China’s Damning US Human Rights Report May Be Propaganda, but It’s Not Wrong

China just released a 13,000-word report on the state of human rights in the United States. While the report clearly has an agenda, it’s not inaccurate.

Source

http://www.mintpressnews.com

by Alan Macleod

March 18th, 2020

“We lied, we cheated, we stole … It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment,” Pompeo said of his time as head of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Amid a global pandemic, you might be forgiven for having missed that the State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China just released a 13,000-word report on the state of human rights in the United States. Entitled “The Record of Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2019,” it begins by quoting Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. “We lied, we cheated, we stole … It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment,” Pompeo said of his time as head of the Central Intelligence Agency during a Q&A at Texas A&M University.

The document reads similarly to reports from other human rights groups like Amnesty International, Freedom House or Human Rights Watch, providing copious facts and figures to highlight shortcomings of the American system on a range of issues. For example, on racist policing, it notes that “Shootings and brutal abuse of African Americans by policemen are frequent. African American adults are 5.9 times more likely to be incarcerated than white adults. A U.N. Special Rapporteur called such racial disparities a vestige of slavery and racial segregation.”

The report expresses alarm at the increase in racial hate crimes. “White supremacy in the United States has shown a resurgence trend,” it claims, noting that the majority of domestic terror-related arrests were linked to white supremacist individuals or groups. It cites a November FBI study that counted thousands of racial hate crimes, almost half of them motivated by anti-African American sentiment. Intolerance against Jews and Muslims is also increasing rapidly the report noted.

It also takes aim at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and its “zero tolerance” policy on illegal immigration, noting that well over 100 people were arrested while demonstrating against those policies. Thus, if skim-read, China’s report could be mistaken for one written by liberal Western organizations based in London or Washington, D.C. But, in fact, it was written directly in opposition to the human rights industry; in its foreword it explicitly states:

The United States claims to be founded on human rights, touting itself as a world human rights defender. Following a framework of its own narrow understanding of human rights and using its core interests of pursuing global hegemony as a yardstick, the United States released annual reports on other countries’ human rights every year by piecing together innuendoes and hearsay. These reports wantonly distorted and belittled human rights situation in countries and regions that did not conform to U.S. strategic interests, but turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to the persistent, systematic and large-scale human rights violations in the United States.”

Furthermore, it goes much further than most Western human rights reports do, incorporating economic and social rights into its critique. These rights are enshrined in the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and are commonly seen as the cornerstone of human rights. The report states that homeless people are in a “miserable situation,” in the United States and are rarely treated with sympathy or helped, noting that an astonishing 80,000 California community college students had been forced to sleep in cars during the previous year alone. It also highlights the “shocking problem” of child poverty; the poverty ratio of American children having barely improved in the last 30 years. The report concluded that, “No child should have to worry where her next meal will come from or whether she will have a place to sleep each night in the wealthiest nation on Earth.” A lack of healthcare is also a killer; around 14 percent of adults have no coverage whatsoever.

The United States, however, has always explicitly rejected the Universal Declaration and its economic and social rights. Its ambassador to the U.N. during the Reagan years, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, famously labeled the Declaration a “letter to Santa Claus.” Likewise, Western human rights organizations rarely broach the topic of economic or labor rights; Human Rights Watch’s co-founder believed them to be antithetical to democracy and even described the very concept as “authoritarian.”

The Chinese report also expands its field to discuss the U.S. role in harming human rights worldwide. “In order to maintain its hegemony over the world, the United States pursued unilateralism and trampled on the international order and international system with the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter as its core,” it states, citing the rights of Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians whose lives have been destroyed by American interventions and condemning the U.S. for its sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela.

 

Well-written, well-sourced propaganda

Of course, many in the West will simply brush the report off as Chinese-government funded propaganda, which it is. The report certainly has an agenda, as its foreword and conclusion make clear. But perhaps we should go deeper and question if this well-written, well-sourced document is propaganda, what makes those from Western-backed human rights organizations any different?

Freedom House, for example, is overwhelmingly funded by Washington, consistently shows a strong conservative bias, and was even employed by the Pentagon to perform what it called “clandestine activities” – i.e. regime change – in Iran. Human Rights Watch began as a Cold War organization directly targeted against Communist governments and last November proved crucial in the overthrow of Evo Morales, the democratically-elected socialist president of Bolivia.

How Human Rights Watch Whitewashed a Right-Wing Massacre in Bolivia

Some may be surprised by its response to the Bolivia crisis, but Human Rights Watch’s support for a U.S.-backed right-wing coup is no aberration.

MintPress News | Alan Macleod | Nov 20, 2019

Amnesty International, perhaps the most famous human rights organization in the world, has an arguably darker past still. As MintPressNews revealed last year, one co-founder of the organization, Peter Benenson, was an avowed anti-Communist with deep ties to the British Foreign and Colonial Offices, propping up the apartheid regime of South Africa at his government’s request. Another co-founder, Luis Kutner, was an FBI asset who was involved in the government’s assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. Kutner went on to form an organization called “Friends of the FBI,” dedicated to countering and combating criticism of the Bureau.

Amnesty International’s Troubling Collaboration with UK & US Intelligence

Amnesty International: connections with US intelligence and the British Foreign Office contradict an image as a human rights defender.

MintPress News | Alexander Rubinstein | Jan 21, 2019

Despite the fact they are united against a common enemy – the coronavirus – the U.S. and China are again at loggerheads, President Trump is facing criticism for continually describing COVID-19 as the “Chinese Virus,” despite explicit World Health Organization warnings against doing so. Trump has used the outbreak to double down on the necessity of building the border wall against Mexico, despite the fact that the virus began in China. Professor Ian Haney Lopez of the University of California, Berkeley, an expert in racist language in American politics, told MintPress:

Labeling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus” is entirely in keeping with Donald Trump’s pattern of dog whistling. The term is designed to trigger racist fears (foreigners as disease-carriers), while preserving plausible deniability (defensible as merely a statement about geography).

The Chinese report concludes by stating:

People have discerning eyes. The United States has long been deceitfully touting itself as a so-called “role model” for upholding human rights, while flagrantly playing with double standards on human rights issues. Human rights, viewed by the United States as a tool to maintain its hegemony, have been championed or violated by it according to its own needs. Actions speak louder than words. The United States, a country preoccupied with human rights problems at home, unscrupulously tramples on the human rights of people in other countries, resulting in untold sufferings.

Whether it convinces many Americans of its legitimacy remains to be seen.

Feature photo | A homeless person holds a shoe while camped on a street bench, March 17, 2020, in Oakland, Calif. Ben Margot | AP

Alan MacLeod is a Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent. He has also contributed to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, Common Dreams the American Herald Tribune and The Canary.

With united Europe MIA in its Covid-19 response, worst-hit nations turn to ‘evil’ Russia and China for help

“In Verduno, near Turin in northern Italy, a hospital that has been under construction for 20 years, and is still unfinished, will open as a Covid-19 hospital next week, and will take in its first 60 coronavirus victims.

In comparison, the Italian government will be well aware that China, using 7,000 builders working around the clock,  built a 1000-bed hospital in just 10 days, and that Russia, with parallel ambition, is looking to finish a virus hospital on the outskirts of Moscow within a month.”

Source

http://www.rt.com/op-ed

Damian Wilson

is a UK journalist, ex-Fleet Street editor, financial industry consultant and political communications special advisor in the UK and EU.

23 Mar, 2020

Russian servicemen load medical equipment and special disinfection vehicles into cargo planes while sending the supply to Italy, hit by the outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), at a military airdrome in Moscow region, Russia March 22, 2020 ©  Reuters / Russian Defence Ministry / Alexey Ereshko

Brussels has all but abandoned them to their fates, so is it any wonder that Italy, Spain and other European countries have turned to Moscow and Beijing for meaningful support in terms of expert advice and medical supplies?

When this coronavirus pandemic has passed and the nations of the European Union are counting the cost of decimated populations, shattered public health infrastructures and economic meltdowns, one thing is certain: the dynamics within the bloc will have changed forever.

Before the global outbreak of this killer virus, Russia and China were always the West’s undisputed bogeymen. Troublemakers, always up to mischief, playing dangerous geopolitical games intended to undermine Western democracies and divide allies in the EU and NATO.

Many in the Western mainstream media are addicted to a daily fix of either Russian or Chinese conspiracy, so they probably don’t appreciate the irony here. Because things have changed.

READ MORE

WATCH Russian Army deliver medical aid at airbase near Rome as Moscow rallies to help coronavirus-ravaged Italy

In a big way.

It’s largely due to the generosity of these two “tricksy” outsider superpowers that some European nations, fully paid-up, long-term members of the EU, have even a remote chance of getting to grips with the immense public health demands caused by the outbreak of the coronavirus.

And thank heavens for that, because if either Italy or Spain had been looking to the EU — or the USA for that matter — for real, on-the-ground assistance that would enable them to simply stop people dying in their thousands in overcrowded hospitals, then they would have found themselves waiting in vain.

Sure, the ECB weighed in only last week, with an unprecedented fiscal bazooka aimed at reducing the economic impact that is being caused by the virus (ar at least by the measures governments are taking to try to stop it). But that’s fighting the virus in one manner only, very much after the fact and certainly not on the frontline.

This significance of that fiscal help will only really be apparent once the health crisis is over and the full, disastrous economic consequences are realized. And the fact that it is far from over right now is what needs immediate attention, like providing more medical staff, personal protection gear, ventilators, hospitals and, obviously, a vaccine.

But the message from Brussels to Italy, Spain and other EU members is clear: in dealing with the pandemic and the thousands of dead citizens it leaves in its wake, you are on your own.

The EU’s abject hopelessness and indifference started to become clear some weeks back in the face of the escalating virus, when the export beyond national borders of facemasks and medical equipment was banned by some EU members, including Germany.

ALSO ON RT.COMRussian military planes with medics & supplies land in coronavirus-hit Italy (VIDEO)It’s unlikely the Italians will forget that. Compare it with the generosity of the Chinese consumer electronics company Xiaomi which has sent tens of thousands of face masks to Italy at the same time as Beijing has filled planes with medical experts and crucial equipment of which Rome was, and remains, in desperate need.

Compare it too with the help from Moscow sent over the weekend: 100 virus specialists, disinfection trucks and medical equipment. All being sent at the request of Italy.

It seems the close ties the Italian government maintained with Russia over the last few years, particularly at the initiative of former coalition foreign minister Matteo Salvini, have paid off. His refusal to be drawn into the EU’s Kremlin-bashing of recent times, preferring to cultivate a closer friendship of his own, has to be applauded for the dividends it has produced in the Italian hour of need.

READ MORE

EU spin in the time of coronavirus

And one unintended consequence of that must be that it is driving critics of the controversial Italian populist absolutely nuts.

It also won’t escape the attention of NATO that the aid from Russia is coming via military channels, which must sting those of its members with a more hawkish view towards Moscow. Just so they don’t miss the irony, the supplies bear a “From Russia with Love” label.

What cannot be denied is that actions speak louder than words. The people of those nations being helped from outside the EU will be eternally grateful for that assistance. It’s help that can be seen. It’s brigades of medical experts, boxes of supplies delivered in big planes. It will save the lives of family and friends and it will provide help on the frontline where it is most needed.

In Verduno, near Turin in northern Italy, a hospital that has been under construction for 20 years, and is still unfinished, will open as a Covid-19 hospital next week, and will take in its first 60 coronavirus victims.

In comparison, the Italian government will be well aware that China, using 7,000 builders working around the clock,  built a 1000-bed hospital in just 10 days, and that Russia, with parallel ambition, is looking to finish a virus hospital on the outskirts of Moscow within a month.

It is these sorts of highly visible acts that people need to see. It builds confidence from despair and hope from misery.

Confidence and hope. As millions of terrified Europeans sit confined in their homes today, isolated voluntarily or by law, those are two things in critically short supply.

The Truth May Scare You (11 min)

Truth propaganda message technology brain wash television warning world news current events 2020

 

Iran missile attack shattered US’ self-proclaimed empire: IRGC spokesman

The bad Iranians don’t seem to be much terrified of the Big Bad Flatulent Orange man. Also, other nations seem to be distancing themselves from the US. Many are dropping the US dollar as the universal trade currency in favor of other currencies, and Duterte, Philipines, dropped the military alliance with the US this week. The US is losing the respect of most nations on the planet.

This is from Iran.

Source

http://www.presstv.com

Monday, 10 February 2020 

This picture taken on January 13, 2020 shows US soldiers clearing rubble at Ain al-Assad military air base in the western Iraqi province of Anbar. (Photo by AFP)

The spokesman for the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) says the retaliatory missile attack on an Iraqi military base housing US forces after assassination of Iran’s top anti-terror general by terrorist US forces shattered the self-proclaimed empire of the United States.

Brigadier General Ramezan Sharif made the remarks while addressing a ceremony held in the central Iranian city of Damghan to mark the 40th day after the assassination of the former commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force Lt. Gen. Qassem Soleimani on the direct order of US President Donald Trump.

On January 8, the IRGC fired volleys of ballistic missiles at Ain al-Assad military base in the western Iraqi province of Anbar in response to the January 3 assassination by US terrorists of General Soleimani, the second-in-command of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, and a group of their companions in Baghdad.

IRGC targets US airbases in Iraq in response to assassination of General Soleimani

Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) has targeted US airbases in Iraq.

Both commanders enjoyed deep reverence among Muslim nations for their endeavors in eliminating the US-sponsored Daesh Takfiri terrorist group in the region, particularly in Iraq and Syria.

Soon after the assassination, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said Washington was to face a “harsh revenge.”

“The important point about the missile attack on Ain al-Assad was shattering the false grandeur and prestige of Americans, which humiliated them in the eyes of the world’s military forces. For 70 years, nobody had dared attack American bases, but this slap in the face by the IRGC brought down the self-proclaimed political, economic and military empire of the United States…,” the Iranian military spokesman said.

At the White House, Trump adamantly denied the Iranian missiles left any casualties. But Tehran said the US military conducted at least nine sorties after the operation, taking the wounded to Jordan and the Israeli occupied territories, while Chinook helicopters transferred the injured to a US hospital in Baghdad.

Out of despair and under pressure from Congress, the Trump administration has gradually announced casualties from the Iranian attack, most recently claiming that 64 US troops have been diagnosed with “traumatic brain injuries.”

Pointing to contradictory US reports about the casualties after the attack, Sharif said, “The first slap was of great significance, of course they (the American officials) will speak of the human casualties and the equipment damaged in the strikes during campaigning for the upcoming US presidential election. Thirteen heavy rockets hit various points at the American base. Of course, our priority was in no way to kill US soldiers, but what’s for sure is that the casualty figure is higher than what they have announced so far.”

IRGC: ‘Brain injury’ is US vague term for missile fatalities

The IRGC says Washington’s alleged numbers regarding “brain injuries” in troops represent US troop deaths.

The Iranian military spokesman stressed, “With the martyrdom of Soleimani, the enemies thought they would be victorious, while they should know they have taken a big gamble and that the ultimate loser of this bet will be undoubtedly the Americans.”

“All people across the world witnessed the million-strong population that flocked to the streets in Iraq — a huge crowd that Iraq had never seen in a rally after [slain dictator] Saddam [Hussein]. This million-strong population turned out to endorse an Iraqi bill on the expulsion of US forces from the country. The Americans are done in the region, they are well aware of this fact but brazen it out,” he added.

Iraqi lawmakers unanimously approved a bill that calls for the withdrawal of all US-led foreign troops from the Arab country in the wake of the US assassination of the two top commanders.

Hollywood has been more heavily censored since 2001, films bashing US army and CIA can’t go public – Oliver Stone to RT

Source

http://www.rt.com

30 Jan, 2020

Oliver Stone (L) and Rafael Correa (R) © RT

The American film industry changed beyond recognition after the milestone year of 2001, director Oliver Stone told RT, with producers using financial restraints to censor movies challenging the US military or the CIA.

“Maybe in the 1980s, when I did ‘Platoon’, ‘Born on the Fourth of July’ and ‘Heaven & Earth’, I could do that, because it was a slightly more relaxed system,” said the award-winning filmmaker, mentioning his famed movies while making his case during former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa’s show on RT Spanish.

When the Iron Curtain fell and the Cold War ended, things didn’t change for the better, Stone believes. “My film career has suffered, because sometimes I’ve said things that American producers hate to hear,” he revealed, adding that those sponsoring film productions sometimes resort to “economic censorship.”

Hollywood has changed since 2001. It has become more censored. The military, the CIA, the depictions of these organizations has been very favorable.

“You can take the budgets down… let’s say you want to make a film criticizing the American military, taking an Iraq war story or a horror story that recently happened in Iraq… You do those kinds of stories, it’s not going to happen,” he explained.

Stone, who scored a number of Academy, BAFTA and Golden Globe awards, has been widely criticized for his anti-war dramas and, most recently, for a series of films questioning the widespread Western narrative on the Ukrainian turmoil, as well as exclusive interviews with Vladimir Putin.

“Now, censorship isn’t something that exclusively affects the American film industry,” Stone lamented, “I can read the American media but they all say the same things … And you don’t hear from Iran and China, you don’t hear from [North] Korea, you don’t hear from Venezuela, you don’t get their point of view.”

ALSO ON RT.COMFrom Bond to ‘Top Gun’: How PC Hollywood will mess with your fave franchises in 2020

The CIA realized – after World War II, basically – they [went into] the business, the news business, they put their people, their agents at newspapers, at magazines and television.

‘It’s all right-wings fighting with right-wings’

The famed film director sounded pessimistic when asked if there is hope for change – or, at least, if the system allows for that change. He said that both parties – be it Democrats or Republicans – act by the same playbook when dealing with issues of war and peace.

“There is no party in the United States, no democratic voice except third parties that are small, that would say ‘Why are we fighting wars?’” Stone exclaimed, adding, “it’s all right-wings fighting with right-wings.” Democrats are no better than Republicans, he says: “Hillary Clinton and her group, and Joe Biden, are just as pro-war as any Republican Dick Cheney.”

Stone thinks Donald Trump who has done “horrible things” by pulling out of the Paris climate accords and the hard-earned 2015 Iran nuclear deal. But, argued Stone, at least Trump was asking why the US needs to fight the Russians, which alarmed the mainstream so much that the media was attacking him from day one.

Stone lamented that politics is transiting from the art of the possible to the art of raising money.

“So much money is spent in politics, it’s impossible for my vote to make any difference… Candidates in America now have to raise billions of dollars to be considered serious,” Stone said.

Empires fall. Let’s pray that this empire, these evil things… because we are the evil empire. What Reagan said about Russia is true about us.

Operation InfeKtion: How Russia Created Fake News and Perfected the Art of War (47 min)

The New York Times

Russia’s meddling in the United States’ elections is not a hoax. It’s the culmination of Moscow’s decades-long campaign to tear the West apart. “Operation InfeKtion” reveals the ways in which one of the Soviets’ central tactics — the promulgation of lies about America — continues today, from Pizzagate to George Soros conspiracies. Meet the KGB spies who conceived this virus and the American truth squads who tried — and are still trying — to fight it. Countries from Pakistan to Brazil are now debating reality, and in Vladimir Putin’s greatest triumph, Americans are using Russia’s playbook against one another without the faintest clue.

 

Pompeo: We had no evidence of a Soleimani attack, Trump made it all up

Source

veteranstoday.com

By VT Editors

January 10, 2020

RT/Moscow: US President Donald Trump earlier claimed that Washington had eliminated the top Iranian military commander to halt Tehran’s plans to blow up the US Embassy in Baghdad.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on a national broadcast that the United States possessed no information about the date and place of an alleged attack planned by assassinated General Qasem Soleimani.

“WE DON’T KNOW PRECISELY WHEN – AND WE DON’T KNOW PRECISELY WHERE. BUT IT WAS REAL … THERE WAS A REAL OPPORTUNITY HERE AND THERE WAS A REAL NECESSITY HERE. WE MADE THE RIGHT DECISION. THE PRESIDENT MADE THE RIGHT CALL”, POMPEO TOLD FOX NEWS.

On 3 January, IRGC Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani was killed in a targeted US drone attack on the Baghdad International Airport. Washington said that Soleimani was planning to attack US personnel and that by eliminating him “a lot of lives were saved”.

The US earlier designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force a terrorist organisation.

Iran retaliated for the murder of its top commander with a missile attack that targeted the US military in Iraq. The attack was dubbed Operation Martyr Soleimani and hit the Ayn al-Asad Air Base in western Iraq and American facilities in Erbil. No US personnel were injured in the attack President Trump said in his Wednesday address to the nation…or so the US claims.

Soleimani was a highly respected figure in Iranian politics and was praised for combating a wide range of terrorist groups in the region, including Daesh*. He was also given credit for being an “architect” of the entire Iranian security structure.

 

Secret intelligence and ‘highly likelys’: How media created narrative around Tehran jet crash to blame Iran, Russia and Trump

Source

http://www.rt.com/op-ed

Nebojsa Malic

Jan 10, 2020

Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT.

Whatever caused Flight 752 to crash just after takeoff from Tehran, the 176 people who died were quickly drafted as elements in a propaganda narrative targeting both Iran, Russia and US President Donald Trump.

The Ukraine International Airlines (UIA) Boeing 737 took off from Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran on Wednesday morning. It was bound for Kiev, amid rising tensions over the Iranian missile strikes against US targets inside Iraq. The nine crew members and 167 passengers on board, including 15 children, may have complained that the flight was running almost an hour late. Within seven minutes, they would all be dead.

Dan Cohen

✔@dancohen3000

The text of the article totally contradicts the headline and contains nothing about western intelligence agencies claiming there was a technical malfunction. What is going on with Reuters’ coverage? https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1215183928350445568 …

Reuters

✔@Reuters

Five security sources told Reuters the initial assessment of Western intelligence agencies is that the Ukrainian airliner that crashed in Iran suffered a technical malfunction and was not brought down by a missile https://reut.rs/2FuMDTG 

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4:14 PM – Jan 9, 2020

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Initial reports spoke of “technical problems” as the cause. By Thursday morning, however, the narrative was shifting: US officials were “confident that Iran shot down a Ukrainian jetliner,” CBS reported citing anonymous sources.

AP qualified the speculation as “highly likely,” a weasel phrase made notorious by the official UK narrative of the 2018 Salisbury “novichok poisonings.”

Rania Khalek

✔@RaniaKhalek

This could have been anything: A malfunction, an accident, an intentional downing (the US has done it to an Iranian airliner before!)

What I do know is that after all the lies intelligence officials have told us about the Middle East, it’s idiotic to take them at their word. https://twitter.com/cbsthismorning/status/1215313078918746113 …

CBS This Morning

✔@CBSThisMorning

#BREAKING: @CBSNews has learned U.S. officials are confident that Iran shot down a Ukrainian jetliner in the hours after the Iranian missile attack on U.S. targets.

176 people were killed, including at least 63 Canadians.

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9:23 AM – Jan 9, 2020

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By the time the New York Times got to it, though, the qualifications have disappeared: “An Iranian missile accidentally brought down a Ukrainian jetliner over Iran this week, killing everyone aboard, American and allied officials said on Thursday…”

Then it was Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s turn. He told reporters that “intelligence from multiple sources… indicates that the plane was shot down by an Iranian surface-to-air missile.” 

ALSO ON RT.COMTrump confirms more sanctions against Iran, says Tehran plane crash may have been ‘mistake’It was textbook “citogenesis” at work, the manufacturing of a narrative through circular reporting and reliance on published assertions as proof.

Yet just the day before, Reuters had been reporting something completely different, citing an anonymous “Canadian security source.”

“The initial assessment of Western intelligence agencies is that the plane was not brought down by a missile. There is no evidence to suggest that,” said the source, adding that a “technical malfunction” was the likely culprit. Iranian civil aviation authorities likewise said that no missile debris was found at the crash site, and that rumors of a missile were “illogical” and “scientifically impossible.”

ALSO ON RT.COM‘Psychological warfare’: Iran dares Canada & others to show ‘intelligence’ they used to accuse Tehran of downing Ukrainian jet

Instead of being skeptical of anonymously sourced claims by intelligence agencies – which have a stellar record of being wrong on major issues, from the Douma “chemical attack” and Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” to the whole sordid ‘Russiagate’ mess – mainstream media outlets in the West happily ran with the “Iran shoots down airliner” angle. Some went even farther, adding that a “Russian missile” was involved.

Bryan MacDonald

✔@27khv

Notable how some US/UK media correspondents are making a point of referencing that the Iranian missile was “Russian-made.” It’s not important to the story (no more than Israeli weapons are often US made, for instance). But it helps associate the tragedy with Russia, in some way

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2:29 PM – Jan 9, 2020

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Soon enough, the “verification” wizards at Bellingcat were involved in parsing “open source evidence” of course. Photos and videos of missile parts and alleged strikes quickly made rounds online, amplified by mainstream outlets, to cement the Narrative that was already becoming weaponized.

Ben Norton

✔@BenjaminNorton

Yesterday, Reuters/NYT reported Western intelligence agencies said the Ukrainian airliner in Iran was NOT brought down by missile

They admitted “there is no evidence” for this conspiracy

Now they’re saying the opposite. Don’t believe their war propagandahttps://web.archive.org/save/https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/01/08/world/middleeast/08reuters-iran-crash-canada-intelligence.html …

Western Intelligence Agencies See No Signs Ukraine Airliner Was Shot Down: Canadian Source

The initial assessment of Western intelligence agencies is that a Ukrainian airliner which crashed in Iran on Wednesday was not brought down by a missile, said a Canadian security source.

web.archive.org

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Even as they took the claim about an Iranian missile at face value, Democrats were quick to blame Trump for the deaths on board Flight 752, and explain how the passengers and crew were somehow caught in a “crossfire” – though the crash happened hundreds of miles away and hours after the Iranian missile strikes.

Tom Elliott@tomselliott

.@RepSpeier blames Trump for Iran shooting down a passenger jet: “This is yet another example of collateral damage from the actions that have been taken in a provocative way by the president of the United States.”

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Republicans, on the other hand, used the Narrative as proof that the “regime in Tehran” was monstrous, justifying Trump’s decision to launch a drone assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani last week. Gone was their skepticism towards intelligence agencies that had been caught red-handed abusing procedures to spy on the Trump campaign and cook up ‘Russiagate.’

At this point, with the media narrative established, and policy decisions based on it no doubt to follow, it won’t matter what the actual investigation on the ground finds. The truth about the Iraqi WMDs or Douma “chemical attack” didn’t bring back the deaths the lies about them had caused. It won’t bring back those 176 unfortunate souls who perished horribly at dawn on Wednesday – only to find themselves posthumously conscripted as fighters in a propaganda war.

ALSO ON RT.COMThe more we find out about Tehran plane crash, the more questions we have. Here are the main ones

Corbett Report: Did Soleimani Kill 600 Americans? (12 min)

Everyone has heard by now that Soleimani was responsible for 600 American deaths . . . but where does this oddly specific number come from? Today on “Questions For Corbett,” James finds the answer at the bottom of a barrel of neocon lies.

 

America the Repugnant. Assassinating Foreign Leaders Is an Act of War

“Donald Trump should be aware that there is considerable downside to the tiger than he has let out of its cage. What will he do if “enemies” all over the world decide to copy the Trump example and kill American diplomats, soldiers and tourists because they oppose U.S. policies. And what about if they up the ante a little bit and kill senior Ambassadors, Congressmen, and even succeed in killing a presidential cabinet member or two. Trump in his foolishness has invited reciprocity and has even granted those who do the killing a certain immunity if they are claiming that they are doing it to stop something worse, i.e. war.”

Source

http://www.strategic-culture.org

Philip Giraldi

January 9, 2020

Funeral of Qasem Soleimani

Once upon a time there was a Constitution of the United States. In Article II, Section 2 it stipulated that only the U.S. Congress has the power to declare war, which means the American president has to go to the legislative body and make a case for going to war against an enemy or enemies. If there is a vote in favor of war, the president is empowered as commander-in-chief to direct the available resources against the enemy.

There is also something called international law. Under international law there are situations in which a head of state or head of government can use military force defensively or even preemptively if there is a substantial threat that is imminent. But normally, a country has to go through a procedure similar to that in the U.S. Constitution, which means making a case that the war is justified before declaring war. The Nuremberg Tribunals ruled that starting a war of aggression is the ultimate crime.

The president has already declared that he needs no approval from Congress or from anyone else to initiate further military operations against Iran in the Middle East, even if the action taken is “disproportionate.” Meanwhile he, the State Department and the Pentagon are all stating, without presenting any evidence at all to the public, that Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani was planning attacks that would kill “hundreds of Americans” as a casus belli justifying his assassination. The White House is also asserting that the killing was done to “stop a war,” which makes no sense even coming from the addled tweet-conditioned brain of Donald J. Trump. And if one still harbors suspicions that Trump might actually be of sound mind, it is possible to listen to him on the day after the assassination while speaking to a gathering of his supporters at an evangelical church in Florida. He told the cheering crowd that “God is on our side” and that Soleimani “…was planning a very major attack, and we got him.” The audience went wild in approval, chanting “four more years.”

Such chest-beating moments of pretend strong leadership coming from president bone spurs as well as similar justifications for an assassination that will be surfacing over the next few days simply do not pass the smell test. Take the window dressing away from the Pentagon and media propaganda and all one has left is that the United States illegally and openly killed a senior official from a country with which it is not at war and did so without the consent of the third country where the assassination took place with which the U.S. is also not at war. The assassination was not in reality based on any imminent threat and is therefore illegal under international law and is undeniably an unconstitutional act of war directed against both Iran and Iraq.

What is particularly bizarre about Trump-think on this issue is that the assassination was carried out right in the open in a country with which the United States has had of late a friendly relationship and which allows American soldiers to be based on its soil. Judging from the crowds of protesters gathered in Baghdad to protest the killing, that somewhat comfortable arrangement is about to end. And it will also end American involvement in neighboring Syria, which will be unsustainable without a presence in Iraq. That is the only good news to come out of the assassination.

To be sure nations at war will try and sometimes succeed to assassinate enemy leaders, and the intelligence services of various countries also have been known to kill foreign politicians who are considered to be threatening. America’s best friend Israel leads the world in that statistic. But spy agencies work their mischief on a basis of plausible denial, which means that the countries that carry out assassinations make every effort to obscure their role and permit deniability.

The difference in what the White House has done now is that another page has been turned in the process of the United States going completely rogue. It all started when George W. Bush warned that “you’re either with us or against us.” Barack Obama subsequently labored over his Tuesday morning kill lists, which included American citizens, and the Trump White House has now expanded that license, asserting that it can act with complete impunity and out in the open to kill anyone at any time anywhere without due process or any actual demonstrated cause or accountability.

Donald Trump should be aware that there is considerable downside to the tiger than he has let out of its cage. What will he do if “enemies” all over the world decide to copy the Trump example and kill American diplomats, soldiers and tourists because they oppose U.S. policies. And what about if they up the ante a little bit and kill senior Ambassadors, Congressmen, and even succeed in killing a presidential cabinet member or two. Trump in his foolishness has invited reciprocity and has even granted those who do the killing a certain immunity if they are claiming that they are doing it to stop something worse, i.e. war.

Finally, if the target of the assassination had been anyone but an Iranian, Israel’s enemy, one can count on there being hell to pay with Congress and the media over Trump’s having gone completely off the rails. Assassinating a foreign leader as a new United States government policy has to be an impeachable offense. Forget about obstruction of justice and collusion with foreigners: assassination is the real deal and if it does not constitute a high crime, it is hard for one to imagine what does. By all means let’s impeach Trump based on what he has actually done, not on speculation over what he might have connived at.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has repeatedly justified the U.S. “extreme pressure” directed against Tehran, demanding that Islamic Republic take steps to become a “normal country.” The real question should be, “When will the United States of America become normal?”

Come Home, America: Stop Policing the Globe and Put an End to Wars-Without-End

“Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging its endless wars.”

“The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”

This is how a military empire occupies the globe.”

“As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

Source

“Let us resolve that never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad. This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to the rebuilding of our own nation. America must be restored to a proper role in the world. But we can do that only through the recovery of confidence in ourselves…. together we will call America home to the ideals that nourished us from the beginning. From secrecy and deception in high places; come home, America. From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation; come home, America.”—George S. McGovern, former Senator and presidential candidate

I agree wholeheartedly with George S. McGovern, a former Senator and presidential candidate who opposed the Vietnam War, about one thing: I’m sick of old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

It’s time to bring our troops home.

Bring them home from Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Bring them home from Germany, South Korea and Japan. Bring them home from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. Bring them home from Niger, Chad and Mali. Bring them home from Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

That’s not what’s going to happen, of course.

The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world. Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”

Don’t fall for the propaganda, though: America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.

The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”

This is how a military empire occupies the globe.

Already, American military service people are being deployed to far-flung places in the Middle East and elsewhere in anticipation of the war drums being sounded over Iran.

This Iran crisis, salivated over by the neocons since prior to the Iraq War and manufactured by war hawks who want to jumpstart the next world war, has been a long time coming.

Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton: they all have done their part to ensure that the military industrial complex can continue to get rich at taxpayer expense.

Take President Trump, for instance.

Despite numerous campaign promises to stop America’s “endless wars,” once elected, Trump has done a complete about-face, deploying greater numbers of troops to the Middle East, ramping up the war rhetoric, and padding the pockets of defense contractors. Indeed, Trump is even refusing to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in the face of a request from the Iraqi government for us to leave.

Obama was no different: he also pledged—if elected—to bring the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan and reduce America’s oversized, and overly costly, military footprint in the world. Of course, that didn’t happen.

Pity the Nation: War Spending Is Bankrupting America

Yet while the rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are policing the globe, these wars abroad (in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen and now Iran) aren’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, are certainly not making America great again, and are undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.

War spending is bankrupting America.

Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.

In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.

Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging its endless wars.

Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.

In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.

Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.

As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors. Indeed, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”

Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.

A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:

$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.

That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.

Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.

Americans have thus far allowed themselves to be spoon-fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda that keeps them content to wave flags with patriotic fervor and less inclined to look too closely at the mounting body counts, the ruined lives, the ravaged countries, the blowback arising from ill-advised targeted-drone killings and bombing campaigns in foreign lands, or the transformation of our own homeland into a warzone.

That needs to change.

The U.S. government is not making the world any safer. It’s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. Since 9/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 human beings. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.

The U.S. government is not making America any safer. It’s exposing American citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America’s use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback.

