Aletho News

Viagra, Gay Bloggers and Phony News

By Margaret Kimberley | BAR | June 23, 2011

The corporate media continue to follow the dictates of people in power, ignoring their obligation to report factual information in as unbiased a way as possible. Instead they behave like scribes in a royal court, dutifully repeating the words of the king in hopes of currying favor and gaining access. Their shameless behavior is on view yet again as another president with imperial aspirations tells obvious lies in order to gain support for wars of aggression.

At the urging of the United States government and NATO, the International Criminal Court has piled on its anti-Muammar Qaddafi rhetoric. One prosecutor even claims that Qaddafi is giving his troops Viagra and using rape as a weapon of war. He has done so without presenting any evidence and even worse, the American media are repeating the assertions without investigation of any kind.

When George W. Bush made the case for invading Iraq, he too used rape as a rhetorical weapon of war, claiming that Saddam Hussein had “rape rooms” in his palaces that were used to assault dissidents. In 2003 as in 2011, the claim was reported without evidence.

The service to their masters takes on many forms. If a president lies about his reasons for killing people, the lie is never exposed. Sometimes the media are so eager for the story which won’t upset the powerful, that they will extend the parameters of their falsehoods.

Such was the case with “Amina,” a Syrian blogger and lesbian who wrote critically about the regime of President Assad. The blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus” was followed by incredulous people all over the world, but it turned out that Amina never existed. The blog and Amina were the creations of a heterosexual American man living in Scotland who wanted to hasten the end of Assad’s days in power. When the non-existent Amina was reported missing, an alleged kidnap victim of the Syrian police, even the state department grew alarmed and made inquiries as to her safety.

“The blog and Amina were the creations of a heterosexual American man living in Scotland who wanted to hasten the end of Assad’s days in power.”

The hypocrisy manifested on the part of the United States government is quite stunning. While denying or minimizing the loss of lives caused by its actions in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Haiti and on the part of any of its allies, the government was willing to use its power to ensure the safety of one person in Syria.

The government does not have a monopoly on these hypocritical expressions of outrage. Private citizens too, are moved to speak and act by a strange set of values. The phony blogger who created Amina knew what he was doing when he created a gay, female persona. Americans and Europeans are convinced of their own moral superiority vis a vis the Muslim world. They rarely say a word about when their governments kill Muslim women with their acts of war. They gasp in horror over the treatment of gay people in some societies, but they know or care little about how their governments’ actions create suffering for all people all over the globe.

We have a media that follows the dictates of government and sensational news items, that is to say sensationalism which proves racist notions of superiority and which don’t create any difficulties for the powerful. The bombing of a university in Tripoli, Libya ought to create a sensation, but that information never makes it onto the front pages.

The media scribes not only pick and choose what they do and don’t think worthy of their attention, but they are also unable to keep very simple facts straight. They are now repeating the Obama administration claim of a significant troop draw down in Afghanistan. The president will reportedly announce a withdrawal of somewhere between 5,000 and 30,000. However, even if he were to withdraw the higher number he would still leave 68,000 troops in Afghanistan, twice the number stationed there when he first took office. Simple arithmetic is yet another criteria that is too much to ask the members of the fourth estate.

Citizens who want to know what is happening in this country and around the world are at a great disadvantage. The old saw that it is unwise to believe everything we read should be modified. When it comes to the corporate media, perhaps we should believe nothing we read. We certainly would be no less knowledgeable of the truth.

~

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgandaReport.com.

June 23, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

How To Report On Syria – WaPo Edition

Moon of Alabama | June 18, 2011

Do not visit the country. Report from Washington or Beirut.

Start with a thesis you have no way to verify. Use it as headline. For example:

Pressure on Syria’s Assad intensifies as protests persist

1a. Report of big demonstrations everywhere and of the government shooting demonstrators sourced solely to a shadowy anonymous group which claims to have organized them.

1b. Claim that the Syrian government “is not abandoning its strategy of relying on force to quell the dissent”.

2a. Report of a big and peaceful demonstration in Hama where no one was shot.

