Fake News About Iran, Russia, China Is U.S. Journalism’s Daily Bread (Annotated)
DISPATCHES FROM MOON OF ALABAMA, BY "B"
This article is part of an ongoing series of dispatches from Moon of Alabama
The chief newspaper for the US ruling class registers the unavoidable reality. The report is however peppered with the usual distortions and ugly innuendoes utilized by Western disinformation.
Every few days U.S. 'intelligence' and 'officials' produce fake claims about this or that 'hostile' country. U.S. media continue to reproduce those claims even if they lack any logic, substance, and do not make any sense.
On June 27 the New York Times and the Washington Post published fake news about alleged Russian payments to the Taliban for killing U.S. troops.
The stories ran on the outlets' front pages.
Two weeks later the story was shown to have no basis:
[T]hat the story was obviously bullshit did not prevent Democrats in Congress, including 'Russiagate' swindler Adam Schiff, to bluster about it and to call for immediate briefings and new sanctions on Russia.
Just a day after it was published the main accusation, that Trump was briefed on the 'intelligence' died. The Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Advisor and the CIA publicly rejected the claim. Then the rest of the story started to crumble. On June 2, just one week after it was launched, the story was declared dead.
...
The NYT buried the above quoted dead corpse of the original story page A-19.
Despite that the Democrats continued to use the fake story for attacks on Donald Trump.
Yesterday the commander of the U.S. forces in the Middle East drove a stake though the heart of the dead corpse of the original story:
Two months after top Pentagon officials vowed to get to the bottom of whether the Russian government bribed the Taliban to kill American service members, the commander of troops in the region says a detailed review of all available intelligence has not been able to corroborate the existence of such a program.
"It just has not been proved to a level of certainty that satisfies me," Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command, told NBC News. McKenzie oversees U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
But as one fake news zombie finally dies others get resurrected. Politico's 'intelligence' stenographer Natasha Bertrand produced this nonsensical claim:
Politico's disgusting fabrication.
The Iranian government is weighing an assassination attempt against the American ambassador to South Africa, U.S. intelligence reports say, according to a U.S. government official familiar with the issue and another official who has seen the intelligence.
News of the plot comes as Iran continues to seek ways to retaliate for President Donald Trump’s decision to kill a powerful Iranian general earlier this year, the officials said. If carried out, it could dramatically ratchet up already serious tensions between the U.S. and Iran and create enormous pressure on Trump to strike back — possibly in the middle of a tense election season.
U.S. officials have been aware of a general threat against the ambassador, Lana Marks, since the spring, the officials said. But the intelligence about the threat to the ambassador has become more specific in recent weeks. The Iranian Embassy in Pretoria is involved in the plot, the U.S. government official said.
Ambassador Lana Marks is known for selling overpriced handbags and for her donations to Trump's campaign. To Iran she has zero political or symbolic value. There is no way Iran would ever think about an attack on such a target. Accordingly the South African intelligence services do not believe that there is such a threat:
South African Minister of State Security Ayanda Dlodlo said the matter was “receiving the necessary attention” and that the State Security Agency (SSA) was “interacting with all relevant partners both in the country and abroad, to ensure that no harm will be suffered by the US Ambassador, including any other Diplomatic Officials inside the borders of our country.”
However, an informed intelligence source told Daily Maverick that although the “matter has been taken seriously… as we approach all such threats, specifically, there appears to be, from our perspective, no discernible threat. Least of all from the source that it purports to emanate from.
There was “no evidence or indicator”, the source said, so the plot was “not likely to be real”. The “associations made are not sustainable on any level but all precautions will be put in place”.
The source suggested this was an instance of the “tail wagging the dog”, of the Trump administration wielding a “weapon of mass distraction” to divert attention from its failures in the election campaign running up to President Donald Trump’s re-election bid on November 3.
The spokesperson for the Iranian ministry of foreign affairs, Saeed Khatibzadeh, strongly denied the allegation in the Politico report which he called “hackneyed and worn-out… anti-Iran propaganda”.
In January the U.S. assassinated Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. Soleimani led the external campaigns of the Iranian Quds Forces. He was the one who orchestrated the campaign that defeated the Islamic State. His mythic-symbolic position for Iran and the resistance in the Middle East is beyond that of any U.S. figure.
