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Category: Iraq

  • “That Is Actually Bollocks”: 20 Propaganda Horrors From 20 Years of Media Lens (Part 1)

    After 20 years of Media Lens, it seems only natural that we should look back in gratitude at the support we’ve received. In response to one of our early pieces, a kindly columnist at the Observer commented:

    ‘Dear David,

    ‘Thank you very much for sending me a copy of your piece, which strikes me as spot on.

    ‘Yrs,

    ‘Nick Cohen’

    A Guardian columnist responded with even more effusive praise:

    ‘This article is brilliant and fascinating David, as ever.’ (George Monbiot)

    Alas, our ethical integrity declined precipitously after we subjected our interlocutors to criticism, with Cohen addressing us as ‘Dear Serviles’, signing off with ‘Viva Joe Stalin’ (Cohen, email, 15 March 2002). Monbiot went on to write an article titled, ‘Media Cleanse’. He described our organisation as ‘an apologist for genocidaires and ethnic cleansers’ – Guardianspeak for ‘critics who embarrass apologists for Western foreign policy’. Both Cohen and Monbiot have long since blocked us on Twitter.

    More seriously, beyond the corporate fringepuddle, we were initially astonished by the level of public support we received. A reader commented early on:

    ‘Dear MediaLens, I feel like crying with the gratitude I feel to you people for the immense amount of work that must go into writing incredibly detailed, researched synopses like that we have just received from you on Iraq.’

    Last month, a reader emailed:

    ‘My sister and I have followed your work for many years and really I don’t have the words to describe the value of the service you provide to a global community.’

    We once asked Harold Pinter what he thought of the media claim that ‘people are completely indifferent to everything that’s going on and couldn’t care less’. In his inimitable style, Pinter replied:

    ‘That is actually bollocks.’

    We sometimes feel genuinely embarrassed by the praise we receive because it has always seemed to us that we are involved in a kind of turkey shoot.

    The fact is that, like other corporate employees, on pain of career cancellation, media workers simply cannot expose truths that discomfit their owners, parent companies, editors, advertisers, colleagues, and allied powerful interests. It is child’s play to demonstrate that this is the case.

    Even as we were editing this alert, Jack Slater, an ostensibly impartial, objective senior BBC broadcast journalist covering Joe Biden’s first visit to the UK as president, tweeted:

    ‘Always special to film POTUS [President of the United States].’

    Nobody noticed. If Slater tweeted, ‘Always special to film Assad’, or, ‘Always special to film Putin’, he would be guilty of ‘bias’ contravening the BBC charter and out of a job. Likewise, if he tweeted, ‘Always uncomfortable to film the head of US imperial power.’

    Because journalists are also not free to discuss what it is they are not free to discuss, we often have the last word (Slater, of course, ignored our tweet, above). This also makes us look great!

    The point is that we don’t have direct bosses – owners, managers, editors, parent companies. And we also don’t have indirect bosses – advertisers, wealthy philanthropists, supportive charitable foundations, organisational allegiances, and so on. This is the one advantage of being a tinpot outfit run on a shoestring.

    The Chinese mystic Chuang Tzu once said: ‘Easy is right.’ Media criticism is easy if you’re willing to burn your media bridges at both ends. We have found that it often produces a lovely light.

    Below, we discuss 20 corporate media horrors from the last 20 years that have remained stuck in our minds and craws, and that are ‘actually bollocks’.

    1. The 30mm M230 Chain-Driven Autocannon ‘Stitching The Fabric Of A Nation Together’

    It couldn’t have been more perfect. On 17 November 2010, BBC News at Ten presenter George Alagiah spoke from the British base, Camp Bastion, in Afghanistan:

    ‘I’ve been here a week now and it’s been long enough to see some of the small but real steps of progress. But it’s also clear how much further there is to go. And it’s not just about women’s rights or more clinics and schools. It’s about stitching the fabric of a nation together.’

    Future historians will write learned dissertations on how gender rights in our time have been commandeered and weaponised by a fathomless cultural arrogance (the polite term) in the service of imperial violence.

    For these fine words were spoken in front of an Apache attack helicopter. The gunship’s 30mm, M230 chain-driven autocannon, fresh from ‘stitching the fabric of a nation together’, was clearly visible. This was the same weapon type seen blowing apart a dozen or more Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in the 2007 WikiLeaks ‘Collateral Murder’ video. And this is the same aircraft type in which (then) Prince Harry had flown as co-pilot and gunner. Now an ardent anti-racism campaigner, when asked if he had killed people as part of the illegal, racist war on brown-skinned Afghans, Harry answered:

    ‘Yeah, so, lots of people have… If there’s people trying to do bad stuff to our guys, then we’ll take them out of the game, I suppose.’

    Talk of a majority white alliance ‘taking out’ brown-skinned people from ‘the game’ (‘The Great Game’?) would perhaps fail Harry’s own refurbished standards of political correctness now.

    2. The Independent on Sunday – ‘Travel Neroists’

    Like everyone else, the billionaire-owned, profit-maximising, ad-dependent corporation calling itself the Independent on Sunday now claims to hold a bright candle for the radical climate action required to address the devastation wrought by… (wait for it!)… the billionaire-owned, profit-maximising, ad-dependent corporate system.

    In 2016, environment editor Geoffrey Lean lavished praise on himself and his employer:

    ‘this has been a newspaper that has long been black and white and green all over, winning many awards’.

    As Noam Chomsky said:

    ‘Heaven must be full to overflowing, if the masters of self-adulation are to be taken at their word.’ 1

    In 2007 – fully 20 years after scientists had blown a loud whistle on the looming threat of climate collapse – the February 4 cover story of the Independent on Sunday’s Review supplement was almost beyond belief. The words on the cover:

    ‘Time is running out… Ski resorts are melting… Paradise islands are vanishing… So what are you waiting for?’

    Did they mean: what are we waiting for before taking radical action? No, this, after all, was a corporate newspaper and business is business:

    ‘30 places you need to visit while you still can – A 64-page Travel Special…’

    From the depths of depraved corporate cynicism, Marcus Fairs wrote:

    ‘I am changing my travel plans this year. Alarmed by global warming, shocked by the imminent mass extinction of species and distraught at the environmental damage wreaked by mass tourism, I have decided to act before it is too late. Yes, carbon-neutral travel can wait. I’m off to see polar bears, tigers and low-lying Pacific atolls while they’re still there… In the spirit of Nero – the Roman emperor who sang to the beauty of the flames while Rome burned to the ground – we are determined to enjoy the final days of our beautiful Earth. We are aware that mass tourism damages the very things we are going to see, but this only increases our urgency. We are aware that we will soon have to act more sustainably, which gives us all the more reason to be irresponsible while we still can.

    ‘Not for us the angsty despair of the eco-worriers, nor the stay-home moralising of the greenhouse gasbags. For we are the travel Neroists, and we have spotted a window of opportunity.’ 2

    Fourteen years later, everything has changed, of course. Well, profit-maximising corporate media now at least pretend they care. In April, Greta Thunberg accurately summed up the reality of these heroic businesses that are ‘black and white and green all over’:

    ‘The climate crisis doesn’t exist in the public debate today. And since it doesn’t really exist… the general level of awareness is so absurdly low…’

    For the corporate system, radical change means finding radical new deceptions to allow them to continue maximising profits at any cost.

    3. Simon Kelner – Corbyn’s ‘Threatening’ Pronunciation

    By the time Jeremy Corbyn stood for the leadership of the Labour Party in May 2015, he had been a Labour MP for 32 years. As a leading anti-war voice, he had received plenty of attention and abuse from corporate politics and media.

    We searched the ProQuest media database for national UK newspaper articles containing mentions of ‘Corbyn’ and ‘anti-semitism’ before 1 May 2015. The search found 18 articles, none of which accused Corbyn of anti-semitism. Then, in November 2019, the month before the last general election, we searched for mentions of ‘Corbyn’ and ‘anti-semitism’ after 1 May 2015. We got 15,857 hits. The figure currently stands at 21,919.

    This represents a truly awesome, in fact, unprecedented, propaganda assault on a democratic politician. In fact, it closely resembles the campaigns used to demonise leaders of Official Enemy states like Iraq, Iran, Libya and Venezuela, conducted by many of the same journalists in the same media organisations. That’s a gentle way of saying the anti-Corbyn propaganda blitz was a serious attack on democracy, a kind of fascism.

    As one would expect during a McCarthyite-style frenzy of this kind, in finding a herd to follow many corporate media workers lost their minds.

    A small but telling example was provided in the i newspaper by former Independent editor Simon Kelner, who focused on the way Corbyn had ‘mispronounced’ the name of the sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. Kelner noted of Corbyn’s contribution to a TV debate: ‘He called him “Ep–Schtine.”’

    In attacking Corbyn, along with other journalists like ITV political editor Robert Peston, Kelner did not merely dispense with the usual affectation of journalistic objectivity, he emphasised his subjectivity:

    ‘My reaction was a visceral one: it’s not something I can explain easily, or even rationally, but a Jewish person does know when there is something that sounds wrong, or perjorative [sic], or even threatening. It was as if he was saying: “Are you aware this man is Jewish?”’

    The idea, then, was that Corbyn – who had been subjected to relentless, highly damaging attacks of this kind for several years, and who had done everything he could to distance himself from anti-semitism, taking a very tough line on the suspension of allies like Ken Livingstone and Chris Williamson from the Labour Party – was emphasising Epstein’s Jewishness in a deliberate – or, worse – unconscious effort to smear Jews.

    Of course, only a crazed racist would be unable to resist such a patently self-destructive impulse on national TV. And yet, as discussed, Corbyn managed to prevent journalists and politicians from observing his right arm shooting skywards for 32 years. In November 2019, the outgoing Speaker of the House of Commons, former Conservative MP, John Bercow, who is Jewish, said in an interview:

    ‘I myself have never experienced anti-semitism from a member of the Labour Party, point one. And point two, though there is a big issue and it has to be addressed, I do not myself believe Jeremy Corbyn is anti-semitic.

    ‘I’ve known him for the 22 years I’ve been in Parliament. Even, actually, when I was a right-winger we got on pretty well… I’ve never detected so much as a whiff of anti-semitism [from him].’

    Our search of the ProQuest media database found no mention of Bercow’s comments in any UK national newspaper. Kelner’s comments belong with the most crazed and paranoid effusions of US McCarthyism, where beds were widely believed to be the preferred hiding place for ‘reds’.

    4. The BBC’s Missing History Of Iran

    The BBC has a long, inglorious history of shortening its historical attention span to suit powerful interests. A key establishment embarrassment was the US-UK’s coup to overthrow the democratically elected Musaddiq government of Iran in 1953.

    It truly is embarrassing that the CIA supplied the weapons and money, that the BBC helped green-light the coup, and above all the fact that the goal was oil.

    In 1952, the British ambassador commented that ‘Persian [Iranian] public opinion is unanimous in rejecting the [British] offer’ of a deal on oil. But Britain did ‘not consider that a deal on acceptable terms can ever be made with’ Musaddiq. 3

    Colonel Wheeler, an adviser at the British embassy, explained that ‘combined Anglo-American action could, of course, have removed [Musaddiq] at any time during the past six months… Given a united Anglo-American front, a change of government could almost certainly be effected without difficulty or disturbance’. (p. 91)

    This neatly captures the traditional US-UK ‘respect’ for democracy and human rights (see point 17 in Part 2).

    In a memorandum in August 1952 discussing this ‘change of government’, Sam Falle, a UK embassy official in Iran, suggested that:

    ‘We should leave the name-suggesting to the Americans… It should not be difficult to bring the American’s candidate… to power.’ (p. 92)

    The British preference was ‘for a non-communist coup d’etat preferably in the name of the Shah. This would mean an authoritarian regime,’ the embassy in Teheran noted ominously. (p. 91)

    According to then CIA agent Richard Cottam, ‘…that mob that came into north Teheran and was decisive in the overthrow was a mercenary mob. It had no ideology. That mob was paid for by American dollars and the amount of money that was used has to have been very large’. (p. 93)

    A US general later testified that ‘the guns they had in their hands, the trucks they rode in, the armoured cars that they drove through the streets, and the radio communications that permitted their control, were all furnished through the [US] military defence assistance program’. (p. 93)

    Of this period of history, a recent BBC report observed merely:

    ‘The UK owes the money for failing to deliver tanks Iran bought in the 1970s.’

    Between 1971 and 1976, the UK sold the Shah 1,500 state-of-the-art Chieftain main battle tanks and 250 repair vehicles costing £650 million. Thatcher praised the Shah as ‘one of the world’s most far-sighted statesmen, whose experience is unrivaled’. She added:

    ‘No other world leader has given his country more dynamic leadership. He is leading Iran through a twentieth century renaissance.’

    Curiously, the BBC made no mention of the fact that the tanks had been sent to prop up a dictator installed by the US-UK alliance to steal Iranian oil.

    Amnesty International reported of Iran under the Shah that it had the ‘highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture’ which was ‘beyond belief’. It was a society in which ‘the entire population was subjected to a constant, all-pervasive terror’.4

    None of this exists for BBC media workers.

    US Iran specialist Eric Hoogland commented of the Shah:

    ‘The more dictatorial his regime became, the closer the US-Iran relationship became.’

    5. Iranian ‘Showdown’ – The Guardian’s Front-Page Farce

    In 2007, a front-page Guardian piece by Simon Tisdall claimed that Iran had secret plans to do nothing less than wage war on, and defeat, American forces in Iraq by August of that year.

    Iran, it seemed, was ‘forging ties with al-Qaida elements and Sunni Arab militias in Iraq in preparation for a summer showdown with coalition forces intended to tip a wavering US Congress into voting for full military withdrawal’.

    The claim was based almost entirely on unsupported assertions made by anonymous US officials. Indeed 22 of the 23 paragraphs in the story relayed official US claims: over 95 per cent of the story. The compilation below indicates the levels of balance and objectivity:

    ‘US officials say’; ‘a senior US official in Baghdad warned’; ‘The official said’; ‘the official said’; ‘the official said’; ‘US officials now say’; ‘the senior official in Baghdad said’ ‘he [the senior official in Baghdad] added’; ‘the official said’; ‘the official said’; ‘he [the official] indicated’; ‘he [the official] cited’; ‘a senior administration official in Washington said’; ‘The administration official also claimed; ‘he [the administration official] said’; ‘US officials say’; ‘the senior official in Baghdad said’; ‘he [the senior official in Baghdad] said’; ‘the senior administration official said’; ‘he [the senior administration official] said’; ‘the official claimed’; ‘he [the official] said’; ‘Gen Petraeus’s report to the White House and Congress’; ‘a former Bush administration official said’; ‘A senior adviser to Gen Petraeus reported’; ‘the adviser admitted’.

    No less than 26 references to official pronouncements formed the basis for a Guardian story presented with no scrutiny, no balance, no counter-evidence – nothing. Remove the verbiage described above and a Guardian front page news report becomes a straight Pentagon press release.

    6. The Observer’s Missing War On Syria

    The Iraq war catastrophe was a genuine wake-up call for Western governments and media. Something had to change. In retrospect, the answer was obvious: if wars destroying whole countries for oil and other resources were damaging the credibility of Western ‘democracies’, why not just pretend that the West isn’t involved? Thus, Western responsibility for the destruction of Libya barely exists for Western media. Thus, also, this Observer editorial on Syrian president Assad:

    ‘Many other factors have kept his regime in power. One is the refusal of the western powers to forcibly intervene… Fearful of another disaster like Iraq, MPs rejected UK military intervention. Days later, Barack Obama and the US Congress followed suit. The then Labour leader, Ed Miliband, said the Commons had spoken “for the people of Britain”. Perhaps.’ (Our emphasis)

    In reality, the West, directly and via regional allies, has played a massive role in the violence. The New York Times reported that the US had been embroiled in a dirty war in Syria that constituted ‘one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the C.I.A’, running to ‘more than $1 billion over the life of the program’. The aim was to support a vast ‘rebel’ army created and armed by the US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey to overthrow the Syrian government.

    In 2013, it was reported that the US had supplied no less than 15,000 high-tech, anti-tank missiles to ‘rebels’ via Saudi Arabia.

    In 2014, Joe Biden said of Syria that US allies ‘poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens… thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad. Except that the people who were being supplied were… Al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis’.

    7. Warmonger David Aaronovitch’s Regretful Musings On The Inherent Tragedy of Life

    Responding to the latest ‘conflict’ (some have gone so far as to call it ‘a war’) between souped-up Palestinian fireworks and US-supplied, state-of-the-art, high-tech ordnance, Times columnist and chateau general commanding the corporate media’s 101st Chairborne Division, David Aaronovitch, sighed wistfully on May 12, 2021:

    ‘It’s not the Hamas leadership or the Netanyahus who are dying. It’s the people who always die.’

    If that sounded empathetic and balanced, it was, in fact, a perfect illustration of a point made by Herman and Chomsky 33 years ago on how ‘worthy’ victims – people Western journalists care about – and ‘unworthy victims’ are treated. In their book, Manufacturing Consent, they wrote of one paired example:

    ‘While the coverage of the worthy victim was generous with gory details and quoted expressions of outrage and demands for justice, the coverage of the unworthy victims was low-keyed, designed to keep the lid on emotions and evoking regretful and philosophical generalities on the omnipresence of violence and the inherent tragedy of human life.’5

    It could hardly be more noticeable that when Israel blitzes Gaza every few years, Aaronovitch’s Twitter account does not erupt – he has little to say, finding other things to tweet about. There’s no outrage, no demands for action and ‘intervention’. The same is true of many of the corporate fringepuddle’s habitual warmongers.

    By contrast, in Aaronovitch’s support for NATO’s war on Serbia, allegedly in defence of the people of Kosovo, ‘expressions of outrage and demands for justice’ were to the fore. He famously wrote:

    ‘Is this cause, the cause of the Kosovar Albanians, a cause that is worth suffering for? … Would I fight, or (more realistically) would I countenance the possibility that members of my family might die?’

    His answer: ‘I think so.’

    But, hold on, ‘It’s the people who always die’, right?

    In supporting war on Iraq in January 2003, Aaronovitch wrote of Saddam Hussein:

    ‘I want him out, for the sake of the region (and therefore, eventually, for our sakes), but most particularly for the sake of the Iraqi people who cannot lift this yoke on their own.’ 6

    But isn’t it the people who always die, not the leaders? (Actually, of course, Official Enemies generally do die – they are lynched, buggered with knives, shot in the head, hanged, found dead in jail, buried alive in jail, and so on) So why not let the UN weapons inspectors continue to find nothing?

    You can see our book, Propaganda Blitz, (pp. 129-131), for further details of how Aaronovitch generally dispenses with wistful philosophising in supporting wars against Official Enemies.

    8. ‘Advertisements For Myself’ – Mehdi Hasan Hawking Left Criticism Of The Left

    Mehdi Hasan of the New Statesman, The Intercept and al-Jazeera, is a prime example of a self-identified ‘leftist’ who fiercely attacks left positions on key issues. For example, Hasan wrote in the New Statesman in 2011:

    ‘The innocent people of Benghazi deserve protection from Gaddafi’s murderous wrath.’

    In fact, the ‘threat’ of a massacre in Benghazi was an Iraqi WMD-style propaganda fiction.

    Later, Hasan wrote an impassioned open letter addressed to ‘those of you on the anti-war far left who have a soft spot for the dictator in Damascus: Have you lost your minds? Or have you no shame?’

    In fact, dissidents who had no ‘soft spot’ for Assad at all, were raising rational questions about more claims that resembled the Iraqi WMD deception.

    And again, Hasan commented:

    ‘I’m no expert on Venezuela but I’m pretty sure you can think Maduro is a horrible/bad/authoritarian president *and* also think it’s bad for the US to back coups or regime change there.’

    As media analyst Adam Johnson tweeted:

    ‘I love this thing where nominal leftists run the propaganda ball for bombing a country 99 yards then stop at the one yard and insist they don’t support scoring goals, that they in fact oppose war.’

    How to explain Hasan’s comments? No need to speculate. Hasan explained his approach in a letter to Paul Dacre, the editor of the l:Daily Mail:

    ‘Dear Mr Dacre,

    ‘My name is Mehdi Hasan and I’m the New Statesman’s senior political editor. My good friend Peter Oborne suggested I drop you a line as I’m very keen to write for the Daily Mail.’

    Hasan continued:

    ‘Although I am on the left of the political spectrum, and disagree with the Mail’s editorial line on a range of issues, I have always admired the paper’s passion, rigour, boldness and, of course, news values.

    ‘For the record, I am not a Labour tribalist and am often ultra-critical of the left – especially on social and moral issues, where my fellow leftists and liberals have lost touch with their own traditions and with the great British public…’

    A key section of the letter read:

    ‘I could therefore write pieces for the Mail critical of Labour and the left, from “inside” Labour and the left (as the senior political editor at the New Statesman).’

    This, again, should be noted by aspiring career journalists – nothing is more welcome in the corporate fringepuddle than an ostensible leftist attacking the left.

    9. The BBC’s Bridget Kendall – Limiting The Spectrum

    Noam Chomsky is a James Randi-style master at exposing the sleights of hand and (forked) tongue of the propaganda prestidigitators:

    ‘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 – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.’

    Cue Bridget Kendall, the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent, who declared on BBC News at Six in 2006:

    ‘There’s still bitter disagreement over invading Iraq. Was it justified or a disastrous miscalculation?’7

    As Chomsky says, this gives the sense of a free-thinking debate. But an honest, fact-based selection of choices would look rather different:

    There’s still bitter disagreement over invading Iraq. Was it an illegal war of aggression for Iraqi oil that disastrously miscalculated the impact on the civilian population, or was it an illegal war of aggression for Iraqi oil that relegated calculations on the likely human consequences for the war- and sanctions-wrecked country to the point of invisibility?

    Media discussion is forbidden, but the stark fact is that Rumaila oilfield – the largest oilfield in Iraq and the third largest in the world – is currently operated by Britain’s BP. West Qurna I oilfield is operated by the US oil giant ExxonMobil. Does the Iraq war look like any kind of ‘disastrous miscalculation’ to BP and ExxonMobil?8

    10. ‘It Was Rubbish’ – Andrew Marr, National Treasure

    BBC interviewer and national treasure Andrew Marr once claimed:

    ‘When I joined the BBC, my Organs of Opinion were formally removed.’9

    This is impossible, of course – Organs of Opinion cannot be surgically removed. But consciences can be.

    Recall, the state-corporate media system is a demeritocracy – journalists are rewarded for doing a bad job in a good way for powerful interests. Marr is a striking example of that phenomenon. He pretty much guaranteed himself a job for life when he delivered this propaganda speech as ‘analysis’ and ‘news’ outside Downing Street as Baghdad ‘fell’ to US tanks on 9 April 2003:

    ‘Frankly, the main mood [in Downing Street] is of unbridled relief. I’ve been watching ministers wander around with smiles like split watermelons.’ 10

    Marr continued:

    ‘Well, I think this does one thing – it draws a line under what, before the war, had been a period of… well, a faint air of pointlessness, almost, was hanging over Downing Street. There were all these slightly tawdry arguments and scandals. That is now history. Mr Blair is well aware that all his critics out there in the party and beyond aren’t going to thank him – because they’re only human – for being right when they’ve been wrong. And he knows that there might be trouble ahead, as I said. But I think this is very, very important for him. It gives him a new freedom and a new self-confidence. He confronted many critics…

    ‘He said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right. And it would be entirely ungracious, even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result.’11

    This was an outrageous declaration that Blair had been completely vindicated. In reality, nothing that US tanks did in Baghdad changed the fact that this was an outright war of aggression for oil, an example of ‘the supreme war crime’.

    Later, we asked Marr for his thoughts on his speech vindicating Blair. He, of course, ignored us. However, he did respond to someone else who asked. Marr said of his April 9 speech:

    ‘…it was rubbish but it came after weeks when I’d been predicting Baghdad bloodbath – the Iraqi army gave up’.

    Ah, so Marr had all along been a fiery contrarian, predicting disaster in Baghdad! He had been too critical of the government, hence his surprised over-reaction! Having watched almost everything Marr said in the months leading up to the war, we can confidently assert: ‘That is actually bollocks.’

    1. Chomsky, ‘Year 501’, Verso, 1993, p. 20.
    2. Marcus Fairs, ‘Travel special: Roman holidays,’ Independent on Sunday, 4 February 2007, our emphasis.
    3. Quoted, Mark Curtis, ‘The Ambiguities of Power, Zed Books, 1995, p. 89.
    4. Martin Ennals, Secretary General of Amnesty International, cited in an Amnesty publication, Matchbox, Autumn 1976.
    5. Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, Pantheon, 1988, p. 39.
    6. Aaronovitch, ‘Why the Left must tackle the crimes of Saddam: With or without a second UN resolution, I will not oppose action against Iraq,’ Observer, 2 February 2003.
    7. BBC1, 20 March 2006.
    8. For details, see Greg Muttitt, ‘Fuel On The Fire – Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq’, Vintage, 2012.
    9. Marr, Daily Telegraph, 10 January 2001.
    10. BBC News At Ten, 9 April 2003.
    11. Marr, BBC 1, News At Ten, 9 April 2003.
    The post “That Is Actually Bollocks”: 20 Propaganda Horrors From 20 Years of Media Lens (Part 1) first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A People’s Vaccine Against a Mutating Virus and Neoliberal Rule

    Photo credit: UNICEF Teachers and students were able to return to school in Lao Cai, Viet Nam, in May 2020

    A recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that worries about the COVID pandemic in the United States are at their lowest level since it began. Only half of Americans are either “very worried” (15%) or “somewhat worried” (35%) about the virus, while the other half are “not very worried” (30%) or “not worried at all” (20%).

    But the news from around the world makes it clear that this pandemic is far from over, and a story from Vietnam highlights the nature of the danger.

    Vietnam is a COVID success story, with one of the lowest rates of infection and death in the world. Vietnam’s excellent community-based public health system prevented the virus from spreading beyond isolated cases and localized outbreaks, without a nationwide lockdown. With a population of 98 million people, Vietnam has had only 8,883 cases and 53 deaths.

    However, more than half of Vietnam’s cases and deaths have come in the last two months, and three-quarters of the new cases have been infected with a new “hybrid” variant that combines the two mutations detected separately in the Alpha (U.K.) and Delta (India) variants.

    Vietnam is a canary in the pandemic coal-mine. The way this new variant has spread so quickly in a country that has defeated every previous form of the virus suggests that this one is much more infectious.

