Faking It: How the Media Manipulates the World into War.

By James Corbett  January 2nd, 2012.  Find Full Article and Video Here:-

As the US and Iranian governments escalate tensions in the already volatile Straits of Hormuz, and China and Russia begin openly questioning Washington’s interference in their internal politics, the world remains on a knife-edge of military tension. Far from being a dispassionate observer of these developments, however, the media has in fact been central to increasing those tensions and preparing the public to expect a military confrontation. But as the online media rises to displace the traditional forms by which the public forms its understanding of the world, many are now beginning to see first hand how the media lies the public into war.

Learn more about the media manipulations behind the beginning of war in this week’s GRTV backgrounder.

SOURCES AND TRANSCRIPT: http://www.corbettreport.com/?p=3588

As the drums of war begin to beat once again in Iran, Syria, the South China Sea, 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.

Video – History of U.S. Intervention in Iran – 1953 Until Present Day.

This video is a basic overview of U.S. imperialism toward Iran that began at the behest of the British Government and big oil interests including British Petroleum also recently known as BP.

Watch Video Here:-

The United States’ own CIA led it’s first coup to overthrow a foreign leader against Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, The U.S. has suffered “Blowback: ever since, all the while the supposed leaders in Washington continue to demonize Iran’s leaders on flimsy grounds as more pretense to continued Middle East war and occupation by the U.S.

Study those who actually vote against getting the U.S. into wars based on false pretense, at places like http://ThePresident.Com

Peace,
Greg Chamberlain
Editor – ThePresident.Com

Haiti: Two years after the earthquake, where did the money go?

Chapter One: A fractured path from donors’ purses to actual rebuilding efforts — and back again.

Donovan Webster  January 10th, 2012.  Find Full Article Here:-

PORT-AU-PRINCE — TO SEE WHERE the enormous sums of humanitarian aid directed to Haiti after its catastrophic earthquake in 2010 went, a good place to start is the ocean harbor. That’s where the island’s shore meets the rest of the world. And the best place for that is here at the seaport in the nation’s capital: Port-au-Prince, near the earthquake’s epicenter.

There, at this moment, a gigantic “supermaritime” cargo ship called the Sarine is off-loading more than five metric tons of rice that has just arrived from Miami.

If you think of the rice as post-earthquake assistance money — the individual grains as donated dollars — you might get some idea about what’s happened since the earthquake of Jan. 12, 2010. Not to mention a sense of where the individual rice grains (or the dollars) have gone.

And, like the grains of rice aboard, the dollars mount into the hundreds of millions; even billions. According to some reports, the United States government, American individuals, families and humanitarian groups donated approximately $3 billion. That’s just from America with a total of something like $12 billion coming from all donor nations for funds to be disbursed.

Still, somehow, no one seems quite sure precisely how many grains — or dollars — we’re talking about. The accounting seems to have a sliding scale that can move hundreds of millions of dollars one way or another. At the time of publication, President Bill Clinton, the UN Special Envoy to Haiti and the co-chair of overseeing the nation’s re-construction for the last two years, hasn’t responded to repeated requests by GlobalPost regarding specific aid and cash donation figures.

“If you read the reports, you’ll see that actual Haitians got less than 1 percent of all the American money pledged.”

~Robert Fatton, Jr., University of Virginia professor

Where those billions went following the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that left a government-estimated figure of 220,000 people dead — and at least 1.6 million more homeless — remains a confounding mystery. Inside of the recovery effort, however, are unquestionable successes along with the failures. And, to be fair, because the money came in so quickly and in such great volume, much of it has been wasted or lost like so much rice spilling on the docks. Or stolen, like the sacks of rice from here which will end up in Haiti’s black market for food.

The situation grows complicated … fast. And the metaphor here of this crane off-loading rice by the metric ton packs a still larger and more complex metaphor, according to aid experts, about this country’s history along a still-active fault line of aid, politics and blame in the aftermath of the quake.

As for this specific ship, the Sarine, it has a double-steel hull and is roughly 330 feet long. And now, pulled up to the quay in Port-au-Prince, the “grabbing box” from a huge off-load crane reaches down into the vessel’s hold, and, like the hand of God, lifts another half-ton or so of rice out — hundreds of thousands of individual grains of rice. Then the loose rice is dumped into a white, V-shaped steel hopper whose nozzle sits inside a small hut on the Port-au-Prince waterfront.

Using gravity, the hopper directs the rice into 25-kg (55-pound) white plastic bags, with blue stars on their fronts and the words “AMERICAN RICE” written on their sides. After that — using a sewing machine — the top of each bag is sealed.

As I watch, over and over — bag after bag after bag — a man running the V-shaped hopper turns to me. He rubs his belly.

“I’m hungry,” he says in French.

“Well,” I respond, “why don’t you take some rice for yourself? There’s a lot.”

The man flashes a grin back, and shrugs. “Yes,” he says, “that’s possible. But I’m not that kind of hungry.”

The rice bags move from the factory along an assembly line to waiting trucks which will travel deeper into Haiti to feed a nation still suffering from hunger on a vast scale.

But the economy of rice in Haiti says everything about the condition the country is in. The US government subsidizes and “donates” ton after ton of rice in Haiti and in so doing has through the last several decades completely undercut Haitian rice farmers and left them destitute and migrating into cities where they live in hovels that were destroyed by the quake.

As recently as the early 1980s, Haiti was producing just about all of its own rice. Now more than 60 percent is imported from the US, making it the fourth largest recipient of American rice exports in the world. That was before the quake and now with donated rice coming in as well, Haiti is even more awash in rice while American agribusiness makes billions of dollars every year through generous government subsidies.

There is perhaps some bitter irony here that the subsidies were promoted in large part by President Clinton to help his home state of Arkansas, the largest rice producing state in the US, thereby crippling a sector of the economy in Haiti where Clinton has worked so tirelessly to help with the recovery.

“You might say it is a perfect metaphor for what is wrong with aid to Haiti,” says Marc Cohen, a senior researcher for Oxfam, one of the largest non-government organizations (NGOs) in the world, which raised approximately $106 million for a three-year response in Haiti and finds itself struggling to deliver the aid effectively.

“Instead of bringing subsidized rice in on ships from Miami, we could be helping Haiti grow rice in its own fields,” adds Cohen, who worked for many years in Haiti with the International Food Policy Research Institute and studied the broad economic impact of US rice subsidies, or “Miami rice,” as it is known here.

Cohen was part of a team at Oxfam America that this week delivered a scathing report on how reconstruction in Haiti was proceeding at a “snail’s pace,” leaving half a million Haitians still homeless two years after the quake. It urged the Haitian government and donor countries to accelerate the delivery of funds for reconstruction. It applauded the initial emergency relief effort, but said the Haitian government and donor countries have failed to come up with a coordinated strategy to rebuild the country and house the more than 500,000 people still living in tents and under tarpaulins without access to running water, a toilet or a doctor.

According to recently published reports by Oxfam, the UN, the US Government Accountability Office and international aid experts interviewed by GlobalPost, billions of dollars of aid were pledged to Haiti’s reconstruction, but promises of funding have not translated into money on the ground. According to the UN report, as of the end of September 2011, donors had disbursed just 43 percent of the total $4.6 billion pledged for reconstruction in 2010 and 2011.

Officials heading up USAID’s efforts in Haiti say they are frustrated by the political and practical realities that slow the pace of reconstruction. They point to costly and painful failures such as the lack of preparedness for the cholera outbreak which still looms over Haiti. But they also point to hard-fought successes particularly in agriculture, where the average salary of a farmer has risen from $600 a year to $1,100 a year through improved irrigation and infrastructure which have resulted in higher yields.

Elizabeth Hogan, Director of Haiti Task Team for USAID, told GlobalPost, “Fixing Haiti is not something that can be done in the short term. It requires Haitians to take ownership of fixing their own country and their own problems with the support of the international community and increasingly private investment.”

This is part of Chapter One of a four-chapter GlobalPost Special Report titled “Fault Line: Aid, Politics and Blame in Post-Quake Haiti.” Read Chapter Two, Chapter Three and Chapter Four.

Skynet: One In Three U.S. Warplanes is a Robot; 7,494 Drones and Counting.

By Mac Slavo  January 12th, 2012.   Find Article Here:-

We may be pulling people out of war zones, but our dependence on robotic weapons systems is growing rapidly, with sales of drone related technology rising significantly over the last decade, and especially in the last year. According to the CEO of  AeroVironment, a government contracted drone manufacturer, sales “actually increased as troops were drawn down from Iraq, supporting our notion that a drawdown is not necessarily unfavorable to our business.”

A Congressional report obtained by Wired Danger Room says that unmanned surveillance and strike technology in use by the military has been growing exponentially over just the last several years:

Remember when the military actually put human beings in the cockpits of its planes? They still do, but in far fewer numbers. According to a new congressional report acquired by Danger Room, drones now account for 31 percent of all military aircraft.

To be fair, lots of those drones are tiny flying spies, like the Army’s Raven, that could never accommodate even the most diminutive pilot. (Specifically, the Army has 5,346 Ravens, making it the most numerous military drone by far.) But in 2005, only five percent of military aircraft were robots, a report by the Congressional Research Service notes. Barely seven years later, the military has 7,494 drones. Total number of old school, manned aircraft: 10,767 planes.

