Abdulsalam was in the middle of Friday prayer at his neighborhood mosque in al-Bab, Aleppo, when he heard a crash — a nearby bakery had just disintegrated under the force of a barrel bomb, a deadly metal container filled with shrapnel and explosives, favored by the Syrian military.
Scanning the sky he saw the hovering chopper that had dropped the weapon. He tried to snap photos as it loomed above the rubble, but the images looked fuzzy. Abdulsalam hopped on the back of a passing ambulance and was among the first on the scene. He trained his camera on the smoldering facade of a bakery, panned to series of blasted-apart food stalls, and then settled his lens on mangled bodies. He kept snapping photos in rapid succession, until he spotted his cousin amid the carnage. Holstering his camera, Abdulsalam decided to join the rescue effort and helped his relative to a nearby hospital.
It was January 2014, almost two years after the Syrian army opened fire on protesters in Abdulsalam’s hometown of al-Bab, in the north of Aleppo province, bringing the country’s raging war to a farming community that had, until that point, remained largely untouched. Since then, Abdulsalam had worked with a group of local media activists to publicize the human toll of the civil war as rebel fighters established a foothold in al-Bab and the Assad regime pounded the town from above.
Within hours of the attack that injured his cousin, Abdulsalam uploaded his photos to Facebook. He thought it was the best way to simultaneously preserve the images — he didn’t know when his camera or computer could be destroyed — and get them out to the world. “It was a particularly horrific bombing,” he told me recently. There had been a pause in the fighting that week, and families who’d spent months cowering inside had just emerged to stroll through an outdoor bazaar near the mosque.
Seven months later, Abdulsalam got an automated email from Facebook notifying him that the images had been removed. Other users had complained that his photos were too gory. By the time he got the email, Abdulsalam’s other copies of the pictures were gone; his hard drive had been burned, along with his small office, when the Islamic State stormed al-Bab and Abdulsalam fled across the border to Turkey.
There’s good reason to believe Abdulsalam’s photos could have been used to address the atrocities he had witnessed. Since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, investigators with Human Rights Watch have been making regular trips to Aleppo to document potential war crimes, including a disturbing pattern of Syrian helicopters blowing up bakeries with barrel bombs. By the time Abdulsalam snapped his pictures, the Islamic State had begun to move into the city, and HRW could no longer collect on-the-ground evidence. Ole Solvang, an HRW researcher who visited Aleppo more than a dozen times, in part to research the bakery attacks, said of Abdulsalam’s photos, which he never saw, “If there is ever a trial, this is the stuff that could become important evidence.”
Photo: Mohammed Al-Khatieb/AFP/Getty Images
The disappearance of Abdusalam’s photos are part of a pattern that’s causing a quiet panic among human rights groups and war crimes investigators. Social media companies can, and do, remove content with little regard for its evidentiary value. First-hand accounts of extrajudicial killings, ethnic cleansing, and the targeting of civilians by armies can disappear with little warning, sometimes before investigators notice. When groups do realize potential evidence has been erased, recovering it can be a kafkaesque ordeal. Facing a variety of pressures — to safeguard user privacy, neuter extremist propaganda, curb harassment and, most recently, combat the spread of so-called fake news — social media companies have over and over again chosen to ignore, and, at times, disrupt the work of human rights groups scrambling to build cases against war criminals.
“It’s something that keeps me awake at night,” says Julian Nicholls, a senior trial lawyer at the International Criminal Court, where he’s responsible for prosecuting cases against war criminals, “the idea that there’s a video or photo out there that I could use, but before we identify it or preserve it, it disappears.”
Worries over disappearing evidence are not just theoretical. This past summer, YouTube rolled out a new artificial intelligence system designed to identify violent content that may be extremist propaganda or disturbing to viewers. Almost overnight, it shut down 900 groups and individuals documenting the civil war in Syria. That included a channel run by Bellingcat, a reputable U.K.-based organization devoted to analyzing images coming out of conflict zones including Syria, Ukraine, and Libya. YouTube also took down content from the group AirWars, which tracks the toll of U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria. Countless media organizations run from Syria were also shut down, including the Idlib Media Center, one of the few groups producing videos from the last Syrian province controlled by rebels. Meanwhile, in September, Facebook began removing photos and images documenting ethnic cleansing and torture of the Rohingya ethnic minority at the hands of the Myanmar government. Like the images taken by Abdulsalam, other users had flagged the Rohingya images as disturbing, and Facebook agreed.
The takedowns, and the murky processes that led to them, represent a dramatic shift from the heady days of the Arab Spring, when protesters posted images of their governments firing on them, and social media chiefs promoted their platforms as nearly limitless tools for reform. “Anyone with a mobile handset and access to the Internet will be able to play a part in promoting accountability,” Google Executive Chair Eric Schmidt wrote in his 2013 book, “The New Digital Age.” Around the same time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared, in a 10-page paper about wiring the world for internet: “I believe connectivity is a human right.”
“They could have said: ‘Don’t use your platforms for this,’” said Alexa Koenig, executive director at the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley. “But they actually tried to get these people use their platforms [for it] — they held themselves up as arbiters of social good, and at that point of creating dependency, I would argue they acquired a heightened responsibility.”
“They had grandiose ideas,” added Keith Hiatt, a former software engineer turned human rights activist who’s served as a sort of intermediary for the tech industry and the human rights community. He is now vice president of Human Rights Programs at the NGO, Benetech, and serves on the Technology Advisory Board for the ICC, a group of experts trying to bridge the gap between investigators and technology. “The big story these companies told, justifying the massive freedom that they had to operate, was that their technologies would lead to openness — and openness will lead to democracy and human freedom,” he said.
Now that their own behavior is at issue, social media companies seem oblivious to the stakes, said Mohammad Al Abdallah, executive director of the Syrian Justice and Accountability Centre, an NGO backed by more 30 governments, including the U.S., which works to preserve social media evidence of atrocities.
“They just don’t appreciate what’s going on on their platforms,” he said. “They don’t take this as seriously as they should.”
Facebook would not answer specific questions about war crimes evidence. A spokesperson, who would not agree to sit for an interview or be named, said Facebook tried to be flexible and allow violent content to live on its platform when that content had some social or documentary value, and pointed to a year-old blog post in which the company said it would be “working closely with experts, publishers, journalists, photographers, law enforcement officials and safety advocates about how to do better when it comes to the kinds of items we allow.”
YouTube defended the way it deals with war crimes evidence and its relationship with the human rights groups who collect that evidence. “We are committed to ensuring human rights activists and citizen journalists have a voice on YouTube and are proud of how our service has been used to expose what is happening across the globe,” Juniper Downs, YouTube’s director of public policy, said. “We collaborate across civil society on many issues, including working with human rights groups to better understand the needs of content creators on the ground. Their expertise helps us make smarter policies and enforcement decisions, and we value the collaboration.”
Social media evidence is increasingly used to build cases against perpetrators of abuses by human rights organizations, by European courts that have “universal jurisdiction” and can bring war crimes charges, and by United Nations investigators. Over the summer, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for a Libyan commander accused of extrajudicial killings on the battlefield, basing the warrant, in part, on videos posted to Facebook. (One of the prosecutors on that case is Nicholls, the ICC lawyer who frets about atrocity evidence disappearing on social media.) Last year in Germany, an ISIS fighter was found guilty of posing with decapitated prisoners based in part on evidence found on Facebook. This year, in Sweden, Syrian regime and rebel fighters were successfully prosecuted for war crimes using evidence from both Facebook and YouTube. In total, there are 30 ongoing war crimes investigations in Swedish and German courts connected to crimes committed in Syria and Iraq. On the other side of the world, the government of Myanmar has barred NGOs and aid agencies from entering northern parts of the country, where human rights groups say a genocide is taking place against the Rohingya population. Human rights workers are often reliant on social media evidence to document the atrocities. At the same time, the U.N. has launched an independent investigation into the Syria conflict — known as the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism — which has a specific mandate to collect evidence of war crimes in Syria, much of which is housed on social media platforms.
Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images
For some who post on social media to document ongoing atrocities, the takedowns seem, at best, a destruction of evidence — and, at worst, complicity in atrocities. “Three years of documentation, just gone, in a moment,” Obayda Abo-Al Bara, a manager at the Idlib Media Center, said. Mohammad Anwar, one of the Rohingya activists whose posts were deleted by Facebook, told The Intercept that “I did feel that Facebook was colluding with the Myanmar regime in the Rohingya genocide.”
Facebook declined to address that statement directly, but said through a spokesperson that it is now making exceptions to its community standards for that conflict, working with NGOs, and conceded some mistakes in its handling of posts from Myanmar after they were brought to light by the Daily Beast in September.
