America’s Democratic Party ‘news’-media are now defending
themselves against charges that they had trumpeted false allegations against
Donald Trump regarding “Russiagate.” Republican Party ‘news’-media are
strutting because they didn’t. But in the lead-up to America’s invasion
and destruction of Iraq
(and here’s “How the US Destroyed Iraq”), the mainstream
‘news’-reporting was just as bad then as now, only with the partisan sides
switched. The chief difference between then and now is only that the media now
have been fictitiously demonizing Putin and Trump by means of lies, whereas
back in 2002 and 2003, they were fictitiously demonizing Saddam Hussein by
means of lies.
In that prior
instance (lies about Iraq), the Republican
media were the worse of the two Party-propaganda-lines. Republican
Party followers were the more-deceived back then,
just as Democratic Party followers are the more-deceived today.
Whereas, in 2003, increased
exposure to news, about what had led up to the invasion of Iraq, produced, for
Democrats, higher scores on a test of knowledge about that matter; for
Republicans, it actually produced lower scores
about that matter. For Republicans, at that time, the ‘news’-reporting decreased, rather than
increased, a historically accurate understanding of the lead-up to (and into)
Iraq-invasion events. By contrast, now in 2019, when the evidence has finally
become clear that the Russiagate accusations against Trump were intensely
politically motivated, it is Democratic
Party followers who are the more-deceived today.
In fact, whereas, back in January of this year, 83%
of Republicans said that the reason for the Russiagate investigation was
“politically motivated,” 84% of Democrats said that it was not. The
more that Democrats had become influenced by Democratic-Party ‘news’-media, the
more inaccurate their
understandings of the events were. On this matter, Democrats were oblivious about
the reality, just swamped by their own Party’s propaganda — just like had
happened to Republicans regarding the invasion of Iraq.
In both of
these two instances (both Democratic ‘news’-media now, and Republican
‘news’-media then), all of
America's major media actually hid —
and continue to
hide — the key facts, from the public (even 16 years,
now, after the invasion of Iraq). On the deeper-level issues
concerning Governmental policies, there is bipartisan deceit against the American public.
These are issues on which all of the billionaires were and are
united, against the American public (and especially against the “40.6% million people in poverty” —
the neediest instead of the richest who are themselves, those billionaires),
and they therefore benefit from the public’s ignorance and misconceptions about
such matters (so that the Government will continue serving chiefly themselves).
These super-rich are determined to continue controlling Government-policies,
for their own benefits, like increased ‘defense’ spending to buy
increased products from their corporations such as Lockheed Martin, and for
increased access to raw materials by their firms such as ExxonMobil. It’s all —
according to their propaganda-media, ‘in defense of freedom and democracy and
human rights’. That’s always the billionaires’ line. It’s always “Trust us!”
“Our Government is democratic — a democracy, not a dictatorship [by us]!” So, the
message from them is: invade Iraq! And: oppose any US President who would meet
privately to negotiate with Russia’s President! America’s billionaires fear
peace abroad. They thrive on conquest (their coups and invasions) abroad.
For example, this is the reason why, consistently in Gallup’s findings,
“The military” (which is actually the most corrupt of all American
institutions) scores, by far, at the very top of the 17 listed
“Institutions” in American society — way above (for examples) “the Supreme
Court,“ or “The church or organized religion,” or “The public schools.” The
billionaires shape the culture, and this is how they’ve managed to get the US
to spend about half of the entire
world’s total military expenses — all to be paid for by the
taxes and governmental debts that the public (and
their descendants), and not merely those billionaires (the actual beneficiaries) pay, and
will be paying in the future. This is the way that a global empire is built,
and maintained — ‘for peace and freedom and democracy and human rights around
the world’.
The two Parties disagree with each other, but each Party
represents only a different faction among the billionaires (not among the
public) regarding what they want the public to believe. The billionaires and
their corporations contribute the vast majority of the money to the major
candidates, and control the think tanks and ‘news’-media that enables each
winning national US politician to become and remain a winning national US
politician and thus to become and be the President,
or member of Congress. So, these few extremely wealthy individuals are
America’s real, behind-the-scenes, government — the “Deep State” that’s
represented by the top levels at CIA, Britain’s MI6, Wall Street, etc. (all
servants — a few of whom are billionaires themselves — of America’s
billionaires, and of their allied foreign billionaires).
No faction within America’s 585 billionaires
actually represents the American public — neither group of billionaires
(Democrats or Republicans) represents the public of either Party. Each of
them represents only him-or-her-self and the property (and employees and other
agents) which that individual controls. (Of course, that’s millions of people,
who are hired and promoted and demoted by the billionaires.) But because
billionaires’ wealth is so extremely concentrated within this tiny number of
people (585), and is so huge, and because their corruption reigns, these
few individuals effectively control the Government.
Especially America’s foreign policies (including, in 2002, toward
Iraq; and, in 2016-18, ‘Russiagate’, toward Russia and Trump)
represent only the interests of billionaires, not of the American
people, who are mainly interested in domestic affairs, such as health
care, education, crimes, etc.
Right now,
the billionaires are (via their media-proxies) battling each other over whom to
blame for ‘Russiagate’: if not Trump, then whom? But that’s only
a Democrat-versus-Republican issue. It appeals to the partisans on each side.
It’s more of the same, so that the billionaires’ control over America’s Government
continues to face no challenge.
Whenever American billionaires’ desires contradict the
public’s needs, the latter have “a minuscule, near-zero,
statistically non-significant impact upon public policy”, and this
has been scientifically proven to have been true since at least 1981. Though
it’s true regarding any field of public policy, it is
the most true regarding international policies,
because those are the ones on which deceiving the public is
the easiest to do. Furthermore, the controlling owners of international
corporations (and these are billionaires) are vastly more concerned about
foreign affairs than the general public is. Whereas domestic affairs interest
everyone, foreign affairs receive far less attention from most people —
but not from billionaires, who are, if anything, often
even more interested in those matters.
Donald Trump
represents one faction of America’s billionaires; Barack Obama represented
another faction of them; but each President (at least since 1981) has been
representing only them (America’s
billionaires). Furthermore, the 2016 Presidential contest was
no exception to this rule; and, so, American democracy has been
destroyed by America’s own billionaires,
and not by any foreign country. Russia didn’t do this to
us. Not even Israel (which interferes in American national
elections vastly more than does Russia, and which also has officially the fourth-largest
of all foreign nations’ lobbies in the US Congress) did. America’s
billionaires did (and do) it. Overwhelmingly, it is they who actually
control America’s foreign policies. (Moreover, on international matters, there
appears to be virtual unanimity amongst the aristocracies of Britain, Israel,
and US; and, on 15 February 2009, Britain’s Guardian reported that
“The pro-Israel lobby’s contributions reach a majority of US politicians. In
2018, it spent money on 269 representatives’ and 57 senators’ campaigns, and
gave to Democrats at a two to one ratio.” So: it’s not only the
Republican Party that’s fronting for Israel. To front for Israel is also to
front for America’s billionaires — even for the roughly 70% of America’s non-Jewish
billionaires. But to front for Russia is ‘traitorous’ while to front
for Israel is ‘not’ — and yet Russia never attacked and slaughtered Americans,
whereas Israel did, and so did
another ‘US ally’, Saudi Arabia. (Yet,
America’s aristocracy is closely allied with both Israel’s and Saudi Arabia’s —
not just with Britain’s.)
All of these assertions will be further documented
and exemplified in what follows.
The two
examples to be focused upon here will be America’s successful rape of Iraq in
2003, and the Democratic Party’s unsuccessful effort, which started in 2016, to
delegitimize the Republican President Donald Trump as being some type of
Russian agent.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003
Here’s Robert
Mueller testifying to Congress about WMD (weapons of mass destruction) in Iraq,
before we invaded and destroyed Iraq:
On 11 February
2003, the then-FBI Director Mueller testified, to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,
that: “Secretary
Powell presented evidence last week that Baghdad has failed to disarm its
weapons of mass destruction, willfully attempting to evade and deceive the
international community. Our particular concern is that Saddam may supply
al-Qaeda with biological, chemical, or radiological material.”
He just
reiterated the President’s lies (and
he credited Colin Powell’s supposed naiveté in having spouted them — for which
deception Powell subsequently apologized, but Mueller never did). Mueller’s
concern wasn’t to raise any question about the lies that led to the
Iraq-invasion, but was simply to reinforce these
lies. He didn’t work for the public. He worked for the President.
As I said 16 September 2016:
On 7
September 2002, US President George W. Bush blatantly lied to
concoct a “new report” by the IAEA about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass
destruction program, and the US news-media reported the statement but hid that
it was a lie. He said (and CNN and others quoted it): “a report came out of the
Atomic — the IAEA that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I
don’t know what more evidence we need,” when he was asked at a press conference,
“Mr. President, can you tell us what conclusive evidence of any nuclear — new
evidence you have of nuclear weapons capabilities of Saddam Hussein?” Immediately, the IAEA said then that
there was no such “new report,” and that the last they were able to find, there
was nothing left of WMD in Iraq. The American news-media simply ignored the
IAEA’s denial, and we invaded Iraq, almost six months after that boldfaced lie,
a lie the press refused to expose, at all — ever. They still haven’t exposed
it, even to the present day; and instead there remains a ‘debate’ as to whether
George W. Bush lied or was instead merely misled by “defective US
intelligence.” In this particular instance, he wasn’t even citing US
intelligence, but instead citing the IAEA, and they immediately denied it, but
the press failed to report that fact; so, really, the President was simply
lying, and the press just continue to lie by saying he had only “been misled by
the CIA” (which he actually controlled; but he didn’t control the IAEA). The
American press hide the fact that the American President lied his nation into
invading Iraq. The press lie that it was only “bad intelligence,” no lying
President.
(Because of
the news-media’s ignoring the IAEA’s denial of the President’s statement, the
author of the IAEA’s denial, Mark Gwozdecky, spoke three weeks later, by phone,
with the only journalist who was interested, Joseph Curl of the Washington
Times, who headlined on 27 September 2002, “Agency Disavows Report on Iraq
Arms” — perhaps that should instead have been “President Lied
About ‘Saddam’s WMD’” — and Curl quoted Gwozdecky: “There's never been a report
like that [which Bush alleged] issued from this agency… When we left in
December '98 we had concluded that we had neutralized their nuclear-weapons
program. We had confiscated their fissile material. We had destroyed all their
key buildings and equipment.” Other news-media failed to pick up Curl’s
article. And, even in that article, there was no clear statement that the
President had, in fact, lied — cooked up an IAEA ‘report’ that never actually
existed — and that he never corrected his false allegation; that he compounded
his lie by not correcting it.)
This is
hardly the only instance where the US news-media cover for the President’s lies
about foreign affairs, by merely stenographically reporting what he says, while
hiding the truth that his statement was a baldfaced lie. For example, how many
times have you read in the newspapers, or in a magazine, or seen on TV, or
heard on the radio (all of which are supposed to report these things),
that in February 2014, the Obama Administration perpetrated a
bloody coup d’etat that overthrew the democratically elected President of
Ukraine, and replaced his government with a racist-fascist, or anti-Russian
nazi, government, so that Ukraine, which had been at peace for
decades, was now suddenly torn by a racist bloody civil war — a war
of ethnic cleansing? Oh? You were instead told that ‘democracy’
started (instead of ended) when Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych was
overthrown then, in a ‘revolution,’ not in any US “coup”?
The very next
day, on 8 September 2002, the New
York Times bannered “THREATS AND RESPONSES: THE IRAQIS;
US SAYS HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS”, and reported
that, “In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially
designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as
components of centrifuges to enrich uranium.” That, too, turned out to be
fiction, which the ‘news’-media stenographically reported to be reality, as any
propaganda-agency is paid or otherwise rewarded to do.
Also on
September 8th, Bush’s National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said on
CNN, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
On 9 September
2002, the IAEA denied the existence of
the ‘new report’ that Bush (seconded by British Prime Minister Tony Blair) had
just said was proof that Saddam was within six months of having a nuclear bomb.
