The Bushes’ ‘Death Squads’

Source: The Bushes’ ‘Death Squads’ – Consortiumnews

consortiumnews.com

By Robert Parry
Special to Consortium News

December 5, 2018

 

George H.W. Bush was laid to rest on Wednesday but some of his murderous policies lived on through his son’s administration and until this day, as Robert Parry reported on January 11, 2005.

 

How George W. Bush Learned From His Father

By refusing to admit personal misjudgments on Iraq, George W. Bush instead is pushing the United States toward becoming what might be called a permanent “counter-terrorist” state, which uses torture, cross-border death squads and even collective punishments to defeat perceived enemies in Iraq and around the world.

Since securing a second term, Bush has pressed ahead with this hard-line strategy, in part by removing dissidents inside his administration while retaining or promoting his protégés. Bush also has started prepping his younger brother Jeb as a possible successor in 2008, which could help extend George W.’s war policies while keeping any damaging secrets under the Bush family’s control.

As a centerpiece of this tougher strategy to pacify Iraq, Bush is contemplating the adoption of the brutal practices that were used to suppress leftist peasant uprisings in Central America in the 1980s. The Pentagon is “intensively debating” a new policy for Iraq called the “Salvador option,” Newsweek magazine reported on Jan. 9.

The strategy is named after the Reagan-Bush administration’s “still-secret strategy” of supporting El Salvador’s right-wing security forces, which operated clandestine “death squads” to eliminate both leftist guerrillas and their civilian sympathizers, Newsweek reported. “Many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success – despite the deaths of innocent civilians,” Newsweek wrote.

Central America Veterans

The magazine also noted that a number of Bush administration officials were leading figures in the Central American operations of the 1980s, such as John Negroponte, who was then U.S. Ambassador to Honduras and is now U.S. Ambassador to Iraq.

Other current officials who played key roles in Central America include Elliott Abrams, who oversaw Central American policies at the State Department and who is now a Middle East adviser on Bush’s National Security Council staff, and Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a powerful defender of the Central American policies while a member of the House of Representatives.

The insurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala were crushed through the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians. In Guatemala, about 200,000 people perished, including what a truth commission later termed a genocide against Mayan Indians in the Guatemalan highlands. In El Salvador, about 70,000 died including massacres of whole villages, such as the slaughter carried out by a U.S.-trained battalion against hundreds of men, women and children in and around the town of El Mozote in 1981.

El Mozote massacre. (Wikimedia Commons)

The Reagan-Bush strategy also had a domestic component, the so-called “perception management” operation that employed sophisticated propaganda to manipulate the fears of the American people while hiding the ugly reality of the wars. The Reagan-Bush administration justified its actions in Central America by portraying the popular uprisings as an attempt by the Soviet Union to establish a beachhead in the Americas to threaten the U.S. southern border.

[For details about how these strategies worked and the role of George H.W. Bush, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.]

More Pain

By employing the “Salvador option” in Iraq, the U.S. military would crank up the pain, especially in Sunni Muslim areas where resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq has been strongest. In effect, Bush would assign other Iraqi ethnic groups the job of leading the “death squad” campaign against the Sunnis.

“One Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Perhmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with discussions,” Newsweek reported.

Newsweek quoted one military source as saying, “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving the terrorists. … From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.”

Citing the Central American experiences of many Bush administration officials, we wrote in November 2003 – more than a year ago – that many of these Reagan-Bush veterans were drawing lessons from the 1980s in trying to cope with the Iraqi insurgency. We pointed out, however, that the conditions were not parallel. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Iraq: Quicksand & Blood.”]

In Central America, powerful oligarchies had long surrounded themselves with ruthless security forces and armies. So, when uprisings swept across the region in the early 1980s, the Reagan-Bush administration had ready-made – though unsavory – allies who could do the dirty work with financial and technological help from Washington.

Iraqi Dynamic

A different dynamic exists in Iraq, because the Bush administration chose to disband rather than co-opt the Iraqi army. That left U.S. forces with few reliable local allies and put the onus for carrying out counterinsurgency operations on American soldiers who were unfamiliar with the land, the culture and the language.

Those problems, in turn, contributed to a series of counterproductive tactics, including the heavy-handed round-ups of Iraqi suspects, the torturing of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and the killing of innocent civilians by jittery U.S. troops fearful of suicide bombings.

The war in Iraq also has undermined U.S. standing elsewhere in the Middle East and around the world. Images of U.S. soldiers sexually abusing Iraqi prisoners, putting bags over the heads of captives and shooting a wounded insurgent have blackened America’s image everywhere and made cooperation with the United States increasingly difficult even in countries long considered American allies.

Beyond the troubling images, more and more documents have surfaced indicating that the Bush administration had adopted limited forms of torture as routine policy, both in Iraq and the broader War on Terror. Last August, an FBI counterterrorism official criticized abusive practices at the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more,” the official wrote. “When I asked the M.P.’s what was going on, I was told that interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment, and the detainee was not to be moved. On another occasion … the detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night.”

Despite official insistence that torture is not U.S. policy, the blame for these medieval tactics continues to climb the chain of command toward the Oval Office. It appears to have been Bush’s decision after the Sept. 11 attacks to “take the gloves off,” a reaction understandable at the time but which now appears to have hurt, more than helped.

TV World

George W Bush as an infant with father George H W Bush at Yale University. (George Bush Presidential Library)

Many Americans have fantasized about how they would enjoy watching Osama bin Laden tortured to death for his admitted role in the Sept. 11 attacks. There is also a tough-guy fondness for torture as shown in action entertainment – like Fox Network’s “24” – where torture is a common-sense shortcut to get results.

