{"id":212588,"date":"2015-12-29T23:58:04","date_gmt":"2015-12-29T23:58:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=212588"},"modified":"2015-12-29T23:58:04","modified_gmt":"2015-12-29T23:58:04","slug":"two-mainstream-u-s-journalists-provide-stenographic-news-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/two-mainstream-u-s-journalists-provide-stenographic-news-report\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Mainstream U.S. \u2018Journalists\u2019 Provide Stenographic \u2018News\u2019 Report \u2013 U.S. Anti-Russia Propaganda"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

This is the story of an ordinary article by two well-known American \u2018journalists\u2019 who market the aristocracy\u2019s lies as \u2018news,\u2019 so that the public believes dangerous myths, which might unfortunately get out of control and end in nuclear war.<\/span><\/p>\n

Josh Rogin and Eli Lake, two \u201cColumnists\u201d functioning in the role of reporters for BloombergView, issued on the night of December 17th, their piece of U.S. government propaganda parading as if it were a \u2018news\u2019 report; and, in the process, they mistakenly included some real and interesting news that contradicts the very same fake storyline they\u2019re pumping on behalf of the U.S. government, and of their billionaire employer: Wall Street\u2019s Michael Bloomberg.<\/span><\/p>\n

They started it with the false assumption \u2013 routine in the American \u2018press\u2019 \u2013 that the U.S. government is right and the Russian government is wrong in their respective war-involvements inside Syria. This false assumption is presented in their opening paragraph.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Headlining\u00a0\u201cNew Russian Air Defenses in Syria Keep U.S. Grounded,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0they opened: “There is a new crisis for the international effort to destroy the Islamic State, created by the Kremlin. The U.S. has stopped flying manned air-support missions for rebels in a key part of northern Syria due to\u00a0Russia\u2019s expansion of air defense systems there, and the Barack Obama administration is scrambling to figure out what to do about it.\u201d<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Their phrase \u201cthe international effort\u201d presumes that the U.S. is fighting on \u201cthe international\u201d side, and that Russia\u2019s forces (and those of the Syrian government that invited-in Russia’s forces) must therefore be the violators of international law. This falsehood is accentuated by the allegation that \u201cthe Kremlin\u201d \u201ccreated\u201d this \u201ccrisis.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Key factual background in order to understand and evaluate the truthfulness, and even the honesty, of this opening paragraph is this:\u00a0The U.S. invaded Syria<\/span><\/a>; it\u00a0was\u00a0not invited in by the universally-recognized-as-legitimate government of that country.<\/i>\u00a0It\u2019s instead trying to\u00a0overthrow<\/i>\u00a0that very government. In fact: it\u2019s an invader.\u00a0The U.S. government has supplied weapons and some air-support to the \u2018rebels\u2019 of Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups (including even ISIS) that are pouring into Syria to overthrow that country\u2019s leader, Bashar al-Assad<\/span><\/a>, who has been shown even in Western-sponsored polls in Syria to be overwhelmingly preferred over anyone else to lead that country<\/span><\/a> \u2013 and the U.S. has now also been bombing that legitimate government\u2019s basic infrastructure<\/span><\/a> in order to weaken it further. Syria had invited in Russian air power to bomb those \u2018rebels,\u2019 the vast majority of whom are foreign invaders, just like the U.S. itself is. So: the U.S. and its allies caused this \u201ccrisis,\u201d whatever it is or might be. In fact, the U.S. started planning it from the moment Barack Obama first became U.S. President, if not before<\/span><\/a>. And, even the sarin gas attack that Obama blamed on the Assad government and used as his reason for invading Syria was a put-up job from the Obama Administration with the cooperation of the Sauds, Qataris, and Turks<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

As a response to Russia\u2019s bombings of ISIS, al-Qaeda (called \u2018al-Nusra\u2019 in Syria) and other jihadist invaders of Syria, ISIS bombed a Russian airliner over Egypt, and the U.S.-allied NATO country of Turkey shot down a Russian bomber in Syria. Russia did not respond with nuclear war against \u2019the West,\u2019 or NATO, but simply sent into Syria additional weapons in order to defend Syrian airspace and protect Syria\u2019s and Russia\u2019s forces against continued attacks by the U.S. and its allies such as Turkey.\u00a0Russia\u2019s President, Vladimir Putin, was, in effect, saying thereby: If you try anything like that again, we\u2019ll shoot it, and then we\u2019ll be in a full-fledged war between you and us over Syria \u2013 and you will be very publicly<\/i> exposed to the world as the invaders \u2013 if that\u2019s what you choose to do.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then, the co-columnists go on to report that, “earlier this month, Moscow deployed an SA-17 advanced air defense system near the area and began \u2018painting’ U.S. planes, targeting them with radar in what U.S. officials said was a direct and dangerous\u00a0provocation.\u201d<\/b> The assumption here is that for Russia to \u201cdefend\u201d its bombers from attacks by the U.S. invading forces is somehow a \u201cdangerous provocation.\u201d The co-columnists don\u2019t themselves say this; they instead simply report the lie from the Pentagon on it. And they do not challenge that lie.<\/span><\/p>\n

