Imagine that you tell a friend something and you say it’s a fact and you know the sources are reliable – but then, a few weeks later, you learn that there was more to it, perhaps even that what you were in good faith believing was unfortunately factually wrong.

Would you not call that friend and say – “hey, I’ve just learned that what I told you wasn’t really true; rather, it turned out to be a story, more or less constructed for a purpose, and the facts are much more complex?”

Well, you are surely a decent person so you would. But what about our mainstream media?

Do you remember to have seen a front-page item stating something to the effect that “we are sorry to inform you that the news story this media published some weeks back, turned out to be a planted propaganda story. We have now learned from a series of competent, trustworthy sources that it was not a true story and there were reasons already back then to question some of the information. We apologize for not having been more cautious and professional at the time. Here is what we know about that event today.”

I have not checked it myself, but I read somewhere that The New York Times seems to still be the only one that has, on its front-page, apologized for its coverage of the build-up to the US war on Iraq, regretting that it didn’t question the ‘evidence’ about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, etc.

TFF’s The Transnational has recently published analyses about the alleged chemical attack in Douma in April 2018 attributed to the government/President and military of Syria. There is one here and here and one here. The cast very strong doubts about the news stories you were brought back then – here is The Guardian’s version as a – typical – example.

May I suggest that you read these links and then see this December 6, 2019, edition of the Corbett Report which puts it all together.

You may then ponder what you’ve been told back then, why you never heard any doubts at the time, and how acceptable it is that the US and allied punishment bombing for this – staged – crime was carried out before there could possibly be any documentation or solid knowledge of what happened and who most likely carried out this crime.

And if your local, or national, media have not told you this much about what we seem to know now – which debunks the whole thing to an embarrassingly high degree – perhaps you should write them a letter and ask: Why haven’t your media told me this now? Are you serving truth and balanced public education or do you, rather, serve the masters of war?

There has been many events and news stories about which it turned out later that the whole thing was a bit more complicated and therefore not so black-and-white and the blame – those that “should be held accountable” – were perhaps not the most important ones. There has been clear cases of deception, propaganda, PsyOps (to instil the right pro-war attitude among citizens) and there has been false flags operations.

I could mention names of some of those disputed events where media, grosso modo, were sure they were telling us the truth – or, perhaps, new they lied, that is difficult to tell:

Racak, the Bread Queue massacre, Merkhale Square, Milosevic’ planned ‘genocide’ on Kosovo-Albanians (the Horseshoe Operation) in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, Khaddafi’s planned mass-murder of the citizens of Benghazi, Assad’s soldiers murdering exclusively nonviolent protesters in Daraa in 2011, his use of chemical weapons in Ghouta in 2013 and the Syrian and Russian governments’ mass murder (‘genocide’) on the citizens of Aleppo when it was liberated in 2016.

You may add, the whole narrative about Iran being a threat to the world and deserving suffocating economic sanctions and embargo, being the main supporter of terrorism and – in spite of signing the 2016 nuclear deal – attempting to acquire nuclear weapons.

False flag operations – covert activities meant to deceive – have a very long history and are part of psychological warfare. Only thorough, multi-dimensional research, historical experience, common sense scepticism and professional caution when apportioning blame and guilt can help us establish the truth.

With the age of digitalization and marketing of news stories, the responsibilities of media and of politics have grown exponentially. Regrettably, they both seem to repeatedly abdicate such responsibility and thereby provide, respectively, juicy news drama with fake and omission that serve to legitimate military and other types of war that serve anything but noble purposes.

The motives are difficult to stated but one is: these stories all facilitated US, or NATO, bombings of places that should never have been bombed.

These wars can be seen – to a large extent – as a consequence of the terrible concept of ‘humanitarian intervention’ – invented for the foreign military intervention and NATO’s out-of-area operation in Yugoslavia in the 1990s – that has killed many more innocent people around the world than it has ever saved.

Notes

1. Read the Courage Foundation’s Open Letter to the OPCW – Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons – providing the substantial evidence through whistleblower information of the OPCW’s report having been “doctored.”
   TFF is proud that two of its Associates, Hans von Sponeck and Richard Falk have contributed to bringing this false flag operation to a wider public’s attention.
   
2. The alleged humanitarian organization, The White Helmets, in Syria was heavily involved in the Douma event. Here is what this author wrote about that – fake – organisation already in 2016.
   
3. Better World Info has an impressive reading/link list to this issue (and many others).
   
4. It is actually nothing new that mainstream media stick to a black-and-white interpretation of complex conflicts and – today compared with decades ago – refuse to listen to and give vice to other interpretations. The present author has given all necessary documentation based on his visit to Damascus and Aleppo in December 2016 here.
   
5. Here a typical footage brought to you by The Guardian:

6. Former CIA analyst over 27 years, Ray McGovern, has this to say about the case.