    This variant must surely also be spreading in other countries, where it will be harder to detect among thousands of daily cases, and will therefore be widespread by the time public health officials and governments respond to it. There may also be other highly infectious new variants spreading undetected among the millions of cases in Latin America and other parts of the world.

    A new study in The Lancet medical journal has found that the Alpha (U.K.), Beta (South Africa) and Delta (India) variants are all more resistant to existing vaccines than the original COVID virus, and the Delta variant is still spreading in countries with aggressive vaccination programs, including the U.K.

    The Delta variant accounts for a two-month high in new cases in the U.K. and a new wave of infections in Portugal, just as developed countries ease restrictions before the summer vacation season, almost certainly opening the door to the next wave. The U.K., which has a slightly higher vaccination rate than the United States, had planned a further relaxation of restrictions on June 21st, but that is now in question.

    China, Vietnam, New Zealand and other countries defeated the pandemic in its early stages by prioritizing public health over business interests. The United States and Western Europe instead tried to strike a balance between public health and their neoliberal economic systems, breeding a monster that has now killed millions of people. The World Health Organization believes that six to eight million people have died, about twice as many as have been counted in official figures.

    Now the WHO is recommending that wealthier countries who have good supplies of vaccines postpone vaccinating healthy young people, and instead prioritize sending vaccines to poorer countries where the virus is running wild.

    President Biden has announced that the United States is releasing 25 million doses from its stockpiles, most of which will be distributed through the WHO’s Covax program, with another 55 million to follow by the end of June. But this is a tiny fraction of what is needed.

    Biden has also agreed to waive patent rights on vaccines under the WTO’s TRIPS rules (the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights), but that has so far been held up at the WTO by Canada and right-wing governments in the U.K., Germany, Brazil, Australia, Japan and Colombia. People have taken to the streets in many countries to insist that a WTO TRIPS Council meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday, June 8-9, must agree to waive patent monopolies.

    Since all the countries blocking the TRIPS waiver are U.S. allies, this will be a critical test of the Biden administration’s promised international leadership and diplomacy, which has so far taken a back seat to dangerous saber-rattling against China and Russia, foot-dragging on the JCPOA with Iran and war-crime-fueling weapons-peddling to Israel and Saudi Arabia.

    Ending international vaccine apartheid is not just a matter of altruism, or even justice. It is a question of whether we will end this pandemic before vaccine-resistant, super-spreading and deadlier variants fuel even more toxic new waves. The only way humanity can win this struggle is to act collectively in our common interest. 

    Public Citizen has researched what it would take to vaccinate the world, and concluded that it would cost only $25 billion – 3% of the annual U.S. budget for weapons and war – to set up manufacturing plants and distribution hubs across the world and vaccinate all of humanity within a year. Forty-two Progressives in Congress have signed a letter to President Biden to urge him to fund such a plan.

    If the world can agree to make and distribute a People’s Vaccine, it could be the silver lining in this dark cloud, because this ability to act globally and collectively in the public interest is precisely what we need to solve so many of the most serious problems facing humanity.

    For example, the UN Environment Program (UNEP) is warning that we are in the midst of a triple crisis of climate change, mass extinction and pollution. Our neoliberal political and economic system has not just failed to solve these problems. It actively works to undermine efforts to do so, granting people, corporations and countries who profit from destroying the natural world the freedom to do so without constraint.

    That is the very meaning of laissez-faire, to let the wealthy and powerful do whatever they want, regardless of the consequences for the rest of us, or even for life on Earth. As the economist John Maynard Keynes reputedly said in the 1930s, “Laissez-faire capitalism is the absurd idea that the worst people, for the worst reasons, will do what is best for us all.”

    Neoliberalism is the reimposition of 19th century laissez-faire capitalism, with all its injustices, inequality and oppression, on the people of the 21st century, prioritizing markets, profits and wealth over the common welfare of humanity and the natural world our lives depend on.

    Berkeley and Princeton political theorist Sheldon Wolin called the U.S. political system, which facilitates this neoliberal economic order, “inverted totalitarianism.” Like classical totalitarianism, it concentrates ever more wealth and power in the hands of a small ruling class, but instead of abolishing parliaments, elections and the superficial trappings of representative government as classical totalitarianism did, it simply co-opts them as tools of plutocracy, which has proved to be a more marketable and sustainable strategy.

    But now that neoliberalism has wreaked its chaos for a generation, popular movements are rising up across the world to demand systemic change and to build new systems of politics and economics that can actually solve the huge problems that neoliberalism has produced.

    In response to the 2019 uprising in Chile, its rulers were forced to agree to an election for a constitutional assembly, to draft a constitution to replace the one written during the Pinochet dictatorship, one of the vanguards of neoliberalism. That election has now taken place, and the ruling party of President Pinera and other traditional parties won less than a third of the seats. So the constitution will instead be written by a super-majority of citizens committed to radical reform and social, economic and political justice.

    In Iraq, which was also swept by a popular uprising in 2019, a new government seated in 2020 has launched an investigation to recover $150 billion in Iraqi oil revenues stolen and smuggled out of the country by the corrupt officials of previous governments.

    U.S.-backed former exiles flew into Iraq on the heels of the U.S. invasion in 2003 “with empty pockets to fill,” as a Baghdad taxi driver told a Western reporter at the time. While U.S. forces and U.S.-trained Iraqi death squads destroyed their country, they hunkered down in the Green Zone in Baghdad and controlled and looted Iraq’s oil revenues for the next seventeen years. Now maybe Iraq can recover the stolen money its people so desperately need, and start using its oil wealth to rebuild that shattered country.

    In Bolivia, also in 2019, a U.S.-backed coup overthrew its popular indigenous president, Evo Morales. But the people of Bolivia rose up in a general strike to demand a new election, Morales’ MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo) Party was restored to power, and Luis Arce, Morales’ former Economy Minister, is now Bolivia’s President.

    Around the world, we are witnessing what can happen when people rise up and act collectively for the common good. That is how we will solve the serious problems we face, from the COVID pandemic to the climate crisis to the terminal danger of nuclear war. Humanity’s survival into the twenty-second century and all our hopes for a bright future depend on building new political and economic systems that will simply and genuinely “do what is best for all of us.”

    The post A People’s Vaccine Against a Mutating Virus and Neoliberal Rule first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Myanmar school strikes and a plane diverted to Minsk: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

    A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Colombia to China

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Battle station: the celebrity podcast that explains modern warfare

    Carey Mulligan on Syria, playwright James Graham on the Troubles … the Imperial War Museums’ new podcast brings celebrities and experts together to understand recent armed struggles

    Comedian and author Deborah Frances-White is sitting at a table, in the shadow of a Spitfire which soars above her head. She is being interrogated on everything she knows about one of the most violent conflicts in recent decades. What comes to mind when she thinks of the Yugoslav wars? “I think of words like Milošević, Serbo-Croatia, Bosnia … I think there’s a star on the flag?” she flounders. “I remember there was a Time magazine cover with a man at the end of the war.”

    Frances-White is in the hot seat because she is a guest on Conflict of Interest, a new podcast from the Imperial War Museums (IWM) – the Spitfire above her head is hung from the ceiling of its London museum’s atrium, and her interrogator is Carl Warner, the IWM’s head of narrative and curatorial.

    I think about all the things I don’t know, all the time, and I feel very ashamed

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • While Palestine burns and Ballymurphy weeps, warmongers Blair and Campbell enjoy a breakfast TV catch-up

    This week saw Palestine under Israeli bombardment once again. Nearer home, an inquest confirmed that British troops massacred innocent civilians in Belfast in 1971. Yet on Wednesday morning, former PM Tony Blair and his one-time propagandist Alistair Campbell chatted on breakfast TV.

    Campbell, now the host of Good Morning Britain, had a smug talk with his old boss about Labour Party politics, political power and vaccines.

    Their role in the destruction of Iraq went unmentioned. As did the profound links between colonialism and violence in Gaza, the West Bank and Belfast.

    For the British ruling class and its media backers, these are figures of legitimacy, vaccinated against any criticism of their own bloody records.

    Ballymurphy

    On 11 May, an inquest found that the nine people shot dead by British paratroopers in Ballymurphy, Belfast, had been innocent. A fact their families had known since the killings in 1971. The coroner found:

    All of the deceased in the series of inquests were entirely innocent of wrongdoing on the day in question.

    In response, Brandon Lewis, Boris Johnson’s Northern Ireland secretary, mustered a mealy-mouthed non-apology:

    The events of Ballymurphy should never have happened, the families of those who were killed should never have had to experience the grief and trauma of that loss

    Palestine

    Meanwhile in Palestine, the Israeli government was continuing to bombard the population with high-tech weaponry, bringing down a 13-storey tower block. And an Arab man was reportedly lynched by a far-right mob in Tel Aviv.

    It is easy for some to sit back and ‘both sides’ what is going on. But as well as being a product of British imperial ambitions, Israel remains a major customer for UK-made military hardware. Israeli violence cannot be disconnected from British arms firm’s profits. The UK government licences millions of pounds worth of arms to Israel annually, as Campaign against the Arms Trade (CAAT) regularly points out.

    A reckoning?

    The British ruling class clearly likes to think of itself as a statesman-like leader in international affairs. In this reading, the likes of Blair and Campbell are the ‘adults in the room”

    The flip side of this fantasy is a country that cannot face its own history. This inability means Blair and Campbell can power-chat on breakfast TV while innocents suffer.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Pete Birkinshaw

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Second Stage Terror Wars

    We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.

    – William Casey, CIA Director, February. 1981

    It is well known that the endless U.S. war on terror was overtly launched following the mass murders of September 11, 2001 and the linked anthrax attacks.   The invasion of Afghanistan and the Patriot Act were immediately justified by those insider murders, and subsequently the wars against Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.  So too the terrorizing of the American people with constant fear-mongering about imminent Islamic terrorist attacks from abroad that never came.

    It is less well known that the executive director of the U.S. cover story – the fictional 9/11 Commission Report – was Philip Zelikow, who controlled and shaped the report from start to finish.

    It is even less well known that Zelikow, a professor at the University of Virginia, was closely associated with Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush, Dickey Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Brent Scowcroft, et al. and had served in various key intelligence positions in both the George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations. In 2011 President Obama named him to his President’s Intelligence Advisory Board as befits bi-partisan elite rule and coverup compensation across political parties.

    Perhaps it’s unknown or just forgotten that The Family Steering Committee for the 9/11 Commission repeatedly called for Zelikow’s removal, claiming that his appointment made a farce of the claim that the Commission was independent.

    Zelikow said that for the Commission to consider alternative theories to the government’s claims about Osama bin Laden was akin to whacking moles.  This is the man, who at the request of his colleague Condoleezza Rice, became the primary author of (NSS 2002) The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, that declared that the U.S. would no longer abide by international law but was adopting a policy of preemptive war, as declared by George W. Bush at West Point in June 2002.  This was used as justification for the attack on Iraq in 2003 and was a rejection of the charter of the United Nations.

    So, based on Zelikow’s work creating a magic mountain of deception while disregarding so-called molehills, we have had twenty years of American terror wars around the world in which U.S. forces have murdered millions of innocent people.  Wars that will be continuing for years to come despite rhetoric to the contrary.  The rhetoric is simply propaganda to cover up the increasingly technological and space-based nature of these wars and the use of mercenaries and special forces.

    Simultaneously, in a quasi-volte-face, the Biden administration has directed its resources inward toward domestic “terrorists”: that is, anyone who disagrees with its policies.  This is especially aimed at those who question the COVID-19 story.

    Now Zelikow has been named to head a COVID Commission Planning Group based at the University of Virginia that is said to prepare the way for a National COVID Commission.  The group is funded by the Schmidt Futures, the Skoll Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and Stand Together, with more expected to join in.  Zelikow, a member of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Development Program Advisory Panel, will lead the group that will work in conjunction with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.  Stand together indeed: Charles Koch, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, the Rockefellers, et al. funders of disinterested truth.

    So once again the fox is in the hen house.

    If you wistfully think the corona crisis will soon come to an end, I suggest you alter your perspective.  Zelikow’s involvement, among other things, suggests we are in the second phase of a long war of terror waged with two weapons – military and medical – whose propaganda messaging is carried out by the corporate mainstream media in the pursuit of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset. Part one has so far lasted twenty years; part two may last longer. You can be certain it won’t end soon and that the new terrorists are domestic dissidents.

    Did anyone think the freedoms lost with The Patriot Act were coming back some day?  Does anyone think the freedoms lost with the corona virus propaganda are coming back?  Many people probably have no idea what freedoms they lost with the Patriot Act, and many don’t even care.

    And today?  Lockdowns, mandatory mask wearing, travel restrictions, requirements to be guinea pigs for vaccines that are not vaccines, etc.?

    Who remembers the Nuremberg Codes?

    And they thought they were free, as Milton Mayer wrote about the Germans under Hitler.  Like frogs in a pot of cold water, we need to feel the temperature rising before it’s too late.  The dial is turned to high heat now.

    But that was so long ago and far away, right?  Don’t exaggerate, you say.  Hitler and all that crap.

    Are you thankful now that government spokespeople are blatantly saying that they will so kindly give us back some freedoms if we only do what they’re told and get “vaccinated” with an experimental biological agent, wear our masks, etc.? Hoi polloi are supposed to be grateful to their masters, who will grant some summer fun until they slam the door shut again.

    Pfizer raked in $3.5 billion from vaccine sales in the first quarter of 2021, the first three months of the vaccine rollouts, and the company projects $26 billion for the year.  That’s one vaccine manufacturer.  Chump change?  Only a chump would not realize that Pfizer is the company that paid $2.3 billion in Federal criminal fines in 2009 – the largest ever paid by a drug company – for being a repeat offender in the marketing of 13 different drugs.

    Meanwhile, the commission justifying the government’s claims about COVID-19 and injections (aka “vaccines”) will be hard at work writing their fictive report that will justify ex post facto the terrible damage that has occurred and that will continue to occur for many years.  Censorship and threats against dissidents will increase.  The disinformation that dominates the corporate mainstream media will of course continue, but this will be supplemented by alternative media that are already buckling under the pressure to conform.

    The fact that there has been massive censorship of dissenting voices by Google/ YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, etc., and equally massive disinformation by commission and omission across media platforms, should make everyone ask why.  Why repress dissent?  The answer should be obvious but is not.

    The fact that so many refuse to see the significance of this censorship clearly shows the hypnotic effects of a massive mind control operation.

    Name calling and censorship are sufficient.  Perfectly healthy people have now become a danger to others.  So mask up, get your experimental shot, and shut up!

    Your body is no longer inviolable.  You must submit to medical procedures on your body whether you want them or not.  Do not object or question. If you do, you will be punished and will become a pariah.  The authorities will call you crazy, deviant, selfish. They will take away your rights to travel and engage in normal activities, such as attend college, etc.

    Please do not recall The Nuremberg Code.  Especially number 7: “Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability or death.” (my emphasis)

    “Now is the time to just do what you are told,” as Anthony Fauci so benevolently declared.

    I am not making a prediction.  The authorities have told us what’s coming. Pay attention.  Don’t be fooled.  It’s a game they have devised.  Keep people guessing.  On edge.  Relieved.  Tense.  Relaxed.  Shocked.  Confused.  That’s the game.  One day this, the next that.  You’re on, you’re off.  You’re in, you’re out.  We are allowing you this freedom, but be good children or we will have to retract it.  If you misbehave, you will get a time out.  Time to contemplate your sins.

    If you once thought that COVID-19 would be a thing of the past by now, or ever, think again.  On May 3, 2021 The New York Times reported that the virus is here to stay.  This was again reported on May 10.  Hopes Fade for Global Herd Immunity.  You may recall that we were told such immunity would be achieved once enough people got the “vaccine” or enough people contracted the virus and developed antibodies.

    On May 9, on ABC News, Dr. Fauci, when asked about indoor mask requirements being relaxed, said, “I think so, and I think you’re going to probably be seeing that as we go along, and as more people get vaccinated.”  Then he added: “We do need to start being more liberal, as we get more people vaccinated.”

    But then, in what CNN reported as a Mother’s Day prediction, he pushed the date for “normality” out another year, saying, “I hope that [by] next Mother’s Day, we’re going to see a dramatic difference than what we’re seeing right now. I believe that we will be about as close to back to normal as we can.  We’ve got to make sure that we get the overwhelming proportion of the population vaccinated. When that happens, the virus doesn’t really have any place to go. You’re not going to see a surge. You’re not going to see the kinds of numbers we see now.”

    He said this with a straight face even though the experimental “vaccines,” by their makers own admissions, do not prevent the vaccinated from getting the virus or passing it on.  They allege it only mitigates the severity of the virus if you contract it.

    Notice the language and the vaccination meme repeated three times: “We get more people vaccinated.” (my emphasis) Not that more people choose to get vaccinated, but “we get” them vaccinated.  Thank you, Big Daddy. And now we have another year to go until “we will be about as close to back to normal as we can.”  Interesting phrase: as we can.  It other words: we will never return to normality but will have to settle for the new normal that will involve fewer freedoms.  Life will be reset, a great reset.  Great for the few and terrible for the many.

    Once two vaccines were enough; then, no, maybe one is sufficient; no, you will need annual or semi-annual booster shots to counteract the new strains that they say are coming.  It’s a never-ending story with never-ending new strains in a massive never-ending medical experiment.  The virus is changing so quickly and herd immunity is now a mystical idea, we are told, that it will never be achieved.  We will have to be eternally vigilant.

    But wait.  Don’t despair.  It looks like restrictions are easing up for the coming summer in the northern hemisphere. Lockdowns will be loosened.  If you felt like a prisoner for the past year plus, now you will be paroled for a while. But don’t dispose of those masks just yet.  Fauci says that wearing masks could become seasonal following the pandemic because people have become accustomed to wearing them and that’s why the flu has disappeared. The masks didn’t prevent COVID-19 but eliminated the flu.  Are you laughing yet?

    Censorship and lockdowns and masks and mandatory injections are like padded cells in a madhouse and hospital world where free-association doesn’t lead to repressed truths because free association isn’t allowed, neither in word nor deed.  Speaking freely and associating with others are too democratic. Yes, we thought we were free.  False consciousness is pandemic.  Exploitation is seen as benevolence. Silence reigns.  And the veiled glances signify the ongoing terror that has spread like a virus.

    We are now in a long war with two faces.  As with the one justified by the mass murders of September 11, 2001, this viral one isn’t going away.

    The question is: Do we have to wait twenty years to grasp the obvious and fight for our freedoms?

    We can be assured that Zelikow and his many associates at Covid Collaborative, including General Stanley McChrystal, Robert Gates, Arnie Duncan, Deval Patrick, Tom Ridge, et al. – a whole host of Republicans and Democrats backed by great wealth and institutional support, will not be “whacking moles” in their search for truth.  Their agenda is quite different.

    But then again, you may recall where they stood on the mass murders of September 11, 2001 and the endless wars that have followed.

    The post Second Stage Terror Wars first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ‘Lest we forget’: anti-war statue of Iraq veteran goes up in Margate

    A statue of a young soldier has gone up in Margate. And it’s quite different to most military statues. It depicts Daniel Taylor, a young anti-war Iraq veteran and campaigner who suffers from PTSD and has a powerful message for Britain’s politicians.

    The statue is named April is the Cruellest Month, after a T.S Eliot poem. It’s the work of Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz. Made from concrete, the statue contains artefacts donated by locals and veterans, including Taylor’s Iraq medal and a peace flag he stole as a 15-year-old from an anti-war demo in his native Devon.

    Iraq medal

    In 2006, Taylor took the flag to Iraq with him when he deployed to war, much to the annoyance of his officers. He came back with post-traumatic stress disorder, ending up serving a spell in military prison. Taylor struggled with a lack of support after discharge. He is now a therapist and member of Veterans for Peace UK.

    In a press release, Taylor said:

    My aim was to draw some small spotlight back onto the subject of militarism & how the arms industry continues to operate in the UK. We are pushed ever closer to war because of profit, resources and power.

    The work also contains Taylor’s Iraq service medal. He hopes that giving it up will spark a debate:

    I expect letting go of my medal in this way will upset some people but I have to be at peace with that if the greater outcome is a broader and more honest debate around how the UK conducts its dangerous foreign policy & how it treats its veterans when they return home.

    Westminster

    The statue is of Taylor’s younger self pointing west from Margate to Westminster. It’s there he lays the blame for both the wars and the problems faced by the soldiers who fought them, like mental health issues, homelessness, and alcohol abuse.

    The occupation of Iraq cost 179 service people their lives, as well as an unknown number of Iraqis. The British and Iraqi dead were remembered at a small ceremony at the unveiling.

    The piece will be in Margate until Armistice Day, after which it will tour various locations around the country.

    Featured images via Thierry Bal and Turner Contemporary and Daniel Taylor

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • W’s Chickens Coming Home to Roost, yet the Media Cocks Aren’t Crowing

    Censorship comes in many forms. One of [them] is a colossal moral indifference to official crimes at the highest levels of our government.

    — Ralph Nader, April 17, 2021, Ralph Nader Radio Hour

    Disclaimer: This is not a traditional mainstream or even left-stream book review. However, Steven C. Markoff’s book does play as the impetus and linchpin to my essay, more of an analysis/reaction to his book.  I give The Case Against George W. Bush, high marks. Read Steve’s book. Press your respective legislators to push for an investigation of W.’s crimes. Markoff sets out in the book about how those crimes were committed. I reference those. He completes his case: The evidence is there to prosecute and find guilty the 43rd President of the USA, George W. Bush.

    Nader’s Raiders of the Lost Warriors

    I was hitting the old Ralph Nader podcast a week ago when I stumbled upon Steven C. Markoff’s book, The Case Against George W. Bush. Nader had Markoff on his podcast, and both talked about the crimes of W Bush, and even more pertinently, the lack of a criminal case against George W. Bush, as well as the crickets in the so-called liberal media (SCLM) as well in the left press concerning Steve’s book.

    I quickly emailed Steve for a copy of his book to review, and he came back at me with a PDF of this book which, as I have stated, has been iced out of mainstream media: no interviews, no reviews let alone getting Steve into a room one-on-one, or onto a Zoom call with other guests to parse his well-researched, well-quoted book on the crimes of George W. Bush.

    The Case Against George W. Bush by Steven C. Markoff, Hardcover | Barnes & Noble®

    Of course, those crimes are more than crimes of omission, or crimes of secret rendition and torture sites, or the crimes of Abu Ghraib “prison” and Guantanamo. The crime was more than just all the lies about WMD’s and Saddam murdering babies. The big crime was Bush and his Regime of psychotic sociopaths of the neocon variety completely derailing valid, active and clear intelligence that Osama bin Laden was about to make a huge fiery asymmetrical splash on the world stage.

    Markoff lays out the daily briefs, the back and forth communiqués, the speeches Bush and others on his team made which all provides evidence of what “we” know about Osama bin Laden. The entire gambit goes back to the Soviet Union’s role in Afghanistan, then with Carter, Reagan, Bush Senior, Clinton and leading up to the ex-governor of Texas, W Bush.

    Carter Doctrine 25 years before 9/11

    Unfortunately, Jimmy Carter’s man  got the Soviet Union and then USA, all tangled up in Afghanistan.

    The best way for us to understand Afghanistan is to look at the record of American involvement going back four decades and to look at the record requires a reexamination of President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. From the start, U.S. policy formation surrounding Afghanistan has lived in a realm of magical thinking that has produced nothing but a catastrophe of nightmarish proportions. Brzezinski impacted the future of American foreign policy by monopolizing the Carter administration in ways that few outside the White House understand. In his role as national security advisor he put himself in a position to control information into and out of the White House and when it came to Afghanistan – to use it for whatever purposes he saw fit.

    “Brzezinski was an obsessive Russia-hater to the end. That led to the monumental failures of Carter’s term in office; the hatreds Brzezinski released had an impact which continues to be catastrophic for the rest of the world.” Helmer wrote in 2017, “To Brzezinski goes the credit for starting most of the ills – the organization, financing, and armament of the mujahedeen the Islamic fundamentalists who have metastasized – with US money and arms still – into Islamic terrorist armies operating far from Afghanistan and Pakistan, where Brzezinski started them off.”

    — ‘Magical Thinking’ has Always Guided the US Role in Afghanistan by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

    The Clinton “team” briefed the incoming George W. Bush “team” before his January 2001 inauguration about al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. For the younger Bush, he repudiated the evidence trail from so many intelligence sources. His eyes were on Operation Iraqi Freedom, but first called, O.I.L,  which was propagated by Jay Leno incessantly after it was blurted out from the source:

    On the afternoon of March 24, 2003 days after the U.S launched missiles at Baghdad to start the illegal war, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer held a press briefing. After a few minutes, a couple of sentences into the briefing, he verbally stumbled on the name of Bush’s war, stating, “Operation Iraqi, uh, Liberation.”

    Calling it “Operation Iraqi Freedom” officially is just more War is Peace, Lies are Truth bullshit. And that 2001 invasion of Afghanistan ― “Operation Enduring Freedom” – is yet more of the PT Barnum spin, all catalogued in the annals of United States Central Command and U.S. Army War College.

    Trail of Tears, Trails of Evidence

    Markoff’s book is a straightforward record of myriad published records – taped speeches, newspaper articles/Op-Eds, sections from books, redacted memos and top secret records. As a buttress to the asymmetrical history of what happened leading up to and during the September 11, 2001 attacks and subsequently all that went wrong in the Middle East, this upcoming 20th anniversary of 9/11, Markoff’s book should be required reading.

    But reading isn’t enough for just consuming Markoff’s book, and reading it is not enough for those of us who have been fighting the wars, those in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as all the others. What we need is a truth and reconciliation hearing for all those murdered in the September 11 attacks (around 3,000) as well as the countless hundreds of thousands (several million some estimates determine up to today) killed when the USA bombed and razed Iraq.

    The deep links between terror attacks and Southwest Florida - News - Sarasota Herald-Tribune - Sarasota, FL

    Remember that famous photo of Bush reading about a goat to kids in Florida:

    On the morning of September 11, 2001, Bush was at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota County, Florida, reading “My Pet Goat.”

    Oh, his dedication to inner-city first graders and listening to them recite the goat story is golden. Earlier, Bush had been on the way from his hotel to the school in his motorcade when it was reported to him a passenger jet had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. Old commander in Chief Bush believed the crash was an accident caused, perhaps, by pilot error.

    That old goat, man, what a story, so much so that when Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, entered the classroom at 9:06 to tell this president a second airplane had struck the South Tower and that the nation was under attack, Bush stayed on his duff for seven more minutes, following along as the children finished reading the book.

    “Class Goat”

    Goat may be an old West Point term for the man/woman graduating last in his/her class, but one infamous George the Goat from the Army Academy is none other than George Armstrong Custer.

    Unfortunately, the proverbial goat in America’s eyes is the million people murdered and millions more suffering because of the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. Steve’s book lays out the three legal frameworks or cases for prosecuting Bush (and solely Bush, not Bush and Company LLC) for crimes against humanity (in Iraq and Afghanistan) and Bush’s own responsibility for those several thousand who died on that fateful day, September 11, 2001.

    Mathematician Finally Solves Goat Problem: Here's the Answer

    Here’s part of a blurb on the book’s web site, Rare Bird Lit:

    Steven C. Markoff presents sourced evidence of three crimes committed by George W. Bush during his presidency: his failure to take warnings of coming terror attacks on our country seriously; taking the United States, by deception, into an unnecessary and disastrous 2003 war with Iraq; costing the lives of more than 4,000 Americans and 500,000 others; and breaking domestic and international laws by approving the torture as means to extract information. While Markoff lays out his case of the crimes, he leaves it up to the reader to decide the probable guilt of George W. Bush and his actions regarding the alleged crimes.

    Casualties of War — Truth, Honor, Duty to Protect 

    I had cut my teeth as a reporter in El Paso and elsewhere covering and following that other container ship of lies – Reagan’s crew of felons and thugs who philandered the American public with their special form of Murder Incorporated in Central America, and notably, Nicaragua. Or the illegal invasion of Panama under George H. W. Bush. Oh, those invasions, coups, clandestine bombings, proxy wars, incursions, secret operations, PsyOps.

    I even ended up “down south,” in Costa Rica, Guatemala and Nicaragua running into all sorts of odd fellows in the “drugs for guns” continuing criminal enterprise involving some of this country’s more nefarious “diplomats” and “generals” and CIA/NSA scum. Oh, those yellow belly Contras, murdering civilians and bombing schools and clinics for Reagan and Company. Those freedom fighters, AKA, the biggest lying cheats in recent times in Central America, Los Contras.

    And the dead horse isn’t dead, and another author, like Markoff, just couldn’t buy the bs on those Contras:

    Thus, in his 2012 book, The Manufacturing of a President, Wayne Madsen claims, based upon his numerous intelligence sources, that the CIA and Mossad have both been funding these rearmed Contras, and that they have been shipping these Contras arms over both the Honduran and Costa Rican borders.  He claims also that the Honduran government which came to power through the 2009 coup – a coup which the Obama Administration actively aided and abetted to unseat a leftist government which, by the way, happened to be friendly to Daniel Ortega – has been key to helping both support the Contras as well as to provide a staging ground for the covert operations to bring down the Sandinista government.  In other words, Honduras is playing the very same role it did in the 1980s, and the US-backed coup in 2009 – a mere 2 years after Ortega was elected – was crucial to this role.

    — Dan Kovalik

    Of course, the Bush Family Legacy was also all written over that fiasco, and again, it was easy for me to continue my penchant for understanding how rotten the United States is as I am the son of a Vietnam War regular army veteran, who put in 31 years in uniform.

    Lords of War, the Racket that is General Smedley Butler’s war warnings. Or Gary Webb, killing the messenger, the same CIA-infused Washington Post, New York Times and LA Times, to just name a few of the publications that corrupted the real work of Webb uncovering that entire drugs for guns Mafiosi.

    Robert Parry, deceased now, but a journalist who started Consortium News in 1994, with Webb as one of his big stories on how bad the US government is, and how bad the mainstream media has become.

    Here, Parry:

    So what I was seeking by the mid-1990s was some solid ground in which to plant a flag for honest journalism, rather than constantly being forced into retreat, pulled by nervous editors and producers looking over their shoulders out of fear of right-wing retaliation. From solid ground, I thought, we could produce journalism that simply assessed the facts and made independent judgments regardless of who might be offended.

    In 1995, it was my oldest son, Sam, who suggested the then-novel idea of “a Web site.” I didn’t fully understand what a Web site was and Sam was no techie but he demonstrated extraordinary patience in building our original Internet presence. (Back then, there were no templates; you had to start from scratch.) We married old-fashioned investigative reporting with the new technology of the Internet and began publishing groundbreaking investigative articles.

    We followed evidence where it went, even when it flew in the face of the conventional wisdom, such as our work on the 1980 October Surprise issue of whether Reagan and Bush went behind President Jimmy Carter’s back during his Iran-hostage negotiations, much the way Nixon had in sabotaging Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks in 1968.

    Not only did we present our own original work but we buttressed investigations by other serious journalists, such as Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News when, in 1996, he revived Ronald Reagan’s Contra-cocaine scandal. When the major newspapers set out to destroy Webb and discredit his revelations, Consortiumnews was one outlet that took on the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

    Yes, we were outgunned. Despite showing that Webb was not only right but actually understated the problem of Contra-cocaine trafficking, we still could not save Webb from having his career destroyed and then watching the big newspapers essentially high-five each other for having helped cover up a serious crime of state.

    The Three Crimes of the POTUS #43 (Secret Service called him Trailblazer)

    I am not going astray here, kind reader. What Steven talked a lot about on the Ralph Nader podcast was how that same media, the So-called Liberal Press, has virtually gone silent on his book, a type of passive censorship that can eat at the soul of any author.

    In reality, the “case against Bush” is the case against mainstream media/press and their close ties to not just the chambers of power, but within their “embeddedness,” inside the ranks, as well as their allegiance to, and participation in, the national security state’s various bureaus of hit men and hit women.

    When I finished the book, I offered the book to everybody that I had quoted, which was… around ninety authors. I offered it to Condoleezza Rice, I offered it to Dick Cheney, I offered it to the [George W.] Bush [Presidential] Library. I haven’t heard from one person about the book.

    — Steven Markoff stated on Nader’s show.

    Interestingly, Markoff incorporates Richard Clarke’s words as a preface to this book. Clarke actually strips culpability from Rumsfeld, Cheney, and others laying the blame on Bush personally. Here, early in Markoff’s book, Clarke puts it clearly in his mind.

    While I may be considered by some to be prejudiced in my judgment, there are facts that any objective observer must accept.

    • First, Bush ignored warnings about the serious threat from Al Qaeda prior to 9/11.
    • Second, Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in violation of international law, when Iraq had been uninvolved in 9/11 and offered no imminent threat to the United States.
    • Third, Bush authorized the use of torture and denied prisoners due process, both acts in violation of international law.

    Note that in each case I say that Bush did these things, not the Bush administration. There is a revisionist school that seeks to place the blame on Bush’s vice president, Richard B. Cheney. While there can be little doubt that Cheney encouraged Bush to take many of these actions, it is not true that the president was merely a tool of a mendacious and scheming subordinate.

    The evidence is now clear that Bush agreed with his vice president and knew full well what he was doing. He was an enthusiastic participant, a believer in the war on terror and the war on Iraq. It is true, however, that he did not master or manage the details of either war until the last few years of his eight-year presidency.

    — Richard A. Clarke, in the Forward of Markoff’s book.

    [In 1992, President George H. W. Bush appointed Richard A. Clarke to chair the Counterterrorism Security Group and to a seat on the United States National Security Council. President Bill Clinton retained Clarke and in 1998 promoted him to the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism. Under President George W. Bush, Clarke initially continued in the same position and later became the special advisor to the president on cyber security. He left his government position prior to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.]

    Markoff uses Clarke’s book, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, as a touchstone of sorts. That was in 2007.

    Importantly, Clarke had the necessary government background, involvement, and position to know about what he wrote. When I finished Clarke’s book, I was shocked. Could Bush have really disregarded threats of bin Laden and Al-Qaeda prior to 9/11? If so, was there a compelling reason that Bush spent his political capital and energy going after Hussein? Could it be that George W. Bush’s Iraq War was about oil?

    It occurred to me that while Clarke seemed knowledgeable about terrorists, 9/11, and the run up to our 2003 invasion of Iraq, he was just one person, and his knowledge was limited to what he had personally seen and learned.

    I thought that if I combined details from Clarke’s book with related information from other diverse sources with inside or special knowledge of those times and places, that combined information could produce new and clearer insights about 9/11 and the Iraq War. I then set out to find what additional facts and information were available on those and related topics.

    — Steven Markoff, The Case Against George W. Bush

    Torture, Rendition, Yellow Cake, WMD’s

    I remember protesting U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales June 27, 2007, in Spokane, when he showed up to talk about his department under Bush. Many of us were there to protest publicly Gonzales and the Bush administration, for many things, including that 2002 memo written by Gonzales that said Bush had the right to waive anti-torture laws and treaties that protect prisoners of war.

    Oh, the long arm of the “law” that Wednesday afternoon took a good friend down to the ground, arborist Dan Treecraft. He did nothing wrong, but Dan along with another person, was arrested for public disturbance.

    I was there with students of mine from two community colleges where I taught, and alas, even those two respective presidents and chairs of the department where I taught thought they had the right to tell a faculty member what he could and couldn’t do as part of a class assignment on “what it’s like to come out and protest a representative of your/our government who states torture is okay.”

    Ironically, he was in Spokane to talk about “gang enforcement,” and Gonzales  wasn’t alluding to the biggest continuing criminal enterprise Gang called the United States of America.

    Steve’s book is a guide, a probable pathway for lawmakers, voters, and others, including the Press, to ratchet up the attention on George W. Bush the War Criminal, and to put to rest the fawning and ameliorating reputation of Bush as The Painter (sic) Friend of Michelle Obama and Ellen.

    The kicker in Markoff’s book, says it all, quite damningly, but the reality is that the War is a Racket machine is a very fine tuned complex – Big Business Complex: Burger King, et al; Home Depot, et al; Mercenaries ‘R Us, et al; paint, air conditioning, roads, drywall, vehicles, depleted uranium, fuel, water, food suppliers, et al; all those financial products, that medical complex et al; Big Ag, Big Oil, Big Chemical, Big Prison et al, all in the manner of the for-profit system that is subsidized – welfare-ized – by the US taxpayer. Insanity we have already seen in other wars, and that War on Vietnam, not enough lessons learned there? I’ve been up close and personal with that war, in Vietnam as a civilian, and as a son of a wounded regular Army officer, social worker for wounded veterans, homeless vets and their families, instructor of college writing for Vietnam veterans.

    There is no urban legend attributed to those $200 hammers and $600 toilet seats and $2000 each bolts holding the shrouding of Patriot missiles. War is graft central, and how many millionaires and billionaires were created after World War I? Read General Butler’s, War is a Racket.

    Evidence of Crimes as Eight Bullet Points

    This shit is personal to me, as well, since I have had friends and students coming back from Bush’s wars, full of trauma, fucked up beyond repair, walking PTSD warriors with all that resentment, anger and physical outbursts, and nowhere to go. Here is Steve’s book, again, near the end:

    Could the following quote from Payback, a book by David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton, in part on the strategy of redirected aggression, explain Bush’s taking our country to war on his misleading and false premises?

    “George W. Bush and his Administration were not stooges at all, but quite brilliant. They read the need of most Americans at the time: to hit someone, hard, so as to redirect their suffering and anger [from 9/11]. The evidence is overwhelming that for the Bush Administration’s ‘neocons,’ the September 11 attacks were not the reason for the Iraq War; rather, it was a convenient excuse for doing something upon which they had already decided. Their accomplishment—if such is the correct word—was identifying the post-9/11 mood of the American people, and manipulating this mood, brilliantly, toward war.”

    It’s difficult to fathom the extent of the death and destruction caused by George W. Bush’s three crimes, but his legacy of death and destruction are of Olympic proportions.

    •  An estimated 2,977 people killed by the attacks on 9/11, and thousands more injured or incapacitated that day. In addition, hundreds if not thousands have died and will die early from the toxic air from the collapse of the Twin Towers and its aftermath.
    • By one count, there were 4,400 United States personnel killed and 30,000 wounded in the Iraq War as of August 31, 2010; tens of thousands more wounded physically and emotionally crippled by participating in that war; millions of Americans and their families destroyed, devastated, and/or traumatized by 9/11 and Bush’s 2003 Iraq War.
    •  As many as 650,000 deaths or more from Bush’s Iraq War, deaths that wouldn’t have occurred but for that war.
    •  Many of our civil rights, and the civil rights of others around the world, were curtailed due to the fear created by 9/11, a fear used by some as an opportunity to weaken our liberties.
    •  Three to seven trillion dollars in costs to our country from 9/11 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Those unnecessary trillions were and will be added to our national debt, a sum burdening our future, the future of our children, and perhaps of generations to come.
    •  Bush’s torture of prisoners puts American soldiers captured in future wars at greater risk of being tortured.
    •  The loss of America’s prestige and moral authority from Bush’s unnecessary Iraq War and torturing prisoners will hurt our country in the years ahead.
    •  Sixteen different US spy agencies on September 24, 2006, concluded that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq since March 2003 has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicals— effectively increasing the terror threat in the years after 9/11—and that the Bush administration tortured detainees and that torture wasn’t effective in securing intel otherwise unavailable.

    Because America invaded a sovereign country without credible reason and tortured prisoners, how can we say without hypocrisy that other countries shouldn’t do the same to other nations or to us? What moral authority do we have to tell others it is wrong to torture?

    — Steven Markoff, The Case Against George W. Bush

    Pretty damning, and as I file this review/analysis/rant, that W is at it again, and his stupidity is the stunt, no, smart as a fox, or pet-painting war criminal?

    George W Bush shakes hands with Condoleezza Rice in Washington DC on 5 January 2006.

    In a People interview, the former president said he told his former secretary of state he had written for her. “She knows it,” said Bush, 74, “But she told me she would refuse to accept the office.”

    Bush has been doing press to support the release of his book, Out of Many, One, which features his painted portraits of American immigrants and the stories of their lives.

    He called current-day Republicans “isolationist, protectionist, and, to a certain extent, nativist.”

    “Really what I should have said — there’s loud voices who are isolationists, protectionists and nativists, something, by the way, I talked about when I was president,” Bush said. “My concerns [are] about those -isms, but I painted with too broad a brush … because by saying what I said, it excluded a lot of Republicans who believe we can fix the problem.”

    Shadow of War — Ghosts of the Dead

    We’ll see if People magazine interviews Markoff, and gets a bit under the skin of his fine book, all 360 pages, with a decent bibliography and works cited section.

    His conclusion:

    Regardless of how I or others see what I submit are Bush’s criminal acts, some will continue to argue that while he wasn’t a perfect president, at least he rid the world of the tyrant, Hussein. Yes, he did, but for what reason, by what method, and at what cost?

    In addition to the unnecessary deaths and wounding of thousands of brave Americans, hundreds of thousands of others died and were injured from Bush’s unnecessary Iraq invasion. The trillions of dollars Bush’s war has cost has and will continue to be added to our national debt. A debt saddling our future.

    In conclusion, I believe the evidence in this book shows Bush’s three crimes were reckless, dishonest, and tragically unnecessary.

    I rest my case.

    — Steven Markoff, The Case Against George W. Bush

    Of course, there are gross inaccuracies when it comes to US-induced casualties, and the first casualty of war is truth, for sure:

    Of the countries where the U.S. and its allies have been waging war since 2001, Iraq is the only one where epidemiologists have actually conducted comprehensive mortality studies based on the best practices that they have developed in war zones such as Angola, Bosnia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan and Uganda. In all these countries, as in Iraq, the results of comprehensive epidemiological studies revealed 5 to 20 times more deaths than previously published figures based on “passive” reporting by journalists, NGOs or governments.

    Taking ORB’s estimate of 1.033 million killed by June 2007, then applying a variation of Just Foreign Policy’s methodology from July 2007 to the present using revised figures from Iraq Body Count, we estimate that 2.4 million Iraqis have been killed since 2003 as a result of our country’s illegal invasion, with a minimum of 1.5 million and a maximum of 3.4 million.

    — Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies, March 19, 2018

    main article image

    [Civil protection rescue teams work on the debris of a destroyed house to recover the body of people killed in an airstrike during fighting between Iraqi security forces and Islamic State militants on the western side of Mosul, Iraq. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana, File)]

    For Markoff, it’s the lives that were destroyed by Bush. That is the echo in his words, and the ghosts of those murdered are the shadows between the lines in The Case Against George W. Bush. 

    Roots of Zionism and U.S. Liberty to Iraq and Now Iran

    Alas, I am ending this analysis/response to Markoff’s book, The Case Against George W. Bush, by slogging through another quagmire, and then some reference to books on just who was lobbying to attack Iraq. We have Markoff trying to open up a case against W. Bush, and his book is clear, focused, not one we’d expect in the pantheon of history books or investigative research/journalistic screeds.

    Some writers, thinkers, educators and journalists (such as myself), however, were already looking into the scope of this terror campaign, the implications of US Patriot Act, the entire mess that is Israel’s murderous mucking about in the Middle East with Israel-Firster American corporate heads, administration wonks, politicians and more clandestine and nefarious actors behind the scenes, supreme puppet masters and Svengali types.

    All those Israeli wars led to the destruction of Lebanon, Syria and the biggest obstacle at the time, Iraq.

    And, here I go again, tangentially putting more fuel into the fires that immolated Iraq and which have blazed through the Middle East before and during and since W. Bush and his Klan invaded the Middle East.

    Here, I reference a recent piece by Timothy Alexander Guzman who briefly alludes to the AIPAC/Israel/Israel-firster connection to the invasion(s) of Iraq in his piece, “The Prospect of a Major False-Flag Operation in the Middle-East Grows by the Day: Remembering June 8th, 1967 the Day Israel Attacked the USS Liberty: “It’s was all part of the long-term plan and Iraq was part of that plan, in fact, the most powerful lobby in Washington is AIPAC and the Bush neoconservatives including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, Elliot Abrams and others who pushed Washington into a war with Iraq. According to John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee)  was a major supporter for the War on Iraq”:

    AIPAC usually supports what Israel wants, and Israel certainly wanted the United States to invade Iraq. Nathan Guttman made this very connection in his reporting [in Haaretz, April 2003] on AIPAC’s annual conference in the spring of 2003, shortly after the war started: “AIPAC is wont to support whatever is good for Israel, and so long as Israel supports the war, so too do the thousands of the AIPAC lobbyists who convened in the American capital.” AIPAC executive director Howard Kohr’s statement to the New York Sun in January 2003 is even more revealing, as he acknowledged “‘quietly’ lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq” was one of “AIPAC’s successes over the past year.” And in a lengthy New Yorker profile of Steven J. Rosen, who was AIPAC’s policy director during the run-up to the Iraq war, Jeffrey Goldberg reported that “AIPAC lobbied Congress in favor of the Iraq war.”

    — John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

     

    Liberty Survivors Say US Still Downplays Israel's Attack on Ship | Military.com

    [Oh, that anniversary, of the attack by Israel on the Liberty, June 8th (1967)]

    I suppose this entire mess that Markoff catalogues in his book, as a triumvirate of crimes by George W. Bush, could for me, personally, be summed up, in my mind, with President George W. Bush, speaking at the annual AIPAC conference in May of 2004:

    You’ve always understood and warned against the evil ambition of terrorism and their networks. In a dangerous new century, your work is more vital than ever.

    Steven Markoff doesn’t go there, for sure, and that is what makes Markoff’s book unique, too:  a clean record of the mess and blunder and murderous trail George W. Bush left in his wake as leader of the so-called “free world.”

    The post W’s Chickens Coming Home to Roost, yet the Media Cocks Aren’t Crowing first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Will to Believe … and to Make-Believe

    If you were born in the 1950’s or even a bit later, you more or less grew up with her. She wasn’t an outlier; Jeane Dixon was a syndicated newspaper personality. She graced the covers of popular magazines and floated on the airwaves of radio and TV. Her presence wasn’t confined to the masses; she was consulted by the elite, including at least one U.S. President (Richard Nixon) and possibly influenced a second (Ronald Reagan). She claimed a transcendent ability to see future events and her predictions were actively followed for decades.

    It’s not likely you grew up with Edgar Cayce, but it is likely you’ve read or heard about him. He died (1945) about ten years before the beginning of Jeane Dixon’s ascent in popular awareness. Like Dixon, Cayce claimed a transcendental gift that allowed him to see what others couldn’t and was widely acclaimed in his day (and still is).

    Long before Cayce, there was the renowned Nostradamus, whose 16th century allegoric quatrains are still perused for meaningful application. Arguably, Nostradamus is considered the greatest seer of all time. His volumes of poetic allegory provide an endless resource for transcendental treasure hunters.

    Perhaps more widely scrutinized than Nostradamus is the Biblical book of Revelation. Authorship may be disputed, but is most popularly accredited to John the Apostle. Its allegorical verse has been interpreted and reinterpreted for centuries and continues to be parsed for present and futuristic insight, most notably for end of the world scenarios and the second coming of Christ.

    There were, and continue to be, others who profess special accessibility to “spiritual” contact and unfolding future events. Not all achieve national and international recognition, but mystical practitioners are always around. The world is never without those who claim the gift of “seeing” beyond what’s visible. It goes hand in hand with the gift of “hearing” beyond what’s audible – as in assertions of privileged access to the voice of God or other spiritual entities. Both claims provide a pedestal from which to be seen and heard.

    It’s woven into our social fabric. We seemingly can’t get enough of those who profess special psychic abilities or claim that God has singled them out to receive exclusive messages. Through 5,000 years of recorded history, we’ve eagerly consulted with and listened to their pleas, declarations, and mandates.

    If not in our DNA, it’s certainly come to be institutionalized. Our religions teach and even demand that we accede to the proclamations of endorsed prophets who claim to be recipients of privileged communications. Beyond religious settings, our popular media outlets sensationalize claims of paranormal psychic ability. We were taught to believe, we teach our children to believe, and we require our political leaders to at least appear compliant with culturally recognized seers and prophets. It’s our normalcy. We live in a world that’s eager to accept “acceptable” assertions of paranormal intimacy and privileged knowledge.

    “Acceptable” is the key word. Religious and cultural tradition usually dictates the boundaries of acceptable “seeing.” New arrivals are first viewed with suspicion and require vetting. If the seer’s visions or proclamations run counter to established tradition or doctrine, they’re apt to be shunned or declared heretical. It’s somewhat like trying to enter an exclusive nightclub; recognition and proper attire is required.

    QAnon is fresh on the scene and doesn’t quite cut it with the established elite. It has aspirations, but is tackily dressed and unconnected. It was met at the door with, “Sorry, no admission, take it to another place.” And so, they did. The “Avengers” comic book version of Biblical prophesying took it down the street. The unconnected are dancing, just like the hoity-toity, but in a cheap pub having no bouncer or cover charge.

    It’s to the same music. Sure, they dance with more abandon, but are they really that much different? Is QAnon willingness to believe the claims of a mysterious prophetic voice any different than Christian (or other) willingness to do the same? Is it more gullible or dangerous?

    Over the course of recent months, QAnon voices predicted former president Trump’s return to power multiple times. When one such date passed without his reinstatement, another was quickly established. Over the course of centuries, Christian voices have continued to forecast the year of Christ’s second coming (nearly fifty times, thus far). When each stated year passes without incident, another prominent voice comes along to recalculate his return. Who is more gullible?

    When QAnon followers (among others) stormed the Capital Building on January 6th, 2021, six people died and hundreds were injured. In 2003, President George Bush referenced the book of Revelation to rally international support for the invasion of Iraq. Thus far,  well more than half a million deaths have occurred and as many as two million have been severely injured. Who is more dangerous?

    Believing is acceptance, no matter the tradition or cultural weight behind it. Accepting the primacy of mystical writings from a prophet who lived 2,000 years ago involves the same “surrender” that takes place when one accedes to a present-day mystical internet voice: the will and perception of another becomes one’s own.

    More than a hundred years ago, William James lectured on “The Will to Believe.” He suggested that upon meeting certain criteria, it’s advisable to believe in the face of uncertainty when the risk/reward ratio of believing is better than the risk/reward ratio of not believing. He exampled Christianity: If its tenets are true and you believe in them, you go to heaven. If you don’t believe, you go to hell. If Christianity is a false narrative that you believe in, you don’t go to heaven, but neither do you go to hell. So, one might as well believe. At best, it might get you into heaven. At worst, it won’t.

    Again, believing is acceptance, but how well does QAnon’s belief fit the James’s rationale for rational acceptance? Not very well, it would seem. Much of QAnon’s conviction centers on Trump’s triumphant return to power, presumably as President of The United States. If the QAnon tenet is true and you believe in it, you go to “Trump world” (What fresh heaven is that?). If it’s true, and you don’t believe in it, you still go to “Trump world” (and what fresh hell is this?). So, if skeptical of QAnon, one might as well remain skeptical. At best it won’t get you into “heaven.” At worst, it might.

    That it can’t stand up to the William James rationale for acceptance doesn’t make QAnon less believable; it only means that there’s too little reward or punishment involved to meet James’s criteria for rational belief. Unaddressed is consideration of whether the “will to believe” is actually a calculated decision whose repercussions apply only to one’s self.

    If “believing” was a lone endeavor, the William James assessment might carry more weight. “Believing” though, often means believing in someone, and usually it means believing in someone as part of a collective. If it’s religious, it means believing the declarations of one who claims special access to God. If it’s not quite religious, if it’s merely psychic or mystical, it still means believing the declarations of one who claims special access to information inaccessible to others: a spirit world or perhaps visions of future events. It requires acceding one’s perception to another who claims a higher perception. When we do so as a collective, our combined influence or power is surrendered to an entity that then wields it for us. At best, the power will be used to facilitate humanitarian deeds. At worst, it won’t be, and one has only to view a news site or open a history book to see how hellish that can be.

    Beyond thoughts of heaven or hell, the “will” to believe allows for collective action that might be constructive, but it also leaves one vulnerable to deception and manipulation. It sets the stage for a perilous Yin Yang duality: a “will to believe” binding with a “will to make-believe.” For both Yin and Yang, “will” is the “craving,” while “believe” and “make-believe” are the “sugars.” The believer’s “will” is to be a part of something bigger than one’s self (it needn’t always be so alluring as heaven). The make-believer’s “will” is to be the center of something bigger than one’s self. When conjoined, it’s a symbiotic relationship; believer and make-believer sweeten and validate each other.

    Ancient prophets, new world spiritualists, and modern-day metaphysical internet voices share the same old dynamic: the desire to appear empowered with extraordinary capabilities. If the dynamic wasn’t real, their need would go unnoticed. But it is noticed; they dramatically reach for an audience while declaring primacy to God’s word, to spiritual contact, to mystical visions, or to some sort of privileged knowledge. They have to have it. An audience grants the necessary validation; an audience is proof that one is special; an audience is empowerment.

