Stephen Lendman

US-led anti-Assad efforts continue. Obama's going all out to topple him. He's heading America for more war. His imperial strategy prioritizes it. Rule of law principles are discarded. Unchallenged global dominance alone matters. America's longstanding permanent war agenda advances it.

Syria is now being ravaged. Assad is wrongfully blamed for US proxy death squad crimes. Ad nauseam propaganda claims otherwise. Facebook and Twitter have Stop Assad campaigns. UK-based medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/alerts-2013/730-this-madman.html">Media Lens reports reliably on media bias. On May 8, it headlined " ' This Madman Must Be Stopped' - Syrian Chemical Weapons."

Propaganda wars precede hot ones. Western efforts are relentless. Media scoundrels regurgitate official lies. Quasi-progressive print publications and web editors are involved. So are NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Corporate foundations fund them. Well-known ones include Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Soros, and MacArthur. Tainted money expects services rendered in return. Conflicts of interest are rife.

Sources [that] viewers, listeners and readers believe are reliable replicate their scoundrel media counterparts. Critics call America's NPR National Pentagon Radio. They do so for good reason. On major world and national issues, Britain's BBC is all propaganda all the time. America's dominant media are deplorable. Truth is systematically suppressed. Managed news misinformation substitutes. When America goes to war or plans one, they march in lockstep. In modern times, it's never been any other way.

Television makes it easy. Stop Assad images proliferate. Doing so overwhelms anti-war voices of truth. Anti-Assad propaganda aims to fool enough of the people enough of the time to matter.

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Stephen Lendman

Russia is Washington's main military rival. Each nation has powerful nuclear arsenals and delivery systems able to destroy the other.

On December 31, 1999, Russia's lost decade under Boris Yeltsin ended. Vladimir Putin replaced him. Yeltsin institutionalized "shock therapy." Economic genocide followed. GDP plunged 50%. Life expectancy fell. Democratic freedoms died. An oligarch class accumulated enormous wealth at the expense of millions of harmed Russians. Contemptuously ignoring essential needs, human rights and civil liberties, Yeltsin let corruption and criminality flourish. One scandal followed another. Money-laundering became sport. Billions in stolen wealth were hidden in Western banks or offshore tax havens. Nonetheless, Western governments and media scoundrels loved him. Decades more may be needed to recover from the human wreckage he caused.

Putin's governing style differs. He rejects US imperialism. He opposes foreign intervention. In 2007, he condemned Washington's quest for unipolar global dominance “through a system which has nothing to do with democracy."

He points fingers West. He says we're "witnessing an almost uncontained hyper-use of military force in international relations."

It's "plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts." Political settlements become impossible. America won't tolerate them.

Putin accuses Washington of spurning international norms and principles. It pursues a reckless arms race. It “overstepped its national borders in almost all spheres." It spurns "basic principles of international law."

It chooses war, not peace. It violates national sovereignty rights. It undermines global stability. It considers aggression a divine right. It threatens humanity.

Its humanitarian wars destroy nations to save them. At issue is global dominance, not liberation. Putin is fundamentally opposed. As a result, media scoundrels bash him.

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medialens&sentence=sentence&in_blogs=6">Medialens
medialens.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=625:bad-news-from-the-bbc-part-2-the-john-motson-approach-to-analysing-news&catid=24:alerts-2011&Itemid=68">Medialens

[Part 1] Between 17-19 May, we had a lengthy exchange of emails with BBC Middle East Bureau Chief, Paul Danahar. It began innocuously enough, but Danahar gradually revealed that he had little intention of sincerely addressing the issues put to him, and the exchange ended with increasingly odd burblings from the BBC's senior Jerusalem-based journalist (the full exchange is archived medialens.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3194">here in our forum).

We started by presenting Danahar with the same points we had put to the other BBC journalists mentioned in Part 1: namely, that the careful studies by Greg Philo and Mike Berry, published in More Bad News From Israel, demonstrated that BBC News tends to reflect the Israeli perspective. We gave a summary of the detailed statistical findings for BBC News coverage of Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009. Quoting Philo and Berry, we noted that the BBC perpetuated ‘a one-sided view of the causes of the conflict by highlighting the issue of the rockets without reporting the Hamas offer’ and by burying rational views on the purpose of the attack: namely, the Israeli desire to inflict collective punishment on the Palestinian people.

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medialens&sentence=sentence&in_blogs=6">Medialens
medialens.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=623:bad-news-from-the-bbc&catid=24:alerts-2011&Itemid=68">Medialens

[Part 2] One of the main headlines on the BBC news homepage earlier this month read, 'Violence erupts at Israel borders'. Israeli soldiers had shot dead at least 12 protesters and injured dozens more. BBC 'impartiality' decreed that the brutal killings were presented almost as an act of nature, a volcanic eruption that simply happened.

Clicking on the link did at least bring up a more accurate headline: 'Israeli forces open fire at Palestinian protesters'. But the brutality was sanitised, with no details of the many victims. The Israeli viewpoint was prominent with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that he 'hoped' that 'calm and quiet will quickly return, but let nobody be mistaken, we are determined to defend our borders and sovereignty'.

Somehow a 'neutral' BBC perspective dictated that the lead image illustrating the story was of young Palestinian men throwing rocks in 'clashes' with fully armed soldiers from the Israeli Defence Forces.

