Welcome back! Ok, second piece 11th April 2024.
This story is nearly four years old, appended at the end is a recording of an interesting conversation I had with Matt Vogel and Tamara Draut who both worked for Amnesty International at the time.
Read all about it! “ROCKSTAR VINDICATED”
Ecuador, Chevron, Douma, the White Helmets, the OPCW, and Amnesty International.
So, here’s the story. I had agreed to take part in a webinar set to take place on August 5th 2020 in support of the claims of 30,000 Indigenous Ecuadoran Rainforest dwellers in their fight to finally collect $9,500,000,000 from Chevron Corporation as reparation for damage caused to them by oil extraction between 1964 and 1991.
We were to be four on the panel for that webinar, my friend Steven Donziger, long time legal council to the Ecuadoran plaintiffs, Paul Paz y Nino, director of Amazon Watch, Simon Taylor, director of Global Witness (Environmental watchdog organization) and me, humble bass player and nascent human rights activist.
On the 3rd of August, good news from Paul Paz. “Amnesty International have agreed to announce the up coming webinar on twitter to publicize the event.” “Whoopee!” “Roger, can you re-tweet tomorrow?”. “No problem.” So I did.
A very few hours after my re-tweet both the original Amnesty International announcement and my re-tweet were deleted.
Hmm?
I wonder why?
Paul?
Paul Paz called his contact, no joy. I started to look at lists of names all up and down the food chain at AI. There are a lot of names and they change with alarming frequency.
Hmmm?
One name cropped up, a chap who works for AI UK.
Kristyan Benedict.
I did a bit of research and came across a tweet exchange between Kristyan Benedict and ELLIOT HIGGINS. Ah ha! No more hmmm? Got it, it’s a Syria Campaign regime change operation. Ahhhhhh, light bulbs go on. In his tweet Elliot Higgins (Bellingcat) demands to know why Amnesty International consider Roger Waters to be an appropriate panelist to speak about human rights, given his well-publicized questioning of the general motives of the organization The White Helmets and specifically the veracity of its reports of a specific alleged chemical attack in Douma on April the 7th 2018?
Well?
Over to Amnesty International. They could have replied, “He’s an appropriate panelist because he’s a well know Human Rights activist who has been working on behalf of the Ecuadoran people for the last seven years, so F*$# O@# Elliot Higgins, we know you are a paid mouthpiece of The Syria Campaign and a committed propagandist for regime change in Syria. In any event, what has the one to do with the other? Do the Ecuadoran people not have human rights too?”
They didn’t say any of that.
So either Kristyan Benedict or someone else deleted the two tweets.
Not best pleased, I tried to contact Amnesty International with no success. Nearly two months went by until one day I got an Email from Matt Vogel at AI offering me a chance to speak on the phone with him and a lady called Tamara Draut, who is/was? Chief Impact Officer AI USA. I attach a recording of that phone call. I have as yet received no public apology from Amnesty International.
So there you have it.
Except, the USA the UK and the Republic of France, ignoring my entreaties to act responsibly and do their due diligence, did bomb Syria in reprisal for the chemical attack that never happened.
The President of the OPCW, under pressure from the US government did falsify the final OPCW report. Ian Henderson OPCW’s chief inspector on the ground in Douma during OPCW’s fact finding mission has been ignored, sidelined and virtually silenced. It is what we human rights activists call a bugger’s muddle. Which is exactly what the powers that be want.
Now some good news!
Someone is shining a light on the bugger’s muddle, scooping some of the mud from the pool.
AARON MATE, human rights activist and honest journalist, made a presentation to the Security Council at The UN recently appraising them of an alternative narrative to the Douma piece in the Regime Change jigsaw. The Regime Change jig saw itself being a small piece in the larger jigsaw that is the Uni Polar Tyrannical Empire which casts its shadow over all our lives.
Love
R.
Links:
Telephone conversation with Matt and Tamara:
Here are the links to Aaron Mate’s UN testimony on Douma (three separate times):
September 2020
April 2021
March 2023
ROCKSTAR VINDICATED