Authentic Fake News

From the beginning of 2002 until U.S. forces began blowing up Iraq in March 2003, the Bushies worked hand in hand with main U.S. media outlets to sell the criminal war to the American people. Because of that Bushies/media coordination 4500 U.S. soldiers lost their lives in a needless war, tens of thousands more were wounded or suffer PTSD, and the Bushies dismantling of Saddam’s military led directly to the formation of ISIS.

The same dynamic has been at work with the civil-war torn country of Syria. All Serious media members, and almost all Serious elected-officials, accept the still-unproven notion that President Assad ordered chemical weapons to be used inside Syria.

But not this U.S. House representative….a veteran…

Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard said she’s “skeptical” that Bashar al-Assad’s regime was behind the chemical weapons attack that killed dozens of people in Syria.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Gabbard if she didn’t believe the President, the secretary of state and Pentagon officials, all of whom came to the same conclusion: that Assad’s regime was responsible. Gabbard mentioned the previous invasion of Iraq, and the intelligence that suggested Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to be false. “So, yes, I’m skeptical,” she said.

 

 Gabbard said: “Why should we just blindly follow this escalation of a counterproductive regime-change war?”  

Here’s Robert Parry, making the same argument I’ve been making….

Assad’s military has gained a decisive advantage over the rebels and he had just scored a major diplomatic victory with the Trump administration’s announcement that the U.S. was no longer seeking “regime change” in Syria. The savvy Assad would know that a chemical weapon attack now would likely result in U.S. retaliation and jeopardize the gains that his military has achieved with Russian and Iranian help.

Assad had no incentive to use chemical weapons. And he had every incentive not to.

And then there is this quite interesting information.…

…former CIA officer Philip Giraldi reported hearing from his intelligence contacts in the field that they were shocked at how the new poison-gas story was being distorted by Trump and the mainstream U.S. news media.  

Giraldi told Scott Horton’s Webcast: “I’m hearing from sources on the ground in the Middle East, people who are intimately familiar with the intelligence that is available who are saying that the essential narrative that we’re all hearing about the Syrian government or the Russians using chemical weapons on innocent civilians is a sham.”

“The intelligence confirms pretty much the account that the Russians have been giving … which is that they hit a warehouse where the rebels – now these are rebels that are, of course, connected with Al Qaeda – where the rebels were storing chemicals of their own and it basically caused an explosion that resulted in the casualties. Apparently the intelligence on this is very clear.”

“People in both the agency [the CIA] and in the military who are aware of the intelligence are freaking out about this because essentially Trump completely misrepresented what he already should have known – but maybe he didn’t – and they’re afraid that this is moving toward a situation that could easily turn into an armed conflict,” Giraldi said before Thursday night’s missile strike. “They are astonished by how this is being played by the administration and by the U.S. media.”

Last month, in Iraq….

…the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) announced that their doctors were treating five children and two women for exposure to chemical agents, adding that it “condemns in the strongest possible terms the use of chemical weapons during fighting around the Iraqi city of Mosul.”

Citing data collected by the research firm IHS Markit, Reuters reports “the Islamic State used chemical weapons at least 52 times in Iraq and Syria and at least 19 times in the areas around Mosul between 2014 and November 2016.”

You might think that clear evidence like that would make U.S. media a bit cautious about jumping onto the propaganda wagon…and especially so when considering their history of assisting the Bushies in misleading Americans about some fucking imminent threat from Saddam’s Iraq, a threat which never existed. But like sick lap dogs, main media is back lapping up their own disgusting 2002-2003 vomit.

The U.S. has a very long history of misleading Americans into middle eastern conflicts. Consider this from 1990, just before the first Gulf War began….

A young woman who gave only her first name, Nayira, testified that she had been a volunteer at Kuwait’s al-Adan hospital, where she had seen Iraqi troops rip scores of babies out of incubators, leaving them “to die on the cold floor.” Between tears, she described the incident as “horrifying.”

Her account was a bombshell. Portions of her testimony were aired that evening on ABC’s “Nightline” and NBC’s “Nightly News.” Seven US senators cited her testimony in speeches urging Americans to support the war, and George HW Bush repeated the story on 10 separate occasions in the weeks that followed.

That story was a total fabrication….

Subsequent investigations by Amnesty International, a division of Human Rights Watch and independent journalists would show that the story was entirely bogus — a crucial piece of war propaganda the American media swallowed hook, line and sinker. Iraqi troops had looted Kuwaiti hospitals, but the gruesome image of babies dying on the floor was a fabrication.

In 1992, John MacArthur revealed in The New York Times that Nayirah was in fact the daughter of Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwait’s ambassador to the US. Her testimony had been organized by a group called Citizens for a Free Kuwait, which was a front for the Kuwaiti government.

Fake news, and false flag operations have been a part of our military-industrial-complex’s “toolbag” for decades. Regime changers need a pre-text for attacking middle eastern countries….so they create their own….pass it along to main media members…who, then, characterize the information as accurate and above reproach.

Today, it’s happening all over again with Syria.