One of the most trenchant, articulate and regular critics of the prestige press (e.g. The New York Times, The Washington Post) is
Robert Parry. He runs
Consortiumnews.com. He features other writers, but his posts are the best.
Yesterday I got around to reading Parry's "
NYT Still Pretends No Coup in Ukraine" from last week, which comments on the same Andrew Higgins and Andrew Kramer story ("
Ukraine Leader Was Defeated Even Before He Was Ousted"
) that
I wrote about last Monday. I was struck by the intense cognitive dissonance the editors of the mainstream news organs create in their audience. Contradictions abound and must be swallowed daily. As Parry explains in terms of the Ukraine:
Throughout the crisis, the mainstream U.S. press hammered home the theme of white-hatted protesters versus a black-hatted president [Yanukovych]. The police were portrayed as brutal killers who fired on unarmed supporters of “democracy.” The good-guy/bad-guy narrative was all the American people heard from the major media.
The New York Times went so far as to delete the slain policemen from the narrative and simply report that the police had killed all those who died in the Maidan. A typical Times report on March 5, 2014, summed up the storyline: “More than 80 protesters were shot to death by the police as an uprising spiraled out of control in mid-February.”
The mainstream U.S. media also sought to discredit anyone who observed the obvious fact that an unconstitutional coup had just occurred. A new theme emerged that portrayed Yanukovych as simply deciding to abandon his government because of the moral pressure from the noble and peaceful Maidan protests.
Any reference to a “coup” was dismissed as “Russian propaganda.” There was a parallel determination in the U.S. media to discredit or ignore evidence that neo-Nazi militias had played an important role in ousting Yanukovych and in the subsequent suppression of anti-coup resistance in eastern and southern Ukraine. That opposition among ethnic-Russian Ukrainians simply became “Russian aggression.”
This refusal to notice what was actually a remarkable story – the willful unleashing of Nazi storm troopers on a European population for the first time since World War II – reached absurd levels as the New York Times and the Washington Post buried references to the neo-Nazis at the end of stories, almost as afterthoughts.
The Washington Post went to the extreme of rationalizing Swastikas and other Nazi symbols by quoting one militia commander as calling them “romantic” gestures by impressionable young men. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine’s ‘Romantic’ Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers.”]
Yet, despite the best efforts of the Times, the Post and other mainstream outlets to conceal this ugly reality from the American people, alternative news sources – presenting a more realistic account of what was happening in Ukraine – began to chip away at the preferred narrative.
Instead of buying the big media’s storyline, many Americans were coming to realize that the reality was much more complicated and that they were again being sold a bill of propaganda goods.
The glaring contradictions the Gray Lady expects her readers to cognitively digest were on full display this past Saturday. The paper was dominated by the terror attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, and its aftermath, by the Kouachi brothers, Cherif and Said, who apparently
received training from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. But that is not where I want to start. I want to start where I ended on Saturday, by reading the unsigned editorial on U.S. aid to Pakistan, "
Is Pakistan Worth America’s Investment?"
It doesn’t take much to stir controversy over America’s relationship with Pakistan. The latest dust-up involves $532 million in economic assistance that the United States expects to provide later this year. Last week, Pakistani officials jumped the gun by suggesting the money is closer to being disbursed than it is; the news annoyed India, which doesn’t think the aid is merited.
That is a familiar complaint. Since 9/11, the United States has provided Pakistan with billions of dollars, mostly in military aid, to help fight extremists. There are many reasons to have doubts about the investment. Still, it is in America’s interest to maintain assistance — at a declining level — at least for the time being. But much depends on what the money will be used for. One condition for new aid should be that Pakistan do more for itself — by cutting back on spending for nuclear weapons and requiring its elites to pay taxes.
Doubts about the aid center on Pakistan’s army, which has long played a double game, accepting America’s money while enabling some militant groups, including members of the Afghan Taliban who have been battling American and Afghan troops in Afghanistan. The relationship hit bottom in 2011 when Osama bin Laden was found hiding in Pakistan and was killed by a Navy SEAL team. But it has since improved. Secretary of State John Kerry is expected to visit Islamabad soon.
After militants massacred 148 students and teachers at an army-run school in Peshawar last month, Pakistan’s government promised that it would no longer distinguish between “bad” militant groups, which are seeking to bring down the Pakistani state, and “good” militant groups that have been supported and exploited by the army to attack India and wield influence in Afghanistan. But there is little evidence that the army has gone after the “good” groups in a serious way.
This double game is a big reason that the administration has been unable to fulfill Congress’s mandate to certify that Pakistan has met certain requirements, including preventing its territory from being used for terror attacks, as a condition of assistance. Instead, officials have had to rely on a national security waiver to keep aid flowing.
Pakistan's "double game" is merely a smaller copy of the U.S. global "double game." To wit, jump from the editorial page to the middle of the paper where Ben Hubbard's "
Saudis Begin Public Caning to Punish a Blogger":
The authorities in Saudi Arabia on Friday began the public flogging of a blogger who was sentenced to 1,000 blows, 10 years in prison and a large fine for starting a website that featured content critical of the country’s religious establishment, the rights group Amnesty International reported.
The floggings are to be administered with a cane over a period of months.
The blogger, Raif Badawi, was arrested after starting a website called “Free Saudi Liberals,” and he was later convicted of charges that included cybercrime and parental disobedience.
The case has drawn attention to the strict limits on freedom of expression inSaudi Arabia, a close Arab ally of the United States, and prompted unusually direct criticism from the American government.
Jen Psaki, a State Department spokeswoman, told reporters on Thursday that the United States was concerned that Mr. Badawi would face “the inhumane punishment of a thousand lashes in addition to serving a 10-year sentence in prison for exercising his rights to freedom of expression and religion.”
The United States government called on Saudi Arabia to cancel the flogging and “review Badawi’s case and sentence,” Ms. Psaki said.
Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy, has used its courts in the past to punish dissidents or those who question the country’s strict interpretation of Islam. Often, these actions face no public rebuke from the United States, which considers Saudi Arabia an important ally in the fight against terrorism and other areas.
Besides being the world’s largest oil exporter, the kingdom is one of five Arab countries that have joined an American-led air campaign against the jihadists of the Islamic State.
Mr. Badawi was arrested in 2012 and prosecuted in a criminal court for offenses that included cybercrime and disobeying his father, who has denounced his son in the news media.
Prosecutors tried and failed to charge him with apostasy and then pressed for a resentencing because they considered his first sentence of seven years in prison and 600 blows too lenient.
Last year, Mr. Badawi received his final sentence of 10 years in prison, a fine of more than a quarter-million dollars and 1,000 blows with the cane.
An unidentified witness cited by Amnesty said that Mr. Badawi was taken from a bus and flogged 50 times in a public square outside of a mosque in the port city of Jidda after Friday Prayer. About 15 minutes later, he was put back on the bus and taken away. Amnesty said it would not identify the witness because of security concerns.
Adam Coogle, a Middle East researcher for Human Rights Watch, said Mr. Badawi was clearly being punished for starting a liberal website and insulting the religious authorities. He said that floggers in Saudi Arabia are supposed to distribute the blows from the top of the back to the back of the legs without breaking the skin. It is not a bloody affair, but it is public and painful.
Imagine if we caned bloggers in the United States for disobeying one's father or starting a website. Every public square in every major city would be filled to overflowing. Better yet, we would have to go Pinochet "dirty wars" style and use our lavishly tax-payer subsidized sports stadiums to facilitate the floggings.
Rather than more pro forma mendacious meek mewling from
The Stepford Wives-like Jen Psaki why not economic sanctions from the ballyhooed Treasury Department official, David S. Cohen, who was just promoted to the number two slot at the CIA? That story -- "
Reaching Outside C.I.A., Obama Picks Treasury Official to Become Agency’s No. 2" by Mark Mazzetti -- which appeared a few pages after the "Saudis Cane Blogger" article illuminates the nature of the U.S. "double game":
WASHINGTON — President Obama has chosen the Treasury Department official who has directed the effort to cut off funding of the Islamic State and impose economic sanctions on Syria, Russia and Iran to become the C.I.A.’s deputy director, the agency announced on Friday.
The official, David S. Cohen, who as under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence has spent more than three years in charge of the Obama administration’s attempts to punish foreign governments and cripple terrorist groups, will help lead an agency that remains at the center of armed drone campaigns and covert efforts to arm and train Syrian rebels.
John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, said in a statement that Mr. Cohen brings a “wealth of experience on many of the issues that we focus on as an agency” — such as money laundering, financial support for terrorism and narcotics trafficking.
In the past, the C.I.A.’s No. 2 job, which does not require Senate confirmation, has often been filled by agency veterans or senior military officers. Mr. Cohen, a lawyer who has no previous C.I.A. experience, will replace Avril D. Haines, who left the C.I.A. to become Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser.
The selection could be an indication that the White House is wary of elevating a C.I.A. insider who might have played a role in the detention and interrogation program that used torture on Qaeda detainees in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Over the past year, Mr. Cohen has been consumed with trying to cut off the spigot of money flowing into the Islamic State’s coffers — primarily from black-market oil sales. The militant group controls oil-rich territory in Iraq and Syria, and has been able to use smuggling routes to sell oil in Turkey. This month, the group announced that it would have a 2015 budget of more than $2 billion that it would use to pay its fighters and govern the territory it has taken.
