White Helmets video: Swedish doctors denounce macabre propaganda use of dead children & staged chemical attacks to obtain No-Fly Zone
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By Prof Marcello Ferrada de Noli, MD
The Indicter
Tuesday, Mar 14, 2017
An examination of a White Helmets video, conducted by Swedish medical
doctors, specialists in various fields, including pediatrics, have
revealed that the 'life-saving' procedures seen in the film are
incorrect – in fact life-threatening – or simply fake, including
simulated emergency resuscitation techniques being used on already
lifeless children.
I
The Alleged Sarmin Attack
There has been a recent intense
publicity campaign that has capitalised on the Oscar for best
documentary being awarded to the NATO and Gulf state funded
organization, the White Helmets and their Netflix documentary producers
[1] The White Helmets had previously been winners of the “Alternative
Nobel Prize”, given to them in Sweden in 2016. [2] These various awards
have ensured that the White Helmet fictitious “saving-children's-lives”
videos have been re-circulating across corporate and social media, a
major PR coup for the sponsors of this questionable organization.
Central to this PR campaign and just
prior to the Oscar award ceremony, Human Rights Watch published a
“retrospective” report on February 13th 2017, focusing on
spurious accounts of chemical attacks on the recently liberated city of
Aleppo. This familiar HRW propaganda piece recycled a previous report
from April 2015 detailing an alleged chlorine gas attack in Sarmin,
Idlib [4].
Footage of the aftermath of this attack
was provided, at the time, by none other than the White Helmets, which
brings us to the macabre video, uploaded by this alleged first responder NGO to YouTube on March 15th 2015 [5]
The “Sarmin attack” report published by
HRW in April 2015 is, in itself, a remarkable feat of evidence
engineering. HRW refers to two witnesses – anonymous “Sarmin residents” – stating they have “heard” helicopters “shortly before the attack”. They heard them but did not see them. Both witnesses also reported hearing “no explosions” [4] In the entire HRW report there is not one reported sighting
of a helicopter, the existence of which should be an essential element
of the White Helmets claims, uncritically reproduced by HRW and never
questioned by the UN.
One of the key witnesses cited in the HRW, April 2015, report is a White Helmet operative by the name of Leith Fares [6]
“Leith Fares, a
rescue worker with Syrian Civil Defence, told Human Rights Watch. “A
helicopter always drops two barrels.” “You know, we were at first
actually happy,” Fares said. “It is usually good news when there is no
explosion.” [4]
A notably peculiar factor of the White
Helmets footage of this alleged attack is that they do not film any
external shots of the attack itself, despite their declared anticipation
of being targeted, having “heard” helicopters.
Instead, the only footage is of an
enclosed indoor space with no contextual filming to evidence where they
are in Syria or that an attack has just taken place. The indoor
environment certainly resembles a makeshift hospital emergency room.
White Helmet “rescuers” parade in and out, manhandling and maneuvering
the limp, lifeless bodies of three children. The naked bodies of these
children have no external, visible injuries and do not respond when the
various “medics” perform all manner of ostensibly “life-saving” procedures, in a haphazard effort to resuscitate these children.
II
“A Macabre Scene”
In order to obtain qualified clinical opinions, I sent the video uploaded by White Helmets
to eminent Swedish medical specialists. I stressed that particular
attention must be paid to the Syringe needle procedure (seemingly,
intra-cardiac injection) carried out on one of the children.
[The scenes shown in the video above form part of the full video uploaded by White Helmets in YouTube, found here.]
Dr Leif Elinder, a well-known Swedish medical doctor, author and
specialist in pediatrics, summarised the following in his reply: [7]
“After examination of the video
material, I found that the measures inflicted upon those children, some
of them lifeless, are bizarre, non-medical, non-lifesaving, and even
counterproductive in terms of life-saving purposes of children”.
Further, I received a detailed clinical statement from Dr Lena Oske, a
Swedish medical doctor and general practitioner. In her statement, Dr
Oske referred to the presumed, adrenaline injection, performed in the
White Helmet video. Her specialist opinion
dismisses the procedure conducted in the White Helmet video, as
unqualified and incorrect. Furthermore, she describes the earlier
assessment of the procedure by a colleague who had exclaimed:
“If not already dead, this injection would have killed the child!”
