Never Forget: The US Government Has A Known History Of Using False Flags

Authored by Caitlyn Johnstone via Medium.com,

When it comes to 9/11, there are two groups of people: those who don’t know exactly what happened, and those who orchestrated it.

Nearly everyone on earth belongs in the former category, but a lot of folks like to pretend they have a rock solid understanding of the events which transpired on that fateful day in 2001. Scoffing mainstream adherents like to pretend they’re confident that the official narrative is accurate, but they aren’t. A lot of hardcore conspiracy analysts like to pretend they know the real story, but they don’t. There’s simply not enough publicly available information for anyone to be certain exactly how things went down that day; all we can know for sure is that (A) the official story is riddled with plot holes, and (B) the American power establishment has an extensive and well-documented history of using false flags and propaganda to manipulate the public into supporting evil acts of military interventionism.

If you think you know for a fact that the official story of what happened on September 11, 2001 is the true account and that all conspiracy theories have been “debunked”, you are ignorant.

If you think you know the precise details of how what really happened differs from the official story, you’ve spent way too much time diving down conspiracy theory rabbit holes and should probably ease off the weed. There’s no need to get all defensive and go bedding yourself down to one hard doctrine of certainty when the US power establishment has already discredited itself so thoroughly. It’s unnecessary to plunge deep into theory when these people’s track record is so firmly established in fact.

Here are just a few of the times the US government is known to have distorted the reality of events in order to manufacture public support for military intervention, which is per definition what a false flag is:

The False Nayirah Testimony

On October 10, 1990 a 15 year-old girl known only as Nayirah testified before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus about the horrors that Iraqi troops were inflicting upon the people of Kuwait. Her testimony that hundreds of babies had been taken out of their incubators and left to die on hospital floors was repeated as fact by Amnesty International, the mass media, numerous senators, and President H. W. Bush, tugging at the heartstrings of America and manufacturing support for American action in the Gulf War.

It was a lie. Nayirah was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the US, and her TV-friendly “removing babies from incubators” testimony was false. It never happened.

Former CIA Director Bush with the Kuwaiti Ambassador, who watched his daughter’s false testimony before congress

The Gulf of Tonkin Incident

In 2005 a declassified historical study by the NSA revealed that one of the two incidents which were used to propel America into the disastrous Vietnam War happened the opposite of the way it was reported to have happened, and the second of the two incidents did not happen at all. The allegation that there were “deliberate” and “unprovoked” attacks upon the US Navy in the Gulf of Tonkin on August 2 and August 4 of 1964 was solemnly affirmed by President Johnson, which led to the swift passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing full presidential authority to commit US military power to the Vietnamese intervention.

In reality the August 2 incident was not in any way “unprovoked”, and it was in fact America’s USS Maddox which fired upon North Vietnamese boats first. On August 4 there was no engagement with any ships whatsoever, with Johnson privately admitting a year later that “For all I know, our navy was shooting at whales out there.”

The USS Maine

“But when the smoke was over, the dead buried and the cost of the war came back to the people in an increase in the price of commodities and rent?—?that is, when we sobered up from our patriotic spree?—?it suddenly dawned on us that the cause of the Spanish-American War was the price of sugar.”

~ Emma Goldman

This goes way back. The video above describes how the Spanish-American war was brought on by a highly suspicious explosion upon the USS Maine while it was docked at the Havana Harbor in 1898, combined with the anti-Spain narratives of the plutocrat-owned newspapers of that time. Like all US wars, it was extremely profitable and benefitted the very rich.

*  *  *

This tradition of using lies to rally the unwashed masses behind military endeavors on behalf of the rich and powerful has probably been going on since the dawn of civilization, and it is only humanity’s increasing adeptness at networking and sharing information which has enabled us to begin catching on to the deceitful manipulations of the people who rule us. Our history books are doubtless riddled with countless inaccuracies as to the real reasons underlying violent conflicts between various kingdoms and factions, because the few literate people who were permitted to write the official historic accounts of them had full control of the narrative at the time.

