Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences: How Fake News Shapes World Order 194976270X, 9781949762709

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PRAISE FOR

ATROCITY FABRICATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES “A. B. Abrams has provided a signal service by taking ‘fake news’ about alleged atrocities out of the current affairs arena in which it is mainly discussed and into a much broader, deeper, and in fact even more disturbing context. He perceptively traces the evolution of the use of fabricated atrocity narratives back to the first days of Western warfare and colonial expansion through to eleven more recent case studies. Chillingly, he chronicles how domination of the information space by Western powers through atrocity narratives has driven conflicts far worse in their outcomes than the atrocities alleged. Scholars, journalists, and others with a serious interest in understanding international affairs will find this thought-provoking, ground-breaking analysis highly rewarding.” —PETER FORD, Former British Ambassador to Syria

“With clinical precision, A. B. Abrams has delivered a devastating exposé of the interventionist clique that has weaponized human rights in order to destabilize enemy nations and immiserate their populations.” —MAX BLUMENTHAL, journalist, editor at The Grayzone, and author of the New York Times bestseller, Republican Gomorrah

ATROCITY FABRICATION AND ITS

CONSEQUENCES HOW FAKE NEWS SHAPES WORLD ORDER A. B. ABRAMS

Clarity Press, Inc.

© 2023 A. B. Abrams ISBN: 978-1-949762-70-9 EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-949762-71-6 In-house editor: Diana G. Collier Book design: Becky Luening Cover design: A. B. Abrams and Diego Alcala ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: Except for purposes of review, this book may not be copied, or stored in any information retrieval system, in whole or in part, without permission in writing from the publishers.

 

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022950647

Clarity Press, Inc. 2625 Piedmont Rd. NE, Ste. 56 Atlanta, GA 30324, USA https://www.claritypress.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS Abbreviations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 A Note on Humanitarian Military Intervention: Atrocity Fabrication’s Most Dangerous End. . . . . . . . . . 13 Chapter One Cuba and Vietnam in the Early Cold War. . 22 Chapter Two The Korean War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Chapter Three Beijing 1989 and Tiananmen Square. . . . . 119 Chapter Four The Gulf War. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 Chapter Five The Yugoslav Wars. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 Chapter Six The Iraq War. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 Chapter Seven The U.S.–North Korean Conflict. . . . . . . . 310 Chapter Eight The NATO-Libyan War. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 358 Chapter Nine The Syrian Insurgency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407 Chapter Ten Xinjiang and the Sino-U.S.Conflict. . . . . . 444

Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 523

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ABBREVIATIONS ASPI – Australian Strategic Policy Institute BRI – Belt and Road Initiative CIA – Central Intelligence Agency CFK – Citizens for a Free Kuwait CHRD – Chinese Human Rights Defenders DIS – Defence Intelligence Service DPRK – Democratic People’s Republic of Korea ETIM – Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement FSA – Free Syrian Army GMR – Great Man-Made River Huk – Hukabulahap IAEA – International Atomic Energy Agency IFF – Identification Friend or Foe IMF – International Monetary Fund JCS – Joint Chiefs of Staff KLA – Kosovo Liberation Army MEW – Middle East Watch NATO – North Atlantic Treaty Organisation NED – National Endowment for Democracy NIE – National Intelligence Assessment vi

NGO – Non-Government Organisation NSA – National Security Agency NSC – National Security Council OAS – Organization of American States OIC – Organisation of Islamic Cooperation OPCW – Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons OPEC – Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries OSP – Office of Special Plans PLA – People’s Liberation Army POW – Prisoner of War PR – Public Relations PRC – People’s Republic of China PSB – Psychological Strategy Board PT – patrol RFA – Radio Free Asia RTS – Radio Television of Serbia SAA – Syrian Arab Army SAS – Special Air Service SDF – Syrian Democratic Forces SIGINT – Signals Intelligence TIP – Turkistan Islamic Party UN – United Nations vii

UNICEF – United Nations Children’s Fund UNSC – United Nations Security Council US(A) – United States (of America) USFJ – United States Forces in Japan USNI – United States Naval Institute USSR – Union of Soviet Socialist Republics VCMF – Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation VOA – Voice of America WMD – Weapons of Mass Destruction WRO – Withhold Release Order

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INTRODUCTION It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true.1 – henry kissinger If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.2 – joseph goebbels Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities, has the power to make you commit injustices.3 – voltaire

Atrocity fabrication – the reporting of an atrocity committed by an adversary without knowledge that it ever occurred – has a centuries-long history at the heart of propaganda and power politics in the Western world with profound influences on its political culture. Portraying an adversary as committing particularly egregious crimes, especially when one intends to initiate military action or other hostile measures against that adversary, has consistently provided an effective means of moving public and international opinion and justifying one’s actions. Applied effectively, atrocity fabrication can transform in the public eye a war of unprovoked aggression into a war of liberation of the oppressed, or turn a blockade to starve enemy civilians into a humane effort to pressure an abusive government. Claims of atrocities can also serve to delegitimise criticisms of one’s actions against an adversary, portraying such opposition as siding with injustice and facilitating egregious crimes. An assessment of how and to what ends atrocity fabrication has been used provides context vital to understanding international politics both historically and in the 21st century. Significant consistencies in how atrocity fabrication has been used in the Western world can be observed throughout much of modern history. A notable example from the early 20th century 1

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was the British government’s response to the German occupation of Belgium in the initial months of the First World War by sponsoring a distinguished panel of lawyers and historians, the Bryce Committee, to document German atrocities.4 The committee sensationally described German public rapes and mutilation of Belgian women and girls and the bayonetting of a two-year-old child by eight German soldiers, among other crimes, allowing it to conclude that “murder, lust, and pillage prevailed over many parts of Belgium on a scale unparalleled in any war between civilised nations during the last three centuries.”5 Such conduct, while far from uncommon in European colonial wars from Australia6 to the Americas,7 was abnormal and considered unacceptable for an inter-European conflict where very different standards applied. The Bryce Committee’s claims strongly influenced public opinion,i and having been chaired by former British ambassador to the United States Viscount James Bryce it was found to have had an “overwhelming effect on the American mind and heart” which helped erode public opposition to entering the war on Britain’s side.8 Despite its persuasiveness, the report’s findings had little evidence to substantiate them, with a Belgian commission of inquiry formed in 1922 conducting investigations at the scenes of the alleged atrocities and failing to confirm even a single report of German excesses.9 Professor Phillip Knightly, a leading authority on journalism and war who lectured at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, the Australian Senate, and Australia’s National Press Club, observed regarding the allegations made: “The committee had not personally interviewed a single witness. i The New York Times reported the committee’s findings in the following long headline on May 15, 1915: ‘Bryce Committee’s Report on Deliberate Slaughter of Belgian Non-Combatants; German Atrocities Are Proved, Finds Bryce Committee Not Only Individual Crimes, but Premeditated Slaughter in Belgium. Young and Old Mutilated Women Attacked, Children Brutally Slain, Arson and Pillage Systematic. Countenanced By Officers Wanton Firing on Red Cross and White Flag; Prisoners Wounded and Shott. Civilians Used as Shields Proof That Belgians Did Not Fire on Germans at Louvain – Germans Received Kindness. Testimony That Shows Murder and Mutilation of Men, Women and Children Evidence That Germans Had Set Plan of Slaughter and Pillage.’

Introduction 3

The report was based on 1,200 depositions, mostly from Belgian refugees, taken by 22 barristers in Britain. None of the witnesses were placed on oath, their names were omitted, and hearsay evidence was accepted at full value.”10 This was far from an isolated case, and reflected broader trends in reporting on German military conduct. The Times, for example, quoted a source who claimed to have witnessed “with his own eyes German soldiery chop off the arms of a baby which clung to its mother’s skirts.”11 The French Propaganda Bureau subsequently provided a picture of a baby without hands, and French papers went on to depict German soldiers eating babies’ hands, although post-war investigations failed to find evidence of any cases of comparable conduct.12 As was generally the case for atrocity fabrication efforts it mattered little how German personnel actually conducted themselves or whether allegations against them had any grounding in reality – only that the alleged atrocities would shape public opinion both domestically and overseas to align with British state interests. As Phillip Knightly concluded: “By the time the atrocity story was discredited it had served its role. It had not only rallied opinion on the home front and strengthened the resolution of Britain and France to prosecute the war to the finish, but had also achieved the important task of lowering resistance to the war in the United States.”13 The barbarism portrayed made almost any policy pursued to counter German power appear justified. Thirty years after the Bryce Committee’s work the beginning of the Cold War united the Western world against the first peer level challenger to its power in centuries, the Soviet Union, and similarly saw organisations and networks established to dominate the information space and fabricate stories vilifying the adversary. To fight a new kind of conflict where winning hearts and minds was often more decisive than firepower, Western intelligence agencies led by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) developed a particularly potent global information network to control political narratives. The CIA’s Operation Mockingbird was one of the more prominent related operations and saw American journalists recruited to publish articles dictated by the agency – articles which very often vilified the USSR and its allies with totally fabricated

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information.14 The agency also funded student and cultural organisations and magazines for similar purposes,15 and through its networks of editors and journalists it went to significant lengths to discredit sources of information that contradicted its narratives down to and including targeting individual columnists in the Philippines.16 An investigation by the U.S. Congress in the early 1970s revealed that CIA operations extended to influence reporting not only in America, but almost worldwide in dozens of languages. Its report concluded: “The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.”17 It further noted that undercover CIA agents held key management positions across major American media organisations to ensure that published content aligned with the CIA’s agendas.18 Former CIA employee William Bader supported the report’s conclusions, illustrating the agency’s operations as follows: “You don’t need to manipulate Time magazine, for example, because there are agency people at the management level.”19 The CIA’s operations to shape the global information space were described by the Washington Post as “a fascinatingly byzantine effort to turn the world to the American way of thinking,” and alongside hundreds of news outlets the agency funded and heavily influenced popular media including hundreds of films and “at least a thousand books” for publication and distribution globally.20 Peacetime vilification of adversaries through both news and popular media was generally far more subtle than depicting ongoing mass slaughter as the Bryce Committee had, but predisposed populations to more easily believe claims of enemy atrocities when they were occasionally made. The adversary did not need to constantly be portrayed as committing slaughter, but rather as

Introduction 5

being the ‘kind of country/actor’ which was highly capable of doing so based on its portrayed history and intrinsic nature.ii The New York Times noted in its own more extensive report that “in its persistent efforts to shape world opinion, the CIA has been able to call upon a separate and far more extensive network of newspapers, news services, magazines, publishing houses, broadcasting stations and other entities over which it has at various times had some control.”21 The Times referred to the CIA’s “communications Empire” as having “embraced more than 500 news and public information organisations and individuals. According to one CIA official, they ranged in importance ‘from Radio Free Europe to a third‐string guy in Quito who could get something in the local paper’ . . . the network was known officially as the ‘Propaganda Assets Inventory.’” The Times also noted that the agency maintained extensive “financial ties to academic, cultural and publishing organisations” globally for much the same purpose. Millions of dollars in subsidies were paid to influence media in Cuba alone, with other large scale and long-term operations carried out worldwide from Kenya and India to Taiwan and South Vietnam.22 The CIA was far from isolated in its extensive efforts to shape the global information space, with other American intelligence services as well as those of allied states creating parallel ‘communications empires’ of their own. A notable example was the British Information Research Department’s work specifically to foster anti-Soviet and anti-Chinese sentiments in the Muslim world, Africa and parts of Asia, which although long denied was ii Means of influencing media included funding existing publications, but “in some instances the CIA simply created a newspaper or news service and paid the bills through a bogus corporation.” A number of front groups were set up for the CIA to fund media outlets worldwide, the Congress of Cultural Freedom being one example named in the New York Times report. “In the United States, the Asia Foundation published newspaper, The Asian Student, that was distributed to students from the Far East who were attending American universities,” the Times noted as an example, with this foundation having been established and run by former CIA members. (‘Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.,’ The New York Times, December 26, 1977.)

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confirmed by declassified documents in 2022. The decades long effort involved fabrications ranging from forging statements from Soviet institutions that would provoke anti-Soviet backlash, to creating media content from fictitious Islamic organisations portraying Moscow as an enemy of the Muslim world. Its publications often resorted to criticising and even calling for attacks on third parties, for example “the Jews,” to gain legitimacy among populations inclined towards such thinking and thus more effectively spread anti-Soviet and anti-Chinese messages. An example was the fabrication of claims by Islamic officials that only by turning against Moscow could the Arab nation gain victory over Israel – a theme which gained much traction in the Arab world while the department was operating.23 The practice of government agencies establishing vast networks to influence various information spaces and promote fabricated stories was hardly relegated to the Cold War. A notable example was the formerly secret U.S. Defence Department Office of Strategic Influence which emerged in the early 2000s and was authorised to plant stories, including feeding false reports to journalists, to influence public opinion worldwide. Although the Pentagon was forced to disband the office after its existence became known, later comments by high level officials indicated that such operations continued under different bodies. This “black propaganda,” as it was referred to repeatedly by the BBC, provided a very potent means to shape international opinion towards American adversaries.24 Providing details on Western intelligence agencies’ sustainment of extensive networks of journalists into the 21st century for the purpose of propagating favoured narratives, German journalist Udo Ulfkotte reported in 2016 regarding his own role in such networks: I ended up publishing articles under my own name written by agents of the CIA and other intelligence services, especially the German secret service [Bundesnachrichtendienst – BND]. . . . One day the BND came to my office at the Frankfurter Allgemeine

Introduction 7

in Frankfurt. They wanted me to write an article about Libya and Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. . . . They gave me all this secret information and they just wanted me to sign the article with my name. That article was how Gaddafi tried to secretly build a poison gas factory. It was a story that was printed worldwide two days later. 25 Ulfkotte further detailed how intelligence agencies contacted journalists and used them to plant stories, the perks that came with working with them, and the risks of non-compliance.26 His example, the story about a Libyan poison gas factory, was one of many that contributed to influencing public opinion to perceive the targeted country as a malign and dangerous actor. False reports published in considerable quantities over several decades made Western economic sanctions on Libya, and eventually an intensive bombing campaign and the assassination of its leadership, much easier to justify publicly.27 By the time of Ulfkotte’s work the information networks operated by Western intelligence agencies had expanded to incorporate large numbers of online assets, including both bots and human personnel, which operated to influence discourse and support Western-favoured narratives globally. This was vital as the internet and social media in particular played an increasingly central role in the global information space. These kinds of operations were revealed on multiple occasions, ranging from a network of bots spreading fabricated information that vilified Russia discovered in an Adelaide University study in September 2022,28 to a Stanford-Graphika joint study a month prior unveiling a network of false social media accounts created by U.S. and British agents to propagate vilifying disinformation about China, Russia and Iran across several Muslim-majority countries.29Alongside intelligence agencies, the Pentagon also invested heavily in software to create vast networks of false social media accounts and influence foreign audiences in their own languages with a relatively small number of personnel, a notable example being Operation Earnest Voice in the 2010s,30 which was mirrored by parallel efforts by the British Armed Forces.31

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Often key to the success of atrocity fabrication has been the ability to construct portrayals of an adversary as part of a greater vilifying metanarrative – an overarching account or interpretation of events and circumstances that provides a pattern or structure for people’s beliefs and gives additional meaning to their experiences. Particularly for countries or actors with which consumers of media content have less firsthand contact, enough sources repeating similar narratives of atrocities and other misconduct can strongly influence ‘what kind of country/actor’ the target is considered to be. All future encounters with the target will then be interpreted through the context of this overarching narrative. A powerful metanarrative affects not only the public but also analysts, journalists and even policymakers who will be strongly inclined to interpret new information related to the country or actor in the context of the narrative.32 An exploration of the formation of metanarratives in U.S. media published in the Yale Review of International Studies observed: Journalists often fail to acknowledge the lens through which they perceive and interpret reality. The existence of overarching themes that define political press coverage, what the Pew Research Centre deems ‘metanarratives,’ is made possible by the enduring tradition of pack journalism. . . . Washington insiders and journalists tweet and re-tweet each other’s content, rapidly formulate an interpretive lens through which to understand major new developments. The resulting echo chamber, one populated by the elite pundits and reporters that convey political information to the rest of the country, builds consensus rather than dialogue. This ‘groupthink’ is how metanarratives form.  A metanarrative tends to be simple but totalising, colouring news coverage so that every new piece of information is interpreted against its backdrop. This is why crude characterisations of presidential candidates (ex. ‘Biden is a plagiariser’ and ‘Clinton is untrustworthy’)

Introduction 9

are difficult to dispel once they have been established. Reporters interpret news involving any given subject through the lens of the agreed-upon metanarrative, even if such interpretations result in factual distortions or blatant double standards. For example, the press framed Obama’s position change on same-sex marriage ahead of the 2012 election as an ‘evolution,’ whereas Romney’s changes in position were seen as ‘flip-flops,’ which fit more neatly into the dominant character narrative of Romney as an inauthentic politician.33 Metanarratives built around fabricated atrocities have often profoundly influenced the fates of targeted countries, a notable example being the Gulf War where proponents of military action against Iraq in late 1990 fabricated a claim that Iraqi soldiers were slaughtering Kuwaiti premature babies in their incubators (as covered in detail in Chapter 4). This and a wide range of other fabricated Iraqi atrocities contributed to very quickly creating an overarching way of viewing the country that structured almost all interpretations and coverage. Claims of Iraqi atrocities provided a key example of “the self-reinforcing nature of the metanarrative,” with the press having “cultivated a social and political environment wherein the incubator story could appear plausible, even reasonable.”34 Despite the incubator babies story being proven entirely false in 1992, the metanarrative of Iraq as a country capable of such acts retained a powerful influence. The Yale Review observed accordingly: “This dynamic continued to colour press coverage of [Iraqi President Saddam] Hussein after the Gulf War and before 9/11. In those years, the U.S. media no longer needed prompting by the government to propagate the ‘Fuhrer Saddam’ mythology, and the U.S. public no longer needed prompting to accept it.”35 Impressions of ‘what kind of country’ Iraq was had been formed largely on the basis of multiple fabricated Iraqi atrocities, which predisposed Americans in particular to suspect Baghdad’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks36 and to believe Iraq was developing

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weapons of mass destruction to attack them. This in turn was key to facilitating another war against Iraq in 2003.37  The slaughter of incubator babies was just one of many widely accepted but totally fabricated stories that vilified Iraq, while Iraq itself was far from an isolated example of a country that had its fate radically transformed by atrocity fabrication. The global reach of Western information networks ensured that even beyond the Western world perceptions of the West’s adversaries were very often shaped in much the same way, which facilitated and created public support for hostile policies ranging from economic sanctions to invasion and war. Furthermore, as with Iraq, once a metanarrative shaped opinion of ‘what kind of country’ the target was, it was extremely difficult to dispel no matter how thoroughly the accounts on which it was based were disproven or retracted. Understanding atrocity fabrication not in terms of the debunking of a single incident or set of incidents, but rather as part of a much broader phenomenon, is vital to comprehending how challengers to Western power have and will continue to be assailed. This book explores eleven leading cases of targeted countries, and the strong consistencies in how and to what ends they were. Also covered are the consequences of atrocity fabrication and how, by providing pretext for actual aggression, it paves the way for very real atrocities against the populations of the falsely accused states, which often far exceed the depravity described in the fabricated narratives.

Notes 1

Smith, Joanne R. and Haslam, S. Alexander, Social Psychology: Revisiting the Classic Studies, London, Sage, 2017 (p. 58). 2 Epstein, Jennifer, “Biden Compares Trump to Goebbels, Saying He’s Promoting a ‘Lie,’” Bloomberg, September 26, 2020. 3 Voltaire, Questions Sur Les Miracles, 1765 4 Lonsdal, Sarah, The Journalist in British Fiction and Film: Guarding the Guardians from 1900 to the Present, London, Bloomsbury, 2016 (pp. 55– 57). 5 ‘Bryce Committee’s Report on Deliberate Slaughter of Belgian NonCombatants; German Atrocities Are Proved, Finds Bryce Committee Not

Introduction 11 Only Individual Crimes, but Premeditated Slaughter in Belgium. Young and Old Mutilated Women Attacked, Children Brutally Slain, Arson and Pillage Systematic. Countenanced By Officers Wanton Firing on Red Cross and White Flag; Prisoners Wounded and Shott. Civilians Used as Shields Proof That Belgians Did Not Fire on Germans at Louvain – Germans Received Kindness. Testimony That Shows Murder and Mutilation of Men, Women and Children Evidence That Germans Had Set Plan of Slaughter and Pillage,’ The New York Times, May 13, 1915. 6 ‘The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back’ (Documentary), British Central Independent Television, 1985. Lawson, Tom, The Last Man: The British Genocide in Tasmania, London, I. B. Tauris, 2014. 7 Adamson, John, ‘The Reign of Spain was Mainly Brutal,’ The Telegraph, December 2, 2002. Goodwin, Robert, Spain: The Centre of the World 1519–1682, London, Bloomsbury, 2015. Gady, Franz-Stefan, ‘How Portugal Forged an Empire in Asia,’ The Diplomat, July 11, 2019. ‘“Colonial-era mass grave” found in Potosi, Bolivia,’ BBC News, July 27, 2014. 8 Chomsky, Noam and Herman, Edward S., After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina & The Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, Boston, South End Press, 1979 (p. 25). 9 MacArthur, John R., Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, London, University of California Press, 2004 (p. 54). Chomsky, Noam and Herman, Edward S., After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina & The Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, Boston, South End Press, 1979 (p. 25). 10 MacArthur, John R., Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, London, University of California Press, 2004 (p. 54). 11 Correspondent in Paris, The Times, August 28, 1914. 12 MacArthur, John R., Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, London, University of California Press, 2004 (p. 52). 13 Ibid (p. 54). 14 Davis, Deborah, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington post, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979 (pp. 137, 138). 15 Bernstein, Carl, ‘CIA and the Media,’ Rolling Stone Magazine, October 20, 1977. 16 Blum, William, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, London, Zed Books, 2003 (p. 42). 17 Church Committee Final Report, Vol 1: Foreign and Military Intelligence (p. 455). 18 Ibid (p. 455). 19 Davies, Nick, Flat Earth News: An Award-Winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media, New York, Vintage, 2009 (p. 228).

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20 Bunch, Sonny, ‘The CIA funded a culture war against communism. It should do so again.,’ Washington Post, August 22, 2018. 21 ‘Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.,’ The New York Times, December 26, 1977. 22 Ibid. 23 Burke, Jason, ‘Secret British “black propaganda” campaign targeted cold war enemies,’ The Guardian, May 14, 2022. 24 Carver, Tom, ‘Pentagon plans propaganda war,’ BBC News, February 20, 2002. Beal, Tim, North Korea: The Struggle Against American Power, London, Pluto Press, 2005 (p. 133). 25 ‘German journo: European media writing pro-US stories under CIA pressure,’ RT, October 18, 2014. 26 Ibid. 27 Libya: Examination of intervention and collapse and the UK’s future policy options, House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Third Report of Session 2016–17, September 14, 2016. 28 Smart, Bridget and Watt, Joshua and Benedetti, Sara and Mitchell, Lewis and Roughan, Matthew, ‘#IStandWithPutin versus #IStandWithUkraine: The interaction of bots and humans in discussion of the Russia/Ukraine war,’ The University of Adelaide, August 20, 2022 (https://arxiv.org/ pdf/2208.07038.pdf). 29 ‘UNHEARD VOICE: Evaluating five years of pro-Western covert influence operations,’ Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory Cyber Policy Centre, August 24, 2022. 30 Fielding, Nick and Cobain, Ian, ‘Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media,’ The Guardian, March 17, 2011. United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Armed Services, ‘Department of Defense Authorization for Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2012 an the Future Years Defense Program,’ March 1, 2011 (p. 199). Norton, Ben, ‘US Government Admits It’s Making Fake Social Media Accounts to Spread Propaganda in Cuba,’ The Real News, August 27, 2018. 31 Sengupta, Kim, ‘New British Army unit “Brigade 77” to use Facebook and Twitter in psychological warfare,’ The Independent, January 31, 2015. ‘Leaked papers allege massive UK govt effort to co-opt Russian-language anti-Kremlin media & influencers to “weaken Russian state”,’ RT, February 18, 2021. 32 Nixon, John, Debriefing the President; The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein, London, Bantam Press, 2016 (pp. 204, 205, 220). 33 ‘Shaping Saddam: How the Media Mythologized A Monster – Honorable Mention,’ The Yale Review of International Studies, June 2018. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Milbank, Dana and Deane, Claudia, ‘Hussein Link to 9/11 Lingers in Many Minds,’ Washington Post, September 6, 2003. 37 Swansbrough, Robert, Test By Fire: The War Presidency Of George W. Bush, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008 (p. 129).

A Note on Humanitarian Military Intervention: Atrocity Fabrication’s Most Dangerous End The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.1 – albert camus

For centuries the history, incentives for, and consequences of atrocity fabrication have been closely entwined with the concept of humanitarian military intervention – an idea deeply entrenched in Western political thought contending that offensive wars can be framed as altruistic if done to prevent abuses overseas. The idea that military action can be just and even noble when done to end enemy atrocities has historically provided one of the strongest motives to fabricate atrocities as a means to legitimise offensive actions. The history of humanitarian military intervention as a central influence in Western political thought dates back to 16th century Europe and the Reformation, when the schism between the Protestant and Catholic faiths led states to frequently allege oppression of their co-religionists abroad as pretexts for offensive wars. Later historians would largely concur that European states’ entries into the religious wars of the period were motivated largely if not overwhelmingly by realpolitik, with concerns for religious minorities or appeasing deities being secondary factors if they were considered at all.2 Premised on protecting fellow believers abroad, successful military campaigns overseas consistently strengthened the positions of the aggressors while gaining widespread domestic support due to the altruistic causes cited for war. The military intervention of England in the religious wars of France during the 1560s, ’70s and ’80s, and in the Netherlands 13

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from 1585 to 1604, were notable examples of wars justified by humanitarian rationales, with offensives in France by the Holy Roman Empire and various German principalities relying on similar justifications. Spain, meanwhile, which had seen the English humanitarian-premised intervention in the Netherlands undermine its interests, claimed “the brutal and cruel yoke” of persecution imposed on the English Catholic minority as a pretext to attempt multiple invasions in the 1580s and 90s.3 This trend towards using humanitarian pretexts for military interventionism continued to profoundly shape European politics in the following centuries. Early humanitarian intervention relied heavily on states portraying themselves as protectors of overseas minorities with whom they held something in common – usually co-religionists – with Catholic states claiming the oppression of Catholic minorities to attack Protestant states and vice versa. As European conquest came to be directed increasingly far afield, however, against countries which lacked minorities with whom an aggressor could claim any common religious or ethnic background, humanitarian intervention evolved and was increasingly applied universally. Western states portrayed themselves as acting in the interests of a common humanity, which meant that even if no one of their race or religion lived within the borders of the targeted state or nation, they could still legitimise military action on the basis that the population, or a segment of it, was suffering injustice. Notable early examples of wars premised on protecting universal humanitarian values were the Spanish and Portuguese 16th century conquests of South and Central America, which were widely justified on the basis that the indigenous populations would be freed by European rule and cultural Europeanisation from their supposedly backward and savage cultural practices. The Native American way of life was portrayed as an atrocity in and of itself so ghastly and inferior that a European invasion would be a benevolent act – a narrative which relied heavily on emphasising, exaggerating, and at times outright fabricating aspects of native culture which were seen as distasteful to Europeans.4 The leading Spanish philosopher and scholar of international law at the time, Francisco Vitoria, was one of many to justify the campaigns on



A Note on Humanitarian Military Intervention 15

this basis.5 The resulting humanitarian-premised conquest of an entire continent quickly turned into one of the most depraved genocides in world history. Invasions which led to the particularly brutal genocides of the populations of three continents and their resettlement by ethnic Europeans – namely the Americas and Oceania – were notably all justified by allusions to altruistic humanitarian missions to free and uplift the targeted populations by westernising them.6 Since Australia and most of the Americas lacked centralised governance, aggressors resorted to portraying an oppressive culture rather than an oppressive government as the ill to which invasion and Europeanisation could be presented as the remedy. Similar trends were observable across the European assaults on non-Western tribes and nations worldwide from the 16th century. The Netherlands’ most renowned legal scholar and philosopher Hugo Grotius, for example, strongly advocated for the conquest of the Dutch East Indies, which included perpetration of genocide,7 on the basis that it was a humanitarian mission to benefit the native population.8 As British historian of political thought Richard Tuck commented regarding Grotius’ position: “The idea that foreign rulers can punish tyrants, cannibals, pirates, those who kill settlers [which appears in the 1625 edition of Grotius’ work] . . . neatly legitimised a great deal of European action against native peoples around the world.”9 The First Opium War against China in the mid-19th century was another notable early example. The British press reported at the time: “Thus it has been the destiny of England to break down a government fabric . . . to uncover to its own subjects its hollowness and its evils.”10 Other reports stated that the Chinese government’s “mysterious and exclusive barbarism” could only be dismantled, for the good of its own people, by “the force of active and intrusive Western Civilisation.”11 This purportedly humanitarian war to free the Chinese people was fought to ensure that the British Empire would maintain the rights to sell highly addictive narcotics to China, and the century that followed the British victories was the very darkest in China’s millennia-long history.

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A further significant example of military intervention under a claimed universal humanitarian jurisdiction was the United States’ invasion of Cuba in 1898–99. As a European settler state the U.S. inherited many aspects of Europe’s political culture, and in its rapid imperial expansion in the Western Hemisphere it became a leading perpetrator of aggression using humanitarian pretexts. U.S. President William McKinley portrayed aggression against Spain as a project to liberate the Cuban people and thereby advance both “civilisation” and “the interest of humanity” – framing the attack as a “war for humanity.”12 The conflict saw the U.S. annex the Philippines and Puerto Rico, committing severe atrocities in the former and forcing the bulk of the population into concentration camps with death rates as high as 20 percent. In November 1901 the Manila correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger wrote that the U.S. invasion force “killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog.”13 Some islands were purged entirely with “not one living native” left,14 killing an estimated 1.4 million Filipinos overall although some estimates were much higher.15 McKinley framed the invasion, a campaign considered by several historians to have been genocidal,16 as a humanitarian effort to “educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilise.”17 Prominent British expert on the history of warfare Professor David Trim was among many to observe that particularly from the 19th century Western populations increasingly believed that their countries had the right to launch military offensives abroad for moral causes. He stated the following concerning what he referred to as the “humanitarian public”: “Keenly interested in the fate of oppressed people groups, albeit admittedly especially if they were Christian or Jewish, or ‘primitive’ peoples who could be converted to Christianity, it both consumed and helped to produce numerous printed reports, in books, pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers, of atrocities, mass murder, and brutality. The humanitarian public could be manipulated by propaganda and polemic.”18 With a strong interest in humanitarian wars which furthered their nation or religion’s interest, Western publics could be led to view



A Note on Humanitarian Military Intervention 17

offensive wars as altruistic or humanitarian. This allowed both governments and non-state actors with influence over information spaces to raise calls for military action by creating public moral outrage often through atrocity fabrication. It was only with the end of the colonial era that a new post1945 international order enshrined in the United Nations Charter gave UN member states equal rights and provided each country, including unprecedentedly those outside the Western world, with the right to non-interference in their internal affairs. This effectively illegalised Western humanitarian military interventions as crimes of aggression, with only a resolution by all five permanent members of the UN Security Council able to legitimise such action. Since two non-Western states, China and the Soviet Union, held permanent council seats with veto powers, there was no longer a legal means for the West to unilaterally launch unprovoked military assaults on non-Western countries. Following the end of the Cold War, however, as states outside the Western sphere of influence became a smaller minority in the world and were increasingly targeted, calls grew in the West to legitimise humanitarian intervention and move beyond a world order where the sovereignty guaranteed under the UN Charter was considered inviolable. NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana, for one, stated in 1999 when the alliance launched an illegal humanitarian-premised military campaign against Yugoslavia: “I think that we are moving into a system of international relations in which human rights, rights of minorities are much, much more important . . . more important even than sovereignty.”19 In his first month in office in January 2017 UN Secretary General of Portuguese origin Antonio Guterres criticised existing concepts of sovereignty and advocated a “whole new approach” to international relations under which international bodies could override it. 20 This followed on from Guterres’ predecessor, Kofi Annan, who called for a new vision of sovereignty in the context of revising restrictions on humanitarian military intervention when UN Security Council authorisation was absent.21 Another notable advocate was the president of the United States’ most influential policy think tank the Council on Foreign

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Relations, Richard N. Hass, who wrote in Foreign Affairs to much the same effect in a January 2017 article titled ‘World Order 2.0’: “The rules, policies and institutions that have guided the world since World War II, have run their course. Respect for sovereignty alone cannot uphold order.” Regarding the changes Hass was calling for, he stated: “A good start, though, would be to amend the concept of self-determination away from its inherent unilateralism on the part of the entity seeking a state of its own and replace it with the notion that statehood is something to be granted rather that asserted.” Under World Order 2.0, Hass advocated, states accused of humanitarian abuses could have their rights to see their borders and peace respected stripped from them and foreign military intervention legitimised.22 Indicating the kind of countries held in mind, the article was captioned by a picture of the North Korean leadership just months after an attack on the East Asian country had been seriously considered by the Obama administration.23 Hass stated: Necessity may also lead to reducing or even eliminating sovereignty when a government, whether from a lack of capacity or conscious policy, is unable to provide for the basic needs of its citizens. . . . Our notion of sovereignty must therefore be conditional, even contractual, rather than absolute. If a state fails to live up to its side of the bargain . . . then it forfeits the normal benefits of sovereignty and opens itself up to attack, removal or occupation. The diplomatic challenge for this era is to gain widespread support for principles of state conduct and a procedure for determining remedies when these principles are violated.24 An understanding of how fabricated claims of humanitarian abuses or atrocities abroad have furthered Western geopolitical interests is vital to comprehending the nature of ‘World Order 2.0’ referred to by Hass. The list of countries most often portrayed in the West as committing the most serious humanitarian abuses and atrocities matches almost perfectly with those which most



A Note on Humanitarian Military Intervention 19

strongly oppose Western hegemonic interests on the international stage. The worst alleged abusers are near synonymous with the small minority of countries which do not have Western military presences on their soil.25 A world where any state labelled a humanitarian abuser or perpetrator of atrocities could be open to unilateral attack by the Western world would thus represent an important step to quashing challenges or resistance to Western-led order, and effectively revert the world to the colonial era order when Western powers could freely use military force worldwide. The idea that a Western public’s indignation at a state of affairs abroad grants their country the right to kill peoples, overthrow governments and occupy lands overseas has historically had calamitous consequences for populations across the non-Western world, with examples explored throughout this work. This aspect of the West’s political culture and worldview has consistently provided aggressors with a strong incentive to fabricate stories of serious humanitarian abuses by their targets, with this work’s assessment of the history of such practices highlighting the extreme dangers of humanitarian intervention.

Notes 1 ‘Keep Your Laws Off My Body,’ Fox News, March 3, 2010. 2 Nexon, Daniel H., The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires & International Change, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2009 (pp. 21, 233, 234). Thompson, James Westfall, The Wars of Religion in France, 1559–1576: The Huguenots, Catherine de Medici, Philip II, New York, Frderick Ungar, 1958. Neale, John Ernest, The Age of Catherine de Medici, London, J. Cape, 1943 (pp. 100–102). Lavisse, Ernest, L’Histoire de France des origines a la Revolution [The History of France from the origins to the Revolution], Paris, 1983 (Volume 6, Part 1). Christensen, Carl C., ‘John of Saxony’s Diplomacy, 1529–1530: Reformation or Realpolitik?,’ Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 15, no. 4, 1984 (pp. 419–430). 3 Strachan, Hew and Scheipers, Sibylle, The Changing Character of War, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011 (p. 153).

20 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11

12 13 14 15

ATROCITY FABRICATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Handy, Gemma, ‘Archaeologists say early Caribbeans were not “savage cannibals”, as colonists wrote,’ The Guardian, April 24, 2018. ‘Cannibals in North America? Not so much, professor says,’ Fulton Sun, October 22, 2018. Watson, Kelly L., Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World, New York, New York University Press, April 24, 2015. Antony, Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004 (p. 22). Tuck, Richard, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999 (pp. 73, 74). Heraclides, Alexis, ‘Humanitarian Intervention Yesterday and Today,’ European Review of International Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 2015 (pp. 15–37). Hanna, Willard A., Indonesian Banda: Colonialism and its Aftermath in the Nutmeg Islands, Philadelphia, Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1991 (p. 55). Pisani, Elizabeth, Indonesia Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation, London, Granta Books, 2014 (p. 17). Heraclides, Alexis, ‘Humanitarian Intervention Yesterday and Today,’ European Review of International Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 2015 (pp. 15–37). Tuck, Richard, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999 (p. 103). Pagani, Catherine, ‘Objects and the Press. Images of China in Nineteenth Century Britain’ in: Codell, Julie F., Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British Colonial Press, Madison, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003 (p. 160). Frankopan, Peter, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, London, Bloomsbury, 2015 (p. 301). Pagani, Catherine, Objects and the Press. Images of China in Nineteenth Century Britain, in: Codell, Julie F., Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British Colonial Press, Madison, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003 (p. 160). Frankopan, Peter, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, London, Bloomsbury, 2015 (p. 301). Simms, Brendan and Trim, David J. B., Humanitarian Intervention – A History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011 (Chapter 13). Saito, Natsu Taylor, Meeting the Enemy: American Exceptionalism and International Law, New York, New York University Press, 2010 (p. 153). Zinn, Howard, A People’s History of the United States: 1492–Present, New York, Harper Perennial, 2005 (p. 315). Ahmed, Eqbal, ‘The Theory and Fallacies of Counter-Insurgency,’ The Nation, August 2, 1971.



A Note on Humanitarian Military Intervention 21

16 Jummel, Rudolph J., Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900, Münster, LIT Verlag, 1998. Gates, John M., ‘War-Related Deaths in the Philippines, 1898–1902.’ Pacific Historical Review, 1983. Francisco, Luzviminda, The End of an Illusion, London, AREAS, 1973. San Juan, Epifanio, ‘U.S. Genocide in the Philippines: A Case of Guilt, Shame, or Amnesia?,’ Medium, March 22, 2005. Boot, Max, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, New York, Basic Books, 2002 (p. 125). 17 Wolff, Leon, Little Brown Brother: How the United States Purchased and Pacified the Philippine Islands at the Century’s Turn, New York, History Book Club, 2006 (p. 201). 18 Strachan, Hew and Scheipers, Sibylle, The Changing Character of War, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011 (Chapter 8: Humanitarian Intervention). 19 Kempster, Norman and Marshall, Tyler, ‘NATO OKs New Policing Role,’ Los Angeles Times, April 25, 1999. 20 Guterres, António, ‘Remarks to the Security Council Open Debate on “Maintenance of International Peace and Security: Conflict Prevention and Sustaining Peace”,’ Official Website of the United Nations, January 10, 2017. 21 Thakur, Ramesh, ‘Outlook: Intervention, Sovereignty and the Responsibility to Protect: Experiences from ICISS,’ Security Dialogue, vol. 33, no. 3, 2002 (p. 325). Heraclides, Alexis, ‘Humanitarian Intervention Yesterday and Today,’ European Review of International Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 2015 (p. 31). 22 Hass, Richard N., ‘World Order 2.0: The Case for Sovereign Obligation,’Foreign Affairs, January/February 2017. 23 Johnson, Jesse, ‘Obama weighed pre-emptive strike against North Korea after fifth nuclear blast and missile tests near Japan in 2016, Woodward book claims,’ Japan Times, September 12, 2018. ‘Obama mulled preemptive attack on N. Korea: book,’ Yonhap, September 12, 2018. 24 Hass, Richard N., ‘World Order 2.0: The Case for Sovereign Obligation,’ Foreign Affairs, January/February 2017. 25 Vine, David, ‘The United States Probably Has More Foreign Military Bases Than Any Other People, Nation or Empire in History,’ The Nation, September 14, 2015. Durden, Tyler, ‘U.S. Special Forces Deployed To 70 Percent of The World In 2016,’ Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, February 11, 2017. Turse, Nick, ‘Special Ops, Shadow Wars, and the Golden Age of the Grey Zone,’ Tom Dispatch, January 5, 2017.

Chapter One

Cuba and Vietnam in the Early Cold War Engineering Pretexts to Invade Cuba: From Exploding Space Rockets to Attacking Jamaica After waging a long guerrilla war against the Westernaligned government in Havana, insurgents led by Fidel Castro and supported by mass protests seized power in Cuba in January 1959. This marked the beginning of decades of conflict with the Western world, with U.S. intelligence agencies going to considerable lengths to undermine the new Cuban government and seeking to reverse what some American analysts referred to as the “unforgivable revolution.”1 As Havana responded to Washington’s perceived hostility by forming defence ties with the Soviet Union, the American assault on Cuba came to involve any and all measures short of open war and focused heavily on targeting the economy and placing downward pressure on living standards. The new developmentalist government in Havana, which quickly improved the country’s development indicators ranging from life expectancy to literacy rates, was seen to threaten Washington’s interests through its potential to provide an example for other Latin American states of an alternative ideology and system of government. Overthrowing the state, and until then stifling its economy, were thus seen as vital to prevent a ‘Cuba model’ of political and economic development from potentially gaining wider traction.2 U.S. combat aircraft began a bombing and firebombing campaign against Cuba from October 1959, and possibly earlier, aimed primarily at targets such as crop fields and sugar mills. At least three American pilots were lost and a further two captured during these offensives.3 Sea and air commando raids launched from the U.S. mainland, most often by exiles of Cuban origin and 22



Cuba and Vietnam in the Early Cold War 23

frequently with CIA supervisors, targeted oil refineries, chemical plants, bridges, crops, mills, warehouses, fishing boats, and merchant ships. After Havana responded by calling for Soviet military support, an assault on a Soviet camp wounded 12 Soviet soldiers and a hotel and theatre were shelled from sea to target Warsaw Pact personnel there.4 A total U.S. trade and credit embargo was paired with sabotage operations targeting both Cuban sugar exports, which were at times contaminated by the CIA at sea,5 as well as its imports. Damage done to foreign goods before delivery to Cuba ranged from adding chemicals to lubricating fluids to wear out diesel engines, to instructing a manufacturer in West Germany, to produce ball-bearings off-centre and another to do the same with balanced wheel gears.6 British busses sold to Cuba in 1964 were sabotaged by U.S. and British intelligence before arriving.7 The bulk of these operations were carried out under Operation Mongoose, and were approved by the State Department, the National Security Council, the White House staff, the Attorney General’s office and the Pentagon.8 The next stage of escalation involved biological warfare. A Canadian agricultural technician reported in 1962 that while working as an advisor to the Cuban government he was paid $5000 by “an American military intelligence agent” to infect Cuban turkeys with a lethal virus which produced the Newcastle disease. 8000 turkeys died as a result. The Washington Post reported of the incident: “According to U.S. intelligence reports, the Cubans – and some Americans – believe the turkeys died as the result of espionage.”9 In 1971 the CIA gave Cuban exiles a virus which caused African swine fever for deployment against the country. Six weeks later the disease broke out in Cuba and forced the country to slaughter 500,000 pigs to prevent a nationwide epidemic. It was called the “most alarming event” of the year by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization.10 The U.S., Canada and Britain had previously invested heavily in developing such weapons to target livestock.11 In 1984 a Cuban exile on trial in New York testified that in late 1980 a ship travelled from Florida to Cuba with the purpose of introducing new germs as part of a biological warfare campaign.12 In a 2002 study of American

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biological weapons development, New York Times journalists Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William J. Broada reported that the CIA had prepared to use biological agents to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro, as well as Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba, although these plans were not put into motion.13 In April 1961 the CIA attempted to deploy Cuban exiles residing in the U.S., many of them associated with the pre-revolutionary U.S.-aligned government, to launch an invasion. Despite CIA pilots flying extensive support missions, the Bay of Pigs invasion resulted in a total failure with four CIA pilots and 100 of the agency’s proxies on the ground killed and a further 1200 taken prisoner.14 Having exhausted the most obvious methods for attack the focus of the U.S. campaign against Cuba shifted to attempting to fabricate international crimes by the Cuban government – namely getting various U.S. government agencies to commit them and placing the blame on Havana – in order to provide pretext for further escalation in the form of a larger invasion. In 1962 the U.S. Department of Defence and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) proposed an operation to turn public and world opinion against Cuba.i This was intended to justify the further escalation of hostilities against the state, and eventually an American invasion to reinstall a Western-aligned government in power. The necessity of the operation was based on JCS assessments that Havana would not of its own accord undertake any provocations which could warrant U.S. intervention.15 Under the operation the CIA was tasked with staging terrorist attacks against i The operation complemented efforts to turn Cuban opinion against their leader Fidel Castro. Alongside propaganda broadcasts, this included plans to drug him before speeches and make him appear incoherent, distribute fake photos of a debauched obese Castro surrounded by beautiful women and delectable food to diminish his image as a man of the people, captioned ‘My Ration is Different,’ and even a plan to use a chemical agent to make his beard fall off which would undermine his charisma. (Blum, William, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, London, Zed Books, 2003 (Chapter 30).) (Boot, Max, ‘Operation Mongoose: The Story of America’s Efforts to Overthrow Castro,’ The Atlantic, January 5, 2018.)



Cuba and Vietnam in the Early Cold War 25

American military and civilian targets. Proposed attacks included hijacking or shooting down airliners, orchestrating major terror attacks against U.S. cities, starting wars between Cuba and its neighbours, assassinating Cuban dissidents on American soil, and blaming possible failures in the U.S. space program on non-existent Cuban electronic attacks. The proposal for Operation Northwoods was drafted and authorised by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, signed by its chairman Lyman Lemnitzer, and had the written approval of every member. It also had considerable support from the Pentagon and the CIA. Longhidden secret JCS documents unearthed decades later emphasised: “World opinion, and the United Nations forum should be favourably affected by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere.” The proposal recommended: “The desired result from the execution of this plan would be to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba and to develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere.” The operation recommended developing a “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” which involved the bombing of civilian targets. This was to be blamed on the “irresponsible” Cuban government and on Fidel Castro to mislead both world opinion and the American public. Support for the idea of creating a pretext to move on Cuba was hardly relegated to the military and intelligence establishments, with President Dwight D. Eisenhower having previously told Lemnitzer and his other aides in his Cabinet Room that he would take action if only the Cuban government gave him pretext to do so. With scandal surrounding the May 1960 U-2 spy plane incident fresh in the minds of the world, which after multiple denials by Washington decisively confirmed longstanding Soviet allegations of U.S. surveillance flights deep into its airspace, Eisenhower for much of the rest of the year pushed hard for an invasion of Cuba. He then floated the idea on January 3, 1961, that if Cuba failed to

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provide “a really good excuse” for an American attack, the U.S. “could think of manufacturing something that would be generally acceptable” as a pretext for an invasion.16 Eisenhower’s successor John F. Kennedy would prove far less supportive, however, and quickly became an obstacle to such plans. Foreign Policy magazine’s national security columnist, veteran journalist James Bamford, who was referred to by the New York Times as “the nation’s premier journalist on the subject of the National Security Agency,” observed regarding operations: The attempts to provoke the Cuban public to revolt seemed dead and Castro, unfortunately, appeared to have no inclination to launch any attacks against Americans or their property. Lemnitzer and the other Chiefs knew there was only one option left that would ensure their war. They would have to trick the American public and world opinion into hating Cuba so much that they would not only go along, but would insist that he and his generals launch their war against Castro.17 Bamford stressed that plans to engineer attacks on the U.S. which could be falsely blamed on Cuba as a pretext for an invasion “had the support of every single member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and even senior Pentagon official Paul Nitze argued in favour of provoking a phony war with Cuba. The fact that the most senior members of all the services and the Pentagon could be so out of touch with reality and the meaning of democracy would be hidden for four decades.” Bamford observed that “Operation Northwoods had called for nothing less than the launch of a secret campaign of terrorism within the United States in order to blame Castro and provoke a war with Cuba.” Regarding the U.S. military leadership, he stressed that “in the name of anticommunism, they proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba.” The plan, in his words:



Cuba and Vietnam in the Early Cold War 27

called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.18 One proposal for a fabricated attack which could be blamed on Cuba involved the American space program at the height of the space race. On February 20, 1962, the first American to orbit the earth, John Glenn, lifted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida in a flight touted as carrying the banner of American truth, freedom, and democracy into space. Speaking to Lieutenant Colonel Edward G. Lansdale, who subsequently launched CIA clandestine operations against Cuba, the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed that should there be any problem with the rocket which resulted in Glenn’s death, “the objective is to provide irrevocable proof that . . . the fault lies with the Communists et al Cuba.” This could be achieved, according to Lemnitzer, “by manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans.”19 Had any problem with the launch occurred, Cuba was to be blamed to help strengthen the argument for an invasion. Unlike kinetic attacks, cyber or electronic attacks could be blamed on almost any party or even fabricated entirely – a fact not lost in subsequent decades as U.S. and Western planners sought to find new pretexts to attribute blame, vilify and enact various hostile policies against their targets (see Chapter 7). When John Glenn became the fifth man to go to space following an uneventful launch, the JCS quickly drafted new plans for false flag operations against Cuba which could be enacted “within the time frame of the next few months.”20

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Subsequent plans to frame Cuba for various atrocities grew more extreme. One stipulated “a series of well-coordinated incidents to take place in and around” the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, which included dressing “friendly” Cubans in military uniforms and having them “start riots near the main gate of the base. Others would pretend to be saboteurs inside the base. Ammunition would be blown up, fires started, aircraft sabotaged, mortars fired at the base with damage to installations.” This attack by America’s own assets on a U.S. naval facility at the command of the JCS would present Havana as an aggressor,ii and be used as a pretext for a military campaign to take over the country.21 Another JCS proposal similarly suggested: “We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,” highlighting that “casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.” 22 Other JCS plans stipulated: “We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. . . . The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. . . . We could sink a boatload of Cubans en-route to Florida (real or simulated). . . . We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicised.” 23 Other operations planned included: • “Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.”

ii A very similar operation considered 50 years later by the White House was to dress U.S. personnel in Iranian uniforms and have them attack an American ship, which would provide a pretext to launch a war on Iran if such a course of action were chosen. (‘Trigger Happy,’ CBS News, July 31, 2008).



Cuba and Vietnam in the Early Cold War 29

• “Advantage can be taken of the sensitivity of the Dominican [Republic] Air Force to intrusions within their national air space. ‘Cuban’ B-26 or C-46 type aircraft could make cane-burning raids at night. Soviet Bloc incendiaries could be found. This could be coupled with ‘Cuban’ messages to the Communist underground in the Dominican Republic and ‘Cuban’ shipments of arms which would be found, or intercepted, on the beach. Use of MiG type aircraft by U.S. pilots could provide additional provocation.” • “Hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft could appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the Government of Cuba.” • “Create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en-route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight.”24 The U.S. had notably managed to acquire modern Soviet-built fighter jets from across the third world, some of which were of the same classes that Cuba itself was thought to field.25 Another plan which could potentially capitalise on these assets would “make it appear that Communist Cuban MiGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack.”26 Elaborating on a separate plan to engineer an airline hijacking which could be blamed on Havana, the JCS reported: An aircraft at Elgin AFB [Air Force Base, in western Florida] would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organisation in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for

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the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone [a remotely controlled unmanned aircraft]. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida. From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Elgin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will be transmitting on the international distress frequency a ‘May Day’ message stating he is under attack by Cuban MiG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft, which will be triggered by radio signal. This will allow ICAO [International Civil Aviation Organization] radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to tell the U.S. what has happened to the aircraft instead of the U.S. trying to ‘sell’ the incident. 27 On March 16, 1962, President John F. Kennedy ruled out the operations after meeting with Lemnitzer. This was one of several more radical operations the president would veto before his assassination, although any of the other occupants of the Oval Office during the Cold War may well have been more inclined to approved it. Lemnitzer’s term as JCS chairman ended on September 30, 1962, and he subsequently went on to serve as NATO’s as Supreme Allied Commander Europe. Kennedy’s death and a change in chairmanship did little to change the position of the JCS, however, with new plans made to start a war between Cuba and a neighbouring country either by engineering provocations against Havana by a U.S.-aligned third country in the region or through another false flag Cuban attack. Such a war would give the U.S. a pretext to launch a military intervention on the request



Cuba and Vietnam in the Early Cold War 31

of its ally, which in turn would facilitate the invasion of Cuba. The documents stated: “A contrived ‘Cuban’ attack on an OAS [Organization of American States] member could be set up, and the attacked state could be urged to take measures of self-defence and request assistance from the U.S. and OAS; the U.S. could almost certainly obtain the necessary two-thirds support among OAS members for collective action against Cuba.” Manufacturing a crisis would thereby provide a pretext for invasion.28 Another ambitious plan stipulated a U.S. attack against either Jamaica or Trinidad and Tobago, which were members of the British Commonwealth. The attack would be launched in such a way that it could be blamed on Havana, which would draw Britain into a war against Cuba.29 In May 1963 Assistant Secretary of Defence Paul H. Nitze sent a proposal to the White House for “a possible scenario whereby an attack on a United States reconnaissance aircraft could be exploited toward the end of effecting the removal of the Castro regime.” The U.S. would continue to violate Cuban airspace with high flying U-2 spy planes, and if one were shot down then the Pentagon would send in further manned surveillance aircraft on very low-level reconnaissance missions which would make them far more vulnerable to taking further losses. Much as flying a U-2 over the USSR had resulted in escalated tensions when one was shot down in May the previous year, the new plan stipulated that “the U.S. could undertake various measures designed to stimulate the Cubans to provoke a new incident.” JCS plans involved sending fighters across the island on “harassing reconnaissance” and “show-off” missions “flaunting our freedom of action, hoping to stir the Cuban military to action.” “Thus, depending above all on whether the Cubans were or could be made to be trigger-happy, the development of the initial downing of a reconnaissance plane could lead at best to the elimination of Castro, perhaps to the removal of Soviet troops and the installation of ground inspection in Cuba, or at the least to our demonstration of firmness on reconnaissance.” Havana failed to take the bait, however, and responded to subsequent low-level flights only by launching formal protests.

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A further plan stipulated bribing senior officers in Cuba’s armed forces to attack the United States Military: “The only area remaining for consideration then would be to bribe one of Castro’s subordinate commanders to initiate an attack on [the U.S. naval base at] Guantanamo.” Although paying foreign nationals to attack an American military facility was highly treasonous, normal rules of conduct were generally discarded when conducting false flag operations. Even major U.S. casualties, both military and civilian, were seen as acceptable to advance the country’s geopolitical interests and forcefully bring a strategically important territory back into Washington’s sphere of influence.30 The major detriment to America’s image which exposure of Operation Northwoods risked causing, as well as the illegality of several parts of the plan, resulted in high levels of secrecy with all details remaining hidden for over forty years. Like many operations of its nature, several of the relevant documents were destroyed with further details remaining unknown. Chairman Lemnitzer, for example, had ordered the JCS’ chief of the Cuba project, Brigadier General David W. Gray, to destroy all notes concerning the period of the Bay of Pigs following its failure. The U.S. ultimately never attempted a further invasion of Cuba after the Bay of Pigs, due to a combination of factors including signs of considerable popular support for the government in Havana, Soviet protection, and conflict between the JCS and the presidency. Plans to fabricate a Cuban provocation or even pin the blame for a U.S.-organised attack on Cuba, however, were highly indicative of the lengths to which the superpower could go to vilify and provide pretext for hostile action against its adversaries. Finding Justification for an Assault on Vietnam Following the defeat of the Japanese Empire in 1945 Vietnam quicky emerged as one of multiple key theatres of conflict in East Asia where Western empires seeking to impose their hegemony were pitted against local nationalists striving for independence. The League for the Independence of Vietnam nationalist movement, better known as the Viet Minh, fought for 30 years against



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Western imperial designs first to resist a French colonial war effort and subsequently against a large U.S.-led coalition seeking to maintain Western influence in the south of the country. Having colonised Vietnam in “an orgy of killing and looting”31 in the late 19th century, France had intended to impose its rule indefinitely and “exclude any idea of self-government, any possibility of development outside the French Empire” for the country.32 Alongside cultural Europeanisation and fierce promotion of Roman Catholicism,33 the policy of colonial underdevelopment was central to Paris’ designs and saw Vietnamese literacy rates and living standards plummet. Access to even a basic primary education became restricted to well under 10 percent of children, among the very lowest in the region, and Vietnamese land was confiscated en masse – much of it granted to the Catholic Church making it the largest landowner in the country.34 When France faced staunch resistance reoccupying Vietnam it responded by deploying 400,000 personnel, half of them French and half local auxiliaries. One of the first French offensives was an attack on Haiphong, the main port city of northern Vietnam, from 23–28 November 1946. It caused 6000 deaths at a very conservative estimate, levelling most of the city as aircraft strafed fleeing refugees, and was intended to “teach a severe lesson” to the Vietnamese.35 A declared policy of collective punishment against areas suspected of supporting the Viet Minh saw French forces widely pillage and rape, with conduct highly consistent with that in prior decades. “They raped women, sometimes until they died,” survivors would recall years later. Villages near sites of Viet Minh operations were systematically burned down, with civilians blown up in their houses by grenades while public displays of severed Vietnamese heads and public torture of suspected insurgents were intended to terrorise the population into submission. Beheadings had long been a common practice in French colonial wars, with some skulls sent back to Paris for display as trophies.36 In politically suspect villages French forces singled out pregnant Vietnamese women for rape, often resulting in death.37 The bayoneting of politically suspect pregnant women by colonial forces was also widely reported.38 Writing in the European Journal of Women’s

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Studies, scholar Helle Rydstrom noted after widely interviewing survivors that pregnant women were “the embodied symbol of an enemy capable of projecting strength into the future by producing children,” which was the French motive for targeting them to send “waves of shock through the community.”39 The U.S. showed a growing inclination to support the French colonial war from 1949, after the Western-aligned Republic of China was decisively defeated in the Chinese Civil War (see Chapter 3), as preserving what remained of Western influence in the region appeared increasingly critical. This support increased significantly from mid-1950 as U.S. and allied Western forces in Korea faced wholly unexpected losses and were forced into a months’ long retreat by North Korea’s scantly armed and outnumbered army. Although the use of military force by the U.S. to support French goals in Vietnam was not authorised, and remained unconfirmed for over 50 years, CIA airline CAT flew support missions for French forces from 1950 and was involved in airlifting paratroopers, artillery, ammunition and other military materials.40 French forces in Vietnam were also provided with much-needed warships and combat aircraft, and in May 1954 U.S. President Eisenhower seriously considered launching nuclear strikes against Viet Minh forces to support a besieged French garrison at Dien Bien Phu.41 Washington dispatched two aircraft carriers armed with nuclear weapons into the Gulf of Tonkin at the time,42 although French commanders pointed out that the proximity in which their own units and the Viet Minh were fighting meant that nuclear strikes were not feasible.43 American support continued to escalate over the next four years, and by 1954 Washington was financing 78 percent of France’s colonial war effort.44 The battle at Dien Bien Phu in the spring of 1954 was a major turning point in the colonial war and resulted in France’s withdrawal that year after having lost over 20,000 personnel and 55,000 local auxiliary fighters.45 The resultant signing of the 1954 Geneva Accordsiii stipulated that colonial forces be removed and iii A notable example of the near constant fabrication of information by Western intelligence agencies through their extensive networks of media assets came in the days preceding the Geneva conference. In his memoirs CIA agent



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Vietnam be partitioned into northern and southern states with unifying elections scheduled for July 1956. The Viet Minh under the leadership of the leftist nationalist Ho Chi Minh controlled the north based in Hanoi, while the south was placed under the rule of the Francophone elite of the colonial era based in Saigon. With the Cold War escalating, however, what had been one country’s struggle for independence became a central part of a major regionwide U.S.-led effort to cement the Western sphere of influence and push back against challengers to Western power. With the pro-Western leadership in southern Vietnam expected to overwhelmingly lose unifying elections, the threat an independent Vietnam under the Viet Minh posed to the West’s already faltering regional hegemony led Washington to support cancellation of the elections in 1955.46 As U.S. President Eisenhower concluded based on the intelligence available: “had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, a possible 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader.”47 The CIA had predicted in their own report: “if scheduled national elections are held in July 1956 . . . the Viet Minh will almost certainly win.”48 Under a Francophone elite headed overwhelmingly by members of the Catholic minority, the South Vietnamese government discriminated harshly against the Buddhist majority,49 strongly promoted the Catholic faith,50 and was vehemently pro-Western in its orientation mirroring the policies of the French colonial era. With the government having little support in either the north or the south, CIA psychological warfare experts led by Colonel Joseph Smith recalled how he enlisted a local newsman in Singapore on whom “the big-name foreign correspondents . . . relied . . . for all their scoops and legwork,” who then filed a fake story, attributed to an anonymous British defence officials that the Viet Minh were receiving supplies and personnel contributions from China. The purpose was to support Western portrayals of the Viet Minh as agents for the interests of an international communist conspiracy, and undermine conceptions of them “as a purely indigenous Vietnamese group of national patriots.” Doing so was seen to strengthen the Western position at Geneva, and other CIA stations were notably alerted “to have their press assets ready to pick [the story] up and make sure [it] was used in as many newspapers as possible.’” (Chanan, Michael, ‘Reporting from El Salvador: A Case Study in Participant Observation,’ The Journal of Intelligence History, vol. 9, no. 1 and 2, Summer 2010 (pp. 67, 68).)

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Edward Lansdale were deployed to engineer a program to reshape public opinion. This targeted the Catholic minority in particular and proved even more successful than Lansdale’s stunning prior psyops successes in the Philippines. As CIA case officer Ralph McGehee, who deployed to Southeast Asia from the late 1950s into the 1970s, reported: Lansdale’s men, operating in teams in North Vietnam, stimulated North Vietnamese Catholics and the Catholic armies deserted by the French to flee south. SMM teams promised Catholic Vietnamese assistance and new opportunities if they would emigrate. To help them make up their minds, the teams circulated leaflets falsely attributed to the Viet Minh telling what was expected of citizens under the new government. The day following distribution of the leaflets, refugee registration tripled. The teams spread horror stories of Chinese Communist regiments raping Vietnamese girls and taking reprisals against villages. This confirmed fears of Chinese occupation under the Viet Minh. The teams distributed other pamphlets showing the circumference of destruction around Hanoi and other North Vietnamese cities should the United States decide to use atomic weapons. To those it induced to flee over the 300-day period the CIA provided free transportation on its airline, Civil Air Transport, and on ships of the U.S. Navy. . . . It not only convinced the North Vietnamese Catholics to flee to the South, thereby providing [President Ngo Dinh] Diem with a source of reliable political and military cadres, but it also duped the American people into believing that the flight of the refugees was a condemnation of the Viet Minh by the majority of Vietnamese.51 Lansdale’s team was far from isolated, another notable example being the atrocity fabrication efforts of Lieutenant Tom Dooley who operated with the U.S. Navy out of Haiphong. Dooley invented stories of the Viet Minh disembowelling 1,000



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pregnant women, beating a naked priest on the testicles with a bamboo club, and jamming chopsticks in the ears of children to keep them from hearing Christian scripture.52 His ties to the CIA were uncovered in 1979.53 Once largely alienated from the population Catholics would be relied on to run the Western client government in the south. As McGehee observed: “The CIA had completed the imposition of a Catholic premier and the importation of a Catholic encoded army and police to rule a nation that was primarily Buddhist.”54 Despite these successes, the southern client government remained overwhelmingly unpopular. As Ralph McGehee noted, U.S. intelligence appeared to be deluding itself that its adversaries did not have mass popular support. “U.S. policymakers had to sell the idea that the war in the South was being fought by a small minority of Communists opposed to the majority-supported democratic government. . . . The situation, however, was the opposite, as I was to understand later,” he stated. Washington was supporting a “tiny oligarchy against a population largely organised, committed, and dedicated to a communist victory.”55 The Viet Minh in South Vietnam became more active as an insurgency, and from the early summer of 1959 operated as the Viet Cong against the Westernaligned government and its foreign sponsors. The U.S. for its part, and President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) in particular who assumed leadership from November 1963, showed growing signs of an eagerness to intervene to preserve South Vietnam as a separate Western client state. Johnson had been a critic of American reluctance to intervene more in Vietnam during the French colonial war, and in 1954 he condemned the Eisenhower administration’s failure to preserve French rule.56 As president he exhorted his aides during 1964 to do more to defeat the insurgency within South Vietnam,57 and according to Defence Secretary Robert S. McNamara he “felt more certain than President Kennedy that the loss of South Vietnam had a higher cost than would the direct application of U.S. military force.”58 Support for drastic escalation was widespread among much of the military and civilian leadership, an example being Vice Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Claude Ricketts, who

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in February 1964 called for airstrikes on military and industrial targets across North Vietnam. The purpose was to impose unacceptable costs on Hanoi for its continued support for the Viet Cong insurgents in the south.59 Offensives by Hanoi-aligned Pathet Lao insurgents in neighbouring Laos from mid-May, 1964, only deepened the sense of urgency for more heavy-handed American military involvement as the possibility grew of Vietnam’s neighbour moving out of the Western sphere of influence.60 As the positions of American clients fast deteriorated, plans for escalated U.S. military intervention began to be laid awaiting a suitable incident to serve as pretext.61 The Johnson administration gained the pretext it needed to escalate the war effort in Vietnam in the first week of August 1964.iv On August 2 the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Maddox was approached by three North Vietnamese patrol (PT) boats off the country’s coast and fired the first shots, with accounts varying on whether these were intended to kill or as warnings. The Vietnamese ships reportedly responded by firing torpedoes which missed their targets, but the ensuing exchange of fire saw two patrol boats seriously damaged while the destroyer was lightly damaged by machine gun fire. The Maddox subsequently withdrew. Its operations were described as “routine,” which as the New York Times notedv iv A number of analysts claimed that Johnson was also motivated by the need to win the upcoming presidential election, with opposition candidate Barry Goldwater’s primary campaign strength being his claim that the president was weak on foreign policy – a card he lost when Johnson took military action. U.S. Army Colonel H. R. McMaster, who served as Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs from 2017–18, noted to this effect that President Johnson and Defence Secretary McNamara “deceived the American people and Congress about events and the nature of the American commitment in Vietnam. They used a questionable report of a North Vietnamese attack on American naval vessels to justify the president’s policy to the electorate and to defuse Republican senator and presidential candidate Barry Goldwater’s charges that Lyndon Johnson was irresolute and ‘soft’ in the foreign policy arena.” (McMaster, H. R., Dereliction of Duty, New York, Harper Collins, 1997 (p. 129).) v The Times and other media outlets widely referred to “Red PT boats” or “Communist PT boats” – leveraging almost two decades of intensive anti-communist propaganda to invoke an ideological animosity towards the adversary in a way that referring to them simply as North Vietnamese



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left “no ready explanation why the PT boats would in effect attack the powerful Seventh Fleet” when “unprovoked.”62 A little over 48 hours later on August 4 the Maddox returned to the North Vietnamese coast on personal orders from President Johnson and was accompanied by a second destroyer the USS Turner Joy. The two reportedly opened fire on Vietnamese patrol boats after allegedly detecting torpedo fire against them. They suffered no damage. The president took this as a pretext for an immediate escalation of the war effort, and within half an hour of the incident’s end he overruled the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet to order major airstrikes on North Vietnam. The strike targeted naval bases and an oil storage facility using fighters based on nearby aircraft carriers, with the haste with which it was ordered reportedly intended to ensure that Johnson could announce it on television that night. This was despite his staff having yet to determine whether a Vietnamese attack had indeed occurred.63 Johnson framed the alleged attack on the American ships as “open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America,” and as a result the Tonkin Resolution was hastily passed in the Senate and the House of Representatives on August 7.64 This empowered the president “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.”65 Reports of the two incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin were not duly investigated in what was widely interpreted as an attempt to force Congress into signing the resolution. The president’s National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy described the push for a rushed congressional resolution as an attempt to “go for it on the basis of some snap event and a surge of feeling around the snap event” – something he advised against.66 Classified transcripts released by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in July 2010 showed that serious questions ships would not have done. Others such as Time magazine more directly tied North Vietnam to communist adversaries of which the U.S. public had already formed a strongly negative opinion, namely China which had been demonised extensively during the Korean War. (see Chapter 2). It thus described clashes in the Gulf of Tonkin as part of “the ominous expanse of Communist China.” (‘Action in Tonkin Gulf,’ Time, August 14, 1964).

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had quickly emerged regarding whether Congress had been misled to approve escalation of the war effort. As committee member Senator Frank Church stated in 1968, reflecting a widespread sentiment at the time: “In a democracy you cannot expect the people, whose sons are being killed and who will be killed, to exercise their judgment if the truth is concealed from them.” Regarding the case at hand, he stressed: “we have a case that will discredit the military in the United States, and discredit and quite possibly destroy the president.”67 National Security Agency (NSA) historian Robert J. Hanyok noted regarding the committee’s discussions: “there were doubts, but nobody wanted to follow up on the doubts,” perhaps because “they felt they’d gone too far down the road.” He concluded that NSA officers had deliberately falsified intercepted communications in the incident to make it appear that the alleged August 4 North Vietnamese attack had occurred.68 As a study by Robert J. Hanyok, published by the Washington D.C.-based U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, observed in 2017 on the basis of evidence declassified 50 years after the incident and a comprehensive analysis of signals intelligence records from the night of the attacks: Two startling findings emerged from the new research. First, it is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night. Through a compound of analytic errors and an unwillingness to consider contrary evidence, American SIGINT [signals intelligence] elements in the region and at NSA HQs reported Hanoi’s plans to attack the two ships of the Desoto patrol. Further analytic errors and an obscuring of other information led to publication of more ‘evidence.’ In truth, Hanoi’s navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on 2 August. . . . In order to substantiate that claim, all of the relevant SIGINT could not be provided to the White House and the Defence and intelligence officials. The conclusion that would be drawn from a review of all SIGINT evidence would have been that



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the North Vietnamese not only did not attack, but were uncertain as to the location of the ships . . . the overwhelming portion of the SIGINT relevant to 4 August was kept out of the post-attack summary reports and the final report written in October 1964. The withheld information constituted nearly 90 percent of all available SIGINT. This information revealed the actual activities of the North Vietnamese on the night of 4 August that included salvage operations of the two torpedo boats damaged on 2 August, and coastal patrols by a small number of DRV [North Vietnamese] craft.69 The command’s report stressed that “the overwhelming body of reports, if used, would have told the story that no attack occurred.” It stressed that NSA summary reports from the time which portrayed North Vietnamese aggression relied heavily on “fragments of legitimate intercept lifted out of its context and inserted into the summary reports to support the contention of a premeditated North Vietnamese attack on 4 August. The sources of these fragments were not even referenced in the summaries . . . SIGINT information was presented in such a manner as to preclude responsible decision makers in the Johnson Administration from having the complete and objective narrative of events of 04 August 1964.”70 A U.S. Naval Institute (USNI) paper noted to similar effect in 2008,vi citing “the release of the nearly 200 documents related to the Gulf of Tonkin incident and transcripts from the Johnson Library evidence recently made available,” that “these new documents and tapes reveal what historians could not prove: There was not a second attack on U.S. Navy ships in the Tonkin Gulf in early August 1964. Furthermore, the evidence suggests a disturbing and deliberate attempt by Secretary of Defence McNamara to distort the evidence and mislead Congress.”71 vi One aspect the USNI paper highlighted was the discrepancy in signals intelligence interceptors on August 2 and August 4, with the former showing widespread communications between North Vietnamese units as military action was coordinated.

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The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution served as a blanket endorsement of several rounds of escalation and the rapid expansion of the war effort, including the largest bombing campaign in world history targeting North Vietnam, the Viet Cong, and supply lines in neighbouring Cambodia and Laos. The resolution was vital to legitimizing such action under U.S. law – referred to by President Johnson as “like Grandma’s nightshirt. It covers everything.”72 Within one month of the Gulf of Tonkin incident 93 U.S. warplanes had been dispatched to South Vietnam and Thailand, and within a year 200,000 American personnel were in South Vietnam.73 This figure quickly grew to over 500,000, with the resolution justifying open-ended U.S. military operations across Southeast Asia.74 Despite the magnitude of the response White House tapes released in 2002 showed that even President Johnson, although benefitting from the pretext for escalation, was highly sceptical of claims that North Vietnam had launched an attack. The tapes, as well as evidence from the preceding 38 years, left little question that an attack had not occurred.75 North Vietnam’s innocence was “well established,” according to USNI’s Acting Director of Naval History and Senior Historian of the Navy Dr. Edward J. Marolda.76 Following the August 4th incident President Johnson had given an address at midnight in which he made multiple tenuous claims including that the North Vietnamese had launched two days of attacks, that its actions were unprovoked, and that the administration did not intend to go to war in Vietnam. As former White House chief speechwriter Robert Lehrman, writing for The Hill, observed: Was any of LBJ’s speech that night, true? To historians the verdict is clear. No. ‘Seek no wider war?’ That is exactly what he sought with a resolution written six months earlier, waiting for an event to justify it [Vietnamese aggression] ‘On the open seas,’ with its implication that the attack was unprovoked? The Maddox, cruising off the Vietnamese coast, was part of a covert and illegal intelligence-gathering mission, designed to provoke exactly the response it got. Two days of attacks?



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Even Johnson didn’t believe the second one occurred. Aggression? The Maddox fired first. More important, the North Vietnamese were off their own coast. They were home. U.S. sailors were about 8,000 miles from home. If anything, the aggressors were us. Moreover, LBJ didn’t limit himself to deceiving the public. He deceived the Senate.77 While the USS Maddox’s operations were described as routine, further details of its activities off the North Vietnamese coast indicate that this was far from the case. The destroyer was tasked with simulating attacks on the North Vietnamese coast as part of the effort to “locate and identify all coastal radar transmitters,” and had been equipped with extensive signals intelligence equipment and embarked 17 associated specialists in Taiwan in July for this purpose.78 Such missions were vital to pave the way for an expanded military campaign to neutralize such equipment – which in August was seen as a considerable possibility. The growing weight of proposals that the U.S. should bomb North Vietnam, of which Hanoi was far from unaware, made such offensive operations by American warships particularly sensitive. The U.S. already had approximately 16,500 personnel in South Vietnam whom it claimed were military advisors, but who were already widely involved in military operations,79 and by June it had deployed air units to strike insurgents as well as communist-held areas of neighbouring Laos. CIA operations from 1961, which were transferred to the Pentagon from January 1964, saw commando teams inserted into North Vietnam for reconnaissance and sabotage operations. This campaign was described by the Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, Admiral Harry D. Felt, as targeting “power plants, railroads, bridges, VIP residences, and the like,” although these efforts were met with a string of failures and saw the attackers consistently take heavy losses to North Vietnamese defences.80 Another major factor which made the Maddox’s mission particularly provocative, and led many to speculate that by sailing as it did and firing the first shots it was seeking to provoke

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a response, was that it coincided with major South Vietnamese escalations at sea. In July the commander of the U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam, Lieutenant General William C. Westmoreland, initiated an offensive campaign under Operational Plan 34A that focused on using South Vietnamese patrol boats to conduct shore bombardments using mortars, rockets and recoilless rifles. These offensives built on a previous campaign that focused more on commando raids to do damage to North Vietnam.81 On July 22 South Vietnamese Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky confirmed to reporters that his country had been sending sabotage missions to the north for three years; and from July 31 with American approval South Vietnamese naval forces had begun to attack northern coastal and island installations without provocation.82 The U.S. had been increasing its own special forces and air operations in Vietnam at the time among other steps to rapidly expand is involvement. It was at the same time pressing Saigon to escalate including by insertion of guerrilla warfare teams into North Vietnam. July 31 was also the day the USS Maddox began its patrol,vii in what looked very much like a coordinated hostile action. U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk conceded in a classified cable regarding clashes between the USS Maddox and North Vietnamese ships on August 2: “Maddox incident is directly related to [North Vietnam’s] efforts to resist these activities,” with the patrol boats likely to have been operating as they did in response to the ongoing attacks. The American destroyer had effectively been sailing with special electronic surveillance equipment through a battle zone and close to an enemy coast just after its ally had initiated offensives.83

vii The routes of both the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy notably took them very close to every target of the southern attacks, and with North Vietnam’s claims to territorial waters remaining somewhat ambiguous at between three and twelve miles the two ships were operating well within this range. In the words of Adam Roberts, writing in a publication by the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the ships “were certainly pushing their luck and adding to the sensitivity of an already delicate mission.” (Roberts, Adam, ‘The Fog of Crisis: The 1964 Tonkin Gulf Incidents,’ The World Today, vol. 26, no. 5, May 1970 (pp. 209–217).)



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Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, when testifying before a joint session of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees two days after the incident on August 6, notably evaded questioningviii regarding whether North Vietnam may have been provoked into taking military action. He instead answered: “our Navy played absolutely no part in, was not associated with, was not aware of, any South Vietnamese actions, if there were any.” He subsequently that day claimed at a Pentagon news conference that he had no knowledge of the South Vietnamese coastal attacks which provoked that – a statement which proved to be an outright lie.84 An audio tape from the Johnson Presidential Library declassified in December 2005 showed that on August 5, the morning after the attacks, McNamara admitted to the president: On Friday night, as you probably know, we had four TP [sic] boats from [South] Vietnam, manned by [South] Vietnamese or other nationals, attack two islands, and we expended, oh, 1,000 rounds of ammunition of one kind or another against them. We probably shot up a radar station and a few other miscellaneous buildings. And following 24 hours after that with this destroyer in the same area undoubtedly led them to connect the two events.85 Alongside a simultaneous U.S.-directed commando raid,86 South Vietnamese ships had launched a second round of larger assaults on August 3–4.87 The Maddox had been ordered to approach the North Vietnamese coast as part of a coordinated action with South Vietnamese attacks to draw the northern patrol boats away from the area where the attacks were being launched.88 The

viii In his 2003 video memoirs McNamara remained unapologetic for his deception and boasted: “I learned early on never answer the question that is asked of you. Answer the question that you wish had been asked of you. And quite frankly, I follow that rule. It’s a very good rule.” (Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (Documentary), Sony Pictures, 2003.)

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northern navy was thus acting defensivelyix not only because the American destroyer approached its coast and fired first, but also because the ship was operating as part of an offensive operation which saw southern ships bombard northern targets without provocation.89 The fact that the Pentagon misinformed the Senate and the press about where clashes had occurred – more than doubling the distance away from the Vietnamese coast – further contributed to misrepresenting North Vietnamese actions as aggression.90 Much as had been done in Korea, where the Western aligned south was also responsible for the majority of offensives preceding the outbreak of the Korean War,91 relatively minor northern retaliation was portrayed out of context and in isolation to portray the non-westernized states as the aggressors and in turn provide pretext for hostile policies including large scale Western military interventions. Not only was the framing of the clashes in the Tonkin Gulf as unprovoked northern aggression highly misleading, but the claim that North Vietnamese ships even fired torpedoes, or were involved in any capacity whatsoever, was itself highly questionable. A few hours before the second incident began USS Maddox’s sonar equipment and its Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) device broke down and were repaired. Numerous erroneous sonar reports of torpedoes were made by the Maddox that night mostly caused by the ship’s own violent movements, as the ship had been going unusually fast and zigzagging.92 The Maddox’s SPS-40 long-range air-search radar and the Turner Joy’s SPG-53 fire-control radar were both out of action, while thunderstorms and rain squalls significantly reduced visibility and created waves ix As American historian Chris Oppe noted: “LBJ was looking for a pretext to go to Congress to ask for a resolution that would give him the authority to do basically whatever the hell he wanted to do in Vietnam, without the intense public debate that a declaration of war would have required . . . the more pernicious deception was this idea that American ships were sailing innocently in the Gulf of Tonkin and were attacked without provocation. In fact, the United States had been waging a small, secret war against North Vietnam since 1961. In the days leading up to the first incident of August 2nd, those secret operations had intensified.” (‘What really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964?,’ PRI, September 14, 2017.)



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six feet high – factors which combined to significantly further reduce situational awareness.93 On August 5 at 1:30am, around one hour after the second naval incident ended, the patrol commander Captain John Jerome Herrick reported to Pacific headquarters: “Review of action makes many reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather effects and over-eager sonarman may have accounted for many reports. No actual visual sightings by Maddox. Suggest complete evaluation before any further action taken.”94 At 8am he sent another message: Maddox scored no known hits and never positively identified a boat as such. . . . Air support not successful in locating targets. . . . No known damage or personnel casualties to either ship. . . . Turner Joy claims sinking one boat and damaging another. . . . The first boat close to Maddox probably fired torpedo at Maddox which was heard but not seen. All subsequent Maddox torpedo reports were doubtful in that it is suppose that sonar man was nearing ship’s own propeller beat.”95 Herrick later stated that he confirmed the firing of the first torpedo only because he assumed that the Maddox had been moving at a slower speed, since the sonar equipment only confused rudder noises with torpedoes when the ship moved at more over 25 knots. When shown that his notes and the ship’s log indicated that the Maddox had been traveling at 30 knots when it was allegedly attacked, Herrick conceded that it was probable that no torpedoes had been fired.96 The Maddox’s own officers were suspicious of reports of how many torpedoes were being fired because North Vietnam’s entire navy was only thought to be able to fire 24 torpedoes from all its patrol boats. They began to suspect that no attack was actually in progress. As the ship’s physician Samuel E. Halpern recalled, upon realising that the attack was false: “Immediately after the attack, the officers came streaming into the wardroom and it was hysterical. . . just hysterical laughter. Everybody was laughing

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like mad, and then suddenly, I realized I was laughing too, the same way. And it was this tremendous release from pressure.” American fighters flying overhead notably also reported that they could not confirm the presence of any enemy ships, with one reporting seeing: “No boat wakes, no ricochets off boats, no boat gunfire, no torpedo wakes – nothing but black sea and American firepower.” Skipper of the Maddox, Commander Herbert L. Ogier, confirmed on the morning of August 5 from the ship’s command bridge that reports of an attack were wrong.97 Award-winning journalist I. F. Stone suggested that the crisis involved “not just decision-making in a crisis, but . . . crisis-making to support a secretly pre-arranged decision,” indicating that the provocative actions of the American warships alongside South Vietnamese attacks were intended to draw fire and in turn provide pretext for expanding the war.98 This opinion was widely shared by analysts, with the wholly disproportionate nature of the U.S. response strongly indicating that very minor clashes at the Gulf of Tonkin, even if they had indeed occurred as Washington tenuously claimed, were blown very far out of proportion. The Tonkin incident thus served as a pretext for an already desired series of actions. A preliminary congressional resolution had been drafted by the Johnson administration from February to June awaiting some kind of incident, no matter how small, which could trigger it to be tabled.99 Indeed, President Johnson informed Senator J. William Fulbright on July 26, a week before the first incident and nine days before the second, that he planned to go to Congress soon to request a resolution on Vietnam – meaning the incidents were optimally timed.100 As historian Andrew L. Johns, writing for the Journal of American-East Asian Relations, noted: “The outpouring of patriotism which ensured the overwhelming acceptance of the resolution provided Johnson with the best of all worlds – bipartisan support, domestic political protection (albeit temporary), and the means to augment the American involvement in Vietnam with congressional sanction.” 101 “Clearly, the situation in Vietnam was growing progressively worse during the first half of 1964. Johnson and his advisers realized that the status quo on the ground



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in Vietnam would soon be hopeless without a major commitment of American troops – indeed, perhaps unwinnable in any case – and thus planning commenced for the eventual escalation of the conflict,” Johns observed, stressing that while plans to go to Congress with a Vietnam resolution had been long in the making, the Tonkin Gulf incident provided “the perfect pretext to submit a resolution to Congress and avoid divisive debate as a matter of patriotism and expediency.”102 Leading British international relations expert Professor Adam Roberts observed regarding the seemingly excessive response to the Tonkin incident: “It is as if Tonkin Gulf had been mistaken for Pearl Harbour,” an opinion which he highlighted was shared by many of America’s allies.103 Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies Alastair Buchan similarly referred to “President Johnson’s ludicrous over-reaction to an attack on two ships in the Gulf of Tonkin.”104 Not only was the escalation of the war grossly disproportionate to the incident in question, but whether the incident had ever occurred was in serious doubt even in the eyes of the president himself. As Under Secretary of State George Ball observed, President Johnson: “wasn’t convinced at all after the thing . . . but they had been waiting for a provocation for a hell of a long time. . . . I don’t think he was sure, I think he had grave doubts that this attack had occurred . . . but from the point of view of the President and those who were around him who were eager for a stronger American line to be taken, this served the purpose.”105 As more information came to light over time, both on the events in the Gulf of Tonkin itself and on the more general conduct of the United States during that period, the Johnson administration’s narrative regarding the chain of events appeared increasingly tenuous. Former U.S. State Department analyst and historian William Blum noted in 1995: “Serious enough doubts were raised at the time about the reality of the attack, but over the years other information has come to light which has left the official story in tatters.”106 President Johnson himself told Secretary George Ball: “Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!”107 He later commented privately: “For all I know, our navy

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was shooting at whales out there.”108 Secretary McNamara also later expressed doubts that any attack had ever occurred.109 Squadron Commander James Stockdale, a U.S. pilot who was flying overhead at low altitude for over 90 minutes during the August 4 incident, wrote in 1984 that he “had the best seat in the house to watch that event, and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets – there were no PT boats there. . . . There was nothing there but black water and American fire power.” He recalled that his superior officers instructed him to keep quiet on the matter.110 With officers on the USS Maddox also reportedly prevented from speaking out, Stockdale lamented: “I would never have guessed that commodores in charge on the scene of action are sometimes not allowed to blow the whistle on a screw-up or set records straight themselves.”111 As a result, he stressed, the Johnson administration had effectively moved “to launch a war under false pretences, in the face of the on-scene military commander’s advice to the contrary.”112 Naval officer John White was among many in the military who alleged that the pretext for war was far from honest, stating in 1967: “I maintain that President Johnson, Secretary McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave false information to Congress in their report about U.S. destroyers being attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin.” Captain Herrick of the USS Maddox himself refuted reports of North Vietnamese provocation.113 Foreign Policy magazine’s national security columnist, veteran journalist James Bamford, noted regarding the new perspective declassified documents on operations in Cuba gave the Gulf of Tonkin incident: in light of the Operation Northwoods documents, it is clear that deceiving the public and trumping up wars for Americans to fight and die in was standard, approved policy at the highest levels of the Pentagon. In fact, the Gulf of Tonkin seems right out of the Operation Northwoods playbook: ‘We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba . . . casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of indignation.’ One need only replace ‘Guantanamo Bay’



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with ‘Tonkin Gulf,’ and ‘Cuba’ with ‘North Vietnam.’ The Gulf of Tonkin incident may or may not have been stage- managed, but the senior Pentagon leadership at the time was clearly capable of such deceit.114 As Rodney Carlisle’s Encyclopaedia of Intelligence and Counterintelligence similarly noted: In addition to formal propaganda, disinformation was informally promulgated to journalists and the public as well. The 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident is perhaps the prime example. At the time, most journalists and the public accepted at face value the claims of President Lyndon B. Johnson. The president, and other officials, characterised the August incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin . . . as examples of clear, unprovoked North Vietnamese aggression. The second attack almost surely did not occur, though some officials at the time believed it had. Yet the highly secret Plan 34A, involving covert attacks jointly managed by the CIA and the U.S. Navy against North Vietnam was not revealed. Nor was the fact that a U.S. naval patrol had been sent to gather electronic intelligence in the Gulf of Tonkin. The North Vietnamese ‘aggression,’ widely reported in the news media, paved the way for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, providing the basis for the U.S. escalation of the war in Vietnam.115 The U.S. war effort in Vietnam was broadly heavily reliant on fabrications both to justify escalation and to vilify and delegitimise resistance. Evidence of fabricated incidents engineered to justify U.S. intervention was considerable. Former CIA officer Philip Liechty stated in 1982 that in the early 1960s he saw written plans to load large quantities of Soviet-Bloc arms onto a Vietnamese boat, fake a battle in which the boat would be sunk in shallow water, and call in Western reporters to see the captured weapons as proof of aid by foreign communist powers to the Viet Cong. This occurred in 1965 exactly as Liechty had told it. A U.S.

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State Department white paper titled ‘Aggression From the North,’ which was published at the end of February 1965, reported that a “suspicious vessel” was “sunk in shallow water” off the coast of South Vietnam on 16 February 1965 and contained 100 tons of military supplies. These were “almost all of communist origin, largely from Communist China and Czechoslovakia as well as North Vietnam.” The paper noted that “representatives of the free press visited the sunken North Vietnamese ship and viewed its cargo.”116 While records show that U.S. analysts were under no illusion that the Viet Minh were agents of an international communist conspiracy by Moscow and Beijing, and not the popular nationalists that they were, it was seen as vital to misrepresent them as such to both delegitimise them internationally and to justify U.S. military action against them.117 Liechty had also seen documents involving an elaborate operation to print large numbers of multicolour postage stamps showing a Vietnamese downing of a U.S. Army helicopter. He stressed that the high professionalism required to produce such stamps was meant to indicate that they were produced by North Vietnam, as the Viet Cong would not have been able to do so. According to the former officer, letters in Vietnamese were then written and mailed all over the world with this stamp on them “and the CIA made sure journalists would get hold of them,” which created an impression of Hanoi being highly complicit in the war effort. Life magazine’s issue published on February 26, 1965, featured a full colour blow-up of the stamp on its cover which it referred to as a “North Vietnam stamp.” This was just two days before the State Department’s white paper appeared. Reporting Liechty’s statements, the Washington Post noted: “Publication of the white paper turned out to be a key event in documenting the support of North Vietnam and other communist countries in the fighting in the South and in preparing American public opinion for what was to follow very soon: the large-scale commitment of U.S. forcesx to the fighting.”118 x The 1966 U.S. Army training film ‘County Fair’ showed sinister Viet Cong in a jungle clearing heating gasoline and soap bars to concoct a ‘vicious communist invention’ called napalm – an irony since it was in fact a Western



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Ohio Senator Stephen Young was quoted as saying that while he was in Vietnam, he was told by the CIA that the agency disguised people as Viet Cong to commit atrocities such as murder and rape in order to discredit them in the eyes of the population.119 Although not verified, this kind of atrocity fabrication would have been far from unusual. In the Philippines the CIA had used very similar tactics to counter the Hukabulahap (Huk) insurgency which opposed U.S. hegemonic designs in the country. U.S.-aligned government forces disguised as Huks were allowed to pillage villages and wreak havoc in order to undermine the insurgents’ public image. L. Fletcher Prouty, a retired U.S. Air Force officer, said this technique was “developed to a high art in the Philippines.” Soldiers were “set upon the unwary village in the grand manner of a Cecil B. DeMille production.”120 The head of the CIA clandestine paramilitary operations in the Philippines, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Lansdale, who had pioneered many clandestine operation techniques there, used many of the same methods in Vietnam.121 The Gulf of Tonkin incident paved the way for one of the most brutal wars in modern history, second since 1945 only to the much shorter but more intense Korean War that preceded it.xi As Robert Lehrman noted in The Hill to mark 50 years since the incident regarding its direct consequences: “Three million deaths in a [total Vietnamese] population of 30 million! That’s a Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 shot down each day, seven days a week – for 30 years. Sixty Memorial walls the size of our one – not counting weapon which was doused in great quantities over the population centres of Japan, Korea and later Vietnam. This was not only highly misleading, but a very serious lie regarding what napalm was and how it was being employed, with U.S. and allied forces exposed to it being only those subjected to their own friendly fire. (Covert Action Information Bulletin, no. 10, AugustSeptember 1980 (p. 43).) xi The extent of destruction from American bombardment quickly became overwhelming to observe, with Austrian correspondent Bernard Fall warning that “Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity . . . is threatened with extinction” as “the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size.” (Fall, Bernard, Last Reflections on a War, New York, Doubleday, 1967 (pp. 33, 34).)

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the 500,000 to a million victims of Agent Orange.” Unexploded mines from the war, he stressed, caused over 100,000 Vietnamese casualties, most of them civilians since the conflict ended.122 Aside from mines, of the 15 million tons of explosive ordinance dropped on Vietnam from the air the Pentagon estimated that around 10 percent did not explode. The U.S. bombing campaign subsequently initiated against neighbouring Laos and Cambodia to prevent supplies from reaching Vietnam saw the air force target the population indiscriminately using all assets at its disposal – described as “anything that flies on anything that moves.”123 Beyond explosives, the war effort premised on a response to the Gulf of Tonkin incident saw toxic chemicals widely sprayed across Vietnamese farmland and forests. Former U.S. Army medic in Vietnam Mike Hastie, who subsequently studied the effects of their employment, commented: The spraying of 70 million litres of [the chemical defoliant] Agent Orange on the Vietnamese people by the United States Government, is one of the worst war crimes ever committed in modern warfare. It is the war crime that is born again with every new generation. Children die from cancer, they are born without arms and legs, they are born with twisted bodies, mental illness, or no eyes, to name a few birth defects. Their parents and society have an enormous burden to try and make their lives as meaningful as possible.124 Cancer, diabetes, brain cell degeneration, muscular dystrophy and mental problems among the Vietnamese population were all consequences of the lasting legacy of American chemical attacks, and were passed on by the victims to their children.125 According to the Vietnamese Red Cross 4.8 million Vietnamese were exposed to Agent Orange, with 3 million suffering illnesses as a result,126 as poisonous chemicals were found to have entered food chains and even the breast milk of Vietnamese women.127 American personnel accidentally exposed to Agent Orange suffered many of the same ailments – as did their families. According



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to scientists from the U.S. Air Force’s chemical weapons branch, the military was aware of the potential damage from dioxin contamination – and that dangers to human health were significantly greater from the cheaper mass-produced version used.128 Extensive dehumanization of the local population was encouraged in the U.S. Military, the ‘Mere Gook Rule’ being the most notable example. This stipulated that mistreatment and killing of civilians was largely acceptable – they were the lives of “mere Gooks” which was a widely used derogatory term for East Asians. American soldiers were told when stationed in Vietnam: “The rule in Viet-Nam was the M.G.R – the ‘mere gook rule’: that it was no crime to kill or torture or rob or maim a Vietnamese because he was a mere gook.”129 Telford Taylor, a prominent American lawyer specializing in war crimes, commented on the prevailing American sentiments towards the Vietnamese which fuelled war crimes: “The trouble is no one sees the Vietnamese people. They’re not people. Therefore, it doesn’t matter what you do to them.”130 Serviceman Scott Camil testified regarding the psychology of personnel committing rapes and massacres against Vietnamese civilians: “It wasn’t like they were human. . . . They were a gook or a Commie and it was okay.”131 Veteran Joe Bangert similarly testified that “in regards to the women in Vietnam, first of all, you get this feeling sometimes when you’re over there that you don’t even think of their sex. This is really disgusting. You don’t even think of them as human beings, they’re ‘gooks.’ And they’re objects; they’re not human, they’re objects.”132 He described watching another serviceman, not a new recruit but a veteran with 20 years of service, disembowel and skin a Vietnamese woman.133 The U.S. Military also encouraged personnel to gain the highest body counts possible, largely due to a lack of tangible objectives in the campaign, which led both servicemen and commanders to pass off civilian dead as enemy combatants.134 As the BBC reported: Unable to deal with an enemy that dictated the time and place of combat, U.S. forces took to destroying whatever they could manage. If the Americans could

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kill more enemies – known as Viet Cong or VC – than the Vietnamese could replace, the thinking went, they would naturally give up the fight. To motivate troops to aim for a high body count, competitions were held between units to see who could kill the most. Rewards for the highest tally, displayed on ‘kill boards’ included days off or an extra case of beer. Their commanders meanwhile stood to win rapid promotion. Very quickly the phrase – ‘If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s VC’ – became a defining dictum of the war and civilian corpses were regularly tallied as slain enemies or Viet Cong. Civilians, including women and children, were killed for running from soldiers or helicopter gunships that had fired warning shots, or being in a village suspected of sheltering Viet Cong.”135 The atrocities that resulted from both dehumanization and incentives to maximize kills were only worsened by the very widespread use of drugs among U.S. forces,136 with 28 percent of personnel in Vietnam being on hard drugs, namely heroin in 1971, and 70 percent using intoxicants by 1973.137 Amphetamines were among many stimulants given out ‘like candies’ by the military, and were blamed for the “unjustified violence against the civilian population.” A 1971 report by the U.S. House Select Committee revealed that from 1966 to 1969 the military had used 225 million tablets.138 Drugs were considered an effective means to help soldiers handle mounting pressure particularly when morale flagged after the Viet Cong’s Tet Offensive in 1968.139 Personnel from the 23rd Infantry Division recalled that men raped Vietnamese women “on the average of once every third day,”140 while those from the 2nd Platoon said women would be raped whenever the company passed through a village.141 Infantryman Jamie Henry referred to rape as “SOP” – standard operating procedure.142 Vietnamese civilians widely recalled extremely frequent rapes by U.S. forces as well as the arbitrary rounding up of civilians for torture in areas suspected of supporting the Viet Cong.143 Officers and instructors widely condoned and



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at times promoted rape as a means of enhancing performance.144 As American researcher Elizabeth Anderson noted: “almost all of the men whose testimonies I have reviewed say that the leadership within their unit either directly encouraged sexual violence or passively allowed it to exist.” In part as a result “sexual violence was an indisputable part of the war, and undercurrents of gendered violence appear in almost every historical account of atrocities in Vietnam.”145 Some personnel reported that their commanders instructed units to kidnap women for ‘entertainment’ while on patrol, who would face hours of gang rape and then death.146 At times commanding officers saw that they had to outperform their subordinates in rapes to cement their positions of leadership.147 Rape was considered a standard practice for U.S. personnel, many of whom recalled being told by instructors: “we could rape the women,” “spread them open” and “drive pointed sticks or bayonets into their vaginas.” As a squad leader in the 34d platoon attested: “That’s an everyday affair . . . you can nail just about everybody on that – at least once.” As well as recreationally, rape and threat of rape were also widely used strategically to enforce submission and obtain information from both prisoners and civilians.148 Elizabeth Anderson thus observed: “the unique breed of fear generated by the threat of sexual violence became a potent weapon against the civilian population and the North Vietnamese fighters thought to be hiding within it.”149 As one veteran testified regarding the use of rape to cow the population: “It makes a lasting impression on some guy – some ‘zip’ – that’s watching his daughter get worked over. So we have a better opportunity of keeping him in line.”150 Women were often raped using bottles and rifles.151 Executions following rapes were highly common, with men who raped and then killed Vietnamese women widely referred to as “double veterans.”152 One veteran described such an incident as follows: “After we raped her, took her cherry [virginity] from her, after we shot her in the head . . . we literally start stomping her body. And everybody was laughing about it. It’s like seeing the lions around a just-killed zebra. You see them in these animal pictures, Wild Kingdom or something. The whole pride comes

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around and they start feasting on the body.”153 Another example was recalled by former GI John Ketwig who stated that when three young Vietnamese women were captured: “everybody circled around and they tortured these women with lit cigarettes . . . the one girl, they held her down and put the hose from the fire truck between her legs and turned on the water and exploded her. And the explosion of body fluids splashed across our faces.” He described it as a “revenge type of thing: hate against the Vietnamese, the ‘gooks’.”154 Regarding life in the American client state, which was created and sustained by Washington largely using humanitarian pretexts, a World Health Organization study described South Vietnam as “a land of widespread malaria, bubonic plague, leprosy, tuberculosis, venereal disease and 300,000 prostitutes . . . one of the few places on earth where leprosy was spreading and bubonic plague was still taking lives.” The WHO reported there were half-million drug addicts, 80,000–160,000 leprosy cases and an estimated 5,000 cases of bubonic plague annually in South Vietnam alongside rampant epidemics of tuberculosis and venereal disease.155 North Vietnam, although its cities were far more intensely targeted by American bombings, was still far better off. This was aside from the state of terror intended to suppress dissent against Washington’s designs, a notable example being the Phoenix Program under which U.S. forces tracked and assassinated an estimated 100,000 dissidents in South Vietnam.156 It was common for civilian prisoners in South Vietnam to be slaughtered or tortured using fists, sticks, bats, water and electric shocks,157 with gang rapes of female political prisoners by U.S. personnel widely reported.158 Deploying hundreds of thousands of personnel who were drugged, rapacious, incentivised to kill civilians, and taught to see the local population as sub-humans, inevitably led to disaster. The brief description above of the horrors suffered by the Vietnamese population as a result of U.S. military intervention in the county provides just a small indication of the depravity of the conflict. Other consequences ranged from emergence of a massive human trafficking industry in neighbouring Thailand to meet the sexual needs of American soldiers,159 to the systematic destruction of



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Vietnamese rural population centres under a policy of Forced Draft Urbanization leaving millions destitute and fuelling human trafficking160 The latter policy, as confirmed by the representative of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, was designed to force the rural population into concentrations in U.S.-controlled cities to deny the Viet Cong its support base, at tremendous cost to the southern economy and at the expense of leaving millions destitute.161 These events were all made possible by the fabricated narrative of an unprovoked North Vietnamese attack in the Gulf of Tonkin which, had it not been believed, could have spared millions of lives. False Atrocity Claims After a Lost War Although atrocity fabrication played many important roles throughout the American campaign in Vietnam, it took on a renewed importance as it became increasingly apparent that the objective of sustaining a separate South Vietnamese state was untenable and steps towards drawing down U.S. military involvement began to be taken. As the war became increasingly unpopular not only on the home front, but among troops on the ground, proponents of continued military involvement very widely propagated false atrocity stories to strengthen their cases. Attributing false atrocities to the Viet Minh provided a key basis to claim that terrible consequences were inevitable if a sufficiently hard line was not taken. A withdrawal of U.S. forces, it was claimed, would “almost certainly” be followed by “a slaughter in the South of all those who have fought against the Communists,” thus leaving Washington with a moral obligation to persist in the war effort.162 A notable example was expert Patrick Honey, personal friend and adviser of President Diem, former Reuters correspondent, former Foreign Editor of the Economist, and leading commentator on Vietnamese affairs, who confidently predicted regarding possible reunification under the Viet Minh: “Calculated on the basis of past Communist deeds, and given the size of South Vietnam’s population, the minimum number of those to be butchered will exceed one million and could rise to several times that figure.”163

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Even after the withdrawal of U.S. forces, atrocity propaganda was used extensively as a means to bolster South Vietnamese resistance. While Southern forces had more than double the numbers and triple the firepower of the North, an unwillingness to fight and lack of popular support for the U.S. client government was widely seen to be the cause of their effective collapse.164 Propagating reports of impending mass slaughter by the North Vietnamese was thought to potentially help remedy this. CIA analyst Frank Snepp observed that in the final days of the North Vietnamese advance the U. S. embassy in Saigon organized “a noisy press campaign around recent reports that the Communists were torturing and mutilating recalcitrant civilians in newly captured areas.” While this could have generated international sympathy for the South and helped vindicate prior American efforts to preserve a separate southern state, it had the unexpected effect of sparking “panic and chaos” among “the South Vietnamese population itself.” Snepp also cited in his notes: atrocity stories . . . now imaginatively embroidered by Saigon radio, the local press and the Embassy. At the Ambassador’s orders, [the political counsellor] Joe Bennett is still zealously churning out his share of them, playing on thirdhand reports relayed out of Ban Me Thuot by a Buddhist monk. “They’re tearing out women’s fingernails up there and chopping up the town council,” one of Bennett’s younger staffers advised me gleefully this afternoon. “That should turn some heads in Congress.”165 Regarding one series of atrocity stories from the embassy, Snepp highlighted that the ambassador and CIA chief “apparently consider the latest crop too useful to risk putting them to any test of veracity,” stressing their effectiveness in spreading terror.166 Although U.S. embassy and CIA atrocity stories were usually accepted without scepticism being voiced publicly, this was not absolute. The Christian Science Monitor, for one, noted that its reporter, Daniel Southerland, had cabled from Saigon that:



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so far he has been unable to verify reports of executions of officials and others in occupied areas. Mr. Southerland does report cables from the U.S. embassy in Saigon to Washington reporting alleged executions, but says one monk supposed to be an eyewitness is nowhere to be found. Another alleged eyewitness in Da Nang told Mr. Southerland he had seen no such thing. The embassy’s cables have the apparent aim of persuading Congress to vote more aid, Mr. Southerland reports.167 Even after Vietnam’s reunification on April 30, 1975, atrocity propaganda played a key role in both justifying continued U.S. economic warfare efforts against the country and in retrospectively justifying the American war effort. With a very small fraction of the atrocities U.S. forces had committed in Vietnam gaining publicity internationally, which alone was damaging enough to their reputation, depicting the Viet Minh as more depraved still if not genocidal provided a means of presenting the Americans as having still been the lesser evil in the war. American scholars Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, who wrote extensively on U.S. relations with post-war Vietnam, observed that a key goal which the U.S. sought to attain largely through atrocity fabrication was “to reconstruct recent history so as to present their past role in a better light . . . to teach the lesson that exit from the Free World in the interest of national autonomy is the worst fate that a subject people can endure, and to provide a post hoc justification for U.S. intervention by showing the awful consequences of its defeat.”168 They referred to an “extensive effort to dispel what the Wall Street Journal calls the ‘simple-minded myth’ that Indochina’s suffering is somehow related to U.S. actions over the past thirty years,” which would be achieved by claiming that Vietnam under the Viet Minh was worse off than it would have been as a U.S. client state.169 Aside from atrocity fabrication, another means by which this was pursued was misrepresenting the poor conditions in Vietnam, which were caused primarily by the devastating American air campaign and subsequent post-war sanctions, as instead being

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a result of the Viet Minh’s governance. Chomsky and Hermanxii observed that “death and suffering from malnutrition and disease in societies brought to ruin by U.S. intervention are displayed as proof of the evil nature of Communism.”170 The two scholars emphasized following their study of Western coverage of Vietnam, and Indochina more broadly, that it was “remarkable to see how susceptible intellectuals have been, over the years, to the machinations of the atrocity fabrication industry.”171 They highlighted regarding one notable technique used to vilify Vietnam and other adversaries: As intelligence services have become more sophisticated – or at least, better funded – they have learned to play upon the willingness of the more thoughtful members of the community to believe the worst about official enemies of the state to which they are devoted. One technique is to arrange for ‘scholarly studies,’ such as the book by [prominent defector] Hoang Van Chi which had such remarkable success in establishing the mythology concerning the bloodbaths during the North Vietnamese land reform.172 A favourite source cited in the American press to claim mass abuses after April 1975 was Andre Gelinas, a Canadian Jesuit who, among other often similarly absurd claims, reported that “15,000 to 20,000 Vietnamese have committed suicide rather than live under Communism.”173 The Jesuit dispelled criticisms from Western xii The two scholars were among many to compare the practices of Western media in post-war Vietnam to the Bryce Report (see introduction), albeit not to justify a war effort but rather to vilify a victorious adversary and thus justify the war retrospectively. They highlighted that “the limitations on the [American] press are to a significant extent self-imposed, reflecting ideological constraints rather than the exigencies of reporting under difficult conditions,” leading them to instead widely re report fabrications of crimes which sharply contradicted the observations of people on the ground. (Chomsky, Noam and Herman, Edward S., After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina & The Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, Boston, South End Press, 1979 (p. 96).)



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and other foreign eyewitnesses by dismissing them as parrots for Vietnamese government narratives, although in his congressional testimony in June 1977 he notably did not repeat the story of mass suicides. Gelinas told the Montreal Star: “People in South Vietnam today are praying for war . . . the way people in France were praying for it in 1942. They want to be invaded.”174 His refusal to name sources and inability to name key locations in his narrative sparked widespread scepticism, particularly among those who interviewed and discussed the allegations with Gelinas. Richard Hughes, head of the Shoeshine Boy Foundation which sheltered homeless children in Vietnam, concluded after a “probing, threehour conversation with Father Gelinas” that his charges illustrated how “second-hand information fed rumour, and bitterness bias,” and stressed how harmful they had been to post-war recovery of ties.175 The dissemination of Gelinas’s charges by major media outlets, which took them very much at face value, were seen to have influenced several congressmen towards supporting a harder line.176 His allegations and those of defecting South Vietnamese allowed Western sources to claim that events in Vietnam had vindicated President Johnson’s predictions of mass suffering should the U.S. not intervene, and thus justified the American war effort, and ruined the credibility of those who had opposed it.177 Gelinas offered no evidence for his charges, which were very widely contradicted by more credible sources on the ground that did much more to substantiate their own claims.178 Earl Martin, a Mennonite social worker who had done relief work in South Vietnam’s concentration camps and spent considerable time in the country after unification, was thus among many to conclude that “Andre Gelinas has seriously eroded any basis he might have had for serving as a credible witness.”179 Chomsky and Herman observed regarding the American press’ widespread propagation of Gelinas’ claims despite their highly tenuous nature: “nevertheless, it is Gelinas’s story that has remained ‘the truth’ for the Free Press . . . since Gelinas’ account is very critical of an official enemy, its truthfulness is irrelevant and no further analysis is required.”180 They further observed regarding his popularity in the Western press: “Imagine a man of the cloth who was able to live for 13

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years in Vietnam through the worst barbarism of the U.S. war, never raising a peep of protest so far as is known, then inventing mass suicides and North Vietnamese coups to order for an admiring international audience.”181 The scholars highlighted that U.S. media outlets widely publicised the Jesuit’s reports to imply that the American war effort was entirely justified and delegitimise those who had opposed it.182 Another notable source used was the French correspondent R. P. Paringaux from Le Monde, who wrote of severe repression and a very high portion of the population forced into concentration camps. His claims were widely propagated on American radio, television and in the written press, although like those of Gelinas they had little supporting evidence and were strongly contradicted by the large majority of foreign observers in Vietnam.183 John Fraser from the Toronto Globe and Mail, for example, who spent four weeks travelling through the country, concluded that the French journalist’s reports were vastly exaggerated.xiii Although highly critical of the Vietnamese government, Fraser had been specifically interested in verifying the observations and conclusions of the French journalist and explained why through his extensive experience, including many discussions with Vietnamese critical of the government, Paringaux’s narrative appeared far removed from reality.184 Paringaux notably frequently cited a figure of 800,000 prisoners, which had been repeatedly stated by defectors from former South Vietnam residing in the West, although this number was reached by counting 750,000 city residents who returned to the countryside after the war as prisoners to falsely give the impression of mass repression.185 Western portrayals of mass repression in post-war Vietnam were consistently strongly contradicted by the large majority of foreign observers on the ground. Indeed, while Western outlets such as the New York Times consistently widely claimed that Vietnam was totally off limits to Americans after the war, this was very far from true. It nevertheless provided valuable pretext for xiii Fraser claimed to have “more access and freedom to roam independently throughout Vietnam (seven provinces and the two principal cities) than any western journalist since 1975” during his four weeks in the country.



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focusing on reports from defectors and activists rather than on anyone actually in the country. The Times had itself requested a report on a trip to Vietnam from the distinguished U.S. historian Gabriel Kolko, but refused to permit its printing as his findings strongly contradicted the prevailing Western narrative.186 A Swedish delegation led by parliamentarians, which met with leading non-Communist opposition figures who strongly denied charges of widespread humanitarian abuses by the post-unification government, concluded that Washington had a “need to invent all kinds of stories to destroy trust.”187 An Italian missionary priest who had spent 15 months in post-unification Vietnam, where he lived in a small village in the suburbs of Saigon with other Christians, was highly critical of how increasingly extreme testimonies of defectors were propagated in the Western media to provide an impression of the country that was far out of touch with reality. He thus stressed that it was “terribly dishonest to make these refugees say, in the countries that have received them, those things that the welcoming countries strongly wish to hear.”188 Another notable example was Wallace Collett, a businessman who headed a Quaker mission to Vietnam and specifically investigated Western allegations of repression. His delegation met well-known non-Communist political figures in the South who denied such reports, and concluded that the allegations were untrue. Ly Chanh Trung, who had been a leading spokesman for the non-Communist opposition, was among those to deny outright Western claims of humanitarian abuses, stating: “If a violation of human rights occurs, we ourselves will raise our voices. We will not wait for our friends from abroad to raise theirs.” He dismissed Western claims that re-education camps “have the purpose of revenging or killing [U.S. collaborators] gradually.”189 This was in reference to the widespread misportrayals of these facilities which was central to forming a narrative of mass repression. Regarding conditions in such camps Max Ediger of the Mennonite Central Committee reported he “met several old friends who, because they were officers in the old [South Vietnamese] army, spent nine months in re-education camps. They made no mention of torture and mistreatment” but “rather talked about learning how to work

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with their hands” and said that they had learned “about the new economic and social system they were living under. One young doctor, after completing his reeducation course, was made director of a drug rehabilitation centre near Saigon.”190 In Western coverage, however, the camps would continue to be likened to milder successors to Auschwitz or Birkenau where, much like the camps American POWs had been held in in Korea, two decades prior, all kinds of atrocities were imagined to portray them as something entirely different to what they were.

Notes 1

Blum, William, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, London, Zed Books, 2003 (p. 185). 2 Nelson, Anna Kasten, ‘Operation Northwoods and the Covert War against Cuba, 1961–1963,’ Cuban Studies, vol. 32, 2001 (p. 146). 3 The New York Times, February 19, 1960. The New York Times, February 20, 1960. The New York Times, March 22, 1960. Cuba, the U.S. and Russia, 1960–63, New York, Facts on File, 1964 (pp. 7–8). 4 Branch, Taylor and Crile III, George, ‘The Kennedy Vendetta,’ Harper’s Magazine, August 1975 (p. 52). Hinckle, Warren and Turner, William W., The Fish is Red: The Story of the Secret War Against Castro, New York, Harper & Row, 1981. The New York Times, August 26, 1962 (p. 1). The New York Times, March 21, 1963 (p. 3). Washington Post, June 1, 1966. Washington Post, September 30, 1966. Cuba, the U.S. and Russia, 1960–63, New York, Facts on File, 1964. 5 Branch, Taylor and Crile III, George, ‘The Kennedy Vendetta,’ Harper’s Magazine, August 1975 (p. 52). The New York Times, April 28, 1966. 6 Branch, Taylor and Crile III, George, ‘The Kennedy Vendetta,’ Harper’s Magazine, August 1975 (p. 52). 7 Washington Post, February 14, 1975 (p. C31). Branch, Taylor and Crile III, George, ‘The Kennedy Vendetta,’ Harper’s Magazine, August 1975 (p. 52). 8 Nelson, Anna Kasten, ‘Operation Northwoods and the Covert War against Cuba, 1961–1963,’ Cuban Studies, vol. 32, 2001 (pp. 145–154). 9 Washington Post, March 21, 1977 (p. A18). 10 San Francisco Chronicle, January 10, 1977. 11 Cole, Leonard A., Clouds of Secrecy: The Army’s Germ Warfare Tests over Populated Areas, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 1989 (p.18).



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12 Covert Action Information Bulletin, no. 22, Fall 1984 (p. 35). The trial of Eduardo Victor Arocena Perez, Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York, transcript of September 10, 1984 (pp. 2187– 89). 13 Miller J., Engelsberg S. and Broad W., Germs. Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2002 (Chapter 3: Revelations). 14 Wise, David, ‘Colby of CIA – CIA of Colby,’ The New York Times Magazine, July 1, 1973 (p. 9). 15 Nelson, Anna Kasten, ‘Operation Northwoods and the Covert War against Cuba, 1961–1963,’ Cuban Studies, vol. 32, 2001 (p. 147). 16 Bissell, Richard M., Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996 (p. 161). 17 Bamford, James, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency From the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century, New York, Doubleday, 2001 (p. 83). 18 Ibid. (p. 83). 19 Ibid. (p. 84). Feinsilber, Mike, ‘Anti-Castro Plots Out Of This World Blaming Cuba For Possible Nasa Mishap Among Proposed Tricks In Early 1960s,’ Spokesman, November 19, 1997. 20 Bamford, James, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency From the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century, New York, Doubleday, 2001 (p. 84). 21 Ibid. (p. 84). 22 U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff,  ‘Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba (TS),’ Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, Department of Defense, March 13, 1962 (https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//news/20010430/ northwoods.pdf). Weinter, Tim, ‘Declassified Papers Show Anti-Castro Ideas Proposed to Kennedy,’ The New York Times, November 19, 1997. 23 Joint Chiefs of Staff,  ‘Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba (TS),’ Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, Department of Defense, March 13, 1962. (https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//news/20010430/northwoods. pdf). 24 Ibid. 25 Davies, Steve, Red Eagles, Oxford, Osprey, 2008. 26 White, Mark J., The Kennedys and Cuba: The Declassified Documentary History, Chicago, Ivan R. Dee, 1999 (p. 113). 27 Joint Chiefs of Staff,  ‘Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba (TS),’ Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, Department of Defense, March 13, 1962 (https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//news/20010430/northwoods. pdf). 28 Bamford, James, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency From the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century, New York, Doubleday, 2001 (p. 89). 29 Ibid. (p. 89). 30 Ibid. (p. 89).

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31 Karnow, Stanley, Vietnam: A History, New York, Viking, 1982 (p. 87). 32 McMahon, Robert J., The Cold War in the Third World, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013 (p. 49). 33 Ngô, Vĩnh Long, Before the Revolution: The Vietnamese Peasants under the French, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1973 (pp. 73, 74). Cumings, Bruce, Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations, Chapel Hill, Duke University Press, 2002 (pp. 83–86). Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, New York, Verso, 1991 (p. 126). Pears, Pamela A., Remnants of Empire in Algeria and Vietnam: Women, Words and War, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2006 (p. 18). 34 Ngô, Vĩnh Long, Before the Revolution: The Vietnamese Peasants under the French, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1973 (pp. 73, 74). Cumings, Bruce, Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations, Chapel Hill, Duke University Press, 2002 (pp. 83–86). 35 Tonnesson, Stein, ‘The Haiphong Massacre of 1946 is a severe illustration of empire,’ Southeast Asian Globe, November 23, 2021. Smith, Richard Harris, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1972 (p. 347). 36 Lewis, Norman, A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, London, Jonathan Cape, 1951 (pp. 184, 208). Rydstrom, Helle, ‘Politics of colonial violence: Gendered atrocities in French occupied Vietnam,’ European Journal of Women’s Studies, 2014 (pp. 1–17). ‘Vụ thảm sát Mỹ Trạch - Nỗi đau nhức nhối suốt 66 năm’ [My Trach Massacre - Painful Suffering for 66 years], Da Tri, November 28, 2013. ‘Algeria buries fighters whose skulls were in Paris museum,’ AP News, July 5, 2020. 37 Rydstrom, Helle, ‘Politics of colonial violence: Gendered atrocities in French occupied Vietnam,’ European Journal of Women’s Studies, 2014 (pp. 1–17). 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 U.S. Pilots Honored For Indochina Service, Embassy of France in the United States, February 24, 2005. 41 Whitfield, Stephen J., The Culture of the Cold War, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 (pp. 6, 7). Marder, Murrey, ‘When Ike Was Asked to Nuke Vietnam,’ Washington Post, August 22, 1982. 42 Fall, Bernard, Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu, New York, Lippincott, 1967 (p. 307). Parade Magazine, April 24, 1966. Drummond, Roscoe and Coblentz, Gaston, Duel at the Brink, New York, Doubleday, 1960 (pp. 121, 122). 43 Cooper, Chester, The Lost Crusade: The Full Story of US Involvement in Vietnam from Roosevelt to Nixon, London, MacGibbon and Kee, 1971 (p. 72).



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44 Gravel, Mike, The Pentagon Papers Volume I, Boston, Beacon Press, 1971 (p. 78). 45 Dalloz, Jacquez, La Guerre d’Indochine 1945–1954, Paris, Seuil, 1987 (pp. 129, 130). 46 Geneva Accords, Agreement on the Cessation of Hostilities in Vietnam, July 20, 1954. 47 Eisenhower, Dwight, Mandate for Change, 1953–1956; The White House Years, New York, Doubleday, 1963 (p. 372). 48 Kolko, Gabriel, Vietnam: Anatomy of a War, 1940–1975, New York, Harper Collins, 1987 (p. 85). 49 Buttinger, Joseph, Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled, Santa Barbara, Praeger, 1967 (p. 993). Karnow, Stanley, Vietnam: A History, New York, Penguin, 1997 (p. 294). Fall, Bernard B., The Two Viet-Nams, Santa Barbara, Praeger, 1963 (p. 199). Jacobs, Seth, Cold War Mandarin: Ngo Dinh Diem and the Origins of America’s War in Vietnam, 1950–1963, Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield, 2006 (pp. 100, 147–154). 50 Tucker, Spencer C., Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social and Military History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000 (p. 291). Gettleman, Marvin E., Vietnam: History, documents and opinions on a major world crisis, Robbinsdale, Fawcett, 1966 (pp. 280–282). ‘South Vietnam: Whose funeral pyre?,’ The New Republic, June 29, 1963 (p. 9). Halberstam, David, ‘Diệm and the Buddhists,’ The New York Times, June 17, 1963. Karnow, Stanley, Vietnam: A History, New York, Penguin, 1997 (p. 294). Jacobs, Seth, Cold War Mandarin: Ngo Dinh Diem and the Origins of America’s War in Vietnam, 1950–1963, Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield, 2006 (p.91). ‘Diệm’s other crusade,’ The New Republic, June 22, 1963 (pp. 5, 6). 51 McGehee, Ralph W., Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA, New York, Sheridan Square Publications, 1983 (pp. 131–133). 52 Dooley, Tom, Three Great Books, New York, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1960 (pp. 48, 98, 100). 53 Winters, Jim, ‘Tom Dooley the Forgotten Hero,’ Notre Dame Magazine, May 1979 (pp. 10–17). 54 McGehee, Ralph W., Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA, New York, Sheridan Square Publications, 1983 (p. 133). 55 Ibid. (pp. 127–128). 56 Prados, John, Operation Vulture, New York, ibooks, 2002 (pp. 125–127). 57 Stoessinger, John, Crusaders and Pragmatists, New York, Norton, 1979 (pp. 183–96). Goodwin, Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, New York, Harper & Row, 1976 (p. 176). 58 McNamara, Robert S. and Van De Mark, Brian, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, New York, Vintage Books, 1996 (p. 102).

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59 Marolda, Edward J., ‘Grand Delusion: U.S. Strategy and the Tonkin Gulf Incident,’ U.S. Naval Institute Naval History Magazine, vol. 28, no. 4, July 2014. 60 Telephone conversation transcript, Johnson to Mansfield and Johnson to McNamara, June 9, 1964, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Johns, Andrew L., ‘Opening Pandora’s Box: The Genesis and Evolution of the 1964 Congressional Resolution on Vietnam,’ The Journal of AmericanEast Asian Relations, vol. 6, no. 2/3, Summer-Fall 1997 (pp. 175–206). Unpublished manuscript, William P. Bundy, Papers of William P. Bundy, box 1, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, Chapter 13 (pp. 1, 18, 22). 61 Johns, Andrew L., ‘Opening Pandora’s Box: The Genesis and Evolution of the 1964 Congressional Resolution on Vietnam,’ The Journal of AmericanEast Asian Relations, vol. 6, no. 2/3, Summer-Fall 1997 (pp. 175–206). Roberts, Adam, ‘The Fog of Crisis: The 1964 Tonkin Gulf Incidents,’ The World Today, vol. 26, no. 5, May 1970 (p. 213). 62 Lubasch, Arnold, ‘Red PT Boats Fire at U.S. Destroyer on Vietnam Duty,’ The New York Times, August 3, 1964. 63 Scheer, Robert, ‘Vietnam: A Decade Later: Cables, Accounts Declassified: Tonkin – Dubious Premise for a War,’ Los Angeles Times, April 29, 1985. 64 Lehrman, Robert, ‘Turning 50: The tragedy of Tonkin Gulf,’ The Hill, August 1, 2014. 65 Background Information on the Use of U.S. Armed Forces in Foreign Countries, 1975 Revision, By the Foreign Affairs Division, Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, For the Subcommittee on International Security and Scientific Affairs of the House Committee on International Relations, Washington DC, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975 (p. 71). 66 Scheer, Robert, ‘Vietnam: A Decade Later: Cables, Accounts Declassified: Tonkin – Dubious Premise for a War,’ Los Angeles Times, April 29, 1985. 67 ‘Records Show Doubts on ’64 Vietnam Crisis,’ The New York Times, July 14, 2010. 68 Ibid. 69 Hanyok, Robert J., ‘Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2–4 August 1964,’ Cryptological Quarterly, Winter 2000/Spring 2001 (p. 6). 70 Hanyok, Robert J., ‘Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2–4 August 1964,’ Cryptological Quarterly, Winter 2000/Spring 2001 (p. 6). 71 Paterson, Pat, ‘The Truth About Tonkin,’ U.S. Naval Institute Naval History Magazine, vol. 22, no. 1, February 2008. 72 Blum, William, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, London, Zed Books, 2003 (Chapter 19: Vietnam 1950–1973). Hanyok, Robert J., ‘Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2–4 August 1964,’ Cryptological Quarterly, Winter 2000/Spring 2001 (p. 6). 73 Lehrman, Robert, ‘Turning 50: The tragedy of Tonkin Gulf,’ The Hill, August 1, 2014.



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74 Roberts, Adam, ‘The Fog of Crisis: The 1964 Tonkin Gulf Incidents,’ The World Today, vol. 26, no. 5, May 1970 (pp. 209–217). 75 ‘Release of LBJ tapes adds to Tonkin debate,’ The Baltimore Sun, August 4, 2002. ‘New Tapes Indicate Johnson Doubted Attack in Tonkin Gulf,’ The New York Times, November 6, 2001. 76 Marolda, Edward J., ‘Grand Delusion: U.S. Strategy and the Tonkin Gulf Incident,’ U.S. Naval Institute Naval History Magazine, vol. 28, no. 4, July 2014. 77 Lehrman, Robert, ‘Turning 50: The tragedy of Tonkin Gulf,’ The Hill, August 1, 2014. 78 Fulbright, J. William, ‘Truth Is The First Casualty: The Gulf of Tonkin Affair,’ speech to the U.S. Senate, November 10, 1969, S14020. Hanyok, Robert J., ‘Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2–4 August 1964,’ Cryptological Quarterly, Winter 2000/Spring 2001 (p. 6). 79 Valentine, Douglas, The Phoenix Program America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam, New York, Open Road, 2014. 80 Marolda, Edward J., ‘Grand Delusion: U.S. Strategy and the Tonkin Gulf Incident,’ U.S. Naval Institute Naval History Magazine, vol. 28, no. 4, July 2014. 81 Andrade, Dale and Conboy, Kenneth, ‘The Secret Side of the Tonkin Gulf Incident,’ U.S. Naval Institute Naval History Magazine, vol. 13, no. 4, July/ August 1999. 82 Roberts, Adam, ‘The Fog of Crisis: The 1964 Tonkin Gulf Incidents,’ The World Today, vol. 26, no. 5, May 1970 (pp. 209–217). 83 Scheer, Robert, ‘Vietnam: A Decade Later: Cables, Accounts Declassified: Tonkin – Dubious Premise for a War,’ Los Angeles Times, April 29, 1985. 84 Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Historical Series, version XVI, Washington, Government Printing Office, 1988 (p. 293). Paterson, Pat, ‘The Truth About Tonkin,’ U.S. Naval Institute Naval History Magazine, vol. 22, no. 1, February 2008. 85 Johnson and McNamara recording, August 3, 1964 at 10:30 a.m., recording provided by the, Presidential Recordings Program, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia.  86 Scheer, Robert, ‘Vietnam: A Decade Later: Cables, Accounts Declassified: Tonkin – Dubious Premise for a War,’ Los Angeles Times, April 29, 1985. 87 Roberts, Adam, ‘The Fog of Crisis: The 1964 Tonkin Gulf Incidents,’ The World Today, vol. 26, no. 5, May 1970 (pp. 209–217). 88 Ibid. (pp. 209–217). 89 Ibid. (pp. 209–217). 90 Landry, Steven M., ‘“Reds Driven Off”: the US Media’s Propaganda During the Gulf of Tonkin Incident,’ The Cupola, Spring 2020. 91 National Records Center, USFIK 11071 file, box 62/96, G-2 ‘Staff Study,’ February 1949, signed by Lieutenant Colonel B. W. Heckemeyer of Army G-2.

