Tasneem Khalil, a self-styled investigative reporter and chief editor of a pro-Islamist website named ‘Netra News’, which is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Several days ago, Tasneem Khalil, with the active collaboration of a notorious culprit named Zulkarnain Saer Khan Sami and militancy-connected dismissed military officer Hasinur Rahman prepared an anti-Bangladesh propaganda video named ‘Aynaghar’. Following publication of this cooked-up video, as Tasneem Khalil and his cohorts already realized, several diplomatic missions in Dhaka were already checking if there was at any existence of ‘Aynaghar’ and the National Endowment for Democracy had written a letter of ‘Netra News’ website asking for clarification about why such bogus propaganda content has been released by a website that received more than half-a-million dollars every year from NED, Tasneem Khalil quickly changed the story stating there was no existence of ‘Aynaghar’ in Bangladesh and the photographs his and his cohorts had shown on their so-called investigative report was of “Joint Interrogation Cell” (JIC), which actually existed only during the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Jamaat-e-Islami coalition government during 2001-2006.
It may be mentioned here that, JIC was located at Baridhara area in Dhaka.
While Tasneem Khalil and his cohorts made a foul bid of fooling people in Bangladesh as well as international community and rights groups with the bogus story of ‘Aynaghar’, as the claims made by ‘Netra News’ was challenged by several international media outlets, a crook Tasneem quickly altered his earlier claim stating there “actually was no existence of anything named Aynaghar”.
According to Wikipedia information, prior to fleeing Bangladesh, Tasneem Khalil worked for The Daily Star and was a stringer for CNN and consultant for Human Rights Watch. He currently lives in Örebro, Sweden and runs a publication named Independent World Report, which Khalil claims to be “a world news magazine focused on human rights issues”.
Before fleeing Bangladesh, Tasneem Khalil worked with ‘Forum’, a monthly publication of The Daily Star.
Searching internet, although existence of any publication named ‘Independent World Report’ was not found, Tasneem Khalil still false told a news portal named Open Democracy: “International World Report is based in Sweden, where freedom of the press is constitutionally guaranteed. Since moving here, what has always fascinated me is how this freedom is in the very DNA of the society and of politics. In a way, IWR is a project to share the freedom enjoyed in free societies, advanced democracies, with those where this freedom is absent and who therefore need it most”.
Tasneem Khalil also runs his own website named tasneemkhalil.com, where the last content titled ‘Meet the emir of ISIS in Bangladesh’ was posted on August 4, 2017. Onwards Tasneem Khalil did not post anything on his website. What was the reason behind sudden suspension of posting anything new on his website after August 4, 2017? Although we may not get exact answer to this question, we definitely have some scoops.
Tasneem Khalil got connected to Interpol wanted fugitive terror-funder Shahid Uddin Khan in 2017. This connection was established by another dubious individual named David Bergman (son in law of a pro-Islamist Bangladeshi opposition leader). Moreover, during that time, Qatari terror-broadcast network as well as a number of Islamist media outlets began orchestrated propaganda against the ruling party in Bangladesh with the agenda of bringing Islamist forces back to power in the country.
Tasneem Khalil and David Bergman although are receiving thousands of dollars every month from the US Congress for running Netra News, this news portal has been engaged in publishing false information on a regular basis and providing platform to various discredited and controversial individuals.
According to an opinion editorial titled ‘Pulitzer for lies and faux pas for Khalil-Bergman duo’:
The latest is Netra News’s providing a platform to a discredited Indian author Sarmila Bose, whose ‘Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War’ was a shameless attempt to distort the history of the Liberation War.
Bose, disowned by her mother Late Krishna Bose (educationist politician) and brother Harvard academic Sugata Bose, had put her ‘original new research’ on the 1971 war in question by not only playing down the Pakistani genocide but making huge factual errors.
Bose’s history of fraud stood exposed on her grievously wrong ORBAT (order of battle) in 1971 when she claimed Pakistan just had 26,000 soldiers in the field of battle in East Pakistan at the start of ‘civil war’ and this rose to 34,000 when war broke out with India in December 1971.
“How could such a small number of soldiers rape a quarter of a million Bengali women,” Bose stupidly seemed to reason.
BBC veteran Subir Bhaumik exposed Bose by reminding her that 93,000 Pakistani soldiers officially surrendered to the Indian army in December 1971 and a few thousand were killed in the battle (Book, film greeted with fury among Bengalis – Subir Bhaumik/Al Jazeera, Apr 29, 2011).
Bhaumik, an Oxford fellow himself, had seriously questioned an Oxford thesis by Bose going so horribly wrong on basic facts and how could such a flawed thesis even be considered for a DPhil in hallowed Oxford.
“Why should she miss out on such basic statistics which is all in the public domain,” said Bhaumik, a veteran BBC war correspondent.
As someone who has covered the 1971 war intensely and reported on the Pakistani surrender on Dec 16, 1971, I could not believe an Oxford scholar like Bose, whose brothers Sugata and Sumantra are both top-flight scholars, could go so horribly wrong on basic facts.
But then her motive became clear – ‘Dead Reckoning’ was a book project in a series of efforts by Pakistan to run down war crimes by belittling the extent of the genocide and mass rape.
Now Netra News providing Bose with a platform to revive her flawed and twisted narrative and Bose referring to David Bergman as one of two prima donnas whose opinions she cared about lets the cat out of the bag on the anti-Bangladesh conspiracy trail.
Netra News’ operation has been badly exposed in recent months and the trash they have fed on Bangladesh imagining the country was loaded with fools like him. But it was me who exposed Netra News for being a paid front for US regime-change operations in Bangladesh.
I banked on good old Jeff Richelson’s book on the US intelligence community and Khalil’s own admission that Netra News was actually funded by the National Endowment for Democracy. Richelson has detailed how NED was funded out of the US intelligence budget for regime change operations across the globe — so this was no democracy expansion platform but one that brought down governments not subservient enough to the US by spreading the stink about lack of democracy in their rule.
Are the members of the US Congress and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) aware of the nefarious agenda of Tasneem Khalil, David Bergman and their propaganda site Netra News? Do the members of the US Congress and NED know the main agenda of Tasneem Khalil and David Bergman? These individuals are using American’s tax dollars towards implementing vicious agenda of pro-Islamist forces in Bangladesh.
