Left Cover Flying Fast and Furious for Obama – They Refer to Libya as “armed aerial peacekeeping” (archive)

(archived from March 22, 2011)

by Scott Creighton

It’s a perfect example of just how morally bankrupt the liberal left has become in America and shows how far some of them will go to protect the rapidly tarnishing image of their favorite product.

Over at the Huffington Post, the new ”progressive” home of Andrew Breitbart, David Wood seems to be doing his best impression of every Fox News anchor back in March of 2003 after the Shock and Awe started in Iraq.

In an article titled “Pilots Struggle to Avoid Civilian Casualties“, David goes to great lengths to justify what he seems to consider the inevitable civilian body-count in Libya.  I guess he’s just playing the odds since civilian body counts are definitely on the rise under the reign of our Nobel Peace Prize “winning” president.

 

Just the other day two U.S. helicopters hovered over 10 kids in Afghanistan while they were out collecting firewood for their families. Then after a minute or two of evaluation, they fired rockets at them and lit-em up with their mini-guns killing all but one of them.  One escaped to tell the story and the U.S. had to, once again, change their official version of the event.

“One survivor of the attack, an 11-year-old boy, is reported as saying the helicopters hovered over the boys, rose up, fired rockets and then shot the boys one after the other using their canons.”  ABC News

At first the official story was that the U.S. used artillery fire to kill the kids then they tried to claim that  jets bombed the area since jets move so fast and fly so high, it’s a natural excuse for mistaking children for soldiers. They could barely see them. Of course, the 11-year-old survivor messed that up that story.

Using a variation on that same theme, David Wood seems to be launching his own pre-emptive spin on Libya.

He claims in his new article for AOLPo that it’s hard for fighter pilots to tell civilians from fighters when they zip by at supersonic speeds way up in the air like they do. See? It’s not their fault.

The thought never seems to occur to Mr. Wood that maybe they shouldn’t be there in the first place or that maybe if they can’t tell fighter from child, maybe they shouldn’t launch their weapons.  Kinda like sending a blind and deaf SWAT team into an armed hostage situation then acting like that decision was business as usual.  Unfortunately it is pretty much business as usual for American foreign policy and has been for quite sometime.

David Wood’s article, like hundreds of reports from the MSM before, during, and after the application of “Shock and Awe” in 2003, goes on and on listing one bit of carefully planned disinformation after the other.

If you’re confused about the term “disinformation” just read as “lies”… pretty much the same thing only “disinfo” sits better with those who pretend to call themselves journalists these days.  No one likes to think as they gather at their local Green Zone watering holes that they get paid to spread lies to the American people for a living… well, maybe that’s giving them too much credit.

So many lies, so little time. Where to begin? Let’s take it from the beginning, the very beginning.

David Wood Lie #1

The title “Pilots Struggle to Avoid Civilian Casualties“. Really? Does that really hold up to the history that we know about what is going on in the Middle East and Africa right now?  First of all, we have the recent event which took the lives of 9 children which was brought about by two, not one, but TWO pilots who gunned those kids down after hovering for a minute DECIDING what to do.

Apparently mortars had been fired at a nearby U.S. base in Afghanistan and so it would seem that someone DECIDED to send a clear message to the locals “help insurgents shot at us, and this is the price you will pay”. The only “struggle” I saw there was the breathless effort to keep the truth from getting out.

We all remember the collateral Murder video that went viral a year or so ago. In that video I can clearly hear the gunner commenting about the kids he KNOWS HE JUST SHOT by claiming that is what a father gets when he decides to bring his kids into a war-zone.

The father had his kids in a mini-van in his neighborhood and he stopped to help out a journalist who was lying on the street dying. He didn’t see a “war zone” since the pilot of that gunship was about 10,000 feet in the air above him. The father was clearly a civilian, unarmed, and just trying to help someone he saw dying on the street… yet they lit him up as well.  He died, his two wounded kids lived.  The only “struggle” I heard in that video was the pilot and the gunner trying to figure out how best to lie about the situation to their commanders so that they could get authorization to kill more people.

In a broader sense, let’s go back to the start of “Shock and Awe” in Iraq.  We know now that thousands of Iraqi civilians died in those opening salvos and I remember seeing videos of the first pilots flying those early missions in their stealth bombers at about 50,000 feet above Baghdad in the middle of the night.  They dropped tons of high explosive weapons on tiny little targets in the middle of a very populated city.  Civilians were bound to be killed by the hundreds.  Where was their “struggle”?

The only supporting evidence Mr. Wood offers as justification for his historically inaccurate title seems to be from an unnamed Pentagon source. Kind of disinfo wrapped in a mystery of a lie of omission.  But that is the state of journalism these days, so why hold a “progressive” “news” site to any higher standard, right?

“Pilots have been issued very restrictive rules of engagement and instructed to make “conservative’’ decisions, a senior defense official told The Huffington Post. “We just cannot afford to take the chance of striking the kind of people we are there to protect,’’ the official said.” David Wood

That’s funny. All the “conservatives” and most liberals are pushing for the latest and greatest ground war to start-up. A “conservative” decision would be to kill everything that moves and let Halliburton sort them out.

I guess David took the less cynical interpretation of his stenography.

David Wood Lie #2

The photo.  Man, I’ll tell you, two lies and we haven’t even gotten to the opening paragraph of David’s work.  That’s pretty good.

