Hide the Photos of the Maimed and the Dead, so the War Looks Sterile, Glorious and Successful.

They hide the dead to help the "fight for freedom." Most corporate news organizations have been cheerleaders for the wars waged by the party in power.  They curate the experience for you to spare you the trouble of thinking.  Think of Afghanistan. And see here.  Raw photography would end almost every war, so that's why you are not permitted to see the photos, especially photos of up-close suffering, maiming of civilians and death, in the corporate media. Not in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Iran or anywhere else that the US fights for "freedom." Robert Fisk, Robert Fisk (1946–2020) was a highly regarded British journalist and author:

I always remember when Madeleine Albright announced that Israel was under siege. For a brief moment, I asked myself, if there were Palestinian tanks in Haifa. How do we reach a stage where we so distort reality that we actually have a lethal effect on the conflict itself? The worst example of this, I'm sorry to say, is television, the way in which, unless an Iraqi is obliging enough in a war to die romantically beside the road in silhouette with all his arms still attached, you do not see the dead for viewers of television, not in the Arab world, I might add that in the West we do not see the dead, and thus our leaders, all of whom at the moment have ZERO experience of real war--the journalists do, but not our leaders in the West--they are able to present, to the public, war as a bloodless sand pit. War as something primarily to do with victory and defeat rather than death, which is exactly what is about on a large scale. War represents the total failure of the human spirit.

And I had a perfect example of this in 2003 I was in Baghdad. I was trying to get down to Basra. I got halfway, and then I was so frightened I could hardly write. And were so many bombs dropping from my own Air Force, among others, that I turned back to Baghdad. But Al Jazeera were in Basra, and they got back the same day to Baghdad with their video film, and I sat with them in their little tent. You probably realized that in a war, many of the big agencies pool their material, especially the television companies. So it was being sent through the satellite to Reuters in London, whose job was to edit the film. So of course, this was film of a civilian hospital. There were some soldiers brought in wounded and dead, but most of the pictures were of dead and wounded, women and children. They had been killed and wounded by British artillery fire in Basra. The British were besieging Basra while the Americans took the highway to claim Baghdad. And what was particularly revealing was, as they showed the film, I listened to the remarks coming back from London. You know, there were terrible scenes. It was one of a child holding its intestines and a woman with part of her hand missing. And there were screams and cries and lots of blood on the film. And the voice from London said, "You know, we can't really show this. You can't show this to people at tea time." And by this moment, I had my notebook out for The Independent, my newspaper. THIS was going to be tonight's story. So [Al Jazeera] said, "Please, please. Please, we risked our life for this. Just let us put out a little bit more of the film. Maybe you can use it." And of course, there were more pictures of blood and wounded children and dead children. And then the voice came back and said, "This is obscene. We can't put obscene pictures like this on Western television." They pleaded again by now, of course. My pen was skidding over the pages. These were great quotes, because this is what was wrong. And then the voice came back for the third and final time. "We can't show these pictures because we must respect the dead." Now you get the point. We didn't respect them when they were alive. We didn't respect them when we blew them to bits. But when they're dead, by God, we have to respect them.

Continue ReadingHide the Photos of the Maimed and the Dead, so the War Looks Sterile, Glorious and Successful.

Tucker Carlson: No More Blank Checks for Israel

Tucker Carlson's message needs to be blasted from every corporate news outlet:

It's time not to end it, not to set up an adversarial relationship, but to set up a healthy conventional relationship where Israel can pay its own bills and fund its own military and act within the constraints imposed on it by its own economy and population. That's what normal countries do. Most countries live with neighbors that don't like them, with whom they have testy relationships. But they make accommodations because they have no choice. There's no country in the world that acts with total impunity because it knows a much larger country will backstop it no matter what it does that just doesn't exist in the natural world, because it's not natural, it's grotesque, and it's terrible for the United States, and now it's obvious.

Continue ReadingTucker Carlson: No More Blank Checks for Israel

Democrat Party War Mongering

There was no anti-war party on the presidential ballot in 2024.

Jeremy Loffredo:

There is a version of the Democratic Party that exists only in the imagination: the peace party, the anti-war party, the party that marched against the Iraq War and howled at its neocon designers. As Donald Trump (reportedly) accepted Iran’s ceasefire terms this week, some of the most pointed attacks coming his way from Democrats are not about the thousands of civilians killed, the weeks of brutal bombardments against medical centers and universities, or the global economic damage the war has caused. They are about the war ending before the U.S. and Israel finished the job.

