Left I on the News  

All over the news are claims of web attacks in which North Korea is "suspected." Why are they suspected? Becaause "the South's spy agency has said the hacking may be linked to North Korea." Ah, well, that clinches it.

The level of disinformation is almost beyond belief. If we make it as far as the tenth paragraph of the article, we read this:

One online expert was quoted as telling a South Korean daily that tracking the spread of the malicious software showed it had originated from an IP address based in United States.

Long before we've gotten to that paragraph, however, we've read such things as: "the attacks...served as a reminder that Pyongyang has been planning for cyber warfare." Really? Only if they had anything to do with North Korea, about which the evidence is not only non-existent, but, based on the previous quoted statement, positively contra-indicated.

Elsewhere we read:

The attacks will likely be regarded by the North's leadership as a victory for Kim Jong-il -- even if Pyongyang was not behind them -- because they hurt the country's traditional foes, adding a new dimension to the threat level posed by the reclusive state.

which is not only speculative but also bizarrely convoluted, since the "threat...posed by the reclusive state" is only relevant if this was an "attack" by North Korea. And, by the way, that threat is described elsewhere in the article as having had "negligible" impact. Talk about having it both ways!

And what about that bit about how North Korea has been "planning for cyber warfare"? It's linked to yet another bit of speculation/possible disinformation:

An expert on North Korea at the Heritage Foundation, Bruce Klingner, said the North had in operation a military unit with up to 1,000 skilled computer hackers created 10 years ago.

Ah, the Heritage Foundation, that well-known source of independent, unbiased information. And, based as they are in Washington, D.C., sure to be the world's best source of information on the inner workings of North Korea.

The one in which 53 American diplomats were held hostage by Iranian students for 444 days? No, the one in which five Iranian diplomats were held hostage by the American government in Iraq for 900 days. They've just been released, having been accused but never actually charged (and certainly never tried or convicted) of "arming and funding Shia groups," for all intents and purposes simply held as hostages for two and a half years (during the better part of which, by the way, the U.S. hasn't even been fighting "armed Shia groups" at all as far as one can tell).

I did a search at the State Department press site to see what they had to say about the "Irbil Five." There have been two questions about possible "prisoner swaps" involving them (a misnomer since they were hostages, not prisoners), at one of which the State Dept. spokesperson admitted that "I have no idea where the Irbil Five are at this point." Well, really, considering that the U.S. holds thousands of people in similar circumstances (without charges, trial, or conviction), how could he be expected to know the status of every one, even the more "significant" ones like Iranian diplomats?

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

However, that's not the complete story. Because here's some related history:

When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written, the Soviet Union—a socialist country where health care was treated as a right—fought for the primacy of the right to health and health care, along with other social, economic and cultural rights, among human rights.

Eleanor Roosevelt, head of the U.N. Human Rights Commission in 1948, led the drafting discussions of the UDHR. She did so representing the United States and summed up its position: "… my government has made it clear in the course of the development of the Declaration that it does not consider that the economic and social and cultural rights stated in the Declaration imply an obligation on governments to assure the enjoyment of these rights by direct governmental action." She added, "This in no way affects our wholehearted support for the basic principles of economic, social and cultural rights set forth in these articles."

A reminder of Robert McNamara's lesser-known war crimes, as the media does its best to paint him as a born-again anti-war advocate.

Update: More from Alexander Cockburn.

Very reliable reports have the Honduran military murdering two people at Tegucigalpa Airport yesterday. An Al Aljazeera reporter on air personally witnessed the dead people, even filming one young child shot in the head whose brains were spilling out on the ground. But when you turn to AP today, the main source of news for this event for most U.S. news consumers, what do you find? Only one death is reported, and it in the 13th paragraph of the story. But how the death is reported was even more interesting than the fact that only one was reported [emphasis added]:

Clashes broke out Sunday afternoon between police and soldiers and the huge crowd of Zelaya supporters surrounding Tegucigalpa's international airport. At least one man was killed — shot in the head from inside the airport as people tried to break through a security fence, according to an Associated Press photographer at the scene.

