The Dumbed-Down New York Times

In a column mocking the political ignorance of the “dumbed-down” American people and lamenting the death of “objective fact,” New York Times columnist Timothy Egan shows why so many Americans have lost faith in the supposedly just-the-facts-ma’am mainstream media.

Egan states as flat fact, “If more than 16 percent of Americans could locate Ukraine on a map, it would have been a Really Big Deal when Trump said that Russia was not going to invade it — two years after they had, in fact, invaded it.”

But it is not a “fact” that Russia “invaded” Ukraine – and it’s especially not the case if you also don’t state as flat fact that the United States has invaded Syria, Libya and many other countries where the U.S. government has launched bombing raids or dispatched “special forces.”  Yet, the Times doesn’t describe those military operations as “invasions.”

Nor does the newspaper of record condemn the U.S. government for violating international law, although in every instance in which U.S. forces cross into another country’s sovereign territory without permission from that government or the United Nations Security Council, that is technically  an act of illegal aggression.

In other words, the Times applies a conscious double standard when reporting on the actions of the United States or one of its allies (note how Turkey’s recent invasion of Syria was just an “intervention”) as compared to how the Times deals with actions by U.S. adversaries, such as Russia.

Biased on Ukraine

The Times’ reporting on Ukraine has been particularly dishonest and hypocritical. The Times ignores the substantial evidence that the U.S. government encouraged and supported a violent coup that overthrew elected President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22, 2014, including a pre-coup intercepted phone call between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt discussing who should lead the new government and how to “midwife this thing.”

The Times also played down the key role of neo-Nazis and extreme nationalists in killing police before the coup, seizing government building during the coup, and then spearheading the slaughter of ethnic Russian Ukrainians after the coup. If you wanted to detect the role of these SS-wannabes from the Times’ coverage, you’d have to scour the last few paragraphs of a few stories that dealt with other aspects of the Ukraine crisis.

While leaving out the context, the Times has repeatedly claimed that Russia “invaded” Crimea, although curiously without showing any photographs of an amphibious landing on Crimea’s coast or Russian tanks crashing across Ukraine’s border en route to Crimea or troops parachuting from the sky to seize strategic Crimean targets.

The reason such evidence of an “invasion” was lacking is that Russian troops were already stationed in Crimea as part of a basing agreement for the port of Sevastopol. So, it was a very curious “invasion” indeed, since the Russian troops were on scene before the “invasion” and their involvement after the coup was peaceful in protecting the Crimean population from the depredations of the new regime’s neo-Nazis. The presence of a small number of Russian troops also allowed the Crimeans to vote on whether to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, which they did with a 96 percent majority.

In the eastern provinces, which represented Yanukovych’s political base and where many Ukrainians opposed the coup, you can fault, if you wish, the Russian decision to provide some military equipment and possibly some special forces so ethnic Russian and other anti-coup Ukrainians could defend themselves from the assaults by the neo-Nazi Azov brigade and from the tanks and artillery of the coup-controlled Ukrainian army.

But an honest newspaper and honest columnists would insist on including this context. They also would resist pejorative phrases such as “invasion” and “aggression” – unless, of course, they applied the same terminology objectively to actions by the U.S. government and its “allies.”

That sort of nuance and balance is not what you get from The New York Times and its “group thinking” writers, people like Timothy Egan. When it comes to reporting on Russia, it’s Cold War-style propaganda, day in and day out.

And this has not been a one-off problem. The unrelenting bias of the Times and, indeed, the rest of the mainstream U.S. news media on the Ukraine crisis represents a lack of professionalism that was also apparent in the pro-war coverage of the Iraq crisis in 2002-03 and other catastrophic U.S. foreign policy decisions.

A growing public recognition of that mainstream bias explains why so much of the American population has tuned out supposedly “objective” news (because it is anything but objective).

Indeed, those Americans who are more sophisticated about Russia and Ukraine than Timothy Egan know that they’re not getting the straight story from the Times and other MSM outlets. Those not-dumbed-down Americans can spot U.S. government propaganda when they see it.

US Routinely Manipulates Intelligence to Justify Engaging in Conflicts

Allegations US Central Command deliberately manipulated intelligence about the fight against the Daesh, if confirmed, were likely motivated by efforts to expand the war, antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan told Sputnik.

