Just what is the point of Mark Mardell?

When he reports a story his own politcal leanings colour his reports…getting it wrong on Boston, Obama’s foreign policy and Benghazi….but that’s when he bothers to report a story:

 Two recent eye catchers don’t seem to have raised his interest judging by his Twitter feed…the Obama government targeting political opponents and journalists who embarrass them:

Wider Problems Found at IRS

Probe Says Tax Agency Used Sweeping Criteria to Scrutinize Conservative Groups

Secret U.S. Trawl of AP Calls Decried by Press Groups

Media groups and government watchdogs said the U.S. Justice Department interfered with press freedom when it secretly collected telephone records from Associated Press reporters and editors over a two-month period last year.

“This is really a disturbing affront to a free press,” Arnie Robbins, executive director of the American Society of News Editors in Columbia, Missouri, said in an e-mailed statement. “It’s also troubling because it is consistent with perhaps the most aggressive administration ever against reporters doing their jobs.”

The BBC should be a necessary part of the fabric of our society providing impartial and balanced news and views that are accurate and truthful, a counter weight to the myriad of partisan broadcasters and publishers who offer just one side of any argument.

The existence of this site, and many like it, is evidence that all is not as it should be at the BBC.

Does it matter you ask if the BBC is biased, if it plays politics and favours one side or the other?

Greg Dyke, once BBC DG, quotes the Daily Telegraph in his autobiography which said:

‘A nation kept in ignorance is a nation easily led.’

If the BBC is not doing its job in providing accurate and impartial news the consequences can be severe.

The BBC more often than not actively campaigns on many fronts, either by commission or omission in what it broadcasts.

If the BBC does take an active part in politics, manipulating opinion or attempting to engage in social engineering rather than sticking to its remit of informing and educating the Public then the BBC has to take responsibility for the outcome of its interventions.

People need to start asking the BBC questions and getting answers.

Today Labour’s Lord Mandelson has admitted that Labour deliberately engineered the mass immigration that flooded this country:

‘Labour sent out ‘search parties’ for immigrants to get them to come to the UK, Lord Mandelson has admitted.

In a stunning confirmation that the Blair and Brown governments deliberately engineered mass immigration, the former Cabinet Minister and spin doctor said New Labour sought out foreign workers.

He also conceded that the influx of arrivals meant the party’s traditional supporters are now unable to find work.’

‘In 2004 when as a Labour government, we were not only welcoming people to come into this country to work, we were sending out search parties for people and encouraging them, in some cases, to take up work in this country.’

He said: ‘The problem has grown during the period of economic stagnation over the last five, six years.’

When Labour encouraged new arrivals ‘we were almost … a full employment economy’ but, he admitted: ‘The situation is different obviously now.

‘We have to just realise… entry to the labour market of many people of non-British origin is hard for people who are finding it very difficult to find jobs, who find it hard to keep jobs.

‘For these people immigration tends to loom large in their lives and in their worlds, now that is an inescapable fact, and we have to understand it, address it, engage with people in discussion about it.’

So far the BBC’s website has ignored Mandelson’s ‘bombshell’ comments despite linking to the Telegraph’s comment on them:

Elsewhere on the web

The BBC for a long time completely ignored Labour’s policy, but they didn’t just ignore Labour’s immigration policy…they deliberately buried it and the damaging effects of its consequences…firstly because they themselves approve of immigration and the end of the nation state, but also because they knew that if this story had caught light it would have been the end of Labour for a long time as it betrayed not just the country, and a class of people but in effect carried out a policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’….trying to dilute the ‘horrible whiteness’ of this country.

The BBC ignored Labour’s Andrew Neather when he revealed the true nature of Labour’s open border policy….one that should have been political dynamite if publicised…..

Lord Mandelson’s remarks come three years after Labour officials denied claims by former adviser Andrew Neather that they deliberately encouraged immigration in order to change the make-up of Britain.

Mr Neather said the policy was designed to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’.

He said there was ‘a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural’.

Not only were the working class betrayed and put on the scrap heap but Labour’s policy imported massive amounts of crime…just how many murders, attacks, rapes, thefts, drug crimes have been committed by people Labour allowed into this country?

Nearly a fifth of all suspected rapists and murderers arrested last year were immigrants

Just how many people would still be alive now had it not been for Labour and the BBC?

As I said the BBC’s own actions have severe consequences.

The BBC’s support for Labour’s immigration policy has condemned this country to a very different future to that which was likely in 1997 before Labour took power.

A future in which Miliband’s much vaunted ‘One Nation’ will become more and more segregated and divided with conflicts erupting with ever more frequency and seriousness.

The BBC has played its part in that. It has played its part in bringing serious and dangerous crime within our borders, it played its part in bringing terrorism to our shores, often excusing and ‘explaining’ it away, it has played its part in making the future a bleaker place for the working class who can’t get a job, or when they do they find the wages are so much lower, but it doesn’t matter because even if they could afford to rent or buy a house they find they are last on the list behind the immigrant family just off the plane whose human rights seem more important than the native Brits.

The BBC fully supported and actively promoted mass immigration.

It is one of the ’Guilty Men’ responsible for the bloodshed, the crime, the jobless, the homeless, the crowded schools and hospitals that comes with that mass immigration.

That’s not an exaggeration…think about it…that’s the uncomfortable truth.

All those people without jobs or forced onto low wages might like to ponder the fact that it is highly paid BBC employees, some getting paid £150,000 allowances to relocate to Salford, who are making decisions that destroy lives, not just lives but a culture, a nation…and yes even a ‘Race’.

The BBC has dominated the Sony radio awards which makes a mockery of its claim that Murdoch monopolizes everything.

It does show that the BBC, funded by the license fee, smashes the opposition….pretty easy when you don’t have to worry where the next penny is coming from.

The Today programme gets ‘Best Breakfast Show’ (Over 10 million listeners)……Humphry’s gets Best Journalist…5Live gets best UK station….

There is essentially no competition for the Today programme in the area that it covers…that of serious news and current affairs.

Humphrys had a sitting duck with Entwistle and so he could hardly fail to have a ‘good interview’….Would be more impressed if he dragged in Gordon Brown and gave him the same treatment….many of his other interviews are pretty dire, seeming more about point scoring than informing the listener.

5Live isn’t bad covering a wide range of subjects and sport naturally….but it does often pick the low hanging fruit…Derbyshire in particular going for the easy tearjerkers whilst Campbell picks subjects for his phone-ins that seem entirley to miss the major talking points of the day…major newsworthy talking points that is….going for ones that interest the BBC chattering classes whilst often avoiding the ones making headlines in the papers or giving them a lightweight shallow coverage.

This morning Campbell had on the Tory Europe Minister, David Lidington…didn’t ask him any difficult questions about Europe, but just wanted to point out that it was all rather embarrassing for Cameron…Campbell let the Minister ramble on about how vital Europe was to us without any challenge to his assertions about our ‘influence’ or jobs reliant on us being joined at the hip with the EU….just how much influence do we have?….ask the banks who are going to be subject to the financial transaction tax….on which we had no influence at all it seems.

Looking at the judges (they all come from the industry)….  they are dominated by BBC employees or people who have been BBC employees…out of the first 35 judges 24 are ‘BBC’ with one Guardianista….there are around 100 judge in all…covering different categories.

Only natural you might say, the BBC being the ‘breeding ground’ for other stations….maybe the rest of the Judges were all commercial through and through.  I doubt it.

‘Mr Lord Mayor, we will not forget that the first and foremost duty of government – as the governor has reminded us – is to maintain and indeed to strengthen the monetary and fiscal stability that has enabled us, successively, to grow and remain free of recession…..stability through a predictable and light touch regulatory environment.’

Gordon Brown Mansion House speech 2007

The BBC has set out to target the Banks….as Evan Davis admitted before…“So we can blame the bankers for it, as we normally do”….but it has set the parameters, the limits of engagement so to speak.

