is about the same thing that caused Kristyan Benedict to have Amnesty’s tweet in support of indigenous people in Ecuador deleted,” Waters reflected. “It’s all about covering up Douma and preserving the lies that led to missile strikes on a sovereign country and almost took us to war again.”

thegrayzone.com

Max BLUMENTHAL

An American man with ties to Amnesty International and key Hong Kong separatist figures has been posing online as a Hong Kong native named Kong Tsung-gan. Routinely cited as a grassroots activist and writer by major media organizations and published in English-language media, the fictitious character Kong appears to have been concocted to disseminate anti-China propaganda behind the cover of yellowface.

Through Kong Tsung-gan’s prolific digital presence and uninterrogated reputation in mainstream Western media, he disseminates a constant stream of content hyping up the Hong Kong “freedom struggle” while clamoring for the US to turn up the heat on China.

Whispers about Kong’s true identity have been circulating on social media among Hong Kong residents, and was even mentioned in a brief account last December by The Standard.

The Grayzone spoke to several locals outraged by a deceptive stunt they considered not only unethical, but racist. They said they have kept their views to themselves due to the atmosphere of intimidation looming over the city, where self-styled “freedom fighters” harass and target seemingly anyone who speaks out publicly against them.

In this investigation, The Grayzone connected the dots between Kong and an American man who has become a major presence in Western media and at protests around Hong Kong. Our research indicates that Kong’s editors and prominent protest cheerleaders were likely aware of the deceptive ploy.

Kong Tsung-gan bursts onto Hong Kong Twitter scene, becomes go-to source for anti-China content

The Twitter user Kong Tsung-gan (@KongTsungGan) first appeared in March 2015. Kong Tsung-gan’s earliest tweets featured commentary about Tibet and the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement.

At some point, Kong changed his Twitter avatar to a black-and-white headshot of an unknown Asian person. A search of the Wayback Machine internet archive shows that this photo remained up until sometime in late 2019.

Later, Kong changed his Twitter avatar to an image depicting Liu Xia, the wife of the late Nobel Prize-winning dissident Liu Xiaobo. Liu Xiaobo was a right-wing ideologue who celebrated the US wars on Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and was rewarded with the 2014 Democracy Award by the National Endowment for Democracy – the favorite meddling machine of the US government.

As of August 2020, Kong Tsung-gan’s Twitter account boasts more than 32,000 followers. He live-tweets during protests, posts incendiary commentary about the Communist Party of China (CPC), likens the Hong Kong “struggle” to Tibet and Xinjiang, begs the United States to ram through sanction bills like the Hong Kong Safe Harbor and Hong Kong People’s Freedom and Choice Acts, urges NBA star Lebron James to “find out about our freedom struggle,” retweets Nancy Pelosi and other US politicians, promotes his books, maintains an ongoing tally of arrests in his regular “#HK CRACKDOWN WATCH UPDATE,” and disseminates images of protest posters.

At around the time he created his Twitter account, Kong Tsung-gan published his first Medium post. He has since filled his Medium feed with protest timelines, lists of recommended human rights books and journalism (including a link to the questionable China “expert” Adrian Zenz), and “first-hand accounts” of his protest experiences on the ground. In one account, Kong Tsung-gan claimed he attended a Band 1 government school, implying he was a native Hong Kong resident.

Kong’s work has been amplified by Joshua Wong, the Hong Kong protest poster-boy who has enjoyed photo-ops with neoconservative Republican senators like Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton.

Thanks to his continual stream of content on Twitter and Medium, and his platform on the website Hong Kong Free Press, Kong Tsung-gan has become one of mainstream Western media’s go-to sources for soundbites.

Kong Tsung-gan: Darling of the Western press

Since bursting onto the Hong Kong Twitter scene, Kong Tsung-gan has been quoted by a who’s who of Western corporate media outlets. He has been described as an “author” (CNN, Globe and Mail, Time), “writer and activist” (New York Times, Washington Post), “activist and author” (LA Times),“activist” (AFP, Al Jazeera), “writer, educator and activist” (Guardian), “political writer” (Foreign Policy), “writer” (Vice), and “Hong Kong writer and activist” in an op-ed posted by the Nikkei Asian Review.

Kong has also been cited as a “Hong Kong journalist and rights activist” by Radio Free Asia and as a “rights activist and author” by Voice of America, two subsidiaries of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM). Tasked with a mission to “be consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States,” the USAGM budgeted around $2 million to support protests in Hong Kong in 2020.

When he is not churning out commentary on Twitter and Medium accounts, Kong Tsung-gan is a columnist at Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP) and publishes books about the Hong Kong “freedom struggle,” whose proceeds go directly to HKFP.

Hong Kong Free Press describes itself as an “impartial non-profit media outlet” and “completely independent.” The outlet also boasted that it “gets full marks” from a supposed journalism ethics verification initiative called News Guard, which happens to be overseen by a collection of former US government national security and law enforcement officials.

HKFP editor-in-chief Tom Grundy has boasted of rejecting article pitches from deceptive figures operating behind false identities. At the same time, Grundy has provided a regular home for Kong’s commentary.

The Grayzone emailed HKFP to request a comment on Kong’s identity, but received no reply.

The distinctly American voice of Kong Tsung-gan

To burnish his reputation as a reliable source, Kong Tsung-gan has furnished audio interviews to Western outlets. In July 2019, Kong Tsung-gan was featured on Louisa Lim’s Little Red Podcast alongside National Endowment for Democracy fellow Johnson Yeung, lawmaker Eddie Chu Hoi-Dick, and former Hong Kong Chief Secretary Anson Chan.

Around the same time, an American man in Hong Kong named Brian Kern spoke to RTHK at a march commemorating the Tiananmen anniversary.