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Cumings, Bruce, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1997 (p. 257). British Foreign Office, (FO 317), piece no. 76259, Holt to FO, September 2, 1949. Washington to Canberra, memorandum 953, August 17, 1949. 92 Scheer, Robert, ‘Vietnam: A Decade Later: Cables, Accounts Declassified: Tonkin – Dubious Premise for a War,’ Los Angeles Times, April 29, 1985. 93 Drea, Edward J., ‘Tonkin Gulf Reappraisal: 40 Years Later,’ MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, vol. 16, no. 4, Summer 2004 (p. 75). 94 McNamara, Robert, In Retrospect, New York, Vintage, 1996 (p. 133). 95 Scheer, Robert, ‘Vietnam: A Decade Later: Cables, Accounts Declassified: Tonkin – Dubious Premise for a War,’ Los Angeles Times, April 29, 1985. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid. 98 Stone, I. F., ‘McNamara and Tonkin Bay: The Unanswered Questions,’ New York Review of Books, March 28, 1968. 99 Johns, Andrew L., ‘Opening Pandora’s Box: The Genesis and Evolution of the 1964 Congressional Resolution on Vietnam,’ The Journal of AmericanEast Asian Relations, vol. 6, no. 2/3, Summer-Fall 1997 (pp. 175–206). Agenda, Executive Committee Meeting, May 24, 1964, ‘Meetings on Southeast Asia, vol. 1,’ box 18/19, Files of McGeorge Bundy, National Security File, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. 100 Johns, Andrew L., ‘Opening Pandora’s Box: The Genesis and Evolution of the 1964 Congressional Resolution on Vietnam,’ The Journal of AmericanEast Asian Relations, vol. 6, no. 2/3, Summer-Fall 1997 (pp. 175–206). Berman, William C., William Fulbright and the Vietnam War: The Dissent of a Political Realist, Kent, Kent State University Press, 1988 (p. 22). 101 Johns, Andrew L., ‘Opening Pandora’s Box: The Genesis and Evolution of the 1964 Congressional Resolution on Vietnam,’ The Journal of AmericanEast Asian Relations, vol. 6, no. 2/3, Summer-Fall 1997 (pp. 175–206). 102 Ibid. (pp. 175–206). 103 Roberts, Adam, ‘The Fog of Crisis: The 1964 Tonkin Gulf Incidents,’ The World Today, vol. 26, no. 5, May 1970 (pp. 209–217). 104 Buchan, Alastair, ‘Questions About Vietnam,’ Encounter, January 1968. 105 Scheer, Robert, ‘Vietnam: A Decade Later: Cables, Accounts Declassified: Tonkin – Dubious Premise for a War,’ Los Angeles Times, April 29, 1985. 106 Blum, William, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, London, Zed Books, 2003 (Chapter 19: Vietnam 1950–1973). 107 ‘Records Show Doubts on ’64 Vietnam Crisis,’ The New York Times, July 14, 2010. 108 ‘Congress Approves Gulf of Tonkin Resolution: August 7, 1964,’ Politico, August 7, 2016. 109 ‘New Tapes Indicate Johnson Doubted Attack in Tonkin Gulf,’ The New York Times, November 6, 2001. 110 Stockdale, Jim and Stockdale, Sybil, In Love and War: The Story of a Family’s Ordeal and Sacrifice During the Vietnam Years, New York, Harper Collins, 1984 (p. 23).



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111 Scheer, Robert, ‘Vietnam: A Decade Later: Cables, Accounts Declassified: Tonkin – Dubious Premise for a War,’ Los Angeles Times, April 29, 1985. 112 Stockdale, Jim and Stockdale, Sybil, In Love and War: The Story of a Family’s Ordeal and Sacrifice During the Vietnam Years, New York, Harper Collins, 1984 (p. 25). 113 ‘John White’s Letter to the New Haven Register, 1967,’  Connecticut Magazine, August 1, 2014.  Ellsberg, Daniel, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, New York, Viking, 2002 (Chapter One: The Tonkin Gulf: August 1964 ). Burham, Robert, ‘False Flags, Covert Operations and Propaganda,’ lulu. com, 2014 (p. 86). 114 Bamford, James, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency From the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century, New York, Doubleday, 2001 (p. 91). 115 Carlisle, Rodney, Encyclopaedia of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Abingdon, Routledge, 2005 (p. 357). 116 Blum, William, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, London, Zed Books, 2003 (Chapter 19: Vietnam 1950–1973). 117 Chomsky, Noam, For Reasons of State, New York, Pantheon, 1973 (p. 51f). 118 Washington Post, March 20, 1982. 119 Chicago Daily News, October 20, 1965. Washington Post, October 21, 1965. 120 Prouty, L. Fletcher, The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the World, New York, Ballantine Books, 1974 (pp. 38, 39). 121 ‘Document 95, Lansdale Team’s Report on Covert Saigon Mission in 1954 and 1955,’ The Pentagon Papers, Gravel Edition, vol. 1 (pp. 573–583). 122 Lehrman, Robert, ‘Turning 50: The tragedy of Tonkin Gulf,’ The Hill, August 1, 2014. 123 Becker, Elizabeth, ‘Kissinger Tapes Describe Crises, War and Stark Photos of Abuse,’ The New York Times, May 27, 2004. 124 Hastie, Mark, ‘Agent Orange Children Vietnam 2016,’ Vietnam Full Disclosure, May 13, 2016. 125 ‘Vietnam: My Orange Pain’ (Documentary), RT (Youtube Channel), September 21, 2014. 126 Hughes, Richard, ‘The Forgotten Victims of Agent Orange,’ The New York Times, September 15, 2017. Steward, Phil, ‘U.S. prepares for biggest-ever Agent Orange cleanup in Vietnam,’ Reuters, October 17, 2018. 127 Chiras, Daniel D., Environmental science, Sudbury, Jones & Bartlett, 2009 (p. 499). 128 Grotto, Jason and Jones, Tim, ‘Agent Orange’s lethal legacy: Defoliants more dangerous than they had to be,’ Chicago Tribune, December 17, 2009. 129 Gabrial Mestrovic, Sejepan, Rules of Engagement?: A Social Anatomy of an American War Crime – Operation Iron Triangle, Iraq, New York, Algora Publishing, 2008 (p. 159). 130 Taylor, Telford, Nuremberg and Vietnam, New York, Quadrangle Books, 1970 (p. 103).

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131 Brownmiller, Susan, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, New York, Fawcett Books, 1975 (p. 109). 132 Vietnam Veterans Against the War, The Winter Soldier Investigation: An Inquiry into American War Crimes, Boston, Beacon Press, 1972. 133 Anderson, Elizabeth, ‘“An Everyday Affair”: Violence Against Women during the Vietnam War,’ The University of Texas at Austin, May 2020. Vietnam Veterans Against the War, The Winter Soldier Investigation: An Inquiry into American War Crimes, Boston, Beacon Press, 1972. 134 Kifner, John, ‘Report on Brutal Vietnam Campaign Stirs Memories,’ The New York Times December 28, 2003. 135 ‘Was My Lai just one of many massacres in Vietnam War?,’ BBC News, August 28, 2014. 136 Kamienski, Lukasz, ‘The Drugs That Built a Super Soldier,’ The Atlantic, April 8, 2016. 137 Kamienski, Lukasz, Shooting Up; A History of Drugs in Warfare, London, C. Hurst, 2016 (p. 188). 138 Ibid. (pp. 189–190). 139 Ibid. (p. 189). 140 Turse, Nick, Kill Everything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, London, Picador, 2014 (p. 167). 141 Bilton, Michael and Sim, Kevin, Four Hours in My Lai: A War Crime and its Aftermath, London, Viking, 1992 (p. 81). 142 Anderson, Elizabeth, ‘“An Everyday Affair”: Violence Against Women during the Vietnam War,’ The University of Texas at Austin, May 2020. 143 Hess, Martha, Then Americans Came: Voices From Vietnam, New York, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993 (pp. 140, 147). 144 Vietnam Veterans Against the War, The Winter Soldier Investigation: An Inquiry into American War Crimes, Boston, Beacon Press, 1972. Anderson, Elizabeth, ‘“An Everyday Affair”: Violence Against Women during the Vietnam War,’ The University of Texas at Austin, May 2020. Bourke, Joanna. Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present Day. London: Virago Press, 2007 (p. 367). 145 Anderson, Elizabeth, ‘“An Everyday Affair”: Violence Against Women during the Vietnam War,’ The University of Texas at Austin, May 2020. 146 Lang, Daniel, ‘Casualties of War,’ The New Yorker, October 10, 1969. 147 Bourke, Joanna. Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present Day, London, Virago Press, 2007 (p. 366). 148 Meger, Sarah, Rape Loot Pillage: The Political Economy of Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016 (pp. 60, 61). Askin, Kelley Dawn, War Crimes Against Women: Prosecution in International War Crimes Tribunals, The Hague, Kluwar Law International, 1997 (p. 50). 149 Anderson, Elizabeth, ‘“An Everyday Affair”: Violence Against Women during the Vietnam War,’ The University of Texas at Austin, May 2020. 150 Vietnam Veterans Against the War, The Winter Soldier Investigation: An Inquiry into American War Crimes, Boston, Beacon Press, 1972. 151 Denvir, Daniel, ‘The Secret History of the Vietnam War’ (Interview with Nick Turse), Vice News, April 17, 2015.



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152 Belknap, Michal R. The Vietnam War on Trial: The My Lai Massacre and the Court-Martial of Lieutenant Calley, Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 2002 (p. 68). Greiner, Bernd, War Without Fronts: The USA in Vietnam, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2009 (pp. 152–159). Anderson, Elizabeth, ‘“An Everyday Affair”: Violence Against Women during the Vietnam War,’ The University of Texas at Austin, May 2020. 153 Baker, Mark. NAM: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There, New York, First Cooper Square Press, 2001 (p. 210). 154 Kendall, Bridget, The Cold War; A New Oral History of Life Between East and West, London, BBC Books, 2017 (p. 305). 155 ‘South Vietnam, After 30 Years of War, Is Land of Widespread Disease, U.N. Group Says,’ The New York Times, March 21, 1976. 156 de Beer, Patrice, Le Monde, January 26–28, 1976. 157 Turse, Nick and Nelson, Deborah, ‘Civilian Killings Went Unpunished,’ Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2006. 158 Hess, Martha, Then Americans Came: Voices From Vietnam, New York, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993 (p. 84). 159 Bishop, Ryan and Robinson, Lilian, Night Market, New York, Routledge, 1998 (p. 98). Holcomb, Briavel, and Turshen, Meredeth, Women’s Lives and Public Policy: The International Experience, Westport, Greenwood Press, 1993 (p. 134). Gay, Jill, ‘The “Patriotic Prostitute”,’ The Progressive, February 1985 (p. 34). Osornprasop, Sutayut, ‘Amidst the Heat of the Cold War in Asia: Thailand and the American Secret War in Indochina (1960–1974),’ Journal of Cold War History, vol. 7, no. 3, 2007 (pp. 349–371). Rhodes, Richard, ‘Death in the Candy Store,’ Rolling Stone, November 28, 1991 (pp. 65–67). 160 Luong, Hy V, Postwar Vietnam: dynamics of a transforming society, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2003 (p. 3). 161 Chomsky, Noam and Herman, Edward S., After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina & The Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, Boston, South End Press, 1979 (p. 66). 162 Ibid. (pp. 16, 61). 163 Honey, Patrick James, ‘Vietnam: If the Communists Won in: The Human Cost of Communism’ in: Vietnam: A Compendium Prepared for the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Washington DC, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972 (p. 112). Honey, Patrick James, Vietnam: If the Communists Won, Saigon, Vietnam Council on Foreign Relations, 1972. 164 Hearing Before the Subcommittee on International Organisations of the Committee on International Relations, House of Representatives, NinetyFifth Congress, First Session, Part 1, June 22, 1977 (pp. 13–14).

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165 Chomsky, Noam and Herman, Edward S., After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina & The Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, Boston, South End Press, 1979 (p. 28). 166 Ibid. (p. 29). 167 Sperling Jr., Godfrey, ‘Will Saigon become election issue?,’ Christian Science Monitor, April 21, 1975. 168 Chomsky, Noam and Herman, Edward S., After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina & The Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, Boston, South End Press, 1979 (p. 6). 169 Ibid. (p. 296). 170 Ibid. (p. 296). 171 Chomsky, Noam and Herman, Edward S., After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina & The Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, Boston, South End Press, 1979 (p. 24). 172 Chomsky, Noam and Herman, Edward S., The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume II, Montreal, Black Rose Books, 1979 (p. 27). 173 Vietnam and the Press in: Congressional Hearings: Hearings before the Subcommittee on International Organizations ofthe Committee on International Relations, House of Representatives, Ninety-Fifth Congress, First Session, Washington DC, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978 (Appendix 7). 174 Braid, Don, ‘Viets “pray for war”,’ Montreal Star, March 26, 1977. 175 Chomsky, Noam and Herman, Edward S., After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina & The Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, Boston, South End Press, 1979 (p. 108). 176 Vietnam and the Press in: Congressional Hearings: Hearings before the Subcommittee on International Organizations ofthe Committee on International Relations, House of Representatives, Ninety-Fifth Congress, First Session, Washington DC, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978 (Appendix 7). 177 ‘Harvest in Vietnam,’ Wall Street Journal, April 21, 1977. 178 Chomsky, Noam and Herman, Edward S., After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina & The Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, Boston, South End Press, 1979 (pp. 107–111). 179 Martin, Earl, ‘The New Vietnam: An Opposing View,’ The New York Review of Books, May 12, 1977. 180 Chomsky, Noam and Herman, Edward S., After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina & The Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, Boston, South End Press, 1979 (p. 111). 181 Ibid. (p. 114). 182 Ibid. (p. 111). 183 CBS News, October 5, 1979. Browning, Jim, ‘Repression in Vietnam growing?,’ Christian Science Monitor, October 6, 1979. ‘Vietnam’s “Gulag Archipelago”,’ Christian Science Monitor, October 10, 1979.



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Fitchett, Joseph, ‘Saigon Residents Found Intimidated by “Occupation Force”,’ Washington Post, November 6, 1978. 184 Chomsky, Noam and Herman, Edward S., After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina & The Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, Boston, South End Press, 1979 (pp. 115–116, 332–333). 185 Vietnam South East Asia International, October–December 1978. 186 Chomsky, Noam and Herman, Edward S., After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina & The Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, Boston, South End Press, 1979 (pp. 81, 82). 187 Ibid. (pp. 92–93). 188 Ibid. (pp. 95–96). 189 Ibid. (pp. 88–91). 190 Ibid. (p. 90).

Chapter Two

The Korean War Massacres in Korea: Blaming Allied Atrocities on the Enemy Waged for three years from June 1950, the Korean War in many respects remains the most consequential military confrontation since 1945, and pitted a U.S.-led United Nations coalitioni made up almost entirely of Western and South Korean forces against the East Asian Communist states of China and North Korea. The war left both a long legacy, which remains at the centre of tensions on the Korean Peninsula today, as well as several controversies ranging from whether the conduct of coalition forces towards Korean civilians was a genocide, to which parties bore what share of responsibility for its outbreak. Although atrocity fabrication was not a significant factor in starting the war, it profoundly shaped both the course of the conflict in its final 18 months as well as public perceptions of China and North Korea in much of the world. Five years before the outbreak of the Korean War the United States had from September 1945 placed the southern half of the i President Dwight D. Eisenhower concluded in his memoirs the main purpose of the coalition America led was to provide the U.S. with a means to intervene without the appearance of acting unilaterally. He stated that “the token forces supplied by other nations, as in Korea, would lend real moral standing to a venture that otherwise could be made to appear as a brutal example of imperialism.” In the contest for world opinion, the U.S having created a military coalition through the United Nations did much to advance the image of Washington fighting for the interests of the world against threats to the international community – rather than a superpower preying on newly independent East Asian countries. UN forces were all placed under American command which in turn was accountable only to Washington and not to the UN Security Council. (Eisenhower, Dwight, The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953–1956, New York, Doubleday, 1963 (p. 340).)

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Korean Peninsula under American military rule, and in the process forcibly dismantled the fledgling local government the People’s Republic of Korea. The U.S.-installed replacement was headed by Syngman Rhee, who was personally selected by the Commanderin-Chief of the U.S. Military’s Far East Command, General Douglas MacArthur, and flown in from Washington where he had resided for two decades.ii Having been impeached by the prior Provisional Government of Korea for misuse of power, Rhee had little standing in the country itself although his vision for its future closely aligned with Western interests.1 Rhee’s security apparatus responded to considerable public opposition with a campaign of massacres across southern Korea,2 with American historian Bruce Cumings describing the conduct of its paramilitary youth groups in population centres suspected of improper loyalties as follows: “In Hagui village, for example, right-wing youths captured a pregnant twenty-one-year-old woman named Mun, whose husband was allegedly an insurgent, dragged her from her home, and stabbed her thirteen times with spears, causing her to abort. She was left to die with her baby half-delivered. Other women were serially raped, often in front of villagers, and then blown up with a grenade in the vagina.”3 Donald Nichols, a commander in the American Counter Intelligence Corps, was among those in the corps to describe its close work alongside these paramilitaries and the atrocities they committed in gruesome detail, noting that there were some he would “never be able to erase” from his memory due to their severity.4 By 1950 two percent of South Korea’s population had been killed in such campaigns at a conservative estimate,5 with official ii The CIA’s personality assessment of Rhee had described him as having “devoted his whole life” to “the ultimate objective of controlling that country [Korea]. In pursuing this end he has shown few scruples about the elements which he has been willing to utilise for his personal advancement, with the important exception that he has always refused to deal with communists. . . . Rhee’s vanity has made him highly susceptible to contrived flattery or self-seeking interests in the U.S. and Korea. His intellect is a shallow one, and his behaviour is often irrational and even childish.” (CIA, Prospects for the Survival of the Republic of Korea, ORE 44–48, October 28, 1948 (Appendix A, ‘Personality of Syngman Rhee’).)

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investigations years later placing the death toll in the first five years between 600,000 and 1.2 million.6 Those suspected of improper loyalties and their families were targeted indiscriminately, with particularly brutal methods reserved for suspected sympathisers of the Korean Workers’ Party that ruled northern Korea.7 Rhee had made his intentions very clear should he see through plans to place the north under his rule, stating: “I can handle the Communists. The Reds can bury their guns and burn their uniforms, but we know how to find them. With bulldozers we will dig huge excavations and trenches, and fill them with Communists. Then cover them over. And they will be really underground.”8 This was far from empty rhetoric, with his forces burying politically suspect segments of the population, including children, in the tens of thousands in mass graves across southern Korea exactly as he described.9 These killings escalated immediately after the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. As an indication of their scale, Reuters quoted the chief of National South Korean police Kim Tai Sun stating shortly after the war began: “Twelve hundred Communists and suspected Communists have been executed by South Korean police since the outbreak of the hostilities.”.10 The mass graves created by Rhee’s forces for the politically suspect and their families across the countryiii were widely reported on by both government and American sources, with U.S. Army Private Donald Lloyd recalling of one such incident witnessed by the 3rd Engineers Company: “We heard the machine-gun fire and saw them [South Korean personnel] burying them in this big pit. There were women in that pit holding babies. I’d say one hundred people.”11 In his book, Colonel Donald Nichols recalled observing the systematic slaughter of political prisoners near Suwon in the first week of July 1950 by similar means, writing: “I stood by iii The South Korean government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission conducted a thorough investigation into these incidents several decades after Rhee’s overthrow, and proved using declassified records that the Rhee government, with full American compliance, was responsible for extermination programs targeting suspected dissidents and their families. It uncovered mass burial sites containing thousands of bodies, including many children. (Spencer, Richard, ‘More than 100,000 massacred by allies during Korean War,’ The Telegraph, December 29, 2008.)



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helplessly, witnessing the entire affair. Two big bulldozers worked constantly. One made the ditch-type grave. Trucks loaded with the condemned arrived. Their hands were already tied behind them. They were hastily pushed into a big line along the edge of the newly opened grave. They were quickly shot in the head and pushed into the grave.”12 The scenes of mass killings on a tremendous scale and of women holding babies in mass graves were terrible – but also an excellent opportunity for propagandists intent on delegitimising and vilifying the North Korean government. The massacres were thus intentionally falsely attributed to North Korean forces, with American observers collecting and publicising extensive footage of the remains but mislabelling it as evidence of enemy war crimes. Prominent American actor Humphrey Bogart narrated the Pentagon-sponsored film The Crime of Korea which falsely presented sites of the U.S.-installed Southern government’s atrocities as the results of North Korean killings.13 Widely circulated in U.S. media, it lent considerable moral imperative to the war effort in the public eye. If the North Koreans were slaughtering women and babies and dumping them in their thousands in mass graves, it was difficult to criticise military intervention to liberate the Korean people. Use of different forms of media ensured that the message circulated as widely as possible, and there was even a comic book titled ‘Atrocity Story’ which highlighted the terror of the mass graves across South Korea and falsely attributed them to northern forces. After a long list of misattributed war crimes, the comic asked the reader to imagine if these were happening in Nevada, Atlantic City, New Jersey, or Inglewood, California – at once both fuelling empathy with the victims and implying a possible North Korean or other communist threat to America. It went on to describe, for comparison, the crimes of Nazi Germany, portraying the North Koreans as the ‘new Nazis’ and their conduct as from “the dark ages of barbarism and savagery.”14 Time magazine published a column titled ‘Barbarity’ describing the Taejon Massacre of 5000 to 7500 prisoners, with the victims referred to as “anti-Communists – soldiers, officials, business and professional men.” The U.S. Army report described it as

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follows “for murderous barbarism, the Taejon massacre will be recorded in the annals of history along with the rape of Nanking, the Warsaw Ghetto and other similar mass exterminations.  .  .  . Those responsible . . . must be brought to judgement before the tribunal of civilised peoples.” South Korean government investigations decades later proved without doubt that Rhee government forces were the perpetrators, and that the victims of their killings among the country’s civilian population numbered in the hundreds of thousands in the weeks following the outbreak of the war.15 It was the perpetrator of these massacres which the U.S. was fighting not only to preserve in power, but also to impose on the people of North Korea as well which would guarantee further similar atrocities. Such slaughter was widely seen from October 1950 when much of North Korea was briefly placed under the Rhee government’s rule following U.S.-led offensives. The American war effort, launched in the name of liberating South Koreans and later North Koreans as well, and increasingly reliant on fabricated atrocities for justification, would itself pave the way to actual atrocities by coalition forces against both populations.iv Orders were given for U.S. personnel across the country to massacre South Korean civilians, which was confirmed by the accounts of war correspondents, Korean survivors, American perpetrators and years later by Pentagon archives.16 Professor Kim Dong Choon a leading member of the South Korean government’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee, a government body established in 1993 to investigate historical incidents, reported in 2004 that widespread atrocities committed by American personnel were a result of their “deep racial prejudices” towards the Korean people. Taking the massacre of the population of the village of No Gun Ri as an example he stated: iv British author Elizabeth Comber had accompanied American forces in South Korea in the early stages of the war, and wrote in her diary on July 14, 1950, regarding their conduct: “they think every Korean is an enemy, firing at, and sometimes killing refugees.” Two weeks later she wrote: “Day after day with their aircraft the Americans are laying waste towns and cities, killing fifty civilians for every one soldier.” (Han, Suyin (penname of Elizabeth Comber), Love is a Many Splendored Thing, London, Jonathan Cape, 1952 (pp. 342, 349).)



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With total ignorance of Asia, young soldiers regarded Koreans and Chinese as ‘people without history.’ They usually called Koreans ‘gooks,’ a term used during World War II for Pacific Islanders. The fact that many Korean women in the villages were often raped in front of their husbands and parents has not been a secret among those who experienced the Korean War. It was known that several women were raped before being shot at No Gun Ri. Some eyewitnesses say that U.S. soldiers played with their lives like boys sadistically playing with flies.17 Gil Insham from the U.S. Army 7th Infantry Division recalled his sergeant organised patrols into villages for the sole purpose of raping Korean women, and once watched him pistol-whip a village elder for not leading him to young women and then rape the old man’s wife in front of him. He recalled GIs tortured North Koreans in their power, poking the exposed brains of the wounded and laughing or tying them to trees and pulling them apart. “I don’t know why some of our people did things like that. Maybe they were just like that inside, sadistic,” he recalled.18 South Korean soldiers returned home to stories of their sisters and other family members being targeted for rapes by Western personnel, 19 while Chinese soldiers recalled finding pictures of naked Korean rape victims in the helmets of dead American soldiers alongside pictures from home.20 New York Times reporter George Barrett was among those to highlight the stark contrast between the Korean population’s perception of Chinese forces compared to those of Western nations as a result of their vast discrepancy in their conduct.v He wrote that v A notable indicator of how the Korean War was fought was that the war crimes committed by U.S. and South Korean forces were used by the Nazi German war criminals’ defence to argue that German generals should have their sentences commuted since their crimes were no worse. Supreme Commander Matthew Ridgway, who after Korea served as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, said he favoured pardons on the basis that he had himself given orders in Korea to commit crimes no less severe than those

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widespread rapes committed by U.S. and Canadian forces “have created a deep animosity among large sections of the Korean populace.” The Koreans stressed that Western soldiers committed crimes against civilians, including rapes and killings, with impunity and without reprimand by their superiors. By contrast, Barrett noted, the Chinese military “have impressed many Koreans with the discipline of their troops. Many residents of Seoul seem to go out of their way to tell about the good Chinese behaviour, and especially about executions of two rapists the Chinese are said to have held.”21 The extent of American war crimes against the populations of both Koreas, which were carried out on a tremendous scale in a war fought under the pretext of liberating the peninsula, would require several volumes to fully elaborate (see: Abrams, A. B., Immovable Object: North Korea’s 70 Years At War with American Power, Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2020.) On the basis of these crimes international observers present at the time, and several scholars from both South Korea and the West have since concluded that U.S. conduct towards Koreans both north and south was consistent with the definition of genocide based on the Genocide Convention of 1948.22 While American and allied atrocities would not become widely known for some decades, however, misattributing South Korean mass graves to North Korean forces provided an effective means of disguising a campaign to impose the rule of the perpetrators of such acts as a just war to protect civilians from mass slaughter. Fabricating a Massacre of American Prisoners The escalation of years of frequent hostilities into full scale war between the two Koreas in June 1950 was capitalised on by the United States to reverse highly unfavourable Cold War power the Nazi generals had. This may well have included his commands to massacre refugees, firebomb civilian population centres across both Koreas, and “kill everything in front of us, including women and children” during advances in 1951. (New York Times, February 24, 1952.) (Large, David Clay, Germans to the Front: West German Rearmament in the Adenauer Era, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1996 (p. 117).)



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trajectories, with the conflict reviving the struggling American economy and winning much of the world over to the view that a harder line against Communist states was needed. Furthermore, in the eyes of some hardliners, the war provided an opening to expand hostilities to include China or even the Soviet Union, while placing tremendous strain on the Chinese economy supplementing ongoing American offensives on its other borders (see Chapter 3).23 By contrast for the economies of China and North Korea the war imposed unsustainable costs. American advances after three months of fighting North Korean forces led its soldiers to approach China’s borders in late September 1950, just one year after China’s own long civil war had ended, to which Beijing responded after multiple unheeded warnings with a fullscale military intervention. The Chinese Civil War had itself had been immediately preceded by an eight-year war with Japan, and before that by decades of internal conflict between warring factions, leaving China’s ruined economy and negligible industry in a poor position in 1950 to support conflict with a coalition of major industrial powers. America’s position in the Cold War benefitted considerably not only from fully scale miliary intervention in what was essentially an escalation of a Korean civil war, but also from prolonging the conflict when opportunities emerged to end it. From October 1950, after multiple major military victories, Beijing and Pyongyang pushed hard for ceasefire talks and an end to hostilities, with these efforts threatening to win over much of the United Nations as most member states had much less to lose than Washington should the fighting end. Thus just as talks were getting underway the U.S. on November 8 relaxed bombing restrictions and firebombed the city of Sinuiju on the Sino-Korean border with 85,000 incendiaries, which was immediately followed by an escalation of the bombing to target “every means of communication, every installation, factory, city and village” across North Korea.24 Ordered by the coalition’s Supreme Commander General MacArthur, who was a strong proponent of expanding the war to Chinese soil and overthrowing the government there, the escalated bombings were widely interpreted as an effort to ensure

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the conflict continued.25 The forthcoming Japanese peace conference in August 1951, during which the Korean War would serve as a vital pretext for maintaining the U.S. military presence in the country after direct American military rule ended, added further impetus to the need to sustain hostilities.26 As the conflict dragged on through 1951, the forthcoming session of the UN General Assembly in October was seen as a forum where world opinion could be turned against continuation of the war should the Chinese and North Koreans offer reasonable terms for concluding it. On October 4, speaking to a luncheon of the UN Correspondents Association in New York, the United States deputy representative on the UN Security Council Ernest A. Gross warned that a ceasefire in Korea would facilitate a “phony” peace offensive by the Soviet Union. The goal of Moscow’s supposedly malign peace plans would be to weaken “the sense of urgency that has developed in the free world as a result of Sovietvi actions.”27 This was based on the presumption that the Korean War was a Soviet conspiracy, despite U.S. military sources consistently concluding that North Koreans were not receiving Soviet material support.28 Such statements warning against sinister intentions behind every peace proposal, and by implication advocating the war’s continuation, were hardly unprecedented. Shortly before the war’s outbreak John Foster Dulles, author of the influential American containment policy analysis War and Peace and soon to be Secretary of State, dismissed what he termed Soviet “Peace Offensives” as “deceptive Cold War strategy” which seriously threatened the West. “As things are going now . . .we must develop better techniques. . . . They [the USSR] can win everything by the cold war they could win by a hot war,” Dulles warned, with the Soviet, Chinese and North Korean positions relative to the United States suffering from the war’s outbreak and continuation.29 vi References to the Korean War as “a result of Soviet actions” were made on the basis of prevailing but thinly evidenced Western claims that the outbreak of war and the policies of Pyongyang and Beijing were part of a malign Soviet grand plan to strengthen its hand in the Cold War. This fit in with a broader trend towards denying agency to actors outside the Western world and portraying any opponent to Western interests as a puppet of Moscow.



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Before June 1950 global power trajectories including prestige and influence in the third world, economic growthvii and military modernisation, all favoured the USSR, with America’s formerly overwhelming advantages fast declining. As Secretary of State Dean Acheson noted regarding this in 1953, the Korean War “came along and saved us.”30 By mobilising the West for war the conflict had turned the tables, and there remained a strong incentive in 1951 to ensure that the fighting could be extended.31 Representative Ernest A. Gross revealed in October 1951 that rather than ending the war Washington was considering expanding it, informing correspondents: “if the Korean talks fail . . . the Assembly would have to consider additional measures to employ against the foe there.” By the end of 1951, having previously penetrated deep into South Korea, Chinese and North Korean forces had been driven northward leaving battle lines little above the prewar inter-Korean dividing line the 38th parallel. It was expected that Beijing and Pyongyang would require a return to the parallel – status quo ante bellum – as a condition for armistice, which would provide the U.S. with an optimal opportunity to refuse. On this basis the U.S. Military’s Tokyo Headquarters, which oversaw the coalition war effort, was described at the time as “cheerfully pessimistic.” As it informed the New York Times on October 20 regarding the possibility of renewed peace talks: “Even if . . . fulldress sessions again began, few believed that an armistice would come much nearer.” Three days later the Times’ esteemed military editor Hanson Baldwin stressed that unless U.S.-led coalition forces were “willing to pull back to the 38th Parallel all along the front . . . there is not likely to be a cease-fire.”32 vii Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur was one of many in the U.S. leadership who attested to America’s “fear of peace” in Korea as a result of economic overreliance on military industries, stating four years after the Korean War began: “It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.” He warned that this economic orientation “renders among our political leaders almost a greater fear of peace than is their fear of war.” (Imparato, Edward T., General MacArthur Speeches and Reports 1908–1964, Nashville, Turner, 2000 (p. 206).)

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It thus came as a shock to many in the U.S. when on October 26, the second day of truce talks, the Chinese and North Koreans expressed willingness to cease hostilities based on the current battle lines – a major concession that would make it far more difficult for hardliners in Washington and the military to provide a further pretext for continuing the war. As award winning journalist I. F. Stone observed, from the perspective of a U.S. leadership which sought to sustain hostilities: Now the Reds were ready to yield on the 38th Parallel. It looked as if it would be difficult to keep peace from breaking out. By November 4 the Communists had ‘finally yielded to UN insistence that the armistice line should be generally based on the line of battle contact,’ had agreed on a neutral buffer strip one and a quarter miles wide, and were ‘largely in agreement’ on the location of the line itself. The situation looked desperate, but a stumbling block happily turned up.33 U.S. negotiators responded by pushing for further concessions, namely by insisting on neither the status quo ante bellum nor on a ceasefire based on the current battle lines which advantaged Western forces. They instead required the Chinese and North Koreans to give up their territory south of the 38th parallel, namely the city of Kaesong, while the U.S.-led coalition would give up nothing. These highly unusual terms succeeded in preventing what appeared to have been an imminent breakthrough in the peace process and were widely interpreted as a move to prevent a swift end to hostilities. The New York Times reported on November 11 regarding this development: “In Washington – especially in diplomatic quarters – there was some mystification why Kaesong had taken on such importance when both sides had agreed on the principle that the battlefront should be the basis for the armistice line. It was pointed out that the battered town lay in a plain dominated by hills and hence had little military value.”34 According to the Times there was “a belief that after the Communists had made the big concession on the line,” and that



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the U.S. was “sticking at straws.” British press indicated that such conduct gave Beijing and Pyongyang grounds “to claim that the Allies [U.S.-led coalition] did not really want a truce.” 35 Rumours spread among American personnel in the field that their leaders were avoiding a peace settlement despite major enemy concessions, with the New York Times highlighting: “in many places along the Korean front the muttering guns fell silent. Ground fighting was almost at a standstill though air battles went on. The foxhole-to-foxhole grapevine on the UN lines was active with rumours. The GIs had hopes that an end to this fighting might not be far off – hopes which had been raised before and dashed before.” On November 11 China’s Radio Peking broadcast the statement that “if the Americans give up their demand for Kaesong a settlement can be reached in a matter of hours.”36 The Chinese proposal for an immediate ceasefire was particularly concerning for those favouring continued hostilities. General James Van Fleet, Commander of the U.S. Eighth Army, addressed the troops to clarify that the war would be “business as usual” until “the Communist aggressors terminate their violation of human liberty.” Considering Western interpretations of how their East Asian adversaries “violated human liberty,” this purposefully vague objective meant that the war could continue indefinitely as long as the Chinese and North Korean states existed. A November 14 report from Tokyo Headquarters slammed the East Asian states’ calls for an immediate ceasefire, emphasising that “The Reds openly repudiated their long-standing agreement that hostilities would go on until a full armistice was signed.” As I. F. Stone noted ironically regarding such criticisms, “the blackguards were trying to bring the war to an end” – they were being vilified for attempting to end hostilities sooner.37 American personnel on the frontlines appeared far from supportive of the positions taken by the military leadership. A New York Times dispatch on the central front in Korea published on November 12 emphasised that the same question was being raised by men across the front: “why don’t we have a cease-fire now?” Regarding “the troops who have to fight the war . . . the unadorned way that an apparently increasing number of them see the

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situation right now is that the Communists have made important concessions, while the United Nations Command, as they view it, continues to make more and more demands.” The Times’ frontline correspondent George Barrett emphasised: “the United Nations truce team has created the impression that it switches its stand whenever the Communists indicate they might go along with it,” while recent developments “have convinced some troops that their own commanders, for reasons unknown to the troops, are throwing up blocks against an agreement.”38 I. F. Stone described the U.S. Military’s response to the issue at hand, facing decline in both faith in the leadership and in soldiers’ will to fight when peace was clearly being offered, as “atrocities to the rescue.” He observed: Something had to be done and done quickly. Something was. . . . On November 14 in Pusan, Colonel James M. Hanley, Judge Advocate General of the Eighth Army, called in the local Korean ‘stringers’ who covered that out-of-the-way place for the big news agencies and gave out one of the biggest sensations of the war. ‘U.S. REVEALS REDS KILLED 5500 G.I. CAPTIVES IN KOREA,’ said the headlines next day. And on November 16, when the estimate was raised to 6270, the Associated Press sent out a gory compilation, ‘REDS BUTCHERED MORE AMERICANS THAN FELL IN ’76.’ . . . Troop dissatisfaction over the delay in the truce talks was to be countered with an injection of hate. The alleged atrocities also were used to explain the delay in arranging a cease-fire. 39 The explanations which followed this perfectly timed news of atrocities against American prisoners gave a strong indication of its purpose. The Associated Press reported that on November 16 Colonel James M. Hanley, the Judge Advocate General of the Eighth Army responsible for compiling and investigating all war crimes, said he “divulged the Reds’ ‘wanton murder’ of American prisoners because he thought American soldiers at the front ought



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to know what they are up against.” From the following day the Armed Forces Radio “broadcast the atrocity story . . . and repeated it at intervals.” It further reported: “A highly placed Allied officer said today the announcement that the Communists in Korea have murdered thousands of American prisoners has stripped the mystery from what has been holding up Korean armistice talks.” The officer stated: “The Communists don’t want to have to answer questions about what happened to their prisoners.”40 For the significant benefit this narrative provided, Supreme Commander General Matthew Ridgway likened the sudden report of atrocities and the way it quickly changed prevailing attitudes to a divine intervention, stating on November 17: It may perhaps be well to note with deep reverence, that in his inscrutable way God chose to bring home to our people and to the conscience of the world the moral principles of the leaders of the forces against which we fight in Korea. . . . It may well be that in no other way could all lingering doubts be dispelled from the minds of our people as to the methods which the leaders of communism are willing to use, and actually do use, in their efforts to destroy free peoples and the principles for which they stand.41 Reports that the Chinese and North Koreans had slaughtered prisoners in their custody built on multiple fabricated atrocities since the war began that characterised the adversary in a way that made such slaughter appear more believable, with the aforementioned misattribution of mass graves to North Korean massacres being but one example. British reports, however, indicated that Colonel Hanley’s claim of a mass slaughter of prisoners “seemed evidence of bungling propaganda or a deliberate effort to sabotage the negotiations.” The New York Times correspondent in London added that “a suspicion exists that the United States, for some inexplicable reason, wants to prolong the fighting.”42

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New York Times diplomatic correspondent James Reston reported from Washington on November 15 that the circumstances appeared highly peculiar, stating: Several days ago it appeared that a compromise finally had been arranged on the cease-fire line, at which time Secretary of State Dean Acheson, speaking in the United Nations meetings in Paris, attacked the Chinese Communists for conduct below the level of ‘barbarians.’ When this attack was followed during the critical moment of the armistice negotiations by the publication of Colonel Hanley’s atrocities report, even officials here conceded that it might look to the world as if the United States was purposely trying to avoid a cease-fire in Korea.43 Successful atrocity fabrication quickly realigned popular opinion behind efforts to continue the war and punish the Chinese and North Koreans for what was portrayed as a wanton disregard for humanitarian norms. This allowed the U.S. to continue to stall negotiations while raising the possibility of escalation to a fullscale war with China. Atrocity fabrication was thus essential to more than doubling the war’s duration, extending it by 20 months, which exerted a far greater toll on the East Asian adversaries than it did on the Western powers since the former side had from the outset been in a much weaker position to sustain a war effort. U.S. media outlets and politicians only further exaggerated claims of atrocities, with the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Korean War Atrocities later stressing that the East Asian adversaries were guilty of “beast-like acts committed against civilised humanity.” As an example of the kinds of misconduct seen, he claimed: “a Red Chinese nurse cuts off the toes of a GI with a pair of garden shears, without benefit of anaesthesia, and wraps the wounds in a newspaper.” Other alleged atrocities included GIs “lined up in a ditch and shot in cold blood, with their hands wired behind their backs,” and others “put into small iron cages and



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starved to death like animals, with maggots coming out of their eye sockets.”44 Claims of enemy brutalisation or massacre of Western prisoners were highly inconsistent not only with the testimonies of the prisoners themselves, which emerged once they were released, but also with one another. On November 14 Colonel Hanley claimed 5500 American and 290 other coalition prisoners of war had been slaughtered in their camps by the Chinese and North Koreans. Two days later he announced that the figures for prisoners killed actually stood at 6270 Americans, 7000 South Koreans, and 130 other coalition personnel – a total of 13,400. Ridgway’s formal statement the following day on November 17 confirmed Hanley’s claims but did not provide figures. Three days later on November 20 Ridgway said it was “possible” that 6000 American soldiers listed as missing in action may have been killed as prisoners, but that there was proof of only 365 such murders. He gave no indication of the status of prisoners from other coalition members.45 Two days later on November 22 documents sent by air courier to the UN New York headquarters contained the text of Ridgway’s fortnightly report dated November 12 which covered the two weeks from August 16–31. The report alleged that 8000 American prisoners of war had been killed. Thus the claims for numbers of American prisoners killed included: Ridgway (November 12) 8000, Hanley (November 14) 5500, Hanley (November 16) 6270, and Ridgway (November 20) “possibly” 6000, “definitely known” 365. Addressing these discrepancies on November 29, Ridgway said the figures were subject to “constant re-evaluation,” but the 6000 figure “was the most up-to-date” and included all coalition personnel except for South Koreans. The 8000 figure, he said, was an earlier estimate. Thus between November 20 and November 29, Ridgway had amended his estimate from a “possible” 6000 American prisoners killed, to the 6000 figure including other coalition forces. Furthermore, on November 20 Ridgway did not cover up or account for his own 8000 figure of November 12 by saying that it was “possible” that 8000 were killed. Regarding what he referred to as these “weird statistics” I. F. Stone observed:

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It does not help prisoners in the hands of the enemy to make charges of mistreatment if these charges are false, nor does it help their families. . . . To excuse oneself later by saying that atrocity reports were subject to ‘constant re-evaluation’ and that the 6000 was the more ‘up-to-date’ figure was to admit that these reports and estimates were so unreliable that in one week this process of ‘constant re-evaluation’ cut Ridgway’s estimates by 25 percent, while Hanley’s figures rose by 14 percent. This is sheer statistical slapstick, understandable enough if the purpose was merely to stir up hate and upset peace talks, utterly inexcusable if intended as a serious accounting on the murder of American men by the enemy.46 Stone noted that Hanley’s accounts sounded much more like “wartime rumour picked up from the local population which [Ridgway’s predecessor] MacArthur himself did not think reliable enough to include in any of his reports.” He highlighted a sharp contrast in the reports on treatment of prisoners before the need arose to fabricate atrocities, and afterwards. Editors across the American press nevertheless took the story of prisoners being massacred at face value, with headlines ranging from that of the editorial of the New York Herald Tribune which referred to “The Communist Brutes,” to that of the New York Times which referred to the enemy as having “butchered prisoners in cold blood.” The New York Post, while critical of Hanley, stressed: “Let no one minimise the gravity of Hanley’s charges. The Communists are ruthless enemies whose disregard for human life is notorious.”47 An exception was the Washington Times-Herald, which inserted an editor’s note in the middle of a Tokyo dispatch on the front page on November 17 citing a “top Pentagon authority” who “said flatly Army headquarters has no conclusive evidence of atrocities or other barbaric acts committed by Chinese Reds in the Korean War.”48 Claims that Americans had been slaughtered or tortured in Chinese and Korean prison camps were ultimately disproven once



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prisoners started to be released in significant numbers. Coalition prisoners had a harsh experience in the war’s initial months as battle lines were constantly changing, supply lines were strained or non-existent and no prison camps could be established. Prisoners could only be kept with troops at the moving frontlines and food was scarce for both captives and soldiers, resulting in an estimated 90 percent of U.S. prisoner deaths occurring in the first year of the war.49 Many died alongside their captors in bombing raids and, as noted by British military historian Max Hastings, “the plight of the prisoners was often no worse than that of the northern soldiers and people.”50 An order by North Korea’s advanced headquarters strictly forbade “the unnecessary killing of enemy personnel when they could be taken prisoners of war. . . . Those who surrender will be taken as prisoners of war.”51 Prisoners were nevertheless often assailed by the local population or shot by men on the frontlines who could not afford the burden of taking them along in this semi-guerrilla stage of the war.52 The nature of the war changed considerably after the entry of Chinese forces in October 1950, with fighting soon localised around the 38th parallel and secure prison camps quickly established behind the frontlines. Conditions for American and coalition prisoners quickly improved, and their camps were opened to the press including Western reporters. By the time allegations of mass slaughter were made in the U.S. the harsh conditions of the war’s early stages had long since passed. Reports of “communist atrocities” against prisoners strongly contradicted the press’ findings and the pictures of decently fed smiling prisoners who were allowed exercise – prisoners who had allegedly seen many of their number slaughtered. Britain’s former chief of defence staff, Field Marshal Lord Richard Carver, observed regarding conditions in camps: “The UN prisoners in Chinese hands, though subject to ‘re-education processes’ . . . were better off in every way than any held by the Americans.”53 Reeducation involved lessons on the ‘evils of capitalism’ and the history of Western imperialism. Evidence of Chinese and Korean forces slaughtering prisoners at this time was non-existent, and reports from prisoners who returned painted a very different picture to the claims from the military regarding their treatment.54

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American prisoners reported Chinese guards inviting them to their quarters “for drinking and talking” and playing music with them in joint “jam sessions.”55 One American prisoner of war, Shelton Foss, recalled regarding his treatment that he, alongside his North Korean captors, “played chess, sang American songs . . . and talked generally about the U.S. and Korea.”56 As one U.S. prisoner recounted upon being freed, conditions in Chinese camps were as follows: Prisoners rose at 7 a.m. and either took a short walk or performed light calisthenics. They washed their faces and hands, and at 8 a.m. representatives from each squad drew the appropriate number of rations from the kitchen. Food was cooked by the Chinese and the diet was essentially the same as that provided the Communist soldiers consisting of singular items such as sorghum seed, bean curd, soya bean flour, or cracked corn and on certain special occasions such as Christmas or Lunar New Year, the prisoners received small portions of rice, boiled fatty pork, candy and peanuts.57 Others recalled being given access to an English language library of “more than a thousand books,” with those less literate Americans being given tuition to improve their literacy skills.58 American prisoner Howard Adams reported not only the far better treatment of prisoners in Chinese and Korean custody relative to those held by Western forces, but also of the mishandling of peace talks and extensive coercion of Chinese and Korean prisoners by U.S. forces. He recalled in an interview: “the [American] prisoners’ hopes soared when the peace talks began. We thought we’d be free soon. The Chinese thought so too at one point and gave us a feast, but the talks dragged on and on as the U.S. side made ridiculous demands regarding prisoners and other issues.”59 The Associated Press reported on April 12, 1953, as U.S. prisoners were first being released, that “American soldiers returning from communist prison camps told a story today of generally good treatment.” One former prisoner, Kenyon Wagner,



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had much praise for his medical treatment, saying he had been given “the whole works.” Another, Corporal Theodore Jackson, similarly praised the quality of the medical treatment he and his fellow prisoners had received. “To my idea” he said, “they did fair, about the best they could do with the medicines they had.” Former British prisoner Arthur Hunt said that there was a daily sick call and prisoners’ health was well taken care of, with inoculations given against various diseases. Albert Hawkins, another former British prisoner, said that he had reported his feet were feeling slightly numb and was carefully attended to and fed vitamin pills as a result. Former prisoner Private William R. Brock Jr. stated that conditions in prison camps were agreeable and he had never seen a prisoner ill-treated. He said that there was no barbed wire around the camps and that each man was issued with a quilt and blanket and their houses had floor heating.60 Upon examination when returning home, the U.S. Military was surprised by the excellent physical health and low number of fatalities among the prisoners – although it was concerned by what was termed the “Oriental brainwashing” of the servicemen.61 Statements from American prisoners indicated that interrogation rooms in Chinese and Korean camps were devoid of torture.62 Marines interviewed by the Saturday Evening Post recalled that in six months of captivity the Chinese “never struck, beat, or in any way physically maltreated a prisoner,” and even protected them from mobs of North Korean civilians who tried to strike them while they were being marched to their camp. At camp they were told to regard themselves as “newly liberated friends.” The worst that happened to them was the obligation to sit through interminable Communist speeches and propaganda indoctrination sessions – hardly the kind of prison camp where one could expect thousands to be executed.63 The return of significant numbers of American servicemen who made public statements contradicting prevailing portrayals of the Korean and Chinese adversaries, often strongly criticising the conduct of the U.S.-led coalition and alleging that serous war crimes were committed by their own side, itself required a creative propaganda approach to remedy. A narrative was thus constructed

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which stripped the servicemen of their agency and credibility, and portrayed any criticisms of U.S. conduct or policy as being involuntary as a result of some mysterious form of Asiatic mind control. The creation of the myth of “brainwashing,” a term first coined by the CIA for this purpose during the Korean War, was intended to delegitimise these American servicemen and their testimonies. Although seemingly ridiculous, racial sentiments against East Asians and widespread perceptions of an impending ‘yellow peril,’ combined with the narrative’s endorsement by respected figures in media and the intelligence community, led to its widespread acceptance. As New York University professor of history and prominent Korea expert Monica Kim noted: “‘Brainwashing’ became the perfect trope with which to render these American POW’s [prisoner of war’s] ‘desires’ – or politics, to be more exact – into a more familiar racialised narrative of the unwitting, innocent American being seduced by the mysterious ‘Oriental’.”64 ‘Brainwashing’ allowed the Western world to rest assured in the righteousness of their cause. It neutralised as contradictions to this narrative not only the statements of former servicemen, but also the actions of those who defected to or collaborated with the West’s adversaries, and even the Chinese and North Korean POWs who refused to defect to the ‘free world’ and chose to return home. Professor Kim described a “process of fashioning the Korean Communist POW into an ideological figure – or more specifically, a ‘fanatic’ – a phrase used extensively by U.S. military personnel to describe the Communist POWs in both their statements for the case file and administrative memos passed from higher command to the camps.” 65 These individuals, Western and allied populations were assured, were not acting of their own free will, and fantastical stories of communist Asiatic mind control were widely propagated to explain their actions.66 Thus those whose firsthand experience of the war led them to dispute the narrative of a Western good against an Asian communist evil were stripped of their voices – it was the Asian communist propagandists speaking through them, not the people themselves, be they freed American soldiers or East Asian prisoners.



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The narrative of a massacre of prisoners did not need to be remotely true to be effective, and ultimately served not only to gain support for an extension of the war through abnormal demands at the armistice talks, but also to reinforce the metanarrative in the West vilifying countries at the forefront of opposing Western power and empire as malign and barbaric actors. In sharp contrast to the treatment of Western prisoners in Chinese and Korean camps, sources consistently pointed to extreme brutalisation of East Asian prisoners held by U.S.-led coalition forces. Propaganda from Beijing and Pyongyang had no need to fabricate atrocities when covering the hardships their men endured, as the reality was already too extreme and gruesome for most media to fully cover. Journalists repeatedly found that American officers they interviewed admitted knowledge of or participation in massacres of Chinese and Korean prisoners.67 Robert William Burr of the U.S. Army second infantry division recalled one such incident in which his platoon sergeant shot a dozen prisoners personally. He stated regarding the prevailing attitude towards killing East Asian soldiers: “At the time I would have felt worse if I had run over someone’s dog with my car.”68 The ease with which East Asians could be slaughtered was similarly observed five years prior in the Pacific War, where surrendering Japanese soldiers frequently met with the same fate. Killing them was also frequently compared to killing animals in a way that killing ethnically European soldiers never could be.69 Multiple studies highlighted the considerable discrepancy in American treatment of surrendering ethnically European adversaries compared to East Asians as a result of the extent to which the latter were dehumanised.70 As resistance to Western occupation in Korea involved all parts of society, it was not unheard of to see three generations of the same family held in the same prisoner of war camps with many children also imprisoned.71 The fatality rate among prisoners was high with many not adequately fed and dying due to malnutrition72 and more intentionally killed by soldiers after their capture. Prisoners were shot by soldiers for insulting their guards, hunger striking, and even for singing.73 An example of one such

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incident saw around fifty women gathered in the common area of their compound begin to sing folk and political songs, which quickly spread to other compounds. They were met with gunfire by the guards causing 29 casualties.74 A more extreme case saw protesting prisoners, who had not even a rifle among them, suppressed by American paratroopers, battle tanks and flamethrowers. Brigadier General Haydon Boatner recalled regarding the killing: “What a gruesome sight it was! . . . A battlefield in every respect. Entrenchments, wounded, dead, burning buildings and tests [tents] with a few human hands, legs or feet here and there.”75 After being repeatedly interrogated, severely beaten, halfstarved, and kept in solitary confinement, North Koran officer Pak Sang Hyong was kept in a six-by-three-foot cage with only strands of barbed wire for walls. He was given one blanket and no shoes and left outdoors for three winter months. He recalled after his release: “I lived like an animal.”76 Korean female prisoners were particularly singled out for abuse, with Pulitzer Prize–winning American historian John Toland, the war’s contemporary, describing one example as follows: One girl, Kim Kyung Suk, told how they had forced a group of women prisoners into a large room. Here they were stripped. Then nude male North Korean prisoners were shoved in. ‘We heard you Communists like to dance,’ an American shouted. ‘Go on! Dance!’ They pointed bayonets and revolvers at the prisoners, who began to dance, while drunken, cigar smoking, guffawing American officers stubbed out cigars on the girls’ breasts and committed indecencies.77 With conduct strongly influenced by racial prejudice, a British officer noted that U.S. forces treated prisoners “as cattle.” Chinese and Korean prisoners were provided with extremely poor sanitary conditions, lacking access to clean water or toilets,78 and in a period of just 10 months from October 1950 over 4,000 prisoners in one camp died mostly due to dysentery. Prisoners were also used for medical experiments, in violation of Articles 13 and 19 of



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the Geneva Conventions, with the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene reporting that the primary concern towards sick prisoners was often experimentation rather that treatment. In one epidemic at a prison camp on Koje Island treatments varied greatly, and some 1,600 cases of the same disease followed 18 different treatment and dosage schedules. The Journal noted: “the Korean outbreak demonstrated again that an epidemic situation provides the opportunity to accumulate valuable scientific data very rapidly,” which was prioritised over the wellbeing of the POWs. The epidemic resulted in 19,320 hospitalisations and a very high 9 percent fatality rate – 1,729 deaths. It was referred to as “150 epidemics in one.” 79 British and Australian journalists Alan Winnington and Wilfred Burchett documented a number of accounts of experimentation on prisoners after interviewing North Korean doctors who were held in the camps. Their 68 examples included providing prisoners with experimental doses of sulfadiazine tablets, ranging from eight to 48, “to test the effects of very high sulfa intake and many patients died of sulfa poisoning.”80 POWs at the U.S. 14th Field Hospital near the Pusan prison camp and the U.S. 64th Field Hospital at Koje were at times operated on either to give young surgeons practice or for experimentation.81 Prominent journalist and Harvard graduate Hugh Deane noted regarding experimentation: “The American doctors, if they had qualms, could always remind themselves that the purpose was to add to medical knowledge, making possible saving of more lives, and that the victims were inferior beings, gooks to many, near animals to others.”82 Excessive amputations were also widely reported, with limbs stiff from lack of exercise or from having just been released from plaster casts being cut off.83 Prisoners were housed in compounds at four times the legal density of U.S. federal prisons, itself far from a high standard at the time, in conditions “considered appropriate to Asian peasants.” Max Hastings noted that “Western treatment of the Koreans and the Chinese was dictated by a deeply rooted conviction that these were not people like themselves, but near-animals.”84 Prisoners held on Koje Island by U.S. forces described the state of their captivity in a letter they signed in 1952:

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“Koje Island is a living hell. The shores of this island are no longer washed by sea water, but by our tears and blood. There is no breath of fresh air here, the pungent stench of blood fills our nostrils in every corner of the island.”85 Observing the prisoners’ eventual return Winnington and Burchett emphasised the stark contrast to the well treated Western prisoners coming out of Chinese and Korean camps, describing prisoners released from Western camps as follows: Haggard, with faces dank and moist like corpses, bearing the hideous mutilations of experimental surgery, some vacant eyed, girls driven mad by attempted rapes. . . . Half of the prisoners in many ambulances were lacking legs, often both legs. Even men missing two legs and without artificial ones were not treated by the Americans as stretcher cases, so plentiful were amputees. In a single hour it was possible to see six people delivered who lacked all four limbs – hacked back to mere torsos.86 If Chinese or North Korean media had had anything near the influence of that of the West, it is likely that treatment of their prisoners in the custody of the U.S. and its allies would have been recorded in history as one of the great atrocities of the 20th century. As it was the two East Asian states were too isolated and vilified and lacked the media clout needed to propagate their narratives or make their grievances known. While the U.S. had a much more formidable media establishment, however, its own claims of atrocities against its prisoners were seriously undermined by a lack of evidence and by the accounts of the prisoners themselves after their release – leaving them deeply discredited after the war ended. The ‘Free World’ and its War Prisoners In parallel to the battles on land and in the air the contest for world opinion was a major arena of conflict in the Korean War,



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with the U.S. and its allies seeking to delegitimise their adversaries and portray themselves not only as representing their own countries’ national interests, but also as representing universal values and the interests of all humanity. As it became increasingly clear from the spring of 1952 that a decisive routing of Chinese and North Korean forces was unachievable, the United States began to focus on leveraging one of its major assets, the large numbers of prisoners of war it was holding, to construct a narrative of a moral and psychological victory. This centred around claiming that Chinese and North Korean prisoners did not want to return to their homelands outside the Western sphere of influence, and that when given free choice would defect en-masse to live in Westernaligned Taiwan and South Korea. Washington sought to have the world believe that the conditions the Beijing and Pyongyang governments created for their populations were an atrocity in and of itself, and engineering prisoner defections thus quickly gained a central place in furthering American and allied strategic interests. American negotiators first mentioned the entirely unheard-of concept of voluntary repatriation in January 1952, which if implemented would mean that prisoners of war choosing to remain elsewhere would not be returned to their home countries. This directly contradicted the 1949 Geneva Conventions on the Treatment of Prisoners of War, which stipulated the mandatory return of all prisoners, and was described by the U.S. delegate to the armistice talks Admiral Ruthven Libby with phrases such as “principle of freedom of choice” and “the right of individual self-determination,” and “a bill of rights” for the prisoner of war.87 While British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was among those to concede that “our legal grounds were so poor” for pursuing such action,88 the coalition’s policy was effectively settled in Washington by February 27 on an insistence on voluntary repatriation. The wholly unexpected and illegal terms served to delay an armistice agreement by over a year.89 Beyond providing a propaganda victory, engineering mass defections was vital to facilitating Western powers’ efforts to recast themselves as altruistic rather than imperial powers. As rhetoric from the Western world increasingly placed a new emphasis on

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claims of moral universalism to frame the rationale for its interventionism abroad in a new light, such defections would be particularly valuable. While a world order based on the dominance of Western military might ever-present across the globe remained as it had in the colonial era, the pretext for this order and for Western interventionism changed. The West’s wars were now “humanity’s wars” fought on behalf of mankind, and those such as the Chinese and North Koreans who resisted were accordingly portrayed as acting not only against Western interests – but against the interests of humanity, the international community and even their own people. The will of the “free world” and the “international community” and Western geopolitical designs were to be indistinguishable. Intended to justify the sustainment of Western-dominated global order and the quashing by Western armies of those that resisted it, the first major use of this rhetoric came in Korea. Portraying the order it presided over as one with universal appeal to all peoples was key to the Western Bloc’s claim to represent the interests of humanity, legitimising its military interventions and delegitimising opposition to its hegemony. With China and North Korea both being decolonising states at the forefront of the conflict against the Western-led order at the time, engineering defections from them provided an extremely valuable and vital contribution to these designs. Monica Kim observed to this effect: The choice of the Korean War POW would be further evidence of the fundamental appeal of U.S. mandated projects of democracy on the global stage. . . . The notion of defending humanity came to the fore as the moral impetus for war. Sovereign recognition, decolonising imperatives, or state interests – including those of the United States – none of these elements were placed on the table regarding how the American public should imagine the U.S. military intervention abroad.90 She concluded: “Desire on the part of the decolonised Korean POW and the Chinese POW would enable the critical disavowal of imperial ambitions on which the United States insisted



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– if others demonstrated their wish to belong to the U.S.-defined liberal order, then the United States was not imposing an imperial design on the globe. Desire, however, was not a predictable variable in the interrogation room.”91 Ensuring that prisoners from the East Asian countries which resisted Western dominance would act in a way the Western narrative and ‘free world’ ideology would presuppose was thus essential. Rather than fabricating an atrocity, the U.S. and its allies would create the image of both a universal appeal of the West and universal unattractiveness of life in decolonising and non-westernised East Asian states, which was achieved by employing extreme methods of coercion on the prisoners in their power. The effects of this were highly complementary to atrocity fabrication efforts, which similarly portrayed those countries outside the Western sphere of influence as lacking in basic humanity and thus showed the Western-led order as representing a more humane and benevolent future for the world. Playing a central role in the manipulation of the prisoner of war issue, the U.S. Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) established in 1951 recognised that the figure of the POW could be emblematic of a new way of fighting for world opinion – one in which President Harry Truman took a strong personal interest and which would persist long after the cessation of hostilities in Korea. While undermining the image of unchallenged Western military might through their successes on the battlefield had provided the Chinese and North Koreans with considerable prestige, the PSB’s work had the potential to bolster the Western Bloc’s standing considerably in the eyes of the world while reversing its adversaries’ gains.92 The PSB was responsible for efforts to shape international public perceptions of the war effort as one fought in the name of universal values rather than Western interests, which effectively placed the world in a total struggle between the Western-led order and those such as North Korea and China which remained outside it. Examples included recommendations that the language of “containment” of enemy states be abandoned in favour of references to the “liberation” of their populations, and replacing “made

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in America” labels in aid programs with tags stating: “Peace Partnership of Free Humanity.”93 Prominent political theorist and former jurist Carl Schmitt observed regarding the construction of this universal moralism at the time that it “would bring into existence – in fact allow only the existence of – wars on behalf of humanity, wars in which enemies would enjoy no protection, wars that would necessarily be total.”94 Where in the early 1950s, the prisoner repatriation issue lay at the crux of these efforts, the legacy of what PSB started in Korea would remain prominent in Western rhetoric into the 21st century particularly regarding how military interventions were justified.95 When in early April 1952 American negotiators had offered to return 70,000 prisoners, which was a 40 percent reduction from a prior offer of approximately 116,000, Chinese and North Korean negotiators were stunned as the Americans had predicted. Hugh Deane reported on the U.S. strategy which necessitated a high number of enemy defections: Reduced estimates reflected the results of savage coercion in the compounds. President Truman and an increasing number of others in the leadership had come to envisage a substitute for the victory the U.S. had failed to win on the battlefield – a propaganda triumph in line with the rollback doctrine that was prevailing over mere containment. An impressive number of prisoners were to refuse adamantly and publicly to go home to the communist evils awaiting them. To do the brunt of the dirty work in selected compounds (there were 32 of them on Koje, all overcrowded) the U.S. secured some 75 persuaders from Taiwan, mostly from [President] Chiang Kaishek’s equivalent of the Gestapo, and a larger number of members of terrorist youth groups sent in by the Syngman Rhee government. Some wore neat American uniforms, others were posing as prisoners. . . . Their continuing task was to locate prisoners who wished repatriation and to do whatever was necessary to dissuade them. Control of the food



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supplies was a powerful means, and that, threats, beatings, slashings and the killing of the most stubborn, led to a gratifying number who muttered ‘Taiwan, Taiwan, Taiwan’ when asked the key question. . . . Thus many Chinese who didn’t want to go to Taiwan found themselves there. Of the Chinese prisoners 6,670 were repatriated to China, 14,235 were sent to Taiwan.96 The Anti-Communist Youth League, a far-right South Korean militia which had played a key role in quashing dissent against U.S. military rule there, maintained a strong presence in the prison camps. They were often given jurisdiction over meal distributions, disciplinary beatings, surveillance and interrogations, and reserved the right to execute or otherwise punish prisoners.97 Comparisons of prison camps where Chinese and North Koreans were held to Nazi concentration camps were common in internal U.S. reports.98 U.S. Ambassador to the South Korea John Muccio alleged that the Taiwanese representatives involved in repatriation were “members of Chiang Kai-shek’s Gestapo.” He passed on reports that Chinese prisoners were being forced under severe threats to sign petitions in blood and undergo tattooing to prove they were anti-communists and wanted to go to Taiwan. One report from a prisoner stated, regarding the enforcement of this policy: In early 1952, the brigade leader, Li Da’an, wanted to tattoo every prisoner in Compound 72 with an anti-Communist slogan. . . . He ordered the prison guards to beat those who refused the tattoo in front of the five thousand prisoners. Some of those who couldn’t stand the beatings gave up and agreed to the tattoo. One prisoner, however, Lin Xuepu, continued to refuse the tattoo. Li Da’an finally dragged Lin up to the stage, and in a loud voice asked Lin: ‘Do you want it or not?’ Bleeding and barely able to stand up, Lin, a nineteenyear-old college freshman, replied with a loud ‘No!’ Li Da’an responded by cutting off one of Lin’s arms

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with his big dagger. Lin screamed but still shook his head when Li repeated the question. Humiliated and angry, Li followed by stabbing Lin with his dagger. . . . Li yelled to all the prisoners in the field: ‘whoever dares to refuse the tattoo will be like him.’99 The true meaning of ‘voluntary repatriation’ and defection to the ‘free world’ were well known to the State Department, with Ambassador Muccio reporting to State Secretary Acheson as early as May 1952 that Taiwanese overseers in the compounds “dominated proceedings through violent systematic terrorism and physical punishment of those choosing against going to Taiwan throughout both orientation and screening phases. Severe beatings, torture, some killings.”100 He had reported four months prior in January to Secretary Acheson’s aide, Ural Alexis Johnson, that “beatings, torture and threats of punishment are frequently utilised to intimidate the majority of Chinese POWs” as part of “an attempt at forced coerced removal to Formosa [Taiwan] in direct contradiction of the UNC [United Nations Commission] stand at Panmunjom on voluntary repatriation of internees.”101 He later again emphasised in a report to Secretary Acheson the use of “physical terror including organised murders, beatings, threats, before and even during the polling process” to ensure an outcome on the repatriation issue favourable to Western interests. His findings were confirmed by others in the State Department.102 Muccio later referred to news on the treatment and coercion of Chinese and Korean prisoners as “very disturbing reports of horrors being perpetuated in the prisoners’ camps,” for which he said the United States was responsible.103 A report from the Department Office of Intelligence research similarly observed that the U.S., with Taipei’s support, had created “a police-state type of rule over the main Chinese POW compounds, which provided the foundation and means for powerfully influencing the screening against repatriation.” This included “enforced tattooing of the POWs” and “violent and terroristic coercion of the POWs by the KMT [Taiwanese] trusties during



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the screening.” The report concluded that this seriously inflated the numbers of prisoners who ‘chose’ to defect.104 U.S. State Department officers A. Sabin Chase and Philip Mansard were sent to Korea to ascertain why large numbers of prisoners defected, and concluded in their report that the main reason was “violent tactics of the PW [POW] trustees before and during the screening process.” They reported a “police state type of rule” over the prisoner compounds and that prisoners were not only subjected to an “information blockade,” but also that physical terror with organised threats, beatings and murders before and during the polling process were all widespread. While the investigators found substantial evidence of coercion, they did not find any significant lack of support for the Chinese government or the military among Chinese prisoners.105 North Korean doctor Rhee Tok Ki, who was held in prison camps, concurrently reported that ill patients were harassed to the detriment of their recovery to ensure that they would refuse repatriation. He stated: “TB patients especially need rest, but they were hounded day and night as a sort of specially refined torture to get them to renounce repatriation.”106 Internal U.S. reports were corroborated by the Red Cross which reported finding “some very grave incidents” regarding the treatment of Chinese and North Korean prisoners particularly relating to coercion over the repatriation issue. Although reporters were not allowed near prison camps, one from the Toronto Star managed to enter with a British delegation. His report affirmed that the prisoners chose not to be repatriated due to “physical threats, often carried out.” In some cases prisoners were instead given the option either to remain imprisoned indefinitely or to go to Taiwan, and so elected to go to Taiwan based on false information.107 The final report by the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission reached the same conclusion, emphasising that “any prisoner who desired repatriation had to do so clandestinely and in fear for his life.”108 With reports being almost unanimous that use of violence and intimidation tremendously inflated the number of ‘defections,’ American officers reported to chief negotiator Admiral

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Charles Turner Joy that the screening process was not indicative of real choice by the prisoners.109 The admiral himself wrote of the Taiwanese controlled compounds that “the results of the screening were by no means indicative of the POWs’ real choice,” and that, should Taiwanese overseers be removed the numbers wishing to be repatriated would rise “from 15% to 85%.” He further noted reports that “a mock screening which had taken place in compound 92 prior to the regular screening. The [Taiwanese] leaders had asked those who wished to return to step forward. Those doing so were either beaten black & blue or killed.” Regarding his Army interpreters who witnessed the repatriation process, Joy reported they had “said their experience watching Chinese POWs at the polls convinced them that the majority of the POWs were too terrified to frankly express their real choice. All they could say in answer to the questions was ‘Taiwan’ repeated over & over again.”110 Thus although referred to in most Western histories of the Korean War as a key affirmation of the superiority of Western values and the Western-led order, the prisoner repatriation issue instead revealed highly depraved conduct by the U.S.-led alliance that put its claims to represent a ‘free world’ to serious question. What the U.S. and its partners had fabricated was not an atrocity, but rather a reinforcement of the metanarrative which portrayed the alternative to Western hegemony – life in those countries outside the Western sphere of influence – as terrible enough that even their own soldiers would abandon their homes and families to defect to Western-aligned states. The construction of this narrative relied heavily on vilifying Western adversaries using fabricated atrocity propaganda. CIA Director Allen Dulles was not overstating the importance of the issue when he referred to alleged mass defections as “one of the greatest psychological victories so far achieved by the free world against communism” – with the communist world at the time representing the primary challenger to Western-led order.111 The Korean War saw atrocity fabrication to vilify Western adversaries, as well as the fabricated narrative of prisoner defections, both play very major roles in furthering Western Bloc objectives. As a result economically developed Western countries



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which brutalised and killed their prisoners were successfully portrayed as humanitarians standing for universal values, while their East Asian adversaries which treated prisoners as well as they did their own soldiers were cast as brutalising both the POWs under their power as well as their own people – the latter whom the Western narrative claimed were defecting in droves as a result. Although perpetuated highly successfully through Western media, the narratives created in Korea appeared to those from both sides familiar with the state of affairs of the ground to be entirely at odds with reality.

Notes 1

Breen, Michael, ‘Syngman Rhee: president who could have done more,’ The Korea Times, November 2, 2011. 2 ‘The Background of the Present War in Korea,’ Far Eastern Economic Review, August 31, 1950. Cumings, Bruce, The Korean War: A History, New York, Modern Library, 2010 (p. 189). 3 Kim, Seong Nae, ‘The Cheju April Third Incident and Women: Trauma and Solidarity of Pain,’ paper presented at the Cheju 4.3 Conference, Harvard University, April 24– 26, 2003. Cumings, Bruce, The Korean War: A History, New York, Modern Library, 2010 (p. 119). 4 Nichols, Donald, How Many Times Can I Die?, Brooksville, Brooksville Printing, 1981 (pp. 119, 120). 5 Cumings, Bruce, The Korean War: A History, New York, Modern Library, 2010 (p. 189). Hanley, Charles J. and Change, Jae-Soon, ‘Summer of Terror: At least 100,000 said executed by Korean ally of U.S. in 1950,’ The Asia-Pacific Journal, vol. 7, issue 7, July 2008. 6 ‘‘최소 60만명, 최대 120만명!’ [‘More than 600,000, less than 1,200,000!’], Hankyoreh, June 20, 2001. 7 Kim, Monica, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War; The Untold History, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2019 (pp. 231, 232, 236). Kim, Seong Nae, “The Cheju April Third Incident and Women: Trauma and Solidarity of Pain,” paper presented at the Cheju 4.3 Conference, Harvard University, April 24–26, 2003. Nichols, Donald, How Many Times Can I Die?, Brooksville, FL, Brooksville Printing, 1981 (pp. 119–120). 8 Rhee quoted by president of United Press International Hugh Baillie in: Baillie, Hugh, High Tension: the Recollections of Hugh Baillies, London, Thomas Werner Laurie, 1960.

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MacDonald, Callum, ‘“So terrible a liberation” – The UN occupation of North Korea,’ Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, no. 23, vol. 2 (pp. 3–19). 9 The Times (UK), December 18, 21 and 22, 1950. Cumings, Bruce, The Korean War: A History, Modern Library Edition, 2010 (pp. 168, 181). 10 Stone, I. F., The Hidden History of the Korean War (Chapter 16: Reversal on the Parallel). 11 Hanley, Charles J. and Choe, Sang Hun and Mendoza, Martha, The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War, New York, Henry Holt and Company, 2001 (p. 169). 12 Nichols, Donald, How Many Times Can I Die? Brooksville, FL, Brownsville Printing Co., 1981. 13 Cumings, Bruce, The Korean War: A History, Modern Library Edition, 2010 (p. 177). 14 Rifas, Leonard, Korean War Comic Books, Jefferson, McFarland & Co., 2021 (pp. 152, 153). 15 Shaines, Robert A., Command Influence: A story of Korea and the politics of injustice, Denver, CO, Outskirts Press, 2010 (p. 54). 16 ‘“Kill ’Em All”: American War Crimes in Korea’ (Documentary), Timewatch, February 1, 2002. Hanley, Charles J., ‘No Gun Ri: Official Narrative and Inconvenient Truths,’ Critical Asian Studies, vol. 42, issue 4, 2010 (pp. 589–622). 17 Kim, Dong-Choon, ‘Forgotten war, forgotten massacres – the Korean War (1950– 1953) as licensed mass killings,’ Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 6, issue 4, December 2004 (pp. 523–544). 18 Hanley, Charles J., Ghost in Flames: Lift & Death in a Hidden War, Korea 1950–53, New York, Public Affairs, 2020 (p. 281). 19 Ibid (p. 290). 20 Ibid (p. 284). 21 ‘Koreans Watch U. N. Murder Trial as Test of Curb on Unruly Behavior,’ The New York Times, August 21, 1951. 22 Kim, Dong-Choon, ‘Forgotten war, forgotten massacres – the Korean War (1950–1953) as licensed mass killings,’ Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 6, issue 4, December 2004 (pp. 523–544). Chossudovsky, Michael, Presentation to the Japanese Foreign Correspondents Club on U.S. Aggression against the People of Korea, Tokyo, August 1, 2013 (https:// off- guardian.org/2017/05/08/video-u-scrimes-of-genocide-against-korea/). Hynes, Patricia, ‘The Korean War: Forgotten, Unknown and Unfinished,’ Truthout, July 12, 2013. Cumings, Bruce, The Korean War: A History, New York, Modern Library, 2010 (p. 154). Report on U.S. Crimes in Korea, Commission of International Association of Democratic Lawyers, March 31, 1952 (p. 21). 23 Brower, Charles F., George C. Marshall: Servant of the American Nation, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011 (Chapter 6: Fighting the Force Problem: George C. Marshal and Korea).



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Foreign Relations of the United States 1951, Vol. VII (pp. 667, 668, 881– 882, 1106–1109). Foreign Relations of the United States 1952–1954, Vol. IV (p. 1068). Foot, Rosemary, The Wrong War, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1985 (pp. 148–153, 176). Hermes, Walter, Truce Tent and Fighting Front, Washington, Department of the Army, 1966 (pp. 56, 107). Pogue, Forrest C., George C. Marshall, Volume 4: Statesman, 1945–1959, New York, Viking, 1987 (p. 488). Levine, Alan J., Stalin’s Last War; Korea and the Approach to World War III, Jefferson, McFarland & Company, 2005 (pp. 208, 277, 278, 280, 283, 284). G-3 381 Pacific, G-3 Staff Study, ‘Capability of U.S. Army to Implement CINCUNC Operations Plan,’ ca. 21, Jan 53. BBC Summary, Far East, No. 221, January 23, 1953. Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 86th Congress, vol. 105, part 7, May 20–June 4, 1959 (p. 8703). Futrell, Robert Frank, The United States Air Force in Korea, 1950–1953, Washington DC, Office of Air Force History, 1983 (p. 667). 24 Stone, I. F., Hidden History of the Korean War, Amazon Media, 2014 (Chapter 24: The China Lobby Responds). Merrill, Frank J., A Study of the Aerial Interdiction of Railways During the Korean War, Normanby Press, 2015 (Chapter V). Acheson, Dean G, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department, London, W. W. Norton, 1969 (pp. 463, 464). Far Eastern Air Forces HQ to MacArthur, 8 November 1950, RG 6 Far East Command Box 1, General Files 10, Correspondence Nov-Dec 1950, MacArthur Memorial Library. 25 Acheson, Dean G., Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department, London, W. W. Norton, 1969 (pp. 463, 464). Stone, I. F., Hidden History of the Korean War, Amazon Media, 2014 (Chapter 24: The China Lobby Responds). Far Eastern Air Forces HQ to MacArthur, 8 November 1950, RG 6 Far East Command Box 1, General Files 10, Correspondence Nov-Dec 1950, MacArthur Memorial Library. 26 Stone, I. F., Hidden History of the Korean War, Amazon Media, 2014 (Chapter 6: Time War Short). 27 Ibid (Chapter 45: Atrocities to the Rescue). 28 Ibid (Chapter 13: MacArthur’s Blank Check). Time, October 6, 1950. 29 Stone, I. F., Hidden History of the Korean War, Amazon Media, 2014 (Chapter 4: The Role of John Foster Dulles). 30 LaFeber, Walter, America, Russia, and the Cold War, New York, John Wiley, 1976 (p. 100). 31 For a detailed assessment see: Abrams, A. B., Immovable Object: North Korea’s 70 Years At War with American Power, Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2020 (Chapter 2: Strategic Implications of the Korean War’s Outbreak)

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32 Stone, I. F., Hidden History of the Korean War, Amazon Media, 2014 (Chapter 45: Atrocities to the Rescue). 33 Ibid (Chapter 45: Atrocities to the Rescue). 34 The New York Times, November 11, 1951. 35 Stone, I. F., Hidden History of the Korean War, Amazon Media, 2014 (Chapter 45: Atrocities to the Rescue). 36 Ibid (Chapter 45: Atrocities to the Rescue). Evening Herald, November 10, 1951. La Crosse Tribune, November 10, 1951. 37 Stone, I. F., Hidden History of the Korean War, Amazon Media, 2014 (Chapter 45: Atrocities to the Rescue). 38 The New York Times, November 12, 1951. 39 Ibid, November 12, 1951. 40 Evening Star, November 16, 1951. 41 The Commander in Chief, Far East (Ridgway) to the Chief of Staff, United States Army, Tokyo, November 17, 1951, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1951, Korea and China, Volume VII, Part 1, Document 720. 42 Stone, I. F., Hidden History of the Korean War, Amazon Media, 2014 (Chapter 45: Atrocities to the Rescue). 43 Ibid (Chapter 45: Atrocities to the Rescue). 44 Rifas, Leonard, Korean War Comic Books, Jefferson, McFarland, 2021 (pp. 151, 152). 45 462nd Plenary Meeting, United Nations General Assembly, Eighth Session, Official Records, November 30, 1953 (p. 353). Altavista Journal, vol. 43, no. 1, December 1951 (p. 13). Stone, I. F., Hidden History of the Korean War, Amazon Media, 2014 (Chapter 46: Weird Statistics). 46 Ibid (Chapter 46: Weird Statistics). 47 Ibid (Chapter 46: Weird Statistics). 48 Washington Times-Herald, November 17, 1951. 49 Hastings, Max, The Korean War, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1987 (p. 298). 50 Ibid (p. 298). 51 Ibid (p. 298). 52 Cumings, Bruce, Origins of the Korean War: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945–1947, Volume 1, Seoul, Yeogsabipyeongsa Publishing, 2004 (pp. 702, 703). 53 Deane, Hugh, The Korean War, 1945–1953, San Francisco, China Books and Periodicals, 1999 (p. 164). 54 Stone, I. F., Hidden History of the Korean War, Amazon Media, 2014 (Chapter 45: Atrocities to the Rescue) and (Chapter 46: Weird Statistics). 55 Sayre, George, 950774-RECAP-K, Intelligence Document File, Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, Intelligence, Box 1025, RG 0319 Army Staff, National Archives, College Park. 56 Kim, Monica, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War; The Untold History, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2019. (p. 330). 57 Paschall, Rod, Witness to War: Korea, New York, Perigee Trade, 1995 (p. 173).



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58 Adams, Clarence, An American Dream: The Life of an African American Soldier and POW Who Spent Twelve Years in Communist China, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 2007, (p. 56). 59 Deane, Hugh, Good Deeds & Gunboats, San Francisco, China Books & Periodicals, 1990 (Chapter 22). 60 Winnington, Alan and Burchett, Wilfred, Plain Perfidy, The Plot to Wreck the Korea Peace, Britain-China Friendship Association, 1954 (p. 19). 61 Mayer, William E., Beyond the Call: Memoirs of a Medical Visionary, Volume 1, Albuquerque, Mayer Publishing Group International, 2009 (p. 350). 62 Kim, Monica, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War; The Untold History, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2019. (p. 338). 63 Martin, Harold M., ‘They Tried to Make Our Marines Love Stalin,’ Saturday Evening Post, August 25, 1951. 64 Kim, Monica, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War; The Untold History, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2019. (p. 335). 65 Ibid (pp. 205, 206). 66 Ibid (p. 306). 67 Deane, Hugh, The Korean War, 1945–1953, San Francisco, China Books and Periodicals, 1999 (p. 166). 68 Burr, Robert Williamm (2nd Inf div. 38th inf. Reg, 2nd battalion, Company E), Korean War Veterans’ Survey Questionnaire, Military History Institute Archives, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. 69 Glenn Gray, Jesse, The Warriors, Reflections of Men in Battle, Winnipeg, Bison Books, 1998 (p. 150). Munro, Victoria, Hate Crime in the Media, A History, Santa Barbara, Praeger, 2014 (pp. 42, 43). 70 Fenton, Ben, ‘American Troops Murdered Japanese Pows,’ The Telegraph, August 6, 2005. Munro, Victoria, Hate Crime in the Media, A History, Santa Barbara, Praeger, 2014 (p. 44). Krammer, Arnold, ‘Japanese Prisoners of War in America,’ Pacific Historical Review, vol. 52, no. 1, 1983 (p. 70). Hastings, Max, Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, New York, Harper Perennial, 2008 (pp. 173, 174). 71 Kim, Monica, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War; The Untold History, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2019 (p. 93). 72 Ibid (p. 87). 73 Ibid (pp. 112–115). Case file #104, Box 5, POW Incident Investigation Case Files, 1950–53, Office of the Provost Marshal, Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-1, Headquarter, U.S. Army Forces, Far East, 1952–57, Record Group 554, NARA, College Park, Maryland. 74 Kim, Monica, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War; The Untold History, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2019. (pp. 83, 84). 75 Typed unpublished manuscript, Box 7, Haydon Boatner Collection, Hoover Institution Archives.

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Kim, Monica, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War; The Untold History, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2019 (pp. 204, 205). 76 Deane, Hugh, The Korean War, 1945–1953, San Francisco, China Books and Periodicals, 1999 (p. 166). 77 Toland, John, In Mortal Combat: Korea, 1950–1953, New York, William Morrow, 1991. Deane, Hugh, The Korean War, 1945–1953, San Francisco, China Books and Periodicals, 1999 (p.170). 78 Ibid (p. 178). 79 Ibid (p. 176). 80 Ibid (p. 177). 81 Williams, Peter and Wallace, David, Unit 731; Japan’s Secret Biological Warfare in World War II, The Free Press (British edn.), 1989 (pp. 385–387). Winnington, Alan and Burchett, Wilfred, Plain Perfidy, The Plot to Wreck the Korea Peace, Britain-China Friendship Association, 1954 (Chapter 10). 82 Deane, Hugh, The Korean War, 1945–1953, San Francisco, China Books and Periodicals, 1999 (p. 176). 83 Ibid (p. 177). 84 Hastings, Max, The Korean War, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1987 (Chapter 17: The Pursuit of Peace, Part 1, Koje-do). 85 Deane, Hugh, The Korean War, 1945–1953, San Francisco, China Books and Periodicals, 1999 (p. 166). 86 Winnington, Alan and Burchett, Wilfred, Plain Perfidy, The Plot to Wreck the Korea Peace, Britain-China Friendship Association, 1954 (p. 9). 87 Meeting dated January 2, 1952. Minutes of Meetings of Subdelegates for Agenda Item 4 on Prisoners of War, 12/11/1951–02/06/1952; Korean Armistice Negotiation Records; Secretary, General Staff; Headquarters, United Nations Command (Advance); Record Group 333; National Archives, College Park. Kim, Monica, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War; The Untold History, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2019 (p. 8). 88 Jager, Shella Miyoshi, Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea, London, Profile Books, 2013 (p. 205). 89 Memorandum of Conversation by the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, ‘U.S. Position on Forcible Repatriation of Prisoners of War,’ February 27, 1952, Top Secret, Top Secret, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, vol. 15, part 1 (p. 69). 90 Kim, Monica, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War; The Untold History, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2019 (pp. 107, 128). 91 Ibid (pp. 107, 128). 92 Ibid (p. 99). 93 Document: Overall Strategic Concept for our Psychological Operations, May 7, 1952, Folder: 091.412, File #2, ‘The Field and Role of Psychological Strategy in Cold War Planning,’ Box 15, SMOF: Psychological Strategy Board files, Papers of Harry S. Truman, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library Archives. 94 Schmitt, Carl, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, New York, Telos Press, 2003 (p. 419).



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95 Roberts, Adam, ‘NATO’s “Humanitarian War” on Kosovo,’ Survival, vol. 41, no. 3, Autumn 1999 (pp. 102–123). ‘Bush Renews Vow to “Free” Iraqi People,’ The New York Times, April 1, 2003. Hong, Adrian, ‘How to Free the North Korean People,’ Foreign Policy, Dec. 19, 2011. Zenko, Micah, ‘The Big Lie About the Libyan War,’ Foreign Policy, March 22, 2016. Marks, Jesse and Pauley, Logan, ‘America Must Find New Ways to Protect Syrian Civilians,’ National Interest, November 20, 2018. 96 Deane, Hugh, The Korean War, 1945–1953, San Francisco, China Books and Periodicals, 1999 (p. 167). 97 Thimayya, Kodendera Subayya, Experiment in Neutrality, New Delhi, Vision Books, 1981 (p.113). Kim, Monica, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War; The Untold History, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2019 (pp. 278, 281). 98 Carruthers, Susan Lisa, Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape and Brainwashing, Oakland, University of California Press, 2009 (p. 125). 99 Westad, Odd Arne, The Cold War; A World History, London, Allen Lane, 2017 (p. 180). Peters, Richard and Li, Xiaobing, Voices from the Korean War: Personal Stories of American, Korean and Chinese soldiers, Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 2005 (pp. 244, 245). 100 Muccio to Secretary of State, May 12, 1952, Top Secret, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, vol. 15, part 1 (p. 192). 101 Memorandum by P. W. Manhard of the Political Section of the Embassy to the Ambassador in Korea, Secret, March 14, 1952, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, vol. 15, part 1 (pp. 98, 99). 102 The Ambassador in Korea to the Department of State, Top Secret, June 29, 1952, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, vol. 15, part 1 (p. 360). Muccio to Secretary of State, July 2, 1952, Top Secret, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, vol. 15, part 1 (pp. 369, 370, 379). Rose, Gideon, How Wars End: Why We Always Fight the Last Battle, New York, Simon and Schuster, 2010 (pp. 146, 147). 103 Muccio, John J., Oral History Interview, Harry S. Truman Library, February 10 and 18, 1971 (pp. 100, 101). 104 Chase, A. Sabine, Estimate of Action Needed and Problems Involved in Negotiating and Implementing an Operation for Re-Classification and Exchange of POWs, July 7, 1952, Top Secret, National Archives, 693.95A24/7-752 (pp. 3, 4, 7). 105 Foot, Rosemary, A Substitute for Victory: Politics of Peacemaking at the Korean Armistice talks, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1990 (pp. 120, 121). 106 Deane, Hugh, The Korean War, 1945–1953, San Francisco, China Books and Periodicals, 1999 (p. 178). 107 Ibid (pp. 169, 178).

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108 Young, Charles S., Name, Rank, and Serial Number: Exploiting Korean War POWs at Home and Abroad, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014 (p. 89). 109 Levine, Alan J., Stalin’s Last War; Korea and the Approach to World War III, Jefferson, McFarland, 2005 (pp. 253, 254). 110 Negotiating While Fighting: The Diary of Admiral C. Turner Joy at the Korean Armistice Conference, Stanford, Hoover Institution Press, 1978 (p. 355). 111 Memorandum of discussion at the 181st meeting of the National Security Council, January 21, 1954; Eisenhower Library, Eisenhower papers, Whitman file.

Chapter Three

Beijing 1989 and Tiananmen Square Background: Subversion and the Sino-U.S. Cold War The coming to power of the Communist Party of China and declaration of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in October 1949 marked the beginning of new phase in Sino-U.S. relations, with the new state almost immediately labelled a leading adversary to Western interests alongside the Soviet Union and targeted accordingly. Washington’s hostility towards China’s communist movement had long predated 1949, and the United States had actively intervened in China’s civil war in the preceding four years against communist forces and on the side of the staunchly pro-Western Guomindang government. From August 1945 American air and naval assets were used to facilitate a massive and rapid redeployment of 400,000–500,000 Guomindang personnel and of U.S. Marines to prevent the communist People’s Liberation Army (PLA) from taking key positions across the country. Among their targets were Beijing,1 Shanghai,2 and important railway lines, coal mines, ports and bridges.3 By 1946 100,000 American military personnel, including 50,000 Marines, were deployed to China,4 with PLA reports indicating that they actively took to the offensive against communist-held areas.5 Regular reconnaissance flights by U.S. aircraft provided vital intelligence to the Guomindang, with multiple reports indicating that American aircraft strafed and bombed PLA positions and massacred the populations of communist-held towns.6 As communist forces enjoyed widespread support particularly from rural communities, entire population centres were often perceived as adversaries and targeted indiscriminately. One U.S. Marine recalled to this effect

119

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that his unit had “unmercifully” blasted a Chinese village without knowing “how many innocent people were slaughtered.”7 To fight alongside Guomindang forces and their own Marine Corps the U.S. had before the end of 1945 already begun rearming surrendered Imperial Japanese personnel in China – what President Truman referred to as “using the Japanese to hold off the communists.”8 From 1947 the CIA’s first ever air unit the Flying Tigers deployed to China to help counter communist forces,9 and by 1949 the U.S. had provided almost $2 billion in funds and a further $1 billion worth of military hardware as aid to the Guomindang and trained a full 39 of its divisions.10 The lengths to which the U.S. went to defeat China’s communist movement reflected the importance it attached to ensuring the country remained in the Western sphere of influence, and ensured that America and the new People’s Republic were effectively at war from the moment the latter came into existence when the Guomindang lost the civil war. Regarding the reasons for the defeat of the Guomindang and their leader Chiang Kaishek former State Department employee William Blum observed that the key lay in “the hostility of the Chinese people at large to his [Chiang’s] tyranny, his wanton cruelty, and the extraordinary corruption and decadence of his entire bureaucratic and social system.”11 The head of the U.S. Military Mission in China General David Barr assessed that the Guomindang were under “the world’s worst leadership,” highlighting “widespread corruption and dishonesty throughout the armed forces.” There was a broad consensus among U.S. analysts at the time supporting Barr’s views, but while the nature of Guomindang leadership was well known the U.S. still went to great lengths to impose it on China.12 In contrast reports on the communists by a U.S. Army delegation sent in 1944 were immensely positive, with the delegation’s leader John Service observing: “[party chairman] Mao and the other leaders are universally spoken of with respect . . . these men are approachable and subservience toward them is completely lacking. . . . To the casual eye there are no police in [the communist capital of] Yenan. . . . Morale is very high . . . there is no defeatism but rather confidence.” He contrasted this sharply



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with the Guomindang’s low morale, high corruption and militarist police state.13 Following the communist victory British journalist and China scholar Felix Greene noted: “Americans simply could not bring themselves to believe that the Chinese, however rotten their leadership, could have preferred a communist government.”14 Largely as a result Washington’s position towards China was unremittingly hostile, with a very wide range of measures pursued to isolate and destabilise it with the goal of restoring a Western client government to power. Although Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai made repeated overtures to Washington seeking improved relations after 1949, these were flatly rejected and the U.S. instead made several attempts to assassinate him.15 Following the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, as the American military leadership continued to pledge to ‘roll back’ Chinese communism, U.S. forces came within firing distance of Chinese territory and its vital border infrastructure and attacked Chinese forces which had been deployed to form a buffer inside Korea. Reports of the Chinese deployment, which were known to have begun over a week before hostilities broke out, were notably censored from American media so that when U.S. forces engaged them on October 25, 1950, it was made to appear that the Chinese had initiated hostilities. The result was an overwhelming defeat for U.S. and allied forces.16 Further assaults on Chinese positions led Beijing to eventually commit to a full scale military intervention in December, with China and the U.S. fighting a limited war confined to the Korean Peninsula.17 Many in the U.S. military leadership proposed expanding the war effort to the Chinese mainland with strategic firebombing or even nuclear strikes, a blockade and mining of Chinese ports, and eventually a full scale invasion supported by Guomindang remnants which had fled to Taiwan. The presence of Soviet forces in China, and risk of war with the USSR, were the primary deterrents to such action.18 The U.S. waged war on China on multiple fronts, and beyond the battlefields of Korea it pursued extensive economic warfare measures, pressed for Beijing’s isolation internationally, provided protection and offensive weapons to Guomindang remnants, and

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supported Guomindang assaults on the mainland from Taiwan.19 The CIA further provided arms, training, logistical support, and its own advisors and engineers to Guomindang remnants in Myanmar, which repeatedly launched incursions into Chinese territory sabotaging infrastructure and forcing Beijing to divert resources towards defence on a third front. Although they were consistently defeated and several CIA advisors were killed,20 these operations continued until the PLA and Myanmar’s own armed forces launched a joint operation to expel the CIA presence and its militias.21 CIA use of Taiwan as a base for operations to destabilise the mainland included airdropping paramilitary units for “promoting domestic anti-government guerrilla operations. This was to be accomplished by small teams of Chinese agents, generally inserted through airdrops, who were to link up with local guerrilla forces, collect intelligence and possibly engage in sabotage and psychological warfare, and report back by radio” – according to the agency’s reports.22 While Washington repeatedly claimed that Beijing was paranoid and dismissed all charges when confronted over these actions, declassified documents later proved Chinese claims entirely correct – as did the shooting down and capture of CIA pilots.23 A fourth front for destabilisation of China was opened by the CIA in the southwestern province of Tibet.i Although Washington had refused requests from Tibetan separatist groups for assistance in obtaining independence under Guomindang rule, and made clear that it recognised Chinese sovereignty over the territory,24 this quickly changed after the foundation of the PRC in October 1949, after which separatist groups were leveraged as assets for

i A 1964 memorandum showed allocation of funds as follows: $500,000 to support 2,100 fighters based in Nepal, $400,000 in expenses for a covert training site in Colorado and $185,000 for black air transportation of trainees from Colorado in India, for later infiltration into China. The Dalai Lama was also given a personal subsidy of $180,000 annually. (United States of America Department of State, Office of the Historian, Historical Documents, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume XXX, China, 337. Memorandum for the Special Group, Washington DC, January 9, 1964.)



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destabilisation.ii On November 1 President Truman called for “modern weapons and sufficient advisors” to be sent to separatist forces,25 and in June 1950 Secretary of State Dean Acheson stated that London and Washington were jointly exploring means to “encourage Tibetan resistance to Commie control.”26 Efforts escalated from the mid-1950s, and a four-day conference between U.S. intelligence and the Tibetan separatist leadership in 1955 saw a ten-year joint plan laid out to balkanise China and establish Tibet as a separate state aligned with Western interests.27 The CIA invested heavily in training and arming separatist guerrillas from 1956,28 which were tasked with sabotaging infrastructure, mining roads, cutting communications lines and ambushing PLA forces.29 Both the Chinese state and its Tibetan minority suffered as a result of U.S. intervention, with the fourteenth Dalai Lama being among those to highlight that separatist cooperation with the CIA to undermine China “only resulted in more suffering for the people of Tibet.”30 According to him, Western support was provided “not because they cared about Tibetan independence, but as part of their worldwide efforts to destabilise all communist governments.”31 With the Korean War having ruled out prospects for an invasion of China, U.S. policy for the next quarter century was effectively summarised by Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Walter Robinson as follows: “our hope of solving the problem of the mainland of China was not through attack on the mainland but rather by actions which would promote disintegration from within.”32 ii Under Operation St Bailey, the U.S. also oversaw propaganda to foster separatist thinking among Tibetan communities, and according to the State Department: “objectives are aimed toward lessening the influence and capabilities of the Chinese regime through support, among Tibetans and among foreign nations, of the concept of an autonomous Tibet under the leadership of the Dalai Lama; toward the creation of a capability for resistance against possible political developments inside Tibet; and the containment of Chinese Communist expansion – in pursuance of U.S. policy objectives.” (‘Memorandum for the 303 Committee,’ Office of the Historian, Historical Documents, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume XXX, China, United States of America Department of State, January 26, 1968.)

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The U.S. was moved to pursue détente and normalisation of diplomatic relations with China in the mid-1970s, largely due to setbacks in the Vietnam War, economic stagnation at home, and a perceived rise in Soviet power. With Beijing itself perceiving the USSR as an imminent threat to its security following the SinoSoviet split of 1960, China’s rapprochement with the U.S. ended its political isolation and facilitated an expansion of economic ties with the Western world. This compensated for the decline in ties with the Soviet Bloc which had previously been key to bolstering its war-ravaged economy. Détente would be short lived, however, and just a decade later the end of the Cold War, a relative decline in Soviet power, and improving Sino-Soviet ties meant China was no longer seen in the U.S. as a vital asset to Western goals of containing Moscow. The result was a resumption of efforts to target China for destabilisation, which first materialised in the summer of 1989. Unrest in June 1989: The West Claims Mass Slaughter in Beijing By 1989 China’s position to withstand subversion from abroad was in many ways much weaker than it had been in the 1950s and 1960s. Economic reforms pursued under the administration of Deng Xiaoping had fuelled economic growth, but also inequality and increasingly conspicuous at times obscene signs of corruption. This contrasted sharply with both the communist ideals with which two generations had by then been raised, and the Mao-era zero tolerance towards corrupt practices. The result was growing dissatisfaction particularly among the urban youth who felt that their parents’ sacrifices to build a new China were being exploited by a new class of corrupt officials leading the country astray. The recent relaxation of price controls had greatly improved the wellbeing of China’s rural population and increased crop yields and productivity, but this came at a cost to the urban population who faced rising prices for staple foods. Inflation shocks throughout the 1980s worsened the situation, with rates averaging



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almost 19 percent in 1988 and 1989.33 Former Chinese Premier and General Secretary of the Communist Party of China Zhao Ziyang was seen as a symbol of the new corruption in government and had proposed reforms which directly fuelled inflation. Zhao was the initial target of the public’s ire, with handbills passed out in 1989 asking: “How much does Zhao Ziyang pay to play golf?” Hailed in the West as a ‘Chinese Gorbachev,’ Zhao was alluded to in the following decade as ‘China’s Yeltsin’ after the Russian president of the time both for his strongly pro-Western inclinations and his commitment to a westernisation of China’s political and economic systems. In May 1988 Zhao pushed hard for accelerated price reforms leading to widespread complaints and calls for a return to greater centralisation of economic controls. This precipitated a debate that lasted well into 1989.34 In April 1989 Chinese university students flooded the capital’s main square, Tiananmen, for a sit-in protest against government corruption and deviation from the ideals of the 1949 revolution. A former student protestor from Beijing interviewed by the writer in 2019, who worked as a teacher at the time, recalled regarding the movement (writer’s translation): From the Deng Xiaoping era we all saw that China was becoming very different from the country our parents had aspired to build. Under Chairman Mao even slight corruption was never tolerated, everyone lived more or less equally, and we built the country together. But Deng Xiaoping’s era saw a new class of parasites, those who didn’t necessarily follow the rules and who weren’t particularly honest or hard working, take most of the benefits from the country’s growth which the people had worked to build. As a result we went to protest – to tell the government we were not satisfied. All the later talk in Western press about how we were asking for Western democracy is absurd, we were loyal to the revolution of 1949 and were protesting against moves towards the Western capitalist system – not asking for more of it. But China’s enemies misrepresented the

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peaceful protests to portray us as counterrevolutionaries calling for a reversal of the revolution. It is really sad, really absurd, that this is what people in the West think of us [former student protesters].35 Hijacking any form of public discontent to portray it as a call for political westernisation was a common practice in the West particularly after the Cold War. Whether Egyptian protestors calling for “bread, freedom and administrative correctness” in 2011 or those in neighbouring Sudan in 2019 demonstrating against the rise in prices, protests over living conditions or government misconduct were very consistently spun to be portrayed as calling for Western-style liberal democracy.36 Western-trained professional activists would often then move in to seize leadership positions and divert public discontent in this direction – presenting political and economic westernisation as both a solution and a historical inevitability. Such portrayals were consistent with the post-Cold War Western worldview of an ‘end of history,’ which presented the West’s systems of governance as an ultimate truth and the inevitable outcome of political development across the world. The Western narrative of a Chinese protest which “drew upon Western-inspired ideals”37 and was led by “pro-democracy dissidents”38 had little real grounding in reality, however, and while there were minority elements in Tiananmen Square in 1989 who did aspire for westernisation, they did not reflect the purpose of the movement. The deeply rooted Western perceptions of its own political and economic systems as ones universally aspired to, however, made it very easy for Western populations to believe that any discontent was a result of lack of westernising ‘pro-democracy’ reforms. Award winning Hong Kong journalist of Sri-Lankan origin Nury Vittachi was one of many to observe regarding how student protests were presented in the West: Don’t say that the student demonstrations were a call for freedom. You see that written everywhere, but scholars agree that the students were complaining about



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the widespread corruption that they saw as preventing the achievement of what they wanted: a fair and just communist society. The students were fiercely patriotic and proud of China and its socialist stance. . . . Don’t say that the protests were a call for democracy. In truth, they were calling for reform within communism. It was only when students noticed that international reporters would race to photograph placards with English words such as ‘liberty’ that democracy was elevated to a major theme.39 Although a leading critic of Beijing, the London-based Guardian conceded that events at Tiananmen more generally “have been distorted – continually and wildly – by the Western human rights lobby,” slamming “the selective remembering of influential reporters and human rights activists. . . . They have abused the memory of June 1989, turning it into a weapon to be used as part of their human rights agenda for China.” 40 Following the clearing out of Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, a Western narrative quickly emerged portraying authorities as having responded to the sit-in by dispatching soldiers to open fire into crowds and massacre peacefully protesting students without provocation. This was presented as a reflection of the party and military’s lack of respect for the lives of their people, and quickly became the overarching theme in Western portrayals of both the event and of China more broadly that would influence the metanarrative surrounding the country for decades. NBC’s Washington bureau chief Tim Russert was one of many who referred to “tens of thousands” of deaths in Tiananmen Square.41 CBS correspondent Richard Roth’s story of being arrested and removed from the scene referred to “powerful bursts of automatic weapons, raging gunfire for a minute and a half that lasts as long as a nightmare.”42 Australian journalist Adrian Brown, who later became Al Jazeera’s most senior China correspondent, described: “A tank treading on two flattened bodies, a burned-out army personnel carrier and the charred corpse of a soldier inside.” He claimed decades later that the continued presence of police on China’s streets was meant to

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deter and intimidate its people with the threat of a similar outcome.43 The Wall Street Journal referred to “violent suppression of pro-democracy protests in China’s Tiananmen Square – an event that shocked TV audiences around the world, [and] made global pariahs of the country’s top leaders.”44 As Vittachi summarised the Western version of events: “your government gunned down all these poor students who were in Tiananmen Square pleading for freedom and democracy; the young people were so brave, one guy stood in front of a tank, but tens of thousands were massacred.”45 Essentially, the West pushed a narrative of good against evil – the former being the Chinese youth calling for westernisation of their country’s political system who were suppressed by the ‘brutal’ and ‘totalitarian’ government holding China back. While this narrative is the most spectacular and memorable for a Western public relations effort, available evidence very strongly contradicts it. What Happened in Beijing in June 1989 While protests in Beijing reflected real concerns with the direction of Chinese politics, such unrest presented external adversaries with multiple valuable opportunities to further their interests at the expense of the Chinese state and its people. The fabricated narrative of a mass slaughter played a vital role in vilifying China as part of an at the time fast-shrinking minority of states outside the Western sphere of influence, while misrepresenting protesters’ dissatisfaction served to strengthen the narrative of a global desire for political westernisation. The unrest also provided an opportunity to pursue China’s destabilisation, with Western intelligence agencies deeply involved in shaping the protest movement and supporting elements that were amenable to Western interests. As the Vancouver Sun was among the publications to report in 1992, citing officials, for several months preceding the clearing of Tiananmen Square on June 4: “the CIA had been helping student activists form the anti-government movement, providing typewriters, facsimile machines and other equipment to help them spread their message.”46 The involvement of Western intelligence agencies had been widely suspected, with the speed at which they



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were able to later locate and extract key pro-Western protest leaders further indicating that contacts had been established for some time. Despite the complete absence of footage indicating protestors may have been killed in Tiananmen Square, as Western sources nearly unanimously claimed they had been, the incident came to be symbolised in Western reporting by images of a column of PLA tanks halting as a single civilian stood in its path. Considered “the most famous, enduring image of the massacre,”47 this was widely portrayed in the West as a symbol of the ‘pro-democracy westernisation’ movement standing in the way of ‘repressive authoritarianism.’ Like many aspects of the Western portrayals of the events of that day, this proved to be far from well founded. Although only a short extract was shown by Western sources, the full footage revealed that the armoured column was leaving Tiananmen Square on June 5. It showed that the man not only moved to prevent the tanks from driving around him, but was even allowed to climb onto one of them. This was hardly an image Western interests would benefit from conveying, and as a result a small cut of the footage was consistently shown out of context. Cables from the U.S. embassy in Beijing published by Wikileaks in 2016 provided some of the most valuable insights into the events in Tiananmen Square. Written for government officials as a report of the events that happened, the cables contrasted sharply with the sensationalised reports in Western media written for public consumption. According to the embassy a Chilean diplomat and his wife were present when Chinese soldiers moved into Tiananmen Square to disperse protestors. They were able to enter and leave many times, and faced no harassment. Citing the diplomat, the embassy reported: “He watched the military enter the square and did not observe any mass firing of weapons into the crowds, although sporadic gunfire was heard. He said that most of the troops which entered the square were actually armed only with anti-riot gear – truncheons and wooden clubs; they were backed up by armed soldiers.” Crucially, and entirely contrary to Western claims, the diplomat witnessed “no mass firing into the crowd of students at the monument.” The students then agreed to leave the

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square, and there were no incidences of lethal force being used by authorities. “Once [an] agreement was reached for the students to withdraw, linking hands to form a column, the students left the square through the southeast corner,” it concluded, adding in reference to prevailing Western portrayals at the time that “there was no such slaughter.”48 Chile was politically closely aligned with the U.S. at the time, and its diplomats’ accounts were considered reliable. Former Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post, Jay Mathews, similarly conceded in 1998 that: “all verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully.” He referred to the ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre’ as a myth, stressing that it was “hard to find a journalist who has not contributed to the misimpression.”49 Regarding the questionable reliability of the sources used to claim a massacre had occurred, Mathews recalled: The resilient tale of an early morning Tiananmen massacre stems from several false eyewitness accounts. . . . Probably the most widely disseminated account appeared first in the Hong Kong press: a Qinghua University student described machine guns mowing down students in front of the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the middle of the square. The New York Times gave this version prominent display on June 12, just a week after the event, but no evidence was ever found to confirm the account or verify the existence of the alleged witness. . . . Student leader Wu’er Kaixi said he had seen 200 students cut down by gunfire, but it was later proven that he left the square several hours before the events he described allegedly occurred. . . . A BBC reporter watching from a high floor of the Beijing Hotel said he saw soldiers shooting at students at the monument in the centre of the square. But as the many journalists who tried to watch the action from that relatively safe vantage point can attest, the middle of the square is not visible from the hotel. 50



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“As far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen Square,” Mathews concluded, with his statement highlighting the prevailing tendency for figures such as Kaixi and the BBC reporter to fabricate claims of a massacre and falsely pass themselves off as eyewitnesses.51 New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof, who was in Beijing at that time, observed that claims of a massacre were questionable on several “major points.” He effectively debunked and highlighted major inconsistencies in the sensational article attributed to the anonymous Qinghua student that was circulated in Hong Kong press and widely cited by British sources, which was the source most key to promoting the narrative of a massacre. “State television has even shown film of students marching peacefully away from the square shortly after dawn as proof that they were not slaughtered,” Kristof stressed in conclusion.52 As sources claiming a massacre were over time discredited, a growing number of eyewitnesses attested to the fact that no massacre had ever taken place. One of the most notable was the Taiwan-born writer Hou Dejian, who had been on hunger strike in Tiananmen Square to show solidarity with the students. He recalled: “Some people said that 200 died in the Square and others claimed that as many as 2,000 died. There were also stories of tanks running over students who were trying to leave. I have to say that I did not see any of that. I myself was in the Square until 6:30 in the morning.” 53 Reuters correspondent Graham Earnshaw, who spent the night of June 3–4 at the centre of Tiananmen Square and interviewed many students, watched the military arrive in the early dawn and “saw the clearing of the square from the square itself.” Earnshaw confirmed that most of the students had already left peacefully by this time, and that the remaining few hundred were persuaded to do the same. There was no violence, let alone a massacre.54 Even the BBC’s Beijing correspondent at the time, James Miles, who had for years criticised Chinese government actions and accounts of the incident, conceded 20 years later: “I was one of the foreign journalists who witnessed the events that night. . . .

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There was no massacre on Tiananmen Square.” Western reporting had “conveyed the wrong impression,” and “protestors who were still in the square when the army reached it were allowed to leave after negotiations,” he concluded.55 Spanish ambassador in Beijing at the time, Eugenio Bregolat, noted in his own book which covered the subject that Spain’s TVE state media outlet had a television crew in the Tiananmen Square on June 4, and that if there had been a massacre, they would have been the first to record it. He stressed that most of the reports claiming a massacre were made by Western journalists in the Beijing Hotel some distance from the square and out of sight.56 With the narrative of a massacre having originated in the British colony of Hong Kong, and gaining particularly strong support from British media, former Australian diplomat and Tokyo bureau chief for The Australian Gregory Clark was one of many to attribute the narrative to a British black information operation. He observed in the title of a prominent article for the International Business Times on the incident’s 25th anniversary: “Tiananmen Square Massacre is a Myth, All We’re ‘Remembering’ are British Lies,”iii referring to it as one of the more spectacular UK black information operations – almost on a par with the mythical Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The original story of Chinese troops on the night of 3 and 4 June, 1989 machine-gunning hundreds of innocent student protesters in Beijing’s iconic Tiananmen Square has since been iii Clark further elaborated: “Anonymously planted stories are a favourite technique of UK black information authorities, but this did not stop it from being front-paged by the New York Times on June 12, together with photos of blazing troop-carrying buses and followed up by Tankman – the photo of a lone student allegedly trying to stop a row of army tanks from entering the Square. The myth of an unprovoked massacre has since taken root.” “As for Tankman, we now know from the cameraman himself that his widely-publicised photo was taken from his hotel window the day AFTER the riots, and the tanks were going away from, not into, the Square,” he further stressed. (Clark, Gregory, ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre is a Myth, All We’re “Remembering” are British Lies,’ International Business Times, June 4, 2014.)



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thoroughly discredited by the many witnesses there at the time – among them a Spanish TVE television crew, a Reuters correspondent and protesters themselves, who say that nothing happened other than a military unit entering and asking several hundred of those remaining to leave the Square late that night. Yet none of this has stopped the massacre from being revived constantly, and believed. 57 While available evidence strongly points to there having been no ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre,’ despite how potent such a narrative quickly became as a symbol of ‘authoritarian Chinese government evil’ against ‘pro-democracy pro-Western good,’ unrest elsewhere in Beijing in June 1989 did result in lives being lost. Contrasting to Western claims of tens of thousands of innocent students killed in Tiananmen, street battles far from the square between soldiers and anti-government insurgents saw hundreds killed. Unlike the fabricated massacre of students which had no photographic evidence to support it, footage fully confirmed reports of attacks by unknown militants on PLA personnel and that many were burned alive and tortured in the streets. Coverage and publication of related images were conspicuous by their almost total absence from Western reporting, however.58 Gregory Clark alleged that soldiers were victims of attacks by petrol bombs, and that many were trapped in busses, strung up and burned. He questioned the suspicious circumstances under which radical anti-government elements had managed to gain access to such weapons and learned to use them.59 By contrast the PLA personnel in Beijing, according to U.S. State Department reports, had carried no firearms when facing civilians up to June 3 which limited their ability to respond to armed attacks.60 Regarding the photographic evidence of the mutilated and burned bodies of soldiers, Clark wrote: “Let’s go back to those photos of the burning buses. The popular view is that they were torched by angry protesters after the shooting began. In fact they were torched before. The evidence? Reports of charred corpses being strung up beneath overpasses (one photographed by Reuters remains unpublished),

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and photos of badly burned soldiers seeking shelter in nearby houses.”61 These details were almost totally absent from Western coverage and would have undermined Western sources’ black and white portrayals of anti-government elements as purely moderate and peaceful. Scholar and freelance writer Philip J. Cunningham witnessed the emergence of violent youth groups who were well organised, armed and very distinct in both conduct and appearance from the students in Tiananmen Square. He stated: The [peaceful] May Fourth spirit was gone, replaced by something murky and malevolent. There was a new element I hadn’t noticed much of before, young punks decidedly less than student-like in appearance. In the place of headbands and signed shirts with university pins they wore cheap, ill-fitting polyester clothes and loose windbreakers. Under our lights, their eyes gleaming with mischief, they brazenly revealed hidden Molotov cocktails. . . . Who were these punks in shorts and sandals, carrying petrol bombs? Gasoline is tightly rationed, so they could not have come up with these things spontaneously. Who taught them to make bottle bombs and for whom were the incendiary devices intended?62 Another account detailed how soldiers were massacred on June 3 by several armed and seemingly radical militants who were calling for blood. The burning of a military personnel carrier and targeting of a soldier trapped inside was recounted by Cunningham as follows: “After throwing rocks at the armored vehicle, rioters stopped it. . . . Why did so many people choose to pursue the APC once it had safely passed? . . . The camouflaged vehicle was attacked on all sides . . . someone tossed a Molotov cocktail, setting the APC on fire. Flames spread quickly over the top of the vehicle and spilled onto the pavement.” Accompanying Cunningham was a student from the Central Academy of Drama, a former hunger striking peaceful protestor named Meng, who was himself shocked



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at the extreme violence of the rioters. Cunningham recalled Meng shouted: “Let the man out,” he cried. “Help the soldier, help him get out!” The agitated congregation was in no mood for mercy. Angry, blood-curdling voices ricocheted around us. “Kill the mother f*cker!” one said. Then another voice, even more chilling than the first screamed, “He is not human, he is a thing.” “Kill it, kill it!” shouted bystanders, bloody enthusiasm now whipped up to a high pitch. “Stop! Don’t hurt him!” Meng pleaded, leaving me behind as he tried to reason with the vigilantes. “Stop, he is just a soldier!” “He is not human, kill him, kill him!” said a voice. . . . At least one surrendering soldier was safely evacuated to a waiting ambulance, but the ambulance itself was attacked, the back door almost ripped off. . . . The blood thirst made me nauseous.63 Cunningham stressed the difference between the minority militants and the majority of peaceful protestors, with the former “deliberately instigating violence, putting them at odds with conscientious demonstrators who had no intention of hurting anyone.”64 The goal of the violent minority appeared to be to provoke a military response against both themselves, but also against the peaceful majority, which in turn would provide grounds to vilify the government and swell the ranks of radical anti-government factions.iv Militants mingling among peaceful protestors iv Use of such tactics may not have been unique to China. Following the overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014 European lawmaker Korwin-Mikke claimed the CIA had trained snipers in Poland to target protestors from behind police positions. Doing so provoked a major riot and violent retaliation against police forces, he claimed, which in turn sparked an escalating cycle of violence. Speaking to EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton, Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet later claimed these allegations were confirmed by considerable evidence on the ground. (MacAskill, Ewen, ‘Ukraine crisis: bugged call reveals conspiracy theory about Kiev snipers,’ The Guardian, March 5, 2014.) (‘“Maidan snipers trained in Poland”: Polish MP alleges special op in Ukraine to provoke riot,’ RT, April 22, 2015.)

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and launching attacks from within their ranks, as alluded to by Cunningham and other observers, may have been what Deng Xiaoping referred to when he lamented on June 9: “because bad people mingled with the good, which made it difficult to take the drastic measures we should take.”65 Pictures of dead, burned and mutilated Chinese soldiers provide important evidence of the actions of the armed militants. A photograph of one was published in Granta, but never appeared elsewhere in the British press and made few appearances elsewhere in the West. “Perhaps because it challenges the myth of a peaceful student protest inside Tiananmen Square,” one analyst speculated regarding why these images of actual killings were scarcely shown or even known of, while misrepresentations of the ‘tank man’ image were propagated widely.66 Gregory Clark, for one, noted as an example of what he claimed was an intentional effort led by Britain to distort public perceptions of the events: “Reuters, the British new agency, refused to publish a photo of a charred [soldier’s] corpse strung up under an overpass – a photo that would have done much to explain what had happened.”67 The Washington Post was a notable exception, and did provide some coverage of these attacks, stating in a June 12 article that “on one avenue in western Beijing, demonstrators torched an entire military convoy of more than 100 trucks and armoured vehicles. Aerial pictures of conflagration and columns of smoke have powerfully bolstered the [Chinese] government’s arguments that the troops were victims, not executioners. Other scenes show soldiers’ corpses and demonstrators stripping automatic rifles off unresisting soldiers.”68 The Wall Street Journal also briefly referred to the presence of “radicalised protesters, some now armed with guns and vehicles commandeered in clashes with the military.” “As columns of tanks and tens of thousands of soldiers approached Tiananmen many troops were set on by angry mobs. . . . [D]ozens of soldiers were pulled from trucks, severely beaten and left for dead. At an intersection west of the square, the body of a young soldier, who had been beaten to death, was stripped naked and hung from the side of a bus. Another soldier’s corpse was strung at an intersection east of the square,” it observed on June



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5.69 These reports were notably published very early on before a narrative surrounding the unrest had fully been established. The violence by rioters was conspicuous for its almost total absence in subsequent Western coverage of the incident over the following three decades. The Guardian would belatedly mention the attacks in 2008, but notably referred to the lynching of soldiers in radical terms as a “people’s execution” of “oppressors,” and as “understandable, even admirable.” It noted that “in one suburb, two soldiers were hanged from a burnt-out bus.”70 In light of the U.S.’ long aforementioned history of infiltrating guerilla fighters and saboteurs into China for attacks on both military personnel and civilian infrastructure, it was speculated that these well-prepared insurgents, who appeared to come out of nowhere and attack soldiers without provocation, may have been infiltrated from Taiwan or elsewhere. This would explain their evident hatred for the PLA and their familiarity with producing makeshift weapons. Had these plain clothed but armed provocateurs succeeded in inciting soldiers to attack civilian protestors, it could have seriously undermined the prestige and legitimacy of both the military and the government. Ideally, as far as Western interests were concerned, this would eventually lead to the Chinese state’s collapse, and perhaps its balkanisation, as pro-Western elements were restored to power much as was being achieved across the Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union itself at the time. While some soldiers did respond to attacks with live fire, this occurred far from Tiananmen Square and was defensive. As the U.S. embassy cables themselves noted regarding the reason why soldiers used firearms: “some of the soldiers were forced into firing for self-defence or to protect the lives of their fellow soldiers.”71 Gregory Clark addressed this in the Japan Times as follows: [w]e do not have to look much beyond those widely publicised photos of military buses in rows being set on fire by those protesting crowds. To date the world seems to have assumed that those buses were fired by the crowds AFTER the soldiers had started shooting.

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In fact it was the reverse – the crowds attacked the buses as they entered Beijing, incinerating dozens of soldiers inside, and only then did the shooting begin. Here too we do need not go far to find the evidence – in the not publicised photos of soldiers with horrible burns seeking shelter in nearby houses, and reports of charred corpses being strung from overpasses.72 Considering the nature of the attacks on and killings of the soldiers, their responses and those of their commanders were far more proportional and restrained than one would expect of most militaries. This could be attributed to the PLA’s emphasis on political education, and perhaps to commanders’ awareness that the biggest danger militants could pose would be to provoke a disproportionate response. Indeed, the ‘tank man’ video showing a single protestor being allowed to block a tank column could easily have been interpreted as a sign of this restraint. By contrast police and military vehicles in other countries – including on many occasions in the West – were known to drive at high speed into protestors who attempted to block their passage.73 Clark himself compared the more restrained responses of PLA personnel to attacks with the responses of U.S. forces in Fallujah, Iraq, where despite fewer American personnel being killed the population was forced to endure extremely brutal reprisals.74 Regarding the intention to provoke soldiers to target civilian protestors, the most extreme of the protest leaders the 23-year-old Chai Ling, who considered herself the “chief commander” of the radical wing, stated six years later in 1995: “what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed, for the moment when the government has no choice but to brazenly butcher the people. Only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes. Only then will they really be united. But how can I explain any of this to my fellow students?” She referred to those who opposed provoking the government into carrying out such a massacre as “selfish.”75 The fact that the Chinese population had failed to respond to political events as she had hoped led her to lament: “you, the Chinese, you are not worth my struggle. You



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are not worth my sacrifice.”76 Ling attested to the fact that there was a harsh competition for leadership of the protest movement, with the majority calling for better workers’ rights and reduced corruption while a militant minority led by herself called for the government’s overthrow. She was particularly critical of the moderate Beijing Students’ Autonomous Union which represented the more mainstream aspirations of the protest movement.77 Ling and other leaders of the protests’ radical wing reportedly worked very closely with Gene Sharp, who was considered America’s leading expert on the exploiting of internal dissent in countries outside the Western sphere of influence to achieve their destabilisation. Sharp arrived in Beijing in May 1989, and the tactics of protestors notably closely mirrored those recommended in his own writings on the subject. This was documented in detail by French scholar Dr. Bertrand M. Roehner, who authored the book Driving Forces in Physical, Biological and Socio-economic Phenomena.78 Multiple sources, including several foreign governments, indicated that Sharp worked very closely with the CIA and the CIA-linked and U.S. government funded National Endowment for Democracy,79 and played an important role in similar destabilisation efforts in the Warsaw Pact and European regions of the Soviet Union at the time. He subsequently played important roles in similar efforts targeting Soviet successor states, the Arab world from 2011, and Myanmar and Venezuela later that decade.80 Leaders of the protests’ radical wing consistently expressed strongly Western-supremacist sentiments and the strong belief that westernisation was the only way for China to progress. The most notable was Liu Xiaobo, who was much lauded in the West and awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. He praised “100 years of colonialism” in Hong Kong for allegedly improving the territory, and claimed that China needed at least 300 years of Western colonialism imposed on it to be able to advance.81 His strongly Western supremacist position was hardly new, and as early as 1988 he had stated: “To choose Westernisation is to choose to be human,” while China’s own supposedly inferior culture left the population “wimpy, spineless, and f**ked up.”82 Liu similarly expressed strong belief in the idea of a Western ‘civilising and

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democratising mission,’ for example stating regarding the U.S.led invasion of Iraq: my support for the invasion of Iraq will not waver. Just as, from the beginning, I believed that the military intervention of Britain and the United States would be victorious, I am still full of belief in the final victory of the Freedom Alliance and the democratic future of Iraq, and even if the armed forces of Britain and the United States should encounter some obstacles such as those that they are currently facing, this belief of mine will not change . . . a free, democratic and peaceful Iraq will emerge.83 The Western war efforts in Korea and Vietnam, the former which was described as genocide against the Korean population by several Western and South Korean scholars,84 were both strongly praised by Liu.85 Liu’s stances later won him both substantial funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as considerable support from across the Western world.86 His statements were hardly isolated, with many of the leadership of the protest’s radical wing expressing similar sentiments. The ideal outcome of the Tiananmen incident, as far as Western interests were concerned, would have been to place China under a new leadership ascribing to such a Western supremacist school of thought. For his statements and his pro-Western activism Liu was widely hailed in the Western world as the “Chinese Nelson Mandela,” ironic as it was since Mandela fought for decades against Western supremacist ideas and systems while Liu was strongly guided by them and advocated for their imposition. Western involvement in the unrest in China in 1989 extended to information warfare operations targeting the government, the military and the general public. Voice of America (VOA) targeted the People’s Liberation Army by broadcasting to its satellites, and falsely reported several times that military units were turning on each other and the country was collapsing into civil war. The goal appeared to be to sow confusion and panic in the



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military and government. Shortly after attacks on soldiers began in Beijing, VOA reported that Prime Minister Li Peng had been shot and Deng Xiaoping was nearing death. It increased Chinese language broadcasts to 11 hours daily.87 VOA’s focus on events in Tiananmen Square were extreme, growing from 20 percent of airtime between May 4 and May 15 to over 80 percent after June 4.88 Such tactics were hardly unique to operations against China. Two years later during Operation Desert Storm, for example, the U.S. accessed Iraqi military communications to transmit contradictory orders and excessively ludicrous propaganda statements pretending to be the Iraqi leadership in order to disrupt and demoralise the country’s armed forces. Later that year when the USSR disintegrated the U.S. was able to access Soviet military communications to ensure that any attempt to stop pro-Western elements from seizing power could be pre-empted.89 Western intelligence operations in China continued after protests disbanded on June 4, the most notable being Operation Yellowbird which was carried out by the CIA and by British agencies. The operation sought to extract the Western assets who had led the radical wing of the protests from China. The close connections many of these figures already had to Western intelligence played an important role in facilitating their extraction, with 15 of the 21 most important assets successfully retrieved and taken to the British colony of Hong Kong.90 Yellowbird saw Western intelligence agencies work closely with criminal gangs, the support of which was key to its success, most notably the Sun Yee On triad, which was involved in human trafficking, prostitution, smuggling, extortion, counterfeiting, gambling and narcotics. The criminal organisation was provided with sophisticated equipment and weapons for the operation by the CIA.91 Known gang members in Hong Kong were also heavily involved in financing Operation Yellowbird.92 Such organisations across East Asia had long partnered with Western interests as far back as the Opium Wars, and did so increasingly during the Cold War, in part due to fears that communist rule and a much harder line on crime and trafficking would bring an end to their ability to operate.

