Tony Cartalucci Explains
Ways That The Media Lie To Us
Tony
Cartalucci Explains Ways That The Media Lie To Us
The Western
Media Is Dying and Here’s Why
Seymour Hersh has risked
much over his decades of journalism. He is a true journalist who has been
attacked, slandered, and shunned by all sides simply because he seems to resist
taking any side.
When he reported on US
atrocities in Vietnam, he was first attacked and denounced as a traitor or
worse. In time, both the truth and Hersh were vindicated and the importance of
what he did as a journalist to both inform the public and serve as a check and
balance against the special interests of ruling power were recognized with a
Pultizer Prize.
But then in 2013, when
Hersh brought forward information contradicting the West’s official narrative
regarding a chemical attack on the outskirts of Damascus, the New Yorker
decided not to publish it. His report, “Whose Sarin?” instead found itself
published in the London Review of Books.
The story of Hersh bringing
this information forward to the public and how the Western media attempted to
first discourage it, then bury it, before attempting to discredit both the
report and Hersh himself is a microcosm of the dying Western media.
The Final Nail
Hersh’s report
went on in detail covering the manner in which Western leaders intentionally
manipulated or even outright fabricated intelligence to justify military
intervention in Syria – eerily similar to the lies told to justify the
invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the escalation of the war in Vietnam
after the Gulf of
Tonkin incident.
And not only did the report
punch holes through the official narrative, it helped hobble what little
momentum was left for Western military aggression against Syria based on the
lies told by the US and its allies regarding the chemical attack.
In Hersh’s follow up
report, “The Red Line
and the Rat Line,” also published by the London Review of Books, he
revealed information not only further exposing the lies told by the US and its
allies, but suggested NATO member Turkey and close US-ally Saudi Arabia may
have played a role in supplying those responsible for the attack with the
chemical weapons.
Should Hersh’s reports
reach wider audiences and the idea of a West capable of conceiving, carrying
out, then trying to exploit a crime against humanity to justify expanded,
unjust war, Western foreign policy would irrevocably be disfigured and perhaps
begin to unravel.
Outsourcing Trust
The methods of augmenting an
increasingly discredited and distrusted Western media have become very
creative. With the advent of the Internet and social media, attempts to produce
viral content and seemingly outside sources to help guide the public back who
are turning away from the mainstream media in droves was actually the subject
of an entire policy paper by former Administrator of the White House Office of
Information and Regulatory Affairs, Cass Sunstein. The paper was covered in a
Salon article titled, “Obama confidant’s spine-chilling
proposal,” which stated (emphasis added):
Sunstein advocates that the
Government’s stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert
agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space
groups.” He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to
so-called “independent” credible voices to bolster the Government’s messaging
(on the ground that those who don’t believe government sources will be more
inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on
behalf of the Government).
It would be these – what
are essentially government-paid liars – who the West would turn to in an
attempt to bury Hersh and the remnants of real Western journalism with him.
The “Independent Credible
Voices”
UK-based unemployed
government worker Eliot Higgins began and maintained a popular blog
amalgamating online photos and videos from the Syrian conflict. Journalists and
analysts from all sides used his resource as a sort of “wartime encyclopedia.”
While Higgins possessed no qualifications or background in warfare,
geopolitics, or weapons specifically, what he did possess was a great amount of
time. In this time he was able to accurately look up and catalog the media on
his blog.
However, it wasn’t long
before the Western media approached him to fulfill the role of “independent
credible voice.” Whether Eliot Higgins was the recipient of “secret payments”
at that time or not, it is clear now that he was both
approached by and sought those willing to pay him for his services and that his work
from then on was decidedly both biased and dishonest.
Higgins was furnished with
his own “weapons expert,” Dan Kaszeta, who either owns or is an associate
of multiple dubious “consulting” firms. Together from the beginning Higgins and
Kaszeta bolstered the West’s narrative that the Syrian government was
responsible for using munitions filled with nerve agents right in front of UN
inspectors in Damascus.
Using what they
collectively called “open source intelligence” – watching YouTube videos and
looking at Google Earth – they claimed the type of rocket and nerve agent used
could only have been deployed by the Syrian government.
Hersh contested these
claims in both of his reports and in additional interviews pointing out that
the rockets were crude and could just as easily be homemade, while the
production of nerve agents – certainly the work of a state actor – could have
been done in either Turkey or Saudi Arabia or with either nations’ assistance,
then deployed by militants in Syria.
To this day, the UN’s
official conclusion is that there was “clear and convincing evidence” that
rockets containing nerve agents were launched at Damascus suburbs – assigning
no blame, nor indicating from where either the rockets or the nerve agents originated.
Higgins and Kaszeta,
featured in the London Guardian and Foreign Policy Magazine, would directly
attack Hersh’s claims citing YouTube videos and UN reports as evidence that the
Syrian government possessed the type of rockets used in the attack and the type
of nerve agent contained in the rockets – omitting one very important question
– what if the attack was meant to look like the work of the Syrian government?