2b. Ignore your claim in 1b and claim that this is a sign that the government has “given up trying to assert control”.

3a. Report of various unsourced and likely false rumors.

3b. Claim that the various unsourced and likely false rumors “give the government jitters”.

3c. Quote someone from the Israel Lobby(!) in Washington(!) saying that the various unsourced and likely false rumors have the Syrian government “definitely panicking”.

4a. Report of a government concession which was obviously not a government concession.

4b. Have an opposition activist in Beirut(!) dismiss the government concession which was obviously not a government concession as being obviously not a government concession.

5a. Report that the Syrian leader is to make a televised address to the nation.

5b. Claim that this is a sign of his “absence”.

6. Quote the meaningless blustering of two anonymous U.S. officials in Washington(!).

7a. Report on reports about Turkish government intervention intentions which the Turkish government has thoroughly dismissed as utter nonsense.

7b. Claim that the opposition would like the reported Turkish government intervention which the Turkish government has thoroughly dismissed as utter nonsense.

7c. Quote an opposition activist in London(!) saying that the reported Turkish government intervention intentions which the Turkish government has thoroughly dismissed as nonsense is a “nightmare for the Syrian regime”.

7d. Claim that the “nightmare” is the explanation for an unrelated Syrian government operation against a small armed local rebellion.

8a. Repeat your reporting using various unsourced and likely false rumors.

8b. Quote an opposition activist in Ohio(!) with some theory about the meaning of the various unsourced and likely false rumors.

(Do NOT report of armed government opposition. Do NOT report that the demonstrations this Friday were smaller than last Friday. Do NOT report that the shadowy anonymous group’s website is registered and run in Germany by a German with a phone number in Berlin as contact information. Do NOT report that the group seems inactive as the last daily update on that site was eight days ago. )

Rinse and repeat next Friday.

June 18, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Libya ‘rape’ propaganda plunges to new depths of desperation

By Martin Iqbal – empirestrikesblack – 17 June 2011

The Libya war propaganda drive has plunged to new depths of cynicism, depravity, and a downright embarrassing lack of credibility.

Over a week after the ICC’s completely baseless claims of ‘rape being used as a weapon’ by Gaddafi’s forces, today CNN is running a propaganda set-piece that is so blatantly invented it makes one cringe with embarrassment for this rabble of liars and propagandists.

CNN claims that rebel forces have found mobile phone footage on ‘Gaddafi loyalists’, which allegedly shows them ‘raping women and torturing people’. Lo and behold, the story completely falls apart upon the most cursory inspection.

CNN plainly admits that they “cannot confirm when or where the video was shot“. To make matters worse for the propagandists behind this nonsense, there is no date to the video, and the men in the video are not even wearing Libyan Army clothing – they are dressed in civilian attire. But it gets better.

Their story revolves completely around this unverifiable mobile phone footage, and the testimony of NATO’s proxy ‘rebels’. On top of this CNN doesn’t reveal who their source is, and instead they parrot baseless claims from rebel spokespeople:

“We were able to confirm that rape was used as a weapon of war because it was systematic.”
~ Rebel spokesman Abdullah al-Kabeir

Without performing even the most basic journalistic duty of providing evidence, CNN simply forwards this completely unfounded claim from a rebel spokesperson.

According to CNN, Al-Kabeir also tells us:

The rebels have many videos showing other types of torture, and a few depict rape, he said. He did not know exactly how many videos there were showing abuse.

But his next admission really exposes this utter fabrication for what it is (emphasis added):

“There was a commander here at the eastern front in Misrata named Mohamed al-Halboos; he ordered all the (rebel) fighters to give him all the rape videos they find on Gadhafi soldiers’ cell phones. I heard that he used to destroy every rape video he got“

We are supposed to believe that Gaddafi’s forces are ‘systematically’ raping women in Libya, but all of the evidence has been destroyed.

