American news media beating the drums to start war against Iran

It is shocking and dismaying that American "news media" is currently leading the charge for America's next war, against Iran. "News outlets are focusing on how the war would progress rather than challenging the propaganda of the American government and Israel. Please read this article by Glenn Greenwald and speak out. Here's an excerpt:

The propaganda at play here is intense indeed. For several years, the U.S. and Israel threaten on an almost daily basis to aggressively attack a country, all while engaging in multiple acts of war against them, and then when their leaders suggest they may not acquiesce to such an attack with passivity and gratitude, those vows of defensive retaliation are used to depict them as the threat-issuing aggressors. And the American media, as always, eagerly implants the propaganda. Thus, if such a war breaks out, NBC News‘ Mik announces, “the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet would be the world’s first line of defense,” though those crazed Persian leaders have threatened to use “Iran’s massive stockpile of ballistic missiles” and to “launch those missiles at U.S. targets.” . . . time and again, Americans support whatever new war of aggression their government proposes, then come to regret that support and decide the war was a “mistake,” only to demonstrate that they learned no lessons from their “mistake” by eagerly supporting whatever the next proposed war is.
This recurring felt-need to go to war repeats pursuant to a tried and true formula described by Normal Soloman in his documentary, "War Made Easy." When you hear out-of-touch commentators (even "liberal" commentators) advocating the "need" for war with Iran, take the time to respond by questioning the claims and offering real world facts. Take a look at what happened at Huffpo when Alan Dershowitz showed that he has drunk the Kool-aid--notice the many hostile comments to his article. The case of Iran is an intense and coordinated propaganda battle that is turning into yet another terrible and destructive war to feed the pockets of the military industrial complex and to satisfy America's need for a scapegoat for its many self-inflicted problems. We are truly living in days of bread and circuses.

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The many lies about Afghanistan

Who would you trust more to report what is really going on in Afghanistan? High ranking generals spellbound by the sunk costs and warped to incoherence by their increasingly outrageous promises of success in this ten-year old war? Or would you trust a 17-year army veteran who has put his career in jeopardy by reporting his frank observations outside of his chain of command? Here is the detailed unclassified report of Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis. He has also provided a classified version to various members of Congress, as reported by Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone, in an article he has titled, "The Afghanistan Report the Pentagon Doesn't Want You to Read." Here is an excerpt from the unclassified report by Daniel Davis:

[A]s was repeated with frequency during the first quarter of 2011 senior ISAF leaders have explained that we killed a significant number of insurgent (INS) leaders and foot soldiers, we took away his former sanctuaries, cut off his supply routes, took away his freedom of movement, discovered a huge number of weapons and ammo caches, and captured hundreds of insurgent fighters. But if these things are so, the expectation of yet another all-time record of violence warned by the leaders was illogical. If I have tens of thousands of additional ISAF boots, and I kill hundreds of INS leaders thousands of his fighters, capture huge numbers of caches, take away his sanctuaries, and deny him freedom of movement, how could he then significantly increase his level of attacks as the Taliban did in the first half of 2011? By any rational calculation, our vastly increasing numbers combined with the enemy's dwindling pool of fighters and loss of equipment ought to have had precisely the opposite effect: they should have been capable of conducting considerably fewer attacks, emplacing a smaller number of IEDs, and their influence on the population should have been notably diminished. Yet none of those things came to pass. ISAF leaders, nevertheless continue to make bold and confident statement after statement that we are succeeding, that the insurgency is weakening, and that the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GoIRA) is gaining the confidence of its people though they offer almost no tangible evidence to that effect, while explaining away the considerable volume of evidence which logically should cause one to reach a very different conclusion.
What is the truth about Afghanistan? Davis cites with approval from a 2011 report by Anthony Cordesman, on behalf of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (see pages 10 and 11): • US and ISAF won every major tactical clash, but lost much of the country; • ISAF denied the scale of the insurgency and the seriousness of its rise. Issued intelligence and other reports claiming success that did not exist; • The US and ISAF remained kinetic through 2009; the insurgent fought a battle of influence over the population and political attrition to drive out the US and ISAF from the start; • In June 2010, the Acting Minister of Interior told the press that only 9 of Afghanistan's 364 districts were considered safe; • No ISAF nation provides meaningful transparency and reporting to its legislature and people. But what about all of those optimistic reports from high ranking U.S. military brass? Davis cites with approval from a report written by Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (ANSO) and signed by ANSO Director, Nic Lee, examining "the security situation in Afghanistan in order to inform the greater NGO community about the risks they face when operating there."
More so than in previous years, information of this nature is sharply divergent from (International Military Forces) 'strategic communication’ messages suggesting improvements. We encourage (NGO personnel) to recognize that no matter how authoritative the source of any such claim, messages of the nature are solely intended to influence American and European public opinion ahead of the withdrawal, and are not intended to offer an accurate portrayal of the situation for those who live and work here.
The report by Davis is compelling, detailed and damning of the propaganda issued by the U.S. regarding Afghanistan. His report is a must read in these times while we continue to spend $2 Billion per week on this fiasco. Now it's time for American journalists to step up and report the truth, though Davis is not optimistic that they will carry out their mission (see p. 28):
So long as our country’s top TV and print media continue to avoid challenging power for fear of losing access, there is every reason to expect many senior Defense Department leaders will continue to play this game of denial of access in order to effect compliant reports. As I’ve shown throughout this report, there is ample open source information and reports all over the internet that would allow any individual – or reporter – to find the truth and report it. But heretofore few have. As I note later in this report that there are a number of high ranking generals in the military today who are brilliant leaders and have the highest standards and integrity (giving me hope that there is a chance of reform in the future), so too there are some really fine journalists in both print and on-air media organizations. We need more experienced and honorable journos – and their parent organizations – to summon the courage to report wherever the truth leads and not simply regurgitate the bullet points handed out by some action officer. America needs you.
Feb 15, 2012 - Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone discusses the report of Lt. Col. Daniel Davis with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now:

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U.S. courts invoke secrecy and immunity to avoid review of detainee abuse cases

Glenn Greenwald writes:

Virtually without exception, the American judiciary has refused to allow any victims of America’s War on Terror abuses — whether foreign national or American citizen — to even have their claims heard in court. Federal courts have repeatedly shielded government officials from any accountability for these abuses, not by ruling in their favor on the merits, but by ruling that they need not answer for their actions at all. Courts have accomplished this whitewashing by accepting the Bush and Obama DOJ’s arguments that government actions undertaken as part of the War on Terror are completely shielded from judicial review — i.e., from the rule of law — by both secrecy doctrines (it’s too secret to risk having a court examine) and immunity prerogatives (government officials cannot be sued even for egregious wrongdoing committed while in office).
Greenwald then lists five examples of U.S. Courts preventing meaningful inquiry based on "secrecy" and "immunity." In comparison, he describes a recent ruling by the Pakistan's highest court holding its ultra-secret ISI agency accountable for prisoner abuse. It appears that the "backwards" country of Pakistan offers more civil rights protection to victims of "the war on terror" than the United States.

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Iran’s nuclear bomb

At Truthout, Retired Republican House and Senate staffer Mike Lofgren indicates that he is seeing so much toxic warmongering aimed at Iran these days that it makes George W. Bush look like a pacifist:

For most of my three-decade career handling national security budgets in Congress, Iran was two or three years away from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The idea of an Islamic bomb exerts a peculiar fascination on American political culture and shines a searchlight on how the gross dysfunctionality of American politics emerges synergistically from the individual dysfunctions of its component parts: the military-industrial complex; oil addiction; the power of foreign-based lobbies; the apocalyptic fixation on the holy land by millions of fundamentalist Americans; US elected officials' neurotic need to show toughness, especially in an election year. The rational calculus of nuclear deterrence, which had guided US policy during the cold war, and which the US government still applies to plainly despotic and bellicose nuclear states like North Korea, has gone out the window with respect to Iran. . . . Whether it is sources in Tel Aviv, sources in Washington, or both, that are feeding Iran stories to the US news media is unclear. Whoever they may be, they are playing much of the press - The Washington Post and CBS News are standout examples - like a Stradivarius. In Pentagon-speak, this is known as "prepping the psychological battlefield."

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Indiscriminate drone attacks by the U.S. termed “war crimes”

Glenn Greenwald takes a look at the disturbing reports concerning Afghanistan drone attacks by the United States, suggesting a pattern to many of the attacks:

the U.S. first kills people with drones, then fires on the rescuers and others who arrive at the scene where the new corpses and injured victims lie.
Experts quoted by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism conclude "targeting rescuers and funeral attendees is patently illegal and almost certainly constitutes war crimes."

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