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S I D E B A R To Middle Eastern Shi'ites, he is James Bond, Erwin Rommel and Lady Gaga rolled into one. To the West, he is the commander of the Quds Force of Iran's Revolutionary Guards—responsible for exporting Iran's Islamic revolution, supporting terrorists, subverting pro-Western governments and waging Iran's foreign wars. A veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, Hajj Qasem, as he is known, took command of the Quds Force in the late 1990s. The Force is paymaster of Hizballah, Hamas and other terrorists plaguing Israel. When the Assad regime faced defeat in 2012, it was Soleimani who brought in Shi'ite militiamen from Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan to Syria, and then the Russians in 2015. When ISIS overran northern Iraq, it was Soleimani who armed the Shi'ite militias and organized the defense of Baghdad, where his proxies had often ambushed U.S. troops. Soleimani is also a master of propaganda, posting selfies from battlefields across the region to convince one and all that he is the master of the Middle Eastern chessboard. Pollack, a former CIA analyst, is an expert on Middle Eastern politics
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There is simply no one in the U.S. military or political hierarchy who could be seen as his equal. Iran has therefore announced that it will take other ways to revenge the assassination of Soleimani.
As an immediate response to the assassination of Soleimani Iran launched a precise missile attack against two U.S. bases in Iraq. It has also announced that it will make sure that the U.S. military will have to leave the Middle East. That program is in full swing now as U.S. bases in Iraq are again coming under daily missile attacks:
More than eight months after a barrage of rockets killed an American contractor and wounded four American service members in Kirkuk, Iraq, militia groups continue to target U.S. military bases in that country, and the frequency of those attacks has increased.
"We have had more indirect fire attacks around and against our bases the first half of this year than we did the first half of last year," Gen. Frank McKenzie, the commander of the U.S. Central Command, said. "Those attacks have been higher."
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McKenzie's comments came just hours after he announced the United States would be cutting its footprint in Iraq by almost half by the end of September, with about 2,200 troops leaving the country.
Just hours ago two Katyusha rockets were fired against the U.S. embassy in Baghdad's Green Zone. Two British/U.S.convoys also came under attack. U.S. air defense took the missiles down but its anti-missile fire is only further disgruntling the Iraqi population.
These attacks are still limited and designed to not cause any significant casualties. But they will continue to increase over time until the last U.S. soldier is withdrawn from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and other Middle East countries. That, and only that, is the punishment Iran promised as revenge for Soleimani's death.
The alleged Iranian threat against the U.S. ambassador to South Africa is just another fake news propaganda story. It is useful only for lame blustering:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump - 3:04 UTC · Sep 15, 2020
...caused over so many years. Any attack by Iran, in any form, against the United States will be met with an attack on Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude!
The danger of such fake stories about Russia or Iran is that they might be used to justify a response in the case of a false flag attack on the alleged targets.
Should something inconvenient happen to Ambassador Lana Marks the Trump administration could use the fake story as an excuse to respond with a limited attack on Iran.
It is well known by now that U.S. President Donald Trump is lying every time he opens his mouth. Why do U.S. journalists presume that the agencies and anonymous officials who work under him are more truthful in their uttering than the man himself is hard to understand. Why do they swallow such bullshit? [Rhetorical question.]
Posted by b on September 15, 2020 at 11:50 UTC | Permalink
Addendum
America's vassal states mirror and often outdo US journalism's cynical practices. Britain and Australia lead the pack. Here's a typical example from Australia, contributed by Evan Jones, himself an Aussie, who spares no verbal fury.
China's 'hybrid war': Beijing's mass surveillance of Australia and the world for secrets and scandal
are state and federal politicians, military officers, diplomats, academics, civil servants, business executives, engineers,
journalists, lawyers and accountants."
In fact, such articles are classic projectionism, where the accuser projects onto those he is accusing, exactly the transgressions that he himself practices.
In joint operation with GCHQ and the NSA, Australia's 5 Eyes has been hoovering private data on all citizens for decades. Worse, their data security practices are so hopelessly mismanaged, that billions of data points have leaked into the public domain in dozens of incidents, as regularly reported in various IT data security reports.
In other words, if China wants to hoover up private data on Australians they have two simple open source choices:
1] Buy a few hundred million data points on Australian citizens from Facebook and Google 2] Buy the leaked data from dozens of vendor/hackers on the dark web.
On the other hand, why the fc*k would China need private data on the citizens of a small-medium country on the far side of the planet, that has the population of Chongqing?
Anyway, such articles serve their purpose of brainwashing the Aussies into transferring their ten minutes of hate from them-thar evil Muslims to them-thar evil Chinese.
