The Israeli army used US-manufactured white phosphorous shells in a brutal attack on south Lebanon in October, the Washington Post reported Monday, citing an analysis of shell fragments found in the southern Lebanese village of Al-Dhahira.
A Washington Post journalist came across the remnants of three 155-millimeter artillery shells near the border. Production codes found on the shells indicate that they were made by ammunition depots in Louisiana and Arkansas in 1989 and 1992.
White phosphorus fired by Israeli army on Nov.12. via Reuters
Residents told the journalist that the shells in question “incinerated at least four homes.” Nine people were injured in the white phosphorous attack, which reportedly took place on October 16, including three who were hospitalized.
Photos and videos verified by Amnesty International show the white phosphorus falling on Al-Dhahira on October 16. “Israeli forces continued to shell the town with white phosphorus munitions for hours,” trapping residents in their homes until 7:00 AM the next day, locals told the Washington Post, adding that they now refer to that evening as the “black night.”
Israel has used white phosphorous on southern Lebanon over 60 times since the war began in October, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). “The Israeli army fired artillery shells containing white phosphorus, an incendiary weapon, in military operations along Lebanon’s southern border between 10 and 16 October 2023,” Amnesty International said on October 31st, adding that the October 16 attack must be immediately investigated as a war crime.
Israel claimed its use of the banned munitions was in line with international law, given that they used them to create “smokescreens” and not for targeting, according to an army statement.
However, the October 16 white phosphorous attack took place at night, when “smoke would have little practical use … and [when] there were no Israeli troops on the Lebanese side of the border to mask with smokescreens,” Washington Post said.
With Russia’s war in Ukraine now in its fourth month, mainstream media consumers have been treated to seemingly endless headlines and analysis of Russia’s extensive military losses. At the same time Ukrainian forces have tended to be lionized and their battlefield prowess romanticized, with essentially zero public information so far being given which details up-to-date Ukrainian force casualties, set-backs, and equipment losses.
But for the first time The Washington Post is out with a surprisingly dire and negative assessment of how US-backed and equipped Ukrainian forces are actually fairing. Gone is the rosy idealizing lens through which each and every encounter with the Russians is typically portrayed. WaPo correspondent and author of the new report Sudarsan Raghavan underscores of the true situation that “Ukrainian leaders project an image of military invulnerability against Russia. But commanders offer a more realistic portrait of the war, where outgunned volunteers describe being abandoned by their military brass and facing certain death at the front.”
As many careful and less idealistic observers suspected the whole time, a steady stream of both wartime propaganda and one-sided social media feeds where it seems the only tanks being blown up are Russian ones has served to present a very skewed portrayal of the battlefield to the Western public. While it’s perhaps easier to get sucked into this pro-Ukraine bias based on the innumerable so-called open source intelligence self-anointed ‘experts’ on Twitter, this is less so if one wades into Telegram, where a flood of uncensored videos from both sides gives a truer picture, as the fresh report seems to also suggest.
The Washington Post report belatedly admits the avalanche of propaganda based in a pro-Kiev, pro-West narrative from the outset: “Videos of assaults on Russian tanks or positions are posted daily on social media. Artists are creating patriotic posters, billboards and T-shirts. The postal service even released stamps commemorating the sinking of a Russian warship in the Black Sea.”
The report then pivots to the reality of an undertrained, poorly commanded and equipped, rag-tag force of mostly volunteers in the East who find themselves increasingly surrounded by the numerically superior Russian military which has penetrated almost the entire Donbas region. “Ukraine, like Russia, has provided scant information about deaths, injuries or losses of military equipment. But after three months of war, this company of 120 men is down to 54 because of deaths, injuries and desertions,” the report reads as it follows one particular battalion.
The report’s sources speak out despite threat of being court-martialed amid a heavily controlled information flow:
“War breaks people down,” said Serhiy Haidai, head of the regional war administration in Luhansk province, acknowledging many volunteers were not properly trained because Ukrainian authorities did not expect Russia to invade. But he maintained that all soldiers are taken care of: “They have enough medical supplies and food. The only thing is there are people that aren’t ready to fight.”
The report references a video widely circulating online this week wherein a group the size of a platoon declares they simply can’t fight for lack of weaponry, ammunition, food and proper command support:
“We are being sent to certain death,” said a volunteer, reading from a prepared script, adding that a similar video was filmed by members of the 115th Brigade 1st Battalion. “We are not alone like this, we are many.”
Ukraine’s military rebutted the volunteers’ claims in their own video posted online, saying the “deserters” had everything they needed to fight: “They thought they came for a vacation,” one service member said. “That’s why they left their positions.”
