True Lies: US Spins Reports to Downplay Responsibility for Civilian Massacres

Rasa - At the Pentagon regime’s department of lies, damn lies, and fake statistics, it is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.

News ID: 428642

Date: 03 April 2017 - 22:52

The cabal of US war criminals are still under the illusion that if they tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed by the international community. Take, for instance, high civilian casualties in Iraq and Syria, or in Yemen and Afghanistan. That the Pentagon has a habit of dramatically undercounting the number of civilians it has killed in these countries is increasingly itself an understatement. With heavy documentation of scores of civilians being killed in the month of February alone, the Pentagon is desperate to cut out its work for keeping this month’s civilian death report low.

But it is wishful thinking. Despite dozens of civilians getting killed in Iraq and Syria on a daily basis, despite growing attention on the civilian death toll from US air strikes, and despite the several hundred killed in March alone, the Pentagon regime is taking us for fools to admit to only four civilians killed in February!

What is clear is that the worse US violations of International Humanitarian Law get in Syria and Iraq, the more opportunities there are for the Pentagon to come up with new lies and fake statistics. Anyone who professes to worry about high civilian casualties thus ought to worry about the US-instigated humanitarian crises there. Append the further observation that the repeated response by the Pentagon to international criticism and condemnation has been - if it is not otherwise restrained - to kill even more civilians, making the humanitarian crises there even worse.

However, fake reports will do nothing to help fix the problems of Syria and Iraq. Neither will dramatically under-counting the number of civilians the US has killed, for that matter.

And it is not just American officials that use such watered-down language. Britain and France also largely echo the US government line to greatly influence what the public thinks about their own complicity in civilian massacres. Their whitewashed lies and reports are remarkably reminiscent of those composed by the Pentagon to cover up the high-profile US-NATO massacre of civilians in Iraq and Syria.

To substantiate, they also contradict themselves in reporting on the recent Mosul massacre. They misleadingly claim that the genocidal Salafi jihadist group of ISIL (a brutal group that emerged because of the US war on Iraq), and not the US-led coalition was responsible for killing 200 civilians in the Mosul airstrike! They go even further. They try to exculpate the US for the atrocity, instead blaming ISIL for hiding among civilians and using them as human shields.

The problem is, the details are not that murky, as Iraqi military officers and government officials have all said, “The blast was caused by a US airstrike called on ISIL snipers on the roof of a building.” If that’s not enough, the commander of the US-led task force fighting ISIL has also tepidly admitted, “My initial assessment is that we probably had a role in these casualties in Mosul.” More direct reports also slowly come trickling out, saying comparable US-led atrocities are happening in Syria.

The dust has settled and the facts have become clearer. The Pentagon regime cannot downplay its atrocities: Carnage in Iraq and Syria is surging under the Trump White House. It is wrong to only focus on the extreme brutality of ISIL, a genocidal Salafi jihadist group that slaughters civilians from religious and ethnic minority groups. It is perhaps understandable that much of the global attention is on its crimes. But the United States and its allies are at fault too.

The atrocities committed by US-led coalition air strikes on the pretext of targeting ISIL militants cannot be ignored. Such an approach is a recipe for disaster, as the US and NATO allies have demonstrated a tendency to exploit ISIL atrocities for propaganda and military escalation.

Little ink has been spilled in the Western media for this truth, nonetheless. According to the monitoring group Airwars, as many as 1,000 civilians were killed by US-led coalition actions in Iraq and Syria just in the month of March. Many more civilians have been killed in the past two years, yet their deaths have received little attention not only by the “fakestream” corporate news networks, but also by the United Nations.

There is no real discussion at the United Nations, let alone political debate, about whether or not the US-led bombing of civilians on the pretext of bombing ISIL is a good idea - not to mention whether or not these airstrikes are actually legal and would ultimately defeat the hyper-sectarian ISIL in the first place.

Per usual, mass casualty “incidents” will continue to rise by US-led forces in Iraq and Syria. And the United Nations won’t be able to do anything about it. The world body will never investigate these atrocities, much less hold to account those guilty. It simply reflects UN’s deference to power. If the US government reports something, there are countless UN officials and allied ambassadors waiting in line to obediently echo it. With acquiescence, if not complicity, the UN has a long history of acting as mouthpiece to the US power.