{"id":347593,"date":"2018-02-10T05:34:20","date_gmt":"2018-02-10T04:34:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=347593"},"modified":"2018-02-10T05:48:15","modified_gmt":"2018-02-10T04:48:15","slug":"u-s-news-reports-syrias-war-hide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/editorials\/u-s-news-reports-syrias-war-hide\/","title":{"rendered":"What U.S. News Reports on Syria\u2019s War Hide"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse<\/span><\/p>\n

What\u2019s being hidden from the public by the U.S. news-media\u2019s reports on Syria\u2019s war is that, ever since 2012, the U.S. Government has been trying to overthrow Syria\u2019s Government by supporting, training and arming, in Syria, the many jihadist groups who were being led by Al Qaeda in Syria \u2014 jihadist groups which unanimously accept Al Qaeda\u2019s leadership there.<\/span><\/a> Without Al Qaeda in Syria, the U.S. effort to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad (who was elected in 2014 to a new Presidential term in an internationally monitored democratic election, winning 89% of the vote<\/span><\/a>) wouldn\u2019t have come anywhere close to succeeding; but, with Al Qaeda\u2019s help, it almost did succeed. America, even as late as late 2016, was demanding Russia to stop its bombing of Al Qaeda and of their allied jihadist groups in Syria, but Russia refused; this was a major hang-up in the years-long Kerry-Lavrov (U.S.-Russia) negotiations for a ceasefire in Syria<\/span><\/a>. Kerry couldn\u2019t get President Obama to go along with Russia\u2019s (Putin\u2019s) insistence upon continued bombing both of ISIS and of Al Qaeda; Obama insisted: No bombing of Al Qaeda.<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

More recently, after the effort to overthrow Syria\u2019s Government failed during 2016, the U.S. goal (since nearly the very end of Obama\u2019s Administration) has become assisting Kurds in Syria\u2019s northeast who want to establish there a Kurdistan, which would be beholden to Washington and would cooperate with U.S. oil companies and their contractors such as Halliburton to extract Syria\u2019s oil and to construct pipelines for both oil and gas from mainly three U.S. allies \u2014 Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar \u2014 into the world\u2019s largest energy-market, the EU, to enable the U.S. and those fundamentalist-Sunni allies to displace Russia from that market<\/span><\/a>, where Russia currently is the largest energy-supplier. <\/span><\/p>\n

This hiding, which is done in order to block the public\u2019s understanding of what\u2019s going on, is well-exemplified in the slick February 9th front-page New York Times<\/i> headline news-report<\/span><\/a>, titled \u201cIt\u2019s Hard to Believe, but Syria\u2019s War Is Getting Even Worse,\u201d which is headlined online as instead \u201cFar From Winding Down, Syria\u2019s War Escalates on Multiple Fronts\u201d<\/span><\/a>. This half-fictional potboiler opens like any war-potbiler generally does, not by explaining anything, but instead with the typical slick-journalism device, of an anecdote (the bloodier and more-obviously outrageous, the better, in order to whip-up the interest and attention of the gullible mass of readers), \u201cHalf a dozen newborns, blinking and arching their backs, were carried from a burning hospital hit by airstrikes. A bombed apartment house collapsed, burying families.\u201d<\/i> Anyone will, of course, have sympathy for babies, and their families, in a hospital that gets hit by a bomb in a war. Everything that follows this slick opening is designed to anger readers against Syria\u2019s Government \u2014 that being the propagandistic objective of virtually all U.S. \u2018news\u2019-coverage of this war.<\/span><\/p>\n

The article leaves the reader totally confused as to why<\/i> what is happening is happening. But it\u2019s accompanied by yet another article, \u201cWhy Is the Syrian War Still Raging?\u201d<\/span><\/a> That piece says, \u201cEach of the major conflicts has its own underlying logic that sustains the fighting\u201d and then it goes on to consider, in turn, what it identifies as \u201cthe major conflicts,\u201d which it alleges to be the following three (as being answers to consider, for the article\u2019s title-question, \u201cWhy Is the Syrian War Still Raging?\u201d \u2014 which means why the war is still raging, even after<\/i> ISIS in Syria has been defeated and when the task that everyone had been expecting to remain<\/i> now would be to kill the few ISIS and the other jihadists who still are there, and then to restore the country fully to peace without any jihadists):<\/span><\/p>\n

“1Assad versus rebels\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

“2The battle against ISIS\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

“3Turkey versus the Kurds\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

They ignore altogether<\/b> the actual<\/b> reason \u201cWhy Is the Syrian War Still Raging?\u201d: <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c4U.S. versus Syria\u201d<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s what the Times<\/i> leaves out \u2014 hides.<\/span><\/p>\n

The U.S. went into Syria lying to say that its main goal was to eliminate ISIS there, but didn\u2019t do anything to ISIS in Syria, until after Russia was invited into the war on 30 September 2015 and promptly started to bomb the oil-tanker-trucks that were carrying Syrian oil from ISIS-controlled areas into Turkey for export and income to ISIS (and Turkey). America had been committed ever since 2012 to overthrow Syria\u2019s Government, but now (under Trump) it\u2019s trying to break up Syria and to steal its oil and at least enough of its territory, so as to destroy Syria even further, and to cripple Russia in its main foreign market.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, this isn\u2019t a criticism of the New York Times especially, but of all \u2018news\u2019reporting in the U.S. and its allied countries. For example, the BBC did a one-year retrospective on the first anniversary of Russia\u2019s 30 September 2015 start of its bombing of what the U.S. regime calls \u2018the rebels\u2019 in Syria, and, under the headline \u201cSyria war: How Moscow\u2019s bombing campaign has paid off for Putin\u201d<\/span><\/a> quoted a supposed reliable authority as saying, \u201cMoscow had sought to steadily destroy the moderate Syrian opposition on the battlefield, leaving only jihadist forces in play, and lock the US into a political framework of negotiations that would serve beyond the shelf-life of this administration.\u201d This is basically upside-down: The myth that there had been any substantial non-jihadist or \u201cmoderate\u201d Syrian opposition, and that Washington\u2019s operation in Syria relies upon such \u201cmoderates,\u201d is an essential lie, in which all of the mainstream, and well over 90% of the \u201calternative news\u201d media, must participate, if they\u2019re to be allowed to continue. Billionaires have lots of clout. There\u2019s talk about \u201cmanufactured consent,\u201d and this is the way<\/i> it is \u201cmanufactured.\u201d It is manufactured by incessant lying, not only by the Government, but by the press.<\/span><\/p>\n

A good rule is to distrust everything you read, and to click onto at least a sampling\u00a0 <\/span>of its sources and examine them yourself to see whether they support the allegations that they allegedly support; and to evaluate whether those sources are themselves trustworthy \u2014 and to ignore any \u2018news\u2019medium that doesn\u2019t link to its sources (doesn\u2019t conveniently let you check out its truth or falsehood), which includes especially TV, radio, and print media. Only online news can even qualify to be considered by an intelligent reader; but if it\u2019s online print, like for example the New York Times<\/i>, then it can be taken only on trust, which certainly isn\u2019t earned by any record of carefulness to report the truth and only<\/i> the truth. This is why I always link to my sources, either directly, or via articles that do link directly to them but that additionally place them into their essential context so that they can be accurately understood.<\/span><\/p>\n

No news-report can be any more reliable than its sources are. Most \u2018news\u2019 is sourced to propagandists. The key thing for any educational system is to teach people how to be intelligently skeptical of everything; but no regime wants such an educational system. Honest news-coverage is therefore rare. Any assumption that it\u2019s not rare is blatantly false.<\/span><\/p>\n

As George Monbiot, the Guardian<\/i> columnist, said in an extraordinary burst of honesty<\/span><\/a>: <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI work in a profoundly corrupt industry, and I hate it. \u2026 There are some really great journalists out there, but they live in a country under occupation \u2014 that\u2019s how it feels. The industry is a really hostile place for good journalism, for journalism which seeks to hold power to account, which in my view is what journalism is all about \u2014 that\u2019s the point of it. .. <\/i>[But the reality of journalism is] it\u2019s about actually reinforcing the messages of power \u2026 persuading people that what the billionaires want is what the rest of us should want\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of<\/span> \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse What\u2019s being hidden from the public by the U.S. news-media\u2019s reports on Syria\u2019s war is that, ever since 2012, the U.S. Government has been trying to overthrow Syria\u2019s Government by supporting, training and arming, in Syria, the many jihadist groups who were being led by Al Qaeda in Syria \u2014 jihadist groups which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":347594,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-347593","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347593\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/347594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}