The 9/11 attacks were blowback. The Boston Marathon Bombing was blowback. The attempted Times Square bomber was blowback. The Fort Hood shooter, a major in the U.S. Army, was blowback.

The assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani by a U.S. military drone strike will, I fear, spur yet more blowback against the American people.

The war hawks’ militarization of America—bringing home the spoils of war (the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.) and handing them over to local police, thereby turning America into a battlefield—is also blowback.

James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” As Madison explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

We are seeing this play out before our eyes.

The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.

At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

This is the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us more than 50 years ago not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that emerged following the war—one that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.

We failed to heed his warning.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, there’s not much time left before we reach the zero hour.

It’s time to stop policing the globe, end these wars-without-end, and bring the troops home before it’s too late.

*

This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © John W. Whitehead, Global Research, 2020

America’s Decline Around the World, Is it for the Best?

“America’s 700 plus billion-dollar defense budget, riddled with waste while the American people suffer from massive cuts in services and benefits, reeks of failed policy, failed leadership and a failure on the part of the once guiding hand of the West to repeat Reagan’s efforts against the Soviet Union.

That policy failure, one based on following more the myth of Reagan than the facts, has been suicidal. Reagan buried America in debt, destroyed America’s manufacturing base, impoverished America’s cities and flooded the nation with narcotics, the real scandal behind Iran Contra.”

Source

journal-neo.org

Author: Gordon Duff

Jan 3, 2020

Under President Trump, the US has faced one disaster after another, Europe, NATO, North Korea, and of course, the Middle East.

Let us catalog a few:

• Pakistan: Under Imran Khan, that nation has moved toward Russia, with huge investment programs already in place and military aid not far behind.
• India: That nation continues its military buildup as well, with broad technological partnership with Russia delivering new technologies like the Brahmos missile
• North Korea: Attempts to threaten North Korea into dropping its missile and nuke programs totally backfired, with North Korea approaching the ability to hit the US with thermonuclear weapons mounted on ICBMs, all coming online while Trump continues to “negotiate.”
• Israel: Trump’s slavish support of Israel has led to a 169 to 2 vote in the UN General Assembly condemning Israel for its treatment of Palestinian refugees, one of 18 resolutions against Israel including broad human rights condemnations.
• Iran/Syria: Russia’s inclusion of Iran with Turkey in the Astana Process has overshadowed and, in reality, crushed any US influence in events in Syria.
• Turkey: Economic cooperation between Russia and Syria has never been greater while Turkey now threatens to close a major US base, which represents de facto abandonment of NATO, due to Trump’s sanction threats over Erdogan’s purchase of an S400 air defense system. The S400 would only be required if Turkey feared war with the United States, a supposed ally.
• Syria: With Trump announcing publicly that the US is bringing in Exxon to steal Syrian oil, while Russia, Iran and Syria cleanse that nation of terrorists, the world now views America’s role as broadly criminal.
• Germany: Trump’s attempt to stop Nord Stream 2 through sanctions will only tie that nation more to Russia economically and threaten the US military stance in Europe, which is largely based in Germany, as well. Germany simply doesn’t trust the US as a partner of any kind.
• Venezuela: More failed regime change as the most “ham handed” CIA operation since the Bay of Pigs, failing miserably.

Past this, efforts to squeeze Russia in an arms race has led that nation to develop and, by December 2019 begin deployment of, a series of new weapons that totally turns the tables on American military dominance.

Vladimir Putin’s January 2018 announcement of a series of new strategic weapons has been more than an empty threat. With ten hypersonic vehicles with warheads up to two megaton in place and ten more to be quickly deployed, American efforts at missile defense are shattered for a generation or more.

America’s 700 plus billion-dollar defense budget, riddled with waste while the American people suffer from massive cuts in services and benefits, reeks of failed policy, failed leadership and a failure on the part of the once guiding hand of the West to repeat Reagan’s efforts against the Soviet Union.

That policy failure, one based on following more the myth of Reagan than the facts, has been suicidal. Reagan buried America in debt, destroyed America’s manufacturing base, impoverished America’s cities and flooded the nation with narcotics, the real scandal behind Iran Contra.

The issue of course is moral decline, bullying abroad, oligarchical rule well outside the law at home, dictatorship, propaganda, division, and rot.

Worst of all has been the American opinion, something hidden from the world, one held by many, perhaps even a majority, that Russian leadership around the world is preferred to that of an American government few Americans trust.

From Pew Research:

“When the National Election Study began asking about trust in government in 1958, about three-quarters of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing almost always or most of the time. Trust in government began eroding during the 1960s, amid the escalation of the Vietnam War, and the decline continued in the 1970s with the Watergate scandal and worsening economic struggles. Confidence in government recovered in the mid-1980s before falling again in the mid-1990s. But as the economy grew in the late 1990s so too did confidence in government. Public trust reached a three-decade high shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks but declined quickly thereafter. Since 2007, the share saying they can trust the government always or most of the time has not surpassed 30%.

Currently, 21% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they can trust government, compared with 14% of Democrats and Democratic leaners. Throughout Obama’s tenure, more Democrats than Republicans reported trusting the government, though that has flipped since Trump’s election. Since the 1970s, trust in government has been consistently higher among members of the party that controls the White House than among the opposition party. However, Republicans have been much more reactive than Democrats to changes in political power. Republicans have expressed much higher levels of trust during Republican than during Democratic presidencies, while Democrats’ attitudes have tended to be more consistent, regardless of which party controls the White House.”

There is another problem here, that of how a minority party, the Republicans, can control government in the US. From Pew Research again:

“For more than 70 years, with few exceptions, more Americans have identified as Democrats than Republicans. But the share of independents, which surpassed the percentages of either Democrats or Republicans several years ago, continues to increase. Currently, 39% Americans identify as independents, 32% as Democrats and 23% as Republicans.”

Even with a censored press, Americans are more than aware that elections in the US are decided by money, not money which buys advertising or even smears and wild conspiracy theories but rather pays for voter suppression, vote tampering, wide patterns of gerrymandering and outright bribery of public officials, long legalized in the US under “Citizens United,” a 2005 5/4 decision by a rigged Supreme Court.

Thus, when Russia develops new weapons or makes advances around the world, Americans see it as a “safety valve” against aggression and injustice at home and abroad, done in the name of the American people, by the corrupt oligarchical rulers the same American people feel powerless to reign in.

Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

Finian Cunningham: Postmortem Assassination of Iran’s General Soleimani

Pathetic doofus in chief

Source

http://www.strategic-culture.org

Finian Cunningham

January 5, 2020

Even before he was buried, Iranian General Qasem Soleimani had to endure a second assassination at the hands of the Americans; besmirching his character and military history.

U.S. President Trump declared the “world’s number-one terrorist” had been “caught” and “terminated” by American forces when they launched an airstrike on Soleimani’s motorcade at Baghdad airport on Friday, January 3. The leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force was blown to pieces, his body later identified only from a distinctive red-stone ring he wore on his left hand.

At least six other members of the convoy were also killed including Abud Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy commander of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). The PMF are an officially recognized component of the Iraq national defense forces, which the U.S. is supposedly allied with.

Soleimani and Al-Muhandis were revered in Iran and Iraq, and across the Middle East, for their masterful defeat of the Islamic State terror group and its multiple al Qaeda offshoots. Iran and Iranian-backed militia were crucial in the routing of the al Qaeda-linked terror network in Iraq and Syria.

Soleimani was also feted as a national hero in Iran for his courageous leadership during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88).

Now, according to the Trump administration, the Iranian general was no different from the dead leaders of Al Qaeda and Islamic State, Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Trump boasted that the world was safer (again) because he had ordered the killing of Soleimani.

“Let this be a warning to terrorists: if you value your own life, you will not threaten the lives of our citizens,” Trump declared hours after the assassination. He bracketed Soleimani’s death with “these monsters”, saying the Iranian commander had “a sick passion for killing innocent people”.

Heaping insult upon insult, Trump told evangelical Christian supporters in Florida that the U.S. “did not war” but rather was seeking “a world of peace and harmony”. The president said he authorized the killing of Soleimani in order to “prevent war” with Iran.

That authorization was given from his luxury beach mansion at Mar-a-Lago in Florida while he reportedly ate dinner of meatloaf and ice cream with a close circle of friends.

Trump claimed he had received “actionable intelligence” that Soleimani was preparing plots to kill hundreds of American diplomats and troops across the Middle East. That’s just U.S. intel voodoo logic for which evidence is never presented. He also said the Iranian general was responsible for “thousands” of American troop deaths and the death of “millions” of innocent people. That’s plain slander.

Depicting General Qasem Soleimani as a terrorist is the logical step in the American propaganda narrative that demonizes Iran as the “world’s top terror sponsor”. But that narrative is as bogus as American claims of virtue. The need to assassinate Soleimani’s character stems from the need for the Trump administration to justify its barbaric act of murder.

Trump’s claims about eradicating terrorists and his single-handed defeat of the IS caliphate in Syria and Iraq is the really “sick passion” here.

If it wasn’t for the strategic intervention of Iran led by Soleimani, as well as that of Russia, the war in Syria would have expanded the terror caliphate in that country and Iraq, and no doubt to other countries in the Middle East.

It was illegal U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – killing over one million people and destroying whole societies – that forged the pandemic disease of terrorism across the region. The Americans and their allies have utilized these terror groups for regime change operations.

Soleimani was not a mastermind of terrorism, as his American detractors allege. He was a mastermind of legitimate resistance against American illegal occupation and state-sponsored terrorism in the Middle East. The defeat of Islamic State and their assorted proxies in Syria and Iraq exposed the dirty war that the U.S. had orchestrated and its shambolic, hypocritical claims about “fighting terrorism”.

In a mark of respect, Russia’s Ministry of Defense paid homage to General Soleimani for his contribution to defeating terror groups in Syria and Iraq.

That is why Soleimani became such a hate-figure for Washington. He had thwarted the American imperialist agenda for subjugating the region according to its strategic desires.

Trump and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are absurdly saying the U.S. doesn’t want a war with Iran. Pompeo has even said the White House is “trying to de-escalate tensions” with Tehran.

With cloying disingenuousness, the president said: “I’ve deep respect for the Iranian people – they are a remarkable people with an incredible heritage and unlimited potential. We do not seek regime change. However, the Iranian regime’s aggression in the region, including the use of proxy fighters to destabilize its neighbors, must end and it must end now.”

Iranian regime’s aggression? This from a U.S. regime that is simultaneously bombing several countries, has tens of thousand of troops in the region, uses strangulating economic sanctions/warfare, rips up international arms control agreements, and has the blood of millions on its hands.

Hawkish former National Security Advisor John Bolton congratulated Trump over the assassination of Soleimani as the first step towards regime change.

Another hawkish acolyte Senator Lindsey Graham helped formulate the logic of war escalation, by stating: “If Iran continues to attack America and our allies, they should pay the heaviest of prices, which includes the destruction of their oil refineries.”

The U.S. under Donald Trump is caught up fatally in its own delusions and web of propaganda lies. A nation whose leader celebrates murder while attending an ecstatic church meeting is a nation that is doomed.

The US Government Lies Constantly, And The Burden Of Proof Is On The Accuser

Source

caitlinjohnstone.com

AUTHOR: CAITLIN JOHNSTONE

Jan 5, 2019

Over the last 48 hours I’ve been splitting my free time between (A) learning as much as I possibly can about the US assassination of top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and (B) arguing with people online who are uncritically swallowing US government claims about why that assassination was necessary. I always engage such political debates because they’re a valuable source of information on what propaganda narratives people are buying into, and therefore which propaganda narratives need to be addressed.

