WATCH: The White Helmets are a propaganda construct

Founded by a UK mercenary, funded by NATO and EU governments, promoted by a complacent media too hubristic or too atrophied to recognise what they are being paid to shill for, the “White Helmets” may go down as one of the most egregious deceptions in the history of western imperialism. James Corbett looks at the truth behind the lies

TRANSCRIPT:

In November 2017, journalist Vanessa Beeley gave a groundbreaking presentation to the Swiss Press Club in Geneva on the so-called “Syria Civil Defence” (better known as the “White Helmets”), which bills itself as an impartial group of volunteer search and rescue workers working “to save lives and strengthen communities in Syria.” In her presentation, Beeley demonstrated the connections between this supposedly “neutral” organization, recognized terrorist groups operating in Syria, and the UK government.

Less than three weeks later, The Guardian released a report painting all skeptics of the White Helmets, including Beeley and other “anti-imperialist activists” as proponents of a Russian propaganda campaign directed by the Kremlin.
This is no coincidence. The White Helmets are in fact part of a coordinated propaganda campaign. But that campaign is not being directed by the Kremlin, but the western governments which have been responsible for the founding and funding of the White Helmets. And the ones promoting that propaganda are not independent journalists like Beeley, but establishment mouthpieces like The Guardian.

The White Helmets Are A Propaganda Construct.
This is The Corbett Report.

It’s quite appropriate that a propaganda documentary honouring the work of The White Helmets won an Oscar at the 2017 Academy Awards. This is, after all, an organization that thrives on the magic of movie-making to make themselves into heroes. Surely any movie that could turn a group funded by the US and UK governments, associated with western intelligence operatives, and embedded with Al Qaeda terrorists into a group of crusading heroes is as worthy of an Academy Award as any similarly fictitious movie about superheroes saving the world.
It was also fitting that the leader of the group, Raed Saleh, was not at the ceremony to help accept the prize as originally planned.

What Orlando von Einsiedel, the director of the film, neglected to mention is that this was not the first time that Raed Saleh, the leader of the White Helmets, failed to appear in the US. In April of 2016, InterAction, an alliance of NGOs, held a gala dinner in Washington where it planned to honour Saleh and the work of the White Helmets in Syria. However, Saleh was refused entry into the country when he arrived at Washington’s Dulles Airport. Declining to talk about the details of the case, a State Department spokesman merely said “the U.S. government’s system of continual vetting means that traveler records are screened against available information in real time.”

So how is this possible? How could the leader of such a valiant team of crusading do-gooders himself be denied a visa to enter the United States as a potential security threat with ties to terrorists? The multi-million dollar PR campaign that surrounds the White Helmets, after all, portrays the group as being pure as the driven snow.

But what is always left out of these glowing mainstream media puff pieces is any actual information about the organization. Where did it come from? Who founded it? Where does it get its funding? And why does it operate exclusively in terrorist-held areas of Syria?
The first clues about the real nature of the group come from their name itself. Calling themselves the “Syria Civil Defence” is misleading in multiple ways. First, it implies that the group was founded in Syria by Syrians. It was not. The group was in fact founded in March 2013 in Turkey, by James Le Mesurier, a former British military intelligence officer then doing contract work for the US and UK governments. None of this information is even controversial. This is the story as told by Le Mesurier himself at a conference in Lisbon in 2015.

The name “Syria Civil Defence” is also a lie because there is a real Syria Civil Defence that has been operating in the country for 65 years. The actual Syria Civil Defence, a volunteer search and rescue organization, was established in Syria in 1953. Unlike the White Helmets, the real Syria Civil Defence is a member of the International Civil Defence Organisation and (again in contrast to the White Helmets) has an emergency number (113) that can be called in Syria by those needing assistance.
But this Syria Civil Defence does not enjoy the glitz and glamour of Oscar-winning documentaries, the constant attention of the international press, or the more than $60 million in funding by foreign governments that have been bestowed on the White Helmets.

But even more disturbing than the unusual founding or clandestine funding of the group is the mountain of evidence demonstrating that the White Helmets, far from their official claim to political neutrality, are in fact intimately embedded with known and listed terrorist organizations in Syria.
Again, the most damning evidence in this regard is not controversial in the slightest. It comes directly from the White Helmets themselves.
Numerous videos and photos have surfaced showing the White Helmets parading on the dead bodies of Syrian government forces and flying the flags of known terrorist organizations. An in-depth report on The Syrian War Blog last year examined the social media profiles of 65 different White Helmets connected figures and found numerous posts in support of ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham and other listed terrorist organizations. Some even posted pictures of themselves with known terrorist leaders or waving the flag of terrorist groups like ISIS, and many proudly displayed images of dead Syrian soldiers.
Most incredible of all is the footage of White Helmets attending the executions of Syrian civilians and soldiers by terrorist groups, moving in to cart the dead bodies away mere seconds after the victims are brutally slain.
Most of this evidence is explained away as “bad apples” in the organization acting on their own. Some of these “bad apples” are then castigated in public displays, like when one White Helmet was fired when footage surfaced showing him disposing the mutilated corpses of Syrian government fighters.
When a graphic video of the White Helmets overseeing the execution of a man in terrorist-occupied Daraa surfaced last year, the group actually defended the workers while acknowledging that they “did not fully uphold the strict principle of neutrality and impartiality.”
But incredibly, Le Mesurier, the former British intel officer who founded the White Helmets in 2013, defended the workers caught in one bloody video from May 2015. The Middle Ground, a Singaporean website, ran a story last year featuring Le Mesurier’s take on the incident.
“But what about the damning video, from May 6, 2015?” the article reads. “White Helmet volunteers were caught on tape running in to clear a body seconds after a gunman executed a man. It turns out that the deceased was tried and sentenced to death in a local Sharia court, said Mr Mesurier. When his father found out about the time of execution, he called the White Helmets to help him conduct a proper burial. Besides, the gunman was clad in a balaclava, not a white helmet. Accusing the White Helmets of this act would be akin to accusing Joseph of Arimathea of crucifying Jesus.”
In opposition to the deafening mainstream media silence over this incredible mountain of evidence against the White Helmets stand only a handful of independent researchers, universally ignored, castigated or marginalized from the mainstream discussion on the issue.
These independent researchers include Vanessa Beeley, a British researcher who has been one of the few journalists to report extensively on the ground in areas like East Aleppo over the last two years, and Eva Bartlett, a Canadian blogger who has gained notoriety for using her own on-the-ground reporting from Syria to speak out against the mainstream narrative about the White Helmets.