Neither the NYT nor other ‘news’-media reported that the President
had lied on September 7th. So, Gwozdecky of IAEA tried again, on September
27th, but the NYT and all the others continued to ignore them. That
(the US President’s deceiving this nation into an invasion) wasn’t included to
report — wasn’t even buried (like on an inside page) — in “All the News That’s Fit to Print”.
Did the NYT (and WP and CNN, etc,)
lose subscribers, and go out of business, for that serial-deceit of the public?
The opposite: they thrived. And, now, they
accuse smaller news-media (which had had had nothing to do with
deceiving Americans into invading Iraq) of providing ‘fake news’.
And the standards of American ‘journalism’ are just as poor today as they were
back in 2002 and 2003.
Then, on 8
October 2002, President Bush delivered, to the nation, his major address on why
we needed to invade Iraq very soon. He said: “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the
final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” Condoleezza
Rice’s fictitious “mushroom cloud” was now — exactly a month later — President
Bush’s, too.
On 18 March 2003,
President Bush ordered the UN’s weapons-inspectors out of Iraq by telling them
that if they wouldn’t be gone within 48 hours they’d be under
US bombing there. Hans Blix and his team rushed out, to meet that
deadline. The Iraqi people couldn’t do any such thing — Bush’s warning simply
spelt doom for them.
Nobody in the
mainstream press, at the time, or afterward, reported that the IAEA had
actually issued no such ‘new report’. It didn’t exist, at all. The American
public didn’t know that Bush was lying through his teeth and that this invasion
was 100% a blatant international war-crime. They didn’t know, because the
billionaires’ American ‘news’-media hid that fact.
All of these
‘news’ lies are stenographic ‘reporting’, and it’s endemic in all of
America’s mainstream ‘news’-media, all of which are controlled by billionaires,
via ownership and/or their corporations’ advertising. Stenographic
‘news’-reporting is still as acceptable to them as it was to them then, when we
invaded and destroyed Iraq, on
the basis of those stenographically reported lies from the Government and its
agents.
That’s
America’s mainstream. Many in alternative, smaller, news-media had
reported over and over and over and over and over and over — and even
Rupert Murdoch’s own London Times had reported
as early as 26 November 2009 (after the Republican President
Bush was no longer in office and had been replaced by a Democrat) — that all of the
insiders had known that Iraq didn’t have weapons of
mass destruction (WMDs). What all of the mainstream ‘news’-media were
publishing, back in 2003, were merely lies from the Government. What should
have been the first question, then, on 9 September 2002 when the IAEA said that
there wasn’t any “new report” from them, about the matter such as the US
President had alleged? The questions were never asked, much less followed up
immediately to expose the response to be yet another lie. This is how Bush and
his team got away with mass-murder abroad. There was no resistance, in any of
the mainstream (the billionaire-controlled) media. Not even in the
Democratic-Party ‘news’-media. This was bipartisan evil (by the billionaires)
and ignorance (by the public).
On 22 January
2018, CNN reported that,
“George W. Bush's favorable rating has grown from 33% to 61% since he left
office. … Most of Bush's climb back to popularity came from Democrats and
independents. His favorability mark among Democrats has soared from only 11% in
February 2009 to a majority 54% now.” Maybe that’s because of ‘news’-media such
as CNN, continuing to trumpet ongoing official deceits as if those were instead
established truths. The US Government can lie as much as it wants, because
there’s nothing to stop it from lying. There is no accountability in an
aristocracy, but only in
a democracy (and the US is an aristocracy).
The
media-mainstream, and its supporters, refuse to become honest. Mainstreamers
think that they’re terrific as they are, and certainly shouldn’t be put out of
business for the mass-murdering lies they’ve pumped. The ‘Russiagate’ fraud is
the latest example of this. If it had succeeded, then not only would US
‘defense’-spending soar even more and the Government’s domestic spending
plunge, but World War III against Russia would suddenly become enormously more
likely.