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Extraction teams were sent into the Chinese mainland, reportedly from Hong Kong, equipped night-vision goggles, infrared signallers, encryption devices and makeup to help disguise the assets. Once out of China, the protest leaders were quickly relocated to the West primarily to the U.S. and France. Newsweek described them as the “media darlings of Tiananmen Square,” and their continued operations against the Chinese government from the cities of the countries that had first supported their operations represented a significant Western propaganda coup. Hailed in the West as ‘Chinese Joan of Arc’ Chai Ling, who had stated her intention to provoke a government massacre of protestors, was among those extracted. For her activities and her prestige as a fighter for westernisation she received two Nobel Peace Prize nominations and an invitation to attend Princeton University, where she studied international relations at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Ling became a fundamentalist Christian, which was publicised in 2009, and she subsequently hosted fundraisers for far-right politicians in the U.S. while her American husband Robert Maginn served as the Chairman of the Massachusetts Republican Party from 2011 to 2013. She testified eight times at the U.S. Congress against the Chinese state.93 Regarding her vision for a politically westernised China and an end to party rule, Ling stated: “China will definitely have democracy in the future but it will be better than democracy, it will be like heaven. All our tears will be dried. There will be no death or unhappiness.” Her work, she said, was “at all times was motivated and guided by the teachings of Jesus Christ.”94 China and the West After Tiananmen Square With PLA units launching only modest reprisals in response to the militants attacking them from among the protestors, and the military avoiding a fall into disorder, Western intervention to destabilise China fell far short of success. As a result, the country would continue its path towards economic growth, and the ruling party would eventually crack down harder on corruption while raising living standards considerably. China emerged as the



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world’s largest economy in 2014, and by the end of 2020 had a GDP one sixth larger than that of the United States. 95 Its industries by then were poised to gain dominance in many key areas of high tech ranging from artificial intelligence to 5G.96 In contrast the Soviet Union, which in 1989 had been several decades ahead of China in its high tech and economic development, was successfully destabilised two years later leading to its balkanisation, a 45 percent contraction in the post-Soviet Russian economy, the loss of much its industrial base, a crash in life expectancy and skyrocketing poverty rates.97 The result was millions of deaths and the trafficking of hundreds of thousands of women into slavery in Western Europe and the U.S. during the 1990s.98 In the Cold War’s immediate aftermath, the possibility of a balkanisation of China into smaller states was being openly discussed in the West as such a process was underway in the Soviet Union.99 In the USSR’s case this led to Soviet successor states devoting much of their energies over the next three decades to fighting one another after having formerly been united as a single superpower, which left Western hegemony unchallenged.100 The unrest of 1989 thus marked a decisive turning point in China’s history in which the country avoided a very dark fate, and resulted in the deposition of Zhao Ziyang who was accused of having openly sided with pro-Western elements in the protest movement. Some analysts, such as international relations scholar Hal Brands, interpreted June 1989 as the beginning of a new phase in China’s relations with the West – a Cold War which would intensify with time as Western rhetoric towards Beijing changed drastically. Brands claimed in 2019 that 1989 highlighted “fundamental political differences at the heart of today’s U.S.-China competition,” and served as an “early notice” that China was not going to westernise its political system as Soviet Bloc communist states had.101 Indeed, three decades later when China had comfortably surpassed the U.S. in GDP,102 in spending on military acquisitions,103 and in scientific publications,104 among several other key metrics, hardliners in Washington such as former CIA Director Mike Pompeo lamented Western complacency in 1989. Using the fabricated Tiananmen massacre as a pretext, many contended the

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West should have taken much more aggressive actions to snuff China out as a challenger to Western power when it was much weaker.105 The Tiananmen incident closely coincided with multiple Western interventions across the communist world targeting states in the Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia, which in most cases relied not on military action but rather on new information warfare capabilities and on cultivation and support for pro-Western paramilitary units. When China remained stable, however, the West managed to salvage a public relations victory by referring to a purported one-sided massacre of student protestors which never happened to vilify Beijing – an atrocity fabrication for propaganda purposes. The alleged massacre would continue to be used as a pretext to pursue limited hostile policies against China including economic sanctions, arms embargoes, the suspension of World Bank and Asian Development Bank loans, and cancellation of many investment projects. Beijing was nevertheless able to leverage Western private sector interests, which in contrast to Western nations’ geopolitical interests were leading major firms to push for a normalisation of ties, to quickly resume trade and have most sanctions lifted. The ludicrous potential of access to Chinese markets and to its workforce provided this leverage. Canada, which took the hardest line on the issue, maintained sanctions for four years but was eventually forced to relax them as it remained an outlier even among Western countries. Chinese sources also perceived that Britain used claims of a massacre in Tiananmen Square as a pretext to renege on bilateral understandings relating to the return of the colony of Hong Kong to Beijing.106 Memorial services were held across the Western world commemorating those who had supposedly been slaughtered fighting for westernisation in Tiananmen Square – a self-congratulatory narrative which both vilified the East Asian enemy and placed Western values and the Western political system on a pedestal. Much like the forced defections of Korean War prisoners to Western-aligned states (see Chapter 2), this was repeatedly reemphasised in the West to convey the narrative of a Chinese government at odds with the best interests of its population – and



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a Western world which stood with the Chinese people and represented their future hopes and aspirations. Regular references to the clashes of June 1989 cast an aura of notoriety on the most central location in Beijing, subtly reminding the world ‘what kind of country’ China was with the incident widely referred to in Western media on June 4 every year. Propagation of the myth of a massacre was key to shaping Western and global public perceptions of the post-Cold War world order and casting China, and those others which failed to westernise their political systems, firmly as the villains. The alleged Tiananmen Square massacre thus formed the core of a new metanarrative surrounding China for a new era of post-Cold War relations. For well over a decade the alleged Tiananmen massacre provided a key reference point for discussions surrounding China whenever the country made headlines. Before and during U.S. President Bill Clinton’s trip to Beijing in 1998, for example, the New York Post referred to the square as “the site of the student slaughter.”107 USA Today and the Wall Street Journal referred to Tiananmen the following day as the place “where pro-democracy demonstrators were gunned down,” and to the “Tiananmen Square massacre” where armed troops killed “hundreds or more.”108 A Baltimore Sun front page headline referred to “Tiananmen, where Chinese students died.”109 During the 2008 Beijing summer Olympics, when international media was in China’s capital, Tiananmen Square was referred to by Western reporters as China’s “blackened heart” – supposedly a symbol of Chinese malice which Western voices widely claimed overshadowed an almost perfectly executed Olympic games.110 As observed in the Japan Times in July 2008: With the Beijing Olympics looming we see more attempts to remind the world about the alleged June 4, 1989, massacre of democracy-seeking students in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The New York Times, which did so much to spread the original story of troops shooting student protesters there with abandon, has recently published several more articles condemning

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the alleged massacre, including one suggesting there should be an Olympic walkout. Other media, including Britain’s usually impartial Guardian and Independent, and Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald, have chimed in. None are interested in publishing rebuttals. This effort is impressive, especially considering the overwhelming evidence that there was no Tiananmen Square massacre. . . . Damage from the Tiananmen myth continues.111 Such efforts by Western news outlets to keep the story alive and evoke it to shape perceptions of China would only increase in the 2010s as the Barak Obama administration’s Pivot to Asia initiative fuelled greater tensions with Beijing and made countering China a primary foreign policy priority. Time, for example, framed the incident on its 40th anniversary in 2019 as: “Beijing’s bloody showdown with democracy” – directly contradicting information declassified since by stating “the massacre at Tiananmen killed hundreds, possibly thousands.”112 This was highly representative of the predominant trend in Western coverage. By the early 2020s, as Sino-U.S. relations reached lows not seen since the 1960s, art commemorating Tiananmen Square became increasingly common in the West. Examples from New York City alone ranged from the gay romance Tiananmen Requiem which opened in March 2022 to Broadway’s Tiananmen: A New Musical which premiered the following year. The alleged slaughter in Tiananmen Square has for decades been characterised in the West as a manifestation of the nature of the Chinese government, and as showing an almost unique level of depravity in the country. This characterisation bore a very strong contrast to the way clashes between authorities and protestors or rioters were covered when they occurred in countries more closely aligned with Western interests. A notable example was the deployment of the U.S. Military during the 1960s to suppress peaceful student protesters,113 at times killing them.114 American students had not lynched soldiers, thrown firebombs at military vehicles or torched public property, and no soldiers were killed or harmed – the violence was totally one-sided. While the alleged massacre



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in Tiananmen Square was consistently closely associated with the intrinsic nature of the Chinese state, no remotely similar associations were made with the very real student killings in America. Another notable example was the South Korean government’s well documented military action to suppress the Gwangju student uprising in May 1980, in which the U.S. Military was heavily complicit and which saw a death toll estimated at between 1000 and 2000.115 While there had been no serious attacks on police or security forces to provoke the use of deadly force, Western media and political leaders largely turned a blind eye.116 In Venezuela nine days of protests beginning on February 27, 1989, saw hundreds and by some estimates several thousand protestors killed, although with a Western-aligned government having been responsible the incident was scarcely mentioned in Western press. 117 In India the police’s mishandling of riots in Bihar in 1989 caused an estimated 1000 deaths, which also received little coverage in the West.118 This trend towards Western sources strongly downplaying massacres in friendly states went back decades, a notable example being in 1961 when French police fired on and killed an estimated 300 peaceful protestors without provocation in Paris. The Paris police chief who ordered it was subsequently promoted and awarded the Légion d’Honneur, while police archives were sealed to anyone looking to investigate until the 1990s.119 In sharp contrast to Tiananmen, Western media outlets such as Time and the Washington Post strongly downplayed the massacre as it was perpetrated by a Western country.120 Had there been unrest in Beijing just five years prior when China was a valued partner against the Soviet Union, Western actors would have been far less likely to capitalise on it to promote destabilisation and vilify the Chinese state. Even a massacre, had one occurred just a few years earlier, would have likely received minimal coverage much like clashes in Gwangju, Paris or Caracas. It was only due to the Cold War’s end that destabilising China and fabricating narratives that vilified the country again aligned with Western interests.

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Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Harris Smith, Richard, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First CIA, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1972 (pp. 259–282). Fleming, Denna Frank, The Cold War and its Origins, 1917–1960, Crows Nest, Allen and Unwin, 1961 (p. 570). The New York Times, September-December 1945. Tuchman, Barbra W., Sitwell and the American Experience in China 1911– 1945, London, MacMillan, 1970 (pp. 666–677). The New York Times, December 26, 1945 (p. 5). The New York Times, September-December 1945. Tuchman, Barbra W., Sitwell and the American Experience in China 1911– 1945, London, MacMillan, 1970 (pp. 666–677). The New York Times, November 6, 1945 (p. 1). The New York Times, December 19, 1945 (p. 2). ‘Letter to Congressman Hugh de Lacy of State of Washington,’ Congressional Record, January 24, 1946, Appendix, vol. 92, part 9 (p. A225). Truman, Harry S., Memoirs, Vol. Two: Years of Trial and Hope, 1946–1953, New York, Doubleday, 1956 (p. 66). The New York Times, December 26, 1945 (p. 5). Robbins, Christopher, Air America, New York, Avon Books, 1985 (pp. 46– 57). Marchetti, Victor and Marks, John, The Cia and the Cult of Intelligence, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1974 (p. 149). Testimony of Dean Acheson, Hearings held in executive session before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee during 1949–1950 (p. 23). Blum, William, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, London, Zed Books, 2003 (p. 21). Conn, Peter, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010 (p. 316). Mitter, Rana, China’s War With Japan 1937–1945; The Struggle for Survival, London, Allen Lane, 2013 (pp. 331–333). Stockwell, John, In Search of Enemies, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1978 (p. 238). Blum, William, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, London, Zed Books, 2003 (p. 23). Blum, William, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, London, Zed Books, 2003 (p. 21). Appleman, Roy E., South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu: United States Army in the Korean War, Washington DC, Department of the Army, 1998 (pp. 674, 691). Ecker, Richard E., Korean Battle Chronology: Unit-by-Unit United States Casualty Figures and Medal of Honor Citations, Jefferson, McFarland, 2005 (p. 47). Chae, Han Kook et al., The Korean War, Volume II, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2001 (p.124).

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Beijing 1989 and Tiananmen Square 149 抗美援朝战争史 [History of War to Resist America and Aid Korea], Volume II, Beijing, Chinese Military Science Academy Publishing House, 2000 (p. 35). Abrams, A. B., Immovable Object: North Korea’s 70 Years At War with American Power, Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2020 (Chapter 4: The Battlefield Moves to North Korea – And China). Brower, Charles F., George C. Marshall: Servant of the American Nation, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011 (Chapter 6: Fighting the Force Problem: George C. Marshal and Korea). Foreign Relations of the United States 1951, Vol. VII (pp. 667–668, 881– 882, 1106–1109). Foreign Relations of the United States 1952–1954, Vol. IV (p. 1068). Foot, Rosemary, The Wrong War, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1985 (pp. 148–153, 176). Hermes, Walter, Truce Tent and Fighting Front, Washington DC, Department of the Army, 1966 (pp. 56, 107). Pogue, Forrest C., George C. Marshall, Volume 4: Statesman, 1945–1959, New York, Viking, 1987 (p. 488). Levine, Alan J., Stalin’s Last War; Korea and the Approach to World War III, Jefferson, McFarland & Company, 2005 (pp. 208, 277, 278, 280, 283– 284). G-3 381 Pacific, G-3 Staff Study, ‘Capability of U.S. Army to Implement CINCUNC Operations Plan,’ ca. 21, Jan 53. BBC Summary, Far East, No. 221, January 23, 1953. Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 86th Congress, vol. 105, part 7, May 20–June 4, 1959 (p. 8703). Futrell, Robert Frank, The United States Air Force in Korea, 1950–1953, Washington DC, Office of Air Force History, 1983 (p. 667). Journal of the American Intelligence Professional, unclassified articles from Studies in Intelligence, vol. 57, no. 3, September 2013 (pp. 22–28). Washington Post, August 20, 1958. Blum, William, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, London, Zed Books, 2003 (pp. 24, 25). Mitchell, Arthur H., Understanding the Korean War: The Participants, the Tactics, and the Course of Conflict, Jefferson, McFarland, 2013 (p. 177). The New York Times, April 25, 1966 (p. 20). Burkholder Smith, Joseph, Portrait of a Cold Warrior, New York, Putnam, 1976 (pp. 77, 78). ‘Two CIA Prisoners in China, 1952–1973,’ Central Intelligence Agency Official Website, News & Information, April 5, 2007. Marchetti, Victor, and Marks, John, The Cia and the Cult of Intelligence, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1974 (p. 150). The New York Times, March 28, 1969 (p. 40). Department of State Bulletin, May 2, 1966. Aide-memoire from U.S. State Department to the British Embassy, July 13, British Foreign Office Records 371/35756, The National Archives of the United Kingdom.

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‘The United States, Tibet and the Cold War,’ Journal of Cold War Studies, vol. 8, issue 3, Summer 2006 (pp. 145–164). 25 Deane, Hugh, Good Deeds & Gunboats, San Francisco, China Books & Periodicals, 1990 (p. 177). 26 Grunfeld, A. Tom, The Making of Modern Tibet, Armonk, M. E. Sharpe, 1987 (p. 95). 27 Deane, Hugh, Good Deeds & Gunboats, San Francisco, China Books & Periodicals, 1990 (p. 179). 28 Chen, Jian, ‘The Tibetan Rebellion of 1959 and China’s Changing Relations with India and the Soviet Union,’ Journal of Cold War Studies, vol. 8, issue 3, Summer 2006 (p. 68). 29 Blum, William, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, London, Zed Books, 2003 (p. 26). Wise, David, The Politics of Lying, New York, Random House, 1973 (pp. 239–254). Deane, Hugh, Good Deeds & Gunboats, San Francisco, China Books & Periodicals, 1990 (pp. 181, 182). 30 Mann, Jim, ‘CIA Gave Aid to Tibetan Exiles in ‘60s, Files Show,’ Los Angeles Times, September 15, 1998. 31 Ibid. 32 Deane, Hugh, Good Deeds & Gunboats, San Francisco, China Books & Periodicals, 1990 (p. 179). 33 ‘China: The Dragon of Inflation,’ Stratfor Analysis, February 11, 2010. 34 Ji, You, ‘Zhao Ziyang and the Politics of Inflation,’ The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, no. 25, January 1991 (pp. 69–91). 35 Interview with Li Yanting (pseydonym), Beijing, November 19, 2019. 36 Pedde, Nicola, ‘The Libyan conflict and its controversial roots,’ European View, vol. 16, 2017 (pp. 93–102). Hashemi, Nader, ‘The Arab Spring two years on: reflections on dignity, democracy, and devotion,’ Ethics & International Affairs, vol. 27, no. 2 (pp. 207–221). Horovitz, David, ‘A mass expression of outrage against injustice,’ Jerusalem Post, February 25, 2011. 37 History Hit on Facebook, June 7, 2016 (https://www.facebook.com/ watch/?v=1059717217426669). 38 Brands, Hal, ‘Today’s U.S.-China Clash Began at Tiananmen Square,’ Bloomberg, May 31, 2019. 39 Nury Vittachi on Facebook, ‘How NOT to talk to mainland Chinese friends about June 4,’ June 3, 2019. (https://www.facebook.com/708946213/ posts/10157360352516214/?d=n). 40 O’Neil, Brendan, ‘Olympian myths of Tiananmen,’ The Guardian, August 8, 2008. 41 Meet the Press, May 31, 1998. 42 Black Hands of Beijing: Lives of Defiance in China’s Democracy Movement, New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1993 (pp. 246–248). 43 Brown, Adrian, ‘Reporting from Tiananmen Square in 1989: “I saw a lot I will never forget”,’ Al Jazeera, June 4, 2019.



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44 ‘25 Years Ago in Beijing, A “Movement Unlikely to Die”,’ Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2014. 45 Nury Vittachi on Facebook, ‘How NOT to talk to mainland Chinese friends about June 4,’ June 3, 2019. (https://www.facebook.com/708946213/ posts/10157360352516214/?d=n). 46 Vancouver Sun, September 17, 1992 (p. A20). 47 O’Neil, Brendan, ‘Olympian myths of Tiananmen,’ The Guardian, August 8, 2008. 48 ‘Latin American Diplomat Eyewitness Account of June 3–4 Events on Tiananmen Square,’ US Embassy Telegram (Confidential), Wikileaks, July 12, 1989 (https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/89BEIJING18828_a.html). 49 Mathews, Jay, ‘The Myth of Tiananmen,’ Colombia Journalism Review, June 4, 2010. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Kristof, Nicholas, ‘Turmoil in China; Tiananmen Crackdown: Student’s Account Questioned on Major Points,’ The New York Times, June 13, 1989. 53 Clark, Gregory, ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre is a Myth, All We’re “Remembering” are British Lies,’ International Business Times, June 4, 2014. 54 Clark, Gregory, ‘Birth of a massacre myth,’ Japan Times, July 21, 2008. 55 ‘Tiananmen killings: Were the media right?,’ BBC News, June 2, 2009. 56 Clark, Gregory, ‘Birth of a massacre myth,’ Japan Times, July 21, 2008. 57 Clark, Gregory, ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre is a Myth, All We’re “Remembering” are British Lies,’ International Business Times, June 4, 2014. 58 Cunningham, Philip J., Tiananmen Moon: Inside the Chinese

Student Uprising of 1989, Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield, 2009 (p. 269). ‘25 Years Ago in Beijing, A “Movement Unlikely to Die”,’ Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2014.

59 Clark, Gregory, ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre is a Myth, All We’re “Remembering” are British Lies,’ International Business Times, June 4, 2014. 60 Secretary’s Morning Summary for June 3, 1989, Secret, Department of State (p. 10) (https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB16/ documents/09-01.htm). 61 Clark, Gregory, ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre is a Myth, All We’re “Remembering” are British Lies,’ International Business Times, June 4, 2014. 62 Cunningham, Philip J., Tiananmen Moon: Inside the Chinese Student Uprising of 1989, Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield, 2009 (pp. 269, 270). 63 Ibid (pp. 273–274). 64 Ibid (pp. 273, 274). 65 Deng, Xiaoping, ‘在接见首都戒严部队军以上干部时的讲话’ [Speech Made While Receiving Cadres of the Martial Law Units in the Capitol], Beijing, June 9, 1989.

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66 O’Neil, Brendan, ‘Olympian myths of Tiananmen,’ The Guardian, August 8, 2008. 67 Clark, Gregory, ‘What really happened at Tiananmen?,’ Japan Times, June 3, 2014. 68 John Burgess, ‘Images Vilify Protesters; Chinese Launch Propaganda Campaign,’ Washington Post, June 12, 1989. 69 Sterba, James P. and Ignatius, Adi and Greenberger, Robert S., ‘Class Struggle: China’s Harsh Actions Threaten to Set Back 10-Year Reform Drive – Suspicions of Westernization Are Ascendant, and Army Has a Political Role Again – A Movement Unlikely to Die,’ Wall Street Journal, June 5, 1989. 70 O’Neil, Brendan, ‘Olympian myths of Tiananmen,’ The Guardian, August 8, 2008. 71 ‘Latin American Diplomat Eyewitness Account of June 3–4 Events on Tiananmen Square,’ US Embassy Telegram (Confidential), Wikileaks, July 12, 1989. (https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/89BEIJING18828_a.html). 72 Clark, Gregory, ‘What really happened at Tiananmen?,’ Japan Times, June 3, 2014. 73 Snyder, Alec, ‘Video appears to show Detroit police car driving into protesters,’ CNN, June 30, 2020. Austin, Henry and Ciechalski, Suzanne and Winter, Tom, ‘New York Mayor Bill de Blasio defends police after video shows NYPD SUV driving into protesters,’ NBC News, May 31, 2020. Reid, Alex, ‘Protests spurred by Washington police SUV running over crowd at street race,’ driving.ca, January 25, 2021. 74 Clark, Gregory, ‘What really happened at Tiananmen?,’ Japan Times, June 3, 2014. 75 Gordon, Richard and Hinton, Carma, The Gate of Heavenly Peace (film), Independent Television Service, 1995. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. Minzhu, Han, Cries for Democracy: Writings and Speeches from the Chinese Democracy Movement, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1990. 78 Roehner, Bertrand M., ‘How China almost became an American backyard,’ Paris, Abraca Publishing, 2017 (https://www.lpthe.jussieu.fr/~roehner/oce. pdf). 79 Smith, Marcie, ‘Change Agent: Gene Sharp’s Neoliberal Nonviolence,’ Nonsite, May 10, 2019. ‘The Quiet American,’ The New York Times, September 3, 2012. Smith, Marcie, ‘Getting Gene Sharp Wrong,’ Jacobin, December 2, 2019. Roehner, Bertrand M., ‘How China almost became an American backyard,’ Paris, Abraca Publishing, 2017 (https://www.lpthe.jussieu.fr/~roehner/oce. pdf). 80 ‘Q&A: Gene Sharp,’ Al Jazeera, December 6, 2011. ‘Egypt: Gene Sharp Taught Us How To Revolt!,’ Global Voices, April 15, 2011.



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Sapozhnikova, Galina, The Lithuanian Conspiracy and the Soviet Collapse: Investigation into a Political Demolition, Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2018 (pp. 43, 44, 50, 51, 58, 176, 177). 81 Liu, Xiaobo, ‘文壇“黑馬”劉曉波’ [The “Dark Horse” of Literature], Open Magazine (http://www.open.com.hk/old_version/1011p68.html). 82 Sautman, Barry and Hairong, Yan, ‘Do supporters of Nobel winner Liu Xiaobo really know what he stands for?,’ The Guardian, December 15, 2010. 83 Liu, Xiaobo, ‘刘晓波：美英自由联盟必胜’ [Victory to the AngloAmerican Freedom Alliance], Boxun, 2004 (http://blog.boxun.com/hero/ liuxb/133_1.shtml). 84 Kim, Dong-Choon, ‘Forgotten war, forgotten massacres – the Korean War (1950–1953) as licensed mass killings,’ Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 6, issue 4, December 2004 (pp. 523–544). Chossudovsky, Michael, Presentation to the Japanese Foreign Correspondents Club on U.S. Aggression against the People of Korea, Tokyo, August 1, 2013. Hynes, Patricia, ‘The Korean War: Forgotten, Unknown and Unfinished,’ Truthout, July 12, 2013. Cumings, Bruce, The Korean War: A History, New York, Modern Library, 2010 (p. 154). Report on U.S. Crimes in Korea, Commission of International Association of Democratic Lawyers, March 31, 1952 (p. 21). 85 Sautman, Barry and Hairong, Yan, ‘Do supporters of Nobel winner Liu Xiaobo really know what he stands for?,’ The Guardian, December 15, 2010. 86 Ibid. 87 ‘Voice of America Beams TV Signals to China,’ The New York Times, June 9, 1989. Becker, Brian, ‘What Really Happened in Tiananmen Square 25 Years Ago,’ Global Research, June 4, 2014. 88 Zhou, He, Media and Tiananmen Square, Hauppauge, Nova Science Publishers, 1996 (p. 112). 89 Pincus, Walter, ‘Bush Aided Yeltsin in ’91 Coup, New Report Says,’ Washington Post, May 15, 1994. 90 ‘Escape From Tiananmen: How Secret Plan Freed Protesters,’ Bloomberg, May 28, 2014. 91 Lo, Shiu Hing, The Politics of Cross-Border Crime in Greater China: Case Studies of Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macao, New York, M.E. Sharp, 2009 (pp. 87, 88). 92 Liu, Melinda, ‘Still on the wing; inside Operation Yellowbird, the daring plot to help dissidents escape,’ Newsweek, April 1, 1996. Anderlini, Jamil, ‘Tiananmen Square: the long shadow,’ Financial Times, June 1, 2014. 93 Ebbert, Stephanie, ‘Ex-worker sues software firm Jenzabar Inc. on bias charge,’ Boston Globe, April 19, 2015.

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94 Anderlini, Jamil, ‘Tiananmen Square: the long shadow,’ Financial Times, June 1, 2014. 95 Allison, Graham, ‘China Is Now the World’s Largest Economy. We Shouldn’t Be Shocked.,’ Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center, October 15, 2020. 96 Abrams, A. B., China and America’s Tech War from AI to 5G: The Struggle to Shape the Future of World Order, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2022. 97 Menshikov, Stanislav, ‘Russian Capitalism Today,’ Monthly Review, vol. 51. no. 3, 1999 (pp. 82–86). Klein, Naomi, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, London, Penguin, 2008 (Chapter 11). 98 Tverdova, Yulia V., ‘Human Trafficking in Russia and Other Post-Soviet States,’ Human Rights Review, December 11, 2016. 99 Miles, Jack, ‘Another “Prison of Nations”: China: As in the Soviet Union, a regional decoupling could end communism.,’ Los Angeles Times, November 27, 1991. 100 ‘Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan border clashes claim nearly 100 lives,’ BBC News, September 19, 2022. De Waal, Thomas, ‘Unfinished Business in the Armenia-Azerbaijan Conflict,’ Carnegie Europe, February 11, 2021. Ellyat, Holly, ‘Tensions between Russia and Georgia are on the rise again: Here’s why it matters,’ CNBC, July 11, 2019. Flanagan, Stephen J. et al., ‘Deterring Russian Aggression in the Baltic States Through Resilience and Resistance,’ RAND Corporation, April 2019. Yuhas, Alan, ‘Thousands of Civilian Deaths and 6.6 Million Refugees: Calculating the Costs of War,’ New York Times, August 24, 2022. 101 Brands, Hal, ‘Today’s U.S.-China Clash Began at Tiananmen Square,’ Bloomberg, May 31, 2019. 102 Allison, Graham, ‘China Is Now the World’s Largest Economy. We Shouldn’t Be Shocked.,’ National Interest, October 15, 2020. 103 Mitt Romney on Twitter, ‘China matches US spending on military procurement, which is tremendously dangerous given that China doesn’t believe in human rights or democracy. My #FY21NDAA amendment directs the @DeptOfDefense compare our spending with that of China and Russia to provide us with a lay of land.,’ July 20, 2020. ‘Schieffer Series: A Conversation with Senator Mitt Romney on U.S.China Relations and Great Power Competition,’ Centre for Strategic and International Studies, July 22, 2020. 104 Koshikawa, Noriaki, ‘China passes US as world’s top researcher, showing its R&D might,’ Nikkei, August 8, 2020. 105 Big Tech and China: What Do We Need from Silicon Valley?, The Nixon Seminar on Conservative Realism and National Security, April 6, 2021. 106 Maxwell, Neville, ‘Sino-British Confrontation over Hong Kong,’ Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 30, no. 23, June 1995 (pp. 1384–1398). 107 New York Post, June 25, 1998 (p. 22). 108 USA Today , June 26, 1998 (p. 7A). Wall Street Journal, June 26, 1998 (p. A10).



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109 Baltimore Sun, June 27, 1998 (p. 1A). 110 O’Neil, Brendan, ‘Olympian myths of Tiananmen,’ The Guardian, August 8, 2008. 111 Clark, Gregory, ‘Birth of a massacre myth,’ Japan Times, July 21, 2008. 112 Barron, Laignee, ‘How the Tiananmen Square Massacre Changed China Forever,’ Time, June 4, 2019. 113 Cox, Chelsey, ‘Fact check: National Guard was activated most often during the Civil Rights Era,’ USA Today, June 14, 2020. 114 Kaur, Harmeet, ‘50 years ago today, the shooting of 4 college students at Kent State changed America,’ CNN, May 4, 2020. 115 Clark, Donald N., ‘U.S. Role in Kwangju and Beyond,’ Los Angeles Times, August 29, 1996. Shorrock, Tim, ‘The Gwangju Uprising and American Hypocrisy: One Reporter’s Quest for Truth and Justice in Korea,’ The Nation, June 5, 2015. 116 Plunk, Daryl M., ‘South Korea’s Kwangju Incident Revisited,’ Asian Studies Backgrounder, no. 35, 1985 (p. 5). 117 Grainger, Sarah, ‘Victims of Venezuela’s Caracazo clashes reburied,’ BBC News, February 28, 2011. Márquez, Humberto, ‘UN, Venezuela: Wound Still Gaping 20 Years after “Caracazo”,’ Inter Press Service, February 27, 2009. 118 Iqbal, Javed, ‘The forgotten riots of Bhagalpur,’ Al Jazeera, December 31, 2014. Hazarika, Sanjoy, ‘India Reports 1,000 Deaths in Hindu-Muslim Fighting,’ The New York Times, December 28, 1989. 119 Willsher, Kim, ‘France remembers Algerian massacre 50 years on,’ The Guardian, October 17, 2011. Ramdani, Nabila, ‘The massacre that Paris denied,’ The Guardian, October 16, 2011. Thibaud, Paul, ‘Le 17 octobre 1961 : un moment de notre histoire’ [October 17, 1961: a moment in our history], Esprit, vol. 279, no. 11, 2001 (pp. 6–19). 120 Napoli, James J., ‘A 1961 Massacre of Algerians in Paris When the Media Failed the Test,’ The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 1997 (p. 36).

Chapter Four

The Gulf War Iraq as the New Adversary On August 2, 1990, the Ba’athist Republic of Iraq launched a full-scale invasion of its southern neighbour the State of Kuwait in what proved to be one of the most consequential military actions in modern Middle Eastern history. Multiple factors influenced Baghdad’s decision, with the country under the presidency of Saddam Hussein from 1979 having spent eight of the past eleven years at war with its neighbour to the east, the Islamic Republic of Iran, after invading in 1980. The war had exhausted Iraq’s substantial foreign reserves of almost $100 billion, and by 1990 its economy was in dire straits with a combination of crashing oil prices and Iranian strikes on its infrastructure having lowered annual oil revenues from $26 billion to just $10 billon.1 Thus when Kuwait repeatedly far exceeded OPEC oil production quotas despite repeated Iraqi warnings and requests, with the effect of driving prices down, the resulting Iraqi losses seriously impeded postwar recovery and were annually equivalent to the entire budget deficit of Iraq’s oil-reliant economy.2 While Baghdad repeatedly alleged this was part of a Kuwaiti-American economic conspiracy against it,3 it also accused Kuwait of horizontal drilling to steal its oil, and of blocking access to the sea by holding Iraqi-claimed islands.4 Kuwait’s inflexibility over its oil policies and territorial disputes, despite repeated warnings, was seen by King Fahd of Saudi Arabia among other regional leaders to have brought the invasion on itself, with Riyadh having urged its neighbour to be more accommodating.5 Kuwait had the Middle East’s fourth largest oil reserves at an estimated 94 billion barrels, and Iraq initially planned to use its invasion to install a friendly client government in power6 much as the U.S. had done recently in Grenada in 19837 and in Panama 156



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just eight months prior in December 1989.8 With the invasions of Kuwait, Grenada and Panama being almost identical in the kind of international crimes they represented, it was argued by some analysts that by its illegal and unprovoked actions the U.S. had diminished the post-Second World War taboo against crimes of aggression against one’s smaller neighbours and set an international precedent on which Iraq then acted.i Much as installing a U.S. client state in Panama was seen in Washington to be necessary to ensure favourable access to the strategically vital Panama Canal, Iraq planned to install a client government in Kuwait which would presumably reduce oil production to within OPEC quotas and invest more of its revenues in Iraq. Kuwait was also expected to agree to a resolution of territorial disputes over the strategically located Bubiyan and Warba islands that was favourable to Baghdad. ii With Soviet influence in the Middle East having been in decline for over a decade Iraq remained the only major power in the region outside the Western sphere of influence. Its close security ties with the USSR and China, highly tense relations with Western-aligned Israel, and unpredictable leadership, led it to be seen as a potential challenger to Western interests. With the Cold War over and Iran successfully contained, crushing Iraq’s military i When calls grew in the West to put the Iraqi leadership on trial for the war, the Iraqi Bar Association notably sought to organise a popular trial for President Bush for the crime of invading Grenada, indicating that the recent American attack had some presence in Iraqi political discourse. Baghdad also tried to relativise its crime by tying it to the post-1967 Israeli annexation of Arab lands, in part to win Arab support, and to this end offered to withdraw if Israel also returned to its UN-recognised borders. (Baghdad Domestic Service, August 16, 1990.) (Baghdad Voice of the Masses, September 1, 1990.) (Iraq News Agency, September 4 and 24, 1990.) ii Some analysts postulated that Iraq had been given the green light by Washington to take military action against Kuwait, possibly in an effort to bait Baghdad into invading, with U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie having told President Hussein shortly before the war: “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” The State Department also affirmed to Baghdad that Washington had “no special defence or security commitments to Kuwait.” (‘Confrontation in the Gulf; U.S. Gave Iraq Little Reason Not to Mount Kuwait Assault,’ The New York Times, September 23, 1990.)

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and economy would mark a key turning point in regional order, returning it to the pre-Cold War status quo of near unchallenged Western hegemony. Following the USSR’s effective withdrawal from its prior role of containing Western power, demonstrating America and its allies’ ability to project force on a tremendous scale into the territories of countries across the world would also send a message of unchallenged strength with the potential to transform global order. According to U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff General Michael J. Dugan, President George H. W. Bush intended to go to war with Iraq almost as soon as he heard Kuwait had been invaded, and quickly announced plans for an air campaign which would concentrate on targeting Iraqi population centres.9 Dugan was dismissed from his post a few days after his revelations.10 Thus while Iraq initially announced plans on August 5 that it had begun its withdrawal from Kuwait,11 the announcement on August 8 that the U.S. was deploying its own forces near Iraq’s borders, including unprecedentedly to neighbouring Saudi Arabia, led Baghdad to reverse its plans.12 Kuwait was instead formally annexed into Iraq on August 28,13 with the territory expected to be used as leverage to gain Western security guarantees, or to otherwise serve as a buffer zone between Iraq and the Western military contingent in the Gulf in the face of possible attacks.14 Opportunities for a mediated settlement over Kuwait were notably consistently rejected by Washington on the basis that they would legitimise the Iraqi government, despite Baghdad repeatedly indicating a willingness withdraw and restore Kuwaiti sovereignty.15 Iraq’s key condition for withdrawing was that it would be guaranteed that it would not come under Western attack afterwards. As President Hussein informed former British Prime Minister Edward Heath when asked to withdraw Iraqi forces from Kuwait: “But what guarantee will you give me that if I pull out of Kuwait, the Americans and the British won’t come in with forces and be in a better position to bomb me and my country than they are at the moment; to attack us from Kuwait instead of Saudi Arabia?”16



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An offer on August 7 proposed that in return for security guarantees Iraq would fully withdraw, reinstate the Kuwaiti monarchy, reach an agreement with Washington for all matters pertaining to oil, and later even to sign a non-aggression pact with Kuwait. Washington’s response indicated it saw there was little to discuss.17 In part as a result it was widely assessed that the U.S. sought to have Iraq remain in Kuwait so as to provide a pretext for military action.18 As noted in a publication by the U.S. National Security Archive regarding efforts by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to mediate a peace deal: “the United States saw Gorbachev’s efforts to work out a peaceful solution as a problem and a nuisance.  At that moment Washington was concerned that Saddam might actually comply with U.N. resolutions, which would undermine the grounds for [the military operation] Desert Storm.” A peaceful resolution was not seen to be in Washington’s interest.19 The U.S. instead quickly took an uncompromising position and called for the removal of Saddam Hussein as Iraqi president and the disbanding of the Iraqi Military as preconditions for a peaceful settlement.20 Baghdad expressed a strong willingness to enter negotiations with the assistance of the Arab League, the USSR and even America’s ally France, but having alienated its neighbours over the previous decade it was isolated on the international stage. The Cold War’s end and Soviet Union’s effective capitulation to the West enabled the U.S. and its allies to take an unprecedentedly hard line, guaranteeing much greater freedom to launch military strikes in the Middle East than at any time since the colonial era.21 While Baghdad persisted that it needed security guarantees if it was to withdraw from Kuwait, the U.S. was expected to press for Iraq’s full disarmament of strategic military assets even if Iraqi forces withdrew.22 British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who played a key role in lobbying Washington to take military action, insisted that it was vital to destroy Iraq’s military and likely all of its industrial potential. “No one should interfere with that objective,” she declared to Soviet KGB Director Yevgeni Primakov. When asked: “so you see no other option but war?,” she replied with a definite “no.”23 Former State Secretary Henry Kissinger

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informed the Senate Armed Services Committee on November 28 that “any solution to the crisis must provide for a reduction of Iraq‘s offensive capability. . . . Without addressing this fundamental imbalance, a solution will only postpone, and probably exacerbate, and eventual resolution of Gulf instability.” His views were seen as a guide to American thinking, although they were less hardline and those of President Bush and his Secretary of State James Baker.24 President Bush similarly alluded to ensuring the Iraqi leader could not “keep his military power” as a key objective, as neutralising the country increasingly became a goal in and of itself regardless of the status of Kuwait.25 There was little doubt anywhere in the world that Iraq’s invasion and annexation of another UN member state was illegal, and that Kuwait’s population was worse off under occupation than it had been beforehand. This was far from sufficient, however, to gain support globally or even among Western populations for a military campaign against Iraq – particularly considering that Baghdad was offering to withdraw its forces with very limited conditions.26 A country invading its neighbour halfway across the world was hardly enough to sufficiently vilify it in the U.S. – particularly considering that America had launched full scale invasions of its own neighbours twice in the past decade including one just months before. Media in the West had for decades focused on vilification of Communism, of Soviet peoples as an ‘Asiatic Menace’ and ‘Red Terror,’ and at times on Chinese, Vietnamese and North Koreans as an ‘Asiatic Horde’ that threatened the Western world.27 Preceding this Japan had been the target for demonisation – ranging from papers in leading scientific journals examining alleged Japanese ethnic inferiority to posters depicting its population as insects and rats, in the context of portrayals of the war as a racial and civilisational clash between East and West.28 The Arab world, by contrast, had seen little attention in Western media as an ‘enemy’ figure. Arab jihadists employing terrorist tactics were largely aligned with Western interests and received considerable Western support in their campaign against the Soviet-aligned Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, and subsequently against the Soviet Union.29 By



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the 1980s a large majority of Arab governments were aligned with Western interests, with Libya being the only state to receive significant negative coverage in Western media. Few in the U.S. had heard of Iraq before 1990, and those who had knew of it politically mainly as on the ‘good side’ working with the ‘free world’ to contain the ‘evil’ Iranian revolutionary government. Indeed, under Saddam Hussein’s leadership which began in 1979 Iraq’s relations with the West had improved significantly as Baghdad distanced itself the USSR and Soviet-backed Syria.30 For war against Iraq efforts were made not only to portray the country as a significant threat, but also to vilify both the Iraqi government and the general population by presenting Iraqi forces as committing a wave of extreme atrocities. Western efforts to cast Iraq as both an imminent threat and a uniquely depraved actor relied very heavily on fabricated claims that had little basis in the reality of the situation on the ground. The Bush administration and its partners made the case that if Kuwait was allowed to fall permanently, Iraq would subsequently launch invasions across the Middle East. Resembling a key argument for the Vietnam War, this was essentially a Middle Eastern iteration of the ‘domino theory.’ As noted in the Christian Science Monitor in 2002, a key part of the first Bush administration’s case “was that an Iraqi juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia. Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid-September that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key U.S. oil supplier.”31 Nothing less than a quarter of a million Iraqi troops, battle hardened from an invasion of Iran and with heavy armour supporting them, amassed on the border of the world’s largest oil exporter, appeared very menacing. Like many aspects of the propaganda campaign, however, it turned out to have no basis in reality. Claims of Iraqi forces massed on Saudi Arabia’s borders provided the pretext for the first major deployments of U.S. ground units to the Gulf region – which in turn influenced Baghdad to keep its forces in Kuwait where it had previously stated that it would

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withdraw after a new pro-Iraqi client government was installed.iii Reporter Jean Heller from the Florida-based St. Petersburg Times obtained commercial satellite images of the Saudi-Kuwaiti border at the exact same time and location that Washington claimed American intelligence had found the large Iraqi force. The images showed nothing but empty desert, which substantiated Saddam Hussein’s personal claim that Iraqi forces were all deployed far from the Saudi border to prevent any misunderstandings and as a guarantee of the kingdom’s security. Heller contacted the office  of Defence Secretary Dick Cheney “for evidence refuting the Times’ photos or analysis offering to hold the story if proven wrong,” but received none. As noted in the Christian Science Monitor, the Iraqi build-up on Saudi Arabia’s borders “was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn’t exist.”32 The Saudi leadership was itself sceptical of U.S. claims, with its armed forces detecting no Iraqi presence near its border.33 It mattered not where hundreds of thousands of Iraqi personnel really were, but where Washington and major Western media outlets said they were, with this seemingly imminent threat providing sufficient pretext to quickly involve the U.S. and a growing coalition of its security partners in the Gulf. Iraqi control of Saudi and Kuwaiti oil, it was said, would allow it to deny the West the supplies it needed and would place Baghdad in a position to sway global oil prices. Thus much as Imperial Japan 50 years prior had seen a Western oil embargo as a reason to go to war,34 the United States now portrayed itself as being at risk of a similar crisis if it iii The first large scale deployments of U.S. ground and air units to the Gulf, and subsequent expansion of the Western military presence, was strongly opposed by both secular and Islamist voices in the Arab world. Among statements to this effect, President Chadli Bendjedid  of Algeria warned regarding the significance of U.S. deployments as a turning point in regional affairs: “We have fought all our lives to get rid of imperialism and imperialist forces, but now we see that our endeavours are wasted and the Arab nation – and I am not nominating anyone specifically – is inviting foreigners to intervene. We were not given a chance to solve this problem in an Arab way or an Arab context.” (Heikal, Mohamed, Illusions of Triumph: An Arab View of the Gulf War, New York, HarperCollins, 1993 (pp. 292, 296).)



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did not act quickly. According to President Bush, guarding the safe supply of oil was a major cause for the initial U.S. deployments to the Gulf,35 with Trade Representative Carla Hills subsequently stating that the following campaign to restore the Kuwaiti monarchy was necessary “to guarantee the right to import oil.” 36 The claim of a threat to oil supplies, however, was itself based on the lie that Iraqi deployments reflected an intent to invade Saudi Arabia. Complementing the portrayal of an Iraqi threat, and playing a much more significant role in swaying Western and global opinion, an intensive months-long propaganda campaign by Western media outlets, officials and various non-government organisations made allegations of gruesome Iraqi atrocities. The Washington Post, for example, reported that Iraqi soldiers were “attacking Kuwaiti civilians with axes, raping women and hanging mutilated body parts of slain victims in the streets of Kuwait City.” 37 Only after the war’s end did it become apparent that these kinds of reports, lacking corroboration and often citing sources with obvious incentives to exaggerate or outright fabricate claims, were far removed from reality. Such reports nevertheless successfully recast Iraq’s overseas image within a very short period. Western coverage and discourse in many ways resembled that of 1942 against Japan, that of 1950 against North Korea and China, and that of the early 1980s against Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. The most prominent atrocities circulated by Western media and verified by Western officials, which served to foster significant anti-Iraqi sentiments, turned out to be fabrications. From British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher38 to U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Clairborne Pell,39 Saddam Hussein was very widely likened to a new Adolf Hitler in the West. President Bush claimed he was “even worse than Hitler.”40 U.S. print media notably likened Hussein to Hitler 1,035 separate times.41 This almost cliché description for any serious Western adversary continued to be used from the 1950s well into the 21st century, from Egypt’s President Nasser42 and Iran’s Supreme Leaders Khomeini43 and Khamenei44 to North Korean President Kim Jong Un45 and Chinese President Xi Jinping46

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among over a dozen other examples.47 Invading Kuwait alone, however, was far from sufficient to vilify Hussein to the ‘Hitler level’ in the eyes of Western publics, which would require several months of concerted reports portraying mass atrocities against the Kuwaiti population. Pressing such a narrative to demonise the country had very significant implications for the Iraqi population. Every Iraqi soldier became a “Saddam Hussein soldier,” Iraqi industries became “Saddam’s factories,” and the Iraqi Army became “Saddam’s Army.”iv This served not only to dehumanise Iraqis, but also to facilitate much harsher measures against their country, with such extreme personification of a country in the figure of a vilified leader becoming increasingly common in Western propaganda in the decades following the Gulf War. The Story of Slaughtered Incubator Babies Paves the Way to War Among the multiple narratives vilifying Iraq, the one which had the strongest impact and gained especially strong endorsement from prominent political figures was the claim that Iraqi military personnel had taken babies out of incubators at Kuwaiti hospitals and left them to die on the floors. The claim was most famously made as part of a highly emotional testimony before the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990, by a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl who identified only as Nayirah. Her family name was not revealed on the basis that it could invite reprisals against relatives still in Kuwait. Nayirah was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, Saud al-Sabah, as the Senators who sponsored her hearings well knew, iv A notable example was U.S. Army Major General Thomas Rhame, who stated when justifying burying Iraqi personnel alive in their trenches: “A thousand dead Saddam Hussein soldiers is not worth one U.S. soldier’s life.” While Rhame’s rationale may have been sound from a military standpoint, it was made much more palatable to the general public when those being buried to save Americans and having a low value attributed to their lives were “Saddam Hussein soldiers” – rather than “Iraqi soldiers.” The demonisation of the Iraqi leader facilitated the use of the former as a more dehumanising term. (‘Riding the Storm – how to tell lies and win wars’ (Documentary), Channel 4, January 1996.)



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and she had not been in Kuwait since the Iraqi invasion. The entire story, it emerged after the Gulf War was over, was false.48 Nayirah’s allegations were backed and strongly endorsed by Western media outlets, human rights organisations and political figures. The story was described as President Bush’s “favoured symbol of Iraqi vileness” which he referred to repeatedly both leading up to and during war – a reminder for both Western publics and the wider world of who the ‘good side’ and ‘bad side’ were and why extreme measures against Iraq were justified.49 The testimony, echoed in multiple reports across Western media and in strong rhetoric from key political figures, played a particularly central role in building consensus both in the Western world and globally for decisive military action against Iraq. The Nayirah testimony was far from isolated, with Western news outlets citing a wide range of sources which made the very same claims long before the Kuwaiti girl spoke on Capitol Hill. On September 5, 35 days before the testimony was given, the London-based Daily Telegraph reported citing Kuwaiti sources: “babies in the premature unit of one hospital had been removed from their incubators so that these, too, could be carried off” – taken to Iraq as war loot.50 On September 7 the same story from Reuters, which was also based in London, was re-reported by the Los Angeles Times, which marked the first time it reached the U.S. It cited Americans who had escaped stating that Iraqis were: “taking hospital equipment, babies out of incubators. Life-support systems are turned off. . . . They are even removing traffic lights . . . the Iraqis are beating Kuwaitis, torturing them, knifing them, beating them, cutting their ears off if they are caught resisting or are with the [Kuwaiti] army or police.” They described people stranded in Kuwait as “begging” for U.S. forces to launch a military intervention to save them.51 The fact that Reuters and the Times allowed sources to remain anonymous and give testimony with a total lack of evidence was seen by some as highly suspicious, and was described by one analyst as “a serious breach of one of the few ironclad rules of journalism.”52 While the origin of the incubator babies atrocity fabrication appeared to be Britain, it was subsequently expanded on considerably in the U.S. to form

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the heart of the public understanding of what kind of country Iraq was. Reports by a number of news outlets were themselves far from enough to sufficiently reshape perceptions of Iraq, and it was thus necessary as part of the next stage in escalation of the narrative that Nayirah spoke at Congressional Human Rights Caucus. The caucus provided the ideal setting, and since it was not officially a committee of the U.S. Congress the legal accoutrements that would usually deter a witness from knowingly providing false testimony were not in place. While lying under oath was a very serious crime in front of a congressional committee, in front of the less formal human rights caucus the testifying party could not be held accountable. The leading orchestrator of the Nayirah  testimony was the Washington D.C. based public relations committee the Citizens for a Free Kuwait (CFK), which was heavily funded by the exiled Kuwaiti government.53 CFK worked closely with the public relations firm Hill+Knowlton to influence world opinion against Iraq, and more specifically to gain support for U.S. military action against the country. Public relations efforts included producing propaganda videos depicting life under Iraqi occupation, organising a ‘Kuwait Information Day’ on college campuses, having churches observe a national day of prayer for Kuwait, and even having September 24th declared ‘Free Kuwait Day’ in thirteen American states.54 Hill+Knowlton was the largest and widely considered the most influential public relations firm in Washington at the time,55 and conducted a $1 million study with the goal of ascertaining how best to shape public opinion in favour of supporting action against Iraq.56 The study was based on focus groups and was conducted by Withington Groups – a leading provider of such services. It found that a strong emphasis on atrocities in particular would be most effective, giving specific details on the kind of story which would have the most powerful impact on public opinion.57 The public relations campaign conducted by Hill+Knowlton was later found to have cost approximately $12 million – over $24 million if valued in 2022 dollars.58 The firm coached Nayirah on how to



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give her testimony and wrote the script which she recited in the address to the Human Rights Caucus.59 The testimony given two months after the Iraqi invasion read as follows: Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee, my name is Nayirah and I just came out of Kuwait. My mother and I were in Kuwait on August 2nd for a peaceful summer holiday. My older sister had a baby on July 29th and we wanted to spend some time in Kuwait with her. I only pray that none of my 10th grade classmates had a summer vacation like I did. I may have wished sometimes that I can be an adult, that I could grow up quickly. What I saw happening to the children of Kuwait and to my country has changed my life forever, has changed the life of all Kuwaitis, young and old, mere children or more. My sister with my five-day-old nephew travelled across the desert to safety. There is no milk available for the baby in Kuwait. They barely escaped when their car was stuck in the desert sand and help came from Saudi Arabia. I stayed behind and wanted to do something for my country. The second week after invasion, I volunteered at the Al Dar Hospital with 12 other women who wanted to help as well. I was the youngest volunteer. The ‘other’ women were from 20 to 30 years old. While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor. It was horrifying. I could not help but think of my nephew who was born premature and might have died that day as well. After I left the hospital, some of my friends and I distributed flyers condemning the

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Iraqi invasion until we were warned we might be killed if the Iraqis saw us. The Iraqis have destroyed everything in Kuwait. They stripped the supermarkets of food, the pharmacies of medicine, the factories of medical supplies, ransacked their houses and tortured neighbours and friends. I saw and talked to a friend of mine after his torture and release by the Iraqis. He is 22 but he looked as though he could have been an old man. The Iraqis dunked his head into a swimming pool until he almost drowned. They pulled out his fingernails and then played electric shocks to sensitive private parts of his body. He was lucky to survive. If an Iraqi soldier is found dead in the neighbourhood, they burn to the ground all the houses in the general vicinity and would not let firefighters come until the only ash and rubble was left. The Iraqis were making fun of President Bush and verbally and physically abusing my family and me on our way out of Kuwait. We only did so because life in Kuwait became unbearable. They have forced us to hide, burn or destroy everything identifying our country and our government. I want to emphasise that Kuwait is our mother and the Emir our father. We repeated this on the roofs of our houses in Kuwait until the Iraqis began shooting at us, and we shall repeat it again. I am glad I am 15, old enough to remember Kuwait before Saddam Hussein destroyed it and young enough to rebuild it Thank you. Hill+Knowlton was highly effective in ensuring that the hearing received maximum coverage. The firm sent its own crew to



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film the testimony and sent out a video news release to MediaLink which served 700 television stations across the U.S., with portions of the testimony on ABC News alone reaching an estimated 35–53 million Americans that night.60 The Congressional Panel to which it was given notably did not demand any kind of proof, with the emotional account widely accepted both in the United States and overseas.61 Nayirah’s testimony proved to have a pivotal effect on public opinion, with co-chairman of the Human Rights Caucus Representative John Porter stating that in his eight years of service on the Caucus he had never heard of such “brutality and inhumanity and sadism” as that which the Iraqis were allegedly committing.62 Complementing atrocity fabrication efforts Hill+Knowlton also made considerable efforts to present the Kuwaiti political system to members of Congress as one with commonalities with those of the West, and thereby invoke ideological support for its deposed semi-constitutional monarchy and for a war to restore it to power.63 Congressmen Tom Lantos and John E. Porter notably had close ties to Hill+Knowlton and received $50,000 from CFK as donations to the private group, the Congressional Human Rights Foundation, which they had themselves founded, as well as free office space at Hill+Knowlton’s Washington headquarters.64 Such donations in exchange for political favours were hardly an unheard of practice, with multiple political figures receiving generous contributions to various charitable or human rights foundations associated with them in exchange for actions that advantaged the donors. These practices became more widely known two decades later under the Barack Obama administration due to the relationship between State Secretary Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.65 The New York Times would note in 1992 regarding how special interest groups could influence specific parts of the U.S. Congress, citing the Nayirah case with Congressmen Lantos and Porter as an example: dubious financial dealings of the House caucus system. Unlike Congressional committees, which act on

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legislation, the caucuses bring together like-minded members to highlight issues like human rights abuses, the environment and minority concerns. Current rules prohibit the caucuses from accepting private donations or government grants. But the caucuses often have close ties to companion nonprofit ‘foundations’ or ‘institutes’ that attract funds from special interests. Caucus leaders often play a central role in these foundations. The Times further drew attention to some of the material benefits which senators could gain from accepting the funds being offered by various interest groups which were seeking favours in return.66 Other officials were similarly targeted, with a separate case seeing officials including former U.S. ambassador to Bahrain, Sam H. Zakhem, found to have taken $7.7 million in Kuwaiti money to help build public support in America for military action against Iraq. Zakhem and others ran front businesses from August 1990 to influence public opinion, although further details on how they did so were not given.67 Congressmen Lantos and Porter not only helped to conceal the identity of Nayirah when she testified, but also sponsored the congressional hearings on Iraqi atrocities.68 These in turn formed the heart of a public relations campaign against Iraq under the guise of concern over human rights abuses. Had these hearings not been sponsored, or had the nature of Nayirah’s testimony not been concealed from the outset, public and world opinion toward Iraq would have almost certainly been very different. Manipulation of public opinion in such a way, in turn, was key to facilitating moves to sanction and later to make war on Iraq. As award winning former Wall Street Journal reporter and president of Harper’s Magazine John R. MacArthur observed: “it was all part of a campaign to turn Saddam Hussein, at least in the public consciousness, into Adolf Hitler. And the feeling was that they couldn’t sell the Gulf War without this. In other words, they had to cheat to win . . . if he’s a baby killer then, reasonable people can disagree about how to enforce international law, how to prevent



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countries from invading other countries, but we have to draw the line at baby killing.”69 Executive director of Middle East Watch Andrew Whitley, who participated in an investigation in post-war Kuwait that visited multiple hospitals, stated regarding the effect that the narrative of Iraqis slaughtering incubator babies had: I think the impact was enormous. I think it was a story which had been treated as one [in] which Iraq was capable of any depravity. Most of the incubators which had apparently been stolen had been stored away. When we went to the maternity hospital we saw that there was an entire wing which had been stripped and they had been put away into a storeroom . . . it was a major lie. I don’t believe there was any truth in fact as to Iraqis having deliberately systematically removed babies from incubators in order to steal them. And I think it made a major impact on public opinion in this country.70 The centrality of the incubator story, as one of many alleged Iraqi atrocities which were being continually reported and re-reported by Western media sources, NGOs and political figures, was attested to on 60 Minutes as follows: “There was plenty of evidence of Iraqi brutality, but the incubator story became almost a rallying cry. It has Presidential confirmation and the confirmation of Amnesty International, which published a report after Nayirah testified, quoting her and claiming 312 babies were killed when Iraqi troops pulled them from their incubators.” This extreme claim was reportedly more than the actual number of incubators in all of Kuwait City’s hospitals.71 Prominent American scholar Tom Regan, writing for the Christian Science Monitor, recalled regarding the powerful effects Nayirah’s testimony had on public opinion: More than 10 years later, I can still recall my brother Sean’s face. It was bright red. Furious. Not one given to fits of temper, Sean was in an uproar. He was a father,

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and he had just heard that Iraqi soldiers had taken scores of babies out of incubators in Kuwait City and left them to die. The Iraqis had shipped the incubators back to Baghdad. A pacifist by nature, my brother was not in a peaceful mood that day. ‘We’ve got to go and get Saddam Hussein. Now,’ he said passionately. I completely understood his feelings. Although I had no family of my own then, who could countenance such brutality? The news of the slaughter had come at a key moment in the deliberations about whether the U.S. would invade Iraq. Those who watched the nonstop debates on TV saw that many of those who had previously wavered on the issue had been turned into warriors by this shocking incident.72 The next stage in strengthening the narrative involved Western human rights organisations, which from 1990 would increasingly emerge as a key tool in atrocity fabrication efforts. The perceived credibility of these organisations, which presented themselves as having no connection to any government or political agenda and working impartially for the interests of humanity, was a major asset to efforts to lend weight to both media reports and Nayirah’s testimony. The most prominent Western human rights organisation at the time, London-based NGO Amnesty International, publicised multiple independent reports which claimed Iraqi personnel had indeed carried out such killings.73 Amnesty was the first in the world to produce publications which claimed to independently verify what Nayirah had said.74 Amnesty published a report on December 19 which played a vital role in further escalating the demonisation of Iraq, stating that Iraqi troops “left 300 premature babies to die after stealing their incubators.” It claimed to have talked to several doctors and nurses who “gave details of the deaths of 300 babies removed from incubators in hospitals by Iraqi troops and left to die on cold floors.” The NGO further declared that it had “substantial information on the extent of the killings.”75 The report was said to have given the story “the ring of authority because it carried Amnesty’s



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imprimatur,” thereby giving the claim of Iraqi soldiers slaughtering babies “a quantum leap in public relations terms.” Amnesty’s U.S. executive director, John Healy, gave testimony to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on January 8 confirming the story.76 Amnesty further claimed that Iraqi forces were committing castration, rape, mass executions and mass torture.77 The British source, held in high regard as a global champion of human rights, gave much credibility to the growing narrative against Iraq and, through false portrayals extreme Iraqi barbarism, greatly contributed to building widespread public and political support for military action. Amnesty International had worked closely with British and U.S. intelligence agencies in the past,78 and published multiple reports in the lead up to the war to similar effect citing a range of sources.79 The British NGO worked to form an impression that its claims had left little room for doubt and were fully verified. The Nayirah testimony was widely cited by senators in speeches urging public support for the war. President Bush repeated the story at least ten times in his public statements over the following weeks,80 which was itself a testament to the importance of the alleged Iraqi atrocities as the cornerstone in the case for war against the country.81 He used particularly emphatic language such as “babies pulled from incubators and scattered like firewood across the floor.”82 On January 10, 1991, as the U.S. Senate voted to authorise military action against Iraq, seven senators cited Nayirah’s testimony in speeches backing the use of force, with some quoting Amnesty’s report on incubator babies word-forword. The authorisation notably passed by just five votes, 57:42, leading many to conclude after stories of Iraqi atrocities were later debunked that they had proven decisive and provided the Bush administration with the bare majority it needed.83 As the New York Times noted, the Nayirah testimony “created a furore that helped convince several Senators to vote in favour of authorising military action against Iraq.”84 Allegations of mass infanticide were part of a far larger media campaign in the Western world demonising Iraq and were placed at the centre of efforts to build a consensus for war using human

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rights precisely because focus groups found they were expected to move public opinion the most. There were numerous other examples of alleged atrocities, and Western media outlets very often uncritically reproduced stories sourced from Hill+Knowlton which complemented the Nayirah story and made it appear part of a wider trend of Iraqi barbarism. President Bush, for one, spoke on Thanksgiving Day 1990 of other stories including “mass hangings” and “kids shot for failing to display the photos of Saddam Hussein,” comparing Iraqi conduct to “the days of the slave trade.” He further warned of a potential Iraqi nuclear menace and compared a policy of non-intervention against Baghdad to appeasing Nazi Germany.85 Aziz Abu-Hamad from Middle East Watch stated on January 6 regarding the coverage of the conflict in both the U.S. and in U.S.-aligned Arab states: In August, while I was in Saudi Arabia, I reported to MEW [Middle East Watch] how the leading Saudi daily, Al-Riyadh, published on its front page photographs of four children who had died of thirst while trying to cross the border from Kuwait. It turned out that the story was bogus and so were the photographs, as the newspaper had to admit a week later. Saudi, Kuwaiti, and Egyptian newspapers are full of similar stories. So are U.S. papers. Many prominent Kuwaitis had been reported dead before I left for Saudi Arabia in mid-October, but I was surprised to find them alive and well in the Kuwaiti Popular Conference. For example the L.A. Times reported [on October] that Dr. Abdul al-Sumait, a senior official of the Red Crescent, had been killed and his mutilated body was thrown in front of his house. Dr. al-Sumait is also alive and well. When he is not on public relations tours for the Kuwaiti cause, he shares offices with the Kuwait government-in-exile. He is also the source of much of AI’s [Amnesty International’s] information on incubators. 86



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Regarding the importance of the Kuwaiti incubator story in particular, among multiple accounts of Iraqi atrocities, John MacArthur noted: “The significance of the baby incubator story in the larger propaganda campaign against Saddam Hussein and for the war option cannot be underestimated. Without it, the comparison of Hussein with Hitler loses its lustre; to make the case effectively, one had to prove Hussein’s utter depravity.”87 MacArthur notably recalled a later meeting with the Americaneducated head of Citizens for a Free Kuwait, Hassan al-Ebraheem, who alongside U.S. public relations firms put out stories alleging gruesome Iraqi atrocities. Although they were thinly evidenced or even totally unevidenced, they had a major impact on public opinion in America. MacArthur emphasised that although by that time the Gulf War was over, al-Ebraheem was still unable to relax and stop selling his story. Iraqi ‘atrocities’ in Kuwait were still very much on his mind, and he said he wanted to show me some shocking photographs. The pictures, at first glance were horrifying. Some were amateurish out-of-focus shots of human figures covered with bloody gashes. A couple of figures had metal shafts driven through their chests, and some were trussed with straps. Another picture showed ‘torture’ instruments. For a few minutes my scepticism about Dr.al-Ebraheem was checked, but on closer examination I realised the human figures were actually mannequins. Someone had reconstructed the alleged results of the Iraqi occupation for public relations purposes. 88 This was highly symbolic regarding the entire campaign of atrocity propaganda. The Kuwaiti propaganda agency could do whatever it pleased to the mannequins and claim whatever atrocities it liked had taken place, and with Washington’s blessing this would be widely re-reported by NGOs and media outlets. As MacArthur observed: “The significance of this little pantomime cannot be underestimated; vaguely documented photographs

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and testimony from unidentified Kuwaitis provided some of the staples of the Hill and Knowlton campaign throughout the late summer and fall.”89 A Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by Atrocity Fabrication The Gulf War was optimally timed to further U.S. interests, with its military at peak strength in 1990 after a decade of high spending initiated under the Reagan administration, in contrast to its much weaker position in 1980 when Iraq had invaded Iran.90 Had the war taken place five years later, post-Cold War decommissioning of much of the U.S. arsenal, demobilising of its assets and deep spending cuts would have made it considerably harder to fight. With the Soviets and then Russia beginning to offer a new generation of very capable heavyweight fighter and interceptor aircraft and long-range air defence systems for export, and Iraq having begun to seriously invest in fleet modernisation from 1988, Iraqi airspace would have been significantly more difficult to penetrate by 1995.91 As the American campaign was very heavily centred on air power, this could have caused serious complications. Iraq’s ballistic missile arsenal, which already proved a challenge to tackle despite using 1960s Scud technologies, was also expected to be brought several decades forwards technologically with the purchase of new high precision solid fuelled designs in the early 1990s which would have placed U.S. assets at much greater risk. Had the Kuwait crisis occurred five or ten years earlier, the Soviet Union would likely have intervened to protect Iraq as it had throughout the Cold War against Western targets across Asia and the Arab world. Moscow would have, at the very least, ensured a peaceful withdrawal of Iraqi forces while guaranteeing Iraq’s security against any post-withdrawal Western attacks. In 1990, however, Iraq faced an adversary at the height of its power both militarily and economically in one of the most unipolar moments in world history, and at a time when Baghdad was more isolated than ever. On November 27, two days before the United Nations was scheduled to vote on whether to support military action, the walls



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of the Security Council chamber were “covered with oversize colour photographs of Kuwaitis of all ages who reportedly had been killed or tortured by Iraqis.”92 Chairing the Council, the U.S. gave an audio visual presentation alleging widespread Iraqi atrocities. John R. MacArthur, reported that the presentation was loaded with anonymous charges of Iraqi thuggery, mayhem and murder. One videotaped ‘witness’ was clearly scripted to sound the ‘Saddam-is-Hitler’ theme that proved so useful to the White House. . . . It seemed that Saddam was everywhere, personally meting out punishment, torturing Kuwaitis, and bayoneting and raping women. The videotapes were interspersed with live witnesses, one of whom reiterated the baby incubator story. A Kuwaiti claiming to be a surgeon, and identified in the U.N.’s provisional transcript as ‘Dr. Issah Ibrahim,’ or Witness No. 3, explained that after the Iraqis took over ‘the hardest thing was burying the babies. Under my supervision, 120 newborn babies were buried the second week of the invasion. I myself buried 40 newborn babies that had been taken from their incubators by soldiers.’ The next day, the major media failed to mention Hill and Knowlton’s involvement with the hearings, and their news reports converted the claims of ‘witnesses’ into ‘testimony.’ Evidently no one thought to point out that the Kuwaiti spokesmen were not under oath. . . . Had they made inquiries, the U.N. reporters might have discovered that five of the seven witnesses at the U.N. that day – coached by the Hill and Knowlton team led by Lauri Fitz-Pegado – had used false names without saying they were doing so. Rather than common observers, MacArthur found that the witnesses giving fake names had various ties to the Kuwaiti government and Citizens for a Free Kuwait, and that Issah Ibrahim

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was a dentist rather than a surgeon. He later admitted his story had been false.93 The lies put to the Security Council reflected the broader metanarrative which had encompassed Western discourse on the Iraq-Kuwait issue. That day the Toronto Star published a quote from a surgeon name Mohammed, who said that he had supervised the burying of 120 new born babies in Kuwait and that he himself had buried 40 “new born babies that had been taken from their incubators by the soldiers.” Mohammed was later found not to be a doctor and to have no knowledge of the issue.94 Shortly beforehand on November 11, Kuwaiti physician Dr. Ali al-Hawil denounced doubts of the baby incubator story and claimed to have personally buried 50 babies alongside his colleagues. This was among several further alleged eyewitness accounts widely cited in the West that proved to be totally fabricated.95 On November 29 Washington gained support from the United Nations Security Council through Resolution 678 to use all necessary means to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Having recently capitulated in the Cold War, the USSR was increasingly dependent on Western aid and voted in favour.96 With China seeking to avoid confrontation with the West at a time of instability, and thus abstaining, the Western world gained UNSC legitimisation for its attack. As was demonstrated twice in the past decade, and would be again in later years, when the Western Bloc countries failed to obtain UNSC authorisation to launch attacks on other target states, they were perfectly willing to carry out offensive overseas military action without such authorisation and in direct violation of international law. Panama and Grenada, and subsequently Yugoslavia and the second war against Iraq (2003) were among the many examples. For 118 days leading up to the UNSC’s vote the United States had been redeploying over half a million personnel to the Gulf region alongside vast quantities of equipment, from battle tanks with depleted uranium shells and carrier battle groups to new F-117 stealth fighters. With such a large force built up, the momentum towards war was so great by this stage that authorisation from Congress and from the UNSC almost appeared to be



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afterthoughts. The U.S. refused Soviet offers for a joint command, ensuring that the campaign would be waged overwhelmingly by the Western powers.97 The United States initiated hostilities with an intensive aerial bombardment under Operation Desert Storm, which from January 17, 1991 saw U.S. and allied aircraft fly over 100,000 sorties and drop 88,500 tons of munitions across a range of Iraqi targets. On February 15, in a speech at the Fort Hood base in Texas, Vice President Dan Quayle emphasised the virtue of the U.S.-led war effort by stressing the atrocities allegedly committed by Iraq. “There are pictures Saddam doesn’t want us to see. Pictures of premature babes in Kuwait that were tossed out of their incubators and left to die.”98 The same claim was still being widely repeated throughout Western media. The following day, for example, in a column dedicated to maligning the “egregious” and irresponsible critics of the war, popular historian and journalist Paul Johnson wrote in Britain’s Spectator stressing Saddam Hussein’s “slaughter of 7,000 Kuwaitis – including babies torn from life-support machines which were then stolen – and his systematic stripping of this small country of all its valuables, public and private, are well authenticated.”99 Discourse regarding the highly dubious nature of these claims was only allowed to begin once the war was over. On February 24, after 38 days of aerial bombardment, U.S.led ground forces crossed into Kuwait. Facing heavily fortified Iraqi positions including an estimated 70 miles of defensive trenches, large ploughs were used to bury the defenders alive. Thus, when war correspondent Leon Daniel subsequently asked the commander of the U.S. Army First Infantry Division “where are the bodies,” he replied “what bodies?” They were all buried under several tons of sand. As U.S. Army Colonel Anthony Moreno recalled: “What I saw was a bunch of filled-in trenches with people’s arms and legs sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands.” 100 While this action was criticised in the limited coverage it did receive, there was a case to be made that it was a military necessity and much ‘cleaner’ than going into the trenches with flamethrowers and bayonets.101 Had the Iraqis perpetrated any similar act when entering Kuwait, however,

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it would have been ensured that this shaped the country’s public image and forever became associated with ‘what kind of country’ Ba’athist Iraq was. The American mass burial of live Iraq troops was quickly forgotten, and for the overwhelming majority of people it would not be permanently associated with the images of the U.S. Military or the Gulf War.102 Iraqi soldiers in trenches widely reported having been bombarded heavily with napalm, a weapon previously employed extensively in Vietnam and Korea which stuck to their skin and burned them alive. They described such attacks as “unimaginable . . . like a living hell.” When it emerged that napalm was being employed U.S. officials denied it was being used against enemy personnel, although this claim appeared increasingly tenuous as the body of evidence grew that it was being doused across Iraqi troop concentrations.103 Although horrific, napalm’s use in the Gulf was far less extreme than its uses in prior conflicts in East Asia where it was dropped in tremendous quantities by American aircraft to douse civilian population centers from end-to-end.v These American attacks, which many considered to be inhuman atrocities in their own right, were only made possible by the vilification of Iraq using fabricated atrocities in the lead up to the war. Another notable tragedy that resulted directly from the fabrication of Iraqi atrocities was the fallout from the use of depleted uranium rounds by U.S. forces in the theatre. During Operation Desert Storm an estimated 340–350 metric tons of depleted uranium was fired in battle releasing millions of grams of airborne radioactive particles with half-lives of over four billion years – meaning contamination would be effectively indefinite.104 Depleted uranium rounds were made from low-level radioactive waste left over from manufacturing nuclear fuel or warheads, and although not designed for the purpose of contamination this was a very significant side effect of their employment. As one of the v For details on the experience of death by napalm, and how it has been employed by U.S. forces in multiple conflicts, see Abrams, A. B., Immovable Object: North Korea’s 70 Years at War with American Power, Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2020 (Chapter 5: Absolute Destruction: The Ravaging of North Korea).



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densest elements on the planet – 84 percent as dense as the world’s densest element osmium – depleted uranium had applications both in tank armour and in various anti-armour and anti-bunker weapons. According to the U.S. Army, depleted uranium rounds fired by an American M1A1 Abrams tank provided “the force of a race car striking a brick wall at two hundred miles per hour, but with all of its energy compressed into an area smaller than a golf ball.”105 These weapons later saw extensive use by U.S. forces in Yugoslavia106 and Syria,107 as well as within Iraq’s own borders for years after the 2003 invasion.108 Upon impacting its target a depleted uranium round oxidises into an easily inhalable dust which can travel for at least 42 kilometres from the site of impact.109 Effects of exposure to depleted uranium contamination include an extreme rise in cancer rates, genetic abnormalities and severe deformities in children at birth.110 The element’s particularly long half-life makes contamination from it much more dangerous than that from neutron and thermonuclear bombs. This affected both Iraqis and Western personnel. As British Royal Navy Commander Robert Green stated in a paper in the New Zealand International Review, citing a range of scientific sources: Since the 1991 Gulf War, there has been a surge of unexplained illnesses, cancers and children born with genetic deformities among the Iraqi people, especially in the south near the battlefields. At the same time, both American and British veterans have reported similar health and reproductive problems, collectively known as Gulf War Syndrome. Many of their problems, particularly cancers and birth defects, seem consistent with radiation exposure. The official U.S. casualty total in 1991 was less than 300 dead and another 300 wounded or ill. Now over 8000 are dead, and over 200,000 of those same troops are claiming disability benefits. In Britain, more than 600 veterans have died and 9000 are seriously sick with multiple ailments. This amounts

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to around 30 per cent of American and 17 percent of British troops who went to the Gulf.111 Green’s conclusions were widely supported by a range of sources, which as time passed increasingly represented a majority consensus on the issue.112 A confidential UN report leaked in May 1999 notably stated regarding depleted uranium: “this type of ammunition is nuclear waste, and its use is very dangerous and harmful.”113 The Gulf War would hardly be the last time that atrocity fabrication facilitated American military offensives abroad in which depleted uranium was then very widely used. While the results of extensive use of depleted uranium rounds by U.S. forces would become clearer only with time, as is the case with all forms of nuclear contamination, the most devastating immediately visible impact of the war was the Western air campaign and in particular its targeting of Iraqi population centres. While shortages of precision guided weapons limited U.S. capabilities against tactical targets, attacks focused primarily on key civilian infrastructure targets such as water and sewage processors.114 The British military intelligence company Jane’s Information Group concluded that coalition operations had worked to “bring Iraqi’s infrastructure virtually back to where it was at the country’s birth” – back to 1921 setting back 70 years of sustained development.115 U.S. forces launched 109,390 of the 126,581 coalition air sorties, or 86 percent, with Saudi Arabia and Britain between them making up most of the reminder with over 12,000 between them.116 According to a report by the Washington Post in 1991, the purpose of the U.S. bombardment was to drive down Iraqi living standards by destroying key infrastructure such as oil refineries, electrical plants and transportation networks. Examples included the destruction of 80 percent of Iraq’s power generation capabilities and the crippling of its sewage treatment system.117 The U.S. air campaign targeted eight dams, destroying not only a major supply of hydroelectric power but also municipal water supplies and flood control. Other consequences included the emergence of widespread malnutrition and associated illnesses, and an inability to store vaccines which ended the vaccinations of



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children. Farm herds were devastated and food storage facilities were destroyed. Among the targets the U.S.-led air campaign destroyed were 676 schools, 16 chemical and petrochemical plants, seven textile factories and five engineering plants.118 As a result the population was forced to subsist on a starvation-level calorie intake at half the calories per person of the minimum standard for healthy living,119 with malnutrition rising steeply across the country.120 From an upper-middle income country, Iraqi living standards quickly plummeted with a subsequent 12 years of economic sanctions further deepening the population’s impoverishment. Living standards never recovered to pre-war levels and over 1 million of its population died as a result.121 Sanctions proved highly effective in preventing post-war recovery, and according to statistics from U.S. sources they had caused the deaths of half a million Iraqi children by 1996.122 Pulitzer Prize-winning CNN war correspondent Peter Arnett, who reported from Baghdad during the war, recalled having a very tense relationship with the U.S. Military because they did not approve of his coverage of the air campaign. Relations deteriorated, he said, “as the bombing campaign developed and I was revealing every day more excesses of bombing. There were villages [where] 20, 30, 40 houses had been destroyed. Only about 6 percent of the bombs used in the Iraq war were guided missiles, and they were mainly in Baghdad – the most high-profile target. Elsewhere in the country they were using these dumb bombs and they were devastating many localities we were visiting.” 123 When Arnett’s team filmed a bombed out Iraqi baby milk factory, U.S. intelligence claimed that it was a biological weapons facility. Arnett ridiculed the claim, stating: if this was a biological testing centre, they would not have let us walk all over the premises. Accompany us around the premises. Let us touch everything. Pick up samples such as this bag [of powdered baby milk]. We used it for coffee – that’s how confident I was. The U.S. government is perfectly capable of lying to achieve its aims in a time of national crisis – and they did. It was

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very effective because in the years that followed the Gulf War, that was the most frequently asked question: ‘what about the baby milk plant.’ And the question was always: ‘you weren’t duped, were you?’ That was the single most effective piece of military black propaganda that I’ve seen in my whole career. And I’ve been in this business for 35 years.124 Arnett was chastised as a “dupe of Saddam Hussein,” which was particularly reputationally harmful as Hussein had by then been built into a “worse than Hitler” figure primarily on the basis of fabricated atrocities attributed to him. The metanarrative surrounding Iraq meant that civilian targets could easily be portrayed as parts of menacing weapons programs to legitimise their destruction. 125 U.S. and allied justification of attacks on civilian targets on the false premise that they were part of weapons programs became increasingly common in the following years. These ranged from a cruise missile strike on one of East Africa’s largest medicine factories in Sudan in 1998, under the false pretext that it was a chemical weapons facility,126 to an Israeli attack on Syria in 2007 under the dubious claim that the target was part of a Syrian-Korean nuclear weapons program.127 By fabricating claims of enemy weapons facilities the U.S. gave itself a free hand to attack civilian targets at will – much as fabricating claims of Iraqi atrocities had allowed it to go to war. The U.S. was further able to cover up its involvement in a major disaster by blaming Baghdad, with an oil spill resulting in a 30-mile-long oil slick at sea and footage of a bird struggling in the black water used to claim that Iraq had “declared war on nature itself” by intentionally causing it. The Daily Mirror referred to it as “Saddam’s Black Sea” on its front page. William Arken, a former military intelligence officer with access to Pentagon records, stated regarding the fabrication of Iraqi environmental terrorism: I think that one of the biggest coverups of the Gulf War is the fact that the U.S. Navy and allied air forces attacked Iraq oil installations and oil tankers and didn’t



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want to acknowledge that there was a tremendous amount of controversy over that very point. And so they hid behind claims of Iraqi environmental terror to avoid a debate over whether those are legitimate targets in warfare. . . . They attacked those two oil platforms at Mina Al Bakur and also at Al Kabar, and also at the same time they attacked oil related ships. On the 18th of January, on the second day of the war, French aircraft attacked an Iraqi tanker that was at Mina Al Ahmadi on the Kuwaiti coast. And those were the very tankers that a few days later they stated were expelling their oil into the sea.128 When asked if there was a coverup, Arken replied: “Oh absolutely. There’s no doubt about it. Of course they lied about it. Have you ever read in any report that the U.S. Navy or the French Air Force attacked Iraqi oil tankers and were responsible for much of the oil that flowed into the gulf. No. Is that a coverup, is that a lie? Of course it is.” 129 The strict regulation of reporters during the war meant that many potentially scandalous incidents were not made known to the public.130 Arguably the most important military discrepancy between Iraq and the U.S.-led coalition was in intelligence gathering capabilities, an advantage the Americans exploited to the fullest and translated into massive battlefield gains. Without the support of the USSR, which at the time had far more satellites in space than any other country and would have previously been expected to at the very least provide updates on American positions and movements, Iraq’s armed forces could be described as going into battle blind and deaf relative to their adversaries.131 While its air force’s sole squadron equipped with high performance MiG-25 interceptors from the 1970s put up a strong fight and took down as many American fighters as it lost,132 it was overwhelmingly outnumbered by America’s own heavyweights, lacked supporting assets such as airborne early warning aircraft, and saw airfields quickly destroyed.133 Control of the skies allowed American air power to devastate not only Iraqi population centres, but also its

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ground forces which suffered from deficiencies in organisation, equipment and, following sustained bombardment, also morale. The Kuwait campaign was unique in the history of conventional wars fought by the U.S. Army, as while neutralising enemy ground units was traditionally primarily an Army task in this case the Air Force laid down the bulk of the firepower used against them. With Iraqi ground units deployed on Kuwait’s flat lands, often with little-to-no cover, American air units perpetrated a massacre causing well over 100,000 Iraqi military casualties in just 44 days.134 The BBC claimed up to 200,000,135 alongside thousands more civilians killed. Large numbers of Iraqi personnel seeking to leave Kuwait on the six-lane Highway 80 were killed from the air by U.S., French, British and Canadian units after a large vehicle column was trapped using cluster bombs. It came to be known as the ‘Highway of Death.’ The concerted attacks on retreating soldiers were highly controversial and came to be widely considered a serious war crime. Reports from U.S. journalists also showed disarmed and surrendering Iraqi personnel being fired on by American heavy weapons.136 American Photojournalist Peter Turnley reported U.S. personnel digging mass graves for the victims, seeing bodies scattered across the road, and a stretch of destroyed vehicles over a mile long. He stressed that Western media outlets avoided publishing the extensive footage they had of the incident.137 The Atlantic similarly referred to “the war photo no one would publish” – specifically an image which humanised an Iraqi soldier trying to pull himself over the dashboard of his truck but was incinerated in his place. It observed: The colours and textures of his hand and shoulders look like those of the scorched and rusted metal around him. Fire has destroyed most of his features, leaving behind a skeletal face, fixed in a final rictus. He stares without eyes. . . . The image, and its anonymous subject, might have come to symbolise the Gulf War. Instead, it went unpublished in the United States, not because of military obstruction but because of editorial choices . . .



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the hypnotising and awful photograph ran against the popular myth of the Gulf War as a ‘video-game war’ – a conflict made humane through precision bombing and night-vision equipment. By deciding not to publish it, Time magazine and the Associated Press denied the public the opportunity to confront this unknown enemy and consider his excruciating final moments.138 In sharp contrast to the emotive depictions Kuwaiti babies who were never slaughtered, or of tortured mannequins which CFK presented as supposed evidence of Kuwaiti suffering, the very real and often brutal deaths of Iraqis was sanitised with strict censorship and with “bloodless language” such as “surgical strikes” and “kinetic warfare.” These were far removed from the often gruesome reality on the ground.  The commander of U.S.-led coalition forces General Norman Schwarzkopf notably justified the mass killing of retreating soldiers by citing the atrocities they had allegedly committed, stating: “This was a bunch of rapists, murderers and thugs who had raped and pillaged downtown Kuwait City and now were trying to get out of the country before they were caught.”139 The New York Times similarly stressed that most of those who observed the incident “thought the Iraqis were getting only what they deserved.”140 Even after the war’s outcome was decided, the fact that fabricated atrocities vilifying the enemy had become central to the metanarrative surrounding it made almost any measure against Iraq, including the slaughter of thousands of retreating soldiers, seem acceptable.vi The ‘Highway of Death’ came at the close of the war and was one of the few parts of the conflict which the press had vi The Times noted that the U.S. Military went to considerable lengths to shape public perceptions of the massacre, including “playing down evidence that Iraqi troops were actually leaving Kuwait,” which was abundant at the time, and making tenuous claims that the disordered retreating forces, despite having orders from Baghdad to withdraw, threatened to turn around and move into Kuwait again. (Coll, Steve and Branigin, William, ‘U.S. Scrambled to Shape View of “Highway of Death”,’ The New York Times, March 11, 1991.)

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relatively free access to. As professor and award-winning journalist Ben H. Bagdikian reported: “the military learned its own lesson from Vietnam: keep wars short and keep the news media completely controlled in the opening days of the engagement. By maintaining total control of the initial image in a military action, the government can create the framework into which the public theatre fits subsequent information.” Censorship was described as “unprecedented” and “draconian,” even compared to the extreme precedent set by the Korean War. Bagdikian further elaborated: “In the opening days of the Gulf War, American news people were sequestered and forced to transmit totally controlled military versions of what was happening. After the shooting war was over and reconstruction of the realities known, once again, the major news media failed to collect all the facts and present them in a coherent way that would effectively correct the misleading and inadequate information the public had been given earlier.”141 Press seen to be overstepping their bounds were in some cases physically assaulted and arrested by the U.S. Military.142 The few parts of the war the press did gain free access to, however, they found truly horrific, and it can only be speculated how many more atrocities were committed in the preceding 40 days leading up to the Highway of Death.vii U.S. military intervention against Iraq in 1991 paved the way for over a decade of economic sanctions followed by full scale invasion of the country in 2003. This had further consequences not only for Iraq, whose population would endure several more massacres by Western hands, but also for the wider Middle East.143 vii Press censorship notably also played a vital role in covering up for the failures of multiple new American ‘wonder weapons,’ with the portrayal of their effectiveness being central to the U.S. propaganda campaign. Prominent examples were the Tomahawk cruise missile, which supposedly demonstrated never before seen precision strike capabilities, but in fact missed the large majority of its targets and sometimes hit Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and the Patriot air defence system which reportedly proved effectively useless despite the modesty of Iraq’s missile arsenal. (Postol, Theodore A., ‘Lessons of the Gulf War Experience with Patriot,’ International Security, vol. 16, no. 3, Winter, 1991–1992 (pp. 119–171).). (Gellman, Barton, ‘Gulf War Workhorses Suffer in Analysis,’ Los Angeles Times, April 10, 1992.)



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Decades of Western warfare on Iraqi soil, both economic and kinetic, were made possible by successful atrocity fabrication from August 1990 to January 1991, with Western forces having never left Iraqi territory ever since. Only once the Gulf War was over was the content of Nayrah’s testimony confirmed to have been completely false – as was the case with many other alleged Iraqi atrocities which had been reported as total certainties but lacked verifiable sources. By this stage, with Iraq lying in ruins not to recover for well over three decades and with the country’s image cemented as ‘evil’ in the Western world and beyond, the facts disproving the anti-Iraqi narratives were only an afterthought. As NBC News’ John Chancellor wrote shortly after the war ended: “The conflict brought with it a baggage train of myth and misconception, exaggeration and hyperbole. . . . Accounts of Iraqi atrocities were accepted without question. There was the tale of premature babies thrown out of incubators in a Kuwait hospital and left to die. It never happened. . . . There were facts misperceived, truth bent out of shape and a fog of myth and misconception.”144 In Kuwait City John Martin from ABC News interviewed the director of Kuwait’s primary healthcare system, Dr. Mohammed Matar, and his wife the chief of obstetrics at the maternity hospital on March 15 1991. Matar firmly denied that Iraqis had taken babies from incubators. Martin, apparently very surprised, then asked again: “But, I mean, this is very specific. Iraqi soldiers took them out of the incubators and put them on the floor to die.” “I think this is something just for propaganda,” replied Dr. Matar.145 Martin subsequently questioned the surgeon who had testified under a false name at the UN Security Council, who was in fact the dentist Ibrahim Behbehani and served as the acting director the Kuwait’s Red Crescent Society. Asking him about the incubator atrocity, Behbehani conceded: “I can’t tell you if they were taken from incubators . . . didn’t see it.” He backed off from his previous claim of supervising burials of 120 babies – although with the war premised on his lie now over this counted for very little.146 The narrative nevertheless persisted. An example was the wife of U.S. Senator John McCain, a leading advocate for military action, who as late as June 1991 insisted under questioning

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that allegations were true. She later acknowledged that she had been relying on hearsay.viii While the story was disproven, the metanarrative it created, and the way it shifted public discourse and perceptions of Ba’athist Iraq would stain that state’s image indefinitely.147 The incubator baby killings were far from isolated among Western allegations in proving to be entirely fabricated. Another was the report that Iraq had forcibly relocated 40,000 Kuwaitis to its own territory, although the actual figure was 1500–2000. Another came from Amnesty International, which had claimed in its December 19 report that “the number of extrajudicial killings runs into the hundreds and may be over 1,000.” According to senior Kuwaiti officials, the figure was “a little bit over 300.” Stories of Iraqi soldiers raping and looting at will were also seriously questioned. Paris Match, for example, had received a picture allegedly depicting Iraqis shooting blindfolded Kuwaiti resistance in Kuwait City. It later emerged that the picture was of Iraqi soldiers who had looted the city being executed by their own military as a disciplinary action – indicating zero tolerance for such conduct. Although this was discovered before U.S.-led military operations had begun, the French source notably withheld this evidence until after the war to avoid improving Baghdad’s image and undermining the West’s prevailing narrative. The editors later described their motive as follows: “it was our obligation to renounce publication so as not, in the name of the scoop, to aid the image of Saddam Hussein.”148 In contrast to Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, where premature babies in their incubators were relatively safe, many prematures were killed in Iraq by the U.S. and its allies. In July 1991 Patrick Tyler from the New York Times interviewed the director of Baghdad’s Saddam Paediatric Hospital, Dr. Qasm Ismail, who recalled that viii The false nature of the incubator babies narrative became more widely known that any other case of atrocity fabrication, partly because Iraq was defeated relatively quickly and the story could subsequently be debunked by investigations in Kuwait, but also because the campaign for war on Iraq rested particularly heavily on this one story where other campaigns saw multiple stories given similar levels of attention.



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on the first night of the Western air campaign the targeting of civilian infrastructure caused major losses. The hospital lost electricity, and as a result: “mothers grabbed their children out of incubators, took intravenous tubes out of their arms. . . . Others were removed from oxygen tents, and they ran to the basement, where there was no heat. I lost more than 40 prematures in the first 12 hours of bombing.”149 Iraqis did take babies out of incubators during the war, but they were not Iraqi soldiers at hospitals in Kuwait – rather they were Iraqi parents trying to save their children from Western attacks in Baghdad. While the Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait was seen to have concluded the conflict, the U.S., Britain and France pressed the offensive further and created two ‘no fly zones’ that prevented Iraq from operating aircraft in its own airspace. These zones had no authorisation from the United Nations Security Council and covered over 60 percent of Iraqi airspace.150 Their imposition was widely seen by experts to be a violation of international law – one which was only made possible and acceptable by the vilification of Iraq from 1990.151 Iraq would remain under tight Western and UN economic sanctions which seriously impeded post-war reconstruction, and alongside a UN arms embargo which remained in place long after the Gulf War ended this effectively eliminated the country as an independent pole in the Middle East and as a major power outside the Western sphere of influence. This remained the status quo for 12 years until a much-weakened Iraq faced a full-scale U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The U.S.-led assault in 1991, facilitated by fabricated claims of humanitarian abuses, led to a decades-long humanitarian catastrophe from which Iraq is unlikely to fully recover for at least half a century. The result was over 700,000 Iraqi deaths at a conservative estimate between 1991 and 2003,152 and over 1 million deaths between 2003 and 2008 in a second war made possible by Desert Storm.153 This did not account for the deaths and extreme deformities in children caused by depleted uranium, stunted growth of an entire generation, or the sharp decline in the quality of life seen after 1991. Iraq faced multiple further rounds of Western attacks throughout the 1990s which similarly relied heavily on fabricated

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narratives and false claims for justification. A notable example in December 1998 saw Washington and London claim that Baghdad had expelled weapons inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission, which Western-drafted resolutions at the United Nations Security Council required to be deployed to disarm the country. The alleged expulsion was used as a pretext to launch Operation Desert Fox, which added to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed over the past seven years by Western attacks with a further 2,000 Iraqi lives taken. The pretext for the attacks proved to be fabricated, with head weapons inspector Richard Butler revealing years later that it was the U.S. ambassador Peter Burleigh, acting on orders from Washington, who suggested inspectors be pulled out of Iraq to protect them from planned U.S. and British airstrikes. The withdrawal of inspectors was done in order to pave the way for attacks, and was then used to justify those same attacks which the withdrawal had been carried out to facilitate in the first place.154 In 2003 U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell repeated multiple times that Iraq had forced inspectors to withdraw, which he claimed proved Baghdad held malign intentions regarding weapons of mass destruction and justified the illegal U.S. invasion then being planned. The nature of the withdrawal was only later made public.155 A particularly notable aspect of the use of atrocity fabrication in the Gulf War was the role of Amnesty International and other Western human rights NGOs in providing legitimacy to false claims of atrocities, as this marked the starting point of a predominant trend in future Western atrocity fabrication efforts. This saw Western NGOs, under the pretext of supporting human rights, publish vilifying and very often poorly evidenced content to target a particular Western adversary whenever there was a need to turn opinion against them. While weaponisation of human rights was far from unprecedented before 1990, the use of major NGOs for this purpose, with Amnesty joined by several more over the next three decades, became common only from 1990. Western human rights NGOs followed a very consistent pattern of targeting those states whose policies undermined the interests of the Western world, and particularly those whose



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governments the West was seeking to overthrow, with criticisms generally being proportional to how hostile the target state’s relations were with the West. This had the impact not only of building public consensus in support of hostile policies, be it military action or economic sanctions, but also of delegitimising opposition to such policies by portraying those who failed to sufficiently oppose the targeted state as uncaring for human rights and ‘regime apologists.’ Such reactions to those who opposed military action against Iraq were widespread and often emotionally charged by Nayirah’s testimony and the other similar fabricated reports. The Gulf War saw Western atrocity fabrication efforts achieve a new level of sophistication, and very similar trends could be observed in multiple subsequent conflicts where similar fabrications consistently played central roles in shaping perceptions of Western adversaries.

Notes 1

Lewis, Adrian R., The American Culture of War: A History of US Military Force from World War II to Operation Enduring Freedom, Abingdon, Routledge, 2012 (p. 313). 2 ‘Opec pressures Kuwait to moderate quota demand,’ New Straits Times, July 7, 1989. Salameh, Mamdouh G., ‘Oil Wars,’ USAEE Working Paper No. 14-163, 2014. Heikal, Mohamed, Illusions of Triumph: An Arab View of the Gulf War, New York, HarperCollins, 1993 (Chapter 12: Why Kuwait?). 3 Ibid. (p. 315). 4 ‘Confrontation in the Gulf: The Oilfield Lying Below the Iraq-Kuwait Dispute,’ The New York Times, September 3, 1990. ‘It’s Time to Think Straight About Saddam,’ The New York Times, December 23, 1997. Heikal, Mohamed, Illusions of Triumph: An Arab View of the Gulf War, New York, HarperCollins, 1993 (p. 183). Nasrawi, Salah, ‘Iraq Accuses Kuwait of Violating Border, Stealing Oil,’ AP News, July 18, 1990. 5 Heikal, Mohamed, Illusions of Triumph: An Arab View of the Gulf War, New York, HarperCollins, 1993 (pp. 229–231, 239, 273). 6 Karsh, Efraim and Rautsi, Inari, Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography, New York, Grove Press, 1991 (p. 222). The Times, December 8, 1990.

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Waters, Maurice, ‘The Invasion of Grenada, 1983 and the Collapse of Legal Norms,’ Journal of Peace Research, vol. 23, no. 3, September 1986 (pp. 229–246). Berlin, Michael J., ‘U.S. Allies Join in Lopsided U.N. Vote Condemning Invasion Of Grenada,’ Washington Post, November 3, 1983. 8 Rothschild, Matthew, ‘In Panama, An Illegal and Unwarranted Invasion,’ Chicago Tribune, December 21, 1989. Maechling Jr., Charles, ‘Washington’s Illegal Invasion,’ Foreign Policy, no. 79, Summer, 1990 (pp. 113–131). Henkin, Louis, ‘The Invasion of Panama Under International Law: A Gross Violation,’ Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, vol. 29, issue 2, 1991 (pp. 293–318). 9 Washington Post, September 6, 1990. 10 Clarke, Richard A., Against All Enemies, New York, Free Press, 2004 (p. 9). 11 Iraq News Agency, August 3, 1990. 12 Financial Times, August 9, 1990. Heikal, Mohamed, Illusions of Triumph: An Arab View of the Gulf War, New York, Harper Collins, 1992 (pp. 285, 288). 13 Iraq News Agency, August 28, 1990. 14 ‘Soviets Say Iraq Accepts Kuwait Pullout Linked to Truce and End to Sanctions; Bush Rejects Conditions: War is to Go On,’ The New York Times, February 22, 1991. 15 Ibid. 16 Heikal, Mohamed, Illusions of Triumph: An Arab View of the Gulf War, New York, HarperCollins, 1993 (pp. 340–341). 17 Ibid. (pp. 310–313). 18 Ibid. (p. 318). 19 Savranskaya, Svetlana and Blanton, Thomas, ‘Gorbachev’s “Diplomatic Marathon” to Prevent the 1991 Persian Gulf War,’ NSA Archive, February 26, 2021. 20 Wells, Donald Arthur, The United Nations: States Vs International Laws, New York, Algora Publishing, 2005 (p. 86). 21 ‘Soviets Say Iraq Accepts Kuwait Pullout Linked to Truce and End to Sanctions; Bush Rejects Conditions: War is to Go On,’ The New York Times, February 22, 1991. ‘Gorbachev’s “Diplomatic Marathon” to Prevent the 1991 Persian Gulf War,’ National Security Archive, February 26, 2021. Kapeliouk, Amnon, ‘The U.S.S.R. and the Gulf Crisis,’ Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 20, no. 3, Spring, 1991 (pp. 70–78). 22 Heikal, Mohamed, Illusions of Triumph: An Arab View of the Gulf War, New York, HarperCollins, 1993 (p. 348). 23 Ibid. (pp. 269, 338). 24 Ibid. (pp. 355, 356). 25 Ibid. (p. 352). 26 Atkinson, Rick, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War, New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993 (p. 284).



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‘Soviets Say Iraq Accepts Kuwait Pullout Linked to Truce and End to Sanctions; Bush Rejects Conditions: War is to Go On,’ The New York Times, February 22, 1991. 27 Russell, Edmund, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001 (pp. 187, 188). ‘New war, old warlord,’ Time, December 11, 1950. 28 Dower, John, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, New York, Panthoen, 1986 (pp. 18, 71). Ham, Paul, Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and their Aftermath, New York, Doubleday, 2012 (p. 14). Hastings, Max, Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, New York, Harper Perennial, 2008 (pp. 39, 200, 201). Schrijvers, Peter, The GI War Against Japan: American Soldiers in Asia and the Pacific During World War II, New York, New York University Press, 2005 (pp. 212, 217). 29 Weiner, Tim, ‘History to Trump: CIA was aiding Afghan rebels before the Soviets invaded in ’79,’ Washington Post, January 7, 2019. Crile, George, Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times, New York, Grove Press, 2003. Bergen, Peter, Holy War Inc., New York, The Free Press, 2001 (p.68). Coll, Steve, ‘CIA in Afghanistan: In CIA’s Covert War, Where to Draw the Line Was Key,’ Washington Post, July 20, 1992. 30 MacArthur, John R., Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, London, University of California Press, 2004 (pp. 37–40, 56–57). 31 Peterson, Scott, ‘In war, some facts less factual,’ Christian Science Monitor, September 6, 2002. 32 Ibid. 33 Heikal, Mohamed, Illusions of Triumph: An Arab View of the Gulf War, New York, HarperCollins, 1993 (pp. 272–273). 34 Stinnett, Robert B., Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, New York, Free Press, 2000 (p. 14). 35 Bush, George H. W., Address to the Nation Announcing the Deployment of United States Armed Forces to Saudi Arabia, August 8, 1990. 36 MacArthur, John R., Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, London, University of California Press, 2004 (p. xxiv). 37 Nora Boustany, ‘Refugees Describe Iraqi Atrocities Seen in Kuwait,’ Washington Post, February 26, 1991. 38 Skopeliti, Clea, ‘Saddam Hussein “acted like Hitler” when Iraq invaded Kuwait, Thatcher said,’ The Independent, February 25, 2012. 39 MacArthur, John R., Second front: censorship and propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2005 (p. 72). 40 Raum, Tom, ‘Bush Says Saddam Even Worse Than Hitler,’ AP News, November 1, 1990.

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41 Keeble, Richard, The Myth of Saddam Hussein: New Militarism and the Propaganda Function of the Human Interest Story, New York, Routledge, 1998 (p. 73). 42 Braun, Lindsay Frederick, ‘Suez Reconsidered: Anthony Eden’s Orientalism and the Suez Crisis,’ The Historian vol. 65, no. 3, Spring 2003 (pp. 535–561). ‘Hitler On the Nile,’ The New York Times, February 25, 2003. 43 MacArthur, John R., Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, London, University of California Press, 2004 (p. 70). 44 Knipp, Kersten, ‘Ayatollah Khamenei and the “final solution” in the Middle East,’ Deutsche Welle, May 24, 2020. 45 Furchtgott-Roth, Harold, ‘Time To Take On Kim Jong Un,’ Forbes, December 22, 2014. Gamel, Kim, ‘Biden calls North Korean leader a “thug” but says he’d meet Kim if denuclearization is agreed,’ Stars and Stripes, October 23, 2020. Martirosyan, Lucy, ‘Trump-Kim summit gave “master manipulator” a global platform, says defector,’ PRI, June 13, 2019. Weiss, Bari, ‘Kim Jong-un Isn’t Tough. North Koreans Are.,’ The New York Times, June 14, 2018. 46 Kolb, Charles, ‘Xi Jinping’s China and Hitler’s Germany: Growing parallels,’ The Hill, January 6, 2021. Goradia, Prafull, ‘Hitler and Xi,’ The Statesman, February 7, 2021. 47 Kelley, Michael B., ‘12 Prominent People Who Compared Putin To Hitler Circa 1938,’ Business Insider, May 22, 2014. ‘Putin “will use World Cup like Hitler’s Olympics”, agrees Johnson,’ BBC News, March 21, 2018. Johnson, Paul, ‘Is Vladimir Putin Another Adolf Hitler?,’ Forbes, April 16, 2014. Sharman, Jon, ‘Even Hitler didn’t “sink” to using chemical weapons like Assad has, Sean Spicer claims,’ The Independent, April 12, 2017. Fisk, Robert, ‘Syria report: One is reminded of Nazi Germany,’ The Independent, October 5, 2016. Saberi, Fred, ‘From Nazism to Islamism in Europe,’ The Jerusalem Post, July 2, 2019. 48 ‘Deception on Capitol Hill,’ The New York Times, January 15, 1992. MacArthur, John R., ‘Remember Nayirah, Witness for Kuwait?,’The New York Times, January 6, 1992. 49 Cockburn, Alexander, ‘Right Stuff,’ London Review of Books, vol. 13, no. 3, February 1991. Walton, Douglas, Appeal to Pity: Argumentum Ad Misericordiam, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1997 (p. 129). Boyack, Connor, Feardom: How Politicians Exploit Your Emotions and What You Can Do to Stop Them, Salt Lake City, Libertas Press, 2014. 50 International Human Rights: Problems of Law, Policy, and Practice, New York, Wolters Kluwer, 2018 (p. 581). 51 ‘171 Americans Fly to Freedom : Refugees Fear for Husbands, Tell of Iraqi Atrocities,’ Los Angeles Times, September 7, 1990. 52 MacArthur, John R., Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, London, University of California Press, 2004 (pp. 54, 55).



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53 Ibid. (p. 49). Prokop, Dieter, ‘Kriegsberichterstattung: Geschichte, Produktionsbedingungen und Produktstrukturen’ [War coverage: history, production conditions and product structures], Mass Communications Lecture, Winter 1999/2000 (https://www.audimax.de/fileadmin/ hausarbeiten/medienwissenschaft/Hausarbeit_Medienwissenschaft_ Kriegsberichterstattung_Geschichte_Produktionsbedingungen_und_ Produktstrukturen_ahx1130.pdf). 54 MacArthur, John R., Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, London, University of California Press, 2004 (pp. 49–51). 55 ‘Nayirah,’ 60 Mintues, CBS News Transcript, vol. XXIV, no. 18, January 19, 1992 (p. 11). 56 Rowse, Aruther E., ‘Teary Testimony to Push America Toward War,’ The San Francisco Chronicle, October 18, 1992 (p. 9/Z1). 57 Andersen, Robin, A century of media, a century of war, Bern, Peter Lang, 2006 (pp. 170–172). 58 ‘Jury Says 3 Took Kuwaiti Money To Promote War,’ Washington Post, July 8, 1992. 59 Sriramesh, Krishnamurthy and Vercic, Dejan, The Global Public Relations Handbook: Theory, Research, and Practice, Mahwah, Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003 (p. 418). 60 Rowse, Arthur E., ‘How to build support for war,’ Columbia Journalism Review, September–October 1992.  Sriramesh, Krishnamurthy and Vercic, Dejan, The Global Public Relations Handbook: Theory, Research, and Practice, Mahwah, Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003 (pp. 418, 419). 61 Krauss, Clifford, ‘Congressman Says Girl Was Credible,’ The New York Times, January 12, 1992. 62 Pratt, Cornelius, ‘Hill & Knowlton’s two ethical dilemmas,’ Public Relations Review, vol. 20, no. 3, 1994 (p. 288). Boyack, Connor, Feardom: How Politicians Exploit Your Emotions and What You Can Do to Stop Them, Salt Lake City, Libertas Press, 2014 (p. 45). 63 Sriramesh, Krishnamurthy and Vercic, Dejan, The Global Public Relations Handbook: Theory, Research, and Practice, Mahwah, Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003 (p. 418). 64 Krauss, Clifford, ‘Congressman Says Girl Was Credible,’ The New York Times, January 12, 1992. 65 Becker, Jo and McIntire, Mike, ‘Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal,’ The New York Times, April 23, 2015. Helderman, Rosalind S. and Hamburger, Tom, ‘Foreign governments gave millions to foundation while Clinton was at State Dept,’ The Washington Post, February 25, 2015. Ballhaus, Rebecca, ‘Newly Released Emails Highlight Clinton Foundation’s Ties to State Department,’ Wall Street Journal, August 10, 2016.  ‘Will Clinton’s experience be a liability?,’ The Washington Post, March 8, 2015.

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66 ‘Deception on Capitol Hill,’ The New York Times, January 15, 1992. 67 ‘Jury Says 3 Took Kuwaiti Money To Promote War,’ Washington Post, July 8, 1992. 68 Walton, Douglas, Appeal to Pity: Argumentum Ad Misericordiam, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1997 (p. 136–137). Krauss, Clifford, ‘Congressman Says Girl Was Credible,’ The New York Times, January 12, 1992. 69 MacArthur John R., ‘How False Testimony and a Massive U.S. Propaganda Machine Bolstered George H.W. Bush’s War on Iraq,’ Democracy Now, December 5, 2018. 70 Maggie O’Kane interview with Andrew Whitley in: ‘Riding the Storm how to tell lies and win wars’ (Documentary), Channel 4, January 1996. 71 ‘Nayirah,’ 60 Mintues, CBS News Transcript, vol. XXIV, no. 18, January 19, 1992 (p. 8). MacArthur John R., ‘How False Testimony and a Massive U.S. Propaganda Machine Bolstered George H.W. Bush’s War on Iraq,’ Democracy Now, December 5, 2018. 72 Regan, Tom, ‘When contemplating war, beware of babies in incubators,’ Christian Science Monitor, September 6, 2002. 73 Cockburn, Alexander, ‘Right Stuff,’ London Review of Books, vol. 13, no. 3, February 1991. 74 ‘Deception on Capitol Hill,’ The New York Times, January 15, 1992. 75 Frankel, Glenn, ‘Amnesty International Accuses Iraq of Atrocities in Kuwait,’ Washington Post, December 19, 1990. ‘Iraqi Atrocities Cited by Amnesty,’ The Globe and Mail, December 19, 1990. 76 MacArthur, John R., Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, London, University of California Press, 2004 (pp. 66, 67). 77 ‘Iraqi Atrocities Cited by Amnesty’, The Globe and Mail, December 19, 1990 (pp. A1, A2). 78 Rubinstein, Alexander, ‘Amnesty International’s Troubling Collaboration with UK & US Intelligence,’ Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, January 19, 2019. 79 Cockburn, Alexander, ‘Sifting for the Truth on Both Sides: War brings propaganda, all designed to protect government,’ Los Angeles Times, January 17, 1991. 80 ‘Nayirah,’ 60 Mintues, CBS News Transcript, vol. XXIV, no. 18, January 19, 1992 (p. 8). 81 Walton, Douglas, Appeal to Pity: Argumentum Ad Misericordiam, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1997 (p. 129). 82 ‘Mideast Tensions; Excerpts From Speech By Bush at Marine Post,’ The New York Times, November 23, 1990. 83 Walton, Douglas, Appeal to Pity: Argumentum Ad Misericordiam, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1997 (p. 129). 84 Krauss, Clifford, ‘Congressman Says Girl Was Credible,’ The New York Times, January 12, 1992. 85 ‘Mideast Tensions; Excerpts From Speech By Bush at Marine Post,’ New York Times, November 23, 1990.



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86 MacArthur, John R., Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, London, University of California Press, 2004 (p. 69). 87 Ibid. (p. 68). 88 Ibid. (p. 47). 89 Ibid. (p. 47). 90 Lewis, Adrian R., The American Culture of War: A History of US Military Force from World War II to Operation Enduring Freedom, Abingdon, Routledge, 2012 (p. 312). 91 The USSR would approve the first export of its top fighter the Su-27 in December 1990, just four months after Iraq’s invasion, and had the conflict not broken out Iraq would have been considered a leading client over the next five years. The Su-27 was consistently found in American testing in the 1990s to provide significant advantages over U.S. Air Force fighters. The MiG-31 interceptor, R-73 air-to-air missile and S-300PMU-1 air defence system were among the other assets Iraq would have likely acquired in the 1990s that could have very seriously complicated an American air campaign. Lilley, James and Shambaugh, David L., China’s Military Faces the Future, Abingdon, Routledge, 2015. (pp. 96–99). Department of Defense Appropriations for 2002: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations House of Representatives, One Hundred and Seventh Congress, First Session, Subcommittee on Defense, Washington D.C., U.S. Government Printing Office, 2004 (p. 813). Gordon, Yefim, Sukhoi Su-27, Hinckley, Midland Publishing, 2007 (p. 524). Lake, Jon, Su-27 Flanker: Sukhoi Superfighter, London, Osprey, 1992 (Introduction). 92 Rowse, A. E., ‘How to Build Support for War’, Columbia Journalism Review, vol. 31, 1992 (p. 20). 93 MacArthur, John R., Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, London, University of California Press, 2004 (pp. 64, 65). 94 ’20/20,’ ABC, January 17, 1992. 95 MacArthur, John R., Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, London, University of California Press, 2004 (pp. 62, 63). 96 Kramer, Mark, ‘Food Aid to Russia: The Fallacies of US Policy,’ PONARS Policy Memo 86, Harvard University, October 1999. 97 Johns, Michael and Kosminsky, Jay, ‘Bush To Gorbachev: Choose Between Saddam and the West,’ Heritage Foundation, August 30, 1990. 98 Seagren, Chad W. and Henderson, David R., ‘Why We Fight: A Study of U.S. Government War-Making Propaganda,’ The Independent Review, vol. 23, no. 1, Summer 2018 (pp. 69–90). 99 Johnson, Paul, ‘Rebuttal from the Pews,’ The Spectator, February 16, 1991. 100 ‘U.S. Army Buried Iraqi Soldiers Alive in Gulf War,’ The New York Times, September 15, 1991. Sloyan, Patrick J., ‘“What I saw was a bunch of filled-in trenches with people’s arms and legs sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands”,’ The Guardian, February 14, 2003.

200 ATROCITY FABRICATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 101 ‘Riding the Storm - how to tell lies and win wars’ (Documentary), Channel 4, January 1996. 102 ‘U.S. Army Buried Iraqi Soldiers Alive in Gulf War,’ The New York Times, September 15, 1991. Sloyan, Patrick J., ‘“What I saw was a bunch of filled-in trenches with people’s arms and legs sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands”,’ The Guardian, February 14, 2003. 103 ‘Riding the Storm – how to tell lies and win wars’ (Documentary), Channel 4, January 1996. Pyle, Richard, ‘Controversial Vietnam Weapon Used Differently in Desert, U.S. Says,’ AP News, February 23, 1991. Jensen, Robert, ‘The Gulf War Brought Out the Worst in Us,’ Los Angeles Times, May 22, 2000. 104 Peterson, Scott, ‘Depleted Uranium Haunts Kosovo and Iraq,’ Middle East Report, Summer 2000, no. 215, Summer 2000 (p. 14). ‘Depleted Uranium Hurt Gulf Vets: Pentagon,’ Peace Research, vol. 30, no. 3, August 1998 (p. 109). Duraković, A., ‘On depleted uranium: gulf war and Balkan syndrome,’ Croat Medical Journal, vol. 42, no. 2, April 2001 (pp. 130–134). 105 Atkinson, Rick, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War, New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993 (p. 251). 106 ‘“Up to 15 tons of depleted uranium used in 1999 Serbia bombing” – lead lawyer in suit against NATO,’ RT, June 13, 2017. 107 Oakford, Samuel, ‘The United States Used Depleted Uranium in Syria,’ Foreign Policy, February 14, 2017. 108 Edwards, Rob, ‘U.S. fired depleted uranium at civilian areas in 2003 Iraq war, report finds,’ The Guardian, June 19, 2014. 109 Peterson, Scott, ‘Depleted Uranium Haunts Kosovo and Iraq,’ Middle East Report, no. 215, Summer 2000 (p. 14). 110 Hindin, Rita and Brugge, Doug and Panikkar, Bindu, ‘Teratogenicity of depleted uranium aerosols: A review from an epidemiological perspective,’ Environmental Health, vol. 4, no. 17, August 26, 2005. Doyle, P. et al., ‘Miscarriage, stillbirth and congenital malformation in the offspring of UK veterans of the first Gulf war,’  International Journal of Epidemiology, vol. 33, no. 1, 2004 (pp. 74–86). Sen Gupta, Amit, ‘Lethal Dust: Effects of Depleted Uranium Ammunition,’ Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 36, no. 5/6, February 2001 (pp. 454– 456). Peterson, Scott, ‘Depleted Uranium Haunts Kosovo and Iraq,’ Middle East Report, no. 215, Summer 2000 (p. 14). 111 Green, Robert, ‘Depleted Uranium and Human Health: Another View,’ New Zealand International Review, vol. 31, no. 2, March/April 2006 (pp. 25– 28). 112 Wan, Bin and Fleming, James T. and Schultz, Terry W. and Sayler, Gary S., ‘In Vitro Immune Toxicity of Depleted Uranium: Effects on Murine Macrophages, CD4+ T Cells, and Gene Expression Profiles,’ Environmental Health Perspectives, vol. 114, no. 1, January 2006 (pp. 85–91).



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Fahey, Dan, ‘The Final Word on Depleted Uranium,’ The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, vol. 25, no. 2, Summer 2001 (pp. 189–201). Peterson, Scott, ‘US reluctance to talk about DU,’ Christian Science Monitor, October 5, 1999. ‘Depleted Uranium Hurt Gulf Vets: Pentagon,’ Peace Research, vol. 30, no. 3, August 1998 (p. 109). 113 Peterson, Scott, ‘US reluctance to talk about DU,’ Christian Science Monitor, October 5, 1999. 114 ‘Operation desert storm,’ Adelphi Papers, vol. 33, no. 282 (pp. 24–51). ‘Saddam’s Iraq: Key Events,’ BBC News (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/ spl/hi/middle_east/02/iraq_events/html/desert_storm.stm). 115 Cullen, Tony and Foss, Christopher F., Jane’s Land-Based Air Defence 1992–93, Couldson, Jane’s Information Group, 1992 (p. 11). 116 Keaney, Thomas A. and Cohen, Eliot A., Gulf War: Air Power Survey Summary Report, Washington DC, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993. 117 Gellman, Barton, ‘Allied Air War Struck Broadly in Iraq,’ Washington Post, June 23, 1991. 118 Clark, Ramsey, War Crimes: A Report on United States War Crimes Against Iraq, Washington DC, Maisonneuve Press, 1992 (pp. 10–14). 119 Joy, Gordon, Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2010 (p. 25). 120 Woertz, Eckart, ‘Iraq under UN Embargo, 1990–2003, Food Security, Agriculture, and Regime Survival,’ The Middle East Journal, vol. 73, no. 1, Spring 2019 (p. 101). Blaydes, Lisa, State of Repression: Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2018 (p. 122–124). 121 ‘Iraq conflict has killed a million Iraqis,’ Reuters, January 30, 2008. 122 ‘Sanctions Blamed for Deaths of Children,’ Lewiston Morning Tribune, December 2, 1995. Stahl, Lesley, ‘Interview with Madeline Albright,’ 60 Minutes, May 12, 1996. 123 Maggie O’Kane interview with Peter Arnett in: ‘Riding the Storm - how to tell lies and win wars’ (Documentary), Channel 4, January 1996. 124 Ibid. 125 Ibid. 126 Lacey, Marc,  ‘Sudan Says, “Say Sorry,” but U.S. Won’t,’ The New York Times, October 20, 2005. 127 Abrams, A. B., World War in Syria: Global Conflict on Middle Eastern Battlefields, Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2021 (pp. 40, 41). Jonathan, Marcus, ‘US Syria claims raise wider doubts,’ BBC News, April 25, 2008. 128 Maggie O’Kane interview with William Arken in: ‘Riding the Storm - how to tell lies and win wars’ (Documentary), Channel 4, January 1996. 129 Ibid. 130 McNair, Brian, An Introduction to Political Communication, Abingdon, Routledge, 2011 (pp. 194–197).

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MacArthur, John R., Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, London, University of California Press, 2004 (Chapter 1: Cutting the Deal). 131 Broder, John M., ‘Schwarzkopf’s War Plan Based on Deception,’ Los Angeles Times, February 28, 1991. 132 International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance, Volume 90, 1990 (p. 106). 133 ‘When MiG-25 Foxbat Shot Down F-15 Eagle,’ Fighter Jets World, June 16, 2022. ‘Top Six Air to Air Engagements of the Gulf War: How Iraq and the U.S. Went Head to Head With F-15s, Foxbats and More,’ Military Watch Magazine, February 20, 2021. ‘Soviet MiG-25 Foxbat vs. American F-15 Eagle: Which Was Better in Air to Air Combat?,’ Military Watch Magazine, October 15, 2020. 134 Cooper, Patrick, ‘Coalition deaths fewer than in 1991,’ CNN, Junee 25, 2003. 135 ‘Flashback: 1991 Gulf War,’ BBC News, March 20, 2003. 136 Hersh, Seymour M.,  ‘Overwhelming Force: What happened in the final days of the Gulf War?,’ The New Yorker, May 22, 2000 (pp. 48–82).  137 Turnley, Peter, ‘The Unseen Gulf War,’ The Digital Journalist, December 2002. 138 DeGhett, Torie Rose, ‘The War Photo No One Would Publish,’ The Atlantic, August 8, 2014. 139 Giordono, Joseph,  ‘U.S. troops revisit scene of deadly Gulf War barrage,’ Stars and Stripes, February 23, 2003. 140 Coll, Steve and Branigin, William, ‘U.S. Scrambled to Shape View of “Highway of Death”,’ The New York Times, March 11, 1991. 141 MacArthur, John R., Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, London, University of California Press, 2004 (pp. xv-xvi). 142 Sloyan, Patrick J., ‘“What I saw was a bunch of filled-in trenches with people’s arms and legs sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands”,’ The Guardian, February 14, 2003. 143 De Vita, Lorena and Taha, Amir, ‘Gulf War: 30 years on, the consequences of Desert Storm are still with us,’ The Conversation, February 26, 2021. Kinsley, Michael, ‘How Bush Wars Opened the Door for ISIS,’ Vanity Fair, April 14, 2015. Church, Lindsay, ‘ISIS Success in Iraq: A Movement 40 Years in the Making,’ University of Washington, Jackson School of International Studies, 2016 (https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/ bitstream/handle/1773/36464/Church_washington_0250O_16069. pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y). de Gracia, Danny, ‘August 2 1990 Persian Gulf War Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm Begins,’ Constituting America, July 17, 2020. 144 MacArthur, John R., Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, London, University of California Press, 2004 (p. 76). 145 Ibid. (pp. 73, 74).



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146 Ibid. (pp. 73, 74). 147 Ibid. (p. 75). 148 Ibid. (pp. 75–76). 149 Tyler, Patrck E., ‘Basra Journal; Iraqi Hospitals Struggle With Wounds of War,’ The New York Times, July 5, 1991. 150 Meixler, Louis, ‘Saddam Challenges No-Fly Zones,’ AP News, January 4, 1999. 151 Timothy P. McIlmail, ‘No-Fly Zones: The Imposition and Enforcement of Air Exclusion Regimes over Bosnia and Iraq,’ Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review, vol. 17, 1994 (pp. 35–83). Boileau, Alain E., ‘To the Suburbs of Baghdad: Clinton’s tension of the Southern Iraqi No-Fly Zone,’ ILSA Journal of International & Comparative Law, vol. 3, issue. 3, article 5, 1997. Gellman, Barton, ‘U.S. Planes Hit Iraqi Site After Missile Attack,’ Washington Post, December 29, 1998. 152 500,000 children dead only from 1991–1995: ‘Sanctions Blamed for Deaths of Children,’ Lewiston Morning Tribune, December 2, 1995. Stahl, Lesley, ‘Interview with Madeline Albright,’ 60 Minutes, May 12, 1996. Up to 200,000 military casualties, 1991: ‘Flashback: 1991 Gulf War,’ BBC News, March 20, 2003. 153 ‘Iraq conflict has killed a million Iraqis: survey,’ Reuters, January 30, 2008. 154 Butler, Richard,  Saddam Defiant: The Threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Crisis of Global Security, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000 (p. 224). Clark, Neil, ‘Fools no more,’ The Guardian, April 19, 2008. 155 ‘U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation to the U.N. Security Council on the U.S. case against Iraq,’ CNN, February 5, 2013.

Chapter Five

The Yugoslav Wars Target: Yugoslavia Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact and the communist government of Albania, Yugoslavia by 1992 remained the only communist state in Europe and one of the few major industrial powers in the world outside the Western sphere of influence. The country had emerged in 1918 as a union of the Croat, Serb and Slovene Slavic peoples who had formerly been ruled under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the belief that historical divisions needed to be overcome and unity pursued to safeguard all four from external imperial interests. Albanians and Macedonians also represented significant minority groups in the union, which had a 5 percent Muslim minority as a legacy of Ottoman imperial rule. Following four years of Nazi German occupation from 1941, communist resistance fighters led by Josip Broz Tito formed the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in November 1945. Yugoslavia quickly established itself as an independent pole in the Cold War and was a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement alongside Indonesia, Egypt, India and Ghana. Like the other four founders, the country would come under Western attack in an attempt to forcefully bring it into the Western sphere of influence, with a lack of tolerance for non-aligned states being a consistent part of the Western Bloc’s Cold War foreign policy. Attacks on non-aligned states included extensive support for coups by the CIA (Ghana,1 Indonesia2), direct Western military assaults (Yugoslavia, Egypt, Indonesia), and assassination attempts against their leaders (India in 1955, Indonesia in the 1950s and 1962, Egypt in 1957).3 As the closest to the USSR geographically, meaning it was for decades shielded from the West by the Warsaw Pact, Yugoslavia was the last to come under attack with 204



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the campaign against it only gaining momentum from the early 1990s. After the Cold War’s end and the declaration of an ‘end of history,’ under which global economic and political westernisation were portrayed as inevitabilities,4 Yugoslavia remained an outlier in an otherwise politically unified Europe. Despite stagnation in the 1980s, its industries remained competitive internationally and living standards by metrics from education to life expectancy and employment rates were high. Furthermore, unlike most of the former Warsaw Pact, the country appeared highly unlikely to be absorbed into the U.S.-led NATO military alliance and was by far the most formidable European military outside it. An independent pole in the world with a relatively advanced industrial economy, Yugoslav industries ranging from automobiles and pharmaceuticals to household appliances and agriculture were competing with Western brands internationally – competition which would disappear if the state were destabilized, dismantled and set back developmentally. With leading industries all widely dispersed, and different regions responsible for providing different primary and secondary inputs, a divided country would lack the industrial potential of the union state.5 Yugoslav petroleum, mining and in particular the substantial mineral wealth in Kosovo,6 were also major prizes which could strengthen Western power if the country’s territory could be placed under Western client governments to provide access on favourable terms. Germany and the United States played leading roles in realizing Yugoslavia’s partitioning,7 and framed separation as a solution to economic stagnation while generously supporting ethno-nationalist factions. The West’s allies within various Yugoslav regions were accordingly encouraged to pursue separatist goals. As American political scientist and Yale PhD Michael Parenti noted: “the Western powers were deeply involved in inciting civil war and secession in the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] before that time [1991–95]. One of the earliest and most active sponsors of secession was West Germany, which first openly championed Yugoslavia’s dismemberment in 1991, but was giving Slovenia and Croatia every encouragement long before then.”

