Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences: How Fake News Shapes World Order

Another strong hitter from A. B. Abrams and perhaps his most insightful book yet. The introduction highlights the very long history atrocity fabrication has had in facilitating the expansion of Western power for centuries, ranging from false claims that various tribes were too savage or worse in order to justify imposition of Western rule to save them in the colonial era, to the Cold War where all manner of false stories were created to vilify countries that were outside Western control. It also goes into detail regarding how the Western media apparatus operates and the very deep penetration which Western governments, militaries and intelligence agencies have of their media organisations which is key to allowing false atrocity stories to be widely propagated.The book covers ten case studies which are as follows - all covered coldly and with over 100 references so one knows where the information comes from. The large majority of references are from respected Western sources:Cold War Cuba and VietnamKorean WarTiananmen SqGulf WarYugoslav WarsIraq WarNorth Korea-US ConflictNATO-Libyan WarNATO-Syrian WarXinjiang and Sino-US ConflictThe cases are all quite shocking, both for the blatancy of the atrocity stories, and for the often savage consequences that ensue from successful atrocity fabrication - ranging from child killing economic sanctions, to outright Western invasions and worse.Certainly worth a read. One of the most under addressed phenomenon shaping today’s geopolitics.

This remarkable book explores eleven cases of wars and provocations by NATO powers, and the atrocity fabrications which were part of the war preparations: the US aggressions against Cuba and Vietnam, the UN assault on Korea, the Tiananmen Square incident, NATO’s 1991 assault on Iraq, NATO’s wars against Yugoslavia, the 2003 war against Iraq, the USA’s ongoing conflict with North Korea, NATO’s attack on Libya, the assault on Syria, and the ongoing US conflict with China.Atrocity fabrications by NATO governments, by their media and by human rights ‘NGOs’ provide the pretexts for the aggressions, paving the way for very real atrocities against the populations of the falsely accused states, which far exceed the depravity described in the fabricated narratives. There is a standard template to these fabrications - find an abuse, exaggerate it, extrapolate from it, build it up to end with the inevitable analogy to Hitler.In 1961, the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved Operation Northwood which in James Bamford’s words, “called for nothing less than the launch of a secret campaign of terrorism within the United States … a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba.”A U.S. Naval Institute paper concluded that, “There was not a second attack on U.S. Navy ships in the Tonkin Gulf in early August 1964. Furthermore, the evidence suggests a disturbing and deliberate attempt by Secretary of Defence McNamara to distort the evidence and mislead Congress.”After the Incident, President Johnson addressed the American people. In 2014, Robert Lehrman, former White House chief speechwriter, asked, “Was any of LBJ’s speech that night, true? To historians the verdict is clear. No. ‘Seek no wider war’? That is exactly what he sought with a resolution written six months earlier, waiting for an event to justify it. ‘On the open seas’, with its implication that the attack was unprovoked? The Maddox, cruising off the Vietnamese coast, was part of a covert and illegal intelligence-gathering mission, designed to provoke exactly the response it got. Two days of attacks? Even Johnson didn’t believe the second one occurred. Aggression? The Maddox fired first. More important, the North Vietnamese were off their own coast. They were home. U.S. sailors were about 8,000 miles from home. If anything, the aggressors were us. Moreover, LBJ didn’t limit himself to deceiving the public. He deceived the Senate.”In the years 1945-50, in US-occupied South Korea, government investigations years later proved beyond doubt that government forces killed between 600,000 and 1.2 million people. They killed hundreds of thousands more in the weeks after the war started.“Orders were given for U.S. personnel across the country to massacre South Korean civilians, which was confirmed by the accounts of war correspondents, Korean survivors, American perpetrators and years later by Pentagon archives.”US General Matthew Ridgway, the Commander of all the United Nations forces in Korea, said that he himself had given orders in Korea to commit crimes no less severe than those the Nazi generals had. Abrams notes, “this may well have included his commands to massacre refugees, firebomb civilian population centres across both Koreas, and ‘kill everything in front of us, including women and children’ during advances in 1951.”Britain’s former Chief of the Defence Staff, Field Marshal Lord Richard Carver, observed about the POW camps, “The UN prisoners in Chinese hands, though subject to ‘re-education processes’ … were better off in every way than any held by the Americans.”US Ambassador to South Korea, John Muccio, told Secretary of State Dean Acheson that Taiwanese overseers in the US-run POW camps, “dominated proceedings through violent systematic terrorism and physical punishment of those choosing against going to Taiwan throughout both orientation and screening phases. Severe beatings, torture, some killings.”On the June 1989 incident in Tiananmen Square, Abrams notes ‘the complete absence of footage indicating protestors may have been killed’, and he points out that the most famous image shows precisely a lone protestor not being killed! The US Embassy reported that a Chilean diplomat who had been in the Square saw ‘no mass firing into the crowd of students at the monument’. The Embassy concluded, “there was no such slaughter.”The BBC’s Beijing correspondent at the time, James Miles, wrote later in BBC News (2 June 2009), “I was one of the foreign journalists who witnessed the events that night … There was no massacre on Tiananmen Square.”For the 1991 Gulf War, the key atrocity story was the one about the murdered Kuwaiti babies, the fable put forward by the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the USA. The London-based NGO Amnesty International, which has quite a record of working with the CIA and MI6, published reports purporting to validate the lie.Abrams adds, “Even after the war’s outcome was decided, the fact that fabricated atrocities vilifying the enemy had become central to the metanarrative surrounding it made almost any measure against Iraq, including the slaughter of thousands of retreating soldiers, seem acceptable.”The deputy chief of the Yugoslav desk at the State Department, George Kenney, said, “The US government doesn’t have proof of any genocide and anyone reading the press critically can see the paucity of evidence, despite interminably repeated claims and bloodcurdling speculation.”