[A-List] Fwd: New Statesman - The way to lie about another war if U.N Sanctions are Unavailable

[Nadja Tesich]

 Let's not agrandise CIA.Everything they have done recently could have been done by the army etc or by computers.
 On the personal level they are worthless.They have nobody 
good inside since the fall of Soviet Union.Just the machines.
Nadja
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> Date: Sun, 13 Jun 2010 20:03:05 +0200
> From: suzannedk at gmail.com
> To: a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu
> Subject: [A-List] Fwd: New Statesman - The way to lie about another war if U.N Sanctions are Unavailable
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Sid Shniad 
> Date: Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 10:11 PM
> Subject: New Statesman - The way to lie about another war
> To:
>
>
> http://www.newstatesman.com/middle-east/2010/06/north-korea-vietnam-pilger
>
> New Statesman
> 03 June 2010
>
> The way to lie about another war
>
> John Pilger
>
> The CIA set a precedent with the Tonkin “incident”, sparking off the
> Vietnam war. Today, we see the same arts of spin at work in Israel’s
> reasons for the bloody assault on the Muslim aid ships to Gaza.
>
> How do wars begin? With a "master illusion", according to Ralph
> McGehee, one of the CIA's pioneers in "black propaganda", known today
> as "news management". In 1983, he described to me how the CIA had
> faked an "incident" that became the "conclusive proof of North
> Vietnam's aggression". This followed a claim, also fake, that North
> Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked an American warship in the Gulf
> of Tonkin in August 1964.
>
> “The CIA," he said, "loaded up a junk, a North Vietnamese junk, with
> communist weapons - the agency maintains communist arsenals in the
> United States and around the world. They floated this junk off the
> coast of central Vietnam. They shot it up and made it look like a
> firefight, and they brought in the American press. Based on this
> evidence, two marine landing teams went into Danang and a week after
> that the American air force began regular bombing of North Vietnam."
> An invasion that took three million lives was under way.
>
> The Israelis have played this murderous game since 1948. The massacre
> of peace activists in international waters on 31 May was "spun" to the
> Israeli public for the better part of the week, preparing them for yet
> more murder by their government, with the unarmed flotilla of
> humanitarians described as terrorists or dupes of terrorists. The BBC
> was so intimidated that it reported the atrocity primarily as a
> "potential public relations disaster for Israel", the perspective of
> the killers, and a disgrace for journalism.
>
> Guilt trip
>
> A similar master illusion now consumes Asian governments. On 20 May,
> South Korea announced it had "overwhelming evidence" that a torpedo
> fired by a North Korean submarine sank one of its warships, the
> Cheonan, in March with the loss of 46 sailors. The US keeps 28,000
> troops in South Korea, where the public has long supported détente
> with Pyongyang.
>
> On 26 May, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, flew to Seoul
> and demanded that the "international community must respond" to "North
> Korea's outrage". She flew on to Japan, where the new North Korean
> "threat" eclipsed the briefly independent foreign policy of the
> Japanese prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, elected last year with
> popular opposition to America's permanent military occupation of
> Japan. (On 2 June Hatoyama resigned, having failed to move a US
> military base in Okinawa.) The "overwhelming evidence" is a propeller
> that "had been corroding at least for several months", reported the
> /Korea Times/. In April, the director of South Korea's national
> intelligence, Won Se-hoon, told a parliamentary committee that there
> was no evidence linking the sinking of the /Cheonan/ to North Korea.
> The defence minister agreed. And the head of South Korea's military
> marine operations said, "No North Korean warships have been detected
> [in] the waters where the accident took place." The reference to an
> "accident" suggests the warship struck a reef and broke in two.
>
> To the American media, North Korea's guilt is beyond doubt, just as
> North Vietnam's guilt was beyond doubt, just as Saddam Hussein had
> weapons of mass destruction, just as Israel can terrorise with
> impunity. But, unlike Vietnam and Iraq, North Korea has nuclear
> weapons, which helps to explain why it has not been attacked, not yet:
> a salutary lesson to other countries, such as Iran, currently in the
> cross hairs.
>
> In Britain, we have our own master illusions. Imagine someone on state
> benefits caught claiming £40,000 of taxpayers' money in a second-home
> scam. A prison sentence would almost certainly follow. But David Laws,
> chief secretary to the Treasury, does the same and is described as
> follows: "I have always admired his intelligence, his sense of public
> duty and his personal integrity" (Nick Clegg). "You are a good and
> honourable man" (David Cameron). Laws is "a man of quite exceptional
> nobility" (Julian Glover, the /Guardian/), and "a brilliant mind"
> (BBC).
>
> The Oxbridge club and its associate members in politics and the media
> have tried to link Laws's "error of judgement" and "naivety" to his
> "right to privacy" as a gay man, an irrelevance. The "brilliant mind"
> is a wealthy, Cambridge-groomed investment banker devoted to the noble
> task of cutting the public services of mostly poor and honest people.
>
> Crushing blow
>
> Now imagine another public official, the force behind one of the great
> war criminals and liars. This official "spun" the illegal invasion of
> a defenceless country that resulted in the deaths of at least a
> million people and the dispossession of many more: in effect, the
> crushing of a human society. If this was the Balkans or Africa, he
> would very likely have been indicted by the International Criminal
> Court.
>
> But crime pays for the clubbable. In quick step with the Laws affair,
> this truth was demonstrated by the continuing celebration of Alastair
> Campbell, whose frequent media appearances provide a vicarious thrill
> for the liberal intelligentsia. To the Guardian, Campbell is "bullish,
> sometimes misdirected, but unafraid to press on where others might
> have faltered". The Guardian's immediate interest is its "exclusive"
> publication of Campbell's "politically explosive" and "uncut" diaries.
> Here is a flavour: "Saturday 14 May. I called Peter [Mandelson] and
> asked why he didn't return my calls yesterday. 'You know why.' 'No, I
> don't.' He said he was incandescent at my /Newsnight/ interview . .
> .'"
>
> In a promotional interview with the /Guardian/, Campbell dispensed
> more of this dated incest, referring just once to the bloodbath for
> which he was a principal apologist. "Did Iraq lose us support in
> 2005?" he asked rhetorically. "Without a doubt . . ." Thus, a criminal
> tragedy equal in scale to the Rwandan genocide was dismissed as a
> "loss" for New Labour: a master illusion of notable profanity.
> 		 	   		  
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