A tweet circulated today by numerous Twitter users casts a particularly nasty slur on Olivier Voisin, the French photographer who was fatally injured in Syria last week. It says:

"Dead French Photographer was State Department-Funded – Embedded in Syria With Al Qaeda"

There are no established facts to justify this smear but it obviously appeals to conspiracy theorists. It also sheds some interesting light on the tenuous connections they make in order to sustain their theories.

The tweets refer to an article by Tony Cartalucci, a Bangkok-based "geopolitical analyst", which is posted on the Global Researchwebsite and the Infowars website as well as Cartalucci's ownLand Destroyer website which appears to blame just about everything on American imperialism – including the Arab uprisings.

Cartalucci's recent e-book, War on Syria (co-authored with Nile Bowie) claims that the Arab Spring is basically a western plot, with international media using "unverified reports of excessive government violence" to "tarnish the image of national governments in the region". Regarding Syria, he writes:

"Contrary to the popular historical account of events, the conflict that has ravaged Syria is not an indigenous internal dispute, and it is not a tale of a belligerent dictator bent on 'murdering his own people'. Regardless of how this situation is resolved, it must be remembered as an attempt by allied foreign entities to use unrestrained tactics of subversion and terrorism to overthrow a sovereign nation's government."

Photographer Voisin was implicated in this plot, according to Cartalucci's article, because at the time of his fatal injury in Syria he was working for the Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF, known in English as Reporters Without Borders).

Cartalucci describes RSF as "a notorious faux-NGO that plays a pivotal role globally, undermining nations targeted by Western corporate-financier interests, working in tandem with US State Department-backed proxies in Iran, China, Russia, Sudan, and everywhere else Wall Street and London seek to plant their flag".

Despite Cartalucci's complaints about "unverified" reports in the international media, his own article scarcely sets a good example. He provides zero evidence to back up his claim that Voisin's fatal trip to Syria was in fact funded by the State Department. The best he can do is point to RSF's accounts for the year 2008 which state that one of its donors was the National Endowment for Democracy(NED) – which in turn is funded mainly by a grant from the State Department's USAID budget. 

Whether RSF still receives money from the NED is another matter. The most recent accounts (for 2011, and not referred to in Cartalucci's article) make no mention of it – which suggests it has stopped.

Cartalucci, of course, is trying to bolster his grand conspiracy theory by characterising RSF (and Voisin) as proxies of the US State Department. Whether or not RSF was wise to accept NED money, there is no indication that it has ever provided more than a small part of RFS's overall income. In the 2008 accounts, donations from the NED and three other foundations were only 10% of its total income.

Nor is the claim of State Department influence borne out by RSF's website which has plenty of articles criticising the US authorities' behaviour towards journalists.

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 25 February 2013