Selected Comments
Amerikas propaganda machine never sleeps and sadly to many people believe the BS
Posted by: jo6pac | Sep 15 2020 12:01 utc | 1
But CNN has and will continue torepeat the allegations as fact, so it's mission accomplished for the deep state. As another poster said on this board about manufacturing consent:
"It is important to discuss the story, not its credibility, the more the discussion, the more the reaction and the more it reinforces the narrative."
Just for laughs, I looked at the reviews of Gordon Chang's book, 'The Coming Economic Collapse of China' to see if I could figure out the reasoning and one of the reviewers said that China weakens because they lack a free press to hold their govt accountable. I had a good laugh at that one.
Posted by: Christian J. Chuba | Sep 15 2020 12:44 utc | 3
There's an objective explanation for that.
In the 1920s (or 30s), far-rightist Karl Popper (the Queen's the favorite "philosopher") coined the concept of "public opinion". This would become a hallmark of Western Civilization in the post-war.
The public opinion theory states that the masses don't have an opinion for themselves or, if they have, it is sculpting/flexible. The dominant classes can, therefore, guide the masses like a shepherd, to its will.
Friedrich von Hayek - a colleague of Popper and father of British neoliberalism (the man behind Thatcher) - then developed on the issue, by proposing the institutionalization of public opinion. He proposed a system of three or four tiers of intellectuals which a capitalist society should have. The first tier is the capitalist class itself, who would govern the entire world anonymously, through secret meetings. These meetings would produce secret reports, whose ideas would be spread to the second tier. The second tier is the academia and the more prominent politicians and other political leaderships. The third tier is the basic education teachers, who would indoctrinate the children. The fourth tier is the MSM, whose job is to transform the ideas and opinions of the first tier into "common sense" ("public opinion").
Therefore, it's not a case where the Western journalists are being fooled. Their job was never to inform the public. When they publish a lie about, say, Iran trying to kill an American ambassador in South Africa, they are not telling a lie in their eyes: they are telling an underlying truth through one thousand lies. The objective here is to convince ("teach") the American masses it is good for the USA if Iran was invaded and destroyed (which is a truth). They are like the modern Christian God, who teach its subjects the Truth through "mysterious ways".
It is an insult to the noble profession, to call what the mainstream media in the west, especially in the USA do, journalism. In my opinion what they do is propaganda and stenography on behalf of those who are in power. I am not sure who coined the term but “presstitution” is not a bad attempt at describing their profession.
Unfortunately they have been amazingly successful in brainwashing people. One current example, from numerous ones that could be cited, is the public’s opinion on Julian Assange. .
While the western corporate media lie on a continuous basis - and that has the predictable effect - what is more insidious is not these acts of commissions (meaning lies), but their acts of omission (meaning excluding or deemphasizing important contextual information) leading people to make the wrong conclusions. NPR in the US is an excellent example of such presstitution.
What I am saying is nothing new to the bar flies here. But I am extremely distressed when I see how poorly informed (propagandized, brainwashed) the vast majority of the people I know are. Let’s say a decade ago, ideological polarization was the main reason why it was so difficult to have an open discussion on important issues the US. Today it has become even more difficult because, thanks to the success of the presstitutes, people also have different sets of “facts”. And most alarmingly, after successfully creating a readership who believe in alternative “facts”, the mainstream presstitutes are moving on to creating a logic-free narrative. Examples include Assad supposedly gassing his people when he was winning (even though that was guaranteed to produce western intervention against him). A more recent example is the Navalny affair. Sadly, very sadly, way too many people are affected.
Posted by: Nathan Mulcahy | Sep 15 2020 12:56 utc | 5
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"b" is Moon of Alabama's founding (and chief) editor. This site's purpose is to discuss politics, economics, philosophy and blogger Billmon's Whiskey Bar writings. Moon Of Alabama was opened as an independent, open forum for members of the Whiskey Bar community. Bernhard )"b") started and still runs the site. Once in a while you will also find posts and art from regular commentators. You can reach the current administrator of this site by emailing Bernhard at MoonofA@aol.com.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
US and European journalists are also lying constantly, that's why. Even when they make embarrassing attempts at "being unbiased" or "factual". Do they understand it? Many might not, but some do, perhaps fewer than anyone would think reasonable.
Btw a lot of these "journalists" in Europe in particular openly self-identify to "the left" or even as socialists and communists or "greens". So much for ideology as some kind of solution: entirely worthless and superficial.
Posted by: Sunny Runny Burger | Sep 15 2020 12:27 utc | 2