Google and Al Jazeera Accused of Orchestrating Syrian Crisis

WikiLeaks reveals emails where it implicates the American State Department of orchestrating Syrian regime change.

WikiLeaks revealed a series of emails which have the potential of implicating the US State Department, Google and Al Jazeera in manipulation of the political scenario that eventually resulted in civil strife in Syria.(Photo: iStockphoto)

• WikiLeaks, in over 30,000 emails, implicates the American State Department in orchestrating the Syrian regime change.
  
• Neil Clark indicates that Hillary Clinton may have been involved.
• Jared Cohen, President of Jigsaw, formerly known as Google Ideas, also accused of being involved.
• Al Jazeera accused of joining forces with Google.

WikiLeaks revealed a series of email conversations from as early as 2010 which indicate that the US State Department may have manipulated the political scenario in Syria, which eventually resulted in civil strife.

In a Russian Today op-ed, Neil Clark wrote about these emails which were leaked by WikiLeaks on 16 March.

Clark, a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger, used the information provided by the leak as evidence of American involvement in the attempted regime change of President Bashar al-Assad’s government. His statement on the West’s portrayal of theMiddle East is bound to ruffle some feathers.

WikiLeaks confirms that — as was the case in Libya and Iraq — almost everything about the official “western establishment” version of the war in Syria was false.

Neil Clark

WikiLeaks Releases Emails and Attachments with Questionable Content

WikiLeaks published a total of 30,322 emails and attachments from June 2010 to August 2014, with thousands written by Hillary Clinton herself, US Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013.

This leak made its most noticeable appearances in the op-ed story run online by the Russian news channel RT, and another story by the Iranian television network PressTV. Other than Daily Mail and The Independent, the leak has not been discussed much anywhere else in mainstream media.

WikiLeaks Accuses Google of Involvement

One comment which drew draw maximum attention comes from Jared Cohen’s emails to Hillary Clinton in 2012. Cohen talks about a virtual tool capable of encouraging defection in the Syrian population.

My team is planning to launch a tool on Sunday that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from. Our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities, nobody is visually representing and mapping the defections, which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition.

Jared Cohen

Currently the President of Jigsaw, formerly known as Google Ideas, Cohen has served some key positions in the US State Department including member of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff, and as an adviser to Condoleezza Rice, followed by Hillary Clinton.

Julian Assange commented on Google and their involvement in foreign policies post a meeting with Cohen and Google chairman Eric Schmidt in 2011 during his house arrest.

Whether it is being just a company or ‘more than just a company, Google’s geopolitical aspirations are firmly enmeshed within the foreign-policy agenda of the world’s largest superpower.

Julian Assange on Google

Al Jazeera Also Partnered with Google, According to WikiLeaks

Cohen wrote in an email to Deputy Secretary Bill Burns in 2012 which mentions Al Jazeera’s involvement in encouraging defection from the Syrian regime.

Given how hard it is to get information into Syria right now, we are partnering with <i>Al-Jazeera</i> who will take primary ownership over the tool we have built, track the data, verify it, and broadcast it back into Syria.&nbsp;

Jared Cohen

Google’s Syrian Defector Tracking tool proved quite beneficial for Al Jazeera. It won the channel the prestigious Online Media Award for “Best Technical Innovation”.

(Picture Courtesy: iStockphoto)

When Google was contacted by RT to comment on WikiLeaks’ allegations, the tech-giant responded with an email that read as follows:

No comment, but pointing out that this data visualisation project was very public, <i>Al Jazeera</i> won a journalism award for it

Google

The tool is currently defunct for unknown reasons.

However, the media network issued an official statement on 29 March where Al Jazeera denied any direct involvement in the communication between Jared Cohen and the US State Department.

Al Jazeera works regularly with technology giants to come up with innovative ways to present information, facts and stories to our audiences, and this project was one example. Al Jazeera is proud of the journalism behind the project, especially because it was - and still is - difficult for journalists to get solid information out of Syria.

Imad Musa Head, of Online, <i>Al Jazeera</i> English

Al Jazeera describes itself as “the first independent news channel in the Arab world” with the goal of giving “a global audience an alternative voice.” The broadcaster is funded by the Qatar government, which has been publicly supporting the rebels in the Syrian conflict.

Facebook Accused by WikiLeaks of Repressing Related Content

The leaked emails were bound to generate an entire series of reactions. One of them, claims WikiLeaks, is Facebook’s attempts to repress posts about these emails on its platform. The website took its grievances against the social media network to Twitter where it explicitly expressed its unhappiness.

The Wall Street Journal reported in 2015 that when American attempts to overthrow Assad had failed by 2012, it resorted to orchestrating a military coup in Syria. The US government took recourse in offering incentives to militant groups within the country. A senior administration official told WSJ of America’s plans:

The White House’s policy in 2011 was to get to the point of a transition in Syria by finding cracks in the regime and offering incentives for people to abandon Assad.

An official to <i>WSJ</i>

As for RT, the news network has been called a “Russian propaganda machine” by Western critics and writers ever since its inception in 2005. Ted Rall, an American columnist comments on RT and says:

If <i>RT </i>wanted PR in American media, this is exactly the move it should make. You would never hear the end of that on American media. You really don’t have a right to call anyone a propaganda if you yourself is doing the same thing.

Ted Rall

No official comments have been provided so far by Hillary Clinton in response to these allegations.