How they deceive us with the truth

By Donald Hank

The following is a true account.

In 1964, an athlete in his prime savagely attacked an older, handicapped man with his fists in full view of countless witnesses, causing the victim lacerations under the left eye and severe bruising under the right eye.

The assailant was never arrested but amazingly, the victim was arrested weeks later!

What I have just described is the Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston fight of 1964. I used a tactic employed daily by media and government, inserting accurate enough details but omitting the most important details that the public would need to assess the situation correctly.

At the time of the fight, Liston was suffering from severe bursitis and could not lift one of his arms beyond waist level. This "handicapped man" was in fact a ruthless ex-con who had learned boxing in prison. Sports reporters considered him the most feared boxer in history. His arrest weeks after the fight was for drunken driving and driving without a license.

Now if reporters had reported this fight as I did above, they would have lost all credibility. Yet in matters of war that cost the lives of young men, they – and their cohorts in politics – report in precisely this manner when describing a supposed enemy in an effort to stir up war from scratch.

After 911 at ground zero, G. W. Bush, his arm draped around the shoulder of a NY fireman, said on live TV, "The people who knocked these buildings down will hear from all of us soon."

The people responsible were all Saudis, every one, and strong evidence later surfaced that the Saudi government had supported the terrorists. Yet, the people who "heard from" us were the nation of Iraq. Classic bait and switch.

The Kosovo war serves to show how US legal rationale is applied lopsidedely in Ukraine, based on accurate enough details but with the main ones omitted.

The US declared that Russia had no right to intervene to help the Crimeans secede, despite the overwhelming desire of these Russian speaking people to unite with their brothers in the Russian Federation – particularly since they had reason to fear for their safety in a region dominated by anti-Russian Ukrainians, who wanted to deny a nation with a Russian speaking majority the right to speak their language at home. The official US argument was that international law forbids any country to intervene in a secessionist civil conflict.

Yet that stands in direct contradiction to what Bill Clinton did in Kosovo.

The US reasoned during the Kosovo War of 1998-9 that it was legitimate to support Kosovo's secession from the then sovereign Serbia because the Kosovars supported such – even though the decision to secede was made under a UN administration not elected by Kosovars. The US had done the same thing in Panama, militarily supporting that department's secession from Colombia.

Yet later, in 2008, the US government later told the Russians that they could not militarily support the secession of South Ossetia because Georgia was a sovereign country (the EU wisely abstained from using the same lopsided logic at the time).

According to US reasoning, what was "legal" in Kosovo and earlier in Panama (secession supported by a foreign power, the US) was illegal in S. Ossetia because the foreign power happened to be Russia in that case. But hatred of Russia could never be a valid legal argument.

This is how the US government makes up international jurisprudence on the fly.

But you can't have it both ways in law, international or other.

Now the Russians are using the US's own logic to defend their actions in Crimea. The US government may or may not be correct in their interpretation of international law, but they have no legal authority to oppose what the Russians and Crimeans did because they themselves set the precedent for this kind of action.

A revisit of Kosovo is instructive. Numerous reports show that Western media and the US government brazenly hid important details to present the false picture that only the (Christian) Serbs had committed atrocities, whereas the Kosovars (Muslims), whom we portrayed as the good guys, had perpetrated their share of wholesale atrocities as well.

It would be a stretch to imagine that the Albanian Kosovars, who had committed genocide against Serbs in coordination with the Nazis in WW II, had suddenly become choir boys, as Western media suggested at the time. An article containing a series of gruesome photos of Serbs brutally murdered by Kosovars was published in a Serbian web site, even as Western governments and media were insisting that the Kosovars were the innocent victims. Another report showed that Kosovars killed Serbs for organ harvest.

Lest the reader think the above linked reports were purely anti-US propaganda, even the left leaning Amnesty International (natural allies of Clinton) admitted that the UN unfairly reported exclusively atrocities perpetrated by Serbs, when in fact, the Kosovars had been equally brutal.

Even the elitist CFR admitted Kosovo was a botch-up.

Fast forwarding, a similar false portrait was painted in Ukraine, where the rebels were portrayed as innocent victims, whereas in reality, they had broken into an armory and used rifles to kill the police of a democratically elected government.

Psychologists tell us that single instances of a behavior are not significant in evaluating a patient. But when enough of these instances have been documented, then a behavior pattern is established.

From Panama to Kosovo, from Georgia to Ukraine, from Libya to Egypt, Western governments and their cohorts in media have established a clear cut pattern of one-sided reporting and one-sided interpretation of international law – a pattern that is best described as fraud. It has cost untold human lives and suffering, both to our young sent to war and to the peoples of invaded nations.

It is therefore no less criminal than an overt act of brutality by a tyrant. The overt tyrant commits the atrocities himself.

The deceiving tyrant induces us to commit them.

© Donald Hank