It’s not just CNN that’s partaking in this onslaught of propaganda. Today, Time is running some similar ‘just trust us’ journalism. See the following report regarding doctors working in Benghazi (emphasis added):

They talk for hours about the rape of women. But it’s only stories. They have never met a victim.The medics don’t deny that others in the hospital may have treated rape victims. But they say the stigma of sexual assault runs so deep in Libyan culture that the raped are virtually forced into social exile, unable to wed, a humiliation to their entire family, choosing to remain silent rather than to give voice to the crime they have suffered.

That the likes of CNN and Time even expect anybody to believe this farcical nonsense demonstrates the contempt in which they hold their audience. The sheer laziness of this propaganda reflects how desperate NATO now is, spectacularly failing to achieve its objective of regime change using the ‘humanitarian intervention’ myth.

June 17, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Gay Ops of American Intel?

By Anthony Wile | The Daily Bell | June 15, 2011

A strange thing happened the other day. The blogosphere was swept by the confession of one Tom MacMasters that he was behind a well-known blog supposedly written by a lesbian and called Gay Girl in Damascus. It was convincing for the most part, and he even stole a picture online to identify his blog – which was apparently how he was discovered. His confession was wrenching and the blogosphere (which trends liberal these days) has been virtually convulsed ever since.

On the heels of the MacMasters’ incident, another blogger “Paula Brooks,” was revealed to be a man, Bill Graber. He had posted some of MacMasters’ lesbian musings on HIS lesbian news site. According to the Washington Post, Graber was a 58-year-old retired US air force officer. Graber identified himself as such when called by the Associated Press.

“LezGetReal was not meant to be deceitful or con anyone,” he is reported to have said. Apparently he didn’t comment on the coincidence of two men secretly operating two separate lesbian blogs, making coincidental contact with each other via email and then, quite by chance, supporting each others’ compositional efforts. Graber admittedly helped MacMasters develop his Internet presence.

Here is a possible truth: The Gay Girl in Damascus blog and LezGetReal are part of a sub dominant theme being purveyed by American intelligence agencies that are trying to undermine regimes in both Syria and Libya. The MO would also seem plausible as such Intel teams work in tandem (MacMasters and Graber), with one presenting the meme and the other one endorsing it. This can be seen on many libertarian (freedom-oriented) websites as well, where one will attack and the other endorse.

Already the usual suspects (Reuters, Washington Post and Slate) are producing articles comparing the MacMasters hoax with other hoaxers who “thought faking reports about a perceived truth was a valid form of advocacy.” The Reuters article carefully points out that the fraud had gone on for five years though the blog site was only five months old.

How Reuters can establish the five-year mark is a mystery – and is more in line with corroborating MacMasters’ potential cover story than debunking him. It is also surprising that such savvy news enterprises don’t even mention the possibility that these two men had links to American Intel.

The five month timeline for MacMasters’ blog is probably a good deal more accurate than five years and conforms to how intelligence promotions unfold, with a thin back-story measured in months not years. It also conforms almost exactly to the current agitation for regime change in Syria. Graber’s website seems to be down now, but a look at the cached version reveals that it has been in existence for three years. He says he was motivated by anger at “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Of course, it is always possible that all of the above is entirely coincidental. Two straight, white men, one with links to the US military, decide separately to set up their own lesbian blogs. They then met each other via email, though neither knows the other is a man and one, Graber, decides to promote the blog-stories of the other (MacMasters). Stranger things have happened, yes? As Slate informs us. “Sexual disguise is as old as humanity, and posing as a lesbian is merely a natural variant on the practice. It energizes writers as often as it does readers.”

MacMasters is admitting nothing as regards US Intel involvement (though many have begun to question how he makes a living and affords extended trips to the Middle East). He published a wrenching apology on the blog site explaining how he always wanted to be a fiction writer and that Amina Arraf, who didn’t exist, was a character that he could not discard. He had developed her, he writes, in the following way:

“I noticed that when I, a person with a distinctly Anglo name, made comments on the Middle East, the facts I might present were ignored and I found myself accused of hating America, Jews, etc. I wondered idly whether the same ideas presented by someone with a distinctly Arab and female identity would have the same reaction.” (Why he decided that his alter ego would be a LESBIAN is never explained.)

In Libya, reports that Muammar Gaddafi gave his soldiers Viagra to encourage them to perform mass rapes have swept the Internet despite the insanity of the concept. This seems to be deliberate disinformation. Now, we have the spectacle of a young man (40-ish) writing a blog about a young woman who is maltreated in Damascus because of her sexuality. In fact, before he was exposed, MacMasters had her abducted. Here is a post by a purported (fictional) cousin of Arraf called Rania:

I have been on the telephone with both her parents and all that we can say right now is that she is missing. Her father is desperately trying to find out where she is and who has taken her. Unfortunately, there are at least 18 different police formations in Syria as well as multiple different party militias and gangs. We do not know who took her so we do not know who to ask to get her back. It is possible that they are forcibly deporting her.

People’s sexuality is a private affair. But in the West, a 50-year battle (sponsored by the elites in our view) has been waged to inject private sexual practices into the public discussion. A decades-long campaign has been waged to reconfigure the state itself to recognize and provide benefits to “others.” The meme purveyed is that one is not fully human until one’s “rights” are legally enshrined in the pantheon of Western regulatory democracies.

The result has likely been destructive to the family itself, as the very public emphasis on other kinds of lifestyles (let alone legislation and public education) has surely had a corrosive effect on the historical family unit. Additionally, the Anglosphere elites have been able to cultivate an intelligentsia that is entirely constructed around minority – and sexual – issues.

Thus, sexual issues have become an issue of importance not only to the mainstream Western intelligentsia (such as it is) but also to many verbal and committed young men and women overseas. These young men and women look at the West and see that sexual issues are seemingly the most important to the modern Anglo-American intelligentsia, and thus these issues loom large overseas as well. This is also true of “women’s issues” in general, which are being used by the Pentagon and American Intel to justify America’s serial warring, bombing of women and children, etc.

Enter the CIA, FBI, military intelligence, etc. (We shall refer to the 16 separate American spy agencies as “American intel.”) Much American Intel in the lower ranks is made up of young men and women, but mostly young men who go to the same schools and have the same fairly insular views. In fact, they are chosen for these traits.

These young men, mostly, are not only adept at the use of sexual memes for propaganda purposes; they are perhaps, to some degree, fixated on them. Many opponents of the West’s (and America’s) current activities are targeted by sexual allegations, warranted or not. It is not surprising then, that these young men would design lesbian promotions.

Such promotions were designed to play on the sympathies of the modern, sexualized intelligentsia but also cater to the fixations of the young (or older) man involved in these intelligence agencies. To put it bluntly, to build propaganda around lesbians was at least partially a big joke.

One has to understand what is going on to fully appreciate it. These young men, unfortunately, are involved every day in undermining Western freedoms and in facilitating what can only be described as oppression at home and genocide abroad. They did not join the government in most cases to participate in such things, but this is what they have ended up doing.

Western Intel inevitably enforces the agenda of Western elites that are trying to build a New World Order – the public be damned. “Operation Damascus Lesbian” would seem to be only one tiny example of the gung-ho authoritarianism that now pervades these entities. In this case, the intention was seemingly to illustrate the intolerant and brutal methodologies of the Syrian secret services in the hopes of further undermining the regime. Western leaders apparently intend to make Syria a political appendage, and MacMasters’s Arraf spends a good deal of time writing about how horrible the Syrian government is.

Things went wrong. MacMaster’s apology, in his own voice, sounds sincere in places, but it mostly sounds shocked. He had no idea his story involving Arraf’s abduction would “go viral.” In fact, this is what undid him. The State Dept among others started an investigation and lesbian and gay bloggers started to look into the tale and became suspicious.

If he was American Intel, MacMasters was undone by his own success. But what Western Intel is discovering generally is that all the billions (trillions?) they have invested in spying infrastructure is increasingly at risk. There are reports now of hacker incidents focused on the US Senate and the IMF. Even if these are false-flag events, there are plenty of others like them. Likely, it will be increasingly difficult for spy agencies to operate with 20th century impunity, spying on citizens and manipulating them without having the favor returned.

