When is a volunteer not a volunteer?

There's another dose of White Helmets propaganda on view at the Globe and Mail today, courtesy of Mark MacKinnon.

Seems that a few of those brave White Helmet volunteers that Israel allowed transit to Jordan last year remain stuck in Jordan, instead of finding their way to a warm welcome in Canada. Apparently there are "security concerns," and our Foreign Minister sounds like she's trying to fob them off on some other Western country, one that doesn't vet their young Muslim immigrants of fighting age, coming from combat zones, as thoroughly as Canada does.

Call me skeptical, but the White Helmets saga has smelled mighty fishy from the get-go. The official story, that these are local volunteers saving their neighbours from the vile Assad's relentless attacks, sounds good on the face of it.

So why does that bit of local altruism require an ex-SAS guy from the British Army by the name of James Le Mesurier to organize it? And how can a "volunteer" group soak up well over $100 million in Western financing over four short years? That's well over $25,000 per "volunteer." To put that into context, $25k is about 20 years salary for a conscript in Assad's Syrian Arab Army.

Either these are the best paid volunteers in the Middle East, or James and his Mayday Rescue outfit are siphoning off one hell of a management fee.

MacKinnon recycles the stale tale of the White Helmets expose of Assad's use of chemical weapons:

Videos made by the White Helmets also provided the initial evidence-later substantiated by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons-that the regime had used chemical weapons against its opponents.

Mark is being disingenuous with that claim. Google "OPCW news" and see what comes up. The integrity of the OPCW has taken a huge hit in recent weeks, and Mark is surely aware of that fact. Why not mention it in his story?

Instead, he quotes Chystia Freeland blaming Russian smears.


Not sure exactly what it is you're doing, Mark, but it isn't journalism. Propaganda, perhaps?

Chrystia Freeland welcomed ISIS terrorists into Canada

When reports of the "missing" pages of the OPCW report on the Douma gas attack first began to circulate a couple of weeks ago, I didn't want to jump the gun and give them too much credence. After all, this story seemed largely confined to RT, Sputnik, and assorted non MSM sources. It increasingly seems that in this case, RT got the story right. The New York Times and the rest of the Western mainstream media got it wrong.

By now, a number of Western journalists I respect, including Robert Fisk, Jonathan Cook, and Peter Hitchens, have seemingly corroborated the RT version.

No hint yet from the Globe and Mail, the CBC, or any other Canadian media outlets that they acknowledge being conned by the White Helmets.

And it wasn't just our media outlets who were conned. Apparently our PM and our Foreign Minister were too...

Unless they were in on the scam from the beginning.


Foreign Minister Freeland gets honorary White Helmet

I'm looking forward to an explanation from our Foreign Minister.

True fakery, fake truthiness, fake news, true fake news, and fake news that might be true...

I see where the White Helmets are in the news again. Well, obliquely, anyway.

As regular readers will know, I'm more than a little skeptical of the official story. You know, those plucky volunteers who work exclusively in areas of Syria held by the "rebels," meaning ISIS/al Qaeda, and their affiliates.

Ya, I'm fully aware Assad is a bad dude and all that, but...

That plucky band of Syrian volunteers was originally organized by James Le Mesurier, a non-Syrian, non-Arab, non-Muslim white guy with deep connections to the UK military. And, for "volunteers," they've managed to hoover up an incredible amount of money from the same constellation of foreign state actors who have been behind the Syrian "civil war" from even before the get-go.

So here's the latest story.  Some version of it has been on virtually every "fake" news channel on the internet (although I believe it's absent from Glenn Greenwald's "The Intercept"). This of course is where things get dodgy. How do we know what's fake news on the internet? That original Propornot disinformation piece at the WaPo, advising us what was fake and what was not, turned out to be more fake than true itself.

Our official media, on the other hand, has not even acknowledged the existence of this story.

Anyway, this alleged report from the OPCW (the folks who are charged with investigating alleged chemical weapons attacks) was allegedly deep-sixed by the OPCW itself. If that is the case, and if that allegedly quashed report is indeed the real deal, then the entire "White Helmets are heroes" narrative goes down the shitter, as does the credibility of the OPCW itself.

That would be a huge story.

The allegedly quashed OPCW report was leaked to an outfit called the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, a bunch of mainly Brit academics who you'd think would know enough to put a comma after Propaganda. I'm not sure what their fakery rating might be, but they've done some yeoman work on the faker-than-fake Integrity Initiative (lots of initiative, a little light on integrity).

So, who/what to believe? Let me know if you figure it out.