 US Congress revealed in a report last week that US Central Command (CENTCOM) distorted intelligence to present a positive outlook of anti-Daesh efforts in Iraq and Syria.

“IS [Daesh] is another over-blown construct of US imperialism to keep the average American afraid and supporting military interventions like terrorism and communism before it,” Sheehan, a gold star mother whose son was killed in Iraq in 2004, said.

Sheehan observed that if investigators confirmed that CENTCOM had manipulated intelligence on Daesh to give more favorable reports to US President Barack Obama and other leaders on the progress of the conflict, such activities would be consistent with well-established patterns of behavior.

“Why does the US war machine need to always manipulate facts and propaganda is a more appropriate question,” she remarked.

The manipulation of intelligence by US leaders and agencies had repeatedly been used to justify unnecessary and avoidable conflicts, Sheehan maintained.

“Throughout US history, events have been used to smooth the path for war, and more war.”

This tendency had become more pronounced, not less in recent years, Sheehan warned.

“Most recently, [former US Vice President] Dick Cheney was known to go to CIA headquarters to ‘cherry-pick’ intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003.”

US intelligence agencies and their senior analysts were under continual pressure to exaggerate alleged threats to the United States in order to justify expensive arms build ups and the enormous profit margins that went to major domestic military contractors, Sheehan explained.

“There must always be an enemy to keep the wheels of the war machine greased and to keep the pockets of the profiteers full.”

US Navy Commander Kyle Raines told Sputnik on Thursday that CENTCOM was looking into the congressional report.

Sheehan’s son, US Army Specialist Casey served in the First Cavalry Division and was killed in action on April 4, 2004.

Australia, UK, US Complicit in Indonesian Massacres, International Judges Say

By Samantha Hawley

A non-binding international tribunal at The Hague has found Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States were complicit in facilitating the 1965 mass killings in Indonesia.

Key points:

• 500,000 Indonesians killed in anti-communist purge at height of Cold War
• Report found Australia continued to back army despite knowing about the killings
• President Joko Widodo has refused to apologise for historic murders

An estimated half a million people perished in what was one of the worst massacres of the 20th Century. The killings were triggered by a failed coup that led to the deaths of six army generals, followed by the mass targeting of communists.

The International People’s Tribunal at The Hague has now ruled that Indonesia committed crimes against humanity, but the finding is non-binding and carries no legal weight.

The judges found allegations of “cruel and unspeakable murders” and the “unjustifiable imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of people without trial” was well founded.

“It has also been demonstrated that sexual violence, particularly against women, was systematic and routine, especially during the period 1965 to 1967,” the report said.

The judges found Indonesia responsible for the crimes and called for the current administration to apologise and to institute investigations and prosecutions of those perpetrators who are still alive.

“Furthermore, the archives should be opened and the real truth on these crimes against humanity should be established,” the judges said.

The tribunal’s report found Australia, the US and the UK complicit by using propaganda to manipulate international opinion in favour of the Indonesian army.

The report said Australia and the UK, ” … shared the US aim of seeking to bring about the overthrow of president Sukarno.”

“They continued with this policy even after it had become abundantly clear that killings were taking place on a mass and indiscriminate basis. On balance, this appears to justify the charge of complicity,” the report said.

The report detailed horrifying details of rape and torture, including accused communists being forced to drink soldiers’ urine, while in other cases victims’ ears were cut off and they were forced to consume them.

According to the report, other acts of torture included, burning body parts, electric shocks, water torture, pulling out of fingernails and tying victims inside a sack with snakes.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo has said he will not apologise for the historic atrocity, but the report argued it was his duty to do so.

Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy

from John Pilger

 

Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy from John Pilger on Vimeo.

German Politician Slams His Colleagues For ‘Demonizing Russia’

German politician, former Minister of State and member of the Green party Ludger Vollmer wrote an open letter, criticizing the policies of his colleagues toward Russia and accusing them of “demonizing” Russian President Vladimir Putin, Frankfurter Rundschau wrote.

According to Vollmer, German politicians are inclined to demonize Russia and Vladimir Putin, thus worsening the conflict between the West and Moscow, Volmer said.

Although Putin is not “an ideal of liberal democracy,” there is still no reason to position him as an aggressor and fear alleged Russian aggression in Poland and the Baltic States, the German politician stressed.