The fact is that if Russia doesn\u2019t defend itself from the attacks by the U.S. and its allies, then Russia will itself be conquered by the U.S. and its allies, because\u00a0that has been the central foreign-policy goal of the United States government ever since the late 1970s, if not even earlier \u2013 first as a \u201ccold war\u201d war to defeat the Soviet Union, and then (starting in 1990, just before the USSR and its Warsaw Pact military alliance broke up in 1991) explicitly and knowingly as a continuing war by the U.S. aristocracy to take control over Russia,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0the world\u2019s\u00a0most resource-rich nation<\/span><\/a>. To the American aristocracy and its military, which is the Pentagon: self-defense by Russia, and even Russia\u2019s joining an ally (Syria) in order to defend it against the invasion by the U.S. and its allies, constitutes \u201cdangerous provocation.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s one thing for the aristocracy\u2019s stooges, such as Obama or his nameless \u201cofficials,\u201d to emit that lie, but it\u2019s something else altogether when the \u2018press\u2019 (which may be actually just a propaganda-operation to serve the aristocracy that controls the government) reports it to the public without challenging it (not even incompetently<\/i> challenging it). Only a fool would respect \u2018journalists\u2019 such as that, but\u00a0the George W. Bush Administration had no problems getting them to believe his lies about \u201cSaddam\u2019s WMD\u201d etc., which similarly were stenographically reported and not challenged, by the American \u2018press.\u2019<\/span><\/a>\u00a0(And: Bush probably had been working with the Sauds to facilitate the 9\/11 attacks, in order for him to be able to win the authorization to invade Iraq.<\/span><\/a>) Barack Obama is relying upon the same fake \u2018press,\u2019 and same widespread public stupidity trusting it. After a nation\u2019s \u2018press\u2019 has so stenographically reported unchallenged its leader\u2019s lies, as happened in 2002 and 2003, the only reasonable response by the public is to boycott those very same stenographic \u2018news\u2019 media. But that never happened in the United States, which\u00a0demonstrably is no real democracy<\/span><\/a>. And so, the current regime there is just as bad as its lying predecessor was \u2013 basically just a continuation of it. Republican and Democratic Presidents now represent the same aristocracy, merely different wings of it, and those two wings don\u2019t differ very much from each other; and they are united in their shared<\/i> <\/span>warfare against the public (but the rhetoric is much prettier and the lies are more subtle under Obama). As the liberal wing of it said, in the person of its Warren Buffett,\u00a0\u201cThere\u2019s class warfare, all right, but it\u2019s my class, the rich class, that\u2019s making war, and we\u2019re winning.\u201d (He told this to the conservative Ben Stein reporting in the artistocracy\u2019s New York Times<\/i>, on 26 November 2006, but that newspaper\u00a0won\u2019t let readers access the article online, and instead prefer to charge anyone who seeks to see whether or not the quotation is authentic \u2013 it is<\/span><\/a>. And the statement is true<\/span><\/a>. But the vast majority of aristocrats (unlike Buffett there) want to fool the public to believe that either no class-war exists, or else its victims are instead its actual perpetrators the aristocrats themselves, just like they want their fools to believe that internationally the aggressor is Russia, not the U.S.-Saudi-led alliance of Western \u2018democracies\u2019 and jihadist groups that together hate the non-sectarian government of Russia and want to grab that land\u2019s resources.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Then, these two stenographers-to-power wrote: “‘The increasing number of Russian-supplied advanced air defense systems in Syria, including SA-17s, is another example that Russia and the regime seek to complicate the global counter-Daesh <\/b>[meaning ISIS] coalition\u2019s air\u00a0campaign,’ said Major Tim Smith, using another term for the Islamic State. The increasing number of Russian air defense systems further complicate an already difficult situation over the skies in Syria, and do nothing to advance the fight against the Islamic State, which has no air\u00a0force, Smith said.\u201d<\/b>\u00a0In other words: they\u2019re saying two things here: (1) Russia\u2019s defending itself in Syria against another Turkish \u2013 or maybe even American \u2013 shoot-down of another Russian bomber, “further complicate an already difficult situation over the skies in Syria,\u201d and (2) it also does “nothing to advance the fight against the Islamic State.\u201d But both of those also are lies: The U.S. and its allies are the ones who \u201cfurther complicate\u201d the situation, by increasing the stakes after the barbarous Turkish shoot-down of Russia\u2019s anti-jihadist<\/i> bomber. And Russia\u2019s bombing campaign in Syria has achieved more in two months than the U.S. and its allies \u2013 including the Sunni Shariah-law nations that finance jihad \u2013 had achieved in two years there while the \u201callied\u201d side were actually trying to bring down the government of Bashar al-Assad. The fakery of the Western \u2018democracies\u2019 and \u2018press\u2019 is bare-faced in that passage.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then, the stenographers report, regarding Russia, that: “the Obama administration has accused it of targeting the rebel groups the U.S. was supporting, not the Islamic State.\u00a0The Russian strikes are also targeting commercial vehicles passing from Turkey into Syria,\u00a0the administration official told us.\u201d<\/b> The lies there are (1) that Russian air-strikes have not included ISIS along with all of the other many jihadist groups, all of them fundamentalist Sunnis, fighting in Syria to overthrow the secular Shiite Assad; and (2) that bombing “commercial vehicles passing from Turkey into Syria\u201d that are sent there to load up on ISIS-controlled oil stolen from Syria, and which \u201ccommercial vehicles” (oil trucks) Russia has bombed around a thousand of them<\/span><\/a> (though the U.S. over the prior years had bombed none at all), shouldn\u2019t be bombed<\/i>. Oh? Really? On which side of this war are America and its allies? Duh \u2013 the stenographers show they don\u2019t even care. They\u2019re just stenographers \u2013 or, as America calls them, \u201creporters\u201d and \u201ccolumnists.\u201d This is \u2018news reporting\u2019 in the U.S. \u2018press.’<\/span><\/p>\n

The remainder of the article (the entire closing half of it \u2013 and by their closing with this far-right garbage they are thereby placing their emphasis<\/i> upon it) presents far-right criticisms of Obama, which Bloomberg’s stenographers then summarize at the very end of this scummy work by saying that “the U.S. is not only decreasing pressure, but acquiescing to Russian pressure.\u00a0This benefits not only Assad and Russia, but also the Islamic State.\u201d<\/b> In other words, the message there is: the Republican wing of the aristocracy (and the stenographers don\u2019t even inform their readers that this is what they\u2019re now actually quoting from, and here paraphrasing) want Obama to force Russia to have to choose right now between either nuclear war, or else capitulation in Syria<\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This is more of the type of \u2018press\u2019 that was on display in America during 2002-2003: Back then, it was lies from the Republican wing of the aristocracy, but this time it\u2019s lies from the Democratic wing of the aristocracy \u2013 but attacked, in this instance, by Republicans, since that\u2019s the wing from which Bloomberg comes. In either case, it\u2019s still the same fake \u2018press.’\u00a0George W. Bush wasn\u2019t bad enough, so they gave us Barack Obama.<\/span><\/p>\n

Regarding my having said at the opening, that, \u201cin the process\u201d of all this lying, \u201cthey mistakenly included some real news that contradicts the very same fake storyline they\u2019re pumping on behalf of the U.S. government, and of their billionaire employer,\u201d here\u2019s that snippet of real news, which is the entirety of their article\u2019s positive value (it\u2019s the entirety of their article\u2019s second sentence): <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe U.S. has stopped flying manned air-support missions for rebels in a key part of northern Syria due to\u00a0Russia\u2019s expansion of air defense systems there, and the Barack Obama administration is scrambling to figure out what to do about it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

That was the smidgeon of truth contained in their \u2018news\u2019 report about the war in Syria. All the rest of their article was pure deception.<\/span><\/p>\n

No wonder \u2018we\u2019 invaded Iraq, Libya, and perpetrated a coup in Ukraine<\/span><\/a>. But Vladimir Putin isn\u2019t like Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, or Viktor Yanukovych. And, it seems that Barack Obama knows this, even if his Republican opposition don\u2019t. (Actually, they\u2019re just lying: they know it, but they are constantly baiting him to go even farther to the right, because this is the way that Republican \u2018news\u2019 media successfully sucker their fools, to think that Obama is a communist Muslim Kenyan alien, inside the White House. Suckers never learn.)<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013<\/span><\/p>\n

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

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org This is the story of an ordinary article by two well-known American \u2018journalists\u2019 who market the aristocracy\u2019s lies as \u2018news,\u2019 so that the public believes dangerous myths, which might unfortunately get out of control and end in nuclear war. Josh Rogin and Eli Lake, two \u201cColumnists\u201d functioning in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":165829,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[115,30,96,535,38,541,526,987,754,523,49,76,40,1024],"class_list":{"0":"post-212588","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"tag-barack-obama","9":"tag-big-brother","10":"tag-cover-up","11":"tag-global-news","12":"tag-iraq","13":"tag-media","14":"tag-propaganda","15":"tag-russia-today","16":"tag-syria","17":"tag-ukraine","18":"tag-usa-news","19":"tag-warfare","20":"tag-white-house","21":"tag-ww3"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212588\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/165829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}