In the tribunals of the future, investigators imagine a constellation of evidence — social media content will be introduced alongside traditional materials, such as eyewitness testimony or official documents to build stronger, more durable, cases against war criminals. Social media will never replace flesh-and-blood witnesses or old-fashioned forensics. But such evidence is clearly growing in importance — and is uniquely concentrated on the servers of Silicon Valley corporations.
“These platforms are now essentially privately owned evidence lockers,” said Christoph Koettl, a senior analyst at Amnesty International.
“But they are not in the business of being a human rights evidence locker; that work is not included in their business model.”
Koettl, who is also the founder of Citizen Evidence Lab, a group that trains human rights researchers to use social media to gather evidence of atrocities, recently received a YouTube link from a source who said it depicted an extrajudicial killing in Nigeria. By the time he clicked the link, the material had been taken down. When he contacted the company to ask for it to be restored, he said, they told him it wasn’t possible. A spokesperson at YouTube told The Intercept that, in such a scenario, the company has to respect the wishes of the video’s original poster — even if a human rights group like Amnesty flags the media as potential war crimes evidence.
Cases like the Nigeria video place social media companies in a difficult position, trying to strike a balance between the thirst for evidence of atrocities and privacy guarantees made to users. Nonprofit rights groups see less noble priorities at play, as well. Koenig has worked for years to help forge cooperation between human rights crusaders and the major social media companies. In 2014, she helped convene a meeting between investigators at the ICC and major tech companies in San Francisco; Google sent a representative, but Facebook pulled out last minute. (Koenig was able to debrief Facebook the week after at the 2014 meeting of RightsCon, an annual digital human rights conference.) This was the first meeting of its kind, she said, and the differences between the two camps were laid bare. “When you’re talking about privately held companies, with loyalty to their shareholders, they think on quarterly timelines and about maximizing profits,” she added. “With war crimes, we’re talking about a totally different set of priorities, and a timeline of five years minimum.”
Silicon Valley’s attitude is not the only obstacle to deploying social media content in war crimes proceedings. Courts and prosecutors are still hammering out how the evidence can be used, how much weight to give it, and how to make sure defense attorneys can fairly rebut it. There’s the perpetual question of how to distinguish real from fake: Is a YouTube video of an execution authentic or staged? To address such concerns, investigators and activists are racing to standardize how they archive social media evidence, to make it searchable and easier to verify. One priority is sifting through hundreds of thousands of videos and photos to separate so-called lead evidence, content that indicates a crime has taken place, from “linkage evidence,” content that connects perpetrators to that crime.
Beyond the question of how to handle evidence is the challenge of obtaining it in the first place. Courts in European countries where war crimes prosecutions often take place can only submit warrants to American social media companies using cumbersome processes that operate via mutual legal assistance treaties, or MLATs, between their nations and the U.S. Through such channels, it can take years for the data to make its way into the hands of prosecutors. On top of that, the ICC is blocked from getting any social media data (or other information) from U.S. companies, thanks to the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, a law signed by former President George W. Bush in 2002 that shields U.S. soldiers from war crimes prosecutions and also prevents U.S. companies from turning over evidence to the ICC.
Of course, information shared openly on social networks is fair game. And it’s hard to overstate the potency of such evidence — or the consequences of its deletion. Take the trial of Haisam Omar Sakhanh last February. A former Syrian rebel fighter, he sought asylum in Sweden and was then investigated by Swedish authorities for allegedly withholding details of his past. During that investigation, his role in an extrajudicial killing on the Syrian battlefield in 2012 came to light, and he was charged with a violation of international law. He was subsequently convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
Social media evidence proved crucial, the chief prosecutor on the case, Henrik Attorps, told The Intercept. A video published by the New York Times in 2013 showed Sakhanh with an anti-Assad militia, known as the Suleiman Soldiers, executing bound prisoners after a battle in the northern province of Idlib.
Sakhanh claimed that those prisoners had been sentenced to death in a lengthy trial. Attorps was able to use social media to eviscerate that defense. He started Googling Sakhanh’s name and found videos posted on YouTube showing Sakhanh participating in the Idlib battle. He later subpoenaed YouTube for precise times that those videos were posted. He also subpoenaed Facebook for data from a deleted account of the Suleiman Soldiers; this included time-stamped announcements of the group’s attack on Syrian soldiers. Attorps then built a timeline showing that between the announcement on Facebook by the Suleiman Soldiers, the battle itself, and the execution, no more than 48 hours could have elapsed.
If YouTube had removed videos showing Sakhanh participating in that Idlib battle, Attorps could very well have failed to convict. But, the prosecutors still had mixed feeling about social media companies taking down disturbing images that could also be war crimes evidence. “As a prosecutor in this field of law, I’m worried,” he admitted. “But as a citizen, I’m a bit relieved.” Such images and video, Attorps said, can be disturbing for the general public and can serve as propaganda for extremist groups like ISIS.
Social media companies are under tremendous pressure to deny these extremist groups a safe haven for their propaganda. In September, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May demanded that such firms come up with a way to remove extremist content within two hours of its posting. This presents a real dilemma, an official at YouTube told The Intercept: one person’s extremist propaganda is another person’s war-crime evidence.
Photo: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
“A video of a terrorist attack may be informative news reporting if uploaded by a news outlet or citizen journalist,” Downs of YouTube said. “But that same video clip can be glorification of violence if uploaded in a different context by a different user.”
Cognizant of these tensions, human rights groups are building ways to preserve potential war crimes evidence outside of the purview of social media companies — a sort of emergent, anarchic alternative architecture for media collection. That effort is centered on the Syrian Civil War; the group Syrian Archive, for example, is building a parallel evidence locker, downloading and organizing thousands of hours of video, with a team of six and a budget of $96,000. Researchers are also coming up with new ways to amass atrocity evidence in conflicts in other regions, including sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia.
“NGOs are doing the work that companies should do,” said Dia Kayyali, a tech and advocacy program manager at Witness, a group that also maintains a network of contacts in conflict zones documenting human rights abuses on video. “They should be paying people to be in contact with these groups and have relationships with them.”
Of course, the human rights groups, scouring social media for evidence, have longstanding relationships with the platforms — especially YouTube. In 2012, YouTube partnered with Witness to release a tool that allows activists to blur the faces in a video so investigators could collect testimony from anonymous witnesses. More recently, YouTube worked with Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, the U.K. NGO stung by YouTube’s AI this summer, to develop a tool called “Montage” to help investigators crowdsource analysis of conflict videos. Facebook, human rights activists say, has been less open to such collaborations. “Facebook has been a mess forever,” Higgins told The Intercept. He points to one egregious case: In 2013, after the Syrian regime launched a chemical attack on the civilian population of Damascus, Higgins said that 80 percent of the firsthand reports of the attack, including videos and images, posted to Facebook were erased from the platform. (Facebook declined to answer a question about Higgins’s claim.)
Even human rights groups with strong ties to social media companies often feel buffeted by the whims of the platforms. Rules about what can and can’t be shared can change without much warning. In 2014, for example, YouTube decided to change its Application Program Interface, or API, essentially the language that outside organizations rely on to create software to extract data from, or otherwise interact with, the platform. The Syria Justice and Accountability Centre, a nonprofit group that has collected hundreds of thousands of videos of potential war crimes in Syria, was caught totally unaware and its system crashed. This summer, when YouTube introduced its new AI, channels feeding SJAC again disappeared.
“These companies don’t consult us or even give us educational guidance about how to post to not avoid things being blocked,” Abdallah, the group’s executive director, told The Intercept.
Even Witness was caught off guard by the company’s AI rollout. Many of the groups they partner with in conflict zones found their content removed.
“Who designs this AI? What was their understanding of these conflicts? We don’t know,” said Kayyali. “Huge companies need to recognize that every change they make … will have an effect on human rights users,” Kayyali added. “Instead of working to fix issues after policies and tools have already been instituted, it just makes sense to reach out to stakeholders.”
Screenshot of Syrian Archive website.
In August, when YouTube’s new AI removed thousands of videos associated with human rights and war crimes research, it caused a minor scandal. Higgins reamed the company to his 60,000 Twitter followers: “So far, YouTube’s attempts to remove ISIS and Jihadi content has proven to be a total flop, loads of false positives,” he wrote. YouTube has worked closely with human rights groups to restore videos and channels that its AI took down. A company spokesperson admitted that the rollout was executed poorly, and human rights groups should have been more in the loop.
“Inevitably, both humans and machines make mistakes. We use these errors to retrain our teams and our technology,” Downs, the YouTube spokesperson said. “We are also working on ways to educate those who share video meant to document or expose violence on how to add necessary context, so our reviewers can distinguish their videos from more malicious uploads.”
But more than three months after the botched AI rollout, human rights groups are still reeling:
“All our efforts have shifted to deal with YouTube thing,” said Hadi al-Khatib, the co-founder of the Syrian Archive.
He used to spend his days archiving potential war crimes evidence; now he’s engaged in a Sisyphean battle with YouTube’s algorithm. “We spend all our time helping Syrian media organizations whose content is deleted — we take their accounts, we check them out, make sure they are doing good work, then we we send to YouTube,” he explained. “A few days later, it’s deleted again.” This couldn’t be happening at a worse time, Khatib says. The Syrian regime and its allies are quickly retaking large swaths of Syria from ailing rebel groups and Islamic extremists. “They are demolishing all types of evidence on purpose — some of what we collect is the the only thing that is left indicating that a crime took place,” he said. In mid-October, for example, YouTube removed bloody video evidence of a Russian airstrike that Khatib said targeted civilians in the Idlib countryside. “This was quite crucial,” he says. “It was a violation of international law and, until now, we can’t get it restored.”
This ad-hoc process for restoring videos raises a lot of questions. Groups and individuals in Europe and the U.S. who have ties to the social media companies have a shot at getting their content back. But for others it’s not within reach: Talal Kharrat, a manager with the Turkish-based Qasioun News Agency, said his organization draws on 80 correspondents, some of them undercover, spread across Syria. Since 2014, he says, nearly 6,000 videos from his agency have been removed by YouTube. Sometimes the content is restored, sometimes not. He’s tried over and over again, he said, to get in touch with someone at YouTube using the “help” button on his personal account. “I receive no reply,” he told The Intercept. “Please separate between people like us, working in a conflict zone, putting our lives in danger, and someone who’s posting violent images from a normal place, or some extremist,” he said.
The Idlib Media Center was only able to restore some of its videos after it appealed to the Syrian Archive. And Ro Nay San Lwin, a Rohingya activist whose account was shut down and later restored by Facebook in September, says he was able to get in touch with someone at the company because a friend knew someone there. “It isn’t so easy to reach them,” he told The Intercept
This all makes Alexa Koenig, the human rights expert at UC Berkeley, nervous: “We have huge equity concerns: What stories are we losing? Whose voices are we not hearing? Who’s in a dire situation who we don’t know about?”
Abdulsalam, the Syrian photographer, is now in Turkey and quite sympathetic to the dilemma a company like YouTube faces. He’s also thankful to the platform and credits it with helping “spread the voice” of Syrians under duress. “I also understand why they don’t want bloody content,” he said in a recent phone call. “All I’d ask is that they deal with this issue with more integrity.”
Abdulsattar Abogoda and Rajaai Bourhan contributed to this report.
Avi Asher-Shapiro, you’re probably not bothered with the truth that is slowly emerging from Syria, as more and more of the anti-Assad fiction is headed down the toilet. But then looking at your name, my guess is; you’re probably a Zionist; only interested in spreading bullshit anyway.
Crude, but reasonably true supposition. Sadly, a Jewish name is now a legitimate element of critical thinking in international reporting these days.
It’s articles like this that keep me from fully supporting Intercept due to obvious pandering and positioning in anything related to Israel.
I’m a Sanders/Stein voter and contributor.
agreed, that name seems israeli, and I’ve heard enough about the atrocities of the battle for East Aleppo. Was the president of syria supposed to let foreign backed al-qaeda head choppers and mercenaries retain control of the second biggest city in the country?
I wondered why i came less and less in here to get news and then i read :
“That included a channel run by Bellingcat, a reputable U.K.-based organization devoted to analyzing images coming out of conflict zones including Syria, Ukraine, and Libya.”.
BellingCat is now a reputable organization ? I guess i’ll treat the Intercept as such too then.
I support the Assad gov’t in its repression of domestic agitators and foreign attackers. Good job!
Clearly biased article ignores that armies of foreign-sponsored terrorists have been committing war crimes in Syria since 2011. Foreign-sponsored by the US coalition of cutthroats. The US still gives money to the “White Helmets,” who are literally staffed with dozens of Jihadists and work with them to produce propaganda, much of it faked.
https://politicalfilm.wordpress.com/?s=white+helmets
What’s disappeared is evidence linking these terrorists to their benefactors, and ultimately to the US CIA. That’s why there is a war in Syria. That is the war crime, a crime of aggression and international terrorism by the Saudis, Turks, Qataris and NATO countries.
Here’s an important video showing a “Free Syrian Army” colonel admitting to working with Al Qaeda and ISIS, admitting that they all work together, which should be obvious, but not to US corporate media.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piN_MNSis1E&feature=youtu.be
THOSE are the war crimes Youtube has been covering up.
But looky there, someone reposted it!
https://youtu.be/yGaSghFK0nI
Why doesn’t the Intercept cover that? FSA Colonel with ties to US ambassador admits he works with ISIL. Never did get covered in the news here, but demonizing Russia for bombing them is approved.
Facebook, a proponent of free speech? Was that ever more than advertising?
Youtube has also demonetized any content that discusses such issues…..except of course, that by large entities such CNN,CBS, etc. There is more at workthere than just clumsy AI.
A rather hysterical article that wants you to believe Google and Facebook have the power to deny evidence like photographs being saved. If you have access to the internet to load pictures on Facebook, also email the photographs to yourself, and also upload them to Google Drive.
At least with You Tube you get Lucid Dreamer. Facebook, you get law enforcement.
Why the big attraction to join Facebook? Free!, How about Skype? Acres better?
Zuckerberg what now sitting at 71 big ones off a free social network site. Zberg censors Nick Ut Cong Huynh’s Pulitzer Prize winning 1972 iconic photo of a young Vietnamese girl running naked after ripping off her burning clothes from a napalm bomb attack. Facebook claimed Nick Ut’s photo violated Facebook’s censorship rules. Lesson, dump Facebook in a ditch, and live your dreams!
Forgive me if this is a naive question, but can video files be uploaded to something like Onedrive, Google Drive, or iCloud (or some equivalent overseas), and THEN given to these social media outlets? At least that would get them off the phone and protect them somewhere. And if YouTube deletes them, you would still have a copy.
Posts deleted?
Highly unlikely anything gets deleted by these collect-it-all ideologues. The common practice is to tag posts with ‘do not show to the public’. This is not deletion.
The question is whether their political bias and in-house war-psychologists (or their equivalent) allow the release of certain evidence.
Racist, “alt-right” people are demonstrably and preponderantly violent in concrete terms, thus exceeding free speech protections.
Germane to the topic..
Why is every Don Henley music vid except “Dirty Laundry “ available on YouTube?
Is it because of the demeaning words used to characterize msm news prehaps?
The idea that photos or videos of war are too graphic to be viewed is an excuse to sanitise the reality. Sanitising the reality allows pro-war cheerleaders to casually suggest bombing here and there without seeing the results of those bombs. We Americans should have the collective integrity to insist on publication of war photos and videos.
I just sent the following email to Human Rights watch. I’m sure you readers will find all my numerous lapsus mentis, but what the hell!
Hello,
The”Nature of [my] Inquiry” is not listed above, so I chose one at random.
What I want to talk about is something that could possibly guarantee the maintenance of evidentiary images and films. Rather than entrusting these documents to social media that have destroyed evidence in the past, either intentionally or not, I suggest that HRW,either alone or in concert, create an evidentiary medium specifically dedicated to the receipt and guaranteed maintenance of image or film evidence of human rights abuses. In other words, a journalist or witness would record evidence and save it NOT to unreliable social media where it can be destroyed maliciously or not, BUT RATHER to Human Rights Witness. Witness would be open to all on the front end but viewing and editing access would be granted only those with legitimate need. Saving of material would be universally accessible, but playback strictly controlled. True, this would be a huge undertaking, but funding could be found, I’m sure. Human Rights Witness would become an incredibly valuable resource in the 21st century struggle against the abuse of human rights.
Sincerely,
JD
@Dez and racist Karl
Wingnuts are grossly dishonest. You, Dez, truncated my sentence to change its meaning, and my full sentence included: “of the so-called “alt-right” is because it is a grossly violent movement, and thus the issue is not speech.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/white-hate-group-campaign-of-menace-rise-above-movement>See the link I included.
That’s not a speech issue; it’s murder and assault by white supremacists, like overt racist Karl whose views are supportive of Nazis.
What happened to the old, if it bothers (or offends) you, stop looking (or change the channel)? The age of PC speech, language, & dialogue will be the death of us.
Pornography is still in the eyes of the beholder, isn’t it?
So should be the horrors of war & war crimes.
Let it stand.
The most frightening thing that I listened to was the Senate Intel Committee hearing on Russian propaganda earlier this week.
Both parties were in agreement on the need to eliminate Russian prop.