In the wake of the video, the Ukrainian troops featured are being accused of ‘desertion’:
Additional videos have surfaced that are similar: units complain even of being left to fight in already impossible conditions with WWI and WWII-era rifles, which can do little up against Russia’s far superior firepower.
Whether you call such criticism “propaganda” or “dissent,” it is absurd to blame it all on Russia. When it comes to “destabilizing people’s trust in institutions,” the E.U. — especially with its inept handling of the Great Recession and its clumsy response to the Syrian refugee crisis — is doing a bang-up job on its own without Russian help.Read the rest of this entry »
WaPo and NYT Prove ‘Fake News’ Is a Good Thing — but Only If It’s Anti-Russian
By Alice Salles
Anti Media
Journalist Abby Martin was surprised to learn through a fake news story on New York Times that she had quit her former job as a reporter at RT.com due to propaganda.
“I worked at RT for 1 [year] after speaking out,” she tweeted in response, adding she had left the TV channel over other reasons, not “[because] of ‘propaganda.’” RT, or Russia Today, is funded by the Russian government, but instead of confirming their story first with Martin and waiting to hit publish once they knew the author wasn’t simply speculating, the New York Times allowed a fake news article to hit the web. The story was clearly meant to confirm the then-recently released Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)’s report concerning Russia’s alleged effort to change the outcome of the 2016 presidential election in the United States. But what it actually did was further damage the mainstream media’s reputation as a source of real news.
The original New York Times piece alleged Martin was one of two anchors who quit “during live broadcasts to protest the network’s coverage of Russia’s invasion and occupation of Crimea.” Once the piece hit the internet, Martin took to Twitter to point out the mistake, urging author Russell Goldman to issue a correction.
Shortly after, the piece was edited, and the following correction footnote was added:
“An earlier version of this article misstated when the RT anchor Abby Martin left the network. She quit some months after denouncing on air Russia’s war in Ukraine, not during that broadcast.”
But Martin noticed that despite the edit, the piece was still incorrect.
In a tweet published after the correction note went live, she added that the “correction still insinuates I quit RT over Ukraine but I had my show for [one year] after denouncing Putin — disproving the article’s point.” At the time, she justified her departure from the network, explaining she wanted to “focus on investigative field reporting.”
In a back and forth with Goldman, the journalist expressed gratitude for the edit, pointing out that, “unfortunately [the non-factual piece] was up for almost a day [with] glaring errors about me.” In the response to the New York Times author, she added: “The truth disproves your whole point.” Goldman did not provide an answer to that particular remark.
Despite the lack of evidence connecting the Kremlin to any alleged attempt to meddle with U.S. elections, the ODNI report has been highly cited as “proof” Russian president Vladimir Putin was directly involved with attempts to elect Donald Trump. This is especially true with publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post. The Post’s reputation recently took a hit after it published reports claiming Russia had invaded the U.S. power grid. Needless to say, the report was inconsistent with the facts.
Like the New York Times, the Post published the report without first confirming the story with Burlington Electric, the electrical company Russia allegedly hacked.
From The Intercept:
“Apparently, the Post did not even bother to contact the company before running its wildly sensationalistic claims, so Burlington Electric had to issue its own statement to the Burlington Free Press, which debunked the Post’s central claim.”
Martin echoed Glenn Greenwald’s words when responding to a question concerning the New York Times piece.
“The so-called paper of record hadn’t even bothered to reach out,” she told RT.
Ironically, the New York Times and the Washington Post have been two of the fiercest critics of so-called fake news on the internet. The Washington Post even published an article that claimed many pushers of fake news — including the site you are reading right now — are actually Russian agents. Hilariously, though, WaPo later distanced itself from the article after it was found to be fake news itself.
Why are so many well-established news organizations like The New York Times and the Washington Post risking their reputations over these small mistakes, failing to check with sources before breaking news?
We might never know the answer, but many seem to think it’s politically motivated.
This article is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Alice Salles and theAntiMedia.org.
“Of course, the NYT/WaPo nexus rarely publishes any of our serious dissents and therefore we take refuge in alternate media, such as ‘Consortiumnews,’ ‘The Intercept,’ ‘Naked Capitalism,’ ‘Counterpunch,’ ‘Zero Hedge,’ ‘Antiwar.com,’ ‘Truthdig,’ ‘Common Dreams,’ etc. I think then we were all quite shocked (but not surprised) when recently we saw 200 WEBSITES listed as tools of the Kremlin (WaPo’s November 24, “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election”).”
The DNC out plumbed Nixon’s plumbers. Fixing primaries, trying to fix elections, enticing illegal aliens to vote and when one of their own leaks the info they blame the Russians! Vote early, vote often!
MCViewPoint 