The overarching framework, Chomsky points out, is the so-called Clinton Doctrine, named after former US president Bill Clinton. The doctrine asserts that United States is entitled to the ‘unilateral use of military power’ to ensure ‘uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources’. This entitlement is dressed up as alleged ‘security’ or ‘humanitarian’ concerns.
Iran and Turkey could assist Russia if Greece fulfills the US’ request to close its airspace to Russian aircraft carrying humanitarian aid to war-torn Syria.
The Syria story is being universally framed as ‘We have to go in there and do something’ but a crucial element is missing, namely that US-aligned forces have long been covertly operating in Syria. An internal email dated 7th December 2011 of the Stratfor ‘global intelligence’ company published by WikiLeaks makes this very clear.
The US funded, armed and fueled the very crisis its partisan media are now calling for it to swoop and in save. The moral ADD required by those pushingfurther US involvement in the Syrian civil war in the face of this fact is severe.
It is very reminiscent of the entirely fake narrative of a (non-existent) tank column sweeping down to massacre every civilian in Benghazi, to halt which we had to murder, by bombing, many thousands of civilians in Sirte, several hundred miles away and containing no tank columns.
A cursory yet objective glance at Western powers’ domestic and foreign policies over the course of the last 100 years shows a repeated penchant for exploitation, abuse, insatiable greed and mass murder, all under the guise of ‘fiscal responsibility’, ‘peace keeping’, ‘foreign investment’, ‘fighting terrorism’ or some other paramoralistic hokum.
On and on, the establishment press has attacked an obviously authentic representative of Labour values as the ultimate threat to Labour values. On and on, the alleged concern has been to save the Labour party from itself, to protect its electability, to defend democracy. Much of this ‘concern’ has been expressed by sworn enemies of the Labour party.
By the time politicians reach Westminster, they do not need to be recruited to a cabal. They have simply proven over a long period that they have a strong ideological fit with the institutions that govern us. If not, their careers would have stalled much earlier, in the lower rungs of these institutions, or they would have “dropped out”. The same processes select those who fill top posts in the media and other influential “professions”.
Associations representing the profession have no difficulty accommodating apologists for war crimes. Yet it’s not deemed acceptable for journalists to protest at war crimes.
Has journalism turned into stenography? Should Jorge Ramos simply report Donald Trump’s plans to expel 11 million people from the United States, without challenging the inherent cruelty and — let us be frank — racism?
What is happening in Yemen is truly a heinous crime against humanity committed by Western governments. It is an unspeakable crime. And that is why the Western media will not dare talk about it. The Western media are obliged to ignore, obfuscate and distort the shocking truth of what their governments are committing in Yemen.
This makes the Western media just as complicit in the appalling criminality.
In spite of the erased and ruined lives in millions, the ruins of Iraq, of much of Baghdad “the Paris of the 9thcentury”, of many of historical gems that have survived assaults over millennia but not Bush and Blair, it seems likely Chilcot’s Inquiry, if it eventually appears, will prove another dead end.
A new memoir by a former senior State Department analyst provides stunning details on how decades of support for Islamist militants linked to Osama bin Laden brought about the emergence of the ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS).
