Vehicles belonging to forces loyal to Gadhafi explode on a road between Benghazi and Ajdabiyah
after an air strike by coalition forces (20/2/2011).
after an air strike by coalition forces (20/2/2011).
Iedereen die iets van westerse oorlogen zoals momenteel die in Libië weet, doorziet de stroom van legitimerende propaganda wel. Zo smeten bijvoorbeeld in 1990 Iraakse militairen in een ziekenhuis in Koeweit de te vroeg geboren babies uit de couveuses op de grond. Inclusief getuigen. Later kwam uit dat het om zorgvuldig ontworpen agitatiepropaganda ging, verzonnen, en met audio-visuele presentatie voor het Amerikaanse Congres, vormgegeven door pr-bureau Hill & Knowlton, in opdracht van een lobbygroep genaamd 'Citizens for a Free Kuwait'. Vijf van de zeven "ooggetuigen" die gehoord werden hadden valse namen opgegeven. De 15-jarige hoofdgetuige, die beweerde dat er 312 babies waren vermoord, bleek de dochter te zijn van de Koeweitse ambassadeur in de VS. Haar verhaal werd zo serieus genomen dat het een doorslaggevende factor werd om een oorlog tegen Irak te beginnen.
De gelouwerde Amerikaanse journalist Edward Bernays schreef hierover in zijn boek Propaganda uit 1928 hoe de psychoanalyse van zijn oom Sigmund Freud kan worden gebruikt om het publiek te manipuleren.
"Het op intelligente manier manipuleren van georganiseerde gewoontes van de massa is een belangrijk element in elke democratische samenleving."
De "manipulatie van georganiseerde gewoontes" wordt in dit geval bereikt door een valse werkelijkheid te creëren en die als "belangrijk nieuws" de wereld in te sturen dankzij satelliete zenders van de petrodollar. De manipulators geloven er heilig in dat ze het publiek een eigen moraal kunnen opdringen als ze maar hun valse werkelijkheid doorlopend uitzenden. Mensen gaan er vanzelf in geloven als het maar vaak genoeg in het nieuws komt. Verwonderlijk is het dan ook niet dat bijvoorbeeld Joseph Goebbels zich heeft laten inspireren door Bernays' boek, de Reichsminister für Propaganda van nazi-Duitsland.
Maar onze journalisten van de zelfbenoemde "kwaliteitspers" doorzien de oorlogspropaganda zogenaamd nooit. Die schrijven alleen over wat andere collega's van (meestal Amerikaanse) kranten en persbureaus schrijven - en natuurlijk wat hen opgedragen wordt. Alzo geschiedde, zonder één enkele kanttekening:• Staatsomroep NOS: Hof: verkrachting tactiek Kadhafi
• De Gelderlander: 'Kaddafi gaf sekspillen voor verkrachtingen'
• NRC: Onderzoek naar Gaddafi inzake verstrekking viagra voor verkrachtingen
• PowNed: 'Kaddafi faciliteerde massaverkrachtingen'
• HP/De Tijd: Inzetten Viagra als oorlogsmiddel is 'uniek in de geschiedenis'
• RTL Nieuws: Clinton: 'verkrachtingen in Libië'
Het behoeft geen toelichting dat premier Rutte de 'massaverkrachtingen' gretig aangreep: "Een verlenging van de [Nederlandse] missie [in Libië] is daarom gerechtvaardigd."
Nederland moet nu zeker tot eind september meedoen, met zes F-16's en een mijnenjager. Daarnaast levert Nederland enkele extra stafleden aan de NAVO.
Maar ook GroenLinks Tweede Kamerlid Mariko Peters bepleitte (meer) westerse dood en destructie in Libië: "We kunnen de Libiërs niet in de steek laten en overleveren aan het regime van Khaddaffi, dat burgers verkracht en vermoordt."
Weet u nog: "We mogen de Afghanen nu niet in de steek laten"?
De reden waarom 'de gevaarlijke massa' (lees Propaganda van Edward Bernays) niet wordt geïnformeerd is om het militair-industrieel complex te beschermen:
• NAVO-baas dringt weer aan op grondaanvallen F-16's
• Ook Britten leveren aan Libische rebellen
• Frankrijk leverde wapens aan burgers Libië
• Berlin hilft Nato mit Waffentechnik für Libyen-Krieg
Maar denk niet dat dat gratis is: EU: geld Kadhafi naar opstand Libië. Zodat ze hun schulden aan de westerse wapenleveranciers kunnen terugbetalen. En de burger moet zoals gewoonlijk ook de winsten voor de wapenindustrie bekostigen: 'Oorlog Libië heeft Britten al 280 mln euro gekost'.
Inmiddels zijn er allang berichten in de internationale pers verschenen dat de beweringen over de massaverkrachtingen met behulp van Viagra van twijfelachtig tot gelogen zijn. Amnesty International en Human Rights Watch hebben de aantijgingen tegen het leger van Khadafi onderzocht en hebben geen enkel bewijs kunnen vinden. Maar in Nederland lezen we dat niet. Want we mogen de Libiërs nu niet in de steek laten.
Momenteel kampt de beschaafde wereld met het volgende probleem: Libië schijnt al geheel platgebombardeerd te zijn, dus de enige manier om de handel draaiende te houden is voortzetting als grondoorlog. Daarover maak ik me geen zorgen, want die komt er wel. Voor zover die er al niet is. En ja, Rutte gaat onze jongens ook weer een oorlog insturen. Of dacht u misschien dat Nederland een soeverein en autonoom land was?
Rape, Mercenaries, And Bloodbaths On The Scale Of Yemen?
The Media Blank Amnesty's Failure To Find Evidence In Libya
MediaLens | By naam | 30.06.2011 | NEDERLANDS
In the Independent on June 24, Patrick Cockburn reported a vital development countering official propaganda on Libya:
'Human rights organisations have cast doubt on claims of mass rape and other abuses perpetrated by forces loyal to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, which have been widely used to justify Nato's war in Libya.
'Nato leaders, opposition groups and the media have produced a stream of stories since the start of the insurrection on 15 February, claiming the Gaddafi regime has ordered mass rapes, used foreign mercenaries and employed helicopters against civilian protesters.'
Amnesty and Human Rights Watch (HRW) have checked the claims and found flat zero evidence.
And yet, earlier this month, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, told a press conference: 'we have information that there was a policy to rape in Libya those who were against the government. Apparently he [Colonel Gaddafi] used it to punish people'.
Last week, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she was 'deeply concerned' about reports of widespread rape in Libya by Gaddafi's forces.
By contrast, Donatella Rovera, senior crisis response adviser for Amnesty, who spent three months in Libya after the start of the uprising in February, said: 'we have not found any evidence or a single victim of rape or a doctor who knew about somebody being raped'.
Liesel Gerntholtz, head of women's rights at HRW, said of the rape claims: 'We have not been able to find evidence.'
The Amnesty investigation also found no evidence of mercenaries fighting for Gaddafi. Rovera commented:
'Those shown to journalists as foreign mercenaries were later quietly released. Most were sub-Saharan migrants working in Libya without documents.'
And what about the massacres? Cockburn writes:
'During the first days of the uprising in eastern Libya, security forces shot and killed demonstrators and people attending their funerals, but there is no proof of mass killing of civilians on the scale of Syria or Yemen.'
Not quite the impression given by the flood of media propaganda.
Cockburn followed up his June 24 piece with another excellent report on June 26: 'Don't believe everything you see and read about Gaddafi.'
At time of writing, there has been a single low-profile response to Cockburn's reports in Roy Greenslade's Guardian blog.
Greenslade quoted Cockburn, adding only that these findings of course do not mean that Gaddafi's forces have not committed crimes.
There have been no other mentions in the UK media that we can find of this credible information challenging key claims justifying the war on Libya.
But shouldn't a media system that so eagerly advanced these claims against the latest target of Western violence be equally willing to publicise counter-evidence?
Media Performance – The 'Gut-Churning Atrocities'
For once, let's sample from the performance of The Sun, which hosted a piece by TV celebrity and chat show host Lorraine Kelly:
'Of all the gut-churning atrocities to come out of Libya, the use of mass rape as a weapon of war is the most horrific.
'Over the years despot Gaddafi has been accused of many heinous crimes. But now he has been charged with procuring container loads of Viagra-like pills which are given to his troops so they can rape their victims more "efficiently".
