As I have written in my last two blog posts (here and here), the U.S. government is prosecuting members of a small political group named the African People’s Socialist Party and its related “Uhuru” movement. The trial is taking place in U.S. District Court in Tampa. The group has been advocating socialism and opposing U.S. imperialism for around 50 years. The feds are prosecuting them as part of their anti-Russia crusade that U.S. officials have been waging since even before the end of World War II. Specifically, the defendants are being prosecuted for failing to register themselves as agents of the Russian government and “sowing discord and conflict” within American voters, especially by opposing the U.S. government’s foreign policy of interventionism, including in Ukraine.
On Day 3 of the trial last week, the feds presented an “expert witness” to establish Russia’s history of disinformation. That’s rich, given that the U.S. government has long been one of the leaders of disinformation.
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How about that 20-year war that the national-security establishment waged in Afghanistan? Most everyone now acknowledges that U.S. officials were lying about about the war during the entire time they were waging it. See this article from the Intercept entitled “A War’s Epitaph,” whose subtitle is “For Two Decades, Americans Told One Lie After Another About What They Were Doing in Afghanistan.”
And what about those infamous WMDs in Iraq? They were used to initiate a vicious, deadly, and destructive war that killed, injured, incarcerated, and tortured tens of thousands of Iraqi people and destroyed their entire country. How’s that for a good example of U.S. disinformation?
In fact, let’s not forget the propaganda that was emanating from U.S. officials after the 9/11 attacks — that the terrorists attacked America because of hatred for our “freedom and values.” More disinformation. Assuming that the attacks were not an “inside job,” the motivation was retaliatory anger over the continuous killing spree that was being inflicted on the Iraqi people with the brutal U.S. sanctions, which succeeded in killing countless Iraqi children.
Let’s go back a bit further — to the Pentagon Papers, which established that the U.S. intervention in Vietnam was based on official lies. And what about the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which was based on official lies regarding a supposed attack by North Vietnam on U.S warships operating off North Vietnamese waters? That disinformation ultimately led to the senseless and meaningless deaths of some 58,000 American soldiers, not to mention more than a million Vietnamese.
One of the biggest items of disinformation has been the claim that American soldiers have killed and died in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam for our country or to protect our “rights and freedoms.” That’s a pure lie because none of those regimes were ever threatening our country or our rights and freedoms. Those soldiers killed and died for nothing but U.S. lies and disinformation.
What about the entire Cold War racket, in which U.S. officials inculcated a deep fear among the American people that the “Russians are coming!”? That was one of the biggest disinformation campaigns in U.S history.
Let’s not forget the U.S. false claim with respect to Ukraine, which states that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked.” In fact, Russia’s invasion was provoked by the U.S. decision to have NATO absorb Ukraine, which would enable U.S. officials to place their troops, bases, equipment, tanks, and nuclear missiles ever closer to Russia’s border, especially in Ukraine. Yet, the U.S. disinformation on Ukraine has been eagerly embraced by the assets and acolytes of the U.S. national-security establishment within the mainstream press.
U.S. officials want to eliminate “discord and conflict” by unifying every American behind their their lies and disinformation. That’s why they are trying to shut down people who challenge their beloved anti-Russia crusade, just like they tried to shut down people who objected to their beloved anti-communist crusade during the Cold War.
After all, let’s not forget that that’s what they did with President Kennedy. They shut him down completely. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK achieved a breakthrough in which he recognized that the national-security establishment’s anti-Russia crusade was nothing but a deadly and dangerous racket, one that he announced he was ending. They knew that Kennedy was threatening not only their racket but also their very existence. After all, if people were to figure out the nature of their racket, they might demand the dismantling of the national-security state and the restoration of our founding governmental system of a limited-government republic. Thus, Kennedy had to be dealt with, and he was. No president since then has dared to challenge their anti-Russia racket.
It would have been great if the defendant’s lawyers in the Tampa trial had used their cross-examination of the government’s “disinformation expert” to bring out how the U.S. government is itself one of the greatest disseminators of propaganda and disinformation in the world. No doubt the presiding judge would have disallowed that cross-examination but at least the jury might have gotten the point — that the U.S. government is also one of the biggest hypocrites in the world.