Why Do These Uighur Witnesses' Stories Constantly Change?
Two months ago we documented astonishing changes over time in the testimony of a Uyhgur woman who had claimed to have been incarcerated in China:
Over the years [Sayragul] Sautbay has given several interviews. The details of her story continued to change in anti-Chinese directions.
- In early interviews Sautbay claimed to have been an instructor working in a re-education camp. In later interviews she claims to have been a detainee.
- In more recent interviews she claims that she had seen torture and violence in the camps. In earlier interviews she had refuted such claims.
- In one story she claims to have observed mass rape. In older interviews she insisted that she had observed no violence at all.
- While she now claims that detainees in the camp were forced to eat pork she had earlier claimed that no meat was served in the camps.
The changes in her story came after Sautbay had fallen into the hands of a propaganda group:
After she had gained asylum in Sweden Sautbay joint up with a U.S. financed Uighur organization. Her story then changed dramatically. The party member and language teacher had became a detainee. There was suddenly extensive violence in the camp and people who earlier never got meat were suddenly made to eat pork.
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The Swedish Uyghur association is part of the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress, a CIA affiliated organization that has in recent years gained prominence as part of the U.S. driven anti-China campaign.
A similar change can be observed in the testimony of another Uyghur woman who currently makes the rounds through the media. Tursunay Ziawudun, a Uyghur woman who last year moved to the United States, now claims to have observed mass rape in Chinese detention camps.
The BBC headlined yesterday: 'Their goal is to destroy everyone': Uighur camp detainees allege systematic rape
First-hand accounts from inside the internment camps are rare, but several former detainees and a guard have told the BBC they experienced or saw evidence of an organised system of mass rape, sexual abuse and torture.Tursunay Ziawudun, who fled Xinjiang after her release and is now in the US, said women were removed from the cells "every night" and raped by one or more masked Chinese men. She said she was tortured and later gang-raped on three occasions, each time by two or three men.
Ziawudun was first interviewed (video) at the office of the Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights organization in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on October 15, 2019. An English summary of the interview is here. There are no allegations of rape or overly harsh treatment. The biggest problem seem to have been 'urinary disorders' which some people developed because the camp buildings were new and the concrete had not yet completely dried out.
The organization which did the first interview with Ziawudun acted as a broker between such persons and 'western' media:
Cont. reading: Why Do These Uighur Witnesses' Stories Constantly Change?
Open Thread 2021-010
News & views ...
This Is Why They Attack Him - Putin Explains Why We Need New Economic Policies
The President of Russia Vladimir Putin has given a great speech to the Davos 2021 online forum organized by the World Economic Forum. As usual it created little echo in the 'western' media.
Putin sees a new danger of large international conflicts. Economic imbalances have caused socio-political problems in many countries which, when externalized, can lead to international conflicts.
To solve this one has to reject the laissez faire doctrines that caused the economic imbalances. The nation states must intervene more in their economies. The people must be seen as the ends, not the means of such economic policy. There must be more international cooperation through global organizations to enable this everywhere.
There is more in the speech than that. But the above is the core idea. U.S. neo-liberalism will of course reject such a program.
Following are excerpts that reflect on the above points.
The big picture view points to great danger:
The pandemic has exacerbated the problems and imbalances that built up in the world before. There is every reason to believe that differences are likely to grow stronger. These trends may appear practically in all areas.Needless to say, there are no direct parallels in history. However, some experts – and I respect their opinion – compare the current situation to the 1930s. One can agree or disagree, but certain analogies are still suggested by many parameters, including the comprehensive, systemic nature of the challenges and potential threats.
We are seeing a crisis of the previous models and instruments of economic development. Social stratification is growing stronger both globally and in individual countries. We have spoken about this before as well. But this, in turn, is causing today a sharp polarisation of public views, provoking the growth of populism, right- and left-wing radicalism and other extremes, and the exacerbation of domestic political processes including in the leading countries.
All this is inevitably affecting the nature of international relations and is not making them more stable or predictable. International institutions are becoming weaker, regional conflicts are emerging one after another, and the system of global security is deteriorating.
Klaus [Schwab] has mentioned the conversation I had yesterday with the US President on extending the New START. This is, without a doubt, a step in the right direction. Nevertheless, the differences are leading to a downward spiral. As you are aware, the inability and unwillingness to find substantive solutions to problems like this in the 20th century led to the WWII catastrophe.
Putin then goes into the details of the above theses.
What caused the current economic imbalances?
Cont. reading: This Is Why They Attack Him - Putin Explains Why We Need New Economic Policies
Lebanon - British Embassy Infiltrates Military Intelligence, Provides Snooping Equipment, Indoctrinates Young Palestinians
The British ambassador to Lebanon is 'very exited' to hand off some useless, half armored patrol vehicles to the Lebanese army:
Martin Longden @MlongdenUK - 12:25 UTC · Feb 1, 2021Very excited to witness the arrival in Beirut of 100 armoured patrol vehicles, a donation from 🇬🇧 to @LebarmyOfficial. This is a great practical example of the 🇬🇧 🇱🇧 partnership, and of our longstanding support for the LAF's vital role in keeping the Syria border safe and secure.
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Keeping the Syrian border safe and secure is certainly not a British priority. Let's not forget that it was Britain which hired various companies, led by 'former' British intelligence officers, who then organized and ran the propaganda campaigns for the Jihadi onslaught on Syria.
The same companies were hired to secretly create 'civil society' groups in Lebanon that were then used to demonstrate for 'regime change' and to pressure the Lebanese government. It was also Her Majesties Government which hired such intelligence cutouts to embed into and undermine Lebanon's justice and security services.
Lebanon's army was another target of British intelligence efforts to gain control over Lebanon's policies.
'Anonymous' hackers have recovered and published a third batch of documents which show how Britain infiltrated Lebanon's Armed Forces Military Intelligence Department. Other documents show that Britain supplied spying equipment to the intelligence services it had infiltrated. Another secret program was designed to infiltrate Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and to manipulate Palestinian youths.
For all this the British government is using company cutouts. A government's Terms of Reference document for the penetration of Lebanon's military intelligence describes how the vendor is supposed to proceed. The 'excuse' is to provide training and support for counter terrorism (emphasis added):
The objective of [British Embassy Beirut] is to increase the capacity, capability and Human Rights compliance of the LAF and Military Tribunal within the CT arrest to trial process. A compliant pathway through the Lebanese CT system is sought that could be used by UK law enforcement in the case of terrorism cases with UK links in Lebanon.Requirement
An external supplier is required to deliver a two year programme on behalf of the British Embassy Beirut working primarily with the Lebanese Armed Forces Department of Military Intelligence, but with scope to engage with a broader range of security services here, to develop their investigative processes and evidential standards.
Working primarily via a embedded CT adviser, the successful supplier will also be expected to demonstrate a broad range of areas of expertise available on call down as necessary, to effectively project manage the programme while reporting into BE Beirut, and to demonstrate that they have built in rigorous and independent M&E processes throughout the programming timeline.
The British government offered £600,000 for the two year project which ran from July 2018 to March 2020 but has been extended to 2022. Importantly the 'supplier' had been told to keep the project secret:
The MoA Week In Review - OT 2021-009
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
- January 27 - More Cyber Crimes, Attributed To Russia, Are Shown To Have Come From Elsewhere
Related:
30% of 'SolarWinds' Hacking Victims Did Not Actually Use SolarWinds Software, Feds Say - Gizmodo
- January 28 - The System Is Rigged - Episode 4537: Game Stop Corp
Related:
Wall Street’s Bounty Hunter Abandons Short Selling Research - Bloomberg
Robinhood, in Need of Cash, Raises $1 Billion From Its Investors - New York Times
Late Cycle Bubblicious? - Barry Ritholtz
Suck It, Wall Street - Matt Taibbi
- January 29 - Syria - The U.S. Controlled Al-Tanf Serves As ‘ISIS’ Base - Truth Or Propaganda? - by Hedwig Kuijpers
Related:
Syria: A new policy is needed, but not this one - Peter Ford / Just World
Why Is America Still In Syria? - Matthew Petti / Reason
Syrians protest against Kurdish siege in Hasakah province - China.org
- January 30 - Navalny Scam Sells Empty Concrete Shell As 'Putin's Luxurious Palace'
Related:
How not to help the Russian opposition - Irrussianality
Raising Hell: QandA: Who The Hell Is Alexei Navalny? - Raising Hell
The Navalny Protests Charade: More Western Interference & Disinfo on Russia Eva Bartlett / InGaza
A NEW YEAR UPDATE FROM LUGA, RUSSIA - Between Two Worlds
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Other issues:
Cont. reading: The MoA Week In Review - OT 2021-009
Navalny Scam Sells Empty Concrete Shell As 'Putin's Luxurious Palace'
In 2010 some minor Russian businessman, Sergei Kolesnikov, who had pissed off people above his pay grade, resettled from Russia to Estonia. To make himself interesting, and likely to get financial support, he made up a story. David Ignatius, the CIA's resident writer at the Washington Post, picked it up:
You can see the sprawling, Italian-style palace on the Black Sea in satellite photos. There's a fitness spa, a hideaway "tea house," a concert amphitheater and a pad for three helicopters. It's still under construction, but already the cost is said to total more than $1 billion.And most amazing of all, according to a Russian whistleblower named Sergey Kolesnikov, it was predominantly paid for with money donated by Russian businessmen for the use of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The funds have come "mainly through a combination of corruption, bribery and theft," charges Kolesnikov, a businessman who until November 2009 worked for one of the companies he alleges was investing money for Putin.
In 2012 BBC Newsnight again picked up the story and made it into a nine minutes long anti-Putin segment.
Putin's palace? A mystery Black Sea mansion fit for a tsar
On a thickly wooded mountainside overlooking Russia's Black Sea coast, an extraordinary building has gradually taken shape. It is alleged to be a palace built for the personal use of Vladimir Putin, with massive and illegal use of state funds.Originally conceived, it is said, as a modest holiday house with a swimming pool, it now boasts a magnificent columned facade reminiscent of the country palaces Russian tsars built in the 18th Century.
The massive wrought-iron gates into the courtyard are topped with a golden imperial eagle. Outside are formal gardens, a private theatre, a landing pad with bays for three helicopters, and accommodation for security guards.
At the end of 2020 the 'Putin's palace' story was recycled to promote the rightwing Russian nationalist and anti-corruption campaigner Alexey Navalny. Navalny was at that time in Germany's Black Forrest area where he recovered from an alleged poisoning. A studio was needed to produce a video about the 'palace'.
A German producer couple who had recently opened a TV-studio received a request. As the German daily Badische Zeitung reported (my translation):
Cont. reading: Navalny Scam Sells Empty Concrete Shell As 'Putin's Luxurious Palace'
Syria - The U.S. Controlled Al-Tanf Serves As ‘ISIS’ Base - Truth Or Propaganda?
Photo of US soldiers training Maghweer al-Thora forces in the al-Tanf pocket (source: Hammurabi news)
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Many questions remain unanswered about the al-Tanf United States base in the Syrian desert, that is called illegal by the Syrian government and Russia. Why is al-Tanf so important to the US? What are the US soldiers still doing there? Who else are hosted in the al-Tanf pocket? Why is ISIS growing again? Is al-Tanf really a launching pad for ISIS attacks in the region?
Why is the al-Tanf base so important to the US?
The al-Tanf base is located in the al-Tanf pocket, at about 20km of the al-Tanf border crossing. It’s 55 km-deconfliction zone is located along the border with Iraq and Jordan, and cuts off the Baghdad-Damascus highway. By controlling this highway, the United States ensures that Iranian deliveries to the Syrian capital Damascus cannot take place by land. This is of high strategic importance to the US, because Iranian shipments and air deliveries are much easier intercepted, and form an easy target to Israeli airstrikes.
The US-led coalition forces use al-Tanf as an entrance point to launch operations into Syria. The base can be easily reached from both Baghdad and Jordan. Both the Syrian government and Russian officials have repeatedly stated that the al-Tanf zone are being used by terrorist groups active in the region, as a safe haven and a foothold to carry out attacks on government-held areas and Iranian proxy-groups in the Bukamal area. This ‘ISIS rear base’ has been actively protected by the forces stationed at al-Tanf, which threaten any deployment of the Syrian Arab Army, Iranian proxy-groups and Russian forces close to the al-Tanf zone. The formal justification given by the US surrounding these actions is that Syrian government troops as well as Iranian-backed forces in Syria pose a threat to US-backed ‘less-radical’ rebel groups and US troops deployed at the garrison.
Oil, Rebels, Iran, Chaos and Leverage
Many allegations exist surrounding the activities of the US soldiers present at al-Tanf, even though the Trump-administration claimed it wanted to pull back troops from Syria and victory had been announced over ISIS.
One of the reasons is the presence of US-backed ‘rebel’ groups such as Maghweer al-Thora. According to an OIR inspector general report released Aug. 4. 2020, OIR officials want to want to double the size of US-proxy forces in Syria and finish training a 2,200-man “oilfield guard” unit there.
Cont. reading: Syria - The U.S. Controlled Al-Tanf Serves As ‘ISIS’ Base - Truth Or Propaganda?
The System Is Rigged - Episode 4537: Game Stop Corp
Early this week a few amateur stock trading nerds decided to promote a stock that was heavily shorted by certain hedge funds. The idea was to raise the stock price of Game Stop Corp., a vendor for computer games, by having lots of small stock traders to buy into it. The hedge fund that shorted the stock, and thereby bet on a dropping stock price, would then make huge losses while the many small buyers would potentially profit.
These people, who had joined up in the sub-reddit /r/WallStreetBets, were not driven by greed but by rage against the financial machine:
Instead of greed, this latest bout of speculation, and especially the extraordinary excitement at GameStop, has a different emotional driver: anger. The people investing today are driven by righteous anger, about generational injustice, about what they see as the corruption and unfairness of the way banks were bailed out in 2008 without having to pay legal penalties later, and about lacerating poverty and inequality. This makes it unlike any of the speculative rallies and crashes that have preceded it.
The movement was successful. The stock price of Game Stop Corp. rose from some $10 to over $400 within just a few days. The short seller had to take cover under a larger firm:
Hedge fund Melvin Capital closed out its short position in GameStop on Tuesday after taking huge losses as a target of the army of retail investors. Citadel and Point72 have infused close to $3 billion into Gabe Plotkin's hedge fund to shore up its finances.
Then the system hit back.
Discord, the company which hosted the server for the sub-reddit /r/WallStreetBets suddenly found that there was 'hate-speech' in the threads. It unplugged the server. (Discord had previously unplugged the sub-reddit /r/The_Donald.)
Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald - 0:53 UTC · Jan 28, 2021What an absolutely extraordinary coincidence of timing that Discord happened to decide the r/Wall Streetbets sub-reddit had too much “hate speech” to tolerate on the same day hedge fund billionaires declared them a huge threat for the crime of winning at their expense!
Next the trading app Robinhood, which many of the amateur traders use, blocked further buys into the stock:
Cont. reading: The System Is Rigged - Episode 4537: Game Stop Corp
More Cyber Crimes, Attributed To Russia, Are Shown To Have Come From Elsewhere
Earlier today police in Europe took down the Emotet bot-network:
First discovered as a fairly run-of-the-mill banking trojan back in 2014, Emotet evolved over the years into one of the most professional and resilient cyber crime services in the world, and became a “go-to” solution for cyber criminals.Its infrastructure acted as a mechanism to gain access to target systems, which was done via an automated spam email process that delivered Emotet malware to its victims via malicious attachments, often shipping notices, invoices and, since last spring, Covid-19 information or offers. If opened, victims would be promoted to enable macros that allowed malicious code to run and instal Emotet.
This done, Emotet’s operators then sold access on to other cyber criminal groups as a means to infiltrate their victims, steal data, and drop malware and ransomware. The operators of TrickBot and Ryuk were among the many users of Emotet.
Up to a quarter of all recent run of the mill cyber-crime was done through the Emotet network. Closing it down is a great success.
Wikipedia falsely claimed that Emotet was based in Russia:
Emotet is a malware strain and a cybercrime operation based in Russia.[1] The malware, also known as Geodo and Mealybug, was first detected in 2014[2] and remains active, deemed one of the most prevalent threats of 2019.[3]
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However the Hindu report linked as source to the Russia claim under [1] only says:
The malware is said to be operated from Russia, and its operator is nicknamed Ivan by cyber security researchers.
"Is said to be operated from Russia" is quite a weak formulation and should not be used as source for attribution claims. It is also definitely false.
Cont. reading: More Cyber Crimes, Attributed To Russia, Are Shown To Have Come From Elsewhere
Sorry, No Post Today.
Sorry, no post today.The heating installation for the block I am living in failed yesterday. It is supposed to be up again only late this evening. It is freezing not only outside and typing with mittens on is just too inconvenient.
Use as open thread ...