After His Mysterious Death, the Media Scrambles to Get its Story Straight About White Helmets Founder James Le Mesurier
December 2, 2019
Almost immediately after Le Mesurier’s alleged plunge to his death, reports began to emerge of tampering and the removal of details about the controversial “private security” operative’s career.
Graphic by Claudio Cabrera
On November 11, 2019, the British founder of the notorious White Helmets, James Le Mesurier, died in Istanbul, Turkey. The circumstances surrounding his death immediately elicited a flurry of Turkish and corporate media reports, many of them contradictory, as the details of his final hours came to light.
Mark Urban, the diplomatic editor at BBC Newsnight,
immediately tweeted that “a former colleague” had told him it was impossible to “fall from that balcony,” referencing Le Mesurier’s reported cause of death and intimated that there may have been “state involvement.” Urban did not identify his mysterious “former colleague” or explain what made him sufficiently qualified to conclude that Le Mesurier’s death may have been a state-sanctioned hit.
Urban, declaring ignorance over Le Mesurier’s suspected ties to Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency, then suggesting that a “black propaganda campaign by Russian and Syria media and their social media acolytes” against Le Mesurier was “a prelude to murder” (emphasis added). Extraordinary claims for a journalist to make prior to the publication of any official autopsy.