A small sliver of those nearly 7,500 drones gets all of the attention. The military owns 161 Predators — the iconic flying strike drone used over Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere — and Reapers, the Predator’s bigger, better-armed brother.

But even as the military’s bought a ton of drones in the past few years, the Pentagon spends much, much more money on planes with people in them. Manned aircraft still get 92 percent of the Pentagon’s aircraft procurement money. Still, since 2001, the military has spent $26 billion on drones, the report — our Document of the Day — finds.

When President Obama announced that he was scaling down troop levels in the middle east citing success, cost, and the need to focus more on protecting the homeland, what much of the mainstream media failed to report is that the new military planning strategy under Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is the expansion of our capabilities and influence in Asia. This particular deployment of military assets, however, is unprecedented in its scope:

The U.S. military has become so concerned at China’s rapidly growing arsenal of anti-access and area-denial weapons that just over two years ago it authorized the navy and air force to collaborate on ways to off-set the Chinese challenge to America’s capacity to project power and sustain its alliances and military partnerships in Asia.

…

To move out of harm’s way, the United States aims to deploy sea-based drones on its aircraft carriers in the Pacific by 2018. “They will play an integral part in our future operations in this region,” according to Vice Admiral Scott Van Buskirk, commander of the U.S. 7th Fleet in the Pacific and Indian oceans. “Carrier-based unmanned aircraft systems have tremendous potential, especially in increasing the range and persistence of our intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations, as well as our ability to strike targets quickly.”

At present, jet fighters and bombers on U.S. carriers must take off within 800 km of their target, leaving the carriers within range of land-based missiles and combat aircraft. However, the new generation of sea-based drones being developed by the U.S. could operate as far as 2,500 km from the carrier, putting the ships out of range.

Source: Maritime Security

The popularity of a technology capable of seeing targets by their heat signature, zooming in on situations-of-interest  from thousands of feet in the air, and the ability to kill or disable those targets when necessary is no longer restricted to just the U.S. Department of Defense.

It has also been tempting the domestic law enforcement sector, which by some accounts is now considered by the Department of Homeland Security and Congress as the new battlefield against terrorism.  The FAA recently granted approval for widespread use of drones over U.S. airspace, and  local sheriff’s offices and metropolitan areas are now regularly deploying re-purposed drones from the middle east theater of war to their localities in the interest of maintaining safety, security and a watchful eye over the American people. Since, according to DHS chief Janet Napolitano, the terrorist threat has “shifted” to lone wolf attackers living in the United States, domestic deployment of military drone technology has and will continue to increase.

With the success of robotic ‘soldiers’ on the battlefields of the middle east and north Africa, and the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act solidifying government’s seal of approval for domestic war-time and surveillance operations, Americans can expect that our own law enforcement fleets will soon see marked increases in the use of  these weapons and technologies.

The only question now, it seems, is who is flying these unmanned vehicles over America?

Any drone flying over 400 feet needs a certification or authorization from the Federal Aviation Administration, part of the DOT. But there is currently no information available to the public about who specifically has obtained these authorizations or for what purposes. EFF filed a Freedom of Information Act request in April of 2011 for records of unmanned aircraft activities, but the DOT so far has failed to provide the information.

“Drones give the government and other unmanned aircraft operators a powerful new surveillance tool to gather extensive and intrusive data on Americans’ movements and activities,” said EFF Staff Attorney Jennifer Lynch. “As the government begins to make policy decisions about the use of these aircraft, the public needs to know more about how and why these drones are being used to surveil United States citizens.”

Source: Blacklisted News, The Daily Sheeple

Due to the secret nature of these local law enforcement operations, for all we know these vehicles are being operated by military personnel, which would suggest that the US military has already been deployed over the streets of America.

London 2012 Olympics: ‘Dummy Bomb’ taken past Olympic security.

By Patrick Sawer  8th January 2012.   Find Article Here:-

Police carrying out covert testing of security around the Olympic Park have managed to smuggle a “bomb” onto the site on at least one occasion.

Dummy runs by London 2012 security staff have achieved a 90 per cent success rate in foiling attempts to smuggle devices into the site in Stratford, where the centrepiece Olympic stadium, velodrome and pool are based – meaning at least one attempt succeeded.

The disclosure underlines growing concerns over security at the games. Such is the level of threat that all of the Army’s explosive search dogs are likely to be recalled from duty in Afghanistan to boost the security operation.

One security official said: “The issue of explosive search dogs is crucial – they are the tools that will find the bombs, but we don’t have enough of them. We have around 30 and they can only work for 30 to 40 minutes before they get distracted or bored. From what I understand there will be virtually none left in Afghanistan – they will all be here.”