The BBC programme about the banking system is described thus by the Open University who partner the BBC in producing this series:

‘Interviewing a range of important figures in the financial and political sector, including those intimately involved with the meltdown of 2007 / 2008, this new series will delve behind the scenes of a crisis that brought the global banking system to the brink of collapse.’

Note that ‘behind the scenes of a crisis that brought the global banking system to the brink of collapse’…the BBC programme is entitled ‘Fixing the System’…so surely you must examine why it ‘broke’.

Unfortunately that’s just what the BBC doesn’t do.

The BBC itself says about the programme…‘Fixing the System traces the cultural changes that took place in London’s banks during the late 1990s and early 2000s, which many now identify as one of the underlying causes of the Libor scandal.’

The Libor? So what? The Libor rigging didn’t cause the Crash.

Once again the BBC have decided to duck the issue of what caused the Crash…why? To protect Labour and Gordon Brown.

The BBC tells us that: ‘By 2009 the FSA knew that there was cheating and lying at the heart of the banking system and the layers of control were failing: The bank management failed, the BBA failed, the FSA failed‘…but the BBC doesn’t mention the Labour politicians failing.

Labour is only mentioned in relation to its challenge to the bonuses to be paid to the RBS bankers….our heroes!

Unfortunately for the BBC even Gordon Brown admits his own part in our downfall:

“The truth is that, globally and nationally, we should have been regulating them more”.

The BBC though doesn’t look at the cause of the Crash…it has decided that what is important is to ask the question ‘Can we trust the Banks?’…claiming also that: ‘Some say it took this latest scandal to expose a profit-at-all-costs cynicism that they believe has corrupted the heart of our banking system; all agree things need to change.’

Well, no…we never have been able to trust banks, no one has ever trusted the banks…but nor can we trust supermarkets, garages, the NHS, schools, food producers and yes even the BBC.

That’s why we have all sorts of regulators and inspectors…because no one trusts anyone.

The Banks went belly up precisely because Labour decided they didn’t need regulating…allowing them to ‘let rip’…..so the question is really ‘Can we trust the politicians to protect us from monopolies, incompetence and fraud?’

As Lord Turner of the FSA said: ‘Politicians were in love with the ultra free market and wanted to let it rip.’

So what exactly is the point of this new series?

Here are a couple of comments on the Open University site about the programme that sums it up:

‘The most telling statement in the whole programme was that the banks have been making money from their customers and not for their customers. I thought that most of the comments from both sides of the debate were like watching a hamster in its wheel. Lots of activity but ultimately going nowhere. The programme was full of prejudicial opinions and devoid of any hard evidence. The fundamental problem which caused the crash was missed entirely. The creation of money as debt by the privately owned banks. Anyone looking at the data with an open mind will understand the problem, if you review the money supply over the last 100 years……The reason the banks caused the crisis/crash is being conflated with the banks’ demonstrable dishonesty. I fear the politicians will ‘solve’ the dishonesty but gloss over the reason the banks actually caused the crisis/crash.’

And:

‘I just watched this on iplayer and i have to say it was totally biased. The producers obviously had an agenda that went something like this:

A in the old days there was trust and integrity

B greed took over and Barclays symbolised a greed-leads-to growth environment by its own exponential growth

C libor fixing was part of all this greed

D bob diamond “aggressiveness” was to blame for libor fixing taking place

E the regulators now step in where before they turned a blind eye

All contributions were carefully edited to support this pre-conceived agenda.

I am not a banker, do not work in financial services, am not a politician or belong to a political party, I am working and living on the minimum wage despite being middle aged. And yet i can see a skewed truth when i see it.

Libor Fixing? I hope someone makes a programme about “BBC Truth Fixing” – boy, there is more than enough evidence to back that up.’

A write up of the first episode is available…..‘the first episode a three-part BBC Two series looks at the Libor scandal – a watershed moment that finally exposed wide-scale lying and cheating at the heart of the banking system.’

Episode 2 (available this coming Wednesday) looks at risk…but in relation to recent incidents, not that which caused the crash:

‘With gripping first-hand accounts from banking insiders, regulators and politicians this film tells the story of two recent multi-billion pound trading disasters that rocked the City. It shows that some bankers are still taking reckless risks, five years after the crash that brought the world’s economy to its knees.’

Episode three is still under wraps.

The programme seems aimed at undermining banks reputations rather than asking real questions about how economic crashes occur…it seems more in line with simple, child like rhetoric from Occupy than something that will enlighten and provide answers and solutions….and avoids asking difficult questions of those really in control…the politicians.

A final telling comment told us that by 2012 there was a new world order…the regulators were now the most powerful people whereas previously it was the bankers.

That means that the bankers, not the Regulators were in control before the crash….allowed to ‘let rip’ by the politicians like Gordon Brown.

A Gordon Brown who the BBC strangely fail to remind us that in his  June 2007 Mansion House speech,  that this is “an era that history will record as the beginning of a new golden age for the City of London  …..And I believe it will be said of this age, the first decades of the 21st century, that out of the greatest restructuring of the global economy, perhaps even greater than the industrial revolution, a new world order was created…..and I will be honest with you, many who advised me, including not a few newspapers, favoured a regulatory crackdown”.    “I believe”, he went on, “we were right not to go down that road … and we were right to build upon our light touch system….fair, proportionate and increasingly risk based”.

Back in 2005, he said that the better model for financial regulation was “not just a light touch, but a limited touch. We should not only apply the concept of risk to enforcement of regulation, but to…the decision as to whether to regulate at all.”’

And did Ed Balls have a hand in all this…which he denies?

“Ed Balls, our new City Minister, will work with you to develop publish and then promote a long term strategy for the development of London’s financial services and promoting our unique advantages and assets.”

‘

Way back in 2005 even Stephanie Flanders knew that Gordon Brown’s economy was in trouble…long before the Crash brought on by under regulating the banks…this was trouble caused by over spending and reliance on consumer credit….just a shame that she can’t seem to remember that now:

Testing the Miracle

Stephanie Flanders, BBC economics reporter

On running the rule over Gordon Brown’s economic record

2005

‘These must be frustrating times for Gordon Brown. Now his foes have decided it is open season on the economy – which even a year ago had seemed beyond reproach.

Britain is growing slower than it has in more than a decade. The high street has ground to a halt, and inflation is the highest it has been under Labour.

When we look back, in a few years’ time, at Brown’s economy, will we still see an economic miracle? Or another old-fashioned spending binge that, sooner or later, had to run dry?

Former chancellor Ken Clarke was disarmingly petulant. “What I’m saying is that I did all the spadework, and that my four years were better than the eight years since….And if he doesn’t do something about the public finances soon he’s going to leave a terrible mess for his successor.”

‘Gordon Brown took my nice shiny economy and he frittered it away.’

Our trade gap has widened almost every year since Labour took office.

Ed Balls was with Gordon Brown every step of the way until he became MP for Normanton in May 2005. I asked him whether he was disappointed by Britain’s continued low productivity and widening trade gap.

“There’s an ability for people to plan ahead, invest in the future, which we’ve not seen in the last 20 to 30 years.”

Quite a few people around the country echoed this view – especially the property developers (before the property crash of course….causing the credit crunch). There is just one problem. Businesses are not investing more. They are investing less.

Total investment as a share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the lowest it has been since those records began in 1965.

Saved by spending

The miracle, if there is one, is that we carried on growing. But looking around the country, you see it is a miracle built not on investing, or exporting, but on a miraculous capacity to spend.

The public spending prop

What is left of the miracle economy, if you strip out the cheap imports and the consumer spending? What is left is a lot of public spending. The only part of the economy that has grown faster than spending by all of us the past few years has been spending by the government.

In the north-east, one recent estimate puts the public sector of the economy at close to 60%.

But all of that public spending, sooner or later has to be paid for. Ed Balls denies that Gordon Brown’s decision to move the goal posts on his golden rule this summer has done his reputation real harm.

What Gordon Brown would like to be his final years as chancellor could be the most testing yet.’

So just remember that quote at the top of the page from Brown:

‘…the first and foremost duty of government – as the governor has reminded us – is to maintain and indeed to strengthen the monetary and fiscal stability…..’

