Corporate Media Re-buffs the Turd of US Humanitarian Imperialism Even When It's For Friends of al Qaeda

(There are 590 Obama-dumping days until the 2012 Election)

Before we get to a most recent super-Orwellian dimension of Obama’s Libyan War fiasco, the revelations that we are enabling some of our former enemies in our mad quest to usurp control of Libyan oil and region, let’s address some provocative and troubling comments from Steve Lendman about this so-called media- and government-labeled humanitarian intervention:

... humanitarian intervention is cover for mass killing and destruction. The more the better to assure corporate crooks huge contracts to rebuild, then on to the next war, and the next one, ad infinitum, America's addiction, the major media its cheerleading chorus.

[snip]

Against Iraq and Afghanistan it's to dominate Eurasia, and against Libya for greater regional hegemony, including resource control, privatization of state industries, new Pentagon bases for future imperial wars, and deterring any democratic spark from emerging.

[snip]

America remains in charge for what promises to be a protracted, destructive, expensive war to replace one despot with another. Like Iraq and Afghanistan, it'll likely cost billions of dollars at a time homeland needs are neglected to hand America's wealth to Wall Street, other corporate favorites, and militarists for endless wars - lawless naked aggression each time.

In an article "Cheerleading for War", Lendman:

When America goes to war, managed news goes with it spreading rumors, half-truths, misinformation, and willful deception about targeted nations, regimes and leaders, whether despots or democrats. Whoever first said it, the first casualty of war is truth, and then some as John Pilger once observed saying:

"Journalism is the first casualty. Not only that: it has become a weapon of war, a virulent censorship (and willful misreporting) that goes unrecognised in the United States, Britain and other democracies; censorship by omission, whose power is such that, in war, it can mean the difference between life and death for people in faraway countries...."

Managed news, in fact, jeopardizes free and open societies by substituting fiction for facts, carefully filtered reports for truth, and cheerleading propaganda for real journalism. As a result, wars of aggression are called liberating ones. Civil liberties are suppressed for our own good, and patriotism means going along with lawless governments, reigning death and destruction on defenseless nations for imperial, not noble, reasons.

Media support backs them, notably in America where dominant electronic and print reporting marches in lockstep with government policy, right or wrong.

As a result, dominant information sources (the major media) are in crisis as leading media scholar/critic/activist Robert McChesney once observed, saying:

"Going to war is arguably the single most important decision any society can make. The track record of the US news media in the twentieth century is that they often went along with fraudulent efforts to get the nation into one war or another" from WW I to today.

Each time with no exceptions, "administration(s) in power believed that (truth wouldn't enlist) support (for) war. So they lied. The Pentagon Papers (exposed it about Southeast Asia) in shocking detail."

Post-9/11 through Obama's war on Libya, "the very debate over whether to go to war" is absent. Obama decides. The media salute, and public opinion is manipulated to say amen. Never discussed are justifiable reasons, choosing diplomacy over militarism, America acting as judge, jury and executioner, and cui bono fruits of war. Without them, they'd be none.

Said another way, absent the power and profit benefits, who'd wage them, especially capitalist America, generously enriching war profiteers that fund politicians for bottom line friendly policies.

As a result, government is unaccountable to the electorate. Democracy is the best money can buy, and wars are always imperial, not liberating ones, especially ones America wages.

Today, round the clock media coverage supports them. Long before television, media critic AJ Liebling said, "People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news." Today it's mostly TV, the dominant managed news source, supporting power, not truth, functioning as a propaganda system for elitist interests, especially on matters of war and peace.

In Lendman's America's Permanent War Agenda:

All US presidents are war criminals. Obama is one of the worst, doubling Bush's lawlessness, adding Pakistan and Libya aggression to Iraq and Afghanistan, spending $1.5 trillion annually for militarism plus multi-trillion dollar handouts to Wall Street crooks, while pleading poverty to cut essential homeland social benefits.

As a result, it's no exaggeration saying America is on a fast-track to tyranny and ruin. It's no longer a fit place to live in. Young people have a choice - leave or be exploited, a shocking indictment of a corrupted, declining, lawless nation.

