Press TV journalist Serena Shim killed in Turkey

[outsider]

Press TV reporter in Turkey killed in suspicious car accident:
http://www.iran-daily.com/News/13808.html

'Press TV’s correspondent in Turkey, Serena Shim, has been killed in a suspected car accident near the Turkey-Syria border.
Shim was killed on Sunday as she was on a working mission in Turkey to cover the ongoing war in the strategic Syrian town of Kobani.
She was going back to her hotel from a report scene in the city of Suruç in Turkey's Urfa Province when their car collided with a heavy vehicle.
Shim covered reports for Press TV in Lebanon, Iraq, and Ukraine, Press TV reported.
On Friday, she told Press TV that the Turkish intelligence agency had accused her of spying probably due to some of the stories she has covered about Turkey’s stance on the ISIL terrorists in Kobani and its surroundings, adding that she feared being arrested.
Shim said she was among the few journalists obtaining stories of militants infiltrating into Syria through the Turkish border, adding that she had received images from militants crossing the Turkish border into Syria in World Food Organization and other NGOs’ trucks.
Shim flatly rejected accusations against her, saying she was “surprised” at this accusation “because I have nothing to hide and I have never done anything aside my job.”
Kobani and its surroundings have been under attack since mid-September, with the ISIL militants capturing dozens of nearby Kurdish villages.
Turkey has been accused of backing ISIL militants in Syria.'

'Accident' my aunt Fannie.

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

Tim Hayward
On Bellingcat, Truth and War
21 hours ago
https://timhayward.wordpress.com/2017/07/10/on-bellingcat-truth-and-wa r/

Bellingcat has a difficult job, and I admire its founder and leading light, Eliot Higgins. For those who don’t know, the difficult job is to set the record straight when US-UK foreign policy is challenged on the truthfulness of its factual premises. The particular skill required is in maintaining a reputation for reliable and truthful analysis at the same time.

Facts are always, in the end, recalcitrant. They can only ever be spun for so long until a misleading narrative, the effort of maintaining it spent, subsides into acquiescence with the truth.

I admire Eliot Higgins because he does his work with dedication and, for the most part, good humour and civility. Some of his associates will owe their positions to their research skills rather than talents of persuasive communication, but together they make a diligent and, for the most part, effective team.

Higgins is sharp and resourceful. His deft ability to see all sides of a problem and devise insightful and innovative ways of analysing it have brought him justified renown. From his legendary sofa in Leicester he has made his way onto the world media stage. As well as leading the team at Bellingcat he is a Senior Fellow in research at Atlantic Council and Visiting Research Associate at King’s College London, a leading UK university.

As an academic myself, I have thus come to regard Eliot – I hope not too presumptuously – as a colleague. Of course on some matters we differ, as colleagues always will, but I find him personally agreeable and professionally very scrupulous.

His scrupulousness was clear to see only last Sunday. I put it to him – in an amateurish way, via Twitter – that the UK Government could not quite rule out the possibility of opposition forces in Syria having access to the kinds of chemical found in the recent OPCW tests on samples said to come from Khan Sheikhoun this April. Higgins was very gracious in response to my simplistic question, and very patient, given how long he has been studying these matters in depth.

Still, as it happens, others share my concern. In particular, Professor Piers Robinson from Sheffield University, who has done considerable research on how propaganda about war has come to permeate our media, including a recently published analysis of how we were misled about Iraq. He brought his professional acuity to the colloquium. As it also happens, that same day, Peter Hitchens, the famously independent-minded and highly experienced journalist, published a piece in the Mail on Sunday (found half way down the page here) arguing that while everyone now realises we were lied to about Iraq, it would be a very good idea also to check now, rather than 15 years after the event, whether we are being lied to about Syria.

Certainly, we have learned – as millions of people have died in the showing – that if the lie is big enough, the circulation of it will acquire a great deal of momentum and can take a long time to stop. Better to try and stop it at the outset.

Between them, Robinson and Hitchens brought a professional edge to the engagement with Bellingcat in the Twitter colloquium, exemplifying the kind of constructive collaboration that is possible – and arguably much needed – between journalists and academics. The upshot was edifying. Higgins admitted it was just a judgement call whether the Syrian government was responsible for the Khan Sheikhoun incident. On the specific question whether opposition access to relevant chemicals could be ruled out, Higgins was clear on behalf of Bellingcat that the UK Government position is an ‘opinion’.