This is why we’ve been seeing increasingly blatant panic from existing power structures about alternative media. Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. It is only by general societal consensus that power exists where it exists, that money works the way it works, etc. At any time the public could stop honoring existing power structures and create an entirely different model for itself, deciding to distribute resources and allocate responsibilities in a way that benefits more people more efficaciously than the current paradigm. It is only by their ability to manipulate and control the mainstream narrative that powerful people have been able to keep this from happening.

If the power elites didn’t need the consent of the public to rule, they wouldn’t have to lie constantly about their reasons for war. The public would never consent to military interventions if politicians were allowed to appear on CNN and say “Yeah well America has become a stronghold for the most powerful plutocracy in the history of civilization and it needs to maintain its status as the world’s only superpower in order to protect the investments of that plutocracy. This is why we have to keep knocking the pillars of support out from underneath Russia and China, and why I get millions in re-election campaign donations.”

My more pessimistic readers won’t like hearing this, but the reality is that Americans are basically good people who generally want what’s best for the world. If they weren’t, the unelected power establishment which rules over them wouldn’t have to keep making up lies about babies in incubators and protecting their family from Weapons of Mass Destruction in order to secure US hegemony. If they ever told the public the truth, they’d be dealing with hundreds of millions of heavily-armed Americans telling them to get their sociopathic asses out of here.

Obama Urged Trump To Continue Neoconservative Foreign Policy#Trump #Obama #letter #neoconhttps://t.co/b4BMZqpof2

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) September 4, 2017

What this means is that those of us who want what’s best for America and the world instead of endless war and economic oppression are necessarily locked in a media war with the plutocracy and its cronies. The populist alternative media owned and operated by ordinary people is the natural enemy of the plutocrat-owned mainstream media designed to prop up the existing power structure with establishment propaganda. Our ability to win this media war increases the more networked and internet-literate our society becomes, which is why the oligarchs have been working overtime to shut us down with corporate censorship.

There is no reason to believe anything these lying sociopaths say, especially not about something that has served such a crucial role in their openly stated agenda to ensure US dominance over the world using its military and economic might. When you’ve got the extremely influential neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century saying in September of 2000 that it would require “a new Pearl Harbor” to advance this agenda, and then getting exactly that one year later in an American tragedy which was used to manufacture support for greatly expanded US military interventionism, there’s no good reason to take all that in with a trusting “Yeah, that sounds legit.”

These people are liars, and they are depraved. They have no problem using lies to kill a million Iraqis and thousands of US soldiers to advance their agendas, and there’s no reason to believe they wouldn’t kill US civilians as well. There’s no harm in familiarizing yourself with all the details about the various conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 if that’s what you want to spend your brainpower on, but really all you need to know is that these people are known liars who have no problem slaughtering countless people to advance their agenda of global domination. There is no reason to trust them and many reasons not to. End of.

*  *  *

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"Never Forget" - A Marine Reflects On The Lies Of Our Endless Wars

Submitted by Brad Hoff via The Canary

The fires which began with the 9/11 attacks were never extinguished. They continue to burn fiercely from Afghanistan to Iraq to Syria to Yemen to North Africa, as the region and its regimes came unglued in the wake of George W. Bush’s ‘war on terror’.

The 16th anniversary of 9/11 was marked in America with the usual somber memorials and directives to ‘never forget". But this definitive 9/11 slogan always takes me back to the overwhelming tide of pro-war fervor that swept the US and stifled any deeper reflection or debate in the years after September 11, 2001. Sadly, I was part of that fervor – and this too I will never forget.

The militarism of my youth

I joined the US Marine Corps as an idealistic 18-year-old in 2000, with a firm resolve – as I enthusiastically told my military recruiter shortly before leaving for boot camp – to “fight evil in the world”. This resolve was rooted more deeply in my veins after the 9/11 attacks. As a relatively new Marine, I had temporarily worked at the Pentagon while attached to a headquarters computer programming unit in the two months just prior to that tragic day, and was fortunate not to be there when it was attacked.

After the smoke cleared in New York, Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon, I and many others wanted ‘justice’ at all costs against an enemy we were told was present in multiple Middle Eastern countries. Slogans such as ‘let’s roll!’ echoed in my ears, and my zeal for ‘the mission’ influenced others to follow my path of military service.

While stationed in Quantico, outside of Washington DC, I became close friends with a local civilian nearing his high school graduation, and I encouraged him to join the Marine Corps. This occurred just as the Bush administration was making the case for war in Iraq.

The author as an idealistic 18-year-old not long before 9/11. Attending ‘Marine Combat Training’ (MCT) near San Diego, California.

A close friend dies in Anbar Province

While I remained at my headquarters unit in Virginia, my friend embarked on multiple tours of duty within a short two years as a Marine infantryman. I remember even then being surprised and unsettled by how rapidly his overseas deployments came. He was killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq on his third deployment overseas prior to his twenty-first birthday. He had selflessly tried to stop a car laden with explosives as it sped into his checkpoint, possibly preventing more deaths among the nearby group of Marines wounded in the attack.

Paul Wolfowitz, considered one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, attended my friend’s funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. More recently, Wolfowitz spent last year"s anniversary of the 9/11 attack on NBC’s Meet the Press shamelessly arguing that he and the Bush administration had done nothing wrong in selling the war and were honest with the American people.

Neither my friend nor I had ever really understood much about the place of his eventual death or the politics of the war. This had been clear during our brief visits together as we reconnected prior to what we didn’t know would be his final deployment to the Middle East. We were never encouraged to learn about the history of Iraq or the Arab world, or to ask too many questions for that matter.

“You’re either with us or against us” was enough for us to want to go out and “win hearts and minds” – a constant refrain in the post-9/11 atmosphere.

At 2:40 pm on 9/11, exactly 16 years ago, Donald Rumsfeld was pushing to invade Iraq:

Hit SH [Saddam Hussein] @ same time—
Not only UBL pic.twitter.com/H3gYIWCgLd

— Jon Schwarz (@tinyrevolution) September 11, 2017

Uncovering a disturbing history

As the power of such simple platitudes faded, I began to investigate for myself the history of US involvement in the region. My search began in the library of the Marine Corps University at MCB Quantico, and would later lead to my travelling to Syria after completion of active service.

Few Americans know of the absurd contradictions of our foreign policy in Iraq and other places over the past few decades, yet I soon found that many Iraqis and Syrians know the history well.

The United States, through covert support of the Iraqi Ba’ath Party in the 1960s and 1970s, sponsored Saddam Hussein’s rise to power as a way to combat perceived communist influence and populist national movements in the Middle East. Throughout that time, the CIA-supported Ba’ath engaged in ‘cleansing campaigns‘ which involved door-to-door death squads offing Washington’s enemies, based on questionable lists provided through covert liaisons.

Absurd contradictions of endless militarism

Upon Hussein’s rise to the Iraqi presidency in 1979, and the increasing boldness of the Iranian Revolution, the United States encouraged Hussein to invade Iran, kick-starting the most devastating war in the region’s history. Most Americans still haven’t seen the easily accessible archive footage of Reagan’s then special envoy to the Middle East, Donald Rumsfeld (another architect of the 2003 Iraq regime change), shaking hands with Hussein in 1983, in what was clearly a warm and cordial visit.

CNN coverage of the first 9/11 anniversary, Sept. 12, 2002 interview: a visibly upset Rumsfeld asks "Where did you get this video?" when confronted with footage of his prior chummy relations with Saddam Hussein.

Saddam would go on, during the course of the Iran-Iraq war that took over a million lives (1980-1988), to frequently employ chemical nerve agents against Iranian troop movements. Later into the war, this occurred with the assistance of the CIA and DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency). By the time of the 1988 gas attack against Kurdish citizens in Halabja, US covert assistance to Iraq’s military was established and routine.

And yet, Hussein soon became the new super-villain of the 1990s and the post-9/11 world. The very image of evil incarnate in the world. Even though his brutal dictatorial rule and regional aggression had undergone little change from when he was the CIA’s man in Baghdad. It was only American perceptions of him that changed.

The United States had helped to create the very monster it was telling young men and women to travel across the world to destroy in 2003. Ironically, one of the main justifications for going after the ‘evil tyrant’ offered by Bush was Hussein’s gassing of Halabja.

Resisting a ‘forever war’ culture

By the final year of my military contract, I was learning too many uncomfortable truths. But ultimately, it was meeting families with roots in Iraq and Syria during social functions outside of military work that finally transformed my thinking. Military culture and the general pro-war atmosphere in America had warped me into thinking of Iraqis as ‘savage’ and ‘tribal’, according to the usual simplistic stereotypes.

But I saw very quickly that Arab people and others from the region tended to have a much more nuanced understanding of the world, reflecting its true complexities, than the average American. Looking back, it was these Arab-American friends (who gave predictions and warnings about what was to come of the US invasion of Iraq) who were proven exactly right. At the time, they were sneered at and ridiculed by most for daring to offer a contrary viewpoint, even though they knew the history of America’s prior destructive meddling in the Middle East quite well.

I remember that my friend who had died so young in Iraq said, during one our last conversations, that his heart had been warmed by his brief encounters with the Iraqi civilians he spoke to during his first tour. He saw hope in their faces. He soon redeployed to Iraq, still trusting that our leaders had it right.

My friend, like thousands of others among the US war dead, loved his country. But the architects and promoters of the war were playing the same cynical and deceitful game they’ve played for decades in the Middle East. The men that led us into war lost no friends, grieved no loved ones, and suffered no lasting consequences. They left government and went on book tours, headed up powerful global institutions, retired to comfortable jobs at think tanks, and continued to make millions – as war profiteers have always done.

My young friend is buried in the ground at Arlington Cemetery. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are also long dead. And the region is still on fire.

Leaving the Marines

During my last work day as an active duty member, I sat in an administrative room in Quantico with about 30 other marines about to receive ‘honorable discharge‘. Our final debriefing included having to sit through multiple presentations from representatives of major private military contractor firms (mercenary groups like Blackwater/Academi). As active military personnel we were forced to hear the mercenary companies" recruitment pitches before being able to access our official discharge papers. I later learned that it was never widely known among the public that this happened on bases that were especially located around D.C. during the years just after 9/11.

They boasted of huge payouts to deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq in a private capacity, at a time when both countries were engulfed in chaos and ruin. There was a smug grin on each mercenary recruiter’s face.

It seems that almost every Marine in the room flocked to the contractors’ tables after receiving official discharge papers. I walked past these mercenary recruitment tables in disgust, jumped in my packed-up car, and drove back to Texas as a civilian.

The US Government Punishes People For Helping Dying Children

Authored by Jacob Hornberger via The Future of Freedom Foundation,

In my article “The Evil of Killing Children,” I pointed out how the U.S. government, in an attempt to achieve regime change in Iraq, knowingly and intentionally killed hundreds of thousands of innocent children in Iraq.

Unfortunately, killing those innocent Iraqi children was not the only evil action taken by U.S. officials regarding the Iraq sanctions. They also went after an American man for trying to help the children that U.S. officials were trying to kill with their sanctions.

The man’s name is Bert Sacks. They didn’t try to kill him but they did prosecute him both criminally and civilly for trying to help the Iraqi children who U.S. officials were killing.

What specifically did Sacks do that caused U.S. officials to put him in their sights? He took medicine to Iraq. That infuriated U.S. officials because the medicine that Sacks took into Iraq interfered with their ability to kill more Iraqi children, which in turn, impeded their ability to achieve regime change in Iraq.

In a 2003 article entitled “Sanctions in Iraq Hurt the Innocent in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Sacks explained the origins and consequences of the U.S. government’s system of sanctions against Iraq.

He began the article by focusing on the large number of Iraqi children that that the U.S. government killed with the sanctions. Quoting an article from the New York Times magazine, he wrote: “American officials may quarrel with the numbers but there is little doubt that at least several hundred thousand children who could reasonably have been expected to live, died before their fifth birthdays.” Sacks then cited Richard Garfield, a health specialist at Columbia University, who estimated the death toll among the Iraqi children to be 400,000.

We also should also note that when U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright was asked in 1996 whether the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children were worth it, she didn’t deny the number and said that the deaths were, in fact, worth it. After she said that, no other U.S. official, to my knowledge, took her to task, either on the number of Iraqi children they had killed up to that year or the fact that the official U.S. spokesperson to the UN considered the deaths to be worth it. (The sanctions weren’t lifted until 2003, after the U.S. government had finally achieved regime change with its invasion of Iraq.)

While it’s true that several hundred thousand doesn’t rise to the number of people killed by Hitler’s Nazi regime or Stalin’s communist regime, nonetheless hundreds of thousands is not a small number of dead people. Moreover, while all innocent life is sacred, it seems, instinctively, that killing innocent children might be more evil than killing innocent adults.

Citing the New England Journal of Medicine, Sacks pointed out that during the Persian Gulf War, “The [U.S. government’s] destruction of the country’s power plants had brought [Iraq’s] entire system of water purification and distribution to a halt, leading to epidemics of cholera, typhoid fever, and gastroenteritis, particularly among children.”

One of the important things to note about the sanctions, which were continued after the war, is that they prevented Iraq from repairing the water and sewage treatments that the U.S. military had intentionally destroyed during the war. Naturally, that ensured that that the cholera, typhoid fever, gastroenteritis, and other illnesses would continue, particularly among the Iraqi children, who were dying en masse.

A 1991 Washington Post article pointed out:

The worst civilian suffering, senior officers say, has resulted not from bombs that went astray but from precision-guided weapons that hit exactly where they were aimed — at electrical plants, oil refineries and transportation networks. Each of these targets was acknowledged during the war, but all the purposes and consequences of their destruction were not divulged. Among the justifications offered now, particularly by the Air Force in recent briefings, is that Iraqi civilians were not blameless for Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait.

“The definition of innocents gets to be a little bit unclear,” said a senior Air Force officer, noting that many Iraqis supported the invasion of Kuwait. “They do live there, and ultimately the people have some control over what goes on in their country.”

A 1991 New York Times article cited in Sacks’ article pointed out what U.S. officials were aiming for: “Ever since the trade embargo was imposed on Aug. 6, after the invasion of Kuwait, the United States has argued against any premature relaxation in the belief that by making life uncomfortable for the Iraqi people it will eventually encourage them to remove President Saddam Hussein from power.”

In a 2002 article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a U.S. official was quoted on U.S. policy: “We have made it clear that the world would be better off with a regime change in Iraq. Regime change has always been part of United States policy.”

The article also pointed out, “After 12 years of sanctions, Saddam is still in power but more than 70 percent of the population does not have clean drinking water.” As a 2011 article in the Seattle Times put it, “For 12 years, Iraqis had bacteria-infected water. The result was cholera, typhoid and gastroenteritis. Add malnutrition and a shortage of common medicines. The problem was known; in 1992, the New England Journal of Medicine raised the alarm about it. By the late 1990s, UNICEF estimated that an extra half a million Iraqi children had died because of war and sanctions.”

The U.S. government just didn’t care because that was their aim — to kill as many Iraqi children as necessary with their sanctions until the Iraqi people cried “Uncle” and ousted Saddam from power and replaced him with a pro-U.S. dictator.

Enter Bert Sacks. Struck by conscience by the massive number of deaths that his own government was inflicting on the children of Iraq, Sacks traveled to Iraq with $40,000 in medicines to help the victims of the sanctions.

Not surprisingly, Sacks attracted the attention of U.S. officials, who deemed him an anti-American criminal for helping America’s enemies by bringing them medicine that could save their lives.

To make it appear that they were not objecting to Sack’s bringing medicine into Iraq, the U.S. government filed criminal charges against him and also levied a civil fine of $10,000 on him $10,000 for spending money in Iraq. They said that spending money in Iraq violated their sanctions.

The criminal charges went nowhere but U.S. officials pursued the civil fine with an obsession that bordered on the pathological.

To the everlasting credit of Bert Sacks, who can only be described as a genuine real-life hero for standing up against manifest evil, he told the U.S. government to go take a hike. He told them that he would never pay their stupid and evil fine.