“The Guardian, a leading proponent of the war, conceded in an article nine years later in 2008: ‘The ‘genocide’ in Kosovo was a complete fabrication, but it helped Blair and Clinton spin their narrative of a ‘humanitarian’ intervention, to cloak the real economic and strategic reasons for NATO’s military intervention.”As the Wall Street Journal noted in December 1999, “NATO stepped up its claims about Serb ‘killing fields’ essentially to divert attention away from its own killings.” (31 December 1999, ‘Despite Tales, the War in Kosovo Was Savage, but Wasn’t Genocide’.)Ken Livingstone backed NATO’s lies, writing, “As the Serbs slaughter their way across Bosnia, Europe is seeing the first real attempt at genocide since Hitler murdered six million Jews.” This echoed Blair: the Serbs were “set on a Hitler-style genocide equivalent to the extermination of the Jews during World War Two.”NATO carried out a 78-day bombing attack, starting on 24 March 1999. “Lacking authorisation from the United Nations or from the Yugoslav government for these attacks, or any argument that it was acting in self-defence, the Western assault was a crime of aggression against a sovereign state - considered the supreme international crime.”George Kenney said, “Dropping cluster bombs on highly populated urban areas doesn’t result in accidental fatalities. It is purposeful terror bombing.”“The invasion began on March 10, 2003, and was carried out without authorisation from the United Nations Security Council or the pretext of defence from an Iraqi attack, which made it a serious breach of the UN charter and an illegal act of aggression - the supreme international crime.”In September 2003, five months after Baghdad was occupied, President Bush admitted, “No, we’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th.” So, he and his entire administration had been lying for two whole years, to the American people, to his allies, to the UN, and to the rest of the world.Defectors from North Korea, like Shin Dong Hyuk and Park Yeonmi, make up the most ridiculous stories of abuses. Anyone who dares to question these professional liars is routinely accused of endorsing the abuses - again, standard propaganda ploys. Shin’s fictitious ‘autobiography’ has been translated into 27 languages and promoted worldwide. A UN report based its positions almost entirely on Shin’s claims. Years later, the book’s actual author, Blaine Harden, revealed that the defector had fabricated much of his story while the book was being drafted, and Shin later admitted to much the same.No claim is too ludicrous: Park said that there were no words for ‘love’ and ‘I’ in North Korea - do they speak a different Korean in South Korea? She claimed to have crossed the entire Gobi Desert on foot, with six people including a baby, in temperatures of minus 40 degrees, without any winter clothing, and without a guide, in just one day, and when asked how she achieved this impossible feat, replied that it was a miracle. Perhaps her $12,500 fee per speech is a miracle too? As the Washington Post’s Max Fisher wrote, when covering North Korea, “almost any story is treated as broadly credible, no matter how outlandish or thinly sourced.”Park was backed and trained by the Teach North Korean Refugees Global Education Center, which was founded by Casey Lartigue, International Director of the Atlas Network, an ‘NGO’ funded by the US State Department and the US Congress.On NATO’s illegal assault on Libya, Abrams writes, “Western journalists on the ground reported that Western air and missile strikes were causing extremely high civilian casualties, far greater than the Libyan government had even been accused of causing, with civilian targets across the capital Tripoli such as universities and hotels bombarded repeatedly and very heavily.”As in Iraq in 1991 and Yugoslavia in 1999, NATO forces specifically targeted water and sewage infrastructure, water-pumping stations and wells.The US Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, claimed that Colonel Gaddafi had supplied his troops with Viagra to commit mass rapes. UN investigators, journalists and human rights groups later concluded that the claim was wholly false. Eleven years later, UN Special Representative Pramila Patten tried to rerun this claim, claiming that Russian troops had been supplied with Viagra. Patten later admitted that the claim had been unevidenced and that monitoring teams had found ‘nothing about Viagra’.The US Permanent Representative on the NATO Council, Ivo Daalder, and US Navy Admiral James Stavridis published an article in Foreign Affairs in March 2012 titled ‘NATO’s Victory in Libya: The Right Way to Run an Intervention’. They claimed that “NATO’s operation in Libya has rightly been hailed as a model intervention … NATO’s involvement in Libya demonstrated that the alliance remains an essential source of stability … By any measure, NATO succeeded in Libya.” In 2017 a former US Ambassador to Libya, John Graham, more accurately called the country ‘a completely failed state’.French Foreign Minister Ronald Dumas noted in 2009 that Britain had begun training militiamen for operations in Syria. US, Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies were also involved this early. “Operations began in March 2011, … from that time NATO members Britain, France, the U.S. and Turkey, alongside Western-aligned Jordan, all covertly deployed special forces to Syrian territory to support anti-government militias.”“On April 14 [2018] France, Britain and the U.S. again bypassed the [UN Security] Council to launch another attack on Syrian government positions, and like their attack in April 2017 it constituted a crime of aggression without provocation or UN authorisation. The BBC highlighted that the justification for the attack ‘would return the world to the era before the advent of the UN Charter’ - which had outlawed the crimes of aggression and stripped states of the right to unilaterally attack others. The strikes were nevertheless supported by both the European Union and by NATO.”“weapons producers played key roles in financing anti-China narratives, the leading example being Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing and others’ funding of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which resulted in public support for military pressure on Beijing.”The Financial Times’ Edward Luce wrote, “China is not Nazi Germany: reckless analogy.” And, “The rise of Sinophobia in the U.S. and beyond is disturbing.”“a joint investigation by Stanford University and the New York-based social media analytics firm Graphika … found that defaming China, and the authorities in Xinjiang in particular, had been at the crux of a very large five-year social media disinformation campaign by the U.S. and Britain targeting Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and Central Asia with false information.”