And this is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a pattern coming from Democratic senators, the Democratic House Foreign Affairs Committee, ranking members of the Armed Services Committee, and some of the party’s most prominent voices. The liberal opposition party wants more war.

This pattern predates the war. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Kamala Harris called Iran America’s “greatest adversary,” vowed that Iran would never obtain a nuclear weapon under her watch, and argued that Iran’s attacks on Israel would not have happened under her presidency. The Democratic nominee for president was running on a promise to be harder on Iran than Donald Trump.

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Jeffrey Sach: Trump Lies that the US Needs to Wage War Against Iran

Once again, Jeffrey Sachs is spot on:

Trump's entire framework is completely phony and it's completely phony because Iran did not want nuclear weapons. They signed an agreement that there would not be nuclear weapons and then Trump ripped it up. Now, why did he rip it up in 2018 and why was there a standing ovation in Congress? Because this is Israel's policy, because Congress and the White House are owned by radical, militant, crazy Zionists in Israel, Bibi, Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben Gvir, who want a war with Iran, and Trump is a puppet here. He does not have an independent capacity. Maybe he's not bright enough. Maybe he's blackmailed. We don't understand entirely, but the standing ovation reflects the Zionist lobby in the United States. This is Israel's war, and like so many of America's wars, they're trying to bring us into their fight, which is not our fight, when I say so many of our wars, the United States has been drawn by Israel into the wars in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria, across the Middle East. These are not wars for American security. They're not even wars for Israel's security. They're wars for Israel's hegemony in the region. They're wars by Israel to take out any opponent in the region or any counterweight in the region. So the United States tasked the CIA to overthrow the Syrian government. That was Obama that started that one. Trump continued it. Trump even said, I put the current leader of Syria into power. Yeah, that's a CIA operation. It was Israel that got the United States to go to war with Libya in 2011 leading to the next 15 years of chaos in that country. It is Israel that got the United States into the Iraq war in 2003. This is all so thoroughly documented at this point that that was not a war under mistaken pretenses of weapons of mass destruction. That was a PR campaign to justify Bibi's war.

And the reason why it's most likely that Trump will attack is the following: The American people don't want it. The Iranians have said they don't want nuclear weapons. The regional leaders have said, Don't go to war. Other leaders around the world, President Putin, President Xi and others have told the United States that is a terrible idea. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have told Trump this is a terrible idea. Trump's political advisers have told Trump this is disastrous because the American people don't want this. But that's all on one side. The other side is Bibi, is Israel, is Miriam Adelson, who else? We don't know exactly why, but this is the point. Trump is being overwhelmingly advised by everybody, by his military, by leaders in the region, by his political advisors, and not the least by the American people: don't do this. But it's so strange and discouraging. There isn't an honest word that comes out of Washington because of this Zionist lobby right now. And there is was no coverage whatsoever, by the way that when Rubio said a couple of weeks ago, look, we need a broad-based negotiation, and the Iranians said two days later in a speech in Doha by the foreign minister, yes, here's a path to peace, The two state solution, a state of Palestine, Israel, mutual respect, peace. That wasn't even picked up in our newspapers. [We] are subject to mass propaganda. And Trump lied every word that we just watched, and the Congress stood up and applauded him. But that's for a reason. That is the chokehold on American politics that this Zionist lobby has right now. And we need to break that chokehold for our own security.

Continue ReadingJeffrey Sach: Trump Lies that the US Needs to Wage War Against Iran

They Lied About Ukraine and NATO Too

After many thousands of people have been needlessly slaughtered, the truth comes out:

Amanda Sloat (Biden's top National Security Council official for Europe) recognises that if NATO had promised not to expand, then the war could have been avoided.

** This comes after our political-media establishment has for 4 years smeared, censored and cancelled anyone who claimed that NATO expansion triggered the war.

** It is strange how these people present the US as a passive actor in the question of NATO expansion, and suggest that the only alternative to NATO expansion is a Russian “sphere of influence.

Continue ReadingThey Lied About Ukraine and NATO Too