In 2001: The US Had Already Decided to Take Down The Governments of 7 Countries In 5 Years

The following is a tapped lecture by, retired four-star US General Wesley Clark given in 2007 at the Commonwealth Club of California. Clark babbles about a lot of issues; after all, he is a former presidential candidate, and more importantly, he is marketing a new book. However, he admits to the following: 

• In 2001 the US had already taken the decision to take down the governments of 7 countries (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran) in 5 years.
• The US was taken over by a group of people with a policy coup, Wolfowitz and Cheney and Rumsfeld and you could name a half dozen other collaborators from the project for a new American century. They want to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, and make it under their control.

Below is a transcript of this lecture. In my humble view, General Clark’s abilities to understand history strike me as, dangerously handicapped and limited to the “face value” of events he lived or learned about. This shows lucidly when he analyzes the Cold war and the reasons underlying the fall of the Soviet Union (Highlighted in Blue: bogus, superficial, pure American). It also shows when he naively dismisses the creation of the Israeli State as the root of all evil, when he judges the invasion of Afghanistan as a right decision, and when gives his opinion about Iran, Lebanon and Hezbollah, Syria, and Israel (Highlighted in Bold Fuchsia: completely bogus and false; no understanding whatsoever about the great and real Zionist threat embodied in the State of Israel). Stuff highlighted in Bold Red is just amazing to read!

There is also a shorter version of this video (its beginning and end are indicated in the text). Enjoy!

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START OF LECTURE

THE COLD: REASONS WHY THE US WON 

The beginning of this problem with Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror and all of that...it's not with the birth of Mohammed, and it's not with the founding of the state of Israel. It's actually 1989, it was the year of miracles in Europe.

It was the year in which the Berlin Wall came down. It was the year in which the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe collapsed. It was the year in which we are generally credited with having won the Cold War. We won the Cold War with an integrated civil, political, diplomatic, economic and military strategy that was calling upon all of America's resources and strengths to contain the expansion of communism and deter the use of Soviet military power.

...The strategy was actually formulated in the late 40's by Harry Truman and it was carried by Eisenhower...Republicans always believe we should have more weapons and talk tougher and threaten more people...Democrats always said, can't we be nicer and have more negotiations and can't we sign more treaties...but those abroad common agreement, that this was America's purpose in the world...And so Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Reagan all carried this strategy forward until the Soviet Union collapsed.

....It was unthinkable to us that we would win...the Berlin Wall was down. We couldn't believe it. And within two years the Soviet Union had collapsed. We won the greatest victory of the 20th Century. We won it without ever having fought the Russians directly.

REASONS WHY THE US WON THE COLD WAR

We won it (the Cold War) because we:

• Built our economy and Eisenhower said America's greatest strength was our economic strength.
• Took our military and trained them, but we told them that their real purpose was to deter war, not to fight war.
• Took our educational system and we tried to sharpen it for training and teaching and science and education and technology to compete with the Soviets on Sputnik and the race to the moon.
• Took our young people and we appointed the football coach from Oklahoma to be the Presidential Physical Fitness Advisor for America.
• (Encouraged) young people to be physically fit and get a presidential physical fitness badge
• Did a lot of things to try to harness America:. 
• Brought tens of thousands of young people here to study and see our ideas. 
• Sent American companies abroad.
• Encouraged them to hire local people and then bring them back here for training. Those multinational corporations were America's eyes and ears and ambassadors on the world. 

All of that was designed to contain the spread of communism and deter the Soviet Union and it worked.

THE COLD WAR IS OVER: IT IS THE END OF HISTORY

But when we won the Cold War, we lost our strategy. We had no adversary:

• We lost our purpose in the world. 
• We lost the organizing principles that held the American society together and focused just on the outer world
• We lost the organizing principles that kept the NATO alliance together. 
• We were in a new world. It was so new that Harvard historian Francis Fujiyama it the end of history. 
• George Bush proclaimed a new world order. 

SIX DAYS, FIVE WARS

...Suddenly I was told I was going to go to Washington, get a third star and be the Director of Strategic Plans and Policy on the Joint Staff, the highest military staff in the country. My job was to integrate military thinking with diplomatic and political strategy.

...When I went up there. I didn't know what we were doing because there was no Soviet threat, there was no organizing principle...

...So the 2nd day, I was there...and somebody said, bad news in Africa, we just had a shoot down of an aircraft by a missile that shot-down the presents of Rwanda and Burundi...it turned out it was a French missile and not an American missile...I said well, who are these people on Rwanda and Burundi. They said [...] we don't have time to brief you on it right now, but we will get on your calendar and come back and give you the run down next week...I had already learned, when every time I went to Shalikashvili's office, he had CNN on continuously.

...I realized - my learning experience was if you ever want to find out what's happening, you don't ask the National Military Command Center, you watch CNN.

...So I was leaving office...on a Friday night (4th day)…I was looking on the CNN screen, there is fighting, there are soldiers, they are in Africa...I said what is this, a war movie or what?...My assistant said, oh no it's some action in Kigali or someplace...I think it's a French and maybe it's the Belgians.

...So I quickly called the National Military Command Center and said I am the new J5, I am supposed to know everything, what's going on in the world and looks like we got a battle going on in Africa, what's that about? They said, sir we don't know anything.

I said did you look at CNN, they said, no sir. So I called the European Command Center in Stuttgart, Germany...they are supposed to keep up with Africa. I said, what's going on, they said, we don't know anything about it. So I had to call the embassies...we were up all night with the State Department trying to figure out what the French and Belgians were doing.

Saturday morning (5th day), I had a nine o'clock meeting with Secretary of Defense Bill Perry and they said, if you impress Perry you may get to go with him on a trip to Korea. So I went in there and...I discovered we were about to go to war with North Korea.

It seemed like President Clinton had been there in October of 93...the North Koreans [...] told (that there's) no nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula. He got home, the CIA said, well Mr. President there has been a slight problem, it seemed like we may have misled you...there is this Korean reactor and they can take the fuel rods out of it and if they reprocess them, they could extract plutonium from the spent fuel and that could make a nuclear weapon and there could be enough plutonium to make two nuclear weapons...And so we were going to threaten them and we were going to take them to the UN. And they (North Koreans) said, if you take us to the UN and put sanctions on us, we will consider it as act of war. And so the generals in Korea called us to say they say it's a act of war, it's going to be an act of war.

And on Sunday (6th day) I got called into a meeting in the White House...there was the Secretary of State Warren Christopher...and there was Madeleine Albright on a TV screen from New York, she was the UN Ambassador and Sandy Berger, the Deputy National Security Advisor, Tony Lake, the National Security Advisor and Bill Perry was there again and Shalikashvili, my boss was there and several other people, Vice President's National Security Advisor, and they are arguing about the Air Rules of Engagement for flying combat air patrols over Bosnia. And they are talking about what are the criteria which enable them to shoot Serb aircraft...I am sitting there trying to follow this conversation. I got a little stenographer's notebook. I am thinking I have to copy everything down, I couldn't follow it, they couldn't follow it, they want an aviator in the room, no body understood the technology, we spent three hours there on a Sunday afternoon and we ended with nothing. That was my first weekend.

And on Monday morning (6th day), a guy came in, knocked on the door, he was a one star general...he said, I have to report something to you, I am not allowed to tell you this because it's classified information and it's compartmented. But I and I am representing you in this compartmented program, but I feel like how to tell you any way we are planning an invasion of Haiti.

And you know, here I come up, here it's the end of the Cold War, I don't know why we have armed forces left and we are about to go to war with North Korea, we are fighting the war over the Balkans and we are going to invade Haiti. And it was crazy. 