The Government is responsible ultimately….Banks can’t be trusted, we know that, have always known that…that’s why we have Regulators.

The BBC just can’t seem to accept that simple premise…Gordon Brown’s fingerprints are all over this recession.

So far this series hasn’t been about ‘Fixing The System’….dishonesty or fraud was not what caused the collapse of the System….bad judgement, a preparedness to take unqualified risks and the lack of regualtion to rein in such impulses were the main causes.

The BBC is going round kicking the tyres when the real reason Gordon Brown’s Rolls Royce economy is off the road is because the engine has blown up due to lack of maintenance.

Laughed a lot when Victoria Derbyshire tore a strip off the Police for running an internal review of their own behaviour because as we know the BBC is well versed in the ins and outs of that old trick itself.

Always worth a reminder of all those reviews by the BBC into its own impartiality…what could go wrong?

From the BBC Trust:

Yesterday I praised Paul Danahar for his realistic and reasoned analysis of the situation in Syria and compared it favourably against the efforts of Mark Mardell whose reports seem coloured by his admiration for Obama.

But I was looking at this which was published on the 3rd of  May on ‘Jonathan Spyer’ (A well known blog that analyses the Middle East):

Is Assad Winning?

What is striking about it is just how similar it is to Danahar’s report…or rather how similar Danahar’s is to this one….as Danahar’s came out on the 9th.   The similarity is even more striking when you compare Danahar’s radio report which is almost word for word, or idea for idea, the same….Danahar on 5Live Drive  (18:36)

Facts on the ground of course are the same for everyone but how they interpret them is something else…especially for BBC journo’s who often have their own view of the world….could Danahar really have come up with this himself..or has he taken a ‘shortcut’ and borrowed a few thoughts on the Syrian situation?

Talk of ‘vacuums’ being filled, fragmented  forces and command and control, Assad supported by Iran and Russia  knowing he will survive because the West still refuses to take action and the picking off of a divided enemy one by one….and of course that possibly very telling concept, the ‘big idea’ of the piece…that if Assad hasn’t lost he has won:

Spyer:  ‘So Assad isn’t winning, despite the new bullishness of his supporters. But right now, he isn’t losing either.’

Danahar:  ‘Now, by hanging on this long, the regime in Damascus increasingly thinks that by not losing it is winning.’

Could just be coincidence…as I said, the facts are the same for everyone….but its a very close fit.

An investigation into a child sex ring in Telford has concluded.

Around 100 white girls were abused by British Pakistani ‘heritage’ men…Muslims.

The BBC tells us that: (11:27:30)

‘It’s a case that has echoes of Rochdale and Derby and other cases…the offenders all being British Pakistani Muslims and the vicitms generally being white British teens.

No one is suggesting this is something endemic within that community…but obviously one can’t deny that these are similar cases and I know people within the Muslim community saying that they’ve got to deal with it, they have got to stand up and recognise that within that community there has been a problem.’

Later on Shelagh Fogarty’s show (13:09) Eleanor Oldroyd deals with the same question and states that:

  ‘Clearly there is a cultural implication to all of this.’

So it seems that even the utlra PC BBC has been forced to recognise  a link between religion/culture and the abuse….most especially the choice of victim.

The Police attitude is interesting, and not unusual…they deny that there is any racial element at all to this case.

Victoria Derbyshire is in full on ‘Grandstanding’ mode today (10:40)…having a go at the Coppers as usual.

West Yorkshire Police have published their internal investigation into its relations with Jimmy Savile…and given themselves a clean record.

Derbyshire isn’t impressed and asks ‘How they can investigate themselves?’.

She asks ‘Don’t you think this is odd that the Force is investgating the Force…how can anyone trust the report?…there is a conflict of interest…how can anyone see it as independent, impartial and fair in anyway?’

Now of course those are perfectly legitimate questions..although an IPCC investigation is aslo possible and any organisation would naturally run an internal review of its own performance.

What is such a cheek though is that the BBC ran its own internal review…of its coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict…and spent £300,000 hiding the  final report.

At least West Yorkshire published theirs…imagine the BBC’s cries of outrage if they had hidden it away from prying eyes.

Why did the BBC spend £300,000 to keep the Balen Report under wraps?

What does it say?

Does the BBC’s coverage of the Middle East incite anti-Semitism?

Does it say ‘BBC News kills Jews’?

Any independent observer might conclude that that was the suspicion and the BBC were trying desperately to cover something up.

What does the new Director General have to say? 

 Trying to close down debate by defining  someone as racist, homophobic or Islamophobic is a favourite trick of  those who want to avoid talking about certain issues…we get the race card etc deployed regularly on this site…so it is interesting to listen to 5Live’s Tony Livesey show  (from about 2300) which had a fascinating little spat between someone named ‘Kate’ (didn’t catch her full name), and Brendan O’Neill from Spiked magazine…subject… ‘Freedom of Speech’.

The aggressive and opinionated ‘Kate’ I think you may agree, might persuade us of the need for curtailment of the right to free speech, which was the subject of this discussion….as she railed violently against O’Neill.

It didn’t help that she seems to have made up a ‘fact’ to enhance her argument. She claimed a barrister suggested we ignore the law and don’t prosecute men who have committed sex crimes in the past and was therefore unfit to do her job..and should be sacked.   Having read the article (see below) that she was ranting about it doesn’t appear to have said anything quite so dramatic…merely saying that there should be a statute of limitations on prosecutions….that is, don’t prosecute people for minor crimes committed so long ago that genuine evidence must be well nigh impossible to find and that would anyway have resulted in little more than a ‘slap on the wrist’ at the time had they been then prosecuted.

Spiked published an article by barrister Barbara Hewson in which she talked about what she likened to a Soviet style justice system putting celebrities on show trial for sexual misdemeanours acted out many years previously.

It has raised a bit of a stink…especially as one of her recommendations is that the age of consent be lowered to 13 years.

The age of consent issue aside the rest of the article seems pretty much common sense, certainly nothing of a utterly scandalous and abhorrent nature that good old Kate seems to suggest, though Stuart Hall’s crimes were not just ‘low-level misdemeanours’…there was an allegation of actual rape. 

What she is certainly right about is that many of the rights and safeguards incorporated into our legal system have been abandoned…..unelected judges able to dismiss Statute law in favour of  subjective ‘human rights’, hate crimes defined as such by the ‘victim’ rather than an objective definition and the legal system used not to provide justice or a legal solution but to fulfil a social or political objective:

‘It is depressing, but true, that many reforms introduced in the name of child protection involve sweeping attacks on fundamental Anglo-American legal rights and safeguards, such as the presumption of innocence. This has ominous consequences for the rule of law, as US judge Arthur Christean pointed out: ‘Therapeutic jurisprudence marks a major and in many ways a truly radical shift in the historic function of courts of law and the basic purpose for which they have been established under our form of government. It also marks a fundamental shift in judges’ loyalty away from principles of due process and toward particular social policies. These policies are less concerned with judicial impartiality and fair hearings and more concerned with achieving particular results…’

‘When will the Syria crisis end? God knows.  

God knows because this crisis is increasingly not about freedom but about religion.’  Paul Danahar BBC

Mark Mardell has long supported Obama’s dithering, sorry, masterly inactivity..no….cautious, wise, diplomacy over Syria.

‘It is clear Mr Obama doesn’t want to go to war in Syria. He regards it as too complex, too difficult, too uncertain.

American action there would have a huge impact on the perception of America in the region – confirming every image he wants to change.

Yet the US is, perhaps, moving slowly and cautiously toward taking action. There is no sense of a time scale and no real certainty about what might be done. This is very Obama: the caution, the desire to bring allies along, the reluctance to rush to judgment.

Enemies call it dithering. Even allies are sometimes impatient. I doubt whether any of that worries a president who says sending young men and women into action is the hardest thing he has ever had to do.’

Unfortunately the real world has intruded into Mardell’s Obamian utopia, oddly, in the shape of the BBC’s Paul Danahar who has introduced a full dose of realism into the debate on Syria.

