The American People Are the Target for Corporate Media Censorship By Hassan El-Najjar

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Since the United States is involved in four raging wars (on Palestine, Lebanon indirectly through financing Israeli occupiers, and directly in Iraq, and Afghanistan) and being hammered daily by the Israeli Lobby to start three more (on Syria, Iran, and Sudan), the pro-Israel corporate media have been instrumental in beating drums of war. Simultaneously, the corporate media have accepted to be embedded with military units, covering only what the military wants them to cover.

The result has been a massive effort to deny the American people the basic facts about why is the US fighting all these wars and what is really going on over there.

Corporate media units have taken the Israeli side in Lebanon and Palestine, describing Israelis as victims and assaulting Lebanese and Palestinians with all kinds of negative labels. The media relentlessly mentioned that the current Israeli war on Lebanon and Gaza Strip started when resistance fighters captured three Israeli soldiers, as if history of the conflict started then.

They never mention that these attacks on Israeli soldiers were in retaliation for the continuous Israeli killing of Palestinian civilians and the continuous assassination of members of the Palestinian resistance despite a year-long truce, in which Palestinians held their fire.

They never mention that there are about 10,000 Palestinian, Lebanese, and other Arab prisoners in Israeli occupation prisons, whom the Israeli occupation government refused to release after withdrawal from south Lebanon and later from Gaza Strip.

They never mention that the Gaza Strip has never been free of the Israeli occupation despite the withdrawal of illegal Israeli settlers and Israeli occupation forces protecting them. The Israeli occupation forces have maintained a suffocating control of the Gaza Strip by land, air, and sea, literally preventing movement of Palestinians whenever it wished, by closing the Rafah and Beit Hanoon terminals most of the time.

They do not tell the American people that Iraq before the US invasion and occupation in 2003 never had this devastating and ugly sectarian killing. They never remind readers (in daily reporting) of the Interior Ministry's death squads and the role of the occupation forces in what's going on in Iraq, like the infamous incident of September 19, 2005, when two British undercover soldiers were arrested by Iraqi police when they were driving a car bomb in the streets of Basra.

The corporate media never shed light on who is behind the campaign of pressuring the US-EU governments to invade Sudan, particularly the relentless efforts of Zionists in Congress, led by Lantos.

Today, we have a new evidence about how the corporate media is an accomplice in the global US-led NATO war to subjugate the Muslim world and control its resources. The story is from Afghanistan.

The objective of all of this censorship, media embeddedness, and total loyalty to Israel is to keep the American people on the dark. So, they do not know about what's happening around the world in their name.

With the US national debt reaching about $8.5 trillion as a result of this Neocon Zionist "permanent war" strategy, ignorance about one's government policies is no longer a luxury. Ignorance and indifference in this case may have devastating financial consequences on the US not only on the long term, but also in the near future

I have observed recently that US news media have been publishing news reports about NATO occupation forces killing scores of Taliban resistance fighters by air strikes on their camps or bases.

I quickly alerted readers that it was impossible for Taliban fighters to have camps or bases in occupied Afghanistan, which is totally under the control of the US-led NATO occupation forces.

However, the same daily news have continued, which have made no sense until today.

In the following AP news report, the US-led NATO occupation forces admit for the first time that Taliban resistance fighters are in control of certain areas in southern Afghanistan.

Now, the previous puzzling news reports are making sense finally. This means that the Taliban resistance fighters have been in control of these areas for weeks, since the first time news reports mentioned bombing Taliban camps, bases, or centers. We were not told about it.

So what? Well, here we go again. The American people know very little about what's going on in all the wars America was dragged to in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

The embedded US corporate media has been reduced to Third-World-level media, spreading only what the government wants the people to know.

The American people need to look for alternative sources of news provided now through the internet. The corporate media should not be trusted any more as the only source of information.

US-Led NATO Occupation Forces Admit Losing an Area for Taliban Fighters, Prepare "Decisive" Assault on the Town of Garmser

U.S.-led forces declared Tuesday that they will launch "decisive operations" to reclaim territory from the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, where officials said Taliban resistance fighters still hold at least one town.

Afghan officials said scores of Taliban fighters had crossed from Pakistan to the town of Garmser and defeated a small group of police who holed up in a concrete compound for 16 days. The officers withdrew Sunday.

The next day, large numbers of Taliban resistance fighters chased police from Naway-i-Barakzay after a brief clash, officials said.

"The Taliban (resistance fighters) have taken control of the areas of Garmser and Naway-i-Barakzayi. However, US-led NATO occupation coalition forces do have them under observation," military spokesman Col. Tom Collins told reporters in Kabul.

"Decisive operations will begin soon," he added, without saying when. (It sounds like a Falluja-style assault will be launched on these liberated areas soon).

Deputy Interior Minister Abdul Malik Sidiqi said government forces had retaken control of Naway-i-Barakzayi on Monday, shortly after the Taliban victory.

A U.S. official said the battlefield situation was fluid, and details on Naway-i-Barakzayi's return to government control may not have reached American forces.

Helmand province's deputy governor said at least 400 Afghan soldiers, backed by US-led NATO occupation coalition troops, were heading in dozens of vehicles to Garmser to wrest it back from the Taliban.

An official with the International Organization for Migration said about 4,000 Afghans have fled fighting between Taliban resistance fighters and coalition forces in southern Helmand province in recent days.

It was not clear how many, if any, were escaping the two towns taken by the Taliban resistance fighters.

Sidiqi accused Pakistan-based Islamic groups Lashkar-e-Tayyaba - an outlawed Pakistani organization - and Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, a pro-Taliban political party, of taking over Garmser.

"They burned the Afghan flag and raised the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam flag," Sidiqi told reporters. "The government of Afghanistan has technically and temporarily left Garmser. We did so to prevent casualties to civilian people."

In the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore, Jamiat spokesman Riaz Durrani dismissed Afghan claims that his group's members were involved in the Helmand fighting.

"We are not helping any militant group in Afghanistan against (President) Hamid Karzai's government, but the fact is that he has failed to restore order," Durrani told The Associated Press. A Lashkar-e-Tayyaba spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment.

Taliban resistance fighters long have operated freely in their former strongholds in the southern provinces, but their ability to capture towns highlighted the weakness of Afghanistan's police forces in remote areas, and the challenge faced by the US-led NATO occupation forces in restoring order in the country.

"The Taliban (resistance fighters) have reconstituted and dispersed, but this is certainly not about the Taliban being strong," Collins said. "The reality is that the government has not yet extended to the far-reaching areas of the country."

Helmand, one of Afghanistan's most resistant regions, is dotted with small villages and towns linked by long, remote highways that provide ideal ambush sites for resistance fighters.

More than 10,000 U.S., British, Canadian occupation forces and US-recruited Afghan soldiers are taking part in an anti-Taliban offensive across southern Afghanistan. About 4,000 British occupation troops, part of an expansion of NATO occupation forces into the region, are deploying to Helmand province to take control at the end of the month from U.S. forces. They have figured prominently in fierce fighting there in recent weeks.

Alleged Taliban fighters killed two Afghan policemen Tuesday in an execution-style shooting and wounded another in southeastern Ghazni province, police said.

Associated Press writer Noor Khan in Kandahar and Munir Ahmad in Islamabad, Pakistan, contributed to this report.