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Western powers subsequently increasingly involved themselves in “financing the secessionist organisations and creating the politico-economic crisis that ignited the political strife,” according to Parenti, who highlighted regarding the process: “once the bloodletting starts, the cycle of vengeance and retribution takes on a momentum of its own. In order to hasten the discombobulation of Yugoslavia, the Western powers provided the most retrograde, violent, separatist elements with every advantage in money, organisation, propaganda, arms, hired thugs, and the full might of the U.S. national security state at their backs. Once more the Balkans were to be balkanised.” 8 After building ties with and generously supporting separatist factions in Yugoslavia’s republics, threats were made to cut off aid unless the country held unscheduled elections in 1990. Washington further stipulated that these elections were to be conducted within each republic and not at the federal level. The U.S. in particular had a very long history of manipulating foreign elections to ensure that candidates favourable to Western interests prevailed,9 or else cancelling or preventing them when victories for pro-Western candidates could not be engineered.10 In Yugoslavia the National Endowment for Democracy and various CIA front organisations funnelled vast funds to support the election campaigns of separatist political groups favourable to Western interests. These parties, openly described in U.S. media as “pro-West” and as the “democratic opposition,” also received considerable campaign support from Western advisors, and after overwhelmingly outspending their local opponents on campaign they won elections in every republic other than Serbia and Montenegro.11 Slovenia was the first region to leave the union, and in 1991 closed its borders and banned any protests against its moves towards secession. Croatia soon followed suit and both quickly began to receive Western military advisors and sizeable arms shipments from Western countries and particularly from Germany. German instructors further engaged in combat with the Yugoslav military when fighting alongside separatist militias. The European Community then moved to call for Yugoslavia’s separation into “sovereign and independent republics,” while the U.S. passed the



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1991 Foreign Operations Appropriations Act which offered aid to individual republics but not to the Yugoslav central government – thereby further weakening federal ties. When Croatia and Slovenia subsequently declared their full independence as separate states within one day of one another in June 1991, Germany and the Vatican were the very first to recognise them as nation-states. Unlike Slovenian, Croat or Muslim minority groups, which quickly became dominated by separatist factions that fell in line with Western designs for a partitioning of Yugoslavia, the Serb ethnic minority was far from compliant. Serbs were the only group to have given up an independent nation-state in order to enter into a unified state when Yugoslavia was formed, and Serbia and Montenegro remained the most strongly supportive of the federation. Serbs were not only the largest and most influential ethnic group, but also had a proportionately higher percentage of membership in the ruling communist party than any other. In the 1989 elections Serbs and Montenegrins supported the former communists in their respective republics, with Serb workers having also led opposition to an austerity program imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to service Yugoslav debt. Serbia accordingly refused IMF-prescribed privatisation of state assets.12 The entrenched historical religious animosity between the Western world and the Orthodox Christian world to which the Serbs belonged was also seen by some analysts to have been a further factor leading the Serbs to be singled out for targeting. As the union increasingly fell apart Serb-majority regions in separatist provinces, such as Croatia’s Krajina district, sought to secede from the newly seceded countries and re-join Yugoslavia.13 In the case of Krajina, Croatia responded with a military operation by separatist militias which now formed the post-independence armed forces and with Western support, including airstrikes, caused thousands of casualties among Serb civilians and sent 225,000 more into flight as refugees. Many of those who fled were subsequently strafed from the air, with the operations described years later in 1999 as “the largest ethnic cleansing” of the Yugoslav civil war.”14 The Independent reported in August 1995: “The rearming and training of Croatian forces in preparation for

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the present offensive are part of a classic CIA operation: probably the most ambitious operation of its kind since the end of the Vietnam war.”15 Similar support was provided on an even greater scale to separatist forces from the Muslim and Croat ethnic groups in the self-declared Bosnian republic,16 and by 1997 the CIA station in Bosnia was reputed to have become one of the largest in Eastern Europe.17 Hired to represent the interests of Croat, Bosnian Muslim and later Kosovar Albanian separatist groups, the public relations firm Ruder & Finn played a central role in the campaign to turn world opinion against the Yugoslav state and the Serbs. The firm’s director James Harff highlighted how disseminating sensationalist reports caused a drastic increase in public support for U.S. military intervention in Bosnia. He told French journalist Jacques Merlino in April 1993 that he was proud of having manipulated overseas Jewish opinion, which was otherwise set to oppose the Islamic and Croat state projects due to the former’s close ties with radical Islam and the latter’s historical collaboration with Nazi Germany and extermination of Jews in the 1940s. Regarding Jewish opinion towards Western-aligned far-right separatist forces, he said: “our challenge was to reverse this attitude and we succeeded masterfully,” with a campaign focused on portraying Serbs as the new Nazis and capitalising on Roy Gutman’s reports of death camps (see below). The ideological predecessors of the Croat separatist leadership had provided the most manpower to the Nazi Germanled war effort in the 1940s, committing atrocities against Jews and Serbs too extreme even for the Nazis themselves.18 Harff highlighted how this past and the similarly extremist position of the Muslim Bosnian leadership posed difficulties to public relations efforts: To have managed to put Jewish opinion on our side. This was a sensitive matter, as the dossier was dangerous [when] looked at from that angle. President [of Croatia Franjo] Tudjman was very careless in his book, Wastelands of Historical Reality. Reading his writings one could accuse him of anti-Semitism. In Bosnia the



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situation was no better: President Izetbegovic strongly supported the creation of a fundamentalist Islamic state in his book The Islamic Declaration. Besides, the Croatian and Bosnian past was marked by real and cruel anti-Semitism. Tens of thousands of Jews perished in Croatian camps, so there was every reason for intellectuals and Jewish organisations to be hostile towards the Croats and the Bosnians. Our challenge was to reverse the attitude and we succeeded masterfully. . . . When the Jewish organisations entered the game on the side of the [Muslim] Bosnians, we could promptly equate the Serbs with the Nazis in the public mind. Nobody understood what was happening in Yugoslavia. The great majority of Americans were probably asking themselves in which African country Bosnia was situated. By a single move we were able to present a simple story of good guys and bad guys which would hereafter play itself. . . . Almost immediately there was a clear change of language in the press, with use of words with high emotional content such as ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘concentration camps,’ which evoke images of Nazi Germany and the gas chambers of Auschwitz. No one could go against it without being accused of revisionism. We really batted a thousand in full.19 When Merlino highlighted: “When you did this, you had no proof that what you said was true. All you had were two Newsday articles,” Harff replied: “Our work is not to verify information. . . . Our work is to accelerate the circulation of information favourable to us. . . . We are professionals. We had a job to do and we did it. We are not paid to moralise.”20 The receptivity of Western media to almost any anti-Serb story was key to facilitating Ruder & Finn’s success. Deputy chief of the Yugoslav desk at the U.S. State Department George Kenney gave a sharper comment regarding the fabricated nature of Western claims, stating: “The U.S. government doesn’t have proof of any genocide and anyone reading

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the press critically can see the paucity of evidence, despite interminably repeated claims and bloodcurdling speculation.”21 Michael Parenti similarly stated: “The charge of genocide was reiterated so relentlessly in regard to Bosnia that evidence became irrelevant,” stressing that an objective analysis would indicate that portrayals in the West which developed into a broad consensus on the issue were very far removed from reality.22 Former deputy commander of the U.S. Military’s European Command Charles Boyd noted the following in Foreign Affairs regarding the way Serb minority was vilified in the West during clashes with Western backed Croat and Muslim separatist forces in Croatia and Bosnia: “The popular image of this war is one of unrelenting Serb expansion. Much of what the Croatians call ‘the occupied territories’ is land that has been held by Serbs for more than three centuries. The same is true of most Serb land in Bosnia – what the Western media frequently refer to as the 70 per cent of Bosnia seized by rebel Serbs. In short the Serbs were not trying to conquer new territory, but merely to hold onto what was already theirs.”23 Boyd highlighted that it was U.S. policy to covertly approve offensives by Muslim militant groups that destroyed the ceasefire Washington claimed to support, and thereby “encouraged a deepening of the war.”24 Mass expulsions by the Croatian government of its Serb minority on ethnic grounds also received Western encouragement and support.25 As a result Stephen Harper, among other analysts who were generally supportive of the Western position, conceded that “the commonplace Western media position that [Yugoslav President Slobodan] Milosevic was more inclined to ultranationalism than the presidents of Bosnia or Croatia rests on political demonology [demonisation] rather than sober historical analysis.”26 The Serb minority’s land holdings in Bosnia were reduced from 65 to 43 percent as a result of the Western-backed campaign, with Belgrade forced under considerable pressure to agree to a ceasefire on highly unfavourable terms under the Western-brokered Dayton Accords. This finalised the breakup of Yugoslavia and succession of Croatia and Bosnia, leaving Serb minorities in these new states in highly precarious positions. The



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remainder of Yugoslavia – a federation of Serbia and Montenegro – was placed under harsh Western economic sanctions which fuelled hyperinflation and malnourishment, collapsed the country’s healthcare system and blocked access to raw materials vital for the production of medicines.27 As Foreign Affairs noted in May 1999, economic sanctions could be considered the world’s leading weapon of mass destruction due to the simultaneous destruction wrought on Yugoslavia and on Iraq, and could have “contributed to more deaths during the post-Cold War era than all the weapons of mass destruction throughout history.”28 Western Atrocity Fabrication Targets the Serb Minority As the Western powers sought to more strongly and openly align themselves against the now predominantly Serb Yugoslav government, as well as the interests of the Serb minorities in the seceded territories of Croatia and Bosnia, vilification using fabricated atrocities became increasingly essential. Slobodan Milosevic, who became president of Yugoslavia from July 1997, was among those to highlight that Western powers focused heavily on media and information warfare to control political narratives both globally and within Yugoslavia itself. He stated in April 1999, at a time when Western warplanes were opening fire on media outlets and television infrastructure across the country: Your government is running two wars against Yugoslavia. Against our people. One is military war and the other is media war or if you like it better, propaganda war. Propaganda war started long before military war, and its goal is to satanize [demonise] this country, our people, leadership of this country, individuals, and whatever was needed to create, artificially of course, public opinion in United States which will be supportive to aggression they committed later.29 Vilification through atrocity fabrication served to justify a range of hostile measures ranging from support for further

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partitioning of Yugoslavia and arming and training separatist militias, to bombing media sites in Belgrade and dropping cluster bombs across Serb areas. The most notable fabricated Serb atrocities were allegations of mass rape of civilians from other minorities – a narrative that would strongly shape perceptions of the Yugoslav state and Serb people internationally throughout the war and for decades to come. From 1991 Serbs were portrayed as pursuing an officially sanctioned policy of mass rape, with the Serb minority in Bosnia said to have raped between 20,000 and 100,000 women from the Muslim majority. With Bosnian Serb forces having numbered only around 30,000 personnel or less, many of whom were engaged in high intensity combat, these claims appeared highly dubious. They were nevertheless widely re-reported and given considerable airtime in Western media. The New York Times belatedly ran a small retraction that “the existence of ‘a systematic rape policy’ by the Serbs remains to be proved,” but inevitably far more people read the original striking headlines than the one retraction.30 Although claims that Serb forces had raped 20,000–100,000 Muslims were widely circulated,31 hearings held by the European Community’s Committee on Women’s Rights in February 1993 rejected them due to a lack of evidence. Representatives from the United Nations War Crimes Commission and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees concluded at the hearings there was insufficient evidence to sustain charges of a Serbian mass-rape campaign – although this did not stop such claims from shaping public opinion across much of the world towards the Yugoslav situation.32 One widely reported story depicted a Bosnian Serb commander instructing his forces to “go forth and rape” – although the source of the quote could never be traced and the commander’s name was never produced.33 Western media outlets repeatedly referred to ‘rape camps’ allegedly set up as part of an ‘ethnic breeding’ campaign in which thousands of captive Muslim women were allegedly impregnated and forced to give birth to half Serb children.34 After hostilities ceased and UN forces occupied all of Bosnia-Herzegovina, however, evidence of the existence of



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the mass rape camps never materialised. The waves of pregnant or recently pregnant victims supposedly treated at Bosnian hospitals, and the associated medical records, were non-existent, with rape-produced births being very small in number. Agence France Presse reported that in Sarajevo “Bosnian investigators have learned of just one case of a woman who gave birth to a child after being raped,” while Amnesty International reported it “has never succeeded in speaking with any of the pregnant women.”35 Although it was suggested that there appeared to be very few rape victims because they were stigmatised by local culture, which left women unwilling to come forward, international aid agencies notably rendered confidential assistance and never asked victims to go public – but only to be interviewed anonymously and receive medical care. Considering this, the discrepancy with the claim of 20,000 or more rape victims was particularly stark. If tens of thousands of women were keeping their treatment a secret so well – this raised the question of how Western journalists and Western-aligned Bosnian and Croatian government officials could have known about them or estimated such a figure in the first place. Substantial evidence of mass rapes involving tens of thousands of women was never produced. Although some rapes were committed by all sides, available evidence indicates that the victims numbered in the dozens rather than the tens of thousands and were not part of an organised or systematic policy of genocide or ‘ethnic breeding’ by any party. Perpetrators of rape were notably not restricted to local factions, and after the war American military personnel in former Yugoslavia were found to have taken girls “not a day over twelve [years old]” as sex slaves – in the words of an American who had bought such a girl and kept her at home while working there. As Army veteran Ben Johnson, who worked as a military contractor in Yugoslavia, recalled regarding the trafficking of sex slaves: “you could get basically any girl you wanted. Lot of people said you can buy a woman and how good it is to have a sex slave at home.”36 Rapes and child rapes committed by Western-aligned forces, and particularly by Western personnel themselves, inevitably received negligible coverage.

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A representative from Helsinki Watch noted that reports of mass rapes originated with the Croatian and Bosnian governments and had no credible support. Chief correspondent of the London Observer, Nora Beloff, claimed she elicited “an admission from a senior German official that there is no direct evidence to support the wild figures of rape victims.” The official in charge of the Bosnian desk in the German Foreign Affairs Ministry admitted that all such reports came either from Bosnian government sources or from the Catholic charity Caritas, which relied entirely on Bosnian Muslim and Croat sources without independent corroboration.37 As stories of Serb atrocities were increasingly widely accepted by Western populations, European media outlets outdid themselves in the gruesome nature of their allegations. Even among the Western media, however, it was the British press which fabricated the most extreme claims. The BBC, for one, informed its millions of listeners that Serb snipers were under orders to single out children for targeting, and were paid 2,700 French Francs for every child killed.38 The London Daily Mirror took this even further, and alongside Germany’s Bud am Sonntag and Italy’s La Repubblica reported that a Bosnian woman was “forced to give birth to a dog” – a bizarre and biologically incredible story supported by lurid fabricated accounts of fiendish Serbian gynaecologists implanting canine foetuses into her womb.39 German parliamentary deputy Stefan Schwarz told stories in the Bundestag of Serbian “successors to Mengele” who forcibly implanted dog embryos in women, claiming that a videotape would corroborate his claim. A year later he admitted that no such tape existed – but again the retraction gained much less attention than the original claim. Schwarz had gained instant fame by telling stories of Serbs roasting children in ovens, carrying out burnings and castrations and using poison gas among many other atrocities. None were supported by evidence. For his extreme claims of enemy misconduct, which made for shocking headlines and could quickly turn public opinion, Schwarz became a very popular source with the Western press.40 Complementing stories of rape camps, dog births, poison gas and almost any kind of other imaginable horror, equally unsubstantiated Western allegations of Serbian ‘death camps’ were



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widespread. Evoking the memory of Nazi Germany and its allies’ Holocaust in the 1940s, American reporter Roy Gutman led efforts to portray the Serbs as the ‘new Nazis.’ A notable example came on the front page of Newsday in August 1992, which bore the large headline ‘Bosnian Death Camps’ and opened with: “The Serbian conquerors of northern Bosnia founded two concentration camps where more than a thousand civilians have been killed or died of hunger, and thousands are being kept until death follows. . . . In one of the camps, over a thousand men are locked up in metal cages.” As was far from uncommon for fabricated accounts, Gutman relied on anonymous sources – in this case an ex-prisoner who said: “I saw ten young men lying in a trench. Their throats were slit, their noses cut off and their genitals torn.”41 Those allegedly exterminated in the death camps were, according to the narrative, burned in cremation furnaces and turned into animal feed.42 British newspapers were quick to follow Gutman’s lead in publishing similar stories, followed by claims that Bosnian Serbs had executed more than 17,000 Muslim and Croatian prisoners. The Sun columnist Richard Littlejohn described the Serbs as “the Nazis of the 1990s,” while the Daily Mail referred to the alleged death camps as “Serbia’s Nazi-style attempts at ‘ethnic purification’.”43 Leading British leftist politician Ken Livingstone made one of the most dramatic and misleading descriptions, stating: “As the Serbs slaughter their way across Bosnia, Europe is seeing the first real attempt at genocide since Hitler murdered six million Jews.”44 The Independent later similarly compared the Serbs to the Nazis to describe them as “a challenge to the collective security of the whole continent.”45 The French humanitarian NGO Medecins du Monde even spent $2 million on a publicity campaign promoting juxtaposed pictures of Hitler and President Milosevic, while maxing extensive use of highly misleading barbed wire pictures taken by ITN (see below).46 The narrative of equating Serbia with Nazi Germany was promogulated across Western media and by multiple Western officials, with any reluctance to bomb Yugoslavia equated with allowing Nazi death camps to continue operating.47

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Roy Gutman’s extreme horror stories played a central role in influencing public opinion in the West and beyond, with his particularly gruesome and debased stories being among the most effective.48 When UN forces gained access to all of BosniaHerzegovina, however, they failed to unearth any evidence to support the existence of death camps with metal cages, cremation furnaces, mass graves or the starved mutilated corpses – the existence of which Western reporting had presented as a certainty.49 Gutman would later play a major role in a very similar campaign to vilify the government of Syria, which by the early 2010s had succeeded Yugoslavia and the Serbs as a primary target for Western fabrication of wartime atrocity stories. He was accused by a number of journalists and scholars of whitewashing the crimes of NATO-backed insurgent groups and allowing a very strong opinion bias to influence his work.50 The importance of Gutman’s publications was largely a result of its popularity with Western media outlets, which consistently very actively promoted them. This led British journalist Joan Phillips to retrace Gutman’s steps on the ground, which represented one of very few cases of members of the Western press making serious efforts to verify allegations against the Serbs. Phillips discovered that Gutman had visited Serbian camps only after publishing articles describing them as death camps. A visit to the Trnopolje camp, a death camp akin to Birkenau according to Gutman, was not even entirely a detention camp, with many of its inmates having entered willingly to find safety from the fighting in nearby villages. Omarska camp, meanwhile, was run by civil authorities as a temporary holding centre, with Gutman’s story about it resting solely on the testimony of one man who himself admitted that he had not witnessed any killings.51 Phillips also determined that Gutman’s article on the Brcko camp, where 1,350 people were supposedly slaughtered, also relied on the testimony of just one individual who claimed he had been imprisoned there.52 A notoriously unreliable Bosnian government source was the only confirmation. Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović would later concede that the stories of Serb death camps had been fabricated



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with the aim of bringing about a NATO assault to support separatist groups from the air.53 Investigating further, Phillips found that while Gutman did journey to the Manjaca detention site, which was another facility in the hands of the supposedly genocidal Serbs, he had toured it and interviewed prisoners who, although complaining about the food, gave no indication that torture or executions were taking place. Indeed, Serb forces seemed to be respecting the Geneva Conventions, with Phillips reporting that the International Red Cross had consistently had access to Manjaca from the time it opened while many of those held were prisoners of war being kept for future prisoner exchanges. Similar camps with similar conditions were seen in Muslim and Croat areas, and while at times crowded there was never any substantial evidence of unusual conduct. Nonetheless, Western coverage portrayed standard Serb prison camps as the new Auschwitz while giving little indication that the almost identical camps of Western-aligned forces even existed. In 1992 photographs were widely published by Western media outlets allegedly showing mistreated Bosnian Muslim prisoners in Serb camps. They subsequently proved to be staged. At the Trnopolje refugee camp, for example, Western journalists and photographers deliberately placed themselves in a small barbedwired enclosure which fenced in a utility shed, while the Muslim men were photographed standing outside. The pictures cleverly gave the impression the men were behind barbed wire. Furthering the imagery evoking the liberation of the Nazi death camps, Western media outlets singled out a small number of emaciated men from among the well fed and healthy majority and photographed them individually behind barbed wire. One such image was prominently displayed on the cover of Time among several other Western publications. Another such prisoner, who appeared on the cover of Newsweek, was identified as a Serb, Slobodan Konjevic, who had been arrested by Serb forces for looting – although his criminal and ethnic backgrounds were left out in order to portray his clearly poor health as a result of ethnic cleansing

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and Auschwitz-like conditions. His skinny frame was the result of over ten years of tuberculosis.54 First Force Commander and Head of Mission of the United Nations Forces deployed in the former Yugoslavia in 1992–1993, Lieutenant General Satish Nambiar, himself stated regarding Western allegations of genocide: “with 28,000 forces under me and with constant contacts with UNHCR and the International Red Cross officials, we did not witness any genocide beyond killings and massacres on all sides that are typical of such conflict conditions. I believe none of my successors and their forces saw anything on the scale claimed by the media.”55 While Serbs, Croats, Muslims, and Albanians all accused their territorial rivals of genocide, supporting and magnifying allegations against Serbs proved effective in aligning public opinion behind the Western world’s geopolitical interests.56 As inter-ethnic conflict escalated within Croatia and Bosnia, Serb militias committed a number of war crimes and massacres, but these were portrayed as being totally unprovoked where they were often reprisals for similarly and often more brutal Croat and Bosnian militias’ massacres of Serb civilians. The Chair of a Holocaust survivors organisation John Ranz, for one, took an interest in the Yugoslav conflict and questioned the serious double standards determining which war crimes were given attention and which were conveniently ignored. He thus questioned why secret indictments were made against the entire government of Serbian Krajina, and war crimes charges openly levelled against its leader Milan Martic, while Croatian war crimes on a much greater scale through the same region were never mentioned. Similarly, when Muslim militias slaughtered hundreds of Serbs near Srebrenica, it was vital for the Western narrative not to mention this and only to discuss Serb atrocities. This was not atrocity fabrication, but rather gross misrepresentation of events by portraying them in isolation and concealing the crimes of Western-aligned parties.57 The vast numbers of Serb refugees and racially motivated attacks on their population centres were consistently ignored in the West throughout the war to provide a one-sided account favouring



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Western-aligned Bosnian and Croat parties which themselves had a great deal of blood on their hands.58 Former White House press secretary and director of the Council on Foreign Relations Bill Moyers produced a special documentary on alleged Serb war crimes which aired on PBS in 1999 and again the following year. He made many very notable claims, including that in the city of Tuzia Serb forces had stored “more than a thousand bodies in a mine” after perpetrating a genocidal mass killing. No evidence was provided to substantiate this despite the area being highly accessible since the fighting had ended. Moyers stated multiple times that 7,414 Bosnian Muslims were executed by Serb forces in Srebrenica area, claiming that thousands of Bosnian men and boys were separated from their female family members and shot. How such a precise figure was arrived at was highly uncertain, but Moyers conceded that only seventy bodies had been identified. To explain the vast discrepancy between the two body counts, one which was 100 times greater than the other and indicative of ethnic cleansing rather than an ordinary toll from warfare, Moyers claimed that Serbs reburied bodies in secondary graves to conceal them. He offered no details as to how Serbs could have buried and then located, dug up and reburied the other 7,344 bodies during a difficult and often chaotic military campaign without leaving a trace – or when or where this happened. Nor did he explain why the initial grave sites could not be found, or why secondary mass graves were also impossible to locate. As American political scientist Michael Parenti asked rhetorically regarding Moyers’ somewhat unrealistic claim of a well-hidden second group of graves: “When it came to hiding bodies, what did the Serbs know the second time that they kept forgetting to do the first time?”59 Several individuals familiar with the situation on the ground in the Srebrenica commune, where the most widely publicised massacre of the war did take place and after which Bill Moyers named his documentary, highlighted the highly misleading nature of Western coverage. The massacre occurred in July 1995, five months before the signing of the Dayton Agreement which largely concluded hostilities in Bosnia and Croatia. The most

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notable omission from the Western narrative was that the siege and massacre of Muslims at Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb militias was preceded by a large-scale attack by Muslim militants which razed fifty Serb villages in Srebrenica and Bratunac, and massacred more than 1,200 Serb women, children and elderly people while leaving more than 3,000 wounded.60 The Chief of Staff of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Yugoslavia, Canadian Major General Lewis MacKenzie, was among those critical of prevailing Western portrayals of the war.i He observed: “As the Bosnian Muslim fighters became better equipped and trained, they started to venture outside Srebrenica, burning Serb villages and killing their occupants before quickly withdrawing to the security i Intelligence cables from Canadian peacekeepers to the country’s National Defence Headquarters, released in 2022, highlighted that they predicted the “insurmountable” goal of “satisfying Muslim demands will be the primary obstacle in any peace talks.” They emphasized continued “outside interference” in the peace process, namely the U.S. “encouraging Izetbegovic to hold out for further concessions” and “clear U.S. desires to lift the arms embargo on the Muslims and to bomb the Serbs” which were “serious obstacles to ending the fighting.” “Serbs have been the most compliant with the terms of the ceasefire,” they affirmed, while stressing that Muslim militias’ expectations for supporting NATO airstrikes meant they were “not giving peace talks a chance, just going hell for leather,” and consistently launching broadsides into Serb minority areas in violation of the ceasefire. While Muslim units sought to “increase Western sympathy by provoking an incident and blaming the Serbs,” by contrast “most of the Serb activity has been defensive or in response to Muslim provocation.” Regarding how U.S.-backed Muslim militias sought to fabricate Serb attacks and ceasefire violations, the Canadian observers cabled: “The Muslims are not above firing on their own people or UN areas and then claiming the Serbs are the guilty party in order to gain further Western sympathy. The Muslims often site their artillery extremely close to UN buildings and sensitive areas such as hospitals in the hope that Serb counter-bombardment fire will hit these sites under the gaze of the international media…. We know that the Muslims have fired on their own civilians and the airfield in the past in order to gain media attention… Muslim forces outside of Sarajevo have, in the past, planted high explosives in their own positions and then detonated them under the gaze of the media, claiming Serb bombardment. This has then been used as a pretext for Muslim ‘counter-fire’ and attacks on the Serbs.” The cables’ contents bore a strong contrast to Western portrayals of the conflict. (‘UNPROFOR Intelligence Reports,’ Canada Declassified >)



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provided by the UN’s safe haven. These attacks reached a crescendo in 1994 and carried on into early 1995.” MacKenzie stressed that the Serb move on Srebrenica was provoked by the need to end attacks by Western-aligned Muslim militias, that these attacks on Serb villages had killed at least as many Serbs as the Muslims who were killed in the reprisals, and that by sparing women and children the Serbs could not be considered guilty of genocide despite Western claims to the contrary.61 Indeed, with Srebrenica’s location making it vital to the formation of a separate Bosnian Muslim state, and with just 25 percent of its population belonging to the Serb minority while 73 percent were Muslims, it was far more plausible that proponents of a purely Islamic state would seek to ethnically cleanse the Orthodox Christian Serb minority than that the minority would attempt genocide against a population three times their number. The presence of foreign jihadist militias among the ranks of Bosnian Muslim forces, many of which had been set up with Western support to fight the Afghan government the previous decade, 62 made reports of their genocidal conduct more credible considering the extreme atrocities they had committed in Afghanistan.63 America’s chief Balkans peace negotiator Richard Holbrooke himself testified that deployment of Arab jihadists from Afghanistan was key to ensuring the survival of Western-aligned Muslim militias in that conflict.64 Britain’s Spectator observed that after the fall of the Afghan government in 1992: many Arabs, in the words of the journalist James Buchan, were left stranded in Afghanistan ‘with a taste for fighting but no cause.’ It was not long before some were provided with a new cause. From 1992 to 1995 the Pentagon assisted with the movement of thousands of mujahedin and other Islamic elements from Central Asia into Europe, to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs. The Bosnia venture appears to have been very important to the rise of mujahedin forces, to the emergence of today’s cross-border Islamic terrorists who think nothing of moving from state to state in the

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search of outlets for their jihadist mission. In moving to Bosnia, Islamic fighters were transported from the ghettos of Afghanistan and the Middle East into Europe; from an outdated battleground of the Cold War to the major world conflict of the day; from being yesterday’s men to fighting alongside the West’s favoured side in the clash of the Balkans. If Western intervention in Afghanistan created the mujahedin, Western intervention in Bosnia appears to have globalised it. . . . The Pentagon’s secret alliance with Islamic elements allowed mujahedin fighters to be ‘flown in,’ though they were initially reserved as shock troops for particularly hazardous operations against Serb forces.65 Vilifying the State and Whitewashing Extremists: Western Coverage of Yugoslav Separatists As the separation of Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia was achieved the focus of the campaign against Yugoslavia shifted to within the Serbian republic itself – namely the southern Kosovo region. Forming the heart of a new insurgency against continued Yugoslav and Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) separatist group received very considerable support from U.S. and its allies, most notably Germany and Turkey from the mid-late 1990s. Much like Bosnian Islamic groups, the Liberation Army was also bolstered by large numbers of foreign jihadists many of them trained in Al Qaeda terror camps in Afghanistan.66 The group made its debut by bombing camps housing Serbian refugees from wars in Croatia and Bosnia in February 1996. It was described by Jane’s at the time as acting indiscriminately and as a force that “does not take into consideration the political or economic importance of its victims, nor does it seem at all capable of seriously hurting its enemy, the Serbian police and army. Instead, the group has attacked Serbian police and civilians arbitrarily at their weakest points.”67 In contrast to the Yugoslav republic which had its origins in the anti-Nazi guerrilla movement of the 1940s, the KLA was a direct successor to Italian-backed fascist militias during the Second World War.68



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Western efforts to divide Kosovo from what remained of Yugoslavia, and from Serbia which it was an integral region of, centred on forcing the Yugoslav armed forces to withdraw from the territory while simultaneously strengthening the KLA. As noted by director of the British-American Security Information Council Dan Plesch, Yugoslavia’s neighbour Albania had already become “a military colony, with a status in relation to the United States similar to that of some South American countries or the Philippines in the past” after its communist government was overthrown, with much the same fate expected for Albanianmajority Kosovo should it be partitioned.69 Indeed, by the midlate 1990s other Yugoslav successor states had already begun to host tens of thousands of NATO personnel including 60,000 in Bosnia-Herzegovina and 16,500–20,000 in Macedonia.70 It was predicted that the result of Western efforts to separate Kosovo from Serbia could be a ‘Greater Albania’ firmly under U.S. and NATO influence.71 The KLA sought to establish an ethnically pure Albanian state, with Serbs and other minorities singled out for targeting. A notable example was that 90,000 people of the Roma minority were forced to flee from Kosovo under attacks from the Westernbacked militants.72 Western support for the KLA thus mirrored the approach in Croatia and Bosnia, with a 1999 paper in the International Journal observing that “the main result of Western intervention in Bosnia was the creation of a minority-free client state in Croatia and the establishment of a NATO-run protectorate comprising ‘ethnically cleansed’ statelets in Bosnia.”73 KLA members and affiliates featured very prominently in delegations sent for talks on the territory’s future, and despite the organisation’s record the U.S. State Department noted in 1999 regarding its intentions to help the KLA come to power in Kosovo: “the United States is moving quickly to help transform the Kosovo Liberation Army from a rag-tag band of guerrilla fighters into a political force. . . . Washington clearly sees it as a main hope for the troubled province’s future.”74 Indeed, under the U.S.-backed Rambouillet Agreement of 1999 the KLA had been set to form the backbone of Kosovo’s police force.75

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Although portrayed as freedom fighters until after the Western military campaign against Yugoslavia ended in 1999, the KLA’s war crimes were well documented by both Western and international sources. Aside from ties to Islamist terror groups, this included widespread organised rapes of Serb, Roma and pro-government Albanian women,76 attacks on Serbian cultural sites including centuries old churches, at times using mortar bombs,77 racially motivated massacres and disappearances of Serbs,78 and the use of child soldiers. Ambassador and chief prosecutor at The Hague’s International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia Carla Del Ponte, who formerly served as the Swiss attorney general, reported that the KLA relied on organ trafficking to earn revenues. Citing evidence obtained by Hague Tribunal investigators, she reported that this included the targeting of Serb prisoners for forced organ harvesting.79 Member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and Swiss state prosecutor Dick Marty cited a figure of 300 Serb prisoners victimised in this way, and tied former KLA political leader Hashim Thaçi, who by that time had become Kosovan prime minister, to the harvesting.80 NATO did not initially demand outright independence for Kosovo, but rather the creation of a transitionally autonomous protectorate with the establishment of a separate state structure safeguarded by Western militaries – a state of affairs which would pave the way for the KLA to then declare independence.81 Former State Department Yugoslavia desk officer George Kenney observed in 1998 regarding the expected nature of the KLA-run protectorate which the West was working to create: “It will have a pan-Albanian and Islamist orientation, overlaying a culture steeped in the tradition of extended patriarchal families, blood vengeance, and an incomprehension of women’s rights.”82 The ethnically Albanian ethno-nationalists NATO empowered ensured that Kosovo was cleansed of its non-Albanian populations, with Serbs in particular slaughtered, forced to flee, or worse. 164,000 Serbs and Roma fled Kosovo by mid-1999 with the KLA’s killings and abductions seen by foreign observers as intended to terrorise them into leaving to create an ethnically pure Albanian state. This



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was a goal which the KLA’s predecessors, the Nazi collaborators of the 1940s, had also sought to achieve.83 The KLA relied heavily on funds from the narcotics trade and trafficking in human slaves to fund its operations against Yugoslav forces, although Western media outlets only began to give meaningful coverage to this after the war was over. Police records in other European states, as well as multiple independent investigations, consistently provided strong evidence for this connection. With one fifth of all sex slaves in the world passing through the Balkans and 80 percent of all Europe’s heroin being imported by Kosovar Albanian groups, the revenues of KLAassociated organised crime were substantial.84 These groups benefitted considerably from Western support to realise Kosovo’s separation from Serbia and Yugoslavia, which allowed them to continue their illicit activities unchecked as they formed the leadership of the new independent Kosovo.85 As Mother Jones observed in early 2000 regarding Kosovo’s drug trade in particular: “With [Yugoslav leader Solobodan] Milosevic gone, and no one in control, the former freedom fighters are now transforming the province into a major conduit for global drug trafficking . . . in the six months since Washington enthroned the Kosovo Liberation Army in that Yugoslav province, KLA-associated drug traffickers have cemented their influence. . . . In Kosovo, it’s hard to separate a legal organisational structure from an illegal one.”86 Militiamen from allied drug cartels notably fought as part of the KLA against the Yugoslav government.87 Among those attesting to the KLA’s role as one of the world’s leading drug traffickers were France’s Geopolitical Observatory of Drugs, Germany’s Federal Criminal Agency, Europol, Jane’s Intelligence Review and even the U.S. Chief Negotiator and architect of the Rambouillet Agreement Christopher Hill.88 Regarding prevailing attitudes in the American leadership towards the KLA and its activities, a Congressional expert who monitored the drug trade stated a few months after hostiles ended: “There is no doubt that the KLA is a major trafficking organisation. But we have a relationship with the KLA, and the administration doesn’t want to damage [its] reputation. We are partners.

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The attitude is: The drugs are not coming here, so let others deal with it.” 89 The KLA’s nature was increasingly acknowledged in the West after 1999 once the war effort to bring it to power was over and Yugoslavia had suffered its final defeat. British Member of Parliament and member of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom, Alan Clark, for one, compared the KLA to the “the Contras . . . and other groups who were armed by the CIA” to stress that they were “exactly the sort of people British service men should never fight alongside” due to their extreme abuses.90 British Special Air Service (SAS) units on the ground nevertheless provided training and operated alongside the KLA.91 As early as February 1998 President Bill Clinton’s special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, described the KLA on the basis of its conduct in Kosovo as “without any questions, a terrorist group.”92 “I know a terrorist when I see one and these men are terrorists,” he stated on a separate occasion.93 Expediently overlooking this reality, the drug traffickers, slave traders and jihadist terrorists which made up the KLA were not only whitewashed, but lionised, which helped to justify massive Western material support and close military cooperation for the war against the deeply vilified Yugoslav state. A confidential report by NATO’s North Atlantic Council stated that the KLA was “the main initiator of violence” in Kosovo and “launched what appears to be a deliberate campaign of provocation” which led to the outbreak of hostilities with Yugoslav government forces. These hostilities in turn paved the way for NATO military intervention.94 Other Western assessments of KLA activities consistently came to similar conclusions.95 James Bissett, who served as Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia for much of the 1990s, noted that the CIA and the British SAS trained the KLA “to foment an armed rebellion in Kosovo.” He stressed regarding the goal of supporting the KLA and the way they operated: “The KLA terrorists were sent back into Kosovo to assassinate Serbian mayors, ambush Serbian policemen and do everything possible to incite murder and chaos. The hope was that with Kosovo in flames NATO could intervene.”96 Germany, too, had as early as 1996 begun training the militants who later became the KLA.97



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In 1998–99 the KLA escalated attacks to kill or ‘disappear’ as prisoners all manner of targets associated with the Yugoslav state or the Serb ethnic group, ranging from police and postal employees to Serb farmers. Approximately half of their victims were ethnic Albanians loyal to the Yugoslav state, many of whom had their villages burned by the KLA. Yugoslav counterinsurgency efforts responding to these attacks by well-armed and highly trained militants, in which hundreds of soldiers were killed, were portrayed in the West not only as repression, but even as a Serb genocide against the ethnic Albanian population.98 Such claims had little grounding in reality but were valuable for Western efforts to gain a pretext for military intervention to more directly support the KLA. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, perhaps the leading proponent for Western military action against Yugoslavia, referred to the Serbs as “set on a Hitler-style genocide equivalent to the extermination of the Jews during World War Two,” with the Western war effort described as part of “a great moral crusade.”99 “It is no exaggeration to say that what is happening is racial genocide, something we had hoped we would never again experience in Europe. Thousands have been murdered, 100,000 men are missing, and hundreds forced to flee their homes and the country,” he claimed in May 1999.100 The U.S. State Department echoed these claims, stating that Yugoslav forces were “conducting a campaign of forced population movement not seen in Europe since WW2.” The department and the U.S. Information Agency similarly claimed that hundreds of thousands of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian population had been massacred by government forces.101 Once genocide had been alleged and such claims widely re-reported across Western media, the proponents of war could on the basis of these claims frame a NATO assault as Blair did: “There are no half measures to Milosevic’s brutality. There can be no half measures about how we deal with it. He is determined to wipe a people from the face of his country. NATO is determined to stop him. And we will. We are united in our determination to right this wrong and reverse ethnic cleansing.”102

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Much like allegations made to vilify the West’s adversaries across other Yugoslav regions, those against government forces in Kosovo had little substance to them. As observed by American political analyst and author of multiple assessments of the Yugoslav wars, Professor Noam Chomsky: “the term genocide, as applied to Kosovo is an insult to the victims of Hitler. In fact, it’s revisionist to an extreme. If this is genocide, then there is genocide going on all over the world. And Bill Clinton is decisively implementing a lot of it. If this is genocide, then what do you call what is happening in the southeast of Turkey? The number of refugees there is huge.”103 Alleged Yugoslav government genocide was not the only fabrication which served to provide pretext for a Western military campaign, with Western portrayals of the Rambouillet peace talks in February-Mach 1999 also serving to frame a Western attack as unavoidable. The talks were portrayed as having failed due Belgrade’s unwillingness to grant Kosovo greater autonomy which, although it infringed greatly on Yugoslavia and Serbia’s sovereignty and right to self-govern, was central to Western demands. British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Robin Cook claimed that “the reason they [the Yugoslav state] refused to agree to the peace process was that they were not willing to agree to the autonomy of Kosovo, or for that autonomy to be guaranteed by an international military presence at all.”104 This portrayal was highly misleading for several reasons. By February 1999 Serbia had already agreed to most of the autonomy proposals, and even to allow UN peacekeeping forces to deploy to Kosovo.  The Yugoslav government had not been expected to comply with these somewhat intrusive terms, but such a peace settlement did have the potential to stabilise the situation, undermine the power of Western-aligned separatist factions in Kosovo, and ultimately leave the territory as part of what remained of the Yugoslav state. With engineering military intervention in Kosovo widely seen to have been a key foreign policy objectiveii of the Bill ii President Milosevic stated regarding the failure of the talks and the role the U.S. allegedly left to the KLA-dominated Kosovar Albanian delegation: “In Rambouillet, as I said to you, we are not talking to Albanians, we



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Clinton administration for months before the talks even started,105 it was imperative for Western designs to have the Rambouillet talks fail and thus be able to portray Belgrade as rejecting peace – thereby providing the pretext for Western military action against it. U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright and her British counterpart Secretary Cook thus moved to insert new terms into the Rambouillet accord which were so provocative and unacceptable that they would ensure Belgrade would reject them. As a result, Appendix B in the seventh chapter of the document insisted on an occupation of Kosovo by NATO forces, rather than neutral UN forces which Belgrade had accepted. It took this further by also insisting that NATO military aircraft and ground forces would have “unrestricted access” to all of Yugoslavia – terms few countries would accept. As France’s Le Monde Diplomatique observed 20 years later in 2019: “inflexibility was not always on the side you would expect: the Serbs agreed to an autonomous government, free elections, and the release of all political prisoners. But the West also wanted to impose NATO troops.” 106 The full text of the Rambouillet document was kept secret from the public, meaning that world opinion could be shaped to see the Yugoslav government, rather than NATO states, as opposing peace and having unreasonable demands. The extreme nature of the Western terms was only exposed weeks after the military campaign had begun, by which time Yugoslavia already lay in ruins.107 NATO’s Bombing of Yugoslavia: War Crimes to Achieve Humanitarian Ends Under the pretext of preventing an alleged but non-existent genocide, and on the basis that all peace terms had been rejected are talking to Americans who would like to take over our territory for themselves and for NATO – and Albanians were just an excuse for that. They were keeping them in a side room to be their alibi for doing these crimes which your Government is committing against our country and our people.” The Western goal, according to Milosevic, was always aggression for which Albanian separatists provided a convenient pretext. (Interview with President Slobodan Milosevic by Dr Ron Hatchett, transmitted on Houston-KHOU-TV 21.00–22.00 CDT, April 21, 1999.)

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by Belgrade, NATO commenced an intensive 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia on March 24, 1999. Lacking authorisation from the United Nations or from the Yugoslav government for these attacks, or any argument that it was acting in self-defence, the Western assault was a crime of aggression against a sovereign state – considered the supreme international crime.108 The Western alliance had launched limited strikes on Yugoslavia previously, the first in 1995 to support attacks by U.S.-trained Croat forces, but the new air assault was far larger in scale and was far more focused on non-military targets.109 20,000 tons of bombs were dropped in 40,000 sorties, with the munitions used being approximately equivalent to the payload of one of the nuclear warheads dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Yugoslavia was one of four countries the U.S. had attacked from the air in the span of just a few months, with Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq also being targeted at the time. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labour, Harold Koh, met with the leaders of several U.S. human rights groups to explain how the Pentagon and President Clinton believed human rights concerns should be the driving force behind the Western bombings. He expressed hopes that human rights groups would support the mission and promised that State Secretary Albright could meet with them in person in the near future if they agreed to do so. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and others subsequently provided very considerable support to indirectly endorse and legitimise the campaign through their reporting, much as they had eight years prior against Iraq.110 A significant number of analysts decried the West’s “selective humanitarian concern” in claiming that alleged abuses against the Albanian minority in Kosovo warranted a military campaign, as while Yugoslavia appeared to be singled out for challenging Western hegemony, minorities in Western-aligned countries were faced far more desperate situations without intervention.111 From the ongoing civil war in Sri Lanka taking 100,000 lives,112 to internal conflict in Congo deemed the world’s “deadliest since World War 2,”113 and Turkey’s ethnic cleansing of Kurdish villages,114 it appeared to many that humanitarian military intervention was



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only conducted when such campaigns could further Western geopolitical interests.iii Highlighting the absurdity of the precedent set by the Western assault and the fact that it could never be applied consistently, Israeli Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon highlighted that if his country’s Arab minority in the Galilee region declared autonomy, as KLA-affiliated separatists did in Kosovo, would NATO not then need to attack Israel?115 Despite the target being a socialist state, figures on the American right similarly pointed out that the pretext to attack was so absurd that there was nothing to stop similar strikes on Israel over its Arab minority or the U.S. over its own minority issues if the principle was applied equally.116 Indeed, after the bombings of 1999, Yugoslav citizens frequently argued to illustrate their sense of injustice that just as NATO had intervened to separate Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, Yugoslavia needed to intervene protect the Mexican minority in Texas which they claimed suffered more serious cultural discrimination and economic adversity than Albanians in Kosovo ever had. If the rationale NATO had used for its assault were applied consistently, they claimed, then foreign military action was urgently needed to make Texas an independent country as a safe haven for Mexican Americans. While the argument for ‘liberating’ Mexican Americans was ludicrous, it served to highlight how nonsensical the Western pretext for war appeared to many observers.117 NATO conducted multiple serious war crimes in its humanitarian-premised military campaign, the most notable being its massive attacks against civilian targets. The headquarters of Belgrade TV, which had been a persistent thorn in the side of Western efforts to control narratives regarding the conflict and iii U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues David Scheffer highlighted as an example: “while the world’s attention has been focused on the massacre last month of 45 civilians at Racak, Kosovo, and the resulting peace talks in Rambouillet, France, the atrocities in Sierra Leone are far greater in number and severity. The magnitude of massacres, mutilations, torture, rapes, and destruction of civilian property in Sierra Leone is so great that its full extent is unknown.” (Scheffer, David, ‘Deterrence of War Crimes in the 21st Century,’ paper delivered at the International Military Operations and Law Conference, Honolulu, Hawaii, February 23, 1999).

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had given extensive coverage to the crimes of Western-aligned parties, had long been expected to be a priority target for NATO attacks once the air campaign began. Shortly before the bombing commenced, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea gave a written assurance that the TV building would not be attacked, although this counted for little when it was destroyed in a NATO airstrike and its staff killed on April 23. Many of its staff, in the middle of their workdays, were left buried under rubble for days, with survivors describing the experience as “like a nightmare.”118 The attack caused 32 casualties, half of them deaths. Rather than denying that the attack was intentional as it did when striking other civilian targets, NATO justified bombing the media station on the basis that it was “making an important contribution to the propaganda war.”119 The Pentagon justified the attack by claiming that “Serb TViv is as much a part of Milosevic’s murder machine as his military is.”120 U.S. envoy to Yugoslavia Richard Holbrooke described the attack in a speech at the Overseas Press Club’s  anniversary dinner a few minutes after it was carried out as “an enormously important and, I think, positive development” – a sentiment widely echoed across in Western media and by political figures.121 Critics of the attack, however, would years later compare it to the radical Islamist killings of French press figures at the Charlie Hebdo magazine in 2015, highlighting the double standards between Western outrage at the targeted killings of press figures in France and the broad support when Western militaries did the same in Yugoslavia.122 The Yugoslav Foreign Ministry described the attack as an “attempt to dig out our eyes and cut off our ears so that you will be exposed only to one side, to the factory of lies.”123 iv Yugoslavia and its government, media and armed forces were consistently referred to as ‘Serb’ in Western coverage, which was vital to conveying the narrative of the country and its institutions and military as ethnonationalist and able to carry out ethnic cleansing. Although what was left of Yugoslavia, the provinces of Serbia and Montenegro, were predominantly Serb, the government and military were highly diverse and included Albanians, Slovenes, Croats, Roma, Hungarians and Turks which reflected the country’s demographics.



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Western justifications for the attack were based on the presumption that if a media outlet’s political narratives were opposed by the West, it was justifiable to attack that outlet and kill its staff. The Yugoslavs, and its Serb ethnic group in particular, had been sufficiently vilified with fabricated atrocities so as to make such Western attacks appear widely acceptable. The attack was one of several serious war crimes committed,124 although the only one ever charged was the general manager of the TV HQ, Dragoljub Milanović, who was sentenced by the European Court of Human Rights to 10 years in prison for failing to evacuate the building when ordered to do so by NATO.125 Milanović was under no obligation to follow NATO’s orders, and the fact that he was the only one charged provided an important insight into the nature of the Western understanding of human rights at the time. The airstrike on the Belgrade TV HQ was far from an isolated incident, with NATO attacks singling out transmitters throughout Serbia for targeting and cutting off television reception in Kosovo and the northern province of Vojvodina. An example was an attack on TV facilities in the city of Novi Sad which interrupted broadcasts to all its 400,000 residents, with the destruction of means whereby political narratives contrary to those of the West were promogulated appearing to be an important priority for attack.126 NATO notably attempted to use the threat of bombing to force Yugoslav media outlets to disseminate pro-Western content, with spokesman Air Commodore David Wilby in one case on April 8th warning the Serbian national broadcaster RTS that it would be met with fire from Western aircraft unless it drastically altered its schedule and coverage to play Western programs for six hours a day in prime time. The message was clear – those who did not become tools to promote Western political narratives would see NATO aircraft deploy lethal force against them.127As evidence that Yugoslav media was supposedly purely misinformation and propaganda, Western sources cited claims of large numbers of NATO aircraft being shot down which was vehemently denied in the West.128 A trickle of information over the following decades, however, revealed that over 50 aircraft, mostly drones but including two of America’s supposedly near-invulnerable stealth fighters,

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had been neutralised by Yugoslav air defences despite the serious erosion of the country’s military and its lack of modern hardware. Yugoslav claims that its own fighters shot down American F-15s in air-to-air combat, however, were never verified. Although in many cases verified, Yugoslav media’s reports were considered unacceptable because their portrayal of the war was at odds with Western interests.129 On April 23 alone, the day of the strike on the TV HQ, NATO planes attacked at least three transmitters as well as key civilian infrastructure including bridges and electrical plants. The New York Times conceded that these attacks were being carried out “even though the electrical power largely goes to civilians, who are also the main users of the country’s bridges.” 130 Indeed, even journalists highly critical of the Yugoslav government and its media outlets referred to NATO as having “lost the distinction between military and civilian targets and aims.”131 Beyond the dangers of being hit by NATO bombs directly, civilians were seriously endangered by the secondary effects of the Western air campaign including food and fuel shortages, loss of access to medicines, destruction of water, sewage and sanitation systems, and breakdowns in healthcare and the functioning of hospitals. A further example of a serious NATO war crime during the humanitarian-premised military assault was the widespread use of cluster munitions to scatter delayed explosives in civilian areas. The most famous incident was the Royal Netherlands Air Force’s attacks on a crowded marketplace, a hospital, a university and several shops, in the Serbian city of Nis from May 7–12. The positions attacked were far from any military targets, with residents describing NATO strikes on the market as “showering it with bombs randomly.”132 NATO denied knowledge of the attack and subsequently claimed it was an accident, although the incident was hardly isolated.133 The extent of the use of cluster munitions by Western forces resulted in large quantities of unexploded ordinance littering the Serbian countryside and threatening civilians into the 2020s – despite clean-up efforts by the post-war government.134 In 2009, ten years after NATO concluded its air campaign, an independent Norwegian survey estimated that



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160,000 people in Serbia were still in danger from cluster weapons, with many areas left indefinitely off limits due to their use. Belgrade emerged as a world leader in calls to globally ban cluster munitions largely as a result of its population’s experience on the receiving end of their use.135 Deputy chief of the Yugoslav desk at the U.S. State Department George Kenney himself conceded regarding the nature of NATO’s employment of cluster munitions against Yugoslav targets: “Dropping cluster bombs on highly populated urban areas doesn’t result in accidental fatalities. It is purposeful terror bombing.”136 Western war crimes were notably not confined to Yugoslav targets, with the U.S. launching an unprovoked precision strike on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade on May 7 that demolished the office of the military attaché and caused 27 casualties. A $2 billion B-2 Spirit bomber, one of the latest additions to the American arsenal, launched the attack from a base on the U.S. mainland using a highly precise JDAM  satellite guided bomb which had an unrivalled degree of accuracy. Although the CIA, U.S. State Department and British Foreign Office all claimed the strike was accidental, this was not widely believed even within the Western world. Claims that the embassy was not clearly marked or that NATO was using obsolete maps were widely deemed by experts and officials to be far from credible. As the National Interest noted: “it’s difficult to imagine that the vast U.S. military and intelligence apparatus could mistake an embassy with a traditional Chinese green tiled roof for a military logistical hub.”137 The Chinese government referred to American explanations of the incident as “anything but convincing.”138 At NATO’s Combined Air Operations Centre in Vincenza, Italy,  an American colonel was widely cited by Western media outlets near the end of the year admitting to the intentional strike, stating: “That was great targeting . . . we put two JDAMs down into the attaché’s office and took out the exact room we wanted . . . they [the Chinese] won’t be using that place for rebro [re-broadcasting radio transmissions] any more, and it will have given that bastard [Serbian paramilitary commander] Arkan a headache.”139 Other reported motives for the attack included sending a strong signal to the Yugoslav leadership

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that the international community, including China as the world’s leading non-Western power, could not save it from the Western assault, and that Chinese intelligence was using the embassy to monitor NATO cruise missile strikes under combat conditions in order to develop countermeasures.140 The Guardian noted regarding the attack: “non-U.S. staff were suspicious. On 8 May they tapped into the NATO target computer and checked out the satellite co-ordinates for the Chinese Embassy. The co-ordinates were in the computer, and they were correct. While the world was being told the CIA had used out-ofdate maps, NATO’s officers were looking at evidence that the CIA was bang on target.”141 As the U.S. National Imagery and Mapping Agency noted, the Pentagon’s “wrong map” story was “a damned lie.”142 The Observer, citing a range of sources including multiple serving officers from NATO colonels to intelligence officers and a general, showed that the Chinese Embassy was deliberately attacked. As one intelligence officer told the paper: “if it was the wrong building, why did they [U.S.] use the most precise weapons on Earth to hit the right end of that ‘wrong building’?”143 CIA director George Tenet later confirmed regarding the special nature of the mission that it was not only carried out outside of NATO, but that it was the only airstrike of the campaign organised and directed by his agency rather than by the military.144 After the public consensus shifted to more firmly support the narrative of an intentional attack, Western sources attempted to justify the war crime by claiming that because the embassy was allegedly being used to rebroadcast signals for commander Arkan, who according to the Western narrative was perpetrating a genocide, the strike was legitimate.145 Again, once Western media, political leaders and NGOs could construct a narrative which sufficiently demonised an adversary with atrocity fabrication, any measure including bombing an embassy could be justified by claiming that it was part of a humanitarian effort to prevent evil deeds from being perpetrated by Western adversaries. A number of other aspects of NATO’s air campaign were notable, including the use of up to 15 tons of highly toxic depleted uranium in its munitions which caused serious health issues for



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the local civilian population for decades afterwards.146 President Milosevic’s house was also singled out for targeting, another notable war crime, in what appeared to be an attempt either to take his life or to terrorise the leadership into submission.147 Another notable target for Western bombings in the same week was a 23-story Belgrade high-rise building housing the headquarters of the Socialist Party of Serbia and the Yugoslav United Left party. Multiple civilian factories were also bombed as part what NATO called an effort to destroy “national assets” of Yugoslavia, with targets ranging from car plants and tobacco concerns to petroleum refineries in what appeared to be an effort to wipe out key sectors of the nation’s economy. These strikes, too, were justified on the basis that the country was committing genocide. Such attacks, the Western narrative claimed, were to be considered altruistic and done out of humanitarian concern for ethnic groups at risk of being wiped out by the Yugoslav government.148 Covering the air campaign in a way seldom seen in Western press, the Chicago Tribune noted regarding the list of targets for the Western bombing campaign, which it described as a “a war against all of the Serbs” with the goal of taking out “the mainstays of the Serbian economy”: NATO expanded its list to include facilities whose destruction will do the most harm to civilians. . . . Rail lines have been severed, industrial plants flattened and bridges demolished. Often, bystanders have found themselves classified, posthumously, as ‘collateral damage.’ Travel is hazardous, and just getting to work can be nearly impossible . . . it’s hard to justify a policy whose chief achievement – and possibly its main purpose – is to make life miserable, frightening and dangerous for people who have no control over what is going on in Kosovo. . . . Torturing or killing innocents in order to further a political goal is normally regarded as terrorism. But deliberately and needlessly inflicting pain on the people of Serbia, while creating conditions

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that promise to spawn disease and death, is seen by NATO as a perfectly legitimate strategy.149 Writing on the Western air campaign award winning Australian journalist John Pilger referred to civilians being “blown up in crowded passenger trains and buses, in factories, television stations, libraries, old people’s homes, schools and 18 hospitals, many cut to pieces by the RAF’s [British Royal Air Force’s] thousands of ‘unaccounted for’ cluster bombs which fragment into shrapnel.” The extent of the slaughter perpetrated by the Western powers on the basis of fabricated atrocities widely and uncritically reported in Western press, he said, “require[s] an apology from the propagandists; because, as NATO’s planners never tired of saying at their post-bombing seminars, without journalists ‘on board,’ they could never have pulled it off.”150 In sharp contrast to the Iraqi Army eight years prior, the capabilities of Yugoslav ground forces were not significantly eroded by NATO’s air campaign.151 Effective use of cover and innovative kinds of decoys had ensured that Yugoslav units were difficult to locate and target despite NATO’s massive surveillance capabilities and extensive use of cluster bombs and precision guided weapons.152 This led Western powers to increasingly focused on non-military strategic targets such as factories and media outlets. Former senior National Security Council aide in the Clinton administration, Charles Kupchen, claimed that NATO was “increasingly frustrated, and they want to up the ante by going after more lucrative targets in Belgrade.” Difficulties in the campaign would reduce the possibility of sending in Western ground forces as had been initially planned, according to Kupchen.153 Although a ground invasion was ruled out, NATO was able to press Belgrade to yield by imposing massive costs on its population, with the threat of further strategic bombing being the only major card it had to play. The government in Belgrade, however, agreed to yield under threat of further attacks, in a move several historians and scholars would later criticise as falling for NATO’s bluff.154 Regarding the price NATO was promising to exact for continued defiance of Western demands, the chairman of NATO’s



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military committee German General Klaus Naumann said Yugoslavia had been set back economically by 10 years, and that the air campaign could turn the clock back half a century if continued. President Milosevic, he warned, “may end up being the ruler of rubble” after the Western alliance was done with his country.155 As the Chicago Tribune noted: “NATO, in short, plans to reduce a country that is home to 10 million people to a huge pile of worthless debris.”156 New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman stated that the message of the air campaign to Belgrade to the Yugoslav population was as follows: “Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation, and the stakes have to be very clear. Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverising you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1398? We can do 1398, too.”157 This mirrored Vietnam War proposals to ‘bomb them back to the Stone Age,’ as had been done during the Korean War, but which the U.S. had been deterred from fully seeing through against Hanoi due to the threat of Soviet or Chinese intervention. Belgrade, however, had no such protector to curb Western ambitions, and beyond public opinion in the West itself there was nothing to stop Western attacks from escalating and continuing indefinitely in the new post-Cold War world – all under humanitarian pretexts. A Washington Post article titled ‘NATO’s Latest Target: Yugoslavia’s Economy,’ detailed some of the impacts of the bombings in a way that was rare for Western publications, and cited figures showing that the first month of attacks alone had caused over $100 billion in material damage. The attacks, it noted: set Yugoslavia back one or even two decades . . . have devastated targets ranging from the country’s two biggest oil refineries, in Pancevo and Novi Sad, to the Zastava factory at Kragujevac, which produced the Yugo car and employed some 15,000 workers. The bombing has cut all but one of the bridges across the Danube River. . . . Other targets have included chemical, drug, cigarette, shoe and light aircraft factories, as well as TV transmitters, railway stations and airports.158

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Taking the city of Krusevac as an example, the Post noted: Today, Krusevac is in a sorry state. With the destruction of its largest factories by NATO bombs, unemployment is escalating and prospects for economic reconstruction seem bleak. On April 12, NATO warplanes attacked a heating plant on the edge of the town, reducing it to a smoldering heap of rubble and twisted metal. They went on to hit the region’s biggest factory, the October 14 plant, which produced bulldozers, excavators and other heavy machinery. What was left standing was destroyed in a second raid three days later. ‘This was the biggest heavy machinery plant in the Balkans,’ said Nebojsa Toskovic, the factory’s deputy general manager, as he took reporters on a guided tour of the ruins. ‘Without machinery from this factory, the country will be unable to reconstruct all the bridges and everything else that has been destroyed by NATO.’ 159 Quoted by the Post, the director of the coal-fired heating plant which supplied heat to 50,000 people, Radoslav Savic, observed regarding the attack: “Nobody can understand why our plant was hit. We were not a military target. There was not a single gram of oil inside the plant. The only purpose is to make our people suffer.”160 Yugoslavia Yields – But No Sign of Mass Graves As multiple Western studies of the war concluded, the fact that the Yugoslav leadership “apparently believed that NATO had both the intent and the freedom of action to destroy their country’s entire infrastructure if need be” led them to yield to avoid unacceptable hardship for the civilian population. It was the “attacks and threat of additional attacks” on infrastructure which “generated the decisive pressure for war termination,” after having subjected the public to “cumulative stress caused by daily air raid alerts.” Conveying to Belgrade that this was the price of defying Western



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interests thus “greatly benefited NATO when it came to persuading Milosevic to accept its terms for war termination.”161 Indeed, some claimed that “more robust bombing of infrastructure targets in Belgrade at the outset of the conflict” could have brought about a Western victory more quickly.162 It was clear that Yugoslavia’s military had not been defeated, but attacks on civilian targets and its economy had terrorised it into submission. Members of the Yugoslav leadership were subsequently sent for trial on NATO territory in the Netherlands, with several meeting with untimely and somewhat suspicious deaths shortly before their days in court.163 Milosevic himself complained of being denied medication or treatment for his heart condition, among other “active, wilful steps taken, to destroy my health” taken by his detainers while he was held in The Hague, before dying of a heart attack in March 2006.164 Yugoslav forces were withdrawn from Kosovo, and the much weakened Yugoslav state ceased to exist in 2003.165 Kosovo itself became a hub of operations for NATO forces in the region and beyond, with the U.S. military base Camp Bondsteel being its largest facility in Eastern Europe. Despite being recognised by the United Nations as a part of Serbia, Kosovo’s separation gained Western recognition, and increasingly recognition from much of the non-Western world, as a de-facto independent state which aligned itself strongly with Western interests. Although Kosovo’s lack of UN member status prevented it from formally joining NATO,166 Slovenia, Croatia and Montenegro did so in 2004, 2009 and 2017 respectively. Bosnia and Herzegovina joined a Membership Action Plan and was considered a NATO “aspirant country” – leaving only Serbia outside the Western military bloc.167 After the bombing campaign came to an end and investigations into the alleged genocide in Kosovo began, the Western narrative increasingly began to fall apart under weight of evidence. The U.S. State Department first put out figures in April 1999 claiming 500,000 Kosovar Albanians were missing – apparently ‘disappeared’ by the ‘new Nazis’ the Yugoslavs and feared to be victims of genocide.168 Once NATO began its bombing campaign these inflated figures had served their purpose, and they were

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eventually revised to 200,000, then to 100,000, then to 8000.169 It later emerged, however, that no killings had occurred, with 1,400 bodies found by international investigators all belonging to victims killed after NATO’s bombing campaign had begun and long after the claims of genocide of tens or hundreds of thousands were made.170 The American Association for the Advancement of Science’s war-crimes specialist Patrick Ball, who claimed Yugoslav forces were hiding the bodies of their victims very effectively and “were not going to leave any bodies lying around as evidence,” still extrapolated based on such assumptions a death toll of 9000 plus or minus 3000. This was not a body count, but an estimate based on the assumption that the Serbs were effective at hiding the bodies of their victims.171 British Foreign Office Minister Geoff Hoon subsequently referred to claims of around 10,000 ethnically cleansed by Yugoslav forces “in more than 100 [separate] massacres,”172 a figure which American officials referred to as “conservative in the extreme.”173 The figure originated with the Kosovo-based Council for the Defence of Human Rights and Freedoms, many of the staff of which were KLA members, although the highly partial nature of the source was not made an issue as its claims aligned with Western interests. The U.S. State Department and multiple media outlets used this figure, which was impossible to verify because the KLA-linked council refused to share its list of missing persons.174 The New Statesman was among the minority of Western outlets which highlighted that these claims were “utterly unsubstantiated” – stressing how unreliable such claims really were by highlighting how the number had so quickly fallen from hundreds of thousands to just tens of thousands.175 While the term genocide was used to provide NATO with a pretext to launch its military campaign, the findings of forensic teams on the ground showed that the Western narrative was very far removed from reality.176 The leader of a Spanish team sent to Kosovo, for one, complained angrily that he and his colleagues had become part of “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one – not one – mass grave.”177 A United Nations court subsequently ruled in September 2001



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that Yugoslavia had not carried out genocide in Kosovo – a verdict harshly criticised in the West and deemed highly controversial for contradicting the Western narrative. This was particularly remarkable considering the massive and near unchallenged Western influence over UN proceedings, especially in the post-Cold War years, and was only possible due to the overwhelming nature of available evidence contradicting Western allegations of genocide.v The Guardian, a leading proponent of the war, conceded in an article nine years later in 2008: “The ‘genocide’ in Kosovo was a complete fabrication: but it helped Blair and Clinton spin their narrative of a ‘humanitarian’ intervention, to cloak the real economic and strategic reasons for NATO’s military intervention.” 178 As France’s Le Monde Diplomatique observed 20 years later in 2019: “In order to justify their own use of force, Western forces denounced Serbian intransigence, and exaggerated the gravity of the situation on the ground, calling it a ‘genocide’, and putting forward fake news that was taken up by a host of media outlets.”179 Indeed, in the three months from June to August1999 alone the New York Times ran eighty articles, nearly one a day, that made some reference to mass graves in Kosovo.180 What mass killings did occur, however, appeared to have been done by the KLA rather than by the government as international investigations made clear.vi As the Wall Street Journal noted in December v These findings were reached after British officials had claimed that NATO forces were “by the hour . . . uncovering evidence of savage wartimes atrocities – mass murder, rapes, and torture – carried out against ethnic Albanian civilians by Serb soldiers and police in Kosovo.” It was hardly the last time (see chapter 6) that British officials claimed evidence of mass atrocities had already been found by forces on the ground, only for it to later be proven that such atrocities had never occurred, and the existence of evidence was entirely fictional. (Milligan, Susan and Leonard, Mary, ‘Crisis in Kosovo; Serb Atrocity Evidence Mounting,’ Boston Globe, June 21, 1999). vi Regarding the KLA’s conduct James Bissett was one of many to highlight that once it gained power with Western support in 1999: “almost all of the non-Albanian population was ethnically cleansed from Kosovo,” with NATO defying UN resolutions by refusing to disarm it. In contrast to its fabrication of non-existent massacres by Yugoslav government forces, he referred to “NATO’s policy of encouraging and actively supporting the Albanians of Kosovo [as the KLA] to use violence and force to achieve

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1999 following its own investigation that “the huge killing fields some investigators were led to expect . . . the pattern is of scattered killings [mostly] in areas where the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army had been active.” It concluded that “NATO stepped up its claims about Serb ‘killing fields’” essentially to divert attention away from its own killings – in response to “a fatigued press corps drifting toward the contrarian story: civilians killed by NATO’s bombs.” Referring to a much hyped “mass-grave obsession,” the Journal stressed that this atrocity propaganda largely came from the KLA, the very party responsible for the majority of the killings, and that no genocide had in fact been perpetrated.181 Such admissions were rare in Western media, with the Wall Street Journal standing out for conceding these points. A further very significant disclosure, which was confirmed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in October after hostilities concluded, was that the Trepca lead and zinc mines which were central to the Western narrative alleging genocide, contained no corpses, remains or even teeth. This contradicted repeated claims by NATO and American officials and by Western media outlets that over 1000 corpses of genocide victims had been hidden there, many disposed of in vats of hydrochloric acid, and that the mines were the site of a “mass dumping of executed corpses” and “Auschwitz-style furnaces.”182 The Daily Mirror predicted that the names of the victims at the mines would “live alongside those of Belsen, Auschwitz and Treblinka,”183 with Western media outlets widely setting a similar tone. As Michael Parenti noted regarding the investigation and the absence of mass graves which the Western narrative indicated certainly existed: “How the Serbs accomplished these mass-grave disappearing acts without being detected is not explained. Where was the evidence of mass grave sites having been disinterred? Where were the new grave sites now presumably chock full of bodies? And why were they so impossible to detect? Questions their political goal . . . the KLA is NATO’s own creature and continues to be looked upon favourably by its previous masters. There seems little doubt that NATO intends to ensure that Kosovo remains under KLA control.” (Bissett, James, ‘We Created a Monster,’ Toronto Star, July 31, 2001.)



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of this sort were never posed.”184 The Western narrative, although later thoroughly disproven, was highly successful, and after over a decade of operations against Yugoslavia the West’s objectives in what remained of the state were fully attained in 1999 as a direct result of effective atrocity fabrication.

Notes 1

Stockwell, John, In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1978 (p. 201). Prados, John, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA, Chicago, Ivan R. Dee, 2006 (p. 329). Hersh, Seymour, ‘CIA Said to Have Aided Plotters Who Overthrew Nkrumah in Ghana,’ New York Times, May 9, 1978. 2 Blum, William, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, London, Zed Books, 2003 (Chapter 14: Indonesia 1957– 1958: War and pornography). 3 Cockburn, Andrew, Kill Chain, Drones and the Rise of High-Tech Assassins, London, Picador, 2016 (p. 84). Blum, William, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, London, Zed Books, 2003 (Appendix III). 4 Fukuyama, Francis, ‘The End of History?,’ The National Interest, no. 16, Summer 1989 (pp. 3–18). 5 Shank, Gregory, ‘Not a Just War, Just a War – NATO’s Humanitarian Bombing Mission,’ Social Justice, vol. 26, no. 1, issue 75, Spring 1999 (p. 14). 6 Corruption Risk Assessment: Kosovo Extractive Industries Sector, Findings and Recommendations, United Nations Development Program, 2016. ‘World Bank survey puts Kosovo’s mineral resources at 13.5bn euros,’ Kosova Report, January 28, 2005. ‘A New Deal for Kosovo: Creating Sustainable Economic Growth,’ Economic Initiative for Kosovo, June 2013. 7 Gervasi, Sean, NATO the Balkans: Voices of Opposition, New York, International Action Center, 1998 (pp. 21–46). Shank, Gregory, ‘Commentary: Not a Just War, Just a War – NATO’s Humanitarian Bombing Mission,’ Social Justice, Spring 1999, vol. 26, no. 1, issue 75 (p. 11). 8 Parenti, Michael, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, London, Verso, 2002 (pp. 24, 25). 9 Burkholder Smith, Joseph, Portrait of a Cold Warrior, New York, Putnam, 1976 (p. 210–211). Election Code of the Philippines, Article X, Campaign and Election Propaganda, Section 81. Weiner, Tim, ‘C.I.A. Spent Millions to Support Japanese Right in 50’s and 60’s,’ The New York Times, October 9, 1994.

246 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

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Levin, Dov H., Meddling in the Ballot Box: The Causes and Effects of Partisan Electoral Interventions, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020. Kolko, Gabriel, Vietnam: Anatomy of a War, 1940–1975, New York, Harper Collins, 1987 (p. 85). Hanley, Charles J, and Choe, Sang Hun and Mendoza, Martha, The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War, New York, Henry Holt and Company, 2002 (p. 170). Weathersby, Kathryn, ‘“Should We Fear This?” Stalin and the Danger of War with America,’ Cold War International History Project: Working Paper No. 39, 2002. Parenti, Michael, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, London, Verso, 2002 (p. 26). Gervasi, Sean, ‘Germany, US and the Yugoslav Crisis,’ Covert Action Quarterly, Winter 1992–93. People’s Weekly World, June 13, 1999. Parenti, Michael, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, London, Verso, 2002 (pp. 21, 22). Elich, Gregory, Covert Action Quarterly, Fall/Winter 1999. Bonner, Raymond, ‘Croatian Army Charged with War Crimes,’ San Francisco Chronicle, March 21, 1999. The Independent, August 6, 1995. ‘CIA Agents Training Bosnian Army,’ The Guardian, November 17, 1994. ‘America’s Secret Bosnia Agenda,’ The Observer, November 20, 1994. ‘How The CIA Helps Bosnia Fight Back,’ The European, November 25, 1994. Glenny, Misha, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War, London, Penguin, 1992 (p. 42). Los Angeles Times, November 11, 1997. Paris, Edmond, Genocide in Satellite Croatia, 1941–1945, Chicago, American Institute for Balkan Affairs, 1961. Parenti, Michael, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, London, Verso, 2002 (pp. 42–43). Simon, Roger I. and Rosenberg, Sharon and Eppert, Claudia, Between Hope and Despair: Pedagogy and the Remembrance of Historical Trauma, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2000 (pp. 24–25). Merlino, Jacques, Les verités Yougosla- yes ne sont pas toutes bonnes 4 dire, Paris, A. Michel, 1994. Harper, Stephen, Screening Bosnia: Geopolitics, Gender and Nationalism in Film and Television Images of the 1992–95 War, Bloomsbury, New York, London, 2017 (p. 41). Klaus Bitterinann, Serbia Must Die: Truth and Lies in the Yugoslav Civil War, Berlin, Tiamat, 1994 (pp. 143–156). Kenny, George, ‘Steering Clear of Balkan Shoals,’ Nation, January 8–15, 1996. Parenti, Michael, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, London, Verso, 2002 (p. 94). Boyd, Charles C., ‘Making Peace with the Guilty: The Truth about Bosnia,’ Foreign Affairs, September/ October 1995.



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24 Ibid. 25 Shank, Gregory, ‘Commentary: Not a Just War, Just a War – NATO’s Humanitarian Bombing Mission,’ Social Justice, Spring 1999, vol. 26, no. 1, issue 75 (pp. 4–48). Roberts, Walter R., ‘Serbs as Victims,’ Washington Post, April 10, 1999. 26   Harper, Stephen, Screening Bosnia: Geopolitics, Gender and Nationalism in Film and Television Images of the 1992–95 War, New York, Bloomsbury, 2017 (p. 43). 27 Parenti, Michael, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, London, Verso, 2002 (pp. 34, 35). 28 Mueller, John and Mueller, Karl, ‘Sanctions of Mass Destruction,’ Foreign Affairs, May 1999. 29 Interview with President Slobodan Milosevic by Dr Ron Hatchett, transmitted on Houston-KHOU-TV 21.00–22.00 CDT, April 21, 1999. 30 ‘Correction: Report on Rape in Bosnia,’ The New York Times, October 23, 1993. 31 Salzman, Todd A., ‘Rape Camps as a Means of Ethnic Cleansing: Religious, Cultural, and Ethical Responses to Rape Victims in the Former Yugoslavia,’ Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 2, May 1998 (pp. 348–378). Gutman, Roy, ‘Rape Camps; Evidence Leaders in Bosnia Okd Attacks,’ Newsday, April 19, 1993. Halsell, Grace, ‘Human Rights Suit Came as a Surprise to Bosnian Serb Leader; Case Filed in U.S., but Alleged Actions Occurred Elsewhere,’ Dallas Morning News, February 24, 1993. 32 Parenti, Michael, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, London, Verso, 2002 (p. 83). 33 Phillips, Peter, Censored 2000: The Year’s Top 25 Censored Stories, New York, Seven Stories Press, 2000 (p. 200). 34 Black, Ian, ‘Serbs “enslaved Muslim women at rape camps”,’ The Guardian, March 21, 2000. 35 Agence France-Presse release, February 2, 1993. L’Evnement du Jeudi [Thursday Event], March 4, 1993. 36 Vine, David, Base Nation, How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, New York, Henry Holt and Company, 2015 (Chapter 9: Sex for Sale, Section 5: Sold Hourly, Nightly or Permanently). O’Meara, Kelly Patricia, ‘US: DynCorp Disgrace,’ Insight Magazine, January 14, 2002. 37 Beloff, Nora, ‘Doubts about Serbian Rapes,’ letter to Daily Telegraph, January 19, 1993. 38 ‘Serbs file claim against NATO for use of chemical weapons during 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia,’ Morning Star Online, August 1, 2021. 39 Daily Mirror, January 4, 1993. La Repubblwa, January 15. 1993. Ivanovic, Zivota, Media Warfare: The Serbs in Focus, Belgrade, Tanjug, 1995 (p. 20). 40 Parenti, Michael, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, London, Verso, 2002 (pp. 85, 86). 41 Newsday, August 2, 3, 4, 1992.

248 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

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Parenti, Michael, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, London, Verso, 2002 (p. 86). Newsday, August 2, 3, 4, 1992. Parenti, Michael, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, London, Verso, 2002 (p. 86). Doughty, S. and Deans, S., ‘Time Is Running Out, Major Warns Serbia,’ Daily Mail, 1992 (p. 10) Harper, Stephen, Screening Bosnia: Geopolitics, Gender and Nationalism in Film and Television Images of the 1992–95 War, New York, Bloomsbury, 2017 (p. 40). Ascherson, Neal, ‘Words fail us as the world drifts towards disorder,’ The Independent, October 23, 1993. Harper, Stephen, Screening Bosnia: Geopolitics, Gender and Nationalism in Film and Television Images of the 1992–95 War, New York, Bloomsbury, 2017 (p. 40). ‘German Minister Warned Milosevic of Sea of Blood,’ Reuters, April 11, 1999. Parenti, Michael, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, London, Verso, 2002 (p. 86). Philips, Peter, Censored 2005: The Top 25 Censored Stories, New York, Seven Stories Press, 2004 (p. 130). Brock, Peter, Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting Journalism & Tragedy in Yugoslavia, Los Angeles, GM Books, 2005 (pp. 87–116). Al-Tamimi, Aymenn Jawad, ‘A Response to Roy Gutman’s “Have the Syrian Kurds Committed War Crimes?”,’ Syria Comment, February 11, 2017. Phillips, Joan, ‘Who’s Making the News in Bosnia?,’ Living Marxism, no. 55, May 1993 (p. 12). Ibid (p. 12). Kouchner, Bernard, Les Gurriers de la Paix [The Peace Warriors], Paris, Grasset, 2004 (pp. 374–375). Harper, Stephen, Screening Bosnia: Geopolitics, Gender and Nationalism in Film and Television Images of the 1992–95 War, New York, Bloomsbury, 2017 (p. 41). Lituchy, Barry, ‘Media Deception and the Yugoslav Civil War’ in: NATO in the Balkans: Voices of Opposition, New York, International Action Centre, 1998 (pp. 205, 206). Deichmann, Thomas, ‘The Picture That Fooled the World,’ in: NATO in the Balkans: Voices of Opposition, New York, International Action Centre, 1998 (pp. 165–178). Parenti, Michael, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, London, Verso, 2002 (pp. 88, 89). Nambiar, Satish, ‘The Fatal Flaws Underlying NATO’s Intervention in Yugoslavia,’ United Services Institution of India, April 6, 1999. Column 291, British Parliament, May 26, 1999 (https://publications. parliament.uk/pa/cm199899/cmhansrd/vo990526/debtext/90526-05.htm). Johnstone, Diana, ‘Notes on the Kosovo Problem and the International Community,’ Dialogue, no. 25, Spring 1998.



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Shank, Gregory, ‘Not a Just War, Just a War – NATO’s Humanitarian Bombing Mission,’ Social Justice, vol. 26, no. 1, issue 75, Spring 1999 (p. 23). 57 Parenti, Michael, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, London, Verso, 2002 (p. 89). John Ranz, paid advertisement by Survivors of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, USA, The New York Times, April 29, 1993. 58 Parenti, Michael, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, London, Verso, 2002 (p. 12). 59 Ibid (p. 90). 60 Mira Beham, ‘The Media Fan the Flames,’ in: Klaus Bitterinann, Serbia Must Die: Truth and Lies in the Yugoslav Civil War, Berlin, Tiamat, 1994 (pp. 122, 123). 61 ‘The real story behind Srebrenica,’ The Globe and Mail, July 14, 2005. 62 Burke, Jason, ‘Frankenstein the CIA created,’ The Guardian, January 17, 1999. Fisher Max, ‘Blowback: In Aiding Iranian Terrorists, the U.S. Repeats a Dangerous Mistake,’ The Atlantic, April 6, 2012 Bergen, Peter and Reynolds, Alec, ‘Blowback Revisited,’ Foreign Affairs, November/December 2005. Weiner, Tim, ‘Blowback from the Afghan Battlefield,’ The New York Times, March 13, 1994. Boldak, Spin, ‘The “blowback” from Afghanistan “Monster”,’ The Baltimore Sun, August 6, 1996. 63 Sageman, Marc, Understanding Terror Networks, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004 (pp. 58, 59). Akram, Assen, Histoire de la Guerre d’Afghanistan, Paris, Editions Balland, 1996 (pp. 227–277). 64 O’Neil, Brandon, ‘How We Trained Al Qaeda,’ Spectator, September 13, 2003. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. ‘Unhealthy Climate in Kosovo as Guerrillas Gear Up for a Summer Confrontation,’ Jane’s International Defense Review, February 1, 1999. ‘U.S. Alarmed as Mujahidin Join Kosovo Rebels,’ The Times, November 26, 1998. ‘Kosovo Seen as New Islamic Bastion,’ Jerusalem Post, September 14, 1998. Bodansky, Yossef, ‘Italy Becomes Iran’s New Base for Terrorist Operations,’ Defense and Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, February 1998. 67 Jane’s Intelligence Review, October 1, 1996. 68 Hedges, Chris, ‘Kosovo’s Rebels Accused of Executions in the Ranks,’ The New York Times, June 25, 1999. 69 Murphy, Richard, ‘Albanian Love Affair with NATO Carries Risks,’ Reuters, April 12, 1999. 70 Agovino, Theresa, ‘Refugee Crush Threatens Macedonia’s Delicate Balancing Act,’ San Francisco Chronicle, April 22, 1999.

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Shank, Gregory, ‘Not a Just War, Just a War – NATO’s Humanitarian Bombing Mission,’ Social Justice, vol. 26, no. 1, issue 75, Spring 1999 (p. 16). 71 ‘Yugoslavia’s Strategy,’ Stratfor Global Intelligence Update, March 31, 1999. Shank, Gregory, ‘Commentary: Not a Just War, Just a War – NATO’s Humanitarian Bombing Mission,’ Social Justice, Spring 1999, vol. 26, no. 1, issue 75 (p. 14). 72 Hammond, Philip and Herman, Edward S., Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis, London, Pluto Press, 2000 (p. 139). 73 Vogel, Tobias K., ‘“Preponderant Power”: NATO and the New Balkans,’ International Journal, vol. 55, no. 1, Winter, 1999/2000 (pp. 15–34). 74 Castan Pinos, Jaume, Kosovo and the Collateral Effects of Humanitarian Intervention, Abingdon, Routledge, 2019 (Chapter 1). 75 Shank, Gregory, ‘Not a Just War, Just a War – NATO’s Humanitarian Bombing Mission,’ Social Justice, vol. 26, no. 1, issue 75, Spring 1999 (p. 17). 76   ‘After two decades, the hidden victims of the Kosovo war are finally recognised,’ The Guardian, August 3, 2018. ‘“Wounds that burn our souls”: Compensation for Kosovo’s wartime rape survivors, but still no justice,’ Amnesty International, December 13, 2017. 77 ‘KLA rebels accused of vandalizing Serb monastery,’ CNN, June 17, 1999. Maniscalco, Fabio, ‘The Loss of the Kosovo Cultural Heritage,’ webjournal, 2006. ‘“Stop denying the cultural heritage of others,” UN expert says after first fact-finding visit to Serbia and Kosovo,’ Geneva, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, October 14, 2016. The New York Times, November 1, 1987. 78  ‘“Wounds that burn our souls”: Compensation for Kosovo’s wartime rape survivors, but still no justice,’ Amnesty International, December 13, 2017. Bogdanović, Ljiljana, ‘Abductions and Disappearances of Non-Albanians in Kosovo,’ Belgrade, Humanitarian Law Center, 2001. Bytyci, Fatos, ‘War crimes prosecutor indicts Kosovo president Thaci,’ Reuters, June 24, 2020. 79 de Quetteville, Harry and Moore, Malcolm, ‘Serb prisoners “were stripped of their organs in Kosovo war”,’ The Daily Telegraph, April 14, 2008. 80 Pope, Conor, ‘Politician angers MEPs over Kosovo organ harvesting claim,’ Irish Times, March 11, 2011. 81 Shank, Gregory, ‘Not a Just War, Just a War: NATO’s Humanitarian Bombing Mission,’ Social Justice, vol. 26, no. 1, issue 75, Spring 1999 (pp. 17, 21). 82 Kenney, George, ‘Caught in Kosovo,’ The Nation, July 6, 1998. 83 Cohen, Tom, ‘Associated Press Dispatch,’ August 3, 1999. Talbot, Karen, ‘The Real Reasons for War In Yugoslavia: Backing up Globalization with Military Might,’ Social Justice, vol. 27, no. 4, issue 82, Winter 2000 (pp. 94–116).



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84 ‘Drugs Money Linked to the Kosovo Rebels,’ The Times, March 24, 1999. ‘Life in the Balkan “Tinderbox” Remains as Dangerous as Ever,’ Jane’s Intelligence Review, March 1, 1999. ‘Albanian Mafia, This Is How It Helps the Kosovo Guerrilla Fighters,’ Corriere della Sera, October 15, 1998. ‘Major Italian Drug Bust Breaks Kosovo Arms Trafficking,’ Agence FrancePresse, June 9, 1998. ‘Speculation Plentiful, Facts Few About Kosovo Separatist Group,’ Baltimore Sun, March 6, 1998. ‘Another Balkans Bloodbath? – Part One,’ Jane’s Intelligence Review, February 1, 1998. ‘The Balkan Medellin,’ Jane’s, March 1, 1995. Binder, David and Mendenhall, Preston, ‘Sex, drugs and guns in the Balkans,’ NBC News, February 2, 2004. Klebnikov, Peter, ‘Heroin Heroes,’ Mother Jones, January/February 2000. 85 Binder, David and Mendenhall, Preston, ‘Sex, drugs and guns in the Balkans,’ NBC News, February 2, 2004. 86 Klebnikov, Peter, ‘Heroin Heroes,’ Mother Jones, January/February 2000. 87 Ibid. 88 ‘KLA Linked To Enormous Heroin Trade: Police suspect drugs helped finance revolt,’ San Francisco Chronicle, May 5, 1999. 89 Klebnikov, Peter, ‘Heroin Heroes,’ Mother Jones, January/February 2000. 90 Clark, Alan, ‘A clumsy war,’ BBC News, May 13, 1999. 91 Shank, Gregory, ‘Not a Just War, Just a War – NATO’s Humanitarian Bombing Mission,’ Social Justice, vol. 26, no. 1, issue 75, Spring 1999 (p. 18). 92 Craig, Larry E. and West, Jude, ‘The Kosovo Liberation Army: Does Clinton Policy Support Group with Terror, Drug Ties?,’ United States Republican Policy Committee, March 31, 1999. 93 ‘The KLA – terrorists or freedom fighters?,’ BBC News, June 28, 1998. 94 Castan Pinos, Jaume, Kosovo and the Collateral Effects of Humanitarian Intervention, Abingdon, Routledge, 2019 (Chapter 2). 95 Layne, Christopher and Schwarz, Benjamin, ‘For the Record,’ The National Interest, no. 57, Fall 1999 (pp. 9–15). 96 Bissett, James, ‘We Created a Monster,’ Toronto Star, July 31, 2001. 97 ‘Rise of the Kosovar freedom fighters,’ Le Monde Diplomatique, May 1999. Fallgot, Roger, ‘How Germany Backed KLA,’ The European, September 21–27, 1998. Küntzel, Matthias, Der Weg in den Krieg. Deutschland, die Nato und das Kosovo [The Road to War. Germany, Nato and Kosovo], Berlin, Elefanten Press, 2002 (pp. 59–64). 98 Castan Pinos, Jaume, Kosovo and the Collateral Effects of Humanitarian Intervention, Abingdon, Routledge, 2019 (pp. 155, 156). Parenti, Michael, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, London, Verso, 2002 (p. 99). Shank, Gregory, ‘Commentary: Not a Just War, Just a War – NATO’s Humanitarian Bombing Mission,’ Social Justice, Spring 1999, vol. 26, no. 1, issue 75 (pp. 4–48).

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Gellman, Barton, ‘The Path to Crisis: How the United States and Its Allies Went to War,’ Washington Post, April 18, 1999. 99 Pilger, John, ‘US and British officials told us that at least 100,000 were murdered in Kosovo. A year later, fewer than 3,000 bodies have been found,’ New Statesman, September 4, 2000. 100 Blair, Tony, ‘Prime Minister Blair’s Article for BBC News Online,’ BBC News, May 14, 1999. 101 Clark, Neil, ‘How the battle lies were drawn,’ Spectator, June 14, 2003. Nelson, Lars-Erik, ‘Numbers in Kosovo Don’t Add Up,’ Orlando Sentinel, October 28, 1999. 102 Blair, Tony, ‘Prime Minister Blair’s Article for BBC News Online,’ BBC News, May 14, 1999. 103 Max Boehnel Interview with Noam Chomsky, CBC News, April 8, 1999. 104 ‘Rambouillet talks “designed to fail”,’ BBC News, March 19, 2000. 105 Craig, Larry E. and West, Jude, ‘The Kosovo Liberation Army: Does Clinton Policy Support Group with Terror, Drug Ties?,’ United States Republican Policy Committee, March 31, 1999. 106   Descamps, Philippe, ‘Kosovo’s open wounds, twenty years on,’ Le Monde Diplomatique, March 2019. 107 Clark, Neil, ‘How the battle lies were drawn,’ Spectator, June 14, 2003. ‘Did We Ever Really Try Diplomacy on Kosovo?,’ The New York Times, May 25, 1999. Hammond, Philip and Herman, Edward S., Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis, London, Pluto Press, 2000 (p. 138). 108 Wintour, Patrick, ‘MPs say Kosovo bombing was illegal but necessary,’ The Guardian, June 7, 2000. Erlanger, Steven, ‘Rights Group Says NATO Bombing in Yugoslavia Violated Law,’ The New York Times, June 8, 2000. 109 Badsey, Stephen and Latawski, Paul, Britain, NATO and the Lessons of the Balkan Conflicts, 1991–1999, London, Frank Cass, 2004 (pp. 83, 84). 110 Shank, Gregory, ‘Not a Just War, Just a War – NATO’s Humanitarian Bombing Mission,’ Social Justice, vol. 26, no. 1, issue 75, Spring 1999 (pp. 25, 26, 28). 111 Lobel, Jules and Ratner, Michael, ‘Humanitarian Intervention in Kosovo: A Highly Suspect Pretext for War,’ New York, Center for Constitutional Rights, 1999. Parenti, Michael, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, London, Verso, 2002 (pp. 10, 11, 27). Shank, Gregory, ‘Not a Just War, Just a War – NATO’s Humanitarian Bombing Mission,’ Social Justice, vol. 26, no. 1, issue 75, Spring 1999 (pp. 4–48). Talbot, Karen, ‘The Real Reasons for War in Yugoslavia: Backing up Globalization with Military Might,’ Social Justice, vol. 27, no. 4, issue 82, Winter 2000 (pp. 94–116). 112 Harrison, Frances, ‘The broken survivors of Sri Lanka’s civil war,’ BBC News, October 11, 2012.



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113 ‘Congo crisis is deadliest since second world war,’ New Scientist, January 2006. 114 McKiernan, Kevin, ‘Turkey’s War on the Kurds,’ Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March/April 1999 (pp. 26–37). 115 Derfner, Larry and Sedan, Gil, ‘Why Is Israel Waffling on Kosovo?,’ Jewish Bulletin News, April 9, 1999. Shank, Gregory, ‘Not a Just War, Just a War – NATO’s Humanitarian Bombing Mission,’ Social Justice, vol. 26, no. 1, issue 75, Spring 1999 (p. 33). 116 Shank, Gregory, ‘Not a Just War, Just a War – NATO’s Humanitarian Bombing Mission,’ Social Justice, vol. 26, no. 1, issue 75, Spring 1999 (p. 34). 117 Parenti, Michael, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, London, Verso, 2002 (p. 27). 118 Erlanger, Steven, ‘Survivors of NATO Attack on Serb TV Headquarters: Luck, Pluck and Resolve,’ The New York Times, April 24, 1999. 119 McCormack, Timothy and McDonald, Avril, Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law – 2003, The Hague, T.M.C. Asser Press, 2006 (p. 381). 120 Erlanger, Steven, ‘Survivors of NATO Attack on Serb TV Headquarters: Luck, Pluck and Resolve,’ The New York Times, April 24, 1999. 121 Chomsky, Noam, ‘Chomsky: Paris attacks show hypocrisy of West’s outrage,’ CNN, January 20, 2015. 122 Ibid. 123 Erlanger, Steven, ‘Survivors of NATO Attack on Serb TV Headquarters: Luck, Pluck and Resolve,’ The New York Times, April 24, 1999. 124 ‘No justice for the victims of NATO bombings,’ Amnesty International, April 23, 2009. 125 Chomsky, Noam, ‘Chomsky: Paris attacks show hypocrisy of West’s outrage,’ CNN, January 20, 2015. 126 Richter, Paul, ‘Milosevic Not Home as NATO Bombs One of His Residences,’ Los Angeles Times, April 23, 1999. 127 Badsey, Stephen and Latawski, Paul, Britain, NATO and the Lessons of the Balkan Conflicts, 1991–1999, London, Frank Cass, 2004 (p. 92). 128 Tanjug press release, April 9, 1999. ‘Analysis: Propaganda War Hots Up,’ BBC News, April 9, 1999. Badsey, Stephen and Latawski, Paul, Britain, NATO and the Lessons of the Balkan Conflicts, 1991–1999, London, Frank Cass, 2004 (p. 91). 129 ‘Officially confirmed / documented NATO UAV losses,’ Aeronautiics.ru, June 1, 2001. Newdick, Thomas, ‘Yes, Serbian Air Defenses Did Hit Another F-117 During Operation Allied Force In 1999,’ The Drive, December 1, 2020. 130 Erlanger, Steven, ‘Survivors of NATO Attack on Serb TV Headquarters: Luck, Pluck and Resolve,’ The New York Times, April 24, 1999. 131 Ibid. 132 Norton-Taylor, Richard, ‘NATO cluster bombs “kill 15” in hospital and crowded market,’ The Guardian, May 8, 1999. 133 Ibid.

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134 ‘Ниш чисти касетне бомбе’ [Nis cleans cluster bombs], Rts.rs, May 24, 2009. 135 ‘Scale of cluster bomb problem in Serbia revealed for first time,’ Relief Web, March 10, 2009. Zimonjic, Vesna Peric, ‘BALKANS: Cluster Bombs Threaten Thousands,’ Inter Press Service News Agency, April 8, 2009. 136 Phillips, Peter, Censored 2000: The Year’s Top 25 Censored Stories, New York, Seven Stories Press, 2000 (p. 208). Los Angeles Times, May 23, 1999. 137 Mizokami, Kyle, ‘In 1999, America Destroyed China’s Embassy in Belgrade (And Many Chinese Think It Was on Purpose),’ National Interest, January 21, 2017. 138 Fox, Tom, ‘Bombs over Belgrade: An Underrated Sino-American Anniversary,’ War on the Rocks, May 7, 2019. 139 ‘Truth behind America’s raid on Belgrade,’ The Guardian, November 28, 1999. 140 Sweeney, John and Holsoe, Jens and Vulliamy, Ed, ‘Nato bombed Chinese deliberately,’ The Guardian, October 17, 1999. 141 ‘Truth behind America’s raid on Belgrade,’ The Guardian, November 28, 1999. 142 Sweeney, John and Holsoe, Jens and Vulliamy, Ed, ‘NATO bombed Chinese deliberately,’ The Guardian, October 17, 1999. 143 Ibid. ‘Truth behind America’s raid on Belgrade,’ The Guardian, November 28, 1999. 144 Schmitt, Eric, ‘In a Fatal Error, C.I.A. Picked a Bombing Target Only Once: The Chinese Embassy,’ The New York Times, July 23, 1999. 145 ‘Truth behind America’s raid on Belgrade,’ The Guardian, November 28, 1999. 146 ‘The chemical effects of DU,’ Le Monde Diplomatique, February 2001. ‘“Up to 15 tons of depleted uranium used in 1999 Serbia bombing” – lead lawyer in suit against NATO,’ RT, June 13, 2017. ‘Side Effects of NATO’s Yugoslavia Campaign: Cancer, Sterility & Mental Disorders,’ Sputnik News, May 16, 2019. 147 ‘22 April: Milosevic defiant as Nato bombs hit home,’ The Guardian, April 22, 1999. 148 Richter, Paul, ‘Milosevic Not Home as NATO Bombs One of His Residences,’ Los Angeles Times, April 23, 1999. 149 Chapman, Steve, ‘A War Against All of the Serbs,’ Chicago Tribune, April 29, 1999. 150 Pilger, John, ‘US and British officials told us that at least 100,000 were murdered in Kosovo. A year later, fewer than 3,000 bodies have been found,’ New Statesman, September 4, 2000. 151 Hosmer, Stephen T., ‘The conflict over Kosovo: why Milosevic decided to settle when he did,’ Rand Corporation, 2001 (p. xxv). Dobbs, Michael, ‘NATO’s Latest Target: Yugoslavia’s Economy,’ Washington Post, April 25, 1999.



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152 Schmitt, Eric, ‘Bombs Are Smart. People Are Smarter,’ The New York Times, July 4, 1999. Hackworth, David, ‘How the Serbs Outfoxed NATO,’ Kitsap Sun, July 11, 1999. 153 Richter, Paul, ‘Milosevic Not Home as NATO Bombs One of His Residences,’ Los Angeles Times, April 23, 1999. 154 Stigler, Andrew L., ‘A Clear Victory for Air Power: NATO’s Empty Threat to Invade Kosovo,’ International Security, vol. 27, no. 3, Winter, 2002– 2003 (pp. 124–157). 155 Graham, Bradley, ‘Analysis: Warnings of Air War Drawbacks,’ Washington Post, April 27, 1999. ‘General Admits Error in Sizing Up Milosevic,’ San Francisco Chronicle, April 27, 1999. 156 Chapman, Steve, ‘A War Against All of the Serbs,’ Chicago Tribune, April 29, 1999. 157 Friedman, Thomas L., ‘Foreign Affairs; Stop the Music,’ The New York Times, April 23, 1999. 158 Dobbs, Michael, ‘NATO’s Latest Target: Yugoslavia’s Economy,’ Washington Post, April 25, 1999. 159 Ibid. 160 Ibid. 161 Hosmer, Stephen T., ‘The conflict over Kosovo: why Milosevic decided to settle when he did,’ Rand Corporation, 2001 (pp. xxix-xxv). ‘War in Europe’ (Documentary), PBS Frontline, February 22, 2000. 162 Hosmer, Stephen T., ‘The conflict over Kosovo: why Milosevic decided to settle when he did,’ Rand Corporation, 2001 (p. xxiii). 163 Clark, Neil, ‘Murder at The Hague? The strange case of sick & suicidal Serbs,’ RT, October 29, 2015. 164 Hibbitts, Bernard, ‘Russia confirms Milosevic letter, wants to review postmortem results,’ Jurist, March 13, 2006.  Slobodan Milosevic’s Letter to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, March 8, 2006. 165 Simpson, Daniel, ‘Bye-Bye Yugoslavia, Hello Serbia and Montenegro,’ The New York Times, February 4, 2003. 166 ‘Kosovo’s NATO future: How to Square the Circle?,’ Clingendael – Netherlands Institute of International Relations, December 2020. Bauluz, Alfonso, ‘Kosovo still dreams of EU and NATO membership,’ Euracitv, October 25, 2016. ‘Slovenia supports Kosovo’s efforts to join NATO, EU,’ Gazeta Express, August 4, 2021. 167 Lakic, Mladen, ‘NATO Approves Membership Action Plan for Bosnia,’ Balkan Insight, December 5, 2018. 168 Nelson, Lars-Erik, ‘Numbers in Kosovo Don’t Add Up,’ Orlando Sentinel, October 28, 1999. 169 Erlanger, Steven and Wren, Christopher S., ‘Early Count Hints at Fewer Kosovo Deaths,’ The New York Times, November 11, 1999.

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Nelson, Lars-Erik, ‘Numbers in Kosovo Don’t Add Up,’ Orlando Sentinel, October 28, 1999. Phillips, Peter, Censored 2000: The Year’s Top 25 Censored Stories, New York, Seven Stories Press, 2000 (p. 204). 170 Nelson, Lars-Erik, ‘Numbers in Kosovo Don’t Add Up,’ Orlando Sentinel, October 28, 1999. 171 Ibid. 172 ‘Up to 10,000 buried in Kosovo’s mass graves, British say,’ CNN, June 17, 1999. 173 ‘The Horrors of Kosovo,’ The New York Times, June 21, 1999. 174 ‘Despite Tales, the War in Kosovo Was Savage, but Wasn’t Genocide,’ Wall Street Journal, December 31, 1999. 175 Pilger, John, ‘US and British officials told us that at least 100,000 were murdered in Kosovo. A year later, fewer than 3,000 bodies have been found,’ New Statesman, September 4, 2000. 176 Nelson, Lars-Erik, ‘Numbers in Kosovo Don’t Add Up,’ Orlando Sentinel, October 28, 1999. 177 Hammond, Philip and Herman, Edward S., Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis, London, Pluto Press, 2000 (p. 139). Pilger, John, ‘Kosovo Killing Fields?,’ New Statesman, November 21, 1999. 178 Clark, Neil, ‘Fools no more,’ The Guardian, April 19, 2008. 179 Descamps, Philippe, ‘Kosovo’s open wounds, twenty years on,’ Le Monde Diplomatique, March 2019. 180 Phillips, Peter, Censored 2000: The Year’s Top 25 Censored Stories, New York, Seven Stories Press, 2000 (p. 205). 181 ‘Despite Tales, the War in Kosovo Was Savage, but Wasn’t Genocide,’ Wall Street Journal, December 31, 1999. 182 Pilger, John, ‘US and British officials told us that at least 100,000 were murdered in Kosovo. A year later, fewer than 3,000 bodies have been found,’ New Statesman, September 4, 2000. 183 Clark, Neil, ‘How the battle lies were drawn,’ Spectator, June 14, 2003. 184 Parenti, Michael, ‘Where Are All the Bodies Buried? NATO Commits Acts of Aggression,’ Z Magazine, June 2000.

Chapter Six

The Iraq War 9/11 as a Pretext for War: Inventing a Baghdad-Al Qaeda Connection On September 20, 2001, nine days after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the George W. Bush administration declared that the United States was at war. Quickly declaring Al Qaeda to be the perpetrator, and launching a war on October 7 against Afghanistan which had longstanding ties to the terror group, administration officials soon came to see the 9/11 attacks as an opportunity for military intervention against other state adversaries. Foremost among these were the three countries named as members of the ‘Axis of Evil’ by President Bush in his 2002 State of the Union Address – namely Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Of these Iraq, which was both the easiest to casually tie to 9/11 due to its Arab and Sunni Muslim population, and which also presented by far the softest military target, was reported to be the primary target on Washington’s list even before the first troops had moved into Afghanistan.i On September 12, as the National Security Council (NSC) met to formulate a policy response to 9/11, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld first raised the possibility of attacking Iraq. State Secretary Colin Powell, although not opposed to military action, stressed that as a priority, “the American people want us to do something about Al Qaeda” – which was based primarily in Afghanistan.1 Richard Clarke, who served as the administration’s counterterrorism chief and chaired the NSC meeting, was stunned i Beyond the Axis, former NATO Secretary General Wesley Clark testified, citing a memo from the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defence in 2001, that Washington had planned to “attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years,” starting with Iraq and subsequently targeting “Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.” (Greenwald, Glen, ‘Wes Clark and the neocon dream,’ Salon, November 26, 2011.)

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when he found the discussion focused on Iraq. “Then I realised with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and [Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul] Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda,” he recalled.2 When Rumsfeld argued: “There aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan, and there are lots of good targets in Iraq,” Clarke angrily responded that there were lots of targets everywhere, “but Iraq had nothing to do with it [9/11 attacks].”3 President Bush subsequently pulled Clarke into a room and asked: “See if Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way.”4 Clarke reportedly again made clear that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks, but the president persisted. After Clarke re-examined the data, he consulted with intelligence experts who signed off on a report to the president stating there was no evidence linking Baghdad to the 9/11 attacks. Clarke later noted: “It got bounced and sent back saying, ‘Wrong answer.’”5 According to a senior administration official cited by the Washington Post, a September 17 top-secret document which outlined plans for a military campaign against Afghanistan also directed the Pentagon to begin planning the invasion of Iraq.6 Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, an influential neoconservative member of the Pentagon’s Defence Policy Board, stated at a September 19–20 meeting regarding the 9/11 attacks: “If we don’t use this as the moment to replace Saddam after we replace the Taliban, we are setting the stage for disaster.”7 The Pentagon notably authorised former CIA Director James Woolsey, a neoconservative member of the board, to fly to London on a government plane to find evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.8 On September 17 President Bush reportedly told his advisors: “I believe Iraq was involved” – an inclination he voiced on at least one other occasion.9 Having been shown no intelligence to this effect, whether this assertion was a hunch based on the prevailing American metanarrative on Iraq, or an early sign of the president’s intention to use 9/11 as a pretext for war, remains uncertain. By September 21 the CIA had informed the president that no Al Qaeda-Baghdad link existed, but Bush continued to press intelligence agencies to find a connection.10 Following the creation



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of the Office of Special Plans (OSP) by Secretary Rumsfeld the following year, this pressure on intelligence analysts to select raw data supporting the purported ties between Baghdad and Al Qaeda, as well as on Iraqi development of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), escalated further. As a Pentagon adviser acknowledged: “The goal of Special Plans [was] . . . to reveal what the intelligence community can’t see” – providing intelligence which suited Washington’s agenda but did not necessarily reflect the real state of affairs.11 Iraq had been explicitly on Washington’s target list for the preceding three years, since the U.S. Congress and Senate had passed the Iraq Liberation Act by an overwhelming majority in 1998. The legislation stipulated that Washington should work “to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace it.” The U.S. subsequently more openly provided financial assistance to pro-Western Iraqi opposition groups and funded radio and television broadcasts into the country to propagate American-favoured political narratives. The consensus in Washington had shifted away from that of 1991, when leaving the Ba’athist government in power was seen to be in the American interest, with the new legislation of 1998 and extensive airstrikes launched by the Bill Clinton administration in its aftermath marking a turning point in the long campaign against Iraq. The impetus for imposing a change in government on Iraq increased from 2001. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, one of the leading figures on the NSC, recalled that at the Bush administration’s first NSC meeting on January 30, 2001, the president’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice raised the agenda topic: “How Iraq is destabilising the region.” O’Neill later observed: “Ten days in, and it was about Iraq.”12 This was partly motivated by concerns that the UN sanctions regime on Baghdad was soon to expire, and with oil prices high and much of the world willing to do business the country had the potential to make a swift recovery from the crisis of the 1990s and re-emerge as a major power that could undermine Western hegemony in the Middle East. Indeed, even with sanctions in place, Iraq had already begun to show some

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signs of an economic recovery by 1997 – a few months before the Clinton administration had launched its own major attack. At his senate confirmation hearing that month Secretary of State Colin Powell pledged to the Senate that the new administration would reenergise the UN sanctions on Iraq, but although this was considered vital to U.S. interests Washington’s ability to do this unilaterally was limited.13 Leading figures in the Bush administration including Defence Secretary Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy State Secretary Richard Armitage, and Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, argued in a joint statement that the policy of simply containing Iraq had to be rejected on the basis that the U.S. “can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions.”14 Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Armitage and Zoellick were all subscribers to the increasingly prominent neoconservative school of thought, which heavily influenced the Bush administration and called for the U.S. to take “an imperial role” in world affairs15 and establish a “benevolent global hegemony.”16 Eighteen leading neoconservatives had sent an open letter to President Bill Clinton on January 26, l998 urging him to work towards “the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.”17 Ten of them received positions in the new Bush administration.18 The neoconservatives were said to have “a focus on the Middle East and global Islam as pivotal to America’s national interests.”19 Their resulting foreign policy outlook was arguably highly detrimental to America’s hegemonic position since the most formidable challengers to its power such as China and North Korea were outside the Islamic world and were notably largely ignored in the Bush years. Attacking Iraq was not only a time sensitive issue due to the expiry of UN sanctions, but it was also militarily one of the most vulnerable American adversaries for several reasons including the destruction of much of its forces in 1991 and the arms embargo imposed since which prevented its military’s replenishment or modernisation. Baghdad’s acceptance of highly intrusive UN inspections throughout much of the 1990s, meanwhile, had allowed the U.S. and its allies to ensure that it had been stripped of ballistic missiles and chemical weapons which could have



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otherwise enabled it to deter or retaliate against future Western attacks. By contrast North Korea, which had by far the largest and most sophisticated defence sector of the three axis members, had proliferated many of its technologies including medium range ballistic missiles to Iran. The fact that Iraq’s population was far less homogenous than those of the other two targets, with sizeable Shiite and Kurdish minorities which had shown a propensity for rebellion in the past, and which potentially had much to gain from seeing crippling Western sanctions end if the government in Baghdad was removed, also made the country a more attractive target. In order to justify a full-scale invasion of Iraq Washington leveraged the preceding negative portrayals of the country and of President Hussein in particular to claim that the kind of government it represented was a threat to the world if allowed to continue to exist. Negative portrayals of the country had already made a strong imprint on the American and Western consciousness and formed a metanarrative which presented Baghdad as capable of almost any kind of evil act. A poll conducted by Time and CNN on September 13, 2001, found that 78 percent of Americans suspected Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.20 A Gallup poll conducted from September 21–22 found that over 68 percent of respondents in the U.S. supported removing Saddam Hussein from power.21 The administration had not yet tied Iraq to terror groups in any statements, but such perceptions were already predominant largely as a legacy of Gulf War propaganda efforts. Indeed, a Gallup poll conducted before the 9/11 attacks in February 2001 had found that 85 percent of Americans had an “unfavourable” opinion of Iraq – the worst of 26 countries the poll asked about.22 An April 1991 Gallup Poll found that 57 percent of Americans felt hostilities with Iraq had ended too soon – with Washington’s decision not to invade that year and to allow the Ba’athist government to stay in power considered controversial.23 In mid-August l992 almost two-thirds of respondents polled supported a new military campaign to overthrow the Iraqi government by force.24 A poll after 9/11 in mid-December, 2001, found that 61 percent

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of Americans believed Saddam Hussein had to be removed from power for the War on Terror to be successful – despite the administration having as yet made no indications to the public of a connection between Baghdad and Al Qaeda or terror attacks.25 The Bush administration’s thought, although sharply contradicting available intelligence, closely reflected the major public consensus which had itself been shaped by 13 years of propaganda – much of it based on total fabrications. Subsequent statements by Bush administration figures served to remind the public that Saddam Hussein was to be viewed as ‘another Hitler’26 and a ‘madman,’27 recalling the rhetoric of the Gulf War. To provide further impetus to the need for military action, the argument for war centred around two new aspects of the ‘Iraq Threat’ which had not been significant parts of the narrative of the Gulf War. These were allegations of ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and the country’s alleged development of weapons of mass destruction. The former allowed the case for war to benefit from post-9/11 fervour and public calls for harsh retaliation against those responsible, while making the danger Iraq allegedly posed appear far more imminent. Although developing weapons of mass destruction was hardly an atrocity, nor did it violate international norms since several other states had done or were doing so, Iraq’s Ba’athist government had been portrayed as so terribly atrocious in nature that its possession of such weapons was considered totally unacceptable. Thus, the fabricated weapons program was made significant largely due to a metanarrative which had been built on fabricated atrocity stories such as the 1990 slaughter of incubator babies, in contrast to weapons programs in other countries which aroused far milder public responses. In February 2002 chairman of the influential neoconservative Project for a New American Century think tank William Kristol testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when asked about the next step in the war on terrorism: “the short answer is that Iraq is next.”28 The first significant allusion of possible Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda had come on December 9, 2001, when Vice President Dick Cheney, appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, said an alleged meeting between Al Qaeda plotter Mohamed



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Atta and an Iraqi agent in Prague was “pretty well confirmed.”29 Secretary Rumsfeld subsequently alluded to the possibility of Iraq harbouring Al Qaeda terrorists in August 2002, 30 claiming the following month that evidence for such ties was “bulletproof.”31 Administration officials increasingly raised the possibility of ties between Baghdad and the terror group. On September 9, Cheney claimed U.S. intelligence reports after September 11 had disclosed “a number of contacts over the years” that pointed to links between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks.32 The president himself began to allude to the possibility of Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda from September 2002, although not claiming it outright. As a Yale Review of International Studies paper on the image of Saddam Hussein highlighted, Bush “simply tarred both Hussein and Al-Qaeda with the same terroristic brush to imply a relationship. The persistence of such insinuation effectively allowed the Bush administration to claim that Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda worked together, and that Hussein was involved in 9/11, without ever outright saying so.”33 Of the 13 speeches the president gave between that of September 12, 2002 at the United Nations General Assembly, and the conclusion of the invasion of Iraq in May 2003, twelve mentioned Iraq and terrorism in the same paragraph and ten placed them in the same sentence.34 Other administration officials similarly implied a connection between Baghdad and Al Qaeda without stating it explicitly. In response to a New York Times story claiming a link between Iraq and terror groups, which was later proven to be entirely false,ii President Bush’s National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said: “I think it surprises no one that Saddam Hussein is engaged in all kinds of activities that are destabilising.”35 Creating the ii The New York Times had notably cited Iraqi defectors residing in the West as the source of its claims, which represented part of an emerging trend that played a central role in Western atrocity fabrication efforts long after Iraq – namely the exploiting of dissidents who depended heavily on Western or allied support and patronage. To earn their livelihoods in an unfamiliar country, or else allured by the promise of attaining power when their country’s government was overthrown and a pro-Western regime installed, dissidents would tell all kinds of stories to vilify their countries in line with narratives which would have the greatest impacts on public opinion.

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image of such ties was heavily dependent on how American and Western perceptions had been shaped regarding ‘what kind of country’ Iraq was – leading the public to assume what officials would not state outright. A possible connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda became increasingly central to Washington’s arguments for war, and was made more serious by claims that the weapons of mass destruction Iraq was allegedly developing could be proliferated to terror groups. As Vice President Cheney declared in March 2002, in reference to Iraqi WMD and its alleged ties with terror groups: “The United States will not permit the forces of terror to gain the tools of genocide.”36 President Bush elaborated in a speech at West Point in June: “Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons or missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.”37 The WMD argument alone may not have been sufficient to sway the American public, for which claims of ties to terror groups were much more important. Polls showed that 82 percent of Americans said they would support the war regardless of whether WMDs were found in Iraq,38 and 64 percent said “Saddam Hussein should be removed from power in Iraq, regardless of whether U.N. inspectors find evidence of weapons of mass destruction.”39 Indeed, from January 2002 to May 2003 President Bush referred to Iraq’s alleged ties to terror groups over five times as much in his speeches as he did to alleged WMDs (an average of 12.2 mentions per speech vs. 2.3 mentions). While the latter allegation held more sway internationally, particularly in Britain, the former had a stronger impact on the post-9/11 American public.40 The importance of the Al Qaeda link was highlighted by the fact that poll respondents who considered Al Qaeda to be America’s greatest threat were more likely to favour invading Iraq than those who thought Iraq itself was America’s most important threat.41 Even if Iraq had WMD and became the world’s seventh non-Western nuclear weapons state, it had no reason to suddenly attack the U.S. with them much as it had refrained from using its chemical or biological weapons even at the height of the Gulf War. While Iraq on its own was not a threat, the image of a Baghdad-Al



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Qaeda axis added an unpredictable and undeterrable element to the enemy, and effectively framed Iraqi WMDs as a force multiplier to future 9/11-type attacks. This was key to conveying an imminent need for action against Baghdad. June 2002 saw the initiation of preliminary military actions against Iraq to pave the way for an invasion, with American and British combat aircraft assigned to patrol no fly zones over Iraq since 1991 reassigned to carry out offensive sorties without provocation under the then-secret Operation Southern Focus. British MoD figures released three years later showed that, despite U.S. claims that renewed air attacks were a response to increased Iraqi provocations, Iraqi actions which could be construed as such had in fact been in decline before the operation was initiated.42 Multiple official sources, including U.S. Army General and CENTCOM Commander Tommy Franks who in 2003 oversaw the invasion of Iraq, later conceded that Operation Southern Focus was falsely premised on a response to Iraqi resistance to the no fly zone, and was in fact an attempt to destroy Iraqi air defences to pave the way for invasion.43 Defending minorities within Iraq was also used as a pretext for the escalated air assault, although this was later conceded by Whitehall officials to have been false with the weakening of Iraqi air defences and communications systems being the actual goal.44 These attacks continued for nine months, with a large 100-aircraft strike three months into the operation ensuring that Iraq would be blind to special forces and other assets entering its territory through neighbouring Jordan. In July 2002 the administration formed the White House Iraq Group to create a media strategy to promote war. Its campaign centred on the narrative that Iraq would provide terror groups with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, and on the argument that the only sure defence was to forcefully dismantle the Iraqi government before it could arm its alleged terrorist accomplices. Even many of the most tenuous claims by administration officials regarding ties to Al Qaeda or WMD were almost never questioned in major media outlets, which to the contrary only amplified the government’s line. Leading journalist Bob Woodward, for example, when asked on CNN what would happen if America went to

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war and didn’t find any WMDs, answered: “I think the chance of that happening is about zero. There’s just too much there.”45 Several media outlets would later apologise for their uncritical and one-sided coverage, but only once the war was over and the damage was done – before then going on to similarly support future unprovoked miliary assaults based on similarly tenuous pretexts. Addressing the press alongside British Prime Minister Tony Blair on September 7, 2002, President Bush asserted the existence of a new report from the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which stated that an Iraqi nuclear arsenal was imminently expected to materialise. “A report came out of the IAEA that they [Iraq] were six months away from developing a weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need,” he stated.46 This was one of the most blatant examples of a fabricated claim by the administration, and the IAEA had notably never issued any report which even an imaginative interpretation could reach such a conclusion from. Award winning former Wall Street Journal reporter and president of Harper’s Magazine John MacArthur described Bush’s claim as a “near total fabrication,” and “a completely uncorroborated case for pre-emptive war,” stressing that “for public relations purposes, it hardly mattered that no such IAEA report existed, because almost no one in the press bothered to check out the president’s claim.”47 The Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung notably quoted an IAEA spokesman saying that “the agency has issued no new report,” but she didn’t confront the White House with this information nor was it ever mentioned by the Post beyond her 20-second summary of the press conference.48 The right-leaning Washington Times was effectively alone in addressing the issue, and pointed out that there were no new reports from the IAEA as the president claimed, nor had the agency ever issued any report with a time frame for an Iraqi nuclear weapons program. It also cited spokesman from the UN inspection teams Mark Gwozdecky, who reported on the actual state of the Iraqi nuclear industry and the possibility of developing nuclear weapons. He stated: “we had concluded that we had neutralised their nuclear weapons program.



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We had confiscated their fissile material. We had destroyed all their key buildings and equipment.” 49 Aside from the Washington Times, U.S. and Western press, and the New York Times in particular, not only did not question the president’s claims, but played an important role in ensuring that they resonated with the public. The Times, in John MacArthur’s words, inflated what appeared to be a totally fabricated claim by President Bush “into something resembling a prediction of nuclear Armageddon” while repeatedly citing “anonymous administration sources” for increasingly ludicrous claims. 50 President Bush formally introduced plans for war on Iraq on September 11, 2002, in a national address from Ellis Island, New York City, which commemorated the 9/11 attacks. The occasion chosen did more to cement the idea in the minds of the public of a connection between the threat from Al Qaeda and the need for an attack on Iraq – which the president now stated explicitly. Bush alleged that Iraq trained Al Qaeda in bomb making and other key skills, provided medical treatment to its leadership, and maintained “high level contacts” with the terror group. This partnership was supposedly intended by Baghdad to “allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.” “The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstructing its nuclear weapons program,” he further alleged, stressing the importance of military action to forestall the possibility of a nuclear armed Iraq – a possibility that allegedly could materialise within a year. The terrifying narrative Bush put forward was that Baghdad obtaining nuclear weapons could directly result in nuclear attacks by Al Qaeda on the United States – none of which would be traceable to Iraq. The following day on September 12 President Bush addressed the UN General Assembly with a focus on portraying an imminent Iraqi threat, and much like American delegations had in 1990 he stirred emotions through graphic depictions of alleged humanitarian abuses by Baghdad. “Wives are tortured in front of their husbands, children in the presence of their parents,” he claimed before the world.51 The U.S. subsequently used the UN as a forum to press its claims particularly surrounding Iraq’s alleged development of nuclear weapons – claims which leading

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international experts firmly refuted. UN weapons inspector Hans Blix told reporters before meeting the Security Council: “We haven’t found any smoking guns.”52 IAEA Director General Dr. Mohamed Al Baradei reported in late January: “We have to date found no evidence that Iraq has revived its nuclear program.”53 Baradei subsequently told the UN Security Council on March 7 that documents purportedly showing Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium from Niger, which were thought to have been supplied by Britain or the U.S. who were pushing this claim, were forgeries.54 In response to the questions raised regarding Iraq’s development of weapons of mass destruction, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer responded: “We know for a fact that there are weapons there.”55 Deputy Defence Secretary Wolfowitz told the Council on Foreign Relations on January 23, 2003: “Iraq’s weapons of mass terror and the terror networks to which the Iraqi regime are linked are not two separate themes – not two separate threats. They are part of the same threat.”56 National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice wrote a New York Times Op-Ed that same day titled “Why We Know Iraq Is Lying,” which described Iraq’s weapons disclosure to the United Nations as “a 12,200-page lie.”57 To undermine Washington’s case for war and prove its own innocence, Baghdad had notified UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in late September that it would allow UN weapons inspectors to return “without conditions.”58 This was a major concession reflecting the seriousness of the situation, since U.S. and British intelligence had previously infiltrated UN inspection teams not only for espionage, but also to attempt unsuccessfully to engineer a coup in Iraq and assassinate Saddam Hussein.59 UN inspectors had otherwise passed on their findings and large quantities of seized Iraqi government documents to Washington before doing so to the United Nations itself, highlighting controversies regarding how impartial the inspection regime could have been and drawing strong criticisms from several quarters of the UN.60 Iraq’s prior reluctance to allow inspections was portrayed in the West either as paranoia, or more often as a sign that it was hiding something, with the U.S. and British operations that used



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the inspections as cover only later being revealed. It nevertheless appeared to be the correct move by Baghdad. As a U.S. government source who insisted on anonymity stated in 2002, the Bush administration “doesn’t want to have UN weapons inspectors go back in, because they might actually show that the probability of Iraq having [threatening illicit weapons] is much lower than they want us to believe.” “This administration is capable of any lie . . . in order to advance its war goal in Iraq,” the source concluded.61 Washington’s timetable for military action notably overrode, the timetable and processes set by the UN Security Council for inspections in Iraq, thus effectively terminating the possibility.62 The UN was again used as a forum to make the case for war when on February 5, 2003, State Secretary Powell addressed the Security Council to advocate a U.S.-led invasion. Like all major figures in the administration Powell was a hardliner, and in the 1990s had indicated the possibility of a Desert Storm-like military campaign to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons.63 Where he stood out was in his high approval ratings and credibility which made him the ideal figure to deliver such a presentation. Powell reportedly insisted that CIA Director George Tenet sit directly behind him during the speech to provide the impression that everything said had the full support of the intelligence community.64 It proved successful, with some studies pointing to a 30-point rise in the number of Americans who felt convinced of a Baghdad-Al Qaeda connection following Powell’s speech at the Security Council.65 An assessment by scholars at Princeton University published by the American Political Science Association in 2005 concluded: the 2003 war in Iraq received high levels of public support because the Bush administration successfully framed conflict as an extension of the war on terror, which was a response to the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Our analysis of Bush’s speeches reveals that the administration consistently connected Iraq with 9/11. New York Times coverage of the president’s speeches featured almost no

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debate over the framing of the Iraq conflict as part of the war on terror. The assertion had tremendous influence on public attitudes, as indicated by polling data from several sources. . . . In 2002 the terrorism frame was available, believable, and understandable to a country scarred by September 11, making the frame powerful and convincing.66 They stressed that although “President Bush never publicly blamed Saddam Hussein or Iraq for the events of September 11, but by consistently linking Iraqi with terrorism and Al Qaeda he provided the context from which such a connection could be made. . . . The way language and transitions are shaped in his official speeches almost compelled listeners to infer a connection.” They elaborated on the technique and its success: The administration juxtaposed allusions to Iraq with the terms terror, bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Furthermore, there was little elite opposition to this rhetoric, leaving the American public with a one-sided flow of information. . . . The connection between Iraq and 9/11 made the latter the most relevant consideration in the minds of the American people when they thought about the war in Iraq, which increased support for the war.67 In his January 2003 State of the Union Address, President Bush made one of most the direct allusions to the possibility of Al Qaeda being equipped with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, evoking the painful memories of the 9/11 attacks and strongly implying links to Iraq. He stated: “Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans – this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.”68 The distinction between “imagine the hijackers . . .” and “the hijackers could have been/could be in future.” was a



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significant one, but not one most viewers would notice.iii Fifty days later, on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the majority of Americans believed President Saddam Hussein was involvediv in the 9/11 attacks.69 Truth or Fabrication? In the lead up to the Iraq War, and increasingly so afterwards as more papers were declassified and more officials provided new testimonies, it became clear not only that the Bush administration had misled the public, but that the claims it used to justify the invasion were outright false and sharply contradicted the intelligence it was being given. In 2015v the CIA’s 93-page 2002 National Intelligence Assessment (NIE) was declassified, and showed that claims of ties between Al Qaeda and Baghdad were not supported by available intelligence. The NIE concluded that there were no operational ties between Iraq and the terror group, casting claims by administration officials in a new light. Secretary Rumsfeld, for example, had stated: “We do have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad. We have what we consider to be very reliable reporting of senior-level contacts going back a decade, and of possible chemical- and biological-agent training.”70 President Bush made multiple claims to the same effect,71 including after Baghdad was captured that “we have removed an ally of Al Qaeda.”72 The CIA’s own documents indicated that these were all entirely false.

iii These highly misleading portrayals continued after the war began. Vice President Cheney, for example, stated in September 2003 that the success of the Iraq campaign “struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11.” (Interview with Vice President Richard Cheney, Meet the Press, September 14, 2003.) iv It was only in September 2003, five months after Baghdad was occupied, that Bush would acknowledge: “No, we’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th.” (Milbank, Dana, ‘Bush Disavows Hussein-Sept. 11 Link,’ Washington Post, September 18, 2003.) v A prior version of the NIE was made public in 2004, but gave virtually no useful information as it was very heavily redacted.

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The only source for claims that Iraq was training Al Qaeda to use chemical and biological weapons came from detained jihadist Ibn al-Shaykh Al Libi, a Libyan who operated a training camp in Afghanistan. He later retracted his claims, stating that he was under torture and was only telling his captors what they wanted to hear. 73 The case of Al Libi was an example of what former Congressman Lee Hamilton, who served multiple foreign affairs and intelligence committees, described as follows: “the intelligence that you get is driven by the policy, rather than the policy being driven by the intelligence.”74 David Kay, a former Iraq weapons inspector who also headed the Iraq Survey Group, stressed to similar effect in an interview in 2006 that assessments were trying to drive towards a policy conclusion while the information available simply didn’t support it.75 A 2014 RAND Corporation report on the case for war in Iraq similarly highlighted that many intelligence reports from the time were flawed and unreliable because they were “influenced by policymakers’ desires.”76 Al Libi’s statements extracted through torture were a case in point.vi National Security Advisor Susan Rice had received a memo on September 18, 2001, summarising intelligence on the possible relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq, which concluded there was little evidence of any links.77 The administration’s narrative of an Iraqi threat, however, continued to be centred on claims that Baghdad was working with the terror group. Claims frequently cited by the vice president that 9/11 conspirator Mohammed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer were at the centre of the case presented for these ties, although by the time they began to vi As noted by Lee Hamilton: “This is not a problem unique to George Bush. It’s every president I’ve known, and I’ve worked with seven or eight of them. All, at some time or another, used intelligence to support their political objectives. Information is power, and the temptation to use information to achieve the results you want is almost overwhelming. The whole intelligence community knows exactly what the president wants, and most are in their jobs because of the president certainly the people at the top and they will do everything they can to support the policy (sic).” Hamilton had received awards from both the CIA and the Defence Intelligence Agency. He concluded: “I’m always sceptical about intelligence. It’s not as pure as the driven snow.” (Peterson, Scott, ‘In war, some facts less factual,’ Christian Science Monitor, September 6, 2002.)



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be voiced the CIA and FBI had already reported their conclusion that such a meeting never took place.78 The CIA’s 2002 National Intelligence Assessment notably stressed that “the information we have on Iraqi nuclear personnel does not appear consistent with a coherent effort to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program,” and that there were no definitive signs of development of chemical or biological weapons. Thus, when President Bush stated in 2002 that Iraq “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons” and that “the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program,” this sharply contradicted the information his administration was actually receiving.79 The U.S. Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence itself eventually concluded that the Bush administration’s claims about Iraq’s WMD program were “not supported by the underlying intelligence reporting.”80 In August 2002 when Vice President Cheney said: “Simply stated, there’s no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,”81 there was nothing approaching confirmed intelligence to this effect. Indeed, General Anthony Zinni who had accessed the same intelligence later recalled regarding Cheney’s speech: “It was a total shock. I couldn’t believe the vice president was saying this, you know? In doing work with the CIA on Iraq WMD, through all the briefings I heard at Langley, I never saw one piece of credible evidence that there was an ongoing program.”82 In October President Bush claimed that Iraq had a “massive stockpile” of biological weapons,83 although CIA Director George Tenet highlighted that the CIA had informed policymakers there was “no specific information on the types or quantities of weapons agent or stockpiles at Baghdad’s disposal.”84 On December 31, in an effort to justify a policy focus on Iraq over North Korea which multiple reports indicated already had nuclear weapons, the president declared: “We do not know whether or not he [Saddam Hussein] has a nuclear weapon.”85 This was one of the most difficult comments to substantiate, although it did serve to portray Iraq as a more imminent threat. CIA Director Tenet later testified “We said that Saddam did not have a nuclear weapon and probably would have been unable to make one until 2007 to 2009.”86

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Indeed, if there was any significant ambiguity on Iraq’s possession of any substantial chemical or biological weapons arsenals, let alone nuclear weapons which were much harder to produce, the invasion likely would not have been carried out in the way it was. Regarding Iraq’s interest in the procurement of aluminium tubes, which was cited as proof that it was developing nuclear weapons, the U.S. Department of Energy concludedvii that their dimensions were “consistent with applications to rocket motors” which was a “more likely end use.” The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research also indicated that the tubes’ purpose was not for the development of nuclear weapons.87 Nevertheless, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice subsequently stated that the tubes “are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs” – which she used to argue for military action on the basis that “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”88 This had caused controversy at the time with the Institute for Science and International Security being one of many parties to have alleged in 2002 that the administration was exerting pressure on its own analysts for evidence that could be interpreted in a certain way – namely to support its narrative regarding Iraq’s WMDs and Al Qaeda ties. The institute stressed that evidence for an Iraqi nuclear weapons program was underwhelming.89 Although Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed 13 years later that his UN speech was a “great intelligence failure,”90 available evidence strongly indicated that he had knowledge of but intentionally contradicted what intelligence agencies were saying and was deliberately committing lies to the record to provide vii U.S. weapons inspector David Albright similarly stressed in a CBS interview that “people who understood gas centrifuges almost uniformly felt that these tubes were not specific to a gas centrifuge use [for uranium enrichment]” – that the administration was “selectively picking information to bolster a case that the Iraqi nuclear threat was more imminent that it is, and, in essence, scare people.” The head of the IAEA Mohamed Al Baradei similarly stressed that “extensive field investigation and document analysis have failed to uncover any evidence that Iraq intended to use these 81mm tubes for any project other than reverse-engineering of rockets.” (MacArthur, John R., Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, London, University of California Press, 2004 (p. xxvii, xxx).)



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pretext for war.viii These included, among many other mistruths, lies regarding the designs of Iraq’s aluminium tubes, doctoring of UN evidence on Iraqi compliance with requests for disarmament to portray it as proof Iraq was hiding weapons, and lies by omission regarding Iraq’s VX nerve agent program.91 Among several dozen outright lies committed to the record, when quoting intercepts of the conversations of Iraqi officers, Powell went so far as to add sentences that were not in the original quotes to make it appear as though they were talking about hiding evidence of WMD. None of the incriminating parts of conversation could be found in the original transcripts.92 An early indicator of how tenuous administration allegations against Iraq were came in February 2003, when Secretary Powell informed the UN Security Council that a “poison factory” in Northern Iraq was linked to Al Qaeda. No evidence was provided, and when Western reporters subsequently visited the compound, they found nothing of the kind. “There is no sign of chemical weapons anywhere – only the smell of paraffin and vegetable ghee used for cooking,” British reporter Luke Harding reported.93 A State Department official responded to the embarrassment by telling the New York Times: “a ‘poison factory’ is a term of art.”94 The claim marked part of what would become a growing trend of satellite images of buildings which could be put to almost any use being cited by the U.S. and its European partners as evidence of a site where some kind of malign activity was committed. Although there were Islamist fighters at the site, this was explained by its location in Iraq’s Kurdistan region over which the Iraqi government had exercised almost no control since 1991 after Kurdish separatist groups there were placed under Western protection. Even if there had been a poison factory there, Baghdad could hardly have been held responsible.95 viii In response to Powell’s repeated fabrications, high-ranking Foreign Service officer John Brady Kiesling resigned in protest, writing a letter to the State Secretary slamming his “systematic distortion of intelligence, systematic manipulation of American opinion” and practice of “arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq.” (‘Letter of resignation by John Brady Kiesling,’ February 27, 2003.)

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Secretary Powell subsequently announced a threat from a new Iraqi drone – which was portrayed as a major threat that was able to launch biological weapons attacks far and wide. Four months prior in October President Bush had alluded to the possibility that Iraqi drones could be used to launch attacks on the U.S. – meaning either that Iraq had the only drones in the world with intercontinental ranges or it had some kind of operating base in the Americas which were both ludicrous propositions. Washington’s concerns were soon echoed by London. The possibility of Iraqi drones flying down American streets launching WMDs was widely reported in U.S. media and contributed to portraying Iraq as an imminent threat. The drone referred to, it quickly emerged, was no better than a civilian hobby model and had a wooden propeller, engines smaller than those of a lawnmower and a range of no more than five miles.96 The Iraq War was thus based on claims which the administration, in the best cases, was aware were highly tenuous, and in the worst cases knew were outright lies. The invasion’s far-reaching consequences were thus all direct results of fabricated information vilifying the government in Baghdad, associating it with the 9/11 atrocity, and falsely portraying it as an imminent threat with malign intentions.ix ix Contrasting the foci of government campaigns to build support for the first and second wars against Iraq, the first focused primarily on fabricated atrocities against the Kuwaiti population while the latter, capitalizing on post-9/11 public sentiments, focused on the imminent threat allegedly posed by Baghdad due to its alleged WMD development and Al Qaeda ties. Neither campaign focused entirely on one aspect, however, with portrayals of Iraq as a threat and Iraq as a humanitarian abuser being highly complementary. The case for the 2003 Iraq War was strengthened by fabricated stories of atrocities, for example, when President Bush claimed that “on Saddam Hussein’s orders, opponents have been decapitated, wives and mothers of political opponents have been systematically raped as a method of intimidation, and political prisoners have been forced to watch their own children being tortured.” While the Iraqi government did widely practice torture of political opponents, these particular claims were nevertheless far removed from reality with even Western human rights groups and the State Department’s own human rights reports providing no corroborating claims. Such fabricated abuses were only a secondary focus of the campaign, however. In the same vein, a secondary aspect of the



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False Claims of Iraqi Atrocities The credibility of U.S. allegations against Iraq, in particular that of its development of weapons of mass destruction, was bolstered by corroborating claims from Britain which would be its primary coalition partner in launching the invasion. A 55-page dossier published in September 2002 by the British government, based on reports made by the Joint Intelligence Committee, alleged that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons. This included claims that Baghdad sought “significant quantities of  uranium from Africa” for such purposes, although the sources for large majority of the evidence were not reported supposedly to protect anonymity. Its findings, according to Prime Minister Tony Blair, left both London and the world no choice but to act. British reports that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, and Al Hussein Scud-derived ballistic missiles capable of carrying them, were presented by politicians and major media outlets as evidence of an imminent threat to the Western world. Britain’s most popular daily newspaper The Sun, for example, claimed “Brits 45mins from doom,” while the Daily Star reported “Mad Saddam ready to attack: 45 minutes from a chemical war,” and the Daily Mail published the headline “Just 45 minutes from attack.”97 Prime Minister Blair similarly alluded to the possibility that Iraq, again personified as Saddam Hussein, would not only expand its arsenal, but also “use the weapons he has” unless swift action was taken.98 Even if Iraq did have the chemical and biological weapons it was alleged to, presenting the case that the country would use them unprovoked was somewhat ludicrous. The missiles Iraq allegedly had, even according to the dossier itself, had only a 650km range allowing them to reach only “Cyprus and NATO members Greece and Turkey as well as all Iraq’s neighbours.” The fact that Britain had a military base on Cyprus was used to spin this as a sign that campaign to win support for the 1991 Gulf War had focused on false claims of vast Iraqi armies on the Saudi border, a threat to Western oil supplies, and an expansionist Iraq developing nuclear weapons. (‘Butchery in Baghdad,’ Chicago Tribune, December 18, 2005.)

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Iraq not only could hit Britain, since the base was technically British soil, but that such an attack was going to be initiated without provocation. Iraq’s alleged capability was far from remarkable, not only compared to Western and Western-aligned states such as Saudi Arabia99 and Israel,100 but even compared to other U.S. adversaries. Syria and Iran, for example, used North Korean missiles with ranges of 1000km101 and 1500km102 respectively and much more survivable and sophisticated terminal warheads,103 and the former likely fielded more chemical weapons that Iraq ever had. Blurring the very distinct lines between a deterrent, and a weapon which would be used as soon as the owner had the chance to,104 was later similarly used by advocates of war to portray North Korea as ready to launch nuclear attacks on the United States as soon as it developed a nuclear-tipped missile capable of reaching it.105 As it was, however, Iraq actually had neither. Major General Michael Laurie, who had been involved in producing the dossier, wrote to a subsequent inquiry in 2011, later known as the Chilcot Inquiry, that “the purpose of the dossier was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence, and that to make the best out of sparse and inconclusive intelligence the wording was developed with care.”106 The claim that Iraqi missiles could reach British territory within 45 minutes was found not only to have been misleading, but to have been outright false, and had been inserted by the government’s director of communications, Alastair Campbell, against the wishes of the intelligence agencies. British weapons expert David Kelly from the Defence Ministry, who had led ten UNSCOM missions to Iraq, spoke with journalists highlighting that the dossier, and in particular the ’45 minutes’ claim, were misleading. Kelly was subsequently reported to have committed suicide under circumstances for years seen as suspicious.107



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The invasion began on March 10, 2003,x and was carried out without authorisation from the United Nations Security Council or the pretext of defence from an Iraqi attack, which made it a serious breach of the UN charter and an illegal act of aggression – the supreme international crime.108 This was one of several U.S. led crimes of aggression which violated international law, with preceding examples including the invasions of Grenada109 and Panama110 and the illegal air campaigns and no fly zones targeting Yugoslavia111 and post-Gulf War Iraq.112 Following the invasion U.S. and allied allegations of Iraq’s development of weapons of mass destruction were revealed to have been totally fabricated. They had proven invaluable as a pretext for hostile policies towards Baghdad, however, particularly when paired with efforts to portray the Iraqi leadership as a potential supplier of such weapons to Al Qaeda, and otherwise as irrational or insane and therefore willing to use such weapons unprovoked.113 As Professor Robert Swansbrough, President Bush’s most prominent biographer, stressed: “The Bush administration’s call for a pre-emptive war against Iraq – replete with frightening x Coverage of the war itself saw press tightly controlled, not only through a similar pool system to the first Gulf War, but also through threats and expulsions. Newsday’s Letta Taylor, for one, was threatened with expulsion for reporting what the U.S. Marines she was accompanying were saying. She cited frequent references to “nuking” the “ragheads” and “camel jockeys” – the names widely used for Iraqis – and asked one lance corporal what a raghead was. He replied: “anybody who actively opposes the United States of America’s way. . . . If a little kid actively opposes my way of life, I’d call him a raghead too.” She recalled: “Because the remarks suggested an enormous cultural chasm between the invaders and the invaded, I reluctantly felt obliged to report them. After my article was published, Capt. Myle Hammond, the Gold Company commander, threatened to kick me out of his unit in a move I interpreted as an attempt to soften my reporting.” Later in the campaign as U.S. forces faced growing opposition, four journalists, two each from Israel and Portugal, were roughed up and expelled from Iraq by the U.S. Army on the basis that they posed a security threat. That day U.S. forces fired on a hotel known to be full of reporters, killing one from Reuters and one from Spain’s Telecino. Although the military claimed it was unintentional, several analysts speculated otherwise based on the timing and circumstances. (MacArthur, John R., Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, London, University of California Press, 2004 (pp. xxxvi, xxxix)).

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warnings about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda and hints of the Iraqi’ dictator’s role in the 9/11 attacks on America – created a powerful juggernaut towards a ‘war of choice’ with Iraq.”114 He noted regarding the Bush administration’s decision to go to war “once the president had made that decision, groupthink shunted aside warnings, contrary data, and less optimistic assumptions that disputed the president’s preferred policy.”115 The head of Britain’s MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove similarly concluded, as documented in the Downing Street Memorandum published in 2005: “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”116 He recalled that many figures in the administration had been “playing fast and loose with the evidence” to provide a pretext for the policies they hoped to enact.117 Many of the statements by U.S. officials were found to have been not only misleading, but outright false. An example was an address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on August 26, 2002, when Vice President Cheney unequivocally declared “we now know” that Iraq has resumed its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.118 The CIA had not cleared the speech, which went well beyond the facts the intelligence community had established.119 Another was an address on October 7, 2002 during which President Bush stated: “We know Iraq and Al Qaeda had high-level contacts over a year.” House Speaker Dennis Hastert summarised five days later regarding this claim: “is there a direct connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda? The president thinks so.”120 This unevidenced claim was seen as a highly dubious by experts considering, among other factors, the sharp animosity between the secular Ba’ath Party and the fundamentalist terror group and their starkly opposing backgrounds and ideologies.121 As a CATO Institute report noted: “as a secular leader of a country divided along religious lines, Saddam represented everything that the global jihadists and Islamic fundamentalists hate. Saddam was deterred from cooperating with terrorists because he feared the terrorists.”122 Colin Powell’s Chief



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of Staff, Larry Wilkerson, was one of many who stated that available evidence showed the agendas of the state and the terror group were “incompatible,” leaving little room for cooperation.123 With a Catholic, Tariq Aziz, as one of his closest confidants, former foreign minister, and deputy prime minister, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had consistently had some of the very worst relations with Islamist groups of any country in the Arab world, and had abolished Sharia courts very early on. For those familiar with Iraq the allegations of ties to Al Qaeda appeared absurd.124 The primary argument for war with Iraq was not that it was committing atrocities, but rather that there was an imminent need to pre-empt an atrocity by terrorists using Iraqi WMD – a narrative bolstered by a strongly implied connection between Baghdad and the mass killings of 9/11. The British narrative placed a lesser emphasis on possible Baghdad-Al Qaeda ties, but instead strongly implied that an Iraq with an expanded WMD capability would not use it as a deterrent, and could instead use it to attack the West without warning. Both narratives were perhaps best summarised by the statement of President Bush: “facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof – the smoking gun – that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”125 The atrocity fabricated for Iraq by its Western adversaries, pertaining to its weapons program, was one yet to happen and which invading the country was presented as the only means to prevent. J.D. Maddox, an intelligence officer for the Department of Energy assigned to the Iraq Survey Group – the American-led team searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – recalled regarding his deployment to Iraq in June 2003 and growing disillusionment with Washington’s narrative: I had privately questioned the motive for going into Iraq, suspicious of the way the administration had shifted its justification over time, but I still chose to go. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s now-notorious United Nations speech on Feb. 5, 2003 – when he argued that Saddam Hussein’s regime had developed weapons of mass destruction and posed an imminent threat – assuaged

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any reservations I might have had. ‘Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources,’ he said. ‘These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.’ There was no more trustworthy spokesman, I thought at the time. . . . After just a short time with the group, I had little belief that we would find any nuclear weapons. During late-night rants, my fellow intelligence officers debunked the stories that the Iraqi government had access to African uranium, had developed special centrifuges or was driving biological-warfare trailers around the country. But nobody said anything during work hours. That argument had already been made and lost in Washington. . . . The Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were no more than a bit of improvised sham, a con man’s counterfeit goods.126 Maddox highlighted that those who believed WMD would be found were a minority by the time he arrived, as well as the tremendous disconnect between what the military saw on the ground, and what the media and government claimed at home. He recalled: “when I returned to Washington, some weeks later, it was clear to me that people who hadn’t served in Iraq knew little of what was really going on. A friend asked me how the search for weapons of mass destruction was going. I responded wryly, ‘Well, I’m back, aren’t I?’ I avoided explaining the enormity of it.” Regarding the findings of the group he had been working with, he noted: “When the Iraq Survey Group’s interim progress report was released, in October 2003, the truth became unavoidable. It offered a thinly veiled admission of failure to find any convincing evidence of recent W.M.D. activity.” After that, Maddox recalled: “It became impossible to square my American sense of free will – our image of ourselves as empowered citizens participating in informed choices – with the reality of the way that we were hoodwinked into going along with the invasion of Iraq. I had been taught throughout my childhood and my military training that



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America conducts wars based on just cause, but the reality emerging from Iraq was that we had been compelled by deception.” 127 U.S. government funded Iraqi National Congress (INC) made up of anti-government defectors, which were relied on heavily by the administration to accuse Baghdad of developing WMDs and maintaining ties to Al Qaeda, considered the invasion to be a major victory. After post-invasion investigations proved their claims to be entirely fabricated, the head of the congress Ahmed Chalabi proudly declared: “We are heroes in error. . . . As far as we’re concerned, we’ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important.”128 In aiding the Bush administration, the defectors had not only gained funding and a living in the U.S., but now had a chance to gain power and influence in Iraq itself.129 Their statements consistently contradicted available intelligence, but administration officials could choose to believe and cite these defector sources with whom they had a common agenda. Similar defector sources would continue to be cited and placed on a pedestal to profoundly shape Western narratives surrounding other adversaries – most notably North Korea and China (See Chapters 7 and 10). Complementing claims that Iraq posed an imminent threat to Western security through WMD development and Al Qaeda ties, a secondary narrative portraying the invasion of the country as a humanitarian action also played a significant role in providing pretext for war. Like in 1990–91, when the Kuwaiti population were portrayed as the victims in fabricated atrocity stories, in the months preceding 2003 invasion new horror stories cast Iraq’s own population in the role of those a Western war effort was needed to save. Iraq’s government was far from the most humane in its treatment of dissent, as perhaps best demonstrated by its large-scale chemical attacks on Kurdish villages in the 1980s for which it had received full U.S. support. Its post-1980s practices, namely various forms of torture, were hardly sufficient to evoke an extreme enough reaction overseas, both because such practices were almost unanimous in the Arab world and extremely common in much of the third world, and because the U.S. and Britain

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themselves were known to be severely torturing suspected jihadists at the time. Indeed, several of America’s own victims were tortured to death at various ‘black sites’ across the world, and many including U.S. citizens were arrested and held indefinitely without trial.130 Iraq’s abuses thus had to be portrayed as out of the ordinary, and shown to be particularly grotesque. The most prominent atrocity story was that of ‘Saddam’s human shredder.’ This was a plastic shredding machine into which the Iraqi president was reported by Western sources to feed his enemies into, feet first, as a particularly brutal form of execution, which was described in graphic detail. According to Western coverage, the remains of the victims were subsequently used as fish food. “See men shredded, then say you don’t back war,” the (London) Times headline read on March 18.131 The story itself originated in an address to the British House of Commons, with member of parliament Ann Clwyd writing a piece in the Times on the day of the Iraq debate in the House. When Australian Prime Minister John Howard addressed his country on March 20 to explain why Australian forces would support the U.S.-led coalition, he alluded to a humanitarian mission justified by “the use of a human shredding machine as a vehicle for putting to death critics of Saddam Hussein.” “This is the man, this is the apparatus of terror, we are dealing with,” he concluded. 132 Citing the shredder story, the Daily Mail slammed activists and religious leaders who refused to endorse the war, stating: “bodies got chewed up from foot to head. . . . This is the evil that the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Anglican bishops refuse to fight.” Fittingly headlined “This war IS about good versus evil,” the paper claimed that those protesting against the war were “committing nothing less than an act of treachery” for defending “a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler.” Those “fighting against a free democracy,” it added, could never be on the right side – an absolutist ideological argument.133 Other publications across much of the British media spectrum made claims to similar effect, with the



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Telegraph asserting that peace activists, by opposing the invasion, were effectively telling Iraq to “crank up the shredder.” 134 This alleged Iraqi atrocity, like so many others vilifying Western adversaries at times of high tensions, proved to be a baseless fabrication. As the Guardian observed in 2004: “The horror of one of Saddam’s execution methods made a powerful pro-war rallying cry – but the evidence suggests it never existed.”135 The Sun noted regarding the atrocity’s impact in providing support for an invasion: “Public opinion swung behind Tony Blair as voters learned how Saddam fed dissidents feet first into industrial shredders.” It had a similarly strong impact in the United States.136 The human shredder story would likely have played a much larger role in shaping the narrative for the war if it had been published earlier, much like the story of Kuwaiti babies being thrown out of incubators did in the Gulf War. As former Wall Street Journal reporter and president of Harper’s Magazine, John MacArthur, noted in reference to consistencies in fabricated atrocity propaganda between the two wars: “These are all the same people who were running it more than 10 years ago. They’ll make up just about anything . . . to get their way.”137 Seeking to capitalise on growing claims of Iraqi atrocities and to broaden support for military action, President Bush’s rhetoric notably changed 15 days before the beginning of the war from February 23, 2003. The core message of subsequent statements was not the imminent threat from weapons of mass destruction or terrorism, but rather the need to promote the Western political model, Western-style liberal democracy, by imposing this system on Iraq.138 This ideological argument invoked the Western world’s age-old belief in the ‘civilising mission’ – which in its latest iteration had evolved into the ‘democratising mission’ – to spread its ideology, political models and way of life across the world. Portrayals of the supposed depravity of the Iraqi system affirmed the idea of Western supremacy, and the need for a ‘civilising mission’ to build a better Iraq that was influenced by Western ideology and political values.xi xi Over a decade of propaganda vilifying Iraq had fed a metanarrative which

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Following the invasion, it became increasingly clear that Baghdad had no ties to Al Qaeda and no WMDs – with even its old chemical and biological programs having been abandoned in exchange for expected sanctions relief as international inspectors had verified in the 1990s. Indeed, many analysts noted that if Iraq really had WMDs, and the U.S. and its allies had not been able to get inspectors into the country to confirm they were gone, an invasion would have been unlikely due to the danger that such weapons would be used to retaliate against Western and allied targets. While an illegal U.S. and British-led invasion in 2003 was based on the pretext of halting Iraq’s WMD development, when this narrative had been fully debunked the invasion needed to be retrospectively justified with a new round of fabricated atrocities. These efforts benefitted from the metanarrative created from 1990, and amplified after 2001, which cast Baghdad as capable of practically any evil deed. In November and December 2003, as the war faced growing criticism for being unjust and conducted on false premises, British Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed that “400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves [writer’s italics]” – victims of government massacres. In doing so, Blair attempted to vindicate the invasion by reframing it as humanitarian affected not only the general public, but also many in the political and military leadership, legitimizing the idea of a moral invasion to impose westernization of the Iraqi political system. Robert Swansbrough, for one, observed in Bush a “moral outrage at the forces of evil operating in the Middle East.” CIA analyst John Nixon was among those to highlight that even when it was in complete contradiction, the U.S. leadership consistently placed their own prejudices above what intelligence on adversaries such as Iraq and North Korea actually indicated. Conditioned to see them as ‘evil,’ policymakers were unable to objectively analyse them. He stated after several meetings in the White House and with military and intelligence officials: “I can conclude that U.S. policymakers were prisoners of what they thought they knew . . . countervailing intelligence be damned.” Intelligence on Iraq or North Korea which did not fit in with their images as essentially evil was dismissed. This cognitive dissonance was key to justifying an invasion based on the premise of a moral democratizing mission. (Swansbrough, Robert, Test By Fire: The War Presidency Of George W Bush, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008 (p. 138).) (Nixon, John, Debriefing the President; The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein, London, Bantam Press, 2016 (pp. 204–205, 220).)



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war. The claim was widely cited by prominent sources, including by members of parliament, and widely published including in the introduction to a USAID pamphlet dedicated exclusively to the issue titled “Iraq’s Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves.” Blair is quoted as having stated on November 20: “We’ve already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.” The pamphlet further elaborated “If these numbers prove accurate, they represent a crime against humanity surpassed only by the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Pol Pot’s Cambodian killing fields in the 1970s, and the Nazi Holocaust of World War II.”139 Since Prime Minister Blair alleged that the larger number of bodies had been found, rather than asserting that they would be found, it appeared a very deliberate falsification to vilify Iraq and dissipate growing criticism of London and Washington’s actions. It was only in July the following year, after the story had circulated for over six months, that Downing Street admitted its claims had been false.140 Even a retracted atrocity fabrication, however, would continue to reinforce the metanarrative which had shaped public opinion to favour the war, and to view Western military action as justified against those countries outside the Western sphere of influence accused of humanitarian abuses. The saying in American politics that “voters, once deceived, tend to stay that way despite all evidence” summarised the value of alleging extreme atrocities even if these allegations were then quietly retracted.141 As noted by professor at the Catholic University of Louvain, Jean Bricmont in his book on the subject of atrocities and humanitarian military action regarding the Iraqi mass graves case specifically: The lie remains in the public consciousness and has its effect if someone points out that the U.S. war has cost the lives of 100,000 Iraqi civilians, the immediate answer is: ‘Ah, yes, but they found 400,000 bodies in Saddam’s mass graves’. . . . What would be the reaction if the leader of a Third World country multiplied by a factor of 80 the number of dead at Sabra and Chatila (160,000), or during the Vietnam War (240 million) or

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in the invasion of Iraq (8 million)? How much credibility would he retain?142 Iraq’s Fate After a Humanitarian Premised Invasion Following the U.S.-led invasion Iraq would remain in a near constant state of instability with serious negative implications for its population. The conduct of U.S. and allied forces exacerbated the suffering, including not only the kinds of munitions used but also the comportment of servicemen conditioned for extreme violence. Representative Duncan D. Hunter, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, said his military unit “killed probably hundreds of civilians.” This statement was an attempt to justify Navy SEAL chief Edward Gallagher’s killing of an Iraqi prisoner, to which Hunter responded: “I frankly don’t care if he [the prisoner] was killed. I just don’t care. Even if everything that the prosecutors say is true in this case, then, you know, Eddie Gallagher should still be given a break, I think.” Claiming Gallagher was not guilty of any unique crime, and implying a prevailing norm among personnel in Iraq, Hunter stated: “Well, then, how do you judge me? So, I was an artillery officer, and we fired hundreds of rounds into Fallujah, killed probably hundreds of civilians – if not scores, if not hundreds of civilians. Probably killed women and children, if there were any left in the city when we invaded. So do I get judged, too?” His statement ultimately pointed to the fact that only a small fraction of atrocities and war crimes committed were ever publicised, with the majority being overlooked. Gallagher’s target had notably been a teenage combatant who he killed with a knife before posing with his corpse for photos, which Hunter defended by saying he had also posed for pictures with dead combatants.143 U.S. Marine sniper Rudy Reyes recalled being shown footage of targets having their heads blown off by sniper rifles in order to become desensitised to violence before being sent to Baghdad in 2003. Marines were “systematically programmed to kill,” he said. “In our boot camp, do you know how we say the word ‘yes’? It’s the word “kill”. It’s the only way you can say ‘yes’.” “We’re watching real world: head shots, footage of sniper kills. And then



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they’re slowing it down in slow motion, head expanding three times the size, then vacuum collapse, then brains and skull.” He initially questioned if he was capable of continuing, “because there was still some human in me,” but the extreme desensitisation to violence led his group of Marines to slaughter Iraqi civilians including children.144 More extreme methods of desensitising Western forces for war were known, a notable example being the junior Australian personnel in Afghanistan given civilians to kill by hand by their seniors – mental preparation for war in the country known as ‘blooding.’145 British special forces had a similar practice.146 U.S. Army Corporal Michael Prysner was one of many former servicemen who stressed that, much like in its wars in the Philippines Japan, Korea and Vietnam, racial dehumanisation of the population significantly influenced the conduct of American personnel. Although less well documented and arguably much less severe than in the wars in East Asia, the Iraqi population still suffered greatly for being perceived as less than human in the eyes of Western occupation forces. Another Marine recalled regarding how perceptions of the Iraqis fuelled misconduct: “If they looked like an insurgent, you did what you wanted for them. . . . The Marines took it upon themselves to shoot at, beat, rob, rape, kill whomever they wanted to. And that’s being proposed on the news as a few bad apples, an isolated incident.” Regarding how Marines’ training influenced their conduct, he stated “what’s inherent to that training? Well people in the Middle East are referred to as sand niggers, hajis, camel jockeys, towel heads, barbarians, terrorists. Women [as] bitches, c***s.” These prevailing attitudes which fuelled misconduct, according to him, were “all firmly entrenched in the training, all firmly entrenched in the ideology. All firmly entrenched in the linguistics and lexicon within the military.”147 Speaking to Middle East Eye in 2019, British personnel recalled that rules of engagement in Iraq as well as Afghanistan allowed them to kill suspicious looking unarmed civilians – with one describing the result as a “killing spree.” In the Iraqi city of Basra anyone holding a phone or a shovel could be considered a

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combatant and shot on the spot. One serviceman recalled: “We were shooting old men, young men. This is what I witnessed. I have never seen such lawlessness.” They revealed instances in which, after young boys were killed, weapons were planted on them to make them look like combatants. “Our commanders, they would tell us: ‘We will protect you if any investigation comes. Just say you genuinely thought your life was at risk – those words will protect you,’” one of the former servicemen said.148 Some British activists alleged that because the military was “allowed to run their own criminal courts and prosecution service,” and was able to exert considerable pressure domestically, its personnel could not be held accountable for such conduct.149 Although the overthrow of the Iraqi government in May 2003 left U.S.-led coalition forces fighting only insurgents with handheld weapons, meaning they faced no tanks, armour or bunkers, U.S. forces still made extensive use of depleted uranium weaponry (see Chapter 4) including in civilian areas. In 2014 reports emerged that showed that U.S. forces fired depleted uranium rounds in population centres such as Samawah, Nasiriyah and Basrah.150 From 2005 Iraqi doctors observed a staggering increase in rates of infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by U.S. Marines the previous year, with these rates exceeding those among survivors of the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. As The Independent observed in 2011: Iraqi doctors in Fallujah have complained since 2005 of being overwhelmed by the number of babies with serious birth defects, ranging from a girl born with two heads to paralysis of the lower limbs. They said they were also seeing far more cancers than they did before the battle for Fallujah between U.S. troops and insurgents. Their claims have been supported by a survey showing a four-fold increase in all cancers and a 12fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14s. Infant mortality in the city is more than four times higher than



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in neighbouring Jordan and eight times higher than in Kuwait.151 Similar effects were seen in parts of Yugoslavia and in southern Iraq after the Gulf War.152 Professor Chris Busby, one of the authors of a survey of 4,800 Fallujah residents, said regarding the cause of cancers and birth defects “to produce an effect like this, some very major mutagenic exposure must have occurred in 2004 when the attacks happened.” What was striking, he noted, was not only the greater prevalence of cancer, but the speed at which it affected people. The fallout, he concluded, suggested that some kind of uranium weapon was used. The survey was carried out by 11 researchers in January and February, who visited 711 houses in Fallujah, and concluded that the effects on the population were “similar to that in the Hiroshima survivors who were exposed to ionising radiation from the bomb and uranium in the fallout.”153 Aside from their toxic effects, depleted uranium rounds were also incendiary and thus had a much greater threat of collateral damage than normal munitions. Fallujah had also been bombarded with white phosphorous which represented another serious war crime. The Independent reported: “U.S. commanders largely treated Fallujah as a free-fire zone to try to reduce casualties among their own troops. British officers were appalled by the lack of concern for civilian casualties,” with officers who ordered such attacks not seeing them as significant enough to be worth reporting to superiors. A decline in healthcare and sanitary conditions in Iraq after 2003, where it was already much lower than before 1991 due to 12 years of sanctions and the bombing of key infrastructure, only worsened the situation – as did the population’s fear of U.S. military checkpoints which prevented them from going to Baghdad for healthcare.154 The treatment of Iraqis suspected of aiding the insurgency was similarly egregious, with many held without charge or legal access, killed in custody or subjected to severe torture. The Washington Post described “prisoners forced to retrieve their food from toilets” and produced 65 pages worth of sworn statements. It reported:

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The detainees said they were savagely beaten and repeatedly humiliated sexually by American soldiers working on the night shift at Tier 1A in Abu Ghraib [prison] during the holy month of Ramadan . . . pressed to denounce Islam or were force-fed pork and liquor. Many provided graphic details of how they were sexually humiliated and assaulted, threatened with rape, and forced to masturbate in front of female soldiers. . . . Many of them recalled the same event or pattern of events and procedures. . . . Most of the detainees said in the statements that they were stripped upon their arrival to Tier 1A, forced to wear women’s underwear, and repeatedly humiliated in front of one another and American soldiers. They also described beatings and threats of death and sexual assault if they did not cooperate with U.S. interrogators. Kasim Mehaddi Hilas, detainee No. 151108, told investigators that when he first arrived at Abu Ghraib last year, he was forced to strip, put on a hood and wear rose-colored panties with flowers on them. ‘Most of the days I was wearing nothing else,’ he said in his statement.155 During the rape of a boy between 15 and 18 years old, other prisoners heard his screams and watched the assault, with a female soldier taking pictures. “The kid was hurting very bad,” one prisoner said. He recalled prisoner being punished for asking for time to pray by being cuffed to the bars of a cell window and left for close to five hours – his feet dangling off the floor. The prisoner also watched a detainee being tied to his bed and sodomised by soldiers with a phosphoric light. Another recalled regarding that incident that the Iraqi victim: “was screaming for help. . . . There was also a white female soldier, short, she was taking pictures.” 156 Others recalled being beaten severely, having U.S. personnel step on their heads, and having the chemicals from phosphoric lights poured on them – which made their bodies glow for the soldiers’ amusement. “They were taking pictures of me during all



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these instances,” the victim recalled, and that he was subsequently sodomised with a nightstick. 157 Detainee No. 13077, Hiadar Sabar Abed Miktub al-Aboodi, recalled: “They forced us to walk like dogs on our hands and knees. And we had to bark like a dog, and if we didn’t do that they started hitting us hard on our face and chest with no mercy. After that, they took us to our cells, took the mattresses out and dropped water on the floor and they made us sleep on our stomachs on the floor with the bags on our head and they took pictures of everything.” 158 Detainee No. 151362, Ameen Saeed Al-Sheik, recalled: “They said we will make you wish to die and it will not happen. . . . They stripped me naked. One of them told me he would rape me. He drew a picture of a woman to my back and makes me stand in shameful position holding my buttocks.” 159 Detainee No. 18170, Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh, recalled a soldier brought a box of food and he made me stand on it with no clothing, except a blanket. Then a tall black soldier came and put electrical wires on my fingers and toes and on my penis, and I had a bag over my head. . . . ‘Do you pray to Allah?’ [one asked]. I said ‘yes.’ They said, ‘[Expletive] you. And [expletive] him.’ One of them said, ‘You are not getting out of here health[y], you are getting out of here handicapped.’ And he said to me, ‘Are you married?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ They said, ‘If your wife saw you like this, she will be disappointed.’ One of them said, ‘But if I saw her now she would not be disappointed now because I would rape her.’ The soldiers told him that if he cooperated, they would release him in time for Ramadan. He said he did but was not released. One soldier continued to abuse him by hitting his broken leg and ordered him to curse Islam. “Because they started to hit my broken leg, I cursed my religion. They ordered me to thank Jesus that I’m alive.” After being handcuffed him to a bed, he was

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asked “Do you believe in anything?.” “I said to him, ‘I believe in Allah.’ So he [soldier] said, ‘But I believe in torture and I will torture you.’”160 Only a small portion of the evidence of abuses committed against Iraqi prisoners would ever become available to the public. Journalist Seymour Hersh, who gained special access to a greater quantity of the evidence, recalled regarding its contents: Some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib. . . . The women were passing messages out saying, ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomised with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. 161 Rick Pearlstein recalled after hearing him speak, that Hersh “said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, ‘You haven’t begun to see evil . . .’ then trailed off. He said, ‘horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.’ He looked frightened.”162 Iraqi businesswoman Huda Alazawi, who was suspected of ties to insurgent groups, recalled: “They handcuffed me and blindfolded me and put a piece of white cloth over my eyes. They bundled me into a Humvee and took me to a place inside the palace. I was dumped in a room with a single wooden chair. It was extremely cold.” After being joined by her crying sister and left there overnight, Alazawi was taken to a “torturing place” where: “The U.S. officer told us: ‘If you don’t confess, we will torture you. So you have to confess.’ My hands were handcuffed. They took off my boots and stood me in the mud with my face against



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the wall. I could hear women and men shouting and weeping. I recognised one of the cries as my brother Mu’taz. I wanted to see what was going on so I tried to move the cloth from my eyes. When I did, I fainted.”163 Alazawi recalled being beaten by an American soldier, and her brother being sexually abused in custody. American guards then made her stand with her face against the wall for 12 hours, then returned her to her cell at midnight. “The cell had no ceiling. It was raining. At midnight they threw something at my sister’s feet. It was my brother Ayad. He was bleeding from his legs, knees and forehead. I told my sister: ‘Find out if he’s still breathing.’ She said: ‘No. Nothing.’ I started crying. The next day they took away his body.” Her brother had been tortured to death and his corpse thrown in with his sisters – perhaps as a threat to compel them to confess. His body had extensive bruising to the chest and arms, and a severe head wound above the left eye. Photos were shown to British journalists as evidence, although his death certificate from an American doctor claimed he died from “cardiac arrest of unknown etiology.”164 After being put on a minibus with 18 other detainees, Alazawi recalled the U.S. personnel told them: “‘Nobody is going to sleep tonight.’ They played scary music continuously with loud voices. As soon as someone fell asleep, they started beating on the door. It was Christmas. They kept us there for three days. Many of the U.S. soldiers were drunk.” An American serviceman eventually broke her shoulder, and she was transferred to Abu Ghraib prison and kept in solitary confinement for 156 days in a two-metre-square cell, initially with no bed and a bucket for a toilet. Prisoners under punishment were thrown in one-metre-square cells and had cold water poured on them for hours. Dogs were used to torture inmates and allowed to bite them, and female detainees including children were on occasion raped. “The American interrogators were entirely ignorant and knew nothing about Iraqi people. The vast majority of people there were innocent,” Alazawi concluded.165 Reports from U.S. military personnel, alongside photographic evidence, verified claims of abuse, including arranging male prisoners naked in a pile and jumping on them, forcing prisoners

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to rape one another and simulating electric torture.166 U.S. Major General Antonio Taguba, commenting on the photos American soldiers took as evidence of their own sexual abuse against Iraqis, said that they “show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.”167 Many of these pictures were not released, as it was believed that it would seriously tarnish the country’s image. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld commented: “If these are released to the public, obviously it’s going to make matters worse.”168 President Obama, upon taking office, also strongly opposed releasing the photos, stating that they would “inflame anti-American public opinion.”169 This decision was supported by General Taguba, and was vital to preserving the United States’ international image and to concealing some of the real consequences of Washington and its allies’ humanitarian-premised war. These very real and egregious humanitarian abuses against the Iraqi population were direct results of successful U.S. and allied fabrication of false allegations of Iraqi atrocities, WMD development and ties to terror groups, without which no invasion would have been possible. International authority on Iraq and the Arab world, President Emeritus of the International Association of Middle East Studies and consultant to the State Department, the Department of Defence and USAID, Raymond Baker, observed in 2010 seven years after the invasion: The consequences in human and cultural terms of the destruction of the Iraqi state have been enormous: notably, the deaths of over 1 million civilians; the degradation in social infrastructure, including electricity, potable water, and sewage systems; the targeted assassination of over 400 academics and professionals and the displacement of approximately 4 million refugees and internally displaced people. All of these terrible losses are compounded by unprecedented levels of cultural devastation, attacks on national archives and monuments that represent the historical identity of the Iraqi people. Rampant chaos and violence hamper efforts at



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reconstruction, leaving the foundations of the Iraqi state in ruin.170 Foreign Affairs in 2012 described “the Iraq we left behind” as “the world’s next failed state.” In sharp contrast to the Ba’athist period, and relative prosperity preceding Western sanctions and bombings or the imposition of a Western-style political system, it noted: The Iraqi state cannot provide basic services, including regular electricity in summer, clean water, and decent health care; meanwhile, unemployment among young men hovers close to 30 percent, making them easy recruits for criminal gangs and militant factions . . . the current pace of bombings and shootings is more than enough to leave most Iraqis on edge and deeply uncertain about their futures. They have lost any hope that the bloodshed will go away and simply live with their dread.171 Human Rights Watch reported to similar effect: “The rights of Iraq’s most vulnerable citizens, especially women and detainees, are violated with impunity, and those who would expose official malfeasance or abuses by armed groups do so at enormous risk. The 2003 invasion and its resulting chaos have exacted an enormous toll on Iraq’s citizens.” Taking women’s rights as an example, which contrasted very sharply with the Ba’athist era: The deterioration of security has promoted a rise in tribal customs and religiously-inflected political extremism, which have had a deleterious effect on women’s rights, both inside and outside the home. For Iraqi women, who enjoyed some of the highest levels of rights protection and social participation in the region before 1991, these have been heavy blows. Militias promoting misogynist ideologies have targeted women and girls for assassination, and intimidated them to stay out of public life . . .

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Trafficking in women and girls in and out of the country for sexual exploitation is widespread.172 The full consequences of the invasion are too great to cover in this volume, but one result would be over one million Iraqi deaths by September 2007, according to Britain’s Opinion Research Business polling group.173 Approximately 40 percent of the country’s middle class had fled within four years of the invasion,174 with 2 million refugees leaving the country and a further 1.7 million left internally displaced – figures which only increased in the following years.175 The invasion ultimately saw Iraq transformed from a recovering and stable power with considerable economic potential into a weak and internally divided nation over which various foreign powers fought for control.176 The weak institutions of the postBaathist government established under the U.S.-led occupation, and foreign sponsorship of various non-state groups including radical jihadist groups backed by Western-aligned Gulf States, to which State Department officials turned a blind eye, ensured a perpetuation of this situation.177 Indeed, President Barack Obama himself acknowledged that the rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and later the creation of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terror group, were direct consequences of the U.S.-led invasion.178 There was no notable presence of jihadist terror groups on Iraqi soil before March 2003, but by the end of the year Iraq had become one of the leading hotspots for terrorist activities. The eventual rise of the Islamic State was thus also a direct consequence of Washington’s fabricated atrocities and other false narratives to vilify Baghdad, including not only those in 2001–03, but also in 1990–91, which had been essential to paving the way to two devastating assaults on the country. An investigative report released by the British government in 2016 strongly indicated that intelligence officials knew before March 2003 that the invasion would only fuel terrorism and lead to instability and societal collapse. Indeed, Britain’s Defence Intelligence Service (DIS) had predicted as early as March 2002 that an invasion would lead to “political disintegration and extremist violence in Iraq.”179

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Although Western forces formally withdrew from Iraq in 2011, Western military contractors would remain indefinitely.180 U.S. personnel, alongside those from allied states such as Britain and Norway, returned within three years and appeared set to stay indefinitely despite significant clashes with militia forces loosely aligned with the Iraqi government. On January 4, 2020, the CIA assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani near Baghdad International Airport181 after he had been invited to the country for peace talks and was scheduled to meet the Iraqi Prime Minister.182 Soleimani’s killing, likely many U.S. actions taken in the country over the preceding two decades, was considered by analysts to be illegal,183 if not a war crime,184 and as a serious breach of Iraqi sovereignty it demonstrated just how limited this sovereignty was. The Iraqi parliament passed a resolution the following day calling for the removal of U.S. and foreign forces from the country, but the U.S. State Department made clear the following week that the issue of a troop withdrawal would not be open for discussion with the Iraqis.185 Baghdad was left issuing somewhat feeble protests as the U.S. launched continuous airstrikes on various militia groups in the destabilised country, and ultimately had only limited sovereignty as Western forces were able to operate on its soil effectively at will.186

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Woodward, Bob, Bush at War, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2002 (p. 49). Clarke, Richard A., Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, New York, Free Press, 2004 (p. 30). Clarke, Richard A., ‘Interview by Leslie Stahl,’ 60 Minutes, CBS News, March 21, 2004. Clarke, Richard A., Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, New York, Free Press, 2004 (p. 32). Clarke, Richard A., ‘Interview by Leslie Stahl,’ 60 Minutes, CBS News, March 21, 2004. Kessler, Glenn, ‘U.S. Decision On Iraq Has Puzzling Past,’ Washington Post, January 12, 2003. Sciolino, Elaine and Tyler, Patrick E., ‘Some Pentagon Officials and Advisers Seek to Oust Iraq’s Leader in War’s Next Phase,’ The New York Times, October 12, 2001.

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Bush, George W., Prime Time News Conference, White House, Washington, DC, October 11, 2001. 9 Woodward, Bob, Bush at War, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2002 (pp. 99, 167). 10 van der Heide, Liesbeth, ‘Cherry-Picked Intelligence. The Weapons of Mass Destruction Dispositive as a Legitimation for National Security in the Post 9/11 Age,’ Historical Social Research, vol. 38, no. 1, 2013 (pp. 286–307). 11 Swansbrough, Robert, Test by Fire: The War Presidency of George W Bush, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008 (pp. 153, 154) Hersh, Seymour, ‘Selective Intelligence,’ New Yorker, vol. 79, no. 11, May 12, 2003 (p. 45). 12 Suskind, Ron, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2004 (p. 75). 13 Powell, Colin, Testimony before U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, U.S. Senate, Washington DC, January 17, 2001. 14 Rosen, Gary, The Right War?: The Conservative Debate on Iraq, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005 (p. 20). 15 Robin, Corey, ‘Grand Designs: How 9/11 Unified Conservatives in Pursuit of Empire,’ Washington Post, May 2, 2004 (p. B1). 16 Kristol, William and Kagan, Robert, ‘Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,’ Foreign Affairs, vol. 75, no. 4, July–August 1996 (p. 20). 17 Letter to President Clinton, Project for the New American Century, January 26, 1998 (http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm). 18 Swansbrough, Robert, Test by Fire: The War Presidency of George W Bush, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008 (p. 127). 19 Halper, Stefan and Clarke, Jonathan, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2004 (p. 11). Swansbrough, Robert, Test by Fire: The War Presidency of George W Bush, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008 (p. 128). 20 Milbank, Dana and Deane, Claudia, ‘Hussein Link to 9/11 Lingers in Many Minds,’ Washington Post, September 6, 2003. 21 Swansbrough, Robert, Test by Fire: The War Presidency of George W Bush, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008 (p. 129). 22 ‘Americans Felt Uneasy Toward Arabs Even Before September 11,’ Gallup. com, September 28, 2001. 23 Mueller, John, Policy and Opinion in the Gulf War, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994 (p. 270). 24 Ibid (p. 271). 25 ‘America at War,’ Washington Post, December 21, 2001 (survey from December 18–19, 2001). 26 ‘Bush: NATO should be firm on Iraq,’ China Daily, November 21, 2002. 27 ‘The Madman in Iraq,’ CATO Institute, February 20, 2004. 28 Kristol, William, Testimony of William Kristol to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, United States Senate, Washington DC, February 7, 2002.



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29 ‘The Vice President Appears on NBC’s Meet the Press,’ White House news release, December 9, 2001. 30 Stout, David, ‘Rumsfeld Says Criticism Won’t Determine Policy on Iraq,’ The New York Times, August 20, 2002.  31 ‘Rumsfeld Says U.S. Has “Bulletproof” Evidence of Iraq’s Links to Al Qaeda,’ The New York Times, September 28, 2002.  32 Allen, Mike, ‘War Cabinet Argues for Iraq Attack,’ Washington Post, September 9, 2002. 33 ‘Shaping Saddam: How the Media Mythologized A Monster,’ Yale Review of International Studies, June 3, 2018. 34 Gershkoff, Amy and Kushner, Shana, ‘Shaping Public Opinion: The 9/11Iraq Connection in the Bush Administration’s Rhetoric,’ Cambridge Core, August 26, 2005. ‘Shaping Saddam: How the Media Mythologized A Monster,’ Yale Review of International Studies, June 3, 2018.  35 Press Briefing by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, The James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, The White House, November 8, 2001. 36 Gordon, Michael R., ‘Cheney Says Next Goal in U.S. War on Terror Is to Block Access to Arms,’ The New York Times, March 16, 2002. 37 Bush, George W., President Bush Delivers Graduation Speech at West Point, United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, June 1, 2002. 38 Los Angeles Times, Poll Study 484, April 2–3, 2003. Gershkoff, Amy and Kushner, Shana, ‘Shaping Public Opinion: The 9/11Iraq Connection in the Bush Administration’s Rhetoric,’ Perspectives on Politics, vol. 3, no. 3, 2005 (pp. 525–537). 39 Ibid (pp. 525–537). Based on 4 poll average. Sources: Los Angeles Times Poll Study 481, January 30–February 2, 2003; Los Angeles Times Poll Study 482, February 7–8, 2003; CNN/ USA Today/Gallup Poll, March 22–23, 2003; ABC News/ Washington Post Poll, March 20, 2003. 40 Gershkoff, Amy and Kushner, Shana, ‘Shaping Public Opinion: The 9/11Iraq Connection in the Bush Administration’s Rhetoric,’ Perspectives on Politics, vol. 3, no. 3, 2005 (pp. 525–537). 41 Ibid. (pp. 525–537). 42 Smith, Michael, ‘RAF Bombing Raids Tried to Goad Saddam into War,’ Sunday Times, May 29, 2005. 43 Smith, Michael, ‘The war before the war,’ New Statesman, May 30, 2005. Franks, Tommy R., American Soldier, New York, HarperCollins, 2004 (p. 342). 44 Norton-Taylor, Richard, ‘Britain and US step up bombing in Iraq,’ The Guardian, December 4, 2002. 45 Mitchell, Greg, ‘Bob Woodward’s Biggest Failure: Iraq,’ The Nation, March 7, 2013. 46 President Bush, Prime Minister Blair Discuss Keeping the Peace, Remarks by the President and Prime Minister Tony Blair in Photo Opportunity, Camp David, Maryland, Office of the Press Secretary, September 7, 2002. 47 MacArthur, John R., Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, London, University of California Press, 2004 (Preface).

302 ATROCITY FABRICATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 48 DeYoung, Karen, ‘Bush, Blair Decry Hussein,’ Washington Post, September 8, 2002. MacArthur, John R., Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, London, University of California Press, 2004 (p. xxv). 49 Washington Times, September 27, 2002. MacArthur, John R., Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, London, University of California Press, 2004 (pp. xxx, xxxi). 50 MacArthur, John R., Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, London, University of California Press, 2004 (p. xxv). 51 Bush, George W., ‘President’s Remarks at the United Nations General Assembly,’ September 12, 2002. 52 Lynch, Colum, ‘No “Smoking Guns” So Far, U.N. Is Told,’ Washington Post, January 10, 2003. 53 ‘No “Genuine Acceptance” of Disarmament, Blix Says,’ Washington Post, January 28, 2003. 54 MacArthur, John R., Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, London, University of California Press, 2004 (p. xxviii). 55 Press Briefing by Ari Fleischer, The White House, January 9, 2003. 56 Wolfowitz, Paul D., ‘Address on Iraqi Disarmament,’ Council on Foreign Relations, New York, January 23, 2003. 57 Rice, Condoleezza, ‘Why We Know Iraq Is Lying,’ The New York Times, January 23, 2003. 58 Preston, Julia and Purdum, Todd S., ‘Bush’s Push on Iraq at U.N.,’ The New York Times, September 22, 2002. 59 Ritter, Scott, ‘The coup that wasn’t,’ The Guardian, September 28, 2005. ‘Interview with Melvin Goodman: The October ’02 National Intelligence Estimate,’ Frontline, PBS (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ darkside/themes/nie.html). Edwards, David and Cromwell, David, Propaganda Blitz: How the Corporate Media Distort Reality, London, Pluto Press, 2018 (Chapter 5: Libya: ‘It’s All. About Oil’). ‘Scott Ritter and Seymour Hersh: Iraq Confidential,’ The Nation, October 26, 2005. 60 Heikal, Mohamed, Illusions of Triumph: An Arab View of the Gulf War, New York, HarperCollins, 1993 (pp. 414, 415). 61 Peterson, Scott, ‘In war, some facts less factual,’ Christian Science Monitor, September 6, 2002. 62 Wintour, Patrick, ‘Bush largely ignored UK advice on postwar Iraq, Chilcot inquiry finds,’ The Guardian, July 6, 2016. 63 Drezner, Daniel W., The Sanctions Paradox: Economic Statecraft and International Relations, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999 (p. 286). 64 Swansbrough, Robert, Test By Fire: The War Presidency Of George W Bush, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008 (pp. 135, 136). Moore, David W., ‘Powell’s U.N. Appearance Important to Public,’ The Gallup Poll, February 4, 2003.



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65 Gershkoff, Amy and Kushner, Shana, ‘Shaping Public Opinion: The 9/11Iraq Connection in the Bush Administration’s Rhetoric,’ Perspectives on Politics, vol. 3, no. 3, 2005 (pp. 525–537). 66 Ibid (pp. 525–537). 67 Gershkoff, Amy and Kushner, Shana, ‘Shaping Public Opinion: The 9/11Iraq Connection in the Bush Administration’s Rhetoric,’ Perspectives on Politics, vol. 3, no. 3, 2005 (pp. 525–537). 68 Bush, George W., ‘President Delivers “State of the Union”,’ Washington DC, January 28, 2003. 69 Squitieri, Tom and Page, Susan, ‘Rumsfeld: Al-Qaeda-Saddam Link Is Weak,’ USA Today, October 5, 2004. 70 Stout, David, ‘Rumsfeld Speaks of Evidence Linking Iraq and Al Qaeda,’ The New York Times, September 26, 2002. 71 Pfiffner, James P., ‘Did President Bush Mislead the Country in His Arguments for War with Iraq?,’ Presidential Studies Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 1, March 2004 (pp. 25–46). 72 ‘Transcript: Bush on the USS Lincoln,’ ABC News, January 6, 2006. 73 Leopold, Jason, ‘The CIA Just Declassified the Document That Supposedly Justified the Iraq Invasion,’ Vice News, March 19, 2015. 74 Peterson, Scott, ‘In war, some facts less factual,’ Christian Science Monitor, September 6, 2002. 75 ‘Interview with David Kay,’ Frontline, June 20, 2006. 76 Gompert, David C. and Binnendijk, Hans and Lin, Bonny, Blinders, Blunders, and Wars: What America and China Can Learn, Santa Monica, RAND Corporation, 2014 (pp. 169, 170). 77 The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Washington DC, U.S. Government Printing Office, 2004 (p. 334). 78 ‘The Czech Connection; No Evidence Of Meeting With Iraqi,’ The New York Times, June 17, 2004. 79 Leopold, Jason, ‘The CIA Just Declassified the Document That Supposedly Justified the Iraq Invasion,’ Vice News, March 19, 2015. 80 Conclusions, Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, Select Committee on Intelligence, United States Senate (https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/shoulders/ senateiraqconclusions.pdf). 81 Cheney, Richard, ‘Address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars,’ Nashville, Tennessee, August 26, 2002. 82 Stept, Stephen and Isikoff, Michael and Maddow, Rachel, ‘Hubris: Selling the Iraq War’ (Documentary), MSNBC Films, 2013. 83 ‘President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat,’ Remarks by the President on Iraq, Cincinnati Museum Centre, October 7, 2002. 84 ‘Transcript: CIA Director Defends Iraq Intelligence,’ Washington Post, February 5, 2004. 85 Presidential Comments, CNN, December 31, 2002. 86 ‘CIA mostly right, Tenet says,’ The Baltimore Sun, February 6, 2004. 87 Leopold, Jason, ‘The CIA Just Declassified the Document That Supposedly Justified the Iraq Invasion,’ Vice News, March 19, 2015.

304 ATROCITY FABRICATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 88 ‘Top Bush officials push case against Saddam,’ CNN, September 8, 2002. 89 ‘Evidence on Iraq Challenged,’ Washington Post, September 19, 2002. 90 Breslow, Jason M., ‘Colin Powell: U.N. Speech “Was a Great Intelligence Failure”,’ Frontline, May 17, 2016. 91 Schwartz, Jon, ‘Lie After Lie: What Colin Powell Knew About Iraq 15 Years Ago and What He Told the U.N.,’ The Intercept, February 6, 2018. 92 Ibid. 93 Harding, Luke, ‘Revealed: truth behind US “poison factory” claim,’ The Guardian, February 9, 2003. 94 ‘Threats and Responses: The Evidence; Islamists in Iraq Offer a Tour of “Poison Factory” Cited by Powell,’ The New York Times, February 9, 2003. 95 Fleishman, Jeffrey, ‘Fears Grow in Village U.S. Cited as Threat,’ Los Angeles Times, February 18, 2003. Daragahi, Borzou, ‘Media Tour Alleged “Poison Site” in Iraq,’ MRT News, February 7, 2003. 96 Holland Michel, Arthur, ‘History Lesson: Iraq’s Foil-clad Drones,’ Drone Center, March 13, 2015. Peterson, Scott, ‘The Case of the “Deadly” Drone,’ Christian Science Monitor, March 13, 2003. ‘The Air Force Dissents,’ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 11, 2003. 97 ‘Just 45 minutes from attack,’ Daily Mail, September 24, 2002. 98 ‘Full text of Tony Blair’s foreword to the dossier on Iraq,’ The Guardian, September 24, 2002. 99 Lewis, Jeffrey, ‘Why Did Saudi Arabia Buy Chinese Missiles?,’ Foreign Policy, January 30, 2014. Roblin, Sebastien, ‘Saudi Arabia Already Has a Ballistic Missile Arsenal Courtesy of China – With a Little Help from the CIA,’ National Interest, September 22, 2018. 100 ‘Israel could use ballistic missiles against Iran-report,’ Reuters, March 17, 2009. 101 Bechtol Jr., Bruce E., North Korean Military Proliferation in the Middle East and Africa, Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 2018 (p. 20). 102 Segal, Udi, IDF Radio, March 22, 1994. Worldwide Intelligence Review, Hearing Before the Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States Senate, One Hundred Fourth Congress, First Session on Worldwide Intelligence Review, January 10, 1995 (p. 105). 103 ‘Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR): North Korea’s Submitted Pursuant to Resolution 2050 (2012),’ S/2013/337, June 11, 2013. Hughes, Robin, ‘SSRC: Spectre at the Table,’ Jane’s Defence Weekly, January 22, 2014. 104 Preble, Christopher A., ‘The Madman in Iraq,’ CATO Institute, February 20, 2004. 105 Brown, Daniel, ‘Republican congressman says the US should preemptively strike North Korea,’ Business Insider, September 22, 2017. Peters, Ralph, ‘The moral answer to North Korea’s threats, Take them out!’ New York Post, September 4, 2017.



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Friedman, Uri, ‘Lindsey Graham Reveals the Dark Calculus of Striking North Korea,’ The Atlantic, August 1, 2017. Thomas, Raju G. C., The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime: Prospects for the 21st Century, Houndmills, MacMillan, 1998 (p. 228). 106 Norton-Taylor, Richard, ‘Iraq dossier drawn up to make case for war – intelligence officer,’ The Guardian, May 12, 2011. 107 Goslett, Miles, ‘Damning new evidence that Dr Kelly DIDN’T commit suicide,’ Daily Mail, January 12, 2019. Hoggard, Simon, ‘The real scandal of David Kelly’s death,’ The Guardian, June 9, 2011. Gilligan, Andrew, ‘The betrayal of Dr David Kelly, 10 years on,’ The Telegraph, June 21, 2013. Cassidy, John, ‘The David Kelly Affair,’ New Yorker, November 30, 2003. Baker, Norman, The Strange Death of David Kelly, London, Methuen, 2007. Goslett, Miles, An Inconvenient Death: How the Establishment Covered Up the David Kelly Affair, New York, Apollo, 2018. 108 MacAskill, Ewen and Borger, Julian, ‘Iraq war was illegal and breached UN charter, says Annan,’ The Guardian, September 16, 2004. Kramer, Ronald and Michalowski, Raymond and Rothe, Dawn, ‘“The Supreme International Crime”: How the U.S. War in Iraq Threatens the Rule of Law,’ Social Justice, vol. 32, no. 2, 2005 (pp. 52–81). Hughes, David, ‘Chilcot report: John Prescott says Iraq War was illegal,’ The Independent, July 9, 2016. 109 Waters, Maurice, ‘The Invasion of Grenada, 1983 and the Collapse of Legal Norms,’ Journal of Peace Research, vol. 23, no. 3, September 1986 (pp. 229–246). Berlin, Michael J., ‘U.S. Allies Join in Lopsided U.N. Vote Condemning Invasion Of Grenada,’ Washington Post, November 3, 1983. 110 Rothschild, Matthew, ‘In Panama, An Illegal and Unwarranted Invasion,’ Chicago Tribune, December 21, 1989. Maechling Jr., Charles, ‘Washington’s Illegal Invasion,’ Foreign Policy, no. 79, Summer, 1990 (pp. 113–131). Henkin, Louis, ‘The Invasion of Panama Under International Law: A Gross Violation,’ Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, vol. 29, issue 2, 1991 (pp. 293–318). 111 Wintour, Patrick, ‘MPs say Kosovo bombing was illegal but necessary,’ The Guardian, June 7, 2000. Erlanger, Steven, ‘Rights Group Says NATO Bombing in Yugoslavia Violated Law,’ The New York Times, June 8, 2000. 112 Bennis, Phyllis, ‘The February Bombing of Iraq and the Bush Jr Administration,’ Transnational Institute, July 18, 2005. 113 Schwarz, Jon, ‘Lie After Lie: What Colin Powell Knew About Iraq 15 Years Ago and What He Told the U.N.,’ The Intercept, February 6, 2018. Matthews, Dylan, ‘No, really, George W. Bush lied about WMDs,’ Vox, July 9, 2016. 114 Swansbrough, Robert, Test by Fire: The War Presidency Of George W Bush, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008 (p. 139).

306 ATROCITY FABRICATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 115 Ibid (p. 136). 116 Sunday Times, May 1, 2005. 117 Tenet, George, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, New York, Harper Collins, 2007 (p. 310). 118 Cheney, Richard, ‘Address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars,’ Nashville, Tennessee, August 26, 2002. 119 Tenet, George, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, New York, Harper Collins, 2007 (p. 315). 120 Dalrymple, Mary, ‘Byrd’s Beloved Chamber Deaf to His Pleas for Delayed Vote,’ Congressional Quarterly, vol. 60, no. 39, October 12, 2002 (p. 2674). 121 Pfiffner, James P., ‘Did President Bush Mislead the Country in His Arguments for War with Iraq?,’ Presidential Studies Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 1, March 2004 (p. 26). 122 ‘The Madman in Iraq,’ CATO Institute, February 20, 2004. 123 Thomas, Gary, ‘State Sponsored Terrorism Thrives,’ Voice of Asia, April 19, 2006. 124 Silverstein, Ken, ‘Official Pariah Sudan Valuable to America’s War on Terrorism,’ Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2005. 125 Jeffery, Simon, ‘“We cannot wait for the smoking gun”,’ The Guardian, October 8, 2002. 126 Maddox, J.D., ‘The Day I Realized I Would Never Find Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq,’ The New York Times, January 29, 2020. 127 Ibid. 128 Murphy, Dan, ‘Bad reason to invade Iraq No. 3: “We can trust Ahmed Chalabi”,’ Christian Science Monitor, March 19, 2013. 129 Isikoff, Michael and Corn, David, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, New York, Crown Publishers, 2006 (p. 415). 130 Matthews, Dylan, ‘16 absolutely outrageous abuses detailed in the CIA torture report,’ Vox, December 9, 2014. Pfeiffer, Sacha, ‘CIA Used Prisoner As “Training Prop” For Torture, Psychologist Testifies,’ NPR News, January 23, 2020. ‘Daniel Jones: CIA torture not needed to get terror leads,’ BBC News, December 6, 2019. 131 Clwyd, Ann, ‘See men shredded, then say you don’t back war,’ The Times, March 18, 2003. 132 ‘Truth and fairness stuffed down the shredder,’ Sydney Morning Herald, March 22, 2003. 133 Phillips, Melanie, ‘This war IS about good versus evil,’ Daily Mail, March 24, 2003. 134 O’Neill, Brendan, ‘Not a shred of evidence,’ Spectator, February 21, 2004. 135 O’Neill, Brendan, ‘The missing people-shredder,’ The Guardian, February 25, 2004. 136 O’Neill, Brendan, ‘Not a shred of evidence,’ Spectator, February 21, 2004. 137 Peterson, Scott, ‘In war, some facts less factual,’ Christian Science Monitor, September 6, 2002. 138 Bush, George W., ‘The President Discusses the Future of Iraq,’ American Enterprise Institute, February 26, 2003.



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139 Beaumont, Peter, ‘PM admits graves claim “untrue”,’ Observer, July 18, 2004. 140 Ibid. Beal, Tim, North Korea: The Struggle Against American Power, London, Pluto Press, 2005 (p. 129). 141 Landry, Steven M., ‘“Reds Driven Off”: the US Media’s Propaganda During the Gulf of Tonkin Incident,’ The Cupola, Spring 2020. 142 Bricmont, Jean, Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War, New York, Monthly Review Press, 2006 (Chapter 7: Prospects, Dangers and Hopes, Section 2: The Crimes of Saddam Hussein). 143 Sonmez, Felicia, ‘Rep. Duncan Hunter says his unit “killed probably hundreds of civilians” in Iraq,’ Washington Post, June 4, 2019. 144 Phakdeetham, Janine, ‘Iraq War Vet says he was “shown slow-motion sniper kills to desensitize him” & was “systematically trained to kill”,’ The Sun, July 14, 2020. 145 ‘Australian “war crimes”: Elite troops killed Afghan civilians, report finds,’ BBC News, November 19, 2020. Hadid, Diaa, ‘“I Remember Them Screaming”: Afghans Detail Alleged Killings By Australian Military,’ NPR News, April 25, 2021. 146 Bardo, Matt and O’Grady, Hannah, ‘Did UK Special Forces execute unarmed civilians?,’ BBC News, August 1, 2020. 147 ‘Iraq war veteran: “The Marines took it upon themselves to shoot at, beat, rob, rape, kill whoever they wanted to. And that’s being proposed on the news as a few bad apples, an isolated incident”,’ In the NOW, December 16, 2019. 148 Cobain, Ian, ‘British army permitted shooting of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan,’ Middle East Eye, February 4, 2019. ‘“Killing spree”: UK soldiers told to kill unarmed citizens in Iraq and Afghanistan – report,’ RT, February 15, 2019. 149 ‘“Power and Influence” of UK Armed Forces Ended Iraq War Crimes Investigations, Peace Group Fears,’ Sputnik News, June 3, 2020. 150 Edwards, Rob, ‘U.S. fired depleted uranium at civilian areas in 2003 Iraq war, report finds,’ The Guardian, June 19, 2014. 151 Patrick Cockburn, ‘Toxic legacy of US assault on Fallujah “worse than Hiroshima”,’ The Independent, October 22, 2011. 152 ‘“Up to 15 tons of depleted uranium used in 1999 Serbia bombing” – lead lawyer in suit against NATO,’ RT, June 13, 2017. 153 Patrick Cockburn, ‘Toxic legacy of US assault on Fallujah “worse than Hiroshima”,’ The Independent, October 22, 2011. 154 Ibid. 155 Higham, Scott and Stephens, Joe, ‘New Details of Prison Abuse Emerge,’ Washington Post, May 21, 2004 (p. A01). 156 Ibid (p. A01). 157 Ibid (p. A01). 158 Ibid (p. A01). 159 Ibid (p. A01). 160 Ibid (p. A01).

308 ATROCITY FABRICATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 161 Sealey, Geraldine, ‘Hersh: Children sodomized at Abu Ghraib, on tape,’ Salon, July 15, 2004. 162 Ibid. 163 Harding, Luke, ‘After Abu Ghraib,’ The Guardian, September 20, 2004. Taguba, Antonio, ‘“The Taguba Report” on Treatment of Abu Ghraib Prisoners in Iraq,’ Findlaw.com, May 2004. 164 Harding, Luke, ‘After Abu Ghraib,’ The Guardian, September 20, 2004. Taguba, Antonio, ‘“The Taguba Report” on Treatment of Abu Ghraib Prisoners in Iraq,’ Findlaw.com, May 2004. 165 Harding, Luke, ‘After Abu Ghraib,’ The Guardian, September 20, 2004. Taguba, Antonio, ‘“The Taguba Report” on Treatment of Abu Ghraib Prisoners in Iraq,’ Findlaw.com, May 2004. 166 Ibid. 167 Gardham, Duncan and Cruickshank, Paul, ‘Abu Ghraib abuse photos “show rape”,’ The Telegraph, May 28, 2009. 168 Sealey, Geraldine, ‘Hersh: Children sodomized at Abu Ghraib, on tape,’ Salon, July 15, 2004 169 Gardham, Duncan and Cruickshank, Paul, ‘Abu Ghraib abuse photos “show rape”,’ The Telegraph, May 28, 2009. 170 Baker, Raymond W. and Ismael, Shereen T. and Ismael, Tareq Y., Cultural Cleansing in Iraq, London, Pluto Press, 2010 (p. 4). 171 ‘The Iraq We Left Behind,’ Foreign Affairs, March/April 2012. 172 ‘At a Crossroads: Human Rights in Iraq Eight Years after the US-Led Invasion,’ Human Rights Watch, 2010. 173 ‘Iraq conflict has killed a million Iraqis: survey,’ Reuters, January 30, 2008. 174 Lochhead, Carolyn, ‘Conflict in Iraq – Iraq Refugee Crisis Exploding – 40% of Middle Class Believed To Have Fled Crumbling Nation,’ San Francisco Chronicle, January 16, 2007. 175 ‘Millions Leave Home in Iraqi Refugee Crisis,’ NPR News, February 17, 2007. ‘UN warns of five million Iraqi refugees,’ The Independent, December 14, 2007. 176 ‘Iraq Is Caught in the Middle as U.S. and Iran Spar on Its Soil,’ The New York Times, June 28, 2021. 177 ‘We finally know what Hillary Clinton knew all along – U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar are funding Isis,’ The Independent, October 14, 2016. 178 ‘President Obama Speaks with VICE News,’ Vice News, March 17, 2015. 179 Beauchamp, Zack, ‘I read the UK’s huge Iraq War report. It’s even more damning than you think.,’ Vox, July 6, 2016. 180 Bowman, Tom, ‘As U.S. Military Exits Iraq, Contractors To Enter,’ NPR News, May 17, 2011. ‘Civilians to Take U.S. Lead as Military Leaves Iraq,’ The New York Times, August 18, 2010. 181 Read, Russ, ‘World’s most feared drone: CIA’s MQ-9 Reaper killed Soleimani,’ Washington Examiner, January 3, 2020. 182 Tawfeeq, Mohammed and Humayun, Hira, ‘Iraqi Prime Minister was scheduled to meet Soleimani the morning he was killed,’ CNN, January 6, 2020.



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183 Nebehay, Stephanie, ‘U.N. expert deems U.S. drone strike on Iran’s Soleimani an “unlawful” killing,’ Reuters, July 6, 2020. Brennan, David, ‘Killing Soleimani was a “Violation of National and International Law,” Former Nuremberg War Crimes Prosecutor Says,’ News Week, January 17, 2020. ‘Consequences of America’s Assassination of General Qasem Soleimani: Everything That Has Happened Since,’ Military Watch Magazine, January 4, 2020. Korso, Tim, ‘Putin, Erdogan See US Actions in Persian Gulf, Soleimani Assassination as Illegal - Lavrov,’ Sputnik News, January 8, 2020. 184 Gamp, Joseph, ‘Iran has a “shockingly strong” war crimes case against Trump over Soleimani’s killing, NATO military attache warns,’ The Sun, January 15, 2020. 185 Macias, Amanda, ‘State Department tells Iraq it will not discuss US troop withdrawal,’ CNBC, January 10, 2020. 186 ‘Iraq slams “unacceptable” US strikes on pro-Iran fighters,’ France 24, June 28, 2021.

Chapter Seven

The U.S.–North Korean Conflict Shaping Global Opinion of North Korea North Korea in 2020 marked its 70th year in a state of war with the United States – the longest war between two industrial powers in world history – making it the oldest state adversary ever faced by Western empire. The conflict had taken on newfound importance for Washington after the Soviet Bloc’s disintegration, with immense Western pressure on much of the world to eschew ties with Pyongyang and intense Western economic sanctions between them leaving the country increasingly isolated. With Soviet protection and military aid lost military pressure simultaneously escalated, leading Washington to come close on multiple occasions to launching attacks.1 From the 1990s, and increasingly in the 20th century, a strong consensus emerged in the Western world that North Korea’s destruction was not only inevitable, in line with broader perceptions of an ‘end of history’ and inevitable global westernisation, but that this process had to be accelerated. In more extreme terms, as noted by the Centre for the National Interest’s Director of Korea Studies Harry J. Kazianis: “North Korea is a stain on human history that needs to be expunged” – a statement which broadly reflected Western thinking towards the country.2 Western economic warfare efforts, although pursued over several decades, succeeded only in curbing North Korea’s potential growth but not in forcing it into crisis as was achieved in Iraq,3 Venezuela,4 Iran,5 Syria or other Western targets with more vulnerable economies. The East Asian state succeeded in sustaining economic growth, albeit at a slow rate, and in keeping both exchange rates and prices for most basic goods stable despite sanctions that were wholly unparalleled worldwide in their intensity.6 This was largely explained by the robustness of the state’s economy, which before the 1990s had been one of the most 310



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developed of all Western adversaries. Data from the Geneva-based World Intellectual Property Organization showed that, in terms of registered industrial designs North Korea was second only to the Soviet Union among socialist countries by the mid-1980s, with sustained investment raising it to fourth place in the world in 1990 behind only Japan, South Korea and the United States.7 High levels of technical education among the workforce even in rural areas were repeatedly observed by foreign professionals, while domestic industrial works such as hydroelectric dams were, according to experts from companies such as the Swiss-Swedish ABB Group, considered nothing less than “engineering masterpieces.”8 North Korea repeatedly proved resilient not only to Western economic pressure, but also to military threats, with its emphasis on military readiness, widespread political education9 and a sizeable defence industry limiting options for a Western assault. In the mid-2010s a conventional invasion was projected to lead to the loss of approximately 200,000 American military personnel,10 while other reports indicated that the Pentagon could expect a loss of up to 500,000 troops under its command within 90 days of the outbreak of war.11 These figures did not account for North Korean weapons of mass destruction or its ability to deliver them to U.S. territories such as Guam or Hawaii. The price of military action grew considerably further from 2017 after the ability to strike cities across the U.S. mainland with thermonuclear warheads was demonstrated in Korean weapons tests and confirmed by American intelligence.12 In a war with the country a victory for U.S. and allied forces was considered far from assured, and the eradication of cities across the American mainland was a significant possibility.13 Facing limitations in their ability to impose military and economic pressure on North Korea, the U.S. and its partners capitalised on their tremendous advantages in controlling the global information space to launch complementary campaigns on a third front. These included not only efforts to spread Western-favoured political narratives among North Korea’s population through radio broadcasts among other means,14 but also to promote a negative image of the country overseas. Unlike Iraq in 1991 or Libya in

312

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2011, where intense atrocity fabrication over a period of several months or even days was used to rapidly reshape international public opinion in preparation for war, in the Korean case atrocities and other misconduct were fabricated over decades to mould world opinion over time. The low likelihood of an imminent hot war, and very long span of cold conflict, created conditions for which this kind of information campaign was ideal. Western efforts in the information space have served to seriously tarnish North Korea’s image, to portray its population as better off if their country were brought under Western influence, and to help cast any prospective Western assault as a justified humanitarian endeavour. As North Korea in many ways represents the epitome of rejection of westernisation, discrediting its policy direction as an alternative to submission to Western hegemony and preventing the emergence of any kind of North Korean soft power are other notable achievements of these efforts. The Western campaign in the information space has included not only the fabrication of Korean atrocities and other forms of misconduct by both in Western media outlets and by various anti-Pyongyang human rights groups, but also consistent framing of Pyongyang as the sole perpetrator in major international incidents based on questionable or non-existent evidence. Atrocity Fabrication Through Defectors Since the 1990s atrocity fabrication has played a central role in Western efforts to shape public opinion of North Korea both within Western countries and internationally, with North Korean defectors residing in the West or in Western-aligned states often being at the crux of these efforts. Defectors have consistently been able to derive significant financial benefits from denouncing their former homeland, with the more extreme stories gaining the most publicity, while some of the most prominent figures have gained celebrity status in the West. Although the accounts of a small number of defectors have served as the most essential source of extreme negative stories about the country, the most influential and best publicised testimonies alleging the most egregious



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abuses by the Korean state have consistently suffered from serious inconsistencies. One such defector was Shin Dong Hyuk, whose allegations of severe human rights abuses were widely reported as fact by Western press, activists, political figures and NGOs despite a lack of evidence. Shin’s life story, Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Journey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, was written by former Washington Post journalist Blaine Harden based on Shin’s narration. The title was strongly indicative of the agenda it represented – the story of ‘Western good’ against ‘Asian communist evil’ – and it became a bestseller promoted in Western countries as a key reference for understanding North Korea. Translated into 27 languages and sold worldwide, Western human rights organisations heavily based several of their reports on the country on Shin’s testimony. This testimony, retold several times in movies and documentary films, was then used as a pretext for further Western economic sanctions and was said to have “shifted the global discourse about North Korea.”15 A Western-led United Nations commission in 2014 – Justice Michael Kirby’s Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK – the official name of North Korea) – based its report and positions almost exclusively on Shin’s testimony. A member of the commission referred to him as the world’s “single strongest voice” on Pyongyang’s alleged abuses.16 Shin was the first defector to have his testimony on human rights in North Korea heard by the United Nations. Choe Sung Hun, the New York Times correspondent in Seoul, highlighted growing suspicions surrounding Shin’s testimony and later concluded: “Shin lied to me and so many others.” Professor Andrei Lankov, an expert on and outspoken critic of North Korea,17 acknowledged that Shin had been pressured by anti-Pyongyang groups to tell his story as he did, with the hype surrounding him for years preventing an objective analysis that would later expose him as a fake. Lankov emphasised that this was part of a widespread issue, with defectors facing considerable pressure to fabricate extreme stories.18 Other lower profile North Korean defectors notably referred to Shin’s testimony as “complete lies.”19

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It was only several years after Shin’s testimony was published that its writer, Blaine Harden, himself revealed that the defector had fabricated much of his story while the book was being drafted.20 Shin later admitted to much the same. Referring to him as an “unreliable narrator” Harden re-emphasised that “Shin was the only source of information about his early life” which allowed the defector to alter his account as he pleased in the knowledge that it would be accepted without corroboration or evidence.21 Harden added that he would not be surprised if Shin made further alternations to his testimony in future.22 An assessment of North Korean defector testimonies in the International Journal of Communication Ethics highlighted that “the discrediting of Shin did little to dampen the enthusiasm for celebrity defectors and their stories,” with his testimony being far from the last to significantly influence both policy and world opinion before being proved false.23 Western sanctions on Pyongyang and UN reports made on the basis of Shin’s allegations were notably not reviewed, much less changed, which marked a notable success for the anti-Pyongyang groups which pressured him into fabricating North Korean atrocities and supported his work’s propagation.24 What the DPRK’s adversaries needed was not necessarily a verifiable story, but rather an emotional and horrifying one which could be used to vilify it before the world and serve as a pretext for further hostile actions. Shin’s testimony filled this role perfectly, and there was no need for it to be even remotely true to do so. Shortly after the flaws in Shin’s testimony were exposed another defector, Park Yeonmi, rose to high prominence through similarly fierce promotion and strong endorsements in the West. At her debut speech at the One Young World Summit in Dublin in October 2014 she dressed in highly presentable pink traditional clothing and, much as Nayirah had, conspicuously wiped her eyes and held her hand to her mouth with long pauses which gave her words much added dramatic effect. Much as Colin Powell was described as having committed “lie after lie” to portray an Iraqi threat,25 from advanced drones to a poison factory to false claims regarding aluminium tubes, so too did Park Yeonmi commit



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falsehood after falsehood to the record. Much as Powell’s statements continued to be debunked, only for him to come out with more, so too were most of Yeonmi’s claims relatively easy to confirm as false – as was clear to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of North Korea. This did not stop her from making more claims which continued to be widely publicised by a Western press eager for such stories, and her fame quickly became unprecedented among celebrity defectors. Park’s false claims to global audiences regarding life in North Korea are too numerous to list, but some examples are given below. In the first line of her opening One World Summit speech she stated: “North Korea is an unimaginable country. There is only one channel on tv. There is also no internet.” For anyone with a basic knowledge of the country, who has exchanged emails with friends in Pyongyang or flicked through multiple channels showing several foreign films, these claims are ludicrous – but perfectly believable for Western audiences. When addressing the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club, Park claimed North Koreans had never heard of Africa – although almost every senior and middle school in the country has a world map with Africa clearly labelled.26 A look at a high school history textbook shows that African history receives more attention than it does in most Western countries or anywhere else in East Asia. This is not to mention the performing arts shows put on by the many African students in Pyongyang coming from across the continent – from Zimbabwe and Uganda to Nigeria and Senegal. When Park claimed anyone with a height over 4 foot ten was conscripted into the military, this appeared to have no basis in reality since the country had an all-volunteer force. Of hundreds of North Koreans the writer has met and the dozens to whom he has spoken about the military, none recalled ever being conscripted and all were over five foot.27 When Park claimed there was no word for ‘love’ in North Korea, one needed only listen to one of its many popular love songs to know that there were many, and that her claim was totally ludicrous.28 She also claimed that there was virtually no word for ‘I,’ and that North Koreans had to say ‘we’ for everything from school – again totally ludicrous for anyone who has

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watched television or any kind of North Korean popular media or heard people have daily conversations across the country.29 Her claims relied on her audiences’ total ignorance about the country, and to the prejudiced metanarrative which Western coverage had fostered for decades. Before the end of 2014 a number of foreign journalists, many based in Seoul, had begun to question the truthfulness of Park’s story, with freelance journalist John Power publishing articles for The Diplomat and the Christian Science Monitor highlighting her serious inconsistencies. The result, he noted, was harsh attacks on him by the often radical anti-North Korean groups which supported her. “I got a lot of grief for the story I wrote about Yeonmi Park. I pissed off every right-winger. . . . I wrote the story raising the questions people had about her and it got me in a load of shit,” he noted. Such attacks may have been intended to deter others from highlighting the extremely tenuous nature of her claims. Dr. Andrei Lankov observed that there were “bigger forces of manipulation at play” with Park’s rise to fame, highlighting that it was part of a broader phenomenon under which parts of the typical defector story had to be fabricated for the story to sell. “The real story of the refugee does not sell. It’s easier to create some fake stories about obligatory torture in the camps every second Saturday then to tell the real story which is boring,” he concluded.30 Award-winning documentary producer Mary Ann Jolley, having interviewed Park several times, observed in 2014: “Was the story she told of her life in North Korea accurate? The more speeches and interviews I read, watch and hear Park give, the more I become aware of serious inconsistencies in her story that suggest it wasn’t . . . if someone with such a high profile twists their story to fit the narrative we have come to expect from North Korean defectors, our perspective of the country could become dangerously skewed.” Jolley was one of many to highlight that the facts Park presented consistently failed to stand to reason, for example: “In telling of her escape from North Korea, Park often says she crossed three or even four mountains during the night to get to the border and describes the pain she endured because her shoes had holes in them. However, Hyesan where Park was living



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is right on the river that divides the two countries and there are no mountains to cross.”31 Park similarly claimed to have crossed the Gobi Desert from China into Mongolia at temperatures of minus 40 degrees with her mother and five other people including a baby – none of whom had any winter clothing, gloves, scarves or any guide. She claimed they crossed the entire desert on foot in such extreme weather in a single day, and when asked how this feat, which was impossible for many reasons, was achieved, she said it was a miracle.32 Another noteworthy claim which Park repeated several times was the following: “when I was nine years old, I saw my friend’s mother publicly executed. Her crime – watching a Hollywood movie.” This, too, was ridiculous, with even staunch critics of North Korea including professors in South Korea and other defectors highlighting that while the country did have the death penalty, it was reserved for crimes such as murder, human trafficking or smuggling.33 Park described extreme hardship and having to “go to the mountain to get the grass to eat” and forage for food “like grass or sometimes dragonflies,” “eating grasshoppers, dragonflies, a lot of insects, tree bark, plants, flowers.” 34 “To watch dead bodies was my routine life. That’s how many people were dying from [lack of] food, and starving,” she noted on a separate occasion.35 A 2021 iteration of the story was even more extreme, recalling “piles of human bodies” every spring from malnutrition, “and you see children, just rats eating human eyes, first, and then children catching these rats and they eat them and they somehow die from – I don’t know what it is. Then rats eat the children back. So this cycle of us eating rats and they eat us back is going to continue and continue.” 36 Such horror stories were very far from atypical particularly in her later talks. Earlier in her career preceding her major debut in 2014, however, when Park was interviewed alongside other defectors on the South Korean television show ‘Now On My Way to See You,’ her mother was asked: “When we talk about stories of people eating grass or people struggling to eat, Yeju [Park’s pseudonym at the time] says, ‘Oh that never happened. . . .’ Why is that? Did Yeju

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never go through these experiences?” Park’s mother replied: “We were not to that extent. We were just never in a position where we were starving.” She claimed her daughter didn’t know about any serious hardship in North Korea until she left the country, stating: “Her father did his best to give his kids a better life, so . . . the kids didn’t know the truth about what was going on in North Korea,” highlighting that Yeonmi only learned about such stories after being featured on ‘Now On My Way to See You.’37 The contradictions regarding Park’s personal experiences, including the kinds of abuses and hardships she claimed to have faced, were even more extreme, as well documented by another defector named Park Joo.38 Park Yeonmi’s early perceptions of North Korea contrasted sharply with her much more extreme claims of later years. For example, her mother stated regarding a defector TV program she appeared on, where other defectors recounted various horror stories regarding their experiences: “She calls me before and after a show recording, asking me, ‘Am I really North Korean?’ She says she has no idea what the other girls on the show are talking about. She says she thinks everyone is lying on the show.”39 Lee Je Son, another North Korean defector, noted that several facts about Park’s story were clearly false. Regarding some of Park’s claims she commented “no one would believe this unless they were an idiot.”40 South Korean professors Shi Eun Yu and Kim Hyun Ah, who worked at the country’s processing sector for North Korean defectors, strongly refuted several of Park’s statements. “It’s not possible” they stated outright.41 Swiss businessman Felix Abt, who had worked and travelled extensively in North Korea for seven years, strongly refuted Park’s claims as “obviously exaggerated or plain false,” noting multiple significant inconsistencies.42 Park’s narrative was nevertheless highly prized in the West for the emotional deliveries she gave, for the way her extreme claims could grab headlines, and for affirming Western supremacy by presenting westernisation as the solution to and inevitable fate of her country. She was thus strongly endorsed and promoted by Western sources because, like Nayirah, her story suited the Western



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agenda against a key target. Following her debut, she embarked on an international promotional tour that included radio and television appearances around the world, and subsequently appeared on a panel at the U.S. State Department on Human Rights Day to present her claims. Several journalists, such as veteran DPRK analyst Michael Basset, continued to conclude that Park’s statements regarding North Korea were out of touch with the reality in the country, and that she was using outright lies to gain fame and, in the process, tarnish the country’s image. Park meanwhile reaped a small fortune from her sensationalized speeches, from which she earned over $12,500 per speech according to her agent.43 Much as public relations firm Hill+Knowlton had helped to create Nayirah as a phenomenon, Park was similarly supported and trained by the Teach North Korean Refugees Global Education Center, which was founded by International Director of the Atlas Network NGO Casey Lartigue. Lartigue was the host of North Korea Today, and his NGO was funded by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Congress. It in turn directly funded defectors such as Park and defector groups to promote anti-North Korean narratives. When meeting with the writer in person, Lartigue emphasised that he and his associates had the goal of nothing less than the total destruction of North Korea’s political system, the remaking of its society and punishment of its leadership. “If you met [North Korean leader, Chairman] Kim Jong Un, what would you say to him?” he asked. Answering his own question, he said: “I would have nothing to say to him, there’s nothing one can say to these kinds of people, their only job is killing Koreans, and the only way to help North Koreans is to bring them down.” He showed the writer photos of himself alongside Park, whose work he expressed considerable pride in and to whom he said his organisation had provided tremendous support, alongside other defectors, to speak against the country. To one familiar with North Korea, Lartigue gave the impression of an extremist who firmly believed that that those who resisted Western power and rejected Western hegemony, values and ideology needed to be neutralised. The support of his organisation, which widely

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recruited and groomed defectors in South Korea, was central to facilitating Park Yeonmi’s rise to international fame. At the time of this writing Park had gained 600,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel Voice of North Korea and was publishing new videos several times a week making consistently ludicrous claims and frequently predicting the country’s imminent collapse or its leadership’s imminent overthrow.44 Examples from the first half of 2021 alone include: Kim Jong Un’s sister and many North Korean children being frequent consumers of crystal meth;45 disabled people46 and AIDS patients being executed or experimented on with chemical weapons;47 women being sold by the government as sex slaves to China;48 Kim Jong Un being secretly gay;49 Kim Jong Un having several mistresses50 and female sex slaves;51 among hundreds of others. An entire volume would need to be written on the Park Yeonmi phenomenon in order to debunk the literally hundreds of total fabrications which she spread to her large audience. Shin and Park were very far from isolated examples, with notable others including: • Defector Lee Soon Ok, who gave testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives in 2004 elaborating on claims that Christians were tortured and burned to death molten iron in North Korean political prisons. The head of the North Korean Defectors’ Association in Seoul, Chang In Suk, claimed to know first-hand that Lee was never a political prisoner as claimed, with many other defectors agreeing that Lee’s accounts were very far from credible.52 • Defector Kwon Hyuk, who told the U.S. Congress that he was an intelligence officer at North Korea’s embassy in Beijing and had witnessed the government conducting human experiments on political prisoners. His testimony was key to building support for passing the North Korea Human Rights Act in 2004 to place further sanctions on the country. His story was subsequently retold in a prominent BBC documentary which brought it to the public’s



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attention, but a more detailed analysis by South Korea’s Yonhap news agency subsequently largely discredited his claims.53 • Defector Kim Hye Kyung testified before the Canadian parliament that she knew a woman who killed her baby and sold it as pork in a market in North Korea – which she portrayed as reflecting the general state of affairs in the country. Her testimony was widely questioned by Korean defectors and analysts.54 These testimonies were highly valued in the West for the self-gratification they provided, appearing to affirm the idea of Western superiority over the world’s least westernised state, as well as providing pretexts for hostile policies against the East Asian adversary usually including further economic sanctions. Writing for the International Journal of Communication Ethics, in a study of how defector testimonies shaped coverage of North Korea, journalism educator in South Korea Richard Murray noted that much Western reporting was “highly speculative or loosely fictional,” with uncritical use of defectors skewing the world’s understanding of the country. He observed: There were issues in the reliability of all these sources with defectors and their testimony being particularly problematic. Issues in which defectors and how defector testimony was used reigned supreme. Defector testimony was used to support an isolationist premised narrative on North Korea under the guise of human rights. . . . Stereotyping, caricature and lazy analysis are all hallmarks of the use and treatment of North Korean refugees and their community as a whole in reporting [on] North Korea from South Korea . . . the marketplace for defector stories is crowded and that has led to defectors outdoing each other to sell their stories. 55

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New York Times correspondent Choe Sung Hun similarly observed regarding defectors: “some of them have a habit when they meet a reporter, they begin imagining: ‘What kind of answer is he looking for?’ They will provide the answer they think you want . . . horrible made- up stories about NK.” Efforts by anti-North Korea and human rights organisations to use defectors to manipulate journalists were widespread, he observed, and there was a strong tendency to “exaggerate and make up stories,” recounting: “I see human rights activists doing this all the time.” 56 Media outlets also played important roles in interpreting and at times distorting defector accounts to fit into the narratives that were most favoured. As noted by lecturer at Leiden University and head of Korea work at the International Crisis Group Christopher Green, media outlets and scholars consistently dishonestly portrayed North Koreans as leaving their country only due to hardship and deprivation. He highlighted that the primary reasons for leaving ranged from wanting to be with loved ones abroad or wanting a better education for their children, and often had nothing to do with living conditions in North Korea itself – but that this kind of story would not be fit in with the narratives journalists or scholars sought to convey.57 The South Korean government’s National Human Rights Commission of Korea similarly observed “a tendency on the part of journalists . . . distorting defector accounts of life and escape from North Korea.”58 The manipulation of defector testimonies by media outlets in countries hostile to North Korea, and the use of financial incentives as a means of extracting false testimony, was attested to by defector Kim Ryon Hui in a 2018 interview with KoreanAmerican documentary producer David Yun. Having repeatedly criticised the campaign to vilify the country, she stated: It is defectors who say that there really are human rights violations in the North, but we have to examine defectors very closely. There is a TV show called Now On My Way to See You in South Korea. It’s a show starring defectors and their stories. . . . When you watch this show and all its star defectors, you will watch with



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tears running down your face. ‘North Korea has to be destroyed.’ ‘We must liberate North Koreans and given them freedom.’ It will make you say things like that. . . . However, partition [of Korea] means that news from the other side is not told truthfully. Instead, the prolonged [Korean] war creates a need to distort truth and tell lies. The people who need war are creating this. Now On My Way to See You airs four times a month . . . two days of shooting makes four episodes for a month. The pay for two days of work is $2000. No worker, no matter who they are, if they had a job that pays $2000 for 2 days, what would they do? They would try their best to hold on to that job. But ‘the North lives in extreme poverty,’ ‘we starve and shiver’ – just these testimonies won’t keep you on the show. It’s more difficult than keeping a job at Samsung or those huge corporations. You’re going to need more of ‘I was so hungry I ate a human being,’ ‘I gave birth to a baby, but because he’s disabled the government buried him alive.’ Only these kinds of testimonies can get you a place on the show. I have a friend that got a call from Now On My Way to See You staff. This friend was caught three times while trying to live in China and was caught by Chinese authorities each time. And when the show found out they called and asked my friend if he could join the cast. ‘We heard you were caught three times. All you have to do is tell us the story,’ they said. So my friend replied ‘I have no idea what other defectors are talking about on your show. I was caught three times [and returned to North Korea], but I never have experienced what the defectors claim on your show. I don’t know what country they’re talking about.’ Then, the show staff member said: ‘Sir, you can’t say that kind of stuff.’ Then added: ‘Don’t worry we will give you a script. All you have to do is read it out loud’. . . . So the show has a pre-made script at the ready, and when the defector doesn’t know what to say the script is given to fill the space. So they

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take a kernel of truth like my friend who did get caught three times and when they take that and pile lies on top of it – it becomes the new reality. It becomes the new truth. I think this is very unfortunate.59 A defector interviewed under the name Mr. Choi, who also lived in South Korea, similarly referred to North Koreans who made inflated claims about unfathomable human rights abuses and horrors in the north as “the defectors who just read aloud the NIS’ fictions” – the NIS (National Intelligence Service) being South Korea’s chief intelligence agency equivalent to the CIA. “These guys don’t work for money; they don’t work in factories or companies. They talk for money,” he concluded.60 While the allure of fame and fortune motivated some defectors to seek celebrity status with extreme testimonies, the need to subsist in South Korea was also a significant motivator since northerners earned significantly less money than locals, faced discrimination in employment, education and healthcare access, and often struggled to adapt to life.61 The fact that defectors and their children residing in Seoul have been known in extreme cases to die of starvation was an important indicator of this.62 Statistics ranging from defectors’ unemployment rates to high school dropout rates among their children further demonstrated this,63 making sensationalist reporting an attractive avenue to escape poverty. Dr. Konstantin Asmolov, a leading fellow at the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute for Far Eastern Studies Korean Studies Centre, was among those to observe to this effect: “The media has enough materials about how difficult they find it to adapt in the South and that they are considered second-class citizens there. One of the few ways to get more is to actively participate in propaganda against North Korea, telling the public not so much what is really going on, but what is desired to be heard. And as the competition is high, it is necessary to tell something particularly terrible and become the author of an ‘exclusive rumor.’”64 Senior lecturer in Korean studies at the University of Melbourne Song Jiyoung similarly observed:



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Cash payments in return for interviews with North Korean refugees have been standard practice in the field for years. . . . A government official from the South Korean Ministry of Unification told me the range of fees could vary wildly, from $50–500 per hour, depending on the quality of information. But this practice raises a difficulty: how does the payment change the relation between a researcher and an interviewee, and what effect will it have on the story itself? This practice also drives the demand for ‘saleable stories’: the more exclusive, shocking or emotional, the higher the fee. 65 Song highlighted that defectors “have become well aware of what the interviewer wants to hear. Whether speaking to the UN, U.S. Congress or western media, the questions are the same every time: why did you leave North Korea, and how terrible is it?” He added that “first-person testimonies have become the norm, and have increasingly come to involve younger victims with more tragic, dramatic, visual and emotional accounts.”i With cross-examination and by consulting multiple sources being highly time-consuming, he noted, unverified information was often accepted at face value to satisfy the demand for extreme headlines. In my 16 years studying North Korean refugees, I have experienced numerous inconsistent stories, some intentional omission and occasionally, some lies . . . many refugees say they feel pressured for defector stories. Ahn Myung Chol, a former prison guard at Camp 22, said people liked shocking stories and these so-called ‘defector-activists’ were merely responding to this desire. Chong Kwang-il, a former prisoner at Camp 15, i Song observed in a separate assessment: “The more terrible their stories are, the more attention they receive. The more international invitations they receive, the more cash comes in. It is how the capitalist system works: competition for more tragic and shocking stories.” (Song, Jiyoung, ‘Unreliable witnesses: The challenge of separating truth from fiction when it comes to North Korea,’ Policy Forum, August 2, 2015.)

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said the fame brought by media exposure trapped them, forcing them to reproduce a certain narrative. Song noted that the accuracy of testimonies often mattered little to activists and those who were receiving them so long as they portrayed North Korea negatively.66 These false testimonies had very real consequences. U.S. legislation including the North Korea Human Rights Act, and subsequent much harsher measures passed under the Obama administration, were overwhelmingly reliant on the oral accounts of defectors to provide justification. The same was true for the 2013 UN Commission of Inquiry into human rights in North Korea which launched a report that overwhelmingly relied on defector testimony.67 It was not only the claims defectors which were fabricated, but in many cases also the claims that any defection had occurred at all. The most prominent example was the extreme coercion used to force Korean prisoners of war to refuse repatriation during the Korean War (see Chapter 2). A more recent example was the case of 12 North Korean waitresses employed in China, who were reported to have sought asylum in South Korea in 2016. At a time of high tensions, this was widely hailed by Western media outlets as yet another sign of the disillusionment of North Korea’s population with their country and its leadership.68 While Pyongyang continued to insist that its waitresses had been kidnapped, publicising interviews with their bereaved families, these claims were inevitably dismissed in the West as propaganda. With the inauguration of a new administration in South Korea in 2017, however, it emerged the following year that the waitresses had indeed been kidnapped by South Korean intelligence, reportedly on personal orders of President Park Geun Hye, and that they wished to return home. The women had been denied access to the press or lawyers to prevent this from becoming known. Only after being reported in South Korean media was this later re-reported by a number of Western outlets, although seven years later the women remain in custody and unable to return.69 Many other supposed defectors claimed to have been similarly coerced or tricked into moving to South Korea from China and were prevented from returning,



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although this was very seldom reported as it contradicted the Western narrative of the North as near unliveable and as a country-sized prison.70 For Western efforts to vilify Pyongyang it was an inconvenient truth that significant numbers of defectors sought to return to North Korea, with most prohibited from leaving South Korea although some succeeded.71 Indeed, the numbers seeking to return to their country after experiencing life in the South rose throughout the 2010s. As one North Korean living in Seoul, Kwon Chol Nam, said when interviewed in 2017: “even though North Korea is poorer, I felt more free there. Neighbours and people help each other and depend on each other. Life is simpler there and here they are just slaves to money.” Kwon was arrested by South Korean police for attempting to return home, and his case was far from exceptional.72 Indeed, on the very day that Kwon’s interview was published, a UN human rights hearing on North Korea held in Seoul was interrupted by a tearful defector, Kim Ryon Hui, who begged to be allowed to return home after having repeatedly attempted to leave the South for years.73 This reality undermined efforts to portray the North Korean state as one committing untold horrors within its borders, and was carefully omitted from Western reporting. Also omitted were the rewards offered by South Korea of up to $860,000 per person, depending on circumstances, for defections.74 North Korea in the Western Press Beyond defector testimonies, efforts to vilify North Korea have relied heavily on Western media outlets and various anti-Pyongyang human rights groups’ fabrication or misrepresentation of information. Several Western journalists have attested to the unreliability of major outlets’ reporting on the country, with Max Fisher from the Washington Post writing that when covering North Korea: “almost any story is treated as broadly credible, no matter how outlandish or thinly sourced.”75 Isaac Stone-Fish wrote in Foreign Policy that: “as an American journalist you can write almost anything you want about North Korea and people

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will just accept it.” He admitted to having done the same himself, detailing a severe North Korean drug epidemic without evidence which later proved to be entirely false.76 A study published in the International Journal of Communication Ethics by Richard Murray observed accordingly: “North Korea’s isolation has resulted in an ‘anything goes’ approach to reporting on the nation that would not be acceptable in covering any other country.” 77 The Telegraph similarly noted: “when it comes to covering news about the ‘Hermit Kingdom’ it seems that sometimes the rule book is thrown out the window.”78 A report from Business Insider came to much the same conclusion – that almost any story depicting the country negatively was generally accepted in Western press.79 Korean Studies professor at Colombia University and prominent expert on North Korea, Charles Armstrong, referred to the country’s post-Cold War isolation as having “served in the West as a blank screen on which many – often mutually contradictory – fears and fantasies have been projected.”80 One way this manifested was in common fabricated reports of executions carried out by the Korean state, with Western reports that high profile North Korean figures from leading pop singers to generals were ordered killed consistently followed by reappearances by the same supposedly dead figures on camera.81 An example was CNN’s report in May 2015, which it framed as revealing “the ugly truth about the regime,” alleging that Chairman Kim Jong Un had personally ordered his aunt Kim Kyong Hui to be poisoned and killed. The killing of an elderly family member by the leader of one of the West’s main adversaries was subsequently widely re-reported by Western news outlets, and as was often the case defectors were cited as the source.82 Mrs. Kim was very much alive, however, went on to make a public appearance in January 2020.83 Another example was the report in 2013 that famous North Korean singer Hyon Song Wol not only had been arrested, but was secretly the former girlfriend of Chairman Kim who had then ordered her execution by firing squad along with 11 other entertainers. Widespread reports in Western media outlets surrounding the story included an extramarital affair by the Korean leader and the much older singer, Hyon and other singers trading



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in sex tapes, and several other claims which, although appearing ridiculous to those familiar with North Korea, were believable enough for public consumption.84 Hyon’s fame as a symbol of Korean performing arts, and her frequent singing of national songs at major events, meant she was a particularly attractive target for a fabricated story involving pornography and execution for those seeking to tarnish North Korea’s image. She reappeared on television several months after her supposed execution, however, and subsequently performed several times including on goodwill visits to South Korea in 2018 with no sign of any veracity to the allegations made.85 Serbian volleyball coach Branislav Moro, who trained North Korea’s national team, noted as an example of the near complete detachment of Western reporting from reality that major Western media outlets had reported on the executions of North Korean athletes as punishment for their failure to win medals at international competitions. Moro stated: “for example, I sit right next to one of those ‘killed’ athletes and I’m too ashamed to tell him that he’s supposed to be dead. I even used my cell phone to check on the internet to confirm his identity. Basically, there is very little truthful information out there.” Moro stressed that this was indicative of a wider phenomenon under which Western press’ fabricated stories of misconduct by the Korean state served to harm its international image.86 Another notable prior example was the reporting by a number of Western organisations, most prominently the Washingtonbased Human Rights Without Frontiers, regarding the fate Korean defector Yu Tae Jun. Yu had defected to South Korea and received southern citizenship, but later returned to find his wife. The rights group’s report stated: In June of last year he is known to have been executed in South Hamyong Province in North Korea. It is known that the North Korean government executed many former North Koreans, however this is the first time that the victim has actually been identified. In addition, due to the fact that Mr. Yu was a South Korean

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citizen, the repercussions for this incident are expected to be large. Mr. Yu was publicly executed in front of a group of North Korean citizens. It is known that he was charged with going to South Korea and committing treason against the Pyongyang government.”87 “By all accounts,” seconded prominent British rights expert Aidan Foster-Carter, “he’s now very dead – at just 33.”88 Western and South Korean media were quick to pick up on this execution, with prominent Seoul-based paper Chosun Ilbo reporting on it on ten separate occasions. After reports of his public execution had circulated in Western press for some months, the “now very dead” Yu Tae Jun gave a press conference in North Korea on June 12, 2001.89 He subsequently returned to South Korea in 2002, having been fully pardoned for his defection by Pyongyang. Yu’s mother, Ahn Chong Suk, stated regarding the circumstances of his return: “I heard from my son that the North Korean leader directed my son’s pardon on April 30 last year by saying that a man who loves his wife also loves the fatherland.” She nevertheless cautioned her son to lie about the circumstances of his return because otherwise “it might make [North Korean leader Chairman] Kim Jong Il look good.”90 Yu’s case was far from an exceptional one in terms of the coverage it received from Western human rights groups and media outlets. False reports of executions went as far as the claim in 2019 by leading British papers, citing anonymous sources, that a North Korean general had been executed by being thrown in piranha tank built specifically for such killings. This fit in with reports in Western press over several years of a range of other execution methods, consistently based on anonymous sources, ranging from feeding to tigers and dogs to blasts with anti-aircraft artillery.91 Perhaps the leading media source of extreme fabricated stories on North Korea was Radio Free Asia (RFA),92 a U.S. government-funded non-profit broadcasting corporation with the stated purpose of “advancing the goals of U.S. foreign policy.”93 One of its most widely circulated and spectacular stories in the early years of Kim Jong Un’s leadership was that the new



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leader had “fed his uncle to dogs”94 – a story widely re-reported in Western news outlets which proved to be entirely false.95 RFA was a leading producer of fabricated stories either alleging severe North Korean government abuses of its population or claiming the state had instituted absurd new policies. Another notable example was a report shortly after Chairman Kim’s accession that all men in North Korea were required by law to copy his exact haircut96 – which was similarly re-reported as fact without evidence or corroboration.97 As was very often the case with RFA stories in particular, it turned out to be entirely false.98 Foreign businessmen and NGO workers in Pyongyang at the time all contradicted the story – in the words of the director of Singapore-based NGO Choson Exchange it was “just stupid.”99 In 2017 RFA reported that the Chinese Foreign Ministry had advised all its citizens to immediately evacuate North Korea for their safety,100 and while some who heard the broadcast did evacuate there was no record of such a warning ever being issued.101 The ministry subsequently had to release a statement denying the report which it referred to as Fake News.102 RFA retained close ties to U.S. intelligence from its foundation, and was referred to by the New York Times as a “CIA broadcasting venture” established during the Cold War as part of a generously funded agency propaganda network alongside Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Free Cuba Radio and several others.103 By fabricating stories misrepresenting and demonising North Korea, the state-funded outlet advanced U.S. foreign policy goals by depicting America’s oldest state adversary as a pariah and exacerbating tensions around it. Alongside outright fabrications, news from North Korea was often misrepresented in Western reporting with similar results. An example was a report in 2012 that Pyongyang had claimed to have discovered a “unicorn lair.”104 This was again widely re-reported by Western media outlets and was one of many fabricated stories to appear in the New York Times–endorsed bestselling guide to the country titled North Korea, Unmasking Three Generations of

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Madmen.ii The original Korean statement announced the discovery of an archaeological site associated with the ancient capital of King Dongmyeong of Gogurye, a poetic term for which is “kiringul” – a unicorn lair.iii Complementing Western reporting vilifying the DPRK, positive imagery of the state was consistently depicted either as a façade or censored entirely. The blocking of North Korean-run or pro-North Korean media content by American social media platforms such as YouTube represented only part of the picture.105 A prominent article written for the German Institute of Global Area Studies by researchers David Shim and Dirk Nabers regarding portrayals of North Korea in the West concluded that positive images were tightly and effectively censored. “Images of North Korea showing its military ‘strength’ and internal ‘weakness’ are highlighted as idiosyncratic aspects to emphasise its Otherness. The use of images marks North Korea in particular ways, which separate ‘them’ from ‘us’. . . A good example of what is made almost invisible in Western representations of North Korea is smiling or joyful ordinary North Korean people,” they concluded.106 ii Cases of Korean news being similarly misrepresented were highly common, an example being British press reports that North Korean media was claiming deceased Chairman Kim Jong Il had invented burritos – or shwarma depending on the Western source reporting it – which helped contribute to the image of the country as one far out of touch with reality. Korean outlets had in fact credited Chairman Kim with having suggested that “wheat cakes stuffed with meat” be offered to workers at certain locations, not with inventing the popular snack. (Gill, Kate, ‘North Koreans enjoy burritos after paper bizarrely claims Kim Jong-il “invented dish in 2011”,’ The Independent, January 4, 2022.) iii Taking the unicorn story as an example of a wider phenomenon, one Texan political commentator noted that Western coverage of North Korea relied heavily on “long-standing stereotypes of East Asian ‘oddity’ to dehumanise North Koreans and justify U.S. aggression against them. . . . U.S. propaganda can dismiss North Korea’s legitimate concerns so easily because of the underlying racist assumption that these are a bizarre and simple-minded people that believe in things like unicorns. This feeds off of and into orientalist logic that sees East Asians as a nearly subhuman ‘other’ that can’t be reasoned with and so must be handled with force.” (‘A Lot of What You Know About North Korea Is Racist Nonsense,’ Medium, April 18, 2017).



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One seemingly trivial but significant example of suppression of positive imagery of North Korea was the response to the popular apolitical video blog by British traveller Louis Cole, which focused on the quality of attractions such as its fun karaoke and water parks and the kind local people. When the videos’ popularity risked undermining predominant Western portrayals of North Korea, Cole was heavily criticised by organisations such as New York-based Human Rights Watch for failing to speak negatively about the country’s politics, and was even widely accused of being a paid agentiv of Pyongyang.107 Cole was instead expected to describe the country in line with the way its image had been constructed in the West – an invisible “true North Korea” never seen on camera but which Western sources insisted represented the reality of the country:108 one where seemingly happy and well fed people were supposedly secretly starving and miserable behind closed doors.109 The extent to which positive aspects and achievements of North Korea were denied or dismissed, based on the supposition that the country must actually look different in secret, reflected the strength of the metanarrative the Western world had constructed which predisposed populations exposed to its media to dismiss positive stories and accept negative ones. Dr. Konstantin Asmolov observed to this effect: the author sees one more aspect associated with the fundamental demonisation of the DPRK as the Land of Darkness. After all, from the standpoint of the demonising propagandists, such a state is fundamentally unable to create something positive, especially something aimed at improving the living standards of the population. . . . If something is noticed there which is along the lines of improving the living standards of the population, it is propaganda, and the actual situation iv This allegation was very commonly used to dismiss those whose narratives regarding Western targets strongly contradicted those of the West, whether those defending Chinese state policies after extended time in the country, or reporting positively on life in Iraq under the Ba’athist government.

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does not work that way. If they invent something useful, that is not actually their own invention, they just stole it. If something is built there, then the building has been erected on the bones of countless prisoners, or it has something to do with the Potemkin village.110 Even in supposedly apolitical content, North Korea could very seldom be mentioned in the West without harsh rebuke. Whether it be a travel guide, an art gallery or a collection of mountain scenery there was almost always additional commentary labelling it as something along the lines of the “most vicious, paranoid, murderous dictatorship” – as a British book on flag designs referred to it.111 This is not only indicative of the degree of animosity felt in the Western world towards its oldest adversary – but also an almost total inability to view it apolitically. Sinking a South Korean Warship: An Attack That Never Happened As tensions between Pyongyang and Washington increased in the 2010s North Korea was increasingly accused of launching attacks based on dubious evidence. This served to provide additional pretext both for U.S. involvement in East Asia, furthering the goals of the Obama administration’s Pivot to Asia initiative, and for placing additional pressure on Pyongyang. On March 26, 2010, the South Korean Navy Pohang Class corvette ROKS Cheonan sank during anti-submarine warfare exercises killing 46 seamen onboard. The incident was initially widely blamed by families of the dead on the incompetence of the Navy, but some weeks later local media began to speculate that North Korea may have been to blame. Evidence at the time was highly questionable – namely citing an unnamed NGO representative who said he received a call from a North Korean officer of high rank boasting that he had orchestrated the entire operation to target the Cheonan.112 When it was pointed out that there were no traces of North Korean submarines in the area, as verified by its very close monitoring by specialised anti-submarine warfare



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assets, a number of media outlets then claimed that if it was not North Korea’s navy then its saboteur bombers must have been responsible.113 Some Japanese and Russian outlets meanwhile claimed the corvette was sunk by an American submarine, and that Seoul was concealing the truth by blaming the North. Such allegations were supported by notoriously high rates of friendly fire accidents in the U.S. Military,114 and it was confirmed that American submarines had been present. No evidence was presented, however, to prove the U.S. had been the perpetrator.115 With a new administration in Seoul officially seeking to abandon the previous policy of rapprochement with Pyongyang, the spinning of the Cheonan incident as a North Korean plot not only shielded Seoul, the Navy and the U.S. from criticism, but also provided pretext for a policy shift. Experts nevertheless continued to support the conclusion that the sinking was caused by an accident rather than a North Korean attack, with South Korean Defence Minister Kim Tae Young suggesting that one of the many mines placed by South Korean forces in the 1970s was responsible. Citing interviews with surviving crew who had been operating the frigate’s sensors as evidence refuting the torpedo theory, he called reports of a northern torpedo attack “unfounded.”116 A commission of six nations, all but the ROK being Western states, itself concluded on May 7 that the corvette was most likely “destroyed by a torpedo made in Germany” – a weapon widely employed by South Korean submarines to which North Korea did not have access.117 The commission’s report led to speculation that friendly fire may have been to blame.118 This conclusion, too, was called into question, as the torpedo’s remains were corroded which led experts to believe they must have been submerged for several years.119 The only evidence offered that the torpedo was North Korean was a “No. 1” inscribed in purple marker on one of the parts. This proved wholly insubstantial and led to widespread satirical responses in South Korea – the most prominent being the photoshopping of iPhones with the same “No. 1” as supposed evidence that they too were North Korean.120 As University of Virginia professor Lee Seunghun observed: “You could put that mark on

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an iPhone and claim it was manufactured in North Korea. The government is lying when they said this was found underwater. I think this is something that was pulled out of a warehouse of old materials to show to the press.”121 Dr. Suh Jae Jung, a political analyst at Johns Hopkins University in Washington D.C., was among many experts who argued that the evidence cited in no way proved North Korea had attacked the Cheonan. The biggest inconsistency, he argued, was the white powder found on the warship which could not have resulted from such an explosion. Experiments replicating the chemical process showed that the powder was rust from water exposure over time. He claimed instead that the Cheonan was most likely sunk by an older South Korean mine – as the defence minister had originally stated.122 Dr. Konstantin Asmolov independently assessed in detail the circumstances of the Cheonan’s sinking which effectively ruled out a North Korean attack. Noting that the warship was “specifically designed to hunt enemy submarines,” he stated: It is strange that in the close-combat conditions, and low (15–20m) depths in the area of the tragedy, its crew not only did not find an enemy ship, but also could not detect any torpedo firing. In such a case, the enemy boat as described above had to overtake the ASW [anti-submarine warfare] barrier deployed near the border, make its way unnoticed into the waters off the island of Baengnyeong teeming with enemy ships, submarines and aircraft, then discreetly attack the corvette, sink it with the very first torpedo, and then safely leave, avoiding other anti-submarine ships and helicopters. . . . The question of how it [the alleged North Korean submarine] managed to remain undetected during the exercise and sink a vessel intended for combatting enemy submarines remained open, but that no longer bothered anyone.



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The likelihood of such a trajectory by a North Korean torpedo seemed highly implausible if not impossible. Asmolov called the chances of this happening “miraculous,”123 and was hardly alone in reaching this conclusion. As observed in the Japanese Asia-Pacific Journal: The Cheonan was a patrol boat whose mission was to survey with radar and sonar the enemy’s submarines, torpedoes, and aircraft. . . . If North Korean submarines and torpedoes were approaching, the Cheonan should have been able to sense it quickly and take measures to counterattack or evade. Moreover, on the day the Cheonan sank, U.S. and ROK [Republic of Korea – the official name of South Korea] military exercises were under way, so it could be anticipated that North Korean submarines would move south to conduct surveillance. It is hard to imagine that the Cheonan sonar forces were not on alert.”124 Prominent South Korean papers similarly stressed the low likelihood that a submarine could have operated undetected by the Cheonan and other surveillance assets deployed by both U.S. and South Korean forces in a state of high combat readiness.125 Director of the program on U.S.-Korea policy at the Council on Foreign Relations Scott Snyder cited similar facts and voiced serious doubts regarding the narrative of a North Korean attack.126 Further inconsistencies with the narrative of North Korean culpability were widely highlighted by South Korean official sources, from Defence Ministry Official Kim Chul Woo and investigative panel member Shin Sang Cheol127 to lawmaker Lee Jung Hee and former senior presidential secretary Park Seon Won, among others. Many were openly prosecuted by the state on the basis that they were spreading “groundless rumours,” which carried with it the serious charge of undermining national security and thus deterred others from voicing scepticism or carrying out their own independent assessments.128 Shin had noted regarding his own findings during the investigation: “I couldn’t find the

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slightest sign of an explosion. The sailors drowned to death. Their bodies were clean. We didn’t even find dead fish in the sea.” He presented considerable evidence for his claim that the ship had run aground and collided with another vessel, concluding that what had occurred was nothing more than “a simple traffic accident at sea.” The Defence Ministry responded by asking the National Assembly to eject Shin from the panel for “creating public mistrust” in the investigation.129 Lee Jung Hee was sued for defamation by the Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff for pointing out, in a speech before the national assembly, that the feed from a thermal observation device showing the moment the warship’s stern and bow split apart, which would have indicated how the incident occurred, was being purposefully withheld. Former secretary Park, meanwhile, was charged with libel for simply requesting greater transparency and expressing doubts about the official narrative, stating regarding the resulting lawsuit: “I asked for the disclosure of information for a transparent and impartial investigation into the cause of the Cheonan sinking . . . the libel suit seeks to silence public suspicion over the incident.”130 As Dr. Asmolov observed: “it started to become clear to experts that what’s important is not who actually sank the ill-fated corvette, but who is named responsible for the tragedy.”131 The Cheonan incident played well into the hands of the U.S. and the new Lee administration by reversing inter-Korean rapprochement, and was well timed with escalating sanctions to cut North Korea off from its valuable economic relationship with the South. Lee’s administration used the incident to end almost all trade and escalated pressure on Pyongyang on both the military and information fronts.132 U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited South Korea soon afterwards and spoke of designs towards “changing the direction of North Korea” and “offering the opportunities for a better life for the people of the North,” which based on how such rhetoric was commonly used in the West was widely interpreted as a thinly veiled call for toppling the non-westernised government there. It was hoped that the Cheonan incident would allow the Obama administration to rally greater support from



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other regional actors and from the South Korean public for a hard line against Pyongyang.133 While it remains uncertain how the Cheonan sank the narrative of North Korean culpability, which was later pressed by the Western-led investigation team and repeated to the exclusion of all others across Western media, remains highly implausible. This is particularly true when considering the changing nature of the claims and the nature of the evidence cited. While the Cheonan sinking would have represented one of the most successful North Korean military operations since the Korean War, and Pyongyang had historically never shied away from claiming credit for previous strikes, it denied any involvement from the outset with state media referring to the loss of “fellow countrymen” as a “regrettable accident.”134 A Chemical Assassination in Malaysia On February 13, 2017, Kim Jong Nam, the half-brother of Chairman Kim Jong Un, was assassinated at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The perpetrators, two women of Indonesian and Vietnamese origin, reportedly used a VX nerve agent, and within hours South Korean officials stated with certainty that Pyongyang was responsible – terming it a “naked example of Kim Jong Un’s reign of terror.”135 Western sources were quick to follow, despite no investigation having taken place, and the incident was used as a pretext to swiftly impose further economic sanctions against North Korea. The extent of Western speculation was overwhelming, and leading media outlets had the influence needed to turn this theory into an effective fact regardless of what investigators would conclude. Reports in Western media and subsequent accusations by Western experts and officials focused overwhelmingly on what Western and South Korean sources had to say while ignoring the Malaysian investigation. In sharp contrast to the Western press, official Malaysian sources never accused North Korea of masterminding the assassination. The Malaysian side announced only that South Korea and the United States had accused Pyongyang of being behind

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the attack, without an investigation of their own or presentation of evidence, and that North Korea had denied this. South Korean media were quick to depict Ri Jong Chol, a North Korean residing in Malaysia, as the mastermind behind the attack. Ri was subsequently questioned by Malaysian police and quickly released due to a lack of evidence. Staff at the North Korean embassy in Malaysia were also cleared of all suspicion and, after questioning by police, were no longer mentioned in the investigation. The case was effectively closed in April 2019 with light sentences given to both the women on the basis that neither were aware of what they were doing, as both thought they had been carrying out a televised prank. The official result of the investigation did not state that North Korea was the perpetrator.136 Claims of North Korean culpability were later dismissed as pure speculation by the Malaysian Prime Minister.137 While the lack of evidence implicating North Korea as the perpetrator did not rule out the possibility of its responsibility, it highlighted the extent to which its adversaries could shape narratives and manipulate global opinion based on totally unproven accusations. Multiple parties including hardline anti-DPRK elements in South Korea and the Western world had incentives to assassinate Kim Jong Nam – whether to end what appeared to be a soft line against North Korea by the new Donald Trump administration,138 to frame Pyongyang, or to dispose of Kim who had been working as a CIA informant.139 North Korea also had incentives to carry out the killing, including eliminating Kim as an CIA asset or staging a show of force to demonstrate the reach of its operatives and its expertise in deploying chemical agents abroad. Considering that the killing was done very publicly, however, when Kim Jong Nam had regularly stayed at the country’s embassy and could have been quietly disposed of there, and the fact that it occurred at a time of potential détente with the U.S. under a new administration, indicated that Pyongyang was less likely to be culpable.



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The Death of an American Student On January 2, 2016, American student Otto Warmbier was arrested in Pyongyang after entering as a tourist. He was accused of carrying out a “hostile act against the state” after breaking into a restricted government area of the Yanggakdo Hotel and stealing a poster. Two months later he was convicted under Article 60 of the country’s criminal code, with the prosecution citing his confession, CCTV footage, forensic evidence, and witness testimonies to sentence him to 15 years of hard labour. The sentence was near unanimously criticised by Western sources, although it was no harsher than that he could have received in the United States or several Western aligned states for similar acts.v On June 13, 2017, fifteen months after the sentencing, State Secretary Rex Tillerson announced that North Korea had released Warmbier to American custody. Media outlets subsequently reported that the State Department had been informed Warmbier had fallen into a coma and was seriously ill, and he was hospitalised as soon as he returned to the United States.140 Warmbier died six days later, although the cause of his illness was unclear. Damage to his brain tissues from suffocation and reports of hypoxia, alongside the total lack of trauma or injury on the rest of his body, was consistent with an attempted suicide by hanging which a number of analysts speculated was the likely cause.141 A blood clot, pneumonia, sepsis, kidney failure, and sleeping pills were also cited as potential causes, and could have caused him to stop breathing if he had botulism and was paralyzed from it.142 v A notable example was that of Adolfo Martinez, who was sentenced to 16 years imprisonment in the State of Ohio in December 2019 for tearing down an LGBT flag outside a church and destroying it. Unlike Warmbier, he was not a foreign citizen and did not enter a restricted area to access the flag. In Thailand considerably harsher sentences have repeatedly been issued against those disrespecting symbols of its monarchy, including foreigners, but like the Martinez case, their coverage in the Western press was consistently much more nuanced than that of Warmbier’s sentencing in Korea. (Knox, Patrick, ‘Bigot Caged: Homophobe jailed for 16 YEARS for tearing down LGBTQ flag and setting fire to it in Iowa,’ The Sun, December 20, 2019.) (‘Man jailed for 35 years in Thailand for insulting monarchy on Facebook,’ The Guardian, June 9, 2017.)