Mardell,  no doubt through gritted teeth, has even linked to Danahar’s web article:

@BBCMarkMardell via Twitter thoughtful, gloomy take on Syria’s lengthy conflict http://t.co/x9dZJU8H9z

Why through gritted teeth?  Because the article essentially damns Obama for his inaction over Syria…two years into the conflict and still no support for the anti-Assad rebels.  Danahar is honest about the West’s failure, honest about the need for military action if we want to get rid of Assad, honest about a few other things not normally admitted on the BBC….such as the malign influence of Saudi Arabia and the divisive effects of religion.

I first heard Danahar on 5Live Drive  (18:36) on which he poured scorn, diplomatically, upon the ‘West’…which really means Obama.  The web article is pretty much as the live chat but the 5Live report is blunter and more to the point.

What is Danahar’s conclusion?  

That as soon as it became apparent that the anti-Assad movement was serious, long term and capable of sustained action it should have been supported with funds and arms.

What are the consequences of not doing that?  The original, secular freedom fighters, the original revolutionaries, have lost authority and influence because they have no funds or arms.

Into that vacuum have moved the Islamists funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and who are luring men away from the more secular forces and are now dominating the opposition ranks.

The opposition forces are fragmented with no overall command and control…this could have been put in place from the start if the rebels had been supported and helped to form  such structures at the beginning.  A ‘regular’ army could have been formed and the incursion of the Islamists limited.

Having no overall commander and therefore no overall plan of action means that there is no strategy to beat Assad who can survive lots of single attacks and beat them off individually.

That old phrase ‘divide and rule’ is as apt as ever here.

Iran and Russia are supplying Assad with weapons…and of course should he win will retain the influence over the region that they had before.

Assad has survived, he thinks he can, and will survive long term.  He sees his enemies are divided and without funds or arms whilst he is resupplied by Russian and Iran.

He has no incentive to head for the negotiating table or to cut and run.

The war continues and thousands more lose their lives….all because  Obama hasn’t supported the creation of an army capable of making unified decisions and one that is powerful enough to conduct decisive battlefield  operations capable of knocking out Assad’s forces. 

I disagree with Danahar about this statement which seems at odds with the rest of the report:

‘America is not acting because it does not know what to do or whom to do it with.  Neither do the European countries.

Having spent the last few days in Beirut and Damascus, talking to the international community, Western diplomats, FSA activists and Syrian regime supporters, it is clear that nobody knows how to end this crisis.’

The answer is quite apparent, his whole article pointed to the answer….either let Assad win or pile in arms and money….targeted at the secular rebels, but the Islamists if necessary as well….they are a problem that any post Assad regime would have to tackle.

Here are some notable sentences from Danahar’s web article:

• The vacuum created by Western inaction has been filled by two of the Gulf states – Saudi Arabia and Qatar…..These are both sorely undemocratic states, they are not champions of democracy either at home or abroad.
• Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia hates Shia Iran, so it is using the war in Syria to try and weaken it.   The Saudi interest in the conflict dates back 1,300 years to the split within Islam. That is where its ambitions over the outcome of the civil war begin and end.
• When will the Syria crisis end? God knows.   God knows because this crisis is increasingly not about freedom but about religion.  The Syrian war is turning into a sectarian conflict whose influence will spill beyond the country’s borders.There was the chance at the beginning to stop that being the case. That chance has been lost.

Whilst Danahar’s article and report are examples of how the BBC can provide us with intelligent, informed and unbiased news and analysis you know that this will soon be forgotten.

As soon as the US starts to arm the rebels and fighting breaks out on a larger scale the BBC will change that tune and the normal service of anti-war rhetoric will crank into action with demands for ceasefires and negotiations…thereby just prolonging the war…as we find with Israel which is constantly restrained from winning a decisive battle against Hamas or Hezbollah who survive to fight another day and keep pounding Israel with missiles and any other means of attack they can muster.

If nothing else though, it has shown Mardell how to gauge a situation with an honest appraisal rather than checking first to see how things reflect upon the best beloved Obama’s reputation.