U.S. officials went after Sacks with the same vengeance they pursued against the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi children they were killing, harassing Sacks for years in an Ahab-like manner in their angry attempt to collect their $10,000 fine. While the money was no doubt important to them, what was much more important was sending a message to other Americans: Don’t even think of helping people in Iraq, including the innocent children we are killing, because doing so interferes with our foreign policy goal for Iraq, which is regime change.

Sacks stood his ground. Like Hans von Sponek, Dennis Halliday, and Jutta Purghart, the three UN officials who resigned their positions in a crisis of conscience over the U.S. government’s killing of Iraqi children, Sacks steadfastly followed the convictions of his conscience and refused to pay the fine.

In 2012, a U.S. federal court threw out the government’s claim against Sacks, which now totaled $16,000 with accumulated interest, based on a technicality. While the decision did not save the lives of any Iraqi children, at least in the case of the U.S. government versus Bert Sacks, good triumphed over evil.

If You Think "Fake News" Is A New Phenomena, You're Wrong

Submitted by Mnar Muhawesh via TheAntiMedia.org,

The “fog of war” erupts in the confusion caused by the chaos of war. And in the media, it’s an intentional phenomenon that makes it difficult to separate fact from fiction.

While the battles over war narratives evolve, they all have a common goal: to distort reality on the ground.

Such is the case on the crisis in Syria, the new cold war with Russia, and even the buildup for President Bush’s support for Kuwait’s “humanitarian” war against Iraq.

On Oct. 10, 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl identified only as “Nayirah” told the Congressional Human Rights Caucus that she witnessed Iraqi soldiers removing babies from incubators and leaving them on a cold floor to die.

Her testimony was cited numerous times by senators and even President George H.W. Bush as  justification for backing Kuwait in the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein, which erupted just three months later.

However, it was later revealed that “Nayirah” was the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States, and her testimony was arranged by a PR firm representing a Kuwaiti-sponsored group lobbying Congress for military intervention.

More recently, during the “Arab Spring” uprisings that swept the Middle East in 2011, Libyan media claimed that Moammar Gadhafi loyalists carried out mass “Viagra-fueled rapes,” and that the Libyan leader had ordered rape as a weapon of war. When Luis Moreno-Ocampo, a prosecutor with the International Criminal Court, opened an investigation into these allegations, it grabbed international headlines, appearing in Al-Jazeera, the BBC, and Reuters, among many others.

Even as Amnesty International questioned the legitimacy of the allegations, other supposedly humanitarian groups hit a loggerhead on the veracity of the claims. One top U.N. official said he believed the claims were meant as a scare tactic to invoke “massive hysteria” even as another top U.N. official defended them, creating a distraction from the war itself.

And today the fog of war is obscuring realities on the ground in Syria.

Major news outlets frequently cite unnamed sources, a convenient way to manipulate public perception. From CNN to Reuters, these outlets are publishing unverifiable claims and providing minimal evidence to support them, and readers are supposed to drink it all up

The crisis in Syria has attracted international attention and concern, and the corporate media is using the tragedies of war to push an agenda and boost its audience. This push for content — no matter what — has serious consequences. On Dec. 20, for example, Egyptian police arrested five people for making videos they claimed were set in Aleppo, but were actually filmed at a demolition site.

Social media further distorts reality on the ground, presenting a fragmented image of war as the media promotes only those accounts that align with the goals of the United States and its allies.

The media and public both accept the accounts of the White Helmets as gospel. Yet that group, which purports to serve as volunteer first responders in Aleppo, receives training from British mercenaries and funding from a PR firm with ties to George Soros.

Not only are the White Helmets making fake videos, but they’ve even been exposed as agents embedded in the Nusra Front and ISIS.. Armed and far from impartial, the White Helmets are a recipient of millions in USAID funding.

Whether the White Helmets are the apolitical first responders they claim to be or not, one thing is clear: The narrative being weaved by and about them supports U.S. intervention in the war in Syria.

