When the United States went to war with Spain in 1898, it did so in a media environment of “yellow journalism,” that played no small part in the advent of the Spanish-American War. Yellow journalism was basically the use of sensationalism and poorly researched reportage to stir up excitement and pad the bottom line. In February on that year, the mysterious sinking of the American cruiser Maine on a quiet night in Havana harbor was seized upon by western media outlets like William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World to create an atmosphere rife with tension, accusation, and defamation. War fever was loosed upon the population. The McKinley administration was soon ensnared in combat, which it won in ten weeks across the Caribbean and Pacific theaters, effectively erasing the Spanish imperial footprint from the Philippines and Caribbean, and delivering American control over Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. American author Mark Twain wasn’t fooled by the jingoistic broadsheets, nor by the administration’s claims of support for Cubans, nor by its claims to want to bring democracy to the Philippines, a former Spanish colony. Twain said, “…we have gone there to conquer, not to redeem.”
Different Century, Same Masterplan
It’s depressingly familiar to see the similarities between the scenario Twain and his anti-imperialist colleagues faced off against and the ones progressives face today. The imperial machine marches on, like W.H. Auden’s driveling ogre, subjugating nation after nation that attempt any sort of freethinking alternative to indentured servitude to the globalists. The tactics of the state and the machinations of the media are little different than they were in 1898. Both seek to cloud the clarity of imperial crimes behind a façade of moral necessity.
To the modern ear, yellow journalism sounds a lot like “fake news,” with its ceaseless reliance on anonymous sources, fake experts, misleading interpretations, and scare tactics. Yellow journalism and fake news are both euphemisms for state propaganda, typically employed to mask the machinery of empire. Whatever we name it, state deceit is in any case slated to grow more pervasive thanks to Barack Obama. Obama, the vacuous charlatan who infested the security state with his pro-war acolytes, signed into law the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act (CDPA) as part of the FY 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This followed the 2013 NDAA which permitted the State Department to aim its public relations efforts directly at the American people, something previously illegal. Overt state propaganda is now legal on domestic turf, as if the state’s media fronts weren’t already busily engaged creating domestic propaganda.
If the media that fronts for the imperial state is much the same, so too is the process by which conflict unfolds. These steps, too, are designed to cast aggression as self-defense. A false flag or at least an uncertain event provides a pretext for media hyperbole and state saber rattling. The Maine fiasco delivered the same pretext as the misattributed chemical attacks did in Syria. A list of untenable demands ensures conflict. McKinley demanding Spain quit Cuba had the same escalating effect as NATO’s demand in the Nineties that Slobodan Milosevic permit it to occupy Serbia. A jingoist media drools for war. Hearst had his papers enjoining readers to “Remember the Maine,” just as the Washington Post editorial board did when it claimed the Bush administration’s argument for war with Iraq was “Irrefutable.” And, as always, claims of noble aims ring forth from the precincts of power. Washington was principally helping Cuba throw off the onerous shackle of Spanish rule rather than protect its sugar and tobacco interests, while NATO is backing freedom fighting moderates in Syria against an authoritarian regime rather than seeking to replace Assad. Those that oppose are, as Hermann Goering recommended, denounced for their lack of patriotism, as have been leftists that claim the Syrian state is sovereign and should determine its own future.
We are still in the same situation Twain was in largely because the imperialist elites own the media that shape our understanding of the world, an understanding that permits little if any genuine discussion of American imperialism and its criminal destruction of vulnerable peoples, communities, villages, and families across the globe. The absence of this information continues in no small part because the general public remains convinced we live in a society of wide-ranging debate in which no topics are off limits in the great American marketplace of ideas.
The Limits of Debate
We do have lively debates, by design, and only within acceptable limits. As Noam Chomsky said, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” Imperialism and its consequences–economic, psychological, and physical violence–are largely off limits. We can discuss racism against blacks in the police force, but not racism as a feature of the imperial state. We can discuss corruption on Wall Street, but not finance as a critical tool of imperial exploitation. We can discuss whether policing borders is racist, but not the role of immigration in creating reserve armies of labor for use by the ruling corporatocracy. We can discuss gay rights and gender pay scales, but not how imperialism destroys the lives of countless women and gays in nations we target. We can discuss the Syrian war, but not Syria as a new chapter in imperialism’s history of slaughter. So long as we debate and march for issues that do not challenge the ruling class power and wealth, nothing structural will change. Racism, bigotry, gender discrimination, financial exploitation of Main Street by Wall Street, debt peonage, wage serfdom, foreign wars of dubious provenance, the canonization of war criminals past and present, and much more will continue unabated.
Yet the media consistently denies us the imperial context on issue after issue, which leaves us arguing about our response to an event that we misunderstand. We fail to see the root causes of events, and therefore debate symptoms of imperialism, not the imperialist disease itself.
* Look at the recent Manchester attacks. The media–from the BBC to the Washington Post–refused to deal with the complexities of the collapse of the Libyan state. They will note that in 2011 Libya suffered a “chaotic collapse.” They will mention that Muammar Gadhafi “was toppled from power. They will decry its status as “a failed state.” But they won’t situate that war on the timeline of global imperialism, which quite transparently marches on, toppling ‘despots’ and ‘dictators’ and installing puppet regimes willing to facilitate western exploitation of that particular nation’s resources, infrastructure, and national monetary wealth. The focus, most especially on the right, will descend on Islam, which is radicalized and thereby ‘weaponized’ by imperial brutality. Each war is treated as a one-off, an isolated incident that has its own unique motive force. This is essentially the ‘rogue actor’ excuse writ large, an explanation that is often used to shield corporations from institutional complicity in crimes.
* Look at liberal criticism of President Donald Trump. The Washington Post gave Trump four “Pinocchios” for supposedly lying about NATO. He was first correctly accused of being incorrect for saying nations owed monies to the United States. NATO nations are current on their dues. He was then accused of lying for saying NATO nations weren’t spending enough on their own security. In fact, NATO members have until 2024 to up their spending to two percent of GDP. Therefore, this statement was likewise deemed to be incorrect, even though the article did not note the probable conflict between what Trump deemed to be sufficient spending and what extant NATO agreements thought sufficient. Nor was a word spent illuminating Trump’s overarching criticism, that NATO was a defunct organization that should have been dissolved when the Warsaw Pact was dismantled at the end of the Cold War. The paper never noted that was instead expanded as a tool of western aggression toward Russia in the post-Gorbachev era. The paper failed to note that Washington has increasingly used NATO, and has consequently spent more on NATO, as a Trojan horse by which it can somewhat covertly expand Washington’s imperialism to the East.
* Look at Russiagate. The probe. The investigation. The hearings. The intelligence community’s supposedly “damning” report on Russian hacking of the election failed to deliver technical evidence of the Russian state’s role in the crime and primarily complained about Russian media coverage of America. The supposed consensus of the 17 intelligence agencies is even a dubious claim. Look at the nonstop New York Times coverage of the collusion allegations, a sophomoric attempt to use standard business contacts, cocktail party conversations, media appearance fees, and Twitter contacts to paint the Russian Federation as a wanton imperial power. This baseless investigation steals precious column inches from what could be discussions of the actual empire and its heavy-handed military deployments abroad. Nor is it explained why this fearmongering distraction exists in the first place: because the freewheeling Trump wanted to unwind President Obama’s witless aggressions against Russia, from sanctions to NATO to Syria to the election disinformation campaign. That would have directly challenged the globalist strategy to extend U.S. hegemony worldwide.
