If you’re launching a new media outlet, such as First Look Media’s initial online magazine, The Intercept, and you expect to be taken seriously as the new home to some of America’s leading journalists and muckrakers, and you publish a piece with a title, like the one below, published earlier today, you better have a hell of a lot of facts to support your claims. After reading the story, as far as I’m concerned—at least with regard to telling us like it is—First Look’s The Intercept’s just raised the bar on everyone.
Hussain’s and Greenwald’s report is so overwhelmingly convincing, in terms of its comprehensive takedown and evisceration of our government’s penchant for perpetual war, along with the subservient and obligatory parroting of same throughout the MSM with regard to their propaganda “lead story” over the past couple of weeks, I double-dog-dare readers to attempt to punch holes in it.
The journalists’ closing words, below, belie the even greater power and sheer amount of truly outrageous, highly-substantiated facts reported in the balance of the piece. This story is, without a doubt, as much about the over-the-top level of propaganda to which we’re subjected here in America as it is about anything else. And, it all adds up to this weekend’s “must-read”…
The Khorasan Group: Anatomy of a Fake Terror Threat to Justify Bombing Syria
By Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain
The Intercept
09/28/2014 8:11 AM
…There are serious questions about whether the Khorasan Group even exists in any meaningful or identifiable manner. Aki Peritz, a CIA counterterrorism official until 2009, Time: “I’d certainly never heard of this group while working at the agency,” while Obama’s former U.S. ambassador to Syria Robert Ford said: ”We used the term [Khorasan] inside the government, we don’t know where it came from….All I know is that they don’t call themselves that.” As the Intercept was finalizing this article, former terrorism federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review that the group was a scam: “You haven’t heard of the Khorosan Group because there isn’t one. It is a name the administration came up with, calculating that Khorosan … had sufficient connection to jihadist lore that no one would call the president on it.”
What happened here is all-too-familiar. The Obama administration needed propagandistic and legal rationale for bombing yet another predominantly Muslim country. While emotions over the ISIS beheading videos were high, they were not enough to sustain a lengthy new war.
So after spending weeks promoting ISIS as Worse Than Al Qaeda™, they unveiled a new, never-before-heard-of group that was Worse Than ISIS™. Overnight, as the first bombs on Syria fell, the endlessly helpful U.S. media mindlessly circulated the script they were given: this new group was composed of “hardened terrorists,” posed an “imminent” threat to the U.S. homeland, was in the “final stages” of plots to take down U.S. civilian aircraft, and could “launch more-coordinated and larger attacks on the West in the style of the 9/11 attacks from 2001.”"
As usual, anonymity was granted to U.S. officials to make these claims. As usual, there was almost no evidence for any of this. Nonetheless, American media outlets – eager, as always, to justify American wars - spewed all of this with very little skepticism. Worse, they did it by pretending that the U.S. Government was trying not to talk about all of this – too secret! – but they, as intrepid, digging journalists, managed to unearth it from their courageous “sources.” Once the damage was done, the evidence quickly emerged about what a sham this all was. But, as always with these government/media propaganda campaigns, the truth emerged only when it’s impotent.
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I am very much looking forward to the first issue of Matt Taibbi’s (yet-to-be-titled) online publication over at First Look, scheduled for debut approximately 30 days from now.
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