Even the civil libertarians, and I’ll paraphrase, “As much as I’m for free enterprise and free speech…”
I didn’t hear any defense, as in that woman Rosenfeld (whatever) who is sowing xenophobia in Germany. Or the US prop in – pick a country, any country…
As far as I remember, (and please prove me wrong), the Brits can’t go after Mercer and Cambridge Analytics, because there are no laws against the online manipulation they (in addition to the cooperation of several parties not supposed to be able to cooperate) did during Brexit.
The platforms all said they were hiring humans, etc. There was a lot of warmth, ass-kissing, and appeasement on the part of Silicon Valley and the entire hearing was totally depressing. The humans will turn into robots, I am sure.
It’s too early in the genesis of social media to cut off its legs.
How can we help?
Does your local tv station or paper advertise with pictures of gruesome murders to recruit for the mob? Or child abuse?
The same, sane, simple standard needs to apply to Google, FB et al.
It’s time to abolish section 230 of the communications decency act and hold purveyors of monetized internet content accountable. Free speech is not protected when immenent illicit endangerment and violence ensues.
So, shouldn’t YouTube and Facebook also remove videos posted by anti-abortion groups, used to recruit supporters?
You mean pictures of babies in the womb that have been butchered because they are commodities in the Weinstein/Hefner/Madison Avenue/reproductive health big Pharma/abortion industrial complex? According to current jurisprudence based in part on the definition of slaves as partial persons, babies in the womb are currently not considered as persons under US law (where as corporations are persons, go figure). But I agree that this butchery is as bad as any butchery promoted by FB and Google to recruit gullible youth to serve as disposable ordinance in necon regime change wars on the cheap. Baby killing and youth brainwashing to kill themselves in service of the GCC/neocons are two sides of a same coin of human abuse, an extreme form of slavery. So yes, there is a link between both: human lives as disposable commodities in service of elite agendas.
To answer your questions more directly, the answer is that pictures of slaughtered babies have not been effective at changing people’s minds. On the contrary people are desensitized, the same way FB and Google try to glamorize and profit from beheadings.
Nonsense — complete nonsense. Seeing the naked truth changes people’s minds and hardens their hearts when they need to be hardened. If people like you had prevailed, we wouldn’t be watching ISIS crumble — we’d be watching the American ambassador sit down with them for talks! And if people had had access to the raw videos of terrorist brutality back in the days of the Contras, Reagan and Bush and North might all still be sitting in jail.
How is Jihadists beheading propaganda naked truth?
Same thing with pictures of injured children from Syria? You remember Omar, the little poster boy? Well now his dad says he was coerced. Also at the time the picture was taken the “white helmets” were toasted as heroes by CNN, Clooney. Yet not one, not one child was allowed by the Jihadists controlled Aleppo to be evacuated by the UN. So sure, put your pjs and collect all the videos you want.
BTW I tried repeatedly to post data on how Saudi closed their borders to Syrian refugees, data that was repeatedly censored by Intercept.
The writer is more correct than he realizes. It seems all of the videos that would have debunked the narrative around these bakery attacks are no longer available.
The video in the linked HRW document shows almost all men, basically no women. Were these “civilians” actually FSA militants?
4th time posting. For a “free speech” loving site, the intercept sure likes censorship.
Why is the intercept still pushing the thoroughly debunked “spontaneous peaceful uprising” narrative?
1-people were trained in the US at least since 2006 by, for example, the Boston based Albert Einstein Institute according to a documentary transcript. The featured activist then worked for a western government funded media front (Barada TV).
2-Albert Einstein Institute and its retired military advisor are closely liked with Otpor. Otpor was very involved in Syria. The leader of Otpor worked for Stratford, a leading intel group, as revealed by a hacker that is serving a 10 years jail sentence (did not see him mentioned by Intercept).
3-Google was directly also involved in coordinating regime change in Syria. US government’s Jared Cohen transferred to Google and their helped develop tools to coordinate the uprising. Not to mention that Google carried and still caries recruiting videos for violent Jihadists, including ISIS, to recruit naive youth to become human ordinance at the service of the GCC and neocon Blob planned regime change.
4-Qatar funded Muslim Brotherhood to high jacked the opposition from start according to Hasan.
references
http://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/How-to-Start-a-Revolution-Transcript.pdf
https://www.foreignpolicy.com/2013/03/13/how-the-muslim-brotherhood-hijacked-syrias-revolution/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-secretly-backed-syrian-opposition-groups-cables-released-by-wikileaks-show/2011/04/14/AF1p9hwD_story.html?utm_term=.5ff1b425cbb8
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/google-syria-rebels-defection-hillary-clinton-emails-wikileaks-a6946121.html%3famp
Repeating Syrian War propaganda is basically TI’s editorial line, with perhaps some deviation here and there, heavily vitiated though by the overall acceptance of the MSM narrative.
Why is the intercept still pushing the thoroughly debunked “spontaneous peaceful uprising” narrative? Why are posts with data refuting this narrative repeatedly censored?
1-people were trained in the US at least since 2006 by for example the Boston based Albert Einstein Institute according to a documentary transcript. That particular activist in the documentary then worked for a western government funded media front (Barada TV).
2-Albert Einstein Institute and its retired military advisor are closely liked with Otpor. Otpor was very involved in Syria. The leader of Otpor worked for Stratford, a leading intel group, as revealed by a hacker that is serving a 10 years jail sentence (did not see him mentioned by Intercept).
3-Google was directly also involved in coordinating regime change in Syria. US government Jared Cohen who transferred to Google helped develop a tools to coordinate the uprising. Not to mention that it carried and still caries recruiting videos for violent Jihadists, including ISIS.
4-Qatar funded Muslim Brotherhood high jacked the opposition from start.
references
http://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/How-to-Start-a-Revolution-Transcript.pdf
https://www.foreignpolicy.com/2013/03/13/how-the-muslim-brotherhood-hijacked-syrias-revolution/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-secretly-backed-syrian-opposition-groups-cables-released-by-wikileaks-show/2011/04/14/AF1p9hwD_story.html?utm_term=.5ff1b425cbb8
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/google-syria-rebels-defection-hillary-clinton-emails-wikileaks-a6946121.html%3famp
This post was censored several times.
Why is the intercept still pushing the thoroughly debunked “spontaneous peaceful uprising” narrative?
1-people were trained in the US at least since 2006 by for example the Boston based Albert Einstein Institute according to a documentary transcript. That particular activist in the documentary then worked for a western government funded media front (Barada TV).
2-Albert Einstein Institute and its retired military advisor are closely liked with Otpor. Otpor was very involved in Syria. The leader of Otpor worked for Stratford, a leading intel group, as revealed by a hacker that is serving a 10 years jail sentence (did not see him mentioned by Intercept).
3-Google was directly also involved in coordinating regime change in Syria. US government Jared Cohen who transferred to Google helped develop a tools to coordinate the uprising. Not to mention that it carried and still caries recruiting videos for violent Jihadists, including ISIS.
4-Qatar funded Muslim Brotherhood high jacked the opposition from start.
Some references and selected passages
http://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/How-to-Start-a-Revolution-Transcript.pdf
GENE SHARP: The US Department of Defense and other countries sometimes sent special people to Harvard University for a year of doing something different. I had a program within the Center for International Affairs on the nonviolent sanctions, on nonviolent forms of serving.
….
COLONEL BOB HELVEY: I went to Budapest at the request of the International Republican Institute, which was providing support to the Serbian Opposition Movement, and one particular part of that opposition movement was OTPOR. That’s a Serbian word for resistance.
…
SRDJA POPOVIC: He’s a retired colonel and he has this type of military approach, and the way he speaks is really something that creates a strange impression with a bunch of student leaders
SRDJA POPOVIC: When Bob Helvey gave us the Gene Sharp’s politics of nonviolent action, we were quite amazed. Partly, I was ashamed that I didn’t know about such a book before, even if there was a translation of From Dictatorship to Democracy in Serbian, but I never seen it, and seeing the knowledge of how power operates, and pillars of the support operates, and all this stuff we needed to learn the hard way throughout our experience, written systematically on one place was quite an amazing thing, and from that moment I knew I will read it even if it was quite a fat book, but I didn’t know how much it can influence the way we think and also I didn’t know how useful it will be in developing our own future trainings. It’s obvious that we are a majority. If we can just recognize all of those who are against Milosevic by saluting each other with a fist, he would probably be over within a few years.
…
COLONEL BOB HELVEY: These pillars are holding up the government like my fingers are holding up this book, and I developed a strategy to undermine each of those pillars: the police, the Sanghar, the religious institutions, the workers, whatever; every organization. And as they weaken and start to collapse, the government will collapse when those pillars are broken. Ideally, we want those pillars not destroyed, but transferred over to the democratic movement.
….
COLONEL BOB HELVEY: I was not a member of the CIA. Never have been, never will be, and if you don’t believe me, go fuck yourself.
JAMILA RAQIB: We are absolutely not a CIA front organization, and it’s really ironic because we see this charge in the press and among various groups quite often, and we always wonder, where is this coming from?
…
AUSAMA MONAJED: The reporter there on the CNN, I was talking with her just liaising what’s took place, what was going to happen and what information we can provide and the videos you’ve seen, they’re on CNN. We have some people uploading these videos are now on CNN, on Al Jazeera here, or Arabic or Jazeer English, ABC, About France, 24, BBC, Sky. So we have someone uploading these videos on their website, and we already in contact with various media. Now they need confirmation of videos or fact verification or eyewitness accounts, we can provide that. Without the modern technology, you wouldn’t be able to make it, absolutely. I think Gene would have killed it in the bud. Gene Sharp’s tactics and theories are being practiced on the streets of Syria as we speak now. The dynamics that the regime is facing in Syria is what Gene Sharp spoke about, and what we’ve seen in the early weeks and that was what empowered people and made them believe more in nonviolent struggle – that this is going to work, and it is working. What we did is promote these tactics and explain them to people through the Facebook pages that we have and also the YouTube channels. This is how they’re applied, from putting flowers on the spots where fallen heroes fell, and frustrations from the campaign while you marched, from cleaning streets and making it, you know, nicer and better because we can do something even better than the regime can do in terms of services, so yeah. From Dictatorship To Democracy gives you the inspiration, the assurances that this could really be achieved and this can really happen.
…
INTERVIEWER: When were you last here?
AUSAMA MONAJED: I can’t remember exactly. Was it 2007 or 2006? Yeah, years ago, when it was only a few people thinking about nonviolent resistance scenario, and only quite a few believed this can really happen in a country like Syria. Ok. All set.
https://www.google.com/amp/foreignpolicy.com/2013/03/13/how-the-muslim-brotherhood-hijacked-syrias-revolution/amp/
It is unclear when the group began to receive U.S. funds, but cables show U.S. officials in 2007 raised the idea of helping to start an anti-Assad satellite channel.
…
Ausama Monajed, another Syrian exile in London, said he used to work as a producer for Barada TV and as media relations director for the Movement for Justice and Development but has not been “active” in either job for about a year. He said he now devotes all his energy to the Syrian revolutionary movement, distributing videos and protest updates to journalists.
He said he “could not confirm” any U.S. government support for the satellite channel, because he was not involved with its finances. “I didn’t receive a penny myself,” he said.
..
The April 2009 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Damascus states that the Democracy Council received $6.3 million from the State Department to run a Syria-related program called the “Civil Society Strengthening Initiative.” That program is described as “a discrete collaborative effort between the Democracy Council and local partners” to produce, among other things, “various broadcast concepts.” Other cables make clear that one of those concepts was Barada TV.
….
The April 2009 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Damascus states that the Democracy Council received $6.3 million from the State Department to run a Syria-related program called the “Civil Society Strengthening Initiative.” That program is described as “a discrete collaborative effort between the Democracy Council and local partners” to produce, among other things, “various broadcast concepts.” Other cables make clear that one of those concepts was Barada TV.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-secretly-backed-syrian-opposition-groups-cables-released-by-wikileaks-show/2011/04/14/AF1p9hwD_story.html?utm_term=.5ff1b425cbb8
But since the uprising erupted on March 15, 2011, the Brotherhood has moved adroitly to seize the reins of power of the opposition’s political and military factions.
https://www.foreignpolicy.com/2013/03/13/how-the-muslim-brotherhood-hijacked-syrias-revolution/amp/
Google and Syria
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/google-syria-rebels-defection-hillary-clinton-emails-wikileaks-a6946121.html%3famp
Whatsapp down this morning……another intelligence operation that went wrong ?
The private censorship business is certainly branching out — see https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/1/16596256/uber-bans-right-wing-activist-laura-loomer-anti-islamic-tweets for a new system by which the companies that want to drive the cabbies out of business are coordinating bans on people they don’t like. Cross-reference China’s plot for “social credit” and denying freedom of travel to people expressing political beliefs out of step with the Party.
Describing Bellingcat as a “reputable” organization is truly a new low for The Intercept.
You want truth in media? Stop giving a voice to the lying NGO hacks like the ones in this article. These people and their friends in the intelligence community have been using social media to launder interventionist propaganda for as long as people have been using the platform. For them to start bitching about censorship on Facebook is absurdly dishonest and hypocritical.
Social media is responsible for launching the careers of every future-Benderite warmongering neocon masquerading as a liberal humanitarian that you can name. They aren’t being censored. And even if they were, no one would even be in a position to care what does or does not get posted to Facebook if today’s journalists weren’t a pack of careerist sockpuppets who happily regurgitate corporate propaganda because they’re too chickenshit and too lazy to do their own investigation and reporting.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that YouTube, FB are removing content only now that ISIS is being wiped out. They are basically covering up their tracks of their collusion with Jihadists, for whom they served as principal recruiters of naive youth to become human ordinance at the service of GCC oligarchs and their US neocon partners, for regime chande on the cheap.
It’s disgusting that there is still jihadists recruiting material out there.
For the slacker activist that want to “collect evidence” in their pjs looking at YouTube: get your own server or go to Syria and collect these clips. They are out there.
Idlib Media Center: let me guess, it has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with Al Nusra funders.
gee wiz. Is not the destruction of evidence a crime a crime? Ever since Horilly decided to have emails erased with the co-operation of the non-investigators, and since the thieves of wallstreet in co-operation with their implementors of the theft of the economy, and since the theft of $20 billion in iraq, it is now established common law that robbing and murdering the public is perfectly legal.
Google is deep state propaganda. BaceFook is where you tell wallstreet thieves and the nsa and cia anything and everything so you can be targeted for their next operation to rob you or the country or everyone like you. IT’S WHAT THIEVES DO.
While you are at it, give them a map of your house, a copy of your bank statement (oops, the thieves already got that), and what your future plans are to borrow money for higher prices so they can rob you either way.
And when you march in protest of anything at all, make syre you wear your “I LOVE FUCKING ISRAEL” so that the police, prosecutor and judge can relay that to the elected whore in congress where they can fight about LOVE vs FUCKING.
Something that google as an NSA affiliated company is helping USG do is “automatic, predictive and contextualized virtual jailing”:
USG is testing and training Direct Energy Weapons (DEWs) on unsuspecting civilians prior to “deploying” them. You notice you are being irradiated to the point of burning your skin and are being hit with electromagnetic beams which make your limps jolt. You can at least tell this is being done through the walls of your place and you are absolutely sure it is not psychological because you have put a metal sheet and even your hand in the way (some people have momentarily put their pets) and you notice that it happens on the metal sheet, your hand (or your pet reacts to it).
Since most people don’t know sh!t about Physics, they ask you how they (the government, “intelligence” agencies, police) are doing that and you know it is them, because other things are happening to you which relate to those actions (like they target your left knee and then they make a lot of perps walk and act around you like their left knee hurts in ways that it can’t be random and in addition to that they repeat those skits consistently (they do that to make you talk about it, so they have their clinical feedback)). You ask a Physicist who sends to you a link to those kinds of EM weapons being sold commercially and what your receive is an amazon page with sex toys.
This is what happens:
a) persons being targeted are -mapped- (absolutely all their communications and whereabouts are being monitored)
b) they usually target people who don’t have a clear idea as to how they may be doing such things
c) they notice §a contact someone who does know (an electrical engineer, a Physicist (how do they know?: they keep a bio-psychological, behavioral profile of every individual in society))
d) based on AI they obstruct all information going §a’s way that would inform her/him;
… or, you may be reading some article at theIntercept and since they have a data representation of your ideas (based on the kinds of topics you talk about and how you talk about such topics, for example in my case they know that I like to document what I am saying) they are predictively obstructing your searches in relation to what you are thinking about to write. I know. They do it to me and many other people I know. The way I have found to deal with this beating a bit around the bushes, putting your poetic sense to good use;
… or, your are looking for a job they don’t want for you to get and their calls to you are being all mysteriously dropped
You may be thinking right now: “that niggah is crazy” and all I will tell you is: “mark my word”, what they do to me and people I know is just a pilot project. Soon we will be all living like that.
RCL
// __ mikematloff: Attacked with DEW weapon at Restaurant on July 13, 2011
youtube.com/watch?v=1HDmnRYAtmQ
~
// __ mikematloff: Attacked by Directed-Energy Weapons (DEW)
youtube.com/watch?v=z_g9KgIukC4
~
// __ cherishsweetmemories: Effects from Remotely Applied Directed Energy and Neurological Weapons
youtube.com/watch?v=f4938NC9dOM
~
// __ James Lico: Infamous Targeted Individuals
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP35mWpgvyB4HRvpBnwflpsWzEwoK9q9x
~
RCL
Zuckerberg….still so young and already so corrupted…..