    The “will to believe” is also the same as it ever was: the desire to “belong to” or to be a part of something bigger than one’s self. It doesn’t have to be conjoined with the “will to make-believe,” but the desire leaves it vulnerable to such voices; voices that often claim special knowledge or access to God. The “will to believe” a mysterious internet voice revealing the existence of a satanic global cabal of perverts in the basement of a pizza parlor isn’t new. It’s the same as the “will to believe” in mysterious Biblical allegories portending the second coming of Christ or the dawning of The New Age. Jake Angeli and President George W. Bush shared the same “will to believe.” Jake listened to QAnon, donned a furry horned cap, and invaded the Capital Building. George listened to John the Apostle, donned a respectable suit and tie, and invaded Iraq.

    We all seem to have it, the “will to believe,” the “will” to be a part of something greater than our selves. It doesn’t have to meet the William James rationale for acceptance (we have the creative ability to make any held belief seem reasonable). It doesn’t have to be of eternal consequence (we’re willing to believe for less than that). It doesn’t have to be enculturated (though it’s certainly less scrutinized and more “acceptable” if it is). It doesn’t have to be a “make-believe” voice (but it certainly can be).  It doesn’t take too much; it just has to offer something beyond the confines of our limited selves. We’re vulnerable. We’re low-hanging fruit with a need to believe, primed to believe an intriguing voice. One always seems to come along; a voice with a need of its own; a voice that finds us ripe for the picking.

    Vern Loomis lives in the Detroit area and occasionally likes to comment on news and events that interest him in whatever capacity available. Read other articles by Vern.

    This article was posted on Saturday, April 24th, 2021 at 12:40pm and is filed under George W. Bush, Iraq, Mythology, Opinion, QAnon, Spiritualism.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Will to Believe … and to Make-Believe

    If you were born in the 1950’s or even a bit later, you more or less grew up with her. She wasn’t an outlier; Jeane Dixon was a syndicated newspaper personality. She graced the covers of popular magazines and floated on the airwaves of radio and TV. Her presence wasn’t confined to the masses; she was consulted by the elite, including at least one U.S. President (Richard Nixon) and possibly influenced a second (Ronald Reagan). She claimed a transcendent ability to see future events and her predictions were actively followed for decades.

    It’s not likely you grew up with Edgar Cayce, but it is likely you’ve read or heard about him. He died (1945) about ten years before the beginning of Jeane Dixon’s ascent in popular awareness. Like Dixon, Cayce claimed a transcendental gift that allowed him to see what others couldn’t and was widely acclaimed in his day (and still is).

    Long before Cayce, there was the renowned Nostradamus, whose 16th century allegoric quatrains are still perused for meaningful application. Arguably, Nostradamus is considered the greatest seer of all time. His volumes of poetic allegory provide an endless resource for transcendental treasure hunters.

    Perhaps more widely scrutinized than Nostradamus is the Biblical book of Revelation. Authorship may be disputed, but is most popularly accredited to John the Apostle. Its allegorical verse has been interpreted and reinterpreted for centuries and continues to be parsed for present and futuristic insight, most notably for end of the world scenarios and the second coming of Christ.

    There were, and continue to be, others who profess special accessibility to “spiritual” contact and unfolding future events. Not all achieve national and international recognition, but mystical practitioners are always around. The world is never without those who claim the gift of “seeing” beyond what’s visible. It goes hand in hand with the gift of “hearing” beyond what’s audible – as in assertions of privileged access to the voice of God or other spiritual entities. Both claims provide a pedestal from which to be seen and heard.

    It’s woven into our social fabric. We seemingly can’t get enough of those who profess special psychic abilities or claim that God has singled them out to receive exclusive messages. Through 5,000 years of recorded history, we’ve eagerly consulted with and listened to their pleas, declarations, and mandates.

    If not in our DNA, it’s certainly come to be institutionalized. Our religions teach and even demand that we accede to the proclamations of endorsed prophets who claim to be recipients of privileged communications. Beyond religious settings, our popular media outlets sensationalize claims of paranormal psychic ability. We were taught to believe, we teach our children to believe, and we require our political leaders to at least appear compliant with culturally recognized seers and prophets. It’s our normalcy. We live in a world that’s eager to accept “acceptable” assertions of paranormal intimacy and privileged knowledge.

    “Acceptable” is the key word. Religious and cultural tradition usually dictates the boundaries of acceptable “seeing.” New arrivals are first viewed with suspicion and require vetting. If the seer’s visions or proclamations run counter to established tradition or doctrine, they’re apt to be shunned or declared heretical. It’s somewhat like trying to enter an exclusive nightclub; recognition and proper attire is required.

    QAnon is fresh on the scene and doesn’t quite cut it with the established elite. It has aspirations, but is tackily dressed and unconnected. It was met at the door with, “Sorry, no admission, take it to another place.” And so, they did. The “Avengers” comic book version of Biblical prophesying took it down the street. The unconnected are dancing, just like the hoity-toity, but in a cheap pub having no bouncer or cover charge.

    It’s to the same music. Sure, they dance with more abandon, but are they really that much different? Is QAnon willingness to believe the claims of a mysterious prophetic voice any different than Christian (or other) willingness to do the same? Is it more gullible or dangerous?

    Over the course of recent months, QAnon voices predicted former president Trump’s return to power multiple times. When one such date passed without his reinstatement, another was quickly established. Over the course of centuries, Christian voices have continued to forecast the year of Christ’s second coming (nearly fifty times, thus far). When each stated year passes without incident, another prominent voice comes along to recalculate his return. Who is more gullible?

    When QAnon followers (among others) stormed the Capital Building on January 6th, 2021, six people died and hundreds were injured. In 2003, President George Bush referenced the book of Revelation to rally international support for the invasion of Iraq. Thus far,  well more than half a million deaths have occurred and as many as two million have been severely injured. Who is more dangerous?

    Believing is acceptance, no matter the tradition or cultural weight behind it. Accepting the primacy of mystical writings from a prophet who lived 2,000 years ago involves the same “surrender” that takes place when one accedes to a present-day mystical internet voice: the will and perception of another becomes one’s own.

    More than a hundred years ago, William James lectured on “The Will to Believe.” He suggested that upon meeting certain criteria, it’s advisable to believe in the face of uncertainty when the risk/reward ratio of believing is better than the risk/reward ratio of not believing. He exampled Christianity: If its tenets are true and you believe in them, you go to heaven. If you don’t believe, you go to hell. If Christianity is a false narrative that you believe in, you don’t go to heaven, but neither do you go to hell. So, one might as well believe. At best, it might get you into heaven. At worst, it won’t.

    Again, believing is acceptance, but how well does QAnon’s belief fit the James’s rationale for rational acceptance? Not very well, it would seem. Much of QAnon’s conviction centers on Trump’s triumphant return to power, presumably as President of The United States. If the QAnon tenet is true and you believe in it, you go to “Trump world” (What fresh heaven is that?). If it’s true, and you don’t believe in it, you still go to “Trump world” (and what fresh hell is this?). So, if skeptical of QAnon, one might as well remain skeptical. At best it won’t get you into “heaven.” At worst, it might.

    That it can’t stand up to the William James rationale for acceptance doesn’t make QAnon less believable; it only means that there’s too little reward or punishment involved to meet James’s criteria for rational belief. Unaddressed is consideration of whether the “will to believe” is actually a calculated decision whose repercussions apply only to one’s self.

    If “believing” was a lone endeavor, the William James assessment might carry more weight. “Believing” though, often means believing in someone, and usually it means believing in someone as part of a collective. If it’s religious, it means believing the declarations of one who claims special access to God. If it’s not quite religious, if it’s merely psychic or mystical, it still means believing the declarations of one who claims special access to information inaccessible to others: a spirit world or perhaps visions of future events. It requires acceding one’s perception to another who claims a higher perception. When we do so as a collective, our combined influence or power is surrendered to an entity that then wields it for us. At best, the power will be used to facilitate humanitarian deeds. At worst, it won’t be, and one has only to view a news site or open a history book to see how hellish that can be.

    Beyond thoughts of heaven or hell, the “will” to believe allows for collective action that might be constructive, but it also leaves one vulnerable to deception and manipulation. It sets the stage for a perilous Yin Yang duality: a “will to believe” binding with a “will to make-believe.” For both Yin and Yang, “will” is the “craving,” while “believe” and “make-believe” are the “sugars.” The believer’s “will” is to be a part of something bigger than one’s self (it needn’t always be so alluring as heaven). The make-believer’s “will” is to be the center of something bigger than one’s self. When conjoined, it’s a symbiotic relationship; believer and make-believer sweeten and validate each other.

    Ancient prophets, new world spiritualists, and modern-day metaphysical internet voices share the same old dynamic: the desire to appear empowered with extraordinary capabilities. If the dynamic wasn’t real, their need would go unnoticed. But it is noticed; they dramatically reach for an audience while declaring primacy to God’s word, to spiritual contact, to mystical visions, or to some sort of privileged knowledge. They have to have it. An audience grants the necessary validation; an audience is proof that one is special; an audience is empowerment.

    The “will to believe” is also the same as it ever was: the desire to “belong to” or to be a part of something bigger than one’s self. It doesn’t have to be conjoined with the “will to make-believe,” but the desire leaves it vulnerable to such voices; voices that often claim special knowledge or access to God. The “will to believe” a mysterious internet voice revealing the existence of a satanic global cabal of perverts in the basement of a pizza parlor isn’t new. It’s the same as the “will to believe” in mysterious Biblical allegories portending the second coming of Christ or the dawning of The New Age. Jake Angeli and President George W. Bush shared the same “will to believe.” Jake listened to QAnon, donned a furry horned cap, and invaded the Capital Building. George listened to John the Apostle, donned a respectable suit and tie, and invaded Iraq.

    We all seem to have it, the “will to believe,” the “will” to be a part of something greater than our selves. It doesn’t have to meet the William James rationale for acceptance (we have the creative ability to make any held belief seem reasonable). It doesn’t have to be of eternal consequence (we’re willing to believe for less than that). It doesn’t have to be enculturated (though it’s certainly less scrutinized and more “acceptable” if it is). It doesn’t have to be a “make-believe” voice (but it certainly can be).  It doesn’t take too much; it just has to offer something beyond the confines of our limited selves. We’re vulnerable. We’re low-hanging fruit with a need to believe, primed to believe an intriguing voice. One always seems to come along; a voice with a need of its own; a voice that finds us ripe for the picking.

    The post The Will to Believe … and to Make-Believe first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Why The Main Argument Against Withdrawing US Troops Is Bogus

    Audio recording of this article:

    Former National Security Advisor and literal psychopath John Bolton has a new opinion piece out in Foreign Policy titled “‘Bring the Troops Home’ Is a Dream, Not a Strategy“, which should surprise no one and enrage everyone at the same time. The fact that this reptile continues to be elevated on mainstream platforms after consistently revealing himself to be a bloodthirsty liar is all the evidence you need that we are trapped inside a globe-spanning empire fueled by human corpses.

    John Bolton has pushed for deranged acts of mass military slaughter at every opportunity. He not only remains one of the only people in the world to continually insist that the Iraq invasion was a great idea, but has actually argued that the destabilization and chaos caused by the invasion cannot be attributed to Bush’s war because you can’t prove that “everything that followed from the fall of Saddam Hussein followed inevitably, solely, and unalterably from the decision to overthrow him.” There are harrowing accounts of Bolton threatening, assaulting and intimidating anyone with less power than him if they got in his way; he once threatened to harm the children of former OPCW Director General Jose Bustani because Bustani was interfering in attempts to manufacture consent for the Iraq war.

    In an even remotely sane civilization, such a creature would be driven from every town he entered until he is forced to crawl into a cave for the rest of his miserable life eating bats alone in the darkness. Instead he is given the mainstream spotlight whenever he wishes while truthful and intelligent anti-imperialists are relegated to fringe blogs and podcasts. This would not be the case if we did not live in an empire that is held together by war and war propaganda.

    And now look at me, off on a tangent before my article has even begun.

    Anyway, in his Foreign Policy article Bolton argues that withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan would be a mistake, because it would lead to the nation being overrun by ISIS and al Qaeda.

    “If the Taliban return to power in all or most of the country, the almost universal view in Washington today is the near certainty that al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and others will resume using Afghanistan as a base of operations,” Bolton writes.

    These are very strange words to have to type, but, John Bolton is right. There is a consensus within the hub of the US empire that that is what will happen. You can tell because that’s what the empire’s media have been blaring all year.

    In a March article from Vox titled “The best case against withdrawing all US troops from Afghanistan“, a senior fellow from the military industrial complex-funded think tank Center for a New American Security named Lisa Curtis explains that withdrawing troops can lead to a disastrous terrorist insurgency that will only result in having to send them back again.

    “Let’s look at Iraq,” says Curtis. “When the US withdrew troops, ISIS rose and took over Mosul in 2014. We had to put troops back into Iraq and in even greater numbers, and we had to redouble our efforts to stem the rise of ISIS.”

    A Bloomberg article from this month titled “Biden’s Afghan Pullout Is Risky Politics and Geopolitics” conveys the same message:

    “And once the U.S. is out of Afghanistan, on grounds that it needs to focus on other priorities, it will inevitably become harder to summon the top-level attention and political will needed to stay on top of emerging threats. This is what happened in Iraq in 2013-2014: Midlevel officials were warning, publicly, that ISIS was on the march, but only after a third of the country had fallen did the issue reach the top of the Barack Obama administration’s agenda.”

    A Financial Times article a few days back titled “Biden’s risky Afghanistan withdrawal” says the same:

    “Biden himself is well aware of the risks. It was he, in 2011, who took charge of America’s final pullout from Iraq. Within two years US forces were sucked back into the region by the rapid spread of Isis across Iraq and Syria. Then, as now, the temptation to proclaim an end to America’s ‘forever wars’ trumped the benefits of retaining a US footprint to insure against new deterioration.”

    We hear this same narrative over and over and over again whenever there’s talk about withdrawing US troops from a region, whether it be Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria: this is going to be Obama’s disastrous Iraq withdrawal all over again. Obama withdrew the troops in the early part of his term, but by 2014 Iraq had become so overrun by Islamic State that they needed to return to fight them off.

    This is because it has been Beltway Church doctrine ever since the rise of ISIS that Obama was wrong to withdraw troops from Iraq, and it is Beltway Church doctrine because there was a frenetic push to indoctrinate that narrative into Washington policymakers from day one.

    As soon as it became feasible we had malignant warmongers like Dick Cheney penning op-eds about how bad and wrong the troop withdrawal was, effectively screaming “SEE??? It’s ALWAYS wrong to end wars!” to ensure that a reduced global military presence never becomes the new normal for the US empire. From that day onwards Obama’s Iraq withdrawal has been used to hammer home this narrative that withdrawing troops from anywhere is “risky” and irresponsible. There was a manic, almost orgasmic delight among warmongers at the fact that at last, at long long last, they finally had some evidence that scaling back military expansionism is bad.

    The problem? It’s bullshit.

    It’s bullshit for a couple of reasons, firstly because the US is not withdrawing from Afghanistan; it’s just privatizing the occupation. Mercenaries, special forces, CIA operatives and airstrikes will remain. And that’s assuming there’s even a troop withdrawal at all; as we sit here the US is actually beefing up its military presence in anticipation of Taliban retaliations for remaining in Afghanistan beyond the agreed-upon May 1 deadline, the logic I suppose being something like “We need to add forces to Afghanistan before we leave Afghanistan because we have to kill all the people in Afghanistan who want us to leave Afghanistan before we leave.” In any case the warmongers aren’t actually worried they’ll lose control of Afghanistan, they’re just worried about people becoming too peace-happy; they threw all these melodramatic fits when Trump sought withdrawals that never happened as well.

    Secondly, it’s bullshit because the warmongers are lying about why the US re-entered Iraq in 2014.

    The US didn’t re-enter Iraq in 2014 to stop ISIS, the US re-entered Iraq in 2014 to stop Qasem Soleimani from stopping ISIS.

    This is not a secret. In 2014 the commander of Iran’s Quds Force was already helping to beat back Islamic State in Iraq, and Iraqi officials reminded the world after his assassination last year at the hands of the Trump administration that Soleimani had played a key role in early victories in that fight. Iraq’s Sunni leaders had already been openly saying that they would turn to Iran for help if the US didn’t take the lead in defeating ISIS, and Iran was already demonstrating a willingness to put Soleimani’s notoriously effective fighting forces to work on that endeavor.

    If the United States had been a normal country, and not the hub of a globe-spanning empire bent on indefinite global domination, the obvious choice in that moment would have been to let the people in that part of the world sort out their own affairs in whatever way seems best to them. Because the United States is the hub of an empire that cannot tolerate the idea of another power being dominant in an oil-rich region it seeks to control for geostrategic reasons, allowing Iran and Iraq to become allied that closely was unthinkable.

    So, as usual, the narrative that westerners were fed about US troops being in the Middle East to “fight terrorists” was a lie. It was about geostrategic control of the world and its resources, just like it always is.

    The so-called “war on terror” has never been about defeating violent extremist factions, it’s been about keeping the nations in the region from relying on Iran and its allies to defeat them, and about justifying endless military expansionism in a key geostrategic part of the world. It’s been about ensuring the US power alliance is the dominant military force in the Middle East, not Iran and other unabsorbed powers like Russia and China.

    Qasem Soleimani was the best argument against the “war on terror”, and was the leader best suited for bringing the region out of danger from violent extremist factions like ISIS and al Qaeda.

    That’s why he is dead now.

    The world does not need the US empire to police it. People can sort out their own problems around the world if they were only allowed to. Iraq and its neighbors can sort out their own problems, as can Afghanistan and its neighbors. The only violence at risk of coming toward America and its easily-defended borders is the direct result of the US empire’s relentless aggression and belligerence that has killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century. There is no reason we can’t all just let each other be, collaborating and trading in peace without all these invasions, occupations and toppling of sovereign governments.

    The empire’s need to control the world’s affairs is like a macrocosm of the human ego, which also exists out of a fear that something bad will happen if I can’t remain in control of it all. But the world is forever out of control, and attempts to reign it in can only lead to disorder and suffering. Our species will not survive if we cannot collectively learn to relinquish the impulse to control, both within and without, and let life dance to its own beat on this beautiful blue world.

    _____________________

    I’m celebrating the hardback release of Woke: A Field Guide For Utopia Preppers by making a pay-as-you-feel PDF available.

    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  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • What If EVERYONE Threw Shoes At Bush? Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    The US didn’t re-enter Iraq in 2014 to stop ISIS, they re-entered Iraq in 2014 to stop Soleimani from stopping ISIS.

    This is important to note right now, because that’s the main argument we’re hearing against withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan: “Oh the terrorists will take over and we’ll just have to go back like in 2014.” They didn’t have to go back in 2014; the people who actually live in the Middle East could’ve resolved it on their own if there wasn’t a world-dominating empire trying to control everything.

    The “war on terror” has never been about defeating violent extremist factions, it’s been about keeping the nations in the region from relying on Iran to defeat them, and about justifying endless military expansionism in a key geostrategic part of the world. It’s been about ensuring the US power alliance, not Iran, is the dominant military force in the Middle East.

    Soleimani was the strongest argument that the “war on terror” isn’t actually necessary. And that’s essentially why he’s dead now.

    ❖

    I’m thinking of writing a horror story about a dystopian world where weapons manufacturers are allowed to pay large amounts of money to agencies called “think tanks” which circulate narratives designed to convince government policymakers to start wars that profit the arms industry.

    It’d be just like those other dystopian horror novels about giant corporations butchering the poor for money, except instead of selling human flesh they’re selling the weapons used to kill them.

    What do you think? Too out there and unbelievable?

    ❖

    In tyrannical regimes they don’t let political dissidents speak. In free democracies they just refuse dissidents any influential platforms and use algorithms to keep revolutionary ideas from being heard by a significant number of people.

    ❖

    The US has killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century and its Secretary of State spends all day tweeting about how other countries are human rights abusers.

    No other government has done this. No other government has killed millions and displaced tens of millions since the turn of this century. Yet when you say this, you get accused of “whataboutism”. No, idiot, distracting from the world’s very worst offender is the “whataboutism”.

    ❖

    Even if all US narratives about China were 100 percent true (and they aren’t), Washington would still be a far, far worse human rights offender than Beijing and in no position to criticize human rights abuses at all.

    ❖

    Every time George W Bush makes news headlines and it’s not because of a war crimes tribunal, it’s a reminder that laws are for the little people.

    ❖

    What if EVERYONE threw their shoes at George W Bush?

    ❖

    ❖

    In a remotely sane world creatures like John Bolton would not be given mainstream platforms for decades on end, they would be driven out of every town they enter until they’re forced to crawl into a cave eating bats in the darkness for the rest of their miserable lives.

    The simple fact that this reptile keeps getting platformed is by itself complete evidence that our world is dominated by psychopaths. You never see anti-imperialists on the mainstream media, but John fucking Bolton gets the spotlight whenever he wants it. That’s how bat shit crazy our world is. The status quo has no legitimate claim on anything ever.

    ❖

    The rising threat of nuclear war is the most urgent matter in the world and it’s insane that we’re not talking about it all the time.

    ❖

    The day the world ends will start like any other. People will go to work, argue with strangers online. No one will expect it. Then there will be a miscommunication, misfire, miscalculation or malfunction which leads to a nuke being deployed among heightening cold war tensions.

    The end of the world won’t be the result of some epic Hollywood struggle between good guys and bad guys. It will be the result of garden variety human stupidity. Someone being a little careless amid the day-to-day management of the US empire’s struggle to maintain global hegemony.

    It will be a stupid mistake, just like all the other stupid mistakes humans have made since we first stood upright. Only difference is we won’t be around anymore to recognize and appreciate how stupid this particular mistake was, and to learn from it, and to grow.

    ❖

    There are mountains of evidence that the US and its allies bombed Syria on false grounds in 2018, and yet people who point this out get called “Assadists” and “atrocity deniers”. For scrutinizing the most powerful and destructive government on earth using evidence and journalism.

    The entire argument that the OPCW scandal is fake boils down to a bizarre conspiracy theory that OPCW investigators collaborated with Damascus and Moscow to spin Douma as a false flag for some reason. This would’ve been laughed out of the room if it weren’t backed by the empire.

    It’s freakish that you get accused of war crimes denial when actually trying to get a war crime solved. The facts are in, the Douma incident needs to be ripped wide open, and Aaron Maté needs to be showered with awards for his excellent work exposing this scandal. It’s crazy that it’s 2021 and people are still acting like you’re a treasonous freak if you believe the US power alliance might lie and manipulate about a government it openly wants to topple, whose country it has been bombing and occupying, right next door to Iraq.

    ❖

    It will never stop fascinating me how full online discussion forums are of accounts who spend their time supporting the foreign policy objectives of the most powerful and destructive government on earth while pretending they’re brave, up-punching rebels.

    ❖

    Someone could publish all the darkest secrets of the western empire online and within hours the imperial narrative managers would have everyone convinced that the leaks don’t matter because the person who published it knows somebody who knows somebody who is anti-semitic.

    ❖

    White supremacism is a lot easier to see when you zoom the camera all the way out and look objectively at the way resources, bombs, and human labor are moving on the world stage as a whole.

    ❖

    The majority of people get that the news is at least somewhat bullshit; the problem is there’s no consensus on why. Is it incompetence? A liberal conspiracy? The plutocratic class protecting its interests (ding ding)? Our job is to clarify both that the MSM lies to us, and why.

    If people understand that plutocratic and imperialist interests are being protected by the billionaire media, they know what lies to watch out for. Otherwise all the confusing white noise leaves them screaming at the TV about trans people trying to destroy society or whatever. There’s so much bullshit swirling around that it’s hard to know which way is up. The key is to help people figure out what way’s up, using simple pointers, so they can orient themselves to truth and reality.

    ❖

    Watch this video if you’re unsure why I focus on US politics over Australian politics:

    ❖

    People are so kind to me. I’m basically a digital street busker, relying entirely on reader donations, and I somehow wound up on the kindest, most generous online street corner where people give me money to do what I love full time. I’m really lucky, and I’m very, very grateful.

    ❖

    The internet is a consciousness-expanding substance and our rulers are working to censor it for the same reason they censored psychedelics: dysfunction and awareness cannot coexist.

    It’s also the same reason abusers work to isolate their victims and cult leaders seek to isolate their members: outside eyes bringing consciousness to their abusive dynamics makes the abuse much harder to perpetuate.

    It’s also the same reason the ego tries to convince us not to look too hard at its nature. At every level of the human fractal it’s a struggle between consciousness and unconsciousness, and between those forces who would benefit from each.

    ❖

    People fail to live their lives in awe, wonder, delight and deep peace for the same reason people keep consenting to abusive governments: our lives are ruled by narrative. And the solution to both is the same: intense curiosity about what’s going on underneath the narratives.

    ❖

    Governments are made up and their economies are collective hallucinations and their money is imaginary and our society is pure narrative construct and the individual self is an illusion.

    Have a nice day.

    ____________________

    I’m celebrating the hardback release of Woke: A Field Guide For Utopia Preppers by making a pay-as-you-feel PDF available.

    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  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Five Injured In Rocket Attack On US Airbase In Iraq

    Five people – two foreign contractors and three Iraqi soldiers – were injured on Sunday, April 18 in a rocket attack on an air base near Baghdad, Al Jazeera reported. A total of five rockets hit the Balad air base, north of Baghdad, with two of them landing on a dormitory and one hitting a canteen belonging to US company Sallyport, according to security sources in the area. There were no reports of any deaths. The rocket attack was the latest in a series of attacks targeting US bases and other installations in Iraq as opposition to the US military presence in the country continues to grow.

    Responsibility for the rocket attack was not immediately claimed by any Iraqi armed groups. The US has routinely blamed Iraqi Shia militias for such attacks, accusing them of carrying them out on the behest of or in coordination with neighboring Iran.

    The post Five Injured In Rocket Attack On US Airbase In Iraq appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Denying the Demonic

    In March of last year as the coronavirus panic was starting, I wrote a somewhat flippant article saying that the obsession with buying and hoarding toilet paper was the people’s vaccine.  My point was simple: excrement and death have long been associated in cultural history and in the Western imagination with the evil devil, Satan, the Lord of the underworld, the Trickster, the Grand Master who rules the pit of smelly death, the place below where bodies go.

    The psychoanalytic literature is full of examples of death anxiety revealed in anal dreams of shit-filled overflowing toilets and people pissing in their pants.  Ernest Becker put it simply in The Denial of Death:

    No mistake – the turd is mankind’s real threat because it reminds people of death.

    The theological literature is also full of warnings about the devil’s wiles.  So too the Western classics from Aeschylus to Melville. The demonic has an ancient pedigree and has various names. Rational people tend to dismiss all this as superstitious nonsense.  This is hubris.  The Furies always exact their revenge when their existence is denied.  For they are part of ourselves, not alien beings, as the tragedy of human history has shown us time and again.

    Since excremental visions and the fear of death haunt humans – the skull at the banquet as William James put it – the perfect symbol of protection is toilet paper that will keep you safe and clean and free of any reminder of the fear of death running through a panicked world.  It’s a magic trick, of course, an unconscious way of thinking you are protecting yourself; a form of self-hypnosis.

    One year later, magical thinking has taken a different form and my earlier flippancy has turned darker. You can’t hoard today’s toilet paper but you can get them: RNA inoculations, misnamed vaccines. People are lined up for them now as they are being told incessantly to “get your shot.”  They are worse than toilet paper. At least toilet paper serves a practical function.  Real vaccines, as the word’s etymology – Latin, vaccinus, from cows, the cowpox virus vaccine first used by British physician Edward Jenner in 1800 to prevent smallpox – involve the use of a small amount of a virus.  The RNA inoculations are not vaccines.  To say they are is bullshit and has nothing to do with cows. To call them vaccines is linguistic mind control.

    These experimental inoculations do not prevent the vaccinated from getting infected with the “virus” nor do they prevent transmission of the alleged virus. When they were approved recently by the FDA that was made clear.  The FDA issued Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for these inoculations only under the proviso that they may make an infection less severe.  Yet millions have obediently taken a shot that doesn’t do what they think it does.  What does that tell us?

    Hundreds of millions of people have taken an injection that allows a bio-reactive “gene-therapy” molecule to be injected into their bodies because of fear, ignorance, and a refusal to consider that the people who are promoting this are evil and have ulterior motives.  Not that they mean well, but that they are evil and have evil intentions.  Does this sound too extreme?  Radically evil?  Come on!

    So what drives the refusal to consider that demonic forces are at work with the corona crisis?

    Why do the same people who get vaccinated believe that a PCR test that can’t, according to its inventor Kary Mullis, test for this so-called virus, believe in the fake numbers of positive “cases”?  Do these people even know if the virus has ever been isolated?

    Such credulity is an act of faith, not science or confirmed fact.

    Is it just the fear of death that drives such thinking?

    Or is it something deeper than ignorance and propaganda that drives this incredulous belief?

    If you want facts, I will not provide them here. Despite the good intentions of people who still think facts matter, I don’t think most people are persuaded by facts anymore. But such facts are readily available from excellent alternative media publications.  Global Research’s Michel Chossudovsky has released, free of charge, his comprehensive E-Book: The 2020-21 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup D’Etat, and the “Great Reset.”  It’s a good place to start if facts and analysis are what you are after.  Or go to Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s Childrens Health Defense, Off-Guardian, Dissident Voice, Global Research, among numerous others.

    Perhaps you think these sites are right-wing propaganda because many articles they publish can also be read or heard at some conservative media. If so, you need to start thinking rather than reacting. The entire mainstream political/media spectrum is right-wing, if you wish to use useless terms such as Left/Right.  I have spent my entire life being accused of being a left-wing nut, but now I am being told I am a right-wing nut even though my writing appears in many leftist publications. Perhaps my accusers don’t know which way the screw turns or the nut loosens.  Being uptight and frightened doesn’t help.

    I am interested in asking why so many people can’t accept that radical evil is real.  Is that a right-wing question?  Of course not.  It’s a human question that has been asked down through the ages.

    I do think we are today in the grip of radical evil, demonic forces. The refusal to see and accept this is not new.  As the eminent theologian, David Ray Griffin, has argued, the American Empire, with its quest for world domination and its long and ongoing slaughters at home and abroad, is clearly demonic; it is driven by the forces of death symbolized by Satan.

    I have spent many years trying to understand why so many good people have refused to see and accept this and have needed to ply a middle course over many decades. The safe path. Believing in the benevolence of their rulers.  When I say radical evil, I mean it in the deepest spiritual sense.  A religious sense, if you prefer.  But by religious I don’t mean institutional religions since so many of the institutional religions are complicit in the evil.

    It has long been easy for Americans to accept the demonic nature of foreign leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.  Easy, also, to accept the government’s attribution of such names as the “new Hitler” to any foreign leader it wishes to kill and overthrow.  But to consider their own political leaders as demonic is near impossible.

    So let me begin with a few reminders.

    The U.S. destruction of Iraq and the mass killings of Iraqis under George W. Bush beginning in 2003.  Many will say it was illegal, unjust, carried out under false pretenses, etc.  But who will say it was pure evil?

    Who will say that Barack Obama’s annihilation of Libya was radical evil?

    Who will say the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of Tokyo and so many Japanese cities that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians was radical evil?

    Who will say the U.S. war against Syria is demonic evil?

    Who will say the killing of millions of Vietnamese was radical evil?

    Who will say the insider attacks of September 11, 2001 were demonic evil?

    Who will say slavery, the genocide of native people, the secret medical experiments on the vulnerable, the CIA mind control experiments, the coups engineered throughout the world resulting in the mass murder of millions – who will say these are evil in the deepest sense?

    Who will say the U.S. security state’s assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, Jr., Robert Kennedy, Fred Hampton, et al. were radical evil?

    Who will say the trillions spent on nuclear weapons and the willingness to use them to annihilate the human race is not the ultimate in radical evil?

    This list could extend down the page endlessly.  Only someone devoid of all historical sense could conclude that the U.S. has not been in the grip of demonic forces for a long time.

    If you can do addition, you will find the totals staggering.  They are overwhelming in their implications.

    But to accept this history as radically evil in intent and not just in its consequences are two different things.  I think so many find it so hard to admit that their leaders have intentionally done and do demonic deeds for two reasons.  First, to do so implicates those who have supported these people or have not opposed them. It means they have accepted such radical evil and bear responsibility.  It elicits feelings of guilt. Secondly, to believe that one’s own leaders are evil is next to impossible for many to accept because it suggests that the rational façade of society is a cover for sinister forces and that they live in a society of lies so vast the best option is to make believe it just isn’t so.  Even when one can accept that evil deeds were committed in the past, even some perhaps intentionally, the tendency is to say “that was then, but things are different now.” Grasping the present when you are in it is not only difficult but often disturbing for it involves us.

    So if I am correct and most Americans cannot accept that their leaders have intentionally done radically evil things, then it follows that to even consider questioning the intentions of the authorities regarding the current corona crisis needs to be self-censored.  Additionally, as we all know, the authorities have undertaken a vast censorship operation so people cannot hear dissenting voices of those who have now been officially branded as domestic terrorists. The self-censorship and the official work in tandem.

    There is so much information available that shows that the authorities at the World Health Organization, the CDC, The World Economic Forum, Big Pharma, governments throughout the world, etc. have gamed this crisis beforehand, have manipulated the numbers, lied, have conducted a massive fear propaganda campaign via their media mouthpieces, have imposed cruel lockdowns that have further enriched the wealthiest and economically and psychologically devastated vast numbers, etc.  Little research is needed to see this, to understand that Big Pharma is, as Dr. Peter Gøtzsche documented eight years ago in Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare, a world-wide criminal enterprise.  It takes but a few minutes to see that the pharmaceutical companies who have been given emergency authorization for these untested experimental non-vaccine “vaccines” have paid out billions of dollars to settle criminal and civil allegations.

    It is an open secret that the WHO, the Gates Foundation, the WEF led by Klaus Schwab, and an interlocking international group of conspirators have plans for what they call The Great Reset, a strategy to use  the COVID-19 crisis to push their agenda to create a world of cyborgs living in cyberspace where artificial intelligence replaces people and human biology is wedded to technology under the control of the elites.  They have made it very clear that there are too many people on this planet and billions must die.  Details are readily available of this open conspiracy to create a transhuman world.

    Is this not radical evil?  Demonic?

    Let me end with an analogy.  There is another organized crime outfit that can only be called demonic – The Central Intelligence Agency.  One of its legendary officers was James Jesus Angleton, chief of Counterintelligence from 1954 until 1975.  He was a close associate of Allen Dulles, the longest serving director of the CIA.  Both men were deeply involved in many evil deeds, including bringing Nazi doctors and scientists into the U.S. to do the CIA’s dirty work, including mind control, bioweapons research, etc.  The stuff they did for Hitler.  As reported by David Talbot in The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, when the staunch Catholic Angleton was on his deathbed, he gave an interviews to visiting journalists, including Joseph Trento.  He confessed:

    He had not been serving God, after all, when he followed Allen Dulles.  He had been on a satanic quest….’Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars,’ he told Trento in an emotionless voice.  ‘The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted…. Outside this duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power.  I did things that, looking back on my life, I regret.  But I was part of it and loved being in it.’  He invoked the names of the high eminences who had run the CIA in his day – Dulles, Helms, Wisner.  These men were ‘the grand masters,’ he said.  ‘If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.’  Angleton took another slow sip from his steaming cup.  ‘I guess I will see them there soon.’

    Until we recognize the demonic nature of the hell we are now in, we too will be lost.  We are fighting for our lives and the spiritual salvation of the world.  Do not succumb to the siren songs of these fathers of lies.

    Resist.

    The post Denying the Demonic first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Denying the Demonic

    In March of last year as the coronavirus panic was starting, I wrote a somewhat flippant article saying that the obsession with buying and hoarding toilet paper was the people’s vaccine.  My point was simple: excrement and death have long been associated in cultural history and in the Western imagination with the evil devil, Satan, the Lord of the underworld, the Trickster, the Grand Master who rules the pit of smelly death, the place below where bodies go.

    The psychoanalytic literature is full of examples of death anxiety revealed in anal dreams of shit-filled overflowing toilets and people pissing in their pants.  Ernest Becker put it simply in The Denial of Death:

    No mistake – the turd is mankind’s real threat because it reminds people of death.

    The theological literature is also full of warnings about the devil’s wiles.  So too the Western classics from Aeschylus to Melville. The demonic has an ancient pedigree and has various names. Rational people tend to dismiss all this as superstitious nonsense.  This is hubris.  The Furies always exact their revenge when their existence is denied.  For they are part of ourselves, not alien beings, as the tragedy of human history has shown us time and again.

    Since excremental visions and the fear of death haunt humans – the skull at the banquet as William James put it – the perfect symbol of protection is toilet paper that will keep you safe and clean and free of any reminder of the fear of death running through a panicked world.  It’s a magic trick, of course, an unconscious way of thinking you are protecting yourself; a form of self-hypnosis.

    One year later, magical thinking has taken a different form and my earlier flippancy has turned darker. You can’t hoard today’s toilet paper but you can get them: RNA inoculations, misnamed vaccines. People are lined up for them now as they are being told incessantly to “get your shot.”  They are worse than toilet paper. At least toilet paper serves a practical function.  Real vaccines, as the word’s etymology – Latin, vaccinus, from cows, the cowpox virus vaccine first used by British physician Edward Jenner in 1800 to prevent smallpox – involve the use of a small amount of a virus.  The RNA inoculations are not vaccines.  To say they are is bullshit and has nothing to do with cows. To call them vaccines is linguistic mind control.

    These experimental inoculations do not prevent the vaccinated from getting infected with the “virus” nor do they prevent transmission of the alleged virus. When they were approved recently by the FDA that was made clear.  The FDA issued Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for these inoculations only under the proviso that they may make an infection less severe.  Yet millions have obediently taken a shot that doesn’t do what they think it does.  What does that tell us?

    Hundreds of millions of people have taken an injection that allows a bio-reactive “gene-therapy” molecule to be injected into their bodies because of fear, ignorance, and a refusal to consider that the people who are promoting this are evil and have ulterior motives.  Not that they mean well, but that they are evil and have evil intentions.  Does this sound too extreme?  Radically evil?  Come on!

    So what drives the refusal to consider that demonic forces are at work with the corona crisis?

    Why do the same people who get vaccinated believe that a PCR test that can’t, according to its inventor Kary Mullis, test for this so-called virus, believe in the fake numbers of positive “cases”?  Do these people even know if the virus has ever been isolated?

    Such credulity is an act of faith, not science or confirmed fact.

    Is it just the fear of death that drives such thinking?

    Or is it something deeper than ignorance and propaganda that drives this incredulous belief?

    If you want facts, I will not provide them here. Despite the good intentions of people who still think facts matter, I don’t think most people are persuaded by facts anymore. But such facts are readily available from excellent alternative media publications.  Global Research’s Michel Chossudovsky has released, free of charge, his comprehensive E-Book: The 2020-21 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup D’Etat, and the “Great Reset.”  It’s a good place to start if facts and analysis are what you are after.  Or go to Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s Childrens Health Defense, Off-Guardian, Dissident Voice, Global Research, among numerous others.

    Perhaps you think these sites are right-wing propaganda because many articles they publish can also be read or heard at some conservative media. If so, you need to start thinking rather than reacting. The entire mainstream political/media spectrum is right-wing, if you wish to use useless terms such as Left/Right.  I have spent my entire life being accused of being a left-wing nut, but now I am being told I am a right-wing nut even though my writing appears in many leftist publications. Perhaps my accusers don’t know which way the screw turns or the nut loosens.  Being uptight and frightened doesn’t help.

    I am interested in asking why so many people can’t accept that radical evil is real.  Is that a right-wing question?  Of course not.  It’s a human question that has been asked down through the ages.

    I do think we are today in the grip of radical evil, demonic forces. The refusal to see and accept this is not new.  As the eminent theologian, David Ray Griffin, has argued, the American Empire, with its quest for world domination and its long and ongoing slaughters at home and abroad, is clearly demonic; it is driven by the forces of death symbolized by Satan.

    I have spent many years trying to understand why so many good people have refused to see and accept this and have needed to ply a middle course over many decades. The safe path. Believing in the benevolence of their rulers.  When I say radical evil, I mean it in the deepest spiritual sense.  A religious sense, if you prefer.  But by religious I don’t mean institutional religions since so many of the institutional religions are complicit in the evil.

    It has long been easy for Americans to accept the demonic nature of foreign leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.  Easy, also, to accept the government’s attribution of such names as the “new Hitler” to any foreign leader it wishes to kill and overthrow.  But to consider their own political leaders as demonic is near impossible.

    So let me begin with a few reminders.

    The U.S. destruction of Iraq and the mass killings of Iraqis under George W. Bush beginning in 2003.  Many will say it was illegal, unjust, carried out under false pretenses, etc.  But who will say it was pure evil?

    Who will say that Barack Obama’s annihilation of Libya was radical evil?

    Who will say the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of Tokyo and so many Japanese cities that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians was radical evil?

    Who will say the U.S. war against Syria is demonic evil?

    Who will say the killing of millions of Vietnamese was radical evil?

    Who will say the insider attacks of September 11, 2001 were demonic evil?

    Who will say slavery, the genocide of native people, the secret medical experiments on the vulnerable, the CIA mind control experiments, the coups engineered throughout the world resulting in the mass murder of millions – who will say these are evil in the deepest sense?

    Who will say the U.S. security state’s assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, Jr., Robert Kennedy, Fred Hampton, et al. were radical evil?

    Who will say the trillions spent on nuclear weapons and the willingness to use them to annihilate the human race is not the ultimate in radical evil?

    This list could extend down the page endlessly.  Only someone devoid of all historical sense could conclude that the U.S. has not been in the grip of demonic forces for a long time.

    If you can do addition, you will find the totals staggering.  They are overwhelming in their implications.

    But to accept this history as radically evil in intent and not just in its consequences are two different things.  I think so many find it so hard to admit that their leaders have intentionally done and do demonic deeds for two reasons.  First, to do so implicates those who have supported these people or have not opposed them. It means they have accepted such radical evil and bear responsibility.  It elicits feelings of guilt. Secondly, to believe that one’s own leaders are evil is next to impossible for many to accept because it suggests that the rational façade of society is a cover for sinister forces and that they live in a society of lies so vast the best option is to make believe it just isn’t so.  Even when one can accept that evil deeds were committed in the past, even some perhaps intentionally, the tendency is to say “that was then, but things are different now.” Grasping the present when you are in it is not only difficult but often disturbing for it involves us.

    So if I am correct and most Americans cannot accept that their leaders have intentionally done radically evil things, then it follows that to even consider questioning the intentions of the authorities regarding the current corona crisis needs to be self-censored.  Additionally, as we all know, the authorities have undertaken a vast censorship operation so people cannot hear dissenting voices of those who have now been officially branded as domestic terrorists. The self-censorship and the official work in tandem.

    There is so much information available that shows that the authorities at the World Health Organization, the CDC, The World Economic Forum, Big Pharma, governments throughout the world, etc. have gamed this crisis beforehand, have manipulated the numbers, lied, have conducted a massive fear propaganda campaign via their media mouthpieces, have imposed cruel lockdowns that have further enriched the wealthiest and economically and psychologically devastated vast numbers, etc.  Little research is needed to see this, to understand that Big Pharma is, as Dr. Peter Gøtzsche documented eight years ago in Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare, a world-wide criminal enterprise.  It takes but a few minutes to see that the pharmaceutical companies who have been given emergency authorization for these untested experimental non-vaccine “vaccines” have paid out billions of dollars to settle criminal and civil allegations.

    It is an open secret that the WHO, the Gates Foundation, the WEF led by Klaus Schwab, and an interlocking international group of conspirators have plans for what they call The Great Reset, a strategy to use  the COVID-19 crisis to push their agenda to create a world of cyborgs living in cyberspace where artificial intelligence replaces people and human biology is wedded to technology under the control of the elites.  They have made it very clear that there are too many people on this planet and billions must die.  Details are readily available of this open conspiracy to create a transhuman world.

    Is this not radical evil?  Demonic?

    Let me end with an analogy.  There is another organized crime outfit that can only be called demonic – The Central Intelligence Agency.  One of its legendary officers was James Jesus Angleton, chief of Counterintelligence from 1954 until 1975.  He was a close associate of Allen Dulles, the longest serving director of the CIA.  Both men were deeply involved in many evil deeds, including bringing Nazi doctors and scientists into the U.S. to do the CIA’s dirty work, including mind control, bioweapons research, etc.  The stuff they did for Hitler.  As reported by David Talbot in The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, when the staunch Catholic Angleton was on his deathbed, he gave an interviews to visiting journalists, including Joseph Trento.  He confessed:

    He had not been serving God, after all, when he followed Allen Dulles.  He had been on a satanic quest….’Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars,’ he told Trento in an emotionless voice.  ‘The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted…. Outside this duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power.  I did things that, looking back on my life, I regret.  But I was part of it and loved being in it.’  He invoked the names of the high eminences who had run the CIA in his day – Dulles, Helms, Wisner.  These men were ‘the grand masters,’ he said.  ‘If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.’  Angleton took another slow sip from his steaming cup.  ‘I guess I will see them there soon.’

    Until we recognize the demonic nature of the hell we are now in, we too will be lost.  We are fighting for our lives and the spiritual salvation of the world.  Do not succumb to the siren songs of these fathers of lies.

    Resist.

    This article was posted on Tuesday, April 20th, 2021 at 2:41am and is filed under Barack Obama, Big Pharma, Bill Gates, CIA, COVID-19, Disinformation, Eugenics, George W. Bush, Hiroshima, Iraq, Japan, Libya, Lies, Lockdown, Media, Nagasaki, Opinion, Resistance, Syria, The “Great Reset”, United States, Vaccines, Viet Nam, World Economic Forum (WEF), World Health Organization (WHO).

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • There’s Now a Glimmer of Hope That 20 Years of War in Afghanistan Might End

    A mother holds her happy baby in their home

    The Biden administration has announced that all remaining U.S. non-special operations troops in Afghanistan — officially listed as 2,500, though the current number on the ground is reportedly closer to 3,500 — will be fully withdrawn by September 11, 2021. The Trump administration had negotiated a nebulous May 1 withdrawal, but in true Trump form did no work to facilitate the process. President Biden’s decision to establish a hard date for troop removal sets the stage, at long last, for the longest and most utterly useless war in U.S. history to be brought to a close.

    The choice to set a firm withdrawal date was actually forced by the half-assed “diplomacy” of the prior administration. Trump’s White House announced May 1 as a departure date, the Taliban responded by promising attacks should the withdrawal not happen, and Trump’s people proceeded to do absolutely nothing to begin the arduous process. Mr. Biden picked a date that is more feasible to withdrawal than three weeks from now, and did so in hopes of forestalling any Taliban attacks.

    “If we break the May 1st deadline negotiated by the previous administration with no clear plan to exit, we will be back at war with the Taliban, and that was not something President Biden believed was in the national interest,” an anonymous individual familiar with the negotiations told The Washington Post.

    It’s a wheel, a frictionless machine designed to make excuses for itself and create war profit. If we stay, it will be war. If we leave, it will be war and we will have to return. Every choice is bad, every outcome likely calamitous; choosing the less painful course is impossible, because the whole thing is pain. Yet here looms May 1, and an opportunity to make our way home at long last.

    And so, 20 years and trillions of dollars later, with more than 2,000 U.S. troops and God only knows how many civilians killed, this nation appears set to join the former Soviet Union, Great Britain and a cavalcade of others going back to Alexander the Great, all of which shared the same conceit: They thought they could win a war in the graveyard of empires.

    The planned troop withdrawal is a victory for peace activists. Make no mistake, however: For the U.S. state, it is a defeat that has been a long time coming. Make no mistake. George W. Bush said we would build a nation in Afghanistan, Barack Obama doubled down on that bet, and Donald Trump jacked up the use of private military contractors over there by 65 percent. All for naught; the vast consensus of foreign policy experts on both sides of the spectrum holds that the government in Kabul will fall to the Taliban within weeks of U.S. withdrawal. The wind will blow down from the Hindu Kush, the dust will rise and fall, and our bootprints will be erased like we had never been there. That is war in Afghanistan, in a nutshell.

    The decision to withdraw has elicited exactly the kind of response you’d expect from members of the Republican Party. “It is retreat in the face of an enemy that has not yet been vanquished and abdication of American leadership,” said Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. “An enemy that has not yet been vanquished”? Two decades of futility is not enough? I will never cease to be amazed at McConnell’s ability to spout razor-tipped nonsense without slicing off his own tongue.

    “A full withdrawal from Afghanistan is dumber than dirt and devilishly dangerous. President Biden will have, in essence, cancelled an insurance policy against another 9/11,” said Lindsey Graham. Really, where do they come up with this stuff? The war in Afghanistan is no more an insurance policy against another 9/11 than the war in Iraq was. In point of fact, more Afghan people become furiously radicalized every time their families, funerals and hospitals are bombed in this endless war. The very war we fight over there recruits for the Taliban, and has done so for 20 years now.

    But will the U.S. be leaving, really? By “the U.S.” of course, I refer to the massive number of private military contractors currently “working” in Afghanistan. In 2010, the contractors outnumbered the troops 2-1. By January 2021, there were more than 18,000 contractors in country. More than 3,814 of them have died over there, almost twice the number of U.S. troop casualties. They are almost invisible to the mainstream news media, and are there for the profit: Not just for themselves, but for the companies seeking to cash in on Afghanistan’s vast natural resources.

    “But despite periodic reports and series on contractors by ProPublica and others, the mainstream U.S. media does not regularly pay attention to contractors,” reports The Washington Post. “As a result, they’re subject to political manipulation. These dynamics have contributed to what journalist Dexter Filkins has called ‘The Forever War.’ Which means that U.S. contractors could help sustain hostilities in Afghanistan, even after the U.S. pulls out its troops.”

    There are no promises the U.S. will meet that September 11 deadline. If we do, there is no promise we won’t go blundering back in if the government collapses and bloody carnage grips Kabul again. Some warn against departure, while others see a chance for redemption in leaving. Even if U.S. troops go and stay gone, thousands of private contractors will remain to defend and augment corporate profits from mining and natural gas pipelines. Afghanistan is a hall of cracked mirrors, and we are lost in it.

    Staying has not worked for some 7,300 days. President Biden has made the prudent choice here. Now we see if he keeps to it.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ramsey Clark: A Life Well Lived for the People of the World

    Samarra Iraq 1996, Ramsey Clark visiting pharmaceutical plant. Photo: Bill Hackwell

    Yesterday (April 10) Ramsey Clark died at the age of 93 in New York, and today justice and peace loving people and movements in the US and around the world are in mourning for a man who stood up and fought tirelessly in support of justice, equality and against his country’s drive for endless wars.

    Ramsey Clark, the son of a Supreme Court Justice, was a lawyer who began an 8 year career in the US Justice Department in 1961 where he helped draft the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, becoming the US Attorney General in 1967. During this time he took on the establishment by banning wire tapping of progressive movements, calling for the abolition of capital punishment and banning federal executions.

    Ramsey could have easily remained in the ruling class circles he was born into but once outside of the US government he became a voice against its policies that could not be ignored. He chose instead to become a beacon of unequivocal support for the people of the world going to literally more than 100 countries on fact finding missions and leading humanitarian delegations. He flew tirelessly to countries being targeted by the Pentagon sometimes even as the bombs were beginning to fall.

    Sanctions as a Weapon of War

    It is almost impossible to list all the countries and peoples that Ramsey Clark stood up for but perhaps his role in helping to expose the 12 years (between the first Gulf War to the full scale attack in 2003) of sanctions against Iraq is the most illustrative one in showing the cruelty of the slow misery and death that sanctions cause. During that time, Ramsey went to Iraq over and over again to document just how horrific it was. In February 1996, I had the honor of accompanying him as the photographer on a delegation to document on the ground evidence for a report being compiled by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization that was claiming that 567,000 Iraqi children had died as a consequence of the draconian economic sanctions being applied in just 5 years. We went from empty hospital to empty hospital where doctors informed us that children were dying from preventable dysentery because they could not even get or produce simple hydration tablets and that diseases that had been eliminated were re appearing because of the conditions. Prior to the war Iraq had the most modern medical system in the Middle East. We witnessed a pharmaceutical factory that lay dormant because they could not get material needed to make medicine. Sewage flowed into the Tigris River through bombed out sanitation plants that could get no spare parts to get them running again. It was obvious everywhere we went, from government officials to people on the street the level of respect and love that people in Iraq and throughout the Middle East for that matter had for Ramsey.

    Today the US has sanctions leveled at over 20 countries for the crime of insisting on their independence. Ramsey Clark was opposed to all sanctions and said, “The lawlessness and cruelty of death-dealing sanctions must be recognized as genocide and a crime against humanity and must be prohibited.”

