U.S. and Its Press Lie Americans Into Invasions Routinely

Global Research – by Eric Zuesse

The 2003 invasion of Iraq is the best-known example of America’s Government and press lying to fool its public to invade a foreign country that actually posed no threat to U.S. national security (so that America’s Defense Department was obviously America’s Aggression Department, and even its very name was a lie). However, that fraud and its resulting mega-violence were unfortunately typical, not at all exceptional, for the brutal American regime. This crucial but ugly fact will be documented here, so as to destroy (by clear facts) the lying U.S. regime’s supposed credibility — and this refers to both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party wings (and their ‘news’media), of our ruling aristocracy. (Same for America’s lapdog, UK.) 

First, however: it’s important to document that both Americans and Brits were lied (and that word should be not only a noun, but also a verb, because “deceived” is far too soft a term for so heinous a consequence) into invading and occupying Iraq: 

A crucial date was 7 September 2002, when George W. Bush and Tony Blair both said that a new report had just been issued by the IAEA saying that Saddam Husseinwas only six months away from having a nuclear weapon. The IAEA promptly denied that it had issued any such “new report” at all, and the ‘news’ media simply ignored the denial, which the IAEA then repeated weeks later, and it again was ignored; so, the false impression, that such an IAEA report had been issued, remained in the publics’ minds, and they consequently favored invading Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein before there would be, as Condoleezza Rice warned the next day following Bush-Blair, on September 8th, a “mushroom cloud”. It was all just lies — lies that were believed by the public, at the time, and even believed by many for a long time after we invaded. 

Some of these lies were derived from torturing detainees — torturing them to say what the U.S. and British regimes wanted them to say. But all were concocted by the perpetrating dictators. Like CIADirector George Tenet told his boss, George W. Bush, fooling the public into invading Iraq would be a “slam-dunk.”

Even today, many Americans still are successfully suckered into believing that torture extracts truths, instead of the desired lies, from suspects, to serve as ‘evidence’, in this ‘democracy’.

So: that’s the reality behind America’s destruction of Iraq — it was based upon lies from the Government, which were stenographically published and broadcast to the public as being truths, while the actual truths were being simultaneously hidden from the public — and the truth that the regime was lying didn’t get to reach us until we had already invaded and occupied the targeted country. That’s what happens when an evil regime fools its public, into supporting and doing its aristocracy’s invasion, at the taxpaying public’s expense, and psychopathically ignoring the massive horrors it is imposing upon the residents in the attacked country. This is psychopathy being displayed by a dictatorship — one that claims to be a ‘democracy’ and that demonizes other governments that it claims to be (and some of which, occasionally, are) dictatorships. With the ‘anti-communist’ excuse gone, only these types of lies still work; so, they’re used non-stop.

Here are other such instances:

Right now, the Obama-Trump regime, which use Al Qaeda in Syria to train and arm jihadists from around the world to go to Syria to fight and overthrow Syria’s Government and replace it by one that will be a stooge-regime of the U.S. aristocracy’s allied Saudi aristocracy (the Saud family), is, yet again, violating Trump’s promise to leave Syria as soon as ISIS is defeated. In contrast to the U.S. regime’s promises, Trump stays on in Syria after ISIS’s defeat and tries to carve out the northeastern part of Syria, now relying mainly upon Kurdish forces in Syria’s northeast, but also upon Al Qaeda-led jihadists in Ghouta and elsewhere, to serve as America’s “boots-on-the-ground,” for establishing the stooge-regime that the U.S. aristocracy and its allied Saudi and Israeli aristocracies want to control that land, so as to construct through it oil and gas pipelines to increase the invading aristocracy’s profits. 

How can a news-consumer tell if a supposed ‘news’-medium is honest about Syria? Here’s a simple and reliable method: If the ‘news’-medium uses the term ‘rebels’ instead of “jihadists” or “terrorists” in order to refer to the people who are trying to overthrow and replace Syria’s Government, then you know it’s lying, because those aren’t ‘democrats’ in any sense: they are jihadists-terrorists who are aiming to establish in Syria a fundamentalist-Sunni, Wahhabist-Salafist, and rabidly anti-Shia, dictatorship there, which will be basically run by the Sauds. For example, on 2 April 2018, the BBC headlined “Uncertainty Over Rebel Deal in Ghouta” instead of “Uncertainty Over Jihadist Deal in Ghouta” or “Over Terrorist Deal,” and so the BBC is clearly a lying propaganda-outlet that cannot reasonably be believed, but whose reports one instead must independently verify before citing or quoting to others. Similarly, the prior day, the Telegraph had bannered “Ghouta ‘deal struck’ as rebel fighters evacuated” and thus made clear that it too is propaganda, not reliable news-reporting. To show how consistent these types of deception are through time, the Telegraph, on 6 March 2013, had headlined an editorial “To end the conflict in Syria, President Bashar al-Assad has to go” and called his overthrow “Our moral obligation”. And, just two days later, they bannered “US and Europe in ‘major airlift of arms to Syrian rebels through Zagreb’” — which ‘news’ would have been real news-reporting if only those ‘rebels’ (and what they actually represented) had been at all honestly described. The basic technique of propaganda is to lie in the framing of an issue. It’s so routine as to be endemic in the ‘news’-reporting in any dictatorship. 

For yet another example: Any ‘news’-medium that refers to the overthrow in 2014 of Ukraine’s democratically elected Government, and its replacement by a racist-fascist (nazi) rabidly anti-Russian dictatorship, as having been not a coup but instead a ‘revolution’, is a rotten lying propaganda-medium, nothing better than that.

If the word “revolution” is used to describe the 2014 Ukraine overthrow, and the word “rebels” is used to refer to the fighters for the overthrow of Assad, not only is the medium consistently propaganda, but it is consistently pumping to precipitate World War III.

In my “The Nations that Accept Nazism Today” I documented that under Obama there were three: U.S., Ukraine, and Canada. And then in my “Trump Continues Obama’s Support of Nazism”, I documented that the number had declined to two — and now it was only U.S. and Ukraine. Those two news-reports (and my prior ones about Obama’s having backed nazism at the U.N.) were distributed free to all media, but only a few tiny media published any of them. The dictatorship needed to hide this shocking news from the public, not broadcast it to the public. The mainstream media (and some of the non-mainstream media) are fake-news media — and this comprises almost all of the ‘news’-media. On international relations, they’re just loaded with lies, and the key terms right now are, for Syria, “rebels” versus “jihadists”; and, for Ukraine, “revolution” versus “coup.”

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This article was originally published on Strategic Culture Foundation.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.