The War Against Us, part 2: Living in the Real World

American Dissident Voices Broadcast of April 19, 2003
by Hadding Scott and Kevin Alfred Strom

Welcome to American Dissident Voices. Today we'll be continuing
our series by ADV researcher Hadding Scott, and yours truly,
Kevin Alfred Strom, entitled The War Against Us. Today we present
part 2: Living in the Real World.

I am not going to spend much time this week proving again that
Zionist Jews are the prime movers of this war and this series of
wars. That fact seems to be pretty widely understood at this
point. If it wasn't clear enough before, it is clearer now
because of the threats and pressure being exerted against Syria
on the grounds that Syria might be harboring some exiled leaders
of Iraq, who from any reasonable person's viewpoint ought to
deserve refuge, since the legal accusation against them -- that
they conspired to maintain weapons of mass destruction
specifically prohibited to their country -- has turned out to be
false. The Syrians also make a good point when they show us that
Israel is the big possessor and developer of weapons of mass
destruction in that region, so that any accusation like that
against Syria is a case of the pot calling the kettle black,
given that the United States of America subsidizes the State of
Israel and possesses such weapons itself.

It is abundantly clear that the real complaint against Syria is
on behalf of the Jewish State and this in turn has clarified the
true motive in Iraq for people whose vision has been too dim
until now. The Jewishness of the whole business has become so
clear that even mainstream talk shows are discussing it in a
cowardly, roundabout way.

Therefore instead of talking this week about who is responsible,
I am going to be examining the ways in which we have allowed
ourselves to be manipulated. Ultimately, in order to deal with
our Jewish problem, we have to immunize ourselves against the
insanity that they inflict, the insanity that makes people do
things like obsess over and ultimately destroy countries on the
other side of the world that have done no harm to us. In this
case immunization is a matter of exercising
mental-self-discipline and intelligence.

Retired Army Col. W. Patrick Lang, described as a "special forces
officer and long time Middle East intelligence analyst," said
something recently on PBS' News Hour that really caught my
attention. Commenting on the presentations of the Iraqi
Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, Colonel Lang made
the following generalization about the mentality of
middle-eastern peoples:

"One of the striking things about the information minister's
briefing today was the complete lack of connection to reality in
his descriptions of the American situation. And I think [Colonel]
Dale [Davis] would agree with me that this is characteristic, in
many ways, of the culture of this part of the world under stress
- is that people tend to create a world of ideas and illusions
and their desires of how things should be and then they go and
live in that world. And when really placed under a lot of
pressure, they have a very hard time coming out from that to make
contact with what is really going on." [ PBS News Hour, April 4,
2003
 http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/jan-june03/analysis_04-04.html
]

Colonel Lang's observation was striking to me for a couple of
reasons: first, because the Iraqi Information Minister's daily
reports were really no more far out than what we were getting
from our own government. In fact, his claims usually had a
semblance of truth, although he did exaggerate, claiming for
example that the Iraqi forces had retaken the Saddam
International Airport when in fact they had only partially
succeeded in so doing and were still fighting for it. When the
Information Minister claimed that the U.S. forces held no place
in Iraq, that was also an exaggeration, but no more inaccurate
than what our own government and media were leading us to
believe.

The second reason was because Colonel Lang's observation about
the mentality of Middle Eastern peoples was also applicable to
the Jews, who claim to have their origin in the same part of the
world as the Iraqis.

We have seen that the Zionists have recently been subjects of
worldwide condemnations, and are in danger of losing their Jewish
State through demographic shifts. This is a realistic fear that
augments the usual Jewish persecution complex that the Jews work
to maintain. The solution to this Jewish predicament was provided
by the Israeli generals' buddy Paul Wolfowitz, the Jew who tells
Donald Rumsfeld what to think and say. We have seen that Paul
Wolfowitz's projection of an easy conquest of a grateful Iraq was
either delusional or a particularly egregious case of Jewish
salesmanship. Wolfowitz is like the Iraqi Information Minister,
in that he too has constructed a fantasy-world of rosy scenarios
that he wants us to believe in, so that his cause can be served.
His cause of course is Zionism, support for the Jewish State,
even at the expense of America.