'The thought of civilians being terrorised by troops on drugs who are being positively encouraged to rape is utterly monstrous and chills the blood.'
Amnesty's Rovera noted that rebels meeting with the foreign media in Benghazi showed journalists packets of Viagra, claiming they came from burned-out tanks. Cockburn commented 'it is unclear why the packets were not charred'.
The Daily Mail and numerous other media repeated the same claims ad nauseam.
A leading article in the Guardian expressed some caution in mentioning the presence of mercenaries on February 21:
'If the widespread reports of African mercenaries being used to shoot Libyans are accurate, he has few qualms about mowing down his own people.'
The caution had vanished from a leading article on March 10: 'air activity is not the deciding factor in the firefights between the rebels and regime loyalists and mercenaries'.
The Times went even further, claiming that Gaddafi depended on mercenaries: 'his regime imposes ever greater atrocities against Libya's people (not, incidentally, "his" people, for he leads no legitimate government and relies on foreign mercenaries)'. (Leading article, 'Essence of Indecision,' The Times, March 4, 2011)
A leading article in the Independent, Cockburn's own paper, observed on February 21:
'Colonel Gaddafi is said to have deployed heavy weapons and African mercenaries in an effort to reassert his rule.'
Cockburn wrote on the alleged mercenaries: 'The Amnesty investigation found there was no evidence for this.'
On the use of 'heavy weapons', there was also 'no evidence that aircraft or heavy anti-aircraft machine guns were used against crowds. Spent cartridges picked up after protesters were shot at came from Kalashnikovs or similar calibre weapons'.
Rovera commented:
'The politicians kept talking about mercenaries, which inflamed public opinion and the myth has continued because they were released without publicity.'
No Lessons Learned (Again!)
It ought to be surprising that Amnesty and Human Rights Watch exposed US-UK propaganda in a way that the entire pack of Western media hounds was unable or unwilling to do. But as we have described many times, with rare exceptions, journalists function as stenographers to power. Arguably, as democracy has rapidly eroded in Britain – with all main political parties increasingly serving the same privileged interests – journalists have become even less inclined to challenge the powerful.
The tales of mass rape and vicious mercenaries recall the infamous claim in 1990 that Iraqi soldiers had stormed a Kuwait City hospital, taken hundreds of babies out of incubators, and left them to die on the floor. Journalist John MacArthur, author of The Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, commented:
'Of all the accusations made against the dictator [Saddam Hussein], none had more impact on American public opinion than the one about Iraqi soldiers removing 312 babies from their incubators and leaving them to die on the cold hospital floors of Kuwait City.'
In their book, Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton described how the most powerful testimony came from a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, initially known only as Nayirah:
'Sobbing, she described what she had seen with her own eyes in a hospital in Kuwait City... "I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital," Nayirah said. "While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where... babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die."'
In fact, Nayirah was a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family. Her father was Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwait's Ambassador to the US. Stauber and Rampton noted that Nayirah had been coached by US PR company Hill & Knowlton's vice-president Lauri Fitz-Pegado 'in what even the Kuwaitis' own investigators later confirmed was false testimony'. The story of the 312 murdered babies was an outright lie.
Needless to say, the mainstream media have learned nothing from this and numerous similar cases.
However appalling media performance has been in facilitating yet another bloody war on yet another defenceless country - just a few years after the great Bush-Blair deception on Iraq - the failure of the media to report Amnesty and HRW's claims is almost beyond belief. These are highly credible sources making highly controversial claims (which means they will have been extremely careful to check their facts) about alleged crimes that have been used to help justify war. And the media have responded with a single mention in a blog.
It seems oddly appropriate, as we approach our ten-year anniversary next month, that we should be witnessing one of the most striking examples of media servility to power we have seen.
SUGGESTED ACTION
The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Ask the following editors and journalists why they have not reported Amnesty and Human Right Watch's failure to find evidence of rape, use of mercenaries, use of heavy weapons against civilians, and mass killing on the scale of Yemen and Syria, in Libya:
Write to Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger
Email: alan.rusbridger@guardian.co.uk
Write to Simon Kelner, Independent editor-in-chief
Email: s.kelner@independent.co.uk
Alex Thomson at Channel 4 News
alex.thomson@itn.co.uk
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