Lies Of Omission As Fresh American War Crimes Loom

The US has amassed the largest military force in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq almost 23 years ago and is poised once again to commit mass murder and gleefully perpetrate an astonishing amount of war crimes.

Yesterday a huge number of planes, from fighter jets to air-to-air refuelling tankers to command and control planes, left the US en route to the Middle East. The planes had stop-overs on US military bases in England and Germany, because no imperial war crime is ever complete without the involvement of Europe.

Screenshot of US military planes flying from the US to Europe

A US attack on Iran, a flagrant violation of international law, if such a thing is even worth mentioning any more, appears imminent.

Why? For Israel, for oil, for power projection, for Trump’s legacy. Because the logic of the military-industrial complex demands that $1 trillion dollars a year and an astonishing array of killing machinery doesn’t just sit idle.

Because this is what empires do.

Because the US is violence.

And there is no more stunning display of American violence than a big war.

The US has been at war for 222 out of 239 years since 1776. The country is hardly going to stop now, especially not with the stars aligning for a project the US-Israel-Zionist axis has been desperate to undertake for nearly 50 years.

And despite the fact that a nation at almost constant war is going to attack a country that last initiated a war nearly 300 years ago, the US and Israel are going to pose as the saviours and pacifiers.

The leaders of these countries will self-anoint themselves as such, while western media will subject their readers and viewers to a dizzying display of propaganda to enable the murders and wash the crimes.

The groundwork

But the propaganda won’t start from the day of the attack.

The truth is, we wouldn’t be in this situation without the groundwork laid by the media over the years.

We wouldn’t be on the verge of another major US war without the often subtle lies of omission that have characterised western reporting on Iran for decades, and have been especially evident in recent months.

Let’s go through some of them.

Shifting narratives

Firstly, and importantly, the premise for an attack.

Last June Trump said the US had ‘obliterated’ Iran’s nuclear sites.

But now, eight months later, the US apparently needs to do a much bigger war to take out Iran’s nuclear programme.

No one will ask the obvious question.

The premise, that Iran’s nuclear programme is a threat, will stand tall and uninterrogated in the mind of the propagandised western media consumer who just eight months ago was told it had all been destroyed.

Loaded terms

“Iran’s nuclear programme.”

The words themselves are loaded with an intent that is rarely examined or explained.

They never come with any context and are purposefully designed to shut down any critical thinking, as I’ve written about before.

Western media never explains that Iran is one of the world's biggest producers of radiopharmaceuticals used for cancer diagnostics and treatments. And to diagnose cancer and make cancer drugs, you need medical isotopes. And you can’t make medical isotopes without enriching uranium. Iran is in the top five global exporters of radioactive drugs, supplying fifteen countries, including European countries, with nuclear medicines. And sanctions on Iran prohibit the import of radiopharmaceuticals.

So without its deliberately misrepresented “nuclear programme” Iran would find it hard, if not impossible, to diagnose and treat people with cancer and other illnesses.

The nuclear deal

Media never explains this and also never explains the background to US threats towards Iran over this programme. Amid all the coverage of talks and possible deals, Western media never mentions the fact that in 2018 Trump himself ripped up a deal, signed in 2016, that was working just fine.

That agreement, ratified by the UN Security Council, facilitated regular site inspections and allowed Iran to manufacture nuclear material for medicine and energy. The media will never remind us of this, nor that the last inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency reported Iran to be in full compliance with their obligations.

We are never told that Trump, under pressure from his Zionist backers to manufacture a crisis which could move the US and Israel towards war, and eager to undo a rare Obama success, deliberately created a problem to solve.

And as we’re about to find out, there was never any intention of solving it peacefully.

But media will keep up the pretence that these were good faith negotiations that broke down because of Iran’s demands. And they won’t tell us those demands included being able to diagnose and treat cancer.

Unilateralism

The fact of the US unilaterally withdrawing from the previous deal is also a key omission in the coverage.