And it was a joke, because there was no strategy. And so we tried to create a strategy. We worked really hard to do it. And we labored for year and a half to create. I mean - What do you do after deterrence and containment? There was no obvious threat, we knew that there was a threat of regional war, there was a threat of terrorism, there was a threat of nuclear proliferation, there was a threat of Russia should be become hostile, but there was no obvious immediate threat that you could sort of run up the flag and say, look out here come here they come again, you know. And so how could you use that to mobilize resources, build alliances, so we really puzzle over this. 

...What would be the 2000 election themes? What would be the top five issues? It was like the economy, education, social security reform, and may be trade and that was it. There was nothing about national security, nothing, no significant foreign policy issues. Now, everything was going great.

AND THEN 9/11 HAPPENED  (Shorter video version starts here)

And then 9/11happened...what happened in 9/11 is we didn't have a strategy, we didn't have bipartisan agreement, we didn't have American understanding of it...we had instead a policy coup in this country...a policy coup. Some hard-nosed people took over the direction of American policy and they never bothered to inform the rest of us.

I went through the Pentagon ten days after 9/11...An officer from the Joint Staff called me into his office and said, I would want you to know we are going to attack Iraq. And I said, why? He said, we don't know. I said, will they tie Saddam to 9/11? He said, no...but I guess, they don't know to do about terrorism and so the they think they can attack states and they want to look strong...I guess they think if they take down a state, it will intimidate the terrorists and you know what its like that old saying, if the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem has to be a nail. 

...I walked out of there pretty upset and then we attacked Afghanistan. I was pretty happy about that, we should have. 

And then I came back to the Pentagon about six weeks later, I saw the same officer.  I said why haven't we attacked Iraq? We are sill going to attack Iraq. He said, oh sir...it's worse than that...I just got this memo from the Secretary of Defense's office, it says we are going to attack and destroy the governments in in seven countries in five years. We are going to start with Iraq and then we are going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran; seven countries in five years. 

...I was so stunned by this, I couldn't begin to talk about it. And I couldn't believe it would really be true, but that's actually what happened. 

These people took control of the policy in the United States...then it came back to me, a 1991 meeting I had with Paul Wolfowitz...he was the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, it's the number three position of the Pentagon…and I said to Paul, Mr. Secretary you must be pretty happy with the performance of the troops in Desert Storm. 

And he (Paul Wolfowitz) said: "well yeah...not really...the truth is we should have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and we didn't...But one thing we did learn...we learned that we can use our military in the region in the Middle East and the Soviets wont stop us...we have got about five or ten years to clean up those all Soviet client regimes; Syria, Iran, Iraq, - before the next great super power comes on to challenge us". 

It was a pretty stunning thing, I mean the purpose of the military is to start wars and change governments, it's not to sort of deter a conflict, we are going to have invade countries...

This country was taken over by a group of people with a policy coup, Wolfowitz and Cheney and Rumsfeld and you could name a half dozen other collaborators from THE PROJECT FOR A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY. They wanted at us to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our control.

It went back to those comments in 1991. Now did anybody tell you that, was there a national dialogue on this? Did senators and congressman stand up and denounce this plan? Was there a full-fledged American debate on it? Absolutely not; and there are still isn't, and that's why we are failing in Iraq, because Iran and Syria know about the plan. All you have to do is read the Weekly Standard and Bill Kristol and he blabber mouthed it out all over the world, Richard, the same way. They could hardly wait to finish Iraq, so they could move in to Syria. It was like a lay down, oh our legions are going to go in there. 

This wasn't what the American people voted George Bush in to office, well they didn't actually vote him to office, but it wasn't what many of the people who it wasn't what he campaigned on. He campaigned on a humble foreign policy, the most arrogant foreign policy in American history. He campaigned on no peace keeping, no nation building and here he is with Afghanistan and Iraqis; astonishing.

So the root of the problem is not how many troops are in Iraq, please believe me, don't be mad if you are a Democrat at your Democratic congressmen because they can't reduce the troops and frustrate the president. That's not the issue. And if you are Republican don't be mad at the Democrats because they are fussing with the troops. 