These are evil, greedy, corporations, but there’s more to it to that — the dismaler science, by which I mean the dishonest sell-out peeping-scumbag practice of “computer science”, has built these outlets from the bottom up for control! A video should be a file, something that you post and a thousand people who care make copies of, so there’s no use in censoring it. But that isn’t what the liars and cheats who design computer sites now want!
No, instead they pitched a relentless campaign of “streaming”, a word that always, accurately, makes me think of them pulling out their smelly old prick and pouring a gout of stinking sticky piss all over the heads of the pathetic wretches who so eagerly suck down their only source of water. And so they have ordinary witnesses, who want only to make the world know what happened, “streaming” out their content, so that only the censors-in-charge control it. (Oh, sure, there are YouTube rippers, but apparently they are ever more outmatched and disreputable)
Watchable video isn’t getting any bigger. There’s no reason why any witness should be posting to a streaming site. A non-streaming site knows the content is mirrored elsewhere and therefore has much less to gain by strategic censorship. So we need to point people at decent non-streaming mechanisms for distribution. Give us options — don’t beg YouTube! Get people posting via decent mechanisms until YouTube becomes desperate to try to recapture the relevance it once pretended.
Why, why on earth are people uploading such valuable material only to youtube? There are thousands of ways to preserve this material which does not involve a giant US advertising corporation.
Google/YouTube becomes an overt instrument of the dark state..? One could see this coming a mile away! The New York Times ran an article entitled “For the New Far Right, YouTube Has Become the New Talk Radio” wherein one of its David Carr fellows speaks of “YouTube Creators for Change” and its “tougher treatment to videos that aren’t illegal but have been flagged by users as potential violations of our policies on hate speech and violent extremism.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/magazine/for-the-new-far-right-youtube-has-become-the-new-talk-radio.html
Such measures are far-too-often treated with a certain level of complicit silence from the “free-speech” left when it is the”obdurate” reactionaries of the “alt-right” that are either being demonetized or banned all together by social media outlets. Being white, religious, and conservative has now become a red flag for the duly appointed vanguard of free speech especially when such “extremist”elements band together to oppose the hope-and-change message of the Corporate State. In fact, the Intercept has religiously toed-the-line in parroting the dark-state’s vilification of the alt-right with a shared hope of its political marginalization… and now its own chickens are coming home to roost.
“In fact, the Intercept has religiously toed-the-line in parroting the dark-state’s vilification of the alt-right with a shared hope of its political marginalization… and now its own chickens are coming home to roost.”
er, the alt-right marginalized by its character and nature. efforts to further marginalize them is entirely appropriate. that’s not at all the same as curbing free speech. that IS free speech.
Karl, as per usual for his racist self, is posting nonsense. The reason many of us militant free speech advocates have greatly ceased defending speech rights of the so-called “alt-right” is becasue it is a grossly violent movement, and thus the issue is not speech.
Aside from what the tiki-torch Nazis revealed in Charlottesville (they beat the crap out of a black man and killed a woman), see this Pro Publica piece: Racist, Violent, Unpunished: A White Hate Group’s Campaign of Menace — They train to fight, They post their beatings online. And so far, they have little reason to fear the authorities.
Karl is unhappy about, as he puts it, “vilification of the alt-right… its political marginalization.” Imagine that, upset about “vilifying” violent Nazis, Klansmen and assorted white supremacists who are so often violent. Boo-fucking-hoo; poor racist Karl. [sniffle]
Sorry, Mona. You don’t get to call yourself a “militant free speech advocate” if you “have greatly ceased defending speech rights.” Sorry, but don’t kid yourself for a moment. You’re another member of the PC Authoritarians.
Spot on!!!
It is once again time to watch Mona squirm, squeal, and equivocate:
https://theintercept.com/2017/08/13/the-misguided-attacks-on-aclu-for-defending-neo-nazis-free-speech-rights-in-charlottesville/
OBTW Mona, the “alt-right” is defined as “an ideological grouping associated with reactionary viewpoints, characterized by a rejection of mainstream politics and by the use of online media to disseminate deliberately controversial content.” Paul Gottfried – the man who coined the term paleoconsevatism – was the first person who made specific reference to the “alternative right” in a speech entitled “The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right” ”
As a preface to defining those who comprise the alternative right as post-paleo consevatives, Gottfried gives a brief history of paleoconservatism itself which he defines as “a diffuse reaction to the neoconservative ascendancy.” Citing the divisions that prevented the philosophical unification of paleoconservatism, he defines the post-paleos as the “true right” as they are “an oppositional force that tries to uncover the root causes of our political and cultural crises and then to address them.”
Just as William F Buckley was tasked by his CIA handlers to separate out and marginalize the most extreme elements of the conservative right in his day, various conservative movements have since been like targeted with an eye to bringing conservatism into alignment with it liberal counterpart. It is for this reason that the intellectual right has to keep reinventing itself in a manner that is described as “reactionary.” Even the association between Gottfried and Richard Spencer is described by Gottfried as “reluctant” as Spencer’s white nationalist leanings are a course bastardization of Gottfried’s far more nuanced belief that “there are inherent, irreducible differences not only between individuals but between groups of people – races, genders, religions, nations.” It is the fundamental understanding that there are inherent differences between individuals – and the groups that they comprise – that defines the common ground from which a myriad of otherwise disparate conservative groups can be collectively characterized as alt-right.
Karl is a virulent racist, the sort of racist I, Glenn and the ACLU have defended in court vis-a-vis their right to speak without government sanction. Karl and his racist ilk have that speech right.
What foul people like Karl do not have, is the “right” to beat and kill. Charlottesville altered the ACLU’s view of the “alt-right’s” claim to speech rights, as it did mine. Those like Karl beat and kill at “rallies” and “protests”, and did so recently — they plan to maim and kill some more; thus their speech rights are eclipsed and trumped by violent means and intent at supposed “speech” events.
Note to all:
This is an all-too-typical example of the way in which Mona uses logical fallacy to avoid speaking directly to arguments for which she has no answer:
1. Create a straw man to shift away from the topic being addressed
2. Preemptively attack ones opposition with ad hominem with the hope of hiding ones own weakness and/or eliciting a non-substantive response.
3. Conflate the actions of a minuscule subset of individuals with those of the superset to which they are loosely associated (aka guilt by association; Remember, the article to which I referred does not make reference to a single individual who has even been indicted for inciting violence let alone participating in it; hence the need for a straw man (see #1)
4. Appeal to Extremes – provide a worst case scenario in a manner that suggests no middle ground exists. For example: A small number of violent incidents have been attributed to white supremacists who, in turn, claim to more broadly identify with the aims of the alt-Right. Therefore the alt-right itself is appropriately characterized as violent racists.
5. False attribution – Attributing positions to me for which there is no evidence
When one eliminates Mona’s use of logical fallacy, it becomes abundantly clear that she has nothing of value to contribute in the way of reasoned argument – different day same old bullshit. Pathetic!
Again, the answer to a racist like Karl’s claims about free speech is here. Assault and murder — which he does not and cannot address or redress — are not speech meriting 1st Amendment protection.
Please read the piece.
“Being white, religious, and conservative has now become a red flag…” No, aligning oneself with racists and the corn-pone Nazis is a red flag.
You are not very bright, are you Hugh? By your own metric, the entire political left is as equally culpable for the atrocities committed by those on the extreme left.
That’s the problem with social media being owned by companies whose bottom line is profit. What we need are open-source, publicly-funded or charitably-funded alternatives. The power of the internet is its distributed nature. The curse of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are their centralized control over online interactions. They control the platform, not the users. In fact, the users are the product. Like Bitcoin, social media needs to distribute its ledgers (perhaps blockchain based social transactions?). Socialization belongs in the commons, not under the control of FANG-toothed Big Brother and its corporate hierarchies.
I must insist on pointing out what I believe to be gross inaccuracies in the commentary on Syria in this article. First, the characterization of that conflict as a civil war is highly debatable as many would consider it more akin to a foreign invasion than any sort of civil war. Second, the “protests” in the early days of the insurgency often consisted of armed militants burning down government buildings and quickly morphed in to acts of terrorism carried out by groups funded by Arab Gulf states and the US intelligence apparatus. Relating for example to the so-called “Siege of Daraa,” contemporary accounts seem to suggest that this was a violent riot, particularly by American standards (can you imagine if DAPA protesters had burned down the Sheriff’s office?). Western sources often imply that this event was a peaceful protest that was violently suppressed, but that is not the case. It was violent from the very beginning.
https://gowans.wordpress.com/2016/10/22/the-revolutionary-distemper-in-syria-that-wasnt/
There are legitimate concerns about how Assad has conducted the war. From what I’ve read there may be a case that he or one of his generals is deliberately targeting medical personnel, which is of course a war crime and should be prosecuted in international courts. However, the possible veracity of that allegation does not excuse confusing violent riots and acts of terrorism with “[presumably peaceful] protests.”
If anyone disagrees with these statements and can provide a serious rebuttal of Gowan’s reporting, I’d love to read it. But, I haven’t seen such a rebuttal, yet.
Sounds like you know what you are talking about….Nice to see(and if their is a rebuttal, would like to see this too) Thanks!
Thanks for this balanced and reasonable approach. At war all share responsibility for crimes against humanity.
Here is harsh but balanced account of a background of what happened in Syria [an excerpt] .
In years leading to the events of 2011, the US created a small civilian [ex-political] and armed opposition within Syria that was not there before. All those who opposed the Assad regime were exiled surviving on \Western payroll, cut off from the Syrian society, imprisoned or killed or were economically enticed to support the regime.
As a matter of fact small groups financed by the CIA/GCC protesting in 2011 in the city of Dara and Homs drew thousands, and in all Syria, tens of thousands of ordinary people demanding moderate democratic changes, long overdue, angry on Bashar al-Assad but not because of lack of democracy [which was true] but for his neo-liberal reorientation, dramatically departing from his socialist/arab nationalist father Hafez legacy that brought pride and prosperity to ordinary Syrian people.
The anger of a significant part of the population against Bashar al-Assad was somewhat instigated by the western propaganda but in most part was inspired by his tolerance of rampant corruption and enrichment of his Alawites minority cronies and the wider Syrian elites to detriment of the ordinary people.
The more democracy they demanded was meant as just a political tool of reversing Assad’s infatuation with the western neo-liberal economic policies that collapsed Syrian high standard of living.
Despite continuous provocation by the US stooges in Syria including killing of protesters in Dara, it was Assad duty and responsibility to heed the calling of his own people underneath all that mess and to constitute true economic reforms, kicking out the foreign interests and stand on the side of people against the global capital.
But he did not. [Instead his wife was just about at that time to commence study at LSE to become an investment banker further facilitating the global corporate theft of Syrian national treasure].
He instead he chose pasture of state integrity and put himself as indispensable, a symbol of the Syrian unity, playing nationalistic card i.e. he seemed to focus on saving his own skin first. The over two hundred [fifty] thousands dead and injured, two millions externally displaced Syrians [many millions more internally displaced] is his responsibility as well but in much smaller part than the murderous US/Israeli imperialism and its jihadi’ GCC puppets like Saudis.
Bashar al-Assad an ophthalmologist failed as a leader of his nation in this respect, as his father Hafez predicted when he decided on the power succession to his brother Bassel, military engineer, who unfortunately died in 1994.
Having said that Bashar al-Assad did right thing not to resign and instead seeking a mandate from the Syrian people [won twice since 2011], since his resignation would mean the end of Syrian nation as we know it, threatening to unravel the post WWI colonial order in MENA set by the British purposefully to make Arab states weak, conflicted and dependent on the western interests after the collapse of Ottoman empire in 1918.
He also seem to have learned the lesson of what means the true, based on authentic mutual interest and shared values, friendship with Russians, forged many decades ago between the partners in the war against western colonialism and aggression. But now Russia is different and they see in Syria solely their own strategic, economic and military interests, which would explain their overall restrain and attempt on finding consensus with the west where there could be none.
It is thanks to his long gone father and the support from Russia and Iran that badly wounded and suffering Syria still exists under Assad rule. But for how long?
Now, against all odds, this is Bashar al-Assad duty to rebuild the nation, as only viable today Syrian national figure potentially capable of accomplishing it since no other internal or external party in this conflict has any mandate or interest of doing so. Even if it means his resignation after peace is achieved since there will be no wining. All the Syrians are already at loss. Is he up to the task? Nobody knows.
The question is why all this mess? What was the point of all these massive deaths and suffering brought by the Arab Spring?
Why after attacking Tunisia, Algeria (failed), Libya, Egypt and Yemen (and previously Iraq and Afghanistan but not Jordan, Morocco, Bahrain [it is shia copycat rebellion there] or Saudi Arabia) the West attacked Syria. The answer is clear if we examine what those “horrible”, deposed regimes in the Arab world had in common except for governing of countries with highest standard of living in Africa and in the Middle East.
What they had in common was a special, decades old, ideological, economic and military partnership with the Soviet block countries that supported Arab struggle of de-colonization and independence in 1950-ties and sixties. Most of those killed or deposed leaders or their political predecessors were educated in Moscow many decades ago about the methods of anti-colonial struggle as a type of class struggle against the world oligarchic dominance.
And there were those economic, ideological and historical connections with the Russians that West went after by instigating the Arab Spring in 2011 with all the deadly consequences of destruction and chaos.
It is all about destruction of the social-democratic systems (civil society) and replacing them with the brutal neo-liberal corporatism as decades ago happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is about continuing, after the Eastern Europe in 1990 and the Western Europe in 2000s, eradication of the remnants of Soviet influenced social-democratic economic and political systems that worked so well for ordinary people all over the world and replacing them with the brutal unfettered global corporatism.
What the west called brutal regimes of the Middle East and Africa were autocratic, socially focused political systems which somewhat exaggerated political brutality was an imperfect remedy for the injustice of the colonial arbitrary territorial divisions imposed deliberately by the west and the western colonial policies of stirring the antagonisms among native people of the land.
The political violence of the regimes was a direct consequence of their choice to remain in the colonial boundaries in somewhat perverted bid to keep unity of their “abstract” nations and peace in the region and of course to preserve their own power.
I wasn’t in Syria to rebut any of that but the piece goes on about evidence of atrocities from many places being disposed of; right? I think whoever dropped the barrel-bomb on the bakery might also be guilty like the people who may have targeted medical personel. If some Gulf Country’s invasion involved helicopters loaded down with crappy munitions? Perhaps they’re guilty of all those atrocities? The part about the piece that troubles me is that these tribunals and NGO’s spend considerable amounts of resources, and I believe in the mission. But it seems like relying on feel-good, social platforms to catalogue the work of the do-good industry might not be the best recipe? The part about the article that I found most compelling had nothing to do with Syria. It was the lack of any public statement by as I call em, hatebook. They have other questions to answer to today. Sorry this line of questioning will have to wait. No I can’t give my name. Is it just me, or should they have had some type of statement? About blocking content for periods of time that through the years seemed pretty arbitrary. Maybe it was somebody on my friend-list? But back when Chelsea was known as Bradley, posting their name after the word Free got me repeatedly blocked from posting original content. I realize that’s almost 7 years ago. Hence my notion that they should have a person if not a dept. of people to answer questions related to blocked content. The idea that any of this footage is actually lost is hard for me to believe. The stasi-state or whoever clouded that shit in utah. But for real HRW crowd-fund your own drop cloud. Everybody isn’t trained and ingrained to deal with that kind of carnage and we’re probably all better off if everyone isn’t desensetized to war-crimes.
Excellent commentary. I tried to post before the below select stranscipts from a documentary that shows how a Syrian activist with ties with the Muslim Brotherhood was trained in the US by Boston based “Albert Einstein Institution” since at least 2006. This group has US military links and is linked to Otpor. A hacker (who is serving a 10 year jail sentence) reveiled links between the leader of Otpor and the private Intel group Stratford. Google was directly involved in providing geomaping to coordinate the revolte (under ex us gov then Google employee Jared Cohen).
A FP article by Hasan Hasan describes how the Qatar funded Muslim Brotherhood highjacked the opposition from start. The big question is why Glenn/Intecept keep pushing a misleading narrative? Is it a contract for $$ or a directive from their paymasters?
Some references and selected passages:
http://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/How-to-Start-a-Revolution-Transcript.pdf
GENE SHARP: The US Department of Defense and other countries sometimes sent special people to Harvard University for a year of doing something different. I had a program within the Center for International Affairs on the nonviolent sanctions, on nonviolent forms of serving.
….
COLONEL BOB HELVEY: I went to Budapest at the request of the International Republican Institute, which was providing support to the Serbian Opposition Movement, and one particular part of that opposition movement was OTPOR. That’s a Serbian word for resistance.
…
SRDJA POPOVIC: He’s a retired colonel and he has this type of military approach, and the way he speaks is really something that creates a strange impression with a bunch of student leaders
SRDJA POPOVIC: When Bob Helvey gave us the Gene Sharp’s politics of nonviolent action, we were quite amazed. Partly, I was ashamed that I didn’t know about such a book before, even if there was a translation of From Dictatorship to Democracy in Serbian, but I never seen it, and seeing the knowledge of how power operates, and pillars of the support operates, and all this stuff we needed to learn the hard way throughout our experience, written systematically on one place was quite an amazing thing, and from that moment I knew I will read it even if it was quite a fat book, but I didn’t know how much it can influence the way we think and also I didn’t know how useful it will be in developing our own future trainings. It’s obvious that we are a majority. If we can just recognize all of those who are against Milosevic by saluting each other with a fist, he would probably be over within a few years.
…
COLONEL BOB HELVEY: These pillars are holding up the government like my fingers are holding up this book, and I developed a strategy to undermine each of those pillars: the police, the Sanghar, the religious institutions, the workers, whatever; every organization. And as they weaken and start to collapse, the government will collapse when those pillars are broken. Ideally, we want those pillars not destroyed, but transferred over to the democratic movement.
….
COLONEL BOB HELVEY: I was not a member of the CIA. Never have been, never will be, and if you don’t believe me, go fuck yourself.
JAMILA RAQIB: We are absolutely not a CIA front organization, and it’s really ironic because we see this charge in the press and among various groups quite often, and we always wonder, where is this coming from?
…
AUSAMA MONAJED: The reporter there on the CNN, I was talking with her just liaising what’s took place, what was going to happen and what information we can provide and the videos you’ve seen, they’re on CNN. We have some people uploading these videos are now on CNN, on Al Jazeera here, or Arabic or Jazeer English, ABC, About France, 24, BBC, Sky. So we have someone uploading these videos on their website, and we already in contact with various media. Now they need confirmation of videos or fact verification or eyewitness accounts, we can provide that. Without the modern technology, you wouldn’t be able to make it, absolutely. I think Gene would have killed it in the bud. Gene Sharp’s tactics and theories are being practiced on the streets of Syria as we speak now. The dynamics that the regime is facing in Syria is what Gene Sharp spoke about, and what we’ve seen in the early weeks and that was what empowered people and made them believe more in nonviolent struggle – that this is going to work, and it is working. What we did is promote these tactics and explain them to people through the Facebook pages that we have and also the YouTube channels. This is how they’re applied, from putting flowers on the spots where fallen heroes fell, and frustrations from the campaign while you marched, from cleaning streets and making it, you know, nicer and better because we can do something even better than the regime can do in terms of services, so yeah. From Dictatorship To Democracy gives you the inspiration, the assurances that this could really be achieved and this can really happen.
…
INTERVIEWER: When were you last here?
AUSAMA MONAJED: I can’t remember exactly. Was it 2007 or 2006? Yeah, years ago, when it was only a few people thinking about nonviolent resistance scenario, and only quite a few believed this can really happen in a country like Syria. Ok. All set.
https://www.google.com/amp/foreignpolicy.com/2013/03/13/how-the-muslim-brotherhood-hijacked-syrias-revolution/amp/
It is unclear when the group began to receive U.S. funds, but cables show U.S. officials in 2007 raised the idea of helping to start an anti-Assad satellite channel.
…
Ausama Monajed, another Syrian exile in London, said he used to work as a producer for Barada TV and as media relations director for the Movement for Justice and Development but has not been “active” in either job for about a year. He said he now devotes all his energy to the Syrian revolutionary movement, distributing videos and protest updates to journalists.
He said he “could not confirm” any U.S. government support for the satellite channel, because he was not involved with its finances. “I didn’t receive a penny myself,” he said.
..
The April 2009 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Damascus states that the Democracy Council received $6.3 million from the State Department to run a Syria-related program called the “Civil Society Strengthening Initiative.” That program is described as “a discrete collaborative effort between the Democracy Council and local partners” to produce, among other things, “various broadcast concepts.” Other cables make clear that one of those concepts was Barada TV.
….
The April 2009 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Damascus states that the Democracy Council received $6.3 million from the State Department to run a Syria-related program called the “Civil Society Strengthening Initiative.” That program is described as “a discrete collaborative effort between the Democracy Council and local partners” to produce, among other things, “various broadcast concepts.” Other cables make clear that one of those concepts was Barada TV.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-secretly-backed-syrian-opposition-groups-cables-released-by-wikileaks-show/2011/04/14/AF1p9hwD_story.html?utm_term=.5ff1b425cbb8
But since the uprising erupted on March 15, 2011, the Brotherhood has moved adroitly to seize the reins of power of the opposition’s political and military factions.
https://www.foreignpolicy.com/2013/03/13/how-the-muslim-brotherhood-hijacked-syrias-revolution/amp/
I also want to thank you for the balanced comment.
Evidence of atrocities? Facebook assures me there’s no such thing as an atrocity.
When is the Intercept going to call a spade a spade.
Zuckerberg is a massive sell out! Always was, always will be. Including his pay it forward 100 million to Corey Booker where zero, nada, zilch went to Newark schools. Damn when libs an repubs shed their labels and go with the Truth will America become a cool place .
WHO are we pointing our fingers at?? WAR CRIMINALS?? World Leaders who have immunity as heads of state?? Bush Administration Convicted of War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity In a historic ruling handed down by the Kuala Lumpur (KL) War Crimes Tribunal in Malaysia last week, former-US President George W. Bush was found guilty of war crimes along with his associates, Richard Cheney, former U.S. Vice President, Donald Rumsfeld, former Defense Secretary, Alberto Gonzales, then Counsel to President Bush, David Addington, then General Counsel to the Vice-President, William Haynes II, then General Counsel to Secretary of Defense, Jay Bybee, then Assistant Attorney General, and John Choon Yoo, former Deputy Assistant Attorney-General. TRUTH.. IS.. NEVER.. POPULAR..
>< The Ninth Circuit has affirmed the immunity given to high-ranking Bush-era officials and has dismissed claims of aggression against George W. Bush and others for their alleged planning and commission of the crime of aggression against Iraq.
WORLD LEADER ?.?
TRUTH.. SHOULD.. PREVAIL ..AGAINST.. ANY ..SUCH.. "CRIMES" – and PROSECUTIONS
I think the social media companies need to be held accountable for their actions. Since they are considered people by the Supreme Court hold them accountable for War Crimes also.
If somebody redflags your You Tube content, thy can do it anonymously. You Tube says that you then have the right to appeal. But this is totally unafir:
How can I file an appeal on a cocntent complaint when I don’t know who the other person is? You Tube says they have no obligation to reveal the other person’s identity.
This appeal then goes to arbitration. Who picks the arbitrator?
Totally unfair. But Google (who owns You Tube) is literally so massive they can anything they want and get away with it. They know that maybe people will complain. But will millions of account holders delete them and leave? No they won’t.
There is nothing that newsworthy about any of it. We already knew that U.S. IT companies work hand in hand with the NSA. In fact, they are the ones who newly instilled NSA’s ethos, new cosmic purpose redefining it as: “sniff it all, collect it all, know it all, process it all, exploit it all, …”
What we have been waiting to hear is what have you done with all the information you have had from Snowden leaks to that FBI manual you got later detailing how USG is targeting people through walls with DEWs inside of their homes for experimentation purposes and driving even blind people to the point of committing suicide?
If you want to hear about something a bit more interesting you should try to get the facts straight from some guy who used to be a perp of a sec company using amazon as their shell to target the homeless population of Seattle for experimentation:
https://gangstalkerwars.com/2017/08/08/157-roy-street-connections/
Listen to what he believes to be facts, however be a little more careful with his interpretations.
The reason I think raising such issues is important is because they have such a detailed control of every individual member of society at large, that they don’t need to institutionalize people or use incarcerated folks to experiment with them, to them we are all lab rats nowadays.
RCL
Counter…..
During Odessa massacre in 2014 there were two cameras on adjacent buildings the for six hours documented the mass murder of ethnic Russian trade union members by Ukrainian Nazis and were posted on YT within 24 hours raw, disappeared after a year or so on orders of Ukrainian regime that suppose to investigate the crime. Many other documented atrocities of Kiev regime were removed from YT as were shocking cases of real ISIS terrorists demanding removal of their documented crime videos, not to mention ban of all clips depicting war crimes committed by US coalition in Mosul and elsewhere.
YT is evil and they suppress any investigation of truth that may be detrimental to their sponsors ever changing interests , showing extreme political expediency.
The infamous SOHR a CIA/MI6 outfit YT. Content was promoted under Obama while suppressed under Trump since they suddenly discovered war crimes committed by US while before they only saw Assad/Russian crimes.
Social media is the WRONG PLACE to store evidence. Instead, store the evidence someplace RELIABLE. Facebook was funded by a CIA asset, to which is is still beholden. That makes it pretty much the WORST POSSIBLE PLACE to store important evidence of wrongdoing. Anything important, especially if it puts the USA or its trading partners in a bad light, is apt to disappear. People need to figure that out and quit treating social media like it’s anything but a tool of their oppressors.