“Putin is maybe not a leading figure in terms of a libertarian democracy. But he is not a warmonger,” the politician stressed.

In Vollmer’s opinion, Germany is prone to a one-sided coverage of Putin’s policy and does not take into account the fact that the majority of Russians support him.The politician has accused his own party of presenting Russian President Vladimir Putin as an evil and blindly repeating NATO slogans, thus exacerbating tensions between Berlin and Moscow.

In May, journalist Robert Parry wrote for German website Propagandaschau that major media sources in the West always portray Russia as an aggressor, while Putin is presented as a bad guy and dictator.

“If an intelligent person reads a report on Russia or Putin in the New York Times these days, then should it expect an objective and balanced coverage? Or will it contain predictable scorn and ridicule?,” Parry asked in his publication.

According to Parry, instead of considering all evidence objectively and fairly analyzing various opinions, Western media publish propaganda messages and accuse Russia and other “unpopular” countries of all possible sins.

“Just because you might not like someone, does not mean that one should let his feelings out or look at the facts through a unilateral spectacle,” the journalist wrote.

Washington’s Not- so -Invisible Hand: It’s Not Economics, It’s Empire

By Jason Hirthler

Scottish philosopher Adam Smith famously noted the “invisible hand” of the market that shaped the character of economies near and far. The rightwing neoliberal capitalist movement, dominant in the West since the early Seventies, has turned this phrase into the sacrosanct dictum of its secular religion. All human behavior must be submitted to the “free market.” (This is the notional credo, but in practice corporate elites are subsidized, bailout out, and given every possible taxpayer benefit to ensure higher private profits.) So now, when nations fail, it is typically said in the media to be the product of a) a crazed dictator threatening counterintuitive genocide on his own people; or b) foolish state interventions by deranged socialist ideologues.

In other words, if only these benighted nations would embrace free markets and free elections, all would be well. Imagine Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss admonishing “emerging” nations amid the collapsing scenery of the “developed” world. What’s more, the media conflates free markets with free elections in a risible construct called “free-market democracy,” despite the fact that markets are neither free nor a foundation of democracy, as the construct suggests.

Moreover, absolutely free markets would instantly prohibit democracy, which is why democracy, and often free elections, must be thoroughly undermined to even enable free-market thinking to reign.

In reality, it isn’t the market’s hidden hand at work in country after country, but Washington’s. It is Washington that intervenes to prop up failed businesses at the behest of corporate campaign donors. It is Washington that stages humanitarian interventions to unlock a guarded nation’s resources under the guise of defending the defenseless. It is Washington that negotiates supply gluts in the oil market, crashing the “market price” of crude and producing needless economic trouble for enemies Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and others.

Just as critically, it is Washington that publicly fines miscreant financial concerns in a show of faint justice. It is Washington that first produces a sham publicity campaign slandering a targeted leader in the press, ensuring that, once it summons the requisite cloak of international legitimacy (bogus UN Security Council resolution, a shambling coalition of supplicant nations, etc.), it can prosecute its war of aggression with minimal public agitation. It is Washington that uses engineered capital strikes, commodity price collapse, and debilitating sanctions to cobble together sufficient isolated data points (price of bread, rise in poverty, etc.) to lay the target nation’s economic woes at the foot of imbecile socialists who naturally blaspheme the free market faith by using the heavy hand of the state to steer the economy. As such, Russia is authoritarian and imperialist, Iran rabidly ideological, and Venezuela morbidly statist. In short, it is Washington that guides the economic fate of numberless nations around the world.

Pariahs Three

The aforementioned countries form the demonic trifecta that Barack Obama has spent a good chunk of his feckless presidency antagonizing. He annually declares Venezuela to be a national security threat to the United States, and an extraordinary one at that. The White House actually puts such ideological nonsense in writing, backed with all the pomp of an executive order. Of course, what Obama is really doing is condemning any alternative to neoliberal capitalism and its war and austerity agenda. He’s especially afraid of successful alternatives, as Bolivarian socialism proved to be during the Chavez era. But now, with oil prices cutting the legs out from under the state’s subsidy program, some ham-fisted economic management by the Maduro administration and a capital strike by private producers have Venezuela in a tailspin.