But the larger danger arises when the exceptional case becomes the routine, when it’s no longer the clearly guilty al-Qaeda mass murderer, but it is now the distraught Iraqi father trying to avenge the death of his child killed by American bombs.

Rather than the dramatic scenes on TV, the reality is usually more like that desperate creature in Guantanamo lying in his own waste and pulling out his hair. The situation can get even worse when torture takes on the industrial quality of government policy, with subjects processed through the gulags or the concentration camps.

That also is why the United States and other civilized countries have long banned torture and prohibited the intentional killing of civilians. The goal of international law has been to set standards that couldn’t be violated even in extreme situations or in the passions of the moment.

Yet, Bush – with his limited world experience – was easily sold on the notion of U.S. “exceptionalism” where America’s innate goodness frees it from the legal constraints that apply to lesser countries.

Bush also came to believe in the wisdom of his “gut” judgments. After his widely praised ouster of Afghanistan’s Taliban government in late 2001, Bush set his sights on invading Iraq. Like a hot gambler in Las Vegas doubling his bets, Bush’s instincts were on a roll.

Now, however, as the Iraqi insurgency continues to grow and inflict more casualties on both U.S. troops and Iraqis who have thrown in their lot with the Americans, Bush finds himself facing a narrowing list of very tough choices.

Bush could acknowledge his mistakes and seek international help in extricating U.S. forces from Iraq. But Bush abhors admitting errors, even small ones. Plus, Bush’s belligerent tone hasn’t created much incentive for other countries to bail him out.

Instead Bush appears to be upping the ante by contemplating cross-border raids into countries neighboring Iraq. He also would be potentially expanding the war by having Iraqi Kurds and Shiites kill Sunnis, a prescription for civil war or genocide.

Pinochet Option

There’s a personal risk, too, for Bush if he picks the “Salvador option.” He could become an American version of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet or Guatemala’s Efrain Rios Montt, leaders who turned loose their security forces to commit assassinations, “disappear” opponents and torture captives.

Like the policy that George W. Bush is now considering, Pinochet even sponsored his own international “death squad” – known as Operation Condor – that hunted down political opponents around the world. One of those attacks in September 1976 blew up a car carrying Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier as he drove through Washington D.C. with two American associates. Letelier and co-worker Ronni Moffitt were killed.

With the help of American friends in high places, the two former dictators have fended off prison until now. However, Pinochet and Rios Montt have become pariahs who are facing legal proceedings aimed at finally holding them accountable for their atrocities.

[For more on George H.W. Bush’s protection of Pinochet, see Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

One way for George W. Bush to avert that kind of trouble is to make sure his political allies remain in power even after his second term ends in January 2009. In his case, that might be achievable by promoting his brother Jeb for president in 2008, thus guaranteeing that any incriminating documents stay under wraps.

President George W. Bush’s dispatching Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to inspect the tsunami damage in Asia started political speculation that one of the reasons was to burnish Jeb’s international credentials in a setting where his personal empathy would be on display.

Though Jeb Bush has insisted that he won’t run for president in 2008, the Bush family might find strong reason to encourage Jeb to change his mind, especially if the Iraq War is lingering and George W. has too many file cabinets filled with damaging secrets.

 

The late investigative reporter Robert Parry, the founding editor of Consortium News, broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. His last book, America’s Stolen Narrative, can be obtained in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

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We Remember the Great War, While Palestinians Live It

There was something gruesomely familiar about the way we commemorated the supposed end of the First World War a hundred years ago. Not just the waterfalls

Source: We Remember the Great War, While Palestinians Live It

With permission from

http://www.counterpunch.org

November 19, 2018

by Robert Fisk

Photo Source Jordi Bernabeu Farrús | CC BY 2.0

There was something gruesomely familiar about the way we commemorated the supposed end of the First World War a hundred years ago. Not just the waterfalls of poppies and the familiar names – Mons, the Somme, Ypres, Verdun – but the almost total silence about all those who died in the First World War, whose eyes were not as blue as ours might be or whose skin was not as pink as ours might be or whose suffering continues from the Great War to this very day.

Even those Sunday supplements that dared stray from the western front only briefly touched on the after-effects of the war in the new Poland, the new Czechoslovakia, the new Yugoslavia and Bolshevik Russia, with a mention of Turkey. The mass famine – perhaps 1.6 million dead – of the Arabs of the Levant under Turkish looting and Allied blockade in the First World War received not a word. Even more astoundingly, I could find not a single reference to the greatest crime against humanity of the First World War – not the murder of Belgian hostages by German troops in 1914, but the Armenian genocide of a million and a half Christian civilians in 1915 by Germany’s Ottoman Turkish ally.

What happened to that key document of the First World War in the Middle East, the 1917 Balfour Declaration which promised a homeland for Jews in Palestine and doomed the Palestinian Arabs (a majority in Palestine at the time) to what I call refugeedom? Or the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement which chopped up the Middle East and betrayed the promise of Arab independence? Or General Allenby’s advance on Jerusalem during which – forgotten now by our beloved commentators – he initiated the first use of gas in the Middle East. So smitten are we by the savagery of modern Syrian and Iraqi history, that we forget – or do not know – that Allenby’s men fired gas shells at the Turkish army in Gaza. Of all places. But gas in the collective memory last weekend was confined, yet again, to the Western Front.

First World War Allied war cemeteries in both the Middle East and Europe contain tens of thousands of Muslim graves – Algerians, Moroccans, Indians – yet I did not see a photograph of one of them. Nor of the Chinese labourers who died on the Western Front carrying shells for British troops – nor the African soldiers who fought and died for France on the Somme. Only in France, it seems did President Macron remember this salient feature of the conflict, as well he should. For more than 30,000 men from the Comoros, Senegal, the Congo, Somalia, Guinea and Benin died in the Great War.

There used to be a monument to them in Rheims. But the Germans launched a ferocious racist attack on black French troops who participated in the post-First World War occupation of Germany for raping German women and for “endangering the future of the German race”. All untrue, of course, but by the time Hitler’s legions reinvaded France in 1940, the Nazi propaganda against these same men had done its work. Well over 2,000 black French troops were massacred by the Wehrmacht in 1940; the monument was destroyed. It has just been reconstructed – and reopened in time for the hundredth anniversary of the Armistice.

Then there are the sepulchral ironies of the dead. Of the 4,000 Moroccan troops – all Muslims – sent to the Battle of the Marne in 1914, only 800 survived. Others died at Verdun. Of General Hubert Lyautey’s 45,000 Moroccan soldiers, 12,000 had been killed by 1918. It took the little French magazine Jeune Afrique to note that the graves of many of the Moroccan dead are today still marked with the star and crescent of the Turkish Ottoman caliphate. But the Moroccans, though notionally inhabitants of the Ottoman empire, were fighting for France against Turkey’s German allies. The star and crescent have never been the official symbol of Muslims. In any event, Moroccans had by the Great War already got their own flag.

But of course, the real symbols of the First World War and its continuing and bloody results are in the Middle East. The conflicts in the region – in Syria, Iraq, in Israel and Gaza and the West Bank and in the Gulf – can mostly trace their genesis to our titanic Great War. Sykes-Picot divided the Arabs. The war – only days after the Gallipoli landings – enabled the Turks to destroy their Christian Armenian minority. The Nazis, by the way, loved Mustafa Kemal Ataturk because he had “cleansed” his minorities. When Ataturk died, the party newspaper Volkischer Beobachter edged its front page in black. The division of Lebanon and Syria and their sectarian systems of administration were invented by the French after they secured the post-war mandate for governing the Levant. The post-First World War Iraqi uprising against British rule was partly fuelled by disgust at the Balfour Declaration.

Mischievously, I delved into my late dad’s library of old history books – he of the Great War, Third Battle of the Somme, 1918 – and found Winston Churchill, with rage and sorrow, writing about the “holocaust” of the Armenians (he actually used that word) but he could not see the Arab world’s future even in his four-volume The Great War of 1935. His only disquisition on the smouldering ex-Ottoman empire came in a two-page appendix on page 1,647. It was entitled: “A Memorandum upon the Pacification of the Middle East”.

As for the Palestinians who wake up every morning today in the dust and filth of the camps of Nahr el-Bared, Ein el-Helwe or Sabra and Chatila in Lebanon, Balfour’s pen scratched his signature on this document of dispossession not in 1915, but only last night. For these refugees, still in their hovels and shacks as you read these words, the First World War never ended – not even now, today, on the hundredth anniversary of the “end” of the First World War.

More articles by:Robert Fisk

Robert Fisk writes for the Independent, where this column originally appeared. 

EXCLUSIVE: How Elites Use Mainstream Media to ‘Maintain and Expand Their Power’

For quite some time, debate about ‘fake news’ has reverberated clamorously in both mainstream and alternative discourse. One could easily conclude the issue was a pressingly new plague, restricted to certain corners of the web – but academic TJ Coles begs to differ. In fact, he tells Sputnik fake news has been ubiquitous for thousands of years.

Source: EXCLUSIVE: How Elites Use Mainstream Media to ‘Maintain and Expand Their Power’ – Sputnik International

sputniknews.com

Kit Klarenberg

Nov 16, 2018

For quite some time, debate about ‘fake news’ has reverberated clamorously in both mainstream and alternative discourse. One could easily conclude the issue was a pressingly new plague, restricted to certain corners of the web – but academic TJ Coles begs to differ. In fact, he tells Sputnik fake news has been ubiquitous for thousands of years.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the precise moment the term ‘fake news’ entered the Western political and media lexicon, but the election of Donald Trump as US President certainly turbocharged its usage. For the controversial leader and his supporters, the label can be automatically applied to any and all media reporting critical of him, while his opponents play much the same game when roles are reversed.

This tit-for-tat sparring inspired TJ, director of the Institute for Peace Research, to write a book on the subject — the fruit of his labours, Real Fake News: Techniques of Propaganda and Deception-based Mind Control, was published in September.

“All that talk made me think ‘hang on a minute, we’ve always had fake news’. It’s the nature of power — all power structures want to maintain and expand their power, so it’s therefore important to present information that benefits them, and keeps populations in a psychological and/or intellectual prison. The ‘fake news’ peddled by elite financial, commercial and political financial interests, duly regurgitated by major media organizations, eclipses any bogus story perpetuated by alleged ‘bots’ on Twitter, or whatever,” TJ says.

Babylonian Beginnings

In his work, TJ traces the birth of fake news all the way back to ancient Babylon, when rulers sought to perpetuate the notion they were descended from Gods and thus had a right to dominate and control the populace — history’s first recorded instance of the ‘divine right of kings’.

Similarly, Plato famously popularized the idea of the ‘noble lie’ — privileging untruths told for the benefit of elites and the population alike. These ideas very much endure in the modern day — TJ notes Wikileaks’ dump of the Clinton campaign’s internal emails amply demonstrates her team felt it wouldn’t be good, or necessary, for Hillary’s supporters to be aware of her close connections to Wall Street, so did their utmost to conceal the mephitic kinship.

© AP Photo/ Mark Lennihan

Hillary Clinton and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein

“Elites the world over are acutely aware information is power, and actually quite open about their use and abuse of the news to shape public perceptions and preserve sociopolitical conditions benefitting them. For instance, the UK Ministry of Defence regularly publishes projections of how planners think the world will look in 10 — 20 years, and they routinely note the media is one of the key ways to maintain the current paradigm, and discuss the various ways information can be ‘weaponized’ against the public,” he says.

TJ suggests elites shape and control the public mind so effectively because they exploit fundamental facets of human nature. First, the well-established instinctive inclination to reflexively believe something reinforcing one’s existing beliefs, rather than assessing whether alternative facts or viewpoints have any value, or indeed considering whether what one believes might be wrong, or informed by confirmation bias.

This tendency is greatly exacerbated by the use of internet and social media algorithms that present a ‘personalized’ picture of the world to users, unfailingly presenting individuals with content they want to see, and tacitly suppressing information contrary to their existing opinions.

© Sputnik / Alexei Druzhnin

‘Fantasy’: Seagal Slams Alleged Trump-Russia Collusion as Fabricated Propaganda

“Elites also know how easy it is to exploit guilt, which is why atrocity propaganda is so widespread today. Most sympathize with the victims of major atrocities, and naturally want to do something to help, so this aspect of human nature can be easily manipulated to justify aggressive foreign policy actions — ‘look at what we’re letting happen to poor defenceless people, we have a responsibility to protect them’ etcetera. It’s funny, when it comes to the economy, the powerful are quick to say people are naturally selfish, so it’s everyone for themselves, but when it comes to foreign policy, we should care about our fellow human beings and do something to help,” TJ says.

Absence is Evidence

As the academic’s work makes clear, atrocity propaganda doesn’t even need to have any grounding in reality whatsoever. In the lead-up to the NATO-backed violent overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, the mainstream media was awash with reports government forces fuelled by viagra were conducting mass rapes of civilians, and planning a borderline genocidal massacre of rebel forces — claims used to justify the imposition of a no-fly zone over the country, and NATO airstrikes.

The stories were subsequently found to be entirely without foundation — similarly, serious question marks hover over the veracity of numerous claimed chemical weapons attacks in Syria, which likewise have provided a pretext for Western attacks on the country.

© Flickr / Thierry Ehrmann

Sirte was once home to Libya’s former dictator Muammar Gaddafi before he was killed by a NATO-led rebellion in 2011.

“It’s especially easy to exploit guilt when you present bite-sized news reports about an atrocious event stripped of all context, and exclude the voices of people who are actually on the ground. Occasionally, contradictory voices do filter through the system, although largely by accident. For instance, the BBC made the mistake of inviting Peter Ford, former UK ambassador to Syria, on air to discuss chemical weapons attacks — he quickly demolished their propaganda. He hasn’t been invited back since,” TJ says.

Ford is surely but one of a great many talking heads to effectively be banned from appearing on the BBC for daring to state views and evidence contrary to ascendant elite narratives. However, the British state broadcaster’s blacklisting activities also extend to its own employees — in April 2018, the BBC admitted that for decades, job applicants and serving staff were subject to political vetting by MI5, in an effort to prevent “subversives” gaining employment with the Corporation.

Often, individuals were ostracized on extremely tenuous grounds. For instance, respected film director John Goldschmidt was blacklisted in the late 1960s, with two projects he was working on for the Beeb cancelled midway through production without warning or explanation — MI5 deemed him a potential subversive as he’d spent a few weeks in Czechoslovakia in his youth, as part of a student exchange program. Similarly, award-winning journalist Isabel Hilton was refused a job by BBC Scotland in 1976 — that she spoke Chinese and had been a member of Scottish China Association at Edinburgh University made MI5 extremely anxious.

© AP Photo / Suzanne Vlamis

Declassified Files: Thatcher Government Blacklisted Civil Service ‘Subversives’

Under the policy, popular children’s book author and playwright Michael Rosen was also outright sacked from the BBC in 1972 while a graduate trainee for a number of ‘transgressions’, including student activism at Oxford, and producing a film featuring clips of US soldiers being tested with LSD. The American Embassy in London complained about the project to both MI5 and the BBC directly, whereupon Rosen was shown the door.The policy was wound down in the 1990s, and it’s unknown whether any comparable structures existed at other major news organizations — although City University research suggests dissenting voices remain rare in the British mainstream media. The 2016 study concluded UK journalists are overwhelmingly white, male, and elite-university educated — and are far more trusting of politicians, the government, police and military than the general population, which the study’s authors partly attributed to reporters’ “reliance on these institutions as sources of information”.

Such widespread faith in the establishment may account for why so many prominent reporters see no problem with maintaining close relationships with the intelligence services. The Guardian’s Luke Harding has frequently, openly and proudly advertised his warm bond with British spying agencies in articles and books — and equally frequently been condemned for uncritically running stories of questionable probity potentially provided to him by agency staff. In a September article he claimed Russian diplomats had held secret talks in London with associates of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, in an attempt to assist in his escape from the UK. The covert action would’ve allegedly seen Assange smuggled out of the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge under cover of Christmas Eve in a diplomatic vehicle and transported to Moscow.

© AP Photo / Misha Japaridze

EXCLUSIVE: Sputnik Gatecrashes Launch of Mark Urban’s Book ‘The Skripal Files’

The story was entirely based on the testimony of anonymous sources, the identity of which Harding didn’t even hint at in the piece. In response, Craig Murray, former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, slammed the article, calling it a “quite extraordinary set of deliberate lies” and “entirely black propaganda” published by an “MI6 tool”.”I was closely involved with Julian and with Fidel Narvaez of the Ecuadorean Embassy at the end of last year in discussing possible future destinations for Julian. It is not only the case Russia did not figure in those plans, it is a fact Julian directly ruled out the possibility as undesirable. The entire story is a complete and utter fabrication. It is very serious indeed when a newspaper like the Guardian prints a tissue of deliberate lies in order to spread fake news on behalf of the security services. I cannot find words eloquent enough to express the depth of my contempt for Harding and Katherine Viner, who have betrayed completely the values of journalism,” Murray wrote.

© Sputnik /

A grinning Luke Harding and Mark Urban in conversation

Similarly, in 2007 the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran published an analysis of 44 articles written by Daily Telegraph Defence Editor Con Couglin on Iran — including stories suggesting North Korea was helping Tehran prepare a nuclear weapons test, and the country was grooming Bin Laden’s successor. They found the pieces almost invariably were based on “unnamed or untraceable” sources in intelligence agencies or the UK Foreign Office and “published at sensitive and delicate times” when there’d been “relatively positive diplomatic moves” towards Iran, and contained ‘exclusive revelations’ about Iran combined with eye-catchingly controversial headlines, which were typically based on a single sentence in the wider article.

Prison Break

Despite his bleak analysis, TJ does not view the elite monopoly on information as insurmountable, or invincible — there’s much individuals and groups can do to shatter the stranglehold.

“People should keep a keen eye on sources that analyse news reporting and misreporting, such as Glasgow University Media Group and MediaLens, which offer alternative information and tell you what media coverage is actively omitting from the real story. However, change must come from within too — people should divorce themselves from preconceptions, and question their beliefs wherever and whenever possible. When presented with information that doesn’t conform to our predispositions, we should ask ourselves whether it’s true, rather than reflexively dismissing it outright,” TJ says.

While having less trust in the media more generally is a must, the academic also warns against placing too much faith in alternative news outlets and social networks, despite them being valuable resources with a significant positive potential.”Independent media is growing in size and strength, but its overall reach is still relatively tiny — while print circulation is obviously down, people still get the vast bulk of their information from mainstream outlets. Similarly, social media could’ve democratized the spread of information, but it hasn’t — and in fact any such potential has probably been neutered by the proliferation of ‘fact-checking’ resources, which are anything but unbiased and disinterested arbiters of truth,” TJ notes.

One-such ‘fact-checker’ is the Atlantic Council, a NATO-offshoot with a board of directors comprised of a ‘who’s who’ of contentious US political figures, including Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Robert Gates, Michael Hayden and David Petraeus, among others.

It partnered with Facebook in May to “independently monitor disinformation and other vulnerabilities” and combat the spread of fake news on the platform. To date, the collaboration has resulted in untold hundreds of pages and personal accounts being shut down — rather than being promulgators of propaganda though, the overwhelming bulk of the banished were alternative news sources, political organizations and individuals, highlighting issues and events the mainstream media downplays or ignores, such as US interventionism, drug legalization and police brutality.

© AP Photo / Virginia Mayo

Google Fact-Check Created to Promote MSM Amid Waning Popularity – Lawmaker

Moreover, that elites exploit social media’s information-sharing capabilities to suit their own objectives is well-established.”The US State Department has used major social networks to recruit revolutionaries on several occasions, most notably during the ‘Arab Spring’, connecting ‘moderate rebels’ — actually violent jihadist lunatics — in select countries. Washington wanted Assad, Gaddafi and Mubarak gone, because they weren’t following orders — but there were no Twitter or Facebook ‘revolutions’ in the Gulf states, because the American empire wanted their rulers to remain in place. In Cuba, the CIA even went as far as creating a social network for the same purpose,” TJ concludes.

The views and opinions expressed by the contributors do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.

The Strange, Centuries-Long History of Satanic Pedophile Panics

Modern-day conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and ‘QAnon’ have roots that stretch back to medieval Europe.

Source: The Strange, Centuries-Long History of Satanic Pedophile Panics – VICE

http://www.vice.com

by Mark Hay

Nov 15 2018

This summer, Americans got a crash course in “QAnon,” a pro-Trump conspiracy theory (or possible anti-Trump prank) that has been percolating online for about a year. QAnon’s claims are hard to track, in part because its believers believe so many different things. Conspiracy theory academic Joseph Uscinski noted in an interview that its adherents can basically connect its threads to any number of other conspiracies or beliefs. But most iterations claim that a top government operative nicknamed Q is leaking “breadcrumbs” that show that Donald Trump is secretly working with Special Counsel Robert Mueller to expose Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other high-level Democrats’ involvement in a murderous, Satanic pedophile ring. Not many people actually seem to believe in this QAnon stuff, Uscinski pointed out. But even though the theory has largely been out of the news for a couple months, QAnon groups are still active online, and supporters have manifested at Trump rallies.

Naturally, many have drawn a connection between QAnon and Pizzagate, a conspiracy theory that blossomed in 2016 and centered around the belief that Democrats ran a ritualistic pedophile ring out of a basement at Comet Ping Pong, a DC pizzeria that doesn’t even have a basement. That theory metastasized in late 2016, leading to a December shooting at the pizzeria by a self-proclaimed investigator and sex slave liberator. Even after former Pizzagate promoters like Alex Jones backed off of the theory, it still has proponents. Some observers have slatted these conspiracies into a wider trend on the modern far right of crying pedophile, often using flimsy evidence, against high-profile liberals.