During this short conventional war in Iraq, we as well as the
Iraqis have been targets of psychological warfare -- a fancy way
of saying that our government and media keep lying about what is
really going on. They have told one lie after another intended to
make us feel that the cause was just, that it was moral, that it
was certain to succeed, and that the world would love us for
doing it. I have listed and categorized some of the lies that we
have been told in this Iraqi war. It's useful to look at these
lies carefully and with benefit of hindsight, because it appears
that we are being pushed into another and yet another war, where
the same kinds of lies are likely to crop up again.

The most prominent theme of U.S. propaganda that I noticed was
that victory will be easy because the regime is crumbling. We
were told:

1. That Tariq Aziz was shot in the back while trying to run away
from Iraq into Turkey.

2. That Saddam Hussein had died in the missile-attack of March 19
with which George W. Bush began the war. And, in order to keep
that claim alive, we were supposed to believe that Saddam Hussein
actually anticipated his own death, that he knew when he was
going to die and what would be happening at the time of his
death, and had used this prescience to make videotapes of himself
that would fool the world into thinking that he was still alive
when he was really dead.

Furthermore, we were expected to believe that Saddam Hussein
chose to have himself videotaped looking disheveled and wearing
spectacles in the video to be shown the day after his own death [
 http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/20/earlyshow/main544812.shtml
], and speaking before a makeshift backdrop of white cloth in the
latter, in both cases anticipating before his own death events
that would occur after. What a fiendishly clever devil that
Saddam Hussein is (or was)!

You really needed a wild imagination to believe that, but many
Americans swallowed it. An alternate theory about the two
speeches given by Saddam Hussein after his death, was that the
figure in them was actually one of his legendary "body doubles."
I recall that some years ago we were told that Saddam Hussein had
fifty such body doubles, so that he could be in many places at
the same time. More recently the more popular figure has been
six, but these six were surgically altered, it was said, so that
only a careful, expert examination of their images could tell
them apart. Now, finally, Martin Sieff, writing for UPI, says in
effect that there were no body doubles, strictly speaking:

"His security and intelligence services never showed any
expertise in deception or make-up sufficient to convincingly
display body doubles to him who could not be obviously
distinguished as such at close range." [
 http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030413-082221-7983r ]

Therefore it seems that the attempts to explain away Saddam
Hussein's persistent appearances by reference to body doubles was
misguided. The Saddam-is-dead rumor was kept up until Saddam
Hussein himself finally made two appearances the same day, on
April 4, and even then there were some attempts to deny that it
really was Saddam Hussein making the speech, and to suggest that
the videotape of Saddam Hussein walking around in Baghdad might
be old footage, even though one could see smoke billowing in the
background.

After another attempted assassination-by- missile that was
combined with tanks entering Baghdad and disrupting all
communications, the claim that Saddam is dead has been revived,
and so far there is no way to know if it is true or false.

3. Along with the persistent drumbeat of "Saddam is dead," was
the constant insinuation that his government was crumbling,
either around his ears or because of his absence, and that
Republican Guard leaders were unable to communicate with Saddam
Hussein. This legend of the crumbling government commenced
immediately after the missile attack of March 19. The next day,
one of CNN's announcers inquired anxiously to Peter Arnett in
Baghdad if he could see any signs of this alleged chaos, and
Arnett said that it was absurd, that everything was going on
normally in Baghdad and that the idea of someone in Baghdad being
unable to communicate with Republican Guard commanders just
outside of Baghdad was ridiculous, because messages could be sent
by taxi if nothing else.

4. An actual hoax that was perpetrated very early in the war was
the surrender of Iraq's 51st Mechanized Infantry Division, of
which only a subordinate officer had surrendered. The Iraqi
Information Minister was correct in denying this, and the U.S.
news media were wrong.

5. U.S. television broadcasts made from an aircraft over Iraq
claimed that an ayatollah was urging Iraqi Shiites not to oppose
the U.S. invasion, and the claim continued to be made, for
example by a colonel who was a guest on the Fox News program
Hannity and Colmes, that this ayatollah was urging the Shiites in
Iraq not to oppose the coalition troops, although the office of
that ayatollah had issued a statement that this was not his
position at all.

***

The second theme that I noticed in our war propaganda was that
the enemy was "evil." This theme can be subdivided into tales of
war atrocities, which are designed to convince the listener that,
if the Iraqis had not wronged us before, by God they have wronged
us now, and into tales of cruelty to innocents. Both of these
kinds of atrocity stories have a visceral effect on people so
that they often have a hard time thinking about whether the story
makes any sense or not.

There were a number of atrocity reports during the war that did
not pan out. Regular listeners to American Dissident Voices
already know that the greatest atrocity attributed to the Hussein
government, the gassed-Kurds story, is false, and that the
hundred or so Kurds who died at al-Halabja in 1988 were killed by
cyanide gas that came from advancing Iranian forces.

Given the general demonization of Saddam Hussein's government by
the U.S. and British governments, which has gone so far as to
nickname General Ali Hassan al-Majid as "Chemical Ali," because
of a gas-attack against Kurdish civilians that never even
happened, it is not too surprising that many reporters and others
under the influence of this propaganda interpreted everything
that they saw in Iraq in the worst way possible.

Perhaps you remember the inspiring story of the British commando
whose tattered helmet had saved him from several Iraqi bullets.
On April 15 CNN revealed the following about this case:

"A British serviceman fooled the media when he was portrayed as
having had a miracle escape after his helmet was hit by four
gunshots, it has been revealed. Commando Eric Walderman, 28, was
nowhere near his helmet when it was shot by members of his own
unit, serving in Iraq.... The helmet had been placed on
Walderman's pack before the Marines began firing at a nearby
unexploded anti-tank weapon. Newspapers around the world ran with
the picture and story of the 'miracle' escape. The incident
happened ahead of the battle for Umm Qasr in the south of Iraq in
the early stages of the war. Walderman did not give an interview
but he did not stop reporters assuming he had been wearing the
Kevlar helmet when the bullets ripped into it."
[
 http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/04/15/sprj.irq.helmet.bullets/index.html
]

That was a humorous example of a tendency that we see at work
even in much sadder cases, which also have a greater impact on
our psyches.

Following the capture of the Army maintenance crew that took a
wrong turn into al-Nasiriyah early in the war, when members of
that crew were shown on al-Jazeera, some alive and some dead, it
was alleged that the five dead soldiers shown on al-Jazeera had
actually been executed, and the evidence for this, aside from the
presumed evil of Saddam Hussein's forces, was that one of the
dead soldiers seemed to have suffered a head wound.

I recall a radio talk-show host in a major metropolitan area
(Shannon Burke, WFLA) going on and on about this as if it were a
certainty, seemingly doing everything in his power as a talk show
host to stimulate rage in his listeners over this alleged
execution of American POWs. I was reluctant to agree with that
talk-show host in jumping to such a conclusion when it was based
on so little evidence. I already was aware of the general
proclivity for making false accusations about Iraqi atrocities,
and in this particular case the accusation seemed very
questionable to me, and should have seemed questionable to anyone
who had a little knowledge and was doing a little thinking. I
recalled that Saddam Hussein had offered substantial cash rewards
to his soldiers, and that the cash reward was twice as great for
a live POW as for a dead one. I also found it hard to understand
why some of the captured soldiers in the maintenance unit would
have been executed and some not, and no explanation of this was
offered. Apparently, when atrocity stories are being peddled, no
explanation is needed for people who want to believe such things.

Following the recent discovery of American POWs outside of
Tikrit, it was revealed that in fact none of the dead Americans
from that maintenance crew had been executed, that all were
simply combat casualties.