The government, of course, has opinions on many things that are not shared by all reasonable people. So we should not allow any rush to judgment about who was responsible for the incident on the basis of the UK statement relayed by Ambassador Adams. Aside from the many other reasons to be very cautious,[1] there are good reasons to be critically alert on the specific matter of access to the chemicals analysed. There are abundant reports, analyses, testimonies and videos available from a variety of sources over the past five years that present at least circumstantial evidence, and potentially more than that, to suggest opposition access to the relevant chemicals. In fact, at times, there have been very grave concerns on the part of our governments’ intelligence agencies about the potential threat from opposition terrorists bringing chemical weapons back to our own lands. In the note beneath the text of this article I include links to some of those sources.[2]

While readers can form their own view on the Government’s opinion, I want to finish with a more fundamental question, and with a tribute.

It is said that the first casualty of war is truth. This is a compelling reason for us to fight for truth to prevent war, as urgently and as long as we can. If I admire Eliot Higgins for his skills, determination and good grace, I reserve admiration of a wholly distinct order for people who go up against governments to press for acknowledgement of the truth, even when doing so calls for remarkable courage. In the course of Sunday’s Twitter colloquium, one of the voices called as a witness to Syrian opposition capacities was that of Serena Shim.

If you have not heard of Serena Shim, that will not be surprising, given the priorities of our media, but I would recommend that you take at least a moment to find out something about the witness she was bearing to events in and around Syria. I wish here to honour her memory. Shortly before her untimely and unsatisfactorily explained death in 2014, she filed a report that was particularly germane to the question about the Syrian opposition and chemical weapons.




[1] In the earlier blog linked here I pointed to some which are mentioned by OPCW report itself. Other citizen investigators have covered a vast amount of material evidence to identify anomalies in it, but even just going on what OPCW has reported we have very serious reasons for concern about how the evidence they analysed was acquired. These include the lack of any direct inspection of the crime scene or any assured chain of custody of the samples analysed, along with many other more specific anomalies of evidence and procedure.

[2] This is just a small selection that I had readily to hand. There are very many more out there, and if readers mention others in the comments over the next week or so, I shall consolidate them into this list. Meanwhile, thanks go to all who have already sent links, including Qoppa

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/charles-shoebridge/syria-chemical-weap ons-us_b_3443185.html

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/sarin-gas-materials- sent-to-isis-from-turkey-claims-mp-eren-erdem-34286662.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10039672/UN -accuses-Syrian-rebels-of-chemical-weapons-use.html

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE94409Z20130505

http://brown-moses.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/responses-to-final-un-report -into-use_14.html

http://acloserlookonsyria.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Alleged_Chemical_Attack_K han_Sheikhoun_4_April_2017



journalist-dead-turkey
Serena Shim (born USA 1985 – died Turkey 2014)






Advertisements

Categories: disinformation, journalism, media, propaganda, Syria, UK Government, Uncategorized, war
Leave a Comment
Tim Hayward

Blog at WordPress.com.
Back to top

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

Sunday, 18 November 2018
Serena Shim Identifies Her Killers
http://only9sixty.blogspot.com/2018/11/serena-shim-identifies-her-kill ers.html

In late December 2012, Lebanese American journalist Serena Shim filed a report for Iran’s Press TV, ‘Turkey’s Pivotal Role in Syria’s Insurgency’. However by that time, US complicity in channelling weapons via Turkey into the hands of Syria-bound al-CIAda terrorists had already been publicised by the New York Times, no less. In June 2012, Eric Schmitt explicitly stated that

Sunday 19th October 2014 - Serena murdered, most likely by the BBC/CIA

“A small number of C.I.A. officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey. …weapons, including automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition and some antitank weapons, are being funnelled mostly across the Turkish border by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood and paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.”[1]

Shim therefore was only providing a more detailed picture of an already well-documented situation when she informed her audience:

“The American air base located inside Turkey, Incirlik, has enabled the Turkish government to facilitate the movement of arms without facing public scrutiny. The base is located eight kilometres east of the Turkish city of Adana. Sources say when weaponry arrives it is given to two American and one Mexican man, who either distribute them among refugee camps, or across the border into Syria. Turkish military officials ensure the weapons are transferred swiftly and discreetly to Syria. […] the funds have been provided by Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Syria’s foreign ministry in a letter to the United Nations blamed Turkey along with Qatar and Saudi Arabia for sponsoring terrorists inside Syria.”

