Eric Zuesse -- The Western press has been lying about the war in Ukraine — and more

 

The Western press has been lying about the war in Ukraine — and more

 

Eric Zuesse, June 23, 2022

 

The norm in Western newsmedia has been to lie, and even to hide the truth, and this fact now is especially clear because what they were reporting about Russia’s ‘losing’ the war is, by now, inconceivable without there having been massive lying by them previously. Furthermore, all of those lies were not real journalism, which demands skepticism of any government’s allegations about a war that is going on, because (at least on our side, even if not also on the side of our government’s declared enemy) governments do routinely issue mere propaganda whenever they are in or supporting a war. And yet, though government lies are reasonably to be expected from a nation that is at war, there was NO such skepticism on the part of the Western press; and some of the falsehoods that they published have even been blatantly ridiculous. 

 

For examples: Here are the openings of two major ‘news’-media reports about Ukraine’s war, on April 1st (and the first one of those reports even referred to Russia’s army as being “the Red Army,” as-if Russia were still communist, as you will see):

 

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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10677711/Russias-war-effort-stalls-Red-Army-replacement-weapons.html

“Russia's war effort stalls as the Red Army can't get replacement weapons” [RED ARMY????] or spares for their crippled convoys... because they’re all made in Ukraine.

 

Russia has lost an estimated 143 planes, 131 helicopters, 625 tanks in conflict.

Defence sources say Red Army has run out of weapons and can’t replenish stock.

It was revealed some helicopters, jets and cruise missiles were made by or use vital components from Ukraine.

Russia can’t now source items elsewhere due to international sanctions.

Comes as Ukraine’s forces drove Russia out of dozens of towns around Kyiv 

DAILY MAIL, PUBLISHED: 17:00 EDT, 1 April 2022 

Russia’s war effort is grinding to a halt because much of the military hardware they need is made in Ukraine, it emerged last night.

Kremlin forces have run out of vital weapons and cannot now replenish their stocks, UK defence sources revealed.

The revelations came as President Volodymyr Zelensky’s forces drove Russia out of dozens of towns around Kyiv and the north in one of the most extraordinary days since the start of the invasion. …

 

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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/us/politics/russia-military-ukraine.html

https://archive.ph/ls5El

“Russia’s War Lacks a Battlefield Commander, U.S. Officials Say”

New York Times, 1 April 2022

WASHINGTON — Russia is running its military campaign against Ukraine out of Moscow, with no central war commander on the ground to call the shots, according to American officials who have studied the five-week-old war.

That centralized approach may go a long way to explain why the Russian war effort has struggled in the face of stiffer-than-expected Ukrainian resistance, the officials said.

The lack of a unifying military leader in Ukraine has meant that Russian air, ground and sea units are not in sync. Their disjointed battlefield campaigns have been plagued by poor logistics, flagging morale and between 7,000 and 15,000 military deaths, senior U.S. officials and independent analysts say.

It has also contributed to the deaths of at least seven Russian generals as high-ranking officers are pushed to the front lines to untangle tactical problems that Western militaries would leave to more junior officers or senior enlisted personnel.

A senior American official said that NATO officials and the intelligence community had spent weeks waiting for a Russian war commander to emerge. No one has, leaving Western officials to conclude that the men making decisions are far from the fight, back in Moscow: Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu; Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian military; and even President Vladimir V. Putin. …

 

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That is neoconservative stenography of the assertions by one’s neoconservative Government, not authentic journalism. Some of the statements might have been true, but the sources cited were prejudiced for ‘us’ against ‘them’ and therefore untrustworthy. Subscribers to these ‘news’media — all of which media are neoconservative — are actually paying for government-propaganda, stenographically reported from a neoconservative government, as-if  this were, instead, authentic journalism. It’s not.

 

By contrast: Virtually everything that was being reported by Russia’s news-media at that same time was honest, and thus stands up in retrospect. Here, for example, is what Russia’s RT’s home page was headlining on April 1st — all of the headlines, there — and you can see each of the articles merely by clicking onto any headline there that interests you. One of its homepage headlines was “Ukraine says its defense industry has been destroyed”, and that news-report wasn’t stenography from Russia’s Government, but was instead stenography actually from Ukraine’s Government, which is likewise neoconservative (which Russia’s Government is definitely not), and which stated “If you think that we do not suffer losses, then you are deeply mistaken. They have practically destroyed our military industry and in many ways are finishing it off.” Obviously, Ukraine’s Government won’t be overstating (but far more likely under-stating) how effective Russia’s Government is in the war. That news-report at RT is certainly journalism, NOT propaganda (like one finds in the media of the United States and in its ‘allied’ — or vassal — nations).

 

An interesting other example of Western neoconservative lies about international relations is likewise related to the date 1 April 2022, and it’s the West’s reporting then about followup from the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. Here will be examples of that:

 

On 1 April 2022, the neoconservative Washington Post bannered “Iran nuclear talks at stalemate over terrorism issue”, and reported that

 

Tehran’s demand that the United States lift its designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization, and U.S. refusal so far to do that, have brought the year-long negotiations over reviving the Iran nuclear deal to a halt, with no new meetings scheduled and little obvious room for compromise. …

Designation as a foreign terrorist organization has enormous symbolic significance for both Iran and the United States. President Donald Trump announced the listing in April 2019, a year after he withdrew from the nuclear deal. The move was pushed by his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and national security adviser John Bolton, as part of what Trump called his “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign against Iran.

“We are highly concerned about reports indicating the potential lifting” of the foreign terrorist organization designation of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, a bipartisan group of 21 House members wrote Biden last month, saying that the combination of not “adequately addressing Iran’s role as the world’s leading state sponsor of terror,” and providing billions of dollars in sanctions relief would provide “a clear path for Iranian proxies to continue fueling terrorism.”

 

However, of the 19 alleged 9/11 hijackers, 15 were Saudi citizens, and all of the 19 were Sunni jihadists, none of them were Shiite Moslems, which are the Iranian variety of Islamic believers; so, in what way is Iran then “the world’s leading state sponsor of terror,” which the U.S. Government constantly calls Iran — and NOT the Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia, as instead being precisely that? In fact, there exists overwhelming evidence that 9/11 was actually a joint product of both the Saud family and George W. Bush — perhaps in order to get Congress to pass the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that still exists and that has already produced over a trillion dollars of added sales by U.S. ‘Defence’ Department contractors (armaments-makers) (and which is where the war-profits are), but certainly Iran had nothing to do with that (and the Sauds consider Iran to be their main enemy; so, getting Iran blamed for what the Sauds did is just terrific for the Sauds, and for their U.S. allies).

 

On 8 September 2021, CNN had headlined “Families of 9/11 victims are still looking for answers in court”, and reported that 

 

The US government and its NATO allies invaded Afghanistan almost immediately after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, seeking accountability from al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden for murdering nearly 3,000 people. It began what would become a two-decade military odyssey in nation-building that ended messily last month when Americans handed control of Afghanistan back to the Taliban.

But the family members of 9/11 victims are still pursuing accountability from another country -- Saudi Arabia -- as well as seeking more information hidden by the US government in US courts.

Secrecy has fueled theories. The kingdom has denied any involvement, and the US long ago decided that Saudi Arabia, its strategic partner in the Middle East, had no role in the attacks -- though 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi citizens. So had bin Laden been, although he had been expelled from the kingdom and his citizenship revoked.

Suspicion of Saudi Arabia has persisted, however, and the dogged efforts of 9/11 families over the past two decades have forced the US, bit by bit, to share early leads that tied the hijackers to Saudi officials but were shrouded in secrecy and hidden from public view as classified information.

Persistence has yielded results. More details on those investigations could be forthcoming as a lawsuit against Saudi Arabia proceeds in court.

That lawsuit exists only because, after a years-long campaign by the 9/11 families, Congress passed a special law in 2016 allowing individuals to sue governments for terror attacks.