In reality, all Higgins and
Kaszeta proved was that whoever carried out the attack – designed solely to
grant the US and its allies justification for direct military intervention –
spent a lot of time and effort to make the attack appear as if the Syrian
government carried it out. They predicate their entire argument upon claiming
the West would not – for some reason – fabricate an attack to justify a war
they sought to wage but lacked any justification to do so.
While seeking to re-ignite
the “whodunnit” debate about chemical weapons, Hersh’s article unwittingly
revealed a lot about the changing nature of investigative journalism. Hersh is
old-school. He operates in a world of hush-hush contacts – often-anonymous
well-placed sources passing snippets of information around which he constructs
an article that challenges received wisdom.
The Hersh style of
journalism certainly has a place, but in the age of the internet it’s a
diminishing one – as the web-based work of Higgins and others continually
shows.
It is a talking point that
Higgins himself would again make in the space afforded to him by Foreign Policy
magazine – that traditional journalism with real sources is out, and Cass
Sunstein’s army of paid “independent credible voices” are in.
Vindication
A Russian-brokered deal
that saw the entirety of Syria’s chemical weapon stockpiles removed from the
country under the supervision of the United Nations means that there are
neither chemical weapons for the Syrian government to use (or be blamed for
using), nor chemical weapons left for terrorists fighting the Syrian government
to pilfer and use.
Yet now along Turkey’s
border – the nation Hersh has suggested was behind the 2013 gas attack –
terrorists from the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS) are allegedly deploying
chemical weapons.
Initial reports indicate
the use of mustard gas – a blistering agent. Like nerve agents, the production
and deployment of these weapons requires state resources.
The Western media, in a bid
to explain how ISIS has acquired these weapons, has begun spinning theories that
Syria’s weapons on their way out of Syria somehow ended up in ISIS’ hands. The
presence of chemical weapons in northern Syria and Iraq indicates that just as
Hersh suggested, chemical weapons are being passed on to terrorists operating
in Syria from either Turkey or Saudi Arabia, or both.
With this recent
development, literally years of Higgins and Kaszeta’s lies have been exposed,
vindicating award-winning veteran journalist Seymour Hersh and the traditional
methods of journalism he employed to draw his conclusions. It also exposes
Sunstein’s army of “independent credible voices” as just another facet in the
echo chamber of discredited, now widely distrusted lies of the Western media.
In an attempt to get
Higgin’s and Kaszeta’s opinion on who they believed were supplying ISIS with
chemical weapons, Kaszeta replied by saying, “lizard men.” Higgins refused to
comment. When asked if either would like to extend an apology to Hersh, Kasezta
would inexplicably reply, “Hersh owes me an apology, now get lost you useless
sack of sh*t.“
One might expect a higher
degree of professionalism and civilized debate from “experts” regularly
deferred to by the Western media not only in regards to the Syrian conflict but
also in Ukraine, where Eliot Higgins is now offering his “independent credible
voice” to the MH17 disaster. However, admittedly employed by Western think
tanks and consultancy agencies, Higgins no longer possess an “independent”
voice, and considering his intentional and unrepentant deceit regarding Syria,
he no longer possess a “credible’ voice either.
Sunstein’s Failed
Experiment
Using chemical weapons has
never been an effective means of fighting war. Beyond their psychological
effects, conventional weapons have proven a vastly superior means of waging and
winning war.
During the deadly 8 year
war between Iraq and Iran, chemical weapons were used including nerve agents.
Yet a document produced by the US Marine Corps, titled, “Lessons Learned: The Iran-Iraq War” under “Appendix B:
Chemical Weapons,” revealed less than 2-3% of all casualties were
the result of chemical warfare.The report concluded that even large scale use
of chemical weapons offered little advantage to either side and suggests that
attacks carried out with such weapons required almost perfect weather and
geographical conditions to be of even limited benefit. On a smaller scale, the
use of chemical weapons would be tactically and strategically useless – unless
of course used as a means of implicating your enemy and justifying wider war.
Likewise, shooting down a
civilian airliner over Ukraine offers no benefit to a warring party unless of
course they did it to implicate their enemies and justify wider war.Discerning
this is a product of critical thinking – which is what drove people away from
the Western media in the first place. Sunstein’s mistaken belief that somehow
those drifting away from the Western media were as easily fooled as those still
watching it is why people like Higgins have ended up chased out of the
independent media and back, deeply within the system that co-opted and used him
in the first place.
For Hersh, he proves that
dedication to the truth when it is unpopular is a small price to pay to keep
one’s dignity. The ridicule and accusations of those without dignity fades, but
the truth is everlasting. When the truth Hersh has pointed out beneath the lies
finally surfaced for all to see, vindication exposed people like Higgins and
Kaszeta for all to see.
With the veils of
legitimacy and professionalism yanked from them, they are reduced to vulgar,
miniature versions of the rotting system that created them. Without realizing
their very creation as “consultants” lies in the decline of those who sought
them out, not because of their talent, but because of their willingness to do
what those with dignity refuse to do, they will likely go on with their ignoble
work. But like the media houses that desperately needed their “independent
credible voices” to begin with, fewer will be listening and reading.
Tony Cartalucci,
Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online
magazine“New Eastern
Outlook”.
Dr. Paul Craig
Roberts was
Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of
the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard
News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments.
His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest
books areThe Failure of
Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West
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