Today, more than ever, it is essential to counter powerful governments and corporations that and are able to manipulate the media at will. When we consider that Director General of the CIA General Petraeus is on record as saying US strategy is to conduct a war of perceptions continuously through the news media, we don’t have to imagine much that the prevailing view of world forwarded by the mainstream media and swallowed by most people could well be based on a pack of lies.
Take British politician George Galloway’s comments to a US senate committee hearing in 2005 concerning the invasion of Iraq. He told Senator Norm Coleman that he gave his heart and soul to oppose the policy that Coleman had promoted and his political life’s blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis. Galloway told the senator that Iraq, contrary to his claims, did not have weapons of mass destruction. He also told Coleman that, again contrary to his claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda and no connection to the atrocity on 9/11, 2001.
Galloway concluded by saying, “Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong, and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1,600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.”
And that pack of lies became a common sense version of reality for the masses as the media cheer-leaded the invasion of Iraq based on false claims about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction. Think Iraq then. Think Iran now.
But that’s just a small part of what is a larger pack of lies.
How about considering that al-Qaeda is just a list of Islamist fighters that the US funded against the Russians in Afghanistan and still uses for its strategic aims today, whether in Libya or Syria. How about considering that events surrounding 9/11 were a false flag operation to gain US public support for an ongoing ‘war on terror’ (against the convenient, ever-present al-Qaeda ‘threat’) that purposively destroys civil liberties at home, while justifying military plunder in one resource rich country after another. How about the Lockerbie airline bombing being part of a cover up over the CIA’s involvement in drug running, as former CIA ‘asset’ Susan Lindauer claims.
They couldn’t make such things up? But maybe they could and they are.
Some may say these are merely conspiracy theories gone wild. But the point is that credible alternative versions of reality hardly ever (if at all) receive any airtime or column inches in the mainstream media. If they were to appear and people then began to question the mainstream media’s depiction of recent history and events, then the pack of lies about a war on terror, a simplistic made-for-TV Hollywoodesque good versus evil view of the world or removing tyrants from power under the lie of humanitarian interventionism, would soon come tumbling down.
Modern day myths that have ordinary people lining up in support of ‘anti-terror’ wars or suchlike would then be in tatters and the actual reality seen for the bloody imperialism that it is. It is not without reason that a document by the British Ministry of Defence leaked to WikiLeaks describes investigative journalism as a “threat” greater than terrorism.
The truth matters, especially when it reaches a mass public audience. It is then that the US can become extremely jittery. Look no further than the impact of WikiLeaks and the subsequent plight of Julian Assange to appreciate this.
Julian Assange was fired by the need to hold powerholders to account and was able to provide cutting insight into the back room deals that have traditionally occurred beyond the public gaze. By exposing state-corporate secrets and challenging powerful institutions, Assange has made many enemies in high places. From Wall Street to the heart of US government (and possibly the Indian government too, given the information he claims to have on India’s black money in foreign accounts), they fear him. And they fear what else WikiiLeaks might expose, especially the names of crooked individuals who were responsible for the 2008 economic meltdown.
The US state-corporate machine has done everything in its power thus far to curtail WikeLeaks’ influence. Most debilitating of all was the shutting down of WikiLeaks’ access to finance, notably via PayPal, MasterCard, the Swiss bank PostFinance, Moneybookers, Bank of America and Visa Inc. Bank of America has been especially strident in attempting to discredit and shut down WikiLeaks with various dirty tricks, including backing a smear campaign that involved the use of false documents, disinformation, and sabotage.
US attorney general Eric Holder said Assange put the lives of US citizens ‘at risk’ through the leaking of diplomatic cables. But, if Assange succeeded in doing one thing, it was in shifting the public’s gaze towards the likes of Holder himself and those whom he sought to protect: the billionaire financiers, industrialists and corporate funded politicians who despise transparency, dislike democracy and hate anyone trying to hold them to genuine account. Assange’s tactics stabbed at the heart of the corrupt US establishment (among others) in a way that others had hitherto been unable to do. And that’s why he now finds him caught up in a justice system developed by the powerful and capable of being manipulated in favour of the powerful.
As the saga over his future continues to unfold, the world would do well to contemplate on what is happening to the real criminals who Assange wanted to expose and who have not merely put lives ‘at risk’, to use Holder’s words, but have quite literally got away with murder with their illegal wars and interventions.
James Stockwell, former CIA officer, asserts that, by the 1980s alone, the US and CIA had been responsible for six million deaths through its ‘third world war’ – its war on the ‘third world’. It kind of puts Holder’s hypocrisy and statement about putting lives ‘at risk’ into context. In more recent times, Iraq has been torn to pieces by sectarianism since the US invasion and occupation, Libya is in turmoil in the aftermath of NATO intervention, Pakistan is being destabilised and a proxy war is being stoked by the US and its allies in Syria.
If we really had truth and if we really had justice, instead of Assange, we would see the likes of Bush, Blair, Obama, Cheney, Rice and their profiteering arms dealing cronies and private ‘security’ contractors, to name but a select few, standing in the dock and being made to pay for the hundreds of thousands of deaths they have caused. But we won’t. We not only have sham democracies but sham justice too.
Originally from the northwest of England, Colin Todhunter has spent many years in India. He has written extensively for the Bangalore-based Deccan Herald, New Indian Express and Morning Star (Britain). His articles have also appeared in many other publications. His East by Northwest site is at: http://colintodhunter.blogspot.com
