Home > The Grauniad: An Unlimited Conduit for USUK’s War Propaganda

The Grauniad: An Unlimited Conduit for USUK’s War Propaganda

by Open-Publishing - Thursday 24 May 2007

Media-Network Wars and conflicts International USA UK

http://urlsnip.com/943830

Fed up of the garbage with which their mainstream media force-feeds them, North American as well as readers all over the world have turned to newspapers like the UK’s Guardian in the hope of finding informed, intelligent reporting of world events. They will be disappointed. Today’s Guardian is as much part of an Orwellian, Atlanticist, warmongering propaganda campaign as is the disgraceful New York Times.

Far from being the ’socialist’ newspaper that our American cousins believe it to be, the Guardian has all along played an enthusiastic role in promoting the Bushblair war party’s war crimes against the people of Iraq. Without admitting to it, and through its uneasy relationship with Blairism, it has moved away from Trilateralism to become, de facto, a promoter of the neocon worldview and its Blueprint for a New American Century.

Along with the rest of the western mainstream media (MSM) the quality of its reportage, now so dependent on ’embedded journalism’, has taken a revolting downward lurch. A lurch made all the more disastrous since the appointment of a pimpish US government mouthpiece, Simon Tisdall, as its deputy editor.

British journalism has long been infiltrated by the intelligence services with newspapers like the Telegraph and its notorious Con Coughlin known to be MI5 stooges. Whether or not Tisdall is yet another is not certain but he certainly likes to play the cheerleader for US foreign policy on issues like the Iraq occupation and its anti-Chavism.

His latest piece of disinformation on Iraq, supplied him as the article repeatedly suggests by US "official sources", is not only full of nonsensical contradictions but the kind of blatant propaganda that could only have come straight out of Dick Cheney’s Iran Policy Committee.

’Iran’s secret plan for summer offensive to force US out of Iraq’, begins with the hysterical allegation that, "Iran is secretly forging ties with al-Qaida elements and Sunni Arab militias in Iraq in preparation for a summer showdown with coalition forces intended to tip a wavering US Congress into voting for full military withdrawal, US officials say."

Note the last three words, "US officials say", which are to be found sprayed across the rest of this tripe. Any journalist who uses language such as "al-Qaida elements" without questioning the highly dubious CIA origins of the nebulous Al Qaeda is either naive in extremis or a fully fledged disinformer. Iran is a nation of Shiites who are no friends of the Sunnis. To suggest now that Iran is backing its mortal enemy takes us into a world so full of convoluted logic we could easily drown. Another classic ploy of the disinformer.

Iran expert and academic, Juan Cole, comments despairingly on his blog, "I suppose I have to link to this silly article by poor Simon Tisdall in of all places, The Guardian, whom someone is using to push a sinister agenda. Yes, its sources are looney in positing a coming offensive jointly sponsored by Iran, the Mahdi Army and al-Qaeda."

He continues, "At a time when Sunni Arab guerrillas are said to be opposing ’al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia’ for its indiscriminate violence against Iraqis, including Shiites, we are now expected to believe that Shiite Iran is allying with it. And, it claims that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are shelling the Green Zone."

"The parliament building that was hit to day by such shelling is dominated by the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and its paramilitary, the Badr Organization. Who trained Badr? The Iranian Revolutionary Guards. And they are trying to hit their own guys . . . why?"

" It really is discouraging that Tisdall didn’t report instead on what crazy things the US military spokesmen in Iraq told him. US military spokesmen have been trying to push implausible articles about Shiite Iran supporting Sunni insurgents for a couple of years now, and with virtually the sole exception of the New York Times, no one in the journalistic community has taken these wild charges seriously. But The Guardian?"

Somebody should have warned Juan Cole that the Guardian is no longer the respected journal it was traditionally considered to be. But Cole’s incredulity is common enough among North Americans who, it appears, haven’t quite woken up to smell the Guardian’s new, more bellicose brand of coffee. British readers are already more cynical:

"Merely repeating what unnamed US sources say, however outlandish, is what I’d expect from the Sun, not a proper newspaper. Shame on you - at this time more than ever we need journalists willing to fight the culture of spin and lies, before Brown turns into Blair Two." (WTF is going on at the Guardian?)

Faced with a barrage of hostile criticism, the Guardian editors clearly panicked and put out an explanation stating that Tisdall had never been approached by US officials. Instead, it was he who had sought their views. That’s all right then, so clearly this doesn’t make him a stooge of US military propaganda! Further correspondence by email I had with the Guardian’s Assistant Editor, Michael White, drew a series of hysterically defensive replies suggesting that the newspaper’s editors are now well dug into their bunkers and suffering from severe shell shock.

Clearly, the purpose of this blatant piece of embedded journalism is to provide the Guardian’s chattering classes with a drip-feed of US military propaganda meant to justify Bush’s ’Surge Policy’ and doubling of occupation troops. It is not Bush’s intention or that of his London quislings, Blair and Brown, to withdraw their troops from Iraq. They plan to stay there for an awful long time to come.

And given Bush’s domestic weakness it is quite possible that an outright first strike military onslaught on Iran might have been postponed. But that will not stop an ongoing build-up of US military forces in the Gulf and surrounding area which already encircles and threatens Iran. And now Bush has authorized a "CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran’s currency and international financial transactions." The objective of all this fits in neatly with the neocon Blueprint whose purpose is to capture and occupy the Middle East as on oil producer solely to feed a greedy US appetite.

The greater number of guerilla attacks taking place in Iraq, it is now admitted, are being made against the Coalition occupiers and not on civilians (see GAO Report graph on p.39, Pdf). But you won’t find that in the Guardian or anywhere else in the MSM. What you will find is the endless reporting of so-called terrorist attacks.

By using undercover terrorists to wreak havoc and terror, not only in Iraq but throughout the Middle East, it is the long-term intention of the Bush regime and its European quislings —the latter comprised mainly of Brits— to balkanize the entire area into a region of warring fiefdoms entirely under their control ... a major theatre of the many resource wars we can expect capital to enact during the coming years. And the CIA can expect to further enrich itself, as it has done in Afghanistan, on the rapid increase of opium poppy cultivation in Iraq.

All of this is being actively supported by the banana republic ’journalism’ of the likes of Tisdall and the Guardian. Readers are encouraged to remind the Guardian’s editors that a suitable definition of Tisdall’s embedded propaganda is to be found in the candid observation of Sir Christopher Meyer, ex-UK Ambassador in Washington, who reminds us that the purpose of British foreign policy is to get as far up the arse of the US and to stay there.

**********
Condemnations of Tisdall’s garbage article may be sent to
simon.tisdall@guardian.co.uk
alan.rusbridger@guardian.co.uk
michael.white@guardian.co.uk

Labels: embedded journalism, guardian, informed comment, iran, juan cole, occupation of iraq, simon tisdall

Portfolio