The coming collapse in Caracas has been aided by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a Reagan-era front for U.S. subversion, has deposited millions into the hands of the neoliberal opposition both political and media. The assumption with these donations is that the country in question is desperately in need of institutional reform along the lines of Washington-defined “democratic” principles. This pays for the propaganda cliches produced by embedded journalists and the street violence perpetrated by the so-called pro-democracy groups it funds. To some effect, since the Maduro ticket was soundly beaten in Congressional elections last year. And yet a recent radio debate between two Venezuelan analysts, declared the left-leaning, mild-mannered associate professor George Ciccariello-Maher to be the “radical”, while contemptuous Venezuelan journalist Francisco Toro was the mainstream voice of reason, despite his petty hysterics. This is very much the typical outcome of domestic propaganda and direct state subversion abroad.

Iran is slowly learning that it was foolish to negotiate in good faith with the United States. Washington rarely keeps its word. The State Department is less a source of policy prescriptions than the media-facing front for Pentagon and White House initiatives. The anti-nuclear pressure Secretary of State John Kerry’s department has applied to Tehran is simply part of a larger imperial plan dating back decades, recently reflected in Paul Wolfowitz foreign policy planning for the Clinton administration. Now Tehran, much to the growing disgust of the sharp-tongued Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are pinioned in a vice of an unprecedentedly intrusive IAEA inspections regime. (In the past, the U.S. has contemptuously brushed aside international efforts to monitor its nuclear activity more closely, as has Israel, which insults the world with its policy of “deliberate ambiguity.”) But the larger point is that the United States lifted some nuclear sanctions but of course left non-nuclear sanctions in place, which has predictably deterred investment from European and U.S. banks and businesses because they fear falling afoul of these sanctions, incurring the lavish fines administered to firms like HSBC and Deutsche Bank and smaller ones like Epsilon Electronics. The Department of the Treasury, the punitive financial arm of Washington’s virulent anti-indepedence jihad, uses these publicity ops to cast a gloss of legitimacy over its sanctions regime.

Russia is naturally the kingpin of the trifecta, as the largest and most favorably placed country to influence the development of Eurasia. Washington seems to be mortally afraid of the Chinese-inspired “One Belt, One Road” project that envisions pipelines and power grids and highways and railroads from Vladivostok to Lisbon. Russia and China are cornerstone players in this project, stand to reap substantial economic benefits, and have of course deepened their economic and military ties as a consequence. Yet the central idea of Zbigniew Brzezinski–still jousting with Henry Kissinger for preeminence in the geostrategic Rushmore of their minds–ought to be printed on the entrance to the Pentagon, Congress, and the White House: “Thou Shalt Tolerate No Rivals.”

The Visionary

It is Brzezinski, cribbing from Sir Halford Mackinder, and being avidly parroted by Wolfowitz, that placed the monomaniacal emphasis on Eurasia. He claimed that whoever dominated this parcel of earth would necessarily control Western Europe, East Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. God forbid it be anyone but Washington. Rather than pausing to ask himself what right the United States had to assert its authority halfway across the planet, the venerable don of the Carter administration forged ahead declaring America to be the “indispensable nation”, as President Clinton said, later to be echoed by myriad imperial shills including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (the template on which Hillary Clinton has built her depressingly repugnant image) and that erstwhile champion of change Barack Hussein Obama. Brzezinski quickly got to the point in his book The Grand Chessboard: the U.S. must prevent the rise of a single state or a coalition of states “that could challenge America’s primacy.” According to the Grand Wizard of Geopolitics, this will take quite a lot of “political maneuvering and diplomatic manipulation.” It might have benefited President Hassan Rouhani to take heed of Brzezinski’s ideas and the degree to which they’ve been internalized by Washington’s neoconservative and faux progressive communities.

This is, of course, why we are through NATO building up rapid response forces and stacking armory and munitions along Russia’s Western borders. This is why we are bribing and blackmailing Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines, among others, to let us build bases on its sovereign territory in order to surround China with ships, jets, and artillery. This is why Beijing is the conspicuous absence from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP) that Obama sees as part of his own majestic legacy. It’s about establishing control over Eurasia, largely by weakening Eurasia’s constituent parts, and ensuring as well that Western Europe and Russia don’t form a dreaded community of states that might pose a challenge to American hegemony.