Pedophilia is a real threat. Officials have caught large-scale pedophile rings far more often than one might think, and some of them have involved famous individuals and cover-ups. To many, it is a uniquely evil crime; someone who sexually abuses a child seems capable of anything. But fear of pedophiles can be weaponized and used to whip up mobs that don’t want to wait for solid evidence of wrongdoings to emerge, lest unspeakable horrors go unchecked. In many ways, it is an ideal tool for mobilizing small but highly vocal pockets of opposition against one’s enemies, as it can co-opt some people with genuine fears about child trafficking into perpetuating smear and harassment campaigns. It also offers those who are already predisposed to believing terrible things about the accused more license to hate. Accusations of pedophilia are often taken extremely seriously by law enforcement as well: In 2014, for instance, British police launched a multimillion-dollar investigation into a number of individuals, some of them national politicians, based on one man’s accusations, which turned out to be utterly baseless.

But Pizzagate, QAnon, and other related conspiracies floating around don’t just fit into a long tradition of accusations of pedophilia. As others have noted, the flourishes of these theories—Satanic rituals performed on child victims by depraved cabals, cryptic symbols signaling dark intent or links to the occult, and secret tunnels under ordinary businesses used to abet villainy—actually connect them to a discrete, centuries-old lineage of satanic, or occultic, panics. Most notably, they bear striking similarities to the American “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s. Pizzagate, QAnon, and their modern ilk are “not as Satanic as the stuff in the 80s was,” said Margaret Peacock, an expert on propaganda and conspiracies involving children, but added there are clear “similarities in language and materiality between them.”

According to Rickard Sjöberg, a neuropsychologist who has studied the long history of allegations of Satanic child abuse and pedophilia rings, these sorts of accusations may stretch back at least as far as the 14th century, when stories of ritualistic child abuse by the Knights Templar crusader order were in active circulation. But the first definite link in this conspiratorial chain goes back to 1428 and the valley of Valais, in what is now Switzerland. Locals there started circulating accusations that members of their community had entered into a pact with the devil, who told them to avoid religious services. Rumors and coerced confessions spread the idea that these occult rings met in cellars to hear Satanic preachings, flew around in enchanted chairs, put curses on their neighbors, and abused, murdered, and even ate children. These tales had horrific consequences, as at least hundreds of accused witches were killed over the course of several years, while many more were imprisoned and tortured.

The same things that inspire conspiracies today likely fueled these early occult panics. Mary deYoung, a social psychologist and expert on moral panics, says the roots are often anxieties about social change or strains, and especially the potential loss of power by an in-group. These worries are then projected on “folk devils” who embody that stress. “Usually, but not always, folk devils are already marginalized people,” she said, “so inflammatory rhetoric about the evils they pose to the social and moral fabric of society is easily accepted.” Self-proclaimed “moral experts” pick up these claims and spread them, and people try to rise up against their folk devils.

“You have a flow of rumor that compounds over and over on itself until it creates a critical mass that legitimizes itself,” said Peacock, “if a listener hears it enough.”

Early occult panics, Sjöberg noted, coincided with social changes linked to the transition away from Medieval social structures and norms. (They have been, he said, “described as the dark side of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution.”) Informed by the demonological literature of the day, they used a Christian framework to tar (often, but not exclusively) women as witches, who would supposedly “manifest their dedication to turning normality upside down by eating with their necks, dancing back to back,” and so on. They were accused of abducting and abusing children as part of their self-indulgent effort to distort the social order for their benefit, thus corrupting them. These accusations led, over the course of numerous panics across Europe, to the imprisonment, torture, coercion of confessions, and eventual execution of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of individuals.

Similar panics bounced around Europe well into the late 1800s, Sjöberg notes, often in “naïve” communities that had not yet dealt with them before. Each community and era, conspiracy theory wonk Robert Blaskiewicz said in an interview, made adjustments to the targets of the panic, reflecting the stresses of the area and age. Jewish populations, for instance, were on-and-off targets, accused of trafficking children for blood rituals from the medieval era well into the early 1900s. Details changed as people came to realize certain things weren’t physically possible. “The belief that witches are able to fly on cattle, sleeping humans, or sometimes broomsticks,” Sjöberg pointed out, “has become inconsistent with modern thought and disappeared.”

Peggy McMartin Buckey and her son Ray Buckey during their trial in 1987. They were accused of satanic child abuse but eventually acquitted in what became the most expensive criminal trial in US history. Photo via Getty

The American Satanic Panic of the 1980s fits this lineage perfectly. As US families transitioned from depending on one parent’s income to expecting both parents to work, children increasingly spent their days with childcare professionals. This social change led to widespread suspicion of daycare workers, among others. (Rampant homophobia and rising awareness of the ubiquity of queerness also played a role in these suspicions.) Innocuous but odd remarks made by children or bizarre claims drawn out of kids and adults via bullshit recovered memory techniques got sifted through the same cultural prism that inspired other occult panics through history. Unfamiliar with the details of earlier European panics, most Americans approached increasingly wild claims with an unnerving degree of credulous naivete, said Sjöberg.

Rumors circulated, first in-person within communities, then in the press. They then coalesced into a common narrative about daycare operators forcing children into rituals involving physical mutilation and animal slaughter, among other horrors. These tales of Satanic child abuse and sacrifices in secret tunnels marked by occult symbols, while pegged clearly to that era’s culture and fears, harkened back to older panics.

“The ability of this myth to survive over more than 550 years in considerable detail,” marveled Sjöberg, “is remarkable.”

The American Satanic panic faded by the early 1990s, as investigations into its horrific narratives failed to pan out, and critical reporters debunked their sources. But even though naive societies are more prone to these panics, Sjöberg stressed, this doesn’t mean one experience inoculates a community against experiencing variations of them again.

No one is entirely sure how this conspiracy spreads, or gets recycled within a culture over time. One explanation is that there have always been conspiratorial people predisposed to explore all manner of eccentric theories. It is also likely that even after an occult panic fizzles out, low-level belief in it persists in pockets of these conspiratorial circles. At least one major modern conspiracy theorist, for example, was still investigating a long debunked and widely abandoned 1980s ritualistic abuse claim centered on a childcare facility run by the US military when he died in 2016. So it is possible that themes or motifs of these theories bleed into new general conspiracy believer groups over time, who don’t critically engage with them but rather adapt them to their needs.

Peacock added that it is also not clear whether this bleed is intentional, with people grabbing what they think will be an effective tool to demonize their enemies, or organic. Either way, it makes sense that conspiratorial people would glom onto the old chestnut of Satanic child abuse, even in modern America. Like all good theories, it takes a plausible core—pedophile rings really exist—and details which are easy to spin out of ambiguous evidence but hard to disprove. Blaskiewicz said it also speaks to an attack on “the identity, morality, and cosmic order of Christendom, which some people use as shorthand for the West.” That element is likely less attractive in modern Europe, argued Peacock, which is now highly secularized. This may be why occult inflected pedophile panics don’t seem to strike there as often now. But, she said, “we are kidding ourselves if we think we are free from that [preoccupation] in the United States.”

“’Satanic baby rapist’ is like the ultimate thought-stopping epithet for the worst possible person,” said Blaskiewicz, “combining all of the most hair-triggering fears of parents with the actual worship of evil personified.” So it’s no wonder that the same tropes burble up over and over.

Pizzagate and QAnon, may have strayed from older panics’ primary focus on Satanism, but they carry forward similar language, structure, and certain motifs, all of which are still potent.

These theories seem to draw on other long-standing conspiracy theory lineages as well, like deep-state conspiracies, which have been circulating for much of the last century by groups on the left and right. (Uscinski argued that this lineage actually is the primary focus for many QAnon adherents.)

So how do you fight a seemingly immortal conspiracy? Some research has indicated that persistent debunking, and even ridicule, can sour people on a belief, perhaps breaking it as a social force over time. But diehards, experts always note, will almost never give up on a theory. And even after a conspiracy fades from the public eye, it may simmer in conspiratorial circles just out of mainstream view, and so a related occult-inflected pedophile ring theory may just resurface with new vigor decades later. “Maybe there is no solving it,” mused Peacock. “Maybe we are cursed, like we are cursed to violence, as humans. Maybe there is nothing to be done but try to survive it.”

“Every moral panic is time limited,” noted deYoung. “As the social strains from which they emerge lose their salience over time, their power to generate social anxiety and fuel the relentless pursuit of folk devils” fades as well.

Thankfully, Pizzagate, QAnon, and similar conspiracy theories in the air now and to come down the line will likely not do nearly as much damage as their predecessors.

Social media makes it easier for conspiracy believers to find each other and spread their ideas. The fact Trump and elements of his administration seemingly endorse conspiracy theories, including QAnon, is not reassuring either. Nor is the fact that unlike earlier occult panics, which depended on the (dubious) testimonies of “actual” child victims as anchors, these theories just make claims without identifying clear victims. “When the kids are unidentified,” Blaskiewicz said, “hell, you can imagine whatever extravagant travesty meets your worldview’s need for a villain.” It also frees believers up to constantly adjust their targets and details, reiterating the theory over and over without losing potency or momentum.

However, previous occult-inflected pedophile panics were even more mainstream. They led to the murder of tens of thousands of people, if not more, in the early modern era. Even in the 1980s, they had the buy-in of major media outlets and law enforcement agencies, which actually jailed a number of people on totally bogus charges for years on end. QAnon and its modern kin remain far on the political fringe.

“Mobilization may be today’s conspiracy theories’ biggest challenge,” said deYoung. “We sadly live in an increasingly fragmented and divided society. To build steam and turn into a full-fledged moral panic, such claims and claim-makers would have to bridge these divides. And I don’t think that can happen. So we will not likely experience a moral panic a la the Satanic ritual abuse moral panic. But more likely a series of smaller, evanescent moral crusades.”

That may seem like cold comfort, as Pizzagate already led one armed man to storm a pizzeria. Fears always swirl about future acts of violence. But these panics are no longer sweeping up entire regions or recruiting serious media figures. As ugly as they still are, their destructive power has lessened over time. Even if Satanic pedophile ring conspiracies are immortal, they are hopefully increasingly impotent as well.

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The WWI Conspiracy (32 min)

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TRANSCRIPT AND MP3: corbettreport.com/wwi

What was World War One about? How did it start? Who won? And what did they win? Now, 100 years after those final shots rang out, these questions still puzzle historians and laymen alike. But as we shall see, this confusion is not a happenstance of history, but the wool that has been pulled over our eyes to stop us from seeing what WWI really was. This is the story of WWI that you didn’t read in the history books. This is The WWI Conspiracy.

Doomed By History Unless…

It seems bitterly ironic that as world leaders gather in Paris this weekend to commemorate the centennial end of World War One, international tensions and the threat of war are once again haunting humanity.