Another interesting point is that the MacMasters incident may have given us a further glimpse into the vast promotional network that the Anglosphere elite has at its disposal. Any important story the elite and its enablers wish to devise and propagate is probably going to be picked up and reported by the wires. Whether it is the endless saga of lies surrounding global warming or Lesbians in Damascus, (or the brilliance of seeming elite puppets Lady Gaga or Julian Assange) anything that furthers the cause of the New World Order is to be reported uncritically to millions and even billions. It is king-making on a massive scale.

Will MacMasters and Graber get into any trouble for this seeming elaborate Intel hoax, over which normal people might go to jail, given the hyper-punitive nature of American justice? What kind of investigation will ensue, if any? Let us watch and wait. I won’t hold my breath.

June 17, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Factchecking Takeyh and Maloney

Moon of Alabama | June 16, 2011

There is another boring anti-Iran OpEd in the New York Times by Ray Takeyh and Suzanne Maloney. As usual it mangles the facts, gives a false diagnosis of the situation and comes up with the wrong policy prescription. “Iran wants nukes, the government there is divided, there is no one to talk to, thus more sanctions (and btw let’s bomb Iran).”

I will not bother to discuss it in detail but want to mark two issues if only to set the record straight.

The authors write:

[Ahmedinejad’s] fall from grace has been fierce and fast. […] The most devastating blow came in May from Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who publicly repudiated his hand-picked protégé in a clash over presidential powers.

While there was one of the regular tussles in the Iranian power structures during April and early May since the end of that month the situation has decidedly changed and it is not what the op-ed authors say:

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a public endorsement of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Sunday as he looked to resolve a months-long rift among the country’s conservative power elites.”While there are weaknesses and problems … the composition of the executive branch is good and appropriate, and the government is working. The government and parliament must help each other,” Ayatollah Khamenei said in an address to parliament members, later shown on state television.

But a united Iran does not fit the narrative the op-ed authors want to tell, they therefore just ignore the real situation.

Then there is this outright lie:

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s interest in dialogue was not motivated by any appreciation of American civilization or an impulse to reconcile. Rather, the provocative president saw talks as a means of boosting his stature at home and abroad while touting his vision of a strong nuclear-armed Iran.

Sure – like he touted in an interview in October 2005:

“Our religion prohibits us from having nuclear arms and our religious leader has prohibited it from the point of view of religious law. It’s a closed road,” the Khaleej Times quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.

or when he touted at the UN summit on April 29 2009:

Allow me, as the elected President of the Iranian people, to outline the other main elements of my country’s initiative regarding the nuclear issue:1. The Islamic Republic of Iran reiterates its previously and repeatedly declared position that in accordance with our religious principles, pursuit of nuclear weapons is prohibited. …

or in May 4 2010 at a UN NPT conference:

… the great Iranian nation, does not need the atomic bomb for its advancement and does not regard it as a means for its grandeur and pride.

or in that Larry King interview on September 22 2010

“We are not seeking the bomb. We have no interest in it. And we do not think that it is useful.”

Yes, Ahmedinejad is certainly touting a lot and consistently – AGAINST an Iran with nuclear weapons.

And while we are at it – congrats to Iran for launching its second satellite.

June 16, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

The West’s Obscene Demonization of Gaddafi

By Glen Ford | BAR | June 15, 2011

The slander campaign against Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi has reached way beyond the realm of the ridiculous, and can only be described as obscene. We are now supposed to believe that Colonel Gaddafi, himself, ordered his soldiers to rape hundreds of women. There is not one bit of hard evidence that such mass rapes have occurred, but that does not seem to matter to a corporate media that are bent on glorifying the Benghazi-based rebels and demonizing Gaddafi and his soldiers. Amnesty International, an organization that is decidedly hostile to Gaddafi’s government, admits that it cannot find evidence of mass rapes by the Libyan armed forces. And the man in charge of the United Nations’ human rights investigation in Libya told journalists that “massive hysteria” was behind the rape charge. Nevertheless, the western media repeat the baseless allegations ad nauseam, like young boys telling dirty stories.

