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HuffPost UK ran yet another hit piece smearing academic critics of the dirty war on Syria as Russian stooges. The outlets executive editor, Jess Brammar, assists a British government program that censors journalism that may compromise UK military and intelligence operations.By Ben Norton

The Huffington Post has relied on Western government officials and organizations funded by Western governments to viciously smear anti-war academics as useful idiots of Russia, claiming they are being used by the Kremlin.

Ironically, HuffPost UK has done this while its own executive editor actively collaborates with the British Ministry of Defense in a program that censors journalism on behalf of UK military and intelligence operations, in order to protect national security interests.

HuffPost UK published a hit piece by Chris York on January 29 that hearkens back to the era of McCarthyite witch hunts. Titled The Useful Idiots: How These British Academics Helped Russia Deny War Crimes At The UN, Yorks hatchet job is dedicated to destroying the reputations of several anti-war scholars who have done extensive research exposing the lies and regime-change propaganda spread by Western governments in their hybrid war on Syria.

It was Yorks twelfth piece attacking this small group of academics. From the perspective of the British public, a group of semi-obscure professors is an unusual source of interest. However, it is clear that the UK military-intelligence apparatus that dumped untold millions of pounds into promoting regime change in Syria has a clear agenda here.

Yorks article relies almost entirely on the unsubstantiated opinions of European government officials and groups that are bankrolled by the United States and European governments. It also features some glaring omissions, leaving out key details and misleading readers.

HuffPost UK executive editor Jess Brammar took to Twitter to promote the hit piece, claiming it shows how a group of British academics have been used by Russia to help them deny war crimes by the Assad regime at the UN.

Its quite a tale please give it a read, Brammar added. It is indeed a tale and a tall one at that, given the article dabbles in fiction with unsubstantiated hyperbolic claims based on Cold War-era propaganda tropes.

Brammar shared a quote from the piece that is attributed to an anonymous European diplomat, who claimed anti-war British scholars are unwittingly and naively acting as agents of propaganda for the Russians, or actively support[ing] Russian disinformation.

While the HuffPost UKs executive editor smears dissenting academics as agents of propaganda for the Russians, she herself actively collaborates with a British government censorship program as writer Caitlin Johnstone first pointed out.

Jess Brammar is a member of the Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) Committee, a government initiative overseen by the Ministry of Defence (MOD) that, according to its official website, exists to prevent inadvertent public disclosure of information that would compromise UK military and intelligence operations and methods or potentially challenge national security interests.

In other words, the DSMA Committee is a group of media elites who voluntarily agree to collaborate with the British government to censor stories and information the UK military and spy operations deem inconvenient or too dangerous for the public to see.

The DSMA Committee is chaired by the director of general security policy for the UK Ministry of Defense. It includes four more government officials: the directors of national security at the MOD, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Home Office, and the Cabinet Office. They are joined by three military officials in secretarial positions, along with a government assistant.

Rounding out the committee are 17 media elites, representing major publishers such as the Huffington Post, the Times, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, Sky News, ITV, the BBC, the Press Association, Harper Colins UK, and more.

Brammar was one of the only two members of the committee to be nominated directly by the chair and vice-chairs. In other words, the director of general security policy for the UK Ministry of Defense personally chose her to be on the DSMA Committee a clear stamp of approval for her editorial judgment from the British military establishment.

In a report entitled, How the UK Security Services neutralised the countrys leading liberal newspaper, journalists Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis demonstrated how the military-intelligence apparatus cultivated The Guardian as its tool. The process began in earnest after the Guardian embarrassed Western governments by publishing secret documents leaked by National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.

The DSMA Committee was previously called the Defence Advisory Notice (DA-Notice) and Defence Notice (D-Notice) Committee, and purports to be voluntary. Kennard dug through officials minutes of meetings held by the committee and found that the secretary implied otherwise, insisting, The Guardian was obliged to seek advice under the terms of the DA notice code, and This failure to seek advice was a key source of concern and considerable efforts had been made to address it.

Periodically, the MOD-led committee sends out a private message to British media outlets called a D-Notice, which warns the ostensibly independent press against publishing information that would jeopardise both national security and possibly UK personnel.

Kennard outlined how these D-Notices have been used to muffle journalists, and prevent the publication of stories that threatened to embarrass the British government.

HuffPost UK editor Jess Brammar is at the heart of this government effort to silence critical media.

But it is not just Brammars ongoing, willing participation in a British military-led censorship program that makes her attempts to portray Huffington Post and her reporter Chris York as noble truth-tellers fending off attacks by a baying mob of Kremlin-sponsored abusers so hypocritical.

HuffPost UK smearing independent thinkers and critical-minded academics as Russian puppets while actively peddling propaganda on behalf of Western governments is astoundingly ironic.

In his wildly misleading article, York describes the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (WGSPM), a collective of dissident British scholars, as agents of propaganda for the Russians.

The thrust of this smear piece is the unsubstantiated opinion of an unnamed European diplomat, who is quoted in five paragraphs viciously maligning the scholars, and whose personal partisan views are presented as absolute fact.

The HuffPost UK hatchet job provides no actual evidence that these scholars have been working with or for the Russian government. The only links to the Kremlin that York could find are hilariously thin: one Russian official praised the group, and another tweeted a link to their work.

Moreover, some of the so-called experts cited by York happen to work for pro-war organizations funded directly by Western governments.

York relies on pundit Shadi Hamid to depict WGSPM as crazy loons. Hamid works at the hawkish think tank the Brookings Institution, which is funded by the Qatari monarchy and US governments.