Whether you are Democrat or Republican, if you are an American you ought to be concerned about the strategy of the United States in this region, what is our aim, what is our purpose, why are we there, why are Americans dying in this region? That is the issue (Shorter video version ends here) , for lack of an effective strategy we are going to lose in this regional battle.

They have to do with strategy, whether you talk to or isolate Iran, whether you punish or reform Syria, whether you aid or condemn Lebanon, how you motivate Egypt, how you deal with Saudi Arabia, those are key elements in a strategy and there has to be a purpose for it and none of that has been laid out in any coherent way. 

No, its all about politics, it's what Karl Rove said in January 2002, in Las Vegas, Nevada, he said, "We going to run this President as a War President." And you know what? They are succeeding. The Democratic challenge to Iraq was in my view misplaced.

AND NOW THE RHETORIC IS HEATING UP AGAINST IRAN 

...And now the rhetoric is heating up against Iran. So where is this going to go? Likely to a strike against Iran it could be strike against nuclear, could be built as a strike against Iran because there are aiding and abetting the insurgents who were fighting and killing Americans. And how many Democratic congressmen do you think will be able to take a strong and principle stand against this? 

Well the answer is: Any Democrats who want to stand up and say, "No, I believe Iran has a perfect right to kill and attack American soldiers." Or any congressmen who wants to say, "No, I have I favor Iran getting a nuclear weapon." So, do you see he is kind of he owns the playing field, the President does. It’s not about strategy, it's about politics. It's about election politics. I am sorry to say, I am so disappointed, we can't seem to control the dialogue.

And I am out here tonight begging you to help us get this dialogue reoriented in the right direction before it's too late and we are engaged in another and deeper war with more costs, another unnecessary war in this region. 

What should we be doing? We should send a diplomatic region mission to the region. I would put Richard Holbrooke over there in a heartbeat. Put him on a golf stream gave him a General, gave him a couple of assistance. So I said, "Dick, see you come back when you got it sorted out. I am giving you two months. Go visit every leader in the good, we will give them this; if they are bad, we are going to do this. And see if you can get make some sense out of this and build some coherence." 

Iran cannot tolerate a hostile Iraq. We did them a great favor. But Iran is torn between whether they want to be revolutionary power and up and everything, or whether they want to be recognized and admitted to the world community as a major regional power. They just don't know. They got an ongoing debate and like any you know, good group, they are going to push in both directions as far as they can until they run to an obstacle, because they like to have it both ways.

Syria, well, they like to modernize they like to end the conflict with Israel, but on the other hand they don't have the economic resources, they are under threat, they are trying to maintain alliance with Iran; so they don't get pushed aside. They are at odds with the Saudi's. There is no one to make peace. 

Lebanon, completely ripped apart by internal conflict. Israel, the Palestinians you know about Hezbollah in the north but did you know that the Hamas movement is heavily infiltrated by Iran and is preparing in Gaza, the same kind of fortifications that the Israelis went against in south Lebanon. 

AMERICA HAS GOT ITS OWN CHALLENGES

So, there are a lot of problems in this region, before we use force or threaten force we should talk to people in the region. There is no guarantee, but if it were up to me I would pull out two brigades right now, I would that diplomatic mission over and I'd talk about a big regional strategy.

We have got to extricated our resources and change our focus from the Middle East to the broader world around us because while we are bogged down in terrorism, China and India are growing. They are growing at 10 percent; or in the case if India, nine percent a year. They are developing new technologies new challenges new relationships and we are both customers and competitors of these countries.

And we have got our own challenges. We have got to fix education in this country and healthcare and a business environment and re-ignite American technological ingenuity. We have got to have an energy policy that make sense and gives us greater flexibility and freedom from dependence on Middle Eastern and Russian Oil. We have got to deal with problems that are too big for any one nation to handle but there are national security problems like global warming and climate change. 

All of that is being impacted by the politically driven excessive focus on war in the Middle East. We need a real American strategy. And to get that strategy, its about who we are as Americans. Are we dividers or uniters, bullies or people who outreach and make friends? Do we fear others or do we welcome others?

