Gordon Duff: Freedom Flotilla’s Real Victory, America’s Propaganda Machine Exposed

The second the faked videos were available, cheap edits and voice overs first, Sky News and Fox, both owned by Israeli Likudist Rupert Murdoch, began the disinformation campaign. The “Freedom Flotilla” of peace activists suddenly became an armed Al Qaeda invasion force replete with heavy artillery, dirty bombs and terrorist trainers.

Patched in over the wounded calling for aid was the Israeli soundtrack, “Go Back to Auschwitz.” This was played dozens of times before technicians showed it and other Israeli released video and audio from the attack to be counterfeit. With hours of video smuggled out, those tiny memory cards fit in the oddest places, Israel, Fox, Beck and the parade of media who ate up the lies are now delegitimized as are the groups that stood with them in silence.

It isn’t just the dubbed audio or the new video showing IDF troops executing wounded. With so many witnesses of unquestionable integrity all saying the same thing, Israel and the media married to them are on the ropes. The belief that any story contrary to the political or economic ties of the corporate owners could easily be tagged as “conspiracy theory” has backfired.'

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Media Disinformation Regarding Israel's Murderous Assault in International Waters: the Role of the BBC

In Yiddish it’s called Chutzpah, to have the nerve to say something outrageous, the perfect description—if what was said wasn’t so odious—by Israeli propagandists. I’m talking here about an Israeli spokeman on RT.com the other night, attempting to justify the murderous assault on the Gaza aid activists. Attack becomes “defence”, international waters become Israeli, or not as the case may be.

Actually Chutzpah doesn’t even begin to describe the venomous and hysterical rantings of the Israeli spokesman. Eventually it just got too much for me to watch.

On the other hand we have the ‘measured tones’ of your standard BBC model, allegedly impartial and objective, yet they’re both united by a common worldview.

In the first, the Israeli one, we have the archetypal ‘Goebbels’ style, repeat the lies often enough, shout it even and the job is done. Sheer brute force stamps the Zionist reality on your forebrain.

In the second, it’s the ‘measured tones’ of the BBC repeated ad infinitum that do the trick, for underpinning both is the ideology of superiority, both racial and cultural. The BBC method is more subtle, it has all the marks of a reasoned approach to the event but amounts to the same thing; a justification for barbarism.'

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Zimbabwe Denies Uranium Deal With Iran

A report by the UK-based Daily Telegraph claimed on Saturday that a deal had been reached between the two countries under which Iran would be allowed to mine potential uranium deposits in Zimbabwe to provide fuel for its nuclear reactors and in exchange Zimbabwe would get oil from Iran. The report said that the agreement was sealed secretly last month during a visit to Tehran by a close aide to Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe.

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Comment by Mike Rivero

This is a replay of the infamous and equally mythical deal claimed between Iraq and Niger over "Yellow cake" processed uranium. That claim, which resulted in President Bush's notorious "16 words" in the 2003 State of the Union speech in which he claimed Iraq was acquiring processed uranium from Niger, was based on documents which the IAEA declared to be obvious forgeries.


Clearly the Daily Telegraph hopes you are either too stupid or too forgetful to realize this trick has been played on you before.

Media Disinformation: Syria Threatens Israel’s Security. One Big Smokescreen

In the self-sensationalising world of modern media, some truths are better witnessed than told. Over the past fortnight, major media outlets have converged on Syria’s alleged delivery of scud missiles to the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah. By examining how the story first came to limelight, as well as the manner in which media sources have uncritically covered the story, one can begin to notice the vastly degenerated state of today’s media and its deeply polarising effects.

On 11th April, Kuwaiti daily Al-Rai Al-Aam broke the ‘scud missiles’ story. Relying solely on American sources, the author Husain Abdul-Husain claimed that both western and Israeli intelligence had uncovered the training of Hezbollah resistance fighters in Syria in the use of scud and surface-to-air missiles. This, we are told, occurred some time during last summer. Subsequent to the alleged discovery, the article adds, Israel threatened Syria through official Turkish and Qatari channels warning against the transfer of either of the two armaments to Hezbollah.

Western coverage of the story has been an unquestioned regurgitation of the original claims made in the Al-Rai Al-Aam article. Further signified by an overriding infatuation with Israel’s security, political commentators have even sought to draw parallels between Saddam and the alleged Syrian scud missiles delivery. Amidst the suffocating miasma of yellow journalism redolent in western reporting, the parallel was not lost on Lebanese prime minister. Speaking to a group of Lebanese citizens in Rome, Saad Hariri noted: “All this is similar to what was said previously about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that were never found".'

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Media Disinformation Regarding America’s Afghan War

My own efforts to report as accurately as possible upon the civilian casualty toll of the U.S. Afghan bombing campaign given the existing data limitations, was greeted with charges of being anti-American, unpatriotic, replete with double-counting, and opprobrium was caste upon using a source like the Afghan Islamic Press, etc.[5] Even the left-of-center in the United States went to pains to discredit my tally of Afghan civilians killed by the U.S.[6] The propagandistic cant was well-critiqued by Philip Hammond,

A number of reporters declared the killing of Afghan civilians to be inherently un-newsworthy, and CNN instructed its journalists to ‘balance’ reports of casualties with justifications for war. The study of casualty figures produced by US academic Marc Herold was often dismissed or attacked, and the much lower estimate of civilian deaths offered by a Project for Defence Alternatives report was presented as more credible. In fact, however, the latter is based on an eccentric method whose only rationale can be a desire to produce as low a figure as possible. The report, drawing on a variety of sources but favouring Western ones as the most reliable, used the following formula in cases where no precise numbers were available: ‘“some or a few” deaths was interpreted as 1, “a dozen or more” was interpreted as 3–4, “dozens” was interpreted as 8–10, “scores” was interpreted as 10–15, “hundreds” was interpreted as 40–60’

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Media Camouflage: Seventh Anniversary of the War On Iraq

American media loves anniversaries of major events. They become ideal “news pegs” to do follow-up stories. You would think that they would have pulled out the stops for the seventh anniversary of the US war on Iraq, a war that was described by the Pentagon in its first days as a “cake walk” and designed as a quick intervention modeled after the in-out combat of Operation Desert Storm ending Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

Not only didn’t it work out that way, but the news commitment faded and in the process, as one would expect, so did public attention. The networks went from ‘all the war all the time,’ to withdrawing its troops long before the military did.

As a result, the situation was uniformly described as “quiet” with no real assessment offered on the costs, casualties and consequences of what just about everyone considers a botched and failed mission-- one from which Washington still seems unable to end despite the campaign promises of its new President.'

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Fiction of Marja as City Was U.S. Information War

For weeks, the U.S. public followed the biggest offensive of the Afghanistan War against what it was told was a "city of 80,000 people" as well as the logistical hub of the Taliban in that part of Helmand. That idea was a central element in the overall impression built up in February that Marja was a major strategic objective, more important than other district centres in Helmand.

It turns out, however, that the picture of Marja presented by military officials and obediently reported by major news media is one of the clearest and most dramatic pieces of misinformation of the entire war, apparently aimed at hyping the offensive as a historic turning point in the conflict.

Marja is not a city or even a real town, but either a few clusters of farmers' homes or a large agricultural area covering much of the southern Helmand River Valley.

"It's not urban at all," an official of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), who asked not to be identified, admitted to IPS Sunday. He called Marja a "rural community".'

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The Myth of Haiti’s Lawless Streets

As a member of the media covering the tragedy in Haiti, it's with a sense of alarm and astonishment that I've witnessed how some senior aid officials have argued for withholding aid of the utmost urgency because of sensational claims about violence and insecurity, which appear to be based more on fantasy than reality.'

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Where’s the Beef, Mr. Murdoch?

Parallel with developments in the political arena, attempts to demonize Iran in the media appear to constitute a growth industry. False articles about Iran poison the foreign policy discourse because they create a dangerous narrative, that Tehran’s rulers are irredeemably evil and completely unwilling to compromise. In intelligence circles this is called disinformation.

Nowhere is this barrage of disinformation more evident than in the media empire controlled by Rupert Murdoch, which includes the Wall Street Journal, the Times newspapers in Britain, and Fox television. Murdoch’s media marched in lockstep as a virtual propaganda mill in the lead-up to the Iraq war. Murdoch himself is much esteemed by Israel and by Jewish organizations and he has been outspoken in his approval of Israeli policies, including the devastation of Gaza one year ago.

He has received numerous awards in Israel and the US for his support of Israel, most recently in November when he was given the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Humanitarian Laureate Award. In March 2009 he received the National Human Relations award from the American Jewish Committee. Murdoch is generally believed to be extremely close to Tel Aviv’s intelligence service Mossad and some of the stories featured in the media he controls would appear to be disinformation supporting Israeli government positions.'

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