[snip]

Historians Charles Beard and Gore Vidal called it "perpetual war for perpetual peace," at all times concealing the real agenda. As a result, since WW II, America's been a global menace, today calling "terrorism" the main threat. In fact, it's bogus nonsense to justify militarism, homeland repression, imperial wars, wanton destruction, and lawless killings, heading the nation for moral, political and economic ruin.

[snip]

Diana Johnstone asked "Is This Kosovo All Over Again?" saying:

Despite enormous differences, disturbing similarities include:

-- right or wrong, vilifying a leader;-- "the 'we must do something' chorus;"-- evoking "crimes against humanity (and) genocide;"-- "leftist (narrow vision) idiocy," mindlessly cheerleading for war;-- "refugees," using over-the-top unexplained exaggeration;-- resurrecting bin Laden, despite compelling evidence he's dead; and-- spurning negotiations, mediation, and diplomacy to pursue war, Washington's favorite pastime.

As a result, expect protracted hostilities ahead, perhaps killing thousands, injuring and disabling many more, and causing widespread destruction and contamination from toxic munitions.

Alexander Cockburn is one of the few journalists heeding the stunning and troubling, to say the least, revelations of Wikileaks, especially a secret cable to the State Department in 2008 from the US embassy in Tripoli that the Eastern Libya area residents we are championing, have declared war for, come from a long-time hotbed of anti-American, pro-jihad sensibility.

According to the 2008 cable, the most troubling aspect "... is the pride that many eastern Libyans, particularly those in and around Dernah, appear to take in the role their native sons have played in the insurgency in Iraq … [and the] ability of radical imams to propagate messages urging support for and participation in jihad."

Aha. So many native sons of this area joined up with Iraqi insurgents. But when it comes to love of oil and war, what’s the US gonna do? Detain, torture, drone destroy, uranium poison, etc. innocent peoples, but then figuratively and outrageously (but always covertly--thanks to US media propaganda) wind up getting into bed with the likes of EVEN Osama bin Laden et al. if it means getting Western corporate hands on Libya’s “sweet crude.”

Cockburn also cites a set of documents, “captured al-Qaeda documents”, that were obtained in 2007 and were analyzed by the the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. The papers include details on al-Qaeda personnel including those Libyans who went to Iraq to fight foreign imperialism and even become suicide bombers.

The West Point analysts' statistical study of the al-Qaeda personnel records concludes that one country provided "far more" foreign fighters in per capita terms than any other: namely, Libya.

The records show that the "vast majority of Libyan fighters that included their home town in the Sinjar Records resided in the country's northeast". Benghazi provided many volunteers. So did Dernah, a town about 200 kms east of Benghazi, in which an Islamic emirate was declared when the rebellion against Gaddafi started.

New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid even spoke with Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi who promulgated the Islamic emirate. Al-Hasadi "praises Osama bin Laden's 'good points'," Shadid reported, though he prudently denounced the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Other sources have said that this keen admirer of Osama would be most influential in the formation of any provisional government.

The West Point study of the Sinjar Records calculates that of the 440 foreign al-Qaeda recruits whose home towns are known, 21 came from Benghazi, thereby making it the fourth most common home town listed in the records. Fifty-three of the al-Qaeda recruits came from Darnah, the highest total of any of the home towns listed in the records. The second highest number, 51, came from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. But Darnah (80,000) has less than two per cent the population of Riyadh. So Darnah contributed "far and away the largest per capita number of fighters".

As former CIA operations officer Brian Fairchild writes, amid "the apparent absence of any plan for post-Gaddafi governance, an ignorance of Libya's tribal nature and our poor record of dealing with tribes, American government documents conclusively establish that the epicentre of the revolt is rife with anti-American and pro-jihad sentiment, and with al-Qaeda's explicit support for the revolt, it is appropriate to ask our policy makers how American military intervention in support of this revolt in any way serves vital US strategic interests".

Cockburn ruefully alludes to a previous remark he’s made, "It sure looks like Osama bin Laden is winning the Great War on Terror". Then adds: “But I did not dream then that he would have a coalition of the US, Great Britain and France bleeding themselves dry to assist him in this enterprise.”

Wonder how this will get spun, or if it will even make the horizon of corporate news at all? The scope of the cravenness of US global terrorism and its extraordinary media propaganda tool, as well as of citizen ignorance and/or indifference is mind-boggling!

[cross-posted on correntewire]