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What the Western Press Didn’t Say About the Leaked Luftwaffe Conversation


What if a conversation between Russian officials discussing the explosion of a bridge in Germany had been revealed? Would Western press coverage also treat the leak as something more serious than threats of military attack?

On March 1, the editor-in-chief of the Rossiya Segodnya group, journalist Margarita Simonyan, revealed, on her Telegram channel, a 38-minute audio in which officers from the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) discussed the possibility of sending missiles long-range Taurus to Ukraine and whether they would be able to reach the Crimean bridge in the Kerch Strait, which connects the peninsula to the mainland and is Russian territory.

The Russian press, naturally, made much of the revelation. This forced the mainstream Western media – especially German ones – to report the leak. But whoever thought that a miracle would happen, that is, that the Western press would finally raise the issue of NATO’s military threats against Russia… well, those people are simply very naive.

The Western mass media, as always, tried to manipulate the news and hide the main issue.

The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, The Guardian, Die Welt and Der Spiegel published 39 articles on the topic on their respective websites between the time the news was revealed and the evening of March 6th (when I write these lines).

The two North American newspapers did not want to highlight the matter. The Post published two reports and the Times only one. The three expressed concern about the fragility of German intelligence security systems in the face of Russian espionage.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The Chris Hedges Report Podcast with Patrick Lawrence Examines How the Western Press Has Become a Propaganda Tool of the War Industry and Ukrainian Government

The Chris Hedges Report Podcast with Patrick Lawrence Examines How the Western Press Has Become a Propaganda Tool of the War Industry and Ukrainian Government

The war in Ukraine has exacerbated the loss of credibility within the western press, inflicting, journalist Patrick Lawrence argues, irreparable damage.

The Ukraine conflict has plunged the world into a geopolitical crisis. But this is not, as the writer Patrick Lawrence points out, the only crisis. The war in Ukraine has exacerbated the crisis within the western press, inflicting damage that he believes is ultimately irreparable. The press in the U.S. and most of Europe slavishly echoes the opinions of a ruling elite and oversees a public discourse that is often unhinged from the real world. It openly discredits or censors anything that counters the dominant narrative about Ukraine, however factual. For example, on August 4, Amnesty International published a report titled “Ukrainian fighting tactics endanger civilians.” The report charged Ukrainian forces with putting civilians at risk by establishing bases and operating weapons systems in populated residential areas, including in schools and hospitals, a violating the laws of war. To call out Ukrainian for war crimes, however well documented, saw the press and the ruling elites come down in fury on Amnesty International. The head of Amnesty International’s Kyiv office resigned, calling the report “a tool of Russian propaganda.” In one of the many broadsides the Royal United Services Institute in London wrote that “The amnesty report demonstrates a weak understanding of the laws of armed conflict, no understanding of military operations, and indulges in insinuations without supplying supporting evidence.” It is nearly impossible to question the virtues of Ukraine’s government and military. Those that do are attacked and banned from social media. How did this happen?  Why is a position on the war in Ukraine the litmus test for who gets to have a voice and who does not? Why should a position on Ukraine justify censorship? Joining me to discuss these questions is Patrick Lawrence who a correspondent and columnist for nearly thirty years for the Far Eastern Economic Review was, the International Herald Tribune, and The New Yorker. He is the author of Somebody Else’s Century: East and West in a Post-Western World and Time No Longer: America After the American Century.

…click on the link above to listen to the podcast…

Why ISIS Exists: The Double Game

Why ISIS Exists: The Double Game

Pete SouzaPete Souza

The western press laments the near impossibility of defeating an organization that didn’t even exist a couple of short years ago. Brand ISIS, the unconquerable, may actually become a truism if the people of the western nations continue to listen to the lies and propaganda of their own governments.

You’ve been told a lot of things about the war in Syria, and clearly most of it is finely crafted war propaganda, which seeks to obscure the forest by showing you an endless series of trees. The trees are gunshots, explosions, and dead bodies. The forest is elusive, vast, covers several continents, and we are only ever given small samples of the terrain. The section of the forest that receives some of the latest scrutiny is not necessarily the crucial part of the story. Beneath the entire forest lies an aquifer, a vast ocean of water that feeds the trees invisibly, silently, yet persistently. Without this water supply there would be no forest to speak of.

But here is where the metaphor breaks. Unlike an underground reservoir, which is impossible to eradicate, the money and weapons transfers to fundamentalist militants can be stopped. The problem is that western so-called “leaders” have done absolutely nothing to stop them. In fact they rarely mention these sources of terrorist arms, training and funding at all, in public anyway. When acknowledged these become theater, hand wringing, vague excuses rather than concrete action. At other times intelligence services themselves willingly hand over sophisticated weapons to terrorists, such as TOW anti-tank missiles and surface to air “MANPADS” capable of bringing down commercial airliners. The nations most responsible for creating the extremist armies on the ground—Turkey and the Persian Gulf tyrannies—are close allies and even “friends” to US and European political masters.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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