 

So: the U.S. Government has allowed suits to proceed against Iran for 9/11, but not against Saudi Arabia for 9/11. That CNN report went on to say:

 

Obama vetoed a congressional effort to authorize 9/11 families to sue Saudi Arabia in federal court.

Related Video: Obama: Override of 9/11 bill veto a mistake 03:03

It was the only time during his presidency that Congress overrode an Obama veto.

"Obviously all of us still carry the scars and trauma of 9/11," he told CNN's Jake Tapper in 2016, pointing out that the US had set up a victim compensation fund for the families.

"The concern that I’ve had has nothing to do with Saudi Arabia, per se, or my sympathy for 9/11 families. It has to do with me not wanting a situation in which we’re suddenly exposed to liabilities for all the work we’re doing around the world.”

 

Here is more on that:

 

https://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2016/09/28/transcript-cnn-presidential-town-hall-americas-military-and-the-commander-and-chief/

https://archive.ph/mDoJF

https://archive.ph/mDoJF#selection-2481.0-2601.398

TAPPER: Congress has done something today that they have never done to you before.  You vetoed a bill that would have allowed 9/11 families to sue Saudi Arabia.  They, today, overrode your veto.  That has never happened to you before.

OBAMA:  Right.

TAPPER:  Your reaction?

OBAMA:  Well, I think it was a mistake.  And I understand why it happened.  Obviously, all of us still carry the scars and trauma of 9/11.  Nobody more than this 9/11 generation that’s fought on our behalf in the aftermath of of 9/11.

And, you know, those families deserve support and they deserve resources.  That’s why we set up a victims compensation fund.  And on average, the families receive about $2 million each.

But what this legislation did was it said if a private citizen believes that having been victimized by terrorism that another country didn’t do enough to stop one of its citizens, for example, in engaging in terrorism, then they can file a personal lawsuit, a private lawsuit in court.

And the problem with that is that if we eliminate this notion of sovereign immunity, then our men and women in uniform around the world could potentially start seeing ourselves subject to reciprocal loss, right?

So if you have a situation where we’re doing disaster relief in the Philippines or some other — or Haiti, and a traffic accident happens where, tragically, a citizen of that country is killed, if they passed the same kind of legislation that we just passed, now, potentially, that family in that country could start suing the United States.  They might say we’re going to take jurisdiction over that individual.

And we’ve set up what are called status of forces agreements so that when we deploy, our people are not vulnerable to these kinds of private lawsuits.  And other countries agree to do that but mainly because we reciprocate with them.

And the concern that I’ve had is — has nothing to do with Saudi Arabia per se or my sympathy for 9/11 families, it has to do with me not wanting a situation in which we’re suddenly exposed to liabilities for all the work that we’re doing all around the world, and suddenly finding ourselves subject to the — the private lawsuits in courts where we don’t even know exactly whether they’re on the up and up, in some cases.

So — so this is a — it’s a — it’s a dangerous precedent and it’s an example of why sometimes you have to do what’s hard.  And, frankly, I wish Congress here had done what’s hard.  I didn’t expect it, because voting — if you’re perceived as voting against 9/11 families right before an election, not surprisingly, that’s a hard vote for people to take.  But it would have been the right thing to do.

 

So: Obama said that although Iran (which didn’t do it) is okay to sue, Saudi Arabia (which certainly did very much participate in and largely produce those attacks against America) is not. 

 

For 21 years now, this has been considered to be acceptable by the widely deceived American people, not considered by Americans to be traitorous dictatorial rule over themselves by the approximately one thousand billionaires who virtually own — actually control — the U.S. federal Government (see this and this), and who are allied with the Saud family, against Iran.

 

In fact, even today, Barack Obama (the man who actually started the war in Ukraine) is the most-admired person not only in America but worldwide. And George W. Bush (the man who lied his way into invading Iraq), is again considered to be an admirable person, at least in America, instead of to be a liar and a traitor to his nation. That’s how deceived Americans are, as a result of U.S.-and-allied ‘journalism’.

 

 

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s next book (soon to be published) will be AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change. It’s about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.