Do we build fences around America or build bridges to invite others into see us? Who are we as a nation? I think we are open.

I think we are a nation of immigrants. I think we are a nation of incredible energy, courage, stamina, endurance don't ever sell America short. I want you to read my book. I want you to figure out who we are as Americans and I want you to help me open up this debate into a true dialogue about America's future, not just an argument about 10,000 US Troops in Iraq. Thank you.

END OF LECTURE

Faking It: How the Media Manipulates the World into War

By James Corbett, grtv.ca, 2 January, 2012

Below is a transcript by James Corbett of his video “Faking It: How the Media Manipulates the World into War”.

View the original filmed report here.

NB: Does anyone remember Dustin Hoffman's Wag The Dog?

It is a film about a president who, after being caught in a scandalous situation just a few days before the elections, has to find a way to re-polish his public image tainted by his indiscretions. In this light, the presidential team contracts a top Hollywood producer in order to, through a faked media campaign, convince the public that a war with Albania is imminent. Ultimately, the yellow media saves the president as he gets to  play the hero who ends this presumed war, created by the media, and ended through the media!!!

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As the drums of war begin to beat once again in Iran, Syria, the , and other potential hotspots and flashpoints around the globe, concerned citizens are asking how a world so sick of bloodshed and a population so tired of conflict could be led to this spot once again.

To understand this seeming paradox, we must first understand the centuries-long history of how media has been used to whip the nation into wartime frenzy, dehumanize the supposed enemies, and even to manipulate the public into believing in causes for war that, decades later, were admitted to be completely fictitious.

The term “yellow journalism” was coined to describe the type of sensationalistic, scandal-driven, and often erroneous style of reporting popularized by newspapers like William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. In one of the most egregious examples of this phenomenon, Hearst’s papers widely trumpeted the sinking of the Maine as the work of the Spanish. Whipped into an anti-Spanish frenzy by a daily torrent of stories depicting Spanish forces’ alleged torture and rape of Cubans, and pushed over the edge by the Maine incident, the public welcomed the beginning of the US-Spanish war. Although it is now widely believed that the explosion on the Maine was due to a fire in one of its coal bunkers, the initial lurid reports of Spanish involvement stuck and the nation was led into war.

In many ways, the phrase infamously attributed to Hearst in reply to his illustrator “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” apocryphal as the story may be, nevertheless perfectly encodes the method by which the public would be led to war time and again through the decades.

The US was drawn into World War I by the sinking of the Lusitania, a British ocean liner carrying American passengers that was torpedoed by German U-boats off the coast of Ireland, killing over 1,000 of its passengers. What the public was not informed about at the time, of course, was that just one week before the incident, then-First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill had written to the President of the Board of Trade that it was “most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hopes especially of embroiling the United States with Germany.” Nor did reports of the attack announce that the ship was carrying rifle ammunition and other military supplies. Instead, reports once again emphasized that the attack was an out-of-the-blue strike by a maniacal enemy, and the public was led into the war.

The US involvement in World War II was likewise the result of deliberate disinformation. Although the Honolulu Advertiser had even predicted the attack on Pearl Harbor days in advance, the Japanese Naval codes had already been deciphered by that time, and that even Henry Stimson, the US Secretary of War, had noted in his diary the week before that he had discussed in a meeting with Roosevelt “how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves,” the public were still led to believe that the Pearl Harbor attack had been completely unforeseen. Just last month, a newly-declassified memo emerged showing that FDR had been warned of an impending Japanese attack on Hawaii just three days before the events at Pearl Harbor, yet the history books still portray Pearl Harbor as an example of a surprise attack.

In August 1964, the public was told that the North Vietnamese had attacked a US Destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin on two separate occasions. The attacks were portrayed as a clear example of “communist aggression” and a resolution was soon passed in Congress authorizing President Johnson to begin deploying US forces in Vietnam. In 2005, an internal NSA study was released concluding that the second attack in fact never took place. In effect, 60000 American servicemen and as many as three million Vietnamese, let alone as many as 500,000 Cambodians and Laotians, lost their lives because of an incident that did not occur anywhere but in the imagination of the Johnson administration and the pages of the American media.

