Corporate Media Ignores White House Planning of "False Flag" Operations to Trigger War with Iran

THE BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

Mark Karlin

Editor and Publisher

August 4, 2008

Seymour Hersh is the most trusted and well-connected national security investigative reporter in the nation. (His heir apparent at The New Yorker is Jane Mayer.) He has reliable connections everywhere, including the Bush White House, the CIA, and the Pentagon.

Almost no one vigorously attacks Hersh’s reporting, including the White House and the right-wing media echo chamber. Why? Because many of his sources are from inside the administration and he has such credibility that they would just be drawing attention to his revelations.

Unfortunately, while some of Hersh’s bombshells get picked up by the corporate media, they are usually the ones that the White House actually wants disseminated, such as Hersh’s New Yorker piece on how the Bush Administration is currently conducting special military operations inside of Iran to destabilize the government. The White House wants to ratchet up the pressure on Iran with this sort of saber rattling.

But if the White House doesn’t want a Hersh disclosure to travel far, you can bet that the corporate media will treat it as if it were radioactive, or like they treated the anthrax story, ignoring the telling questions of potential U.S. government involvement, via the biological warfare lab at Fort Detrick, in the attacks on liberal senate leadership just before the vote on the Patriot Act. Nor did the corporate media follow through on why the White House and its shills – like John McCain and Joe Lieberman – were so quick to blame the anthrax attacks on Iraq, providing another casus belli – although a clearly false one, since the anthrax was manufactured in our own military research facility in Maryland -- for attacking that nation.

Last week, Think Progress offered us a Hersh disclosure that should have been on the front page of the major papers and the lead story on corporate broadcast news across the United States: the White House staff, led by Cheney, have been debating ways to provoke a war with Iran. If you are thinking Gulf of Tonkin, you don’t have to go back that far.

Remember just a few months ago that the U.S. corporate media breathlessly reported how an Iranian gun boat allegedly threatened a U.S. naval vessel. Only, it turned out that the recording that the White House had the Pentagon disseminate was doctored and no verbal threat had occurred.

And that is exactly what the White House has been planning, as in "kicking around ideas" that would precipitate a confrontation with Iran that would get the American public behind a war.

We’ll turn it over to the Think Progress report on Hersh’s comments so that you can get a better idea of the horrendous and criminal implications of what Cheney and his crew are still up to, even after the debacle of Iraq. (Remember that Cheney is after control over the oil and assertion of U.S. hegemony over the region.):

Speaking at the Campus Progress journalism conference earlier this month, Seymour Hersh — a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for The New Yorker — revealed that Bush administration officials held a meeting recently in the Vice President’s office to discuss ways to provoke a war with Iran.

In Hersh’s most recent article, he reports that this meeting occurred in the wake of the overblown incident in the Strait of Hormuz, when a U.S. carrier almost shot at a few small Iranian speedboats. The "meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. 'The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,’" according to one of Hersh’s sources.

During the journalism conference event, I asked Hersh specifically about this meeting and if he could elaborate on what occurred. Hersh explained that, during the meeting in Cheney’s office, an idea was considered to dress up Navy Seals as Iranians, put them on fake Iranian speedboats, and shoot at them. This idea, intended to provoke an Iran war, was ultimately rejected:

HERSH: There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up.

Okay, so that specific "false flag" Hollywood style operation was rejected, but ideas for creating the pretext to nuke Iran haven’t been deep-sixed. Apparently, no one but Think Progress, a project of the Center for American Progress, thinks that this sort of treachery and betrayal of the nation is worth reporting upon.

Our policy at BuzzFlash.com has been to be very careful about conspiracy theories, because so many of them rely on speculation, since the very nature of a cover-up is to deny us information. We know that we don’t know the truth about the JFK assassination or 9/11, but we can only hypothesize about what really happened because so much of the evidence has already been shredded or, in the case of unwelcome people with unwanted information, rendered "inoperable."

But here, you have America’s premier investigative reporter informing us that the White House has been actively "brainstorming" ways to fabricate a "justification" for a war with Iran.

It’s another war crime, a war crime against the American people and the innocent civilian population of Iran, and again for oil. (The nuclear issue is of interest, but not the real reason motivating Cheney. He wants another Shah-like puppet in power and Iranian oil under de facto American control.)

When you wonder about why it is important to support progressive news and commentary sites such as BuzzFlash.com, think about who is getting this sort of information out to you and who isn’t.

By the way, many BuzzFlash readers are familiar with the confirmed plan by the Pentagon in the early ‘60s, "Operation Northwoods," to create a war with Cuba and the Soviet Union by attacking our own civilians. "Operation Northwoods" included an idea to shoot down one of our own civilian airliners and blame it on the Cubans, thus raising the battle cry among Americans to invade the island. This is no conspiracy theory, "Operation Northwoods" is well-documented as a plan (even covered by ABC News when it was finally documented some 40 years later in 2001), but fortunately it was buried and never put into action. Saner and less criminal minds prevailed, as President Kennedy nixed the entire Northwoods plan when he first saw it.

But we don’t have JFK in the White House; we have George W. Bush and Dick Cheney – and they aren’t throwing treacherous ideas like "Operation Northwoods" in the shredder; to the contrary, they are creating plans like Northwoods.

And the corporate mainstream media isn’t even informing the American people.

But as soon as one of these ideas is activated, you’ll know about it because the television news networks and newspapers will be covering it breathlessly as if it is for real.

Lives are at stake, as Cheney plots another war based on deception.

And no one but some Netroot sites seems to be interested in alerting the American public.

That is how bad the mess that we are in is.

The corporate media has become the third partner in the military-industrial complex.

War and peace hang in the balance.

THE BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG