lies

2007, in a closed discussion: Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that in her opinion "Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel." She "also criticized the exaggerated use that [Israeli] Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears.1"

2009: "A senior Israeli official in Washington" asserted that "Iran would be unlikely to use its missiles in an attack [against Israel] because of the certainty of retaliation.2"

In 2010 the Sunday Times of London (January 10) reported that Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, war hero, pillar of the Israeli defense establishment, and former director-general of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission, "believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons."

Early last month, US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told a television audience: "Are they [Iran] trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No, but we know that they're trying to develop a nuclear capability.3"

A week later we could read in the New York Times (January 15) that "three leading Israeli security experts — the Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo, a former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, and a former military chief of staff, Dan Halutz — all recently declared that a nuclear Iran would not pose an existential threat to Israel."

Then, a few days afterward, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, in an interview with Israeli Army Radio (January 18), had this exchange:

Question: Is it Israel's judgment that Iran has not yet decided to turn its nuclear potential into weapons of mass destruction?

• 1. Haaretz.com (Israel), October 25, 2007; print edition October 26
• 2. Washington Post, March 5, 2009
• 3. "Face the Nation", CBS, January 8, 2012

General Dannatt said in May 2009 that Britain’s “military reputation and credibility, unfairly or not, have been called into question at several levels in the eyes of our most important ally as a result of some aspects of the Iraq campaign”. Therefore, Dannatt continued, “Taking steps to restore this credibility will be pivotal – and Afghanistan provides an opportunity”.

A confidential August 2009 report by US General Stanley McChrystal, at that time the overall military commander in Afghanistan, stated that “the overall situation is deteriorating” and that NATO faced a “resilient and growing insurgency”

British interests in the region are closely aligned with those of the USA:
“The entire region in which Afghanistan sits is of vital strategic importance to the United Kingdom,” stated the then Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth in July 2009.

UK Defence Minister Liam Fox MP has stated that a withdrawal of troops would “damage the credibility of NATO” and “would be a shot in the arm to violent jihadists everywhere, re-energising violent radical and extreme Islamism”.

General Dannatt said in May 2009 that Britain’s “military reputation and credibility, unfairly or not, have been called into question at several levels in the eyes of our most important ally as a result of some aspects of the Iraq campaign”. Therefore, Dannatt continued, “Taking steps to restore this credibility will be pivotal – and Afghanistan provides an opportunity”.

US Assistant Secretary of State, Richard Boucher, confirmed in 2007 that “one of our goals is to stabilise Afghanistan... so that energy can flow to the south”.

The Foreign Office intervened to stop a criminal investigation into the alleged massacre of 24 unarmed villagers by British troops, in a cover-up that puts Britain's colonial past under renewed scrutiny. Newly disclosed documents reveal that in the 1990s UK officials pressured Malaysian authorities into aborting a police inquiry into the alleged killings by Scots Guards in Malaya in 1948.

They reveal that Malaysian police officers contacted Interpol and were due to visit the UK in 1993 to interview soldiers involved in the shootings, only for the Foreign Office to pressure the country's high commissioner into halting the visit. One memorandum states that senior Foreign Office officials later met Malaysian police chiefs to discuss closing the inquiry shortly before it was aborted...

The plantation workers were shot in cold blood by a 16-man patrol of Scots Guards in December 1948. Many of the victims' bodies were found to have been mutilated and their village of Batang Kali was burned to the ground. No weapons were found when the village was searched during a military operation against Chinese communists in the post-second world war Malayan emergency.

The British government has refused to apologise for the incident or offer reparations, and last November it said it would not hold a public inquiry into an incident that campaigners dub "Britain's My Lai massacre".

Fifty years ago, on 28 May 1959, the World Health Organisation's assembly voted into force an obscure but important agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency – the United Nations "Atoms for Peace" organisation, founded just two years before in 1957. The effect of this agreement has been to give the IAEA an effective veto on any actions by the WHO that relate in any way to nuclear power – and so prevent the WHO from playing its proper role in investigating and warning of the dangers of nuclear radiation on human health...

[T]he effect has been one-sided. For example, investigations into the health impacts of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in Ukraine on 26 April 1986 have been effectively taken over by IAEA and dissenting information has been suppressed. The health effects of the accident were the subject of two major conferences, in Geneva in 1995, and in Kiev in 2001. But the full proceedings of those conferences remain unpublished.

Meanwhile, the 2005 report of the IAEA-dominated Chernobyl Forum, which estimates a total death toll from the accident of only several thousand, is widely regarded as a whitewash as it ignores a host of peer-reviewed epidemiological studies indicating far higher mortality and widespread genomic damage. Many of these studies were presented at the Geneva and Kiev conferences but they, and the ensuing learned discussions, have yet to see the light of day thanks to the non-publication of the proceedings.

In a document titled "The WikiLeaks Threat" three data intelligence companies, Plantir Technologies, HBGary Federal and Berico Technologies, outline a plan to attack Wikileaks. They are acting upon request from Hunton and Williams, a law firm working for Bank of America. The Department of Justice recommended the law firm to Bank of America according to an article in The Tech Herald. The proposed attacks on WikiLeaks according to the slides include these actions:

* Feed the fuel between the feuding groups. Disinformation. Create messages around actions of sabotage or discredit the opposing organizations. Submit fake documents and then call out the error.
* Create concern over the security of the infrastructure. Create exposure stories. If the process is believed not to be secure they are done.
* Cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters. This would kill the project. Since the servers are now in Sweden and France putting a team together to get access is more straightforward.
* Media campaign to push the radial and reckless nature of WikiLeaks activities. Sustain pressure. Does nothing for the fanatics, but creates concern and doubt among moderates.
* Search for leaks. Use social media to profile and identify risky behavior of employees.

Wendell Potter is former head of corporate communications for CIGNA, one of the largest for-profit health insurance companies in the United States.

"If you are among those who believe that the U.S. has the best healthcare system in the world--despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary-- it’s because my fellow spinmeisters and I succeeded brilliantly at what we were paid very well to do with your premium dollars.”

“And if you were persuaded that the health care bill President Barack Obama signed into law in March 2010 was a ‘government takeover of the health care system,’ my former colleagues and I earned every penny of our handsome salaries.”

The talking points [were] designed to be simple, catchy, and memorable. Think government takeover of healthcare, death panels, and socialism.

“And you have to say them over and over and over again. And if you hear them often enough, you think it’s true,” says Potter. “That’s why people, even today, think that the legislation created death panels. Obviously it never had anything approaching that kind of provision. People think this legislation is a government takeover of the healthcare system. In reality, it props up our private healthcare system. It guarantees that these private insurance companies are going to be profitable for years and years to come. It will require us to buy their products and it doesn’t include a public option, which we needed to have.”

Potter says once the talking points are written, they are distributed on Capitol Hill. The process is simple, but it’s done discreetly. “You don’t hand them to a member of Congress, but you develop very good relationships with staff members. That’s key.”

He says he also cultivated relationships with television producers and reporters, who, in turn, handed them to pundits and the talking heads on cable shows.