Provoking Nuclear War by Media: Crimes of the Fourth Estate
By John Pilger http://johnpilger.com/articles/provo...r-war-by-media
The exoneration of a man accused of the worst of crimes, genocide, made no headlines. … Such a rare official admission was buried or suppressed, understandably. … The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia … quietly cleared the late Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, of war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, including the massacre at Srebrenica.
Far from conspiring with the convicted Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, Milosevic actually “condemned ethnic cleansing”, opposed Karadzic and tried to stop the war that dismembered Yugoslavia. … this truth further demolishes the propaganda that justified Nato’s illegal onslaught on Serbia in 1999. Milosevic died of a heart attack in 2006, alone in his cell … Denied heart surgery … his condition worsened and was … kept secret by US officials, as WikiLeaks has since revealed.
Milosevic was the victim of war propaganda that today runs like a torrent across our screens and newspapers and beckons great danger for us all. … vilified by the western media as the “butcher of the Balkans” … responsible for “genocide” … Prime Minister Tony Blair … invoked the Holocaust and demanded action against “this new Hitler”. …
This was the [false] justification for Nato’s bombing, led by Bill Clinton and Blair, that killed hundreds of civilians in hospitals, schools, churches, parks and television studios and destroyed Serbia’s economic infrastructure. It was blatantly ideological; at a notorious “peace conference” …, Milosevic was confronted by Madeleine Albright… [now infamous for] her remark that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were “worth it”. Albright delivered an “offer” to Milosevic that no national leader could accept. … foreign military occupation … with the occupying forces “outside the legal process” … neo-liberal “free market” [i.e. foreign exploitation and control] …. [or] be bombed. This was contained in an “Appendix B”, which the media failed to read or suppressed. …
Once NATO began bombing, there was a stampede of Kosovar refugees “fleeing a holocaust”. When it was over, international police teams descended on Kosovo to exhume the victims of the “holocaust”. The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines”. The final count of the dead in Kosovo was 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the pro-NATO [terrorist organization] Kosovo Liberation Front. There was no genocide. The NATO attack was both a fraud and a war crime.
All but a fraction of America’s vaunted “precision-guided” missiles hit not military but civilian targets … Blair described the dead, profanely, as part of Serbia’s “command and control”. In 2008, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte, revealed that she had been pressured NOT to investigate NATO’s crimes.
This was the model for Washington’s subsequent invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and, by stealth, Syria. All qualify as “paramount crimes” under the Nuremberg standard; all depended on media propaganda. … it was serious, credible, often liberal journalism that was the most effective – the evangelical promotion of Blair and his wars by the Guardian, the incessant lies about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction in the Observer and the New York Times, and the unerring drumbeat of government propaganda by the BBC in the silence of its omissions.
At the height of the bombing, the BBC’s Kirsty Wark interviewed General Wesley Clark, the Nato commander. The Serbian city of Nis had just been sprayed with American cluster bombs, killing women, old people and children in an open market and a hospital. Wark asked not a single question about this, or about any other civilian deaths. Others were more brazen. …
This obeisance to the United States and its collaborators … runs deep in western establishment journalism. It ensures that the present-day catastrophe in Syria is blamed … on Bashar al-Assad, whom the West and Israel have long conspired to overthrow … to consolidate Israel’s aggressive power in the region. The jihadist forces unleashed and armed by the US, Britain, France, Turkey …
The city of Aleppo is in the news. Most readers and viewers will be unaware that the majority of the population of Aleppo lives in the government-controlled western part of the city. That they suffer daily artillery bombardment from western-sponsored al-Qaida is not news. On 21 July, French and American bombers attacked a government village in Aleppo province, killing up to 125 civilians. This was reported on page 22 of the Guardian; there were no photographs.
Having created and underwritten jihadism in Afghanistan … the US is doing something similar in Syria. Like the Afghan Mujahideen, the Syrian “rebels” are America’s and Britain’s foot soldiers. Many fights for al-Qaida and its variants; some, like the Nusra Front … The CIA runs them … as it runs jihadists all over the world.
The immediate aim is to destroy the government in Damascus, which … the majority of Syrians support … The long-term aim is to deny Russia a key Middle Eastern ally as part of a NATO war of attrition …
The nuclear risk is obvious, though suppressed by the media … having promoted the fiction of WMD in Iraq, demand that Obama attacks Syria. Hillary Clinton, who publicly rejoiced at her executioner’s role during the destruction of Libya, has repeatedly indicated that, as president, she will “go further” than Obama. …
most remarkable about the war propaganda now in floodtide is its patent absurdity and familiarity. … Like a resurgent tumour, the anti-Russia cult has returned … When the Panama Papers leak was published, the front page said Putin, and there was a picture of Putin; never mind that Putin was not mentioned anywhere in the leaks.
Like Milosevic, Putin is Demon Number One. … Malaysian airliner over Ukraine…No evidence required. … Washington’s documented (and paid for) overthrow of the elected government in Kiev in 2014. The subsequent terror campaign by fascist militias against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine … Preventing Crimea from becoming a NATO missile base and protecting the mostly Russian population who had voted in a referendum to rejoin Russia … Smear by media inevitably becomes war by media. If war with Russia breaks out, by design or by accident, journalists will bear much of the responsibility.
In the US, the anti-Russia campaign has been elevated to virtual reality. The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman … called Donald Trump the “Siberian Candidate” because … Trump had dared to suggest, in a rare lucid moment, that war with Russia might be a bad idea. In fact, he has gone further and removed American arms shipments to Ukraine from the Republican platform. “Wouldn’t it be great if we got along with Russia,” he said. This is why America’s warmongering liberal establishment hates him. … Bill and Hillary Clinton’s record of racism and extremism can out-trump Trump’s any day. …
The CIA has demanded Trump is not elected. …. The pro-war New York Times … demands that he is not elected. Something is up. These tribunes of “perpetual war” are terrified that the multi-billion-dollar business of war by which the United States maintains its dominance will be undermined … Their panic at the possibility of the world’s great power talking peace …
Dissenting journalism and scholarship have since been systematically banished or appropriated, … and wilfully ignore the state violence and weapons profiteering that destroys countless lives in faraway places, like Yemen and Syria, and beckon nuclear war in Europe and across the world. …
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Originally Posted by Zippyjuan
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