America's Recent Wars have all been Accompanied b
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RUFF/message/68965;_ylc=X3oDMTJzazlyZXEyBF9TAzk3MzU5NzE1BGdycElkAzEwNDk0NjQxBGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTA4Mzc2NARtc2dJZAM2ODk2NQRzZWMDZG1zZwRzbGsDdm1zZwRzdGltZQMxMzA4MTY0Njc5>y
False Stories
By Prof Peter Dale Scott
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.
<http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25249>ca/index.
<http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25249>php?context=
<http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25249>va&aid=25249
<http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25249>
Global Research, June 13, 2011
The Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 9, Issue 24
It is a troubled Time for NATOs campaign against Libya. President Obama
has seen a near-revolt in Congress against the costly war, while Defense
Secretary Gates in Brussels has warned his European allies that their
tepid response is putting the Libya mission and the alliance's very
future at risk.1 Back home, according to the London Daily Mail, Mr
Gates has requested extra funds for Libya operations, but has been
rebuffed by the White House.2
The past history of American wars tells us that, when the war-going
begins to get tough, the professional p.r. campaigns get going, often
with wholly invented stories. For example, when in 1990 Defense
Secretary Colin Powell was expressing doubts that the United States
should attack Kuwait, stories appeared that, as revealed by classified
satellite photos, Saddam had amassed 265,000 troops and 1500 tanks at
the edge of the Saudi Arabian border. Powell then changed his mind, and
the attack proceeded. But after the invasion a reporter from the St.
Petersburg Times viewed satellite photos from a commercial satellite,
and she saw no sign of a quarter of a million troops or their tanks.3
Hawks in Congress, notably Tom Lantos and Stephen Solarz, secured
support for the attack on Iraq with a story from a 15-year-old girl,
that she had seen Kuwaiti infants snatched from their incubators by
Iraqi soldiers. The story was discredited when it was learned that the
girl, the daughter of the Saudi ambassador in Washington, might not have
visited the hospital at all. She had been prepped on her story by the
p.r. firm Hill & Knowlton, which had a contract for $11.5 million from
the Kuwaiti government.4
The history of American foreign interventions is littered with such
false stories, from the Remember the Maine campaign of the Hearst
press in 1898, to the false stories of a North Vietnamese attack on U.S.
destroyers in the so-called Second Tonkin Gulf incident of August 4,
1964. We know furthermore that in their Operation Northwoods documents,
the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962 proposed a series of ways, some
of them lethal, to deceive the American people in order to engineer a
war against Cuba.5
Since the fiasco of the false Iraqi stories in 1990-91, these stories
have tended to be floated by foreign sources, usually European. This was
conspicuously the case with the forged yellowcake documents from Italy
underlying Bushs misleading reference to Iraq in his 2003 State of the
Union address.6 But it was true also of the false stories linking Saddam
Hussein to the celebrated anthrax letters of 2001. (Their anthrax was
later determined to have come from a U.S. biowarfare laboratory.)7
This recurring history of falsified stories to justify interventions
should be on our minds as we now face the allegations, as yet neither
proven nor disproven, that Gaddafi has been using rape as a method to
fight insurrection, and may have been guilty of raping victims himself.
These charges were made on June 8 by Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief
prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), who claimed
(according to Time Magazine
there were indications that Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi had ordered
the rape of hundreds of women during his violent crackdown on the rebels
and that he had even provided his soldiers with Viagra to stimulate the
potential for attacks.8
Luis Moreno-Ocampo
According to Time, the rape stories are being circulated by doctors who
claim to have met and treated patients but do not have patients'
permission to reveal their identities. Earlier, according to a Libyan
doctor interviewed in an Al Jazeera video, many doctors have found
Viagra and condoms in the pockets of dead pro-Gaddafi fighters, as well
as treated female rape survivors. The doctor insists this clearly
indicates the Gaddafi regime is using rape as a weapon of war.9
But what of Morenos charge that Now we are getting some information
that Gaddafi himself decided to rape, and this is new.10 This is a
sensational charge: until we learn there is a reliable source for it,
one can suspect it was made to grab headlines.
One problem in investigating these charges is that Libyan culture is so
unkind to rape victims that they are reluctant to come forward.
Researchers for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International were unable
to find one woman who said she had been raped. A U.N. human rights
investigator, Cherif Bassiouni, told Agence France-Presse that the rape
and Viagra stories were being circulated by the Benghazi authorities as
part of a massive hysteria. In fact he had discovered only three
cases.11
Military conflict of course is normally accompanied by rape. What might
constitute a war crime would be whether (to quote Time) Gaddafi had
provided his soldiers with Viagra. Moreno actually said, according to
the Associated Press, that some witnesses confirmed that the [Libyan]
government was buying containers of Viagra-type drugs to enhance the
possibility to rape."
Others have objected that the purchase of Viagra-type drugs falls far
short of indicating a war crime. Former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia
McKinney, in Tripoli on an investigative mission, has pointed out in her
emails that to date the one army known to have distributed Viagra as
part of its war operations is the U.S. Army as a bribe to entice
information from aging tribal leaders in Afghanistan.12
Times subtle enhancement of Morenos claim from purchasing Viagra to
providing it to soldiers, reminds us of the sorry record of the U.S.
mainstream media in circulating past false stories to justify war. It is
painful to say this, but virtually every major U.S. military
intervention since Korea has been accompanied by false stories. Mr.
Moreno-Ocampo should be pressed to come forward quickly with the
supporting evidence for his charges, which should be based on more than
the testimony of doctors working for the Benghazi regime.
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at
the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and
War, The Road to 9/11, and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep
Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep
Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan.
Peter Dale Scott is a Research Assoc
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subscribe: <mailto:[email protected]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Digest: <mailto:[email protected]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Help: <mailto:[email protected]?subject=laamn>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Post: <mailto:[email protected]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/
<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
[email protected]
[email protected]
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[email protected]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
