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from CorbettReport Website
...and other potential hotspots and flashpoints around the globe,
concerned citizens are asking how a world so sick of bloodshed and a
population so tired of conflict could be led to this spot once again.
In one of the most egregious examples of this phenomenon, Hearst’s papers widely trumpeted the sinking of the Maine as the work of the Spanish:
Whipped into an anti-Spanish frenzy by a daily torrent of stories depicting Spanish forces’ alleged torture and rape of Cubans, and pushed over the edge by the Maine incident, the public welcomed the beginning of the US-Spanish war.
Although it is now widely believed that the explosion on the Maine was
due to a fire in one of its coal bunkers, the initial lurid reports of
Spanish involvement stuck and the nation was led into war.
...apocryphal
as the story may be, nevertheless perfectly encodes the method by which the
public would be led to war time and again through the decades.
What the public was not informed about at the time, of course, was that just one week before the incident, then-First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill had written to the President of the Board of Trade that it was,
Nor did reports of the attack
announce that the ship
was carrying rifle ammunition and other military
supplies. Instead, reports once again emphasized that the attack was an
out-of-the-blue strike by a maniacal enemy, and the public was led into the
war.
Although the Honolulu Advertiser had even predicted the attack on Pearl Harbor (above image) days in advance, the Japanese Naval codes had already been deciphered by that time, and that even Henry Stimson, the US Secretary of War, had noted in his diary the week before that he had discussed in a meeting with Roosevelt,
...the public were still led to believe that the Pearl Harbor attack had been completely unforeseen.
Just last month, a
newly-declassified
memo emerged showing that FDR had been warned of an impending Japanese
attack on Hawaii just three days before the events at Pearl Harbor, yet the
history books still portray Pearl Harbor as an example of a surprise attack.
In 2005, an internal NSA study was released concluding that the second attack in fact never took place.
In effect, 60000 American
servicemen and as many as three million Vietnamese, let alone as many as
500,000 Cambodians and Laotians, lost their lives because of an incident
that did not occur anywhere but in the imagination of the
Johnson
administration and the pages of
the American media.
FAKED 15-YO KUWAITI GIRL TESTIMONY BEFORE CONGRESS, 1990
What the world was never told was that the incident had in fact been the work of a public relations firm, Hill and Knowltown, and the girl had actually been the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador.
Once again, the public
was whipped into a frenzy of hatred for the Hussein regime, not for the
documented atrocities that it had actually committed on segments of its own
population with weapons supplied to them by the United States itself, but on
the basis of an imaginary story told to the public via their televisions,
orchestrated by a pr firm.
The New York Times led the way with Judith Miller‘s now infamous reporting on the Iraqi WMD story, now known to have been based on false information from untrustworthy sources, but the rest of the media fell into line with the NBC Nightly News asking,
Reports about chemical weapons stashes were reported on before they were confirmed, although headlines boldly asserted their existence as indisputable fact.
We now know that in fact the stockpiles did not exist, and the administration premeditatedly lied the country into yet another war, but the most intense opposition the Bush administration ever received over this documented war crime was some polite correction on the Sunday political talk show circuit:
Rumsfeld Busted on Iraq Immediate Threat
Remarkably, the public at large has seemingly learned nothing from all of these documented historical manipulations.
If anything, the media has become
even bolder in its attempts to manipulate the public’s perceptions, perhaps
emboldened by the fact that so few in the audience seem willing to question
the picture that is being painted for them on the evening news.
CNN lies about Georgian/Russian conflict
In 2009, the BBC showed a cropped image of a rally in Iran which they claimed was a crowd of protesters who assembled to show their opposition to the Iranian government.
An uncropped version of the same photograph
displayed on the LA Times’ website, however, revealed that the photo in fact
came from a rally in support of Ahmedinejad.
Libya Incredible media lies - BBC shows "Green Square" in INDIA 24 August 2011
When sharp-eyed viewers noticed that
the flags in the footage were in fact Indian flags,
the BBC was forced to
admit that they had “accidentally” broadcast footage from India instead of
Tripoli.
Some news sites even carried pictures of the infants.
The images were
later
admitted to have been taken in Egypt and no evidence has ever emerged to
back up the accusations.
When the Government Accountability Office
ruled that these fake news reports in fact constituted illegal covert
propaganda, the White House simply issued a memo declaring the practice to
be legal.
In
December of 2011, the DoD’s own Inspector General
released a report
concluding that the program was in perfect compliance with government
policies and regulations.
The federal contract for the software sourced back to the MacDill Air Force
Base in Florida.
This is an awesome responsibility in even
the most ideal conditions, with diligent reporters guided by trustworthy
editors doing their level best to report the most important news in the most
straightforward way.
And that is
precisely what is happening.
Instead,
the public is increasingly turning toward online sources for their news and
information, something that is necessarily worrying for the war machine
itself, a system that can only truly flourish when the propaganda arm is
held under monopolistic control.
While internet freedom exists, individual readers and viewers don’t have to take the word of any website or pundit or commentator on any issue.
They can check the source documentation
themselves, except, perhaps not coincidentally, on the websites of the
traditional media bastions, which tend not to link source material and
documentation in their articles.
And as the public becomes better informed about the very issues that the media has tried to lie to them about for so long, they realize that the answer to all of the mainstream media’s war cheerleading and blatant manipulation is perhaps simpler than we ever suspected:
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