The narrative is built around activists frequently cited by the media, like Bilal Abdul Kareem, who is embedded with the Nusra Front and recently glorified suicide bombers as revolutionaries.

Or Lina Shamy, the young Syrian activist who promotes sectarian terrorists from Jaysh al-Sham, who threaten genocide against religious minorities as revolutionaries.

It’s time to put a critical lens to the propaganda in the news and social media. It’s time to demand more than reporting that toes the government line and makes claims without real evidence.

If You Think ‘Fake News’ Is A New Phenomena, You’re Wrong

January 12, 2017   |   admintam

(MPN) The “fog of war” erupts in the confusion caused by the chaos of war. And in the media, it’s an intentional phenomenon that makes it difficult to separate fact from fiction.

While the battles over war narratives evolve, they all have a common goal: to distort reality on the ground.

Such is the case on the crisis in Syria, the new cold war with Russia, and even the buildup for President Bush’s support for Kuwait’s “humanitarian” war against Iraq.

On Oct. 10, 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl identified only as “Nayirah” told the Congressional Human Rights Caucus that she witnessed Iraqi soldiers removing babies from incubators and leaving them on a cold floor to die.

Her testimony was cited numerous times by senators and even President George H.W. Bush as  justification for backing Kuwait in the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein, which erupted just three months later.

However, it was later revealed that “Nayirah” was the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States, and her testimony was arranged by a PR firm representing a Kuwaiti-sponsored group lobbying Congress for military intervention.

More recently, during the “Arab Spring” uprisings that swept the Middle East in 2011, Libyan media claimed that Moammar Gadhafi loyalists carried out mass “Viagra-fueled rapes,” and that the Libyan leader had ordered rape as a weapon of war. When Luis Moreno-Ocampo, a prosecutor with the International Criminal Court, opened an investigation into these allegations, it grabbed international headlines, appearing in Al-Jazeera, the BBC, and Reuters, among many others.

Even as Amnesty International questioned the legitimacy of the allegations, other supposedly humanitarian groups hit a loggerhead on the veracity of the claims. One top U.N. official said he believed the claims were meant as a scare tactic to invoke “massive hysteria” even as another top U.N. official defended them, creating a distraction from the war itself.

And today the fog of war is obscuring realities on the ground in Syria.

Major news outlets frequently cite unnamed sources, a convenient way to manipulate public perception. From CNN to Reuters, these outlets are publishing unverifiable claims and providing minimal evidence to support them, and readers are supposed to drink it all up

The crisis in Syria has attracted international attention and concern, and the corporate media is using the tragedies of war to push an agenda and boost its audience. This push for content — no matter what — has serious consequences. On Dec. 20, for example, Egyptian police arrested five people for making videos they claimed were set in Aleppo, but were actually filmed at a demolition site.

Social media further distorts reality on the ground, presenting a fragmented image of war as the media promotes only those accounts that align with the goals of the United States and its allies.

The media and public both accept the accounts of the White Helmets as gospel. Yet that group, which purports to serve as volunteer first responders in Aleppo, receives training from British mercenaries and funding from a PR firm with ties to George Soros.

Not only are the White Helmets making fake videos, but they’ve even been exposed as agents embedded in the Nusra Front and ISIS.. Armed and far from impartial, the White Helmets are a recipient of millions in USAID funding.

Whether the White Helmets are the apolitical first responders they claim to be or not, one thing is clear: The narrative being weaved by and about them supports U.S. intervention in the war in Syria.

The narrative is built around activists frequently cited by the media, like Bilal Abdul Kareem, who is embedded with the Nusra Front and recently glorified suicide bombers as revolutionaries.

Or Lina Shamy, the young Syrian activist who promotes sectarian terrorists from Jaysh al-Sham, who threaten genocide against religious minorities as revolutionaries.

It’s time to put a critical lens to the propaganda in the news and social media. It’s time to demand more than reporting that toes the government line and makes claims without real evidence.

---

This article (If You Think ‘Fake News’ Is A New Phenomena, You’re Wrong) by Mnar Muhawesh  originally appeared on MintPressNews.com and was used with permission. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.