Eric Zuesse

The following facts were established and published in obscure places in 2002 (which will be documented here), well before the U.S. and UK invaded Iraq. But, did you know these facts, from the news-reports you encountered, at that time, before we invaded, on that day that will forever be remembered in infamy, as the precise date when America’s rabid dictatorship became clearly exposed, for all future history to contemplate, in horror, that cursed day being 20 March 2003 — the day of the invasion that is still destroying the Middle East, and worse? Did you know these facts, at that time? The New Rulers of the World John Pilger, 2002, Verso Books p.9:At the time of writing, Iraq is likely to be attacked by the United States. Using sections of the American and British press as ‘conduits’, US intelligence has successfully created what the CIA in Indochina used to call a ‘master illusion’. This is the threat of Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’. There is no proof or credible evidence of any such threat, which has been denied by numerous authorities, including the former United Nations inspector in Iraq, Scott Ritter.17 However, the Iraqi ‘threat’ is central to the Bush administration’s post-September 11 strategy of ‘total war p.152:

The most important ‘evidence’ of Iraq’s complicity with September 11 is that the alleged leader of the Twin Towers suicide hijackers, Mohamed Atta, was supposed to have met an Iraqi intelligence agent in the Czech Republic. In the British press, the intelligence agent was promoted from being ‘low level’ (The Guardian) to ‘mid-ranking’ (Independent) to ‘senior’ (Financial Times) to the ‘head of Baghdad’s intelligence services’ (The Times). Only the Financial Times questioned whether the ‘meeting’ took place at all, or had anything to do with the destruction of the Twin Towers.97 On the BBC’s Newsnight, Mark Urban, the Foreign Office correspondent, revealed that there was ‘secret information’ about ‘a missile Saddam Hussein was planning to launch’. He provided no evidence.

p.153:
Omission is the most virulent form of censorship. In much of the reporting of Afghanistan, the American assault on one of the world’s poorest countries was justified with potent images evoking the Taliban’s ‘evil’.
p.155-6:
On July 3, 1979, unknown to the American public and Congress, President Carter authorised a $500 million covert action programme in support of the tribal groups known as the mujaheddin. The aim was the overthrow of Afghanistan’s first secular, progressive government. Contrary to cold war mythology, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which did not happen until six months later, had nothing to do with it. Indeed, all the evidence is that the Soviets made their fatal move into Afghanistan in response to the very tribal and religious ‘terrorism’ that the Americans used to justify their invasion in November 2001.
In an interview in 1998, Brzezinski admitted that Washington had lied about the American role. ‘According to the official version of history,’ he said, ‘CIA aid to the mujaheddin began during 1980, that is, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan . . . But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise.’103 In August 1979, the US embassy in Kabul reported that ‘the United States’ larger interests . . . would be served by the demise of [PDPA government], despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.’104
Thus, Washington began a Faustian affair with some of the most brutal fanatics on earth. Men like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar received tens of millions of CIA dollars. Hekmatyar’s speciality was trafficking in opium and throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. Invited to London in 1986, he was lauded by Prime Minister Thatcher as a ‘freedom fighter’.

As I summed up, on 16 September 2015, another example of this:

On 7 September 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush blatantly lied to concoct a “new report” by the IAEA about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction program, and the U.S. news-media reported the statement but hid that it was a lie. He said (and CNN and others quoted it): “a report came out of the Atomic — the IAEA that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need,” when he was asked at a press conference, “Mr. President, can you tell us what conclusive evidence of any nuclear — new evidence you have of nuclear weapons capabilities of Saddam Hussein?” Immediately, the IAEA said then that there was no such “new report,” and that the last they were able to find, there, was nothing left of WMD in Iraq. The American news-media simply ignored the IAEA’s denial, and we invaded Iraq, almost six months after that boldfaced lie, a lie the press refused to expose, at all — ever. They still haven’t exposed it, even to the present day; and instead there remains a ‘debate’ as to whether George W. Bush lied or was instead merely misled by “defective U.S. intelligence.” In this particular instance, he wasn’t even citing U.S. intelligence, but instead the IAEA, and they immediately denied it, but the press failed to report that; so, really, the President was simply lying, and the press just continue to lie by saying he had only “been misled by the CIA” (which he actually controlled; but he didn’t control the IAEA). The American press hide the fact that the American President lied his nation into invading Iraq. The press lie that it was only “bad intelligence,” no lying President.

(Because of the news-media’s ignoring the IAEA’s denial of the President’s statement, the author of the IAEA’s denial, Mark Gwozdecky, spoke three weeks later, by phone, with the only journalist who was interested, Joseph Curl of the Washington Times, who headlined on 27 September 2002, “Agency Disavows Report on Iraq Arms” — perhaps that should instead have been “President Lied About ‘Saddam’s WMD’” — and Curl quoted Gwozdecky: “There's never been a report like that [which Bush alleged] issued from this agency. … When we left in December '98 we had concluded that we had neutralized their nuclear-weapons program. We had confiscated their fissile material. We had destroyed all their key buildings and equipment.” Other news-media failed to pick up Curl’s article. And, even in that article, there was no clear statement that the President had, in fact, lied — cooked up an IAEA ‘report’ that never actually existed — and that he never corrected his false allegation; that he compounded his lie by not correcting it.)

After the 7 September 2002 statement by Bush, and denial of it by the IAEA, and failure of the ‘news’media to pick up on its denial by the alleged source (IAEA), I phoned and wrote to many ‘news’media, even managed to reach a few famous ‘reporters’ personally, and tried to draw their attention to that and to other indications of Bush’s lying and to his predetermination to invade Iraq no-matter-what, but no one was interested. I was shocked. Nobody in the Establishment ‘news’media seemed even to care whether their nation was being lied into a totally unjustified invasion. They actually defended to me their stenographic reporting of what the government was saying — as if to challenge it, or even ask follow-up questions about it, were unpatriotic.

Suppression of honest news-reports is now being carried out at the highest levels, not only of economic control, but of control over the Internet itself. For example, on April 13th, I published this:

Google Is Now Threatening My Publishers

I just happened to notice at one of my publishers, RINF, “Google’s Censorship Of Independent News – Rinf Becomes Latest Victim”, and the owner, Mick Meaney, described Google’s threat to him if he didn’t remove a news-article that was critical of the Israeli government. He promptly removed it. He continued:

“Then the next day, as I expected, I received another email telling me to delete a second article. This time it was an article about Donald Trump, written by Eric Zuesse.”

He’s in a predicament:

“My choice is now; let Google dictate what information is acceptable, or significantly reduce the amount of time I spend devoted to RINF.” …

Following in that report about the RINF matter, was an explanation of Google’s extensive operation assisting the overthrow of governments that the U.S. aristocracy targets for replacement. Google — now called “Alphabet Inc.” — were heavily involved in 2011 helping Hillary Clinton’s State Department draw up the plans to overthrow two heads-of-state that allied with Russia: Yanukovych in Ukraine, and Assad in Syria.

The website you are now reading is devoted to reporting the truth where the U.S. aristocracy and its agents (including governments and ‘news’media) do not. This site is a place that you can recommend to your friends to expose the falsehoods that they read and hear every day on the aristocratically controlled media. It provides a counterweight to those lies, so as to enable people who do not want to, yet again, support their own government’s atrocities, come to know about these atrocities maybe even before they get perpetrated — maybe even early enough for these readers to become active in opposing them, if such opposition still is tolerated in this ‘democracy’, by that aristocracy and its agents, and will continue to be tolerated by them.

The idea that the American public are in control of the American government is by now a proven falsehood. But restoration of democracy is impossible with ‘news’media that are controlled by billionaires, and by advertising income from other billionaires’ corporations, and by a government that also is controlled by billionaires.

Only continued dictatorship is possible under these circumstances — a one-party, billionaires’-party, regime, with two branches, the ‘liberal’ branch and the ‘conservative’ branch, both controlled by the same tiny aristocracy (billionaires) and its agents, all of whom have the same basic agenda — to crush and control the public. (Lower wages, increase profits, shift environmental and other indirect costs off onto the public, invisible to the billionaires speeding by behind the dark frosted-glass windows on their limousines, which separate these self-styled ‘beautiful people’ from the teeming ugliness that the public will increasingly experience, as poverty and war explode, and corruption surges.)

This is the international police state, the multinational corporations’ globally enforced dreamland, ceaselessly arming to prevent any possibility of revolution. It is neoconservative; it is neoliberal. And it is fascism — whatever it may happen to be called.

This situation is truly dire.

Is any of it (beyond its sensationalistic and lie-infested mere surface) being reported by CBS, ABC, NBC, NYT, WP, WSJ, BBC, AP, etc.? Why not?

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.
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