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Purveyor, Fine Asian Porn
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Posts: 38,323
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Quote:
Originally Posted by _Richard_
damn, that's a lot of time debunking someone who just shared an article written by Dale Gavlak and Yahya Abadneh
I do agree about knowing your sources, however  |
More? 
From the right (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting):
Quote:
Unlike the U.S. government, Mint does not have much of a track record, having been founded only about a year and a half ago (CJR, 3/28/12). The founder of the for-profit startup is Mnar Muhawesh, a 24-year-old Palestinian-American woman who believes, reasonably enough, that "our media has absolutely failed our country"
One of its two reporters on its Syrian chemical weapons piece, Dale Gavlak, is a longtime Associated Press Mideast stringer who has also done work for NPR and the BBC.
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Yahya Ababneh, a Jordanian freelancer and journalism grad student?who "spoke directly with the rebels, their family members, victims of the chemical weapons attacks and local residents." The article reports that "many believe that certain rebels received chemical weapons via the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were responsible for carrying out" the chemical attack.
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independent media accounts are not necessarily more credible than official reports?or vice versa. As with the government white paper, there are gaps in the Mint account; while Abdel-Moneim cites his late son's account of carrying chemical weapons, the rebels quoted do not indicate how they came to know what they say they know about the origin of the weapons.
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A more thorough debunking:
http://antoningregoire.wordpress.com...-saudi-arabia/
Quote:
The Lie :
First the obvious lie : Dale Gavlak is not an AP correspondant. Gavlak has been on a few stories (here is the list : these are much less controversial) but in this case, Gavlak works for Mintpress, a young info website close to the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Gavlak has, via twitter, tried to specify that the article was not an AP Story. But of course, it was the AP initials that interested conspirationists and pro-Assad websites : Infowars called AP and asked them if Dale Gavlak had worked for them. AP said yes and now Infowars can say it is confirmed Dale Gavlak works for AP.
Gavlak also works for the Times of Israel. Although it is not a crime, Gavlak is a « Times of Israel » reporter as much as an AP reporter but somehow, that part of Gavlak?s CV does not appear on infowars or other conspirationists and anti-imperiaists websites.
The second obvious lie is the disclaimer in the very end of the article that reads :
Some information in this article could not be independently verified. Mint Press News will continue to provide further information and updates.
At the very least, this one should be the first paragraph of the article. It is also impossible in the article to know which information has not been verified and which one is confirmed.
Mintpress has, after a day of controversy over its article, added another disclaimer, in the beginning of the article:
Clarification: Dale Gavlak assisted in the research and writing process of this article, but was not on the ground in Syria. Reporter Yahya Ababneh, with whom the report was written in collaboration, was the correspondent on the ground in Ghouta who spoke directly with the rebels, their family members, victims of the chemical weapons attacks and local residents. Gavlak is a MintPress News Middle East correspondent who has been freelancing for the AP as a Amman, Jordan correspondent for nearly a decade. This report is not an Associated Press article; rather it is exclusive to MintPress News.
This second disclaimer makes the article weaker than the original version. The heart of the story (rebels claiming to mishandle chemical weapons) has not been brought by Gavlak (with the trusted AP credentials) but by Yahya Ababneh who was no one before this big scoop.
Weak testimonies and sources :
The info itself relies on a few very weak testimonies, here is the full list :
- Abu Abdel-Moneim, the father of a rebel fighting to unseat Assad, who lives in Ghouta.
- Ghouta townspeople said
- A female fighter named ?K.?
- A well-known rebel leader in Ghouta named ?J?
- More than a dozen rebels interviewed (who reported that their salaries came from the Saudi government.)
- Rebels interviewed
Apart from the testimonies, the article relies on other articles to strengthen the idea of a Saudi involvement.
First, an article from business insiders written by Geoffrey Ingersoll. Please note that Ingersoll is a Operation Iraqi Freedom combat veteran and writes things like ?The UK Was Totally Justified Detaining Greenwald?s Partner?.
The Ingersoll article for its part relies on a Daily Telegraph article which relies entirely on an As Safir article (Lebanese 8 march ? pro-Assad ? newspaper). As Safir details a secret meeting between Putin and Bin Sultan (Saudi Intelligence Chief). On this occasion, Bin Sultan would have threatened Putin of Chechen terrorist attacks if Russia refuses to comply to Saudi demands on Syria.
As Safir is usually not a bad newspaper but here, they appear to be too good (here is the article): they are somehow able to get the exact quotes from a top secret meeting between Bandar Bin Sultan, chief of Saudi Intelligence and Russian President Wladimir Putin. The info in itself, Bandar Bin Sultan manipulating Chechen terrorists is surprising. It is the first time such a claim appears. More likely, and more well documented : the Russian secret services are infiltrating and manipulating Chechen terrorists for 30 years now.
Still, quoting Ingersoll, Gavlak puts in the article the exact quotes of a top secret meeting between the two most secretive people on the planet, obtained by a pro-Assad Lebanese newspaper and confirming a Saudi plot to manipulate Chechen terrorists in Russia?
The second piece Mintpress article is using is a WSJ piece about Bandar Bin Sultan (here is the WSJ article). The WSJ piece counts for almost 20% of the Mintpress article (1537 signs out of 7533) However, Dale Gavlak and Yahya forgot one quote from the WSJ article
The Saudi plan is to steadily strengthen carefully selected groups of rebel fighters not in the radical Islamist camp, with the goal of someday seeing them in control in Damascus
This quote is important because it completely destroys all the argument in mintpress article saying Saudi gave Chemical Weapons to Al Quaeda.
Already debunked :
For the rest of Dale Gavlak article, Brown Moses (who runs an extremely well documented blog about weapons used in Syria) already tried to debunk the info. He asks 4 experts to examine the claims made by mintpress. Here are the conclusions he found. To sum up :
Saudis (who does not have any known CW program) would not be stupid enough to get caught with chemical weapon trying to give them to rebels
If they were stupid enough to do it they would at least have trained the rebels properly to use them.
Even if all the above were true the scale of the attack is too large to have been carried out by rebels.
There is another hint in the article that leads toward a Syrian Mukhabarat propaganda. Syrian Mukhabarat are obsessed with prince Bandar Bin Sultan. In the end of March 2011, Syrian regime newspapers ran out a story about the « Bin Sultan plan to destabilise Syria and create Chaos inside the country ». The title itself is a bit too much but regime newpapers simply copy pasted the « plan » which looks so perfectly detailed that it becomes impossible to believe. (Here is the Bin Sultan plan)
In the Mintpress article, references to Bin Sultan are overwhelming. 15 times his name is mentioned. The case could be credible if it had stayed on a geopolitical level, simply saying « Saudi Arabia » as vague geopolitical enemy who plots against Syria. But the Bin Sultan obsession goes too far to be credible. One of the last sentence of the article is
Rebels interviewed said Prince Bandar is referred to as ?al-Habib? or ?the lover? by al-Qaida militants fighting in Syria.
Gavlak is supposed to have been co-writer to the article. Gavlak is also deeply obsessed with Al Quaeda (here is an article from Gavlak where Al Quaeda is linked to everything that happens in the Middle-East). Anyone claiming to have the slightest knowledge of the middle east would know no Al Quaeda militant would ever refer to the chief of saudi intelligence as « Al Habib ».
Eventually, the article concludes on a weakness, quoting Peter Osborne from the Daily Telegraph.
Osborne argument relies on Del Ponte « conclusions » that the rebels were responsible for last may chemical attack. We debunked this story on a previous post and Gavlak AP should have done the very same.
The Truth :
The « info » went viral on conspirationists and pro-Assad websites and also on antiwar websites which are the reading target of mintpress.
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I'll wait for further corroboration before drawing any conclusions, but to date, I do not feel there is a strong case for bombing anyone over the chemical weapons used in Syria, since there is still no conclusive proof about which group/faction is responsible.
With that said, it defies logic to me that Assad would have used chemical weapons at this point, and even less likely if he did, that he will use them again. What would be gained?
In my mind, the rebels would be more likely to have staged their own false flag operation to blame the Assad regime, and get the US and perhaps other nations to bomb the government.
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