In 1991, the world was introduced to the emotional story of Nayirah, a Kuwaiti girl who testified about the atrocities committed by Iraqi forces in Kuwait.

What the world was never told was that the incident had in fact been the work of a public relations firm, Hill and Knowltown, and the girl had actually been the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador. Once again, the public was whipped into a frenzy of hatred for the Hussein regime, not for the documented atrocities that it had actually committed on segments of its own population with weapons supplied to them by the United States itself, but on the basis of an imaginary story told to the public via their televisions, orchestrated by a PR firm.

In the lead-up to the war on Iraq, the American media infamously took the lead in framing the debate about the Iraqi government’s weapons of mass destruction NOT as a question of whether or not they even existed, but as a question of where they had been hidden and what should be done to disarm them. The New York Times led the way with Judith Miller‘s now infamous reporting on the Iraqi WMD story, now known to have been based on false information from untrustworthy sources, but the rest of the media fell into line with the NBC Nightly News asking “what precise threat Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction pose to America”, and Time debating whether Hussein was “making a good-faith effort to disarm Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.” Reports about chemical weapons stashes were reported on before they were confirmed, although headlines boldly asserted their existence as indisputable fact. We now know that in fact the stockpiles did not exist, and the administration premeditatedly lied the country into yet another war, but the most intense opposition the Bush administration ever received over this documented war crime was some polite correction on the Sunday political talk show circuit.

Remarkably, the public at large has seemingly learned nothing from all of these documented historical manipulations. If anything, the media has become even bolder in its attempts to manipulate the public’s perceptions, perhaps emboldened by the fact that so few in the audience seem willing to question the picture that is being painted for them on the evening news.

Later that year, CNN aired footage of a bombed out Tskhinvali in South Ossetia, falsely labeling it as footage of Gori, which they said had been attacked by the Russians.

In 2009, the BBC showed a cropped image of a rally in Iran which they claimed was a crowd of protesters who assembled to show their opposition to the Iranian government. An uncropped version of the same photograph displayed on the LA Times’ website, however, revealed that the photo in fact came from a rally in support of Ahmedinejad.

In August of 2011, the BBC ran footage of what they claimed was a celebration in Tripoli’s Green Square. When sharp-eyed viewers noticed that the flags in the footage were in fact Indian flags, the BBC was forced to admit that they had “accidentally” broadcast footage from India instead of Tripoli.

Also that month, CNN reported on a story from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claiming that eight infants in incubators had died in a hospital in Hama when Syrian authorities cut off power in the area. Some news sites even carried pictures of the infants. The images were later admitted to have been taken in Egypt and no evidence has ever emerged to back up the accusations.

As breathtaking as all of these lies, manipulations and so-called “mistakes” are, they in and of themselves don’t represent the only functions of the media for the war machine. Now, the US government is taking the lead in becoming more and more directly involved with the shaping of the media message on war propaganda, and the general public is becoming even more ensnared in a false picture of the world through the Pentagon’s own lens.

In 2005, the Bush White House admitted to producing videos that were designed to look like news reports from legitimate independent journalists, and then feeding those reports to media outlets as prepackaged material ready to air on the evening news. When the Government Accountability Office ruled that these fake news reports in fact constituted illegal covert propaganda, the White House simply issued a memo declaring the practice to be legal.

In April 2008, the New York Times revealed a secret US Department of Defense program that was launched in 2002 and involved using retired military officers to implant Pentagon talking points in the media. The officers were presented as “independent analysts” on talk shows and news programs, although they had been specially briefed beforehand by the Pentagon. In December of 2011, the DoD’s own Inspector General released a report concluding that the program was in perfect compliance with government policies and regulations.

Earlier this year, it was revealed the US government had contracted with HBGary Federal to develop software that create fake social media accounts in order to steer public opinion and promote propaganda on popular websites. The federal contract for the software sourced back to the MacDill Air Force Base in Florida.

