HOW AMERICA SCREWS UP THE WORLD WITHOUT EVER LETTING ITS OWN PEOPLE KNOW WHAT IS HAPPENING

John Chuckman

 

Brian Williams, American television network anchor caught telling his audience a fantasy version of his experience on a foreign assignment, has unintentionally provided us with a near perfect allegory and tale of caution about American journalism and the role it plays in politics and foreign affairs.

I am not referring to the fact that a number of prominent Americans have done exactly the same thing Williams did making false public claims of risky deeds, this Münchausen-like condition being surprisingly common among American politicians. Hillary Clinton, in her 2008 nomination campaign, claimed she came under fire in Tuzla, Boznia in 1996, when her plane landed. Actual video of the harrowing event showed her being greeted peacefully by a young child with a welcoming poem. John Kerry, in his quick four-month “grab some glory for a future political career” stint in Vietnam made exaggerated claims of risk and bravery and certainly decency when indeed most of his activities involved shooting at peasant farmers working their fields from his heavily-armed patrol boat on a river, ferrying the odd cutthroat assassin for the CIA’s ghastly Operation Phoenix project, and killing a man, likely Viet Cong, who was lying on the ground badly wounded by the boat’s heavy machine gun fire. Rich men’s sons do get medals for rather hard to understand achievements.

The awful truth is, given the state of American journalism, stunts like that of Williams, despite their symbolism, are virtually without concrete importance. American network anchors like Williams are expected to have good looks, good voices, and sincere, home-townish demeanors while reading scripts. Beyond that, they have almost no connection with what most people understand as journalism. There is the odd effort by large American networks to make their handsome talking heads seem to be at the center of events, the most hilarious of which in my memory was CBS’s Dan Rather garbed in Afghan-style robes crawling around on the ground somewhere pretending to be secretly reporting something or other about Afghanistan, his soundman, lighting technician, cameraman, and make-up artist never making an appearance. Such absurdities lend theatrical flair to American news and probably help frustrated journalists stuck with million-dollar, talking-head jobs feel slightly useful, and you might say they are therapeutic, but they have nothing whatever to do with journalism.

Journalism, as it is taught in schools, is about discovering, or at least suggesting, through a series of well-defined techniques what is actually happening in events of interest and reporting the findings in a non-biased, almost scientific, way, but, remarkably, this is something which virtually never happens in American journalism. Truthfulness and journalistic principles simply have no place in the intensely politically-charged atmosphere of America where no event and no utterance is without political dimensions. Actually, this has been the case for a very long time, but it just hasn’t always been so starkly clear as it is now. The same Dan Rather mentioned above, rising star reporter back in 1963, shortly after the Kennedy assassination, told an audience of millions he had seen the legendary Zapruder film – an amateur 8mm film taken by a man named Zapruder which unintentionally recorded Kennedy’s death. Rather, in almost halting words and with eyes often turned downward suggesting the immensity of what he claimed to have seen, described to millions how the film showed Kennedy slumping forward after being hit in the back by a shot from the “sniper’s nest” with Governor John Connally then hit while turned around towards the President, coat open, widely exposing his white-shirted breast, and with a third shot causing the President “to move violently forward” as his head explodes. Except for the count of three shots striking the car’s occupants, Rather’s description was close to a complete fabrication, but the public didn’t know that until 1975, twelve years later, when the film was first broadcast. (There was actually at least one more on-target, non-lethal shot plus a missed shot hitting a street curb, but even Rather’s three shots, given before security officials had sorted out their story line, was ignored by the feebly-dishonest Warren Commission when it later told us there were only two shots plus a miss.) Even in the film’s almost-certainly doctored state – after all, it had been purchased immediately after the assassination, and held for years, by Life Magazine, a known cooperating resource for the CIA in its day – the film shows Kennedy in distress from a neck wound as he emerges from behind an expressway sign, almost certainly having been shot from the front owing to his body position and the motions of his hands. Connally does turn but his coat is not open exposing his shirt front, and, judging by the time interval involved, is hit by a separate bullet (something he himself maintained in all testimony). The film then shows Kennedy hurled backward as his head explodes, absolute proof by the laws of physics of a shot from the front.

American major news broadcasts and newspapers all have become hybrids of infotainment, leak-planting, suggestion-planting, disinformation, and other manipulative operations. Many of them, such as The New York Times or NBC, maintain a seemingly unassailable appearance of authority and majesty, but it is entirely a show much like a grand march being played as a Louis XIV sauntered into a room, at least when it comes to any important issue in foreign affairs and even most controversial matters in domestic affairs, as with the Kennedy assassination or a thousand other examples from election fraud to corporate bribery. Massive corporate media consolidation (six massive corporations supply virtually all the news Americans receive), the dropping of most foreign correspondent and investigative journalism efforts owing to high costs, the constant and ready compliance of the few remaining owners of news media to adhere to the government line no matter how far-fetched, plus America’s now non-stop interference into the affairs of other people, have made American television and newspapers into a kind of Bryan Williams Media Wonderland where no reported item of consequence can be accepted at face value.

The owners of America’s news media have every reason to comply with government wishes. Failure to do so would immediately cut them off from access to government officials and from the kind of juicy leaks that make journalists here and there look like they are doing their jobs. It would also be costly in the advertising department where the sale of expensive ads to other huge corporations is what pays the bills.  And it would simply not be in keeping with the interests of the very people who own massive corporate news outlets. After all, it was an American, A. J. Leibling, who told us with precise accuracy, “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.”

Americans, the broad mass of them, simply do not know what is happening in Ukraine or in Syria or in Palestine or in a score of other places under assault by America’s establishment, its de facto, ongoing, non-elected government. Those place names are mentioned of course, and regularly, and various interviews are conducted, and maps and charts are shown, but the careful listener or reader will see that none of what is offered is genuinely informative, all of it serving to build one pre-determined idea of events, many of the words resembling the kind of one-liners politicians repeat over and over in America’s literally content-free political campaigns. We see many bits and pieces of seeming information, but they are all just pieces taken from the same jig-saw puzzle, capable only of being assembled in one way.

Americans also have very little idea of the nature of the men who are the actors in these various places, America’s press and networks virtually never granting or soliciting the insights of foreign leaders and representatives not already toeing the American line. Thoughtful foreign leaders generally are only seen through brief images and highly-colored descriptions.

Americans also are rarely informed of the consequences of their government’s acts, informed in hard facts and numbers such as the number of deaths and injuries and the extent of destruction. America’s press has covered up countless facts such as the number of Iraqis killed in the First Gulf War, the number of Iraqi children who perished under an American embargo so feverishly championed by Madeline Albright, or the number of Iraqis killed and crippled by the George Bush’s “I’ll go one better than Pappy” invasion. They never saw pictures of women and children torn up by cluster bombs unless they deliberately searched them out on the Internet. When Americans are given numbers, such as deaths and refugees, as in the American-induced Syrian conflict, it is only because the numbers are said to be the Syrian government’s responsibility, with no reference to the gangs of foreign mercenaries and thugs paid and armed by America or its associates in the region.

For Ukraine, any numbers and facts Americans receive are shaped to fit the construct of an aggrandizing Russia, led by a new Czar intent on upsetting the balance of Europe, opposing a now free and democratic government in Kiev. You can almost imagine the smiles and snickers of the good old boys gathered in planning meetings at Langley a few years ago when they realized how their scheme could both give them Ukraine and discredit Putin, the only reasonable actor in the whole dirty business. No images of Ukrainian militias and thugs displaying swastikas and other neo-Nazi symbols, no discussion of repressive measures taken by the new crowd at Kiev against Russian-speakers, no discussion of a country starting a war on its own people who stood up for their rights, and no discussion of an incompetent Ukrainian military shooting down a plane-load of civilians.

I don’t know whether Brian Williams just became so comfortable over his years of work broadcasting fantasies that he grew easy about adding a personal tall tale or whether he may suffer from some unfortunate disability, but his ridiculous affair does provide us reason to focus on contemporary American journalism’s real function, which is anything but journalism. I think it likely the reason corporate news executives were in a flap over the affair, having handed Williams a 6-month suspension, is not scrupulous concern for truth – there simply is no such thing in such organizations – but fear of having one of the chief presenters of so many other misrepresentations made a laughing-stock.

 

PENETRATING THE DARKNESS COVERING TWO MALAYSIAN AIRLINE DISASTERS

In each case, there appears to be only one explanation consistent with known facts

John Chuckman

 

I wrote previously of a second great mystery surrounding the disappearance over the Indian Ocean of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, and that second great mystery is the United States’ utter silence surrounding its disappearance, despite its being the very nation able to offer the best information from the world’s most sophisticated radars and spy satellites. There can be no question that the United States gathered data on that catastrophe because its military and intelligence surveillance is unblinking. The fact that we did not hear a word from America, and still do not, can only mean its government wants the event, like the airplane itself, to sink, in this case into public forgetfulness.

Now we have a second Malaysian Airliner destroyed (its national origin is presumably sheer coincidence), Flight MH17, this time at a location from which the wreckage was recoverable. The American press immediately jumped to the conclusion that a Russian high-altitude anti-aircraft missile called BUK was responsible, which surely reflected nothing more than suggestive whispers from American intelligence since no evidence was offered. The altitude of the plane before it was destroyed excluded other ground-based missiles.

But Russia had no possible motive for attacking the airliner, and, indeed, the unfortunate event has only served as fodder for a Western press eager to declare Russia a new threat to the world. The Russian-speakers of eastern Ukraine who broke away from that country’s new American-installed government simply do not have this missile in their arsenal, but Ukraine’s government definitely does. These basic facts demonstrate the inappropriateness of the American press’s early suggestions, but we know that in the disinformation business the first one out with even a remotely plausible story repeated loudly enough leaves a lasting impression, as witness the sad fact that polls show a sizeable proportion of Americans yet believe Saddam Hussein hid terrible weapons.

Despite the wreck’s physical accessibility, there were substantial delays getting investigators to it as Ukraine’s new government pressed attacks against its own eastern, Russian-speaking population. We cannot know, but the long delay may well have permitted sanitizing of the crash site. When able to access the site, experts found the flight recorders intact, but, to this writing, nothing from those recorders has been made public. I don’t recall another case of a major crash when at least some information from an intact flight recorder was not made public quickly. After all, the principle behind such data is to discover problems for civilian aviation, enabling others to avoid them. The data, under international civil aviation agreements, is not anyone’s private property, it is to be shared with all in a timely fashion.

But we have heard nothing except a promise that the investigation’s findings will eventually be made public. With such a suspicious delay, the possibility of tampering or destruction of data cannot be ruled out. And here, too, we have silence from the United States which would have the best supplementary data in the form of radar tracks and satellite images on a European event not far from Russia’s border, an area of intense interest to America. Why don’t they produce them? Moreover, despite repeated requests from Russia and others, Ukraine’s new government has released no data of its own, things we know it must have, such as tower-to-pilot recordings. Clearly, information is being deliberately suppressed, and when we hear in our press and from American-influenced governments about Russia’s underhandedness, it is only a loud diversion from that disturbing fundamental fact.

Do you see the television networks and newspapers in the United States calling for the immediate release of information? No, instead you see the suggestion, sometimes far more than a suggestion, that Russia is responsible for destroying the airliner, and this accusation is made with no evidence and without shame.

You might say we have a conspiracy of silence around an event of international importance. But why should that be so? Why is a country whose politicians regularly make speeches praising themselves about openness, democratic values, and fairness, found withholding critical information in two catastrophes of international importance?

In the first case over the Indian Ocean, it is almost certainly because the United States itself shot down the airliner, either mistakenly or deliberately as it may have been regarded as a potential threat to the secret base at Diego Garcia. Neither of these possibilities would be new experiences for America’s military which, over the years, has been involved in destroying at least half a dozen civilian airliners (see my essay with its footnotes, “The Second Mystery Around Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370” found at Chuckman’s Words on WordPress).

In the case of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17, destroyed over Ukraine, I believe the United States is hiding the fact that the Ukrainian armed forces shot it down. Why would the United States do this? We know, there being a great deal of good information in the public record, that the United States has made a huge investment in Ukraine over the past few years trying to destabilize an elected government, one friendly to Russia, and it succeeded when that government fled from a coup. Imagine America’s embarrassment at the world’s seeing its new proxy government, its supposed champion of eastern democracy, first misdirecting a civilian airliner, Flight MH17 having inexplicably been sent off course over a war zone, and then shooting it down with a fighter. Russian data, released to the public, shows a Ukrainian fighter was near the airliner, and an early photo of the wreckage leaked to the world clearly shows a large fuselage panel from the pilot’s cabin riddled with holes as by heavy caliber ammunition from a fighter’s canon.

That embarrassment would come on top of a series of embarrassments America’s meddling in Ukraine’s affairs has produced: over the general revolt of Russian-speaking Ukrainians against a new government openly unfriendly to their interests; over revelations that Nazi-like groups – and Ukraine has a number of them, notably the Right Sector – committed the sniping murders of hundreds of civilians from rooftops in Kiev in support of the original coup; over Ukraine’s pathetic military failures on the ground with its soldiers displaying poor morale and worse leadership; over the world’s seeing Ukraine bombing and rocketing its own citizens; over the failure of various cheap ruses such as using repainted surplus Hungarian T-72 tanks, fit only for scrap, to pass as invading Russian armor (while this ruse failed, it did for a while take in a lot of Western journalists, surely a reflection on the depth of their investigations); and, perhaps, most grating of all for the engineers of the whole murderous and destructive scheme, some deft statesmanship by Vladimir Putin snatched from their grasp important expected fruits of the enterprise.

In a number of instances the Ukrainian armed forces have demonstrated embarrassing incompetence, and reading between the lines of screaming propaganda and demands for this or that, appear actually to be losing the highly unequal fight. They do not fight with motivation for their new American-installed government, with its neo-Nazi auxiliaries, and against fellow citizens. I believe the shooting down of the airliner was one of many blunders, and the recordings from the black boxes, if revealed without doctoring, would unambiguously prove this to be the case. As would Ukraine’s flight controller recordings, still held secret.

The United States, despite embarrassments and setbacks, has worked to make other gains out of its dirty work in Ukraine. It has been able to use almost comical assertions of a new Russian threat to strengthen its hold on NATO, an organization which has been obsolete for years and which serves only to thinly disguise American hegemony in Europe. Even now it pushes members for increased military spending to a minimum of two percent of GDP as the admission price for playing with the big boys in NATO. For America, the great appeal of increased expenditures would be a further subsidizing of its costly presence in Europe. NATO is held together by America’s financial, economic, and diplomatic power, still great despite that country’s having entered its relative decline in world influence. It can still grant rich favors and contracts or it can work away quietly against the interests of a dissenting state. A Europe with the many economic problems we see today is naturally fearful of summoning America’s wrath

Altogether, it’s a vast and shameful enterprise the United States has launched, and while most of its unpleasant consequences have yet to be seen, it has certainly brought war and grief to a previously peaceful region. But the stark truth is that, in recent years, bringing war and grief seems to be a core mission of American foreign affairs.

 

AFTERWORD

Readers will find additional information here:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/07/05/john-chuckman-comment-of-atrocities-and-war-crimes-truth-about-the-atomic-bombing-and-surrender-of-japan-the-record-of-careless-or-malicious-downings-of-civilian-airliners-by-americas-military/