* Look at the British parliamentary elections. Jeremy Corbyn’s tattered, divided Labour party clawed 32 seats away from the center-right, while Theresa May’s reactionary Conservative Party dropped 12 seats, losing its majority. This was considered by the mainstream press to be a devastating turn of events, mostly because it had comprehensively demonized Corbyn and his socialist-leaning ideas. The day before the election the Daily Mail ran a front-page story calling Corbyn a terrorist sympathizer. Context was dutifully elided. It might have been mentioned that May’s own party comprehensively supported terror in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, and the DUP party it will now align with to form a majority was a major supporter of anti-Catholic violence as well. More to the point, May now supports a war in Syria that a) represents a war of aggression by the West against a sovereign state that has never invited it inside its borders; and b) is the most transparent instance yet of the dovetailing interests of terrorist organizations and western governments, namely that the former profitably serve the latter as a lance or trident injecting the triple evils of war, poverty, and racism into the vortex of the post-colonial chaos that is neo-imperialism.
* Look at the faux scope creep in Syria. The so-called coalition of western states plus terrorist factions shot down a Syrian jet that was supposedly bombing ISIS. Washington said it bombed the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). They are probably one in the same, as the Russians seem to think. In any case, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, and Financial Times all skipped the “inciting action” of the U.S. attack on a Syrian jet, an act of war in a nation into which the west’s farcical coalition was never invited. These White House flacks instantly published articles announcing that Russia would now “target” and “threaten” U.S. warplanes over Syria. At once, the roles have been reversed and the aggressor is acting in self-defense. Ostensibly there to combat ISIS, something the Russians and Syrians vehemently challenge, the U.S. is really there to overthrow Bashar Al Assad, balkanize Syria in sectarian statelets that Israel can control on our behalf, and sever linkages between Iran and Hezbollah, which will weaken resistance to Tel Aviv’s conquest and settlement of all of the West Bank. Not to mention moving toward its feverish vision of one day expanding its Jewish democracy from the Nile to the Euphrates.
Topics aside, the question of empire is rarely included, if ever. Not in a reporter’s notes, not in a list of interview questions, not in the video transcript, not in a first or second or final draft.
Corruptions of Protocol
We have two actions in particular to thank for the whitewashing of imperialism in modern times. One is the Clinton regime’s popularization of “humanitarian interventions” as a legitimate form of violent aggression in the Nineties. Generally, the UN Security Council is summoned to provide a patina of legitimacy for such aggression. Simon Chesterton, in his book Just War or Just Peace?, examines what he calls, “Security Council activism, notable for the plasticity of circumstances in which the Council was prepared to assert its responsibility for international peace and security.” The related “responsibility to protect” (R2P) was enshrined by UN members as a new international norm in 2005. Among its intellectual underpinnings is the idea that sovereign states are responsible for the safety of their populations and if they fail to live up to that responsibility, including violations of humanitarian law, it falls to the international community to fulfill it.
Both concepts have been used to confuse and co-opt progressive voters and move them into a state of surrender in which they acquiesce to our noble wars in whatever form they materialize–by air, land, sea, or proxy. Both concepts are founded on a fair premise–the desire to protect the weak against the strong, but predictably both have been deliberately perverted into justifications for their antithesis–removing legal protections for the weak against the aggression of the strong. A look at Libya, Iraq, Serbia, among other wars makes this plain.
Nature of the Beast
But this is the brazen, crass, and intrepid nature of imperialism. It wantonly employs language to erect a curtain of rectitude behind which it prosecutes its vice. As Chesterton points out, the UNSC seems to harbor little fear of invoking R2P for its own uses. Likewise, Washington has no compunction in leveraging the norms of R2P to unilaterally take military action, as though one nation among all has the moral fortitude to stride into the breach and defend the undefended. This has been necessary in Syria since Russia and China have gotten wise to Washington’s intrigues. Perhaps they have finally learned that the Bretton Woods institutions, as well as the UN, are the legitimizing instruments of western hegemony. The “third world” understood this in the Seventies. These institutions are the notary republics that give western violence the stamp of authority.
Twain voiced a popular impulse when he wrote he was “opposed to having the (American) eagle put its talons on any other land.” But his words were drowned out by imperialists then, and today the globalists and their press flacks continue to refashion the notion of “just war” in fresh raiment to bamboozle a new generation of citizen-readers, and lead them hollering and cheering into the breech. As George Orwell said, “It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.” As long as the yellow press at the Times and Post continues to peddle the narrative of America above all, right or wrong, the march of imperial slaughter will never abate. That tale and its glib raconteurs have to be comprehensively discredited if resistance to empire is ever going to achieve critical mass. _______ Join the debate on Facebook More articles by:Jason Hirthler
Jason Hirthler is a veteran of the communications industry and author of The Sins of Empire: Unmasking American Imperialism. He lives in New York City and can be reached at jasonhirthler@gmail.com.
NYT, WaPo Send Top Reporters To Stenograph Five O'Clock Follies
When the U.S. military takes a bunch of journalists on a press junket to a foreign country it has a certain intention and prepares every detail in advance. There will be witnesses and local people who are briefed for their two minute talk with the journalists to convey exactly what the military wants them to convey. After enjoying local flair, for ten minutes max, some U.S. diplomatic official or a general will treat the journos to some good whiskey and a genuine local steak. The official will speak a few prepared lines on the record that will reinforce the story the locals were tasked to tell.
The outcome is predictable. The stories the journalists will write will be the same.
Michael Gordon in yesterday's New York Times and David Ignatius in yesterday's Washington Post both report of their latest junket, a visit of Tabqa in Syria.
Gordon's piece: In a Desperate Syrian City, a Test of Trump’s Policies
The young man unburdened himself about the dark years of living under the Islamic State as a crowd of curious onlookers gathered in front of a weathered storefront in the town marketplace. The militants, said the man, a 22-year-old named Abdul Qadir Khalil, killed many residents, doled out precious jobs and severely limited travel to and from the city. ... He ticked off a list of the things Tabqa needs: electricity, water, fuel and a sizable bakery. Then, laughing about his new freedom to openly denounce the militants, he said, “If they ever come back, they will slaughter all of us.”
The Ignatius' piece: As the Islamic State falls in Syria, one city offers a preview of the country’s future
A boisterous group of young Syrian men is gathered outside a tire and vehicle-parts shop across from the warehouse. American military advisers aren’t sure at first that it’s safe to talk with them, but the men press eagerly toward two visiting reporters. Abdul-Qadr Khalil, 22, dressed in a bright blue-nylon jacket, speaks for the group. He complains that there’s not enough food, water, gas or bread, and there are no jobs. But he dismisses the idea that the Islamic State will ever take hold here again. “No, never!” says Khalil, and the young men around him nod in unison. “It will be impossible to live if they come back. They will kill all of us.”