A close listen to both audio clips, along with an interview Kong furnished to an Italian interviewer, demonstrates that Kong Tsung-gan and Brian Kern are the same person.

Listen for yourself here, or in the video embedded at the top of this article:

• Hong Kong’s Dirty Little Secret: Is One Country Two Systems Dead?, Little Red Podcast (Kong speaks at 33:00) 
  
• Hundreds join march ahead of Tiananmen anniversary, RTHK (Kern speaks at 00:13)
• LIVE Liberate Hong Kong, Una Montagna di Libri Cortina d’Ampezzo (Kong speaks at 19:00)

Indeed, the distinctively American voices of Kong Tsung-gan and Brian Kern are the same.

So why have news outlets like Hong Kong Free Press failed to disclose that Kong Tsung-gan is a pen name for an American man? Who is Brian Kern? And why is he yellowfacing as Kong Tsung-gan?

In plain sight: American teacher coordinating with Hong Kong protesters

Brian Patrick Kern has been a fixture at the Hong Kong protests since they erupted in 2019. He has been profiled by the Chinese press, photographed cleaning egg stains off the walls of the police headquarters and escorting his children to demonstrations.

Kern has even been filmed coordinating with protesters and rioters in videos circulating on social media.

In another video that went viral on social media, Kern was filmed screaming at the police: “You’re a communist puppet! … Kill us all!… With your bug gun, shoot me! I’m so violent! I’m a violent rioter! Shoot me! Your communist masters will love you!”

Brian Kern also writes for the HKFP as a guest contributor under his own name.

Clearly, Kern enjoys the spotlight, and has no apparent fear of local authorities.

But few people know that Brian Kern also hides behind the persona of Kong Tsung-gan, furnishing quotes to media outlets across the West as an expert native source on the Hong Kong “freedom struggle.”

Brian Kern publishes anti-China books under at least two pseudonyms

Not only does Brian Patrick Kern write as Kong Tsung-gan, which he romanized to seem like a Hong Kong native; he also writes under the pen name Xun Yuezang, romanized to appear as a Chinese mainlander. Writings under both aliases are filled with warnings of the “creeping control of the Chinese Communist Party.”

As Kong Tsung-gan, Brian Kern has published three books: Umbrella: A Political Tale from Hong Kong (Pema Press), As long as there is resistance, there is hope: Essays on the Hong Kong freedom struggle in the post-Umbrella Movement era, 2014-2018 (Pema Press), and Liberate Hong Kong: Stories from the Freedom Struggle (Mekong Review).

As Xun Yuezang, Brian Kern has published Liberationists (Pema Press), which “tells the story of a human rights worker who disappears while crossing the border between Hong Kong and mainland China.” One reviewer wrote, “like many debut novels, [Liberationists] a work weighed down by its own good intentions.” In the book, “Xun Yuezang” discloses that it was published under a pseudonym.

No matter which alias he is employing, Brian Kern’s mission is clear: To portray the CPC as one of the world’s most dangerous evildoers.

Kern’s books also are filled with clues exposing him as the man behind both Xun Yuezang and Kong Tsung-gan. Xun Yuezang dedicated the book Liberationists to Mayren “who struggled so long to be free.” Brian Kern’s mother is named Mayren.

Liberationists was also dedicated to someone referred to simply as “Y.” Similarly, Kong Tsung-gan dedicated Liberate Hong Kong: Stories from the Freedom Struggle to “Y, for the shared struggle.” The name of Brian Kern’s wife, Yatman, begins with the letter “Y.”

Pema Press is the publisher for the work by Xun and Kong. Brian Kern’s daughter happens to be named Pema – the same name as the publisher. (It is possible Kern named both his publishing house and his daughter after Jetsun Pema, sister of the Dalai Lama, with whom he and his wife worked in the Tibetan Children’s Villages charity.)

Kern’s Orientalist stunt could be compared to that of Michael Derrick Hudson, a white middle-aged poet from Indiana who struggled to get his work published until he began submitting it to journals under the pseudonym Yi-Fen Chou.

Unlike Hudson’s fake Chinese persona, however, Kern is a political actor posing as a native grassroots activist to spread propaganda. His ploy is therefore more reminiscent of the “Gay Girl in Damascus” hoax, in which Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old American graduate student at the University of Edinburgh, posed as a Damascus-based lesbian activist named “Amina Arraf” to gin up left-liberal support for regime change in Syria throughout 2011.

Kern’s personal profile is similar to MacMaster’s as well. Both are activist-minded liberal internationalist types with PhDs in literature. But unlike MacMaster, who forged a career in academia, Kern also has a record of work in the human rights industry.

Amnesty and US regime change links

Brain Kern grew up in Minnesota and completed his PhD in Comparative Literature at Brown University in 1996. In 1998, he began teaching at the Red Cross Nordic United World College (UWCRCN) in Norway, where he met his wife, Yatman Cheng.

Cheng graduated from UWCRCN in 2002 and received a Jardine Foundation scholarship to attend Oxford. In 2003 or 2004, as a university student, she volunteered with the Tibetan Children’s Villages in India on a trip organized by her college and led by Brian Kern.

In 2004, Cheng became a summer intern at the Hong Kong think tank Civic Exchange, which has received funding from the National Democratic Institute, a subsidiary of the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy. Cheng and Kern lived in London in 2007, where Kern worked for Amnesty International as a member of their education team.

In 2008, they moved to Hong Kong, where Kern began teaching at the Chinese International School and established its human rights club.

A few of Kern’s former students appear to work with him behind the cover of his false Asian identity. Several have translated work by Joshua Wong for Kong Tsung-gan’s Medium blog, and one designed the cover for one of Kong Tsung-gan’s books.

Where is Brian Kern now?

Brian Patrick Kern was last seen in public on May 24, 2020, marching with lawmaker Eddie Chu Hoi-Dick in a demonstration against China’s National Security Law.

Weeks later, Kong Tsung-gan published his next book, Liberate Hong Kong: Stories From The Freedom Struggle. Hong Kong’s last British colonial governor Chris Patten praised the tract as “a fascinating insider’s look at what has happened, which will be a defining issue for China’s place in the twenty-first century.”

Did Chris Patten know Kong Tsung-gan was a made-up person?

And how about Tom Grundy, the editor-in-chief of Hong Kong Free Press? Did he know that his columnist, Kong, was actually an American named Brian Kern?

Below, Kern can be seen warmly greeting Grundy during the June 2019 Wan Chai Police station siege:

This August, Kong Tsung-gan published a long-winded diatribe against China’s National Security Law in the Mekong Review, clamoring for harsh US sanctions on Beijing. While acknowledging in small print at the end of the essay that Kong was a pen name, Kern continued to insinuate that he was a Hong Kong native.

“An indication of just how draconian the CCP edict is, is that I could be arrested, charged with ‘colluding with foreign forces’, and face up to life in prison just for calling for sanctions on CCP and HK officials,” he wrote.

In reality, the author was not colluding with foreign forces. He was the foreign force.

According to Hong Kong locals contacted by The Grayzone, Kern is rumored to have left the city.

Third-grader Farah Abbas al-Halimi didn’t get the UNICEF backpack or textbook she was hoping for this year. Instead, she was given an advanced U.S bomb delivered on an F-16 courtesy of the Saudi Air Force. That bomb fell on Farah’s school on September 24 and killed Farah, two of her sisters, and her father who was working at the school. It will undoubtedly have an irrevocable effect on the safety and psyche of schoolchildren across the region.

Over the course of Yemen’s pre-war history, which locals fondly refer to as the happy Yemen years, never has an entire generation been subjected to the level of disaster and suffering as that levied upon Farah’s generation by the Saudi-led Coalition, which has used high-tech weapons supplied by the United States and other Western powers to devastating effect since it began its military campaign against Yemen in 2015.

Last week a new school year in Yemen began, the fifth school year since the war started, and little has changed for Yemen’s schoolchildren aside from the fact that the Coalition’s weapons have become more precise and even more deadly, leaving the futures of the country’s more than one million schoolchildren in limbo.

“I want to go to school, I can’t wait any longer,” a relative of six-year-old Ayman al-Kindi told MintPress, recalling how Ayman, surrounded by proud family members, waited impatiently to leave for his first day of school. Ayman would never make it to school; in fact, he never even made it outside. “Ayman wanted to become a doctor but a bomb took him away from school. What these American bombs do to our children is terrifying,” his relative told us.

In late June 2019, Coalition aircraft targeted Ayman’s family home located on their farm in the Warzan area, south of Taiz province in southwestern Yemen. Six of Ayman’s family members were killed, including three children aged 12, nine and six. According to  Amnesty International, the laser-guided precision weapon used in the attack was made by Raytheon. Amnesty’s arms experts analyzed photos of the remnants of the weapon recovered from the scene of the attack by family members and identified it as a U.S.-made 500-pound GBU-12 Paveway II.

The use of a U.S.-made weapon in the attack on the al-Kindi home was no anomaly: most of the weapons possessed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which between them have carried out a quarter of a million raids on Yemen since the beginning of the war, are American-made. This week, families who lost loved ones in Coalition airstrikes held an exhibition called “Criminal Evidence” in the city of Sana`a. The event was an opportunity to consolidate evidence of potential war crimes and prompted hundreds of Yemeni civilians to attend the event with remnants of U.S.-made weapons in tow, remnants recovered from the rubble of the attacks that killed their loved ones.

Photos from an Amnesty investigation show the Al-Kindi home and the Raytheon bomb that destroyed it.

The airstrike on the al-Kindi home was one of nearly a dozen carried out by Saudi Arabia using U.S. weapons that were included in a recent UN report. A team of investigators appointed by the UN Human Rights Council found numerous cases of Saudi airstrikes that violated international humanitarian law and, for the first time, directly implicated the United States, Britain, France and Australia for supplying the weapons used in the attacks.

Charles Garraway, a former military lawyer and one of the experts behind the report, recently told PBS, “We have a war that’s going on. It’s causing immense suffering and frankly most of that suffering is caused by arms.” Garraway continued, “The tragedy in Yemen is so awful at the moment that somehow one has got to reach some form of settlement to stop the war.”

Despite the abundance of evidence proving that Saudi Arabia and the UAE have routinely targeted schools and other civilian facilities, the United States continues to replenish the Coalition’s arsenal. Earlier this year, the Trump administration tried to force through an $8.1 billion arms deal to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan; and, despite growing opposition within his own government, President Donald Trump seems determined to maintain the flow of U.S. weapons to Saudi Arabia and its allies.

Not your normal “back-to-school” day

Eleven-year-old Mohammed AbdulRaham al-Haddi is one the few schoolchildren to have survived the horrific August 9, 2018, Saudi airstrike on a school bus on the outskirts of Dahyan in Yemen’s northwestern province of Saada. The attack killed more than 35 of his classmates, but Mohammed miraculously survived. Today, he returns to school for the first time since the deadly attack, but to an underserved school and without his classmates. Al-Faleh, Mohammed’s new school, lies nestled in a dusty valley near Yemen’s northeastern border with Saudi Arabia

Mohammed al-Haddi, a survivor of an August 2018 airstrike on a school bus, returns to school for the first time since the attack. Ali al Shurgbai | MintPress

The attack on Mohammed’s school bus was carried out using a Mark 82 (MK-82) bomb, jointly manufactured by U.S. weapons companies Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics. The MK-82, along with other general-purpose MK-series bombs, has been sold to the Saudi-led Coalition by the United States through a series of contracts made in 2016 and 2017. In addition to last year’s atrocity, the Coalition has used the MK-82 to target Yemeni civilians in the past, such as its bombing of a funeral in 2016 that left over 140 dead and 525 wounded.

As the war in Yemen enters its fifth year, the tragic consequences of these weapons deals are difficult to describe, but their effects are noticed everywhere. Some 3,526 educational buildings have been at least partially destroyed by bombs since the war began, with most yet to be rebuilt. Of those, 402 were completely destroyed, according to a new field survey conducted by the Ministry of Education. Approximately 900 of Yemen’s schools are still being used as shelters for the internally displaced. And 700 schools have been closed as a result of ongoing clashes.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that two million children are out of school in Yemen. “A fourth of the two million Yemeni children have dropped out since the beginning of the Saudi war in March 2015,” UNICEF representative in Yemen Sara Beysolow Nyanti said in a statement released last Wednesday.

Beysolow raised concerns about the future of Yemeni children, saying:

[They] face increased risks of all forms of exploitation including being forced to join the fighting, child labor and early marriage. They lose the opportunity to develop and grow in a caring and stimulating environment, ultimately becoming trapped in a life of poverty and hardship.”

According to the Geneva-based human rights monitoring organization, SAM, four hundred thousand schoolchildren in Yemen suffer from acute malnutrition, exposing them to the risk of sudden death, 7 million schoolchildren face hunger, and more than 2 million do not go to school.

Even before the war began, the education system in Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, was not in good health; a lack of equipment, unqualified teachers, and a shortage of textbooks plagued the country’s schools, which were bursting at the seams with overcrowding. Coalition bombs and a blockade supported by the United States have effectively destroyed what was left, just as schools were beginning to show signs of recovery.

Many of Yemen’s teachers have not received a paycheck in years and some, unable to eke out a living, have sought work as soldiers-for-hire on Yemen’s battlefields, leaving millions of children without prospects for education and the country as a whole with a 70 percent rate of illiteracy. Beysolow warned that the education of a further 3.7 million Yemeni children is at risk, as teachers have not received their salaries for over two years, adding that one fifth of schools in Yemen can no longer be used as a direct result of the conflict. “Violence, displacement and attacks on schools are preventing many children from accessing school,” she said.

In a bid to stop teachers from leaving schools, the Ministry of Education, based in Sana`a, has imposed a fee on students of $2 per month to pay teacher salaries, but that seemingly nominal fee has added a huge burden to families with more than one child, many of whom are living in extreme poverty as a result of the war and siege. “I have six students, meaning that I need to pay $12 a month; I can’t save that amount,” one mother told us. She lost her husband in the clashes that erupted between the former president Ali Saleh and opposition tribes on Hasabah Street in 2011. Now, her only source of income is begging and it is not enough to feed her six children, let alone send them to school.

To make matters worse, just weeks before the new school year began, the Saudi-led Coalition prevented 11 oil tankers from entering Yemen. The move sparked an acute shortage of fuel, which meant that school buses could no longer run, leaving even those with the means to pay school fees unable to send their children to school.

The severe psychological toll

The effect of U.S.-made weapons upon Yemen’s children does not end there. Children who have survived the fighting are often left with physical disabilities and severe and chronic psychological symptoms, turning their environment into the worst place in the world, according to UNICEF.

Beyond the direct casualties from airstrikes, the largely unnoticed and unrecorded (by the world) sounds of explosions and buzzing warplanes are leaving Yemen’s children with irreversible psychological damage.

Terrified children take cover at the entrance of a cave used as makeshift shelter in the Maran border area, September 30, 2019. Taha al Shurgbai | MintPress

Like other students, Mohammed often gets distracted while at home or sitting in class, unable to focus and laden with severe anxiety. While students the world over occupy their minds with the day-to-day matters that should accompany adolescence, Yemen`s students, especially those who live in border districts, are filled with an ever-present fear of an impending airstrike.

Since the school year began on September 15, the Saudi-led Coalition has reportedly dropped more than a thousand bombs and missiles in 400 separate airstrikes targeting border districts including Sadaa, Hajjah, Sana`a, Amran, Dhali, and Hodeida. The hundreds of sorties are accompanied by frightening whizzing noise and have left great panic in the hearts of civilians, especially Yemen’s schoolchildren.

“Before the war, the sound of planes meant happiness for families who were expecting loved-ones returning [from abroad], but now the sound of planes mean destruction, death, blood,” Dr. AbdulSalam Ashish, a consultant for psychological and neurological diseases, told MintPress. Dr. Ashish continued, “Now, the planes bring nothing but fear and panic and are a reminder of tragedies and crimes that were committed with U.S., British, and French weapons.”

“It was 1:45 p.m., when we heard a missile strike; we were able to calm the students down but when the third strike hit we lost control of the students as they began to scream and chaos spread throughout the school,” Hana Al Awlaqi, a school agent at the  “Martyr Ahmed Abdul Wahab Al Samawi” School, said, recounting the moment a Saudi attack took place just tens of meters away from the school. “The sound of the fourth bomb made matters worse, as the school was being broken into by panicked parents and many teachers were fainting.”

School children react to bombs dropped outside of the Martyr Ahmed Abdul Wahab Al Samawi school on Nov 11, 2017. Mohammed al Alkabsi | Yamanyoon

Al Awlaqi went on to say that many students convulse into spasms when they hear the sound of airplanes, while others have refused to come back to school. “The sound of an explosion or the buzz of the aircraft stays in the mind. The sound of an aircraft can send these children into severe panic attacks and anxiety,” Dr. Ashish confirmed.

