The Siege of Syria: Perception management and US-funded unrest used to justify regime change

Tony Cartalucci, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

Bangkok, Thailand May 21, 2011 - After admittedly organizing, training, funding, and equipping the very mobs littering Syria's streets, many of whom have resorted to arson and armed clashes with Syrian security forces, the United States is pressuring the Syrian government to step down. The US does not expect a sovereign nation to stand-down in the face of openly foreign-funded sedition, rather it is simply using the resulting violence to justify wider intervention and the eventual seizure and despoiling of yet another Arab nation.

The coverage by the corporate-owned Western media exclusively relies on "activists inside and outside the country," the London-based "Syrian Human Rights Monitoring Centre" which apparently has no web presence, the Damascus Center for Human Rights which boasts membershipswith the National Endowment for Democracy and Tides Foundation-funded International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, funded by the European Union, the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the Sigrid Rausing Trust, and Humanity United.


A 15 minute video breaking down the contrived uprising in Egypt. Examining what is now known about Egypt and comparing it to information emerging regarding Syria, we see identical operations unfolding. The only difference is Syria's Assad and his determination not to give in to foreign-funded sedition and ochlocracy. 


Humanity United in turn boast partnerships with the BBC World Service Trust, NED/Open Society/US State Department-funded Benetech, the Open Society Institute, and the NED-fundedSolidarity Center which mobilized Egypt's labor unions just as the US-stoked unrest began to falter. In other words, every organization involved interlocks with the vast corporate/foundation-funded imperial network masquerading as individual "human rights organizations" and benign NGOs. In reality this "civil society" network seeks to supplant national governments, and interface with global "institutions" like the IMF, World Bank, and the UN, all of which have been contrived by corporate-financier oligarchs. It is a modern day empire in the making.

These so-called "human rights activists" are entirely funded by, and predominantly based in London and Washington. It would be an understatement to say the "Syrian opposition" has the backing of the very corporations that have been striving for regime change in Syria for at least two decades. These are the same corporations and foundations behind the various think-tanks that are the true architects of Western foreign policy. It should be no surprise then that these "activists," or more accurately, these "agents" behind the Syrian unrest are providing the precise narrative and pretext required to implement increased Western involvement toward the goal of regime change, at the expense of many unwitting, well intentioned people's lives.

Dubious Reporting

NED-funded Reporters Without Borders recently compiled a list of "Journalists targeted by governments desperate to control news," which included Syria, citing the mysterious London-based Syrian Human Rights Monitoring Centre, while the Soros/Ford Foundation-funded Human Rights Watch cited the above mentioned Damascus Center for Human Rights regarding "alleged deaths." And it is these "activists" that are cited by not only by globalist-funded organizations but also the majority of the corporate-owned media, where each sentence is punctuated by "activists say," or the very groups above are mentioned by name.

The Vancouver Sun reports, "According to Syrian activists, at least 700 civilians have died in two months of clashes between government forces and protesters. Syrian authorities dispute this, blaming armed groups instead."

The Wall Street Journal reports, ""It's symbolic, but it's important because it's the first time the U.S. targets the political arm of the regime," said Radwan Ziadeh, a Washington-based Syrian opposition activist and director of the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies." The Wall Street Journal would cite the center against as well as the FIDH, reporting that, "the International Federation for Human Rights and the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies said on Wednesday that Deraa residents had told them that villagers digging in farmland on the city's outskirts found 13 bodies, including women and children. Deraa, the southern cradle of Syria's protests, was under military siege for at least 11 days."

The Boston Globe reports, "Activists said security forces killed at least 26 people and wounded hundreds." Boston Globe continues with astonishing disinformation claiming, "Wissam Tarif, executive director of Insan, a Syrian human rights group, said he had interviewed young men tortured just days ago. One of them, who had his fingernails pulled out, had taken a lead in the protests yesterday in Baniyas." It turns out "Insan" is based in Spain, not Syria and considers itself an "international non-governmental organization." Such information however undermines the overall narrative and it appears that the Boston Globe has no problem hammering reality into a shape more to its pleasing.

The London Guardian notes within a recent article the difficulty of verifying reports, citing a Human Rights Watch "researcher" monitoring Syria from Beirut, Lebanon who said, "We are receiving second hand information from Deraa that is quite worrying about bodies on the ground, more than 30 people killed over the last two days, campaigns of arrests, but we are not able to confirm that."

This second hand information derived from dubious or entirely discredited sources has been ceaselessly conveyed by the corporate media to the impressionable audiences of the West and used as the foundation for sanctions, rhetoric, and threats of wider Libyan-style intervention against Syria. It should be noted that similar second hand, unverified information derived from similar US-funded opposition groups served as the foundation for the current war of aggression being waged against Libya.

Syrian unrest is admittedly US-funded 

Syria has been slated for regime change since as early as 1991. In 2002, then US Under Secretary of State John Bolton, would add Syria to the growing "Axis of Evil." It would be later revealed that Bolton's threats against Syria would manifest themselves as covert funding and support for opposition groups inside of Syria spanning both the Bush and Obama administrations.

In a recent CNN article, acting State Department spokesman Mark Toner stated, "We're not working to undermine that [Syrian] government. What we are trying to do in Syria, through our civil society support, is to build the kind of democratic institutions, frankly, that we're trying to do in countries around the globe. What's different, I think, in this situation is that the Syrian government perceives this kind of assistance as a threat to its control over the Syrian people."

Toner's remarks come after the Washington Post released cables indicating the US has been funding Syrian opposition groups since at least 2005 under the Bush administration and was continued under Obama. As we can see, the campaign against Syria transcended presidential administrations for nearly two decades.

In a recent AFP report, Michael Posner, the assistant US Secretary of State for Human Rights and Labor, stated that the "US government has budgeted $50 million in the last two years to develop new technologies to help activists protect themselves from arrest and prosecution by authoritarian governments." The report went on to explain that the US "organized training sessions for 5,000 activists in different parts of the world. A session held in the Middle East about six weeks ago gathered activists from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon who returned to their countries with the aim of training their colleagues there." Posner would add, "They went back and there's a ripple effect." That ripple effect of course is the "Arab Spring" we are now expected to believe was entirely spontaneous and indigenous.

Conclusion

As we can see, no matter what the Syrian government is really doing, our perception of what is transpiring in Syria is being filtered through a propaganda network bent on the foregone conclusion of regime change and the subsequent reordering of the nation. The level of duplicity has reached a crescendo with presidential speeches still claiming before the American people that "it was the people themselves who launched these movements, and must determine their outcome." Such claims are being made even as public statements by the US State Department and a myriad of reports have openly admit to training and equipping thousands of protest leaders before sending them to their home countries to start a "ripple effect."

It is important to understand that it is not lying puppet presidents like George Bush or Barack Obama that are to blame, but rather the corporate-financier interests who are conspiring and funding these global gambits and building this nefarious "civil society" network to supplant national sovereignty worldwide. Once this is understood, we must begin to undermine the very source of their power - that being our own complicity, our continual patronization of their corporations, their monetary system, our continual respect and obedience to their contrived, extra-Constitutional laws, and our continual participation in their system. We can do this by not participating in their strategy of global tension and instead, pursue our own agenda and build our own system, locally, self-sufficiently, and independently.

Tony Cartalucci's articles have appeared on many alternative media websites, including his own at 
Land Destroyer Report.

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