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The Director of the University of Cincinnati Medical Center’s Neurocritical Care Program, Dr. Daniel Kanter, stated regarding the student’s condition: “We have no certain or verifiable knowledge of the cause or circumstances of his neurological injury. . . . This pattern of injury, however, is usually seen as the result of cardiopulmonary arrest, where the blood supply to the brain is inadequate for a period of time, resulting in the death of brain tissue.” He further noted that there was no trauma to the head or skull.143 Warmbier reportedly had had a neurological injury “for 15 months or so” indicating he may already have been in poor health before entering North Korean custody.144 CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta speculated that medication given to Warmbier after his arrival in the U.S. could have directly caused his situation to deteriorate leading to his eventual death.145 Shortly after his death Warmbier’s parents alleged that their son’s passing was the result of torture in North Korea, an account which fit in with prevailing Western preconceptions of the kind of country it was, but which was strongly contradicted by both the results of medical examinations and the experiences of previous American prisoners in the country.vi The Hamilton County Coroner’s Office carried out an external examination of Warmbier’s body which, according to reports from CNN and other outlets, strongly contradicted the account of his parents. For vi American citizen Matthew Todd Miller, for example, was sentenced to six years of prison labour in April 2014 for committing acts hostile to the North Korean state. While in custody, he repeatedly alluded to his good treatment at the hands of his captors, which led Western sources to widely speculate that he had been coerced to make such claims. Miller was released early after 212 days in custody, and confirmed he was surprised at his good treatment – citing permission to listen to music on his iPad and iPhone in prison. Upon returning to the United States he described his transformed perception of the country, stating regarding his time in prison: “This might sound strange, but I was prepared for the ‘torture.’ But instead of that I was killed with kindness, and with that my mind folded.” Miller also denied widespread speculation in Western reports that his public apology for his crimes in North Korea was coerced, stating that he had been entirely sincere. (‘Freed American Matthew Miller: “I wanted to stay in North Korea,”’ The Guardian, November 20, 2014.) (Nate Thayer, ‘Matthew Miller’s excellent adventure in North Korea,’ NK News, November 14, 2014.)



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example, Warmbier’s father had made an emotionally charged statement that: “His bottom teeth look like they had taken a pair of pliers and rearranged them.” Directly contradicting this, the coroner’s report stated: “the teeth are natural and in good repair.” Addressing the claims by Warmbier’s parents of forced rearranging of his teeth, Coroner Dr. Lakshmi Kode Sammarco stated: “I felt very comfortable that there wasn’t any evidence of trauma. We were surprised at the [parents’] statement.” She said her team, which included a forensic dentist, thoroughly evaluated and assessed various scans of his body.146 Warmbier’s parents declined to comment on the coroner’s report and refused to allow an autopsy which could determine the cause of their son’s death. They instead continued to support a narrative accusing the North Korean government of torture, and subsequently sought through an American federal court to obtain half a billion dollars in compensation from the East Asian state.147 Forensic scientists were highly critical of the unusual and unexpected decision not to perform an autopsy, which Warmbier’s parents did not explain, and which ensured that the cause of death would remain unknown.148 This decision led to speculation that Warmbier’s parents sought to protect their narrative from expected contradiction by the autopsy, thus not only supporting the hardline positions of many in the U.S. government against and further vilifying North Korea, but also potentially winning them very significant financial rewards. Subsequent moves by the United States Navy to seize a North Korean cargo ship in 2018 and escort it to U.S. territory, where it was later sold at auction, were followed by a decision by the Marshals Service to provide Warmbier’s parents with part of the receipts from the sale – a major loss to the Korean merchant shipping fleet.149 The legality of the seizure remains disputed. Hacking Sony In 2015 North Korea was accused of hacking Sony Pictures and publishing company documents in response to its release of the film The Interview earlier that year. Pyongyang had requested

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that the production not be shown due to its crude and at times vulgar depictions of North Korea and the gory killing of its leader. The film was widely accused even by Pyongyang’s Western critics of having strong racist and bigoted depictions of East Asian peoples and particularly women.150 American author and journalist Tim Shorrock, a regular contributor to The Nation and The National Interest and expert on U.S.-Korea relations, observed: “The film used every racist image and trope that [director Seth] Rogen could dream up, from the sing-songy caricatures of Asian speech that were a film staple in the 1940s and ’50s, to the concept that Koreans are either robotic slaves (like Kim’s security guards) or sex-starved submissives who crave American men.”151 The Sony hack, which had seen malware erase key computer infrastructure, revealed the extent of the firm’s close contacts with the Democratic Party and the U.S. defence establishment, which had requested production of The Interview and directly influenced its content.152 This came as part of a broader trend under the Obama administration towards a strong emphasis on the weaponization of information and close cooperation with media organisations.153 Director Seth Rogen himself attested to this, stating: “Throughout this process, we made relationships with certain people who work in the government as consultants, who I’m convinced are in the C.I.A.”154 Chief executive of Sony Entertainment Michael Lynton remained in communication with the State Department during the film’s development, and was told that it could have a real impact on North Korea.155 Sony was further advised to keep Chairman Kim’s gory execution in the film, as it was something American defence analysts and Korea experts believed the DPRK’s population “needed to see” and that could inspire anti-government activities.156 Executive board member of the Korea Policy Institute Professor Christine Hong observed regarding the production and its intentions: if you actually look at what the Sony executives did, they consulted very closely with the State Department, which actually gave the executives a green light with



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regard to the death scene. And they also consulted with a RAND North Korea watcher, a man named Bruce Bennett, who basically has espoused the thesis that the way to bring down the North Korean government is to assassinate the leadership. And he actually stated, in consulting with Sony about this film, that this film, in terms of the South Korean market, as well as its infiltration by defector balloon-dropping organisations into North Korea, could possibly get the wheels of a kind of regime change plot into motion.vii So, in this instance, fiction and reality have a sort of mirroring relationship to each other.157 The alleged North Korean hack was used as a pretext for additional economic sanctions, and shortly after President Obama warned of a proportional response a large scale cyberattack on Korean internet servers was carried out and widely speculated to have been perpetrated by the U.S.158 Many experts raised serious questions regarding Pyongyang’s responsibility, and while there was evidence of considerable cyber espionage targeting South Korea159 there was none of significant cyber warfare efforts against the United States and, according to experts, much evidence to the contrary. As Kurt Stammburger, senior vice president at the leading American cybersecurity firm Norse Corp, informed law enforcement: “We can’t find any indication that North Korea either ordered, masterminded or even funded this attack. . . . Nobody has been able to find a credible connection to the North Korean government.” Data instead pointed to a former Sony employee with insider knowledge of the company. Shlomo Argamon, chief scientist at cybersecurity consulting firm Taia Global, similarly found a complete lack of any indication that North Korea was responsible, stating “there’s certainly reason to doubt the total attribution of this to North Korea.” A number of other experts, vii Bennett worked for the Office of the Secretary of Defence, U.S. Forces in Korea, U.S. Forces in Japan and the U.S. Pacific Command and had made over 100 trips to South Korea as an advisor for senior personnel in the U.S. Army and South Korea’s armed forces.

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including hackers and security researchers, reached similar conclusions.160 Portraying Pyongyang as the culprit nevertheless did much to further cement the state’s image as a transnational threat and an easily provoked aggressor, both vilifying it and vindicating those who had long called for a harder policy line. The Metanarrative’s Influence on Analysts and Policymakers The metanarrative built up around North Korea proved effective not only in shaping global public opinion, but also in deeply influencing officials and policymakers. In his coverage of the lead up to the 2003 Iraq War, award winning American journalist, former Wall Street Journal reporter and president of Harper’s Magazine, John MacArthur, had observed: “the success of ‘Bush’s PR War’ . . . was largely dependent on a compliant media that uncritically repeated every fraudulent administration claim about the threat posed to America by Saddam Hussein.”161 In the Korean case the reverse was largely true, with media’s phantastic depictions of what went on in the world’s least westernised country strongly influenced policymakers, while the tremendous quantities of false information on which predominant narratives were based often prevented officials at all levels from making sound assessments. As CIA analyst John Nixon observed, policymakers conditioned to see the country as “evil” could not analyse intelligence objectively and the CIA itself “seemed completely locked into its interpretations of Kim [Jong Il],” with information contradicting the prevailing narrative routinely ignored.162 The impact of this cognitive dissonance was exemplified by the testimony former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who when visiting Pyongyang in 2000 recalled having been seriously misinformed by prejudiced intelligence officials. “I went having been briefed on what kind of a weirdo he [Kim Jong Il] was from our own people. He was portrayed as reclusive-like with many girlfriends and watching porno movies – basically a very weird kind of person,” she elaborated. Albright stressed that the Korean leader made the opposite impression in person, stating: “He was

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actually quite charming. . . . He was very, very well prepared, responded without notes, was not only respectful but also interested in what I had to say.” To her surprise the talks were a success.163 In an interview eighteen years later her impression remained unchanged, recalling: I do think that what is interesting is how smart and informed Kim Jong Il was . . . he technically knew an awful lot of things. We were actually talking about missile limits at the time. He did not consult his experts. He really was able to talk about various aspects of the programs. And he spent a lot of time on it. It was very interesting. He also could be very gracious. I mean, it was all kinds of dinners and all kinds of things. But I think that he was determined to make some progress. . . . I was surprised by how technically adept and smart he was.164 According to Albright, the success of future negotiations would rely heavily on whether American leaders recognised the North Korean leadership for what it was – in sharp contrast to what the prevailing narratives, up to and including those in her briefings, had led her to believe.165

Notes 1 2 3 4

McIntyre, Jamie, ‘Washington was on brink of war with North Korea 5 years ago,’ CNN, October 4, 1999. Johnson, Jesse, ‘Obama weighed pre-emptive strike against North Korea after fifth nuclear blast and missile tests near Japan in 2016, Woodward book claims,’ Japan Times, September 12, 2018. Kazianis, Harry J.,‘ A U.S. Invasion of North Korea Would Be Like Opening the Gates of Hell,’ National Interest, May 13, 2019. Crossette, Barbara, ‘Iraq Sanctions Kill Children, U.N. Reports,’ New York Times, December 1, 1995. Sachs, Jeffrey and Weisbrot, Mark, ‘Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela,’ Center for Economic and Policy Research, April 2019.

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Selby-Green, Michael, ‘Venezuela crisis: Former UN rapporteur says US sanctions are killing citizens,’ The Independent, January 26, 2019. 5 ‘How Sanctions Affect Iran’s Economy,’ Council on Foreign Relations, May 22, 2012. ‘Iran’s Inflation Rate Reaches An Alarming 50 Percent,’ Iran Intl, April 21, 2021. 6 ‘North Korea’s Stable Exchange Rates Confound Economists,’ Associated Press, November 16, 2018. Kim, Christine and Chung, Jane, ‘North Korea 2016 economic growth at 17-year high despite sanctions: South Korea,’ Reuters, July 21, 2017. Lankov, Andrei, ‘Sanctions working? Not yet . . . ,’ Korea Times, May 29, 2016. Pearson, James and Park, Ju-Min, ‘Despite sanctions, North Korea prices steady as Kim leaves markets alone,’ Reuters, August 8, 2016. 7 The first twenty-five years of the World Intellectual Property Organization, from 1967 to 1992, Geneva, International Bureau of Intellectual Property, 1992 (pp. 294, 295 for DPRK statistics). 8 Abt, Felix, A Capitalist in North Korea: My Seven Years in the Hermit Kingdom, North Clarendon, Tuttle, 2014 (Chapter 2: Malaise into Opportunity, Part 3: Will North Korea Strike Gold?). 9 ‘Interview: Ashton Carter,’ Frontline, March 3, 2003. 10 Bechtol, Bruce E., Military Proliferation to the Middle East in the Kim Jong-un Era: A National Security and Terrorist Threat, Presentation at Shurat HaDin Law Center, March 5, 2016. 11 ‘North Korea: The War Game,’ The Atlantic, July/August 2005. 12 Dominguez, Gabriel, ‘USFK confirms North Korea’s Hwaseong-15 ICBM can target all of US mainland,’ Janes, July 11, 2019. Panda, Ankit, ‘US Intelligence: North Korea’s ICBM Reentry Vehicles Are Likely Good Enough to Hit the Continental US,’ The Diplomat, August 12, 2017. Warrick, Joby and Nakashima, Ellen and Fifield, Anna, ‘North Korea now making missile-ready nuclear weapons, U.S. analysts say,’ Washington Post, August 8, 2017. 13 Sharman, John, ‘America could lose a war against North Korea, former US commander says in leaked letter,’ The Independent, November 10, 2017. Gady, Franz-Stefan, ‘Military Stalemate: How North Korea Could Win a War With the US,’ The Diplomat, October 10, 2017. 14 Abrams, A. B., Immovable Object: North Korea’s 70 Years At War with American Power, Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2020 (Chapter 19: Information War: The Final Frontier). 15 Donghyuk, Shin, Dalhousie University, Academics, Convocation, Ceremonies, Honorary Degree Recipients, Honorary Degree 2014. 
 16 Pilling, David, ‘Lunch with the FT: Shin Dong-hyuk,’ Financial Times, August 30, 2013. 17 Lankov, Andrei, ‘Changing North Korea: An Information Campaign Can Beat the Regime,’ Foreign Affairs, vol. 88, no. 6, November/December 2009 (pp. 95–105).



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Lankov, Andrei, ‘Another Myanmar? Why there won’t be a military coup in North Korea any time soon,’ NK News, February 3, 2021. 18 Lankov, Andrei, ‘After the Shin Dong-hyuk affair: Separating fact, fiction,’ NK News, February 3, 2015. 19 ‘그는 처음부터 18호 수용소에서 살았다’ [‘He Lived in Camp 18 From the Beginning’], Hankyoreh, April 1, 2016. 20 Fifield, Anna, ‘Prominent N. Korean defector Shin Dong-hyuk admits part of story are inaccurate,’ Washington Post, January 17, 2015. 
 21 Harden, Blaine, Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, New York, Viking, 2012 (p. 46).
 22 Power, John, ‘Author of book on North Korea’s founding addresses Shin controversy,’ NK News, March 18, 2015. 23 Murray, Richard, ‘Reporting on the impossible: The use of defectors in covering North Korea,’ The International Journal of Communication Ethics, vol. 14, no. 4, 2017 (pp. 17–24). 24 Dorell, Oren, ‘U.S. puts N. K. leader Kim Jong Un on sanctions list for human rights abuses,’ USA Today July 6, 2016. 25 Schwartz, Jon, ‘Lie After Lie: What Colin Powell Knew About Iraq 15 Years Ago and What He Told the U.N.,’ The Intercept, February 6, 2018. 26 ‘“Speak up against China”: North Korean defector Yeonmi Park’s tearful plea,’ Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club, April 3, 2017. ‘How North Korea’s burgeoning middle class is painting a new picture of life in the DPRK,’ Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club, December 8, 2017. 27 Interview with Yeonmi Park in: ‘Tyranny, Slavery and Columbia U,’ The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast (Youtube Channel), Season 4, Episode 26, May 31, 2021. 28 ‘There’s no word for love in North Korea,’ Yeonmi Park at Google Zeitgeist, May 2016. 29 Interview with Yeonmi Park in: ‘Tyranny, Slavery and Columbia U,’ The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast (Youtube Channel), Season 4, Episode 26, May 31, 2021. 30 Murray, Richard, ‘Reporting on the impossible: The use of defectors in covering North Korea,’ The International Journal of Communication Ethics, vol. 14, no. 4, 2017 (pp. 17–24). 31 Jolley, Mary Ann, ‘The Strange Tale of Yeonmi Park,’ The Diplomat, December 10, 2014. 32 Interview with Yeonmi Park in: ‘Tyranny, Slavery and Columbia U,’ The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast (Youtube Channel), Season 4, Episode 26, May 31, 2021. 33 Jolley, Mary Ann, ‘The Strange Tale of Yeonmi Park,’ The Diplomat, December 10, 2014. 34 Ibid. Interview with Yeonmi Park in: ‘Tyranny, Slavery and Columbia U,’ The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast (Youtube Channel), Season 4, Episode 26, May 31, 2021. 35 ‘Hong Kong Special,’ Casey & Yeonmi: North Korea Today, September 25, 2014.

350 ATROCITY FABRICATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 36 Interview with Yeonmi Park in: ‘Tyranny, Slavery and Columbia U,’ The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast (Youtube Channel), Season 4, Episode 26, May 31, 2021. 37 ‘북한의 상류층 예주의 남모를 고민!’ [‘Worrying about the appearance of Yeju, the upper class of North Korea!’], Now On My Way to See You, Episode 58, January 2013. Jolley, Mary Ann, ‘The Strange Tale of Yeonmi Park,’ The Diplomat, December 10, 2014. 38 ‘Yeonmi Park: The Defector Who Fooled the World,’ JooPark3782 Blog, December 22, 2015. 39 Jolley, Mary Ann, ‘The Strange Tale of Yeonmi Park,’ The Diplomat, December 10, 2014. 40 Lee, Je Son, ‘Why defectors change their stories,’ NK News, January 21, 2015. 41 Jolley, Mary Ann, ‘The Strange Tale of Yeonmi Park,’ The Diplomat, December 10, 2014. 
 42 Power, John, ‘North Korea: Defectors and Their Sceptics,’ The Diplomat, October 29, 2014. 43 O’Carroll, Chad, ‘Claims N. Korean defector earns $41k per speech “completely incorrect”,’ NK News, June 30, 2015. 44 ‘How Covid-19 is Destroying the North Korean Regime,’ Voice of North Korea by Yeonmi Park (Youtube Channel), June 1, 2021. ‘Uprising inside North Korea,’ Voice of North Korea by Yeonmi Park (Youtube Channel), April 28, 2021. ‘Is the North Korean Regime Collapsing,’ Voice of North Korea by Yeonmi Park (Youtube Channel), May 27, 2021. ‘The End of Kim Jong-un,’ Voice of North Korea by Yeonmi Park (Youtube Channel), January 31, 2021. ‘Coup in North Korea,’ Voice of North Korea by Yeonmi Park (Youtube Channel), March 1, 2021. ‘Breaking News: Massive Uprising in Musan, North Korea,’ Voice of North Korea by Yeonmi Park (Youtube Channel), March 9, 2021. ‘Is Kim Jong-Un about to be replaced,’ Voice of North Korea by Yeonmi Park (Youtube Channel), June 17, 2021. ‘The Deadly New Virus Spreading in North Korea Might Bring Down the Regime,’ Voice of North Korea by Yeonmi Park (Youtube Channel), May 3, 2021. 45 ‘Shocking Secret of Kim Yo-jeong,’ Voice of North Korea by Yeonmi Park (Youtube Channel), July 7, 2021. 46 ‘What Happens If you become disabled in North Korea?,’ Voice of North Korea by Yeonmi Park (Youtube Channel), January 14, 2021. 47 ‘The Deadly New Virus Spreading in North Korea Might Bring Down the Regime,’ Voice of North Korea by Yeonmi Park (Youtube Channel), May 3, 2021. 48 ‘How Much Does North Korean Regime Earn Selling Their Women to China,’ Voice of North Korea by Yeonmi Park (Youtube Channel), February 21, 2021.



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49 ‘Is Kim Jong-Un Gay?,’ Voice of North Korea by Yeonmi Park (Youtube Channel), February 26, 2021. 50 ‘Will Kim Jong Un’s Mistress Take Over North Korea?,’ Voice of North Korea by Yeonmi Park (Youtube Channel), March 15, 2021. 51 ‘The True Dark Side of North Korea Pleasure Squad,’ Voice of North Korea by Yeonmi Park (Youtube Channel), April 19, 2021. ‘North Korea’s Secret “Pleasure Squad” Parties,’ Voice of North Korea by Yeonmi Park (Youtube Channel), December 17, 2021. ‘Exclusive: New Photos of Kim Jong Un’s Pleasure Squad,’ Voice of North Korea by Yeonmi Park (Youtube Channel), December 23, 2020. 52 Song, Jiyoung, ‘Why do North Korean defector testimonies so often fall apart?,’ The Guardian, October 13, 2015. Song, Jiyoung, ‘Unreliable witnesses: The challenge of separating truth from fiction when it comes to North Korea,’ Policy Forum, August 2, 2015. 53 ‘BBC “북, 정치범 생체실험 보도” 신빙성 논란’ [‘BBC’s “North Korea reports on political prisoner’s biological experiments” credibility controversy’], Media Today, March 2, 2004. 54 Song, Jiyoung, ‘Unreliable witnesses: The challenge of separating truth from fiction when it comes to North Korea,’ Policy Forum, August 2, 2015. ‘아들을 토막내 고기로 팔았다? 그건 거짓말’ [‘Did you sell your son as meat? That’s a lie’], OhMyNews, February 12, 2012. 55 Murray, Richard, ‘Reporting on the impossible: The use of defectors in covering North Korea,’ The International Journal of Communication Ethics, vol. 14, no. 4, 2017 (pp. 17–24). 56 Ibid (pp. 17–24). 57 Green, C., ‘Why North Korean defectors choose to leave,’ NK News, April 27, 2017. 58 Ahn, J., ‘Almost half of defectors experience discrimination in the South: Major survey,’ NK News, March 15, 2017. 59 Yun, David, ‘Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul’ (Documentary), October 16, 2018. 60 Ibid. 61 ‘Almost half of defectors experience discrimination in the South: Major survey,’ NK News, March 15, 2017 62 Lee, Hakyung Kate, ‘North Korean mother and son defectors die of suspected starvation in Seoul,’ ABC News, September 22, 2019. 63 Go, Myong-Hyun, ‘Resettling in South Korea: Challenges for Young North Korean Refugees,’ The Asan Institute for Policy Studies, vol. 4, no. 26, September 12–29, 2019. ‘Report to Congressional Requesters, Humanitarian Assistance: Status of North Korean Refugee Resettlement and Asylum in the United States,’ United States Government Accountability Office (GAO-10-691), June 2010 (p. 44). 64 Asmolov, Konstantin, ‘On the Fate of Thae Yong-ho,’ New Eastern Outlook, January 28, 2017. 65 Song, Jiyoung, ‘Why do North Korean defector testimonies so often fall apart?,’ The Guardian, October 13, 2015. 66 Ibid.

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67 Song, Jiyoung, ‘Unreliable witnesses: The challenge of separating truth from fiction when it comes to North Korea,’ Policy Forum, August 2, 2015. 68 Ripley, Will, ‘Tearful North Korean waitresses: Our “defector” colleagues were tricked,’ CNN, April 20, 2016. 69 ‘Tale of North Korean Waitresses Who Fled to South Takes Dark Turn,’ New York Times, May 11, 2018. 70 Yun, David,‘Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul’ (Documentary), October 16, 2018. 71 Choe, Sang-Hun, ‘A North Korean Defector’s Regret,’ New York Times, August 15, 2015. Taylor, Adam, ‘Why North Korean Defectors Keep Returning Home,’ Business Insider, December 26, 2013. Yoon, Soo, ‘North Korean defectors see American dream deferred as reality sets in the US,’ The Guardian, June 13, 2016. ‘South Korea to deport Korean-American accused of praising North,’ The Guardian, January 9, 2015. ‘Shattering the myth that all N. Koreans want to defect to S. Korea,’ Hankyoreh, February 4, 2021. 72 ‘After Fleeing North Korea, some defectors want to go back to life under Kim Jong Un,’ ABC News, December 14, 2017. Yun, David, ‘Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul’ (Documentary), October 16, 2018. 73 ‘North Korean defector interrupts UN human rights event to plead tearfully to be allowed to return to Pyongyang,’ The Telegraph December 14, 2017. 74 Hancocks, Paula and Masters, James, ‘South Korea to quadruple reward fee for North Korean defectors,’ CNN, March 5, 2017. ‘South Korea boosts reward for defectors from North to $860,000,’ BBC News, March 5, 2017. 75 Fisher, Max, ‘No, Kim Jong Un probably didn’t feed his uncle to 120 hungry dogs,’ Washington Post, January 3, 2014. 76 Stone Fish, Isaac, ‘The Black Hole of North Korea,’ New York Times, August 8, 2011. 77 Murray, Richard, ‘Reporting on the impossible: The use of defectors in covering North Korea,’ The International Journal of Communication Ethics, vol. 14, no. 4, 2017 (pp. 17–24). 78 O’Carroll, Chad, ‘North Korea’s invisible phone, killer dogs and other such stories – why the world is transfixed,’ The Telegraph, January 6, 2014. 79 Taylor, Adam, ‘Why You Shouldn’t Necessarily Trust Those Reports Of Kim Jong- un Executing His Ex-Girlfriend,’ Business Insider, August 29, 2013. 80 Armstrong, Charles K., ‘Korea and its Futures: Unification and the Unfinished War, Review,’ The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 60, no. 1, February 2001. 81 ‘Former North Korean general believed executed turns up alive,’ Fox News, May 10, 2016. 82 Hancocks, Paula, ‘North Korean leader ordered aunt to be poisoned, defector says,’ CNN, May 12, 2015. 83 Hotham, Oliver, ‘Kim Jong Un’s aunt, once reported killed, makes first appearance in six years,’ NK News, January 25, 2020.



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84 ‘Kim Jong Un’s Ex-Lover Hyon Song-Wol “Executed By North Korean Firing Squad After Making Sex Tape”,’ Huffington Post, August 23, 2018. 85 ‘(和訳)『白頭と漢拏はわが祖国』三池淵管弦楽団・玄松月(ヒョ ンソンウォル)団長 Hyon Song-wol 平昌五輪（北朝鮮芸術団が韓 国ソウルで公演）’ [(Japanese translation) “Hakuto and Hansho is my homeland” Hyon Song-wol, leader of the Miikebuchi Orchestra, Hyon Song-wol Pyeongchang Olympics (North Korean art troupe performing in Seoul, South Korea)] (Youtube Channel), February 12, 2018. ‘Kim Jong Un’s “executed” ex-girlfriend comes back from the dead with appearance on state TV,’ Mirror, May 17, 2014. 86 ‘Serbian Coach Reveals How Mainstream Media “Kills” North Korean Athletes,’ Sputnik News, September 16, 2017. 87 ‘Former North Korean was “publicly executed,”’ Human Rights Without Frontiers, February 28, 2003. 88 Foster-Carter, Aidan, ‘They shoot people, don’t they?,’ Asia Times, March 22, 2001. 89 Seo, Soo-min, ‘Video footage shows defector alive in NK,’ Korea Times, August 21, 2001. 90 ‘Defector pardoned by NK leader, mother says,’ Korea Times, August 31, 2002. 91 Adu, Aletha, ‘Kim Jong-un throws general into piranha-filled fish tank in Bond-inspired execution, reports claim,’ The Sun, June 9, 2019. 92 ‘North Korean University Students Copy Kim Jong Un’s Hairstyle,’ Radio Free Asia, March 25, 2014. 93 Radio Free Asia, ‘About,’ Broadcasting Board of Governors. n.d. (Retrieved June 5, 2016). Sosin, Gene, Sparks of Liberty: an insider’s memoir of Radio Liberty, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999 (p. 257). Welch, David, Propaganda, power and persuasion from World War I to Wikileaks, London, New York, I. B. Tauris, 2014. 94 Dier, Arden, ‘Report: Kim Jong Un fed uncle alive to 120 starved dogs,’ USA Today, January 3, 2014. 95 Kaiman, Jonathan, ‘Story about Kim Jong-un’s uncle being fed to dogs originated with satirist,’ The Guardian, January 6, 2014. 96 ‘North Korean University Students Copy Kim Jong Un’s Hairstyle,’ Radio Free Asia, March 25, 2014. 97 ‘North Korea: Students required to get Kim Jong-un haircut,’ BBC News, March 26, 2014. 98 Asmolov, Konstantin, ‘How the Radio Free Asia released the whole set of baloney,’ New Eastern Outlook, November 26, 2016. 99 Macdonald, Hamish, ‘Why men’s Kim Jong Un hairstyle requirement is unlikely true,’ NK News, March 26, 2014. 100 ‘China Warns its Citizens in North Korea to Leave as Conflict with U.S. Looms,’ Sputnik News, May 2, 2017. 101 Ibid. 102 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Geng Shuang’s Regular Press Conference on May 2, 2017.

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103 ‘Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.,’ New York Times, December 26, 1977. 104 ‘North Korea Says It’s Found a “Unicorn Lair,”’ U.S. News, November 30, 2012. ‘Unicorns’ Existence Proven, Says North Korea,’ Time, November 30, 2012. 105 ‘YouTube blocks North Korean channel,’ Washington Post, December 14, 2016. Solon, Olivia, ‘YouTube shuts down North Korean propaganda channels,’ The Guardian, September 9, 2017. Kang, Seung-woo, ‘North Korea engaged in fights against YouTube sanctions,’ Korea Times, February 11, 2021. O’Carroll, Chad, ‘YouTube terminates new North Korean propaganda channel, weeks after launch,’ NK News, August 5, 2021. 106 Shim, David and Nabers, Dirk, North Korea and the Politics of Visual Representation, German Institute of Global and Area Studies, GIGA Research Programme: Power, Norms and Governance in International Relations, April 2011. 107 Butterly, Amelia, ‘Vlogger Louis Cole Denies North Korea Paid for Videos of his Trip,’ BBC News, August 18, 2016. 108 Robertson, Phil, ‘Louis Cole’s Merry North Korea Adventure,’ Human Rights Watch, September 20, 2016. 109 Anderson, David, ‘Useful Idiots: Tourism in North Korea,’ Forbes, March 6, 2017. 110 Asmolov, Konstantin, ‘Korea: Large Construction Baloney,’ New Eastern Outlook, August 21, 2016. 111 Marshall, Tim, Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags, London, Elliott & Thompson, 2016 (p. 165). 112 Asmolov, Konstantin, ‘Has the history of the Cheonan corvette come to an end? P.1,’ New Eastern Outlook, November 20, 2013. 113 ‘South Korean ship sunk by crack squad of “human torpedoes,”’ The Telegraph, April 22, 2010. Asmolov, Konstantin, ‘Has the history of the Cheonan corvette come to an end? P.1,’ New Eastern Outlook, November 20, 2013. 114 Meek, James, ‘Iraq war logs: How friendly fire from US troops became routine,’ The Guardian, Octoober 22, 2010. Ismay, John, ‘America’s Dark History of Killing Its Own Troops With Cluster Munitions,’ The New York Times, December 4, 2019. Thompson, Mark, ‘The Curse of “Friendly Fire”,’ Time, June 11, 2014. Moran, Michael, ‘“Friendly Fire” is all too common,’ NBC News, March 23, 2003. Shhuger, Scott, ‘The Pentagon’s appalling record on “friendly fire”,’ Slate, April 4, 2002. 115 Asmolov, Konstantin, ‘Has the history of the Cheonan corvette come to an end? P.1,’ New Eastern Outlook, November 20, 2013. 116 ‘Korean War mine “sunk” South Korean navy ship,’ The Telegraph, March 29, 2003.



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117 ‘Probe concludes torpedo sank South Korea ship: report,’ Reuters, May 7, 2010. 118 Stein, Jeff, ‘Analysts question Korea torpedo incident,’ Washington Post, May 27, 2010. 119 Asmolov, Konstantin, ‘Has the history of the Cheonan corvette come to an end? P.1,’ New Eastern Outlook, November 20, 2013. 120 Ibid. 121 Demick, Barbara and Glionna, John M., ‘Doubts surface on North Korea’s role in ship sinking,’ Los Angeles Times, July 23, 2010. 122 ‘S. Korean newspaper exonerates North over torpedo,’ RT, July 29, 2010. 123 Asmolov, Konstantin, ‘Has the history of the Cheonan corvette come to an end? P.1,’ New Eastern Outlook, November 20, 2013. 124 Sakai, Tanaka, ‘Who Sank the South Korean Warship Cheonan? A New Stage in the US-Korean War and US-China Relations,’ Asia-Pacific Journal, vol. 8, issue 21, no. 1, May 24, 2010. 125 ‘Questions raised following Cheonan announcement,’ Hankyoreh, May 21, 2010. 126 Stein, Jeff, ‘Analysts question Korea torpedo incident,’ Washington Post, May 27, 2010. 127 Demick, Barbara and Glionna, John M., ‘Doubts surface on North Korea’s role in ship sinking,’ Los Angeles Times, July 23, 2010. 128 ‘Ex-Pres. Secretary Sued for Spreading Cheonan Rumors,’ Dong-A Ilbo, May 8, 2010. 129 Demick, Barbara and Glionna, John M., ‘Doubts surface on North Korea’s role in ship sinking,’ Los Angeles Times, July 23, 2010. 130 ‘Ex-Pres. Secretary Sued for Spreading Cheonan Rumors,’ Dong-A Ilbo, May 8, 2010. 131 Asmolov, Konstantin, ‘Has the history of the Cheonan corvette come to an end? P.1,’ New Eastern Outlook, November 20, 2013. 132 Carr, Vanessa, ‘South Korea says North will “pay a price” for torpedo attack,’ PBS, May 24, 2010. 133 Choe, Sang-Hun and Landler, Mark, ‘U.S. Pledges to Help S. Korea at U.N.,’ New York Times, May 26, 2010. 134 ‘North denies involvement in ship sinking,’ The Korea Herald, April 18, 2010. 135 Choe, Sang-hun, ‘Kim Jong-un’s Half Brother Is Reported Assassinated in Malaysia,’ The New York Times, February 14, 2017. 136 Asmolov, Konstantin, ‘Kim Jong-nam Murder Case is Closed, or More Precisely Falls Apart,’ New Eastern Outlook, April 16, 2019. 137 Bernama, ‘Dr M hails Seoul’s “Look South” policy; affirms rapprochement with Pyongyang,’ New Straits Times, November 26, 2019. 138 Jackson, Van, On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and the Threat of Nuclear War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018 (pp. 100–102). 139 Strobel, Warren P., ‘North Korean Leader’s Slain Half Brother Was a CIA Source,’ Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2019. 140 Shesgree, Deirdre and Dorell, Oren, ‘U.S. college student released by North Korea arrives back in Ohio,’ USA Today, June 14, 2017.

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141 Lockett, Jon, ‘Tragic student Otto Warmbier “may have attempted suicide” in North Korean prison after being sentenced to 15 years for stealing poster,’ The Sun, July 28, 2018. Basu, Zachary, ‘What we’re reading: What happened to Otto Warmbier in North Korea,’ Axios, July 25, 2018. Tingle, Rory, ‘Otto Warmbier’s brain damage that led to his death was caused by a SUICIDE ATTEMPT rather than torture by North Korean prison guards, report claims,’ Daily Mail, July 25, 2018. 142 Fox, Maggie, ‘What killed Otto Warmbier?’ NBC News, June 20, 2017. 143 Tinker, Ben, ‘What an autopsy may (or may not) have revealed about Otto Warmbier’s death,’ CNN, June 22, 2017. 144 Ibid. 145 Nedelman, Michael, ‘Coroner found no obvious signs of torture on Otto Warmbier,’ CNN, September 29, 2017. 146 Ibid. 147 ‘US court orders North Korea to pay $500 million for Otto Warmbier’s death,’ Deutsche Welle, December 24, 2018. 148 Tinker, Ben, ‘What an autopsy may (or may not) have revealed about Otto Warmbier’s death,’ CNN, June 22, 2017. Nedelman, Michael, ‘Coroner found no obvious signs of torture on Otto Warmbier,’ CNN, September 29, 2017. 149 Lee, Christy, ‘U.S. Marshals to Sell Seized North Korean Cargo Ship,’ VOA, July 27, 2019. ‘Seized North Korean cargo ship sold to compensate parents of Otto Warmbier, others,’ Navy Times, October 9, 2019. 150 Builder, Maxine, ‘The Real Problem With “The Interview” Is Its Racism, Not Its Satire,’ Medium, December 18, 2014. Kim, Ji-Sun (Grace), ‘“The Interview”: No Laughing Matter,’ Huffington Post, January 8, 2015. 151 Shorrock, Tim, ‘How Sony, Obama, Seth Rogen and CIA secretly planned to force regime change in North Korea,’ Grey Zone, September 5, 2017. 152 ‘“The Interview” Belittles North Korea, But is Film’s Backstory and U.S. Policy the Real Farce?,’ Democracy Now, December 22, 2014. Thielman, Sam, ‘WikiLeaks republishes all Sony hacking scandal documents,’ The Guardian, April 17, 2015. ‘Sony,’ Wikileaks, April 16, 2015. 153 Assange, Julian, ‘Google Is Not What It Seems,’ Wikileaks, 2016. Nixon, Ron, ‘U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,’ New York Times, April 14, 2011. 154 Itzkoff, Dave, ‘James Franco and Seth Rogen Talk About “The Interview”,’ New York Times, December 16, 2016. 155 Hornaday, Ann, ‘Sony, “The Interview,” and the unspoken truth: All movies are political,’ Washington Post, December 18, 2014. 156 De Moraes, Lisa, ‘“The Interview” Release Would Have Damaged Kim Jong Un Internally, Says Rand Expert Who Saw Movie at Sony’s Request,’ Yahoo News, December 19, 2014. 157 ‘“The Interview” Belittles North Korea, But is Film’s Backstory and U.S. Policy the Real Farce?,’ Democracy Now, December 22, 2014.



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158 ‘North Korean Internet Collapses After Obama’s Warning,’ Time, December 22, 2014. 159 ‘North Korea “hackers steal US–South Korea war plans,”’ BBC News, October 10, 2017. Choi, Haejin, ‘North Korea hacked Daewoo Shipbuilding, took warship blueprints: South Korea lawmaker,’ Reuters, October 31, 2017. 160 Faughnder, Ryan and Hamedy, Saba, ‘Sony insider – not North Korea – likely involved in hack, experts say,’ Los Angeles Times, December 30, 2015. ‘Former Anonymous hacker doubts North Korea behind Sony attack,’ CBS News, December 18, 2014. ‘The Evidence That North Korea Hacked Sony Is Flimsy,’ Wired, December 17, 2014. ‘New evidence Sony hack was “inside” job, not North Korea,’ New York Post, December 30, 2014. 161 MacArthur, John R., Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, London, University of California Press, 2004 (p. xiii). 162 Nixon, John, Debriefing the President; The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein, London, Bantam Press, 2016 (pp. 204, 205, 220). 163 ‘Nuclear Nightmare: Understanding North Korea’ (Documentary), Discovery Times, 2003 (00:35:50–00:37:42). Gender in Mediation: An Exercise for Trainers, CSS Mediation Resources, ETH Zurich Centre for Security Studies and Swisspeace 2015 (p. 59). 164 ‘Transcript: Securing Tomorrow with Madeleine Albright,’ Washington Post, May 31, 2018. 165 Ibid.

Chapter Eight

The NATO-Libyan War The West Makes War on Libya The Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya emerged from the mid-1970s as the leading opponent of Western hegemony on the African continent, and repeatedly came to blows with U.S., British and French forces during the Cold War.1 The country’s large oil reserves were not only located near major consumer bases in Europe, but were also easy to extract and had low refining costs, providing the wealth needed to raise living standards to the highest levels on the African continent. Libya’s wealth was also used to pursue foreign policy goals against the interests of Western hegemony, often aligned with pan-African causes, including providing training and material support for the ANC in South Africa and the Zimbabwean African National Liberation Army as well as building up its own armed forces with Soviet Bloc equipment.2 By the mid-1980s Libya was a leading regional military power with the most impressive air force inventory in Africa or the Arab world and was a persistent thorn in the side of Western foreign policy designs both on the continent and beyond. Its activities included donating tanks and fighter jets to Syria at a time of conflict with the United States,3 equipping Iran with its first ever ballistic missiles and its most capable battle tanks to counter a Western-backed Iraqi invasion,4 arming and funding the Irish Republican Army against the British government,5 and supporting the Soviet arms industry as its best paying foreign client. For his contributions to the ANC’s struggle, the grandson of party leader Nelson Mandelai was named after Libyan leader Muammar i As South African president, Mandela stated in response to Western criticisms of relations with Libya: “Those who feel we should have no relations with Gaddafi have no morals. . . . Those who feel irritated by our friendship with President Gaddafi can go jump in the pool.” Among other forms of

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Gaddafi,6 while Gaddafi’s daughter served pro-bono on the legal team representing Iraqi president Saddam Hussein after he was captured by U.S. forces in 2003.7 Libya had also strongly supported Yugoslavia when it came under Western assault in the 1990s.8 Fearing an Iraq-style Western assault in the 2000s, after the USSR’s disintegration had allowed the West to impose harsh sanctions and arms embargoes through the United Nations, Libya agreed to unilaterally disarm and accept intrusive Western inspections of its military facilities in exchange for Western security guarantees and sanctions relief. Despite the partial reproachment that followed, Tripoli nevertheless continued to seriously challenge Western hegemony over Africa in other ways. When the U.S. Department of Defence established the United States Africa Command as a unified combatant command in 2007, which was interpreted to signal the beginning of a renewed focus on the continent by the Pentagon, Libya proved a major barrier to Washington’s designs. When countries were offered payment to serve as hosts for the new command, Tripoli notably offered its own funds for them to reject it, and while this was not the only factor in the repeated rejections AFRICOM faced it was a significant one. The official news site of the United States Army referred to Libya as having “voiced the most radical opposition against AFRICOM” alongside Nigeria and South Africa, with all three being “early and vociferous critics.”9 As the continent’s wealthiest country, and guided by a pan-African foreign policy outlook, Libya was well positioned to spearhead efforts to unify and increase cooperation between African states. The country by 2011 had one of the largest sovereign investment funds in the world, more than $150 billion dollars in overseas financial assets, and a much larger domestic reserve, which not only guaranteed prosperity domestically but also allowed it to support major pan-African projects.10 An example was the Libyan government’s position as by far the largest investor in assistance, the Libyan state had paid the legal fees for Mandela’s wife when she was placed on trial under the Apartheid government. (Sengupta, Ken, ‘Nelson Mandela’s foreign policy triumph was to stand against the,’ The Independent, December 23, 2013).

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Africa’s first satellite in 2007 under the Regional African Satellite Communication Organisation, which was hailed as saving countries on the continent collectively several hundreds of millions of dollars annually which were previously being paid to foreign operators.11 Libya had allocated $30 billion for the African Union’s three largest financial projects aimed at ending African dependence on external finance, and the African Investment Bank headquartered in the country was to provide low interest loans for development programs on the continent.ii Libya’s most significant program for African economic integration was the creation of a gold backed currency – the African Gold Dinar – which was cited as a leading threat to the status quo of Western influence and the ability of Western parties to extract resources from the continent on favourable terms. The project was seen to particularly threaten French interests, undercutting Paris’ sphere of influence in resource rich Francophone West Africa where the CFA franc, a currency guaranteed by the French Treasury, was in use. With fourteen African countries bound to agreements providing Paris with special rights, including placing the majority of their foreign reserves in the French Central Bank, use of the Franc, and provision of first rights to major infrastructure contracts or resource extraction opportunities to French firms, the potential loss of these benefits could devastate France and the wider EU.12 Paris and many of its European partners were thus among the leading proponents for action against Libya and were ii These initiatives had significant parallels in East Asia, where projects to enhance regional cooperation and integration were vehemently opposed in the West and in almost every case sabotaged. Although all very different, examples of initiatives targeted by Western states which had moved the region towards interdependence and reduced reliance on the West included: Imperial Japan’s Greater East Asia Co Prosperity Sphere, Indonesia’s Beijing-Pyongyang-Hanoi-Phnom Penh-Jakarta Axis, Malaysia’s East Asia Economic Group, Japan’s Asian Development Bank and the Chinaled Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the Belt and Road Initiative. Libya’s more modest programs in Africa similarly threatened to reduce reliance on and the influence of the Western powers and significantly further regional integration and development, and much like the programs in East Asia it was vital for Western hegemonic interests to prevent this.



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the most threatened by its actions on the continent. As former French President François Mitterand highlighted regarding the importance of special ties to former colonies in Africa to France’s economic wellbeing: “Without Africa, France will have no history in the 21st century.”13 His successor, Jacques Chirac, similarly warned: “Without Africa, France will slide down into the rank of a third world power.”14 Former French foreign minister Jacques Godfrain stated to similar effect that while France was “a little country, with a small amount of strength, we can move a planet because [of our] relations with 15 or 20 African countries.”15 When the Western powers made war on Libya in 2011 France was notably the first to strike, with leaked emails from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton later revealing the prime motivation for Paris’ moves to both attack the country and to press its Western allies to join it in doing so. As Vice News reported, the French government not only had “a desire for Libyan oil,” but the fact that “Gaddafi secretly planned to use his vast supply of gold to displace France’s primacy in the region” reportedly “freaked out” President Nicholas Sarkozy.16 This was entirely consistent with the degree to which France depended on Africa, and West Africa in particular, for its economic wellbeing and status as a major power – an empire in all but name which was seen by African scholars to pose a continued burden on its former colonies.17 With Europe and France in particular having been heavily reliant since the colonial era on the economic benefits their hegemony over Africa brought, Libya’s pan-African policies, which rejected and threatened to deeply undermine this hegemony appeared particularly dangerous. The U.S. had notably committed itself since the 1940s to helping its European partners retain their spheres of influence on the African continent, with the resulting access to its tremendous resources on very favourable terms having been a major boon to the Western Bloc’s collective strength in the Cold War.18 As head of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Staff George Kennan had observed at the outset of the Cold War, the economic wellbeing of Western Europe depended heavily on such access to Africa – a reality which had changed little since then.19 “The only

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way in which a European union, embracing Britain but excluding eastern Europe, could become economically healthy would be to develop the closest sort of trading relationships either with this hemisphere or with Africa,” according to the Policy Planning Staff. It advocated at the time arrangements whereby a, union of Western European nations would undertake jointly the economic development and exploitation of the colonial and dependent areas of the African Continent . . . the idea itself has much to recommend it. The African Continent . . . lies easily accessible to the maritime nations of Western Europe, and politically they control or influence most of it. Its resources are still relatively undeveloped.20 It was on this basis that John Perkins, the former chief economist at the Chas T. Main strategic consulting firm and lecturer at leading universities including Harvard, Oxford, referred to the campaign against Libya as “a war in defence of empire.” Its purpose, according to Perkins, was to neutralise the threat Libya’s gold backed currency would pose to the West’s ability to access African resources on privileged terms.21 In mid-February 2011 the sudden outbreak of concerted attacks on Libyan armouries and security forces by unknown militants saw Libyan forces respond with water cannon and rubber bullets but refrain from using lethal force.22 The BBC acknowledged that internet footage uploaded and widely circulated at the time claiming to show security forces firing live ammunition was fake.23 In the country’s second largest city Benghazi insurgents used firearms, Molotov cocktails, bulldozers, and bomb-laden vehicles to assault and capture the army garrison on February 20, five days after the first signs of unrest.24 Similar assaults were reported across the country. On February 21 militants in Libya’s third largest city Misrata attacked police and army bases and seized arms. The UN reported: “Protests appeared to have escalated rapidly, however, with demonstrators attacking offices of the Revolutionary Committees, police stations and military barracks



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on February 21 and 22, 2011, and arming themselves with weapons found at these locations.” Libyan government forces responded by using live ammunition on the now well armed insurgents.25 Libyan counterinsurgency operations quickly expelled militants from the cities of Zawiya, Misrata and Ajdabiya, before moving on to Benghazi. Civilian casualties were modest despite insurgents hiding in civilian areas, and by the end of February it appeared the conflict would end in a matter of days. The city of Misrata saw the most intense clashes between insurgents and government forces, but figures show that the Libyan Armed Forces conducted themselves well and avoided harming civilians. Human Rights Watch reported that 949 people in Misrata were wounded in the first seven weeks of fighting, of whom only 22 were women and 8 children. With over 97 percent of the wounded being males, this provided a strong indication that civilians were not being targeted. While Western media outlets and NGOs were quick to present Libyan counterinsurgency operations as an indiscriminate massacre of civilians, the female percentage would have been closer to 50, and certainly not under 3 percent, had this been the case. The fact that Misrata’s medical facilities documented only 257 people killed in a city of 400,000 after almost two months of fighting in the conflict’s most intense theatre, including both insurgents and government forces, meant at most 0.0006 percent of the population were killed. This was a very low figure for a counterinsurgency operation in the heart of a major city, and again showed that the Libyan Military was not applying indiscriminate force and was avoiding collateral damage to civilians.26 Similar trends were observed across Libya’s major cities. In Tripoli, for example, when insurgents targeted and burned down government buildings only one percent of those killed in the ensuing operations by security forces were female.27 Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas, Alan J. Kuperman observed to this effect: the regime was responding to the protesters’ escalation of violence . . . the image created by Western media of

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Qaddafi’s [Gaddafi’s] forces initiating violence by attacking purely peaceful protesters was false. . . . Although the government did respond forcefully to the rebels, it never targeted civilians or resorted to ‘indiscriminate’ force, as Western media reported. Indeed, early press accounts exaggerated the death toll by a factor of ten . . . the international press also reported incorrectly, starting on February 21, that Qaddafi’s air force was indiscriminately strafing and bombing civilians in Benghazi and Tripoli. Only after the war ended did a prominent article, by the International Crisis Group’s North Africa Project leader, reveal that ‘the story was untrue.’28 A French doctor working in a Benghazi hospital reported that even after escalating to use live ammunition, Libyan forces were shooting to incapacitate insurgents rather than kill them and targeted the legs and abdomen.29 After later defecting, a high-level Libyan general similarly informed a UN inquiry that government forces only used live ammunition after insurgents began to themselves use firearms.30 Throughout the conflict questions were repeatedly raised regarding who Libya’s insurgents were, how they had coordinated and trained for simultaneous attacks across the country, and why they had initiated a military campaign which it was clear from the outset could only succeed if Western militaries were to intervene in support. Some indications could be found in neighbouring Syria, which alongside Libya had long been one of the two staunchest opponents of Western hegemony in the Arab world and which was targeted simultaneously by a very similar form of attack, and by many of the same foreign actors. Both insurgencies saw very swift calls in the West for military intervention against the targeted governments, and gained considerable support not only from Western media outlets but also from major tech giants such as Google.31 French Foreign Minister Ronald Dumas noted that Britain had been training insurgents since at least 2009 to “invade” Syria, with multiple other reliable sources confirming that the insurgency had arms, training and support from Western



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powers and their partners including the deployment of Western and allied special forces alongside them.32 In Libya the confirmed presence of Western special forces on the ground within days of the insurgency’s outbreak indicated that it had been long in the planning much as was the case in Syria. Muammar Gaddafi, for his part, referred to the insurgents as “the traitors who are working for the United States and Britain, the colonialists.”33 A report from the National Interest in 2014 highlighted, on the basis of a body of evidence that had grown considerably since 2011, that Libya’s insurgency was both separatist and jihadist in nature, stating: The uprising in Libya began as a struggle for succession of the east – a struggle which had been ongoing. . . . A decisive factor in the campaign against Gaddafi was a large  influx of mujahideen, many affiliated with Al Qaeda – many of whom hailed themselves from Eastern Libya, which had become a major source of transnational jihadists over the lifespan of the regime: Cyrenaica provided by far the most foreign fighters per capita to the insurgency in Iraq,34 just as the easterners had made a decisive contribution in the 1980s against the Russians in Afghanistan, with many ascending to pivotal roles in Al Qaeda’s central leadership over the successive decades. 35 This assessment was supported by the fact that a few months after the government’s defeat, militias in the east quickly moved to declare autonomy from Tripoli.36 A later report from the National Interest observed that the West had supported “a rebellion that was actually led by Al Qaeda militants, not by pro-Western liberals as reported at the time. . . . The conventional narrative improbably suggests that Libyan human rights lawyers, reacting spontaneously to regime violence, somehow acquired arms and conquered half the country in a week. The truth makes much more sense: the rebellion was led by Islamist veterans of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.”37 A hallmark of

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jihadist operations, suicide bomb vehicles played a prominent role from the outset of hostilities while Benghazi saw Al Qaeda’s flag widely waved in the streets and hoisted over the main courthouse after the city was placed under insurgent control.38 Citing multiple testimonies by jihadist leaders, many of whom went on to take major roles in the leadership of post-Jamahiriya Libya, the report stated regarding their initial operations: evidence reveals that the Islamists planned the launch of the rebellion prior to any peaceful protests and then used snowball tactics, targeting a series of increasingly important security installations by obtaining weapons from each facility to use against the next larger one. . . . The militants initially attacked police stations with rocks and petrol bombs to get firearms, which they used against internal-security forces to acquire higher-calibre weapons. In turn, they utilised this materiel to attack an army barracks to acquire even heavier weapons and armoured vehicles, which they then deployed to capture eastern Libya’s main garrison and four air bases – all during the week of February 15–21, 2011.39 Following the Jamahiriya’s eventual overthrow, these militants pressed hard not only for both greater autonomy for the eastern regions, but also for the writing into Libya’s constitution of conservative interpretations of Islamic law and a guarantee that this would serve as the foundation of law in the new Libya. Many went on to join eastern separatist movements when their conditions were not fully met.40 As noted in the National Interest: “At the time, Gaddafi was ridiculed for asserting that the rebellion was an Islamist plot, but in retrospect the evidence vindicates him.”41 Leaked emails from State Secretary Hillary Clinton later provided evidence of war crimes perpetrated by insurgents, of Western special forces operating alongside them from the war’s outset, and that the insurgency was well known to have a significant Al Qaeda presence among its ranks. Militias with ties to Al Qaeda received training and support from abroad to join the fight



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against the Libyan government.42 This was far from unprecedented, a notable example being reports from French intelligence that Britain’s MI6 was heavily funding an Al Qaeda affiliate in Libya in the 1990s, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which fought against the government and attempted to assassinate Gaddafi.43 When insurgents proved incapable of capturing major targets such as the city of Benghazi, foreign special forces units and Qatari forces in particular were deployed to do the job for them.44 Western governments and media outlets were quick to portray not only a grassroots revolution being fought in the name of Western political values – a serious misrepresentation of the jihadist insurgency – but claimed there was a looming threat of a massacre by government forces. French President Nicolas Sarkozy stressed that the Libyan population wanted to “liberate themselves from servitude,” and that France had a responsibility to prevent a “killing spree” by the state. France, he said, had “decided to assume its role before history.” “We have a duty to respond to their anguished call,” he claimed, and led Paris to become the first country to recognise insurgents instead of the UN-recognized government as the legitimate leadership of Libya.45 This fit in with the prevailing Western paradigm for portraying much of the non-Western world as tyrannical ‘dictatorships’ and ‘despots’ who stood between their people and westernisation, and a moral obligation for the West to overthrow such leaders and thus further the tide of history. Other similar statements from across the Western world were quickly forthcoming. Dr. Nicola Pedde, Director for Middle East Research at the Italian Defence Ministry’s Centre for High Studies of Defence, and Director of the Institute for Global Studies think tank, highlighted regarding foreign involvement in the Libyan conflict’s first two months – covert at first but subsequently with open attacks by Western states: From the beginning, the coordinated series of actions, the availability of a large quantity of weapons and ammunition, and the existence of a series of targets on the ground clearly demonstrated the presence of a

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plan, something which is incompatible with a simple riot. Another factor of fundamental importance has to do with the rapid reactions of certain European governments, particularly those of France and Great Britain, which almost immediately supported the anti-governmental positions. . . . Massive global media coverage started to disseminate a narrative of the Libyan crisis that was largely built on the idea of a violent government reaction to an attempt at a peaceful popular revolt. The primary source of this narrative was the Qatari news network Al Jazeera, which started broadcasting images of violence, destruction, rage and death on a systematic basis, convincing the European public that a massacre had been started by Gaddafi with the aim of ensuring the continuation of his power and privileges. Most of the news stories which were systematically communicated to western households described how Gaddafi’s air force was indiscriminately bombing urban areas, creating thousands of civilian casualties. Thus the message was that it was a massacre which had to be stopped at all costs, with the support of the international community.46 The Western military assault on Libya was paired with harsh economic warfare efforts, to which the country had become increasingly vulnerable over the past decade as it relied more heavily on Europe for trade, with loss of access to key medicines being particularly damaging. After gaining support from the United Nations Security Council for military action France launched the first airstrikes on March 19. While Paris took the opportunity to showcase its new Rafale fighter jets, which had failed to gain any traction on export markets, the very poor state of Libya’s wholly neglected defences meant resistance was negligible – and any remotely modern fighter jet could have braved them to launch attacks.47 Although Libya did have the largest fleet of Mach 3+ combat aircraft in the world, a force which when acquired in the 1980s would have been more than sufficient to keep any European



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combined force at bay, they had flown little since the turn of the century and particularly after Tripoli’s rapprochement with the West in 2004.48 Lacking not only avionics or weapons upgrades, but even trained pilots or adequate maintenance, they were of no use.iii As Gaddafi’s son, Saif Al Islam, would lament several weeks later: “One of our big mistakes was that we delayed buying new weapons, especially from Russia, it was a big mistake. And we delayed building a strong army because we thought that we will not fight again, the Americans, the Europeans are our friends [since disarming under Western pressure to normalise relations from 2003.]”49 The country had been set to acquire modern air defences, which would have been operational within 2–3 years and were considered by Western experts to be sufficient to deter and if necessary seriously impede European or U.S. attacks. The timing of the Western assault was thus critical, and exploited delays in Libya’s military modernisation caused by Tripoli’s complacency.50 The U.S. was quick to follow France in attacking and launched B-2 heavy bombers and F-16 and F-15 fighters for major airstrikes. The Navy fired 112 cruise missiles at targets across Libya on the first day,51 positioning three nuclear attack submarines, two amphibious assault ships and two guided-missile destroyers and four other warships in the Mediterranean to support operations. Britain, Italy, Canada and Qatar were the next to join, followed shortly by Spain and Denmark. More Western powers such as Sweden and Belgium joined the assault in the following weeks.52 Despite the almost total incapacity of Libyan defences, the campaign was cited as an example of the staggering inefficiencies and underwhelming capabilities of European NATO iii By contrast Syria, which based its air defences around the same weapons systems, albeit in smaller numbers, saw its defences cited repeatedly as a key impediment to potential Western attacks from 2011. Unlike Libya it had modernized its Soviet-supplied hardware, trained its personnel, and kept higher operational readiness rates. Libya’s defencelessness could be primarily attributed not to a lack of armaments, but rather to neglect fuelled by a false sense of security that followed rapprochement with the West. (‘INSIGHT – military intervention in Syria, post withdrawal status of forces,’ Wikileaks, March 6, 2012.) (‘Prospects for Syrian No-fly Zone Assessed at USIP,’ United States Institute of Peace, May 30, 2013.)

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members – in spite of their very considerable collective military spending of approximately $200 billion and despite European states having led calls for an attack.iv This forced the United States to intervene heavily on their behalf to an extent it had not previously anticipated. Extremely low combat readiness rates in several countries such as Spain and Germany, understocked cruise missile arsenals such as those in Britain, or command and control problems affecting Europeans more generally, were among the many issues preventing most from contributing more than token forces.53 The air campaign was paired with provision of arms and training to insurgents and a full spectrum media campaign, with Qatarv also setting up communications networks and deploying its special forces for combat on the ground to support Western efforts.54 Doha simultaneously led calls for the West to launch a similar air campaign against Syria,55 and was found to be supporting Al Qaeda insurgents in both countries.56 Western arms sent to Libya also ended up in Al Qaeda’s hands, with the terror group emerging as a particularly effective fighting force against the Libyan government.57 Even before the first strikes were launched, it was clear from Western rhetoric, from prior similar military interventions, and from the clear motives behind the assault that the purpose of the campaign was not to protect civilians in Libya – who there was negligible evidence were ever in danger. The goal was instead to win the war for the insurgency, establish a pro-Western government, and eliminate the Libya Arab Jamahiriya which had been iv As noted by Dr. Karl-Heinz Kamp, the director of the NATO Defence College research division, as a result of the underwhelming European military performance in Libya: “It became obvious that NATO Europe is still not able to act autonomously without U.S. military support – even if Libya was a comparably ‘easy’ target.” (‘Debate begins over how history will view NATO’s intervention in Libya,’ Deutsche Welle, October 21, 2011.) v The Qatari Chief of Staff admitted that “the numbers of Qataris on ground were hundreds in every region,” and were “running the training and communication operations” for the insurgents. Libyan insurgent leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil admitted the Qataris had “planned” and were “a major partner in all the battles we fought.” (‘Qatar Admits It Had Boots on the Ground in Libya,’ Al Arabiya, October 26, 2011.)



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a major thorn in the side of Western hegemonic designs in Africa and beyond for decades. This became all the more clear once the first airstrikes began, as Libyan infrastructure and other targets across the country were bombarded from the air very often far from where any fighting was taking place. Strongholds of government support were singled out for particularly intense bombardment of civilian infrastructure.58 Western journalists on the ground reported that Western air and missile strikes were causing extremely high civilian casualties, far greater than the Libyan government had even been accused of causing, with civilian targets across the capital Tripoli such as universities and hotels bombarded repeatedly and very heavily. European and American warplanes were described as “massacring anyone that moved” outside insurgent-held areas. British war correspondent Lizzie Phelan reported from Tripoli: “When NATO’s intensive bombing of Tripoli began on August 19th, I could hear those daily lives being robbed by the bombs and Apaches [attack helicopters] all around the hotel with the most brutal force one can imagine, while the world was being told that the Libyan people were being ‘liberated.’” Describing streets “lined with bodies” and hospitals “drowning with dead and injured bodies,” Phlean said her first-hand experience and sources on the ground all corroborated figures from the Libyan government of a severe civilian death toll – including in one instance 1,300 dead and 5000 wounded in Tripoli alone in just twelve hours of Western strikes.vi She documented and photographed multiple cases of civilian targets being purposefully struck which killed large numbers of innocents.59 Phelan’s observations were later supported by Pentagon documents released in 2021 showing that claims of NATO precision strikes and resulting low civilian vi To dispel criticisms of high civilian casualties from the Western air campaign, U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates notably claimed that the Libyan government was placing corpses near the sites of bombings to falsely implicate NATO in their deaths. This strongly contradicted the observations of journalists and foreign observers on the ground, however. (‘Robert Gates On Libya Violence: No Proof of Civilians Killed In U.S. Strikes,’ Huff Post, March 26, 2011.)

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casualties often had little substance to them and devastated the targeted populations.60 The Western powers and the insurgents they were arming and training on the ground consistently eschewed opportunities for ceasefires. While the Libyan government accepted offers from multiple neutral third parties for mediated peace talks, the Islamist-led insurgent leadership was adamant that they “totally rejected the concept of talks.” Tripoli even offered a ceasefire deal which would see Gaddafi sidelined from power and a new constitutional government formed to include both sides, but this was also firmly rejected. The only outcome acceptable was the execution or expulsion of the Jamahiriya leadership and imposition of their own rule over the country.61 As Princeton University international law professor Richard A. Falk was one of many to observe: “NATO forces were obviously far less committed to their supposed protective role than to ensuring that the balance of forces within Libya would be tipped in the direction of the insurrectionary challenge.”62 A Massacre Imagined in the West In a March 26 radio address U.S. President Barack Obama said Western attacks were necessary because the Libyan government imminently threatened “a bloodbath.”63 Two days later, he asserted “We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi – a city nearly the size of Charlotte (N.C.) – could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”64 While this narrative cast a Western attack on Libya as a moral endeavour to save civilian lives, assessments by scholars and analysts repeatedly concluded that claims of such an imminent atrocity were entirely fabricated and had almost no basis in reality. Writing for Foreign Policy in April 2011, leading authority on international relations and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University, Steve Walt, stated: “the claim that the United States had to act to prevent Libyan tyrant Muammar al-Gaddafi from slaughtering tens of thousands



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of innocent civilians in Benghazi does not stand up to even casual scrutiny . . . his forces did not conduct deliberate, large-scale massacres in any of the cities he has recaptured.” Although referring to Gaddafi as “a tyrant with few (if any) redemptive qualities,” Walt stressed that the population was never in danger with threats made by the country’s leadership directed towards the insurgents and not the public.65 Describing the nature and motives for the Western military campaign, Walt clarified that Washington had “launched a new war against Libya. As in Iraq, the real purpose of our intervention is regime change at the point of a gun.”66 Twenty-eight–year CIA veteran and Senior Fellow at the Centre for Security Studies of Georgetown University, Paul R. Pillar, similarly observed that “a warning by the former dictator to deal harshly with those who took up arms against his regime was falsely translated into a prediction of a genocidal bloodbath.” The result, he noted three years later, had been a “never endling Libya nightmare” due to Western intervention.67 Assistant professor at National Defence University Paul Miller, who served on the National Security Council under the Bush and Obama administrations, was another to raise serious questions regarding Western claims of an imminent massacre in Benghazi.68 The New York Times later reported regarding the veracity of insurgent allegations of government misconduct, which played an important role in providing pretext to a Western attack: “the rebels feel no loyalty to the truth in shaping their propaganda,’’ and made “vastly inflated claims.”69 Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas Alan J. Kuperman stressed that evidence such as footage of any kind of massacre by government forces was conspicuous by its absence. “Despite ubiquitous cellphone cameras, there are no images of genocidal violence, a claim that smacks of rebel propaganda,” he concluded.70 Contrasting the European and U.S. narrative claiming an imminent mass slaughter in Benghazi to the actual conduct of Libya’s armed forces, Kuperman observed:

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Gaddafi’s regime never threatened or perpetrated revenge killings against civilians. . . . From March 5 to March 15, Libyan government forces retook all but one of the major rebel-held cities, including Ajdabiya, Bani Walid, Brega, Ras Lanuf, Zawiya, and most of Misurata [Misrata]. In none of those cities did the regime target civilians in revenge, let alone commit a bloodbath. When the regime was poised in mid-March to recapture the last rebel-held city, Benghazi, it again threatened ruthless violence against rebels who stayed to fight, as reported.71 Kuperman highlighted the discrepancy between the stated goal of the Western attacks – protecting civilians – and what appeared to be their actual objective, “bolstering anti-government forces by attacking the Libyan army, especially near Benghazi.” He emphasised that insurgents had known their only chance of prevailing was to gain Western military support, which was an objective shared by their foreign sponsors.72 Contrasting the situation in Libya to other Arab states, Kuperman stated: “Ironically, Obama has applied little pressure on Yemen and Bahrain, which slaughtered peaceful protesters, but he bombed Libya for responding to armed rebels. This sends precisely the wrong message to the Arab street: If you want U.S. support, resort to violence.”73 He strongly implied that the U.S. was “falsely claim[ing] ‘humanitarian’ grounds for intervention driven by other objectives,” as claims that the Western assault was motivated by the need to protect civilians did not stand up to scrutiny and “actually magnifies the threat to civilians in Libya.”74 Steve Chapman, from the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board stated to similar effect: “Obama implied that, absent our intervention, Gadhafi might have killed nearly 700,000 people, putting it in a class with the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. White House adviser Dennis Ross was only slightly less alarmist when he reportedly cited ‘the real or imminent possibility that up to a 100,000 people could be massacred.’ These are outlandish scenarios that go beyond any reasonable interpretation of Gadhafi’s words.” The



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case for war was “absent specific, reliable evidence,” he stressed. “Bush had a host of reasons (or pretexts) for invading Iraq. But Obama has only one good excuse for the attack on Libya – averting mass murder,” a narrative which was even more fragile than that of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Regarding the extreme paucity of evidence, Chapman highlighted: Where Bush sent Colin Powell to the United Nations to make the case against Saddam Hussein, Obama has treated the evidence about Gadhafi as too obvious to dispute. I emailed the White House press office several times asking for concrete evidence of the danger, based on any information the administration may have. But a spokesman declined to comment. That’s a surprising omission, given that a looming holocaust was the centrepiece of the president’s case for war. 75 Highlighting the similarity between the proclaimed need of both administrations to launch attacks to avert humanitarian disasters which there was no evidence actually existed, Chapman stressed: “In 2002, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice waved off doubts about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions, saying, ‘We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.’ Right now, the Benghazi bloodbath looks like Obama’s mushroom cloud.”76 The Bush administration had provided false evidence based on questionable intelligence, and its successor had provided effectively none at all, in both cases to assault and destroy longstanding Western adversaries in the Arab world without provocation leaving failed states in their wake. Citing Walt, associate professor at Indiana University’s School of Global and International Studies David Bosco wrote a separate column for Foreign Policy concurring with his assessment. He stressed that the humanitarian pretexts for the Western assault on Libya were false and had been based largely on speculation of what the Libyan Armed Forces would do. This speculation had little basis in reality and contrasted sharply with the military’s actual prior conduct.77 The ability to base claims of

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an imminent humanitarian crisis purely on presumption depended heavily on prevailing Western worldviews and portrayals of the world outside its own sphere of influence – namely a world of ‘murderous authoritarians’ content to ‘slaughter their own people.’ As shown throughout this work, a significant majority of cases where Western adversaries were accused of conducting genocidal killings within their borders proved to be entirely fabricated, but the weight of decades of fabrication, from the imagined but non-existent Iraqi mass graves to Tiananmen Square, built consensus towards viewing Libya, as a non-westernised state, as one of ‘those types.’ It was far from uncommon for the entire world of politically non-westernised countries to be painted in the West with the same brush. Fabricated atrocities had a cumulative effect, making future atrocities by the West’s enemies seem more believable. Only on this basis could the Western narrative of a Libyan massacre be believed despite a total lack of evidence, and considerable evidence to the contrary showing the good conduct of government forces. Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had himself stated on March 17 regarding upcoming counterinsurgency operations in Benghazi: “We have left the way open to them. Escape. Let those who escape go forever . . . whoever hands over his weapons, stays at home without any weapons, whatever he did previously, he will be pardoned, protected.” For “traitors” who continued to attack security forces, and who called for Western military intervention to provide air support, “we will have no mercy on them.”78 This last sentence was taken out of context, however, and was repeatedly replayed by news outlets across the Western world, and those in Western-aligned Arab states such as Qatar’s Al Jazeera,vii to claim that Gaddafi was somehow threatening the entire population of Benghazi with a mass slaughter. Some scholars such vii Al Jazeera’s coverage was accordingly singled out for particular praise in the West during the war, including by State Secretary Hillary Clinton, for being “the leader in, that are literally changing people’s minds and attitudes” and providing “real news” to extents that even leading Western outlets were not. (Folkenflik, David, ‘Clinton Lauds Virtues Of Al Jazeera: “It’s Real News”,’ NPR, March 3, 2011.)



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as Nicola Pedde claimed that Western public support for military intervention was built up “mostly because of the narrative broadcast by Al Jazeera which built on the fear of carnage and violence by Gaddafi.”79 This indicated a very central role for the Qatari channel in facilitating the initiation of the Western assault. Among Arab states Qatar’s foreign policy was most closely aligned with Western interests, and Al Jazeera in turn was directed by the Qatari royal family. Among Al Jazeera’s controversies were its favourable coverage of terror attacks in Algeria, some of which were linked to Al Qaeda, and a strong general bias in favour of Islamist militant groups.80 Described by scholars as having “mobilised Arab support” for the NATO war efforts against Libya and Syria,81 leaked documents had shown that the U.S. State Department was able to directly exert an influence over its news coverage.82 This also aligned with Doha’s own goal of bringing Islamist parties to power in the Arab world and toppling secular governments.83 Leaked emails also highlighted its practice of coaching eyewitnesses to give false testimony and fabricate information.84 Consequences of Atrocity Fabrication for Libyan Civilians With NATO and Qatar waging a concerted air war on Libya and providing insurgents on the ground not only with generous funds, arms, equipment and training, but special forces to back them on the battlefield, the Libyan Armed Forces struggled to hold their own. Fighting for months without any cover from near constant air attacks, the fact that military could maintain a cohesive force and relatively high morale was itself a major achievement. As leading expert on the Libyan conflict and research fellow with the Southwest Initiative for the Study of Middle East Conflicts, Musa al-Gharbi, observed: “contrary to the Obama administration’s Reaganesque calculations, the relatively small national military  did not defect or desert the Colonel [Gaddafi] until his final days.”85 As a result, he observed:

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The rebels were able to repel Gaddafi’s forces and advance on the capital because of the NATO intervention – which began in March 2011 as a no-fly zone to protect the rebels but was quickly forced to expand far beyond its U.N. mandate because, despite small anti-government protests in Tripoli and other parts of the country, beyond Cyrenaica [an Islamist stronghold in eastern Libya] the people did not rise up en masse to overthrow the regime. . . . And so, the revolution had to be carried largely by the east and its foreign patrons, from the beginning to the bitter end.86 Both NATO and the insurgents ensured that the war would be pursued until the country was in their hands, with offers for ceasefires or mediation from Tripoli and the African Union flatly rejected by both.87 South African President Jacob Zuma visited Libya twice during the conflict and made two desperate attempts to broker a ceasefire – efforts he slammed NATO for undermining. He accused the Western alliance of abusing UN resolutions to pursue “regime change, political assassinations and foreign military occupation.”88 These peace plans were also rejected, with insurgents expressing faith in the Western air campaign’s ability to deliver them a total victory.89 South Africa’s positionviii represented part of a broader trend on the continent towards opposing the Western assault on Libya.90 In August after Libyan forces had held viii Johannesburg’s refusal to support Western military action was harshly criticised in the West and led Western analysts to label it a ‘rogue democracy’ – one of few countries with a westernized political system which openly opposed U.S. and European hegemonic designs. Former President Thabo Mbeki signed a defiant open letter in 2011 alongside 200 others titled ‘Libya, Africa, and the New World Order: An Open Letter to the Peoples of Africa and the World from Concerned Africans,’ which stated: “Those who have brought a deadly rain of bombs to Libya today should not delude themselves to believe that the apparent silence of the millions of Africans means that Africa approves of the campaign of death, destruction and domination which that rain represents. . . . We are confident that tomorrow we will emerge victorious, regardless of the death-seeking power of the most powerful armies in the world.” (Kirchick, James, ‘South Africa Stands with Qaddafi,’ The Atlantic, September 6, 2011.)



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out for months longer than expected, the Obama administration sought to increase pressure on Tripoli by sending a delegation to tour key African states and press them to cease their efforts to mediate the conflict or otherwise support Libya.91 Muammar Gaddafi himself, a man best known in the West before 2011 as the archenemy of Ronald Reagan when their two countries clashed during the 1980s,92 had for decades symbolised rejection of Western hegemony and was targeted accordingly for assassination by his European adversaries. Western powers had made several attempts on his life during his time in power, but with a full-scale war underway the opportunities to see this through had increased significantly. U.S. assassination attempts resulted in the death of his daughter in 1986,93 and his son and three grandsons in a U.S. airstrike on April 30, 2011.94 An American eyewitness who visited the site of the April strike claimed that the target had been a house owned by his wife, rather than a military compound as the U.S. claimed, and that it only missed him because he was 500 feet outside the residence.95 After French intelligence tracked down Gaddafi’s location in October, French air units neutralised his convoy before insurgents were signalled to move in and finish him off. On October 20, after being captured, Gaddafi was beaten by militants and sodomized with a bayonet and with glass, then shot in the street. A leader who had lifted his population out of poverty and raised Libya to the status of a major regional power, his last words while being tortured by the militant youths were: “what did I do to you?” The Guardian referred to his death as “a spectacle of pain and humiliation.”96 Dozens of his supporters were also reported killed while in captivity that day, and Gaddafi’s body was then exhibited in a freezer by militants for several days as a trophy of their victory.97 According to Time, which justified his killing rather than capture, Gaddafi would have likely escaped from Sirte, the city where he died, had he not insisted on taking many of his wounded allies with him.98 He had also refused multiple offers of asylum abroad, pledging to fight and die in Libya.99 Gaddafi’s death was hailed as a positive step forward in statements from Western capitals almost without exception, from Ottawa,100 Canberra101 and Washington102

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to Copenhagen,103 Paris104 and the Vatican.105 The response across Africa was precisely the opposite, with deep regrets for the Libyan leader’s brutal demise expressed across much of the continent.106 Under the pretext of protecting Libyan civilians the Western assault on the country devastated infrastructure that had been built up over decades.ix The campaign “tore the country apart and destroyed much of its infrastructure,” according to Germany’s Deutsche Welle.107 As a result of the intensive Western air assault, and the political turmoil that followed and prevented an effective recovery, post-war Libya would for years lack reliable electricity with power cuts regularly lasting up to nine hours. Prices for essential goods and medical supplies increased exponentially, while sharp cuts to the Jamahiriya-era food subsidies left many in desperation. Britain’s Daily Mail interviewed a number of Libyans in 2016, by which time food costs had quintupled, government workers had often been unpaid for months, and water was increasingly scarce, to investigate the effects the humanitarian premised Western assault had had on the people it claimed to be protecting. One man stated: “Libya died with Gaddafi. We are not a nation anymore; we have become just warring groups of tribes.” Another, a former anti-government fighter, reflected on the way he had been misled to hate and oppose the government, stating: “I joined the revolution in the first days and fought against Gaddafi. Before 2011 I hated Gaddafi more than anyone. But now life is much, much harder, and I have become his biggest fan.” A third simply said: “Before Libya was much better.” 108 Another recalled: “There was always money and electricity and, although people did not have large salaries, everything was cheap, so life was simple.” All consistently believed that the country had been better under the republic that the West had torn down, including those who had previously taken up arms against it. A ix Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin stressed that the destruction of infrastructure was a particularly egregious aspect of the Western assault, describing the campaign as one in which “the entire so-called civilized community falls upon a small country with all its might, destroys infrastructure created over generations.” (Bryanski, Gleb, ‘Putin: Libya coalition has no right to kill Gaddafi,’ Reuters, April 26, 2011.)



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businessman from Tripoli who had harshly criticized the former leader also admitted: “It’s just that people’s lives are so difficult now compared to under Gaddafi.” A British woman who lived in Libya with her local husband stated regarding the rapid deterioration after Western intervention: “I used to walk home alone at midnight with no fear. But now I don’t like to go outside alone after dark. I don’t feel safe.” Residents from all walks of life and from all political affiliations were unanimous in their nostalgia for what had been before the West had used humanitarian pretexts to launch its assault to destroy the Jamahiriya.109 A long-lasting consequence of both Western attacks and postwar neglect under the post-Jamahiriya regime was the damage to Libya’s water infrastructure.110 The country had been water scarce throughout its history, and it was only through extensive investment that fresh water had been made relatively abundant in the Jamahiriya era. The main factory providing pre-stressed concrete cylinder pipes to the massive $27 billion Great Man-Made River (GMR) project, the world’s largest irrigation project which had provided 70 percent of Libya’s fresh water, was targeted in a U.S. airstrike on July 22. Key water ducts and a factory that produced spare parts for that factory were also levelled from the air.111 With these destroyed it was impossible to keep the GMR operational and repair leaks or breakages. The GMR project had been key to facilitating the modernisation of the Libyan economy and its industrialisation and urbanisation, and had made the country a world leader in hydrological engineering which was expected to export its knowhow and technologies across much of Africa.112 The Western strikes, like many attacks on Libyan infrastructure throughout the months-long assault, were serious war crimes, as were attacks by insurgents on water pipelines, confirmed by UNICEF, which Western sources had initially blamed on government forces.113 The UN agency reported that while water infrastructure came under attack, the Libyan government had worked closely with a UN technical team to “facilitate an assessment of water wells, review urgent response options and identify alternatives for water sources.”114

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By August,  UNICEF  reported that the conflict had  “put the Great Manmade River Authority, the primary distributor of potable water in Libya, at risk of failing to meet the country’s water needs.”115 Christian Balslev-Olesen from UNICEF Libya’s head of office stressed that “the current situation is the absolute worst-case scenario, and a swift resumption of water supplies is critical.” Disruption caused by the attacks “could turn into an unprecedented health epidemic” if water supplies were not quickly restored.116 By September UNICEF reported that the attacks on water infrastructure had left four million Libyans without potable water, with issues persisting for several years and infrastructure having yet to fully recover a decade later. Much of Libya’s population was forced to rely on imported bottled water delivered as emergency aid by the UN agency.117 In response to criticisms of Western attacks on infrastructure, research director for the U.S. intelligence contractor Stratfor, Kevin Stech, proposed that the Libyan population revert to relying on limited well water as they had in the pre-Jamahiriya era. “How often do Libyans bathe? You’d have drinking water for a month if you skipped a shower. Seriously. Cut the baths and the showers and your well water should suffice for drinking and less-than-optional hygiene,” he commented.118 His statement created a revealing contrast with that of a senior figure in the Great Man-Made River Authority, Adam Kuwairi, who had stated when the project made fresh water available for the first time in Libya’s history: “The water changed lives. For the first time in our history, there was water in the tap for washing, shaving and showering. The quality of life is better now, and it’s impacting on the whole country.” The impacts of Western intervention, under humanitarian pretexts allegedly to protect Libyan civilians from their government were the direct opposite of the effect the Jamahiriya era had had on living standards in the country – much as it was clear which party was genuinely protecting Libyan civilians and had their interests at heart.119 These kinds of infrastructure attacks were hardly unprecedented, a notable example being the Western bombardments of Iraq in 1991 which had similarly specifically targeted water



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and sewage infrastructure. Combined with subsequent sanctions to prevent restoration, this provoked a major health crisis (see Chapter 4). NATO’s bombardment of Yugoslav infrastructure in 1999 had been similarly devastating (see Chapter 5). The Libyan government had warned on April 3 that any Western attack on the GMR would risk a “human and environmental disaster.” Engineer and project manager Abdelmajid Gahoud told foreign journalists in Tripoli at the time: “If one of the pipelines is hit, the others are affected as well, which could mean a humanitarian catastrophe. If part of the infrastructure is damaged, the whole thing is affected and the massive escape of water could cause a catastrophe,” which would leave 4.5 million Libyans without drinking water.120 The water situation only continued to worsen with time, as did electricity shortages.121 As former foreign correspondent for the BBC and the Financial Times Kieran Cooke reported regarding the state of Libyan infrastructure in 2017: chronic power shortages in most areas of the country are seriously impeding the operation of water-pumping stations and wells. More than 90 percent of people in Libya – the population has doubled since the early 1980s – live in cities and towns on the coast. Coastal aquifers have either been drained dry or are being tainted by seawater intrusion. Old desalination plants are in need of repair. Plans to build new ones are on hold as the  fighting continues. Meanwhile power blackouts mean people in Libya’s two main cities – Tripoli and Benghazi – have to go without water for up to eight hours a day, sometimes longer. Other parts of the country, including farming regions dependent on the GMR for irrigating crops, are similarly affected.”122 Political instability following the Western and insurgent victory left Libya in a near-constant state of conflict which further eroded living standards, prevented post-war recovery, and facilitated the penetration of the country by various foreign interests – which then increasingly made rival factions their proxies in

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a battle for influence. On June 1, 2013, Libya’s oil rich eastern Cyrenaica region declared autonomy and plans to form its own separate legislature. The region’s long history of strong separatist and radical Islamist tendencies had made it the centre of the insurgency, and after attempting to impose strict Islamic law on the whole country with its significant influence on the post-war central government it later sought separation.123 In September 2013 separatists in Libya’s southern Fezzan region declared autonomy, appointing a president and creating an independent military.124 While lacking easy access to seaports to export their oil they quickly set up blockades to prevent the central government from exporting its own.125 More parties quickly involved themselves in the battle over resources, often with the backing of various foreign countries, as a unified Libyan state and identity increasingly fractured. Conflict between tribes, as well as between ethnic groups including Arabs, Tebus, and Tuaregs, fractured the country.126 Libya became a country which foreign powers fought over, rather than a major power in its own right which it had become in the Jamahiriya era when it had projected influence across the African continent and beyond. By 2014 a permanent partitioning of Libya was widely predicted, with the Islamic State terror group feared by the end of the year to potentially be able to take a third of the country.127 The closest thing Libya had to a government was itself seen to be “dominated by Islamist-leaning politicians” – a result of the jihadists’ role in spearheading the insurgency that brought them to power.128 Intelligence analyst at the geopolitical risk consulting firm Max Security Solutions, Jacob Steinblatt, highlighted that year that an “unstable security environment and governmental inability to enforce the rule of law in much of the country” had left Libya open for “tribal or other autonomous militias to disrupt operations at oil-producing facilities in an effort to settle disputes or address financial and political complaints.”129 Analysts writing for the National Interest observed in April 2014: “Since the overthrow of Gaddafi, the capital has long been consumed by fierce struggles between Islamists and the coalition aligned with former



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prime minister Ali Zeidan, largely perceived as Western proxies – each with their own parliamentary blocs and militias.”130 Six years later the constant factional conflict had largely continued, solidifying more clearly into a proxy war in which both sides were dependant on NATO member states’ patronage. In the title of a prominent 2020 article, the National Interest referred to “Libya: A Country Up for Grabs?” and was among multiple sources to warn of the possibility that ongoing civil war would leave it permanently divided into two states.131 More serious still were the widespread and often brutal reprisals the insurgents carried out once the U.S. and European air campaign brought them to power. The Western-backed and predominantly Islamist militants tortured, beat, arbitrarily detained, and massacred thousands of suspected Jamahiriya and Gaddafi supporters, terrorising the population against expressing nostalgia for the previous republic.132 A report by the UN Human Rights Council’s International Commission of Inquiry on Libya reflected the deterioration in law and order and the serious crimes committed by the militants.133 The Washington Post described the situation as follows: “[A]nti-Gaddafi militias carried out reprisal killings of suspected regime loyalists and mercenaries, as well as the wide-scale torture of detainees. . . . Serious abuses continue to be carried out by militias aligned with Libya’s new government.”134 A Human Rights Watch official characterized this behaviour as “a trend of killings, looting and other abuses committed by armed anti-Gaddafi fighters who consider themselves above the law.”135 A yet darker side to the new country the West’s humanitarian-premised war had created was perhaps the most serious case of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the 21st century. It was perpetrated against black Africans who the Jamahiriya era government had protected but who jihadist insurgents targeted for mass slaughter and extermination, with the genocidal conduct of the militants the West had brought to power bearing a very sharp contrast to the Jamahiriya’s Pan-Africanism. Much as the Western military campaign had been facilitated by presumed but totally unevidenced atrocities, the massacre of Libya’s black population was fuelled

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by outright atrocity fabrication – the primary culprit being Qatar’s Al Jazeera news network. Shortly after the outbreak of the insurgency Al Jazeera claimed that black African mercenaries were fighting alongside government forces in Libya and systematically raping Libyan women. The National Transitional Council in Benghazi which represented the insurgency, as well as British Defence Minister Liam Fox and NATO spokesperson Oana Longescu, echoed these claims, which were taken as evidence of the depravity of the ‘Gaddafi-regime.’ U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice supplemented these stories with claims that pro-government forces in Libya were being supplied with Viagrax to commit mass rapes – an unfounded claimxi which originated with Hillary Clinton’s close confidant Sidney Blumenthal and was later discredited.136 As observed in the Foreign Policy Journal regarding Western coverage of such claims: “as long as it painted Gaddafi and his supporters as monsters, and so long as it served the cause of prolonged military action in Libya, it was deemed credible by network news.”137 The narrative built on longstanding stereotypes in both the West and the Arab world portraying black Africans as sexually potent and a threat to the chastity of European or white Arab women,138 as well as the Jamahiriya and Gaddafi’s close ties with sub-Saharan Africa which were looked on disapprovingly in both the Arab world and the West.xii x Near identical allegations were made 11 years later by a wide range of Western sources, most notably UN Special Representative Pramila Patten, against Russian forces in Ukraine. Patten subsequently conceded that these claims had been unevidenced and that “nothing about Viagra” had been found by monitoring teams, although much like in Libya the claim was widely re-reported in the West. (Sedacca, Matthew, ‘UN envoy admits fabricating claim of Viagra-fueled rape as “Russian military strategy”,’ The Grey Zone, October 15, 2022.) xi Although claims of the Libyan government using rape as a weapon were very widely publicized in Western and allied media, later assessments by journalists, human rights groups and UN investigators concluded evidence was wholly lacking. (Cockburn, Patrick, ‘Amnesty questions claim that Gaddafi ordered rape as weapon of war,’ The Independent, June 24, 2011.) (‘Libya rape claims “hysteria” – investigator,’ Herald Sun, June 10, 2011.) xii Regarding the claim of black African mercenary rapists, a July 2011 report



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Regarding the perpetuation of this imagined atrocity Professor at Concordia University Maximilian Forte highlighted: “two of those responsible for giving credibility to falsehoods of African mercenaries landing in Libya were Mona El Tahawy, Egyptian-American journalist and a frequent guest on CNN and Al Jazeera, and Dima Khatib, Palestinian journalist and Al Jazeera’s Latin America bureau chief.” He stressed that longstanding bigoted perceptions of black Africans in the Arab world, as well as among much of Libya’s population in spite of the government’s pan-African policies, provided fertile ground for this story. Forte stressed “the role of the mainstream media, led by Al Jazeera, as well as the seeding of social media, in creating the African mercenary myth,” which in turn fueled the “deadly, racist practice” of ethnic cleansing by Western and Qatari backed militias.139 Amnesty International crisis researcher Donatella Rovera, who spent time in post-war Libya investigating the situation, stated in an interview with Austria’s The Standard regarding the purported myth of rapist African mercenaries: “We examined this issue in depth and found no evidence. The rebels spread these rumors everywhere, which had terrible consequences for African guest workers: there was a systematic hunt for migrants, some were lynched and many arrested. Since then, even the rebels have admitted there were no mercenaries.”140 Western and Qatari backed Islamist militias adopted slogans such as “the brigade for purging slaves, black skin,” according to a Human Rights Watch investigation.141 Irish journalist Mary Fitzgerald reported public hangings of black men in insurgent-held areas with accompanying graffiti describing them as ‘black slaves’ (abid) – a common derogatory term in Arabic for black Africans.142 A BBC News report cited a Turkish construction worker in Libya from Human Rights Investigations commented that it was “an example of highly successful propaganda, appealing to the basest of racial stereotypes. The myth was highly important in gaining consent for the operation in Libya, in order to cover up and justify the massacres of black people taking place. In account after account, the mercenary myth is used to justify the imprisoning and killing of black people and this process continues today.” (‘Libyan rebel ethnic cleansing and lynching of black people,’ Human Rights Investigations, July 7, 2011.)

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who recalled: “We had 70–80 people from Chad working for our company. They were cut dead with pruning shears and axes, attackers saying: ‘You are providing troops for Gaddafi.’ The Sudanese were also massacred. We saw it for ourselves.”143 The militants who made up the new post-Jamahiriya regime did not differentiate between Libyan citizens with black African features, and sub-Saharan expatriate workers. The most notorious case was the fate of the town of Tawergha with a population of 35,000 demographically comprised overwhelmingly black Libyans, which vanished almost overnight after Jamahiriya forces retreated and it was captured by Western-backed Misratan brigades.144 Tawergha’s entire population were either killed or expelled, with their homes and shops burned and looted under the pretext that they had been ‘mercenaries’ and supported Gaddafi’s Jamahiriya.145 In nearby Misrata the black Libyan minority that inhabited its Ghoushi neighbourhood were similarly purged, with the Western-backed insurgents putting bounties on the heads of those few blacks who remained in hiding.146 Video footage clearly showed the insurgents in Benghazi carrying out public lynchings of blacks.147 Bryan Chan from the Los Angeles Times was given access to an insurgent-run prison in Benghazi in March 2011 and was shown terrified black men being paraded before the cameras. The colour of their skin, and for foreign workers their West African passports, were regarded as all the proof needed that they were loyal to the government. Chan’s Libyan interpreter asked him: “So what do you think? Should we just go ahead and kill them?” Considering the fates of most blacks in the country who fell into the insurgents’ hands, this or sale into slavery were the most likely outcomes for the captives.148 The New York Times reported regarding the consequences of the insurgency’s victory for black African expatriate workers across Libya: “For the more than one million African guest workers who came to oil-rich Libya seeking their fortunes, it has meant terror. . . . These innocent migrant laborers now find themselves singled out by ordinary Libyans and rebels who believe they are the enemy.”149 Although it strongly criticised the African Union for not siding with the insurgents and for its support for the



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Jamahiriya, the Guardian admitted that the result of NATO and the insurgency’s victory was an “ugly race war” which polarised relations between Libya and sub-Saharan Africa. It described “pogroms” against blacks reminiscent of Nazi Germany and concluded that as a result of NATO’s success: “Libya’s role as the ideological and financial engine of Africa has ended.”150 Video footage of blacks being tortured by insurgents, including being kept in animal cages and forced to swallow the flag of the Jamahiriya, surfaced on the internet and provided a small indication of the kind of atrocities being perpetrated across the country by the militants the West had empowered.151 In sharp contrast to its pan-African past, the new Libya quickly saw the emergence of regular slave markets as blacks were kept in chains or cages, sold for free labour, and often given hot iron cattle brands on their faces to identify them. Black women and girls unfortunate enough to be captured by the Western-backed militants were subjected to mass rape, according to UN reports. Black men and those seen to be ‘pro-Gaddafi’ were also reportedly raped by insurgents as a means of humiliation and subjugation, and at times imprisoned and raped by militants frequently for serval years under the post-Jamahiriya regime.152 These practices continued to be reported into the latter half of the 2010s, with uniformed personnel from the new Libyan government responsible for frequent cases of rape against black children of West African origin.153 In April 2012 six months after the Jamahiriya fell Human Rights Watch reported that the very severe mistreatment of blacks by the new authorities persisted and “appear to be so widespread and systematic that they may amount to crimes against humanity.”154 A report by the UN Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry in May highlighted that war crimes were being committed against the black population.155 Reports of the atrocities only worsened with time. Racial divisions exacerbated by the African mercenary narrative effectively destroyed Libya’s relations with sub-Saharan Africa and thereby ended a serious threat to Western hegemony on the continent. A report by Ghanaian lawyer Bobby Banson claimed in 2017 that blacks imprisoned or enslaved were having their organs harvested and sold on a significant scale by the

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post-Jamahiriya regime.156 Other reports, such as that by former Nigerian minister Femi Fani-Kayode, made the same claims.157 Multiple sub-Saharan states protested and recalled their ambassadors from Libya over the abusees.158 The Guardian summarized the sharp shift away from Pan-Africanism overseen under the new Western-installed government as follows: “culturally, ideologically and financially, Libya has moved towards a greater identification with its north African, Middle Eastern and south Mediterranean neighbors. Libya is embracing its Arab heritage.”159 The war against Libya was hailed across the Western world as an example of successful humanitarian intervention by West – one which could set a precedent for similar Western attacks on alleged humanitarian abusers in future.160 Strongly reflecting the consensus view in the West, U.S. Permanent Representative on the NATO Council Ivo H. Daalder and U.S. Navy Admiral James G. Stavridis published an article in Foreign Affairs in March 2012 titled: ‘NATO’s Victory in Libya: The Right Way to Run an Intervention.’ “NATO’s operation in Libya has rightly been hailed as a model intervention. . . . NATO’s involvement in Libya demonstrated that the alliance remains an essential source of stability. . . . By any measure, NATO succeeded in Libya. . . . It enabled the Libyan opposition to overthrow one of the world’s longest-ruling dictators,” they stated.161 By the time it was written, the ethnic cleansing of tens of thousands of blacks by the insurgents the West had supported, and the radical jihadist nature of these militants, were overwhelmingly evident. Nevertheless, it was difficult to dispute that the result of the war benefitted Western interests tremendously, destroying a longstanding obstacle to Western empire while protecting the privileged living standards of Europe at Africa’s expense and at an extreme but highly acceptable cost to Libyan and African civilians.162 As observed by CATO Institute Research Fellow in Defence and Homeland Security Studies Benjamin H. Friedman, those “who championed Libya as a model intervention turned their attention elsewhere as it deteriorated.”163 The fallout from the campaign, not to mention the extreme lack of evidence for a humanitarian pretext to attack to begin with, were inconvenient



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truths for those who sought to establish Western humanitarian-premised military interventions as a new norm in the world. The new Libya after humanitarian intervention saw Western special forces continue to operate freely on its soil,164 occasional bombings by Western aircraft,165 and much of the country’s armories transferred to Al Qaeda-linked militants in Syria – where the Western powers and Qatar were seeking to apply a similar model to topple another longstanding adversary.166 While the death toll from what would have been a shortlived insurgency was expected to reach approximately 1,100, the large majority of them militants and security forces, government massacres imagined in Western minds but far removed from reality were used as a pretext for a war which caused over 90,000 casualties in its initial months alone.167 The figure for total deaths resulting from the Western assault was considerably higher, with the town of Tawergha alone, which had a predominantly black population, found almost completely empty after Western-backed militants took it over and engaged in thorough ethnic cleansing of its population of 35,000.168 Indeed, the insurgents had long threatened to wipe the black city “off the map,” and its fate was hardly unexpected nor was the character of the militias the West was supporting at all a mystery.169 Even many years later close to the end of the decade, ongoing instability meant that almost a quarter of Libya’s population were internally displaced and in urgent need of humanitarian assistance, according to reports from the UN High Commission for Refugees. The death toll grew significantly higher in the decade following the Jamahiriya’s fall, as Libya became a battle ground for Arab and NATO states to wage seemingly unending proxy wars by supporting various factions in the permanently fractured country against one another. In 2017, former U.S. Ambassador to the country, John Graham, called the new Libya “a completely failed state.”170 The fallout from the Western victory in Libya notably went well beyond the country’s borders, and Gaddafi’s torturous death was seen by many as symbolizing the imposition of Western power over Africa. The Jamahiriya’s downfall considerably strengthened the Western position on the continent while

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seriously weakening the African Union, which was reflected in the sharply contrasting responses to his demise in the West and Africa. Former Namibian president Sam Nujoma notably predicted regarding the implications the Western military campaign had for all of Africa: “foreign-sponsored killing of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi must serve as a lesson to Africa that foreign aggressors are readying themselves to pounce on the continent.”171 This may well have been substantiated by the subsequent rapid expansion of AFRICOM and of the Western military presence across the continent which was now almost totally unimpeded.172 The decline in major pan-African projects for infrastructure and development which had brought much of the continent together were further direct consequences of the Western victory in Libya. An example of a state which suffered was Sudan, which had formerly benefitted greatly from Libyan economic and political support,xiii but endured isolation and gradual economic decline from 2011 under harsh Western economic sanctions. The loss of Libyan support contributed to facilitating an eventual Westernbacked military coup in the country in 2019 and an even sharper economic decline in the aftermath. Other examples were Mali, Nigeria and Algeria, where Islamist insurgents received substantial quantities of heavy weapons and logistical support through post-Jamahiriya Libya, and in the former two went on to gain considerable ground from government forces. NATO’s humanitarian-premised intervention placed Libya’s large arsenals at the disposal of Islamist militias who in turn passed them on both for profit and out of ideological affinity. Nigeria’s Boko Haram was a major beneficiary, and as a direct result emerged as the world’s deadliest terrorist origination. Libya’s fall under Western assault had similar negative reverberations across the African continent, xiii This support ranged from donating fighter jets to the Sudanese Air Force to constructing the Sudanese capital’s main landmark, the Corinthia hotel, where services were heavily subsidized by the Libyan state, as well as more general investment and support in security. Libya had notably cautioned the Western powers against taking military action against Sudan in 2007 when this was under consideration. (‘Gaddafi cautions West over Darfur,’ Reuters, April 29, 2007.)



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but particularly in West Africa where it directly empowered terrorist actors.173 The Assault on Libya as a Model for Future Western Interventions Despite its devastating consequences, three separate aspects of the war on Libya were cited in the West to characterise it as an ideal military campaign. Firstly, the campaign was and continues to be presented in the West has having liberated the Libyan people and prevented a humanitarian disaster.174 Although available evidence indicates that precisely the opposite is true, the supposed success of the humanitarian war led it to be widely cited as a precedent for the West to consider further similar attacks on states outside its sphere of influence using similar pretexts. Secondly the Western campaign served as a model for an inexpensive war relying on special forces, air and naval assets, extensive use of media and particularly social media, and on organizing and supporting militants on the ground rather than sending in Western troops. This was frequently contrasted with the heavy handed ‘boots on the ground’ invasions of the George W. Bush era, and significantly furthered Western hegemony in the world at a much lower cost. As U.S. Permanent Representative on the NATO Council Ivo H. Daalder and U.S. Navy Admiral James G. Stavridis observed in March 2012 regarding the campaign’s major achievements: “it accomplished all of this without a single allied casualty and at a cost – $1.1 billion for the United States and several billion dollars overall – that was a fraction of that spent on previous interventions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq.” They referred to it as “a teachable moment” which could be a model for future military interventions.175 As U.S. Vice President Joe Biden stated, implying a contrast with the costly Iraq War: “NATO got it right. In this case, America spent $2 billion and didn’t lose a single life. This is more the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has in the past.”176 A very similar model was applied in Syria, and although less successful it still ensured that the damage done to the country far

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outweighed the costs to the Western powers which had initiated the campaign. Germany’s Deutsche Welle thus observed regarding the Libya model’s possible future applications against other Western adversaries: “The template of surgical airstrikes, supported by Special Forces on the ground and the covert training of indigenous, opposition forces seems tailor-made for missions where large-scale invasions would be counter-productive at best, and hugely inflammable at worst. U.S. planners . . . are thought to favour such an approach should the option of military action against Iran become a reality.”177 U.S. Senator John McCain, who would soon afterwards become Chairman of Senate Joint House Services Committee, stated that this new kind of warfare centred around building up and supporting insurgencies was “a virus that will attack Moscow and Beijing.”178 President of the Joseon Institute and founder of Liberty in North Korea and Pegasus Strategies Adrian Hong, who later led a violent attack on the North Korean embassy in Spain and worked in close cooperation with U.S. intelligence,179 stated in much the same vein following successful operations to destabilize Libya and Syria that the offensives were “a dress rehearsal for North Korea.”180 Thirdly, the term ‘Libya Model’ was used to refer to the country’s unilateral disarmament in the early 2000s, including permitting deep Western inspections of its military facilities as part of the process. Upon Libya’s disarmament in 2003 U.S. President George W. Bush had pledged that the country would be “a model for other countries” in the consequences of their disarmament and reconciliation with the West.181 The war in 2011 and subsequent decade of disaster placed Tripoli’s decision to disarm in a new context – with the ‘Libya Model’ coming to refer to the potential fates of those states which placed their trust in Western security guarantees and abandoned efforts to deter Western military action themselves. This had significant consequences for North Korea in particular, where the Libyan precedent was repeatedly cited by a range of figures from Daniel R. Coats,182 the Trump Administration’s Director of National Intelligence, to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter,183 and Russian President Vladimir Putin184 as indicating why Pyongyang would never unilaterally disarm.185

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Libya’s fate proved that once a Western adversary disarmed, the West could always exploit the opening presented by fabricating whatever atrocities were needed to justify an attack.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

de Lespinois, Jérôme, ‘L’emploi de la force aérienne au Tchad (1967–1987)’ [‘Employing the Air Force in Chad’], Penser les Ailes françaises, issue 6, June 2005 (pp. 65–74). Burr, Millard and Collins, Robert, Darfur: The Long Road to Disaster, Princeton, Markus Wiener Publishers, 2008 (p. 201). ‘Mandela Visits Libya, Thanks Kadafi for Helping Train ANC,’ Los Angeles Times, May 19, 1990. ‘“The last great liberator”: Why Mandela made and stayed friends with dictators,’ Washington Post, December 10, 2013. Kirchick, James, ‘South Africa Stands with Qaddafi,’ The Atlantic, September 6, 2011. Trade Registers, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Arms Transfer Database (https://armstrade.sipri.org/armstrade/page/trade_ register.php) (Accessed July 17, 2021). Razoux, Pierre, The Iran-Iraq War, London, Harvard University Press, 2015 (pp. 536, 537). Trade Registers, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Arms Transfer Database (https://armstrade.sipri.org/armstrade/page/trade_ register.php) (Accessed July 17, 2021). ‘The 38-year connection between Irish republicans and Gaddafi,’ BBC News, February 23, 2011. Chothia, Farouk, ‘What does Gaddafi’s death mean for Africa?,’ BBC News, October 21, 2011. Robinson, Georgina, ‘She represented Saddam Hussein, and now “the Claudia Schiffer of North Africa” is backing her father Muammar Gaddafi,’ Sydney Morning Herald, April 1, 2011. ‘Gaddafi Daughter to Defend Saddam,’ BBC News, July 3, 2014. ‘Qaddafi’s Yugoslav friends,’ The Economist, February 25, 2011. ‘Misguided Intentions: Resisting Africom,’ army.mil, February 26, 2010. ‘NATO’s war on African development,’ Tehran Times, September 4, 2011. Worsnip, Patrick, ‘U.N. sanctions lifted on Libya’s central bank,’ Reuters, December 17, 2011. Quinton, Sophie, ‘The Quest for Libya’s Frozen Assets,’ The Atlantic, August 26, 2011. ‘First African satellite launched,’ Endgadget, December 23, 2007. Spagnol, Giorgio, ‘Is France Still Exploiting Africa,’ Institut Europée des Relations Internationales Academia Diplomatica Europaea, February 10, 2019.

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Sylla, Ndongo Samba, ‘The CFA Franc: French Monetary Imperialism in Africa,’ LSA Blog, July 12, 2017. ‘Just Business: China Encroaches on Former French Colonies in Africa,’ Sputnik News, May 20, 2015. 13 Marchesin, Philippe, Mitterand l’Africain [‘Mitterand the African’], Universite de Paris (http://www. politique-africaine.com/numeros/ pdf/058005.pdf). Mitterrand, François, Présence française et abandon [‘French presence and abandonment’], Paris, Plon, 1957. 14 Roger, Antoine, ‘African nations can no longer afford to be France’s garden,’ Global Times, October 22, 2012. Costantinos, BT Costantinos, ‘Devolutionary Political Dynamics of the Crisis in the Central African Republic’ (lecture), African Union Summit, 2014. Leymarie, Philippe, ‘La France contestée dans son “pré carré”’ [‘France contested in its “pre-square”’], Manière de voir, no. 79, February-March 2008. 15 Costantinos, BT Costantinos, ‘Devolutionary Political Dynamics of the Crisis in the Central African Republic’ (lecture), African Union Summit, 2014. 16 Asher-Schapiro, Avi, ‘Libyan Oil, Gold, and Qaddafi: The Strange Email Sidney Blumenthal Sent Hillary Clinton In 2011,’ Vice News, January 12, 2016. 17 Costantinos, BT Costantinos, ‘Devolutionary Political Dynamics of the Crisis in the Central African Republic’ (lecture), African Union Summit, 2014. 18 Rodney, Walter, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Washington DC, Howard University Press, 1982 (pp. 190–201). 19 ‘Report by the Policy Planning Staff,’ Review of Current Trends U.S. Foreign Policy, Washington, February 24, 1948. 20 Ibid. 21 Perkins, John, ‘Libya - It’s Not About Oil, It’s About Currency & Loans,’ John Perkins Official Website (https://johnperkins.org/blog/grassrootsaction/libya-its-not-about-oil-its-about-currency-and-loans). 22 ‘Libya Protests: Second City Benghazi Hit by Violence,’ BBC News, February 16, 2011. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 ‘Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Libya,’ UN Human Rights Council, nineteenth session, A/HRC/19/68, advance unedited version, March 2, 2012 (p. 53). 26 Human Rights Watch, ‘Libya: Government Attacks in Misrata Kill Civilians: Unlawful Strikes on Medical Clinic,’ New York, Human Rights Watch, April 4, 2011 (www.hrw.org/news/2011/ 04/10/libya-governmentattacks-misrata-kill-civilians). 27 ‘Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Libya,’ UN Human Rights Council, nineteenth session, A/HRC/19/68, advance unedited version, March 2, 2012 (p. 53).



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28 Kuperman, Alan J., ‘5 things the U.S. should consider in Libya,’ USA Today, March 22, 2012. 29 Buffet, Gerard, ‘French Doctor Recounts “Apocalyptic” Scenes in Libya,’ Agence France-Presse (Youtube Channel), February 2011 (http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=JwHUqPfIEPs). Malye, Frangois, ‘Libye: “C’etait un carnage absolu”’ [‘Libya: “It was total carnage”’], Le Point, February 23, 2011. 30 ‘Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Libya,’ UN Human Rights Council, nineteenth session, A/HRC/19/68, advance unedited version, March 2, 2012 (p. 53). 31 ‘Syria: is it possible to rename streets on Google Maps?,’ The Guardian, February 15, 2012. Assange, Julian, ‘Google Is Not What It Seems,’ Wikileaks, 2016. Gunnar, Ulson, ‘The Lingering Danger of Google & Facebook,’ New Eastern Outlook, April 30, 2016. 32 Ahmed, Nafeez, ‘Syria intervention plan fuelled by oil interests, not chemical weapons concern,’ The Guardian, August 30, 2013. ‘INSIGHT - military intervention in Syria, post withdrawal status of forces,’ Wikileaks, March 6, 2012. Thomson, Alex, ‘Spooks’ view on Syria: what WikiLeaks revealed,’ Channel 4, August 28, 2013. Giraldi, Philip, ‘NATO Vs. Syria,’ The American Conservative, December 19, 2011. 33 ‘Qadhafi Promises “No Mercy with Traitors” in Address to Benghazi,’ BBC Monitoring, March 17, 2011. Hoff, Brad, ‘Hillary Emails Reveal True Motive for Libya Intervention,’ Foreign Policy Journal, January 6, 2016. 34 Felter, Joseph and Fishman, Brian, ‘Al-Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq: A First Look at the Sinjar Records,’ Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, Harmony Project (http://tarpley.net/docs/CTCForeignFighter.19. Dec07.pdf). 35 al-Gharbi, Musa, ‘Can Libya Stay Together?,’ National Interest, April 8, 2014. 36 ‘Eastern Libya Demands a Measure of Autonomy in a Loose National Federation,’ The New York Times, March 6, 2012. Ahmed, Akbar and Martin, Frankie, ‘Understanding the Sanusi of Cyrenaica: How to avoid a civil war in Libya,’ Al Jazeera, March 26, 2012. 37 Kuperman, Alan J., ‘America’s Little-Known Mission to Support Al Qaeda’s Role in Libya,’ National Interest, August 13, 2019. 38 Greenhill, Sam, ‘Flying proudly over the birthplace of Libya’s revolution, the flag of Al Qaeda,’ Daily Mail, November 2, 2011. 39 Kuperman, Alan J., ‘America’s Little-Known Mission to Support Al Qaeda’s Role in Libya,’ National Interest, August 13, 2019. 40 al-Gharbi, Musa, ‘Can Libya Stay Together?,’ National Interest, April 8, 2014. 41 Kuperman, Alan J., ‘America’s Little-Known Mission to Support Al Qaeda’s Role in Libya,’ National Interest, August 13, 2019.

398 ATROCITY FABRICATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 42 Hoff, Brad, ‘Hillary Emails Reveal True Motive for Libya Intervention,’ Foreign Policy Journal, January 6, 2016. 43 Bright, Martin, ‘MI6 “Halted Bid to Arrest Bin Laden”,’ The Guardian, November 10, 2002. Forte, Maximilian C., ‘Slouching Toward Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa,’ Montreal, Baraka Books, 2012 (pp. 79, 80). Darwish, Adel, ‘Did Britain Plot to Kill This Man?,’ The Middle East, September 4–6, 1998. Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, ‘Libya: Information on an Attempted Attack on President Gaddafi by a Religious Group in 1996, Possibly Affiliated with A Group Called Al-Sahwa of Islam,’ Refworld (UNHCR), July 1, 1998. 44 Black, Ian, ‘Qatar admits sending hundreds of troops to support Libya rebels,’ The Guardian, October 26, 2011. 45 Willsher, Kim, ‘Sarkozy struts the world stage with an eye on French votes,’ The Guardian, March 20, 2011. 46 Pedde, Nicola, ‘The Libyan conflict and its controversial roots,’ European View, vol. 16, 2017 (pp. 93–102). 47 Kopp, Carlo, ‘Operation Odyssey Dawn – the collapse of Libya’s relic air Defence system,’ Defence Today, vol. 9, no. 1, 2011. 48 ‘Col. Gaddafi Commanded the World’s Largest Fleet of Mach 3+ Interceptors: Why Didn’t They Save Libya From NATO Attacks?,’ Military Watch Magazine, October 22, 2022. 49 ‘Gaddafi’s son: Libya like McDonald’s for NATO – fast war as fast food,’ RT (Youtube Channel), July 1, 2011. 50 Kopp, Carlo, ‘Operation Odyssey Dawn – the collapse of Libya’s relic air Defence system,’ Defence Today, vol. 9, no. 1, 2011. 51 Ibid. 52 Ryan,  Missy and Alexander, David, ‘Western military assault on Libya’s Gaddafi,’ Reuters, March 22, 2011. ‘New Coalition Member Flies First Sortie Enforcing No-Fly Zone over Libya,’ Joint Task Force Odyssey Dawn Public Affairs, March 25, 2011. Dwyer, Devin and Martinez, Lu, ‘U.S. Tomahawk Cruise Missiles Hit Targets in Libya,’ ABC News, March 19, 2011. 53 Moorcraft, Paul, Superpowers, Rogue States and Terrorism: Countering the Security Threats to the West, Barnsley, Pen and Sword, 2017 (pp. 20, 21). Pollack, Kenneth M., ‘Libya Escalation Inevitable,’ National Interest, May 6, 2011. 54 Black, Ian, ‘Qatar admits sending hundreds of troops to support Libya rebels,’ The Guardian, October 26, 2011. Ulrichsen, Kristian Coates, Qatar and the Arab Spring, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014 (pp. 78, 126–128). Roberts, David, ‘Behind Qatar’s Intervention in Libya,’ Foreign Affairs, September 28, 2011. Starr, Barbara, ‘Foreign forces in Libya helping rebel forces advance,’ CNN, August 24, 2011. Robinson, Matt, ‘Qatari weapons reaching rebels in Libyan mountains,’ Reuters, May 31, 2011.



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Kuperman, Alan J., ‘A Model Humanitarian Intervention? Reassessing NATO’s Libya Campaign,’ International Security, vol. 38, no. 1, Summer 2013 (pp. 105–136). 55 ‘Qatar’s Emir Suggests Sending Troops to Syria,’ Al Jazeera, January 14, 2012. 56 Mohammed, Riyadh, ‘How Qatar Is Funding al-Qaeda – and Why That Could Help the US,’ The Fiscal Times, December 29, 2015. ‘Funding Al Nusra Through Ransom: Qatar and the Myth of “Humanitarian Principle”,’ CATF, December 10, 2015. ‘Fighting, While Funding, Extremists,’ The New York Times, June 19, 2017. Kirkpatrick, David D., ‘Qatar’s Support of Islamists Alienates Allies Near and Far,’ The New York Times, September 7, 2014. Blair, David and Spencer, Richard, ‘How Qatar is funding the rise of Islamist extremists,’ The Telegraph, September 20, 2014. ‘Qataris and Turks ordered to leave Libya,’ The Economist, June 24, 2014. 57 ‘U.S.-Approved Arms for Libya Rebels Fell into Jihadis’ Hands,’ The New York Times, December 5, 2012. 58 Kuperman, Alan J., ‘A Model Humanitarian Intervention? Reassessing NATO’s Libya Campaign,’ International Security, vol. 38, no. 1, Summer 2013 (pp. 105–136). Ryan, Missy, ‘Libya wants more talks with U.S. and rebels,’ Reuters, July 22, 2011. 59 The Illegal War on Libya, Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2012 (Chapter 1: On the Ground in Libya During Humanitarian Intervention, Part 3: Living Through a Full-Blown Media War). 60 ‘Pentagon documents reveal “deeply flawed intelligence” in US air war in Middle East,’ South China Morning Post, December 19, 2021. Philipps, Dave and Schmitt, Eric, ‘How the U.S. Hid an Airstrike That Killed Dozens of Civilians in Syria,’ The New York Times, November 15, 2021. Khan, Azmat et al., ‘Documents Reveal Basic Flaws in Pentagon Dismissals of Civilian Casualty Claims,’ The New York Times, December 31, 2021. 61 ‘Gaddafi Accepts Chavez Talks Offer,’ Al Jazeera, March 3, 2011. Kenyon, Peter, ‘Libyan Rebels Reject AU Cease-Fire Plan,’ NPR, April 11, 2011. Chulov, Martin, ‘Libyan Regime Makes Peace Offer That Sidelines Gaddafi,’ The Guardian, May 26, 2011. 62 ‘Libya after Gaddafi: A Dangerous Precedent,’ Al Jazeera, October 22, 2011. 63 ‘Weekly Address: President Obama Says the Mission in Libya is Succeeding,’ The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, March 26, 2011. 64 ‘Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on Libya,’ The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, March 28, 2011. 65 Walt, Stephen M., ‘Top 5 reasons we keep fighting all these wars,’ Foreign Policy, April 4, 2011. 66 Ibid.

400 ATROCITY FABRICATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 67 Pillar, Paul R., ‘The Never-Ending Libya Nightmare: Civil War, Benghazi and Beyond,’ National Interest, May 21, 2014. 68 Chapman, Steve, ‘Did Obama avert a bloodbath in Libya?,’ Chicago Tribune, April 3, 2011. 69 ‘Hopes for a Qaddafi Exit, and Worries of What Comes Next,’ The New York Times, March 21, 2011. 70 Chapman, Steve, ‘Did Obama avert a bloodbath in Libya?,’ Chicago Tribune, April 3, 2011. 71 Kuperman, Alan J., ‘A Model Humanitarian Intervention? Reassessing NATO’s Libya Campaign,’ International Security, vol. 38, no. 1, Summer 2013 (pp. 105–136). 72 Kuperman, Alan J., ‘5 things the U.S. should consider in Libya,’ USA Today, March 22, 2012. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 Chapman, Steve, ‘Did Obama avert a bloodbath in Libya?,’ Chicago Tribune, April 3, 2011. 76 Ibid. 77 Bosco, David, ‘Was there going to be a Benghazi massacre?,’ Foreign Policy, April 7, 2011. 78 ‘Qadhafi Promises “No Mercy with Traitors” in Address to Benghazi,’ BBC Monitoring, March 17, 2011. 79 Pedde, Nicola, ‘The Libyan conflict and its controversial roots,’ European View, vol. 16, 2017 (pp. 93–102). 80 ‘Al-Jazeera Gets Rap as Qatar Mouthpiece,’ Bloomberg, April 9, 2012. Chatriwala, Omar, ‘What Wikileaks Tells Us About Al Jazeera,’ Foreign Policy, September 19, 2011. ‘ ‫ واألجندة‬..‫ استقاالت‬:‫ الجزير“ ليست بخير‬,’ [‘Al-Jazeera “It’s not okay: resignations . . .  and the agenda.”’], Al Sagheet, April 3, 2012. ‘Ex-employee: Al Jazeera provided Syrian rebels with satphones,’ RT, April 4, 2012. ‘An exclusive interview with a news editor of Al-Jazeera Channel,’ Axis of Logic, January 6, 2013. 81 Ulrichsen, Kristian Coates, ‘Qatar and the Arab Spring: Policy Drivers and Regional Implications,’ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 2014. 82 Chatriwala, Omar, ‘What Wikileaks Tells Us About Al Jazeera,’ Foreign Policy, September 19, 2011. ‘After Disclosures by WikiLeaks, Al Jazeera Replaces Its Top News Director,’ The New York Times, September 20, 2011. ‘Wikileaks: Al Jazeera Chief Linked to US Defense Department,’ Press TV, September 12, 2011. 83 Roberts, David B., ‘Reflecting on Qatar’s “Islamist” Soft Power,’ Brookings Institute, April 2019. 84 ‘Al-Jazeera Gets Rap as Qatar Mouthpiece,’ Bloomberg, April 9, 2012. 85 al-Gharbi, Musa, ‘Can Libya Stay Together?,’ National Interest, April 8, 2014.



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86 Ibid. 87  ‘Libya: Benghazi rebels reject African Union truce plan,’ BBC News, April 12, 2011. 88 ‘South Africa says NATO abusing U.N. resolution on Libya,’ Reuters, June 14, 2011. 89 Sherwood, Harriet and McGreal, Chris, ‘Libya: Gaddafi has accepted roadmap to peace, says Zuma,’ The Guardian, April 11, 2011. 90 ‘Concerned Africans criticise NATO,’ Independent Online, August 24, 2011. 91 ‘US bids to break Gaddafi Regime,’ Financial Times, August 9, 2011. 92 Frail, Tom A., ‘Ronald Reagan and Moammar Qadhafi,’ Smithsonian Magazine, March 2, 2011. Stanik, Joseph T., El Dorado Canyon: Reagan’s Undeclared War with Qaddafi, Annapolis, Naval Institute Press, 2002. Bowman, Tom, ‘For Reagan, Gadhafi Was A Frustrating “Mad Dog”,’ NPR, March 4, 2011. 93 Glass, Andrew, ‘U.S. planes bomb Libya, April 15, 1986,’ Politico, April 15, 2019. 94 ‘NATO strike “kills Gaddafi’s youngest son”,’ Al Jazeera, May 1, 2011. 95 The Illegal War on Libya, Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2012 (Chapter 1: On the Ground in Libya During Humanitarian Intervention, Part 2: Dispatches from Tripoli). 96 Beaumont, Peter and Stephen, Chris, ‘Gaddafi’s last words as he begged for mercy: “What did I do to you?”,’ The Guardian, October 23, 2011. 97 ‘Row over Muammar Gaddafi’s body delays burial plans,’ BBC News, October 21, 2011. 98 Walt, Vivienne, ‘How Did Gaddafi Die? A Year Later, Unanswered Questions and Bad Blood,’ Time, October 18, 2012. 99 ‘Uganda would offer Gaddafi asylum if asked-TV,’ Reuters, March 30, 2011. Gray, Eliza, ‘This Is How the West Tried to Persuade Gaddafi to Give Up Power,’ Time, January 7, 2016. 100 ‘Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi killed,’ CBC News, October 20, 2011. 101 ‘Gaddafi death brings “relief” to Libya: Gillard,’ ABC News, October 21, 2011.  102 Jackson, David,  ‘Obama: Gadhafi regime is “no more”,’  USA Today, October 20, 2011. 103 ‘I forbindelse med oberst Gaddafis død udtaler statsminister Helle ThorningSchmidt’ [‘In connection with the death of Colonel Gaddafi, Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt’], Statsministeriet, October 20, 2011. 104 ‘Gaddafi’s death met with little sadness,’ CBS News, October 20, 2011. 105 ‘Vatican voices hope for Libya after Ghadafi’s death,’  Catholic News Agency, October 20, 2011. 106 Muhereza, Robert and Njoroge, John, ‘Museveni targets NRM “rebel” MPs,’ Daily Monitor, October 31, 2011. Meldrum, Andrew,  ‘Gaddafi praised as “an African hero” by Mugabe’s party,’ Global Post, October 20, 2011.

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Masinga, Winile, ‘Senators praise Gaddafi,’ The Swazi Observer, October 26, 2011. Sasman, Catherine, ‘Namibia deplores “assassination”,’ The Namibian, October 24, 2011. ‘Kufuor in Tears for Gaddafi,’ Ghana Web, October 24, 2011. 107 ‘Debate begins over how history will view NATO’s intervention in Libya,’ Deutsche Welle, October 21, 2011. 108 Westcott, Tom and Fagge, Nick, ‘“Life in Libya is worse than ever!” Cameron’s “ill-conceived” military action has created “six million little Gaddafis” and turned country into ISIS hotbed - say people who once HATED the dictator,’ Daily Mail, September 16, 2016. 109 Ibid. 110 Sørum, Benedicte, ‘Natos ukjente giftarv’ [NATO’s unknown poison heritage], Klassekampen, January 11, 2020. 111 ‘Libya says six killed in airstrike near Brega,’ Reuters, July 22, 2011. Ali, Moutaz, ‘Freshwater from the desert,’ DANDC, May 14, 2017. 112 Watkins, John, ‘Libya’s thirst for “fossil water”,’ BBC News, March 18, 2006. 113 Ahmed, Nafeez, ‘War crime: NATO deliberately destroyed Libya’s water infrastructure,’ The Ecologist, May 14, 2015. 114 Ahmed, Nafeez, ‘Libya: NATO Targeted Water Infrastructure,’ HLRN, May 14, 2015. 115 ‘UNICEF responds to the emerging water crisis in Tripoli,’ Relief Web, August 28, 2011. 116 Ibid. 117 ‘UNICEF responds to the emerging water crisis in Libyan capital,’ UNICEF Official Website, August 29, 2011. 118 ‘RE: discussion - thirsty Libya,’ Wikileaks, February 13, 2012 (https:// wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/53/5334561_re-discussion-thirsty-libya-.html.) 119 ‘NATO bombs the Great Man-Made River,’ Human Rights Investigations, July 27, 2011. 120 ‘Gadhafi’s river could be hidden weapon,’ UPI, June 2, 2011. ‘NATO warned against strikes on Libya’s “great river”,’ Euractiv, April 6, 2011. 121 ‘Leak in main pipeline of water desalination plant may cut water supply in Tobruk, official warns,’ Libya Observer, February 8, 2016. 122 Cooke, Kieran, ‘Trouble ahead for Gaddafi’s Great Man-Made River,’ Middle East Eye, February 9, 2017. 123 Sami, Mariam, ‘Head of Libya’s Cyrenaica Declares Semi-Autonomous Rule,’ Bloomberg, June 2, 2013. 124 ‘Libya’s southern Fezzan region declares autonomy,’ Al Arabiya News, September 26, 2013. 125 ‘Libya oil output dives after key field shut,’ Al Jazeera, February 23, 2014. 126 ‘Libya’s south scarred by tribal battles,’ Al Jazeera, January 24, 2014. 127 al-Gharbi, Musa, ‘Can Libya Stay Together?,’ National Interest, April 8, 2014. 128 Steinblatt, Jacob, ‘Libya: Oil Giant, Collapsing State,’ National Interest, September 23, 2014.



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129 Ibid. 130 al-Gharbi, Musa, ‘Can Libya Stay Together,’ National Interest, April 8, 2014. 131 Jan, Farah N. and Marandici, Ion, ‘Libya: A Country Up for Grabs?,’ National Interest, September 30, 2020. 132 Michael, Maggie, ‘Rights Group: Libyan Rebels Executed Gaddafi Loyalists,’ Washington Post, October 18, 2012. 133 ‘Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Libya,’ UN Human Rights Council (pp. 76, 196, 197). 134 Lynch, Colum, ‘Report: Human Rights Abuses Continue in Libya,’ Washington Post, March 3, 2012. 135 Lyons, John, ‘Libya’s Rebels Take Revenge,’ Weekend Australian, November 5, 2011. 136 MacAskill, Ewen, ‘Gaddafi “supplies troops with Viagra to encourage mass rape”, claims diplomat,’ The Guardian, April 29, 2011. Ross, Chuck, ‘Sid Blumenthal Floated Disputed Gaddafi Viagra Rape Rumor In Confidential Memo To Hillary,’ Daily Caller, December 31, 2015. 137 Hoff, Brad, ‘Hillary Emails Reveal True Motive for Libya Intervention,’ Foreign Policy Journal, January 6, 2016. 138 Miller Sommerville, Diane, ‘The Rape Myth in the Old South Reconsidered,’ The Journal of Southern History, vol. 61, no. 3, August 1995 (pp. 481–518). Fredrickson, George M., The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914, New York, Harper & Row, 1971 (Chapter 9: The Negro as Beast: Southern Negrophobia at the Turn of the Century). Joan Olds, Madelin, ‘The Rape Complex in the Postbellum South’ (dissertation), Carnegie-Mellon University, Harper & Row, 1989. Leab, Daniel J., From Sambo to Superspade: The black experience in motion pictures, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1976 (p. 28). 139 Forte, Maximilian C., The New Imperialism: Interventionism, Information Warfare, and the Military-Academic Complex, Volume 2, Montreal, Alert Press, 2011 (pp. 155, 156). 140 ‘Es fand eine regelrechte Jagd auf Migranten statt’ [There was a real hunt for migrants], derStandard, July 6, 2011. 141 ‘Libyan rebel ethnic cleansing and lynching of black people,’ Human Rights Investigations, July 7, 2011. 142 Fitzgerald, Mary, ‘We are afraid . . . people might think we are mercenaries,’ Irish Times, August 31, 2011. 143 ‘African viewpoint: Colonel’s continent?,’ BBC News, February 25, 2011. 144 Hoff, Brad, ‘Hillary Emails Reveal True Motive for Libya Intervention,’ Foreign Policy Journal, January 6, 2016. 145 Kareem Fahim, ‘Accused of Fighting for Qaddafi, a Libyan Town’s Residents Face Reprisals,’ The New York Times, September 24, 2011. 146 Dagher, Sam, ‘Libya City Torn by Tribal Feud,’ Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2011. 147 ‘Lynching in Benghazi,’ Human Rights Investigations, July 17, 2011. 148 ‘Journalist Visits Prisoners Held By Rebels in Libya,’ Los Angeles Times, March 23, 2011.

404 ATROCITY FABRICATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 149 Wheeler, William and Oghanna, Ayman, ‘After Liberation, Nowhere to Run,’ The New York Times, October 30, 2011. 150 Chitiyo, Knox, ‘Has Africa lost Libya?,’ The Guardian, September 18, 2011. 151 ‘Black Africans “forced to eat Gaddafi’s flag” in Libya,’ The Telegraph, March 6, 2012. 152 Allegra, Cécile, ‘Revealed: male rape used systematically in Libya as instrument of war,’ The Guardian, November 3, 2012. 153 ‘African migrants raped & murdered after being sold in Libyan “slave markets” – UN,’ RT, April 11, 2017. Osborne, Samuel, ‘Libya: African refugees being sold at “regular public slave auctions”,’ The Independent, April 11, 2017. Adams, Paul, ‘Libya exposed as an epicentre for migrant child abuse,’ BBC News, February 28, 2017. Baker, Aryn, ‘“It Was As if We Weren’t Human.” Inside the Modern Slave Trade Trapping African Migrants,’ Time, March 14, 2019. ‘The Libyan Slave Trade Has Shocked the World,’ Time, December 1, 2017. ‘Libya: Displaced Camp Residents Need Immediate Protection,’ Human Rights Watch, November 19, 2013. 154 ‘Libya: Wake-Up Call to Misrata’s Leaders: Torture, Killings May Amount to Crimes against Humanity,’ Human Rights Watch, April 8, 2012. 155 Murray, Rebecca, ‘One Year Later, Still Suffering for Loyalty to Gaddafi,’ Inter Press Service, August 24, 2012. 156 ‘Lawyer: Slaves in Libya Are Used For Organ Trade,’ Newsweek, December 3, 2017. 157 ‘Nigerian slaves have organs harvested, bodies mutilated and are set on fire, horrifying pictures claim,’ Newsweek, December 1, 2017. 158 ‘Slave trade in Libya: Outrage across Africa,’ Deutsche Welle, November 22, 2017. ‘Nigeria’s Buhari vows to fly home stranded migrants,’  BBC News, November 29, 2017. 159 Chitiyo, Knox, ‘Has Africa lost Libya?,’ The Guardian, September 18, 2011. 160 Logan, Justin, ‘Keeping Score on the Libya Intervention: Good Idea or Tragic Mistake?,’ National Interest, August 22, 2014. 161 Ivo H., Daalder and Stavridis, James G., ‘NATO’s Victory in Libya the Right Way to Run an Intervention,’ Foreign Affairs, vol. 91, no. 2, March/ April 2012. 162 McVeigh, Karen, ‘World is plundering Africa’s wealth of “billions of dollars a year”,’ The Guardian, May 24, 2017. ‘Matteo Salvini accuses France of “stealing” Africa’s wealth,’ Financial Times, January 22, 2019. Burgis, Tom, The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa’s Wealth, New York, Public Affairs, 2015. Dearden, Nick, ‘Africa is not poor, we are stealing its wealth,’ Al Jazeera, May 24, 2017.



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‘How the world profits from Africa’s wealth,’ Honest Accounts 2017, Jubilee Debt Campaign, 2017 (https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/sites/default/files/files/resources/honest_ accounts_2017_web_final.pdf). 163 Friedman, Benjamin H., ‘No, the Libya Intervention Wasn’t a Humanitarian Success,’ CATO Institute, April 7, 2016. 164 ‘US ground troops are in Libya, Pentagon admits,’ RT, August 12, 2016. 165 Timm, Trevor, ‘The US is bombing Libya again. It’s a too-familiar vicious cycle,’ The Guardian, August 2, 2016. ‘U.S. Bombs ISIS Camps in Libya,’ The New York Times, January 19, 2017. 166 Ingersoll, Geoffrey and Kelley, Michael B., ‘The US Is Openly Sending Heavy Weapons from Libya to Syrian Rebels,’ Business Insider, December 10, 2012. Kelley, Michael B., ‘How US Ambassador Chris Stevens May Have Been Linked to Jihadist Rebels in Syria,’ Business Insider, October 19, 2012. 167 Mulholland, Rory and Deshmukh, Jay, ‘Residents flee Gaddafi hometown,’ Sydney Morning Herald, October 3, 2011. ‘Libyan estimate: At least 30,000 died in the war,’ Arab Times, September 8, 2011. 168 Gilligan, Andrew,  ‘Gaddafi’s ghost town after the loyalists retreat,’ The Telegraph, September 11, 2011. ‘Tawergha no longer exists, only Misrata,’ Human Rights Investigations, August 13, 2011. 169 ‘Libyan rebel ethnic cleansing and lynching of black people,’ Human Rights Investigations, July 7, 2011. 170 ‘“Libya becoming completely failed state” – former U.S. Ambassador,’ RT, May 30, 2017. 171 Toivo,  Ndjebela, ‘Nujoma condemns Gaddafi killing,’ New Era, October 26, 2011. 172 Schewe, Eric, ‘Why is the U.S. Military Occupying Bases Across Africa?,’ Daily JSTOR, April 11, 2018. 173 Lounnas, Djallil, ‘The Libyan Security Continuum: The Impact of the Libyan Crisis on the North African/Sahelian Regional System,’ MENARA Working Papers, no. 15, October 2018. Algeria: ‘Algeria hostage-takers aided by Libyan Islamists: source,’ Vanguard, January 22, 2013. ‘Terrorist source claims Libyan connection with In Amenas attack,’ Libya Herald, January 22, 2013. Mali: ‘Expanding Arsenals: Insurgent Arms in Northern Mali,’ Small Arms Survey, 2015 (pp. 157–185). ‘Arms and men out of Libya fortify Mali rebellion,’ Reuters, February 10, 2012. Shaw, Mark and Mangan, Fiona, ‘Illicit Trafficking and Libya’s Transition: Profits and Losses,’ Washington DC, United States Institute of Peace, February 24, 2014.

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Drury, Ian, ‘Don’t Turn Syria into a “Tesco for Terrorists” like Libya, Generals Tell Cameron,’ Daily Mail, June 17, 2013. Nigeria: Isilow, Hassan, ‘Boko Haram using weapons looted from Libya: Diplomat,’ Andalou, January 1, 2015. ‘Arms from Libya could reach Boko Haram, al Qaeda: U.N.,’ Reuters, January 26, 2012. Glazebrook, Dan, ‘“Deadliest terror group in the world”: The West’s latest gift to Africa,’ RT, November 27, 2015. 174 ‘Senator John McCain’s Alliance 21 lecture,’ United States Alliance Centre, May 30, 2017. Daalder, Ivo H. and Stavridis, James G., ‘NATO’s Victory in Libya the Right Way to Run an Intervention,’ Foreign Affairs, vol. 91, no. 2, March/ April 2012. ‘Debate begins over how history will view NATO’s intervention in Libya,’ Deutsche Welle, October 21, 2011. 175 Daalder, Ivo H. and Stavridis, James G., ‘NATO’s Victory in Libya the Right Way to Run an Intervention,’ Foreign Affairs, vol. 91, no. 2, March/ April 2012. 176 Memoli, Michael A., ‘Kadafi death: Joe Biden says “NATO got it right” in Libya,’ Los Angeles Times, October 20, 2011. 177 ‘Debate begins over how history will view NATO’s intervention in Libya,’ Deutsche Welle, October 21, 2011. 178 Clemons, Steve, ‘The Arab Spring: “A Virus That Will Attack Moscow and Beijing”,’ The Atlantic, November 19, 2011. 179 Shorrock, Tim, ‘Did the CIA Orchestrate an Attack on the North Korean Embassy in Spain?,’ Foreign Policy, May 2, 2019. Cho, Yi Jun, ‘Who Is Anti-N.Korean Guerrilla Leader?,’ Chosun Ilbo, April 4, 2019. 180 Taylor, Adam and Kim, Min Joo, ‘The covert group that carried out a brazen raid on a North Korean embassy now fears exposure,’ Washington Post, March 28, 2019. 181 Schwarz, Jon, ‘Trump Intel Chief: North Korea Learned from Libya War to “Never” Give Up Nukes,’ The Intercept, July 29, 2017. 182 Ibid. 183 Carter, James Earl, ‘Jimmy Carter: What I’ve learned from North Korea’s leaders,’ Washington Post, October 4, 2017. 184 ‘Vladimir Putin’s news conference following BRICS Summit,’ President of Russia, The Kremlin, September 5, 2017. 185 Abrams, A. B., ‘The Libyan Model: How NATO’s war with Libya in 2011 has influenced North Korea ever since,’ Daily NK, February 19, 2021.

Chapter Nine

The Syrian Insurgency Misattributing Atrocities The Syrian Arab Republic emerged in the 1970s as the Western world’s leading adversary in the Arab Middle East, with the coming to power of the Ba’ath Party and a Corrective Revolution within the party in 1970 ending two decades of instability and an era of multiple Western sponsored coups and coup attempts.1 Over the following decade Syria strengthened ties with the Soviet Union, North Korea and Iran, invested in becoming a leading regional military power, and saw its forces clash on multiple occasions with U.S. and U.S.-aligned Israeli forces.Although keeping a low profile following the Cold War’s end in 1989, Syria gained attention after the fall of Iraq in 2003 as the only Arab country in the region that remained outside the Western sphere of influence. While Syria was directly threatened, and a U.S.-led invasion openly discussed, the country’s Korean-supplied ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, high combat readiness and relatively capable air force and air defences were seen as valuable deterrents to a similar Western assault.2 Three major factors made Syria a priority Western target from the late 2000s, including the need to undermine the Syrianand Iranian-backed Lebanese militia Hezbollah, which had dealt Israel its first ever military defeat in 2006,3 as well as the Syrian government’s refusal to approve a critical Western-favoured Qatari gas pipeline over a rival Iranian one for exports to Europe.4 The need to isolate China, Russia, North Korea and particularly Iran, with Syria being an important economic and strategic partner of all four of the Pentagon’s designated ‘great power adversaries,’ was another important factor among multiple more minor ones.5 Available evidence indicates that Western plans to topple the Syrian government through support for an insurgency dated 407

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back to the Barack Obama administration’s first year. French Foreign Minister Ronald Dumas noted in 2009 that Britain had begun training militiamen for operations in Syria,6 with cables and reports from American, Saudi Arabian and Israeli intelligence agencies indicating that they were also involved from that stage.7 Operations began in March 2011, with leaked emails from leading private intelligence firm Stratfor showing that from that time NATO members Britain, France, the U.S. and Turkey, alongside Western-aligned Jordan, all covertly deployed special forces to Syrian territory to support anti-government militias. This marked the beginning of a major insurgency with the explicit purpose of forcing a “collapse” of the state “from within.”8 Western air operations were also considered from the outset, with the Stratfor emails stressing that the Pentagon believed further vilification of the Syrian state, namely through “media attention on a massacre” by government forces, would provide humanitarian pretexts for an eventual Libyan-style Western assault. Nevertheless the country’s dense air defence network, large and sophisticated ballistic missile arsenal, and sizeable chemical weapons stockpiles, were cited as major obstacles.9 From the war’s outset media coverage in the Western world and in Western-aligned states consistently vilified the Syrian government and portrayed the insurgency as a moderate and popular uprising. Britain notably played a leading role in the media campaign, and using former British diplomats, intelligence officers and army officers as intermediaries it covertly established a network of journalists across Syria “in an attempt to shape perceptions of the conflict.” These efforts were managed by the Ministry of Defence and aimed to bring about “attitudinal and behavioural change” with the goal of “reinforcement of popular rejection of the [Syrian President Bashar Al] Assad regime.” Media content produced by the network of journalists in the pay of the British government was supported to reach outlets such as BBC Arabic and Al Jazeera.10 It was essential for the West to be able to portray at least some of the militias it backed in the Syrian War as representing a westphilian alternative to the ruling Ba’ath Party. While the War



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on Terror in the previous decade meant jihadism which dominated the insurgency could not be lionised as it had been when the U.S. and Britain previously supported Islamists against the Afghan government in the 1980s, the West relied heavily on portrayals of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) as a moderate ‘right side’ in the war. Formed in July 2011, the FSA was a loose coalition of anti-government militias, rather than a centralised paramilitary organisation with a chain of command and included multiple radical jihadist groups in its ranks. In the early stages of the war the Al Nusra Front, at the time an official branch organisation of Islamic State and affiliate of Al Qaeda, was also a part of the Free Syrian Army.11 The Washington Post would refer to Al Nusra in late 2012 as the most aggressive and successful arm of the FSA,12 and according to the Russian Foreign Ministry it continued for years to be labelled as a Syrian moderate opposition force by the United States.13 An FSA co-ordinator going by the name of Abu Haidar notably stated, regarding the role of Al Nusra in the revolution the Free Syrian Army was professing to lead, that the Al Qaeda affiliate “have experienced fighters who are like the revolution’s elite commando troops.”14 The radical jihadist group received widespread praise from among the FSA leadership,15 with FSA forces widely chanting in December 2012 “we are all Al Nusra Front” in protest against claims the Al Qaeda affiliate was a terrorist organisation.16 Twenty-nine of the militant groups which comprised the FSA, including fighting brigades and civilian committees, signed a petition calling for mass demonstrations in support of Al Nusra – reflecting the high regard in which it was held throughout the FSA.17 The fact that Al Nusra was accepted into Free Syrian Army ranks as an integral member, and the nature of the ties between it and other FSA factions, reflected the FSA’s strongly Islamist orientation which was well concealed by the media coverage of its foreign sponsors. Jihadist groups including several Al Qaeda affiliates could thus receive considerable material support from the West, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel for operations against the Syrian government, with extensive efforts

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made to portray these insurgents as freedom fighters striving for Western-style liberal democracy. With Stratfor having reported that the Pentagon sought to “focus media attention on a massacre,” which provided not only a pretext for increased Western intervention but also a further opportunity to portray the Syrian government as the ‘wrong side’ in the war, fabricated atrocity stories increasingly dominated Western coverage. The war’s initial stages saw no shortages of atrocities committed, although those verified were overwhelmingly committed by Islamist insurgent groups rather than by the Syrian armed forces – officially the Syrian Arab Army (SAA). Thus, much as had been done in Korea, Western reports consistently misattributed incidents such as massacres committed by insurgents to the SAA – simultaneously whitewashing Westernbacked groups and vilifying Damascus. As had been the case for coverage preceding the Iraq War many of the reports in Western outlets such as Reuters consistently cited activists with known ties to anti-government groups and to Western governments as reliable sources on events – while sources with ties to the Syrian government were almost never cited as such. In May 2012 Western media outlets widely reported that government forces had killed large numbers of civilians without provocation in the town of Houla, describing vivid scenes of innocents trying to rescue their families as the Syrian Arab Army bombarded them using artillery before sending in ground forces who “just slaughtered everybody.” The Guardian described a “bloody horror that left more than 100 Syrians dead.”18 An investigation the following month however, reported by Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, showed that insurgent militias had been responsible – not government forces.19 In August 2012 the massacre of 245 people in the Daraya suburb was covered almost unanimously in Western reports as a war crime by “Assad’s army,” although as was often the case there was little evidence for this claim and anti-government activists were cited as the source.20 British journalist from the Independent Robert Fisk, who investigated the incident on the ground and conducted multiple interviews, subsequently confirmed that the Free



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Syrian Army had been responsible and had massacred both the civilians and the off-duty soldiers it had been holding prisoner.21 In December a massacre of between 120 and 150 villagers in the town of Aqrab was also blamed on the Syrian government, with the New York Times suggesting that “members of Assad’s sect” were responsible.22 After launching a thorough investigation on the ground including multiple interviews with survivors, British journalist Alex Thompson reported that the Free Syrian Army had been the perpetrator and had held 500 villagers from the president’s Alawite religious minority hostage for nine days before carrying out mass executions.23 In December 2013 the abduction of an NBC News team was blamed throughout Western media reports on forces aligned with the Syrian government. It was only a subsequent investigation that revealed that the culprits were “a Sunni criminal element affiliated with the Free Syrian Army” – as described by the New York Times.24 These cases all exemplified a far wider trend which prevailed throughout the war, and although individual reports of atrocities could each be disproved, the metanarrative they created in much of the world of severe Syrian government misconduct could not be dispelled. This provided grounds for support for Western moves to more openly back the insurgency, consider direct military action against Damascus, and to insist on a change in government and on the Syrian president being removed from power. The 2013 Chemical Attack Near Damascus From mid-2013 the Western-backed insurgency in Syria suffered a growing number of setbacks, with the Battle of Qusayr in May-June, which marked the entry of the Lebanese Hezbollah militia into the war in support of Damascus, being a major turning point. In the face of highly unfavourable power trajectories on the ground, the U.S. and its allies sought to intervene more directly in late 2013 to decisively turn the tide against the Syrian government and bring insurgents to power as they had in Libya two years prior.

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Western military intervention was initially intended to involve imposition of a Libyan-style ‘no-fly zone’ on Syria,25 shooting down any Syrian aircraft that took off to cut air supplies into the country and prevent the military from providing fire or logistical support to ground forces. All precedents suggested that this would be followed by both Western strikes on Syrian airfields and other positions and provision of more active material and battlefield support to insurgent groups, which would continue until an outcome to the war favourable to Western interests was realised most likely with militants taking over Damascus.i Retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General David A. Deptula, who had overseen the imposition of a no-fly zone over Iraq in the 1990s under Operation Northern Watch, indicated in May 2013 that imposing a no-fly zone could be a means to cut the transfer of supplies to Syria from abroad. Citing the Libyan precedent, he noted that Western air units could subsequently be employed to “target Syrian leadership and active military units” from the air, indicating that the more benign ‘no-fly zone’ would likely pave the way to more aggressive attacks still.26 The Washington Post similarly observed that a no-fly zone would likely be just a first step towards facilitating more active Western offensive operations against Syria. It stressed, as many publications across the Western world did at the time, that conducting such operations against “the oppressor,” as it referred to Damascus, was a moral obligation for Western countries.27 President Obama asked the Pentagon to draw up plans for imposing a no-fly zone over Syria in the penultimate week of May 2013.28 The Pentagon had previously drawn up such plans in April although the administration had not asked to be shown them.29 France, Britain, Qatar and Turkey by contrast, had been i A 2013 report prepared for the U.S. Air Force by RAND Corporation emphasized that the definition of a Western no-fly zone was often “stretched to include” air attacks and operations to directly weaken enemy forces on the ground. The report noted that while Syrian forces had made significant recent gains, a no-fly zone could turn the tide of the war in favour of anti-government forces and “potentially pave the way for more extensive operations” against Damascus. (Lund, Aron, ‘Evaluating the Russian Intervention in Syria,’ Carnegie Middle East Center, December 7, 2015.)



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strongly calling for a no-fly zone up to that point.30 The president notably told aides that a no-fly zone “would require a much larger military operation than its proponents believe,” with the sizes of the Syrian air, air defence and ballistic missile forces being among the deterring factors.31 Syria was assessed to have “one of the densest air-defence systems in the world” and an air force with combat experience and some relatively capable fighter classes.32 This included Su-24M2 strike fighters which in September would conduct a show of force to demonstrate their ability to retaliate against Britain’s RAF Akrotiri airbase in Cyprus.33 President Obama soon afterwards expressed scepticism that a no-fly zone alone could have a significant impact on the conflict.34 The president’s National Security Advisor Spokesman Benjamin Rhodes appeared similarly hesitant, indicating “great and open- ended costs,”35 with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey emphasising the danger of ‘mission creep’ – namely that a no-fly zone could lead the U.S. to commit to further offensive operations against the Syrian government. If Syria’s aerial warfare capability was neutralised, he warned, “the question then becomes: If you eliminate one capability of a potential adversary, will you be inclined to find yourself in a position to be asked to do more against the rest?”36 The administration’s caution came largely as a result of its Pivot to Asia foreign policy initiative and the perceived need to divert attention away from the Middle East to a theatre that was much more important to securing U.S. and Western hegemony. North Korea, for one, showed signs of making a breakthrough in developing longer ranged nuclear tipped missiles capable of striking American territory – a potential game changer in the country’s then 63 year-long ongoing conflict with the United States.37 China, meanwhile, was poised to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy (measured by purchasing power adjusted GDP) which it would achieve in 2014.38 The administration’s strategy for tackling Beijing by drastically expanding the American military presence in East Asia and isolating China from the rest of the region was already being seriously undermined by the drag of Middle Eastern commitments, and could unravel entirely should it

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be forced to commit to war in Syria. Unlike in Libya, from which attention could largely be diverted once Tripoli fell, the presence of sizeable arsenals of chemical weapons and ballistic missiles in Syria meant that even if Damascus fell to insurgents, Western boots on the ground would be needed at the very least to secure these weapons.39 The Obama administration continued to face strong pressure from both its European and Middle Eastern partners, and from much of its own foreign policy establishment, to launch a direct attack on Syria.40 This culminated in an incident on August 21, 2013, when after almost three months of major gains by Syrian and allied forces reports from Syrian anti-government sources emerged claiming that the Syrian Arab Army had killed up to 635 people in Eastern Ghouta, a suburban area in the Damascus governate, with sarin nerve gas.41 The publication of footage purporting to show civilians affected by the attacks fuelled calls in the West for military action. After filing a request, inspectors from the United Nations were subsequently granted both access to sites in Eastern Ghouta and a ceasefire surrounding the area by the Syrian government. UN investigators confirmed that sarin had been used, although they noted that insurgents controlling the sites before they arrived could have moved and manipulated evidence. Reports made no indication as to which party was responsible.42 Western governments almost unanimously very quickly alleged that Damascus was the perpetrator of the sarin attack, and despite significant evidence that Islamist insurgents were the perpetrators the possibility of there being any culprit other than the government was dismissed entirely. One of the most significant factors indicating Damascus’ innocence was circumstantial. President Obama had vowed in August 2012 to take direct action if Syria used its chemical weapons, which was a red line strongly supported by his European allies.43 By August 2013 the Syrian Arab Army had been gaining ground for months, and at a time when many in the West were seeking a pretext for an attack it would have made little sense for government forces to suddenly, unnecessarily and conspicuously use such weapons to provide them with one. Insurgent groups seeking the state’s overthrow, by



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contrast, had much to from a chemical attack, as a mass Western assault on Syria would likely turn the tide of the war in their favour. There was significant evidence that Islamist insurgents had access to sarin and had used chemical weapons in the past. Former Chief Prosecutor of two United Nations international criminal law tribunals, and former Swiss attorney general and ambassador, Carla Del Ponte, served on the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic in 2013, and had reported in May that “opponents of the regime” were conducting the sarin gas attacks.44 Later that month, Turkish security forces arrested members of the Al Nusra Front who were found to be in possession of two kilograms of sarin.45 This proved that Islamist insurgents had access to the very weapon the Syrian government would in August be accused of using in Eastern Ghouta. The case for insurgents being responsible for the sarin attack was further strengthened by a study by Theodore A. Postol, a professor of science, technology and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Richard M. Lloyd, an analyst at the military contractor Tesla Laboratories, which was published by the New York Times in December. Based on an evaluation of the exteriors of the rockets which delivered the nerve agent, they suggested that the motors taken from BM-21 122mm artillery rockets were used to launch the attack. Although BM-21s were used extensively by both government and insurgent forces, the experts concluded based on the calculated maximum ranges for the sarin-filled rockets that the attack could not have come from Syrian Arab Army positions, and that Islamist insurgents were the most likely perpetrators.46 Evidence implicating Al Nusra mounted quickly, with Associated Press correspondent Dale Gavlak and reporter Yahya Ababneh publishing the results of interviews with doctors, Ghouta residents and insurgents who widely expressed certainty that the Al Qaeda affiliate was responsible for the sarin attack. The reports indicated that the sarin used had been supplied by Saudi Arabian intelligence services, which had provided significant material support to the insurgency since early 2011. Although unverified,

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this report closely corroborated with others regarding Al Nusra’s possession of chemical weapons.47 The report gained greater credibility in 2017 when leaked documents from the U.S. National Security Agency showed that Saudi sponsors were indeed able to order the insurgents they had armed in Syria to carry out specific kinds of attacks against very specific targets to achieve political ends.48 In December Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported, based on multiple interviews with U.S. intelligence officials and an extensive investigation, that the Obama administration had dishonestly “cherry-picked intelligence” to implicate Damascus in the Ghouta sarin attack and thereby provide a pretext for further hostile policies against Syria. This including burying intelligence on the Al Nusra Front and avoiding considering it a suspect despite its large presence in Eastern Ghouta, its strong incentive to carry out attacks, and full knowledge that the terror group had access to sarin. Hersh concluded regarding the findings presented by President Obama’s administration: In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significantly, he failed to acknowledge something known to the U.S. intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin. . . . In the months before the attack, the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports, culminating in a formal Operations Order – a planning document that precedes a ground invasion – citing evidence that the Al Nusra Front . . . had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the attack occurred Al Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad . . . in recent interviews with intelligence and military officers and consultants past and present, I found intense concern, and on



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occasion anger, over what was repeatedly seen as the deliberate manipulation of intelligence. One high-level intelligence officer, in an email to a colleague, called the administration’s assurances of Assad’s responsibility a ‘ruse.’ The attack ‘was not the result of the current regime,’ he wrote. A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information – in terms of its timing and sequence – to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening. The distortion, he said, reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the Johnson administration reversed the sequence of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of the early bombings of North Vietnam. The same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy: ‘The guys are throwing their hands in the air and saying, “How can we help this guy” – Obama – “when he and his cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?”’49 Citing considerable evidence that Al Nusra was responsible, Hersh concluded: “The cherry-picking [of intelligence] was similar to the process used to justify the Iraq War . . . the White House’s misrepresentation of what it knew about the attack, and when, was matched by its readiness to ignore intelligence that could undermine the narrative. That information concerned Al Nusra.” He further cited a four-page top secret cable forwarded on June 20, 2013 to Deputy Director of the Defence Intelligence Agency David R. Shedd which confirmed previous reports that Al Nusra could acquire and use sarin. This effectively collapsed the central argument for Syrian government culpability, which was that it was the only party that could launch sarin attacks. “Already by late May, the senior intelligence consultant told me, the CIA had briefed the Obama administration on Al Nusra and its work with sarin,” Hersh stated, highlighting a later intelligence document

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showing that the Al Qaeda affiliate had recruited expertise from the pre-2003 Iraqi military which had had a major chemical weapons program. These assessments were complemented by a Joint Chiefs of Staff Operations Order for a potential deployment of U.S. forces to Syria, which warned that insurgents were capable of producing and employing sarin that could threaten American personnel.50 Citing talks with National Security Agency and government officials, Hersh further highlighted that America had an advanced early warning capability to closely monitor even basic low level activities at Syrian chemical sites as well as extensive surveillance of Syrian communications. None of these intelligence assets gave any indication of Syrian culpability for the Ghouta incident.51 In 2014 a former senior U.S. intelligence official with access to current intelligence told Hersh that Turkey was providing insurgents with training in chemical warfare, and that the Ghouta attack was “a covert action planned by [Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan’s people to push Obama over the red line. . . . The deal was to do something spectacular. Our senior military officers have been told by the DIA and other intelligence assets that the sarin was supplied through Turkey – that it could only have gotten there with Turkish support. The Turks also provided the training in producing the sarin and handling it.” This came as a growing consensus had formed in Ankara that the insurgency was failing and that engineering a U.S. military intervention was the most effective way to turn the tide. Erdoğan was among those known to be strongly supportive of Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria.52 A classified brief issued by the U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency stated that Al Nusra maintained a sarin production cell which represented “the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort.” “Turkey and Saudi-based chemical facilitators were attempting to obtain sarin precursors in bulk, tens of kilograms, likely for the anticipated large scale production effort in Syria,” it further highlighted. Citing sources within the Pentagon, Hersh reported that British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in Ghouta and confirmed that it didn’t match any known to exist in Syria’s arsenal. He also noted, citing a source



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with knowledge of the UN’s activities, that an investigation of the smaller Khan Al Assal chemical weapons attack in March 2013 by a UN mission had clearly shown insurgents to be responsible – although “it did not come out in public because no one wanted to know.”53 Further evidence of insurgent culpability for the Ghouta sarin attack surfaced in December, when UN reports observed strong similarities between it and the preceding smaller Khan Al Assal sarin attack, with both bearing the “same unique hallmarks.” The majority of targets struck with sarin at Khan Al Assal were Syrian Arab Army soldiers, which indicated that the strike, and by extension the latter very similar attack in Ghouta, could not have been carried out by Syrian government forces. The UN report did not explicitly assign blame for chemical attacks to any party, but gave evidence strongly implicating anti-government forces.54 Video evidence in 2014 showing chemical attacks by Al Nusra against Syrian Arab Army soldiers further undermined the case for government culpability for prior sarin use.55 UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon subsequently informed the Security Council in July that Syrian government forces had seized cylinders of sarin nerve gas from insurgents.56 The following year Kurdish militias operating in northern Syria also showed evidence that jihadist insurgents had a chemical weapons capability, seizing canisters as evidence.57 Despite the available evidence, the Ghouta sarin attack strengthened calls in the West not only for a no-fly zone, but also for a more comprehensive humanitarian-premised assault on Syria to topple its government by force. Warships from the British Royal Navy and the United States Navy were deployed close to Syrian territory within a week and by August 26 included a British aircraft carrier, an assault ship, two frigates, an attack submarine, and four American destroyers.58 British Foreign Secretary William Hague stated that day that diplomacy in Syria had failed, and that military action would be considered even without UN authorisation.59 The Western naval and air contingents in the theatre continued to grow,60 with the joint campaign being planned intended to “completely eradicate any military capabilities [Syrian President Bashar Al] Assad had” – as opposed to neutralising a

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specific weapons facility or sending a message with a limited strike. Targets included every known logistics and weapons depot, command and control facility, and military and intelligence building under Syrian government control, and would also extensively target key civilian infrastructure including electric power grids and oil and gas depots.61 On August 25 British government sources revealed that strikes could begin within a week,62 with U.S. and European officials claiming an attack was a moral obligation.63 Reflecting widespread perceptions in the West that Western powers had the right to violate international law in pursuing their foreign policy objectives, if done in the name of Western values or a perceived moral cause, the New York Times published an opinion piece on August 27 stressing that “ethics, not only laws, should guide policy decisions.” It was fittingly titled “Bomb Syria, Even If It Is Illegal.”64 In the eyes of analysts across the Western world, as expressed in multiple papers and editorials, if Western foreign policy contravened international law, it could only mean the law was too constrained. The Europeans and Americans’ right to attack non-Western countries was considered above being questioned.65 This extreme outlook, driven by the idea of Western supremacy, would force Damascus and its partners to resort to more active means than reliance on the law to prevent a Western attack. A successful Western assault was expected to result in a takeover of Damascus by Western-backed Islamist militants and a setting back of economic and social progress in the country by many generations, as had been seen in Afghanistan in 1992 when Western support similarly brought jihadists to power. A Western attack was ultimately prevented not by the evidence of culpability for the Ghouta incident, which as an atrocity fabrication was the key pretext for U.S.-led intervention, but rather by multiple strategic factors. Regarding President Obama’s reservations, his advisor Benjamin Rhodes observed: “He did not see where a more interventionist military option led us, other than being deeper and deeper in a conflict that is extraordinarily complex and shows no signs of having a military solution.” Plans presented to Obama “didn’t feel fully baked,” according to



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Rhodes, with much uncertainty regarding the consequences an attack could have.66 The Pentagon estimated that should the Syrian government be toppled, 75,000 U.S. personnel would be required on the ground to secure the country’s sizeable chemical and ballistic missiles arsenals to prevent them from being acquired by Al Qaeda or other jihadist groups.67 Such a commitment threatened to unravel the Pivot to Asia initiative entirely, and Obama refused to issue an executive order for an attack and instead sought authorisation from Congress. Concerns that war in Syria would be unaffordable given America’s already overstrained overseas commitments were widely shared by members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,68 with the recent memory of how the Iraq War weakened America’s standing in the world being a major factor. Syria’s longstanding strategic partner Russia notably took a firm stance, slamming Western efforts to “create artificial groundless excuses for a military intervention in the region” and to commit “a crude violation of international law” by attacking a UN member state.69 The chief of the Russian parliament’s foreign affairs committee Alexei Pushkov warned on September 11 that if Washington attacked Syria, Moscow would consider drastically increasing arms sales to Iran and restricting supplies to U.S. forces in Afghanistan through Russian territory.70 Russian President Vladimir Putin further indicated that an American attack would undermine future cooperation on the Iranian nuclear program, with Moscow having many more drastic cards to play to bolster Tehran, the Western Bloc’s primary regional adversary, should Syria come under direct attack.71 A major turning point was a vote in the British parliament of 285 to 272 against endorsing military action, with the vote heavily influenced by concerns that attacking Syria would lead to conflict with the country’s allies. Hezbollah, Iran and Russia were respectively mentioned 11, 43 and 68 times when the vote was being discussed in parliament.72 On September 9, amid fast receding support for an attack in the U.S., Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov proposed that Syria place its chemical weapons arsenal under international control for destruction. President Putin published an article in the

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New York Times three days later arguing for preserving international law and denying Al Qaeda the opportunity to gain ground in Syria, and instead proposed cooperation between Washington and Moscow to peacefully destroy Syria’s chemical arsenal. “No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists,” he stated.73 The U.S. and its European partners officially accepted the proposal through a Framework Agreement signed on September 14 and agreed to by all members of the UN Security Council under Resolution 2118. This led to Syria’s entire chemical arsenal being neutralised by June 23, 2014, by a joint mission of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Syria had been vigilant enough to pursue and maintain a formidable deterrent capability, including survivable ballistic missile launchers capable of engaging NATO targets across the region and beyond with conventional and chemical warheads, as well as relatively capable conventional forces. While Western powers would no longer consider military intervention to topple the Syrian state after 2013, however, future allegations of chemical weapons attacks would be used as pretexts to launch more limited illegal strikes to further strengthen insurgents and strain the resources of Damascus and its allies. Preventing a government victory and a return to the pre-war status quo remained a key Western objective. White Helmets, Political Theatre and More Western Attacks By the spring of 2017, four years after the Eastern Ghouta sarin attacks, special forces from the U.S. and several of its European partners had been deployed to support a new insurgent coalition in Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which received considerable Western material and air support. The SDF had replaced the Free Syrian as the primary recipient of Western backing and managed to occupy a significant segment of Syrian territory after wresting it from the control of the Islamic State (IS)



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terror group. It relied heavily on growing numbers of Islamist militias to swell its ranks, with jihadist factions joining in the first quarter of 2016 alone including the Martyrs of Dam Brigade, the Martyr Qasim Areef Battalion, the Soldiers of the Two Holy Mosques Brigade – a former part of the Army of Mujaheddeen – and the Jihad in the Path of God Brigade. The SDF also relied on the forceful conscription of local men in captured areas,74 as well as forced recruitment of children of both genders, some as young as 13, who were forced into active duty according to United Nations reports.75 Following the disintegration of the Islamic State, which had quickly expanded from 2014 to hold the largest portion of Syrian territory the following year, Syrian government forces and the U.S. and SDF fiercely competed to capture territory formerly held by the terror group. As tensions between Washington and Damascus escalated, the Western-backed White Helmets organisation in April alleged that the Syrian government had carried out a chemical weapons attack in the town of Khan Shaykhun in the Idlib governate on April 4, 2017. The governments of the United States, Britain, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel quickly claimed that Damascus was responsible.76 Russia and Syria denied the allegations, claiming that the attack had been staged by the White Helmets to provide the Western powers with a pretext to attack Syrian government positions.77 It was only the following year that U.S. Defence Secretary James Mattis conceded what Damascus, Moscow and several journalists and analysts had emphasised from the outset – namely that there was no evidence of a Syrian chemical attack in Khan Shaykhun. “We have other reports from the battlefield from people who claim it’s been used [but] we do not have evidence of it,” Mattis stated, indicating the White Helmets had essentially been taken at their word as a pretext for military action. “We’re looking for evidence of it,” Mattis concluded, but a year later there was still nothing to implicate Damascus.78 Considering the level of intelligence sharing between NATO allies, Mattis’ statement directly contradicted a French claim from a year prior that Paris had undeniable proof of Syrian government culpability. France’s

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evidence either did not exist or was deemed insufficient by the U.S.79 The White Helmets had played a growing role in the Syrian War since 2014, and was the centre of much controversy with Russia, Iran and Syria all considering it a terrorist organisation while the Western powers hailed it as a humanitarian group. It received funding from many of the same parties which were sponsoring the Islamist insurgency against the Syrian state. The organisation received extremely polarised coverage in global media, with major Western outlets issuing sharp rebukes to even slight criticisms of it.80 Non-Western and ‘alternative media’ outlets meanwhile repeatedly published images of White Helmets and Al Qaeda affiliated jihadists standing side by side, alongside verified quotes from jihadist groups praising the organisation’s members as comrades in arms against Damascus.81 The White Helmets’ ties with radical jihadist groups led to it being banned from operating in both Kurdish and government controlled parts of Syria.82 The leading co-founder of the White Helmets organisation was former British Army officer James Le Mesurier, also a former member of the Olive Group private security firm which would later merge with America’s Blackwater. The Russian Foreign Ministry claimed Le Mesurier was also a former MI6 agent, which was not uncommon for retired officers involved such activities.83 Journalists and observers in Syria issued multiple harsh criticisms of the White Helmets, slamming it as a tool for atrocity fabrication to further Western interests which was exacerbating the population’s suffering. Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett, who reported from the frontlines in the country, presented considerable evidence that the White Helmets frequently staged videos for propaganda purposes,84 although such claims were roundly dismissed across major Western news outlets. Australian journalist John Pilger similarly referred to the White Helmets as a “complete propaganda construct” of the Al Qaeda affiliated Al Nusra Front.85 British journalist Vanessa Beeley, who observed the Syrian conflict for several weeks on the ground and conducted multiple recorded interviews with locals,86 similarly concluded that the White Helmets had “ties to private security firms and to deep state



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in both U.S. and UK.” It was being used to fabricate atrocities and provide pretexts for Western military intervention and was comprised of members of Al Qaeda linked terror groups.87 Delegations from the British parliament’s House of Lords and from the Church of England who visited Syria as observers in 2018 fully verified the claims made by Bartlettt, Beeley, Pilger and others.88 Claims regarding the White Helmets’ nature as a propaganda group were supported by later footage of a White Helmets film set in Syria showing an SAA chemical attack being staged, with actors appearing in multiple scenes playing the roles of both victims and paramedics.89 Footage of White Helmets not only posing with members of UN-recognized terrorist groups, but also assisting jihadist militants in disposing of the bodies of beheaded Syrian soldiers, supported the claim that the group was indeed linked to jihadist terror operations in the country.90 Western claims that the Syrian government was the perpetrator of a sarin attack in Idlib in April 2017 were highly questionable, not only because of the aforementioned evidence showing that insurgents had a sarin capability, but also because the evidence of any sarin use at all was in this case questionable. Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter notably criticised the OPCW investigation on the grounds that it relied almost solely on chemical samples provided by the White Helmets and groups with ties to the insurgency. This gave these actors, which had much to gain from implicating Damascus and providing a pretext for Western military action, considerable room to fabricate evidence.91 Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations announced that samples had also been provided to British scientists and “tested positive for sarin or a sarin-like substance,” although when journalist Tim Ripley from Jane’s Defence Weekly sought to access the scientific reports through a Freedom of Information Act, the Foreign Office refused to “confirm or deny” whether they actually existed.92 Evidence was thus tenuous not only that the Syrian government was complicity in a sarin attack, but that any kind of sarin attack had occurred. Washington nevertheless pledged to take military action against Damascus, with the Syrian Air Force’s Shayrat Airbase

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near the city of Palmyra chosen as the target on the basis of claims that the chemical attack had been launched from the facility. The U.S. had no legal pretext for launching a strike, not only because the sarin attack was unproven but also because use of chemical weapons did not equate to a green light for Western attacks against a UN member state under international law. Due to the significant presence of Russian forces in Syria, which had intervened with Damascus’ permission in August 2015 to pre-empt Western and Turkish plans for safe zones and no-fly zones on Syrian soil, any potential attack was seriously complicated by the need to avoid direct clashes with the Russian Military.93 Fifty-nine Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched from American destroyers, representing a relatively modest strike with munitions which had neither the speed nor the penetrative capabilities to threaten targets sheltered by fortifications. The Russian presence ensured the SAA had prior warning and was able to take cover, and the physical impact of the attack was limited.94 Had Russian units not been present to hold the Western powers in check, however, the fabricated Syrian sarin attack could have potentially been used as a pretext for a much larger and more damaging assault rather than the token strike actually launched.ii The West’s centuries-old view of itself both as the possessor of the world’s supreme moral and humanitarian values, and as a steward of global order with universal jurisdiction to intervene in line with these values, was consistently seen to supersede international law when pertaining to attacks on non-Western UN member states. This resulted in considerable demand in the Western world ii Moscow slammed the American attack as “an act of aggression against a sovereign country violating the norms of international law under a trumped-up pretext,” claiming that it was an attempt to distract attention from growing reports of the high civilian casualties caused by American operations in Iraq. This was likely a reference to the ongoing battle for Mosul, which saw a particularly high death toll among non-combatants and multiple allegations of serious U.S. war crimes. (‘Putin calls US strikes against Syria “aggression against sovereign country”,’ TASS, April 7, 2017.) (Malsin, Jared, ‘Civilian Casualties from American Airstrikes in the War Against ISIS Are at an All-Time High,’ Time, March 26, 2017.)



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for military action against Syria, with the illegal strike appearing to be intended primarily to satisfy this rather than to meaningfully erode the SAA’s capabilities. The U.S. attack was further seen to benefit the American position in Northeast Asia, the primary foreign policy focus of both the Trump and Obama administrations, as a show of force to signal both North Korea and China at a particularly sensitive time. Tensions with Pyongyang were rising fast in early 2017, with the East Asian state on the verge of developing a viable nuclear missile deterrent capable of striking the American mainland which it proceeded to demonstrate later that year.95 The U.S. had come to rely heavily on pressuring China, North Korea’s leading trading partner, to increase pressure on Pyongyang.96 With Beijing having effectively closed the only legal avenue for unprovoked Western attacks on either North Korea or Syria with its veto at the United Nations Security Council, it was thus notable that the American attack on Syria was launched as President Donald Trump was hosting his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping for dinner. Syria was a close economic and defence partner of both China and North Korea, and the attack sent an unmistakable message that American military action could not be constrained by international law, the UN Charter or the Security Council. By demonstrating a willingness to launch attacks without UNSC approval and as brazen crimes of aggression, the American strike on Syria had serious implications for the Korean Peninsula. Trump reportedly leaned over to Xi mid-meal and informed him that a strike which he had ordered was then underway.97 Although Xi succeeded over the following days in convincing Trump that China was not in a position to influence Pyongyang,98 the American attack arguably had far greater significance for Northeast Asia than it did for Syria itself.99 North Korea cited this kind of illegal Western military action, which it termed “a clear and unforgivable act of aggression against a sovereign state,” as precisely the reason why it was pursuing a nuclear deterrent in the first place.100 Washington’s ability to signal its adversaries in such a way was directly facilitated by the ability to fabricate atrocities as pretexts for its military strikes.

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Douma and Another Western Attack on Syria On April 7, 2018, an alleged chemical weapons attack in the insurgent-held southwestern city of Douma killed an estimated 40 to 50 people, leading to a chain of events which largely mirrored that from April the previous year. Claiming to have proof of Damascus’ culpability, France led the Western world in blaming the Syrian government and in calling for military action in response, with Britain and the United States closely following.101 Russia and Syria both claimed that the incident was staged, with the Syrian Foreign Ministry referring to Western claims of such attacks as having become an “unconvincing stereotype.”102 A number of analysts supported the assessment that the attack was indeed staged on the basis of both available evidence that the White Helmets had staged such attacks in the past, and because the Syrian government, having almost neutralised the insurgency in that part of the country, had no incentive to carry out chemical attacks. The Russian Military had notably issued statements in mid-March citing “reliable intelligence” that the White Helmets and affiliated militants were planning to stage and film a chemical weapons attack on civilians as a means of providing Western powers with a pretext to launch another attack.103 At the United Nations Security Council the three Western permanent members vetoed a Russian-proposed resolution to investigate the alleged chemical attack, with Russia reciprocating by vetoing a Western-proposed resolution that could have legitimised a Western attack on the Syrian government. On April 14 France, Britain and the U.S. again bypassed the Council to launch another attack on Syrian government positions, and like their attack in April 2017 it constituted a crime of aggression without provocation or UN authorisation.104 The BBC highlighted that the justification for the attack “would return the world to the era before the advent of the UN Charter” – which had outlawed crimes of aggression and stripped states of the right to unilaterally attack others.105 The strikes were nevertheless supported by both the European Union106 and by NATO.107



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It was particularly notable that no evidence of Syrian culpability had been presented, with the Western attack carried out just hours before inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons arrived in the country.108 Sites targeted included a scientific research centre in Damascus, an equipment storage facility and command post near Homs, and multiple alleged chemical weapons storage facilities.109 This was still far more moderate than the assault which would likely have been launched had Russian forces not been present, and represented only a small fraction of the firepower the Western powers had intended to bring to bear in the planned 2013 assault. American B-1B heavy bombers deploying from Qatar fired nineteen JASSM-A cruise missiles, which were supplemented by sixty Tomahawk missiles fired by a cruiser and two destroyers from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. This was disputed by an anonymous official from the U.S. Department of Defence who informed the Washington Post that 100 Tomahawk missiles had been launched – with the discrepancy potentially covering for the fact that several missiles may have been intercepted.110 A nuclear powered attack submarine launched six more Tomahawks from the Mediterranean, with 28 fighters and two electronic warfare jets deployed as a precaution against Syrian retaliation. Britain and France between them launched 20 cruise missiles from nine fighter jets and a frigate, with the attack force supported by extensive aerial refuelling, airborne early warning and reconnaissance aircraft from the U.S. and France. As had been the case in 2017 the Western powers were deterred from launching anything more than a token attack, which was harshly criticised by Turkish and Israeli officials for not going further and destroying more targets.111 Multiple reports indicated that the attack had been blunted by Syrian defences which shot down several missiles,112 and although these were unconfirmed, the SAA had demonstrated improved air defence capabilities against highly survivable targets in the preceding months.113 While a larger Western attack had been deterred, Western analysts widely questioned why Syria’s government could not be brought down completely with military action, as the governments

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of Iraq, Panama, Libya, Grenada and many more before them had been. A notable example was an article published by The Conversation titled: ‘Why Can’t Trump Just Take Out Assad?.’ This issue was raised on the dual basis that not only did the West have an inherent right as the self-perceived global policeman and moral leader to act above international law and determine which governments could stay and which needed to be brought down, but also that the West had near unrestricted power to do so in the post-Cold War world. While the former remained central to the predominant European and American views of the West’s place in the world, the latter was no longer the case.iii With Russia’s air defences and fighters on standby, and its warships and bombers beyond Syria well within a few minutes’ range of it, the U.S. was forced to refrain from its tendency to launch strikes on the capitals of third world countries and assassinate their leaders. As the Western powers repeatedly demonstrated that they could violate international norms and laws against military aggression with impunity, very often relying on atrocity fabrication for justification, military force appeared to many state actors to be vital as a means to rein in Western ambitions. The OPCW released its report on the alleged Douma chemical weapons attack in December 2019, which sparked considerable controversy due to both the methodology used and the leaks by whistleblowers from within the organisation highlighting misconduct in the investigation. While the report alleged that the Syrian government was responsible for a chemical attack, leaked documents and emails showed that a significant number of the inspectors raised the issue that the final report “did not reflect the views of the team members that deployed to Douma.”114 The documents revealed that the OPCW had omitted evidence which had strongly contradicted the claim that Syria had been responsible.

iii President Donald Trump claimed in 2020 that he had supported taking military action to kill the Syrian president in April 2018 but had been dissuaded by Defence Secretary James Mattis. (Woodward, Alex, ‘‘‘I had shot to take out Assad”: Trump claims he was close to killing Syrian leader but Mattis stopped him,’ The Independent, September 15, 2020.)



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Regarding how the report reached its conclusions British OPCW engineer & ballistics expert Ian Henderson, who had been on the ground in Douma at the site of the alleged attack as part of the investigation team, noted: My concern which is shared by a number of other inspectors relates to the subsequent [OPCW] management lockdown and the practices in the later analysis and compilation of the final report. There were two teams deployed, one team, which I joined shortly after the start of field deployments, was to Douma in Syria. The other team deployed to country X. The main concern relates to the announcement, in July 2018, of a new concept, the so-called FFM [Fact-Finding Mission] core team which essentially resulted in the dismissal of all of the inspectors who had been on the team deployed to locations in Douma and had been following up with their findings and analysis. The findings in the final FFM report were contradictory, were a complete turnaround with what the team had understood collectively during and after the Douma deployments and by the time of release of the interim report, in July 2018, our understanding was that we had serious misgivings that any chemical attack had occurred. What the final FFM report does not make clear, and thus does not reflect the views of the team members who deployed to Douma, in which case I can only really speak for myself at this stage. The report did not make clear what new findings, facts, information, data or analysis in the fields of witness testimony, toxicology studies, chemical analysis and engineering and or ballistic studies, had resulted in a complete turnaround in the situation from what was understood by the majority of the team and the entire Douma team in July 2018. In my case, I had followed up with a further six months of engineering and ballistics studies into the cylinders,

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the result of which had provided further support for the view there had not been a chemical attack.115 The conclusions of the team on the ground were essentially discarded, while the OPCW put forward the entirely contradictory conclusions of a second team based outside Syria instead.116 Several of Henderson’s colleagues made similar reports regarding the nature of the OPCW’s investigation. Significant documentation released through Wikileaks supported these claims and highlighted the deliberate omission and misrepresentation of evidence.117 Former Director of Britain’s special forces Major General John Holmes, who had headed a panel of nine to hear whistleblower testimony from a senior OPCW scientist in Brussels, said the case for a lack of OPCW transparency in the Douma investigation was “very convincing.” He stressed the possibility that perhaps “the issued report did not reflect the findings on the ground.”118 The whistleblower, reporting anonymously as ‘Alex,’ had stated that “most of the Douma team felt the two reports on the incident, the interim and final reports, were procedurally irregular and possibly fraudulent.”119 Holmes highlighted that ‘Alex’ “stood there for four-five hours and he had proof of all his allegations,” and that he was “extremely well qualified” for his position and highly convincing. All the documents in the whistleblower report, according to Holmes, contained strong indicators that the OPCW report did not reflect the findings on the ground. He cited as an example the positions of the alleged gas canisters which showed that they could not have been dropped from the air by SAA aircraft as the White Helmets and the final OPCW report had claimed. Holmes highlighted that biases and external influences on the OPCW’s procedures could lead to the organisation losing credibility, and that it was essential for the organisation to prevent such recurrences for the sake of its reputation.120 Former Chief of Staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and retired Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson similarly stressed that the OPCW’s conduct in Douma needed to be corrected for the sake of the organisation’s future credibility and viability. The investigation, he stated, was “a very convoluted process which



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produced a good report [the first report exonerated Damascus] and then produced a report that was more politically influenced than it was a report on the facts.” He described it as a “tragic mistake,” an “egregious situation” and “an attempt to subvert an otherwise pretty sound organisation.” Wilkerson noted regarding the OPCW report that it came as part of a broader trend under which the U.S. placed immense pressure on international organisations bias their work in favour of its interests – something he had witnessed firsthand. He highlighted as an example the efforts leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq to pressure the International Atomic Energy Agency to fall in line with allegations that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons, which was the central pretext for taking military action but went against all available evidence. Another example was the extensive U.S. effort to ensure that from its foundation the International Criminal Court would never prosecute Americans for war crimes. Beyond these two examples Wilkerson stated: “we brought undue pressure on other international organisations to more or less influence them to make decisions that were in line with our policy preferences and in line with our security preferences.”121 Comparisons between the alleged Douma chemical attack and Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction were made widely, including by former UN Assistant Secretary-General and UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq Hans von Sponeck.122 Criticising sensational reporting on the Douma chemical attacks Wilkerson stated: I saw that some of the claims were preposterous, simply preposterous. When you see a man standing beside a crater, for example, and allege VX or Sarin was used, you know its preposterous. The man would be dead. I know how effective these kinds of chemical weapons are. And I know also what kind of weapons Syria had in stockpile. We had a dossier on that. . . . Count me very sceptical on even any use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government in Syria, that’s the start point.123

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Former British ambassador to Syria Peter Ford noted regarding the danger to Western interests posed by revelations that the chemical weapons allegations were false: It’s an embarrassing development for the three powers [U.S., Britain and France] which used the pretext of the Douma incident to bomb Syria in 2018. The whole narrative for the war of Syria would come apart at the seams. It would call into question not only the Douma incident but all the other many incidents that had been cited to allegedly prove that Assad is a butcher who is gassing his people. And the thing about Douma is that it was the one and only occasion when independent international experts were able to go to the alleged site of the alleged incident and actually find out what went on or what didn’t go on in this case. . . . The evidence pointed away from Assad being responsible. It’s clear from the latest leaks that the people, the experts who actually went to the site were very unhappy about the way their findings were doctored by other officials of the OPCW, some of whom were working from Turkey and working hand-in-glove with the Western powers.124 Ford referred to claims of Syrian Arab Army chemical weapons attacks on civilians as “the crux of the anti-Syria narrative” in the West. He stressed that these allegations were vital to prevent the Syrian government from being seen as the ‘good side’ in the war whenever evidence emerged that the anti-government insurgency was mainly comprised of Al Qaeda type Islamist groups.125 Much as was the case with critics of the White Helmets, Western media outlets would harshly attack those journalists, experts and investigators who highlighted the considerable inconsistencies in the allegations being made against the Syrian state. (For a fuller account by the author of the Syrian War, including all incidents surrounding chemical weapons, atrocity fabrication and Western military intervention, see A. B. Abrams’



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book World War in Syria: Global Conflict on Middle Eastern Battlefields, Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2021.)

Notes 1

Little, Douglas, ‘Cold War and Covert Action: The United States and Syria, 1945–1958,’ Middle East Journal, vol. 44, Winter 1990 (pp. 51–75). Kennedy Jr., Robert F., ‘Why the Arabs Don’t Want Us in Syria,’ Politico, February 22, 2016. Fenton, Ben, ‘Macmillan backed Syria assassination plot,’ The Guardian, September 27, 2003. Copeland, Miles, The Game of Nations, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969 (p. 42). Weiner, Tim, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, New York, Anchor Books, 2007 (Notes: Chapter Nine). Blum, William, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, London, Zed Books, 2003 (Chapter 12: Syria 1956–1957). Declassified Documents Reference System: 1992 volume: document no. 2326, 10 May 1955; no. 2663, 21 September 1955; no. 2973, 9 January 1956; no. 2974, 16 January 1956. 1993 volume: document no. 2953, 14 December 1955; no. 2954, 26 January 1956; no. 2955, 27 January 1956. 2 Kaplan, Fred, ‘Assad’s Situation,’ Slate, April 15, 2003. 3 Final (Third) Presidential Debate of 2012 U.S. Presidential Election, October 22, 2012. 4 Ahmed, Nafeez, ‘Peak oil, climate change and pipeline geopolitics driving Syria conflict,’ The Guardian, May 13, 2013. Kennedy Jr., Robert F., ‘Why the Arabs Don’t Want Us in Syria,’ Politico, February 22, 2016. Orenstein, Mitchell A. and Romer, George, ‘Putin’s Gas Attack,’ Foreign Affairs, October 14, 2015. Chang, Chris, ‘Is the fight over a gas pipeline fuelling the world’s bloodiest conflict?,’ news.com.au, December 5, 2015. ‘Syria’s Pipelineistan war,’ Al Jazeera, August 6, 2012. Dr. Jill Stein on Twitter, ‘This explains so much: there are 2 proposed pipelines through Syria – 1 supported by US, 1 supported by Russia,’ October 22, 2016. 5 ‘Obama’s FY 2017 Budget Addresses Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Terrorism,’ U.S. Department of Defense, February 9, 2016. The National Military Strategy of the United States of America 2015, The United States Military’s Contribution to National Security, June 2015. 6 Ahmed, Nafeez, ‘Syria intervention plan fuelled by oil interests, not chemical weapons concern,’ The Guardian, August 30, 2013. 7 Kennedy Jr., Robert F., ‘Why the Arabs Don’t Want Us in Syria,’ Politico, February 22, 2016.

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8 ‘INSIGHT – military intervention in Syria, post withdrawal status of forces,’ Wikileaks, March 6, 2012. Thomson, Alex, ‘“Spooks” view on Syria: what wikileaks revealed,’ Channel 4, August 28, 2013. Giraldi, Philip, ‘NATO Vs. Syria,’ The American Conservative, December 19, 2011. 9 ‘INSIGHT – military intervention in Syria, post withdrawal status of forces,’ Wikileaks, March 6, 2012. 10 Cobain, Ian and Ross, Alice, ‘The British government’s covert propaganda campaign in Syria,’ Middle East Eye, February 19, 2020. 11 Ignatius, David, ‘Al-Qaeda affiliate playing larger role in Syria rebellion,’ Washington Post, November 30, 2012. 12 Ibid. 13 Isachenkov, Vladimir, ‘US asks Russia to not hit Nusra Front in Syria, Moscow says,’ AP News, June 3, 2016. 14 Mojon, Jean-Marc, ‘Syria revolt attracts motley foreign jihadi corps,’ Daily Star, August 18, 2012. 15 LaFranch, Howard, ‘For newly recognized Syrian rebel coalition, a first dispute with US,’ Christian Science Monitor, December 12, 2012. 16 ‘Syrian protesters slam U.S. blacklisting of jihadist group,’ The Daily Star, December 14, 2012. 17 Sherlock, Ruth, ‘Syrian rebels defy US and pledge allegiance to jihadi group,’ The Telegraph, December 10, 2019. 18 Chulov, Martin, ‘The Houla massacre: reconstructing the events of 25 May,’ The Guardian, June 1, 2012. 19 Hermann, Rainer, ‘Syrien. Eine Auslöschung’ [Syria. An extinction], Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 13, 2012. 20 Oweis, Khaled Yacoub, ‘Syria activists report “massacre” by army near Damascus,’ Reuters, August 25, 2012. 21 Fisk, Robert, ‘Inside Daraya – how a failed prisoner swap turned into a massacre,’ The Independent, August 29, 2012. 22 Stack, Liam and Mourtada, Hania, ‘Members of Assad’s Sect Blamed in Syria Killings,’ The New York Times, December 12, 2012. 23 Thompson, Alex, ‘Was there a massacre in the Syrian town of Aqrab?’ Channel Four, December 14, 2012. 24 Somaiya, Ravi and Chivers, C. J. and Shoumali, Karam, ‘NBC News Alters Account of Correspondent’s Kidnapping in Syria,’ The New York Times, April 15, 2015. 25 Allison, Roy, ‘Russia and Syria: explaining alignment with a regime in crisis,’ International Affairs, vol. 89, no. 4, 2013 (p. 796). 26 ‘Prospects for Syrian No-fly Zone Assessed at USIP,’ United States Institute of Peace, May 30, 2013. 27 Cooper, Scott, ‘A Syrian no-fly zone is the moral and strategic thing to do,’ Washington Post, April 5, 2013. 28 Simpson, Connor, ‘Obama Wants His No-Fly Zone War Plan for Syria,’ The Atlantic, May 28, 2013.



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29 Stolberg, Sheryl Gay, ‘Lawmakers Call for Stronger US Action in Syria,’ The New York Times, April 28, 2013. Entous, Adam, ‘Inside Obama’s Syria Debate,’ Wall Street Journal, March 29, 2013. 30 Simpson, Connor, ‘Obama Wants His No-Fly Zone War Plan for Syria,’ The Atlantic, May 28, 2013. ‘Turkey PM “will support” Syria no-fly zone,’ Al Jazeera, May 10, 2013. 31 Simpson, Connor, ‘Obama Wants His No-Fly Zone War Plan for Syria,’ The Atlantic, May 28, 2013. 32 ‘Prospects for Syrian No-fly Zone Assessed at USIP,’ United States Institute of Peace, May 30, 2013. 33 Nelson, Nigel, ‘Syrian warplanes flee after testing defences at British air base in Cyprus,’ The Mirror, September 8, 2013. ‘Syria’s Most Dangerous Strike Fighter Squadron: The Role of T4 Base’s Su-24M2 Jets in Damascus Defence,’ Military Watch Magazine, February 11, 2022. 34 De Luce, Dan, ‘Obama’s Criticism of No-Fly Zone and Humanitarian Corridors Options for Syria,’ Atlantic Council, June 18, 2013. 35 Hughes, Dana, ‘Will a No-Fly Zone Really Work in Syria?,’ ABC News, June 15, 2013. Hafezi, Parisa and Solomon, Erika, ‘U.S. considers no-fly zone after Syria crosses nerve gas “red line”,’ Reuters, June 14, 2013. 36 Hughes, Dana, ‘Will a No-Fly Zone Really Work in Syria?,’ ABC News, June 15, 2013. 37 Abrams, A. B., Immovable Object: North Korea’s 70 Years At War with American Power, Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2020 (Chapter 13: The 21st Century and Renewed “Maximum Pressure”). 38 Fray, Keith, ‘China’s leap forward: overtaking the US as world’s biggest economy,’ Financial Times, October 8, 2014. Allison, Graham, ‘China Is Now the World’s Largest Economy. We Shouldn’t Be Shocked.,’ National Interest, October 15, 2020. 39 Sanger, David E. and Schmitt, Eric, ‘Pentagon Says 75,000 Troops Might Be Needed to Seize Syria Chemical Arms,’ The New York Times, November 15, 2012. ‘Securing Syrian Chemical Sites May Require 75,000 Troops: U.S. Military,’ NTI, November 16, 2012. Martosko, David, ‘Revealed: Pentagon knew in 2012 that it would take 75,000 GROUND TROOPS to secure Syria’s chemical weapons facilities,’ Daily Mail, September 5, 2013. Foust, Joshua, ‘Obama’s Wrong, Syria’s Chemical Weapons Require Boots on the Ground,’ Defense One, September 11, 2013. Lee, Adrian, ‘Seymour Hersh Alleges Obama Administration Lied on Syria Gas Attack,’ The Atlantic, December 8, 2013. 40 Everett, Burgess, ‘McCain, Graham call for no-fly zone,’ Politico, June 13, 2013. 41 Sheva, Arutz, ‘Syria: Up to 635 Reported Dead in Chemical Attack,’ Israel National News, August 21, 2013.

438 ATROCITY FABRICATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 42 ‘UN: “Convincing evidence” of Syria chemical attack,’ New York Post, September 16, 2013. 43 ‘Obama warns Syria not to cross “red line”,’ CNN, August 21, 2012. 44 Mcelroy, Damien, ‘UN accuses Syrian rebels of chemical weapons use,’ The Telegraph, May 6, 2013. 45 ‘Turkey arrests 12 in raids on “terrorist” organization,’ Reuters, May 30, 2013. 46 Chivers, Christopher John, ‘New Study Refines View of Sarin Attack in Syria,’ The New York Times, December 28, 2013. 47 Gavlak, Dale and Ababneh, Yahya, ‘Syrians in Ghouta Claim SaudiSupplied Rebels Behind Chemical Attack,’ Mint Press News, August 29, 2013. 48 Hussain, Murtaza, ‘NSA Document Says Saudi Prince Directly Ordered Coordinatted Attack by Syrian Rebels on Damascus,’ The Intercept, October 24, 2017. 49 Lee, Adrian, ‘Seymour Hersh Alleges Obama Administration Lied on Syria Gas Attack,’ The Atlantic, December 8, 2013. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Hersh, Seymour M., ‘The Red Line and the Rat Line,’ London Review of Books, vol. 36, no. 8, April 2014. 53 Ibid. 54 ‘Report on Chemical Weapons Attacks in Syria,’ UN Human Rights Council, February 2014. 55 Turbeville, Brandon, ‘New Video Evidence Points To al-Nusra Chemical Attack Against Syrian Soldiers,’ Brandon Turbeville, May 5, 2014. 56 ‘“Abandoned” barrels containing deadly sarin seized in rebel-held Syria,’ RT, July 8, 2014. 57 Akbar, Jay, ‘More evidence emerges of ISIS using chemical weapons as Kurdish fighters seize chlorine canisters after suicide bomb attack that left them “dizzy, nauseous and weak”,’ Daily Mail, March 14, 2015. 58 LaGrone, Sam, ‘U.S. and U.K. Move Ships Closer to Syria,’ USNI News, August 26, 2013. 59 ‘Syria crisis: Diplomacy has not worked, says William Hague,’ BBC News, August 26, 2013. 60 ‘Official: 5th destroyer headed to the Med,’ Navy Times, August 29, 2013. Shalal-Esa, Andrea, ‘Sixth U.S. ship now in eastern Mediterranean “as precaution”,’ Yahoo News, August 30, 2013. 61 Hersh, Seymour M., ‘The Red Line and the Rat Line,’ London Review of Books, vol. 36, no. 8, April 2014. 62 Ross, Tim and Farmer, Ben, ‘Navy ready to launch first strike on Syria,’ The Telegraph, August 25, 2013. 63 ‘John Kerry: Syria’s Chemical Attacks “A Moral Obscenity”,’ The Atlantic, August 26, 2013. ‘Syria crisis: UK draws up contingency military plans,’ BBC News, August 27, 2013.



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64 Hurd, Ian, ‘Bomb Syria, Even if It Is Illegal,’ The New York Times, August 27, 2013. 65 ‘Syria, chemical weapons and the limits of international law,’ The Conversation, April 16, 2018. Sterio, Milena, ‘Syria and the Limits of International Law,’ ILG2, April 12, 2018. Partlett, William, ‘Does it matter that strikes against Syria violate international law?,’ Pursuit: University of Melbourne, April 16, 2018. 66 Warrick, Joby, Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, New York, Doubleday, 2015 (Chapter 20). 67 Sanger, David E. and Schmitt, Eric, ‘Pentagon Says 75,000 Troops Might Be Needed to Seize Syria Chemical Arms,’ The New York Times, November 15, 2012. ‘Securing Syrian Chemical Sites May Require 75,000 Troops: U.S. Military,’ NTI, November 16, 2012. Martosko, David, ‘Revealed: Pentagon knew in 2012 that it would take 75,000 GROUND TROOPS to secure Syria’s chemical weapons facilities,’ Daily Mail, September 5, 2013. Foust, Joshua, ‘Obama’s Wrong, Syria’s Chemical Weapons Require Boots on the Ground,’ Defense One, September 11, 2013. Lee, Adrian, ‘Seymour Hersh Alleges Obama Administration Lied on Syria Gas Attack,’ The Atlantic, December 8, 2013. 68 Smith, Matt and Levs, Josh and Smith-Spark, Laura, ‘Draft resolution on Syria would limit strike to 60 days,’ CNN, September 4, 2013. 69 ‘Syria crisis: Russia and China step up warning over strike,’ BBC News, August 27, 2013. 70 ‘Russia threatens to arm Iran if US strikes Syria,’ Los Angeles Daily News, September 11, 2013. Anishchuk, Alexei, ‘Russia could boost Iran arms sales if U.S. strikes Syria: Putin ally,’ Reuters, September 11, 2013. 71 Putin, Vladimir V., ‘A Plea for Caution From Russia,’ The New York Times, September 12, 2013. 72 Glazebrook, Dan, ‘The British parliament only likes to attack the weak,’ Asia Times, September 6, 2013. 73 Black, Joseph Laurence and Johns, Michael, The Return of the Cold War: Ukraine, the West and Russia, London, Routledge, 2016. Mamlyuk, Boris N., ‘The Ukraine Crisis, Cold War II, and International Law,’ The German Law Journal, vol. 16, no. 3, 2015 (pp. 479–522). 74 ‘Residents of Manbij protest against conscription in Kurdish militias,’ Zaman Al Wasl, November 5, 2017. ‘Manbij residents face off against SDF over conscription policy,’ Al Monitor, November 24, 2017. ‘Tension and resentment in Manbij due to tens of arrests of young men by the military police for the “self-defense duty”,’ SOHR, November 7, 2017. 75 ‘UN: US-backed SDF recruits children,’ Al Jazeera, March 7, 2018. ‘Syrian Democratic Forces arrested a girl for conscription in Aleppo city on May 23,’ SNHR, May 29, 2020.

440 ATROCITY FABRICATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 76 Ripley, Tim, Operation Aleppo: Russia’s War in Syria, Lancaster, TelicHerrick Publications, 2018 (pp. 168–170). 77 Bellingeer III, John B., ‘Legal Questions Loom Over Syria Strikes,’ Council on Foreign Relations, April 15, 2018. 78 Burns, Robert, ‘US has no evidence of Syrian use of sarin gas, Mattis says,’ Associated Press, February 2, 2018. 79 Smith-Spark, Laura, ‘France “has proof” Assad regime was behind Syria chemical weapon attack,’ CNN, April 26, 2017. 80 Solon, Olivia, ‘How Syria’s White Helmets became victims of an online propaganda machine,’ The Guardian, December 18, 2017. 81 Blumenthal, Max and Norton, Ben, ‘Yet another video shows U.S.-funded white helmets assisting public-held executions in rebel-held Syria,’ Salon, May 25, 2017. Tuberville, Brandon, ‘Al-Qaeda Leader Praises White Helmets As “Hidden Soldiers of The Revolution”,’ Mint Press News, May 9, 2017. 82 van Wilgenburg, Wladimir, ‘Kurds say White Helmets not welcome to help fight fires in northeast Syria,’ Kurdistan 24, June 14, 2019. 83 Sanchez, Raf et al., ‘James Le Mesurier, British ex-army officer who trained Syria’s White Helmets, found dead in Istanbul,’ The Telegraph, November 11, 2019. 84 Almasian, Kevork, ‘Eva Bartlett Debunks Syrian War & Exposes White Helmets,’ Syriana, May 30, 2018. Bartlett, Eva, ‘Decision to bring White Helmets to Canada dangerous and criminal,’ RT, August 10, 2018. 85 ‘How the World May End – John Pilger on Venezuela, Trump & Russia,” Going Underground – RT (Youtube Channel), May 25, 2017. 86 ‘Eastern Ghouta – White Helmets Embedded with Terrorist Groups,’ Vanessa Beeley (Youtube Channel), May 6, 2018. ‘White Helmets Working With Al Qaeda: Bab Al Nairab, Aleppo,’ Vanessa Beeley (Youtube Channel), May 2, 2017. 87 Beeley, Vanessa, ‘John Pilger: The White Helmets Are A “Complete Propaganda Construct”,’ Mintpressnews, May 26, 2017. 88 Kennedy, Dominic, ‘White Helmets left Omran Daqneesh in pain to harm Assad, claims Rev Andrew Ashdown”,’ The Times, June 5, 2018. Kennedy, Dominic, ‘Syria trips by clergy and peers “undermine UK”,’ The Times, October 27, 2018. 89 ‘White Helmets making staged video of Idlib chemical attack – SANA,’ TASS, September 22, 2018. 90 ‘Syria’s White Helmets suspend members caught on camera during rebel execution,’ RT, May 19, 2017. ‘White Helmets member caught on camera disposing of Syrian soldiers’ mutilated bodies,’ RT, June 23, 2017. 91 Ritter, Scott, ‘Ex-Weapons Inspector: Trump’s Sarin Claims Built On “Lie”,’ The American Conservative, June 29, 2017. 92 Ripley, Tim, Operation Aleppo: Russia’s War in Syria, Lancaster, TelicHerrick Publications, 2018 (p. 162).



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93 Vanden Brook, Tom and Onyanga-Omara, Jane and Korte, Gregory, ‘Pentagon says Russia could have stopped Syrian chemical weapons attack,’ USA Today, April 7, 2017. 94 Rogoway, Tyler, ‘America’s Tomahawk Missile Attack on Syria’s Shayrat Air Base Was a Sham,’ The Drive, April 7, 2017. Read, Zen, ‘Syrians Say Air Base Operational Just One Day After U.S. Cruise Missile Strikes,’ Haaretz, April 8, 2017. 95 Abrams, A. B., Immovable Object: North Korea’s 70 Years At War with American Power, Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2020 (Chapter 14: Introducing Mutual Vulnerability: Implications of North Korea Attaining a NuclearTipped ICBM). Warrick, Joby and Nakashima, Ellen and Fifield, Anna, ‘North Korea now making missile-ready nuclear weapons, U.S. analysts say,’ Washington Post, August 8, 2017. Dominguez, Gabriel, ‘USFK confirms North Korea’s Hwaseong-15 ICBM can target all of US mainland,’ Janes, July 11, 2019. 96 Mullen, Mike and Nunn, Sam and Mount, Adam, A Sharper Choice on North Korea: Engaging China for a Stable Northeast Asia, Council on Foreign Relations, Independent Task Force Report No. 74, September 2016. Background Briefing by Senior Administration Officials on the Visit of President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China, Washington DC, April 4, 2017. Baker, Gerard and Lee, Carol and Bender, Michael, ‘Trump Says He Offered China Better Trade Terms in Exchange for Help on North Korea,’ Wall Street Journal, April 22, 2017. Lee, Dong Hyuk, ‘Analysis: What Trump Inherited from Obama,’ VOA, June 7, 2018. 97 Alexander, Harriet and Boyle, Danny and Henderson, Barney, ‘US Launches Strike on Syria – How it Unfolded,’ The Telegraph, April 7, 2017. 98 Baker, Gerard and Lee, Carol and Bender, Michael, ‘Trump Says He Offered China Better Trade Terms in Exchange for Help on North Korea,’ Wall Street Journal, April 22, 2017. 99 Abrams, A. B., Immovable Object: North Korea’s 70 Years At War with American Power, Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2020 (Chapter 20). 100 Park, Ju-min and Kim, Jack, ‘North Korea calls U.S. strikes on Syria “unforgivable”,’ Reuters, April 8, 2017. 101 ‘Syria “chemical attack”: France’s President Macron “has proof”,’ BBC News, April 12, 2018. 102  ‘Foreign Ministry: Allegations of using chemical weapons unconvincing stereotype,’ Syrian Arab News Agency, April 8, 2018. 103 ‘Russia says U.S. plans to strike Damascus, pledges military response,’ Reuters, March 13, 2018. 104 Bellingeer III, John B., ‘Legal Questions Loom Over Syria Strikes,’ Council on Foreign Relations, April 15, 2018. ‘Syria strikes violated international law–are the rules of foreign intervention changing?,’ The Conversation, April 18, 2018.

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105 Weller, Marc, ‘Syria air strikes: Were they legal?,’ BBC News, April 14, 2018. 106 ‘Mogherini says EU backs strikes on Syria, reiterates political solution,’ Xinhua, April 14, 2018. Oroschakoff, Kalina, ‘Broad support from EU leaders for Syria strikes,’ Politico, April 14, 2018. 107 ‘Statement by the NATO Secretary General on the actions against the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons facilities and capabilities,’ NATO Press Release, April 14, 2018. 108 Burns, Robert and Colvin, Jill and Miller, Zeke, ‘Trump: US, allied strikes aimed at Syria’s chemical weapons,’ AP News, April 14, 2018. 109 Rocha, Veronica and Wills, Amanda and Ries, Brian, ‘US, UK and France strike Syria,’ CNN, April 13, 2018. ‘Syria air strikes: UK confident strikes were successful, says PM,’ BBC News, April 14, 2018. 110 Gearan, Anne and Ryan, Missy, ‘U.S. launches missile strikes in Syria,’ Washington Post, April 13, 2018. 111 Derbyshire, Jonathan, ‘Opinion today: Syria strikes accomplish little,’ Financial Times, April 17, 2018. McCausland, Phil and Talmazan, Yuliya, ‘Trump’s U.S.-led airstrike on Syria won’t stop Assad’s chemical capabilities, experts say,’ NBC News, April 15, 2018. Mason, Paul, ‘Futile air strikes on Syria won’t defeat Assad and Putin,’ New Statesman, April 11, 2018. Al-Marashi, Ibrahim, ‘Trump’s strike didn’t stop Assad last year and won’t stop him now,’ Al Jazeera, April 14, 2018. Bergman, Ronen, ‘Israeli intelligence: Objectives of Western strike in Syria not achieved,’ Ynet News, April 17, 2018. 112 Beaumont, Peter and Roth, Andrew, ‘Russia claims Syria air defences shot down 71 of 103 missiles,’ The Guardian, April 14, 2018. 113 ‘Syria shoots down Israeli warplane as conflict escalates,’ BBC News, February 10, 2018. 114 ‘Douma false “chemical weapon” narrative: Ian Henderson speaks to UN about OPCW report,’ Vanessa Beeley (Youtube Channel), January 20, 2020. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid. 117 ‘OPCW Douma Docs,’ Wikileaks (https://wikileaks.org/opcw-douma/ document/). ‘OPCW Douma Docs, Omission_of_ppb_levels_in_Interim_R_on_6-July,’ Wikileaks (https://wikileaks.org/opcw-douma/document/Omission_of_ ppb_ levels_in_Interim_R_on_6-July/). ‘OPCW Douma Docs, DG-memo1,’ Wikileaks (https://wikileaks.org/opcwdouma/document/DG-memo1/). 118 ‘Ex-British Special Forces Director- OPCW Could Lose All Credibility Over Syria Douma Leaks!,’ Going Underground, RT (Youtube Channel), January 27, 2020 (Episode 836). 119 ONeill, James, ‘Emerging Evidence on Continuing Allied Lies About the War in Syria,’ New Eastern Outlook, February 19, 2020.



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120 ‘Ex-British Special Forces Director- OPCW Could Lose All Credibility Over Syria Douma Leaks!,’ Going Underground, RT (Youtube Channel), January 27, 2020 (Episode 836). 121 Lawrence Wilkerson Speaking at the Arria-Formula Meeting of the United Nations Security Council, April 16, 2021. 122 Hans von Sponeck Speaking at the Arria-Formula Meeting of the United Nations Security Council, April 16, 2021. Aaron Maté, ‘Did Trump Bomb Syria on False Grounds?,’ Nation, July 24, 2020. 123 Lawrence Wilkerson Speaking at the Arria-Formula Meeting of the United Nations Security Council, April 16, 2021. 124 Becker, Brian and Kirakou, John, ‘Loud and Clear News of the Day – With Peter Ford,’ Sputnik News, December 17, 2019. ‘Western Narrative of Syrian Chemical Attacks “Comes Apart at Seams” Amid OPCW Leaks,’ Sputnik News, December 18, 2019. 125 Becker, Brian and Kirakou, John, ‘Loud and Clear News of the Day – With Peter Ford,’ Sputnik News, December 17, 2019. ‘Western Narrative of Syrian Chemical Attacks “Comes Apart at Seams” Amid OPCW Leaks,’ Sputnik News, December 18, 2019.

Chapter Ten

Xinjiang and the Sino-U.S.Conflict Xinjiang Security Challenges and Foreign Involvement China’s westernmost province of Xinjiang has for centuries been home a diversity of ethnic groups including Tibetans, Tajiks, Hui, Han and Uyghur (otherwise Uygur/Uighur) peoples. Rich in natural resources including arable land and fossil fuels,1 its position bordering eight central and south Asian countries including oil rich Russia and Kazakhstan has made the province an artery for overland energy imports with a key role in China’s food and energy security. Xinjiang’s secure and expanding pipelines became particularly important in the 2010s as prominent American strategists began to highlight the possibility of cutting China’s maritime energy imports via distant blockade to strangle its economy.2 The province’s emergence as a major logistics hub for China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to integrate the economies of Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe only amplified its strategic importance, as it increasingly represented China’s door to Eurasia. The American strategic imperative of preventing Eurasian economic integration, most famously articulated by one of Washington’s leading geopolitical strategists Zbigniew Brzezinski,3 provided a strong motivation for Washington to target BRI. The U.S. Senate’s Strategic Competition Act of 2021, which allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to creating media content negatively covering i BRI-associated programs, was one i One notable example of the negative press BRI received was Foreign Policy’s January 2020 article: ‘Welcome to the Belt and Road Pandemic.’ It asserted that China’s economic integration with neighbouring states was negative as it made the East Asian country “impossible to quarantine,” although the events of the following weeks strongly disproved this. (Garrett, Larry, ‘Welcome to

444



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of many consequences, and leveraged various state propaganda tools such as Radio Free Asia which simultaneously received significant funding increases.4 Xinjiang’s position meant American and allied efforts to stifle BRI also came to target the province’s economy and its stability from the late 2010s, with these efforts escalating the following decade. Like Tibet before it in the 1950s and 60s (see Chapter 3), U.S. efforts to stir unrest in Xinjiang leveraged the relatively low living standards of the province’s Muslim and Turkic Uyghur ethnic minority. Having migrated to China from Central Asia in previous centuries, their nomadic lifestyle fuelled low literacy and education rates and at times caused difficulties integrating into modern society. Many Uyghurs were thus susceptible to Islamic extremism with significant numbers joining UN-recognised terrorist organisations such as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM),ii which later rebranded itself as the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), as well as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State to fight in multiple jihadist wars overseas. The possibility of expanded terrorist attacks by radicalised Uyghurs, and of the minority’s economic status fuelling recruitment to radical groups, had the potential to turn Xinjiang into another Tibet or a Chechnya should radical elements be strengthened sufficiently. The U.S. and many of its allies, most notably Britain and Turkey, had very long histories of supporting radical Islamist forces in states outside the Western sphere of influence. In Indonesia, for example, the CIA had in the 1960s funded and cooperated closely with Islamist elements which launched multiple armed rebellions and assassination attempts on the life of the country’s president.5 Islamists then played a central role in the 1965 Western-backed the Belt and Road Pandemic,’ Foreign Policy, January 24, 2020.) ii According to the New York based Council on Foreign Relations, the ETIM terror group “seeks an independent state called East Turkestan that would cover an area including parts of Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.” It thus represented a transnational threat across Central Asia, with China being its primary target. (Xu, Beina and  Fletcher, Holly and Bajoria, Jayshree, ‘The East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM),’ Council on Foreign Relations, September 4, 2014).

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military coup in the country, and were responsible for a large portion of the killings of suspected communists, the Chinese minority, government supporters and their families.6 Deaths primarily at the hands of Islamists and the military were estimated at between 500,000 and over 3 million,7 with the U.S. embassy providing the kill lists used and thereby effectively eliminating opposition to Western interests in Indonesia.8 This was supported by broadcasts by British intelligence posing as local nationalists urging further killings and further vilifying the politically unfavourable elements which the Islamists were targeting.9 In Afghanistan radical Islamist insurgents received several billion dollars’ worth of material support from the CIA and Britain’s MI6 from July 1979,10 with radicals chosen for backing over more moderate anti-government factions.11 The CIA Station Chief in Kabul Graham E. Fuller described the primary recipients of armaments as “nasty” and “ideologically zealous.”12 Justified on the basis of alleged Afghan and allied Soviet humanitarian abuses, Western intervention strengthened extremist militias over both more moderate factions and the government, moving the country in a more radical direction and paving the way for the rise of Al Qaeda.13 Similar Western operations to support Islamist jihadist insurgencies have been far from uncommon, and have ranged from planned British and French operations to destabilise Muslim regions of the Soviet Union in the 1940s,14 to later Western operations in Libya and Syria (see Chapters 8 and 9). Graham E. Fuller, a key architect of the Afghan insurgency who then served as the CIA National Council on Intelligence’s deputy director, stated regarding the agency’s support for Islamist insurgents in the Russian Caucasus in the 1990s: “The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvellously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilise what remains of Russian power.”15 The U.S. Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare’s director, Yossef Bodansky, detailed the CIA’s strategy to destabilise Central Asia by using Islamist proxies as follows:



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A formal meeting in Azerbaijan in December 1999 in which specific programs for the training and equipping of Mujahedeen from the Caucasus, Central/South Asia and the Arab world were discussed and agreed upon, culminating in Washington’s tacit encouragement of both Muslim allies and U.S. ‘private security companies’ . . . to assist the Chechens and their Islamist allies to surge in the spring of 2000 and sustain the ensuing Jihad for a long time . . . Islamist Jihad in the Caucasus as a way to deprive Russia of a viable pipeline route through spiralling violence and terrorism.16 Russian government agencies claimed to have evidence of contacts between Islamist insurgents and Western intelligence agencies,17 and in the late 2010s and early 2020s repeatedly claimed that the U.S. was actively supporting the Islamic State and other radical groups in both Syria18 and Afghanistan.19 Allegations of U.S. supportiii for jihadists in Syria were made by all non-Western state actors with boots on the ground,20 and even by Congressmen and Senators in the U.S. itself.21 As Western cooperation with Islamist groups expanded, and as Washington’s attentions came to focus more on Beijing in the 2010s, the possibility of similar operations targeting Xinjiang only grew. In 2018 former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, noted to this effect that a primary reason for the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan was its proximity to powerful Uyghur Islamist militants in Xinjiang: If the CIA has to mount an operation using those Uyghurs, as [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan has done in Turkey against [Syrian President Bashar Al] Assad, there are 20,000 of them in Idlib in Syria right now for example . . . those Uyghurs that Erdogan invited iii For a fuller history of Western cooperation with Islamist groups, see Chapter 2 of the writer’s prior work: World War in Syria: Global Conflict on Middle Eastern Battlefields, Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2021.

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in. Well, the CIA would want to destabilise China and that would be the best way to do it. To foment unrest and to join with those Uyghurs in pushing the Han Chinese and Beijing from internal places rather than external.22 Wilkerson’s assessment was supported by former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who in 2018 strongly implied that Western powers were supporting terrorists in Afghanistan to use the country as a hub for jihadist operations into neighbouring states. Having served as president for 13 years and worked closely with NATO states, Karzai recalled regarding the Islamic State (IS) terror group in Afghanistan: “every day the local people, the local elders, government officials, media and others began to report that unmarked foreign helicopters, would go in and support extremists in all parts of the country . . . there’s a lot of evidence, unfortunately, that shows that these extremist forces are supplied from the foreign bases within Afghanistan.”23 The only foreign bases in the country belonged to the U.S.-led coalition, with Karzai claiming that support for IS jihadists was given “for objectives beyond Afghanistan, to cause trouble in the region.”24 As Afghanistan bordered Xinjiang, Iran, and major Chinese BRI partners, a terrorist presence could seriously undermine Western adversaries. FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds noted in a 2015 interview to similar effect regarding the cultivation of jihadist elements in Xinjiang: a lot of these people are taken out [of China] by the operatives, in this case most of the time by the Turks. And they are taken out, they are trained, and then they are armed, and then they are sent back. And there are various areas with porous borders. Even if you look at Afghanistan, especially now that we [NATO] have Afghanistan as a kind of base, you can see how easy it is to smuggle these people out – I mean to get them out, train them, militarily train them and arm them, tell them what to do in terms of the next stage of operations, then send them back from the other side going through



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central Asian Caucuses to Afghanistan and then back to Xinjiang where, lo and behold, some terror events take place and people have no idea – how did they get the guns, how were they trained militarily because Xinjiang is under China’s control? Well, they are trained outside. So that is the goal and that is the operation.”25 Edmonds predicted that the West would fabricate allegations of humanitarian abuses in Xinjiang and ensure that its media gave the issue considerable attention to fuel anti-Chinese sentiments, just as the U.S. had previously done in Tibetiv where a similar campaign of training militants outside the country had been pursued from the 1950s.26 While the Turkistan Islamic Party was responsible for terror attacks on civilians across the Chinese mainland, its forces were deployed to Syria alongside jihadists from across the Muslim world in the 2010s. There they proved highly effective in combat, using drones and car bombs to take a significant toll on the Syrian Army in early 2020 in particular,27 and were considered to have exerted a disproportionate influence over the areas occupied and been a major boon to the insurgency due to their ferocity.28 Turkey had long retained close ties to Islamist groups in Xinjiang, iv Chinese embassy sources directly linked Western intentions towards Xinjiang with U.S. and British-led operations to destabilize Afghanistan in the 1970s and 80s. Regarding the Chinese view of the issue, an article published on the official website of the embassy in Brussels noted: “Terrorists entered Xinjiang from the battlefields in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria. Some violent terrorist organizations overtly clamoured for targeting and attacking Chinese nationals. Between 1997 and 2014, the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement frequently plotted and carried out terrorist attacks, which claimed more than 1,000 civilian lives.” It claimed that the U.S. and other Western states “directed their intelligence establishments and anti-China scholars to mobilise Uyghur diaspora groups in spinning out misinformation” for three purposes. These were to give the impression that Xinjiang’s population widely supported separation, to lionize Uyghur Islamist and separatist groups much as had been done for jihadists in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and to make false claims of severe government human rights violations in the province and thereby vilify Beijing. (‘Things to know about all the lies on Xinjiang: How have they come about?,’ Website of the Chinese Embassy in Belgium, April 29, 2021.)

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and an estimated 5000 fighters had been recruited from there to join various terror groups in Syria29 – although some estimates were considerably higher.30 According to Western reporters on the ground and civilians interviewed, TIP militants committed particularly severe atrocities against the local population.31 The Uyghur jihadists’ bastion in Syria’s Idlib governate straddling the Turkish border had been of considerable concern in Beijing, resulting in greater Chinese interest in the Syrian conflict and closer security cooperation and intelligence sharing with Damascus.32 Other support for counterterror operations was also provided the exact nature of which was not confirmed.33 Many militants interviewed considered Idlib to be a staging ground and opportunity to gain experience for attacks on China,34 with one Uyghur jihadist in Syria informing the Associated Press in 2017: “We didn’t care how the fighting went or who [Syrian President] Assad was. We just wanted to learn how to use the weapons and then go back to China.”35 Multiple sources affirmed that this was Uyghur militants’ primary goalv both in Syria36 and from operations elsewhere in the world,37 with Chinese military officials reaching the same conclusion.38 As early as October 2012 Chinese Major General Yin Jinan warned that “East Turkestan organisations are taking advantage of the Syrian civil war to obtain experience and raise the profile of Xinjiang among jihadists from other theatres.”39 A 2016 report by Riyadh-based Al Arabiya similarly observed that the number of Uyghur militants in Syria had grown rapidly over the past year, with their presence concentrated in “the strategic town of Al Shoghur, Ariha, and the highlands of Jabal Al Zawiya” near Turkey as they settled in deserted towns formerly inhabited by religious minorities.40 Minorities such as the Alawites mentioned by Al Arabiya were frequently massacred by jihadists from the war’s v ETIM’s leader Abd al-Haqq al Turkistani notably called on Uyghur jihadists in 2016 “to make jihad in Sham [Syria and Iraq], help their brothers, and tomorrow the soldiers of Islam must be willing to return to China to emancipate the Western province of Xinjiang from the communist invaders.” (Botobekov, Uran, ‘China’s Nightmare: Xinjiang Jihadists Go Global,’ The Diplomat, August 17, 2016.)



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outset, with Executive Director of the Middle East Centre for Reporting and Analysis Seth J. Frantzman thus observing that militants in Idlib “spend their time attacking local people and killing minorities,” and that “religious minorities have all been removed from an area that was once diverse.”41 As early as September 3, 2015, TIP-affiliated Uyghur jihadists were observed ethnically cleansing Syrian settlements and colonising them with their families,42 massacring and otherwise terrorising Syria’s Christian, Shiite and Druze minorities, desecrating religious sites and participating in suicide bombings.43 Fighting for both Al Qaeda and Islamic State,44 and demonstrating a particular tendency to rely on child soldiers,45 they established multiple terrorist training camps in Syria46 Playing a central rolevi in facilitating Uyghur militants’ deployments to Syria, the Turkish government provided forged Turkish documents and directed recruits them to seek the assistance of Turkish embassies if apprehended.47 Turkish nationals with ties to security services also operated smuggling rings to move recruits out of China.48 Both Middle Eastern and Chinese sources widely reported that Turkey supplied fake passports to this end,49 as part of Ankara’s wider policy of backing Islamist terror groups fighting against the Syrian government.50 In Idlib Turkey ensured jihadists could sustain their war with food and supplies, and actively deployed its military to protect them. This went as far as shooting down Syrian aircraft deep inside Syrian airspace without provocation,51 deploying fighter jets and rocket artillery to provide fire support to terrorists on the ground,52 and interspersing its special forces among the jihadists as advisors.53 vi The significance of Turkish support for the international operations of Uyghur jihadist groups was alluded to by experts from RAND Corporation and the U.S. Army War College in 2017 as follows: “If the Turkish government decides to increase, stem or halt support for Uighur issues, UFFs [Uyghur foreign fighters] in Iraq, Syria and as far away as Southeast Asia would feel the effects.” They highlighted statements by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan which made him the only world leader to publicly voice support for ETIM’s mission. (Clarke, Colin P. and Rexton Kan, Paul, ‘Uighur Foreign Fighters: An Underexamined Jihadist Challenge,’ International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, November 2017.)

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It was not uncommon for Syrian personnel captured by these militants to be grotesquely mutilated.54 NATO expressed full solidarity with Turkey’s actions,55 and the U.S. offered to supply ammunition to support Turkish operations alongside jihadists on Syrian soil.56 Writing for the National Interest in 2019, leading U.S. terrorism expert Professor Robert Rabil described the terror state Turkey was fostering as follows: “Idlib is virtually an Islamic state ruled by the most hardcore of Salafi-jihadis,” and that it “has the largest concentration of hardened and most unyielding Salafijihadis. Estimates of their number vary with the median ranges between sixty thousand and ninety thousand.”57 This was significantly larger than the active military manpower of most countries. Associate professor at the National Security College, Australian National University, and author of Xinjiang and China’s Rise in Central Asia: A History, Michael Clarke, observed: “The apparent linkage of Uyghur militants not only to long-standing sanctuaries in the ‘Af-Pak’ frontier region but also to the jihadist ‘witches brew’ of Syria points to an unprecedented transnationalisation of Uyghur terrorism . . . the danger for Beijing is that some may either return to Xinjiang or seek to influence or recruit others.” 58 The ability of the U.S. and its allies to direct Islamist terror groups against their adversaries was a much prized asset,59 which was perhaps most clearly seen in Syria where a jihad was created and materially supported against the Western world’s oldest state adversary in the Arab world. Terror groups directed to fight in support of NATO interests had considerable potential to destabilise countries or regions with significant Muslim populations that were aligned with Beijing including Xinjiang itself. Beyond Syria several Central, South and Southeast Asianbased Islamist terror groups, many of which had affiliated sister groups in Syria, were joined and influenced by Uyghur militants.60 A major early terror attack perpetrated by militants from the Chinese minority group was the bombing of a Buddhist shrine in Bangkok in August 2015 which caused 145 civilian casualties – the largest terror attack in Thai history. The militants had been based in Turkey and travelled to Southeast Asia specifically to carry out the attack, allegedly in retaliation for Bangkok’s cooperation



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with Beijing in counter-terrorism activities and refusal to allow Uyghur Islamists wanted by Chinese authorities to travel to safe haven in Turkey.61 Further terror attacks led transnational Uyghur militants to be considered “an underexamined Jihadist challenge,” as noted in a 2017 paper by experts from RAND Corporation and the U.S. Army War College.62 One of the largest attacks occurred on October 8, 2021, and saw Chinese Uyghur jihadists affiliated with ETIM attack an Afghan mosque causing over 100 casualties from the Shiite religious minority. The jihadists slammed the Taliban government’s relative tolerance towards the Shiite faith and pledged to slaughter Shiites across the Muslim world.63 Experts consistently highlighted that while terrorists went after softer targets abroad, there was little doubt that their final goal was “to export the fight back to Xinjiang.”64 While targeting local governments, militants also singled out Chinese interests and investments for attacks.65 An early example was an attack on the Chinese embassy in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek on August 30, 2016 by a suicide bomber, injuring two Kyrgyz security guards and three embassy staff.66 The Kyrgyz State National Security Committee disclosed that the bomber was a Uyghur and “a member of the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement,” and that an ethnic Uzbek who “underwent training in Syria in carrying out acts of terrorism and sabotage” was suspected of assisting him in making the explosive device and procuring the vehicle used. The Uzbek fled to Istanbul “several hours before the terrorist attack on August 30”.67 This was hardly an isolated incident, and in 2014 Kyrgyz border guards killed 11 ETIM members near the border with China. In China itself Uyghur Islamist militants carried out multiple major attacks primarily targeting infrastructure and civilians, including in many cases killings of the Muslim Uyghur civilians who were unsupportive of the jihadist cause. One of the earliest was the bombing of two busses and attempted bombing of a cinema and a residential building by ETIM in the provincial capital of Urumqi in 1992 causing 26 casualties.68 This was followed by the bombing of three busses in 1997 leaving nine dead and 68 seriously injured by the ETIM-affiliated Uyghur Liberation Party.69

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A year later six bombs in the city of Qaghiliq, also in Xinjiang, struck economic and industrial targets and the homes and offices of government officials and public security agents.70 In March 2008 a flight from Urumqi to Beijing was targeted by Uyghur militants, with flammable materials discovered in the plane’s toilet, although the attempt was thwarted. A separate attack linked to Xinjiang terror groups targeting the Beijing Olympics was also thwarted that year.71 Three further terror attacks on August 4, 10, and 12, 2008, targeted Kashgar, Kuqa and Yamanya respectively, all in Xinjiang, the first of which saw militants in paramilitary uniforms drive a truck into a group of approximately 70 jogging policemen before attacking them with grenades and machetes. Sixteen were killed and several more injured.72 The second saw seven militants armed with homemade explosives drive cars into government buildings causing at least three casualties.73 The third saw three security officers killed in a stabbing attack.74 ETIM was suspected of involvement in all the attacks. In July the following year major riots by radicalised Uyghurs saw at least 197 non-Muslim civilians killed and 1,721 others injured, with government sources reporting that the attacks were planned by the Munich-based and U.S. government funded separatist group the World Uyghur Congress.75 More than a dozen further attacks by radicalised Uyghur Islamists over the following decade took a heavy toll on China’s civilian population, targeting civilians indiscriminately and in many cases killing dozens at a time. A 2016 study commissioned by the U.S. government highlighted that from 2012 to 2014 attacks in China “apparently became more frequent, more geographically dispersed, and more indiscriminately targeted.”76 Targets ranged from off-duty coal miners – of whom at least 50 were killed in September 201577 – to commuters at Kunming railway station where knife-wielding militants slaughtered 31 and injured another 140 in March 2014. The Kunming attack was referred to by some analysts as ‘China’s 9/11,’ but was far from outstanding in its severity among the many attacks perpetrated.78 The most well-known attack was perpetrated on October 28, 2013, when an ETIM suicide attack on Tiananmen Square caused 40 civilian



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casualties.79 Security at Tiananmen, which symbolised the heart of the People’s Republic of China, had to be stepped up considerably afterwards. Western reports were notably frequently sympathetic towards the perpetrators of terror attacks in China, with commentaries published that would be unthinkable if Western or Western-aligned countries had been similarly targeted.80 Terror attacks by ETIM alone between 1997 and 2014 claimed more than 1,000 civilian lives in China and wounded significantly more, while also killing police, causing very extensive damage and forcing the government to divert considerably more resources to internal security.81 Attacks by other Uyghur militant groups increased the toll further. Multiple terror attacks, significant Uyghur participation in transnational jihadist campaigns particularly in Syria, growing signs of cooperation between the U.S. and its allies and transnational jihadist groups, and escalating Western efforts to place pressure on China, ultimately led Beijing to respond. From 2017 steps were taken to deradicalise parts of the Uyghur population and better integrate those vulnerable to radicalisation into society. New centres were established to teach Uyghurs in need practical skills which would allow them to better find employment and cope with modern life, and thereby reduce the appeal of criminal activities or terrorism. In light of reports that Uyghurs joining jihadist groups were almost without exception the “unskilled, and uneducated,” provision of education and employment skills was a potentially highly effective means of stemming the terrorist threat.82 By March 2019 terror attacks and crime had already begun to decline, with the chairman of Xinjiang’s regional government Shohrat Zakir announcing that the centres could close completely once their role was fulfilled.83 Official reports referred to the new faculties as vocational training centres, and while it remained questionable to what extent many Uyghurs had free choice in entering them, there were no indications from any credible sources that they were intended to do anything other than providing such training. Pakistani Xinjiang analyst Sultan M. Hali, who had spent considerable time across the border in the province and “spoken to Uyghurs and even Pakistanis having Uyghurs spouses, residing

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in Xinjiang for over three decades,” provided perhaps the best description of the intention of training centres as follows: For ages, the opulent eastern provinces of China had presented a stark contrast with the underdeveloped western provinces, but with the advent of the BRI [Belt and Road Initiative] this disparity has been removed. The sense of deprivation of the underprivileged Uyghurs was exploited by China’s disparagers to coerce them to insurgency and violent extremism. Progenitors of the propaganda machinery included Uyghurs settled in the Occident using social media to incite Uyghurs in Xinjiang to demand their rights and indulge in violence. Numerous acts of violence erupted in 2009 and since then there have been sporadic incidents. The Chinese government dealt with the issue in a novel fashion. It decided to remove the sense of deprivation of the Uyghurs by providing them opportunities of better employment, higher education and vocational training so that they could get gainfully employed in the mushroom growth of jobs offered under the BRI umbrella.84 Chinese efforts mirrored similar deradicalisation programs in Indonesia,85 France86 and other countries facing similar issues with terrorism, although due to their very different relationships with the Western world the Indonesian and French programs received entirely different coverage in Western media.87 The Chinese program saw a metanarrative created around it by Western NGOs and media outlets that was very far removed from any verifiable reality on the ground, and was based on highly dubious and in many cases entirely fabricated source materials. As China emerged as an unprecedentedly potent challenger to Western power, this narrative sought to vilify and provide pretext for hostile actions against it.



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Western Claims of Concentration Camps and Genocide in Xinjiang Following the opening of training centres in Xinjiang Western coverage almost immediately portrayed them as concentration camps, consistently using language to strongly imply parallels with the Nazi Holocaust against Europe’s minorities and at times comparing them explicitly. The narrative subsequently escalated to claim the centres were tools for genocide, and that Uyghurs were being disappeared, forcibly sterilised and enduring other similar atrocities. These claims relied overwhelmingly on U.S. government-funded anti-China groups dominated by hardline Uyghur dissidents with Islamist or separatist positions such as the World Uyghur Congress, the Uyghur Human Rights and Democracy Foundation and the Uyghur American Association. These were all heavily funded by the U.S. Congress through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED),vii which had been closely affiliated with the CIA since its foundation and tasked with carrying out overtly what the agency had formerly done alone and more covertly.88 Their reliance on defectors from Xinjiang residing in the West or in Western-aligned countries to fabricate claims of atrocities against China closely mirrored the information campaigns preceding the 2003 Iraq War (see Chapter 6) and that which targeted North Korea over a much longer period (see Chapter 7). The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) was another major source of Xinjiang genocide allegations and was heavily funded by the U.S. Congress through the NED, receiving approximately $500,000 annually. Having spent years campaigning against Beijing and in support of extreme right-wing vii The NED announced in 2020 regarding its support for Uyghur groups: “To further human rights and human dignity for all people in China, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has awarded $8,758,300 to Uyghur groups since 2004. . . . As a result of NED’s support, the Uyghur advocacy groups have grown both institutionally and professionally over the years. . . . These groups played critical roles in introducing the Uyghur cause in various international, regional, and national settings against China’s false narratives.” (‘Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act Builds on Work of NED Grantees,’ National Endowment for Democracy, May 29, 2020.)

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opposition figures, it was widely cited in Western reports as a credible and impartial source on Xinjiang. CHRD listed its address as the Washington D.C. office of  Human Rights Watch on its tax forms, which also had longstanding ties to Western intelligence agencies, and which had played a central role in promoting many of the fabricated atrocities covered throughout this work against previous targets such as Iraq.89 CHRD itself relied very heavily in its coverage of Xinjiang on citing Radio Free Asia (RFA) – a U.S. state-funded media outlet which the New York Times itself referred to as a “CIA broadcasting venture.”90 It had a long history of producing particularly ludicrous fabricated stories to vilify Western adversaries (see Chapter 7). Beyond RFA, CHRD’s sources included the World Uyghur Congress, the International Uyghur Human Rights and Democracy Foundation and the Uyghur American Association, all of which were funded by the U.S. government. These groups played comparable roles to that of the Iraqi National Congress leading up to the Iraq War and were similarly comprised of defectors dependant on Western patronage and aligned with Western interests seeking to promote policies that would undermine the governments of their home countries. World Uyghur Congress Chairman Omer Kanat was notably a former Radio Free Asia employee, and both Washington funded organisations played similar roles with Kanat’s new job having a more specific focus on Xinjiang. Other than U.S. government-funded groups, the only widely cited source for Western reports claiming Chinese abuses in Xinjiang was the German scholar Adrian Zenz. Based on inference and second-hand data, Zenz claimed in 2019 to have found that 1.5 million Uyghurs had been imprisoned in concentration camps, which he followed in 2021 with a claim that China was carrying out genocide.91 Although hailed by multiple Western media outlets as a “world leading expert” on Xinjiang and “the go to source” on the issue, as the BBC referred to him,92 Zenz’s credibility was highly questionable. He had taught exclusively in evangelical theological institutions and never at mainstream



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universities,viii and his reports on Xinjiang, although very widely cited by Western media outlets and NGOs, were not published in peer-reviewed journals overseen by academic institutions. Other significant red flags raised by Zenz’s work indicated that it was something other than honest and transparent scholarship. One was that while academic papers required funding sources to be listed, those details were missing from his publications. Another was that while the research relied heavily on Chinese language sources, and as Zenz could not read Chinese, there was likely a team of unidentified people involved in writing his papers despite his being listed as the sole author. Zenz was notably an independent contractor and senior fellow in China studies with the U.S.-government-funded Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VCMF), a far-right nonprofit with a long history of controversy particularly over its claims of crimes committed by socialist countries. Its sources for such claims were often guilty of serious data manipulation.93 The organisation long equated communism with the Nazi Holocaust and claimed 100 million deaths had resulted from the ideology – a figure which received negligible recognition from credible historians and had a very questionable methodology behind it. VCMF’s claims were considered highly dubious by most moderate conservatives and anti-communists, and Zenz’ membership alone arguably excluded him as a credible impartial source on China. Zenz himself showed strong signs of being a religious extremist who saw his work as a crusade against the leading challenger to Western global hegemony,ix stating to this effect regarding his viii At the time his allegations were made, Zenz worked as a lecturer at the German branch of the Columbia International University of the United States, an institution which considered the “Bible [to be] the ultimate foundation and the final truth in every aspect of our lives,” and had a mission to “educate people from a biblical worldview to impact the nations with the message of Christ.” (‘Core Values’ and ‘Mission,’ web pages for the Columbia International University of the United States (http://www.ciu. edu).) ix Zenz’s perceived God-given mission to depict genocide in China was far from unique. When fabricating narratives of both Iraqi mass killings and weapons of mass destruction, Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed to be working towards a God-given mission to fight evil. The aforementioned

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work on Xinjiang: “I feel very clearly led by God to do this. I’m not afraid to say that. . . . With Xinjiang, things really changed. It became like a mission, or a ministry.”94 Before his work on China, Zenz had authored the book Worthy to Escape: Why All Believers Will Not Be Raptured Before the Tribulation in which he referred to gender equality as a “satanic campaign,” and framed anti-hate crime legislation and tolerance thinking as conspiracies driven by the “leopard-like power behind the antichrist.” 95 He also decried that “rising numbers of countries are banning all forms of physical punishment of children, the primary scriptural method for instilling respect for authority in the young generation and protecting them from rebellious tendencies,” assuring readers that “true scriptural spanking is loving discipline and not violence.” All opposition and contradiction to Christian teachings, according to Zenz, were satanic.96 Christian extremists had long viewed the perpetuation of Western hegemony over the world as a holy mission – particularly when Western power was challenged by Asiatic communist countries – and Zenz thus had a strong motive to ensure his work was as damaging to China as possible. While such radical sources would usually face dismissal or ridicule, usual standards were largely forgotten as the Western world came to perceive an increasingly imminent threat to its hegemony from China’s rise. Mirroring campaigns targeting North Korea, emotional but highly inconsistent female defector testimonies formed an important part of efforts to sway world opinion against the Chinese government over alleged abuses Xinjiang. The most notable example was Tursunay Ziawudun, presented in the West as a concentration camp survivor, who gained significant publicity and support from the BBC, RFA and CNN in particular. Much like prominent North Korean defectors her narrative changed drastically over time with later versions becoming more extreme and widely deviating from the originals. Speaking to the BBC in February 2021 she alleged that female detainees in the alleged Chinese “concentration camps” Chai Ling, who sought to provoke the Chinese military to attack protestors and thereby create martyrs and a popular narrative of Chinese government brutality, also claimed her actions were executed in the name of Jesus Christ.



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were removed from the cells “every night” and raped by masked Chinese men, and that she was tortured, gang-raped and had her genitals electrocuted. “Their goal is to destroy everyone,” she stressed. The BBC cited Adrian Zenz to corroborate her claim.97 These extreme claims not only lacked corroboration by credible sources, but sharply contradicted Ziawudun’s first testimony in 2017 when she said regarding her time in the same centre: “To be honest, it wasn’t that bad. We had our phones. We had meals in the canteens. Other than being forced to stay there, everything was fine.” She stated the following year: “I wasn’t beaten or abused. The hardest part was mental.”98 Further doubts regarding Tursunay’s claims surfaced when a CNN report, which showed her passport ID page, censored the renewal date. The original image revealed not only that supposed victims of genocide held in concentration camps could be issued passports, but also that her passport had been renewed during the time she said she was in such a camp. This was speculated to be the reason why CNN censored the date.99 Ziawudun’s role drew significant parallels to that of Park Yeonmi for the campaign against North Korea, although she gained considerably less publicity and was less effectively promoted. Arslan Hidayat, another prominent Uyghur defector activist who sported an Islamist-style beard, was one of the top sources of information on Xinjiang for many in English speakers. His work proved little more reliable than that of Tursunay or his counterparts from North Korea, however, as exposed in multiple interviews. When confronted over a picture of a girl crying at a nursery, for example, which he published with a caption claiming she was a Uyghur forcibly separated from her parents by the Chinese government, Hidayat conceded that this was fake and that such falsifications were common among anti-China activists. 100 This kind of misrepresentation of photos or footage by activists and Western media outlets was far from unusual, a notable other example being a video posted on social media by a social worker in Xinjiang of herself crying with her daughter. They could only talk from a distance and could only see each other for a short time and were separated due to COVID-19 restrictions as attested to by

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the woman who posted it herself. The video was widely circulated on the internet with captions claiming the crying woman was being taken from her daughter to a concentration camp.101 When Hidayat was confronted over his claim that China was forcibly shaving the heads of Uyghur women to sell their hair as part of a $1.8 billion scheme – due to a lack of evidence or any signs of bald Uyghur women in the province – he said his source had been Radio Free Asia. To amount to sales of $1.8 billion, the 13 tons of hair said to have been forcibly collected would have needed to sell for $8,000 for each single head of hair. It was yet another ludicrous claim by the U.S. state-funded media outlet which became part of the Xinjiang metanarrative in the West.102 Like many similar claims against Chinese authorities in Xinjiang, this story was echoed by leading figures in the U.S. foreign policy establishment. A prominent example in this case was military analyst at the CIA’s Strategic Assessment Group and Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council Matthew Kroenig, a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, who repeated the impossible claim.103 Hidayat and other anti-China activists widely claimed that the Uyghur language had been banned in public places, which was frequently repeated in Western reporting. This starkly contradicted footage and testimony from foreign visitors to the province that the Uyghur language could be widely heard and that everything from street signs to restaurant menus and ID cards were written in it. When confronted over this Hidayat’s answer was highly insightful, claiming that such footage and accounts were entirely staged and the local population were being taught to read, write and speak in their allegedly banned language in case tourists showed up.104 This somewhat absurd line of argument used to justify stark discrepancies between what could be seen on the ground, and what the West and various activists claimed, was far from unique to Xinjiang. A better-known example was North Korea where it was often claimed by Western sources that hundreds of seemingly well fed, smiling and prosperous people in modern buildings were staging their activities for foreigners, that their buildings were showpieces (plastic cutouts, empty inside, or something similar)



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and that they were secretly starving and suffering immensely behind closed doors.105 The fact that this narrative was considered believable by many, particularly for Korea but also for Xinjiang, was a testament to the power Western metanarratives had. Alongside U.S. government funded media outlets and organisations and Adrian Zenz, Western claims regarding Xinjiang also relied on misrepresented footage of the province. Perhaps the most notable was drone footage which emerged in September 2019 which it was claimed showed hundreds of concentration camp prisoners chained and blindfolded in a railway marshalling yard, which was allegedly taken by activists in August. The footage was widely cited by Western news outlets and political figures as evidence of ongoing genocide.106 There was no evidence that the prisoners were from a select ethnic group, and a closer look at the images showed that their hoods read ‘Kashi Detention House’ – a criminal detention facility which had nothing to do with Uyghurs or the government’s education centres. Indeed, the treatment and level of security shown strongly contrasted the known conditions in the centres. A zoomed-out image revealed that the number of prisoners was much smaller than the impression given by the screenshots or clips used in Western reports. As the footage was consistently mislabelled in the West, the Auschwitz Museum in Poland was among the many Western sources to heighten the perception of genocidal intent by publishing corresponding photographs of Jews being forced onto trains before being sent to death camps.107 A second image which came to characterise the Western narrative on Xinjiang was a photograph of men in prison uniforms sitting in rows. Taken from the Xinjiang Judicial Administration’s WeChat social media page,108 the WeChat logo was notably cut off in all major Western uses of the image which required cropping out the hands of the front row of prisoners. The BBC was the first to do this, while others then used the cropped image provided by the BBC. The photograph – dubbed by some the “world’s most misused photo” – became the West’s poster image for the alleged Chinese atrocities. It was accordingly used the cover for hundreds of articles on “concentration camps” and “genocide,” and even as

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the cover image for the Wikipedia page on “Uyghur genocide.” Looking to the original WeChat post, other photos of the same event from different angles showed that the number of prisoners was far smaller than the first angle chosen by the BBC made it appear, and that they were attending a lecture on prisoner reform. This could be seen from the slogans on the front stage as well as the original captions. The images had been taken in a regular prison in the spring of 2017 and had nothing to do with the education centres. Much like the ‘tank man’ footage outside Tiananmen square (see Chapter 3), Western sources again picked a particular image and misrepresented it to support a fabricated narrative. The metanarrative surrounding Xinjiang grew increasingly extreme from late 2017 as Sino-U.S. tensions were escalating under the Donald Trump administration, and from that time into early 2018 claims by Western sources for the number of Uyghurs forced into concentration camps ranged from 120,000 to one million.109 These figures consistently relied on Radio Free Asia as a source, which itself cited anonymous sources for its claim as it consistently had for multiple fabricated stories in the past.110 The narrative later escalated portray the entire Uyghur population being held under suspicion, and a much larger proportion being forced into camps. The term ‘genocide’ simultaneously fast became increasingly widely used. The one million figure was based on a single report by Istiqlal TV, a media organisation run by anti-Beijing Uyghur exiles based in Turkey which advocated jihad against the Chinese state to turn Xinjiang into an ‘Uyghuristan’ or ‘East Turkistan.’ The station frequently hosted terrorist figures including the leader of the UN-listed111 terrorist organisation ETIM, Abdulkadir Yapuquan, who was a regular guest. As the Los Angeles Times noted, when Istiqlal TV hosted Yapuquan “his interviews often extended into hours-long emotional tirades against China.”112 The channel’s background made the widespread use of Istiqlal TV’s figures in the West, and its treatment as a credible source, all the more remarkable. Radio Free Asia subsequently trumped Istiqlal TV’s numbers in May 2018 to become the first major source to claim a figure of



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3 million Uyghurs held in concentration camps, which was widely echoed by others now citing the U.S.-government funded outlet as their source.113 Western media outlets began to claim a figure of 1.5 million in the second quarter of 2019 based on an estimate by Adrian Zenz,114 who subsequently claimed an increased figure of 1.8 million in November 2019.115 The U.S. Defence Department formally accused China of “mass imprisonment of Chinese Muslims in concentration camps” in May 2019.116 Even larger figures would later be cited by Western activists and journalists, with Australian journalist CJ Werleman claiming “5 million Uyghur Muslims are being detained tortured and killed” in October 2020.117 He claimed the following month that “upwards of 6 million” were in concentration camps and subjected to “heinous and vicious” treatment by the state.118 An Associated Press report in June 2020 took these claims further, accusing the Chinese government of: taking draconian measures to slash birth rates among Uighurs and other minorities as part of a sweeping campaign to curb its Muslim population. . . . The campaign over the past four years in the far west region of Xinjiang is leading to what some experts are calling a form of ‘demographic genocide.’ . . . Having too many children is a major reason people are sent to detention camps, the AP found, with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines. Police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children. 119 It quoted Uyghur defectors residing overseas who claimed: “They want to destroy us as a people.” 120 Alongside the defectors, many of whom were based in Turkey, the report also relied heavily on the assessments of Adrian Zenz. It cited China experts from Britain and the U.S. referring to the policy as “genocide, full stop . . . slow, painful, creeping genocide . . . direct means of genetically reducing the Uighur population.”121

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Although Western sources widely claimed China was sterilising Uyghurs and encouraging migration by the Han majority ethnic group to colonise Xinjiang, official figures showed that the Uyghur population grew by 25.04 percent from 2010 to 2018 alone. This represented an increase of 2.55 million, up from 10.17 million to 12.72 million, which was a much higher growth rate than average for Xinjiang’s population at 13.99 percent, as well as being higher than that of all ethnic minority groups. The Han population’s growth, by contrast, was just two percent.122 Data in Adrian Zenz’s own reports showed that the Uyghur population almost doubled from 1985 to 2018 while the Han majority population fell substantially from 2015 to 2018.123 The Uyghurs, as with all 55 minority groups, had been exempted from China’s one child policy, with families of half a dozen or more being far from unheard of as a result. Although fertility rates were far above average among China’s Muslim minorities, by the 2010s they were falling for all ethnic groups as living standards improved and the economy modernised. This represented part of a globally observable trend towards families having fewer children as countries became more affluent.124 As medical statistician at St. Luke’s International University in Japan, Professor Stuart Gilmour, was one of many to observe, Western allegations of genocide and mass sterilisation relied on “present[ing] the benefits of birth control strategies as genocide,” highlighting that fertility rates were falling across much of the world. “Is every country in Asia conducting genocide on its own people?,” he posited, pointing to similar and in many cases more drastic falls in birth rates across the continent to show how this widely occurring phenomenon was being totally misrepresented to further the narrative of abuses in Xinjiang.125 In September 2020 an open letter addressed to China’s ambassador to London, signed by more than 120 British members of parliament and peers from multiple political parties, accused China of a “systematic and calculated programme of ethnic cleansing.” It referred to “sickening” misconduct and “truly chilling” behaviour, likening it to the Nazi German Holocaust. The letter cited the aforementioned railway station drone footage of



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Kashi Detention House prisoners, which was passed off as footage of Uyghur concentration camp victims, as evidence for their claim.126 Parliament passed a non-binding motion seven months later accusing China of committing genocide, although this was not supported by the British government itself.127 In November 2020 Britain’s Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott condemned the “massacres of Muslims in Uyghur” on Twitter, although having set her account to disallow replies no one could point out to her that “Uyghur” was not a place. Her claim was met with widespread surprise, as even Western human rights NGOs and media outlets hadn’t yet claimed there were massacres. This placed Abbott ahead of the curve in the campaign of escalating claims. Based on patterns set by prior Western atrocity fabrication efforts, future allegations of massacres and well-hidden mass graves in Xinjiang remained a significant possibility, and as Western claims grew increasingly extreme, they were a natural next step after allegations of concentration camps, forced sterilisation and state sanctioned rapes.128 The Western Campaign Escalates Despite being a major Al Qaeda affiliate, and having committed multiple widely recognised atrocities against civilians, the East Turkistan Islamic Party’s designation as a terrorist organisation was rescinded by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in November 2020.x This potentially paved the way for more overt support and cooperation as part of a broader campaign targeting China.129 Sofyan Tsauri, a former member of Al Qaeda in Southeast Asia, was one of many who highlighted that this could signify that the “U.S. was considering rallying radical groups to x Professor Sean R. Roberts at George Washington University, a leading commentator on Xinjiang, highlighted that designating the Al Qaeda affiliated ETIM as a terror group had been inappropriate as it had “helped to instil doubt about Uyghur grievances against the Chinese state in the eyes of the international community.” The delisting was intended to delegitimize China’s claim that there was a genuine terrorist threat in Xinjiang. (Chew, Amy, ‘How Syria’s civil war drew Uygur fighters and shaped the separatist group TIP in China’s crosshairs,’ South China Morning Post, November 29, 2020.)

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fight China.” “The U.S. used Muslims to fight against Russia . . . and later eliminated [them]. Is this same formula going to be used against China?” he posited, noting that radical jihadist groups were often supported and provoked to wage wars in ways that furthered Western geopolitical objectives.130 Chinese state media claimed that ETIM’s delisting was part of a broader campaign in the West to whitewash the terror group and reframe its history of relations with Al Qaeda.131 On January 19, 2021, Secretary Pompeo, as arguably the most hardline anti-Beijing senior official in Washington, formally accused China of genocide against the Uyghur population. This was his last major act in office,132 and came three months after the introduction of a Senate resolution in October accusing China of genocide.133 Pompeo cited Adrian Zenz by name as well as his paper alleging forced sterilisationxi as the basis for his allegations.134 Like Zenz, Pompeo was seen to “blend policy and belief”135 and professed that God “informs everything I do” – indicating that this was particularly the case in foreign policy.136 He had a history of espousing religious nationalism which particularly influenced his positions towards both Chinaxii and Muslim actors.137 The Joe Biden administration, inaugurated on January 20 just one day after Pompeo’s genocide allegation, quickly reaffirmed the statement. The State Department’s Office of the Legal Advisor, however, concluded the following month that there was insufficient evidence to prove genocide.138 Nevertheless, on February 23 and 26 the Canadian and Dutch parliaments respectively followed Washington’s lead and formally accused Beijing of committing genocide against the Uyghur minority.139 Alongside the Donald xi Like Zenz’s previous works it had never been submitted to peer review and was not published by an academic institution. xii “Our God is indeed a God of truth. We should every day seek to reflect His character in that regard. Our administration has told some very plain truths – truths that weren’t recognized or, worse, had been conveniently ignored for too long. And that perhaps starts with the Chinese Communist Party,” Pompeo noted on one occasion, issuing many other statements reflecting a similar outlook. (Pfannenstiel, Brianne, ‘Secretary of State Mike Pompeo touts approach to China, religious freedom in Iowa visit,’ Des Moines Register, July 17, 2020.)



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Trump administration these had been among the Western governments to take the most hardline positions against China, with others widely reported to be planning to follow suit. From March 2021 leading Western media outlets very widely cited a report from the Newlines Institute titled: “The Uyghur Genocide: An Examination of China’s Breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention.” It was hailed as a “landmark” and the “first independent report” to determine that China “bears State responsibility for committing genocide against the Uyghurs,” and accused Beijing of having violated “each and every act” of the UN convention against genocide. Former U.S. ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, a longstanding leading proponent of global jurisdiction for Western humanitarian military intervention,140 cited the report claiming: “This report shows how this [genocide] is precisely what China is doing with the Uyghurs.”141 Similar claims were made by leading policy hawks across the Western world. While the Newlines Institute was portrayed as being an independent and non-partisan source, closer examination showed that its credibility was highly questionable. Published on March 8, its report was very similar to one by the U.S. government-funded World Uyghur Congress less than a month prior.142 It was financed by the Newlines Institute’s parent organisation the Fairfax University of America, an institution of very poor repute which state regulators had moved to shut down in 2019 after finding “teachers weren’t qualified to teach their assigned courses,” “patently deficient” academic quality and “rampant” plagiarism that was ignored. At the time the report was published, Fairfax’s license was in jeopardy of being revoked after an advisory board to the Department of Education recommended terminating recognition of the university’s accreditor. It was considered a “visa mill” for international students rather than a legitimate university, with only 1–3 percent of its students coming from North America.143 Much like Zenz’s work, the Newlines Institute notably avoided consulting a wide range of authorities or academic experts or subjecting its study to peer review and instead relied entirely on “a narrowly focused community of like-minded ideologues” – as some analysts referred to it. The report was described by U.S.