At the same time troops are to be used to search members of the public entering the Olympic and Paralympic site.

Armed forces personnel working 12 hours shifts will be used because not enough people have been recruited to assist private security operators and the police.

As many as 7,500 military personnel will assist 16,200 security guards inside the Olympic park, with 12,000 police and 6,000 more armed service personnel on the streets outside.

However, there are fears that the security operation will be overwhelmed by the complex logistics of trying to protect tens of thousands of athletes, spectators and VIPs over the six week event, which opens on July 27.

Some security experts believe the greatest risk will come away from the venues and at sites which enjoy a lower level of protection, such as mainline railway stations, London Underground or shopping centres.

An al-Qaeda style attack on such a target would not only cause death and injury, but also force the authorities to massively increase security at the Olympic Park to what is described as ‘level two’.

That would lead to vehicles being banned from entering the park and all visitors being body-searched.

The increased measures would lead to even longer queues and potentially playing havoc with the timetable of events.

A security official said: “The real fear is that a single bomb somewhere in London a week or two before the games are due to begin will send security levels through the roof. Everyone will have to undergo a full body search, no vehicles will be allowed inside the Olympic park and it will take hours to get inside.”

Security officials are understood to be concerned about communications between the police, the 2012 games’s private security company G4S and the armed forces over what will happen in the event of a major incident.

A Whitehall source said: “Al-Qaeda historically have focused on transport network rather than events – but there is no room for complacency. We know dissident republican would like to disrupt the games – it is after all a world event. And there is always the prospect of an unknown self-contained AQ cell in the UK carrying an attack on their own.

“MI5 and the police are confident the games will proceed as per the schedule, but we have to be vigilant.”

Lord Carlisle, the former terror legislation watchdog, warned that terrorists could be tempted to target venues and locations away from the Olympics and that vigilance would have to be maintained throughout the UK.

“My concern is that we don’t displace so many people to Olympic venues that it leaves a risk elsewhere. Proper policing levels need to be maintained in other areas,” he said.

But Lord Carlisle welcomed the prospect of uniformed servicemen and women searching visitors to the games. He said: “It makes sense to use soldiers who have been trained in carrying out searches on civilians, in places like Northern Ireland and Afghanistan.”

A Scotland Yard spokesman said: “The Metropolitan Police has provided support to the Olympic Delivery Authority’s assurance process that is being run at the Olympic Park. The ODA also runs its own security resilience tests to ensure that preparations for the London 2012 Games are as robust as possible.

The spokesman added: “There are very clear roles and responsibilities between the Met Police and Locog as the event organiser. These are the same as in the thousands of events held every year in the Capital, such as pop concerts and football matches. Locog are responsible for providing venue security and the Met will deliver our key policing responsibilities.”

The Home Office stated: “We have a robust safety and security strategy which is intelligence-led and risk-based. We want to reassure everyone that we will leave nothing to chance in our aim to deliver a Games that London, the UK and the whole world will enjoy.”

A spokesman for the Olympic Delivery Authority said: “Testing is standard practice in all major security operations. Such tests have a key role in developing our capability to ensure that London 2012 is safe and secure and that we are best prepared to detect potential threats before and during the Games.”

A London 2012 Organising Committee spokesman said: “The precise role of members of the armed forces is still being finalised. Locog will be conducting a series of tests on the Olympic Park in the run-up to the Games in order to meet all health and safety and licensing requirements.”

Self-immolation triggers brutal crackdown in Tibet.

14th January 2012.   Find Article Here:-

One woman shot, many injured, as Chinese security forces respond to 16th self-immolation.

Another Tibetan self-immolated in Ngaba today and there are reports of ongoing clashes between Chinese security forces and local Tibetans – including monks inside Kirti monastery.

It is understood that the clashes were triggered when the body of a person who had self-immolated was removed or an attempt was made to remove them.

Tibetans shot and arrested

Free Tibet can confirm that at least one woman has been shot. Further unconfirmed reports allege that many people have been shot.

An eyewitness described the situation as terrifying, that “a strong gas” was used on the crowd and described how “many had fallen to the ground” and people were being beaten. Numerous people have been detained.

Concerns over Chinese response

Stephanie Brigden, Director of Free Tibet said, “We understand that this situation is ongoing and that people in Ngaba are terrified.

“There have been large numbers of Chinese security forces, including the paramilitary People’s Armed Police, deployed there since the first self-immolation last year. Locals are frightened about how the situation will be resolved and there are rising concerns further injuries or fatalities.”

This is the 16th case of self-immolation in Tibet since March of last year; 11 have taken place in Ngaba. Four Tibetans have set themselves on fire in the last week.

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