What has been made abundantly clear from this particular engagement is that those who have bought into the Trump administration’s completely unsubstantiated claims about Soleimani are sincerely unaware that they have unquestioningly bought into unsubstantiated US government narratives. People tend to get their information from tightly insulated echo chambers, and if you inhabit an echo chamber that supports the current president all you’ll get is a bunch of officials, pundits and reporters saying in a confident-sounding tone of voice that Soleimani needed to be taken out. Since they’re surrounded by chatter affirming that Soleimani had attacked America and/or posed an imminent threat in the near future, they assume that chatter must be based on some actual facts in evidence.

It is not.

Dan Maul@DanVMaul

This is very telling. I have read every single reply. Not one produced even the slightest shred of indication that he posed an imminent threat to the US.

Seriously, Stalin himself would’ve been proud of such a display of blind, unflinching acceptance of the deep state narrative. https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1213591198465544193 …

Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz

Show me your very best evidence that Soleimani posed an imminent threat to Americans and needed to be taken out immediately. Bonus points if you can explain how the evidence you provide rises to the level of proof required in a post-Iraq invasion world.

133

5:02 PM – Jan 4, 2020

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When I speak out online against Trump’s act of war on Iran and interact one-on-one with those who object to what I’m saying, the disparity between what they think they know and what they actually know gets very quickly highlighted. Simply by my challenging people to prove the claims that they are making about Soleimani planning to attack Americans, attacking a US embassy, directing a strike that allegedly killed a mysteriously unnamed US contractor in Iraq, killing hundreds of US soldiers in Iraq, that he’s a “terrorist”, etc, they quickly realize that they have literally no evidence for their claims beyond the unsubstantiated assertions of US government officials and people who unquestioningly repeated those assertions.

And from there I just ask them, “How well has uncritically swallowing US government narratives about the need for military action worked out for you in the past?”

Nobody wants to admit that they are doing such a thing, least of all a Trump supporter who’s poured plenty of mental energy into distancing this administration from the previous Republican occupant of the White House. But that is indeed exactly what they are doing: uncritically swallowing baseless claims by US government officials about the need to advance a pre-existing military agenda, in a way that is indistinguishable from the cult-like behavior of Bush supporters in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion.

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

 · 15h

Replying to @realDonaldTrump

….hundreds of Iranian protesters. He was already attacking our Embassy, and preparing for additional hits in other locations. Iran has been nothing but problems for many years. Let this serve as a WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have…..

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

….targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats!

210K

2:52 PM – Jan 4, 2020

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In reality, there’s no evidence for any of the reasons we’ve been offered for why Iran needed to be provoked into an almost inevitable retaliation that Trump is currently tweeting will result in all-out war:

• The claim that Soleimani posed an “imminent threat” is completely without evidence, rumored to be “razor thin“, and entirely debunked in this excellent essay by Craig Murray.
• Mike Pence’s claim that Soleimani assisted 9/11 terrorists is so ridiculous that even the war-loving Washington Post dismissed it.
• There’s no proof that Soleimani directed the strike that allegedly killed a US contractor, or that that contractor even existed.
• There’s no proof that Soleimani was involved in any “attack” on any US embassy, leaving aside the obvious fact that a little graffiti on the walls wouldn’t justify his assassination if he did.
• The “hundreds of American deaths” line you hear regurgitated by everyone from Trump to Elizabeth Warren actually refers to Iraqis defending themselves from an illegal US invasion with some training from Iran. The claim that Iran was behind Iraqi bombs is without evidence and wouldn’t matter if it were true; claiming the inhabitants of an invaded nation don’t have the right to defend themselves is absurd, regardless of where they got their weaponry.
• The claim that Soleimani was “a terrorist” is only made because the branch of the Iranian military he commanded was arbitrarily designated a terrorist organization by the US government last year, a designation that any foreign government could just as easily make for any branch of the US military. He was actually a fearsome enemy of ISIS and al-Qaeda and played a massive role in halting the spread of ISIS.

We are being lied to, yet again, about yet another war on yet another geostrategically crucial Middle Eastern nation. And a huge percentage of the population is marching right along with it. When Iran retaliates for Soleimani’s assassination, these propagandized sheep will be herded by the political/media class into believing that the attack was completely unprovoked. And if their credulity thus far is any indication, they’ll swallow the whole load without so much as a twinge of gag reflex.

The US government has a very extensively documented history of lying to advance pre-existing military agendas. This is an entirely indisputable fact. It’s been universally true from generation to generation, from administration to administration, and from political party to political party. The Afghanistan Papers came out just a few weeks ago further documenting this already conclusively established fact. Anyone who just accepts US government assertions about the need for military force without a mountain of independently verifiable proof is, to put it nicely, a complete fucking idiot.

The demand for proof would be normal even if the entity in question didn’t have an extensive history of lying about these things, because, as anyone with even a cursory understanding of logic already knows, the burden of proof is always on the party making the claim. When it comes to incalculably important matters like life and death, demanding that the burden of proof be met is just being a sensible human being.

Add in the fact that the US government is known to lie constantly about these matters, and believing its current claims about Soleimani makes as much sense as believing a known compulsive liar who has deceived you many times when he tells you it’s urgent that you go murder your neighbor right this instant.

Debating the current Iran situation, then, is simply a matter of holding the unassailable positions that (A) the US government lies constantly, and (B) the burden of proof is on the party making the claim. In a post-Iraq invasion world, the level of proof required is very, very high, and the Trump administration has taken no steps whatsoever to even providing anything that could qualify as evidence.

People will often try to get around this unassailable argument by contending “Well where is your proof that they’re lying?” This is called shifting the burden of proof, and it is a logical fallacy.

I lay this all out not because I expect the US government to suddenly begin conducting itself rationally or providing proof of its claims that rises to the level required in a post-Iraq invasion world, but because streamlining our thinking in this way helps to avoid confusion in a landscape that is saturated with propaganda and its mindless regurgitators.

The only sane response to US government claims about the need for military force is intense skepticism. If US government officials begin telling us that something happened necessitating military intervention, your default assumption should always, always, always be that they are lying. And you should hold that position until the (highly unlikely and historically unprecedented) event that conclusive, independently verifiable proof of their claims is provided.

No changes were made after the Iraq invasion to keep the US government from ever again deceiving Americans into war. No new laws were made, no policies changed, no war crimes tribunals were held; no one was even fired. This is because they had every intention of doing it again. And now here’s the US government again spouting lies about why it was necessary to initiate war with another Middle Eastern nation. And people are swallowing it hook, line and sinker.

The more skepticism we can encourage toward current deceptions about Iran, the easier it will be to encourage skepticism about the next wave of escalations, which make no mistake are absolutely on their way. Spread the word.

“We Do Not Seek War,” Says President Who Just Started A War

Source

With permission from

caitlinjohnstone.com

AUTHOR: CAITLIN JOHNSTONE

Jan 4, 2019

President Trump has been steadfastly assuring the world that the United States government does not wish to start the war it has already started by assassinating Iran’s top general.

“We are a peace-loving nation and my administration remains firmly committed to establishing peace and harmony among the nations in the world,” Trump said in a speech at his luxury Mar-a-Lago getaway on Friday. “We do not seek war, we do not seek nation-building, we do not seek regime change, but as president I will never hesitate to defend the safety of the American people.”

“We took action last night to stop a war. We did not take action to start a war,” the president added.

To be clear, in no way is any part of this a thing. Assassinating a nation’s most senior military official, and then claiming that you do not wish to start a war with that nation, is not a thing.

America is at war with Iran currently. What that war will end up looking like is anyone’s guess right now, but there is no question that a war has been initiated. If any nation had assassinated a top US general via airstrike and then openly admitted to it, the US would immediately be at war with that nation. Without question. An extreme military retaliation would be in the works within minutes of the announcement, and the entire political/media class would fully support that retaliation in whatever form it took.

This may come as a surprise to some Americans, but that same principle holds true for other nations as well.

“His departure to God does not end his path or his mission, but a forceful revenge awaits the criminals who have his blood and the blood of the other martyrs last night on their hands,” Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a statement on Friday.

And, I mean, of course. Of course “forceful revenge” from Iran is in the mail. Only by the most bizarre American exceptionalist mental contortions could this not be blindingly obvious. The question isn’t if Iran will retaliate with extreme force, but when and where. Nobody with any functioning matter between their ears would expect anything else.

Michael Tracey

✔@mtracey

We’re at war with Iran. It’s not a potentiality any more. It just happened. Adjust your frame of reference accordingly

1,142

8:54 PM – Jan 2, 2020

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And of course the US government is now spouting completely unsubstantiated claims about General Qassem Soleimani, and of course the mass media are uncritically repeating those claims as fact, and of course the propagandized masses are regurgitating what their perception management screens have told them to believe. Trump administration officials are claiming without any evidence at all that Soleimani was plotting “imminent attacks on American diplomats and military personnel”, even going so far as trying to marry him to the 9/11 attacks and a host of other unsubstantiated excuses.

Anyone who believes any of this is a brainwashed imbecile. Because of the US government’s extensive history of lying to manufacture support for preexisting military agendas, the only sane response to unsubstantiated US government claims about targeted nations is absolute skepticism. That skepticism should remain in place until mountains of independently verifiable proof of the claims made has been provided. This is the only acceptable level of evidence that critical thinking permits in a post-Iraq invasion world.

This should be extremely obvious to everyone. The fact that it isn’t is the result of generations of increasingly sophisticated propaganda manipulating the way people think about war, what it is, and how it works. My social media notifications are currently flooded with Trump supporters assuring me that Soleimani was a “bad guy” and Trump is therefore a “good guy”, and that assassinating the top military official of a sovereign nation is a perfectly sane and acceptable thing for a government to do.

Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz

“I Oppose Interventionism, But-” But Nothing. Stop Being A Pro Bono CIA Propagandist.

Wrote this last year about apologists for Trump’s warmongering, and it applies equally to the “but Soleimani was a BAD GUY!” propaganda line they’re regurgitating today.https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/02/02/i-oppose-interventionism-but-but-nothing-stop-being-a-pro-bono-cia-propagandist/ …

“I Oppose Interventionism, But-” But Nothing. Stop Being A Pro Bono CIA Propagandist.

In a recent interview with The Corbett Report, the Ron Paul Institute’s Daniel McAdams spoke disdainfully of those ostensibly anti-interventionist libertarians who picked this moment of all t…

caitlinjohnstone.com

233

4:51 PM – Jan 3, 2020

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Don’t do this. Don’t advance war propaganda narratives for the US government.

Those who spread war propaganda are participating in that war just as much as those who actually go and fight in it, only they’re playing a far safer, far more cowardly, and far more dishonest role. A man who flies to Iran and murders Iranians with firearms is at least engaging in the war in a way that he will have to grapple with existentially for the rest of his life. A man who regurgitates Fox News propaganda on Twitter will then eat a pizza, have a wank, go to bed and sleep like a baby. But they both facilitated mass murder based on lies and American supremacist imperialism.

The war that Trump has started must be opposed forcefully and aggressively. Do everything you can to wake people up to what’s going on. This could get very, very ugly.

I’m going to keep following this important story and publishing regular updates as it unfolds. I encourage everyone else to pay close attention to it as well. Trump’s war with Iran should be front and center for everyone who cares about humanity.

The Art of Doublespeak: Propaganda and Mind Control

Source

http://www.darkmoon.me

Edward Curtin
The Unz Review
December 10, 2019

In the 1920s, the influential American intellectual Walter Lippman argued that the average person was incapable of seeing or understanding the world clearly and needed to be guided by experts behind the social curtain.

In a number of books he laid out the theoretical foundations for the practical work of Edward Bernays, who developed “public relations” (aka propaganda) to carry out this task for the ruling elites. Bernays had honed his skills while working as a propagandist for the United States during World War I, and after the war he set himself up as a public relations counselor in New York City.