The discovery of an abandoned morgue in southern Iraq was
automatically assumed to represent an atrocity by the Iraqi
government, and the detail that "many were shot in the head" was
thrown in to give credence to this interpretation. As it turned
out, these were the remains of Iranian soldiers from the war that
ended in 1988, and they had been exhumed and placed in that
building as part of an exchange of mortal remains between Iran
and Iraq. When an atrocity story like this crops up and you hear
an incriminating detail like, "many were shot in the head," you
should grab onto whatever heavy object you can find to keep from
being sucked into believing that story, because details like that
are easy to make up.

Adnan Shaker is a Shiite who complains of having been tortured
during Saddam Hussein's rule. The Washington Post, and
subsequently MSNBC, and now Newsweek and FreeRepublic.com, have
presented Shaker as their witness to the brutality of the
Baathist regime. I don't doubt that there are some victims of
torture in Iraq since it seems to be standard practice in the
region -- at least in the State of Israel it is -- and I don't
want to justify or excuse the use of torture. I will leave that
to Harvard's Jewish law-professor Allan Dershowitz. It is just
interesting to me that this one alleged victim gets such a wide
circulation. The Washington Post article is considerably more
detailed than the MSNBC offering, however, maybe because MSNBC
had more time to think about leaving certain things out. The
Washington Post includes certain facts that tend to undermine
Adnan Shaker's victim status. It mentions that Adnan Shaker
participated in an attempt in 1999 to overthrow the government of
Iraq and establish a Shiite theocracy. What is also mentioned,
just in passing, is Shaker's admission to the Washington Post, "I
killed seven people." [ Susan B. Glasser, "Bearing Wounds,
Shiites Return to Torture Chamber," Washington Post, Apr 9, 03:
A01 ] That piece of information is conveniently left out of the
MSNBC and Newsweek pieces, so that all you get is a pure picture
of unprovoked brutality by Saddam Hussein's police. Now, I have
illustrated with the example of Eric Walderman and his shot-up
helmet that the media are incredibly sloppy, but this goes beyond
sloppiness. This is bias to the point of insanity. It is
certainly deliberate by our media, when they minimize or omit the
fact that a man claiming to deserve our sympathy is in fact a
murdering religious maniac.

After Jessica Lynch was rescued from an unguarded Iraqi hospital
in al-Nasiriyah where she was receiving medical treatment, it was
initially reported that Jessica had suffered multiple gunshots
and a stab wound, and, although her parents announced in a press
conference following the rescue that none of this was true, the
next day CNN's Wolf Blitzer was still saying that Private Lynch
was "riddled with gunshot wounds." It was also claimed that
Private Lynch was "tortured." The Shiite lawyer who allegedly
pinpointed her location is cited in the Washington Post as saying
that he caught a glimpse of a man slapping her twice in the
hospital, but so far this is unconfirmed, and I suspect that this
too will prove to be more imagination than fact. In this case we
seem to have a mixture of sloppiness, on Blitzer's part, and
probably malicious embellishment on the part of the Shiite
lawyer.

I can see that I have run out of time for this broadcast, so next
week we'll continue to update you on unfolding events in the
Middle East war, and we'll continue our analysis of the lies
we've been told by the media and the warmongers, including:

Was Saddam Hussein "another Hitler"? What about the justification
for the war, the alleged chemical weapons? What about reports of
imminent use of chemical weapons and the deployment of a
perimeter of chemical weapons drums around Baghdad? What about
the "joy" of the Iraqi people at their "liberation"? Was Saddam
Hussein harboring terrorists? How are some Islamic terrorists
used as pawns by Israeli intelligence? How many alleged
terrorists were found and who were they? Did Saddam try to
assassinate George Bush, Sr.? And why should we care if lies are
told about a non-White strongman two oceans away from us, like
Saddam Hussein?

Be sure and join me next week for the final installment of The
War Against Us by Hadding Scott and yours truly, Kevin Alfred
Strom.