    Support for Self Determination in Latin America

    Over the years Ramsey played a significant role by leading delegations and participating in events throughout Latin America and the Caribbean including against the US-financed Contras during the Reagan years, to meeting with Hugo Chavez as leader of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, the Zapatistas in Chiapas and support for the FMLN in El Salvador.

    Ramsey actively opposed the over 60-year blockade of Cuba and called for the closure of the illegally occupied US naval base at Guantanamo and returning the land to the Cuban People. He involved himself in the struggle to send Elian Gonzalez home with his father and the prolonged campaign to free the Cuban 5 from US prisons. In recognition for his endearing and unwavering support Ramsey was awarded the Order of Solidarity granted by the State Council of the Republic of Cuba in November 2013 in Holguin by the mothers of the five Cuban heroes.

    Today, Cuban President Miguel-Diaz Canel Bermudez tweeted, “We mourn the death of
    Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General. Honest and supportive, he joined us in crucial battles and was critical of the great injustices committed by his country in the world. Cuba pays grateful tribute to him.”

    Fernando Gonzalez, President of the Institute of Friendship with the People (ICAP) added, “Ramsey was a sincere and faithful friend of Cuba. We share common ideals with regard to civil and human rights and the defense of just causes like Palestine… Cuba will never forget a friend as loyal as Ramsey Clark”.

    Today on facebook, anti war activist Brian Willson said from Nicaragua something that rings true to many of us about what a role model Ramsey Clark was. He was just that for a generation of activists, always speaking truth to power, calm and humble, but with unrelenting conviction.

    Ramsey Clark Presente!

  • Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English
    • Bill Hackwell is an organizer with the International Committee for Peace Justice and Dignity and an editor for the English edition of Resumen Latinoamericano. Read other articles by Bill.

    This article was posted on Sunday, April 11th, 2021 at 7:26pm and is filed under Activism, Iraq, Justice, Obituary.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Ramsey Clark: A Life Well Lived for the People of the World

    Samarra Iraq 1996, Ramsey Clark visiting pharmaceutical plant. Photo: Bill Hackwell

    Yesterday (April 10) Ramsey Clark died at the age of 93 in New York, and today justice and peace loving people and movements in the US and around the world are in mourning for a man who stood up and fought tirelessly in support of justice, equality and against his country’s drive for endless wars.

    Ramsey Clark, the son of a Supreme Court Justice, was a lawyer who began an 8 year career in the US Justice Department in 1961 where he helped draft the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, becoming the US Attorney General in 1967. During this time he took on the establishment by banning wire tapping of progressive movements, calling for the abolition of capital punishment and banning federal executions.

    Ramsey could have easily remained in the ruling class circles he was born into but once outside of the US government he became a voice against its policies that could not be ignored. He chose instead to become a beacon of unequivocal support for the people of the world going to literally more than 100 countries on fact finding missions and leading humanitarian delegations. He flew tirelessly to countries being targeted by the Pentagon sometimes even as the bombs were beginning to fall.

    Sanctions as a Weapon of War

    It is almost impossible to list all the countries and peoples that Ramsey Clark stood up for but perhaps his role in helping to expose the 12 years (between the first Gulf War to the full scale attack in 2003) of sanctions against Iraq is the most illustrative one in showing the cruelty of the slow misery and death that sanctions cause. During that time, Ramsey went to Iraq over and over again to document just how horrific it was. In February 1996, I had the honor of accompanying him as the photographer on a delegation to document on the ground evidence for a report being compiled by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization that was claiming that 567,000 Iraqi children had died as a consequence of the draconian economic sanctions being applied in just 5 years. We went from empty hospital to empty hospital where doctors informed us that children were dying from preventable dysentery because they could not even get or produce simple hydration tablets and that diseases that had been eliminated were re appearing because of the conditions. Prior to the war Iraq had the most modern medical system in the Middle East. We witnessed a pharmaceutical factory that lay dormant because they could not get material needed to make medicine. Sewage flowed into the Tigris River through bombed out sanitation plants that could get no spare parts to get them running again. It was obvious everywhere we went, from government officials to people on the street the level of respect and love that people in Iraq and throughout the Middle East for that matter had for Ramsey.

    Today the US has sanctions leveled at over 20 countries for the crime of insisting on their independence. Ramsey Clark was opposed to all sanctions and said, “The lawlessness and cruelty of death-dealing sanctions must be recognized as genocide and a crime against humanity and must be prohibited.”

    Support for Self Determination in Latin America

    Over the years Ramsey played a significant role by leading delegations and participating in events throughout Latin America and the Caribbean including against the US-financed Contras during the Reagan years, to meeting with Hugo Chavez as leader of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, the Zapatistas in Chiapas and support for the FMLN in El Salvador.

    Ramsey actively opposed the over 60-year blockade of Cuba and called for the closure of the illegally occupied US naval base at Guantanamo and returning the land to the Cuban People. He involved himself in the struggle to send Elian Gonzalez home with his father and the prolonged campaign to free the Cuban 5 from US prisons. In recognition for his endearing and unwavering support Ramsey was awarded the Order of Solidarity granted by the State Council of the Republic of Cuba in November 2013 in Holguin by the mothers of the five Cuban heroes.

    Today, Cuban President Miguel-Diaz Canel Bermudez tweeted, “We mourn the death of Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General. Honest and supportive, he joined us in crucial battles and was critical of the great injustices committed by his country in the world. Cuba pays grateful tribute to him.”

    Fernando Gonzalez, President of the Institute of Friendship with the People (ICAP) added, “Ramsey was a sincere and faithful friend of Cuba. We share common ideals with regard to civil and human rights and the defense of just causes like Palestine… Cuba will never forget a friend as loyal as Ramsey Clark”.

    Today on facebook, anti war activist Brian Willson said from Nicaragua something that rings true to many of us about what a role model Ramsey Clark was. He was just that for a generation of activists, always speaking truth to power, calm and humble, but with unrelenting conviction.

    Ramsey Clark Presente!

    • Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English
    The post Ramsey Clark: A Life Well Lived for the People of the World first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Support the Tropes

     

    In an earlier piece (FAIR.org, 3/3/21), we explored some country case study examples of how the press helps to manufacture consent for regime change and other US actions abroad among left-leaning audiences, a traditionally conflict-skeptical group.

    Some level of buy-in, or at least a hesitancy to resist, among the United States’ more left-leaning half is necessary to ensure that US interventions are carried out with a minimum of domestic opposition. To this end, corporate media invoke the language of human rights and humanitarianism to convince those to the left of center to accept, if not support, US actions abroad—a treatment of sorts for the country’s 50-year-long Vietnam syndrome.

    What follows are some of the common tropes used by establishment outlets to convince skeptical leftists that this time, things might be different, selling  a progressive intervention everyone can get behind.

    Think of the women! 

    The vast majority of the world was against the US attack on Afghanistan that followed the 9/11 attacks in 2001. However, the idea had overwhelming support from the US public, including from Democrats. In fact, when Gallup (Brookings, 1/9/20) asked about the occupation in 2019, there was slightly more support for maintaining troops there among Democrats than Republicans—38% vs. 34%—and slightly less support for withdrawing troops (21% vs. 23%).

    Media coverage can partially explain this phenomenon, convincing some and at the least providing cover for those in power. This was not a war of aggression, they insisted. They were not simply there to capture Osama bin Laden (whom the Taliban actually offered to hand over); this was a fight to bring freedom to the oppressed women of the country. As First Lady Laura Bush said:

    We respect our mothers, our sisters and daughters. Fighting brutality against women and children is not the expression of a specific culture; it is the acceptance of our common humanity—a commitment shared by people of goodwill on every continent…. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.

    Wars are not fought to liberate women (FAIR.org, 7/26/17), and bombing people is never a feminist activity (FAIR.org, 6/28/20). But the New York Times was among the chief architects in constructing the belief in a phantom feminist war. Within weeks of the invasion (12/2/01), it reported on the “joyful return” of women to college campuses, profiling one student who

    strode up the steps tentatively at first, her body covered from face to foot by blue cotton. As she neared the door, she flipped the cloth back over her head, revealing round cheeks, dark ringlets of hair and the searching brown eyes of a student.

    The over-the-top symbolism was hard to miss: This was a country changed, and all thanks to the invasion.

    Time magazine also played heavily on this angle. Six weeks after the invasion (11/26/01), it told readers that “the greatest pageant of mass liberation since the fight for suffrage” was occurring, as “female faces, shy and bright, emerged from the dark cellars,” casting off their veils and symbolically stomping on them. If the implication was not clear enough, it directly told readers “the sight of jubilation was a holiday gift, a reminder of reasons the war was worth fighting beyond those of basic self-defense.”

    Time: Lifting the Veil

    “How much better will their lives be now?” Time (12/3/01) asked. Not much better, as it turned out.

    A few days later, Time‘s cover (12/3/01) featured a portrait of a blonde, light-skinned Afghan woman, with the words, “Lifting the Veil. The shocking story of how the Taliban brutalized the women of Afghanistan. How much better will their lives be now?”

    This was representative of a much wider phenomenon. A study by Carol Stabile and Deepa Kumar published in Media, Culture & Society (9/1/05) found that, in 1999, there were 29 US newspaper articles and 37 broadcast TV reports about women’s rights in Afghanistan. Between 2000 and September 11, 2001, those figures were 15 and 33, respectively. However, in the 16 weeks between September 12 and January 1, 2002, Americans were inundated with stories on the subject, with 93 newspaper articles and 628 TV reports on the subject. Once the real objectives of the war were secure, those figures fell off a cliff.

    Antiwar messages were largely absent from corporate news coverage. Indeed, as FAIR founder Jeff Cohen noted in his book Cable News Confidential, CNN executives instructed their staff to constantly counter any images of civilian casualties with pro-war messages, even if “it may start sounding rote.” This sort of coverage helped to push 75% of Democratic voters into supporting the ground war.

    As reality set in, it became increasingly difficult to pretend women’s rights in Afghanistan were seriously improving. Women still face the same problems as they did before. As a female Afghan member of parliament told Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies (CounterSpin, 2/17/21), women in Afghanistan have three principal enemies:

    One is the Taliban. Two is this group of warlords, disguised as a government, that the US supports. And the third is the US occupation…. If you in the West could get the US occupation out, we’d only have two.

    However, Time managed to find a way to tug on the heartstrings of left-leaning audiences to support continued occupation. Featuring a shocking image of an 18-year-old local woman who had her ear and nose cut off, a 2010 cover story (8/9/10) asked readers to wonder “what happens if we leave Afghanistan,” the clear implication being the US must stay to prevent further brutality—despite the fact that the woman’s mutilation occurred after eight years of US occupation (Extra!, 10/10).

    Vox: An “emotional” moment at an NSC meeting shows why withdrawing from Afghanistan is so hard

    Vox (3/4/21) asserted that the US occupation of Afghanistan has meant “better rights for women and children” without offering evidence that that is the case.

    The trick is still being used to this day. In March, Vox (3/4/21) credulously reported that Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Gen. Mark Milley made an emotional plea to Biden that he must stay in Afghanistan, otherwise women’s rights “will go back to the Stone Age.” It’s so good to know the upper echelons of the military industrial complex are filled with such passionate feminists.

    In reality, nearly 20 years of occupation has only led to a situation where zero percent of Afghans considered themselves to be “thriving” while 85% are “suffering,” according to a Gallup poll. Only one in three girls goes to school, let alone university.

    And all of this ignores the fact that the US supported radical Islamist groups and their takeover of the country in the first place, a move that drastically reduced women’s rights. Pre-Taliban, half of university students were women, as were 40% of the country’s doctors, 70% of its teachers and 30% of its civil servants—reflecting the reforms of the Soviet-backed government that the US dedicated massive resources to destroying.

    Today, in half of the country’s provinces, fewer than 20% of teachers are female (and in many, fewer than 10% are). Only 37% of adolescent girls can read (compared to 66% of boys). Meanwhile, being a female gynecologist is now considered “one of the most dangerous jobs in the world” (New Statesman, 9/24/14). So much for a new golden age.

    The “think of the women” trope is far from unique to Afghanistan. In fact, 19th century British imperial propagandists used the plight of Hindu women in India and Muslim women in Egypt as a pretext to invade and conquer those countries. The tactic’s longevity is perhaps testament to its effectiveness.

    He’s attacking his own people!

    One of the many justifications used to engineer public consent for the disastrous Iraq War was that Saddam Hussein was a monster who was a danger to his own country. ‘There’s no question that the leader of Iraq is an evil man. After all, he gassed his own people. And we know he’s been working on weapons of mass destruction,” President George W. Bush frequently said, with the media parroting his every word.

    In the run up to the Iraq War, the New York Times suddenly became extremely concerned with Hussein’s crimes against civilians. Foreign correspondent John F. Burns (1/26/03), for example, compared him to Stalin and denounced him for plunging Iraq into a “bloodbath of medieval proportions.” The cornerstone of Burns’ pro-regime change argument was, ironically, the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. How did that one work out?

    McClatchy: Gadhafi Accused of Genocide Against His Own People

    The evidence McClatchy (2/21/11) offered that Gadhafi had been charged with “genocide” was a single interview on Al Jazeera.

    At the same time NATO was deciding to intervene in Libya to overthrow Moammar Gadhafi, corporate media were filled with passionate denunciations of his regime, most telling readers that he had attacked “his own people” (e.g., McClatchy, 2/21/11; Washington Post, 3/11/11; New York Times, 3/15/11).

    The Washington Post (4/1/11), approving of the intervention, reported that “a massacre of civilians, amounting to crimes against humanity,” would likely have transpired absent NATO’s intercession. It compared the supposed imminent slaughter to the Holocaust, implying that the United States’ actions “followed reflection in the international community about the failures to prevent genocide in the 1990s.” New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (3/21/11) also praised the attack as “the beau ideal of a liberal internationalist intervention,” claiming its “humanitarian purpose” was plain for all to see.

    The phrase “killing his own people” (or “gassing” them) became commonplace in media accounts of enemy wrongdoings, as it directly fed into the new Responsibility to Protect doctrine, a legal framework that allowed military intervention in other countries under humanitarian auspices. In practice, however, it was generally invoked to overthrow adversarial states. Data from Google Trends shows only minor interest in Libyan human rights until early 2011, reaching a massive spike in March (the date of the NATO intervention) before quickly dropping down to negligible levels and staying there ever since. A majority of Democratic voters supported the intervention, almost on a par with Republicans.

    The fact that talk of human rights in Libya has reduced to a trickle suggests either that the situation has drastically improved there, or that there were ulterior motives for all this human rights talk in the first place. It is clearly not the former (FAIR.org, 11/28/17). That media lost interest in the human rights situation  just after a successful military intervention strongly suggests their newfound passion was not genuine, and was a tool to sell war all along.

    As with Libya, peak discussion of human rights in Syria coincided with the US bombing of the country in April 2017. It stayed high throughout the early period of the civil war, although it has petered out in recent years, as a victory by the government of Bashar al-Assad becomes ever more certain. To corporate media, Assad is a dictator who is “gassing his own people” (e.g., Vox, 4/4/17; Bloomberg, 12/4/18; New York Times, 6/25/18; Economist 6/18/20) and so, the implication is, something must be done—that something likely involving military jets. (In a 2019 survey, far more Democrats opposed withdrawing US troops from Syria than Republicans: 66% vs. 23%—Brookings, 1/9/20.)

    A prime liberal interventionist argument can be found in the Huffington Post (8/26/13), where lawyer Josh Scheinert argued that “Syria’s civilians have paid the highest price” for Obama’s hesitancy, and demanded that “that…must change.” Scheinert wrote that he wanted to “believe that as a global community, when it came to the worst atrocities, not just the really bad ones, we might have moved on from our dark history of failures.” By failures, he did not mean active US participation or leadership in coups, wars and genocides in Latin America and Southeast Asia (to name but a few), but the times when the US military did not intervene.

    Guardian: Assad can still be brought to justice – and Europe’s role is crucial

    The Guardian‘s Natalie Nougayrède (3/1/19) presented the arrest of Bashar al-Assad as a matter of legal spadework rather than military invasion.

    Guardian columnist Natalie Nougayrède (3/1/19) made a similar argument, maintaining that “Assad Can Still Be Brought to Justice—and Europe’s Role Is Crucial.” “Massive human rights violations must not be left unpunished,” she argued, claiming his arrest would “act as a deterrent against further slaughter.” Of course, the only realistic way to arrest Assad, as she surely understood, would be to send an invasion force into the country to overthrow the government and kidnap him. Thus, she effectively managed to couch what would be an all-out military assault on the scale of Iraq as a narrow legal response aimed at preventing human rights violations.

    Sometimes atrocities will simply be made up out of whole cloth, such as Gadhafi’s Viagra-fueled rape squads, Saddam’s soldiers killing babies in incubators, or the “Gay Girl in Damascus” hoax. President Lyndon Johnson used the imaginary “open aggression on the high seas” known as the Gulf of Tonkin incident to convince Congress to authorize the Vietnam War (FAIR.org, 8/5/17).

    Going further back, incidents like the USS Maine explosion—the impetus for US intervention in the Cuban war of independence—and British World War I propaganda about Germans bayoneting babies, crucifying prisoners and cutting the heads of children helped whip a skeptical, pacifist public into a bloodthirsty fervor.

    We have to save democracy!

    This trope has been used extensively against Venezuela, as the Washington Post illustrates. The paper’s editorial board has published editorial after editorial demanding a coup (or more) in order to supposedly save democracy.

    WaPo: The region cannot just stand by as Venezuela veers toward civil war

    Rather than “stand[ing] by as Venezuela veers toward civil war,” the Washington Post (6/30/17) appears to want the US to actively intervene to make civil war more likely.

    The Post (6/30/17) strongly supported a wave of opposition violence in 2017 that killed at least 163 people, including an incident where an opposition leader stole a military helicopter and used it to bomb the Supreme Court and Interior Ministry. The Post strongly (and falsely) implied that it was an inside job by the Maduro “regime,” who were resorting to increasingly “far-fetched” and “brutal” repression of demonstrations that have the “support of the vast majority of Venezuelans.”

    In fact, this “vast majority” turned out to be less than 3% of the country, as a poll taken that week by an opposition-linked firm showed. Eighty-five percent opposed the movement’s tactics, with 56% against any form of opposition action whatsoever, even if it were entirely peaceful. This continued a long trend of media invisibilizing the majority of Venezuelans, with only those agreeing with Washington’s ambitions worthy of being labeled “the Venezuelan people” (FAIR.org, 1/31/19).

    The same editorial made a number of inflammatory predictions that if the US did not act, Maduro would “eliminate the opposition-controlled National Assembly” and “convert Venezuela into a regime modeled after Cuba’s.” None of this has proven to be true. The Post appeared bewildered by the lack of appetite for a US coup from Venezuela’s neighbors, explaining this by telling readers that they had been “bribed by Caracas with discounted oil.”

    One month later, the Post’s editorial board (7/27/17) was still informing us that the violent US-backed coup attempt was actually a peaceful demonstration supported by the “vast majority of its own people,” and that “Venezuela’s lawless regime” was itself the one conducting a coup against democracy. We must act now was the message, as Maduro was about to “abolish” the National Assembly and “cancel future elections”— again, none of which actually happened.

    “The response of the United States and other democracies [to Venezuela] has been consistently inadequate,” the board lamented. Given that the US was doing everything short of active military intervention in the country, the implication of what should be done was clear.

    In case that was not obvious enough, however, the Post (11/15/17) also ran a column headlined “The Odds of a Military Coup in Venezuela Are Going Up. But Coups Can Sometimes Lead to Democracy.” The piece claimed that Maduro had “cracked down on dissidents by force and run roughshod over the country’s democratic institutions.” The military, it noted, will “play a key role in determining whether a country will move to real democracy.”

    WaPo: Nicaragua’s president makes a farce of democracy

    “Ortega first ruled Nicaragua for 11 years after the 1979 revolution, until his ouster in the country’s first genuinely democratic election,” wrote the Washington Post (8/12/16)—ignoring the 1984 elections, because to the Post, elections are only democratic if they US-favored candidate wins.

    The Washington Post (8/12/16) has also claimed that action against Nicaragua was necessary to save democracy. Leftist President Daniel Ortega, the board told readers, has been “astonishingly contemptuous of democratic norms,” including overseeing “a bogus repeal of constitutional term limits, electoral fraud, intimidation of the opposition and control of major media.” How can the United States, which the Post claimed “spent so much money and political capital to promote democracy in Nicaragua during the 1980s,” sit by and offer “nothing but mild verbal opposition?”

    The level of contempt displayed here for basic historical truth is staggering. In reality, the US government in the 1980s trained, armed and funded far-right death squads that wrought havoc in Nicaragua and the rest of the region, killing hundreds of thousands in genocides the area will never recover from. Quite apart from its architects being found guilty in US courts, the Reagan administration was tried and convicted by the International Court of Justice on 15 counts centering on the illegal use of force. It is these actions, presumably, that the Post described to  readers as “promoting democracy,” thereby using a mythical past to convince left-leaning audiences that further “democracy promotion” is necessary today.

    The US has for years been supporting a domestic protest movement aimed at toppling Ortega. However, it has failed to get very far, primarily due to his widespread public support and the opposition’s own unpopularity.

    Corporate media chided the United States, but generally only for not doing enough to ensure a change in government. “What America Must Do to Help Nicaragua Restore Democracy,” ran the Hill’s headline (1/30/20). The article advised that the US must “diversify its strategy and increase sanctions on regime insiders complicit in carrying out human rights abuses.” “Two years After Nicaragua’s Mass Uprising Started, Why Is Daniel Ortega Still in Power?” grumbled a Washington Post headline (1/5/20), disappointed that democracy™ had not been restored yet.

    Unfortunately, even much of the US left media has aligned with the corporate press in condemning progressive Latin American administrations, thereby greasing the skids for US-supported attempts at regime change (FAIR.org, 10/12/19, 1/22/20).

    Who gets to talk on human rights

    Sourcing is a key component of journalism; who the sources are will shape the tone and the argument of anything a news organization produces (Extra!, 1–2/06). However, there are myriad potentially suitable individuals or organizations to go to, and journalists themselves are largely in control of who they select. Media can therefore effectively decide which arguments get heard and which do not, simply by going to the people who reflect the views they wish to push.

    At the beginning of the Iraq invasion, corporate media was saturated with pro-war voices, while dissent was largely squelched. A FAIR study (5/1/03) of TV news in early 2003 found that 64% of all sources favored an attack, while only one in ten voiced any opposition to the idea. As a result, viewers were effectively blitzed by voices arguing for an intervention.

    Moving to the present, a search for pro-peace think tanks such as the Institute for Policy Studies and the Center for Economic and Policy Research elicits 86 and 53 results, respectively, in the New York Times over the past five years, going back to the beginning of 2016. Hawkish organizations are referenced far more frequently; the Center for American Progress, whose executive director Neera Tanden has called for “oil-rich countries” to pay the US for the privilege of being bombed (FAIR.org, 3/3/21), has featured in 432 Times articles since 2016, while conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation appears in 529 over the same period, suggesting that what we saw during the Iraq invasion is the rule rather than the exception.

    If well-paid US columnists start becoming preoccupied with human rights in your country, it is a pretty good sign that you are about to get bombed. It is also remarkable how quickly those same pundits will lose their acute interest in human rights in a nation after a US intervention. Therefore, the next time you hear freedom, human rights and democracy in another country being endlessly discussed, be on your guard for ulterior motives; these cold-blooded media figures may just be crying crocodile tears in the service of empire.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Australia Struggles to Find an Independent Voice

    Australia has always struggled to present an independent foreign policy to the world. For example, during its early days as a British colony its soldiers fought in the Crimean war in the mid 19th century, although it would be impossible to identify any Australian interest in that conflict. World War One saw a similar eagerness to die on behalf of the British Empire. To this day the most solemn day in the Australian calendar is 25th April, ANZAC Day, when Australian and New Zealand troops were sacrificed by their incompetent British officers to a hopeless campaign in Turkey during World War One.

    The same saga was repeated during World War II when Australian troops were rushed to North Africa to fight Rommel’s desert army. They were only withdrawn from that theatre following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when defending home territory from the Japanese superseded defending Britain in its European war.

    The fall of Singapore to the Japanese had a profound effect on Australian military thinking. Foremost was the realisation that they could no longer rely on Britain for their safety.  Rather than formulating a plan for having a uniquely Australian tinge to their defence, Australia simply switched its allegiance from the British to the Americans. That allegiance has continued to the present day and is essentially a bipartisan affair, with both the major political parties swearing undying allegiance to the Americans.

    What did not change from the days of allegiance to a participation in Britain’s wars, was an affinity simply transferred to the Americans to join their wars, regardless of the merits, military or otherwise, of doing so.

    Thus Australia was an eager participant in the first post-World War II exercise in American imperialism when it joined the war in Korea. Australian troops later joined in the invasion of North Korea, contrary to the terms of the United Nations resolution authorising the conflict. After the Chinese joined the war when the western forces reached the North Korea – China border, they were quickly expelled back to the southern portion of the Korean peninsula.

    As is well known, the Americans used their aerial domination to bomb the North until the armistice was finally signed in 1953. During that air war every city in the North suffered severe damage. More than 600,000 civilians died, which was greater than the military losses of around 400,000. To this day the war remains technically alive as no peace treaty has been signed. Of the 17,000 Australian troops that served in Korea, there were 340 fatalities and more than 1400 injured, a comparatively small number for a war that lasted three years.

    In 1962 Australian troops arrived in South Vietnam and remained there until January 1973 when they were withdrawn by the Whitlam Labor government. It was Australia’s longest war up until that time. The withdrawal of Australian troops by the Whitlam government incensed the Americans, on whose behalf they were there. The withdrawal drew the enmity of the Americans and was a major factor in the American role in the overthrow of the Whitlam government in November 1975. It is a fact barely acknowledged in Australian writing on the demise of the Whitlam government. It did, however, have a profound effect on Australian political and military thinking. Since November 1975 there has been no recognisable Australian difference from United States belligerence throughout the world.

    The next miscalculation was Australia joining the United States led war in Afghanistan. That is now Australia’s longest war, rapidly approaching 20 years of involvement with no sign or political talk about withdrawing. It is a war that has largely passed out of mainstream media discussion. This ignorance was briefly disrupted by revelations in late 2020 that Australian troops had been involved in war crimes in Afghanistan, specifically, the killing of innocent Afghanistan civilians.

    The brief publicity given to this revelation rapidly passed and Australia’s involvement in its longest war once more faded from public view. The mainstream media remains totally silent on Australia’s involvement on behalf of the Americans in protecting the poppy crop, source of 90% of the world’s heroin supply and a major source of uncountable illicit income for the CIA.

    Australia’s next foreign intervention on behalf of the Americans was in the equally illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. They have simply ignored demands by the Iraqi government in 2020 that all uninvited foreign troops should leave. The involvement of Australian troops in that country, and indeed in adjoining Syria where they have been since at least 2015 is simply ignored by the mainstream media.

    Australia also plays a role in the United States war machine through the satellite facility at Pine Gap in the Northern Territory. That base is one of a number of United States military facilities in the country, another topic that is deemed by the mainstream media as being unfit for public discussion.

    Another unsung role of the Australian Navy is to be part of the United States confrontation with China in the South China Sea where they protect so-called freedom of navigation exercises, despite the complete absence of any evidence of Chinese interference with civilian navigation in those waters. Equally unexplained is the Australian Navy’s presence in the narrow Straits of Malacca, a vital Chinese export waterway.

    Last year the Trump administration resurrected the “gang of four” that is, India, Japan, the United States and Australia, a blatantly anti-China grouping designed to put pressure on the Chinese government in the Indo Pacific region. The measure is doomed to fail, not least because both India and Japan have more attractive opportunities as part of the burgeoning cooperation in trade among multiple countries in the Asia-Pacific who see better opportunities arising from a friendly relationship with China than the blatantly antagonistic options offered by the Americans.

    Australia seems impervious to these signals. It has already suffered major setbacks to its trade with China, not to mention a diplomatic cold shoulder. The political leadership is silent on this development, perhaps unable to grasp the implications of its changing relationship with China. The inability of the Labor Opposition to grasp the implications of the consequences of Australia clinging to the fading American coattails is of profound concern.

    All the signs are that the relationship with its largest trading partner, by a big margin, will continue to deteriorate. Australians seem unable or unwilling to grasp the lesson that its economic problems are intimately linked to its subservient role to the United States.

    There is every indication that their fortunes in Asia will sink together.

    This article was posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2021 at 1:45am and is filed under Afghanistan, Australia, China, Espionage/”Intelligence”, India, Iraq, Japan, Korea, Militarism, North Korea, Singapore, Surveillance, Syria, Trade, United Kingdom, United States, US Military Bases, Viet Nam, War Crimes, World War One, World War Two.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Australia Struggles to Find an Independent Voice

    Australia has always struggled to present an independent foreign policy to the world. For example, during its early days as a British colony its soldiers fought in the Crimean war in the mid 19th century, although it would be impossible to identify any Australian interest in that conflict. World War One saw a similar eagerness to die on behalf of the British Empire. To this day the most solemn day in the Australian calendar is 25th April, ANZAC Day, when Australian and New Zealand troops were sacrificed by their incompetent British officers to a hopeless campaign in Turkey during World War One.

    The same saga was repeated during World War II when Australian troops were rushed to North Africa to fight Rommel’s desert army. They were only withdrawn from that theatre following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when defending home territory from the Japanese superseded defending Britain in its European war.

    The fall of Singapore to the Japanese had a profound effect on Australian military thinking. Foremost was the realisation that they could no longer rely on Britain for their safety.  Rather than formulating a plan for having a uniquely Australian tinge to their defence, Australia simply switched its allegiance from the British to the Americans. That allegiance has continued to the present day and is essentially a bipartisan affair, with both the major political parties swearing undying allegiance to the Americans.

    What did not change from the days of allegiance to a participation in Britain’s wars, was an affinity simply transferred to the Americans to join their wars, regardless of the merits, military or otherwise, of doing so.

    Thus Australia was an eager participant in the first post-World War II exercise in American imperialism when it joined the war in Korea. Australian troops later joined in the invasion of North Korea, contrary to the terms of the United Nations resolution authorising the conflict. After the Chinese joined the war when the western forces reached the North Korea – China border, they were quickly expelled back to the southern portion of the Korean peninsula.

    As is well known, the Americans used their aerial domination to bomb the North until the armistice was finally signed in 1953. During that air war every city in the North suffered severe damage. More than 600,000 civilians died, which was greater than the military losses of around 400,000. To this day the war remains technically alive as no peace treaty has been signed. Of the 17,000 Australian troops that served in Korea, there were 340 fatalities and more than 1400 injured, a comparatively small number for a war that lasted three years.

    In 1962 Australian troops arrived in South Vietnam and remained there until January 1973 when they were withdrawn by the Whitlam Labor government. It was Australia’s longest war up until that time. The withdrawal of Australian troops by the Whitlam government incensed the Americans, on whose behalf they were there. The withdrawal drew the enmity of the Americans and was a major factor in the American role in the overthrow of the Whitlam government in November 1975. It is a fact barely acknowledged in Australian writing on the demise of the Whitlam government. It did, however, have a profound effect on Australian political and military thinking. Since November 1975 there has been no recognisable Australian difference from United States belligerence throughout the world.

    The next miscalculation was Australia joining the United States led war in Afghanistan. That is now Australia’s longest war, rapidly approaching 20 years of involvement with no sign or political talk about withdrawing. It is a war that has largely passed out of mainstream media discussion. This ignorance was briefly disrupted by revelations in late 2020 that Australian troops had been involved in war crimes in Afghanistan, specifically, the killing of innocent Afghanistan civilians.

    The brief publicity given to this revelation rapidly passed and Australia’s involvement in its longest war once more faded from public view. The mainstream media remains totally silent on Australia’s involvement on behalf of the Americans in protecting the poppy crop, source of 90% of the world’s heroin supply and a major source of uncountable illicit income for the CIA.

    Australia’s next foreign intervention on behalf of the Americans was in the equally illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. They have simply ignored demands by the Iraqi government in 2020 that all uninvited foreign troops should leave. The involvement of Australian troops in that country, and indeed in adjoining Syria where they have been since at least 2015 is simply ignored by the mainstream media.

    Australia also plays a role in the United States war machine through the satellite facility at Pine Gap in the Northern Territory. That base is one of a number of United States military facilities in the country, another topic that is deemed by the mainstream media as being unfit for public discussion.

    Another unsung role of the Australian Navy is to be part of the United States confrontation with China in the South China Sea where they protect so-called freedom of navigation exercises, despite the complete absence of any evidence of Chinese interference with civilian navigation in those waters. Equally unexplained is the Australian Navy’s presence in the narrow Straits of Malacca, a vital Chinese export waterway.

    Last year the Trump administration resurrected the “gang of four” that is, India, Japan, the United States and Australia, a blatantly anti-China grouping designed to put pressure on the Chinese government in the Indo Pacific region. The measure is doomed to fail, not least because both India and Japan have more attractive opportunities as part of the burgeoning cooperation in trade among multiple countries in the Asia-Pacific who see better opportunities arising from a friendly relationship with China than the blatantly antagonistic options offered by the Americans.

    Australia seems impervious to these signals. It has already suffered major setbacks to its trade with China, not to mention a diplomatic cold shoulder. The political leadership is silent on this development, perhaps unable to grasp the implications of its changing relationship with China. The inability of the Labor Opposition to grasp the implications of the consequences of Australia clinging to the fading American coattails is of profound concern.

    All the signs are that the relationship with its largest trading partner, by a big margin, will continue to deteriorate. Australians seem unable or unwilling to grasp the lesson that its economic problems are intimately linked to its subservient role to the United States.

    There is every indication that their fortunes in Asia will sink together.

    The post Australia Struggles to Find an Independent Voice first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • “We did not know… that there is an international law”

    In March 1991, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which had just imploded under a coalition led by Washington, began its descent into hell. It would remain for a long time under close surveillance and embargo. Meanwhile, between a mirage of “glasnost” and a wave of “perestroika,” Gorbachev’s USSR, floundering in dreams of the West, was soon to sink and fall apart. America already saw itself as “the most powerful Empire the earth has brought forth” and readied itself to make those who did not understand it pay dearly. After pretending to seek a peaceful outcome that would spare Iraq humiliation, Mitterrand’s France joined the anti-Saddam assault, gradually realizing how narrow its room for maneuver was vis-à-vis Baghdad. After a Gaullist backlash under Chirac, it would fire its last rounds in March 2003 with Villepin’s flamboyant but inconsequential speech to the Security Council, abandoning Iraq and continuing its slide towards Atlanticism.

    It took thirty years for the mainstream of the nation of reason and human rights to deign to discover the gigantic lie that had obscured the destruction of Iraq and the excruciating torment inflicted on its people. The teary Colin Powell, famous for having sodomized the Security Council with his sinister vial, would wait long years to apologize vaguely on the pretext that he had been misinformed (sic). Some would emulate him later, many never. Faced with the scandal, many are now brandishing an easy excuse: “We did not know”, they say, thus shirking their responsibility. To admit that they knew would be to admit that they were guilty or accomplices. According to the long documentary devoted to Iraq recently on France 2, Chevènement admitted to knowing since August 4, 1990 France had given its consent to Washington to be at his side against Saddam: the diplomatic saga of which the French were proud was therefore only a decoy.

    The overwhelming toll of the Iraqi tragedy has been passed over in silence, despite a number of courageous voices and initiatives that have attempted to unmask the American enterprise inspired by Judeo-Protestant Zionism: a dismantled and destroyed state, its army and its policedissolved, one of the most modern countries in the Arab world sent back fifty years by raids and the use of prohibited weapons, humiliated by an iniquitous “food for oil”. Without counting the pillage and torture, the prisons, the looting of the archaeological heritage. At the very least two million dead including 500,000 children, “the price of democracy” according to elder Albright … And the unspeakable George Dubya Bush asking the historical question: Why do they hate us so much?

    The same exact scenario is happening again for Syria, which entered into its eleventh year of war in mid-March 2021. Except that the Syrian state, strong in its resilience and its alliances (Russia and Iran), has not been destroyed, even if the country is ravaged, its economy ruined and its people suffocated and starved by the embargo and the sanctions, with the end of its ordeal not in sight. Refusing to recognize its “unthinkable defeat” and “the unthinkable victory of Bashar al-Assad,” America has preferred, as Obama’s adviser Robert Malley blithely predicted in 2016, to move on to a second stage of aggression, the actual military war well and truly lost, giving way to an endless economic war, a “proxy” war with the support of the flag wavers of the western-oriented “international community.

    As foreseen, the tenth mid-March “anniversary” of the start of events in Syria unleashed an unprecedented and at first glance incomprehensible hysteria in the dreary bog of the mainstream press, which puts politicians, the media, and those whose job is to think, in the same bed. The stupidity of this fit of furious madness testifies to the moral degeneration of the country of Descartes and of human rights, a kind of Covid of intelligence. These are simply the neoconservative French-style intellectuals who are mobilizing, chanting their string of pious lies and insanities, where pretty words jostle, like democracy, international law, human rights, justice, pluralism, political solution. Furious at their defeat, and having nothing plausible to claim or propose, like the moderate terrorists and the self-styled revolutionaries, they support, they condemn with an air of outraged virtue “the rogue state” in Syria, the “Bashar regime”, the “genocidal” gang, the “massacring tyrant”, perfectly illustrating this “zero degree of political thought” (and intelligence) that is neoconservatism – this Lady Emptyhead with whom they are infatuated. We even see the idea advanced that, in order to permanently defeat the Islamic State in Syria, it is necessary to “stabilize” the rebels, who have destroyed their country and licked themselves of the martyrdom of their compatriots.

    What Iraq has undergone for thirty years, Syria is living for the eleventh consecutive year (more than the two world wars combined), a glittering silence and total denial perfecting the ordeal of a martyred people. If it continues to die slowly, it is not to “pay the price of a necessary democratization”, it is neither a “failed spring” nor a civil war, as one strives to say in the countries of the Axis of Good. Among the “experts” who pontificate, I dare to hope that there are no professors of international law, because they would surely know that, like Iraq in its time, Syria was and is still the victim of international aggression.

    During the Nuremberg (and Tokyo) trials of 1946, this crime of aggression, based on the free and conscious will to threaten or break the peace, was classified as a “crime against peace” and qualified as an “international crime par excellence”, one of the major violations of international law alongside genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. It is inscribed by the Nuremberg Tribunal at the top of the list, along with the following formula: “To start a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime,” the only difference from other war crimes being that it contains within itself all the accumulated Evil of all the others. This is “the crime par excellence.”

    Codified by the United Nations General Assembly, resolution 95/1946, it belongs to international criminal law and falls under the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice in The Hague (with regard to the responsibility and criminalization of States). Assumed by the Treaty of Rome of July 1998, establishing the ICC, it also comes under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (for the personal responsibility of state officials).

    Will we have to meet in thirty years to “discover” the toll of the wars in Syria, whether military and visible or economic and invisible? When the hour arrives to be held accountable and to render justice, it will in any case be necessary to remind with pure honesty the hundred governments that are participating to this day in this naked aggression, of the gravity of their criminal enterprise. And we will first denounce the three Western countries, permanent members of the Security Council, who claim to uphold International Law and to be its guardians, while they are its top violators.

    To enhance his peaceful retirement, Dubya Bush chose, it seems, to paint ridiculous little sheep, without ever being touched by the idea that he should have on his conscience millions of dead, wounded, crippled, handicapped children, not to mention the destruction of several countries. Others, like Blair or Obama, even derive an enviable income from the story of their exploits, by giving handsomely paid lectures, where their ravages and crimes are implicitly considered collateral effects of a pious work: no reference to the dead, to the destruction for which they are responsible, to the fate of ruined or dismembered States …

    They are well dressed, well groomed, well fed, covered with diplomas, they pose as “masters of the world”: they speak the law, make the law, decide on the war, write the story of their exploits seen through a warped pair of spectacles. In short, Westerners or devotees of the West – “Occidentalists” – are the elites of the “civilized world”, the essence of the only humanity that matters to their unseeing eyes. They believe themselves to be invulnerable and untouchable. They have no remorse or shame. They are even proud of their actions, of their records, of their support for these terrorists, whether recycled or not, who “get the job done.” Their regrettable sin, which they cannot get rid of since they see it as the new version of the detestable and outmoded “white man’s burden”, is the mania for delivering moral lessons and deciding for others what countries “that do not belong to our world” must do, even if no one has asked them. Obviously, if there was still a hint of wisdom in the West, one would wonder how people whose sense of governance and international law is so erratic at home can decide the fate of their more or less distant neighbors.

    All the more reason for political or military leaders, intellectuals and the media, who have decided, organized, supported or justified a crime (or many) of international aggression, to know that they are and will remain, whatever they do or do not do, responsible for the crime of international aggression, or for their support or complicity, and that they will be held to account, without statute of limitations . Justice has many flaws, but it is tenacious.

    EnglishTranslation: Paul Larudee

    The post “We did not know… that there is an international law” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • “We did not know… that there is an international law”

    In March 1991, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which had just imploded under a coalition led by Washington, began its descent into hell. It would remain for a long time under close surveillance and embargo. Meanwhile, between a mirage of “glasnost” and a wave of “perestroika,” Gorbachev’s USSR, floundering in dreams of the West, was soon to sink and fall apart. America already saw itself as “the most powerful Empire the earth has brought forth” and readied itself to make those who did not understand it pay dearly. After pretending to seek a peaceful outcome that would spare Iraq humiliation, Mitterrand’s France joined the anti-Saddam assault, gradually realizing how narrow its room for maneuver was vis-à-vis Baghdad. After a Gaullist backlash under Chirac, it would fire its last rounds in March 2003 with Villepin’s flamboyant but inconsequential speech to the Security Council, abandoning Iraq and continuing its slide towards Atlanticism.

    It took thirty years for the mainstream of the nation of reason and human rights to deign to discover the gigantic lie that had obscured the destruction of Iraq and the excruciating torment inflicted on its people. The teary Colin Powell, famous for having sodomized the Security Council with his sinister vial, would wait long years to apologize vaguely on the pretext that he had been misinformed (sic). Some would emulate him later, many never. Faced with the scandal, many are now brandishing an easy excuse: “We did not know”, they say, thus shirking their responsibility. To admit that they knew would be to admit that they were guilty or accomplices. According to the long documentary devoted to Iraq recently on France 2, Chevènement admitted to knowing since August 4, 1990 France had given its consent to Washington to be at his side against Saddam: the diplomatic saga of which the French were proud was therefore only a decoy.

    The overwhelming toll of the Iraqi tragedy has been passed over in silence, despite a number of courageous voices and initiatives that have attempted to unmask the American enterprise inspired by Judeo-Protestant Zionism: a dismantled and destroyed state, its army and its policedissolved, one of the most modern countries in the Arab world sent back fifty years by raids and the use of prohibited weapons, humiliated by an iniquitous “food for oil”. Without counting the pillage and torture, the prisons, the looting of the archaeological heritage. At the very least two million dead including 500,000 children, “the price of democracy” according to elder Albright … And the unspeakable George Dubya Bush asking the historical question: Why do they hate us so much?

    The same exact scenario is happening again for Syria, which entered into its eleventh year of war in mid-March 2021. Except that the Syrian state, strong in its resilience and its alliances (Russia and Iran), has not been destroyed, even if the country is ravaged, its economy ruined and its people suffocated and starved by the embargo and the sanctions, with the end of its ordeal not in sight. Refusing to recognize its “unthinkable defeat” and “the unthinkable victory of Bashar al-Assad,” America has preferred, as Obama’s adviser Robert Malley blithely predicted in 2016, to move on to a second stage of aggression, the actual military war well and truly lost, giving way to an endless economic war, a “proxy” war with the support of the flag wavers of the western-oriented “international community.

    As foreseen, the tenth mid-March “anniversary” of the start of events in Syria unleashed an unprecedented and at first glance incomprehensible hysteria in the dreary bog of the mainstream press, which puts politicians, the media, and those whose job is to think, in the same bed. The stupidity of this fit of furious madness testifies to the moral degeneration of the country of Descartes and of human rights, a kind of Covid of intelligence. These are simply the neoconservative French-style intellectuals who are mobilizing, chanting their string of pious lies and insanities, where pretty words jostle, like democracy, international law, human rights, justice, pluralism, political solution. Furious at their defeat, and having nothing plausible to claim or propose, like the moderate terrorists and the self-styled revolutionaries, they support, they condemn with an air of outraged virtue “the rogue state” in Syria, the “Bashar regime”, the “genocidal” gang, the “massacring tyrant”, perfectly illustrating this “zero degree of political thought” (and intelligence) that is neoconservatism – this Lady Emptyhead with whom they are infatuated. We even see the idea advanced that, in order to permanently defeat the Islamic State in Syria, it is necessary to “stabilize” the rebels, who have destroyed their country and licked themselves of the martyrdom of their compatriots.

    What Iraq has undergone for thirty years, Syria is living for the eleventh consecutive year (more than the two world wars combined), a glittering silence and total denial perfecting the ordeal of a martyred people. If it continues to die slowly, it is not to “pay the price of a necessary democratization”, it is neither a “failed spring” nor a civil war, as one strives to say in the countries of the Axis of Good. Among the “experts” who pontificate, I dare to hope that there are no professors of international law, because they would surely know that, like Iraq in its time, Syria was and is still the victim of international aggression.

    During the Nuremberg (and Tokyo) trials of 1946, this crime of aggression, based on the free and conscious will to threaten or break the peace, was classified as a “crime against peace” and qualified as an “international crime par excellence”, one of the major violations of international law alongside genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. It is inscribed by the Nuremberg Tribunal at the top of the list, along with the following formula: “To start a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime,” the only difference from other war crimes being that it contains within itself all the accumulated Evil of all the others. This is “the crime par excellence.”

    Codified by the United Nations General Assembly, resolution 95/1946, it belongs to international criminal law and falls under the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice in The Hague (with regard to the responsibility and criminalization of States). Assumed by the Treaty of Rome of July 1998, establishing the ICC, it also comes under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (for the personal responsibility of state officials).

    Will we have to meet in thirty years to “discover” the toll of the wars in Syria, whether military and visible or economic and invisible? When the hour arrives to be held accountable and to render justice, it will in any case be necessary to remind with pure honesty the hundred governments that are participating to this day in this naked aggression, of the gravity of their criminal enterprise. And we will first denounce the three Western countries, permanent members of the Security Council, who claim to uphold International Law and to be its guardians, while they are its top violators.

    To enhance his peaceful retirement, Dubya Bush chose, it seems, to paint ridiculous little sheep, without ever being touched by the idea that he should have on his conscience millions of dead, wounded, crippled, handicapped children, not to mention the destruction of several countries. Others, like Blair or Obama, even derive an enviable income from the story of their exploits, by giving handsomely paid lectures, where their ravages and crimes are implicitly considered collateral effects of a pious work: no reference to the dead, to the destruction for which they are responsible, to the fate of ruined or dismembered States …

    They are well dressed, well groomed, well fed, covered with diplomas, they pose as “masters of the world”: they speak the law, make the law, decide on the war, write the story of their exploits seen through a warped pair of spectacles. In short, Westerners or devotees of the West – “Occidentalists” – are the elites of the “civilized world”, the essence of the only humanity that matters to their unseeing eyes. They believe themselves to be invulnerable and untouchable. They have no remorse or shame. They are even proud of their actions, of their records, of their support for these terrorists, whether recycled or not, who “get the job done.” Their regrettable sin, which they cannot get rid of since they see it as the new version of the detestable and outmoded “white man’s burden”, is the mania for delivering moral lessons and deciding for others what countries “that do not belong to our world” must do, even if no one has asked them. Obviously, if there was still a hint of wisdom in the West, one would wonder how people whose sense of governance and international law is so erratic at home can decide the fate of their more or less distant neighbors.

    All the more reason for political or military leaders, intellectuals and the media, who have decided, organized, supported or justified a crime (or many) of international aggression, to know that they are and will remain, whatever they do or do not do, responsible for the crime of international aggression, or for their support or complicity, and that they will be held to account, without statute of limitations . Justice has many flaws, but it is tenacious.

    EnglishTranslation: Paul Larudee

    Michel Raimbaud is a former diplomat and essayist. He has several published books, notably Tempête sur le Grand Moyen-Orient (2nd edition 2017) and Les guerres de Syrie (2019). Read other articles by Michel.

    This article was posted on Friday, April 2nd, 2021 at 8:05am and is filed under Disinformation, International Law, Iraq, Propaganda, Syria, War Crimes.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • ‘Someone Was Out There Deliberately Manufacturing Evidence’

     

    The March 26, 2021, episode of CounterSpin included an archival interview that Steve Rendall conducted with journalist Robert Dreyfuss about Iraq War intelligence, originally aired February 27, 2004. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin210326Dreyfuss.mp3

     

    Janine Jackson: Human rights and antiwar advocates used the 18th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq to call for reparations to that country, for not only that eight-year invasion and occupation—in which US forces and contractors committed all manner of atrocities, including massacres, rapes and torture—but for some 30 years now of assault, including toxic weaponry that has devastated Iraq’s economy, infrastructure, and the health and well-being of its people.

    US media seem to have a “not our problem” approach toward Iraq today, in part because they count on the US public to take their word that everyone at the time thought the invasion was justified because Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction posed an imminent threat to the United States. That intelligence turned out to be wrong, sad to say, but you can’t blame anyone for that.

    And, have you heard? George W. Bush is a big softy, who likes to paint.

    In February of 2004, CounterSpin spoke with investigative journalist Robert Dreyfus about that pre-war intelligence on Iraq. Dreyfus co-authored an article called “The Lie Factory” for MotherJones. Here’s Robert Dreyfus, talking with CounterSpin’s Steve Rendall in early 2004.

    ***

    Steve Rendall: Robert, when David Kay announced that he didn’t think they’d find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he was adamant that the administration was misled by the CIA, and that intelligence was not shaped or distorted by the Bush administration. Much of the media discussion followed that same line, but your article suggests that there’s a lot more to the story. Tell us a little bit about what you found.

    Robert Dreyfuss

    Robert Dreyfuss: “The idea that they were invading Iraq based on faulty intelligence has it exactly backwards. They had already decided they wanted to invade Iraq. So the intelligence was then used to justify a pre-existing policy.”

    Robert Dreyfuss: I think the most important thing is that while the CIA probably did not get very much right about Iraq, they were at least convinced, most of the intelligence agencies, that there was a lot of doubt, that there were a lot of things they didn’t know. The doubts got completely erased in the policymaking circles, and in particular the Pentagon—which set up its own little sort of rump intelligence unit, called the Office of Special Plans, under Douglas Feith at the Pentagon bureaucracy—not only was responsible for deleting these doubts, but they had some value added, too.

    They added in their own spin and their own intelligence, part of which came from Iraqi exiles, part of which came from their own staff, which was doing its own intelligence. And they created talking papers that ended up wildly exaggerating the threat that Iraq allegedly posed to both the United States and to its neighbors, and that information went directly to Vice President Cheney’s office and to the White House, and it led the administration in the direction of going to war, because that was a war they already wanted.

    In other words, the idea that they were invading Iraq based on faulty intelligence has it exactly backwards. They had already decided they wanted to invade Iraq. So the intelligence was then used to justify a pre-existing policy.

    And so for Bush to argue, or anyone else to argue, that the administration went to war based on faulty intelligence is just plain silly. They would have gone to war in any case, but they were afraid to make the argument that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy and therefore, for reasons of national strategy, for reasons of oil, for reasons of Middle East policy and protecting Israel, for all of these reasons, we’re going to invade Iraq. That probably wouldn’t have sold, either to the American public or to Congress, so instead they picked on this “Iraq is a threat” argument.

    Mother Jones: The Lie Factory

    Mother Jones (1–2/04)

    SR: So, Robert Dreyfuss, can I assume that the “lie factory” referred to in the title of your piece refers to this internal Pentagon Office of Special Plans?

    RD: Yeah. It started right after 9/11; within a month of 9/11, they set this unit up. It wasn’t called the Office of Special Plans then; it had a different name. It went from being something like two or three people, and it expanded, and brought in contractors and consultants, and eventually took the name Office of Special Plans, which incorporated this intelligence unit. That’s what became, basically, the war planning office at the Pentagon.

    SR: And from what you report, they pushed out analysts that weren’t going along with the program to some degree.

    RD: They really purged anybody who wasn’t part of the zealous team of missionaries that believed in the war. These people were forced into retirement, they were transferred to other offices; some of them just quit in disgust. And they brought in people, ironically, who were not intelligence experts, people who were ideologues, but who were not particularly skilled at either intelligence collection or analysis.

    So what they did is they took these piles and piles of information, with thousands of little data bits, and they picked out the ones that supported the case for going to war, and they discarded all the rest.

    And any intelligence conclusion is based on evaluating all of the information, a lot of which is going to be contradictory. Some of it’s based on forged documents, on lies, on misinformation, on just plain old honest human mistakes. So all of that information isn’t going to agree, and the job of an intelligence analyst or a professional is to look at it all and say, “Here’s my conclusion, and here’s the reasons why my conclusion isn’t 100%, so I give this a certain percent validity.”

    Well, this office didn’t do that at all; they just basically said, “We’re gung ho for war, and Iraq is an enormous threat to American national security.” And all of the junk that we heard about unmanned aerial vehicles striking the United States, and Iraq building its nuclear program and importing WMD-related materials, all of that was a crock.

    WaPo: Not Everyone Was Wrong

    Washington Post (2/15/04)

    SR: Robert Dreyfuss, at this point, it seems that some very good reporting has come out of mainstream media, particularly from the Washington Post. But some critics suggest the Post hasn’t pushed its reporting to the front page often enough. Even Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler wrote recently, “Make sure you read Page A17, or wherever the next piece of the puzzle appears.” What do you think of the priority the media has given to this story so far?

    RD: I think it has gotten somewhat lost for two reasons. One is it got lost because the aftermath of the war was so catastrophically bad, with an insurgency and a complete mess and a seemingly completely bumbling US administration over there, that that’s become the main story.

    And then, second, it’s sort of obvious that Bush and Cheney were saying “WMD” for months and months and months, and we got over there and they weren’t there. So what else can you say except, “Well, we didn’t find them, and they were wrong?” So I think they sort of lost the handle on how to investigate the wrongdoing.

    I think the core of the problem is the media is unwilling to look at the government and say that there’s conscious malfeasance happening. They much prefer to say this was a mistake, or this was just, you know, incompetence or conflict of interest, or all kinds of other things that are more, I guess, easier to swallow, than to say that someone was out there deliberately manufacturing evidence.

    I mean, one of the most obvious cases is, no one has really investigated who forged those uranium documents. There’s no argument that those documents were deliberately forged by someone. It wasn’t a mistake. And finding out what we know about who forged them—and I believe that somebody in the intelligence system here knows—is something that reporters ought to be just leaping into, and I don’t see that too many people are even asking the question.

    And there are other questions like that that I think have just been ignored, and in part because reporters follow the official investigations, and now there have been several efforts by the Republicans in Congress to intimidate investigations and say, “Well, there’s nothing there.” The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee has pretty much said that point blank. So I think to the extent that the official investigations are turning into coverups, then I think the media is finding it difficult to get these more explosive charges onto the front page.

    ***

    Janine Jackson: That was Robert Dreyfuss speaking with CounterSpin’s Steve Rendall in February of 2004. The article “The Lie Factory,” by Dreyfuss and Jason Vest, can still be found on MotherJones.com.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • ‘Someone Was Out There Deliberately Manufacturing Evidence’

    The March 26, 2021, episode of CounterSpin included an archival interview that Steve Rendall conducted with journalist Robert Dreyfuss about Iraq War intelligence, originally aired February 27, 2004. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin210326Dreyfuss.mp3

    Janine Jackson: Human rights and antiwar advocates used the 18th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq to call for reparations to that country, for not only that eight-year invasion and occupation—in which US forces and contractors committed all manner of atrocities, including massacres, rapes and torture—but for some 30 years now of assault, including toxic weaponry that has devastated Iraq’s economy, infrastructure, and the health and well-being of its people.

    US media seem to have a “not our problem” approach toward Iraq today, in part because they count on the US public to take their word that everyone at the time thought the invasion was justified because Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction posed an imminent threat to the United States. That intelligence turned out to be wrong, sad to say, but you can’t blame anyone for that.

    And, have you heard? George W. Bush is a big softy, who likes to paint.

    In February of 2004, CounterSpin spoke with investigative journalist Robert Dreyfus about that pre-war intelligence on Iraq. Dreyfus co-authored an article called “The Lie Factory” for MotherJones. Here’s Robert Dreyfus, talking with CounterSpin’s Steve Rendall in early 2004.

    ***

    Steve Rendall: Robert, when David Kay announced that he didn’t think they’d find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he was adamant that the administration was misled by the CIA, and that intelligence was not shaped or distorted by the Bush administration. Much of the media discussion followed that same line, but your article suggests that there’s a lot more to the story. Tell us a little bit about what you found.

    Robert Dreyfuss

    Robert Dreyfuss: “The idea that they were invading Iraq based on faulty intelligence has it exactly backwards. They had already decided they wanted to invade Iraq. So the intelligence was then used to justify a pre-existing policy.”

    Robert Dreyfuss: I think the most important thing is that while the CIA probably did not get very much right about Iraq, they were at least convinced, most of the intelligence agencies, that there was a lot of doubt, that there were a lot of things they didn’t know. The doubts got completely erased in the policymaking circles, and in particular the Pentagon—which set up its own little sort of rump intelligence unit, called the Office of Special Plans, under Douglas Feith at the Pentagon bureaucracy—not only was responsible for deleting these doubts, but they had some value added, too.

    They added in their own spin and their own intelligence, part of which came from Iraqi exiles, part of which came from their own staff, which was doing its own intelligence. And they created talking papers that ended up wildly exaggerating the threat that Iraq allegedly posed to both the United States and to its neighbors, and that information went directly to Vice President Cheney’s office and to the White House, and it led the administration in the direction of going to war, because that was a war they already wanted.

    In other words, the idea that they were invading Iraq based on faulty intelligence has it exactly backwards. They had already decided they wanted to invade Iraq. So the intelligence was then used to justify a pre-existing policy.

    And so for Bush to argue, or anyone else to argue, that the administration went to war based on faulty intelligence is just plain silly. They would have gone to war in any case, but they were afraid to make the argument that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy and therefore, for reasons of national strategy, for reasons of oil, for reasons of Middle East policy and protecting Israel, for all of these reasons, we’re going to invade Iraq. That probably wouldn’t have sold, either to the American public or to Congress, so instead they picked on this “Iraq is a threat” argument.

    Mother Jones (1–2/04)

    SR: So, Robert Dreyfuss, can I assume that the “lie factory” referred to in the title of your piece refers to this internal Pentagon Office of Special Plans?

    RD: Yeah. It started right after 9/11; within a month of 9/11, they set this unit up. It wasn’t called the Office of Special Plans then; it had a different name. It went from being something like two or three people, and it expanded, and brought in contractors and consultants, and eventually took the name Office of Special Plans, which incorporated this intelligence unit. That’s what became, basically, the war planning office at the Pentagon.

    SR: And from what you report, they pushed out analysts that weren’t going along with the program to some degree.

    RD: They really purged anybody who wasn’t part of the zealous team of missionaries that believed in the war. These people were forced into retirement, they were transferred to other offices; some of them just quit in disgust. And they brought in people, ironically, who were not intelligence experts, people who were ideologues, but who were not particularly skilled at either intelligence collection or analysis.

    So what they did is they took these piles and piles of information, with thousands of little data bits, and they picked out the ones that supported the case for going to war, and they discarded all the rest.

    And any intelligence conclusion is based on evaluating all of the information, a lot of which is going to be contradictory. Some of it’s based on forged documents, on lies, on misinformation, on just plain old honest human mistakes. So all of that information isn’t going to agree, and the job of an intelligence analyst or a professional is to look at it all and say, “Here’s my conclusion, and here’s the reasons why my conclusion isn’t 100%, so I give this a certain percent validity.”

    Well, this office didn’t do that at all; they just basically said, “We’re gung ho for war, and Iraq is an enormous threat to American national security.” And all of the junk that we heard about unmanned aerial vehicles striking the United States, and Iraq building its nuclear program and importing WMD-related materials, all of that was a crock.

    WaPo: Not Everyone Was Wrong

    Washington Post (2/15/04)

    SR: Robert Dreyfuss, at this point, it seems that some very good reporting has come out of mainstream media, particularly from the Washington Post. But some critics suggest the Post hasn’t pushed its reporting to the front page often enough. Even Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler wrote recently, “Make sure you read Page A17, or wherever the next piece of the puzzle appears.” What do you think of the priority the media has given to this story so far?

    RD: I think it has gotten somewhat lost for two reasons. One is it got lost because the aftermath of the war was so catastrophically bad, with an insurgency and a complete mess and a seemingly completely bumbling US administration over there, that that’s become the main story.

    And then, second, it’s sort of obvious that Bush and Cheney were saying “WMD” for months and months and months, and we got over there and they weren’t there. So what else can you say except, “Well, we didn’t find them, and they were wrong?” So I think they sort of lost the handle on how to investigate the wrongdoing.

    I think the core of the problem is the media is unwilling to look at the government and say that there’s conscious malfeasance happening. They much prefer to say this was a mistake, or this was just, you know, incompetence or conflict of interest, or all kinds of other things that are more, I guess, easier to swallow, than to say that someone was out there deliberately manufacturing evidence.

    I mean, one of the most obvious cases is, no one has really investigated who forged those uranium documents. There’s no argument that those documents were deliberately forged by someone. It wasn’t a mistake. And finding out what we know about who forged them—and I believe that somebody in the intelligence system here knows—is something that reporters ought to be just leaping into, and I don’t see that too many people are even asking the question.

    And there are other questions like that that I think have just been ignored, and in part because reporters follow the official investigations, and now there have been several efforts by the Republicans in Congress to intimidate investigations and say, “Well, there’s nothing there.” The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee has pretty much said that point blank. So I think to the extent that the official investigations are turning into coverups, then I think the media is finding it difficult to get these more explosive charges onto the front page.

    ***

    Janine Jackson: That was Robert Dreyfuss speaking with CounterSpin’s Steve Rendall in February of 2004. The article “The Lie Factory,” by Dreyfuss and Jason Vest, can still be found on MotherJones.com.

    Related Posts

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • While Biden Plots To Divide Iraq, Resistance To US Occupation Is Growing Stronger

    Last year, after the United States so brutally and openly assassinated the Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and the commander of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces, Abu Mahdi al -Muhandis, the Iraqi Parliament voted for the United States to cease its occupation of the country. The United States has not done that, but the resistance to US occupation in Iraq is growing. Clearing the FOG speaks with Iraqi sociologist Sami Ramadani about the history of internal resistance to the Saddam Hussein regime, how the devastation caused by the United States impacted that and the current state of the resistance. Ramadani described the “Biden Plan” to divide Iraq into three sectors and to maintain the US presence in the region to protect US oil interests.

    The post While Biden Plots To Divide Iraq, Resistance To US Occupation Is Growing Stronger appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Igor Volsky on Ending Gun Violence, Robert Dreyfuss on Iraq War

     

          CounterSpin210326Guestname.mp3
    WaPo: How the NRA hijacked history

    Washington Post (9/9/19)

     

    This week on CounterSpin: If you look, you can find reminders that the Second Amendment was forged, distressingly, with the aim of preserving “slave patrol” militias in the South. And that courts consistently interpreted it as meaning a “collective” right of the states; only after a concerted, well-heeled effort was it read as ensuring an “individual” right to ownership of all kinds of guns—which means that when media lazily point to “Second Amendment rights,” they’re tacitly endorsing a particular interpretation. That the history around gun policy is a living history is important, because when US news media move from reporting terrible incidents to hosting debate on policy responses, they can slide into an enervating picture of this country’s unparalleled gun violence as lamentable, but legal, so what are you gonna do? They may as well reprint the Onion headline from years ago: “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

    On this as on a number of issues, many are simply fed up with the idea that change is too hard. Will media conversation shift to keep up with them? We’ll talk with Igor Volsky, executive director of Guns Down America, and author of Guns Down: How to Defeat the NRA and Build a Safer Future With Fewer Guns.

          CounterSpin210326Volsky.mp3

     

    (CNN/Media Education Foundation)

    Also on the show: We’ve just marked the 18th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, and US corporate media could not care less. Iraqis still suffer from decades of war, sanctions, displacement and disease, but so far out of US of media’s range has the country fallen that, when Biden bombed Syria on February 25, it was reported as “Biden’s First Military Action,” even though the US carried out an airstrike in Iraq just days into office. Part of the reason media are comfortable putting the Iraq War in the rear view is that they’re comfortable in the story they’ve settled on, that it was all a tragic mistake. But lies don’t become truth on repetition. We’ll hear a bit of an early 2004 conversation with journalist Robert Dreyfuss just to remind us of that.

          CounterSpin210326Dreyfuss.mp3

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Thoughts On The Iraq Invasion

    It has now been eighteen years since the Iraq invasion, and I’m still not done raging about it. Nobody should be.

    The reason it’s so important to stay enraged about Iraq is because it’s never been addressed or rectified in any real way whatsoever. All the corrupt mechanisms which led to the invasion are still in place and its consequences remain. It isn’t something that happened in the past.

    The Iraq invasion feels kind of like if your dad had stood up at the dinner table, cut off your sister’s head in front of everyone, gone right back to eating and never suffered any consequences, and everyone just kind of forgot about it and carried on life like it never happened. The US-centralized empire is full of willful amnesiacs pretending they don’t remember Iraq because it’s currently politically convenient, and we must not let them do this. 

    No institutional changes were made to ensure that the evils of the Iraq invasion wouldn’t be repeated. It’s one of those big, glaring problems people just decided to pretend is resolved, like racism.

    There’s this weird implicit default assumption among the political/media class that US government agencies have earned back the trust they lost with Iraq, despite their having made no changes whatsoever to prevent another Iraq-like horror from reoccurring, or even so much as apologizing. The reason nobody responsible for the Iraq invasion suffered any consequences for the great evil they inflicted upon the world is because the western empire had no intention of changing and has every intention of repeating such evils. The lies and killing continue unabated.

    No changes were made after the Iraq invasion to keep the US government from deceiving Americans into war. No new laws were made, no policies changed; no one was even fired. And indeed, the government did deceive Americans into war again: the Libya and Syria interventions were both based on lies. It’s happened since, and it will happen again unless the murderous US war machine is stopped.

    Don’t take life advice from people who are miserable. Don’t take career advice from people whose careers aren’t where you want to be. Don’t take creative advice from people who don’t create things. Don’t take foreign policy advice from people who supported the Iraq invasion.

    How true can President Biden’s claim be that he regrets supporting the Iraq invasion if he appointed the guy who advised that decision as Secretary of State? 

    It’s absolutely insane that every US presidential general election since the Iraq invasion has featured a mainstream candidate who actively supported it. The argument that the Iraq invasion was supported by most prominent politicians at the time is not a defense of those politicians, it’s an indictment of mainstream American politics. The fact that politicians who not only supported the Iraq invasion but actively facilitated it are still becoming US presidential nominees proves the entire American political system is corrupt beyond the possibility of redemption.

    Nobody who supported the Iraq invasion should be working in politics at all. They shouldn’t be able to find employment anywhere more prominent or influential than a cash register. This should be true of politics, and it should be true of media as well.

    There is no valid reason for the entire US-led world order not to have been completely dismantled after the invasion of Iraq. A world order which can create something as horrific as the unforgivable Iraq invasion (or the genocide in Yemen today for that matter) is not a world order that will lead the world in a good direction. The facts are in. The US-led world order must end.

    So much establishment loyalism ultimately boils down to an entirely faith-based and unquestioned belief that the corrupt, depraved power establishment which facilitated the Iraq war completely evaporated as soon as George W Bush and Tony Blair left office. There is literally no reason to believe this besides it feeling more psychologically comfortable to believe it.

    It’s essential to keep in mind that western propaganda hasn’t gotten less advanced since the Iraq invasion, it has gotten more advanced. The Russiagate psyop and the smear campaigns against Assange and Corbyn make this abundantly clear. You need to be more critical of western narratives than with Iraq, not less.

    Manipulating public thought at mass scale is a science. Scientific fields don’t magically become less sophisticated over time, they become more sophisticated. Every time they run a new mass-scale manipulation, whether it succeeds or fails, they learn from it. And they evolve.

    We must remember that the mass media can create false narratives without even speaking them explicitly, just by giving a certain impression. After the Iraq invasion 70 percent of Americans still believed Saddam was responsible for 9/11, just because reporters and politicians kept mentioning the two in the same breath.

    Supporting the Vietnam war was dumb. Supporting the Iraq invasion after being lied to about Vietnam was an order of magnitude dumber. Supporting any US war agendas after being lied to about Iraq is an order of magnitude even dumber than that.

    The debate about whether America has the moral authority to intervene in other countries was settled once and for all eighteen years ago. Western mass media have spent the last eighteen years trying to slowly spin the narrative away from facts and reality, but the Iraq invasion invalidates them all.

    Iraq should be a one-word debunk of all pro-regime change arguments. You should be able to just say “Iraq” and have whoever’s pushing escalations and interventionism sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up. The fact that that isn’t enough shows how insanely propagandized we are.

    America shouldn’t be in the Middle East at all, much less Iraq, and the US government is solely responsible for every American soldier who dies there.

    When a known compulsive liar asks you to place your faith in him on a very important matter, you tell him to fuck off. When the western empire tells you to trust them that an evil government needs to be ousted, you take it with an Iraq-sized grain of salt.

    Never let anyone shout you down for openly doubting US intelligence on foreign nations. Iraq means they don’t get to do that anymore. Ever.

    I promise I will always fight to remind the world about the Iraq invasion. I will always do everything I can to make sure that as many people as possible view all actions of the US-centralized power establishment through the lens of what they did to that country for as long as I draw breath.

    I will always do everything I can to keep Iraq from being dismissed as an anomaly of history that could never happen again. Whenever the empire talks about Russia, China, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Yemen, or any other country, I will be talking about what they did to Iraq.

    You don’t get to butcher a million people and then say “Oh yeah, but that was a whole eighteen years ago. You can trust us now.” That’s not a thing. The world has no business taking US defense and intelligence agencies at their word about anything ever again.

    I write about imperial warmongering not just because it is intrinsically evil, but because it is the clearest evidence I can point to that the people who are running things are too sociopathic to be left in charge. The power structure which raped Iraq should not exist. Period.

    The way I see it we’ve got two options: find a way to drastically change the way we think and function as a species, or pray that the world will be saved by the same ruling elites who destroyed Iraq while making the poor poorer for the benefit of the extremely wealthy.

    ____________________________________

    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  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • 18 Years Ago The US War On Iraq Began

    Friday, March 19, 2021 was the 18th anniversary of the U.S. government political decision to invade and occupy oil-rich, Arab/Muslim Iraq, a country of 32 million persons.  U.S. elected officials and their advisors decided it would be in the U.S. national security interest to attack and overthrow the Iraqi government.  We saw how the military attack on Iraq which was based on the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives, homes, infrastructure and culture and unleased a whirlwind of unintended (or sometimes intended) consequences that we are dealing with even now 18 years later.

    At the time I was a U.S. diplomat assigned as the Deputy Chief of Mission (deputy ambassador) in Mongolia. 

    The post 18 Years Ago The US War On Iraq Began appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Bizarre RT Framing

    … you have to include the important information first.

    — News Writing for Television and Radio, University of Florida

    RT America begins a newscast with anchor Rick Sanchez standing by a map of Iraq, informing viewers: “Seven rockets hit a US military base just north of Baghdad. It houses US troops.”1

    Sanchez continues, “But here is what I want you to understand about this story. This is not just a story about Iraq and the United States. This is a story about Iraq and Iran and the United States and China.”

    Sanchez says we should ask: why China? Sanchez answers, “Because this week we learned that China has increased its purchases of Iranian oil by 129%!”

    “Now does this mean that China is partnering with Iran?” Sanchez answers his own question: “Yes, and no.”

    When the buyer has the chance to snap up a regularly purchased commodity at a discount price, usually the buyer will make a large purchase. That is a normal behavior in business transactions. Sanchez recognizes that China may just be agreeing to a good deal.

    But, says Sanchez, “China is ignoring US sanctions, getting tons of oil at a discount and supplying Iran with a much needed revenue source which Iran is in turn using against US troops.”

    Here, his tenuous logic that China is indirectly, and presumably knowingly, funding attacks against the US is so off-putting. And why should China which also finds itself under US sanctions (including new sanctions over alleging Chinese “interfering in Hong Kong’s freedoms.”2 ) want to abide by US sanctions?

    To state the connections proffered is bizarre is putting it mildly. “Question more,” RT advises. Is Sanchez suggesting that when one country conducts trade with another country — for instance, an exchange of cash for goods — that the buyer is responsible for what the buyer does with the cash it receives? Is an employer responsible should an employee use his pay check to drink himself silly and go home and abuse his family? Such is the logical connection that Sanchez proposes.

    Sanchez continues, “So Iran, fueled by its oil revenues, is trying to force the US out of Iraq. And you know what?” Sanchez leans forward and hold his arm out, as if pointing to the viewer: “Seems to be working.”

    Why would Iran want the US — which declared Iran to be part of an “axis of evil” along with Iraq (then under the rule of Saddam Hussein) — next door in Iraq? Who would want a neighbor like that?

    Sanchez got the year wrong,3 in subsequently stating that the Iraqi parliament is “essentially asking the United States troops to leave, to get out of their country.” [emphasis added]

    Most news organizations referred to Iraq expelling US troops; for example, the first page of an internet search on the terms “iraq parliament us troops 2020” listed NPR, Al Jazeera, France24, DW, Rand, Boston Herald, and VOX using some form of the word expel.

    To be fair, the parliament’s resolution did not target only the US: “The Iraqi government must work to end the presence of any foreign troops on Iraqi soil and prohibit them from using its land, airspace or water for any reason.” [emphasis added]

    Sanchez carries on:

    … we have China, Iran, two of the countries most targeted by the United Sates when it comes to sanctions and trade wars in recent years, right?, partnering in a deal that is ostensibly funding attacks against the United States, so what does the United States do at this point? Does it leave Iraq once and for all? Or does it attack China with more sanctions?

    Sanchez is proposing the questions. “Question more” is the RT slogan — a slogan that RT selectively adheres to. There are several more questions that should spring to mind: What are sanctions; i.e, what purpose do they serve? Are sanctions legal? Why is the US military still in Iraq and how did it get to be stationed there in the first place? Why are the purportedly “Iran-backed” militias attacking US bases in Iraq?

    Economic sanctions outside the parameters of a United Nations Security Council resolution or national self-defense are held to constitute an illicit intervention into the sovereign affairs of other nations. More egregiously, sanctions are widely regarded as a declaration of war. And why not? Sanctions kill! Professors John Mueller and Karl Mueller in their article, “Sanctions of Mass Destruction,” made clear the devastating lethality of sanctions:

    economic sanctions … may have contributed to more deaths during the post-Cold War era than all weapons of mass destruction throughout history.

    Speaking of killing, Sanchez does not mention the extremely pertinent assassination of Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani by a US drone strike on 3 January 2020 at Baghdad International Airport. Five Iraqi nationals and four other Iranian nationals were killed alongside Soleimani, including the deputy chairman of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces. This led to the Iraqi resolution to remove foreign troops for its territory.

    When someone commits an unprovoked attack against you, you have a choice to respond or not. What message is sent to the aggressor when you do not respond? Might not the aggressor think she can now attack freely knowing that retaliation is unlikely? For instance, consider how the lack of response to Israeli bombing in Syria has resulted in repeated bombing by Israel of targets in Syria and compare it to Israel’s reluctance to bomb the Hizbollah resistance knowing that there will likely be retaliation.

    There is much dark history regarding the US vis-à-vis Iraq (that includes the western backers of the US, such as the UK, Australia, Canada, etc). There are the deaths of half-a-million children resulting from US-backed UN sanctions on Iraq — a price worth the US sanctions policy, according to Madeleine Albright, then US secretary-of-state. The devastation of a war launched by US president George Bush and UK prime minister Tony Blair in which “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” of removing Iraq’s president Saddam Hussein. Abdul Haq al-Ani and Tarik al-Ani noted the UN complicity, and wrote a book titled Genocide in Iraq: The Case against the UN Security Council and Member States (Clarity Press)4 .

    Sanchez asks if China even cares about sanctions. “These are serious questions that too few of us are even asking in the media these days.”

    Question more Mr Sanchez: The US is sanctioning Iran. Why? Even though Iran was abiding by the terms of the JCPOA (the Iran nuclear deal), president Donald Trump (most certainly at the behest of Israel) wanted further capitulations by Iran, all this while the US was not in compliance with the deal. Then the US withdrew (so much for fidelity to a signed agreement by the US, but there are scads of such examples), and kept insisting that Iran comply, all while the Europeans partners were also in non-compliance.

    Sanchez presents as the top news question of the day: “Is there an alliance building between China [and Iran] and how will it affect the US?”

    Does Sanchez imply that trade between two countries constitutes “an alliance”? Sanchez’s intonation makes it seem as if the word alliance has some sinister connotations. The US trades with China, so do they have an alliance? Do two countries trading with each other constitute a provocative act against a third country? What does Sanchez wish to denote positing that “an alliance” between China and Iran? Wouldn’t it be nice it all countries were in alliance with each other — like a meaningful United Nations where each member country steadfastly abides by the UN Charter?

    Why not question US alliances, such as with Israel? Israel is a country in violation of dozens of UN resolutions, in violation of several Geneva Conventions, and is engaged in a slow-motion genocide against Palestinians. Indeed, Israeli media pointed out yesterday (16 March) that “Israel’s Theft Business Against the Palestinians Is as Thriving as Ever.”

    How does the US even get portrayed as the aggrieved party in this news reportage? It was the US which did not abide by the JCPOA. It is the US sanctioning Iran, inflicting damage to its economy, and killing Iranian people. It is the US which assassinated a high-ranking Iranian general. It is the US (plus Israel) behind the sabotage caused by the Stuxnet virus and the assassinations of Iranian scientists.

    All Rick Sanchez needs do, to get a good overview of the geo-strategic situation, is eyeball a map bigger than the one he used on air. Then question more: Are Iranian military situated near American shores? Are Iranians in the Florida Strait? Yet, US US warships commonly ply the waters of the Persian Gulf. Should US warships be sailing near Iranian shores? Moreover, when the US sanctions another country, assassinates that country’s citizens, and surrounds it with military hardware, then who is the threat? Also noteworthy is that US warships provocatively sail in the South China Sea, allegedly protecting freedom of navigation there, although never has the US provided any evidence that freedom of navigation has been blocked or threatened by China.

    So why then frame the opening segment by casting aspersions against Iran and China?

    The RT segment improved drastically when Sanchez interviewed former British MP George Galloway, but sadly, the opening segment set a terrible tone. That tone needs to be questioned more because RT is so much better than western mass media, and it needs to keep to that standard.

    1. The opening segment report ends at 16:47.
    2. Imagine if China were to sanction the US for interfering in BLM protestors’ or Capitol Hill protestors’ freedoms?
    3. He stated “Earlier this year,” but it was early 2020 — in January.
    4. Review.
    The post Bizarre RT Framing first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.