"Clashes broke out." Yes, soldiers firing live ammunition and a handful of protesters among tens of thousands throwing stones. "Clashes." Then the murder itself. "A shot...from inside the airport." AP fails to point out to its readers that the only ones "inside the airport" were the military.

But worst of all was what comes next in the article:

Critics feared Zelaya might try to extend his rule and cement presidential power in ways similar to what his ally Chavez has done in Venezuela.

Excuse me? How exactly did Chavez "cement presidential power" in Venezuela? By holding vote after vote of the entire population of the country. The idea!

Update: CNN's crawl today: Honduran army fires shots, tear gas, activists say. "Activists say"? I watched the live footage on Al Jazeera and TeleSur, and heard live reports from their reporters on the scene! "Activists say" indeed.

What, you didn't read that? Well, that's because the headlines read the opposite: "Iranian Details Alleged Fraud." But if you remember, the last we heard from Mousavi, he was claiming he actually won the election (a claim he made even before the polls had closed), and that millions, perhaps more than ten million, votes had been stolen from him and/or fraudulently cast for his opponent. But the exact nature of the fraud was always a bit nebulous. Mostly we just heard that Mousavi "should have" won, we know it, look at the support he had (and has), etc.

And now, at long last, Mousavi has released his 24 pages of "evidence" that fraud was committed during the election. And what is that evidence? Testimony from people who stuffed ballot boxes? Proof that the announced count was at wild variance with the actual count? No, this:

In a 24-page document posted on his Web site, Mousavi's special committee studying election fraud accused influential Ahmadinejad supporters of handing out cash bonuses and food, increasing wages, printing millions of extra ballots and other acts in the run-up to the vote.

The committee, whose members were appointed by Mousavi, said the state did everything in its power to get Ahmadinejad reelected, including using military forces and government planes to support his campaign.

That's it. Not a word about actual election fraud. Did Ahmadinejad use the power of his office to help get himself reelected, like every other incumbent in the world? I have little doubt. He may even have broken some campaign laws, again like an awful lot of other politicians. But when your best charges against someone include "increasing wages," that's pretty solid evidence that what you've got is no evidence at all. Mousavi has shown his cards and he was bluffing all along, he doesn't even have a pair of deuces. Queen high at best.

Is AP's Ben Feller a propagator of the big lie on Iran, or has he just heard the big lie so many times he doesn't even think twice about its truth or falseness? Hard to say, but to the public, it doesn't really matter, because when they read this, not in any kind of special article but just casually thrown into the middle of an article on Obama's upcoming foreign trip, they too will internalize it just a little bit more strongly:

Iran and North Korea are defiantly pursuing nuclear weapons programs despite international penalties.

Needless to say, as mentioned here just yesterday, the head of the IAEA admits there is "no evidence" that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, much less is "defiantly pursuing" one. And the "international penalties" being imposed on Iran are being imposed because of its nuclear power program (specifically, Iran's enrichment of its own fuel), not any hypothetical nuclear weapons program.

North Korea tested some missiles today. Reuters says that this was "an act of defiance toward the United States," which is rather bizarre since it is a U.N. resolution that North Korea was violating. AP goes one step further, calling this "an apparent message of defiance to the United States on its Independence Day." Yes, I know my enjoyment of hot dogs and potato salad is going to be totally ruined knowing that another country has "defied" the U.S.' self-proclaimed ruler of the world status.

But what a minute. Isn't shooting exploding things into the sky the very essence of July 4? Maybe North Korea is just honoring Independence Day.

You have to admit it's just as plausible as the explanation offered by Reuters and AP.

Incidentally, also on the 4th of July, Israel continues to imprison a former U.S. Congressperson and Presidential Candidate, Cynthia McKinney. A fact which has barely been reported in the U.S. media, much less described as an "act of defiance to the United States."

Reuters reports:

The incoming head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Friday he did not see any hard evidence Iran was trying to gain the ability to develop nuclear arms.

Except that's not what he said:

"I don't see any evidence in IAEA official documents about this," Yukiya Amano told Reuters.

Not "no hard evidence." "No evidence."

And why is that significant? Because it's a step up from the previous occupant of the office, who relied on the same source of "evidence" as did George Bush - his "gut":

Current International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei said last month it was his "gut feeling" Iran was seeking the ability to produce nuclear arms, if it desired, as an "insurance policy" against perceived threats.

