CIJA, a taxpayer-funded outfit that collaborated with al-Qaeda, lied to entrap a British academic in a sting operation. Its goal was to discredit critics of the dirty war on Syria – and cover up its own corruption.
ABritish academic who belongs to a prominent anti-war research group has been targeted in a deceptive sting operation run by a regime-change organization funded with UK and US taxpayer money. That contractor now stands accused of defrauding the European Union of millions of dollars.
The Working Group on Syria, Propaganda, and Media is a UK-based collective of professors who have published scholarly investigations exposing the disinformation and lies that have been at the heart of the decade-long Western dirty war on Damascus.
The working group’s success in debunking this propaganda, and in amplifying whistleblowers from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), has made it a target of pro-war elements in Western governments and intelligence agencies, along with their allies in major corporate media outlets.
This March, it was revealed that the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), a regime-change organization that has been funded by numerous Western governments and is linked to UK intelligence agencies, had run an elaborate sting operation in a bid to discredit an academic member, and the working group as a whole.
A representative of CIJA posed as a Russian under a fake name and deceived a British researcher named Paul McKeigue into feeding it information with the goal of ensnaring him, vilifying his research group, and smearing its participants as tools of the Kremlin.
In other words, the anti-war British scholar was entrapped by an organization supported by his own government, and that happens to have been accused of large-scale fraud by the EU’s own fraud regulator.
The European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) has formally accused CIJA of fraud, “submission of false documents, irregular invoicing, and profiteering,” and recommended that authorities in the UK, the Netherlands, and Belgium prosecute the EU-funded organization.
Faced with potential consequences over these serious EU allegations of corruption, CIJA appears desperate to discredit anyone that reports on its unsavory activities. So the regime-change group contrived a months-long confidence trick of questionable legality and morality. And Western media outlets have eagerly spread its narrative in a closely coordinated cover-up operation aimed at burying the well-substantiated charges of fraud.
CIJA: Lawfare based on money from Western governments and documents from Al-Qaeda
The group behind the sting operation, the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, has a history of unethical behavior. The Grayzone previously published an investigation documenting CIJA’s suspicious tactics, extensive links to Western governments, and direct collaboration with Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate.
CIJA’s executive director and founder, William Wiley, also directs a company called Tsamota, and the two firms share the same legal address. Wiley has used Tsamota to cash in on conflicts that advance Western foreign policy interests, raking in millions in government contracts, while advising Canadian mining companies on how to avoid prosecution for their activities in Africa.
Leaked documents show that Wiley’s Tsamota is closely linked to other Western intelligence cut-outs and government contractors such as ARK, which was at the center of an enormous global disinformation campaign aimed at orchestrating regime change in Syria. In fact Tsamota and ARK collaborated in jointly launching the Syrian Commission for Justice and Accountability, which in 2014 changed its name to CIJA.
Having since 2013 received an estimated €42 million (nearly $50 million USD) in funding from the EU, Britain, United States, Germany, Canada, Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway – states that have waged war on Syria and supported the country’s Islamist opposition – CIJA has become the key instrument of legal warfare, or lawfare, targeting Damascus and the government of Bashar al-Assad.
The United States and its European allies spent billions arming and training militants, many from extremist Salafi-jihadist groups, to try to overthrow the Syrian government and Assad, as NATO did in Libya in 2011. But in their ruthless crusade to bring about regime change in Syria, these Western nations supplemented their military efforts with other forms of unconventional and hybrid warfare, including suffocating economic sanctions and lawfare.
CIJA was created in 2012, at the beginning of the dirty war, as a weapon of what these Western governments call “transitional justice,” or regime-change-by-court. (The doctrine has also been dubbed the “Responsibility to Prosecute,” based on the “Responsibility to Protect” concept that was employed by liberal interventionists to justify the NATO wars that destroyed the states of Libya and Yugoslavia.)
The commission’s investigators have collaborated with al-Qaeda and other Salafi-jihadist armed opposition groups in order to steal documents from Syria and use them in Western lawsuits against Assad and his government.
CIJA’s collaboration with al-Qaeda was acknowledged in passing in an otherwise fawning publicity piece in The Guardian before it was quickly flushed down the memory hole, never to be mentioned again by the very same mainstream corporate media outlets that have printed puff piece after puff piece heroizing the organization.
