In the very early spring of this year, I gave a lecture to European military personnel interested in the Middle East. It was scarcely a year since Bashar al-Assad’s alleged use of chlorine gas against the civilian inhabitants of the Damascus suburb of Douma on 7 April 2018, in which 43 people were said to have been killed. Few…
The Washington Post, through documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, has published a long investigation into Afghanistan. Journalists have collected over 400 testimonies from American diplomats, NATO generals and other NATO personnel, that show that reports about Afghanistan were falsified to deceive the public about the real situation on the ground. After the…
The Washington Post has obtained a “confidential trove of government documents” revealing that “senior US officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” But many of us knew and wrote that…
In the 1920s, the influential American intellectual Walter Lippman argued that the average person was incapable of seeing or understanding the world clearly and needed to be guided by experts behind the social curtain. In a number of books he laid out the theoretical foundations for the practical work of Edward Bernays, who developed “public…
I watched the film “Official Secrets”the other day, which I highly recommend doing if you want to rekindle your rage about the unforgivable evil that was the Iraq invasion. Which is a good thing to do, in my opinion. Absolutely nothing was ever done to address the fact that a million people were murdered with the…
Over the course of my life I have watched integrity shrivel up and die everywhere in the Western world. It is not like it was ever really abundant, but there was a goodly amount of it, and it had authority. People, especially those in public life, weren’t shameless as they are today. In the past…