Here’s the photo with the lie about it, taken from David’s PR effort, inserted into the caption just to make it a little more obvious.

"a mass popular movement demanding his removal and democratic reforms."

This is the lie that is at the very heart of the Libyan conflict. This isn’t a “mass popular movement”.

I challenge anyone to find pictures of the resistance in Libya that are ANYTHING like those we have witnessed in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, or Yemen.  You can’t do it because they don’t exist.  The staged picture you see here is of a bunch of the CONTRACTORS, the mercenaries, that were brought into Libya, armed by the U.S. and the British secret forces, and then handed a box of identical flags and posed by PR guys to attempt to make them LOOK like the photos from the real revolutions.

Go to Cryptome and look at various photos of the Libyan “revolution”.  This is not a mass uprising, they are contractors and it couldn’t be more obvious.

contractors on parade

 

look more like Mubarak thugs than Egyptian heroes

I dare anyone to find me a picture of this “mass uprising” in Libya that even slightly resembles the ones we have all become very familiar with taken in Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, and Bahrain.  I double dog dare you. In fact, I dare David Wood and all of his co-workers like Andrew Breitbart over at HuffPuff to find ONE SINGLE LEGITIMATE PHOTO of that “mass uprising” he is talking about.

Just in case David Wood is incapable of telling the difference anymore between real and Pentagon PR, here is a picture, a “go-by” if you will… this is what a mass uprising looks like. Take note David… one of these things is not like the other.

 

Can you SEE the difference?

David Wood Lie #3, #4, #5, #6, #7

I’m getting tired of counting and we haven’t even started yet. First two paragraphs…

“The new phase of the war in Libya (#3), a kind of armed aerial peacekeeping (#4), puts a heavy responsibility on U.S. and allied air crews whose simple-sounding mission — to protect civilians (#5) – could easily turn deadly and disastrous.

While the military strategy likely seems clear in the White House Situation Room, analysts (#6) said, it may be difficult or impossible to execute flawlessly while avoiding unintended consequences (#7).” David Wood

We’ll take them one at a time.

#3 -  There has been no declaration of war in Libya, so there cannot be a “new phase” or an old phase or any “phase” of such a “war” because it isn’t a war, it’s a CIA backed destabilization campaign like the tons of them they have done in the past.

#4 – “Peacekeeping” is the process of keeping factions apart from each other. However, in Libya, we are bombing one faction while ARMING and PAYING the other. That is NOT “peacekeeping”, that is an illegal invasion.

#5 – The only “civilians” that were in danger from Gadhafi before we got involved were the ones who were the contractors who were armed to the teeth with weapons we and the British gave them. Just like in America were the people to arm themselves with surface to air missile launchers and heavy caliber machine guns and use those weapons against the White House, Gadhafi protected his country against this small minority of “rebels”, like say the Clintons did against a group in Waco. Only they didn’t attack anyone and they were made up mostly of women and kids and they didn’t have anti-aircraft weapons bolted to the backs of pick-up trucks that look like they came from the African Union surplus sale.

#6 – who are these “analysts”?  Didn’t reporters used to have to tell people who they were quoting so we could see if they worked for defense contractors or not?

#7 – When you launch 112 Tomahawk cruise missiles into populated areas, the consequences are far from “unintended”, that’s why they call it “Shock and Awe”

The mental and moral gymnastics the left is going through right now to justify the callus and brutal behavior of their savior is almost comical to watch especially in light of their relentless and some would argue, clearly justified moral outrage they heaped on the Bush administration and their overzealous right-wing amen chorus just a few short years ago.

Have no fear “progressives” you will find your moral voice again just as soon as the Peace Prize President is voted out. And then you can feel good about yourselves again.  Won’t that be nice?

Seven lies in two paragraphs, a title, and a picture.  That’s got to be a record for Mr. Wood, but frankly, I don’t feel like doing the research to see what else the “journalist” has written.

Those of us in what Obama’s Chief of Staff called “the retarded left”, we are still out here and we are still outraged over the needless loss of life for oil and control of central banking systems. We are still working as hard as we can to expose the lies that permeate our airwaves and decay our moral standing in the world. We, the proudly retarded left, continue on our thankless quest to undermine propaganda where ever we find it regardless if it comes from a neocon or a New Dem. I guess that’s what makes us retarded. We can’t tell the difference between dead kids killed by a republican or a democrat.  To us, they all feel the same.

We also can’t tell the difference between lies told to us by Andrew Breitbart or David Wood. To us, they all smell the same.

UPDATE: Seems to be a trend. From “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell“

“Two days after President Obama launched cruise missiles as part of  an international effort to try to protect Libyan civilians from their homicidal dictator…”

If you go watch that video of last night’s show, you will see a democratic congressman, Meeks, jumping through hoops trying to claim that what Obama is different than what Bush/Cheney did because it’s a “humanitarian” mission and because it’s just a “no fly zone” like Bosnia  and Kosovo were.  He actually thinks that Bosnia and Kosovo were justified, of course that is because it was under Clinton I suppose.  He also claims that because Clinton (war-monger) didn’t ask congress for permission to wage war on another country, then it’s ok if Obama does it.  Now that is quite an amazing bit of mental gymnastics if you ask me.