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BBC
Reporter Discourages Syria Questions Due To “Information War”
With Russia
Caitlin
Johnstone
17
April, 2018
A BBC
interview is making the rounds today among
opponents of western interventionism in Syria. The subject of the
interview, Admiral Alan West, voiced some much needed skepticism
about the establishment narrative around the alleged gas attack in
Douma. Everybody’s talking about it because West is an empire
loyalist that nobody in their right mind would accuse of being an
“Assad apologist” or “useful idiot of the Kremlin”, as anyone
else who doesn’t swallow the official story hook, line and sinker
is uniformly labeled.
West
made some sensible comments about the White Helmets and the fact that
Jaysh al-Islam had far more incentive to stage such an attack than
Assad had to perpetrate it. Even more helpful was his
personal account of
having been aggressively pressured to make false reports about the
success of the British bombing campaign in Bosnia, suggesting that
those pressures can lead to bad intelligence and erroneous military
responses.
“I
just wonder, you know we’ve had some bad experiences on
intelligence,” West said. “When I was chief of defense
intelligence, I had huge pressure put on me politically to try and
say that our bombing campaign in Bosnia was achieving all sorts of
things which it wasn’t. I was put under huge pressure, so I know
the things that can happen with intelligence.”
So
that’s a very significant addition to the dialogue. For me, though,
the most interesting comments made in that interview came not from
West, but from the BBC reporter who was interviewing him.
In
the latter half of the interview, BBC’s Annita McVeigh asked
the following questions after West’s comment
about Bosnia:
“We
know that the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday,
or accused a western state on Friday, of perhaps fabricating evidence
in Douma or somehow being involved in what happened in Douma. Given
that we’re in an information war with Russia on so many fronts, do
you think perhaps it’s inadvisable to be stating this so publicly
given your position and your profile? Isn’t there a danger that
you’re muddying the waters?”
I am of the political left centre - so no axe to grind about this in any political sense ..but thank you for posting this. It clearly indicates there is a bias in the BBC. The interviewer did not clarify that Lord West's comment about 'Russians lie as a matter of policy' which resulted in blatant racism against all Russians being allowed to pass unchallenged. It is a clear breach of Section 2 of the OFCOM code. Added to the orchestrated attempts to take away the RT broadcasting licence since 2013, this amounts to the undermining of free speech. Yes, RT does present the 'Russian' side but no more than Beeb is biased to the western side. In a free society, most intelligent people understand that and can make up their own minds. Whatever our political beliefs and whether you are right or left wing, we should all uphold the freedom of speech that underpins our democracy. If you can spare a moment to do an Ofcom complaint please do so. Thank you.
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