The Palestinians had been taking part in annual protests on Nakba ('Catastrophe') day which, as the BBC put it, 'marks the moment when 100,000s of Palestinians lost their homes' on the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Again, the BBC's sanitised version of 'lost their homes' buries awkward history, as though homes had simply been repossessed when families fell behind on their mortgage payments. In reality, more than half of Palestine's native population, close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted and 531 villages destroyed (Ilan Pappe, 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine', Oneworld, 2006).

After complaints from us, and perhaps realising the newspeak was just too much to swallow, the BBC tweaked the sentence the following day to read:

'Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were forced out of their homes in fighting after its creation.'

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Dirk Adriaensens
War Is A Crime.org

Forced disappearances and missing persons: The missing persons of Iraq. -Always someone’s mother or father, always someone’s child.

A forced disappearance (or enforced disappearance) is defined in Article 2 of the Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly On 20 December 2006, as the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law. Often forced disappearance implies murder. The victim in such a case is first abducted, then illegally detained, and often tortured; the victim is then killed, and the body is then hidden. Typically, a murder will be surreptitious, with the corpse disposed of in such a way as to prevent it ever being found, so that the person apparently vanishes. The party committing the murder has deniability, as there is no body to prove that the victim has actually died. [1]

Article 1 of the Convention further states that No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for enforced disappearance.[2]

Neither Iraq, nor the USA have signed or ratified this convention.[3]

The United States refused to sign, saying that the text "did not meet our expectations", without giving an explanation.[4]

Once again the United States placed itself outside the provisions of International Humanitarian law.

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John Pilger

How do wars begin? With a “master illusion”, according to Ralph McGehee, one of the CIA’s pioneers in “black propaganda”, known today as “news management”. In 1983, he described to me how the CIA had faked an “incident” that became the “conclusive proof of North Vietnam’s aggression”. This followed a claim, also fake, that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked an American warship in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964.

“The CIA,” he said, “loaded up a junk, a North Vietnamese junk, with communist weapons—the Agency maintains communist arsenals in the United States and around the world. They floated this junk off the coast of central Vietnam. Then they shot it up and made it look like a fire fight had taken place, and they brought in the American press. Based on this evidence, two Marine landing teams went into Danang and a week after that the American air force began regular bombing of North Vietnam.” An invasion that took three million lives was under way.

The Israelis have played this murderous game since 1948. The massacre of peace activists in international waters on 31 May was “spun” to the Israeli public for most of last week, preparing them for yet more murder by their government, with the unarmed flotilla of humanitarians described as terrorists or dupes of terrorists. The BBC was so intimidated that it reported the atrocity primarily as a “potential public relations disaster for Israel”, the perspective of the killers, and a disgrace for journalism.

A similar master illusion currently preoccupies Asian governments. On 20 May, South Korea announced that it had “overwhelming evidence” that one of its warships, the Cheonan, had been sunk by a torpedo fired by a North Korean submarine in March with the loss of 46 sailors. The United States maintains 28,000 troops in South Korea, where popular sentiment has long backed a détente with Pyongyang.

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The Anti Press

This past week's Wikileaks release of footage showing the deaths of more than a dozen Iraqis in the summer of 2007 has generated a great deal of desperately needed public dialogue in regard to the reality of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as opposed to the perception of the wars presented to us by the corporate media.

For more than three months, another story has been unravelling, the implications of which are far more startling than the information uncovered by Wikileaks. True to form - the corporate media's coverage of this event has an inverse relationship to its apparent gravity, meaning the coverage has been about zero.

Since the last days of December, the details of this event have been coming into focus - and the emerging image strongly suggests that coalition death-squads have been operating in Afghanistan.

Specific to this case, a group of Special Operations Forces landed outside a village in the middle of the night after receiving reports from informants that improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were being manufactured there. After finding what appeared to be two groups of unarmed fighting age males sleeping in two rooms - the reports indicate that the force summarily executed all of them using silenced weapons. Unfortunately, it appears that the Special Ops team had not entered the sleeping quarters of an IED cell, but the dormitory of a private school for boys.

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Media Lens

The photo is from yet another US massacre.

Ignoring or downplaying Western crimes is a standard feature of the corporate Western media. On rare occasions when a broadcaster or newspaper breaks ranks and reports ‘our’ crimes honestly, it is instructive to observe the response from the rest of the media. Do they follow suit, perhaps digging deeper for details, devoting space to profiles of the victims and interviews with grieving relatives, humanising all concerned? Do they put the crimes in perspective as the inevitable consequence of rapacious Western power? Or do they look away?

One such case is a report that American-led troops dragged Afghan children from their beds and shot them during a night raid on December 27 last year, leaving ten people dead. Afghan government investigators said that eight of the dead were schoolchildren, and that some of them had been handcuffed before being killed. Kabul-based Times correspondent Jerome Starkey reported the shocking accusations about the joint US-Afghan operation. But the rest of the UK news media have buried the report.

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Nikolai Lanine & Media Lens

Introduction

The writer Simon Louvish once told the story of a group of Soviets touring the United States before the age of glasnost. After reading the newspapers and watching TV, they were amazed to find that, on the big issues, all the opinions were the same. "In our country," they said, "to get that result we have a dictatorship, we imprison people, we tear out their fingernails. Here you have none of that. So what's your secret? How do you do it?" (Quoted, John Pilger, Tell Me No Lies, Random House, 2004, p.9)

It's a good question, one being asked by Nikolai Lanine who served with the Soviet Army during its 1979-1989 occupation of Afghanistan, but who now lives and works as a peace activist in Canada. Lanine has spent several years trawling through Soviet-era newspaper archives comparing the propaganda of that time with modern Western media performance.

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