Even so, Shim's focus on the role of the Turkish government is likely to have incensed then Prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his MIT (National Intelligence Organisation) henchmen; especially alongside her exposure of the use of World Food Programme trucks to ferry jihadists (nationals from a variety of Middle Eastern and North African countries) into Syria. In May 2015 upmarket daily Cumhuriyet published pictures of a January 2014 interception by the Turkish gendarmerie of a convoy of MIT-loaded trucks headed for Syria, containing arms and ammunition. Telling editor-in-chief Can Dundar he would “pay a heavy price”, Erdoğan accused both him and journalist Erdem Gul of “espionage”.[2] In December of that year, when MP Eren Erdem produced documentation showing Ankara had turned a blind eye to the transfer from Turkey to Syria of materials to make sarin gas, the “treason” accusations levelled at him were very similar.[3]

This helps to explain how it came to be that on 17 October 2014, having returned to Turkey earlier in the month, Serena Shim disclosed in a Press TV interview that she too stood accused of being a spy, by MIT.[4] Although she expressed her fear of arrest and imprisonment, it’s now clear Ankara had issued a fatwa, condemning her to death at the first available opportunity. So with their wealth of experience, MIT’s ‘road safety experts’ set to work; but automobiles are blunt instruments, making it difficult to contrive a fatal crash without detailed long-term preparation. It appears that neither Shim nor the driver of their rental car, her cousin and camera operator Judy Irish, were critically injured after an impact with a truck[5] on 19 October. Irish was treated at a nearby hospital and survived. Shim however was murdered, either at the crash-site or more likely at the medical facility she was taken to (reportedly in Turkey’s Hatay province nearly three hours drive away). There may be a precedent for this. In the aftermath of the undisputed pre-planned car crash at Susurluk[6] on 3rd November 1996, the three people who died were said to be still alive until MIT's secret traffic police finished them off.

In 2016 Serena Shim’s mother clarified:

“There is no doubt in my mind that my daughter did not die in a car accident. There was not one single scratch on her there was no blood absolutely anywhere.”

Meanwhile the US government has never called for Serena Shim’s death to be properly investigated; and the next part of her mother’s testimony is a further indictment of their attitude:

“I have tried to contact the American Embassy in Turkey with the cell phone numbers they gave me originally when I was going to get my daughter. Absolutely no response from the American Embassy in Turkey, including via personal cell phones.”[7]


[1] Eric Schmitt, ‘C.I.A. Said to Aid in Steering Arms to Syrian Opposition’, New York Times, 21-06-2012
[2] ‘Turkish president Erdoğan wants editor jailed for espionage in video row’, Reuters, 03-06-2015
Besides being jailed, Dundar survived an assassination attempt in the following year.
[3] ‘Sarin gas materials sent to Isis from Turkey, claims MP Eren Erdem’, Befast Telegraph, 14-12-2015
See also: Coleen Rowley, ‘Calling (Again) for Proof: 2013 Sarin Attack at Ghouta’, Huffington Post, 26-12-2015
“Small wonder President Erdogan has accused Erdem of “treason.” It was not Erdem’s first “offense.” Earlier, he exposed corruption by Erdogan family members, for which a government newspaper branded him an “American puppet, Israeli agent, a supporter of the terrorist PKK and the instigator of a coup.””
[4] Serena Shim’s sister Fatmeh later explained that she saw this television appearance in terms of a lesson their Lebanese father had taught them as children:
“He always said, ‘If you’re being attacked, scream.’ Because if you don’t scream, you die for any reason. But when you do scream, people are going to find out why you died. If she didn’t go on air, my sister would [just] have been “killed in a car accident”.”
Mark Mondalek, ‘Remember American Journalist Killed in Suspicious Car Crash in Turkey After Entering Erdoğan’s Crosshairs’, Mint Press News, 05-08-2016.
[5] The authorities subsequently put out a pre-fabricated story about a head-on collision with a cement-mixer.
[6] The scandal which erupted in the wake of the Susurluk incident was perhaps greater and more far-reaching than that which surfaced as a result of the Watergate break-in in the US.
[7] Eva Bartlett, ‘Killed in Turkey: No investigation two years after suspicious death of American journalist Serena Shim’, The Duran, 20-10-2016

James at 12:26
Share

No comments:
Post a Comment
›
Home
View web version
About Me

My photo
James
Hi, I'm James Bruce, a 41 year old chap from Bristol in England. I set off on 22 March 2013 from Blantyre, Scotland, with the aim of reaching Blantyre, Malawi, with God's help. I am raising money for Mary's Meals, the non-denominational charity that feeds children worldwide and helps them gain an education. I paid for all my expenses myself, thanks to a legacy from my late grandfather. If you would like to donate please call call 0800 698 1212 or visit www.marysmeals.org.uk. I hope you will accompany me on this journey from wherever you are! God bless, James
View my complete profile
Powered by Blogger.

[outsider]