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analysts as having “restricted its survey to a narrow range of deeply flawed pseudo-scholarship along with reports by U.S. government-backed lobbying fronts for the exiled Uyghur separatist movement.” Its primary sources other than Adrian Zenz were Radio Free Asia and the World Uyghur Congress, both of which were funded by the U.S. government.144 The report’s principal author, Yonah Diamond, had for months been a leading advocate of a hardline approach by the Western world towards China.145 He previously deemed the United Nations to be “beholden to the Chinese government” and was outspoken in calling for unilateral American action to “punish” Beijing.146 The Newlines Institute itself was also a longstanding advocate for the assertion of Western power to combat almost all major Western adversaries – each one using humanitarian pretexts – using sanctions and other means to support the overthrow of governments in Syria, Venezuela, Iran, and Russia among others. The paper’s signatories, hailed as experts, were primarily Newlines Institute members and members of the hawkish InterParliamentary Alliance on China which was another grouping known for taking particularly aggressive positions against Beijing. Considerable funding and attention were being devoted in Washington towards supporting the Xinjiang narrative and funding overseas anti-Beijing Uyghur groups, with U.S. and other Western media outlets allocating significant airtime and column space to the issue. This reflected the importance this narrative played in the broader Western campaign against China, and contributed to defining the East Asian challenger to Western hegemony as an ultimate other and as the enemy of the time. In the second week of August 2018 major Western media outlets published articles claiming that the United Nations had reported China was holding one million Uyghurs in concentration camps.147 While the claim appeared to lend unprecedented credibility to the Western narrative, subsequent assessments revealed them to be a result of serious misrepresentation of facts. A spokesperson from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Julia Gronnevet, confirmed that the allegation was not made by the United Nations in any capacity. It had been



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made only by a single member of an independent committee who had authority to speak neither for the UN as a whole nor even for the committee itself. That member was the only American on the committee and had no background of scholarship or research on China.148 The report on the purported UN claim was first made by London-based Reuters on August 10 in an article titled “U.N. says it has credible reports that China holds million Uighurs in secret camps,” and this was then quickly re-reported by every major Western media outlet. While Reuters’ headline attributed the claim to the United Nations, the body of its article ascribed it more specifically to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.149 The committee itself made clear on its own website that it was “a body of independent experts” nether comprised of UN officials nor representing the UN.150 The article was thus highly misleading and the words “U.N. says” an outright misrepresentation. The subsequent official news release from the OHCHR on the committee’s presentation highlighted that only its sole American member, Gay McDougall, had made any mention of “camps” in China with no other members indicating they supported this claim. The  Associated Press  subsequently reported that McDougall “did not specify a source for that information in her remarks at the hearing,”151 with a video of the session confirming that she provided no evidence and cited no sources. As was often the case when covering Xinjiang, Western media was portraying a Western position isolated from the wider world, and in this case the isolated position of only the United States on an international panel, as reflecting the position of the international community when this was very far from the case. American journalists Ben Norton and Ajit Singh themselves concluded after investigating Reuters’ claim that “one American member of an independent UN body made a provocative claim that China was interning 1 million Muslims but failed to provide a single named source. And Reuters and the Western corporate media ran with it anyway, attributing the unsubstantiated allegations of one U.S. individual to the UN as a whole.” The OHCHR, they

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stated, had “acknowledged that the comments by McDougall, the lone American member of an independent committee, were not representative of any finding by the UN as a whole. The report by Reuters is simply false.”152 Much as the U.S. government and various Western NGOs and think tanks had previously shown often grainy images of buildings as supposed evidence of both Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and North Korean political prison camps, so too were such images presented as sites built for the state’s genocide in Xinjiang.153 These images often turned out to be all kinds of buildings such as apartment complexes, many of which had little connection with the government.154 The Australian Defence Department-funded defence think tank, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), was responsible for a disproportionate number of these claims which went on to be widely re-reported. Chinese media outlets responded by revealing images from the ground of the areas photographed debunking supposed satellite evidence of detention centres. For example, a “4th level detention centre with a well and a watchtower” turned out to be a gerocomium. A “1st level re-education camp” turned out to be a logistics park, and two “1st level detention centres” turned out to be an elementary and middle school. From the air, however, one could claim they were just about anything.155 Images of elderly Xinjiang residents receiving medical care were similarly cited by Adrian Zenz as evidence of forced birth control in Xinjiang – although there was nothing in the photo to indicate that nor did any of the couples pictured appear to be of childbearing age.156 Western allegations of genocide and widespread abuses in Xinjiang were not only contradicted by visiting delegations from across the non-Western world, but also by Western and other foreigners on the ground in China. Much like the aforementioned allegations against North Korea, Western claims of atrocities in Xinjiang relied heavily on widespread ignorance to appear at all credible. Former London Metropolitan Police officer Jerry Grey, who spent much time travelling Xinjiang, recalled regarding how Western allegations were totally at odds with his firsthand observations:



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This is absolute rubbish – there are not a million Uighurs in concentration camps, that is just total baloney. . . . The Uyghurs that we spoke to didn’t seem to have a problem. Remember, there are 11 to 12 million Uyghurs there. There is absolutely no evidence, no real evidence, to suggest that one million of them are in camps. . . . We went to a restaurant, where they had dancers. This was not a tourist restaurant – this was just a normal restaurant. They sing and they dance. That’s what Uyghurs tend to do when they are having fun. I heard and saw the language is very much alive.xiii People speak their local language. And every shop, every menu, every restaurant has their local language written there, so when I read that the local language was being destroyed, I disagree with that. 157 “Xinjiang looks good. Safe, secure and all the people I spoke with seem happy about it,” Grey concluded.” 158 Pre-empting a common Western argument used to discredit observers who contradicted narratives against a Western adversary, namely that that adversary had carefully staged whatever the observer saw, he asserted: If anyone thinks I am telling a lie, please come over here and show me what it is that you see . . . to indicate this kind of treatment is going on. Because I didn’t see it, I saw no evidence of it and, while I saw huge security presence, I was free to travel anywhere, take pictures of anything and had no restrictions placed on me. No xiii These reflected the observations of every Xinjiang resident the writer spoke to, many of whom studied abroad whether economics at the London School of Economics, Russian at Minsk State University or Islamic Studies at Al Azhar in Cairo. It sharply contradicted the claims of news outlets, antiChina human rights groups, and political figures in the Western world, where understandings were primarily shaped by U.S. and Australian government funded sources and by Adrian Zenz rather than by anyone who spent time in the province.

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policeman has ever said to me, ‘Can I see your camera, can I see what pictures you’ve got?’ In other words, they are not afraid of me taking photographs of anything that I see. If they were afraid, they would stop me going there first – if I did go there without permission, they would want to see my photographs, nobody ever did. That tells they are not trying to hide anything. 159 Canadian businessman and analyst of Chinese politics Daniel Dumbrill, who resided in China for over a decade, noted to similar effect: We’re expected to believe that the population of Uyghurs is being eradicated. It’s a ridiculous statement whether it is in a literal sense or even a cultural sense. Uyghurs in China have been growing faster than the majority Han Chinese in part because they weren’t subject to the one-child policy, they have 20,000 mosques built,xiv their script is written on the national currency, [something he later noted Canada didn’t do for its indigenous people], the biggest star in China is a Uyghur woman who was recently signed on by LV [Louis Vuitton] as their brand ambassador, where Uyghur children can get into top universities easier than Han Chinese and have halal foods prepared for them in canteens and they have prayer areas on campus.160 Western media outlets consistently harshly criticised expatriates living in China, many of whom visited Xinjiang, who denounced Western claims of genocide. The BBC, for one, equated such questioning of the Western narrative with “spreading xiv A frequent claim by anti-China activists in the West that received particularly widespread circulation regarding mosques was that the historic Id Kah mosque in Xinjiang’s Kashgar region, listed as a key national cultural relics site, had been demolished. It later emerged that it had been closed for renovation and was reopened in 2020. (‘Renovation work gives mosques modern touch,’ China Daily, November 17, 2020.)



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Communist Party disinformation” and strongly implied the need for policing to restrict such expats’ reach on YouTube and other social media platforms.161 Even some dedicated critics of the Chinese government and its policies conceded that Western reporting and the work of hardline activists did not reflect reality on the ground. Founder of the Xinjiang Victims Database in 2018 Gene Bunin, for example, noted regarding the BBC’s reporting: “You cannot write a news story claiming systematic rape based on three eyewitness accounts, not all of whom are reliable. . . . You just can’t and the BBC should know better. Take that from someone who’s been dealing with testimonies 24/7 for the past two years now.”162 Ma Haiyun, an associate professor of history at Frostburg State University in Maryland and member of China’s Hui Muslim minority with a long family history of fighting the Chinese government, similarly noted regarding the hysteria generated around the Xinjiang issue and the resulting inability to question the Western narrative: “In the current political climate, if you publicly state that there is no genocide in Xinjiang, it will affect your reputation to the point where if I said this, half of my friends would cut me off.” “This labelling of the situation in Xinjiang as a genocide, it’s all tied to geopolitics, it’s all because of U.S.-China tensions,” he concluded.163 Ma’s claims corroborated widespread observations regarding an anti-China hysteria which gripped the Western world and led to almost any alleged Chinese atrocity, no matter how ludicrous or thinly evidenced, being portrayed as credible if not above question. Philip J. Cunningham, a Niemen Fellow at Harvard University, Knight Fellow and Fulbright Scholar, was one of many to observe that Western media was: complicit in the silencing and outright ridicule of views that don’t comport with the flavour-of-the-month trends coming out of the corridors of power. Take Xinjiang, for example. The dominant narrative at the moment is that China is committing genocide in Xinjiang. . . . Is it not worth considering the possibility that the freighted

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term ‘genocide’ is being bandied about to inflict maximum pain on China, rather than to reflect an honest assessment of the situation on the ground? 164 Observing “the juxtaposition of trains and work camps [to] evoke powerful emotions in the West,” Cunningham highlighted efforts to evoke the memory of the Holocaust. “To date, the strongest accusations come from NGOs and researchers who wear the anti-China agenda on their sleeve. . . . Their accusations, some quite horrific, are based on zero access and anecdotal information. The incompleteness of their research leaves no choice but to extrapolate. Some of the dots connect, some don’t,” he noted. Comparing the situation to the 2003 Iraq War, he highlighted that the U.S. and Britain had used “a crock of lies, half-truths and half-baked speculation” to provide pretext for their invasion – which “had the ring of truth, the imprimatur of respected agencies and elite analysts and, while they didn’t present a slam-dunk case, it was presented as such in the media.” He observed that there was effectively a witch hunt against scholars who challenged the allegations made against China, and that there was a prevailing “fear of a backlash for challenging the dominant narrative of the day.” He cited China researcher Jane Golley from Australia National University who had said scholars chose to remain anonymous when challenging the Western narrative precisely for this reason – because they were afraid.165 Echoing the observations of Cunningham and Golley regarding how Western populations were deterred from questioning key narratives, Daniel Dumbrill observed in a viral video in March 2021: People are also frightened out of asking questions. I want to give you a personal example of that. My father . . . in an academic theology forum he contributes towards, he asked the question whether we should be concerned about the intentions behind the [Western] narrative and if it really is in the best interests of the Uyghur population or if it’s being used to satisfy some



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sort of Western imperialistic agenda. His question was, how do we support the Uyghurs and how do we help them without being used as a tool. With this mild statement in mind, my father was labelled a genocide denier. Not even in a theology forum, full of academics, was he allowed to ask a question or to even question the intentions. . . . Now take that one step further, imagine someone who actually is sceptical of the whole narrative and are seeing these massive red flags. There’s no room for them in society to talk about it. Consent is being manufactured scaring people into a specific narrative . . . we didn’t learn from the problematic phrase used by George Bush during that time – ‘you’re either with us or against us.’ There’s no room to question the narrative. You can’t stand in the middle while trying to figure things out.166 This was hardly unique to commentary concerning Xinjiang, with the political culture in the West leading to widespread self-censorship particularly over claims of atrocities or national security threats. Taking the media response to fabricated claims surrounding the Iraq War as an example, Columnist Norman Solomon observed: “In contrast to state censorship, which is usually easy to recognise, self-censorship by journalists is rarely out in the open. In the highly competitive media environment, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist or social scientist to know that dissent does not boost careers. . . . The rewards of going along to get along are clear. So are the hazards of failure to toe the line.”167 Surveys repeatedly highlighted that despite rising doubts regarding the veracity of claims against Iraq, no leading U.S. outlets expressed significant disagreement and differed only on the means or urgency for disarming or overthrowing the Iraqi government. The penalty for doing more could be severe.168 This closely mirrored the case for the Xinjiang narrative. Dumbrill observed that as a direct consequence of the lack of discourse and the inability to question claims of Chinese atrocities, Western populations widely supported more hardline

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positions against China ranging from sending warships close to its coasts to installing Western missiles across East Asia. He stressed a significant conflict of interest as weapons producers played key roles in financing anti-China narratives, the leading example being Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing and others’ funding of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which resulted in public support for military pressure on Beijing.169 Dumbrill further observed the irony that Western weapons producers funding such narratives relied on exploited prison labour in the U.S. to make their components,170 which was much closer to slave labour than anything found in Xinjiang.171 U.S. journalist Max Blumenthal noted to similar effect regarding the Western narrative on Xinjiang, and the pressure not to question the narratives put out by Adrian Zenz in particular: “Within the academic world there’s a lot of pressure and censorship and self-censorship. If you speak out about this, you will pay a price. You speak out about this in media, and you will pay a price. . . . It’s pretty obvious that people get in hot water for questioning Zenz.” Tweets highlighting inconsistencies in Zenz’s stories were notably erased on many occasions, and those who opposed the Western narrative to which Zenz was central were at risk of being labelled ‘genocide deniers’ and equated with deniers of the Holocaust.172 Using language and imagery to associate Xinjiang with the European Holocaust was widespread in the West. As Quartz magazine noted in August 2020, drawing parallels to the Holocaust played an important role in the media campaign and “helped stimulate global awareness and discussion over the Xinjiang issue” – much as had been done in multiple aforementioned cases of Western atrocity fabrication from Yugoslavia to Iraq.173 Historian at Georgetown University James Millward, for example, alluded to “Beijing’s attempt to find a final solution to the Xinjiang problem . . . those of us who are students of history know what that means” – a close allusion to Nazi Germany’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” “We may see mass murder,” Millward added, stressing that while China had only stopped short of “gassing Uighurs” in camps so far it could take things further in future.174



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Allusions to China as a “new Nazi Germany” were increasingly echoed by Western politicians from 2020,xv which was consistent with prior Western atrocity fabrication efforts spanning over half a century.175 A Turning Point in Western Isolation from the International Community One of the key objectives of Western efforts to fabricate the narrative of a Chinese genocide was to turn global opinion against Beijing and unite the international community behind the West in its confrontation with China. Because similar efforts to use atrocity fabrication had been internationally successful in the past against targets ranging from Yugoslavia and (1980s) Afghanistan to North Korea and Libya, the failure of the new campaign against China to gain traction outside the Western world was widely met with surprise. Calls from Western governments, activists and media outlets for the world and Muslim countries in particular to fall in behind the West176 in criticising and taking a hard line against China were consistently met only with silence, leaving the West alone in making its tenuous claims of Chinese abuses. As an assessment by the Jamestown Foundation observed in May 2019: “Amid mounting Western criticism of China’s handling of its minorities in Xinjiang, especially over the last couple years, there has been a puzzling lack of outcry from the larger Muslim world.”177 CNN observed weeks later that Muslim countries’ support for Chinese policies in Xinjiang were “shattering any myths xv The Financial Times was the only major Western news outlet to draw attention to the “reckless analogies” being circulated widely by Western China experts and anti-China human rights activists – highlighting in 2019 the serious attacks anyone could face for contradicting them. Its U.S. national editor, Edward Luce, observed that when he claimed, “China is not Nazi Germany: reckless analogy” – hardly support for Beijing – responses were “Definitely worse,” “Count the bodies. The CCP is no better than the Nazis,” and “The only reckless thing is appeasement idiots like you downplaying what the CCP really is.” “The rise of Sinophobia in the U.S. and beyond is disturbing” Luce concluded. (Luce, Edward, ‘The reckless analogy between China and Nazi Germany,’ Financial Times, September 16, 2019.)

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of Islamic solidarity.”178 The lack of anti-Chinese statements from Muslim governments, even those aligned with Western interests such as Brunei and Saudi Arabia, and the fact that many of these actually voiced support for Beijing and its deradicalisation program, was in many ways unprecedented considering the enormity of the Western campaign. While lack of support from Muslim states for the Western narrative on Xinjiang was widely cited in the West as a sign of lacking “Islamic solidarity” and a disappointment, this was based on the assumption that this narrative was itself at all credible. What it instead appeared to reflect was the lack of credibility the West had when claiming atrocities were being committed by whichever country was at the time its target – a trend that had become particularly apparent over the past three decades. The governments of Muslim countries could well have been more aware of the magnitude of the West’s history of atrocity fabrication and other false allegations because it was very often Muslim states that were targeted. While many Muslim individuals were taken in by Western claims of an ongoing genocide, for government officials with even a modicum of political education such claims could well be viewed highly suspiciously. From Nayirah and the Kuwaiti babies in incubators to Iraqi human shredders and Syrian chemical attacks, preceding Western fabrications left the credibility among Muslim statesmen of Western claims of its adversaries’ atrocities extremely questionable. Governments in Muslim-majority states instead consistently voiced only support for China’s position. On an official visit to China in February 2019 Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman stated regarding deradicalisation policies in Xinjiang: “We respect and support China’s rights to take counter-terrorism and de-extremism measures to safeguard national security.”179 Bin-Salman issued a similar statement in March 2021 both supporting Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang and opposing Western efforts to create a wedge between China and the Islamic world.180 This was a particularly heavy blow to Western efforts to spark global outrage against and alienate the world from China, with Saudi Arabia considered the centre of Sunni Islam and



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the custodian of its holiest sites as well as a usually dependable Western client state. Riyadh’s position was framed in Western media as the kingdom “defending China’s oppression of Muslims,” “defending China’s right to put Uighurs in concentration camps,” and “giving Xi Jinping a reason to continue his ‘precursors to genocide’.”181 Such responses reflected an almost total lack of introspection and extreme degree of self-righteousness in the West. If essentially the entire non-Western world’s only comments on Chinese policies in Xinjiang were of support for Beijing, this could not be taken as an indicator that the West might be wrong on the issue. Rather, it was taken to mean that the whole world was wrong and reprehensible for not supporting the Western position, as Western allegations, like those fabricated against many Muslim countries of various abuses in the past, were portrayed as being unquestionable facts. While Western reports framed Muslim states as “reluctant to speak out against Beijing’s policies,”182 considering the significant Western pressure on Muslim states to do so, and in many cases their outright praise for China’s Xinjiang policies, what was seen appeared to be not reluctance to support the Western narrative but instead outright disdain for it. With the West presenting its narrative on Xinjiang as an undisputed truth, every Muslim country failing to support it had to be portrayed as having some ulterior motive for doing so. For poorer countries such as Pakistan, they were cast as being “paid off with aid,” while richer ones like Saudi Arabia were portrayed as being paid off by promises from Beijing not to raise their own alleged human rights issues. A nefarious Chinese influence operation was thus fabricated to explain away the Western world’s extreme international isolation on the Xinjiang issue.183 Radical anti-Beijing activists claimed that the fact that Muslim-majority countries did not accept their position showed “that there are no real Muslim countries,” as if there were then such a country “would at least do what the U.S. is doing . . . sanction Chinese officials.”184 With this radical position having almost no support outside the West, narratives focused essentially on delegitimising the voices of non-Western states on the issue.

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While Western media outlets and NGOs repeatedly claimed that foreign investigators had had no access Xinjiang, an argument which was previously used multiple times including to presume Iraq’s guilt for both killing Kuwaiti babies and developing WMD, this was very far from the case. In December 2018 diplomats from 12 countries including India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Russia, Afghanistan, Thailand and Kuwait toured Xinjiang for three days. They visited local markets, farmers, educational institutes, mosques, factories, as well as vocational education and training centres. These were the same training centres which were widely being equated in Western coverage with a new Auschwitz or Birkenau.185 This group of diplomats was just one of four visiting Xinjiang from December to February, which Reuters referred to as China “inviting waves of diplomats.”186 In January 2019xvi 12 media representatives from Egypt, Turkey,xvii Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka visited an education centre in Xinjiang and interviewed locals – representing one of several visits by non-Western press who had full access.187 In February senior diplomats from eight countries at the United Nations Geneva office visited Xinjiang and assessed Chinese government policies highly positively.188 Some of the countries represented included Egypt, Cambodia, Pakistan, Senegal and Belarus.189 Nonetheless, Reuters stressed in February xvi Also in January veteran Pakistani Xinjiang expert Sultan M. Hali, who had established close ties with Uyghur communities in China for over 30 years and spent considerable time in the province, became the latest to denounce Western portrayals as follows: “Blurred satellite pictures are presented as evidence of the so-called re-education camps where according to the biased media reports, Uighurs are kept in squalor, forced to denounce their religion. Interviews with Uighurs tearfully claiming to have escaped from the reeducation camps are also inserted in the Western media documentaries to support the allegations of harsh treatment of the Uighurs.” (Hali, Sultan M, ‘Xinjiang and the Uighur question,’ Pakistan Today, January 24, 2019.) xvii Following a deterioration of its ties with its NATO allies from 2016, culminating in the imposition of economic sanctions by the United States, Turkey remained a leading state sponsor of terror particularly in the Arab world but notably gradually altered its position on Xinjiang as it sought to boost economic ties with China.



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2019 that the West was at the time still holding out “hope that the wider Islamic world could soon start making critical comments about Xinjiang” – hopes which would quickly be further dashed.190 In March 2019 the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which represented 56 Muslim-majority countries, reported on the findings of the delegation it had sent to Xinjiang upon Beijing’s invitation. The OIC had previously been critical of Chinese policies in the province on the basis of prevailing narratives in the Western-dominated global media landscape, but after the delegation freely spoke with religious leaders and with students at training centres these narratives were found to conflict sharply with the situation on the ground. The organisation stated that it: “welcomes the outcomes of the visit conducted by the General Secretariat’s delegation upon invitation from the People’s Republic of China; commends the efforts of the People’s Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens; and looks forward to further cooperation between the OIC and the People’s Republic of China.”191 Subsequently in June the United Nations’ top counterterrorism official, the Undersecretary General for Counterterrorism, visited Xinjiang despite strong Western protests.192 The Chinese Foreign Ministry then announced that it had reached a “broad consensus” with the UN on Xinjiang. The visit was widely labelled controversial in the Western world, although outside the West there was virtually no perception of any kind of controversy.193 When the UN official failed to affirm the Western narrative after his visit this did not lead Western parties to re-evaluate their own positions but instead sparked an escalation of Western condemnation of his visit. Essentially, even if the UN or much of the non-Western world observed Xinjiang first-hand, if they failed to confirm what Western narratives were claiming then they all had to be portrayed as outright wrong and delegitimised accordingly. In August a further group of ambassadors and envoys from Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bahrain and Nigeria toured Xinjiang and evaluated the Chinese government’s efforts in a range of areas including safeguarding citizens’ freedom

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of religious belief and improving people’s livelihood. Nepalese ambassador Leela Mani Paudyal noted after the visit: The vocational education and training centres in Xinjiang are not ‘concentration camps’ as described by some Western media, but schools to help those influenced by extreme thoughts to eliminate the harmful thoughts and learn vocational skills. Every student I saw here is happy. They learn not only laws and regulations, Standard Chinese, but also professional skills, which I believe will give them an edge to adapt to the society after graduation and become a strong competitor in the job market. . . . This anti-terrorism example is worthy of learning by many countries.194 In September 2019 a delegation of envoys from 16 African countries and the African Union visited Xinjiang and toured communities, mosques and local firms. They praised the Chinese government’s efforts to promote social harmony, safeguard citizens’ freedom of religious belief and protect the traditional culture of ethnic minorities. After visiting education centres – the ones widely compared in the West to Nazi death camps – Ugandan ambassador Chrispus Kiyonga commented: “I agree with the practice of the centre, which shows that the government is responsible to its people. The students here are happy and learn a lot of practical skills.” Others made comments to similar effect.195 Foreign visits notably declined from late 2019 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, although in October 2020 envoys and diplomats from 20 Muslim-majority Arab states representing the Arab League visited Xinjiang. They commented positively on the province’s economic, social and human rights development achievements. The delegation also went to Islamic schools, mosques and other places to learn about the protection of freedom of religious belief in Xinjiang, with many of the Arab representatives subsequently slamming Western claims regarding the state of affairs as being far removed from reality.196



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In March 2021 ambassadors to China from the Republic of Congo, Burkina Faso and Sudan spoke at the Seventh Ambassador Lecture in Beijing themed ‘Xinjiang in the Eyes of African Ambassadors to China,’ reflecting highly positively on the state of affairs. Congolese ambassador Daniel Owassa stated: “Some Western forces hyping up the so-called Xinjiang-related issues are actually launching unprovoked attacks on China to serve their own ulterior motives.”197 Western media outlets responded indignantly to the fact that not a single African country would support the West’s efforts at the UN to portray China as an egregious human rights abuser – if not a genocidal actor – and criticise it as such. The BBC was among those to again frame this not as a result of the tenuous nature of Western claims, but rather that African states must have been paid off by China – the only explanation in Western eyes for states not to support ‘truth’ whatever the West dictated truth to be.198 As COVID-19 related travel restrictions were mildly relaxed in mid-2022 the United Nations’ top human rights official, the High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, made a six-day visit to Xinjiang in May. The U.S. State Department slammed the visit and the official’s subsequent “silence” on what the West claimed was an ongoing genocide.199 Bachelet confirmed that her delegation had been able to organise meetings and hold open discussions with former trainees of vocational education and training centres and people from all manner of sectors, describing the meetings as “unsupervised and organised by us.” For her visit and her failure to support the Western narrative, Bachelet faced extremely harsh criticism from across the spectrum of Western sources, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the  Campaign for Uyghurs, and the  World Uyghur Congress. Slammed as having “whitewashed China’s atrocities,” she saw widespread calls across the Western world for her resignation including from over 230 NGOs,200 with editorial boards of major papers from the Washington Post to the Guardian201 issuing special publications criticising her visit in the harshest terms. This immense Western pressure was widely thought to have been the cause for Bachelet to announce, two weeks after her return, that

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she would not seek a second term in office. Her statements nevertheless made her the latest in a long line of official visitors to Xinjiang to highlight how little substance the Western narrative had. A notable outlier in non-Western reports on Xinjiang which prompted widespread speculation as to its origins was a strongly worded OHCHR report on August 31 2022 claiming severe human rights abuses, many of which echoed the unevidenced claims made by Adrian Zenz and widely circulated by Western sources such as forced birth control for Uyghurs.202 The report was released just minutes before midnight when the term of High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet ended, with Bachelet notably neither signing her name on the final report nor releasing it to a press conference which would have been the norm. This fuelled speculation that the report was very different from what Bachelet and members of delegations who had been to Xinjiang actually wanted published – potentially mirroring the similar discrepancy between the observations of OPCW investigators on the ground in Syria and the final report on the subject of their investigation which was entirely contradictory (see Chapter 9). While UN reports, including those mentioned above among others,203 had consistently been highly positive in their findings on state policies after representatives and delegations were granted considerable access, the August report was entirely contradictory and out of line with widespread UN findings. Bachelet herself had praised Chinese authorities’ cooperation with her office, their highly successful poverty alleviation schemes, their efforts to help resolve tensions in neighbouring countries, and their full recognition of the linguistic and cultural identities of ethnic minority groups, and said she had personally interacted with supply chain managers and was encouraged by their engagement with human rights standards. The strange contradictions between the last-minute August 2022 report and the remainder of UN reports on Xinjiang, and the veracity of widespread suspicions that it had based its conclusions on materials from Western government funded sources rather than firsthand experience, remain unresolved at the time of writing.



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Western displeasure as international delegations and experts visited Xinjiang, and either failed to affirm or directly contradicted Western allegations, recalled prior U.S. opposition to UN inspectors going to Iraq in 2003 where it had been expected that their findings would disprove American claimsxviii regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.204 International responses to Chinese polices in Xinjiang and visits by foreign representatives highlighted the West’s isolation from the wider world on the issue, with the fact that non-Western countries and organisations even undertook to review the situation on the ground firsthand seen by some analysts to indicate the limited credibility Western claims had. Indeed, with the sole partial exception of Japan, even five years into the campaign in the early 2020s there was not a single non-Western country which had supported the Western narrative. The reality of this isolation was received poorly in the West, particularly among anti-China NGOs, an example being the 2019 visit by the UN Undersecretary General for Counterterrorism which Time referring to as having “infuriated” Western governments and NGOs and “provoking outcry” in the Western world.205 The West’s isolation from the world was also seen at the United Nations. Of the 22 countries which launched a joint statement to the High Commissioner of the UN Human Rights Council in July 2019, the only non-Western country was Japan.206 At the same Council session 50 countries from across the non-Western world, including 23 Muslim-majority countries, defended China’s position. Among them were Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Nigeria, the United Arab Emirates, Syria, Somalia, Egypt and Algeria.207 Western media outlets responded by asserting that almost all the 50 countries defending China were themselves human rights abusers – which itself highlighted the value of politicised human rights xviii A U.S. government source who insisted on anonymity stated in 2002 that the Bush administration “doesn’t want to have UN weapons inspectors go back in, because they might actually show that the probability of Iraq having [threatening illicit weapons] is much lower than they want us to believe.” “This administration is capable of any lie . . . in order to advance its war goal in Iraq,” the source concluded. The parallels with Xinjiang were significant. (Peterson, Scott, ‘In war, some facts less factual,’ Christian Science Monitor, September 6, 2002.)

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to the West’s geopolitical position.208 Practically any non-Western country which stepped out of line with Western geopolitical designs could be vilified as a human rights abuser, which was an effective asset used to deter countries from doing so. In October 2019 a Western bloc of 23 countries launched another round of criticism of alleged abuses in Xinjiang – which was again countered by support for China from across the non-Western world as 54 countries issued a joint statement supporting its Xinjiang policies.xix The 54 had all sent delegations to Xinjiang to observe the reality on the ground firsthand, and described policies there as having “effectively safeguarded the basic human rights of people of all ethnic groups.” Again the West, backed only by Japan, was isolated from the international community.209 Expressing frustration at the UN and non-Western countries’ reluctance to support the Western narrative on Xinjiang, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large on Women’s Issues Kelley Currie slammed “the complete lack of curiosity or concern we see from the UN” which she claimed was “failing to speak out about the situation in Xinjiang.”210 This followed harsh criticisms of the UN and of Secretary General Antonio Guterres for not taking a more assertive line in support of the Western position. A notable example xix The statement of support by 54 non-Western states read: “we commend China’s remarkable achievements in the field of human rights by adhering to the people-centred development philosophy and protecting and promoting human rights through development. . . . Now safety and security has returned to Xinjiang and the fundamental human rights of people of all ethnic groups there are safeguarded. The past three consecutive years has seen not a single terrorist attack in Xinjiang and people there enjoy a stronger sense of happiness, fulfilment and security. We note with appreciation that human rights are respected and protected in China in the process of counterterrorism and deradicalization. We appreciate China’s commitment to openness and transparency. China has invited a number of diplomats, international organizations officials and journalist to Xinjiang to witness the progress of the human rights cause and the outcomes of counterterrorism and de-radicalization there. What they saw and heard in Xinjiang completely contradicted what was reported in the media. We call on relevant countries to refrain from employing unfounded charges against China based on unconfirmed information before they visit Xinjiang.” (‘Joint Statement on Xinjiang at Third Committee Made by Belarus on Behalf of 54 Countries,’ October 30, 2019.)



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was a hardline opinion piece in the Washington Post in April 2019 by Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth, who claimed that Guterres’ term in office “is becoming defined by his silence on human rights – even as serious rights abuses proliferate” in particular in Xinjiang. Roth said while Western governments had raised the issue “Guterres has not said a word about it in public. Instead, he praises China’s development prowess and rolls out the red carpet for President Xi Jinping.”211 Again, in Western eyes it could never be the West’s tenuous allegations that may be wrong, but rather every other party, be they the Arab League, the African Union, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, or Pakistan which bordered Xinjiang, that had to be in error for failing to back the Western line.xx October 2020 saw the United States, Germany, Britain and other Western countries again press for condemnation of China at the United Nations on issues related to Xinjiang and Hong Kong, although they again gained no non-Western support other than from Japan. By contrast nearly 70 countries voiced their support for China’s position, with Pakistan, Kuwait and Cuba each leading separate groupings of nations to issue joint statements praising Beijing’s human rights and rebutting Western allegations.212 Beijing’s permanent representative to the United Nations Zhang Jun accused the United States specifically of campaigning against China to cover its own serious shortcomings, stressing that “blaming China cannot cover up your poor human rights records.” He further retorted that Washington failed to protect the basic rights of its own people, highlighting that its policies had allowed 200,000 Americans to lose their lives to COVID-19 so far.213 The same trend could be seen the following year, where in June 2021 more than 90 countries expressed support for China’s stance and 65 declared their opposition to interference in China’s domestic affairs in Xinjiang and Hong Kong. This represented a xx The West’s response was reminiscent of the First World War song by Bill Murray: “They Were All Out of Step But Jim,” in which the soldier Jim’s parents, seeing him marching out of step with the rest of his regiment, could not interpret this any other way than that the others were all out of step despite Jim’s isolation in his error.

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clear rebuke of the Western campaign.214 In July, at the 47th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, envoys of 30 countries voiced support for China’s Xinjiang policies while slamming Western efforts to fabricate claims of humanitarian abuses to undermine Beijing. Among those represented were Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Laos, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka and Russia. Representatives from Xinjiang were invited to share their stories at the meeting.215 Opposition to interference in China’s internal affairs had been voiced by 70 countries at the 46th session of the Council in March.216 Thus while Western media outlets continued to refer to “the international community’s attempt to challenge its [China’s] policy in Xinjiang,” this represented a serious misuse of the term “international community” to describe a very isolated Western position. While this was in line with a longstanding tendency for the West to perceive and portray itself as representing the world, it was a portrayal very far detached from reality.217 Just as in the 1990s when a potent metanarrative based on fabricated atrocities led much of the world to see Iraq as the ultimate ‘other’ and the leading threat to humanitarian norms, the Xinjiang narrative was similarly intended to make the targeting of China appear more justified in the eyes of Western populations whether with sanctions, military pressure or other means. Beyond the Western world multiple forms of media were used extensively to propagate the narrative and targeted Muslim populations in particular, an example being U.S. embassy web pages in Muslim countries that consistently gave particularly high publicity to the allegations.218 Pages and groups on Facebook, Twitter and other Western platforms which were followed in Muslim majority countries and published in their languages were widely seeded with videos and images purportedly showing Chinese brutality against the Uyghur Muslim minority. As far as the writer’s investigation found none of these were genuine. Some were photoshopped, while others showed violent acts among non-Uyghur East Asians which were seemingly intentionally mislabelled. While focused on Muslim populations such efforts were global, and in several cases the social media accounts purporting to tell the stories of



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oppressed Uyghur people were found to be run by CIA alumni and other individuals with close ties to Western governments.219 An example of the kind of false content propagated was a video widely circulated in Muslim countries in 2018 which claimed to show a Uyghur being beaten for having a copy of the Quran. It actually showed an Indonesian policeman beating a pickpocket.220 A picture claiming to show a Chinese police officer strangling a Uyghur woman for performing Muslim prayer was actually a video of a police officer restraining a drunk and violent non-Uyghur woman in Shenzhen.221 A picture claiming to show Uyghur forced labour, first published by Forbes, actually showed factory workers in Brazil in 2010. Forbes later changed the picture without announcing the error.222 A picture showing a man with his eyes, mouth and ears sewn shut was similarly passed as a depiction of Chinese atrocities against the Uyghur population, often used as a cover for related articles, but actually showed protester Abas Amini expressing disgust at Britain’s treatment of asylum seekers in 2003.223 Much of this content was debunked by the Indonesian fact-checking agency AFP Fact Check, although not before making profound marks on public opinion. Although long suspected on the basis of prior practices, the involvement of Western governments in propagating such content was confirmed in August 2022 by a joint investigation by Stanford University and the New York–based social media analytics firm Graphika. This found that defaming China, and the authorities in Xinjiang in particular, had been at the crux of a very large five-year social media disinformation campaign by the U.S. and Britain targeting Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and Central Asia with false information. Personnel responsible posed as journalists running independent media outlets, used AI-generated faces to make multiple fake personas on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other media, created memes and short videos for sharing, ran hashtag campaigns across platforms, launched online petitions, and had “an interconnected web of accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and five other social media platforms.” This enabled them to support their fabricated stories by quoting one other, while state media outlets known for

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propagating false information such as Radio Free Asia were relied on particularly heavily as sources. Targeting audiences across the world in multiple languages, China was also portrayed as a threat to their countries or regions including as a “financial imperialist.” The Stanford study observed: These accounts – a fake persona and sham media outlet – mainly focused on the genocide of Uighurs and Muslim minorities in ‘re-education’ camps in Xinjiang. Posts described alleged organ trafficking, forced labour, sexual crimes against Muslim women, and suspicious disappearances of ethnic Muslims in Xinjiang. The assets also posted about the Chinese Communist Party’s poor treatment of women in the country and often framed these stories around news about domestic violence.224 Propagating false Xinjiang narratives among Muslim populations had very significant potential benefits for Western interests. While no governments in Muslim-majority countries appeared swayed by the Western campaign, turning public opinion within their borders could place pressure on these governments to downgrade ties with and condemn China – complementing the external pressure coming from Western countries to do so. This would be a valuable boon to Western economic warfare efforts against Beijing, to efforts to derail BRI, and to overall strategic competition. Portraying China as the world’s most egregious oppressor of Muslims to turn Muslim opinion had the potential to empower Islamist extremist groups that sought to wage war on China. As the Jamestown Foundation reported in 2019, reports of persecution “continue to give enough fodder for jihadist groups such as al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS) to raise their virtual jihadist campaigns against China and its interests abroad.”225 Senior analyst with Singapore’s International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research, Mohammed Sinan Siyech, noted to similar effect that “jihadists are seizing on Beijing’s suppression of



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Uyghurs in Xinjiang . . . in an effort to find a new villain to help justify their existence,” highlighting that the Xinjiang narrative “can be exploited by terrorist groups to recruit individuals.” 226 This fuelled predictions that Islamist attacks on Chinese overseas interests could rise considerably, with businesses, overseas communities and infrastructure projects all being potential targets.227 Terror attacks against Chinese interests could be seen in the early 2020s from Pakistan228 to Indonesia and beyond.229 A notable example of how Islamic extremists could be influenced by Western content to see China as the new enemy of Islam was the overseas Uyghur Islamist social media influencer Arslan Hidayat, who had close ties with anti-Beijing radical groups and resolved on Twitter “to be a better extremist and separatist.”230 Hidayat supported calls for ethnic cleansing of non-Uyghurs in Xinjiang,231 and conceded multiple times during interviews that his view of Xinjiang was very largely shaped by Western internet content including social media, Adrian Zenz and Radio Free Asia.232 Other prominent anti-Beijing Muslim and Uyghur figures, including World Uyghur Congress chairman Omer Kanat himself, consistently stated that they relied on “Western media estimates” when making various extreme claims of Chinese misconduct.233 A further major benefit of fabricating the Xinjiang narrative, and particularly allegations of Uyghur concentration camp victims being used as slave workers, was to provide a pretext for restrictions on trade with China. These Western claims emerged from December 2018, with the Australian government-funded ASPI, various U.S. government-funded groups, and many of the anti-Beijing activists that worked for them, being the sole sources. As bifurcation of the American and Chinese economies became a central goal in Washington,234 the U.S. increasingly cited alleged forced labour in Xinjiang from 2020 as a pretext to escalate this, leading it to be seen by several analysts as a new pretext for economic protectionism. While America’s arbitrary restrictions on Chinese imports had been ruled to be in violation of the World Trade Organisation’s terms,235 its claims of human rights abuses could be used to justify its escalated economic warfare efforts while avoiding being seen to do so for geopolitical or economic

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reasons. This allowed trade restrictions and other more serious economic warfare measures to be portrayed as altruistic, moral and humanitarian. After it was approved by the Senate and passed in the House on May 14 and 27 respectively, the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act was signed into law by President Donald Trump on June 17, 2020. It stipulated that sanctions be imposed both on Chinese individuals alleged to be responsible for humanitarian abuses and on their relatives.236 In July 14 Chinese firms were sanctioned on the basis that they were “implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass detention and surveillance.” A further five were sanctioned for their ties to China’s military, and four more for doing business with other firms that had already been sanctioned. The measures were framed by Washington as: “taking strong, decisive action to target entities that are enabling human rights abuses in Xinjiang or that use U.S. technology to fuel China’s destabilising military modernisation efforts.”237 The U.S. Departments of Treasury and Commerce both issued sanctions on private companies, individuals and quasi-government agencies in Xinjiang, including on the sprawling Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps on July 31, 2020. Eleven firms “implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation” were added to the Commerce Department‘s Entity List, restricting them from doing business with U.S. firms. On September 14 the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency issued Withhold Release Orders (WRO) banning cotton, apparel, hair products and computer parts from four Xinjiang firms. This appeared to be just a small taste of what was to come, with commissioner Mark Morgan telling reporters he was “absolutely confident they’re not going to be the last” WRO orders targeting Chinese products. Eighty-five percent of China’s cotton was produced in Xinjiang, and U.S. annual textile imports from China were valued at $50 billion in 2019. Deputy Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security Kenneth Cuccinelli said these trade restrictions were “combating illegal and inhumane forced labour, a type of modern slavery,” slamming China for holding



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Uyghurs in “concentration camps.” He added that restrictions would also advantage American workers.238 September also saw the House of Representatives pass the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act stipulating that American law should presume that any goods produced either wholly or in part in Xinjiang were produced using forced labour and treated accordingly unless the U.S. government could certify with “clear and convincing” evidence that they were not. This essentially presumed the guilt of all producers linked to Xinjiang. The Act also directed the administration to formally determine whether alleged forced labour in Xinjiang constituted crimes against humanity. Representative Tom Suozzi was one of many who called for measures to support the cotton industries of U.S.-aligned Latin American states as a means to decouple from China’s cotton industry. Others, such as the legislation’s author Representative Jim McGovern, called for measures to be taken much further.239 It was only a wave of lobbying efforts from major American corporations and trade associations, which were concerned about its impact on their supply chains, that stopped the legislation. This represented one of several cases where private sector interests aligned with China against geopolitically or ideologically motivated government actions against it.240 Despite this setback, the bill was reintroduced in 2021 and passed in July that year.241 Much more effectively than declaring a Trade War, the Trump and Biden administrations instead waged a ‘humanitarian economic war’ under which almost any Chinese firm could be deemed complicit in humanitarian abuses and targeted, as the complexity of supply chains meant a great many products could trace at least some inputs to Xinjiang.xxi In June, amid deepening xxi Taking China’s solar power industry as an example, supporters of the Keep China Out of Solar Energy Act in March 2021 focused on alleged humanitarian abuses in Xinjiang as a pretext to decouple the U.S. from this industry.  Senator Marco Rubio stated to this effect: “Beijing has made it clear that to do business in China, you must leave American values behind. As the Chinese Communist Party is actively committing genocide against Uyghurs . . . the CCP’s crimes should not be fuelled by American taxpayer dollars.” Senator Rick Scott similarly stated: “Reports show that many solar companies rely on materials and labour from Communist China’s

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concerns regarding the growing advantages of China’s tech sector over its Western rivals, President Biden said China’s use of technology “facilitates repression or serious human rights abuses,” and by executive order banned Americans from investing in firms that could support surveillance efforts.242 The administration added several firms connected to China’s solar power industry that month – again without evidence of any malpractice. On June 24, 2021, trade bans on five Chinese entities over forced labour allegations were imposed citing joint G7 goals to “clean up” supply chains primarily by purging Chinese inputs. Industries affected such as AI, solar energy and electronics,243 had been targeted by the U.S. for some time, some for almost a decade,244 with claims of human rights abuses providing a pretext to bypass norms of international trade including WTO rules. Almost any area of China’s economy could be alleged to be using forced labour from Xinjiang if Washington sought to suppress it. As progress in China’s semiconductor industry was seen as a major challenge to key Western strategic interests, allegations surfaced in December 2021 that Uyghur forced labour was used in its supply chains.245 As Chinese electric vehicles were beginning to gain traction in Western markets, allegations emerged in July 2022 that the Xinjiang slave labour was used in their supply chains.246 Some Chinese firms responded by opening their production lines to Western journalists and to analysts from major firms such as Goldman Sachs, HSBC and JP Morgan to prove their innocence,247 while others launched lawsuits against Washington for its arbitrary actions.248

Xinjiang province, which is known for forced labour and horrific abuse of the Uyghurs. My Keep China Out of Solar Energy Act, which prohibits the use of federal funds to buy solar panels from Communist China, sends a clear message to General Secretary Xi that the United States will not turn a blind eye to his genocide and human rights abuses.” Targeting this industry was in line with broader efforts by the Biden administration to catch up with China in green technologies and was paired with a focus on boosting industries such as electric cars domestically. (‘Rubio Joins Scott, Colleagues to Introduce the Keep China Out of Solar Energy Act,’ Official Website of Marco Rubio, March 30, 2021.)



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One of the world’s largest shirtmakers, the Hong Kong-based Esquel Group, employed 400 Uyghur workers including almost 15 percent who had worked there for over 10 years, and suffered considerably from U.S. policies as a result. Its chairman, Marjorie Yang, reported “devastating harm” after the firm was placed on the Entity List without evidence of wrongdoing. Its case was far from exceptional with multiple Chinese firms being similarly affected. Esquel Group lost a number of clients as a result including Nike, Gap and Michael Kors and was forced to close factories and reduce operations. In response Esquel invited U.S. Commerce Department staff to visit the facilities in Xinjiang with free and open access but received no response. When it subsequently invited independent labour audit specialists to visit the facilities in Xinjiang and carry out unstructured interviews with randomly selected Uyghur workers, every instance found no evidence of the forced labour or coercion being alleged by Western sources.249 The American footwear producer Sketchers was notably the only major Western clothing firm to investigate allegations itself rather than take them at face value, and after conducting multiple audits over several years to specifically investigate its supplies from Xinjiang it found no evidence to support claims that forced labour was used. Its conclusions notably received almost no coverage in Western press.250 Western firms pressed to purge Xinjiang inputs from their supply chains were far from restricted to clothing brands. Volkswagen, for example, was criticised for continuing to operate a plant in the province due to speculation that it may be using forced labour. Western anti-China human rights activists likened such practices to the German firm’s use of slave labour during the Second World War, although Volkswagen stressed that there was no evidence to substantiate such allegations. Other anti-China figures took this further and alleged that, even if forced labour was not proven, the very presence of Western firms in Xinjiang represented a tacit approval of the humanitarian abuses Western sources were alleging.251 It was notable that multiple firms targeted based on allegations of forced labour had very high levels of automation in

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their production lines, which brought claims of forced labour to serious question. The high-purity polysilicon manufacturer Xinjiang Daqo was a prominent example.252 The Western allegation that over half a million Uyghur slaves were being used to pick cotton253 – another image which had strong resonance in the Western mind due to historical practices in the American south and British Caribbeanxxii – was similarly widely seen by analysts to be absurd considering that cotton picking had long been automated.254 It was nevertheless used as a pretext to further target Chinese industries. Headlines in Western media outlets such as “There’s a good chance your cotton T-shirt was made with Uyghur slave labour,”255 and “UK business must ‘wake up’ to China’s Uighur cotton slaves”256 fuelled Western public pressure on major brands such as H&M, GAP and Nike to boycott Xinjiang cotton. The backlash from Chinese consumers against the brands which joined the boycott was significant, with these brands themselves being boycotted in China leaving an opportunity for non-Western brands with apolitical positions to gain market share.257 In March 2021 the European Union sanctioned China on the basis of alleged abuses in Xinjiang,258 which led Beijing to retaliate with a proportional set of sanctions targeting EU officials.259 These retaliatory sanctions were considered unacceptable in Brussels and led to further European escalation through suspension of a major trade deal with Beijing.260 All across the Western media China was blamed for refusing to accept European sanctions quietly, as the Western world was far from accustomed to its targets retaliating with proportional sanctions of their own.261 Washington was the primary beneficiary, and had strongly opposed the trade deal as it sought a united front against Beijing – a goal which atrocity fabrication had brought closer to being realised.262 xxii Such claims also resonated strongly with those familiar with forced prison labour practices in the United States, where unlike in Xinjiang cotton picking was overwhelmingly done by hand and widely likened to slave labour. (Benns, Whitney, ‘American Slavery, Reinvented,’ The Atlantic, September 15, 2021.) (Rashid Johnson, Kevin, ‘Prison labor is modern slavery. I’ve been sent to solitary for speaking out,’ The Guardian, August 23, 2018.)



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As a result of U.S. moves to impose arbitrary bans based on unproven allegations of forced labour, several international firms in Xinjiang became reluctant to hire Uyghur staff due to concerns that they could be blacklisted. The metanarrative built up in the West led the Western mind to jump to conclusions that any Uyghur in a job would likely be a slave labourer – why else would he or she not be in a concentration camp? Indeed, Western purchasers at times went as far as to ask firms in China whether or not they had Uyghur staff, expressing a preference for a negative response in order to avoid possible negative reactions from overseas. xxiii In this way the West’s humanitarian-premised economic warfare campaign fuelled actual discrimination against Uyghurs by the private sector, and led many Uyghur workers to move out of Xinjiang to find employment in other provinces where there was less Western scrutiny.xxiv Beyond restrictions on trade, anti-China hardliners in several Western countries sought to reap further gains from the narrative xxiii As Canadian analyst Daniel Dumbrill observed to this effect: “As for the Uyghurs, the specific measures being taken such as sanctioning products made in Xinjiang by saying it’s made with slave labour without any actual evidence – well ironically it will take away the livelihoods of those Uyghurs. It’s created an interesting situation where I now see foreign China watchers complaining that Uyghurs need to travel out of province in order to find work – which is a kind of cultural genocide they say without any sense of irony that the West is compounding this problem.” (‘American/Canadian Propaganda - a Xinjiang “Genocide” Panel,’ Daniel Dumbrill (Youtube Channel), March 23, 2021.) xxiv It may well have been the case that making life more difficult for the Uyghur population was an intentional way to undermine Chinese government efforts to integrate them into society. By strongly encouraging discrimination against Uyghurs and banning products from firms using Uyghur labour, Western powers were placing downward pressure on their living standards which could in turn drive more of the population into the hands of radical groups – an outcome that would align with Western interests. New trade legislation enacted in Washington in June 2022, which specifically targeted poverty allegation programs in Xinjiang with sanctions, only furthered this impression. Paving the way for Western governments to target local businesses and single out those hiring Uyghurs, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which was the source of many of the more extreme claims of abuses in Xinjiang, was itself targeted by many Uyghurs who sought to sue it for damages. (‘Young Uygurs look to sue Australian think tank over report on “forced labour” in Xinjiang,’ Global Times, June 20, 2021.)

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of genocide in Xinjiang. Some, for example, claimed that cooperation between China and the West on climate change should be ruled out on the basis that if China could commit genocide, it could not possibly care about preserving the planet nor could it be depended on to work towards any kind of constructive arrangement.263 Political figures with Western supremacist tendencies repeatedly cited the alleged genocide in Xinjiang to portray China as “evil” and stress the need to ensure the perpetuation of Western-led global order to which China was the primary challenger. Charlie Kirk, a popular far-right activist frequently retweeted by President Donald Trump, used Xinjiang as a pretext to call for “a worldwide alliance against evil” to counter China. “We should launch cyber warfare against them. We should have sanctions on China. They have to suffer . . . to choke them out the way we did to the Soviet Union,” he stated in April 2021.264 Fuelled by China’s challenge to Western hegemony, which it had previously been assumed would be totally unchallenged after the Soviet collapse, such animosity had been widespread in the West long before the Xinjiang issue was raised, with the emergence of the genocide narrative providing useful justification for it. Many of the fiercest advocates for a hard line against Beijing to preserve Western primacy went from making anti-Muslim statements to campaigning for Uyghur Muslim rights effectively overnight, just as the perceived primary challenge to Western power shifted from the Islamic World to China.265 On May 18, 2021, House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi calledxxv for the U.S. to lead the world in boycotting the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. “Let’s not honour the Chinese government by having heads of state go to China,” she xxv Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian slammed Pelosi’s “lies and false information,” alleging that the U.S. was afraid visiting countries would see China’s “vigorous development of human rights.” In Washington Chinese Embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu retorted: “I wonder what makes some U.S. politicians think they actually have the so-called moral authority? On human rights issues, they are in no position, either historically or currently, to make wanton groundless criticism against China.” (‘Pelosi calls for U.S. and world leaders to boycott China’s 2022 Olympics,’ Reuters, May 18, 2021.)



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stated, elaborating: “For heads of state to go to China in light of a genocide that is ongoing – while you’re sitting there in your seat – really begs the question, what moral authority do you have to speak again about human rights any place in the world?” 266 Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo referred to Beijing 2022 as the “genocide Olympics,” and was among many in the West to call for pressure on the International Olympic Commission to move the games to another country on the basis of allegations of genocide.267 The New York Times notably also referred to Beijing 2022 as “the Genocide Olympics in Beijing” that month in the title of a prominent article.268 The Xinjiang genocide narrative provided a pretext for calls across the Western world to boycott the Winter Olympics, with Britain, Spain, Italy and Germany leading Europe in advocating such action which had widespread public backing in several Western countries.269 In Canada, for example, 54 percent of Canadians polled in 2021 supported a boycott.270 Anti-Chinese human rights activists in Europe displayed the Olympic rings as rings of barbed wire to campaign for a boycott – which the European parliament passed as a non-binding motion on July 9.271 These kinds of humanitarian-premised campaigns were common whenever a major international sporting event was hosted by a Western adversary. When Russia was set to host the Winter Olympics in February 2014, for example, there were widespread calls in the West to move them to Canada or at the very least for a Western boycott on the basis of Russia’s allegedly improper political and value systems.272 When Russia was set to host the World Cup in 2018 British members of parliament called for action to press FIFA to move the tournament to the UK using many of the same pretexts.273 Both the Russian World Cup,274 and more so the Chinese Olympics,275 were widely compared by Western commentators to Nazi Germany’s hosting of the summer Olympics in 1936 – providing an opportunity for Western media outlets and NGOs to liken the Nazis and China’s ruling parties as two “genocidal regimes.” Outside the Western world, however, the possibility of a boycott of Beijing 2022 was not even raised,

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which again highlighted the West’s isolation from the wider world and from international norms. The Olympic boycott was far from likely to be the last hostile measure against China which Western countries would implement or consider using the fabricated Xinjiang genocide narrative as a pretext for. It was notable that preceding the West’s construction of the Xinjiang narrative, allegations of humanitarian abuses in Tibet had served as the pretext for opposition to the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games, with Western cities through which the Olympic torch passed filled with protestors many of whom tried to attack the torchbearer.276 Alleged abuses in Tibet and the memory of an alleged massacre in Tiananmen Square were key themes in Western coverage of the Games, casting a shadow over them much as Western coverage of Xinjiang did for the Winter Games 14 years later. As China emerged as the world’s largest economy, and one which could annually publish more scientific papers,277 spend more on new armaments278 and apply for more patents279 than the U.S., it would have been highly unusual and sharply contrary to historical trends for Western sources not to fabricate atrocities to vilify it. Allegations of Xinjiang atrocities, concentration camps, and genocide, emerged at a time of rising Sino-U.S. tensions in the mid-late 2010s and a growing consensus in the Western world on the need for a hard line against Beijing. Xinjiang’s Uyghur population were the latest Kuwaiti incubator babies, the latest American civilians killed in Cuban terrorist attacks, the latest Filipino civilians brutalised by the Huks or Syrian victims of their government’s chemical weapons. They were Park Yeonmi forced to walk across three mountains and bury her father, Iraqi dissidents fed live into human shredders, students run over by tanks in Tiananmen Square, or Libyan women raped by Gaddafi’s black African mercenaries. What all these alleged victims had in common was that the crimes against them were never actually committed but were very widely publicised to build narratives which furthered Western foreign policy objectives. The Xinjiang narrative was the culmination of decades of Western atrocity fabrication intended to justify hostile measures against adversaries,



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and targeted a country which represented an unprecedentedly strong challenge to Western hegemony.. Historical precedent provides important insight into the conditions, if any, under which the West may eventually accept the erroneous nature of its claims on Xinjiang. After having played a central role in persuading the world of an imminent threat posed by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and knowingly committed serious lies to record at the UN Security Council, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell had postulated in 2003: “I wonder what’ll happen when we put 500,000 troops into Iraq and comb the country from one end to the other and find nothing?”280 His statement highlighted that only full U.S. control over Iraq was sufficient for the superpower to be able to acknowledge that its narrative had been false and there was no possibility of the Iraqi government hiding anything. In Kosovo, in much the same way, it was admitted that the clearly fabricated and poorly evidenced allegations of genocide were false only after NATO militaries gained control of the territory – by which time it was also far too late and the fabrication had served its purpose. It would stand to reason, based on precedent, that only if Xinjiang were to somehow fall under complete Western control could the West acknowledge the false nature of its claims – by which time China’s innocence would be nothing but a historical sidenote as it had been for the many countries targeted before it. Even then, however, the possibility of fabrication to retrospectively justify Western actions would remain a significant possibility. A notable precedent was Britain’s fabricated claim in 2004 that the mass graves of 400,000 people had been found in Iraq to justify its illegal invasion the previous year – which was later admitted to be entirely false.281 Some parallels could be drawn with British soldiers’ practice of planting weapons on civilians they killed to claim they were legitimate targets.282 Whatever the state of affairs in a targeted country was, abuses could always be fabricated to justify Western actions – whether current or retrospective. Ultimately fabrication of atrocities in Xinjiang is expected to continue to profoundly shape Western perceptions of and political narratives surrounding China, much as the fabricated atrocities

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mentioned throughout this work have done for the West’s many prior targets. In this case, however, serious and unprecedented limits to the West’s ability to press the rest of the world to fall into line against a target have emerged which mark a potentially pivotal moment. As the Xinjiang narrative will likely continue to set the Western world at odds with the international community, it has the potential to discredit the Western sources that have supported it to an extent heretofore unseen. The significant investment the West’s information networks have put behind the Xinjiang fabrication, including assets such as Human Rights Watch, the BBC and RFA, means that pressing this narrative too far, and limited international receptivity to it, may well erode Western international credibility when commenting on humanitarian issues beyond a point of no return. Should this materialise, the result will be a Western world far less able to shape global perceptions to assault the reputations, economies and the borders of those actors which oppose its hegemony and imperial interests.

Notes 1

‘1-billion-ton oil and gas field discovered in Xinjiang’s Tarim Basin,’ Global Times, June 19, 2021. ‘China’s Sinopec flags new oil and gas find in Xinjiang,’ Reuters, August 25, 2021. 2 Hammes, T. X., ‘Offshore Control is the Answer,’ Proceedings Magazine, vol. 138, no. 12, issue 1318, December 2012. 3 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, ‘A Geostrategy for Eurasia,’ Foreign Affairs, September/October 1997. 4 ‘A BILL To address issues involving the People’s Republic of China in the Senate of the United States,’ Strategic Competition Act, 117th United States Congress, 1st Session. (https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/ DAV21598%20-%20Strategic%20Competition%20Act%20of%202021. pdf). 5 Burkholder Smith, Joseph, Portrait of a Cold Warrior, New York, Putnam, 1976 (pp. 210, 211). 6 The New York Times, March 12, 1966 (p. 6). Henschke, Rebecca, ‘Indonesia massacres: Declassified U.S. files shed new light,’ BBC News, October 17, 2017. Life, July 11, 1966.



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Robinson, Geoffrey B., The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2018 (pp. 106, 107). 7 ‘Looking into the massacres of Indonesia’s past,’ BBC News, June 2, 2016. ‘Indonesia’s killing fields,’ Al Jazeera, December 21, 2012. 8 ‘U.S. Role in 1960s Indonesia Anti-Communist Massacre Revealed,’ Sputnik News, October 18, 2017. Martens, Robert, The Indonesian Turning Point, Amazon Digital Services, 2012 (Preface). 9 Public Records Office, Defence Records, 25/170. Tel. 1863 Foreign Office to Singapore, October 8, 1965. Curtis, Mark, Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World, London, Vintage, 2003 (p. 394). Lashmar, Paul and Gilby, Nicholas and Oliver, James, ‘Slaughter in Indonesia: Britain’s secret propaganda war,’ The Guardian, October 17, 2021. Yuniar, Resty Woro, ‘Victims of Indonesia’s 1965 communist killings tell UK to tell truth about its role in genocide and anti-Chinese propaganda,’ South China Morning Post, October 21, 2021. 10 Weiner, Tim, ‘History to Trump: CIA was aiding Afghan rebels before the Soviets invaded in ’79,’ Washington Post, January 7, 2019. Gibbs, David N., ‘Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion in Retrospect,’ International Politics, vol. 37, June 2000 (pp. 241, 242). 11 Bergen, Peter, Holy War Inc., New York, The Free Press, 2001 (p.68). Coll, Steve, ‘CIA in Afghanistan: In CIA’s Covert War, Where to Draw the Line Was Key,’ Washington Post, July 20, 1992. 12 Bergen, Peter, Holy War Inc., New York, The Free Press, 2001 (p. 69). 13 Rashid, Ahmed, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2001 (pp. 128, 129). Cook, Robin, ‘The struggle against terrorism cannot be won by military means,’ The Guardian, June 8, 2005. ‘Al Qaeda’s Origins and Links,’ BBC News, July 20, 2004. 14 ‘UK, France planned joint attack on USSR before Nazis did, DECLASSIFIED docs reveal,’ RT (Youtube Channel), July 7, 2021. 15 Congressional Record, Volume 151, Part 17, U.S. Congress, October 7 to 26, 2005. 16 ‘American political scientist: Western Intelligence used Azerbaijan to export terrorism into Russia,’ Panorama, May 30, 2015. 17 Hille, Kathrin, ‘Putin accuses US of supporting separatist militants inside Russia,’ Financial Times, April 26, 2015. 18 ‘US lets militants train, mount attacks from its Syrian bases – chief of Russian General Staff,’ RT, December 27, 2017. ‘US special ops forces & hardware spotted at ISIS positions north of Deir ez-Zor – Russian MoD,’ RT, September 24, 2017. ‘US Support for Terrorists in Syria Main Obstacle of Defeating Them – Russian MoD,’ Sputnik News, October 4, 2017. ‘All Syrian Terrorist Groups Receive Weapons, Tasks from Abroad – Russian MoD,’ Sputnik News, March 24, 2018.

506 ATROCITY FABRICATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 19 ‘US Special Services Involved in Daesh Militants’ Transfer to Afghanistan - Russian Security Agency,’ Sputnik News, September 23, 2019. 20 ‘Iran accuses US of alliance with ISIS, claims to have proof,’ RT, June 11, 2017. ‘I have confirmed evidence Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claims US-led coalition forces have supported ISIS,’ The Sun, October 8, 2017. 21 U.S. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard Speaks on House Floor, House of Representatives, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Washington DC, September 13, 2018. ‘Dr. Rand Paul Introduces the Stop Arming Terrorists Act,’ Official Website of Senator Rand Paul, March 2017. 22 ‘“What Is the Empire’s Strategy?” – Col Lawrence Wilkerson Speech at RPI Media & War Conference,’ Ron Paul Liberty Report (YouTube Channel), August 22, 2018. 23 ‘“ISIS in Afghanistan is U.S. tool to cause trouble in the whole region” – ex- Afghan President Karzai to RT,’ RT, October 19, 2017. 24 ‘U.S. Role in 1960s Indonesia Anti-Communist Massacre Revealed,’ Sputnik News, October 18, 2017. Martens, Robert, The Indonesian Turning Point, Amazon Digital Services, 2012 (Preface). 25 Sibel Edmonds, 2015 Interview, Facebook Page of the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Bangladesh, April 11, 2021. 26 Ibid. 27 ‘Up to 450 militants attack Syrian forces in Idlib,’ TASS, January 23, 2020. 28 Al-Ghadhawi, Abdullah, ‘Uighur Jihadists in Syria,’ Center for Global Policy, March 18, 2020. 29 Blanchard, Ben, ‘Syria says up to 5,000 Chinese Uighurs fighting in militant groups,’ Reuters, May 11, 2017. 30 Vagneur-Jones, Antoine, ‘War and opportunity: the Turkistan Islamic Party and the Syrian conflict,’ Fondation pour la recherche stratégique, no. 7, March 2, 2017. 31 Vltchek, Andre, ‘March of the Uyghurs,’ New Eastern Outlook, July 21, 2019. 32 ‘China boosts Syria support,’ Global Times, August 18, 2016. Pauley, Logan and Marks, Jesse, ‘Is China Increasing Its Military Presence in Syria?,’ The Diplomat, August 20, 2018. Zhou, Lara, ‘China’s role in Syria’s endless civil war,’ South China Morning Post, April 7, 2017. Lin, Meilian, ‘Xinjiang terrorists finding training, support in Syria, Turkey,’ Global Times, July 1, 2013. 33 ‘Chinese Ambassador to Syria: We Are Willing To Participate “In Some Way” In The Battle For Idlib Alongside The Assad Army,’ The Middle East Media Research Institute, August 1, 2018. Neriah, Jacques, ‘Chinese Troops Arrive in Syria to Fight Uyghur Rebels,’ Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, December 20, 2017. 34 Lin, Christina, ‘Idlib militants eye China, Central Asia as next targets,’ Asia Times, August 13, 2018.



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Shih, Gerry, ‘Uighurs fighting in Syria take aim at China,’ AP News, December 23, 2017. Wu, Wendy, ‘Rising tide of jihadists stopped trying to return to China, Chinese advisers say,’ South China Morning Post, January 8, 2017. Martina, Michael and Blanchard, Ben, ‘Uighur IS fighters vow blood will “flow in rivers” in China,’ Reuters, March 1, 2017. 35 Shih, Gerry, ‘Uighurs fighting in Syria take aim at China,’ AP News, December 23, 2017. 36 Chew, Amy, ‘How Syria’s civil war drew Uygur fighters and shaped the separatist group TIP in China’s crosshairs,’ South China Morning Post, November 29, 2020. 37 Abuza, Zachary, ‘The Riddle of the Bangkok Bombings,’ The CTC Sentinel, October 19, 2015. 38 Vagneur-Jones, Antoine, ‘War and Opportunity: the Turkistan Islamic Party and the Syrian conflict,’ Foundation Pour La Recherch Strategique, no. 7, 2017 (p. 5). 39 ‘金一南：美想推翻巴沙尔政权 或将陷入困局’ [‘Kim Yinan: The US wants to overthrow the Assad regime or will be in a dilemma’], Miltary. CNR, November 1, 2012. 40 Hage Ali, Mohanad, ‘China’s proxy war in Syria: Revealing the role of Uighur fighters,’ Al Arabiya, March 2, 2016. 41 Frantzman, Seth J., ‘Did former US officials support extremists in Syria as an “asset”?,’ Jerusalem Post, April 6, 2021. 42 ‘Syria: Turkistan Islamic Party Seizes and Pillages Public Property in Rural Hama,’ STJ, April 11, 2020. ‘Uyghur Families Colonize Syrian Village,’ Meyadeen TV, September 3, 2015. 43 Weiss, Caleb, ‘Suicide Bombings Detail Turkistan Islamic Party’s Role in Syria,’ Long War Journal, May 3, 2017. Vagneur-Jones, Antoine, ‘War and opportunity: the Turkistan Islamic Party and the Syrian conflict,’ Fondation pour la recherche stratégique, no. 7, March 2, 2017 (p. 6). al-Aswad, Harun, ‘Syria: Murder stalks Druze in north and suspicion falls on Uyghur militants,’ Middle East Eye, August 24, 2022. 44 ‘Uyghur Families Colonize Syrian Village,’ Meyadeen TV, September 3, 2015. 45 Roggio, Bill and Weiss, Caleb, ‘Uighur Jihadist group in Syria Advertises Little Jihadists,’ Long War Journal, September 24, 2015. Weiss, Caleb, ‘Turkistan Islamic Party in Syria Shows More Little Jihadists,’ Long War Journal, September 29, 2016. 46 ‘A Buffer Zone For Erdogan’s Turkic Settlements in Syria,’ Asia Times, October 11, 2015. 47 ‘Turkish embassies in Southeast Asia “gave fake travel documents to Uygurs fleeing China”,’ South China Morning Post, July 10, 2016. Abuza, Zachary, ‘Uyghurs look to Indonesia for terror guidance,’ Asia Times, October 10, 2014.

508 ATROCITY FABRICATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 48 ‘Turks Are Held in Plot to Help Uighurs Leave China,’ The New York Times, January 14, 2015. Lin, Christina, ‘Crossing Red Lines? Turkey’s Assault of China’s Sovereignty and Incitement of Xinjiang Insurgency,’ ISPSW Strategy Series, no. 362, July 2015. Liu, Chang, ‘Turks, Uyghurs held in smuggling, terrorism scheme,’ Global Times, January 14, 2015. 49 Clarke, Michael, ‘Uyghur Militants in Syria: The Turkish Connection,’ Jamestown Foundation, February 4, 2016. ‘China “breaks Turkish-​Uighur passport plot”,’ BBC News, January 14, 2015. 50 Lin, Christina, ‘Chinese Uyghur Colonies in Syria a Challenge for Beijing,’ Asia Times, May 21, 2017. 51 ‘Turkish F-16 Downed Syrian Mi-17 Helicopter Over Idlib – Reports,’ Military Watch Magazine, February 12, 2020. 52 ‘Turkish and Syrian Forces Clash as Damascus Moves to Recapture Idlib: Artillery and F-16s Provide Cover for Jihadist Militants,’ Military Watch Magazine, February 3, 2020. 53 al-Aswad, Harun and Soylu, Ragip, ‘Two Turkish soldiers killed as Syrian rebels stage assault on Idlib’s Neirab,’ Middle East Eye, February 20, 2020. ‘Syria war: Alarm after 33 Turkish soldiers killed in attack in Idlib,’ BBC News, February 28, 2020. 54 ‘Syrian Pilot Killed As Turkey Downs Warplane: Monitor,’ International Business Times, March 3, 2020. 55 McKernan, Bethan and Sabbagh, Dan, ‘NATO expresses “full solidarity” with Turkey over Syria airstrikes,’ The Guardian, February 28, 2020. 56 ‘US Intends to Support Turkey’s Actions in Syria’s Idlib by Supplying Ammunition – Report,’ Sputnik News, March 3, 2020. 57 Rabil, Robert G., ‘Defeating the Islamic State of Idlib,’ National Interest, June 13, 2019. 58 Clarke, Michael, ‘Uyghur Militants in Syria: The Turkish Connection,’ Jamestown Foundation, February 4, 2016. 59 Bhadrakumar, MK, ‘US needs Turkey for its al-Qaeda and ISIS links,’ Asia Times, April 10, 2021. 60 ‘The Rise of Uyghur Militancy in and Beyond Southeast Asia: An Assessment,’ Centre for Security Studies – ETH Zurich, February 15, 2017. ‘4 ISIS suspects arrested by Indonesia are Uighurs from China: Police,’ The Straits Times, September 15, 2014. Vonow, Brittany, ‘Who did it? Thailand bombings: Who are the likely suspects behind Phuket and Hua Hin bomb attacks?,’ The Sun, Aug. 12, 2016. Zenn, Jacob, ‘Beijing, Kunming, Urumqi and Guangzhou: The Changing Landscape of Anti-​Chinese Jihadists,’ Jamestown Foundation, May 23, 2014. Sangadji, Ruslan, ‘Last Uighur member of MIT shot dead,’ The Jakarta Post, August 18, 2016. ‘Indonesian Police Foil Rocket Attack Plot on Marina Bay; Singapore Steps up Security,’ The Straits Times, August 5, 2016.



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61 Lefevre, Amy Sawitta and Niyomyat, Aukkarapon, ‘Thai police look into Turkish connection in Bangkok blast,’ Reuters, August 27, 2015. ‘Sa Kaeo immigration chief transferred in bomb case,’ Bangkok Post, September 1, 2019. 62 Clarke, Colin P. and Rexton Kan, Paul, ‘Uighur Foreign Fighters: An Underexamined Jihadist Challenge,’ International Centre for CounterTerrorism, November 2017. 63 Trofimov, Yaroslava and Shah, Saeed and Amiri, Ehsanullah, ‘Afghanistan Mosque Bombing Kills Dozens of Worshipers,’ Wall Street Journal, October 8, 2021. 64 Cunningham, Susan, ‘Thailand’s Shrine Bombing - The Case for Turkey’s Grey Wolves,’ Forbes, August 24, 2015. 65 ‘Indonesian terror group planning attacks on Chinese ships,’ Splash274, July 4, 2019. Chew, Amy, ‘Indonesian terrorists planned to attack shop owners in areas with Chinese communities,’ South China Morning Post, August 27, 2020. 66 Dzyubenko, Olga, ‘Chinese embassy in Kyrgyzstan hit by suspected suicide car bomb,’ Reuters, August 30, 2016. 67 ‘China Embassy attack: Suspect is 21yo Tajikistan national,’ AKI Press, September 6, 2016. 68 Millward, James, ‘Violent Separatism in Xinjiang: A Critical Assessment,’ Foreign Studies 6, East West Centre, 2004. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid. 71 Blanchard, Ben, ‘China foils attempted terror attack on flight,’ Reuters, March 9, 2008. York, Geoffrey, ‘Olympic terror plot foiled, Beijing says,’ The Globe and Mail, March 10, 2008. 72 ‘Terrorist plot suspected in violent attack on police in west China’s Xinjiang,’ Xinhua, August 4, 2008.  73 Parry, Richard Lloyd, ‘China’s Uighur rebels switch to suicide bombs,’ The Sunday Times, August 11, 2008. 74 ‘Three dead as unrest flares in China’s restive Xinjiang,’ The Daily Star, August 12, 2008. 75 ‘China calls Xinjiang riot a plot against its rule,’ Reuters, July 5, 2009. Macartney, Jane, ‘China in deadly crackdown after Uighurs go on rampage,’ The Times (London), July 5, 2009. 76 Tanner, Murray Scot and Bellacqua, James, ‘China’s Response to Terrorism,’ U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, June 2016. 77 ‘At least 50 reported to have died in attack on coalmine in Xinjiang in September,’ Reuters, October 1, 2015. 78 Tiezzi, Shannon, ‘Is the Kunming Knife Attack China’s 9–11?,’ The Diplomat, March 4, 2014. 79 Kang Lim, Benjamin and Blanchard, Ben, ‘China suspects Tiananmen crash a suicide attack- sources,’ Reuters, October 29, 2013. 80 Kaiman, Jonathan, ‘Islamist group claims responsibility for attack on China’s Tiananmen Square,’ The Guardian, November 25, 2013.

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81 ‘Things to Know about All the Lies on Xinjiang: How Have They Come About?,’ China Daily, April 30, 2021. 82 Allen-Ebrahimiam, Bethany, ‘Report: More Than 100 Chinese Muslims Have Joined the Islamic State,’ Foreign Policy, July 20, 2016. 83 Cao, Siqi, ‘Vocational centers in Xinjiang will disappear when society no longer needs them: official,’ Global Times, March 12, 2019. 84 Hali, Sultan M, ‘Xinjiang and the Uighur question,’ Pakistan Today, January 24, 2019. 85 ‘This Indonesian School Is Deradicalizing the Children of Convicted Terrorists (HBO),’ Vice News (Youtube Channel), January 24, 2018. 86 Sage, Adam, ‘Inside France’s pioneering deradicalisation programme,’ The Times (London), January 27, 2021. 87 ‘This Indonesian School Is Deradicalizing the Children of Convicted Terrorists (HBO),’ Vice News (Youtube Channel), January 24, 2018. 88 Blum, William, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, London, Zed Books, 2006 (Chapter 19: Trojan Horse: The National Endowment for Democracy). Norton, Ben and Singh, Ajit, ‘No, the UN did not report China has “massive internment camps” for Uighur Muslims,’ The Grey Zone, August 23, 2018. 89 ‘Human Rights Watch is Roundly Criticized By… Human Rights Activists,’ World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates (http://www.nobelpeacesummit. com/human-rights-watch-is-roundly-criticized-by-human-rights-activists/). ‘Human Rights Watch’s Revolving Door,’ Jacobin, June 8, 2014. ‘Debate: Is Human Rights Watch Too Close to U.S. Gov’t to Criticize Its Foreign Policy?,’ Democracy Now, June 11, 2014. 90 ‘Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.,’ The New York Times, December 26, 1977. 91 Nebehay, Stephanie, ‘1.5 million Muslims could be detained in China’s Xinjiang: academic,’ Reuters, March 13, 2019. 92 ‘Who is Adrian Zenz? The Christian Fundamentalist Leading the Global Xinjiang Narrative,’ Chollima, June 29, 2020. 93 Chemin, Ariane, ‘Les divisions d’une équipe d’historiens du communisme’ [Divisions among the team of historians of Communism], Le Monde, October 30, 1997. Margolin, Jean-Louis and  Werth, Nicolas,  ‘Communisme  : retour à l’histoire’ [Communism: Return to the History],  Le Monde, November 14, 1997. Hoffman, Stanley, ‘Le Livre noir du communisme: Crimes, terreur, répression’ [The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, and Repression], Foreign Policy, Spring 1998. Ghodsee, Kristen, ‘A Tale of “Two Totalitarianisms”: The Crisis of Capitalism and the Historical Memory of Communism,’ History of the Present, vol. 4, no. 2., 2014 (pp. 115–142). Chomsky, Noam, ‘Counting the Bodies,’ Spectrezine (http://www. spectrezine.org/global/chomsky.html). Ghodsee, Kristen, Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism, Durham, Duke University Press, 2017 (p. 140).



Xinjiang and the Sino-U.S.Conflict 511

94 Chin, Josh, ‘The German Data Diver Who Exposed China’s Muslim Crackdown,’ Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2019. 95 Sias,  Marlon L. and Zenz, Adrian, Worthy to Escape: Why All Believers Will Not Be Raptured Before the Tribulation, Bloomingon, WestBow Press, 2012 (p. 46). 96 Ibid. (p. 47). 97 Hill, Matthew and Campanale, David and Gunter, Joel, ‘“Their goal is to destroy everyone”: Uighur camp detainees allege systematic rape,’ BBC News, February 2, 2021. 98 ‘Without evidence, allegations against China are only allegations,’ The Concordian, February 25, 2021. ‘She Escaped the Nightmare Of China’s Brutal Internment Camps. Now She Could Be Sent Back.,’ Buzzfeed News, February 15, 2020. 99 Daniel Dumbrill on Twitter, ‘And thank you China for renewing her passport while she was apparently under house arrest and thank you @CNN for not running her original testimony from last year, because it’s far less dramatic and interesting.’ (images attached), February 19, 2021. 100 ‘Speaking With a Uyghur Activist About Xinjiang Abuse,’ Daniel Dumbrill (Youtube Channel), August 17, 2020. Daniel Dumbrill on Twitter, ‘13 tons of hair (which would equal 220,000 heads of hair) are being sold for $8,000 US each (based on $1.8b). Uyghur hair is very valuable! They also have to put their heads through holes to get a haircut because there’s a barber chair shortage crisis currently in China.’ (video attached), September 17, 2020. 101 ‘A short video user expressed her frustration when she found a video of her had been manipulated,’ China Daily (Youtube Channel), January 28, 2021. 102 ‘Speaking With a Uyghur Activist About Xinjiang Abuse,’ Daniel Dumbrill (Youtube Channel), August 17, 2020. Daniel Dumbrill on Twitter, ‘The overseas Uyghur community creates fake news and leaves it online with its false captions, supported by no evidence, just in case one day it turns out to be true. In the meantime, their audience accepts it as the truth and are convinced of a genocide by this same community.’ (video attached), September 17, 2020. 103 Matthew Kroenig on Twitter, ‘The Chinese Communist Party’s selling the hair of Muslims detained in prison camps,’ July 2, 2020. 104 ‘Speaking With a Uyghur Activist About Xinjiang Abuse,’ Daniel Dumbrill (Youtube Channel), August 17, 2020. Daniel Dumbrill on Twitter, ‘In Xinjiang, the local population is being taught to read, write and speak in their local banned language just in case tourists show up.’ (video attached), September 17, 2020. 105 Anderson, David, ‘Useful Idiots: Tourism In North Korea,’ Forbes, March 6, 2017. Fifield, Anna, ‘From the skies, the North Korean capital looks just like the Potemkin village the Kim regime wants it to be,’ jacksonville.com, October 19, 2017. Gray, Noah, ‘The Improbable High-Rises of Pyongyang, North Korea,’ Bloomberg, October 16, 2018.

512

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‘North Korea “all make-believe”, says travel blogger,’ ABC News, April 1, 2016. 106 Kuo, Lily, ‘China footage reveals hundreds of blindfolded and shackled prisoners,’ The Guardian, September 23, 2019. 107 Steger, Isabella, ‘On Xinjiang, even those wary of Holocaust comparisons are reaching for the word “genocide”,’ Quartz, August 20, 2020. 108 Nury Vittachi on Facebook, ‘The truth behind the world’s most mis-used photo’ (video and transcript attached), February 3, 2021. 109 Philips, Tom, ‘China “holding at least 120,000 Uighurs in re-education camps”,’ The Guardian, January 25, 2018. 110 Jiang, Steven, ‘Thousands of Uyghur Muslims detained in Chinese “political education” camps,’ CNN, February 3, 2018. 111 ‘Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement,’ official website of the United Nations Security Council (https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/sanctions/1267/aq_ sanctions_list/summaries/entity/eastern-turkistan-islamic-movement). 112 Farooq, Umar, ‘Uighur dissident in Turkey fights effort to extradite him to China,’ Los Angeles Times, March 29, 2019. 113 ‘Survey: Three Million, Mostly Uyghurs, in Some Form of Political “ReEducation” in Xinjiang,’ Radio Free Asia, May 8, 2018. 114 Nebehay, Stephanie, ‘1.5 million Muslims could be detained in China’s Xinjiang: academic,’ Reuters, March 13, 2019. 115 Lipes, Joshua, ‘Expert Says 1.8 Million Uyghurs, Muslim Minorities Held in Xinjiang’s Internment Camps,’ Radio Free Asia, November 24, 2019. 116 Stewart, Phil, ‘China putting minority Muslims in “concentration camps,” U.S. says,’ Reuters, May 4, 2019. 117 CJ Werleman on Twitter, ‘Nothing to see here: just Chinese soldiers doing bayonet training where upwards of 5 million Uyghur Muslims are being detained, tortured and killed.,’ October 12, 2020. 118 CJ Werleman on Twitter, ‘Upwards of 6 million Uyghur Muslims are currently being detained in China’s network of concentration camps, with women subjected to this heinous and vicious sexual abuse.,’ November 30, 2020. 119 ‘China cuts Uighur births with IUDs, abortion, sterilization,’ AP News, June 28, 2020. 120 Ibid. 121 Ibid. 122 ‘Fact Check: Lies on Xinjiang-related issues vs. the truth,’ CGTN, February 6, 2021. ‘China Focus: Xinjiang sees higher growth of Uygur population,’ Xinhua, September 4, 2020. 123 China Statistical Yearbook 2019, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region,1990/2005/2019, Statistical Yearbooks, tables 3-2/4-8/3-8. Zenz, Adrian, ‘Sterilizations, IUDs, and Mandatory Birth Control: The CCP’s Campaign to Suppress Uyghur Birthrates in Xinjiang,’ Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, June 2020. 124 Aarssen, Lonnie W., ‘Why Is Fertility Lower in Wealthier Countries? The Role of Relaxed Fertility-Selection,’ Population and Development Review vol. 31, no. 1, March 2005 (pp. 113–126).



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125 Vittachi, Nury, ‘Statistician demolishes genocide claim,’ Friday Everyday, June 26, 2021. 126 Milmo, Cahal, ‘MPs compare China to Nazi Germany as Beijing is accused of “systematic ethnic cleansing” of Uighurs,’ inews, September 9, 2020. 127 ‘UK parliament declares genocide in China’s Xinjiang; Beijing condemns move,’ Reuters, April 22, 2021. 128 Diane Abbott MP on Twitter, ‘On Saturday I took part in an online meeting entitled “Uniting against racism and the new cold war”. I had no idea that there were people on the call who denied Chinese harassment and massacres of Muslims in Uyghur. The treatment of these communities is a human rights violation.,’ November 15, 2020. 129 Liu, Zhen, ‘China accuses US of double standards as it drops ETIM from terrorism list,’ South China Morning Post, November 6, 2020. 130 Chew, Amy, ‘How Syria’s civil war drew Uygur fighters and shaped the separatist group TIP in China’s crosshairs,’ South China Morning Post, November 29, 2020. 131 Liu, Xin, ‘Whitewashing terror groups on Xinjiang “will backfire on US”,’ Global Times, May 17, 2021. 132 Hansler, Jennifer and Rahim, Zamira and Westcott, Ben, ‘US accuses China of “genocide” of Uyghurs and minority groups in Xinjiang,’ CNN, January 20, 2021. 133 ‘US official says UN has “lack of curiosity” on Xinjiang,’ AP News, October 29, 2020. 134 ‘Pompeo calls report of forced sterilisation of Uighurs “shocking”,’ Al Jazeera, June 29, 2020. 135 ‘The Rapture and the Real World: Mike Pompeo Blends Beliefs and Policy,’ The New York Times, March 30, 2019. 136 Keating, Joshua, ‘The God Doctrine,’ Slate, June 11, 2019. 137 ‘Mike Pompeo’s evangelical zeal could complicate his new diplomatic life,’ The Economist, March 20, 2018. Jenkins, Jack, ‘5 faith facts about Mike Pompeo: A divisive devotion,’ Religion News, April 19, 2018. ‘Mike Pompeo Has Extreme Views on Muslims – and Liberals Don’t Seem to Care,’ The Intercept, August 20, 2019. God and Country Rally with U.S. Congressman Mike Pompeo, July 9, 2015. Pullella, Philip and Brunnstrom, David, ‘Pompeo blasts China over Uighur Muslims during Vatican visit,’ Reuters, October 2, 2019. 138 Lynch, Colum, ‘State Department Lawyers Concluded Insufficient Evidence to Prove Genocide in China,’ Foreign Policy, February 19, 2021. 139 ‘Canada’s parliament declares China’s treatment of Uighurs “genocide”,’ BBC News, February 23, 2021. ‘Dutch parliament becomes second in a week to accuse China of genocide in Xinjiang,’ CNN, February 26, 2021. 140 Power, Samantha, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, New York, Basic Books, 2002.

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141 Samantha Power on Twitter, ‘The 1948 Genocide Convention, the UN’s first human rights treaty, defines genocide as attempted destruction of a group. This report shows how this is precisely what China is doing with the Uighurs. Examine the evidence for yourself,’ March 11, 2021. 142 ‘Press Release: Authoritative legal opinion concludes that treatment of Uyghurs amounts to crimes against humanity and genocide,’ World Uyghur Congress, February 8, 2021. 143 Redden, Elizabeth, ‘Inside the Oversight of a Questionable Institution,’ Inside Highered, May 4, 2018. Mattingly, Justin, ‘Virginia moves to shutter Virginia International University,’ Richmond Times, May 27, 2019. Redden, Elizabeth, ‘“Rampant Plagiarism” and “Patently Deficient” Online Education,’ Inside Highered, March 18, 2019. 144 Singh, Ajit, ‘“Independent” report claiming Uyghur genocide brought to you by sham university, neocon ideologues lobbying to “punish” China,’ The Gray Zone, March 17, 2021. 145 Asat, Rayhan and Diamond, Yonah, ‘U.S. China Policy Must Confront the Genocide in Xinjiang First,’ Foreign Policy, January 21, 2021. Asat, Rayhan and Diamond, Yonah, ‘The World’s Most Technologically Sophisticated Genocide Is Happening in Xinjiang,’ Foreign Policy, July 15, 2020. 146 Asat, Rayhan and Diamond, Yonah, ‘U.S. China Policy Must Confront the Genocide in Xinjiang First,’ Foreign Policy, January 21, 2021. 147 Nebehay, Stephanie, ‘U.N. says it has credible reports that China holds million Uighurs in secret camps,’ Reuters, August 10, 2018. ‘U.N. Panel Confronts China Over Reports That It Holds a Million Uighurs in Camps,’ The New York Times, August 10, 2018. ‘China Uighurs: One million held in political camps, UN told,’ BBC News, August 10, 2018. 148 Norton, Ben and Singh, Ajit, ‘No, the UN did not report China has “massive internment camps” for Uighur Muslims,’ The Grey Zone, August 23, 2018. 149 Nebehay, Stephanie, ‘U.N. says it has credible reports that China holds million Uighurs in secret camps,’ Reuters, August 10, 2018. 150 Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, website of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (https:// www.ohchr.org/en/hrbodies/cerd/pages/cerdindex.aspx). 151 ‘UN panel concerned at reported Chinese detention of Uighurs,’ The Grey Zone, August 10, 2018. 152 Norton, Ben and Singh, Ajit, ‘No, the UN did not report China has “massive internment camps” for Uighur Muslims,’ The Grey Zone, August 23, 2018. 153 Graham-Harrison, Emma, ‘China has built 380 internment camps in Xinjiang, study finds,’ The Guardian, September 24, 2020. 154 Hua Chunying 华春莹 on Twitter, ‘Already forgotten? Last time the socalled “camp” was actually a “five-star” apartment complex. Better not fall in the same hole twice,’ September 25, 2020. 155 ‘Xinjiang offers real-site photos to debunk satellite images ‘evidence’ of “detention centers”,’ Global Times, November 27, 2020.



Xinjiang and the Sino-U.S.Conflict 515

156 ‘What’s behind extremist Adrian Zenz’s report, “genocide” lies?,’ CGTN, March 3, 2021. 157 Chung, Frank, ‘“They sing and dance”: Aussie retiree trashes claims of Uighur repression in Chinese propaganda,’ News.au, September 2, 2020. 158 Ibid. 159 Ibid. 160 ‘American/Canadian Propaganda - a Xinjiang “Genocide” Panel,’ Daniel Dumbrill (Youtube Channel), March 23, 2021. 161 Allen, Kerry and Williams, Sophie, ‘The foreigners in China’s disinformation drive,’ BBC News, July 11, 2021. 162 Baptsta, Eduardo, ‘Human rights in China: activists say sensationalist reports on Xinjiang do more harm than good,’ South China Morning Post, May 24, 2021. 163 Ibid. 164 Cunningham, Philip J., ‘In the West, China the villain is a narrative few dare to challenge,’ South China Morning Post, April 27, 2021. 165 Ibid. 166 ‘American/Canadian Propaganda - a Xinjiang “Genocide” Panel,’ Daniel Dumbrill (Youtube Channel), March 23, 2021. 167 Mitchell, Greg, So Wrong For So Long: How the Press, the Pundits – and the President – Failed on Iraq, New York, Sinclair Books, 2013 (Section 1: January 2003, Part 1: On the War Path). 168 Tompkins, Al, ‘Thursday Edition: Lead’s Toxic Toll,’ Poynter, January 29, 2003 169 ‘American/Canadian Propaganda - a Xinjiang “Genocide” Panel,’ Daniel Dumbrill (Youtube Channel), March 23, 2021. 170 Hippensteel, Chris, ‘A Military Tech Giant Is Using Prison Labor To Make Electronics,’ Vice News, January 13, 2021. ‘Prisoners Help Build Patriot Missiles,’ Wired, August 3, 2011. ‘Prison Labor Fuels American War Machine,’ Prison Legal News, January 15, 2004. Benns, Whitney, ‘American Slavery, Reinvented,’ The Atlantic, September 21, 2015. Johnson, Kevin Rashid, ‘Prison labor is modern slavery. I’ve been sent to solitary for speaking out,’ The Guardian, August 23, 2018. Browne, Jaron, ‘Rooted in Slavery: Prison Labor Exploitation,’ Race, Poverty & the Environment, vol. 14, no. 1, Spring 2007 (pp. 42–44). Love, David A. and Das, Vijay, ‘Slavery in the US prison system,’ Al Jazeera, September 9, 2017. ‘Prison labour is a billion-dollar industry, with uncertain returns for inmates,’ The Economist, March 16, 2017. 171 ‘American/Canadian Propaganda - a Xinjiang “Genocide” Panel,’ Daniel Dumbrill (Youtube Channel), March 23, 2021. 172 ‘What’s behind extremist Adrian Zenz’s report, “genocide” lies?,’ CGTN, March 3, 2021. 173 Steger, Isabella, ‘On Xinjiang, even those wary of Holocaust comparisons are reaching for the word “genocide”,’ Quartz, August 20, 2020.

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174 Lyons, Kate, ‘Uighur leaders warn China’s actions could be “precursors to genocide”,’ The Guardian, December 7, 2018. 175 ‘Sanctioned UK politician compares Beijing’s Xinjiang policies to Nazis,’ CNN, March 26, 2020. Milmo, Cahal, ‘MPs compare China to Nazi Germany as Beijing is accused of “systematic ethnic cleansing” of Uighurs,’ inews, September 9, 2020. 176 Eve, Francis, ‘China is committing ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang – it’s time for the world to stand up,’ The Guardian, November 3, 2018. 177 Roul, Animesh, ‘Al-Qaeda and Islamic State Reinvigorating East Turkistan Jihad,’ Jamestown Foundation, May 17, 2019. 178 ‘Muslim nations are defending China as it cracks down on Muslims, shattering any myths of Islamic solidarity,’ CNN, July 17, 2019. 179 ‘Chinese president meets Saudi crown prince,’ China Daily, February 22, 2019. 180 Xu, Keyue, ‘Mideast states back China’s Xinjiang stance,’ Global Times, March 25, 2021. 181 Ma, Alexandra, ‘Saudi crown prince defended China’s imprisonment of a million Muslims in internment camps, giving Xi Jinping a reason to continue his “precursors to genocide”,’ Business Insider, February 23, 2019. 182 ‘Why do some Muslim-majority countries support China’s crackdown on Muslims?,’ Washington Post, May 4, 2021. 183 Ward, Alex, ‘China is buying Muslim leaders’ silence on the Uyghurs,’ Vox, June 23, 2021. 184 ‘Speaking With a Uyghur Activist About Xinjiang Abuse,’ Daniel Dumbrill (Youtube Channel), August 17, 2020. 185 ‘China Takes Diplomats to Tour “Re-Education Camps” as Pressure Builds Over Mass Detention of Uighurs,’ Time, January 7, 2019. ‘China takes 12 envoys on tour to Muslim Xinjiang,’ Deccan Chronicle, January 10, 2019. 186 Blanchard, Ben, ‘Wary of Xinjiang backlash, China invites waves of diplomats to visit,’ Reuters, February 21, 2019. 187 ‘Foreign media praise Xinjiang’s development, stability,’ Xinhua, January 16, 2019. 188 ‘Senior diplomats from 8 countries to UN Geneva office visit Xinjiang,’ CGTN (Youtube Channel), February 25, 2019. ‘Senior diplomats from 8 countries to UN Geneva office visits China,’ China Daily, February 16, 2019. 189 Blanchard, Ben, ‘Wary of Xinjiang backlash, China invites waves of diplomats to visit,’ Reuters, February 21, 2019. 190 Ibid. 191 Resolutions on Muslim Communities and Minorities in the NonOIC Member States, Adopted by the 46th Session of the Council of Foreign Ministers, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 1–2 March, 2019 (https://www.oic-oci.org/ docdown/?docID=4447&refID=1250). 192 Li, Ruohan, ‘Senior UN official visits Xinjiang,’ Global Times, June 17, 2019.



Xinjiang and the Sino-U.S.Conflict 517

193 ‘China says reached ‘broad consensus’ with U.N. after Xinjiang visit,’ Reuters, June 16, 2019. 194 ‘Diplomats from 7 countries visit Xinjiang,’ Xinhua, August 23, 2019. 195 ‘Diplomats from African countries, African Union visit Xinjiang,’ CGTN, September 19, 2019. 196 ‘20 Arab countries and Arab League envoys and diplomats in China visit Xinjiang,’ Teller Report, October 26, 2020. 197 ‘Western hype about Xinjiang an unprovoked attack on China: African ambassadors,’ Xinhua, March 16, 2021. 198 ‘Why African countries back China on human rights,’ BBC News, May 2, 2021. 199 Pamuk, Humeyra and Martina, Michael, ‘U.S. slams China, U.N. rights chief, ahead of Xinjiang visit,’ Reuters, May 20, 2022. 200 ‘Dozens of NGOs urge UN rights chief to resign after China visit,’ CAN, June 9, 2022. ‘230 Rights groups demand resignation of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights,’ International Tibet Network, June 8, 2022. 201 ‘The Guardian view on the UN in Xinjiang: a grave error,’ The Guardian, May 31, 2022.  ‘Truth emerges about Chinese repression of Uyghurs – no thanks to the U.N.,’ The Washington Post, May 29, 2022. Rogers, Benedict, ‘Michelle Bachelet’s Failed Xinjiang Trip Has Tainted Her Whole Legacy,’ Foreign Policy, June 13, 2022. 202 ‘OHCHR Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China,’ United Nations Officer of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, August 31, 2022. 203 ‘Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights on his mission to China: comments by the State,’ United Nations Human Rights Council, Thirty-fifth session, 6–23 June 2017, Agenda Item 3. ‘Report of the Independent Export on the enjoyment of all human rights by older persons on her visit to China,’ United Nations Human Rights Council, Forty-fifth session, 14 September-2 October 2020, Agenda Item 1. 204 Peterson, Scott, ‘In war, some facts less factual,’ Christian Science Monitor, September 6, 2002. 205 Lynch, Colum and Gramer, Robbie, ‘Xinjiang Visit by U.N. Counterterrorism Official Provokes Outcry,’ Time, June 13, 2019. 206 Putz, Catherine, ‘Which Countries Are For or Against China’s Xinjiang Policies?,’ The Diplomat, July 15, 2019. 207 Yellinek, Roie and Chen, Elizabeth, ‘The “22 vs. 50” Diplomatic Split Between the West and China Over Xinjiang and Human Rights,’ Jamestown Foundation, December 31, 2019. ‘Ambassadors from 50 countries voice support to China’s position on issues related to Xinjiang,’ Xinhua, July 27, 2019. Putz, Catherine, ‘Which Countries Are For or Against China’s Xinjiang Policies?,’ The Diplomat, July 15, 2019. 208 Berlinger, Joshua, ‘North Korea, Syria and Myanmar among countries defending China’s actions in Xinjiang,’ CNN, July 15, 2019.

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209 Westcott, Ben and Roth, Richard, ‘China’s treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang divides UN members,’ CNN, October 30, 2019. 210 ‘US official says UN has “lack of curiosity” on Xinjiang,’ AP News, October 29, 2020. 211 Roth, Kenneth, ‘Why the U.N. chief’s silence on human rights is deeply troubling,’ Washington Post, April 24, 2019. 212 ‘Nearly 70 countries voice support for China on human rights issues,’ CGTN, October 8, 2020. 213 Ibid. 214 Liu, Xin, ‘More than 90 countries express support to China amid rampant anti-China campaign at UN human rights body,’ Global Times, June 22, 2021. 215 Fan, Anqi, ‘UN envoys attend event highlighting ethnic group solidarity in Xinjiang, condemn West for fabricating lies,’ Global Times, July 8, 2021. 216 ‘Belarus represents 70 countries to call for non-interference in China’s internal affairs,’ Xinhua, March 6, 2021. 217 ‘Muslim nations are defending China as it cracks down on Muslims, shattering any myths of Islamic solidarity,’ CNN, July 17, 2019. 218 ‘A tale of torture in a Chinese internment camp for Uighurs,’ U.S. Virtual Embassy Iran (https://ir.usembassy.gov/a-tale-of-torture-in-a-chineseinternment-camp-for-uighurs/). 219 Vittachi, Nury, ‘Uyghur story podcast traced back to CIA man,’ Friday Everyday, February 3, 2022. 220 ‘No, this is not a video of a Chinese soldier beating a Uighur Muslim for having a copy of the Koran,’ factcheck.afp, January 9, 2019. 221 ‘Chinese Police Strangling Uyghur Muslim Woman?,’ factcheck.afp, January 1, 2020. 222 Kelly, Jack, ‘China Moves Uyghur Muslims into “Forced Labour” Factories,’ Forbes, March 5, 2020. (For original Forbes and Brazilian pictures see: https://i.redd.it/20mzu89zo1d51.jpg) 223 ‘Protestor’s Tortured Past,’ BBC News, May 27, 2003. (For examples of misuse see: https://i.redd.it/9zixb3ukmad51.png) 224 ‘UNHEARD VOICE: Evaluating five years of pro-Western covert influence operations,’ Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory Cyber Policy Centre, August 24, 2022. 225 Roul, Animesh, ‘Al-Qaeda and Islamic State Reinvigorating East Turkistan Jihad,’ Jamestown Foundation, May 17, 2019. 226 Ibid. 227 Gurcan, Metin, ‘How the Islamic State is exploiting Asian unrest to recruit fighters,’ Al-Monitor, September 8, 2015. 228 Shakil, FM, ‘Meet the militants chasing China out of Pakistan,’ Asia Times, January 11, 2021. Basit, Abdul, ‘Female suicide bomber adds to China, Pakistan woes in volatile Balochistan conflict,’ South China Morning Post, April 29, 2022. 229 Chew, Amy, ‘Indonesian terrorists planned to attack shop owners in areas with Chinese communities,’ South China Morning Post, August 27, 2020. Siyech, Mohammed Sinan, ‘Why China is becoming a target of jihadist hatred, like the US,’ South China Morning Post, September 14, 2020.



Xinjiang and the Sino-U.S.Conflict 519

230 Arslan Hidayat on Twitter, ‘My New Year’s resolution is to be a better extremist and separatist,’ January 1, 2021. 231 Arslan Hidayat on Twitter, ‘There is nothing wrong with this video, he is warnig the people of China who have illegally settled/ occupied East Turkistan to leave or face the consequences. Unfortunately, thee reality of the situation is, Uyghurs currently don’t have the capacity to physical defend or take back their land, so whilst I support the message, we are a long way away from doing so. Freedom loving nations should be funding Uyghurs militarily to turn the message in the video into reality. The CCP along with every single occupier have to leave East Turkistan.’ May 27, 2021. 232 ‘Speaking With a Uyghur Activist About Xinjiang Abuse,’ Daniel Dumbrill (Youtube Channel), August 17, 2020. 233 Blumenthal, Max and Hedges, Thomas, ‘Inside America’s meddling machine: NED, the US-funded org interfering in elections around the globe,’ The Grey Zone, August 20, 2018. 234 Abrams, A. B., China and America’s Tech War from AI to 5G: The Struggle to Shape the Future of World Order, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2022 (Chapter 9: The World Economy Split in Two: America’s Response to Competitive Disadvantage). 235 Baschuk, Bryce, ‘U.S. Violated Trade Rules with Tariffs on China, WTO Says,’ Bloomberg, September 15, 2020. 236 Liptak, Kevin, ‘Trump signs Uyghur human rights bill on same day Bolton alleges he told Xi to proceed with detention camps,’ CNN, June 17, 2020. Suliman, Adela, ‘Beijing says it will retaliate after Trump approves Uighur Muslims sanctions law,’ NBC News, June 18, 2020. 237 Fromer, Jacob, ‘US sanctions 23 more Chinese companies for suspected Xinjiang abuses, military and business ties,’ South China Morning Post, July 9, 2020. 238 Bermingham, Finbarr and Delaney, Robert and Fromer, Jacob, ‘US issues restrictions on import of Xinjiang cotton and apparel products, citing forced labour,’ South China Morning Post, September 15, 2020. 239 Churchill, Owen, ‘US House passes forced labour bill that would bar Xinjiang imports,’ South China Morning Post, September 23, 2020. 240 Churchill, Owen and Fromer, Jacob, ‘US bill banning Xinjiang imports over forced labour concerns fails to become law,’ South China Morning Post, December 23, 2020. 241 Martina, Michael, ‘U.S. Senate passes bill to ban all products from China’s Xinjiang,’ Reuters, July 15, 2021. 242 Fromer, Jacob, ‘US sanctions 23 more Chinese companies for suspected Xinjiang abuses, military and business ties,’ South China Morning Post, July 9, 2021. 243 Angel, Rebecca, ‘US bans target Chinese solar panel industry over Xinjiang forced labour concerns,’ The Guardian, June 25, 2021. Zhang, Dan, ‘News analysis: “Forced labour” lies won’t beat down Xinjiang solar firms,’ Global Times, May 16, 2021.

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Fromer, Jacob, ‘US sanctions Chinese AI firm SenseTime, Xinjiang officials, citing human rights abuses,’ South China Morning Post, December 11, 2021. 244 Palmer, Doug, ‘U.S. sets steep final duties on Chinese solar panels,’ Reuters, October 10, 2012. ‘U.S. sets anti-dumping duties on solar imports from China, Taiwan,’ Reuters, July 25, 2014. 245 Pan, Che, ‘US chip maker Intel triggers Chinese media backlash after telling suppliers to avoid Xinjiang labour,’ South China Morning Post, December 22, 2021. 246 Ng, Abigail, ‘China’s electric vehicle battery supply chain shows signs of forced labour, report says,’ The West Australian, June 22, 2022. 247 Zhang, Dan, ‘Xinjiang solar firm debunks “forced labour” lies by hosting Western media, analysts,’ Global Times, May 12, 2021. Masterson, Pete, ‘Xinjiang Solar Firm Debunks “Forced Labour” Lies By Hosting Western Media, Analysts,’ Heating News Journal, May 12, 2021. 248 ‘HKers file lawsuit against US on Xinjiang,’ Friday Everyday, July 7, 2021. 249 Ibid. Churchill, Owen, ‘Esquel Group sues US over unit’s inclusion on ‘entity list’ as company’s chief says it faces “devastating harm”,’ South China Morning Post, July 7, 2021. 250 ‘Statement of Sketchers USA, INC. on Uyghurs,’ Sketchers, March 2021 (https://about.skechers.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/SKECHERSUSA-STATEMENT-UYGHURS-March-2021.pdf). 251 Sudworth, John, ‘Volkswagen says “no forced labour” at Xinjiang plant,’ BBC News, November 12, 2020. 252 Zhang, Dan, ‘Xinjiang solar firm debunks “forced labour” lies by hosting Western media, analysts,’ Global Times, May 12, 2021. 253 Batha, Emma, ‘China accused of forcing 570,000 people to pick cotton in Xinjiang,’ Reuters, December 15, 2020. 254 Ng, David, ‘Hong Kong commentator: Xinjiang’s cotton production figures debunk the myth of forced labour,’ Think China, April 8, 2021. Mao, Weihua, ‘Mechanization of Xinjiang’s cotton sector approaches 90%,’ China Daily, April 2, 2021. ‘Xinjiang Human Rights: Uygur cotton grower responds to allegations of forced labour,’ CGTN, March 28, 2021. 255 Ilham, Jewher, ‘There’s a good chance your cotton T-shirt was made with Uyghur slave labour,’ The Guardian, April 9, 2021. 256 ‘UK business must “wake up” to China’s Uighur cotton slaves,” BBC News, December 16, 2020. 257 Westcott, Ben and He, Laura, ‘H&M and Nike are facing a boycott in China over Xinjiang cotton statements,’ CNN, March 26, 2021. Leary, Alex and Mauldin, William, ‘U.S. Condemns Chinese Boycotts of Companies Shunning Xinjiang Cotton,’ Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2021. 258 ‘Uighurs: Western countries sanction China over rights abuses,’ BBC News, March 22, 2021.



Xinjiang and the Sino-U.S.Conflict 521

259 Emmott, Robin, ‘EU, China impose tit-for-tat sanctions over Xinjiang abuses,’ Reuters, March 22, 2021. 260 Ni, Vincent, ‘EU parliament “freezes” China trade deal over sanctions,’ The Guardian, May 20, 2021. Ni, Vincent, ‘EU efforts to ratify China investment deal “suspended” after sanctions,’ The Guardian, May 4, 2021. 261 ‘China’s Embrace of Sanctions Costs It an Investment Deal With EU,’ Bloomberg, May 21, 2021. Fallon, Theresa, ‘China shoots itself in the foot on EU-US relations,’ Orf Online, May 24, 2021. 262 Mears, Eleanor and Leali, Giorgio, ‘EU-China investment deal hits a snag as US exerts pressure,’ Politico, December 22, 2020. Tharoor, Ishaan, ‘The awkward timing of Europe’s deal with China,’ Washington Post, January 5, 2021. ‘Will the Sudden E.U.-China Deal Damage Relations With Biden?,’ The New York Times, January 6, 2021. Kluth, Andreas, ‘The China-EU Investment Deal Is a Mistake,’ Bloomberg, December 30, 2020. Baschuk, Bryce and Nardelli, Alberto, ‘Biden Lines Up EU Help to Toughen Terms of Trade for China,’ Bloomberg, June 9, 2021. 263 Newsnight, BBC, April 14, 2021. 264 Charlie Kirk Speaks at the Young Latino Leadership Summit at Phoenix Arizona, April 18, 2021. 265 ‘Who is CJ Werleman?,’ DFRAC, November 25, 2021. 266 Brunnstrom, David and Martina, Michael, ‘Pelosi calls for U.S. and world leaders to boycott China’s 2022 Olympics,’ Reuters, May 18, 2021. 267 Big Tech and China: What Do We Need from Silicon Valley?, The Nixon Seminar on Conservative Realism and National Security, April 6, 2021. 268 ‘Here’s How to Handle the “Genocide Olympics” in Beijing,’ The New York Times, April 7, 2011. 269 Wintour, Patrick, ‘Raab says UK boycott of Beijing Winter Olympics possible over Uighur abuses,’ The Guardian, October 6, 2020. 270 Delaney, Robert, ‘More than half of Canadians support Beijing Olympics boycott, survey shows,’ South China Morning Post, April 2, 2021. 271 O’Sullivan, Catriona, ‘European Parliament votes to boycott Beijing Winter Olympics,’ Euronews, July 9, 2021. Bermingham, Finbarr, ‘European Parliament to call for Beijing Winter Olympic boycott and sanctions on Hong Kong leaders over Apple Daily closure,’ South China Morning Post, July 7, 2021. 272 ‘Moving Sochi Olympics to Vancouver not “practical,” councillor says,’ CBC News, August 8, 2013. Eveleth, Rose, ‘Is It Possible to Move the Winter Olympics Away From Russia?,’ Smithsonian Magazine, August 8, 2013. ‘Olympics-EU Commissioner joins German president in Sochi snub,’ Yahoo Sports, December 1, 2013. ‘Send Athletes to the Sochi Olympics, but Boycott the Games,’ The New York Times, February 8, 2014.

522

ATROCITY FABRICATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

Berkes, Howard, ‘Talk Of Boycotting Russian Olympics Stirs Emotions,’ NPR, July 17, 2013. 273 Hervey, Ginger, ‘Labour MPs: Tell FIFA to move World Cup from Russia,’ Politico, March 16, 2018. Cohen, George, ‘I think it’s all over for the World Cup in Russia after spy attack – so let England host it instead,’ The Sun, March 15, 2018. 274 Lang, Sean, ‘Why Boris Johnson was right to compare Vladimir Putin’s World Cup with Hitler’s Olympics,’ The Conversation, March 26, 2018. 275 Kopel, Chesky, ‘Between Berlin 1936 and Beijing 2022,’ Lehrhaus, February 4, 2021. Ingle, Sean, ‘Boycott questions over Beijing Winter Olympics raise eerie echoes of 1936,’ The Guardian, March 1, 2021. ‘The 2022 Beijing Olympics will be yet another Games tarnished by genocide,’ Washington Post, February 4, 2021. Da Silva, Michael, ‘Beijing 2022 Olympics: “If genocide isn’t our red line for a full boycott, then I really don’t know what is”,’ Deutsche Welle, June 25, 2021. Timsit, Annabelle, ‘What can a boycott of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics achieve?,’ Quartz, April 13, 2021. 276 Edwards, Richard, ‘Tibet protests disrupt Olympic torch parade,’ The Telegraph April 6, 2008. Ward Anderson, John and Moore, Molly, ‘Paris Protests Disrupt Torch Relay,’ Washington Post, April 8, 2008. 277 Koshikawa, Noriaki, ‘China passes US as world’s top researcher, showing its R&D might,’ Nikkei, August 8, 2020. 278 Mitt Romney on Twitter, ‘China matches US spending on military procurement, which is tremendously dangerous given that China doesn’t believe in human rights or democracy. My #FY21NDAA amendment directs the @DeptOfDefense compare our spending with that of China and Russia to provide us with a lay of land,” July 20, 2020. ‘Schieffer Series: A Conversation with Senator Mitt Romney on U.S.China Relations and Great Power Competition,’ Centre for Strategic and International Studies, July 22, 2020. 279 ‘China continues to dominate worldwide patent applications,’ E and T, December 4, 2018. 280 Schoen, Douglas E., The Nixon Effect: How Richard Nixon’s Presidency Fundamentally Changed American Politics, New York, Encounter Books, 2016 (p. 292). Corn, David, ‘“Hubris”: New Documentary Re-examines the Iraq War “Hoax”,’ Mother Jones, February 16, 2013. 281 Bricmont, Jean, Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War, New York, Monthly Review Press, 2006 (Chapter 7: Prospects, Dangers and Hopes, Section 2: The Crimes of Saddam Hussein). Beaumont, Peter, ‘PM admits graves claim “untrue,”’ Observer, July 18, 2004. 282 Cobain, Ian, ‘British army permitted shooting of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan,’ Middle East Eye, February 4, 2019. ‘“Killing spree”: UK soldiers told to kill unarmed citizens in Iraq and Afghanistan – report,’ RT, February 15, 2019.

Index B

9/11 Attacks  9, 257, 258, 261–265, 267, 269–272, 276, 280, 281, 418, 454

A

Abu Ghraib Prison  292–297 Acheson, Dean  87, 108, 113, 123 Afghanistan  230, 257, 289, 365, 447–449, 445, 453, 482 Afghan Insurgency (1980s)  160, 163, 220–222, 365, 409, 420, 446, 479 Africa  5, 23, 184, 209, 277, 282, 315, 358–362, 371, 378–381, 384–393, 484-485, 489, 502 African Gold Dinar  360–362 African Investment Bank  360 African Union  360, 378, 388, 391, 484, 489 Al Jazeera  127, 368, 376, 377, 385–387, 389, 408 Al Nusra Front  409, 415–419, 424 Al Qaeda  222, 257, 298, 365, 366, 370, 377, 380, 409, 415, 418, 421, 422, 424, 425, 434, 445, 446, 451, 467, 468, 492 alleged links to Iraq  258, 259, 262–265, 267, 269–272, 274–276, 279–281, 283, 286 al-Ebraheem, Hassan  175 al-Hawil, Ali  178 Albright, Madeline  229, 230, 274, 346, 347 Amnesty International  171–174, 190, 192, 213, 230, 387, 485 Annan, Kofi  17, 268 Australia  2, 15, 284, 289, 379, 465, 472, 473 Australian Strategic Policy Institute  472, 478, 493, 499

Bachelet, Michelle  485, 486 Bamford, James  26, 50 BBC  6, 130, 131, 214, 460, 463, 458, 460, 461, 463, 464, 468, 475, 485, 504 Belgium  2, 3, 369 Belt and Road Initiative  360, 444, 445, 448, 456, 492 Bendjedid, Chadli  162 Benghazi Counterinsurgency Campaign (2011)  362, 363, 365, 367, 372–376, 388 Biden, Joe  9, 393, 468, 495, 496 Blair, Tony  227, 243, 266, 277, 285, 286, 287, 459 Bryce Commission  2–4, 62 Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND)  6 Bush, George H. W.  158, 160–163, 173, 174 Bush, George W.  257, 258, 260, 263, 264, 266, 267, 269–273, 276, 280–281, 283, 285, 286, 373, 375

C

Canada  23, 144, 369, 379, 474, 501 Castro, Fidel  22, 24–27, 31 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)  3–6, 23–25, 27, 29, 34–37, 43, 51–53, 60, 79, 98, 122, 123, 128, 139, 141, 143, 204, 206, 208, 226, 235, 258, 269, 271–274, 299, 331, 340, 346, 373, 417, 445–448, 457, 458, 491 Chai, Ling  138, 142, 460 Cheney, Dick  162, 262–264, 271, 273, 280 China–U.S. Cold War (1949–1979) 119–124 Chinese Civil War  34, 85, 119–121 Citizens for a Free Kuwait  166, 175, 177

523

524

ATROCITY FABRICATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

Clinton, Bill  145, 226, 228–230, 243, 260 Clinton, Hillary  9, 169, 338, 366, 376 Colonial Wars  13–17 Council on Foreign Relations  18, 219, 268, 337, 445, 462 crime of aggression  17, 157, 160, 279, 286, 299, 420, 422, 427, 428, 433, 503 democratising mission as justification  37, 104, 126, 140, 259, 284–286 Cunningham, Philip J.  134–136, 475, 476

D

Dayton Agreement  210, 219 Defector Testimonies in Atrocity Narratives  62, 64, 65, 263, 283, 312–329, 345, 457, 460, 461, 465 Deng, Xiaoping  124, 125, 136, 141 Denmark 369 Depleted Uranium Weapons  178–182, 191, 236, 290, 291 Dooley, Tom  36, 37 Dugan, Michael J.  158

E

East Turkistan Islamic Movement  445, 449 Eisenhower, Dwight D.  25, 26, 34, 35, 37, 78 European Court of Human Rights 233

F

First Indochina War  32–35 First Opium War  15 First World War  1–3 France  3, 13, 14, 32–35, 142, 147, 185–186, 190–191, 215, 232, 360, 361, 367–369, 379, 408, 412, 423, 424, 428–430, 434, 456 Free Syrian Army  409–411, 423

G

Gaddafi, Muammar  7, 358, 359, 364–369, 372–374, 376–381, 384–388, 391 Gelinas, Andre  62–64 Genocide of Black Africans in Libya  386–389 Germany  2, 3, 6, 23, 205, 206, 207, 214, 222, 226, 239, 335, 370, 489, 501 Nazi Germany, comparisons to  81, 83, 84, 107, 174, 204, 208, 209, 215, 217, 241, 287, 457, 459, 467, 478, 479, 484, 490, 501 Great Man-Made River  381–383 Grenada  156, 157, 178, 279, 430 Grotius, Hugo  15 Gulf of Tonkin  34, 39, 41, 42, 46, 48–54, 59, 417 Guomindang 119–122 Guterres, Antonio  17, 489 Gutman, Roy  208, 215–217 Gwangju Uprising  147

H

Hanley, James M.  90–94 Hanyok, Robert J.  40 Harff, James  208, 209 Hass, Richard N.  18 Hidayat, Arslan  461, 462, 493 Hill+Knowlton  166, 168–169, 174, 176, 177, 319 Hitler, Adolf, comparisons to  163, 170, 175, 177, 184, 215, 227, 228, 262, 284 Holocaust (Europe) 1941–45  66, 82, 209, 215, 217, 218, 244, 287, 457, 459, 463, 467, 476, 478, 479, 482 Hong Kong  131, 132, 139, 141, 142, 144 Human Rights Watch  230, 297, 322, 333, 363, 385, 387, 389, 458, 485, 489, 504 Hunter, Duncan D.  288



Index 525

Hussein, Saddam  9, 157–159, 161–164, 170, 172, 174, 175, 179, 184, 190, 261–264, 268, 270, 271, 273, 276, 277, 281, 346, 359, 375 human shredder story  284, 285

I

Idlib (Syrian governate)  423, 425, 447, 450–452 Information Research Department (British) 5 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)  266, 268, 274, 433 Iran  7, 28, 156, 163, 278, 299, 310, 393, 407, 421, 422, 470, 490 Iraq  9, 10, 132, 138, 140, 141, 156193, 211, 230, 238, 257–299, 310, 312, 314, 333, 346, 359, 365, 373, 375, 376, 382, 393, 407, 410, 412, 417, 418, 421, 427, 430, 433, 450, 451, 457, 458, 459, 472, 476, 477, 478, 480, 482, 487, 490, 502–503 Iraq Survey Group  272, 281, 282 Islamic State  298, 384, 409, 423, 445, 447, 448, 451, 492 Israel  6, 157, 231, 407–409, 423, 430 Italy  214, 222, 235, 367, 369, 501 Izetbegović, Alija  208, 216

J

Jamaica  29, 31 Japan  86, 99, 120, 160, 163, 289, 360, 487–489 Johnson, Lyndon  37–39, 41–43, 48–51, 63 Joint Chiefs of Staff (U.S.)  24–27, 37, 50, 413, 418 Joint Chiefs of Staff (Korean)  338

K

Karzai, Hamid  448 Kelly, David  278 Kenney, George  209, 224, 225, 235 Kim, Dong Choon  82 Kim, Jong Il  330, 331, 346, 347

Kim, Jong Nam  339, 340 Kim, Jong Un  163, 319, 320, 328, 330, 339 Kennedy, John F.  26, 30, 37 Kennan, George  361 Kosovo Liberation Army  222–227, 228, 231, 242–244 Kuwait  156–171,174–179, 185–187, 189–191, 276, 283, 285, 291, 480, 482, 489, 502

L

Lansdale, Edward G.  27, 36, 53 Lantos, Tom  169, 170 Lemnitzer, Lyman  25–27, 30, 32 Lartigue, Casey  319 Libya 358–395 Liu, Xiaobo  139, 140 Lumumba, Patrice  24

M

MacArthur, Douglas  79, 86, 87, 94 Maddox, J. D.  281, 282 Mandela, Nelson  140, 358, 359 McCain, John  189, 394 McGehee, Ralph  36, 37 McKinley, William  16 McNamara, Robert S.  37, 38, 41, 44, 45, 50 Milosevic, Slobodan  210, 211, 215, 225, 228–229, 239, 241 Moyers, Bill  219 Muccio, John  107, 108

N

National Endowment for Democracy   139, 140, 206, 457 National Security Agency (U.S.)  26, 40, 416–418 National Security Council (U.S.)  23, 238, 257, 373 NATO  17, 217, 223, 226–244, 370–372, 377, 378, 383, 385, 386, 389–393, 429, 448, 452 Nayirah  164–167, 169–173, 193, 314, 318, 319, 480 Netherlands  13–15, 234, 241

526

ATROCITY FABRICATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders 457 Newlines Institute  469, 470 Nichols, Donald  79, 80 North Korea   310–347

O

Obama, Barak  9, 18, 296, 298, 324, 334, 338, 344–345, 372, 374, 375, 412–414, 416–418, 420–421, 427 Office of Special Plans (U.S.)  259 Office of Strategic Influence (U.S.)  6 Olympic Games  145, 146, 454, 500–502 Operation Desert Fox  192 Operation Desert Storm  141, 159, 179–193 attacks on critical infrastructure  182–84, 382 biological weapons centre claims 183 death toll  186, 187 depleted uranium rounds  178–182, 191 incubator deaths at Saddam Paediatric 189–191 live burial of Iraqis  179 napalm attacks  179–180 oil tanker coverup  184, 185 press relations  187–188 Operation Earnest Voice  7, 8 Operation Mockingbird  3 Operation Mongoose  23, 24 Operation Northwoods  25, 26, 32, 50 Operation Southern Focus  265 Operation St Bailey  123 Operation Yellowbird  141, 483, 489 Organisation of Islamic Cooperation  483, 489 Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons  422, 425, 431–434

P

Panama  29, 156, 157, 178, 279, 430 Paringaux, R. P.  64 Paris Massacre (1961)  147 Park, Yeonmi  314–320, 461, 502 Philippines  4, 16, 36, 53, 223, 289, 484 Phillips, Joan  216, 217 Pompeo, Mike  143, 467, 468, 501 Porter, John E.  169, 170 Portugal 14 Powell, Colin  192, 257, 260, 269, 274–276, 280, 281, 314, 375, 447, 503 Psychological Strategy Board (U.S) 105–106 Putin, Vladimir  380, 394, 421, 422

Q

Qatar  367–370, 376, 377, 385, 387, 390, 407, 409, 412, 429

R

Radio Free Asia  330, 331, 345, 458, 460, 462, 464, 465, 470, 492, 493, 504 Rhee, Syngman  79, 80, 82, 106 Rice, Condoleezza  263, 268, 274, 375 Rice, Susan  259, 272, 386 Ridgway, Matthew  84, 91, 93, 94 ROKS Cheonan 334–339 Ruder & Finn  206, 209 Rumsfeld, Donald  257–260, 263, 271, 296 Russia  143, 421–423, 426, 428–430, 444, 446, 447, 468, 470, 482, 501

S

Sarkozy, Nicholas  361, 367 Saudi Arabia  158, 161–163, 174, 278, 408, 409, 415, 416, 418, 423, 480, 481, 487, 490 Shin Dong Hyuk  313–314 Solana, Javier  17 Sony 343–346



Index 527

South Africa  358, 359, 378 South Korea  78–84, 87, 93, 103, 107, 140, 147, 311, 317, 318, 320–330, 334–340, 345 Soviet Union (USSR)  3, 4, 17, 22, 31, 85, 86, 87, 119, 121, 124, 137, 139, 141, 143, 147, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163, 177, 179, 186, 204, 407, 446, 500 Spain  14, 132, 369, 370, 501 Sudan  126, 184, 230, 257, 387, 392, 485 Sun Yee On triad  141 Sweden 369 Syria  161, 181, 184, 216, 257, 278, 298, 310, 358, 364, 365, 369, 370, 377, 391, 393, 394, 407–435, 446, 447, 449–453, 455, 467, 470, 480, 486, 487, 502 Syrian Democratic Forces  423

T

Taejon Massacre  81, 82 Taiwan  5, 43, 103, 106–110, 121, 122, 137 Taylor, Letta  279 Tenet, George  236, 269, 273 Thatcher, Margaret  159, 163 Tibet  122, 123, 445, 449, 502 transnational Jihadism  221, 222, 366, 409, 446–453 Trinidad and Tobago  31 Truman, Harry  105, 106, 120, 123 Trump, Donald  340, 427, 428, 430, 464, 469, 494 Turkey  222, 228, 230, 408, 412, 423, 447, 464, 465, 482 terrorism sponsorship  409, 418, 434, 445, 449–453 Turkistan Islamic Party  445, 450, 451, 467, 449

U

Ulfkotte, Udo  6, 7 UNICEF 381–382 United Nations Charter  17, 279, 427, 429 United Nations General Assembly  86, 263, 267 United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights  485, 486, 471, 487 United Nations Security Council  17, 78, 86, 176–178, 189, 191, 268, 269, 275, 279, 368, 419, 422, 427, 428, 503 United Nations Undersecretary General for Counterterrorism  483, 487 United States Africa Command  359, 391 United States Congress  4, 38–41, 45, 48–50, 60, 61, 63, 142, 166, 169, 170, 259, 319, 320, 325, 421 United States Congressional Human Rights Caucus  164, 166, 169, 170 United States Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA)  272, 417, 418 United States Department of Defence  6, 24, 296, 359, 465 United States Department of State 23, 52, 108, 123, 133, 157, 209, 224, 227, 235, 241, 242, 274, 275, 276, 296, 298, 299, 319, 341, 344, 377, 468, 485 United States Senate Subcommittee on Korean War Atrocities  92 Uyghur American Association  457, 458 Uyghur Human Rights and Democracy Foundation  457, 458

V

Venezuela  29, 139, 147, 310, 470 Vitoria, Francisco  14 Voice of America  140, 141 Voluntary Repatriation  103–111

W

Warmbier, Otto  341–343 Wars of the Reformation  13, 14 White Helmets (Syria)  423–425, 428, 433, 435 Wilkerson, Larry  281, 433, 434, 447, 448 Wolfowitz, Paul  258, 260, 268 World Order 2.0  17, 18 World Uyghur Congress  454, 457, 458, 469, 470, 485, 493

X

Xi, Jinping  163, 427, 481, 489

Y

Young, Stephen  53

Z

Zenz, Adrian  458–461, 463, 465, 466, 468–470, 472, 473, 478, 486, 493 Ziawudun, Tursunay  460, 461