American officials believe that figure wildly overstates the Islamic State’s resources, but they concede that drying up the group’s finances will take time.
“This is not going to be a case of, we flip a light switch and all of a sudden all of their financial resources have disappeared,” Mr. Cohen said in an interview last year.
Economic sanctions on Russia and Iran are trumpeted by the Obama administration as being enormously effective, but somehow when it comes to Islamic State, not so much. Why the disconnect?
Note that three out of the four key targets of Cohen's efforts -- Russia, Iran and Syria (one could also add Hezbollah) -- are official enemies of the United States and its monarchical allies in the Gulf; the fourth, Islamic State, we are told not to expect much. The reason, as briefly reported last August in the mainstream press when people were asking how Islamic State got so big and powerful so quickly, is that
funding for Islamic State tracks back to the U.S.-allied monarchies in the Gulf.
And just as flogging bloggers receives only a canned criticism from a State Department spokeswoman, the effect of economic sanctions on Islamic State is downplayed because the U.S. will never officially go after the corrupt absolutist monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council. This is the U.S. "double game," identical to the one that the Gray Lady criticizes Pakistan for in her unsigned editorial: taking money to fight jihadis at the same time funding and working with jihadis.
Our allies in the fight against Islamic fundamentalism should be Russia, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah (see Anne Barnard's "
Extremists Harming Islam, Leader of Hezbollah Says" for Hassan Nasrallah's cogent reaction to the Paris attacks and her snarky "Hezbollah is the enemy" reply) rather than the very nations that are exporting the extreme militant version of Islam, Wahhabism, that leads to jihad. As Andre Vltchek wrote this weekend in "
Who Should be Blamed for Muslim Terrorism? The West is Manufacturing Muslim Monsters":
Almost all radical movements in today’s Islam, anywhere in the world, are tied to Wahhabism, an ultra-conservative, reactionary sect of Islam, which is in control of the political life of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other staunch allies of the West in the Gulf.
To quote Dr. Abdullah Mohammad Sindi:
“It is very clear from the historical record that without British help neither Wahhabism nor the House of Saud would be in existence today. Wahhabism is a British-inspired fundamentalist movement in Islam. Through its defense of the House of Saud, the US also supports Wahhabism directly and indirectly regardless of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Wahhabism is violent, right wing, ultra-conservative, rigid, extremist, reactionary, sexist, and intolerant…”
The West gave full support to the Wahhabis in the 1980s. They were employed, financed and armed, after the Soviet Union was dragged into Afghanistan and into a bitter war that lasted from 1979 to 1989. As a result of this war, the Soviet Union collapsed, exhausted both economically and psychologically.
The Mujahedeen, who were fighting the Soviets as well as the left-leaning government in Kabul, were encouraged and financed by the West and its allies. They came from all corners of the Muslim world, to fight a ‘Holy War’ against Communist infidels.
According to the US Department of State archives:
“Contingents of so-called Afghan Arabs and foreign fighters who wished to wage jihad against the atheist communists. Notable among them was a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden, whose Arab group eventually evolved into al-Qaeda.”
Muslim radical groups created and injected into various Muslim countries by the West included al-Qaeda, but also, more recently, ISIS (also known as ISIL). ISIS is an extremist army that was born in the ‘refugee camps’ on the Syrian/Turkish and Syrian/Jordanian borders, and which was financed by NATO and the West to fight the Syrian (secular) government of Bashar al-Assad.
Such radical implants have been serving several purposes. The West uses them as proxies in the wars it is fighting against its enemies – the countries that are still standing in the way to the Empire’s complete domination of the world. Then, somewhere down the road, after these extremist armies ‘get totally out of control’ (and they always will), they could serve as scarecrows and as justification for the ‘The War On Terror’, or, like after ISIS took Mosul, as an excuse for the re-engagement of Western troops in Iraq.
Stories about the radical Muslim groups have constantly been paraded on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, or shown on television monitors, reminding readers ‘how dangerous the world really is’, ‘how important Western engagement in it is’, and consequently, how important surveillance is, how indispensable security measures are, as well as tremendous ‘defense’ budgets and wars against countless rogue states.
The Kouachi brothers had a connection to Yemen and the Qaeda branch there, AQAP. Read Kareem Fahim's latest from Yemen, "
Violence Grows in Yemen as Al Qaeda Tries to Fight Its Way Back," to get caught up on the U.S. "double game" there. The U.S. faced with the rise of the pro-Iranian Shiite Houthi movement, which is consolidating power in Sana, is working with its Gulf allies and their AQAP proxies to claw back territory from the Houthis.
This is what the U.S. "double game" does; it foments instability, terror and war. And more is on the way because there is no indication that the people at the top see any reason to change.