Jalal Al-Omeisi, a pediatric nurse at the Psychiatric and Neurological Hospital in Sana`a told MintPress that most of the cases that arrive at the hospital are from areas subjected to intensive Saudi Coalition raids, such as Sana`a, Hodeida, and Saada, as well as the border areas. Al-Omeisi went on to say that most medics lack the training to deal with the complex psychological issues that these children are developing.

Such experiences in children go well beyond the temporary impact on their education and, without proper care and the knowledge necessary to address treat these psychological issues, many will suffer life-long consequences that hinder their ability to obtain an education. This is especially true in light of the lack of programs, centers or hospitals for the rehabilitation of war-affected children in Yemen.

Asking Americans to open their eyes

Schoolchildren living along Yemen’s porous border with Saudi Arabia and throughout its southern districts face a reality even more grim than that faced by their peers. Many are recruited or even forced to join the fight to defend the Saudi border via local trafficking networks, which funnel children into training and recruitment camps in the southern Saudi provinces of Jizan and Najran, as well as to Yemen’s southern districts.

According to a recent report by SAM, Saudi Arabia has been enlisting thousands of Yemeni children to fight along its southern border with Yemen over the past four years. Those have who died as a result of the fighting at the border are often buried in the Kingdom without their families’ knowledge. At least 300 had to have their limbs amputated as a result of their military injuries.

A 17 year-old boy holds his weapon in High dam in Marib, Yemen, July 30, 2018. Nariman El-Mofty | AP

MintPress managed to speak to dozens of school-aged Yemeni children who were captured in a recent Houthi operation that saw thousands of militiamen, including dozens of schoolchildren, and Saudi officers taken into captivity. Fifteen-year-old Adel was among those captured. He left his home in the southern city of Taiz, chasing promises of a regular paycheck of up to 3,000 Saudi riyals ($800). Adel told MintPress: 

We were left alone in Wadi Abu to face our destiny. Older recruits were fleeing on pickup trucks and armored personnel carriers; Saudi airstrikes hit us as we were surrendering to the Houthis.”

Saudi warplanes targeted the captured mercenaries in Wadi Abu Jubarah, killing more than 300 of their own recruits.

Adel, who left school for the promise of a paycheck, went on to say, “Me and the others were recruited to wash the clothes of Saudi soldiers but they gave us rifles and forced us to go to battlefields.” When asked what he would do when freed, Adel said simply, “I want to go back to my mom and school. I don’t want to fight.”

The recruitment of Yemeni children by Saudi Arabia is not without precedent. Although the Kingdom signed the international protocol banning the involvement of children in armed conflict in 2007 and again in 2011, it was accused of recruiting Sudanese children from Darfur to fight in Yemen on its behalf as late as 2018.

Mohammed, who often visits the memorial to his classmates located only a few hundred meters away from his new school, said he will continue to attend school every day, regardless of how much bombing there is. He asked that Americans open their eyes to see what their weapons are doing to Yemen’s children.

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In the course of his crusade against Cuba the White House reported Trump as saying “We will not lift sanctions on the Cuban regime until all political prisoners are freed, freedoms of assembly and expression are respected, all political parties are legalized, and free and internationally supervised elections are scheduled.”

It is commendable to insist that such a country must be encouraged to change its ways and treat its citizens with dignity — but Trump’s statement is crassly hypocritical, because he does not apply such standards to others.

It is deplorable that Cuba has political prisoners, and Human Rights Watch records that in 2018 there were 120 being held. They should be freed. As should those in Saudi Arabia, who in September 2018 numbered “2,613, including prominent lawyers, judges, academics, scientists and journalists.” The US State Department’s Report on Human Rights, while timidly observing that in Saudi Arabia “Credible reporting by advocacy groups and press suggested that authorities detained persons for peaceful activism or political opposition” also acknowledges that “At least 120 persons remained in detention for activism, criticism of government leaders, impugning Islam or religious leaders, or ‘offensive’ internet postings.”

So if Cuba and Saudi Arabia are officially recorded in Washington as each having 120 political prisoners, why does Trump insist on punishing Cubans and not Saudis?

Trump demands respect “for freedoms of assembly and expression”, which is also a most reasonable objective. It is unfitting that Cuban citizens cannot gather where and when they wish to, and are limited in what they can say publicly. And it is also lamentable that, as the State Department puts it, Saudi law “does not provide for freedom of assembly and association, which the government severely limited . . . The government categorically forbids participation in political protests or unauthorized public assemblies.”

Amnesty International feels strongly about denial of “Freedoms of Expression, Association, and Belief”, and its 2019 World Report noted that “Saudi authorities in 2018 intensified a coordinated crackdown on dissidents, human rights activists, and independent clerics. On May 15, 2018, just weeks before the Saudi authorities lifted the ban on women driving on June 24, authorities launched arrests of prominent women’s rights activists and accused several of them of grave crimes like treason that appear to be directly related to their activism.”

We can’t expect Trump to leap up and down in support of women’s rights, anywhere in the world, but if he is so impassioned about freedom of expression in Cuba, to the extent of increasing the harshness of his already savage sanctions, why doesn’t he take action about the Riyadh Monarchy’s refusal to respect “freedoms of assembly and expression”? Is it morally acceptable to penalise one country and not another for denial of exactly the same rights?

The same holds for Trump’s insistence that punishment of Cubans will continue until “all political parties are legalized,” because, as recorded by Freedom House, Cuba is “a one-party communist state that outlaws political pluralism.” Mr Trump abhors and denounces countries that don’t have democratic systems with multiple political parties. Well, perhaps not ALL countries that don’t have political parties, because Saudi Arabia, that close ally of the United States, doesn’t have any, either. But as the State Department tells us, “the US-Saudi partnership is rooted in more than seven decades of close friendship and cooperation, enriched by the exchange opportunities that are key to the promotion of mutual understanding and the long-term development of ties.”