Russiagate-Trump
On 23 March
2019, main conclusions from the Mueller Report — the report from US Special
Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III —
became published. Democratic
Party politicians and ‘news’-media were shocked and stunned that Mueller’s
report asserted: “[T]he
investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or
coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference
activities.” One needs to see the complete sentence, there, not just part of it
(which is all that was released);
but, if this quotation from the Report isn’t out-of-context, then the entire
investigation was pursuing a Democratic Party lie and found it
to be a lie.
On 24 March
2019, Michael Calderone at Politico said
that “while fair-minded criticism can be beneficial to the news media, there
are likely to also be bad faith attempts to delegitimize journalism.” He said
there “journalism,” instead of “propaganda.” He was writing propaganda for
America’s Democratic-Party ‘news’-media. Calderone was happy to report that “Some
journalists have already pushed back on the weekend criticism. ‘Given the
issues, stakes, and seriousness with which special counsel treated all of this,
the media’s coverage of Russia-Trump connection and possible obstruction over
the last two years was somewhere between about right and not quite aggressive
enough,’ tweeted Esquire’s Ryan Lizza.” On the same day, Paul Farhi of
the Washington
Post headlined “Conclusion of Mueller probe raises
anew criticisms of coverage” and reported that “Among the
theories commentators advanced was one by New York magazine writer Jonathan
Chait, who speculated in a cover story in July about whether ‘the dark crevices
of the Russia scandal run not just a little deeper but a lot deeper.’ … In a
statement Sunday night, Chait stood by his article. ‘That story relied on
reports in credible public sources. None of those reports have been refuted.’”
That’s rabidly false, though the top editors at both the Washington Post and
the New York Times were
quoted there as making similar false assertions. Farhi continued: “In fact,
revelations by the Times and The Washington
Post about contacts between Russian agents and Trump’s
campaign advisers in 2016 helped prompt the inquiry that the special counsel
took over in May 2017. The two newspapers shared a Pulitzer Prize for their
reporting on the issue that year.” He seemed to be actually bragging about his
very successful and severely failed ‘news’-paper and its main competitor.
On March 25th, Amy Chozick in the New York Times bannered “After
Mueller Report, News Media Leaders Defend Their Work”, and she
reported that, “Jeff Zucker, president of CNN, said he was ‘entirely
comfortable’ with the network’s coverage. ‘We are not investigators. We are
journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is
exactly what we did,’ Mr. Zucker said in an email.” Furthermore: “Ben Smith,
the editor in chief of BuzzFeed News, defended coverage of the Russian
investigation, including the decision to publish a dossier put together by
British intelligence officer Christopher Steele full of tantalizing (and
unsubstantiated) reports about Russian efforts to blackmail Mr. Trump. ‘It’s
pretty hard to imagine a scenario in which people were aware of its existence
but not allowed to see it,’ Mr. Smith said of the dossier.” Smith took
seriously the “unsubstantiated” ‘dossier’ that the DNC had hired for creating
the myth that the cause of Clinton’s loss was Putin and Russia, instead of
herself, and her profoundly corrupt Party (no different, basically, from the
Republican Party).
On March 26th, The Hill headlined “Media have account to settle with
American people over Mueller investigation coverage”, and a
journalism professor said that the news industry” had been “stumbling around
unsuccessfully in the dark trying to find fact nuggets on which to build the
Mueller story.” Two days later, he told Wisconsin Public Radio that “The
media did underperform over the last couple of years.” The problem was
just blunders, and
‘underperformance’ (instead of its long-proven-normal performance) — not
the entire corrupt system of ‘journalism’ in
America, where the people who do the hiring are answerable ultimately to the
same billionaires who effectively control the Government. No — not that — not
at all (according to him).
As I have
pointed out and documented (via links to solid ultimate sources, sometimes in
the linked-to sources in linked-to articles, but all ultimate sources having
been very carefully verified by this reporter as being true, and those sources
remaining solid), "All US Gov’t. Accusations
Against Russia’s Gov’t. Are Lies.” That’s right: all of “Russiagate” is based on very
dubious ‘evidence’. This means that the time-line, in the
Mueller Report, lists some ‘events’ that did not
happen, and some events that were not partisanly involved in the 2016
Presidential contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/04/05/why-russiagate-same-as-wmd-in-iraq-for-america-mainstream-media.html