Because to remind readers that the crisis was triggered by the US might make the US, not Iran, look like the rogue state.

The fact of American unilateralism is often buried by western media. This is why we’ve heard so little about the 66 international organisations and treaties the US announced in January it will withdraw from. And in case you’re tempted to think this unilateralism is all on Trump, the Biden administration withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty, both key elements of an international framework to avoid nuclear war.

The US is a rogue state operating in plain sight and a huge amount of effort goes into obscuring that fact. Because if people understood the US as a rogue state, they might question if its constant violence is not the violence of a peacekeeper or a freedom fighter, but the violence of a rogue.

They might question who, in fact, the bad guys are.

Israel’s nukes

Talking of rogue states, the media will never examine the foundational premise underlying the whole issue of Iranian nuclear capability.

They’ll never question why Israel is allowed to have a nuclear weapon but Iran isn’t. They’ll never lead readers or viewers to question why the region’s preeminent aggressor, a perpetrator of genocide and a constant violator of laws and norms, is the one trusted with the most destructive weapon in human history.

Because then they’d have to frame Israel as the aggressor.

Then they’d have to explain how empire works.

Then they’d have to examine glaring double standards and hypocrisies and introduce people to critical thinking which doesn’t lead to reflexive cheerleading for empire.

And that is a big no-no.

It is, after all, much easier to manufacture consent for war if a large chunk of the population thinks you’re the good guys doing freedom and peace things.

New pretexts

If you’ve been following the news, you might be aware that the latest talks go beyond the nuclear programme and introduce new pretexts for war, one of which is Iran’s ballistic missile programme.

Israel, having been shocked at Iran’s ability to strike its territory last June, wants the new deal to include the elimination of all Iran’s long-range missiles.

When the US and Israel attack, we’ll be told that it’s Iran’s fault. We’ll be told that wanting to retain defensive capability in the face of an expansionist, genocidal enemy loudly committed to your destruction is an irrational position.

The Guardian among others have already started pushing this line.

By contrast, we won’t be asked to think about why Israel can have any weapon it likes.

We won’t be asked to think about why the US would go to war to stop a country being able to defend itself from Israel.

This will just be presented as the natural order of things.

American violence

The coming war on Iran will be a completely illegal war of unprovoked aggression committed by the US against a country 4500 miles away which poses zero threat.

Yet I doubt a single American serving in the US military will object.

Because massive war crimes are an American tradition.

Because the US is violence.

Will the US ever have a reckoning with the fundamentally violent and imperial nature of its society?

Not judging by the political alternatives currently on offer.

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, considered by many to be the leading leftist edge of the Democratic Party and a viable future presidential candidate, just went to the Munich security conference to establish her imperial credentials. Speaking at a session sponsored by Palantir, she refused to condemn Trump’s military build-up while spouting anti-Iran regime change propaganda. At the same time, she tried to outflank Trump on the right over Venezuela, saying he should have committed to regime change and toppled the entire government.

With lefty peace-loving friends like AOC who needs war-mongering enemies like Trump eh?

Freedom

As the war begins and bombs rain down, politicians and the media will regurgitate fake atrocity propaganda regarding the number of dead in the recent protests to convince us that the violence on our screens is the violence of the liberator.

We’ll be hearing about the ‘mullahs,’ the ayatollahs and authoritarianism.

The average western media consumer will be convinced that Iranians live in a colourless society led by religious nutters who routinely stone women to death, when a simple YouTube search shows a very different reality. Scenes from streets and shopping malls in Tehran that could have been filmed in any western city are a click away, but media consumers will never be directed to these sources.

All we’ll hear about is the necessity of imperial violence.

We’ll hear that Iran failed to cut a deal in stories sheared of context.

We’ll hear that Americans are helping free Iranians from tyranny and this will be good for the world, when in reality the only path to peace is in freeing Americans from the tyranny of their own empire.

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