Another part of the State Department isn’t quite so enthusiastic about mutual understanding, and is blunt about the fact that in the Saudi Kingdom “there are no political parties or similar associations”, and even observes that human rights are unsatisfactory because of “citizens’ lack of ability and legal means to choose their government through free and fair elections.” Yet there hasn’t been a peep of criticism in Establishment Washington about the president’s statement that “The United States intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region.”

On the other hand, Trump is adamant that in the case of Cuba there will be intensification of sanctions that blight the lives of ordinary people until there are “free and internationally supervised elections.” Why this difference in policy? Why punish eleven million Cubans for the refusal of their government to permit elections while concurrently praising an Arab dictator who has no intention of ever permitting democracy?

Secretary of State Pompeo and National Security Adviser Bolton, are also violently opposed to Cuba and unconditionally supportive of Saudi Arabia. Bolton, for example, declared in April that Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua are a “troika of tyranny” and that intensified sanctions would “end the glamorization of socialism and communism” while for so long as its citizens “stand for freedom, the United States will stand with them.” But this does not apply to Bolton’s intentions in other parts of the world. When interviewed by CNN’s Jake Tapper he simply didn’t reply when Tapper said “the United States supports any number of dictators who violate human rights, including the leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE” and asked him “Should those who support those dictators not be allowed to walk around with impunity?” Bolton ignored the question completely.

Pompeo has been equally evasive, and after meeting at length with Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Prince Mohammad bin Salman, during his visit there in January, was reported by the New York Times as having raised concerns over imprisonment of women’s rights activists. He said he had been assured that the Saudis “commitment was that the process, the lawful judicial process here, would take place. They understand the concerns that some have.”

The picture is clear, in that Trump’s Washington intends to destroy Cuba in order to save it from lack of democracy, while energetically supporting Saudi Arabia (and many others) in spite of their total lack of democracy.

The world being what it is, there is no doubt that there is a practical case for US engagement with Saudi Arabia and other dictatorships, providing serious attempts are made to persuade them that democracy is a better system of government for their citizens than the regimes at present imposed. So why run a crusade of vicious sanctions against Cuba for being undemocratic, while maintaining most cordial relations with such countries as Saudi Arabia which are manifestly undemocratic?

The foreign policy mission of the United States is to “build and sustain a more democratic, secure, and prosperous world for the benefit of the American people and the international community.” But choosing enemies selectively and punishing innocent people works against achievement of a more democratic world and engenders resentment and contempt by its brash hypocrisy.

The U.S.-led coalition that launched airstrikes against Iraq and Syria against ISIS admitted Friday that those attacks killed civilians, but the number they reported—1,302 deaths in a nearly five-year period—was immediately dismissed as too low by the human rights organization Amnesty International.

“While all admissions of responsibility by the U.S.-led coalition for civilian casualties are welcome, the coalition remains deeply in denial about the devastating scale of the civilian casualties caused by their operations in both Iraq and Syria,” the group’s senior crisis response advisor, Donatella Rovera, said in a statement.

The coalition, in a statement announcing the findings of its internal review, said that of the “34,502 strikes between August 2014 and the end of April 2019” it found that “at least 1,302 civilians have been unintentionally killed by coalition strikes.”

That number, while 1,302 people too many, is still far below projections from other organizations over the past.

“Even in cases where the coalition has admitted responsibility this has only happened after civilian deaths were investigated and brought to its attention by organizations such as Amnesty International and Airwars,” said Rovera.

In April, a study by Amnesty and Airwars projected that 1,600 civilians died in coalition airstrikes in the Syrian city of Raqqa alone from June to October 2017, a number that, in four months, is higher than the coalition’s total findings for over four years across two countries.

“We hope to finally see an honest assessment of the devastating impact that U.S. lethal strikes have had on the civilians in Raqqa,” Daphne Eviatar, director of Amnesty’s Security with Human Rights program, said at the time. “The public deserves to know how many civilian casualties our government is responsible for, and the survivors deserve acknowledgement, reparations, where appropriate, and meaningful assistance to rebuild their lives.”

Friday’s report indicates that despite calls for more detailed analysis and investigation, an honest assessment may not be a priority for the coalition.

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Amnesty International, the eminent human-rights non-governmental organization, is widely known for its advocacy in that realm. It produces reports critical of the Israeli occupation in Palestine and the Saudi-led war on Yemen. But it also publishes a steady flow of indictments against countries that don’t play ball with Washington — countries like Iran, China, Venezuela, Nicaragua, North Korea and more. Those reports amplify the drumbeat for a “humanitarian” intervention in those nations.

Amnesty’s stellar image as a global defender of human rights runs counter to its early days when the British Foreign Office was believed to be censoring reports critical of the British empire. Peter Benenson, the co-founder of Amnesty, had deep ties to the British Foreign Office and Colonial Office while another co-founder, Luis Kutner, informed the FBI of a gun cache at Black Panther leader Fred Hampton’s home weeks before he was killed by the Bureau in a gun raid.

These troubling connections contradict Amnesty’s image as a benevolent defender of human rights and reveal key figures at the organization during its early years to be less concerned with human dignity and more concerned with the dignity of the United States and United Kingdom’s image in the world.

A conflicted beginning

Amnesty’s Benenson, an avowed anti-communist, hailed from a military intelligence background. He pledged that Amnesty would be independent of government influence and would represent prisoners in the East, West, and global South alike.

But during the 1960s the U.K. was withdrawing from its colonies and the Foreign Office and Colonial Office were hungry for information from human-rights activists about the situations on the ground. In 1963, the Foreign Office instructed its operatives abroad to provide “discreet support” for Amnesty’s campaigns.