Hamid is also a vocal advocate for Western military intervention who has gone to absurd lengths to defend NATOs regime-change war on Libya, which destroyed the most prosperous country in Africa and left behind a failed state that turned into a massive ISIS base and a hub for trafficking and enslavement of African refugees.

Another purported expert cited by York is the open source reporter Eliot Higgins, who smears the WGSPM as useful idiots.

Higgins is the founder of the pro-NATO blog Bellingcat, which is funded directly by the US governments regime-change arm the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a notorious CIA cutout. Bellingcat is also part of a UK government-financed program backed by the British Foreign Office. And Higgins former employer is the Atlantic Council, NATOs unofficial think tank, also bankrolled by Western governments as well as Gulf monarchies and the arms industry.

While HuffPost UKs in-house regime-change cheerleader Chris York treats the Bellingcat founder as an expert, even the New York Times acknowledged in a puff piece that Higgins has no real expertise. Higgins attributed his skill not to any special knowledge of international conflicts or digital data, the paper noted, but to the hours he had spent playing video games, which, he said, gave him the idea that any mystery can be cracked.

In recent months, the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media published leaks from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) revealing that at least two whistleblowers complained that the UN-created organization had become politicized, accusing the management of suppressing and even reversing scientific findings under US government pressure.

The apparent OPCW suppression concerns the allegations that the Syrian government used chemical weapons in the city of Douma in April 2018, in an area occupied by Salafi-jihadist insurgents.

The US, British, and French governments claimed without evidence that Damascus had launched a gas attack in this Islamist extremist-occupied area. In response, Washington and its allies launched missile strikes against the Syrian government in violation of international law.

Numerous leaks from the OPCW have cast doubt on the unsubstantiated allegations of Western governments. Along with the WGSPM, WikiLeaks has published several batches of leaks from the OPCW, including internal emails that show signs of high-level suppression of inconvenient scientific findings about the incident in Douma.

HuffPost UKs Chris York did not even mention WikiLeaks in his wildly misleading article. Instead, York falsely asserts that there is no reliable evidence to support the theory that the alleged Douma gas attack was staged by the Salafi-jihadist insurgents on the ground.

Conspicuously absent from Yorks article was the smoking gun that arrived in the form of testimony at the United Nations Security Council by former OPCW inspection team leader and engineering expert Ian Henderson.

In January, Henderson told the UN via video that OPCW management had suppressed the fact-finding mission (FFM) teams findings on the ground in Douma. (Henderson had wanted to testify in person at the UN, but the US government did not give him a visa.)

We had serious misgivings that a chemical attack had occurred, Henderson explained. The former OPCW expert added that his months of research provided further support for the view that there had not been a chemical attack.

In his article, York completely avoided mention of Henderson and UN testimony, in a very egregious and misleading oversight. And this striking omission appears to be intentional, because on Twitter, York later condemned Henderson, along with the other OPCW whistleblower who goes by Alex, claiming they are wrong.

The fact that York would conveniently leave out Hendersons UN testimony the most important, and scandalous piece of evidence yet of OPCW chicanery while publicly smearing him on Twitter shows that the methodology of the reporting itself is clearly biased, sloppy, and unprofessional.

Yorks attack piece is also self-referential. In one especially dubious sentence, he claims the WGSPM has previously been accused of whitewashing war crimes.' To support this grave accusation, York links to an article by himself from 2018, which is essentially a mimeograph of his latest attack.

This 2018 smear piece accusing the WGSPM academics of whitewashing war crimes attributes the outrageous accusation not to a legal expert on war crimes but rather to Leila al-Shami, who has spent years lobbying for foreign intervention to violently overthrow the Syrian government.

Al-Shami is, in fact, the pen name for a mysterious British activist whose credentials are impossible to validate. According to Robin Yassin-Kassab, the co-author of her book, Burning Syria, Leila al-Shami is the pseudonym of another British Syrian who worked in Syria in the human rights field before the revolution.

For years, al-Shami has refused to show her face on camera. During a 2016 event at NYUs Kevorkian Center, for example, attendees were forbidden from filming al-Shamis talk for security reasons. In a June 2017 interview with Spains El Nacional (in which she and Yassin-Kassab wrongly forecasted a partition of Syria), al-Shami was photographed turning away to hide her face. She claimed that she could not be seen publicly for security reasons.

However, during an April 2016 event at New York Citys New School, al-Shami was photographed and filmed while on stage. The image was published by Flatiron Hot News, a local culture publication.

Al-Shami is best known for marketing the cause of regime change in Syria to the Western left, painting it as a glorious grassroots struggle for participatory democracy, while branding its leftist opponents as crypto-fascists and idiots.

Her book, Burning Country, contained no on-the-ground reporting, relying instead on reports by and about opposition activists largely funded by the US government and Gulf states such as the White Helmets and Raed Fares.

While al-Shami claims to have been involved in human rights and social justice struggles in Syria, the human rights group she supposedly co-founded, Tahrir-ICN, appears to be an empty shell that consists of a few barely active social media pages and a dormant blog.

Yorks reliance on a shady figure like this further highlights his deceptive tactics. By citing regime change activists as credible experts while heaping scorn on his subjects with passive-voice phrases like have been accused of, he disguises his own opinions as objective reporting.

Under the leadership of executive editor and British security state collaborator Jess Brammar, Yorks brand of propaganda is not only tolerated at HuffPost UK; it is encouraged.

Yorks hit piece on the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media was, in fact, his 12th attack on the small band of dissident academics. Desperate to suppress inconvenient facts about the dirty war on Syria, some powerful forces have found reliable propagandists at the HuffPost UK.

Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant editor of The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with editor Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.comand he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.

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HuffPost UK editor works with govt censorship program while smearing anti-war scholars as tools of Russia - The Grayzone