Saturday, August 25, 2018

Debunking Three Of The Biggest Lies The Media Has Recently Told


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Recently, alternative media gained a major victory. After the corporate outlets have refused to cover almost any of the ongoing U.S./Saudi lead genocide in Yemen, many of these outlets have lately started giving the atrocities meaningful coverage. This change is no doubt a response to the extensive coverage that alternative news sites like Truthdig and Mintpress News have been giving to Yemen, which has exposed the complicity of the mainstream media.


This is the latest time that the oligarchic propaganda machine has lost control over how people see the world. And we can continue this trend by exposing the other glaring deceptions that have recently come from our major media outlets. Not just the lies of omission that they’ve made, as the Yemen media blackout exemplifies, but the directly false statements that have been put out on a mass scale to the American people in recent years. The most revealing of these false claims go as follows.
“Russia hacked the DNC”
The claims behind “Russiagate” are almost all either dubious or false, and they’ve been picked apart in articles like this one and this one. But here I’ll dissect a particularly revealing falsehood about Russia that our media has told, which is the claim that the DNC was hacked two years ago by the Russian government.
This claim was brought back into regular media attention last month, when Robert Mueller put out indictments which at first glance proved Russia’s role in the DNC leaks. Yet Mueller’s claims include glaring factual contradictions and unsupported statements; they cite Guccifer 2.0 as the supposed Russian hacker behind the DNC’s infiltration, yet it was found months ago that reports about Guccifer 2.0 were deliberately manipulated in reports to make their data traces look Russian in origin; the report doesn’t include evidence for why the GRU officers that it implicates in this supposed hacking job are tied to the activities mentioned in Mueller’s statements; and on the instances of go of misleading statement within the document.
When a resource with these kinds of flaws is what’s used to try to support the claim that Russia hacked the DNC, it’s unsurprising that the claim itself is flimsy. The public evidence that intelligence agencies have presented for Russia’s involvement in the leak is not sufficient; Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity has run tests showing that the DNC’s software may not have even been compatible with a transatlantic hack; and as Edward Snowden has pointed out, the NSA would have picked up evidence for the DNC hack if the hack had happened.
Our media’s presenting this story as fact has been a shameful act of misinformation. And it ties in with another key piece of propaganda, which is:
“Assange is working for Russia”
First, I should again point out that Assange has not been shown to have broken any laws. His sexual assault charge has been dismissed, and has been disproven by details which directly contradict the claims behind it. And to say he’s guilty of espionage is to say the same about news outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post, which also engage in the regular journalistic practice of publishing leaked secrets. So since Assange is denounced by the people in power as a criminal, we know that Assange is the target of yet another effort to punish those who defy power.
When you recognize this, the baseless claims about Assange being a Russian agent make perfect sense. And yes, this claim is a lie as far as the evidence tells us. President Obama stated in a press conference two years ago that the U.S. hasn’t found information that links WikiLeaks with Russia. Nothing has come out since then to contradict Obama’s assessment. And Assange’s actions have even served to dispel the possibility that he’s working for Putin, with WikiLeaks having put outdocuments last year which show the Russian government’s secret spying practices.
Even so, could you accuse Assange of using WikiLeaks to try to influence politics towards Putin’s interests? All evidence also goes against this idea. WikiLeaks did not try to hack into the DNC or the Podesta server, because WikiLeaks doesn’t ever do any hacking; it only publishes information from independent whistleblowers. There’s also no proof that WikiLeaks published these leaks at politically strategic times, nor that they refused to publish leaks about Trump.
This is because the Podesta emails were published right after the release of Trump’s Access Hollywood tape entirely by coincidence, because WikiLeaks had planned the timing of the emails’ publication before the tape was unexpectedly released. And WikiLeaks’ lack of material about Trump hasn’t been for lack of trying; as was famously reported last year, Assange communicated with Donald Trump Jr. before the election in an attempt to gain and leak Trump’s tax returns. Assange has since continued to seek out publishing Trump’s tax records, and has called for Trump to release them.
But none of this matters to the deep state figures who continue to seek Assange’s persecution; Mueller’s latest indictment, without compelling evidence, has implicated WikiLeaks as a Russian asset. This has set things up for Assange to be prosecuted as a supposed enemy actor.
As New York Times lawyer David McGraw recently assessed, prosecuting Assange would create a legal precedent that allows for all journalists who publish leaks to also be targeted by the state. And this loss for the free press couldn’t come at a worse time.
“Assad has gassed his own people”
The two latest Syria false flags have required some impressive cognitive dissonance-or doublethink as Orwell would call it-to be created by the war propaganda machine. In 2016, Americans saw a report from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical weapons which showed that Syria had given up all of its chemical weapons. Western government and media figures have dealt with this logical contradiction either by baselessly speculating that Assad still has some chemical weapons, or by ignoring the issue and letting people’s memories be revised.
And numerous other holes in the “gas attack” narrative appear as we look at it objectively. James Mattis admitted in February that the U.S. doesn’t have evidence that Assad committed a chemical attack last year. And the details surrounding that incident have all indicated that Assad wasn’t to blame; namely, the United Nations report from last that’s been used to try to incriminate Assad is highly inconsistentwith eyewitness reports of the event.
The situation has been similar for the supposed gas attack this April, with numerous people from the site of the attack having reported and testified that no chemicals were involved. Add this to the fact that Assad has actually never used his chemical weapons and that U.S.-backed jihadists have repeatedly staged gas attacks, and the outrageous extent of the lies we’ve been told about Syria becomes clear. As does the danger of Washington’s aggressive agenda towards Syria, which could escalate into a U.S./Russia war.
But the empire doesn’t want people to notice these things, so it’s now using censorshipdisinformation, and outright repression to stifle the voices that challenge its propaganda. The persecution of Assange is central to this war on dissent, as is the anti-Russia campaign that’s used to justify it.
All of the narratives I’ve talked about are linked with each other, because they all serve to advance the agenda of the global oligarchs. We only have to expose the deceptions, and the manipulators who run society will lose their power.

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