The International Criminal Court, which specializes in prosecuting Africans who get on the wrong side of the United States, speaks vaguely of being in possession of evidence, but it turns out that the allegations come from one Libyan woman, who claims that she sent out inquiries about sexual assaults to 70,000 women, that 60,000 of them responded, and 259 reported they had been abused. But when investigators asked this solitary source to show them the questionnaires, as investigative reporter Russ Baker tells us, she could not produce the evidence. And it is a mystery how she could have mailed out and gotten back tens of thousands of questionnaires, when Libya’s postal system had been shut down by the war.

This war was launched on the basis of an imaginary massacre of Libyan civilians by Gaddafi’s forces – which, of course, never happened – and is now fueled by a campaign of demonization and a depraved indifference to the truth.

Certainly since 2001, the world has been subjected to a massive U.S. psychological assault, a vast disinformation operation in which the corporate media act as megaphones for government liars.

The invasion of Iraq was launched by lies about weapons of mass destruction. When the lies fell apart, American politicians justified the war by saying it was worth it to get rid of the monster, Saddam Hussein. Saddam was so thoroughly demonized that any amount of maiming and death would be acceptable to erase him from the scene. If Saddam Hussein was the Devil, himself, then there could be no limits on military efforts to eliminate him. Now, the same kind of dehumanizing psychological offensive is directed at Moammar Gaddafi, who is depicted in comic-book style as a puppet master of mass rape, so that whatever death and destruction is rained down on Libya by NATO, it will have been “worth it.” This is a profoundly dangerous way for a superpower to behave. It fills the population with a bloodlust that cannot be easily controlled. The U.S. government, with plenty of help from the media, is telling Americans that those who oppose U.S. policies in the world are savages. That’s what the white settlers said about the Indians, and we know how that ended.

~

Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com

June 15, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Rape in Libya: America’s recent major wars have all been accompanied by memorable falsehoods

Peter Dale Scott | The Aasia-Pacific Journal | June 13, 2011

It is a troubled Time for NATO’s 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 Bush’s 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.*

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 Moreno’s 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

Time’s subtle enhancement of Moreno’s 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.

Notes

¹ “Gates rebukes NATO allies, warns of ‘dismal’ future,” Agence France-Presse, June 10, 2011.

² “The billion dollar war? Libyan campaign breaks Pentagon estimates costing U.S. taxpayers $2 million a day,” London Daily Mail, June 9, 2011.

³ “No Casus Belli? Invent One,” Guardian (London), February 5, 2003.

⁴ Ted Rowse, “Kuwaitgate – killing of Kuwaiti babies by Iraqi soldiers exaggerated,” Washington Monthly, September 1992.

⁵ Scott, American War Machine, 195-201.

⁶ Terry H. Anderson, Bush’s Wars, 97.

⁷ Consider the following story in the London Daily Mail by Simon Reeve: Iraq has been identified as the most likely source of the anthrax used to terrorise America during recent weeks. New plans are now being considered for retalia tory military strikes against Saddam Hussein, according to American government officials. Although studies of the anthrax spores sent through the mail are continuing, American scientists have discovered “hallmarks” that point to Iraqi involvement. American investigators are increasingly convinced that the anthrax was smuggled into the US and mailed to a number of targets by unidentified “sleeper” supporters of Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organization. (Simon Reeve, “Scientists Link Iraq to Anthrax Terror Attacks,” Sunday Mail.

⁸ [London], October 28, 2001; discussed in Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, 194-95). [The example is also interesting in its fusing of Saddam and Al Qaeda, in fact bitter rivals]

⁹ Karen Leigh, “Rape in Libya: The Crime That Dare Not Speak Its Name,” Time, June 9, 2011.

¹⁰ Washington Post Blogpost, March 29, 2011.

¹¹ Agence France-Presse, June 9, 2011.

¹² “UN investigator casts doubt over Libya mass rape claims,” Agence France Presse, June 9, 2011.

¹³ Toby Hamden, “CIA give Afghan warlords Viagra in exchange for information on Taliban,” Telegraph [London], December 26, 2008.

June 14, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment