Media coverage of events in Syria.

[Danny Jarman]

This is Julian Borger's retort to Charlie Skelton's article above. I'd appreciate it if someone could translate it into English for me:

The case against the named SNC officials seems especially weak. Take the case of Bassma Kodmani, a member of the SNC executive bureau. Before the revolt, she worked for a variety of thinktanks, such as the Council of Foreign Relations, which Skelton describes as "a powerful US lobby group". This is a needlessly sinister description of America's most prestigious foreign policy talking shop and research centre, which is fairly centrist and does not push in any particular direction. It has lots of scholars, with widely different views of the world, doing their own things.

For added effect Kodmani is photographed looking glum apparently leaving this year's Bilderberg conference, but the days when that was seen as a Spectre-like organisation at which key operatives were handed their instructions to maintain global domination have long gone. Mainly because such claims are unsubstantiated and plain silly.

To see just how silly, you just have to follow Skelton's links on Kodmani. His principal source on her is a man called Webster Tarpley, who calls her "a Nato agent, a destabiliser, a colour revolution queen. The fact that Kodmani was there is a scary one for Syria."

Tarpley, who Skelton described as a "Bilderberg expert", is best known for a conspiracy theory book about the September 11 attacks, called 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, blaming a shadowy American security apparatus.

The affected tone of intrigue in Skelton's piece is grating but it's also beside the point. Most of the hated "mainstream media" treat the people he singles out as they should be treated, as the mouthpiece of a sprawling, dysfunctional coalition of strange bedfellows among which the Muslim Brotherhood are probably far more powerful that these would-be American plants.

I did a search for Bassma Kodmani mentions on the Guardian, and got seven hits for this year. But four of those were pieces by Skelton, and another was a wire agency piece on the infighting inside the SNC.

To appreciate how specious Skelton's approach is, all you have to do is apply it to other situations. In Kosovo, a lot of fighters in the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) were complete rogues, including smugglers and car thieves. But that did not and does not change the fact Serb forces executed thousands of civilians there. To have focused exclusively on the KLA's shortcomings would have somewhat missed the point.

Likewise in Bosnia, there were also a lot of crooks in the Bosnian army, and the likes of the Reaganite Jeane Kirkpatrick and Margeret Thatcher advocated tough action on the Bosnian Serbs, as did lots of other people who turned out to be unsavoury or nutcases but to have obsessed about their politics would have meant you would have missed the genocide.

If you are of a conspiratorial turn of mind you could do a bit of research on me after reading this article and find that I spent more than eight years in Washington (aha!) and about 18 months in Jerusalem (the Mossad connection) and you may well find pictures of me with Ratko Mladic, and Radovan Karadzic, where I maintain I was conducting interviews but which could have had a much more underhand connection.