Gordon:
.. small children greet visitors with a “V” sign for victory. Ignatius:
Young children flash V-for-victory signs. Gordon:
“A fundamental problem in our society is that ISIS’ ideology has been implanted in little kids’ brains, which means it will carry on in the future,” said Ahmad al-Ahmad, the co-president of the council. Ignatius:
Ahmad al-Ahmad, the co-president of the newly formed Tabqa Civil Council, ... Young boys who were indoctrinated at Islamic State training camps are trying to find their balance in a new world where beheadings and the chanting of Islamist slogans are over. Gordon:
Nearly 50 tons of flour, paid for by the Pentagon, were trucked in from Iraq to an American-funded warehouse on Wednesday. Ignatius:
At a warehouse near the town center, the first shipment of American food arrived on Wednesday; sacks of flour and rice are stacked on pallets, ready for distribution, ... Gordon:
“We are not going to get beauty; it’s about pragmatism,” said Maj. Gen. Rupert Jones of the British Army, the deputy commander of the coalition force. Ignatius:
“This is not a work of beauty. This is pragmatism,” says Maj. Gen. Rupert Jones, the British deputy commander of coalition forces in Iraq and Syria .. I agree with the British general. The reporting in the Washington Post and New York Times from this military press junket is not a work of beauty but pragmatism. These highly paid journalists do not want to get their new desert dress dirty. They pragmatically repeat what the well briefed (and bribed) locals say, picture the children that make V-signs (and receive the promised candy) and they stenograph whatever the military or some diplomats say. No real reporting, no thinking and no dirty boots are required for their job.
The military wanted to convey that nearly everything is fine now in Tabqa. The people love the U.S. occupation and all that is needed now are a few billion $$$ for some minor nation building. The journalists ate up the prepared bites and transmit exactly what the military wanted them to say.
The mainstream media want their readers to believe that their narratives from war zones are genuine reporting. The above examples show that they are not. Their journalists are simple recording highly choreographed shows the Pentagon and State Department press advisors made up and the local press officers prepared in advance. A modern version of the Vietnam war's five o'clock follies.
Richard Pyle, Associated Press Saigon bureau chief during the war, described the [military press] briefings as, "the longest-playing tragicomedy in Southeast Asia's theater of the absurd." Back then most media did not fell for the nonsense. Now they willingly join in.
Posted by b on July 2, 2017 at 03:09 PM | Permalink
the comments are interesting:
Comments It would seem that the CIA control of the media is complete. What are the key phrases to bring them in and out of their trances? Trancesentintomedication.
Posted by: JSonofa | Jul 2, 2017 3:25:32 PM | 1
The US seem to be pushing Tabqa. It seems too close to SAA lines for a US base? Just a US outpost to ensure US retains control of the dam?
Posted by: Peter AU | Jul 2, 2017 3:35:16 PM | 2
Great post b. It's all orchestrated.
As for "Back then most media did not fell for the nonsense" ...back then there was a protest movement.
Posted by: dh | Jul 2, 2017 3:41:08 PM | 3
"...50 tons of flour...."
Wow, how generous. And ~500.000 tons of weaponry for the Death Squads.
David Gordon isn't he the one along with Judith Miller two chief propagandist of Bush'r regime for Iraq war? Posted by: Chauncey Gardiner | Jul 2, 2017 3:41:33 PM | 4
Ah, good old Michael Gordon. If memory serves, he was also as culpable for the NYT stories boosting the Iraq War as Miller was. Yet she was the only one to get fired.
Posted by: P Walker | Jul 2, 2017 3:44:27 PM | 5
let me see...
September 8, 2002 New York Times U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts By Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 - More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.
In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium. American officials said several efforts to arrange the shipment of the aluminum tubes were blocked or intercepted but declined to say, citing the sensitivity of the intelligence, where they came from or how they were stopped.
The diameter, thickness and other technical specifications of the aluminum tubes had persuaded American intelligence experts that they were meant for Iraq's nuclear program, officials said, and that the latest attempt to ship the material had taken place in recent months. http://www.realdemocracy.com/abomb.htm
Its not simply that the media is somehow being taken advantage of by a sly military, nor that there are CIA assets in the NYT and Wapo, its that both media outfits (with CNN and other companies) actively collaborate at the highest levels with AIPAC and the CIA to promote their agreed upon interpretation of current events. Posted by: Castellio | Jul 2, 2017 3:51:04 PM | 8
@7 The V sign has become an all purpose response to cameras. Very popular among Asian selfie takers. Even terrorists use it.
Posted by: dh | Jul 2, 2017 3:51:11 PM | 9
Monied interests rule and corrupt everything in order to secure their positions. So, they infiltrate government, corporations, academia. They all speak the same language and derive their belief systems from each other. To paraphrase John Ralston Saul, reality is not in the world, it's in the measurements made by professional bureaucrats. That's why you can see people bouncing between government service, board directorships, the CIA and then becoming pundits on the MSM.
It's a circle jerk where each of the individuals know their roles, and their first rule is never turn on the system itself.
Everything (and I mean everything) is a racket.
Posted by: P Walker | Jul 2, 2017 3:57:20 PM | 10
The Gordon piece reveals some interesting details of how the Taqba dam operation worked.
"The Tabqa operation was proposed in mid-March to Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, the commander of the American-led task force that is battling the Islamic State, by the top commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces, the combination of Syrian Kurds and Arab fighters who would provide the ground troops for the battle. It was approved without a single White House meeting. Just one week later, hundreds of Arab and Kurdish fighters, including many who had never flown before, were airlifted on American helicopters and Osprey planes to the southern banks of Lake Assad, across from Tabqa. Barges ferried their vehicles across the azure water while another group of Syrian fighters to the east hopped from island to island as they zipped along the Euphrates on American fast boats."
The vaunted SDF is totally reliant on US support. Once that goes, so does their effectiveness. From experience, the US does not train foreign militaries to be anything more capable than a police force. The Russians on the other hand train foreign militaries to be fully capable and self supporting.
The Taqba dam is also a poisoned chalice for the Amerians. They now 'own it':
"Syrian engineers have been trying to get one or two turbines running by cannibalizing parts from the wreckage. But with no Soviet-era parts on hand, nobody seems to think that the structure will be generating power in the months ahead, and the hazards of working in and around the dam are still significant: Last week, one newly trained Syrian demining expert was killed when he triggered an improvised explosive device. But the question foremost in the minds of Tabqa’s residents is how they are going to return their lives to some semblance of normal. “There is no electricity, no food, no bread, and we need fuel for our trucks,” said Khalid Mohammed Ali Tata, 54. “Also, there are no jobs.”
No electricity, no food, no bread, no jobs ...
This has all the makings of a typical US tactical victory and strategic defeat.
The unwritten story from the articles is that, had it not been for the pesky Russians interfering, the good ole' US fightin' boys would have defeated ISIS ages ago - and many of the commentators fall for this BS.
I, for one, look forward to the glorious Hollywood blockbusters detailing exactly how the US defeated ISIS all on its own.
......Today’s US-led neoliberal empire, which has Britain as its junior partner, does no such thing. Entire countries have been destroyed, with millions killed, and it’s been done under a ‘progressive’ banner trumpeting concern for ‘human rights’ and ‘enhancing freedoms.’
In an electrifying address, Wight lambasted the pro-imperial propaganda to which we are relentlessly subjected to in the West. How absurd is it, he asked, that NATO troops are on Russia’s borders, while Russian troops have been fighting in Syria the same ISIS/Al-Qaeda terrorist groups who have been killing British citizens back home? Citing Marx, Wight reminded the audience of how the ideas of the ruling class become the dominant ideas, and the demonization of Russia is a classic example of this. Ordinary Britons don’t regard Putin as a ‘threat’ as they go about their daily business, but they do – rightly – regard the terrorist groups that Russia has been fighting as a danger to them. But the ruling class hate Russia because it has thwarted its imperial ambitions.
Wight said that opponents of imperialism should never go on the back foot when confronted by supporters of criminal wars of aggression, such as the Iraq War – which has led to the deaths of around 1 million people and the rise of ISIS. He mentioned that these people hate the fact that there are now alternative media channels such as RT which challenge the dominant neocon/neoliberal narrative.
“Alternative media and those who go on it are under attack because they have the temerity to ask the most subversive question in the English language which is: Why? Why did we go to war in Iraq? Why are there sanctions on Cuba? Why are we going after Iran but are close friends with the Saudis? This question is so powerful. We are attacked because we ask the question, why? I am reminded of the African proverb that until lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. Now with the alternative media, the lions have their historians. We can put the case for the Syrian people; we can put the case for the Venezuelan people; we can put the case why Russia should not be our enemy.”
Speaking next, Peter Ford, the former British Ambassador to Syria and Bahrain, drew on his firsthand experience of many years as a diplomat and UN official based in the Middle East, to explain the current geopolitical situation.
“People who are not regular readers of the Morning Star might be forgiven for thinking that imperialism ended when the colonies became free. Nothing could be further from the truth. We now have a new more insidious but more powerful form of imperialism – one which hides behinds words in order to extend its hegemony. Expressions like ‘protecting our allies,’ ‘countering weapons of mass destruction’ or ‘defending human rights’ – and this one applies as much to the left as the right.”
“We on the left have to be particularly alert to ‘liberal interventionism’: this is actually the new version of ‘carrying the white man’s burden,” Ford continued. “In each case we are intervening in less developed parts of the world which are generally not able to strike back. Consider the appalling war in Yemen – one of the poorest and weakest countries in the world. It used to be a British colony but independence has not made it free. When the Yemenis dared to get rid of their pro-Saudi government, the Saudis, with British and American backing, started bombing and blockading Yemen. Conditions under siege and bombardment have led to a terrible epidemic of cholera.”
Any genuine humanitarians would be greatly concerned with the dire situation in Yemen, but guess what? The ‘liberal interventionists’ who egged on ‘humanitarian interventions’ elsewhere have been silent.
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
I Helped Sell the False Choice of War Once. It’s Happening Again. By LAWRENCE WILKERSON FEB. 5, 2018
Fifteen years ago this week, Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, spoke at the United Nations to sell pre-emptive war with Iraq. As his chief of staff, I helped Secretary Powell paint a clear picture that war was the only choice, that when “we confront a regime that harbors ambitions for regional domination, hides weapons of mass destruction and provides haven and active support for terrorists, we are not confronting the past, we are confronting the present. And unless we act, we are confronting an even more frightening future.”
Following Mr. Powell’s presentation on that cold day, I considered what we had done. At the moment, I thought all our work was for naught — and despite his efforts we did not gain substantial international buy-in. But polls later that day and week demonstrated he did convince many Americans. I knew that was why he was chosen to make the presentation in the first place: his standing with the American people was more solid than that of any other member of the Bush administration.
President George W. Bush would have ordered the war even without the United Nations presentation, or if Secretary Powell had failed miserably in giving it. But the secretary’s gravitas was a significant part of the two-year-long effort by the Bush administration to get Americans on the war wagon.
That effort led to a war of choice with Iraq — one that resulted in catastrophic losses for the region and the United States-led coalition, and that destabilized the entire Middle East.
This should not be forgotten, since the Trump administration is using much the same playbook to create a false impression that war is the only way to address the threats posed by Iran.
Just over a month ago, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said that the administration had “undeniable” evidence that Iran was not complying with Security Council resolutions regarding its ballistic missile program and Yemen. Just like Mr. Powell, Ms. Haley showed satellite images and other physical evidence available only to the United States intelligence community to prove her case. But the evidence fell significantly short.
It’s astonishing how similar that moment was to Mr. Powell’s 2003 presentation on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction — and how the Trump administration’s methods overall match those of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. As I watched Ms. Haley at the Defense Intelligence Agency, I wanted to play the video of Mr. Powell on the wall behind her, so that Americans could recognize instantly how they were being driven down the same path as in 2003 — ultimately to war. Only this war with Iran, a country of almost 80 million people whose vast strategic depth and difficult terrain make it a far greater challenge than Iraq, would be 10 to 15 times worse than the Iraq war in terms of casualties and costs.
If we want a slightly more official statement of the Trump administration’s plans for Iran, we need only look at the recently released National Security Strategy, which says, “The longer we ignore threats from countries determined to proliferate and develop weapons of mass destruction, the worse such threats become, and the fewer defensive options we have.” The Bush-Cheney team could not have said it better as it contemplated invading Iraq.
The strategy positions Iran as one of the greatest threats America faces, much the same way President Bush framed Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. With China, Russia and North Korea all presenting vastly more formidable challenges to America and its allies than Iran, one has to wonder where the Trump team gets its ideas.
Though Ms. Haley’s presentation missed the mark, and no one other than the national security elite will even read the strategy, it won’t matter. We’ve seen this before: a campaign built on the politicization of intelligence and shortsighted policy decisions to make the case for war. And the American people have apparently become so accustomed to executive branch warmongering — approved almost unanimously by the Congress — that such actions are not significantly contested.
So far, news organizations have largely failed to refute false narratives coming out of the Trump White House on Iran. In early November, news outlets latched onto claims by unnamed American officials that newly released documents from Osama bin Laden’s compound represented “evidence of Iran’s support of Al Qaeda’s war with the United States.”
It’s a vivid reminder of Vice President Cheney’s desperate attempts in 2002-03 to conjure up evidence of Saddam Hussein’s relationship with Al Qaeda from detainees at Guantánamo Bay. It harks back to the C.I.A. director George Tenet’s assurances to Mr. Powell that the connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden was ironclad in the lead-up to his United Nations presentation. Today, we know how terribly wrong Mr. Tenet was.
Today, the analysts claiming close ties between Al Qaeda and Iran come from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which vehemently opposes the Iran nuclear deal and unabashedly calls for regime change in Iran.
It seems not to matter that 15 of the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11 were Saudis and none were Iranians. Or that, according to the United States intelligence community, of the groups listed as actively hostile to the United States, only one is loosely affiliated with Iran, and Hezbollah doesn’t make the cut. More than ever the Foundation for Defense of Democracies seems like the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans that pushed falsehoods in support of waging war with Iraq.
The Trump administration’s case for war with Iran ranges much wider than Ms. Haley’s work. We should include the president’s decertification ultimatum in January that Congress must “fix” the Iran nuclear deal, despite the reality of Iran’s compliance; the White House’s pressure on the intelligence community to cook up evidence of Iran’s noncompliance; and the administration’s choosing to view the recent protests in Iran as the beginning of regime change. Like the Bush administration before, these seemingly disconnected events serve to create a narrative in which war with Iran is the only viable policy.
As I look back at our lock-step march toward war with Iraq, I realize that it didn’t seem to matter to us that we used shoddy or cherry-picked intelligence; that it was unrealistic to argue that the war would “pay for itself,” rather than cost trillions of dollars; that we might be hopelessly naïve in thinking that the war would lead to democracy instead of pushing the region into a downward spiral.