Excerpts from Dr Lena Oske’s statement to SWEDHR: [8]
“Intracutaneous injection
with adrenalin may be used if any other resuscitation measure does not
succeed. Especially under precarious circumstances – such as in field
emergency settings– where safer ways for the administration of
medication (i.e. endotracheal, intravenous, or intraosseus) might be
difficult or unavailable. But not in the way shown in the video”.
“In order to perform the injection,
CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) has to be interrupted, and then the
CPR resumed immediately after. Which is not done in the procedures shown
in the video.”
And referring to a correct medical procedure, the Swedish specialist MD adds:
“The technique is simple. Long
needle, syringe with 1 mg adrenaline, find the 4th or 5th intercostal
space and insert the needle just adjacent to the sternum, left side,
deposit the medication after checking you are in the right position
(aspiration of blood and no resistance), take out the needle and
immediately resume CPR! So, the doctor who wrote the comment, ‘If not
already dead, this injection would have killed the child’ was right!
What a macabre scene; and how sad.” [8]
[Both colleagues, doctors Leif Elinder and Lena Oske, are senior
members of SWEDHR, and on behalf of the SWEDHR board I fully endorse the statements of both doctors.]
III
‘White Helmets’ Associations with Nusra-Front, Al-Qaeda in Syria
It is also important to highlight that the so called White Helmets who have bestowed upon themselves, the title of Syria Civil Defence, are
actually fraudulently mimicking the REAL Syria Civil Defence,
established in Syria (not in Turkey) in 1953 and the only Syria Civil
Defence officially recognised as such, by the (UN affiliated)
International Civil Defence Organisation, based in Geneva.
This UK/US shadow state building
project, in Syria, has been extensively investigated in the prominent
work of independent journalist, Vanessa Beeley. [9] The authentic Syria
Civil Defence serves an estimated 80 percent of the Syrian population
inside Syria that lives under the protection of the Syrian state in
Syrian government-held territory.
Conversely, the White Helmets operate
exclusively in Nusra Front and ISIS terrorist-controlled areas and
therefore would service less than 20 percent of the remaining Syrian civilian
population, when one takes into account the sheer numbers of foreign
mercenaries and militants who also occupy those areas. Added to which,
these “moderate” extremist-held areas are continuously dwindling as the
Syrian armed forces and their allies inexorably reconquer the national
territory of Syria and release it from the grip of externally funded
terrorism. As the terrorist factions are pushed out of liberated areas,
such as East Aleppo, we clearly see the White Helmets depart in tandem.
Evidence of the White Helmets' affiliation
to the various terrorist factions is extensively documented. There are
evidenced reports on one of the more prominent White Helmet leaders,
Mustafa al Haj Yussef, in Khan Sheikhoun, Idlib where many of the East
Aleppo terrorists and their civil defence have fled.[11] These reports
detail his declarations of allegiance to various extremist factions such
as Ahrar Al Sham, responsible for many of the ethnic cleansing pogroms
across Syria. Yussef has openly called for the shelling of civilians in
Damascus during the 2014 elections. He has advocated robbery, looting
and sectarian punishments and murder under certain circumstances.
Imagine a Red Cross official calling for such reprisals, and you can
understand how extraordinary this behaviour is for an Oscar winning, “neutral, apolitical, impartial” allegedly humanitarian NGO.
Yusef’s affiliations and behaviour are
not the exception, the majority of White Helmets operatives have
demonstrated the same ideological allegiances to extremist, armed groups
in Syria.
The UN Theatre of the Macabre
The final scene of this “drama” is the
closed-door session at the UN Security Council, where the White Helmets
video we have referred to, took centre stage at a performance by former
US Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power.
Predictably, the shocking scenes of
children’s lifeless bodies being crudely manipulated and “arranged”
combined with the theatrical and entirely ineffectual “life-saving”
interventions – as depicted by the White Helmets movie – emotionally
impacted upon the UN decision makers. In Samantha Power’s words:
“I saw no one in the room without tears. If there was a dry eye in the room, I didn’t see it” [12]
Unfortunately, UN officials were so
distracted by the macabre performance they had just witnessed, that they
did not think to ask for a translation of the various instructions
being issued by the “medics” in the film. A rudimentary element of any
investigation process must be to clarify context, particularly when the
results have a potential to precipitate a terrifying escalation of a conflict
between the US and Russia on Syrian soil.