Source: Doomed By History Unless… – Sputnik International

sputniknews.com

Finian Cunningham

Nov 9, 2018

It seems bitterly ironic that as world leaders gather in Paris this weekend to commemorate the centennial end of World War One, international tensions and the threat of war are once again haunting humanity.

Stephen Cohen, Princeton professor of history, recently warned that the risk of a nuclear war between the US and Russia is greater now than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Given Cohen’s renowned academic expertise, such a warning should be sobering, and not overlooked as mere hyperbole.

One country seems to be the common denominator in generating the danger of war — the United States. Washington is pushing aggression towards numerous nations, simultaneously, from Russia, China, Iran to Venezuela, as well as antagonizing its supposed allies in Europe over trade and other commercial interests.This weekend in Paris, US President Donald Trump will join with other world leaders, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin, in holding a commemorative event marking the 1918 armistice.

But, pointedly, Trump is reportedly “snubbing” a peace summit to be held later the same day in the French capital. Dozens of other world leaders, including Putin, Germany’s Angela Merkel and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan are due to participate in the peace conference.

Why Trump is avoiding the peace summit is not clear. His cancellation seemed to be an abrupt decision. But it could be a swipe at French President Emmanuel Macron.

Earlier this week, Macron made an extraordinary verbal attack on Trump and presumed American global leadership. Macron called for the setting up of a European army in order to protect the continent from foreign powers, including the US.

“We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America,” said the French president.

That’s right, you read that correctly. A purported European ally was saying that the US is a threat to Europe.

Not that European citizens should entrust their security to the likes of Macron. The so-called “president of the rich” cares little about the livelihoods and wellbeing of ordinary people. Macron, who exudes an aristocratic arrogance, is pushing through draconian laws that will seriously erode workers’ rights and public welfare. The French leader, it is clear, is not on the people’s side.

But his comments regarding the formation of a European army to counter American “bullying” are significant in that they reveal one important thing. The rivalry of nation states is reemerging sharply once again — even among those nations that are considered to be allies.

World War One, also known as the Great War, was arguably a culmination of intense nation-state rivalry, especially among the European colonial powers. It was about these powers jockeying for position to assert economic advantages over perceived contenders. The advantages pertained to ruling class interests, not the mass of ordinary workers and their families.

Up to 20 million people were killed in the four-year war from 1914 to 1918. It was the first industrial-scale international conflict. It was supposed to be the “war to end all wars”. Yet only 20 years later, the world would be plunged into an even more infernal catastrophe of World War Two for which the death toll escalated four-fold up to 80 million, with most of the victims being civilians. That war also ushered in the era of nuclear weapons, which means that any future international conflagration could spell the end of humanity and the planet as we know it.

Evidently, while world leaders gather in Paris this weekend the solemn expressions by some about war and never repeating it are rather hollow.

European leaders in particular deserve censure. They obviously know full well that their American “protector” is nothing but a selfish bully. Macron’s remarks are testament to that awareness. Germany’s Merkel also knows that Washington’s haranguing over trade disputes and the Nord Stream 2 gas project with Russia is the action not of an ally but rather of a domineering competitor that doesn’t give a fig about German interests.

We can cite many other examples of Washington treating Europeans like a doormat, such as the way Trump is dictating they have to comply with US sanctions on Iran, thereby jeopardizing investments from Paris, Berlin, Rome and others.However, if that is the case, then why are European states facilitating the US-led NATO military alliance to ratchet up deplorable and ineffably dangerous tensions with Russia? This month saw the biggest-ever NATO war drills since the Cold War being held in the Arctic region near Russia’s borders.

European leaders are caught in a curious, disgraceful double-think. They surely know that the US, especially under Trump, has no regard for their interests. He is prepared to rip up the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which could put Europe on a hair-trigger for nuclear war with Russia.

Still though, European governments meekly go along with Washington’s blatant policy of aggression towards Russia, as seen from their participation in NATO provocations and in imposing trade sanctions on Moscow over dubious propaganda claims about Russia’s interference in Ukraine, the Balkans and Baltic states.

The specter of war continues to haunt the world, even as so-called political leaders around the world don solemn faces and enunciate doleful pledges concerning World War I and II. There is no guarantee against World War III erupting.

That’s because nation-state rivalry and the pursuit of national advantages over others — imperialism — is as alive today as it was 100 years ago. History is not a dead past. It is a living continuum.

The strongest nation state, the US, is the one that is most pushing the agenda of aggression as it tries to stave off perceived competitors. It seems woefully poignant that President Trump has decided to not even show up at the peace summit in Paris this weekend.

Nonetheless, the European leaders are contemptible in that they — despite occasional bickering with their American “ally” — are equally complicit in fomenting dangerous tensions with Russia, China, Iran and others by not standing up to Washington. Their weakness indulges the American bully’s bad behavior.That’s because the Europeans are wedded to the same nation-based capitalist system as the Americans are. This nationalism is driving tensions between countries once again, as did in the run-up to World War I and II.

By not learning from history and understanding underlying causes then, as the saying goes, we are doomed to repeat history.

What is needed is an international system of global cooperation in which national interests of private profit are replaced with a new organizational basis for production, finance, trade and social wellbeing. If nations were organized on a genuinely democratic basis meeting the paramount needs of their people instead of the elite profit interest of their oligarchs, then international tensions and rivalry would be obviated.

Hopefully, ordinary citizens of the world are increasingly aware of the urgency to jettison nationalist capitalism and its relentlessly warmongering tendency. The problem is, we don’t — as yet anyway — have the political leaders who see in that way. As it is, lamentably, we are doomed to repeat history — unless the mass of people rise up and assert their democratic rights.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.