If
there is an honest, unfettered, or unsullied investigative reporter
or commentator working for the major—even minor—US commercial
press, would he or she please stand up?
This
past several weeks have demonstrated that the so-called “free
press” may well be free of overt US government dictate, but it
nevertheless hues faithfully to the US government line on foreign
policy matters. The words that flow from the official US
spokespersons are dutifully recorded and slavishly reported as news
copy by every domestic reporter or pundit holding a press badge and
assigned to cover a branch of government.
Consider
the outrageous rebuff of Seymour Hersh who has won well over a dozen
of the most prestigious US journalism awards, including the Pulitzer
and five Polk prizes. Responsible for the My Lai and Abu Ghraib
atrocity revelations, Hersh has been effectively blacklisted from
publishing in the US since 2013. His accounts of the Syrian war and the US assassination of Osama bin Laden were published overseas in
the London Review of Books, since his former primary
publisher, The New Yorker, and other US outlets refused to
accept them. Amazingly, no groups of journalists, journalist
organizations, or “freedom of the press” advocates have risen in
protest against this muzzling of one of their most esteemed
colleagues. Collective letters protesting alleged media repression in
socialist countries or countries critical of US policy appear
regularly in the New York Review of Books and as paid ads in
the New York Times; yet these same indignant journalists,
pundits, and academics have remained overwhelmingly silent when it
comes to Seymour Hersh.
Even
more outrageous is the lack of any serious effort by the mainstream
press to confirm or refute Hersh’s claims. His counter narrative to
the Obama Administration’s well publicized and embarrassingly
self-serving account of bin Laden’s death would be easily assessed
by following the threads developed by Hersh. Instead, the press
interviewed a handful of government officials and camp followers and
left the official story intact.
Even
more egregious, some independent investigations of Hersh’s
Sarin-gas claims have surfaced that suggest strongly that he might be
right in laying the gassing of civilians at the doorstep of US allies
in the anti-Assad crusade. Both a UN agency and a Turkish legislative
body have challenged the sensational claims of alleged Syrian
government barbarity that prop the US argument for regime change.
However, no major US media outlet has actively acknowledged this
challenge—a shameful affront to journalistic integrity.
The
Blair/Ghadaffi Phone Transcripts
A
few weeks ago, Tony Blair, former UK Prime Minister, released
transcripts of two phone conversations that he had with Muammar
Ghadaffi on February 25, 2011. Despite their significant bearing on
the early moments of the Libyan rising that led to Ghadaffi’s
assassination and overthrow, US media barons and their sycophant
employees chose to trivialize the importance of the calls.
Ten
days after the date that the West marks as the major start of the
Libyan uprising, Tony Blair placed an anxious call to the Libyan
leader, self-admittedly at the behest of the Obama administration and
the NATO allies. It is just as clear, with hostilities at an early
stage, that Blair is threatening Ghadaffi on behalf of his sponsors.
He begins innocuously enough, decrying violence and calling for a
peaceful outcome. He then adds that Ghadaffi must “engage with the
international community, including American and European…” Why
that engagement is essential is not clear. But it soon becomes so…
Five
hours later, Blair is back on the phone with a message from his
masters: “…if you have a safe place to go you should go there
because this will not end peacefully and there has to be a process
of change, that process of change can be managed and we have to
find a way of managing it.” He goes on: “the violence needs to
stop and a new constitution needs to take shape… I repeat
the statement people have said to me, if there is a way that he
can leave he should do so now. I think this can happen peacefully
but he has to act now and signal that he wants this to happen.” [my
italics]
Blair
could not be clearer. He is demanding that the leader of a sovereign
country step aside and allow the US and European powers unilaterally
and without the consent of the people of Libya to determine the
future of Libya. Moreover, Blair clearly backs the demand with the
threat of violence—“…this will not end peacefully.” Sane
people would count this as tantamount to a coup.
For
his part, Ghadaffi asks Blair to come and see the situation himself.
He denies that the situation is either dire or unstable. But he does
affirm strongly that his opposition is Al Qaeda—that is, extreme
fundamentalists. He asks Blair if he supports them: “…are you
supporting terrorism?” Exasperated with the threat, Ghaddafi
concludes: “…we have no problem, just leave us alone. If you are
really serious and you are looking for the truth, get on a plane and
come see us.”
Of
course Blair and those pulling his strings were not “looking for
the truth’ anymore than the Western media are seriously looking for
the truth.
Less
than three weeks later, the UN declared the infamous “no fly zone”
that allowed NATO forces to launch an air war against Ghadaffi’s
forces. US and NATO planes, along with covert fighters from the Gulf
States, crippled loyalist forces and violently turned the war against
Ghadaffi just as Blair said they would.
And
today, Libya is a broken, ungovernable state, a haven for jihadists,
just as Ghadaffi said would happen.
A
pity the courtesans of the US media show no interest in “looking
for the truth.”
Adrift
in the Persian Gulf
Two
shallow draft riverine craft operated by the US military were boarded
and held by Iranian security forces near Farsi Island the day of
President Obama’s state of the union address and days before a
radical shift in US-Iranian relations.
Any
reasonably alert reader of US news accounts of this encounter would
be curious about nearly every detail and subsequent explanation
offered. The fact that two specialized military craft favored by US
special operations and used extensively for command, control and
reconnaissance, were boarded in Iranian territorial waters near
Iran’s largest naval base might cause some wonder.
The
fact that the riverine craft are designed to operate in shallow river
or coastal waters, but found their way over two hundred miles from
the Saudi shore and in the middle of the Persian Gulf surely warrants
some further wonder.
The
military’s first explanations of these bizarre circumstances blamed
engine failure and drift for the embarrassing presence of two boats
and ten US personnel in unauthorized waters.
Of
course, it’s hard to imagine that both boats suffered engine
failure at the same moment and no relief was mobilized to render
assistance. Before anyone asked embarrassing questions (not that the
lapdog press would), Defense Secretary Ash Carter offered another
tale: navigational failure caused the boats to go off course (way off
course!).
But
should anyone press this explanation (no one did), they might notice
that the boats are equipped with sophisticated navigation, radar, and
communication systems; and the likelihood that both of the
boats would make the same error, go undetected, and proceed radically
off course is about the same as a commercial air craft leaving New
York’s LaGuardia airport and heading east rather than west.
So
the military (CENTCOM) returned to a version of the first account,
stating emphatically that mechanical failure of one boat’s diesel
engine caused the two to stop for repairs while travelling from
Kuwait to Bahrain. Of course that leaves the question of why the
shallow draft boats needed to be hundreds of miles from the Saudi
coast in the middle of the Persian Gulf, far away from the most
direct and appropriate route to their destination.
But
the bumbling explanations caused no consternation among the willfully
gullible capitalist press. Instead, they reported earnestly the
xenophobic ranting of election-season politicians about imaginary
offense to US virtue.
Apart
from Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept, no significant
media figure cast a doubt on the Pentagon’s ever changing fairy
tale, another demonstration of the utter spinelessness of the US
media.
Zoltan
Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment