Tag Propaganda

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Jason Burke’s Bin Laden obituary perpetuates myth that Taliban refused to hand Bin Laden over

May 2, ’11 11:13 AM

Jason Burke’s Osama bin Laden obit­u­ary for The Guard­ian per­petu­ates the myth that the Taliban never offered to hand Bin Laden over:

Faced with an ulti­matum, the Taliban again refused to sur­render Bin Laden, who ini­tially denied involve­ment, and an American-led aer­ial bomb­ing cam­paign followed.

In fact the Taliban pub­licly offered in Octo­ber of 2001 to hand Osama bin Laden over to a third coun­try, provided the U.S. hal­ted the illegal bomb­ing of Afgh­anistan and pro­duced the neces­sary evid­ence about involve­ment of Bin Laden or any of his asso­ci­ates in the 11 Septem­ber attacks. Would they have gone through with the offer? We’ll never know because Bush rejec­ted it, put­ting an end to any pos­sib­il­ity of a poten­tially peace­ful, legal res­ol­u­tion to the events of 11 Septem­ber 2001, and opened up the way for the inva­sion and occu­pa­tion of Afgh­anistan and Iraq, along with the mil­lions who have lost their lives or had them des­troyed as a result.

Update: Jason Burke says he’ll cor­rect obit­u­ary.

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Obama perpetuates “wiped off the earth” lie

Sep 25, ’10 4:51 PM

Barack Obama:

Under­stand­ably, Israel is very con­cerned when the pres­id­ent of a coun­try, a large coun­try near them, states that they should be wiped off the face of the earth.

Which is simply a lie. Is it any won­der Amer­ic­ans are so brain­washed?

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Poll reveals: people are easily confused

Feb 23, ’10 8:14 PM

Sharp decline in public’s belief in cli­mate threat, Brit­ish poll reveals:

The pro­por­tion of adults who believe cli­mate change is “def­in­itely” a real­ity dropped by 30% over the last year, from 44% to 31%, in the latest sur­vey by Ipsos Mori.

What I don’t under­stand is that we’ve been here so often before. Why do people listen to the pro­pa­ganda of oil com­pan­ies and the like over sci­entific evid­ence? How many times do you have to have the wool pulled over your eyes by pro­pa­gand­ists deny­ing that smoking causes can­cer, deny­ing that CFCs lead to ozone deple­tion, deny­ing that cer­tain pol­lut­ants cause acid rain or deny­ing that cli­mate change is man­made (or, ori­gin­ally, that it even existed)?

This is a great time to be born, a great time to be alive. This gen­er­a­tion gets to com­pletely change the world we live in. We have a chance here to reima­gine every single thing we do. But, no, per­haps we’d rather go down with the ship and listen to rich old men try­ing to squeeze every last dol­lar, euro and yen from their invest­ments in out­dated industries.

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Chilcot Inquiry into Iraq War is a whitewash before it starts

Nov 23, ’09 9:06 AM

The Chil­cot Inquiry into the Iraq war is already run­ning a pro­pa­ganda cam­paign that it “won’t be a whitewash.”

But you only need to real­ise that its mem­bers were appoin­ted by Gor­don Brown — one of the per­pet­rat­ors — and read the terms of ref­er­ence to real­ise this is a white­wash before it even starts.

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The truth about Amersterdam vs. Bill O’Reilly 2

Sep 7, ’09 7:40 AM

Bill O’Reilly being called out again out on what can only be described as his feeble fact-free attempt to paint Amer­s­ter­dam as a cess­pool of crime and corruption.

You can watch the ori­ginal Bill O’Reilly clip here, and the Roberwter’s first response here.

(via Rus­sell Brown’s Hard News)

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Cheney: an evil person for evil times

Aug 14, ’09 7:19 AM

The Guard­ian: ‘Mem­oirs to reveal Dick Cheney thought Bush had gone soft on war on terror.’

Who knows what dark place we’d all be in if this man had become U.S. President.

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Want to be bemused?

Aug 11, ’09 7:13 AM

Then try fol­low­ing the debate pro­pa­ganda war on health care reform in the U.S.

Dar­ing Fire­ball has a couple of pearlers:

You Can’t Make This Stuff Up, Part One
You Can’t Make This Stuff Up, Part Two

Update: Stephen Hawk­ing:

I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS,” he told us. “I have received a large amount of high-quality treat­ment without which I would not have survived.

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Colonel Julian didn’t get the memo

Jul 20, ’09 8:09 AM

Ahh, yes, there’s noth­ing like a little Amer­ican excep­tion­al­ism to get one going in the morning.

Accord­ing to Reu­ters, Col­onel Greg Julian, a U.S. mil­it­ary spokes­man in Kabul, has been com­plain­ing that the Taliban is viol­at­ing inter­na­tional law by parad­ing a cap­tured U.S. sol­dier on camera.

It seems Col­onel Julian didn’t get the memo: the U.S. tore up inter­na­tional law a long time ago.

Not only did the U.S. com­mit the supreme war crime when it invaded Afgh­anistan and Iraq — supreme because of all that ensues from start­ing a war, includ­ing the crimes of your oppon­ents — but this is the same coun­try, of course, to have declared by pres­id­en­tial order that the Geneva Con­ven­tions did not apply to cap­tured Taliban sol­diers and has since been detain­ing Afghan pris­on­ers without trial, sneak­ing them off to Guantanamo and its secret pris­ons and tor­tur­ing them.

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No, Afghanistan is not “a war we should be fighting”

Jul 13, ’09 8:30 AM

Afgh­anistan is spun as a war we should be fight­ing.

In fact, a fact long for­got­ten by the West­ern media and oth­ers involved in the inva­sion of Afgh­anistan is that, on 14 Octo­ber, 2001, the Taliban pub­licly offered to hand over Osama bin Laden to a third coun­try, provided the U.S. hal­ted the illegal bomb­ing of Afgh­anistan and pro­duced the neces­sary evid­ence about involve­ment of bin Laden or any of his asso­ci­ates in the 11 Septem­ber attacks:

In Jalalabad, deputy prime min­is­ter Haji Abdul Kabir — the third most power­ful fig­ure in the rul­ing Taliban regime — told report­ers that the Taliban would require evid­ence that bin Laden was behind the Septem­ber 11 ter­ror­ist attacks in the US, but added: “we would be ready to hand him over to a third country”.

But, in his usual pissing-in-the-wind style, Bush blew this oppor­tun­ity off, vow­ing to con­tinue the bomb­ing, adding:

There’s no need to dis­cuss inno­cence or guilt. We know he’s guilty.

Sub­sequently, Milton Bearden, a former CIA sta­tion chief who over­saw U.S. cov­ert oper­a­tions in Afgh­anistan in the 1980s, is repor­ted1 to have this to say:

We never heard what they were try­ing to say. We had no com­mon lan­guage. Ours was, ‘Give up bin Laden.’ They were say­ing, ‘Do some­thing to help us give him up.’ … I have no doubts they wanted to get rid of him. He was a pain in the neck.’

The Bush regime’s decision to con­tinue the bomb­ing put an end to any pos­sib­il­ity of a poten­tially peace­ful, legal res­ol­u­tion to the events of 11 Septem­ber 2001 and opened up the way for the inva­sion and occu­pa­tion of Afgh­anistan, Iraq and the threat of inva­sion of Iran, along with the mil­lions who have lost their lives or had them des­troyed as a result.

Not a war we should be fight­ing. Just busi­ness as usual.

Notes:
  1. I had to link to a source other than the Wash­ing­ton Post as the Wash­ing­ton Post appears to have deleted that art­icle from their archive for whatever reason. [↩]
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Neda’s death used selectively as a propaganda tool

Jun 25, ’09 8:36 AM

Neda Agha-Soltan is a young women from Iran who was shot dead while protest­ing against repres­sion in Iran. She has a page on Wiki­pe­dia. Pho­tos and video and of her death have been widely broad­cast by the West­ern media, with copi­ous amounts of faux sympathy.

She deserves our sym­pathy because she appears to be a vic­tim of the latest West­ern bogey­man: Iran. She, as Noam Chom­sky might note, is a “worthy victim.”

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