SWEDHR took the time to get the dialogue in the White Helmet movie translated. At 1:16 the doctor in full light green and a gray & black jumper says:
”Include in the
picture (meaning in the film or the frame -translators note) the mother
should be underneath and the children on top of her, hey! Make sure the
mother is underneath.”
Perhaps, if the video had been
subtitled, the UN officials might have queried this overt staging of an
event that one must assume was chaotic, harrowing and stressful.
Perhaps they would have found it strange that, in the midst of a “chemical weapon” attack, one of the medics, attempting to save the lives of three Syrian children, would be concerned with the positioning of their bodies for the camera.
Objective: No Fly Zone
The UNSC showing of the White Helmet
footage, coincided with a universal call for a No-Fly Zone from NATO and
Gulf state funded “moderate rebel” and terrorist groups, who depend
upon the White Helmets for their civil defence. This
international No-Fly-Zone campaign gathered momentum on the back of the
UNSC tears over the White Helmet video of the alleged Sarmin chlorine
gas attack, and was even supported in the Swedish media. [13]
In a later Channel 4 report on the
alleged Sarmin chlorine gas attacks, during which they aired a brief,
sanitized segment of the White Helmet video, Samantha Power declared:
“This document
that we record now will be used at some point in a court of law, and the
perpetrators of this crime need to have that in mind” [14]
In addition to calls for a No-Fly Zone
and the analogous term ‘Safe Zones’, it should not be overlooked that
all of the dubious and misrepresented media reporting emanating from the
White Helmets is also being used to justify a continuous program of
crippling US-led sanctions against Syria. According to a 2016
leaked UN internal report [15], US and EU economic
sanctions on Syria are causing ‘huge suffering among ordinary Syrians’ and prohibiting the delivery of essential, humanitarian aid.
Conclusion
UN representatives were moved to tears
by the spectacle presented to them by the White Helmets. An appropriate
response, to the black art performance of the White Helmets, whose
acting talents have propelled them onto Hollywood’s red carpet. In any
sane world, however, the ‘misuse’, the propaganda abuse, of the
children being exploited as props in a war that will inevitably kill
more children, should also qualify the White Helmets for due process in a
court of law and condemn their sponsors to prosecution in the European
Court of Human Rights.
As for war-hawk Samantha Power’s
threats, echoed by her puppet human rights organisations, controlled by
western corporate elites, I would like to mention that the war in Syria
started when the US and NATO states, in unholy alliance with Gulf State
tyrannies, funded, trained and armed the “moderate” extremist forces
which have since invaded and terrorized the Syrian state and its people,
who have steadfastly stood with their elected government against the
tide of regime change propaganda and proxy military intervention.
In the final judgement, when the
international court for war crimes puts the immoral warmongers on trial,
they will be condemned and found guilty of abhorrent crimes against
Humanity by all the decent people of this world.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank independent journalist Vanessa Beeley for invaluable feedback.
References, Notes.
[1] The nomination
done by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences took place
January 27, 2017. The award decision was taken February 26. The Human
Rights Watch (HRW) report sustaining the not-proved allegations by the
White Helmets against the government of Syria was published Feb 13,
2017, right in the middle of the period between the nomination and the
decision of the Oscar award to the film 'White Helmets'.
[6] Leith (or Laith)
Fares is repeatedly found in both Arab and Western news giving
statements – from a variety of locations in Syria – to visiting Western
journalists. For instance, while in the Human Rights Watch report Fares
gives the notion of being present at the alleged event in Sarmin, in Arab News
it is reported that Leith Fares is “a rescue worker in Ariha”, and that
“(Fares) told AFP his team had pulled at least 20 wounded people out of
the rubble.”
‘Laith Fares’
also keeps an uploading account in YouTube with anti-Syria propaganda videos,
and on behalf of White Helmets political positions. [5]
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