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PBS NewsHour Uses Russian Airstrike Footage While Claiming U.S. Airstrike Successes
U.S. media can no agree with itself if Russia is giving ISIS an airforce or if Russia pounds ISIS with the biggest bomber raid in decades. Such confusion occurs when propaganda fantasies collide with the observable reality.
To bridge such divide requires some fudging.
So
when the U.S. claims to act against the finances of the Islamic State
while not doing much, the U.S Public Broadcasting Service has to use
footage of Russian airstrikes against the Islamic State while reporting
claimed U.S. airstrike successes.
The U.S. military recently claimed to have hit Islamic State oil tankers in Syria. This only after Putinembarrassed Obama
at the G-20 meeting in Turkey. Putin showed satellite pictures of
ridiculous long tanker lines waiting for days and weeks to load oil from
the Islamic State without any U.S. interference.
The
U.S. then claimed to have hit 116 oil tankers while the Russian air
force claims to have hit 500. But there is an important difference
between these claims. The Russians provided videos showing how
their airstrikes hit at least two different very large oil tanker
assemblies with hundreds of tankers in each. They also provided video of several hits on oil storage sites and refinery infrastructure.
I have found no video of U.S. hits on Islamic State oil tanker assemblies.
The U.S. PBS NewsHour did not find any either.
In their TV report yesterday
about Islamic State financing and the claimed U.S. hits on oil trucks
they used the videos Russia provided without revealing the source. You can see the Russian videos played within an interview with a U.S. military spokesperson at 2:22 min.
The
U.S. military spokesperson speaks on camera about U.S. airforce hits
against the Islamic State. The video cuts to footage taken by Russian
airplanes hitting oil tanks and then trucks. The voice-over
while showing the Russian video with the Russians blowing up trucks
says: "For the first time the U.S. is attacking oil delivery trucks." The video then cuts back to the U.S. military spokesperson.
At no point is the Russian campaign mentioned or the source of the footage revealed.
Any
average viewer of the PBS report will assume that the black and white
explosions of oil trucks and tanks are from of U.S. airstrikes filmed by
U.S. air force planes.
The U.S. military itself admitted that
its strikes on IS oil infrastructure over the last year were "minimally
effective". One wonders then how effective the claimed strike against
116 trucks really was. But unless we have U.S. video of such strikes and
not copies of Russian strike video fraudulently passed off as U.S.
strikes we will not know if those strikes happened at all.
Propaganda and reality also collide in the larger U.S. policy on Syria. President Obama claims that
the "overwhelming majority of people in Syria" want the Syrian
President Assad to leave. But independent British polling in Syria found (pdf) that a strong plurality of Syrians prefers him as president over any of the available alternatives.
And while new research reveals extensive cooperation between NATO member and U.S. ally Turkey and the Islamic State the U.S. is asking for more
cooperation with Turkey to shuffle more weapons into the Syria conflict
and thereby, inevitably, also to the Islamic State. Some other U.S.
allies are likewise deeply involved in financing and equipping the Islamic State.
But Kuwait just arrested a gang that was smuggling weapons from the new U.S. client state Ukraine to the Islamic State. Iraqi military and Shia militia find huge bundles of cash (vid) which were to be smuggled to the Islamic State. How does it come that the otherwise all-seeing (including your emails) U.S. secret services are unable to uncover Islamic State financing and smuggling when smaller states with much less resources can do so?
Does
all this sound like the U.S. is really campaigning against the Islamic
State? Or is this whole campaign just as fraudulent as the PBS video and
Obama's proclamations? Why is the U.S. so deeply lost on the ‘Dark Side’ in Syria?
h/t CHPSTCK
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