Left I on the News  

If you watched TV news yesterday, or read most newspapers, here's the story you heard: "Hypersonic plane could fly from New York to Los Angeles in less than an hour." The news was all about the potential revolution in commercial travel, about how "the WaveRider could potentially fly from Los Angeles to New York in 46 minutes."

But if you're good at reading between the lines, or if you read to the end of the stories that appeared online, you'd learn what this news was really about:

Hypersonic travel, meaning speeds of Mach 5 (3,800 miles per hour) and above, has been a focus of the military as it looks to perfect a technology that can become the new stealth.

and...

If it’s possible to achieve sustained hypersonic flight, it would be possible to deliver missiles to their targets in minutes rather than hours, the Times reported.

The advantage of that would be ensuring the target hasn’t moved by the time the missile’s deadly cargo arrives.

One aspect of this goes unmentioned even in the fine print. The U.S. doesn't only want to be able to "deliver missiles to their targets in minutes." It also wants to be able to deliver missiles to their targets from the U.S., rather than relying on basing them in its hundreds of foreign bases, bases whose future cannot be guaranteed.

But to the average American news consumer, this is all about the possibility of faster travel from LA to NYC. "The truth is out there," but, like a magician, the U.S. government and its obedient media do their best to distract the audience from what is really going on.

Today is "Hiroshima Day" on which people all over the world remember the day the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing up to 140,000 Japanese civilians. Three days later another 75,000 were killed by the second atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. What I choose to remember on this day is that these were not exceptional acts in any way, save the particular method of destruction. Thanks largely to Kurt Vonnegut and his book Slaughterhouse Five and not any history lessons in school, many people know of the firebombing of Dresden, which killed at least 35,000 German civilians, and probably many more. But Dresden was not the only city bombed by British and U.S. forces, and, all told, at least 600,000 German civilians (or "innocent civilians" as they would be called in the corporate media if they were victims of an enemy of the U.S.) were intentionally slaughtered by the U.S. and Britain.

In Japan, the story is the same. The firebombing of Tokyo is relatively well-known (emphasis on the word "relatively"; I doubt students hear much about it in history class either), with 100,000 Japanese civilians slaughtered by U.S. brutality. But an astonishing 67 other Japanese cities were also firebombed, killing hundreds of thousands of more Japanese civilians, exceeding the totals killed by the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The story continued after World War II. In Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of civilians intentionally killed by U.S. forces. In the first Gulf War against Iraq, the deliberate destruction of Iraq's water supply with a plan to keep it from being reconstructed which resulted in more than a million deaths, including a half-million Iraqi children. As I wrote,

The U.S. had studied in detail all aspects of Iraq's water system, had planned a strategy for preventing Iraq from reconstructing that system (via the sanctions), and knew in advance that "this could lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics of disease."

A deliberate war crime, a plan for mass genocide.

The bombing of Hiroshima is worth remembering, but not because it was a unique event, but precisely for the opposite reason, that it was just one of countless examples of mass genocide committed by imperialism against the people of the world.

Aug. 2, 2003. The day of the first post on this blog. Not much happening here lately, probably not many readers any more, since I'm no longer posting regularly, and it's really only regular posting that keeps people showing up. I'm trying to do some tweeting these days to make up, but frankly not that much of that either. Blame it on Facebook, where I spend more time keeping up with my personal friends and, as a result, less time keeping up with the "public" (such as you are). Anyway, if you read this, thanks for checking in once in a while. I'm still around, and still keeping my left eye on the news.

In Anaheim, the police murder of a young man has brought protests that are ongoing even as I write this. Note the back-handed attempt at incrimination in this story:

"Anaheim Police Sgt. Bob Dunn said a single officer shot Diaz and a "gun was not recovered at the scene." But, Dunn, said officers reported Diaz tossed away items as he ran. One of those items was recovered, but it was not a gun."

The fact that Diaz allegedly "tossed away items" is completely irrelevant to the story. Here's the simple fact: No weapon of any kind was found. Here's another fact: Even if he had thrown away a gun, unless they claim that he pointed it at the police or anyone in a threatening manner, the police didn't have the slightest right to shoot him. Possessing a gun and running away from a policeman is not even a crime, much less a death-penalty offense.

Yesterday a bus filled with Israeli tourists was bombed in Bulgaria. Today's San Jose Mercury News (online at the New York Times) carries the story. The Times headline (unlike the article, which we'll get to in a minute) is at least somewhat honest, if not still biased by headlining accusations instead of facts: "Hezbollah Is Blamed for Attack on Israeli Tourists in Bulgaria." The Mercury News headline, the major page one headline on the top right, screams the pseudo-factual "Suicide attack linked to Iran", leaving out "allegedly" or anything which would suggest to the reader that that "link" was made of anything but hot air.

The sub-head finally provides the nature of that link, but only as an afterthought: "Hezbollah cell targeting Israelis in retaliation for assassination of nuclear scientists, U.S. says." Of course the "U.S." said no such thing, only unnamed U.S. officials.

The article, which is the same as the Times article, starts with another simple declarative statement:

American officials on Thursday identified the suicide bomber responsible for a deadly attack on Israeli vacationers here as a member of a Hezbollah cell that was operating in Bulgaria and looking for such targets, corroborating Israel’s assertions and making the bombing a new source of tension with Iran.

"Claimed" would be the proper word to start this sentence; "identified" implies a certainty which wasn't present. And assertions by one person cannot "corroborate" assertions by another person. They can "agree" with them, but, until and unless they both represent some sort of proof, and that proof is independent (that is, they both aren't just reporting the same proof), it still isn't "corroboration."

The next paragraph is more of the same:

One senior American official said the current American intelligence assessment was that the bomber, who struck Wednesday, killing five Israelis, had been "acting under broad guidance" to hit Israeli targets when opportunities presented themselves, and that the guidance had been given to Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group, by Iran, its primary sponsor. Two other American officials confirmed that Hezbollah was behind the bombing, but declined to provide additional details.

Once again, assertions by "one senior American official" cannot be "confirmed" by two others. The only thing "confirmed" is that this is the assertion that the U.S. government wants to make. "Asserted" would be a great word to use in this paragraph, but you'll look in vain for it.

In the next paragraph we find out that U.S. officials are, in fact, mind readers:

The attacks, the official said, were in retaliation for the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, for which Iran has blamed Israeli agents — an accusation that Israel has neither confirmed nor denied.

So not only does this official "know" who did it, he or she knows exactly why they did it as well. Note also the omission. Not only has Iran blamed Israeli agents for these murders, but that claim has been widely agreed to, even by other "U.S. officials." In this article, however, there is no indication that it is anything other than wild assertions by Iran.

Also part of the smear - the fact that we finally read a response from the Iranian government in the 11th paragraph:

Iranian officials condemned the attack and all acts of terrorism. “Terrorism endangers the lives of innocents,” said a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, Ramin Mehmanparast, according to Iran’s state Arabic-language television channel, Al Alam.

It would have been simple enough in the very first paragraph to include a phrase like "claims that have been denied by Iran." Instead, that denial waits until long after the reader's mind has been shaped, and long after the part of the story that will have been broadcast by most broadcast news organizations.

All of this would constitute an attempt at a smear even if, in the end, these accusations turned out to be true. But, as it turns out, that seems highly unlikely, as new reports come out. Even while still asserting the same Hezbollah link, these latest articles now report:

Bulgarian news media reported that the bomber was Mehdi Ghezali, a Swedish national and former Guantanamo Bay detainee. Ghezali was captured by US forces during a 2001 battle in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, and was released from Guantanamo in 2004.

And who were the people in Tora Bora? They were, of course, Al Qaeda, allies of Osama bin Laden, Sunni militants diametrically opposed to Hezbollah and Iran. A group which was, as is well known, originally trained and funded by the CIA. So "Suicide attack linked to U.S." would likely be a far more accurate headline than "Suicide attack linked to Iran." However that headline wouldn't exactly serve the purposes of U.S. foreign policy.

Speaking of which, the Times does include one more interesting fact, but, unsurprisingly, only in the 23rd paragraph (a paragraph which didn't make it into the San Jose Mercury News and likely very many other papers):

The speaker of Iran's Parliament, Ali Larijani, criticized the United States for not condemning the bombing in Damascus on Wednesday that struck at President Bashar al-Assad's inner circle, killing three senior defense officials. "By not condemning the assassination in Syria, the Americans show that they believe in good assassinations and bad assassinations," he said, according to the Fars news agency.