The sole purpose of our actions was to sell the American people on the case for war with Iraq. Polls show that we did. Mr. Trump and his team are trying to do it again. If we’re not careful, they’ll succeed.
Correction: February 5, 2018
An earlier version of this article included outdated information about the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Sheldon Adelson is no longer a donor to the organization.
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”
so sad trump had to fire his main point man on war with Iran...General Yellowkerk...we'd probably be farther along by now if he wasn't forced to let him go
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
Despite years of unqualified failure, nation's liberal intelligentsia announces full support as US redoubles its efforts in its catastrophic "war on terror"
One week before the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the world's “Doomsday Clock” two minutes closer to midnight, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced in a speech to the neo-conservative Hoover Institute that the US will be indefinitely deploying thousands of troops to Syria in order to, “achieve a stable, unified, and independent Syria, free of terrorist threats and free of weapons of mass destruction .” The statement is a clear indication that the US intends to use military force against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. In using the word “independent”, Tillerson is indicating that the US will not tolerate a Syrian government heavily influenced as it is by Russia and Iran. By using the words “free of weapons of mass destruction”, Tillerson is referencing Syria's alleged chemical weapons stockpiles, giving further leeway for US military action against Assad.
Given how vital Syria is as a strategic asset to Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, any use of military force against Assad would almost certainly involve military clashes between the US and one or perhaps all of its allies. To make matters worse, the use of Kurdish soldiers as ground troops has greatly angered Turkey, and any possible regime change in Syria could see the creation of a Kurdish state on Turkish borders, something Turkey is not willing to accept.
Of course, US military action will once again be taking place under the banner of combating “terrorism”. To begin the speech, Tillerson made the absurd claim, popular in neo-con circles but not supported by a shred of evidence, that Syria's Bashar al-Assad is backing ISIS and al-Qaeda in an effort to “destabilize his neighbors”. Aside from the fact that the Assad regime, in conjunction with Russia and Hezbollah, has fought bitterly against ISIS and al-Qaeda since 2012, the claim makes no sense given the sectarian nature of the conflict. Assad, along with much of the Syrian ruling class, comes from the Alawite sect of Shi'ism, a sect even more detested by Sunni extremists than Shias themselves. The claim is even more ludicrous when one considers that it has in fact been the U.S. which has quite openly been funding groups operating under the umbrella of al-Qaeda. For example, the US has been backing the Southern Front in Syria, an organization which regularly fights alongside official al-Qaeda groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrah al Sham considered to be “core al-Qaeda” by the U.S. military. U.S. funding for such groups explains how ISIS has been found to hold stockpiles of sophisticated arms originally supplied to “moderate rebel” groups based in Syria.1
Tillerson's claim either stems from complete ignorance of the current situation, or is just a poorly thought out lie. Of course, it merited no rebuke from the very knowledgeable and qualified intellectuals at the Washington Post, who instead praised Tillerson's commitment to a “serious and sustainable” US presence in Syria saying, “the Trump administration has taken a step toward a clear policy on Syria and its civil war...the United States cannot prevent a resurgence of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State...without maintaining control over forces and territory inside the country.”
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“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
Of Fake News and History Suborned (In War and Peace)
by Greg Maybury, from PoxAmerikana
We have blind men, one-eyed men, squint-eyed men, men with long sight, short sight, clear sight, dim sight, [and] weak sight. All that is a faithful enough image of our understanding; but we are barely acquainted with [men of] false sight.” Voltaire, The Philosophical Dictionary, 1924. Knopf, NY
It was while making news paper deliveries, trying to miss the bushes and hit the porch, that I learned about the importance of accuracy in journalism.”Charles Osgood
Brief: The gulf dividing established institutions—governments, political parties, academia, the judiciary, legislature, bureaucracies, the national security state, think-tanks, lobby groups, and especially the mainstream media—and those within and across the broader body politic, particularly those who’d challenge the chokehold such institutions seek to impose on the information and knowledge that forms the foundation of our political discourse as well as that of the official historical record, is expanding at a rate of knots. With a focus on one man who saw it all coming, it’s time to reflect on the backstory of this bourgeoning, perilous impasse, and what the implications might be for geopolitical stability and security, and indeed, the future of humanity.
Living in a Fog of Historical Myth
With an attendant lack of transparency and accountability, the mainstream media establishment routinely subordinates the basic tenets of ethical reportage in the public interest to the interests, demands, and expectations of what we now refer to as the ‘deep state’. This is largely driven by the failure or refusal of the Fourth Estate to live up to its basic remit in holding the ‘deep staters’ in turn responsible for their decisions and actions. This palpable, vicious circle, downward spiral reality is especially evident in matters of war and peace. Sadly, as we’ll see it was ever thus.
August 18, 2020 author: Caitlin Johnstone 75 Comments
For a full week now the Israeli army has been bombing Gaza, a population that is about to run out of fuel for its only power plant due to a years-long Israeli program of deliberate siege warfare.
Yesterday the US ordered an airstrike on Syrian forces, killing one, when they refused to let the illegal occupying force past a checkpoint in northern Syria.
In both cases an arm of the US-centralized empire used wildly disproportionate force against people who stood against a hostile occupation of their own country. In both cases the more powerful and violent occupiers claimed they were acting in “self-defense”. In both cases dropping explosives from the sky upon human beings barely made the news.
Elaa Naqvi @greyhairs_
ISRAEL is dropping bombs on Gaza and no one is talking about it.. WHYYYYY.????#Gaza #GazaUnderAttack
View image on Twitter
2:51 PM - Aug 17, 2020
Bombs should not exist. Explosives designed to blow fire and shrapnel through human bodies should not be a thing. In a sane world, there wouldn’t be bombs, and if some mentally unbalanced person ever made and used one it would be a major international news story.
Instead, bombs are cranked out like iPhones at enormous profit, and nearly all bombings are ignored. Many bombs are being dropped per day by the US and its allies, with a massive civilian death toll, and almost none of those bombings receive any international attention. The only time they do is generally when a bombing occurs that was not authorized by the US-centralized empire.
This is one of those absolutely freakish things about our society that has become normalized through careful narrative management, and we really shouldn’t allow it to be. The fact that explosives designed to rip apart human anatomy are dropped from the sky many times per day for no other reason than to exert control over foreign countries should horrify us all.
An interesting social experiment when you talk to someone might be to tell them solemnly, “There’s been a bombing.” Then when they say “What?? Where??”, tell them “The Middle East mostly. Our government and its allies drop many bombs there per day in order to keep a resource-rich geostrategic region balkanized and controllable.”
Then watch their reaction.
✖️Edug-kun✖️ @wing_of_night
I think we don't talk enough (or at all) about how US bombed Laos 270 Million times, making it the most bombed country ever.
There were approximately more than 580,000 bombing missions on Laos between 1964 and 1973, that’s one every eight minutes, every day, for NINE YEARS Embedded video 31.4K 2:46 PM - Aug 13, 2020
You will probably notice a marked change in demeanor as the person learns that what you meant is different from what they thought you meant. They will likely act as though you’d tricked them in some way. But you didn’t. You just called a thing the thing that it is, and let their assumptions do the rest.
When someone gravely tells you “There’s been a bombing,” what they almost always mean is that there has been a suspected terrorist attack in a western, majority-white nation. They don’t mean the kind of bombing that kills exponentially more people and does exponentially more damage than terrorism in western nations. They don’t mean the kind of terrorism that our government enacts and approves of.
There’s a lot of pushback nowadays against the racism and prejudices that are woven throughout the fabric of our society, and rightly so. But what doesn’t get nearly enough attention in this discourse is the fact that while some manifestations of bigotry may have been successfully scaled back somewhat in our own countries, it was in a sense merely exported overseas.
The violence that is being inflicted overseas in our name by the US-centralized empire is more horrific than any manifestation of racism we’re ever likely to encounter at home. It is more horrific than the pre-integration American South. It is more horrific than even slavery itself. Yet even the more conscious among us fail to give this relentless onslaught of violence a proportionate degree of recognition and condemnation, even while the consent for it is largely born of the unexamined bigoted notion that violence against people in developing and non-western countries does not matter.
Like many other forms of bigotry, this one has been engineered and promulgated by powerful people who benefit from it. If the mainstream news media were what it purports to be, namely an institution dedicated to creating an informed populace about what’s truthfully going on in the world, we would see the bombings in foreign nations given the same type of coverage that a bombing in Paris or London receives.
This would immediately bring consciousness to the unconscious bigotry that those in the US-centralized empire hold against people in low and middle income countries, which is exactly why the plutocrat-owned media do not report on it in this way. The US-centralized empire is held together by endless violence, and the plutocrats who run it have built their kingdoms upon the status quo of that empire.
When people set out to learn what’s really going on in their world they often start cramming their heads with history and geopolitics facts and figures, which is of course fine and good. But a bigger part of getting a clear image of what’s happening in the world is simply turning your gaze upon things you already kind of knew were happening, but couldn’t quite bring yourself to look at.
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Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.
Information-Management in the U.S. Dictatorship Eric Zuesse April 24, 2021
Instead of fearing to be held to account like the Nazis were at Nuremberg, America’s tyrants face no such international prosecutions whatsoever.
The dictatorship manages information both by deceiving the public to believe what the regime itself knows to be actually false (such as that Saddam Hussein might be only six months away from having an atomic bomb), and also by removing the lie from its ‘news’-media as soon as that lie has served its purpose and becomes no longer useful to the regime. The lie goes down the memory-hole, instead of being focused upon and analyzed by the regime’s media, and the reason why they disappear the lie is that after a certain amount of time, the percentage of the public who know that it was false has risen high enough so that any further mention of that false allegation (remember ‘Saddam’s WMD’? Does anybody today even discuss that lie?) would serve only to increase the percentage of the public who will figure out that it hadn’t been a mistake, but instead had been an intentional deception of the public — a lie. The media hide their lies, instead of report on them. The lie is not investigated; it’s always a corpse that was buried without any autopsy, and that will always stay buried, by the regime.
A classic example of this was George W. Bush’s and Tony Blair’s bold lie on 7 September 2002 that the IAEA had come out with “the new report” which found that Saddam Hussein was “six months away from developing a [nuclear] weapon,” and two days later the IAEA sent out to the media a notice saying that it had issued no new report at all and nothing after 1998 when they had found that Iraq had destroyed its entire nuclear-weapons-development capability. All of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media, except a brief UPI news-report that was published in no major news-media, ignored the IAEA’s statement, and so the IAEA repeated the denial, and all of the ‘news’-media yet again ignored instead of published the fact — the fact that both Bush and Blair had lied through their teeth and invented that new IAEA report. 7 September 2002 was the date when the U.S. and allied regimes started their saying, as U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said the following day, on September 8th, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” And, then, on September 12th, U.S. President Bush delivered his speech at the UN saying that they must authorize action so that “a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.” If he had been referring there to the U.S.-and-allied regime — the U.S. empire — then that would have been a true statement, but instead it was the puny Iraqi regime — and its leader — that were overthrown and murdered, by Bush and Blair, on their fraudulent basis, and they were not tried and executed for having perpetrated “Aggressive War” (as it’s called in international law) — invading a foreign country only on lies — the same legal violation that the Nazis were executed for at Nuremberg.
Of course, Barack Obama and Donald Trump also perpetrated aggressive war, against Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, and other targets which likewise never threatened the U.S., but they were likewise not prosecuted for it. Right now, under President Joe Biden, even just a month into his Presidency, Caitlin Johnstone headlined on February 27th, “U.S. bombs Syria and ridiculously claims self defense” — yet again, aggressive war, by the U.S. regime (and that was after his predecessor Trump and U.S. allies had perpetrated a 100-missile strike against Syria that likewise was based on a baldfaced lie).
Instead of fearing to be held to account like the Nazis were at Nuremberg, America’s tyrants face no such international prosecutions whatsoever. Only good leaders become assassinated in America. The Deep State gets rid of them. Today’s American Government is clearly fascist — and not like Franco was fascist but like Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito were fascist: imperialistic fascists.
One of the reasons for this is that the lies that the U.S. mainstream media make public are rebroadcast in all of its vassal-nations’ ‘news’ media. On 19 April 2018, just five days after the U.S. and its allies had committed an international war-crime by invading Syria on the basis of lies, RT headlined “U.S. media’s love affair with war: Major outlets showed zero opposition to Syria strikes”, and they made the case against the U.S.-and-allied regimes: for example, “Out of 26 newspaper editorials on the strikes, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) found no dissenting voices.” If that isn’t a totalitarian country, then what is? And the United States has a higher percentage of its population being in prison than does any other nation on the planet. How is that NOT a “regime”? (Many ‘news’-sites refuse to publish my articles because I use the term “regime” to refer to today’s U.S. Government. Honesty is forbidden, in and by the U.S. regime.)
At least regarding international news-reporting, the highest percentage of fake-‘news’ is in America’s mainstream ‘news’-media, because only a few of America’s news-sites (all of which are small because no billionaire is funding them) even try to filter-out the many lies that come from the U.S. Government about foreign governments.
Up until February 1st of 2021, U.S.-and-allied international news reported obsessively about Alexei Navalny, who was being promoted throughout the U.S. empire as an ‘anti-corruption’ campaigner against Putin. But then on February 1st, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a “Press release on Russian-German contacts on the ‘Alexey Navalny case’” countering a string of U.S.-and-allied lies about the case, and Russia’s RT headlined “Top Navalny aide asked alleged British spy for millions in funding, intelligence video released by Russia’s FSB claims to reveal” and opened:
The tape, which was first reported by RT television on Monday, is said to have been filmed by the Federal Security Service (FSB) sometime in 2012 and allegedly shows a meeting between Vladimir Ashurkov and an employee of the British Embassy in Moscow. Ashurkov is the executive director of the FBK, Alexey Navalny’s anti-corruption organization.
The person he met at a Moscow cafe was identified as James William Thomas Ford, then Second Secretary for political affairs of the UK embassy in Russia. The FSB suspected he was an MI6 agent working under diplomatic cover. The discussion presents problematic optics for Navalny and the FBK team, and appears to support the Russian government’s claim that they deserve to be considered foreign agents.
Part of Ashurkov’s pitch, recorded secretly by the security service, was dedicated to fundraising.
“If we had more money, we would expand our team, of course,” he said, adding that his goal of obtaining “a little money” like “10, 20 million dollars a year” would make a huge difference. “And this is not a big amount of money for people who have billions at stake. And that’s the message I am trying to project in my fundraising efforts and talking to people in the business community,” he said. …
That is treason. And what is the normal penalty for treason? But instead, the Russian Government has prosecuted, convicted, and on-and-off imprisoned him, only for cases of fraud and embezzlement, and the U.S. regime and its allies lie and allege that Navalny, who is extremely unpopular and widely despised by the Russian public, has been a hero in the view of most Russians and would be the winner in any election where he would be fairly contesting against Putin. Perhaps Putin simply doesn’t want Navalny to be executed for treason because Russia’s enemies would then immortalize Navalny as having been a martyr for ‘honest government’ and ‘against corruption’.
Here is a video that Alexei Navalny posted to youtube on 19 September 2007, under the title of “НАРОД за легализацию оружия” meaning “PEOPLE for the legalization of weapons”: НАРОД за легализацию оружия
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVNJiO10SWw He was saying there that all Russians should get guns in order to kill Muslims who are infesting Russia, which would be like swatting big flies or stamping on big cockroaches.
An article by Kevin Rothrock, on 25 April 2017, “How Alexey Navalny Abandoned Russian Nationalism”, explained Navalny’s switch from being an exterminationist far-right-wing nationalist libertarian Russian to gravitating, after 2011, toward the U.S. liberal position and the key event that caused him to become intensely backed by the U.S. regime being the February 2014 U.S. coup in Ukraine and the subsequent breakaway of both Donbass and Crimea. Rothrock quoted a Russian commentator: “The story with Crimea, where Putin acted like a Russian nationalist [no, Putin acted like a Russian patriot, and patriotism isn’t, at all, the same as nationalism] for the first and only time in his 15-year rule, plunged Navalny into deep confusion. He didn’t know how to act. Support the reabsorption of Crimea? But then they’d consider you a Putin supporter. Oppose it? Well then say goodbye to your patriot image.” (Obviously, that commentator equated “patriotism” and “nationalism.”) This was during the period when Navalny decided that he’d better stick with his ‘anti-corruption’ campaign, in order to replace Putin. The nationalism focus would no longer work for him. And patriotism was alien to Navalny’s character, just as it is alien to the character of any traitor.
Key to all of this is that the major media hide, instead of report about (such as is being done here), each-others’ fraudulence. Amongst all of America’s major media (and also in the majority of this country’s ‘alternative news’ media, since the majority of those, too, are controlled by billionaires), the thing that is the most forbidden of all to report is the fraudulence of any of them — even not to report this against their own competitors — because they’re all in this together. The few sites that are honest are small and therefore no threat to the rest. Though some news sites are controlled by Democratic billionaires, and other news sites are controlled by Republican billionaires, they’re virtually all controlled by U.S.-and-allied billionaires (and/or a few centimillionaires). This is a class-war, not a war within any class. And the lower classes are only victims in it, not perpetrators of it. Only the top class participates in this war against all of the other classes, and against foreign leaders whom America’s billionaires require the U.S. Government to replace. (And Karl Marx got this wrong: it’s not the “bourgeoisie” — the middle class — that’s the problem. It’s the aristocracy — the top wealth class — that is, and always was. Imperialism comes from the aristocracy — not from the middle class — and is a major part of the problem, but only a part. There is lots more harm that billionaires do, which is of the purely domestic or internal-affairs type.)
The media in U.S. and allied nations simply refuse to publish the reality of their respective government’s policy-objectives regarding Russia and China. That objective is conquest, first by subversion (exploiting traitors) and then by any other means that are necessary. The regime’s media are not to be trusted — especially not on international news. The lying there is unanimous, on foreign affairs. Whereas Democratic Party sites foment hatred against Republicans, and Republican Party sites foment hatred against Democrats (and are so far-right as to be also White-supremacist, the new-Dixiecrat party, which even needs the support of KKKers), all of the regime’s media foment hatred against any foreign leaders whom America’s billionaires want to replace. Truth is dangerous to the regime, but truth is patriotic everywhere.
Of course, this doesn’t show itself only in U.S.-Russia and U.S.-China relations. For example, America is also allied with the Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia, and they want the oil that’s in Yemen; so, America, which sells more weapons to the Sauds than to any other country, is also supplying and guiding the Sauds’ bombing of the food-supply lines that feed the Houthis, who control an oil-rich part of Yemen. The strategy of America and the Sauds is to starve these people out, to slaughter enough of them in this famine so as to take that oil. Walter Bragman at “The Daily Poster” (one of the few American news-sites that’s not controlled by billionaires) explained this on April 22nd, under the headline “I Feel The World Is Turning A Blind Eye: While the Biden administration drags its feet on the Yemen crisis, aid workers on the ground there say the situation is worse than ever.” It’s the sort of news that’s NOT “Fit to Print” in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and etc. Nobody in America turns a profit publishing the important truths. The people who have the money won’t support any of that. But publishing the right lies will draw money from billionaires like garbage attracts flies. (However, even “The Daily Poster” doesn’t report on the fraudulence of the billionaires-controlled ‘news’-media. Nobody does that, except Glenn Greenwald, and now he, too, is only an independent blogger. Nobody will hire him. In effect: there’s no market for truth in America, and in its allied regimes.)
On April 19th, Jeremy Kuzmarov at Covert Action Magazine headlined “Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin — Former Member of Raytheon Board of Directors — Has Awarded Over $2.36 Billion in Contracts to Raytheon Since His Confirmation in January” and he documented that Raytheon had previously sold billions of dollars worth of the weapons that are causing the famine in Yemen, and that Raytheon is especially close to the Saudi royal family:
Raytheon was … the first major defense contractor to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia, selling the kingdom over 1,000 cluster bombs designed to maximize civilian casualties between 1970 and 1995. The company further hired members of the Saudi Royal Family as consultants, and opened a branch in Riyadh in 2017. …
In 2019, Raytheon sold an estimated $8 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which are centrally involved in the war in Yemen. After an October 2016 Saudi airstrike on a funeral home in Sana’a that killed 140 people and wounded 500 more, human rights workers discovered a bomb shard bearing the identification number of Raytheon.[2] It was one of at least 12 attacks on civilians that human rights groups tied to Raytheon’s ordnance during the first two years of the war. In order to secure the lucrative Saudi deals, Raytheon took advantage of federal loopholes by sending former State Department officials to lobby their former colleagues, and later benefitted by having their former top lobbyist, Mark Esper, appointed as Defense Secretary in June 2019 in a precursor to General Austin’s hiring.
Kuzmarov had also headlined on April 15th “Biden’s Claim To Be Ending America’s Longest War Misleading” and he documented that though Biden is ordering the acknowledged U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by September 11th,
As of January, more than 18,000 contractors remained in Afghanistan, according to a Defense Department report, when official troop totals had been reduced to 2,500. These totals reflect the U.S. government’s strategy of outsourcing war to the benefit of private mercenary corporations, and as a means of distancing the war from the public and averting dissent, since relatively few Americans are directly impacted by it.
Unfortunately, Scott Ritter had unintentionally erred in the last word of the headline when he headlined at RT on April 14th “U.S. to withdraw from Afghanistan after two decades of war leaving behind a tortured wasteland and having accomplished… NOTHING”. That invasion and military occupation of Afghanistan has accomplished a lot — and will continue to accomplish more — for the people whom the U.S. Government, America’s actual military government, serves as its top priority: U.S.-and-allied billionaires (who own those Government-contractors). Kuzmarov’s report documented, for example, that “One of the biggest mercenary companies is DynCorp International of Falls Church Virginia, which has received over $7 billion in government contracts to train the Afghan army and manage military bases in Afghanistan. From 2002-2013, DynCorp received 69 percent of all State Department funding. Forbes Magazine called it ‘one of the big winners of the Iraq and Afghan Wars;’ the losers being almost everyone else.”
Americans have been brainwashed to believe that privatizing everything is a better way of running a country, and this Biden policy regarding Afghanistan is the reality of it. Furthermore, spending this money through the U.S. State Department instead of through the U.S. ‘Defense’ (Aggression) Department, sounds so much kinder and gentler. Everything is about fooling the public.
And, yet, Americans continue to subscribe to the media, and to vote for the political candidates, who — not merely once but time-after-time and constantly — are perpetrating those U.S.-imperialist lies (such as against Saddam in 2002-, Gaddafi in 2011-, Assad in 2012-, Yanukovych in 2013-, Maduro in 2015-, and Putin and Xi always).
The majority of Americans are blinded by their particular political Party’s propaganda and read (and listen to) only the ‘news’-media that are controlled by the billionaires who fund their particular Party. This is true for academics just as much as it’s true for the general public. As an example of the obliviousness by academics: in 2012, the scholarly journal Psychological Science published a 26-page ‘study’, “Misinformation and Its Correction: Continued Influence and Successful Debiasing”, which simply assumed that the America’s mainstream ‘news’-media are honest and don’t intentionally deceive the public. Its five authors were presuming that only Republicans are a problem, and they also were ignoring the entire matter of CIA and major-media collusion in the deceptive reporting of international ‘news’ throughout the major ‘news’-media, and were ignoring the entire U.S. power-structure and its control by billionaires. (It was pompous, pontificating, stupidity, which is unfortunately normal even for peer-reviewed journals in the psychological and social ‘sciences’.) The lies are, at the top, not only intentional, but carefully planned.
Glenn Greenwald headlined on April 16th, “Journalists, Learning They Spread a CIA Fraud About Russia, Instantly Embrace a New One”, and he called attention to the nearly simultaneous climb-down that the regime’s media had done on their accusation back on June 26th that “Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says” at the same time while the Government (which initiated and had been lying about that matter ever since) were now
targeting … Russian-Ukrainian political consultant, Konstantin Kilimnik, with new sanctions. One sentence of this press release asserted a claim that the Mueller investigation, after searching for eighteen months, never found: namely, that “Kilimnik provided the Russia intelligence services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy” that he received from then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.
Is it true that Kilimnik passed this polling data to the Kremlin? Maybe. But there is no way for a rational person — let alone someone calling themselves a “journalist” — to conclude that it is true. Why? Because, like the CIA tale about Russian bounties — a claim they learned yesterday had no evidence — this is nothing more than a U.S. Government assertion that lacks any evidence.
Supposedly, America’s major ‘news’-media are mere suckers for being repeatedly spreaders of “fake news” from the U.S. Government; but they are, instead, just another privatized part of that Government.
On April 15th, Russia announced that beginning “next week,” and continuing at least until October, Russia will prevent any military vessels of or allied with the United States from passing through the Kerch Strait, which transits from the Black Sea, into the Sea of Azov, which latter accesses the conflict-zone near Ukraine’s coast (see the map, showing this Strait). Only governmental, not commercial ships, would be prohibited passage by Russia. However, the warmongering American Axios ‘news’ site reported this as referring instead to merchant ships, commercial vessels (as if it weren’t intended to prevent U.S. warships from getting too close to Russia and to Ukraine’s conflict-zone). Axios headlined about this matter on April 20th (five days later), “Scoop: Leaked Ukraine memo reveals scope of Russia’s aggression” (though it wasn’t “leaked” but had been openly published by Ukraine’s Government as having been reported to it by Russia’s Government; and it wasn’t a “Scoop” because it was already five days old). This lying ‘news’-report by Axios went on to assert that “Russia has been holding last-minute military exercises near commercial shipping lanes in the Black Sea that threaten to strangle Ukraine’s economy, according to an internal document from Ukraine’s ministry of defense reviewed by Axios. … Russia announced it intends to block foreign ships in parts of the Black Sea. … The leaked memo shows Russian forces escalating their presence on all sides of the Ukrainian border.” However, in reality, Russia’s action didn’t relate to commercial shipping, at all.
Axios had been launched by money from a few intensely neoconservative Democratic Party billionaires, including Brian Roberts who controls NBC, and also including the person who controls ABC and The Atlantic, Laureen Powell Jobs, who is the heir to the Apple Computer and Disney fortune of her deceased husband Steve Jobs.
Of course, since such ‘news’-reporting is loaded with lies, U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media also need lots of hired ‘non-governmental’ ‘independent’ ‘experts’ to quote ‘explaining’ and ‘justifying’ U.S. foreign policies. A typical such organization is The International Crisis Group. This is yet another example of privatization of the U.S. military state.
On April 22nd, I headlined “The International Crisis Group: Do its funders control the world on behalf of American-and-allied billionaires?” and identified the main funders of that ‘nonpartisan’ ‘non-profit’ ‘expert’ commentator on international relations, which is often cited and interviewed by the U.S. regime’s media. These are people who are billionaires, and who serve billionaires, but the billionaires themselves prefer not to be mentioned and instead for the public ‘credit’ (as funding such front-organizations) to go to the other ‘non-profits’ that they control. This way, the U.S. regime is kept anonymous. (For more information on the International Crisis Group, see Matthew Ehret’s 17 November 2020 “Lord Malloch Brown Revealed: The British Hand Behind the Coup Shows Its Scales Again”.) And that is today’s American ‘democracy’. It’s trying to rule the entire world, through remote control (vassal leaders in each ‘allied’ nation). Part of the plan is for the UN to wither and ultimately die. (This is Truman’s world — definitely not FDR’s.)
We can defeat the corporate media’s war to snuff out independent journalism
By Jonathan Cook May 12, 2021 VIDEO AT LINK My talk at the International Festival of Whistleblowing, Dissent and Accountability on May 8.
Transcript:
- I wanted to use this opportunity to talk about my experiences over the past two decades working with new technology as an independent freelance journalist, one who abandoned – or maybe more accurately, was abandoned by – what we usually call the “mainstream” media.
Looking back over that period, I have come to appreciate that I was among the first generation of journalists to break free of the corporate media – in my case, the Guardian – and ride this wave of new technology. In doing so, we liberated ourselves from the narrow editorial restrictions such media imposes on us as journalists and were still able to find an audience, even if a diminished one.
More and more journalists are following a similar path today – a few out of choice, and more out of necessity as corporate media becomes increasingly unprofitable. But as journalists seek to liberate themselves from the strictures of the old corporate media, that same corporate media is working very hard to characterise the new technology as a threat to media freedoms.
This self-serving argument should be treated with a great deal of scepticism. I want to use my own experiences to argue that quite the reverse is true. And that the real danger is allowing the corporate media to reassert its monopoly over narrating the world to us. ‘Mainstream’ consensus