Also that year, Benenson wrote to Colonial Office Minister Lord Lansdowne a proposal to prop up a “refugee counsellor” on the border of present-day Botswana and apartheid South Africa. That counsel was to assist refugees only, and explicitly avoid aiding anti-apartheid activists. “Communist influence should not be allowed to spread in this part of Africa, and in the present delicate situation, Amnesty International would wish to support Her Majesty’s Government in any such policy,” Benenson wrote. The next year, Amnesty ceased its support for anti-apartheid icon and the first president of a free South Africa, Nelson Mandela.

The following year, in 1964, Benenson enlisted the Foreign Office’s assistance in obtaining a visa to Haiti. The Foreign Office secured the visa and wrote to its Haiti representative Alan Elgar saying it “support[ed] the aims of Amnesty International.” There, Benenson went undercover as a painter, as Minister of State Walter Padley told him prior to his departure that “We shall have to be a little careful not to give the Haitians the impression that your visit is actually sponsored by Her Majesty’s Government.”

The New York Times exposed the ruse, leading some officials to claim ignorance; Elgar, for example, said he was “shocked by Benenson’s antics.” Benenson apologized to Minister Padley, saying “I really do not know why the New York Times, which is generally a responsible newspaper, should be doing this sort of thing over Haiti.”

Letting politics creep into mission

In 1966, an Amnesty report on the British colony of Aden, a port city in present-day Yemen, detailed the British government’s torture of detainees at the Ras Morbut interrogation center. Prisoners there were stripped naked during interrogations, were forced to sit on poles that entered their anus, had their genitals twisted, cigarettes burned on their face, and were kept in cells where feces and urine covered the floor.

The report was never released, however. Benenson said that Amnesty general secretary Robert Swann had censored it to please the Foreign Office, but Amnesty co-founder Eric Baker said Benenson and Swann had met with the Foreign Office and agreed to keep the report under wraps in exchange for reforms. At the time, Lord Chancellor Gerald Gardiner wrote to Prime Minister Harold Wilson that “Amnesty held the [report] as long as they could simply because Peter Benenson did not want to do anything to hurt a Labour government.”

Then something changed. Benenson went to Aden and was horrified by what he found, writing “I never came upon an uglier picture than that which met my eyes in Aden,” despite his “many years spent in the personal investigation of repression.”

A tangled web

As all of this was unfolding, a similar funding scandal was developing that would rock Amnesty to its core. Polly Toynbee, a 20-year-old Amnesty volunteer, was in Nigeria and Southern Rhodesia, the British colony in Zimbabwe, which was at the time ruled by the white settler minority. There, Toynbee delivered funds to prisoner families with a seemingly endless supply of cash. Toynbee said that Benenson met with her there and admitted that the money was coming from the British government.

Toynbee and others were forced to leave Rhodesia in March 1966. On her way out, she grabbed documents from an abandoned safe including letters from Benenson to senior Amnesty officials working in the country that detailed Benenson’s request to Prime Minister Wilson for money, which had been received months prior.

In 1967 it was revealed that the CIA had established and was covertly funding another human rights organization founded in the early 1960s, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) through an American affiliate, the American Fund for Free Jurists Inc.

Benenson had founded, alongside Amnesty, the U.K. branch of the ICJ, called Justice. Amnesty international secretariat, Sean MacBride, was also the secretary-general of ICJ.

Then, the “Harry letters” hit the press. Officially, Amnesty denied knowledge of the payments from Wilson’s government. But Benenson admitted that their work in Rhodesia had been funded by the government, and returned the funds out of his own pocket. He wrote to Lord Chancellor Gardiner that he did it so as not to “jeopardize the political reputation” of those involved. Benenson then returned unspent funds from his two other human-rights organizations, Justice (the U.K. branch of the CIA-founded ICJ) and the Human Rights Advisory Service.

Benenson’s behavior in the wake of the revelations about the “Harry letters” infuriated his Amnesty colleagues. Some of them would go on to claim that he suffered from mental illness. One staffer wrote:

Peter Benenson has been levelling accusations, which can only have the result of discrediting the organisation which he has founded and to which he dedicated himself… All this began after soon after he came back from Aden, and it seems likely that the nervous shock which he felt at the brutality shown by some elements of the British army there had some unbalancing effect on his judgment.

Later that year, Benenson stepped down as president of Amnesty in protest of its London office being surveilled and infiltrated by British intelligence — at least according to him. Later that month, Sean MacBride, the Amnesty official and ICJ operative, submitted a report to an Amnesty conference that denounced Benenson’s “erratic actions.” Benenson boycotted the conference, opting to submit a resolution demanding MacBride’s resignation over the CIA funding of ICJ.

Amnesty and the British government then suspended ties. The rights group then promised to “not only be independent and impartial but must not be put into a position where anything else could even be alleged” about its collusion with governments in 1967.

Amnesty’s role in the death of Black Panther Fred Hampton

But two years later, senior Amnesty officials engaged in far more troubling coordination with Western intelligence agencies.

FBI documents, released by the Bureau in the spring of 2018 as a part of a series of disclosures of documents pertaining to the assassination of President John Kennedy, detail Amnesty International’s role in the killing of Black Panther Party (BPP) Deputy Chairman Fred Hampton, the 21-year-old up-and-coming black liberation icon — a killing that was widely believed to be an assassination but was ruled officially as a justifiable homicide.

Amnesty International co-founder Luis Kutner attended a November 23, 1969 speech of Hampton’s delivered at the University of Illinois.

During the speech, Hampton described the BPP “as a revolutionary party” and “indicated that the party has guns to be used for peace and self-defense, and these guns are at the Hampton residence as well as BPP headquarters,” according to the FBI document.