18 civilians were killed by a "NATO" (i.e., U.S.) airstrike in Afghanistan yesterday. AP and the Washington Post provides a classic case in point for how such news is treated by the U.S. media, and by the U.S. government as well.

The first story that appeared was this one. A curious story, because the page title (that appears on top of the browser) as well as the URL refers to the 18 people killed, but the headline and the bulk of the story is about Leon Panetta and Pakistan. Not until the 21st paragraph (!) do we finally get to the news about the murder of the civilians.

Tellingly, although the article informs us that Afghan President Karzai is already rushing back to Kabul from China because of the attacks, the author is then able to report with a straight face that the NATO spokesman says they "had no reports so far of civilian deaths from the airstrike."

Now cut to the next day. The front page of the Washington Post website features as its #1 "World" story the latest alleged massacre in Syria, which has nothing directly to do with the United States (other than the fact that the overthrow of the Syrian government is now the #1 short-term priority of U.S. foreign policy), but the murder of 18 Afghan civilians including the all-important "women and children" by a U.S./NATO airstrike is nowhere to be seen. If you do manage to find the article, you'll find that the headline isn't "NATO airstrike kills 18 civilians in Afghanistan," which is the actual story, but rather "Gen. John Allen apologizes for civilians killed in airstrike in Afghanistan," which is the message the U.S. government wants the American public to go away with. Oops, a mistake happened, but we're sorry. Really sorry. (even though yesterday we were denying we even knew about it).

As an aside, note the issue of credibility. A major story in the last 24 hours has been the alleged massacre in Syria, a story which is sourced to the famous "Syrian Observatory for Human Rights," which is one guy in an apartment in London, a source who has proved unreliable on more than one occasion. Not only is there no evidence yet for who might have committed this massacre, there isn't even any evidence yet that there was a massacre. Yet this "story" immediately jumped to the top of the news, the leads on TV and the front pages of every website and newspaper.

The news from Afghanistan, by contrast, is credibly sourced, with bodies having already been seen, and, as noted, the Afghan President already cutting short a foreign trip to rush back home. Yet despite this credible sourcing, the denial by the NATO spokesperson that they knew anything about it, a denial from a source which has proven to be utterly non-credible on multiple occasions, was enough to bury the story, and now the "apology" has become the only story, and a minor one at that.

And so the partnership between corporate media and the U.S. government continues to function as a well-oiled machine.

The massacre in Houla provides a perfect illustration of how the corporate media shapes the "truth" about Syria. First, let's look at the AP story which reported on the killing of 90 people, including 32 children, in the Syrian town of Houla. After the basic story is established, we jump immediately to outrage from the U.S., and the U.N.'s Ban Ki-moon and Kofi Annan denouncing the Syrian government for its responsibility for the crime.

But Al Jazeera, no friend of the Syrian government, provides one more rather essential detail which the AP omitted, courtesy of the chief U.N. observer on the spot (rather than Ban Ki-moon and Kofi Annan thousands of miles away in New York): [Emphasis added]

Major General Robert Mood, the chief of the UN observer mission deployed to Syria, said monitors touring the area had counted 85 bodies, including 34 children under the age of 10 and seven women.

"Whoever started, whoever responded and whoever supported this deplorable act of violence should be held responsible." Mood said about Friday's assault.

He told Al Jazeera that a residential area had been hit with a range of weapons, including "rifles, machine guns, artillery shells, tank shells," but stressed that the circumstances that "led to the tragic deaths" were still unclear.

"Whatever I learned on the ground in Syria ... is that I should not jump to conclusions."

Mood's rightful caution about "jumping to conclusions" was, of course, ignored by those with an agenda.

A later AP article was fair enough to provide the Syrian government's categorical denial of responsibility, and their explanation of what happened, but still doesn't see fit to quote the U.N. observer on the ground.

Meanwhile, the BBC was caught running a picture, purporting to be of the Houla massacre, which was actually a picture taken of bodies dug up from a mass grave in Iraq in 2003. Naturally, that picture is now making its way around the Internet as an example of the Syrian government's brutality, regardless of the fact that it not only shows something completely unrelated, but that the responsibility for the Houla massacre is far from established.