Fiefs in Tow

You might imagine that Europe would have had enough of this neocolonialism, but it hasn’t. Perhaps German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande fear regime change should they attempt to do what they were hired to do, namely represent the interests of their own people, not those of the Washington elite. Instead of cutting deals with Russia and China and laying the westernmost foundations of the New Silk Road, Europe continues to enforce Washington’s fatuous sanctions against Russia, its natural trade partner, aiding the demise of European economies. Washington couldn’t care less so long as Paris and Berlin toe the line. Through NATO, European nations join the U.S. in illegal attacks on the Middle East, which create waves of refugees that are soon massing on the doorstep of the EU. Another negative outcome for Europeans as a consequence of their subservience to America. Finally, the EU crushes Greece to pay Wall Street creditors and fully reveals itself for the anti-democratic poser every insider already knows it to be. Dismembering national economies and auctioning off the patrimony of sovereign states is no great thing for Brussels, so long as Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and hedge funds that hold European debt are “made whole.”

So when a country like Britain, always a Eurosceptic, votes to sever ties with America’s unelected marionettes in Brussels, it shouldn’t surprise anyone outside of 10 Downing Street. Instead, our elite-owned Western presses hyperventilate about the doomsday outcomes of Brexit. Economic collapse is promised. Punitive social cuts are threatened. Petulant cries emerge from Berlin. British citizens are uniformly denounced as racist xenophobes warped by fascist nationalism. But perhaps they conceive the unaccountable corporate nature of the European Union, as they did during the raucous debates about it and the Euro during the late Nineties. Perhaps they intuit the counterintuitive stupidity of neoliberal austerity. Perhaps they understand after all that the EU (and its NATO military arm) is a project of American force projection and a tool to consolidate and control Europe under a single bureaucratic umbrella.

But the parties of the one percent, the one percent itself, and their media empire, would never concede as much. The sooner the working class comes to understand that this media hegemony does not represent its views, but merely those of an extremist fringe, the more rapidly that false consensus will falter as an engine of consent. It seems to already be happening. Flaws and misguided notions aside, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn, Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece, are all symptoms of a global populace that can no longer stomach the lies of the one percent and its increasingly fangless propaganda. Seems the once-invisible hand of Washington has been revealed for the disfiguring implement of war and conquest that it has always been.

State Department Forms an Army Social Media Trolls To Spread Propaganda

The latest initiative by the country’s diplomatic offices mirrors the social media disinformation campaign used against Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential campaign and may have disquieting impacts on the perceptions of people around the world.

The Obama administration is set to request $21.5 million next year for a propaganda outfit designed to combat Daesh’s growing influence on social media. The program will be fashioned after faux news and social media empire of Hillary Clinton confidante David Brock.

Known as the “Global Engagement Center” (GEC), the division will be part of the US State Department and will have the authority to hire any individual who can “change the narrative” on social media.

This taxpayer-funded boondoggle has grown from a $5.6 million venture in 2015 to $15 million in 2016, with costs continuing to rise. Despite the budget increase, progress continues to stagnate.

Much like David Brock’s “Correct the Record,” which was used to spread vitriol about presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s opposition Bernie Sanders, the State Department will employ internet trolls to ‘shift narratives’ on the US-led coalition.

If the US government’s new army of social media trolls is focused on degrading the appeal of terrorist entities like Daesh and al-Qaeda, the effort will prove much more noble than Brock’s Media Matters platform, which used its influence to acquire a polling service firm and a digital media entity known as Blue Nation Review that is used to distort public perceptions.

But Washington appears to be focused on expanding its mission well beyond combating terrorism. The GEC will also sponsor and fund foreign journalists who are not required to disclose that they receive the lion’s share of their funding from US government sources.

The largest such operation is the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which will have a $777.8 million budget in FY2017 to not only operate defunct media outlets like Voice of America, but to also subsidize foreign reporters while hiding their influence and bias behind the brands of local, impartial news outlets.

With news industry standards deteriorating around the world due to hidden corporate and government support, people around the world have taken to social media to research the facts on the ground in real-time in order to be one step ahead of the spin.

That was the case in the US presidential election, when media titans pushed for Clinton’s nomination while treating Sanders as a longshot candidate.

As David Brock’s $1 million army of internet trolls has proven to be true, grassroots activists can quickly be drowned out. The 2016 election brought with it the realization that propaganda can be extended to social media, and now that the US government realizes it, the truth may never be the same.