As the vehicle through which information from the outside world is captured, sorted, edited and transmitted into our homes, the mass media has the huge responsibility of shaping and informing our understanding of events to which we don’t have first-hand access. This is an awesome responsibility in even the most ideal conditions, with diligent reporters guided by trustworthy editors doing their level best to report the most important news in the most straightforward way.

But in a media landscape where a handful of companies own virtually all of the print, radio and television media in each nation, the only recourse the public has is to turn away from the mainstream media altogether. And that is precisely what is happening.

As study after study and report after report has shown, the death of the old media has accelerated in recent years, with more and more people abandoning newspapers and now even television as their main source of news. Instead, the public is increasingly turning toward online sources for their news and information, something that is necessarily worrying for the war machine itself, a system that can only truly flourish when the propaganda arm is held under monopolistic control.

But as citizens turn away from the New York Times and toward independent websites, many run and maintained by citizen journalists and amateur editors, the system that has consolidated its control over the minds of the public for generations seems to finally be showing signs that it may not be invincible.

Surely this is not to say that online media is impervious to the defects that have made the traditional media so unreliable. Quite the contrary. But the difference is that online, there is still for the time being relative freedom of choice at the individual level. While internet freedom exists, individual readers and viewers don’t have to take the word of any website or pundit or commentator on any issue. They can check the source documentation themselves, except, perhaps not coincidentally, on the websites of the traditional media bastions, which tend not to link source material and documentation in their articles.

Hence the SOPA Act, Protect IP, the US government’s attempts to seize websites at the domain name level, and all of the other concerted attacks we have seen on internet freedoms in recent years.

Because ultimately, an informed and engaged public is far less likely to go along with wars waged for power and profit. And as the public becomes better informed about the very issues that the media has tried to lie to them about for so long, they realize that the answer to all of the mainstream media’s war cheerleading and blatant manipulation is perhaps simpler than we ever suspected: All we have to do is turn them off.

© James Corbett, grtv.ca

UK's Secret Plans For Syria

By The PressTV, From the Voltaire Network, January 2^nd 2012

Revelations have surfaced about the presence of British spies in Syria as the UK government draws secret plans for a NATO-backed no-fly zone over the country.

A British security official has revealed that Britain’s Ministry of Defense has been drawing up secret plots to secure a NATO-sponsored no-fly zone over Syria as intelligence agents from MI6 and the CIA are examining the situation on the ground in the country, reported the Daily Star.

“MI6 and the CIA are in Syria to infiltrate,” revealed the newspaper.

The revelations come as the Western media has launched a campaign to criticize the presence of the Arab League observers in Syria calling on them to return so that their governments would be able to draw up plots for military intervention based on fabricated evidence.

However, independent analysts have seriously questioned the West’s media hype over the usefulness of the Arab League observers’ presence in Syria, as they assert the West is using the Arab League as an NGO.

“[The Arab League] has been one of the most pathetic organizations in the Arab World for a long, long time, doing nothing on Palestine, doing nothing to prevent the war on Iraq. And, now it’s being used as an NGO by the West,” said Tariq Ali, editor of London-based New Left Review.

Furthermore, Ali warned against the Western intervention in Syria saying “we need a negotiated settlement in Syria.”

“We do not want a Western intervention as in Libya which with each passing day the information coming out of Libya shows the disaster,” said Ali in an interview with Russia’s English news channel Russia Today.

The Daily Star also reported that the Western intervention in Syria “is all going like Libya but this will be bigger and bloodier.”

Furthermore, the British newspaper revealed that the British government’s “highest priority” while drawing up its secret plots would be Israel’s security saying “Syria supports Hezbollah. That threatens Israel.”

Pointing out that Western intervention in Syria has already started, Ali said: “I don’t know why they [foreign nations] seem reluctant to [acknowledging armed opposition extremists operating in Syria] because most the nations which seem reluctant to notice that are the ones who’re supplying the weaponry.”

© Voltaire Network