There is a fascinating exchange at the beginning of Adam Curtis’s documentary, The Century of Self, where Bernays, then nearly 100 years old but still very sharp, reveals his manipulative mindset and that of so many of those who have followed in his wake. He says the reason he couldn’t call his new business “propaganda” was because the Germans had given propaganda a “bad name,” and so he came up with the euphemism “public relations.” He then adds that “if you could use it [i.e. propaganda] for war, you certainly could use it for peace.” Of course, he never used PR for peace but just to manipulate public opinion (he helped engineer the CIA coup against the democratically elected Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954 with fake news broadcasts). He says “the Germans gave propaganda a bad name,” not Bernays and the United States with their vast campaign of lies, mainly aimed at the American people to get their support for going to a war they opposed (think weapons of mass destruction). He sounds proud of his war propaganda work that resounded to his credit since it led to support for the “war to end all wars” and subsequently to a hit movie about WWI , Yankee Doodle Dandy, made in 1942 to promote another war, since the first one somehow didn’t achieve its lofty goal.

As Bernays has said in his book Propaganda,

The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today.

He was a propagandist to the end. I suspect most viewers of the film are taken in by these softly spoken words of an old man sipping a glass of wine at a dinner table with a woman who is asking him questions. I have shown this film to hundreds of students and none has noticed his legerdemain. It is an example of the sort of hocus-pocus I will be getting to shortly, the sly insertion into seemingly liberal or matter-of-fact commentary of statements that imply a different story. The placement of convincing or confusing disingenuous ingredients into a truth sandwich – for Bernays knew that the bread of truth is essential to conceal untruth.

In the following years, Bernays, Lippman, and their ilk were joined by social “scientists,” psychologists, and sundry others intent on making a sham out of the idea of democracy by developing strategies and techniques for the engineering of social consensus consonant with the wishes of the ruling classes.

Their techniques of propaganda developed exponentially with the development of technology, the creation of the CIA, its infiltration of all the major media, and that agency’s courting of what the CIA official Cord Meyer called in the 1950s “the compatible left,” having already had the right in its pocket. Today most people are, as is said, “wired,” and they get their information from the electronic media that is mostly controlled by giant corporations in cahoots with government propagandists. Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks increased or decreased over your lifetime. The answer is obvious: the average people that Lippman and Bernays trashed are losing and the ruling elites are winning.

This is not just because powerful propagandists are good at controlling so-called “average” people’s thinking, but, perhaps more importantly, because they are also adept – probably more so – at confusing or directing the thinking of those who consider themselves above average, those who still might read a book or two or have the concentration to read multiple articles that offer different perspectives on a topic. This is what some call the professional and intellectual classes, perhaps 15-20 % of the population, most of whom are not the ruling elites but their employees and sometimes their mouthpieces. It is this segment of the population that considers itself “informed,” but the information they imbibe is often sprinkled with bits of misdirection, both intentional and not, that beclouds their understanding of important public matters but leaves them with the false impression that they are in the know.

Recently I have noticed a group of interconnected examples of how this group of the population that exerts influence incommensurate with their numbers has contributed to the blurring of lines between fact and fiction. Within this group there are opinion makers who are often journalists, writers, and cultural producers of some sort or other, and then the larger number of the intellectual or schooled class who follow their opinions. This second group then passes on their received opinions to those who look up to them.

There is a notorious propaganda outfit called Bellingcat, started by an unemployed Englishman named Eliot Higgins, that has been funded by The Atlantic Council, a think-tank with deep ties to the U.S. government, NATO, war manufacturers, and their allies, and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), another infamous U.S. front organization heavily involved in so-called color revolution regime change operations all around the world, that has just won the International Emmy Award for best documentary.

The film with the Orwellian title, Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World, received its Emmy at a recent ceremony in New York City. Bellingcat is an alleged group of amateur on-line researchers who have spent years shilling for the U.S. instigated war against the Syrian government, blaming the Douma chemical attack and others on the Assad government, and for the anti-Russian propaganda connected to, among other things, the Skripal poisoning case in England, and the downing of flight MH17 plane in Ukraine. It has been lauded by the corporate mainstream media in the west. Its support for the equally fraudulent White Helmets (also funded by the US and the UK) in Syria has also been praised by the western corporate media while being dissected as propaganda by many excellent independent journalists such as Eva Bartlett, Vanessa Beeley, Catte Black, among others. It’s had its work skewered by the likes of Seymour Hersh and MIT professor Theodore Postol, and its US government connections pointed out by many others, including Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal at The Gray Zone. And now we have the mainstream media’s wall of silence on the leaks from the Organization for the Prohibition on Chemical Weapons (OPCW) concerning the Douma chemical attack and the doctoring of their report that led to the illegal U.S. bombing of Syria in the spring of 2018. Bellingcat was at the forefront of providing justification for such bombing, and now the journalists Peter Hitchens, Tareq Harrad (who recently resigned from Newsweek after accusing the publication of suppressing his revelations about the OPCW scandal) and others are fighting an uphill battle to get the truth out.

Yet Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World won the Emmy, fulfilling Bernays’ point about films being the greatest unconscious carriers of propaganda in the world today.

Who presented the Emmy Award to the film makers, but none other than the rebel journalist Chris Hedges. Why he did so, I don’t know. But that he did so clearly sends a message to those who follow his work and trust him that it’s okay to give a major cultural award to a propaganda outfit. But then, perhaps he doesn’t consider Bellingcat to be that.

Nor, one presumes, does The Intercept, the billionaire Pierre Omidyar owned publication associated with Glen Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, and also read by many progressive-minded people. The Intercept that earlier this year disbanded the small team that was tasked with reviewing and releasing more of the massive trove of documents they received from Edward Snowden six years ago, a minute number of which have ever been released or probably ever will be. As Whitney Webb pointed out, last year The Intercept hosted a workshop for Bellingcat. She wrote:

The Intercept, along with its parent company First Look Media,recently hosted a workshop for pro-war, Google-funded organization Bellingcat in New York. The workshop, which cost $2,500 per person to attend and lasted five days, aimed to instruct participants in how to perform investigations using “open source” tools — with Bellingcat’s past, controversial investigations for use as case studies…Thus, while The Intercept has long publicly promoted itself as an anti-interventionist and progressive media outlet, it is becoming clearer that – largely thanks to its ties to Omidyar – it is increasingly an organization that has more in common with Bellingcat, a group that launders NATO and U.S. propaganda and disguises it as “independent” and “investigative journalism.”

Then we have Jefferson Morley, the editor of The Deep State, former Washington Post journalist, and JFK assassination researcher, who has written a praiseworthy review of the Bellingcat film and who supports Bellingcat. “In my experience, Bellingcat is credible,” he writes in an Alternet article, “Bellingcat documentary has the pace and plot of a thriller.”

Morley has also just written an article for Counterpunch – “Why the Douma Chemical Attack Wasn’t a ‘Managed Massacre’” – in which he disputes the claim that the April 7, 2018 attack in the Damascus suburb was a false flag operation carried out by Assad’s opponents. “I do not see any evidence proving that Douma was a false flag incident,” he writes in this article that is written in a style that leaves one guessing as to what exactly he is saying. It sounds convincing unless one concentrates, and then his double messages emerge. Yet it is the kind of article that certain “sophisticated” left-wing readers might read and feel is insightful. But then Morley, who has written considerably about the CIA, edits a website that advertises itself as “the thinking person’s portal to the world of secret government,” and recently had an exchange with former CIA Director John Brennan where “Brennan put a friendly finger on my chest,” said in February 2017, less than a month after Trump was sworn in as president, that:

With a docile Republican majority in Congress and a demoralized Democratic Party in opposition, the leaders of the Deep State are the most—perhaps the only—credible check in Washington on what Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) calls Trump’s “wrecking ball presidency.”

Is it any wonder that some people might be a bit confused?

“I know what you’re thinking about,” said Tweedledum; “but it isn’t so, nohow.”

“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”

As a final case in point, there is a recent book by Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control, the story of the chemist known as Dr. Death who ran the CIA’s MK-ULTRA mind control project, using LSD, torture, electric shock therapy, hypnosis, etc.; developed sadistic methods of torture still used in black sites around the world; and invented various ingenious techniques for assassination, many of which were aimed at Fidel Castro. Gottlieb was responsible for brutal prison and hospital experiments and untold death and suffering inflicted on all sorts of innocent people. His work was depraved in the deepest sense; he worked with Nazis who experimented on Jews despite being Jewish himself.

Kinzer writes in depth about this man who considered himself a patriot and a spiritual person – a humane torturer and killer. It is an eye-opening book for anyone who does not know about Gottlieb, who gave the CIA the essential tools they use in their “organized crime” activities around the world – in the words of Douglass Valentine, the author of The CIA as Organized Crime and The Phoenix Program. Kinzer’s book is good history on Gottlieb; however, he doesn’t venture into the present activities of the CIA and Gottlieb’s patriotic followers, who no doubt exist and go about their business in secret.

After recounting in detail the sordid history of Gottlieb’s secret work that is nauseating to read about, Kinzer leaves the reader with these strange words:

Gottlieb was not a sadist, but he might well have been…. Above all he was an instrument of history. Understanding him is a deeply disturbing way of understanding ourselves.

What possibly could this mean? Not a sadist? An instrument of history? Understanding ourselves? These few sentences, dropped out of nowhere, pull the rug out from under what is generally an illuminating history and what seems like a moral indictment. This language is pure mystification.

Kinzer also concludes that because Gottlieb said so, the CIA failed in their efforts to develop methods of mind control and ended MK-ULTRA’s experiments long ago. Why would he believe the word of a man who personified the agency he worked for: a secret liar? He writes,

When Sydney Gottlieb brought MK-ULTRA to its end in the early 1960s, he told his CIA superiors that he had found no reliable way to wipe away memory, make people abandon their consciences, or commit crimes and then forget them.

SIDNEY  GOTTLIEB
Variously dubbed as a “mad scientist” — “The CIA’s scapegoat” — and “America’s Dr Mengele”

As for those who might think otherwise, Kinzer suggests they have vivid imaginations and are caught up in conspiracy thinking: “This [convincing others that the CIA had developed methods of mind control when they hadn’t] is Sydney Gottlieb’s most unexpected legacy,” he asserts. He says this although Richard Helms, the CIA Director, destroyed all MK-Ultra records.

He says that Allen Dulles, Gottlieb, and Helms themselves were caught up in a complete fantasy about mind control because they had seen too many movies and read too many books; mind control was impossible, a failure, a myth, he maintains. It is the stuff of popular culture, entertainment.

In an interview with Chris Hedges, interestingly posted by Jefferson Morley at his website, The Deep State, Hedges agrees with Kinzer. Gottlieb, Dulles, et al. were all deluded. Mind control was impossible. You couldn’t create a Manchurian Candidate; by implication, someone like Sirhan Sirhan could not have been programmed to be a fake Manchurian Candidate and to have no memory of what he did, as he claims. He could not have been mind-controlled by the CIA to perform his part as the seeming assassin of Senator Robert Kennedy while the real killer shot RFK from behind. People who think like this should get real.

Furthermore, as is so common in books such as Kinzer’s, he repeats the canard that JFK and RFK knew about and pressured the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro. This is demonstrably false, as shown by the Church Committee and the Assassinations Record Review Board, among many others. That Kinzer takes the word of notorious liars like Richard Helms and the top-level CIA operative Samuel Halpern is simple incredible, something that is hard to consider a mistake. Slipped into a truth sandwich, it is devoured and passed on. But it is false. Bullshit meant to deceive.

But this is how these games are played. If you look carefully, you will see them widely. Inform, enlighten, while throwing in doubletalk and untruths. The small number of people who read such books and articles will come away knowing some history that has no current relevance and being misinformed on other history that does. They will then be in the know, ready to pass their “wisdom” on to those who care to listen. They will not think they are average.

But they will be mind controlled, and the killer cat will roam freely without a bell, ready to devour the unsuspecting mice.

Source

‘The Cost of Sanity, in this Society, Is a Certain Level of Alienation’

Source

consortiumnews.com

By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com

December 12, 2019

We close ourselves off from a full sense of participation when we depart from the consensus worldview, writes Caitlin Johnstone. But in closing that door we open so many more.

 

The late psychonaut/philosopher Terence McKenna once said “The cost of sanity, in this society, is a certain level of alienation,” and I think my regular readers will immediately and experientially understand exactly what he was talking about.

It’s not always easy to be on the outside of consensus reality. Our entire society, after all, has been built upon consensus — upon a shared agreement about what specific mouth sounds mean, on what money is and how it works, on how we should all behave toward each other in public spaces, and on what normal human behavior in general looks like.

We all share a learned agreement that we picked up from our culture in early childhood that it’s normal and acceptable to stand around with your hands in your pockets and babble about the weather to anyone who gets too close to you, for example, whereas it would be considered weird and disruptive to stand around slathered in Cheese Whiz shrieking the word “Poop!” But we could just as easily reverse that consensus on behavioral norms tomorrow, and as long as we all agreed, we could do that without missing a beat.

In exactly the same way, there exists a general consensus about what’s going on in our world at the moment. There’s a general consensus that we live in the kind of society we were taught about in school: a free and democratic nation which maybe did some not so great things in the past, but is now a supremely virtuous beacon of light on this earth that kicked Hitler’s ass and then surfed into the present day on a wave of truth and sensible fiscal policy. There’s a general consensus that the news reporters on our screens paint us a more or less accurate picture of world affairs, that there are a lot of Bad Guys in our world with whom the Good Guys in our government are fighting, and that most of our nation’s problems are caused by the people in the other political party.

This consensus is grounded in delusion. It is insanity.

In reality, of course, we live in a world where our understanding of the world is constantly being deceitfully manipulated by oligarchic media propaganda and the utterances of oligarch-owned politicians. Where elections are mostly just a live-action role-playing game that allows the rabble to pretend that they have some degree of influence over the things that their government does. Where our government routinely forms alliances with the worst Bad Guys on the planet while manufacturing consent to topple governments whose downfall would be utterly disastrous. Where our nation’s problems have almost nothing to do with half its population disagreeing with our personal ideology, and practically everything to do with the loose international alliance of plutocrats and government agencies who actually run things behind the facade of the comings and goings of official elected governments.

Friendships Can End 

Sanity means seeing this as it is, rather than subscribing to the mass delusion of the consensus worldview. Which, as you probably already know, can make it difficult to relate to others in some ways. Conversations about politics often either get heated very rapidly when you challenge a tightly-held orthodoxy or dead-end in awkwardness. Friendships can end. Family relationships can be ruined. Collective narratives about you can be woven and circulated within your social circle which have nothing to do with how you actually see things.

And that’s just if you talk about your worldview. If you keep your views to yourself, as many do, that’s just another kind of alienation. It’s to stand outside of public political discourse completely, unable to participate out of fear of the backlash you’d receive from your friends, loved ones and acquaintances if you started talking about President Donald Trump as a symptom rather than the disease, or said that the U.K.’s Jeremy Corbyn is being targeted by a transparently bogus smear campaign, or said that Russia’s interventions in world affairs are clearly dwarfed by America’s by orders of magnitude. The specific heresies will vary depending upon the social circle, but the inability to voice them necessarily comes with the same sense of alienation.

But the alternative to that sense of alienation is to live a lie. It’s to climb back inside the distorted funhouse-mirror reality tunnel of the establishment narrative control matrix and plug yourself back into the same delusions that everyone else is living. Most of us couldn’t even do that if we wanted to. Even if we could, the intense mental gymnastics we’d have to perform just to avoid the discomfort of cognitive dissonance would make it not worth the effort.

We close ourselves off from a full sense of participation in our society when we depart from the consensus worldview, but in closing that door we open so many more. Because, as it turns out, all that effort that people pour into staying on the same wavelength as everyone else closes them off to a vast spectrum of potential human experience. The allure of the mass delusion is that you need to devote yourself to being plugged into it in order to achieve what the mass delusion defines as “success”, but in so doing you lose the ability to leap down psychological and experiential rabbit holes of consciousness that those still jacked into the matrix can’t even imagine. And in so doing you open up the possibility for an immensely more fulfilling and enjoyable life that has really deeply explored the more intimate questions about what it means to be a human being on this planet.

Jiddu Krishnamurti once said, “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” And a profoundly sick society is indeed what we have here. The alienation which we experience is an alienation from something that isn’t worth belonging to anyway.

I began this essay with a quote from one of the celebrated thought leaders of the psychedelic movement, and I think the question of what we can do to cope with the alienation McKenna spoke of is best answered by ending with a quote from another such leader, Timothy Leary:

“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the ‘normal people’ as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like ‘Have a nice day’ and ‘Weather’s awful today, eh?’, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like ‘Tell me something that makes you cry’ or ‘What do you think deja vu is for?’ Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others.”

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium. Follow her work on Facebook, Twitter, or her website. She has a podcast and is the author of “Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.” 

This article was re-published with permission.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

Someone Interfered In The UK Election, And It Wasn’t Russia

Goodbye Britain. Enjoy your new masters, the Americans. Thanks for Kate Bush and Monthy Python. Sorry for your demise.

Someone Interfered In The UK Election, And It Wasn’t Russia

caitlinjohnstone.com

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE

Dec 13, 2019

Ladies and gentlemen I have here at my fingertips indisputable proof that egregious election meddling took place in the United Kingdom on Thursday.

Before you get all excited, no, it wasn’t the Russians. It wasn’t the Chinese, the Iranians, Cobra Command or the Legion of Doom. I’m not going to get any Rachel Maddow-sized paychecks for revealing this evidence to you, nor am I going to draw in millions of credulous viewers waiting with bated breath for a bombshell revelation of an international conspiracy that will invalidate the results of the election.

In fact, hardly anyone will even care.

Hardly anyone will care because this election interference has been happening right out in the open, and was perfectly legal. And nobody will suffer any consequences for it.

Rania Khalek
✔@RaniaKhalek

The centrists and mainstream media outlets are responsible for the right wing win in the UK. They spent all their time bashing and smearing Jeremy Corbyn bc they will always prioritize smashing the left, even if it means allying with the far right. Shameful.

4,593

4:18 PM – Dec 12, 2019

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Nobody will suffer any consequences for interfering in the UK election because the ones doing the interfering were extremely powerful, and that’s who the system is built to serve.

As of this writing British exit polls are indicating a landslide victory for the Tories. Numerous other factors went into this result, including most notably a Labour Party ambivalently straddling an irreconcilable divide on the issue of Brexit, but it is also undeniable that the election was affected by a political smear campaign that was entirely unprecedented in scale and vitriol in the history of western democracy. This smear campaign was driven by billionaire-controlled media outlets, along with intelligence and military agencies, as well as state media like the BBC.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has been described as the most smeared politician in history, and this is a fair description. Journalist Matt Kennard recently compiled documentation of dozens of incidents in which former and current spooks and military officials collaborated with plutocratic media institutions to portray Corbyn as a threat to national security. Journalistic accountability advocates like Media Lens and Jonathan Cook have been working for years to compile evidence of the mass media’s attempts to paint Corbyn as everything from a terrorist sympathizer to a Communist to a Russian asset to an IRA supporter to a closet antisemite. Just the other day The Grayzone documented how establishment narrative manager Ben Nimmo was enlisted to unilaterally target Corbyn with a fact-free Russiagate-style conspiracy theory in the lead-up to the election, a psyop that was uncritically circulated by both right-wing outlets like The Telegraph as well as ostensibly “left”-wing outlets like The Guardian.

Just as Corbyn’s advocacy for the many over the plutocratic few saw him targeted by billionaire media outlets, his view of Palestinians as human beings saw him targeted by the imperialist Israel lobby as exposed in the Al Jazeera documentary The Lobby. For a mountain of links refuting the bogus antisemitism smear directed at Corbyn, a lifelong opponent of antisemitism, check out the deluge of responses to this query I made on Twitter the other day.

This interference continued right up into the day before the election, with the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg flagrantly violating election rules by reporting that early postal votes had been illegally tallied and results were “looking very grim for Labour”.

Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz

There was extreme election interference in the #UKElection. It didn’t come from the Russians. It didn’t come from the Chinese. It came from the billionaire class and its political/media lackeys. And it was perfectly legal.

3,592

2:23 PM – Dec 12, 2019

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The historically unprecedented smear campaign that was directed at Corbyn from the right, the far-right, and from within his own party had an effect. Of course it did. If you say this today on social media you’ll get a ton of comments telling you you’re wrong, telling you every vote against Labour was exclusively due to the British people not wanting to live in a Marxist dystopia, telling you it was exclusively because of Brexit, totally denying any possibility that the years of deceitful mass media narrative management that British consciousness was pummelled with day in and day out prior to the election had any impact whatsoever upon its results.

Right. Sure guys. Persistent campaigns to deliberately manipulate people’s minds using mass media have no effect on their decisions at all. I guess that’s why that whole “advertising” fad never made any money.

I am not claiming here that the billions of dollars worth of free mass media reporting that was devoted to smearing Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party had a greater effect on the election results than Brexit and other strategic stumbles in the party. I’m just saying that it definitely had a much greater effect than the few thousand dollars Russian nationals spent on social media memes in the US, which the American political/media class has been relentlessly shrieking about for three years. To deny that a media smear campaign the size and scope of that directed at Corbyn had an effect is the same as denying that advertising, a trillion-dollar industry, has an effect.

Which means that plutocrats and government agencies indisputably interfered in the British election, to an exponentially greater extent than anything the Russians are even alleged to have done. Yet according to British law it was perfectly legal, and according to British society it was perfectly acceptable. It’s perfectly legal and acceptable for powerful individuals to have a vastly greater influence on a purportedly democratic election than any of the ordinary individuals voting in it.

A free and healthy society would not work this way. A free and healthy society would view all forms of manipulation as taboo and unacceptable. A free and healthy society would not allow the will of members of one small elite class to carry more weight than the will of anyone else. A free and healthy society would give everyone an equal voice at the table, and look after everyone’s concerns. It certainly wouldn’t tolerate a few individuals who already have far too much abusing their power and wealth to obtain even more.

‘Sexy Tricks’: How Journalists Demonize Venezuela’s Socialist Government, in Their Own Words

“We like to think of journalists as plucky truth-tellers standing up to power. But this notion is horribly antiquated; in reality, most journalists are parts of enormous corporate machines with their own political interests and agendas, often directly linked to those of the US government.”

Source

Journalists revealed to me the tactics they use to sell stories painting Venezuela as a socialist dystopia. One described himself as a “mercenary,” explaining how he aims to please his employer’s funders.

***

It is clear that mainstream US media correspondents are no fans of the Venezuelan government. But rarely do you hear them speak so openly about their biases.

One Caracas-based correspondent now working for the New York Times told me on the record that he employs “sexy tricks” to “hook” readers on dubious articles demonizing the socialist government of Venezuela.

Anatoly Kurmanaev made this revealing comment and many more to during an interview I conducted with him for my PhD and book on the media coverage of Latin America.

At the time, he was a correspondent for Bloomberg, and had just published a very dubious story on how condoms supposedly cost $750 per pack in Venezuela. The misleading article was picked up and repeated across the media.

Describing himself and his colleagues as “mercenaries,” Kurmanaev was unabashed, boasting on tape that he essentially grossly exaggerates stories in the media.

“A couple of times from my experience you try to use, I wouldn’t call them ‘cheap tricks’, but yeah, kind of sexy tricks. Just last week we had a story about condom shortages in Venezuela. At the official exchange rate condoms were at like $750 dollars or something and the headline was something like ‘$750 dollar condom in Venezuela’ and everyone clicks it, everyone is like ‘Jesus, why do they sell it for like $750?’” he said.

Kurmanaev emphasized that his goal was to “hook” readers into a larger story about Venezuela’s purported demise under socialism.

The New York Times’ Anatoly Kurmanaev discussing Venezuela on France 24

“Once you click,” the reporter said, “the average reader is hooked and he’ll read about really important issues like HIV problems in Venezuela, teenage pregnancies, the social impact of lack of contraception, the public health impact, things that I do feel are important to tell the world. But you have to use sexy tactics for it.”

We like to think of journalists as plucky truth-tellers standing up to power. But this notion is horribly antiquated; in reality, most journalists are parts of enormous corporate machines with their own political interests and agendas, often directly linked to those of the US government.

And where Washington has skin in the game, a way to quickly advance in the field is to parrot American government positions, regardless of the facts.

One example of this is Venezuela, where the embattled socialist government of Nicolás Maduro is attempting to govern in the face of crushing US sanctions that are estimated to have killed more than 40,000 civilians from 2017 to 2018 alone.

The United States has labeled Venezuela’s government a “dictatorship” and part of a “troika of tyranny,” and has sponsored multiple coup attempts there, including one in November.

Don’t Believe Mainstream US Media Coverage of Venezuela

The corporate media has dutifully ignored the US role in the country’s economic woes, laying the blame squarely at the feet of Maduro, omitting crucial political context on Venezuela’s economic crisis while keeping up a constant flow of content presenting the country as a socialist hellhole.

Don’t you know a hamburger costs $170 there? Well, no, that story was retracted. But condoms cost $750! Also no — we don’t learn until the ninth paragraph of Kurmanaev’s article that a pack of condoms actually cost about the same as it did in the US at the time.

That latter piece of pseudo-news is based on deliberate distortions of the country’s admittedly byzantine currency regulations and has the effect of demonizing the government and socialism in general, advancing the idea that “something must be done” to help them. 

Are we to believe that the journalists who deploy these “sexy tricks” don’t know exactly what they are doing?

From Venezuelan prophylactic to whitewashing Bolivia’s coup

On the back of his coverage of Venezuela, Anatoly Kurmanaev has risen rapidly through the ranks of his industry to a post at the supposed newspaper of record, the New York Times, whose editorial board recently applauded the US-backed military coup in Bolivia that ousted Evo Morales.

Generals appeared on television demanding the newly re-elected Morales step down. Their handpicked replacement Janine Añez immediately pre-exonerated security forces of any crimes in the “re-establishment of order”, leading to massacres of dozens of indigenous protestors.

In the New York Times, Kurmanaev soft-pedaled those events as Morales’ “resignation” – not the military coup that had unfolded in plain sight. According to the correspondent’s narrative, which conveniently echoed Washington’s official line, the ouster of Morales left a “power vacuum” that a reluctant Añez was forced to fill with a “transitional government.”

As the Bolivian junta cuts down and jails its opponents in droves, the Times has resorted to increasingly contorted language to avoid using the apparently forbidden term: “coup.”

“Violent protests over a disputed election that he claimed to win, and after he had lost the backing of the military and the police,” was the reporter’s most recent attempt to characterize the events that forced Morales from power.

In whitewashing a putsch and subsequent campaign of repression waged by avowedly racist, right-wing forces, Kurmanaev was far from alone. Across the mainstream spectrum, media outlets have welcomed the coup, framing the military’s ouster of an elected head of state as a “resignation” while downplaying the massacres as merely “clashes.”

Inside Bolivia, meanwhile, the oligarch-owned “sellout press” has been assisting in the roundup and suppression of alternative media.

As The Grayzone contributor Wyatt Reed reported from La Paz, a crowd of journalists harassed and detained an independent reporter, handing him over to the death squads that have been terrorizing the country for the last two weeks, in retaliation for his refusal to tow the junta’s line.

Reed called this “a complete betrayal of what it is supposed to mean to be a journalist.”

Wyatt Reed@wyattreed13

Wow.
The whole time I’ve been in Bolivia I’ve heard about the “prensa vendida,” aka the sellout press. Watch here as they harass an independent journalist, keep him from doing the job they *should* be doing, then hand deliver him to the army!
Anyone who shows this gets shut down.

550

4:39 PM – Nov 21, 2019

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Wow.
The whole time I’ve been in Bolivia I’ve heard about the “prensa vendida,” aka the sellout press. Watch here as they harass an independent journalist, keep him from doing the job they *should* be doing, then hand deliver him to the army!
Anyone who shows this gets shut down. pic.twitter.com/wY5dwgu4lS

— Wyatt Reed (@wyattreed13) November 22, 2019

Añez’s forces have arrested and disappeared political and media opponents, “hunting down” the “animals” (their words) and forcing virtually every critical voice off the air.

In Venezuela the local media actually led the coup attempt against President Hugo Chávez in 2002. “Not one step backwards!” read the front page headline of El Nacional, one of the country’s most important newspapers. The headquarters of the putsch was at the mansion of Gustavo Cisneros, owner of the Venevisión TV network.

One coup leader appeared on television after what appeared to be a successful operation saying, “We were short of communications facilities and I have to thank the media for their solidarity and cooperation.”

Vice-Admiral Ramírez Pérez told Venevisión,

“We had a deadly weapon: the media. And now that I have the opportunity, let me congratulate you.”

How US media recruits opposition activists

Due to budget cuts, the corporate press has outsourced their Latin America reporting to a collection of unabashed opposition activists.

Francisco Toro, for example, resigned from the New York Times claiming, “Too much of my lifestyle is bound up with opposition activism” that he “can’t possibly be neutral.” Yet Toro is now charged with providing commentary on Venezuela and Bolivia for the Washington Post.

Unsurprisingly, he supports the Bolivia coup and was “elated” when Chávez was overthrown.

Another local Washington Post contributor was Emilia Diaz-Struck, who founded the website Armando.info, an investigative news outlet that runs a constant stream of stories slamming the socialist government and advancing the opposition’s line.

These local reporters, who act as anti-government activists first and journalists second, greatly color the atmosphere of the newsroom, leading to a highly partisan hive mind where supposedly unbiased and neutral journalists unironically refer to themselves as the “resistance” to the government.

Those who do not run with the pack are generally made to feel unwelcome. Bart Jones, who covered Venezuela for the Los Angeles Times, told me that he felt he had to temper what he wrote because he knew exactly what his editors wanted.

“There was a clear sense that this guy [Chávez] was a threat to democracy and we really need to be talking to these opponents and get that perspective out there,” Jones recalled. One even told him “we have to get rid” of the government.

Matt Kennard, who covered Bolivia and Venezuela for the Financial Times (FT), explained how the political slant imposed by mainstream outlets forced even critical-minded journalists into submission:

“I just never even pitched stories that I knew would never get in. What you read in my book would just never, ever, in any form, even in news form, get into the FT. And I knew that and I wasn’t stupid enough to even pitch it. I knew it wouldn’t even be considered. After I got knocked back from pitching various articles I just stopped… It was complete self-censorship.”

‘You are a mercenary in a sense’

“Every journalist has an audience he caters for and in my case, it’s the financial community,” Anatoly Kurmanaev explained. “You are a mercenary in a sense. You’re there to provide information to a particular client that they find important and it’s not good or bad, it’s just the way it is.”

When he made these comments, Kurmanaev was working for the publication owned by Michael Bloomberg, the pro-war billionaire who is today the 13th-richest person in the world, and whose reporters are forbidden from “investigating” his presidential campaign.

With pressure from all sides to serve as stenographers for right-wing opposition movements, many Western correspondents exist in a cultural bubble, almost entirely isolated from the poor and working-class populations that support leftist governments across Latin America.

Western reporters almost universally live and work in the richest areas of capital cities from Venezuela to Mexico, often in gated communities surrounded by armed guards, and rarely venture into the poorer areas where the majority of people live.

Some of the corporate media’s top correspondents confided to me that they could not even speak Spanish for months after they got there, and were therefore unable to converse with the bottom 90 to 95 percent of the population. They are essentially parachuted in to opposition strongholds to work with opposition activists and naturally take that side in the debate.

With all of these factors in mind, the cheerleading across the US press for regime change in Bolivia and Venezuela can hardly be seen as an accident. Too many journalists at corporate media outlets tend to see themselves as the ideological shock troops in an information war against supposedly tyrannical socialist governments.

Passing off regime-change propaganda as unbiased news is all in a day’s work for those embracing their role as servants of the empire.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Alan MacLeod is an academic and journalist. He is a staff writer at Mintpress News and a contributor to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). He is the author of Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting.

Featured image is from The Grayzone

The original source of this article is The Grayzone

Copyright © Alan MacLeod, The Grayzone, 2019

America’s troops love Russia, and Kremlin mind control is to blame – Pentagon officials

Russian disinformation? This is rich, coming from the masters of illusion, propaganda, and outright lies. 

Source

http://www.rt.com

8 Dec, 2019

FILE PHOTO: US troops cheer President Donald J. Trump as he addresses his remarks to military personal at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, November 28, 2019, © Global Look Press / White House

A Reagan Institute survey has found that nearly half of all American military households view Russia as more of an ally than a threat. Pentagon officials reckon they’ve been brainwashed by the Kremlin.

The Reagan Institute’s annual National Defense Survey ranks the attitudes of Americans on all things war, peace, and politics. The latest version, published in October, has more statistics than you could shake a stick at, yet to the Pentagon, one in particular stands out.

46 percent of military households see Russia as an “ally,” while 28 percent of all American households share that belief. China too has overtaken Russia as America’s next top enemy, according to the survey.

The think-tank reckons positive views of Russia are held mostly by Republicans, which could explain the rampant Russophilia in the ranks (America’s men and women in uniform usually vote for the GOP), but the Pentagon’s top brass has other ideas.

ALSO ON RT.COMNo playing around: US Army’s new card decks feature Russian, Chinese & Iranian weapons ‘to learn more about adversaries’

“There is an effort, on the part of Russia, to flood the media with disinformation to sow doubt and confusion,” Defense Department spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Carla Gleason told Voice of America. The Russians do this, Gleason explained, “through false narratives designed to illicit sympathetic views.”

Are these narratives beamed into the troops’ heads via satellite? Via confusion-inducing propaganda-rays?

No, said researcher Jorge Benitez. They’re fed to America’s troops via Kremlin-sponsored hackers, pro-Russian media outlets, and even “President [Donald] Trump’s positive statements about Russia.”

“It’s dangerous,” Benitez told VOA. However, he did not expound on his work with the Atlantic Council, a virulently anti-Russia think tank sponsored by NATO and a collection of arms manufacturers.

ALSO ON RT.COMWhere’s the ‘Russia room’? Moscow’s UN envoy jokes with Trump during White House visit

Gleason said that the military is “actively working to expose and counter Russian disinformation.” Short of screening round-the-clock reruns of ‘Red Dawn’ on bases around the country, it’s unsure what exactly she meant.

Then again, perhaps The Pentagon’s top brass has a different understanding of love. Perhaps the military’s higher-ups express their love for Russia not by holding “sympathetic views,” but by moving their forces as close as possible to its borders and daring their forbidden lover to make the first move.