And of such "gut feelings" are sanctions justified (and more than a million Iraqis killed).

A major story in the Washington Post today begins with the following claim:

Saddam Hussein told an FBI interviewer before he was hanged that he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran, according to declassified accounts of the interviews released yesterday.

This (not the FBI interview, obviously, but the claim itself) was one of the major pieces of "evidence" used to justify the invasion of Iraq at the time, so its repetition now, from the mouth of Saddam Hussein no less, would be an important post-facto justification for the invasion. But the claim itself was bullshit at the time. The truth, as I wrote at the time, was that while Gen. Colin Powell was at the U.N. lying through his teeth (or spouting lies put in his mouth by others, if you prefer to be generous to Powell) about the "evidence" the U.S. had, Iraqi Gen. Amer Al-Saadi (still imprisoned as far as we know) was saying clearly and quite publicly that Iraq had no WMD whatsoever. That's one funny way to "allow the world to believe that you have WMD."

And, guess what? No such statement from Saddam Hussein appears in the interviews, which are all online at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. The interviews aren't even transcripts, they are all simply summaries of the conversations made by an FBI agent, with only a tiny amount of direct quotations embedded within them. But even in those summaries, no such claim appears. Glenn Kessler, the author of the Post article, writes: "The formal interviews covered Hussein's rise to power, the Kuwait invasion, and Hussein's crackdown on the Shiite uprising in extensive detail, while the subject of the weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda were raised in the casual conversations, after the formal interviews." As a result, I read every word of the five "casual conversations" that are posted online, twice. I repeat - no such claim by Saddam Hussein appears (nor does it appear in the summary of the documents prepared by the NSA) - that is entirely a fiction created by the Post.

The Post also omits some rather interesting material, like this:

The former Iraqi leader, when asked about his accomplishments, listed social progress for the people of Iraq, a temporary truce with the Kurds in the early 1970s, the nationalization of Iraq’s oil in 1972, support for the Arab side during the 1973 Middle East war with Israel, and after that, for the remaining 30 years of his rule, simple survival – through a devastating eight year war with Iran that he had launched, and a 12-year sanctions regime imposed on his people after another war that he began.

But it wasn't just the Post omitting things. The FBI either neglected to ask Hussein about some rather interesting subjects (or has simply not released the notes of those interviews, even redacted), like this:

Not included in these FBI reports are issues of particular interest to students of Iraq’s complicated relationship with the U.S. – the reported role of the CIA in facilitating the Ba’ath party’s rise to power, the uneasy alliance forged between Iraq and the U.S. during the Iran-Iraq war, and the precise nature of U.S. views regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons policy during that conflict, given its contemporaneous knowledge of their repeated use against Iranians and the Kurds.

Update: Just to be clear, some will say that these sentences from the June 11 conversation is what the Post was referring to:

"Even though Hussein claimed Iraq did not have WMD, the threat from Iran was the major factor as to why he did not allows the return of the UN inspectors. Hussein stated he was more concerned about Iran discovering Iraq’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities than the repercussions of the United States for his refusal to allow UN inspectors back into Iraq."

But what “weaknesses and vulnerabilities” was Hussein referring to? The lack of WMD? Hardly, as the very next sentences make quite clear:

"In his opinion, the UN inspectors would have directly identified to the Iranians where to inflict maximum damage to Iraq. Hussein demonstrated this by pointing at his arm and stated striking someone on the forearm would not have the same effect as striking someone at the elbow or wrist, which would significantly disable the ability to use the arm."

Second Update: Some additional context. Hussein says "In his opinion, the UN inspectors would have directly identified to the Iranians where to inflict maximum damage to Iraq." Where would he get that idea? From history. Because the U.S./British bombing campaign which began when the inspectors withdrew (in anticipation of the bombing) in 1998 was conducted using targeting based on information provided by those inspectors. That a future Iranian attack might also be based on information provided by the inspectors was hardly a farfetched idea, and certainly a reasonable basis for not readmitting the inspectors. And again, having nothing whatsoever to do with WMD.