(archived from Feb 11 2018)
by Scott Creighton
Recently the widely discredited pro-war, anti-Russian, anti-Iranian, anti-Syrian, anti-self respect, Atlantic Council-backed blogger Eliot Higgins (“Brown Moses” and Bellingcat) popped his ugly head back up out of the weeds where the liar has been laying low since his last public smack down by Robert Parry a year or so ago. And once again, he’s doing his best to pay the bills by making up more unsubstantiated propaganda about whatever enemy the Atlantic Council happens to be demonizing at the moment. In this case it’s Iran and Syria. And in this case I guess he is somewhat reassured his lies might go undiscovered due to the recent untimely death of Mr. Parry (but my guess is… that just ain’t so)
“Bild worked with the research of the human rights group, Syrians for Truth and Justice, and the online investigative journalist website Bellingcat to expose the shocking evidence of “Made in Germany” technology used in alleged Syrian and Iranian regime war crimes. Eliot Higgins, from Bellingcat, told Bild both gas attacks showed that “the rockets were produced in 2016 and delivered from Iran.” Fox News, Feb. 8,2018
In this case Eliot, a Brit (like the guy who made up the “White Helmets” hearts and minds campaign out of al Qaeda and ISIS terrorists and like all the ISIS spokespeople and many of their terrorist kidnappers (remember The Beatles?)) has teamed up with someone from Syrians for Truth and Justice (backed by the European Endowment for Democracy (a Russia-hating, “pro-democracy” color revolution inciting organization that doesn’t think Germany gives them enough money for their “work”)) to scribble the latest of his bullshit junk “science” to blame Iran and Syria for the latest chemical weapons attacks.
Apparently, before cobbling together is latest BS “evidence” payday, Higgins didn’t get the memo about Sec. of Defense Mattis on Feb. 2nd saying he’s seen no evidence that the Syrian government was behind this latest attack. Talk about getting blind-sided huh? Robert’s gone and the damn Secretary of Defense steps right in. Must suck to be Eliot today.
Newsweek – Now Mattis Admits There Was No Evidence Assad Used Poison Gas on His People – Ian Wilke – Feb. 8, 2018
“Lost in the hyper-politicized hullabaloo surrounding the Nunes Memorandum and the Steele Dossier was the striking statement by Secretary of Defense James Mattis that the U.S. has “no evidence” that the Syrian government used the banned nerve agent Sarin against its own people.
This assertion flies in the face of the White House (NSC) Memorandum which was rapidly produced and declassified to justify an American Tomahawk missile strike against the Shayrat airbase in Syria.
Mattis offered no temporal qualifications, which means that both the 2017 event in Khan Sheikhoun and the 2013 tragedy in Ghouta are unsolved cases in the eyes of the Defense Department and Defense Intelligence Agency…”
And he certainly hadn’t heard about the French Defense Minister saying the exact same thing a couple days ago.
RT – No reliable evidence of chlorine use by Syrian govt – French defense minister – Feb. 9, 2018
“France has no reliable evidence that the chemical agent chlorine was used by the Syrian government forces, and thus cannot yet speak of a ‘red line’ having been crossed, the French Defense Minister said.
“We have some indications of possible chlorine use [in Syria], but we have no absolute confirmation,” Minister Florence Parly told France Inter radio on Friday. “So we, alongside the others, are working on trying to confirm this, as we clearly have to get the facts straight.” Parly did not specify who else was engaged in the confirmation effort…
Allegations about a possible chlorine-gas attack in Syria emerged in January this year. They were made by quite controversial pro-militant sources – the Syrian Civil Defense group, better known as the White Helmets and the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). These allegations have not yet been independently verified so far….”
In a pathetic effort to try to defend his paycheck, Eliot Higgins did what every pro-war, pro-establishment liar does when confronted with news they don’t like… obfuscate like hell and start calling people “truthers” and “conspiracy theorists”. This kind of last ditch effort is always the stock and trade of professional liars like Eliot Higgins.
Bellingcat – Newsweek Engages in Easily Debunkable Syria Chemical Weapon Trutherism with the Help of Ian Wilkie – Eliot Higgins – Feb.9,2018
“Following a series of fresh allegations of chemical weapon use in Syria, Newsweek published an article on February 8th, “Now Mattis admits there was no evidence Assad used poison gas on his people” by Ian Wilkie, described as “an international lawyer, U.S. Army veteran and former intelligence community contractor“. The central argument of the article is that in recent comments by Secretary of Defense James Mattis he admitted that the US government had no evidence Assad had ever used Sarin, including in the August 21st 2013 Damascus attack, and the attack on Khan Sheikhoun on April 4th 2017 that resulted in US cruise missiles strikes against Shayrat airbase…
From this central premise Wilkie hangs various conspiracy theories, half truths, and outright untruths. This is particularly problematic when this central claim is entirely wrong, as Mattis did refer to earlier Sarin attacks in the press conference…”
As you can see, Higgins jumps on a minor point of Wilkie’s in an effort to try to discredit his entire story. The focus of which should be that Mattis has clearly stated that the U.S. has no tangible evidence that this latest spate of chemical weapons attacks stories is backed by fact. And in fact Mattis clearly states that the ONLY evidence is coming from “activists” and NGO’s who have a clear stake in framing Assad or the Russians so they can get some help with their regime change agenda.
All of that Mr. Higgins deliberately downplays instead opting to point out that Mattis didn’t in fact claim the previous chemical weapons stories were baseless as well. For that I suppose is all Eliot can hang his hat on. Find something wrong with the argument, exploit it to the max and then claim the entire premise is wrong and there is nothing too see here.. move on.
Truth is, Wilkie doesn’t have to have Mattis discredit the previous administration’s lies about previous chemical weapons stories. They have already been debunked thoroughly and in fact, so much so that back in early 2014, even the Times and Washington Post had to walk back claims of Assad crossing the “red line” (after using Higgins’ bullshit evaluations) because credible researchers, scientists and journalists proved it didn’t happen. Same thing happened with the Khan Sheikhoun fiasco from last year.
Consortium News – Will NYT Retract Latest Anti-Russian ‘Fraud’? – Robert Parry – – July 22, 2016
Last Saturday, on the eve of the second anniversary of the tragedy that claimed 298 lives, the Times touted the amateur analysis asserting that the Russian government had manipulated two satellite photos that revealed Ukrainian anti-aircraft missiles in eastern Ukraine at the time of the shoot-down.
For instance, in his first big splash, Higgins echoed U.S. propaganda in Syria about the Aug. 21, 2013 sarin gas attack — blaming it on President Bashar al-Assad — but was forced to back down from his assessment when aeronautical experts revealed that the sarin-carrying missile had a range of only about two kilometers, much shorter than Higgins had surmised in blaming the attack on Syrian government forces. (Despite that key error, Higgins continued claiming the Syrian government was guilty.)
Higgins also gave the Australian “60 Minutes” program a location in eastern Ukraine where a “getaway” Buk missile battery was supposedly videoed en route back to Russia, except that when the news crew got there the landmarks didn’t match up, causing the program to have to rely on sleight-of-hand editing to deceive its viewers.
When I noted the discrepancies and posted screenshots from the “60 Minutes” program to demonstrate the falsehoods, “60 Minutes” launched a campaign of insults against me and resorted to more video tricks and outright journalistic fraud in defense of Higgins’s faulty information.
This pattern of false claims and even fraud to promote these stories has not stopped the mainstream Western press from showering Higgins and Bellingcat with acclaim. It probably doesn’t hurt that Bellingcat’s “disclosures” always dovetail with the propaganda themes emanating from Western governments.
It also turns out that both Higgins and “armscontrolwonk.com” have crossover in personnel, such as Melissa Hanham, a co-author of the MH-17 report who also writes for Bellingcat, as does Aaron Stein, who joined in promoting Higgins’s work at “armscontrolwonk.com.”
The two groups also have links to the pro-NATO think tank, Atlantic Council, which has been at the forefront of pushing NATO’s new Cold War with Russia. Higgins is now listed as a “nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Future Europe Initiative” and armscontrolwonk.com describes Stein as a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East.
Armscontrolwonk.com is run by nuclear proliferation specialists from the Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey, but they appear to have no special expertise in photographic forensics.”
Read the MIT Global Security Working Group – Possible Implications of Faulty US Technical Intelligence in the Damascus Nerve Agent Attack of Aug. 21, 2013 – Richard Loyd, Theodore Postol – Jan. 14, 2014 – and then compare the REAL science put together by REAL scientists and then go over to Bellingcat’s ridiculous blog and compare the differences.
Real science verses junk science.
Real healthcare verses faith healers.
Truth verses lies.
Higgins started off with no training at all. He was an unemployed finance and admin worker staying at home while his wife worked. He started blogging and early on he came to the realization that telling people the truth about geopolitical events didn’t pay as well as making up lies in support of various foreign policy agendas desired by the various Western powers he now serves on the Atlantic Council.
So that is what he did.
Bellingcat’s founder Eliot Higgins also has made journalistic errors that would have ended the careers of many true professionals, yet he continues to be cited and hailed by the likes of The New York Times and The Washington Post, which have historically turned up their noses about Internet-based journalism.
The secret to Higgins’s success seems to be that he reinforces what the U.S. government’s propagandists want people to believe but lack the credibility to sell. It’s a great business model, marketing yourself as a hip “citizen journalist” who just happens to advance Official Washington’s “group thinks.”
We saw similar opportunism among many wannabe media stars in 2002-03 when U.S. commentators across the political spectrum expressed certitude about Iraq’s hidden stockpiles of WMD. Robert Parry
Higgins made up bullshit graphics about Syrian troops using “barrel bombs” (because he knew what Hell cannons were and who actually used them) and when the first “red line” chemical weapons false flag event occurred (to help Obama justify attacking the Syrian people directly) he became the “go-to-expert” all of a sudden on chemical weapons. He was a darling of the complicit media until people like Robert Parry and Theodore Postol exposed him for the lying know-nothing sycophant he really was.
Eliot dug himself into a little hole and licked his wounds until the neo-Nazi regime we installed in Ukraine shot down flight MH-17 and then he was front and center, once again, with his junk-science snake-oil blaming the separatists and of course, Russia, for the event. And once again, Robert Parry was there to make him pay for his greed-based sins against the whole of humanity.
Consortium News – MH-17 Case: ‘Old’ Journalism vs. ‘New’ – Robert Parry – Oct. 21, 2015
Higgins has become a favorite, too, of the Atlantic Council, which has partnered with him for a report about Russian involvement in the Ukraine conflict, and he wins praise from the Soros-financed Human Rights Watch, which has lobbied for U.S. military intervention against the Assad government in Syria. (Like Higgins, Human Rights Watch pushed discredited theories about where Syrian sarin-gas attack originated.)
Yet, because Higgins’s claims dovetail so neatly with U.S. government propaganda and neoconservative narratives, he is treated like an oracle by credulous journalists, the Oracle of Leicester. For instance, Australia’s “60 Minutes” dispatched a crew to Higgins’s house to get the supposed coordinates for where the so-called “Buk getaway video” was filmed another curious scene that appeared mysteriously on the Internet.
When “60 Minutes” got to the spot near Luhansk in eastern Ukraine where Higgins sent them, the location did not match up with the video. Although there were some billboards in the video and at the site in Luhansk, they were different shapes and all the other landmarks were off, too. Still, the Australian news crew pretended that it was at the right place, using some video sleight-of-hand to snooker the viewers.
However, when I published screen grabs of the getaway video and the Luhansk location, it was clear to anyone that the scenes didn’t match up…
Understandably Eliot Higgins hated Robert Parry and did his best back then to try to defend his bullshit propaganda. The VAST majority of the comments on his own website clearly state Eliot is wrong and his images didn’t match the location. But, like Robert predicted in his article, Higgins didn’t care as he already got paid.
I guess maybe this time around Eliot felt a little more comfortable concocting his latest round of fabricated junk science since he knew Robert was long gone to a better place where he doesn’t care anymore if lying opportunists like Eliot Higgins makes some bank while pushing us every closer to WWIII.
Of course, imagine his surprise when, in the absence of a real investigative journalist like Robert Parry to expose his lies, instead he got the U.S. Secretary of Defense and the French Defense Minister.
Sometime you just have to smile at the irony of it all don’t you? Can you imagine the look on Eliot’s face when he read that? Makes you smile doesn’t it?
Below you will find a portion of the transcript of the Sec. Mattis press conference from Feb. 2, 2018 and a link so you can read the rest of it.
I almost feel for the little weasel Bellingcat but you know what? He made his choice. He picked a side. The side that lies, the side that fabricates. The side the obfuscates and tosses around discussion ending accusations (“conspiracy theorists”) like they are handing out candy on Halloween.
I wonder when he’ll call Gen. Mattis a “conspiracy theorist”
I made a different choice when I started this work and I stuck with it. And for that I might be poorer and never featured on 60 Minutes or in the New York Times, but sleep better at night and can look myself in the eye in the mirror.
And Robert. He made his choice as well and we are all just a little better off for it.
Perhaps we don’t know and or appreciate just how much better off we all are for his life choices. People like Robert were always our fail-safes against those like Elliot Higgins. Our fire-walls against a virus of greed, opportunism and deceit.
And like any other virus, now that one of the fire-walls is down, Elliot tries once again to infect our society with his decease-ridden little fingers, typing away his baseless crass opportunistic lies on his keyboard, hoping against all hope that another Robert Parry isn’t out here paying attention to him, ever watchful, ever diligent. An anti-virus of truth, decency and honesty like Robert was.
My guess is… like always… Elliot Higgins is wrong.
And I personally can’t wait too see it.
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