“Kutner has reached the point where he would like to take legal action to silence the BPP,” the FBI wrote. “Kutner concluded by stating that he believed speakers like Hampton were psychotic, and it is only when they are faced with a court action that they stop their “rantings and ravings.”

The FBI internal report on Kutner’s testimony cited above was issued on December 1, 1969. Two days later, the FBI, alongside the Chicago Police Department, conducted a firearms raid on Hampton’s residence. When Hampton came home for the day, FBI informant William O’Neal slipped a barbiturate sleeping pill into his drink before leaving.

At 4:00 a.m. on December 4, police and FBI stormed into the apartment, instantly shooting a BPP guard. Due to reflexive convulsions related to death, the guard convulsed and pulled the trigger on a shotgun he was carrying – the only time a Black Panther member fired a gun during the raid. Authorities then opened fire on Hampton, who was in bed sleeping with his nine-month pregnant fiancee. Hampton is believed to have survived until two shots were fired at point-blank range towards his head.

Kutner formed the “Friends of the FBI” group, an organization “formed to combat criticism of the Federal Bureau of Investigations,” according to the New York Times, after its covert campaign to disrupt leftists movements — COINTELPRO — was revealed. He also went on to operate in a number of theaters that saw heavy involvement from the CIA — including work Kutner did to undermine Congolese Prime Minister and staunch anti-imperialist Patrice Lumumba — and represented the Dalai Lama, who was provided $1.7 million a year by the CIA in the 1960s.

While Amnesty International’s shady operations in the 1960s might seem like ancient history at this point, they serve as an important reminder of the role that non-governmental organizations often play in furthering the objectives of governments of the nations where they are based.

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Last year’s Washington-led coalition effort against the Islamic State (ISIS) group in the Syrian city of Raqqa included numerous “disproportionate or indiscriminate” attacks on the city, showing little regard for civilian lives and constituting potential war crimes, a new report by Amnesty International stated Tuesday.

The campaign to seize Raqqa spanned June to October of last year, and entailed tens of thousands of U.S. and allied air and artillery strikes in support of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a U.S.-backed force dominated by the Kurdish YPG militia.

The report quotes U.S. Army Sergeant-Major John Wayne Troxell, who said:

In five months they [U.S. Marines] fired 30,000 artillery rounds on ISIS targets… They fired more rounds in five months in Raqqa, Syria, than any other Marine or Army battalion since the Vietnam War… Every minute of every hour we were putting some kind of fire on ISIS in Raqqa, whether it was mortars, artillery, rockets, Hellfires, armed drones, you name it.”

“Given that artillery shells have a margin of error of over 100 meters, it is no surprise that the result was mass civilian casualties,” said Amnesty International senior crisis response adviser Donatella Rovera.

Around 90 percent of airstrikes and bombardments and the entirety of artillery strikes were carried out by U.S. military personnel, while the remaining airstrikes were launched by British and French forces. Remaining members of the 70-member U.S.-assembled Coalition assisted the indiscriminate bombing campaign with logistical help, such as refueling warplanes or by helping to identify targets.

As MintPress News has reported, Coalition forces also widely deployed white phosphorus, a chemical weapon, in spite of its urgings that the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad refrain from the use of chemical agents in the war.

The report notes:

U.S. Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend claimed that the Coalition’s offensive on Raqqa had been ‘the most precise air campaign in the history.’ The reality on the ground could not be more different.”

Throughout the campaign and afterward, journalists and rights monitors warned about the massive destruction of the city that Coalition efforts had led to, with entire civilian districts facing utter destruction due to their unfortunate inclusion in the city. Raqqa had become the administrative capital of the so-called ISIS “caliphate” in 2014, with civilians bearing the brunt of its jihadist brand of Islamist extremism. Rather than being “liberated” by Coalition forces, however, the people of Raqqa instead faced a war of annihilation that claimed thousands of lives while displacing tens of thousands of residents from their homes.

The U.S.-led coalition’s indefensible attacks on civilians

Documenting the ordeals of four families whose experiences were typical of the broader ordeal faced by civilians, the report offers further damning evidence that the U.S. and its Coalition partners failed to minimize the potential of killing or harming civilians living in the ISIS-ruled city.

The report detailed the plight of the Aswad family, which lost eight members in a single airstrike, as well as the Badran family which lost 39 members, the Fayad family which lost 16 members and the Hashish family which lost 18 members. In each of the cases, powerful bombs struck buildings full of civilians who had taken up long-term residency there.

Amnesty added that the experiences of the families, who were among 112 civilians interviewed by the group in February, offers “prima facie evidence that several coalition attacks which killed and injured civilians violated international humanitarian law.”

Speaking to the BBC, Coalition spokesman U.S. Army Colonel Sean Ryan said that Amnesty personnel should “leave the comforts of the U.K.” and see for themselves how Coalition forces are “fighting an enemy that does not abide by any laws, norms or human concern,” including the use of non-combatants as human shields “in order to sadistically claim the coalition is killing civilians.”

Yet Amnesty did clearly detail in its report how ISIS jihadists also endangered civilians by hiding among them or placing them in harm’s way.

In an opinion piece defending the report, Rovera and Middle East researcher Benjamin Walsby noted:

Everyone we spoke to in Raqqa agreed that Isis had to be defeated. But they asked why their families had to be killed and their city destroyed in the process. The coalition remains stubbornly wedded to the notion that precision airstrikes allowed it to defeat Isis with a minimal cost to civilian life. This is wishful thinking, as Amnesty’s research has revealed in Raqqa (and before that in the Iraqi city of Mosul).”

The report ends with a demand for the Coalition to make a public admission of the civilian deaths in Raqqa, to release information publicly for use in an independent investigation, and to pay reparations to those survivors who suffered due to the indiscriminate or intentional destruction of their neighborhoods, families and homes.

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