Given that there are so few voices speaking up against the White Helmets, it should c
ome as no surprise that when The Guardian finally deigned to address what they termed the “conspiracy theories” about the organization, they turned their attention on these very researchers.
In “How Syria’s White Helmets became victims of an online propaganda machine,” The Guardian turned to Olivia Solon to dismiss all opposition to the White Helmets as the work of “anti-imperialist activists,” “conspiracy theorists” and “trolls with the support of the Russian government.”
The choice of Solon to report on this story is especially odd; a “technology reporter” in San Francisco, Solon has no background of any sort in geopolitics or combat zone reporting and, as far as can be determined, has never set foot in Syria. Instead, she relied exclusively on sources such as the murky PR lobbying firm, The Syria Campaign, to praise the White Helmets and castigate their detractors.
Bizarrely, the report devotes a great deal of attention to the White Helmets’ Mannequin Challenge video, footage of an admittedly fake and staged “rescue” operation released by the group in an attempt to cash in on a viral internet video trend taking place at the time.
The inference of the video is obvious: that the group is perfectly capable of staging incredibly realistic and completely fake “rescue” operations at any time. These fake videos, stripped of their context, would be uncritically promoted as authentic by mainstream outlets like The Guardian in the exact same way that the completely fictitious video of a “Syrian” boy rescuing his sister under sniper fire was uncritically accepted by the mainstream media…until it was admitted to be a fake video produced in Malta by a Norwegian film crew “to see how the media would respond to such a video.”
The Guardian’s headline when the fake Norwegian film production was released?
“Syrian boy ‘saves girl from army sniper’ – video.”
Strangely, Solon’s report does not mention that incident.
The majority of The Guardian’s report focuses on why the innocent and virtuous White Helmets would be so viciously attacked by independent journalists and how all opposition to the group is connected to the Kremlin. This is supposedly demonstrated in an utterly meaningless “infographic” of colored dots showing precisely nothing of substance.
Unsurprisingly, Solon’s contact with the reporters whose work she was set to impugn displayed her biases from the very start.

Researchers like Beeley, Bartlett and Professor Tim Anderson, also mentioned in Solon’s report, are easy enough targets for The Guardian. Independent journalists taking it upon themselves to counter the Syria narrative, they would never be taken seriously be establishment media circles in the first place. Curiously omitted from The Guardian article, however, are the award-winning, internationally respected journalists who have similarly expressed skepticism about the White Helmets, their backers, and the PR campaign that surrounds them.
There is Gareth Porter, the award-winning journalist who has contributed to Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The Nation, Al Jazeera, Salon, The Huffington Post, Alternet and countless other outlets, who wrote “How a Syrian White Helmets Leader Played Western Media” in November 2016.
There is Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who wrote “The Fraud of the White Helmets” in July of 2017.
There is Stephen Kinzer, former New York Times correspondent and, ironically, current contributor to The Guardian, who tweeted his congratulations to “al-Qaeda and Syrian jihadists” when the film about “their PR outfit, the White Helmets,” won the Oscar.
And, of course, there is John Pilger, one of the most respected and celebrated journalists and documentarians of the past half-century:

It is unclear whether Solon and The Guardian believe Porter, Giraldi, Kinzer and Pilger to be “anti-imperialist activists,” “conspiracy theorists,” or “trolls with the support of the Russian government.”
But the issue here is not merely one of PR and propaganda, as appalling as the uncritical reporting about the White Helmets has been. What is worrying is that the so-called Syrian Civil Defence is, as we have seen, not Syrian at all. Founded, funded and promoted by foreign governments, foreign contractors and foreign lobbyists and PR agencies, the White Helmets are not a spontaneous Syrian search-and-rescue operation, but a template. A template that, if successful, can and will be employed anywhere and everywhere that those same foreign powers want to destabilize targeted governments in the future.

In the end, the point is no more that we should uncritically accept every statement made in opposition to the White Helmets than that we should uncritically accept every statement made in their favour. The point is that in a world where people were concerned about the real truth of the matter we would not be forced to rely on the on-the-ground reports of Beeley, Bartlett and the handful of other independent journalists who actually bother to visit Syria and talk to actual Syrians about what is happening in their country. In such a world, there would be many different journalists, researchers and citizens all trying to get to the bottom of what was really happening in the country.
But we do not live in such a world, and one thing is perfectly clear: we cannot rely on outlets like The Guardian and their fellow travellers like BBC News, Channel 4, CNN and other mainstream establishment outlets to report the truth on these matters.

Olivia Solon was contacted for comment on this report, but she did not respond to the request

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