AGENTS OF CHAOS

By Jay Taber

Illustration remixed from an original image by andres.thor under Creative Commons License
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0

Exploding Heads
Having inadvertently supplied ISIS with thousands of surface-to-air missiles during the Libya
intervention, the US is now arming the Syrian Al-Qaeda affiliate Al Nusra with rocket-launcher
systems. In case you've been in a coma for fifteen years, Al-Qaeda is the outfit that brought down
the World Trade Center twin towers in New York City, and ISIS is the extended villain family on
a holy murderous rampage from Tripoli to Baghdad. The one hitch in this, as noted at the Wall
Street Journal, is that these guys might get it in their heads to do some target practice on
commercial jetliners, which is potentially embarrassing to the CIA.

The Nihilists
When it comes to the annals of shady people in the U.S. federal bureaucracy, few figures in
American history figure so prominently, if obscurely, as Richard Armitage. As U.S. Deputy
Secretary of State under George W. Bush (2001-2005), Armitage was deeply involved in events
surrounding 9/11 and the Plame affair. As Assistant Secretary of Defense for International
Security Affairs under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush (1983-1989), he was connected to
the Iran-Contra affair.
In part of his taped March 24, 2004 testimony before the 9/11 Commission, Armitage noted that
getting arms to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan was not so difficult: It was making sure
that we wouldnt be, one, embarrassed by what they were. And no matter the charismatic nature
of Ahmed Shah Massoud and he was quite charismatic that doesnt make up for raping, drug
dealing, et cetera, which many of the Northern Alliance had been involved with. So its not
easy.
As Deputy Secretary of State, Armitage was responsible for outing undercover CIA officer
Valerie Plame in retaliation for her husband Ambassador Wilsons refusal to go along with the
fraudulent Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) campaign promoted at the UN by
Secretary Powell.
One of the myths deposed by the 2010 Wikileaks U.S. State Department embassy cable cache is
the notion of diplomacy as a benign exercise, above the fray of dirty dealing that takes place at
the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency. With the revelation of spying
on UN officials authorized by Secretary of State Clinton the continuity of malpractice
under the previous White House by Secretary Powell, with help from his long-time associate at
the Department of Defense, Richard Armitage, proceeded seamlessly under the Obama
administration.
As documented by Jerry Sanders in his book Peddlers of Crisis, Cold War hawks in Washington
made their bones by producing and disseminating misperceptions about the Russian threat, that
in turn justified the inordinate military buildup by the US and NATO. In essence, says Sanders,
the national security military industrial complex, while perhaps warranted at some level, was
nevertheless a colossal fraud concocted by Washington insiders at Langley and the Pentagon.

Deliberately falsified information and wildly exaggerated threats were, in fact, not only used to
enable looting of the U.S. Treasury to meet these false threats, but also to promote some
notorious characters into the halls of power. People like Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, and
Richard Armitage.
Today, through agencies like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAID,
lessons in psychological warfare learned by Cold War hawks and private sector friends like
George Soros are still being applied in the interest of US hegemony, albeit in more creative
ways. As noted in this 2011 article about NED-funded political opposition groups in Russia, the
exaggerations, while containing an element of truth, are leveraged to perpetuate popular myths
that can be capitalized on by US interests.

Wag the Dog: Campaigns of Purpose

In 1997, Robert De Niro and Barry Levinson produced a movie called Wag the Dog, a fictional
film about a Washington-based PR firm -- days before a presidential election -- "that distracts the
electorate from a sex scandal by hiring a Hollywood film producer to construct a fake war with
Albania." The film was released one month before the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the
bombing of Sudan by President Clinton.

Some might also recall the false testimony by a Kuwait Royal Family member about Iraqi human
rights abuses -- part of a campaign created for $11 million by US PR firm Hill & Knowlton on
behalf of Citizens for a Free Kuwait (a front for the Kuwait Government) -- that was used by the
Pentagon to justify the 1991 invasion of Iraq, otherwise known as the Gulf War. As noted
at Wikipedia:

Among many other means of influencing U.S. opinion (distributing books on Iraqi
atrocities to U.S. soldiers deployed in the region, 'Free Kuwait' T-shirts and speakers to
college campuses, and dozens of video news releases to television stations), the firm
arranged for an appearance before a group of members of the U.S. Congress in which
a woman identifying herself as a nurse working in the Kuwait City hospital described
Iraqi soldiers pulling babies out of incubators and letting them die on the floor. [88]
The story was an influence in tipping both the public and Congress towards a war with
Iraq: six Congressmen said the testimony was enough for them to support military
action against Iraq and seven Senators referenced the testimony in debate. The Senate

supported the military actions in a 5247 vote. A year after the war, however, this
allegation was revealed to be a fabrication. The woman who had testified was found to
be a member of Kuwait's Royal Family, in fact the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to
the U.S.[88] She hadn't lived in Kuwait during the Iraqi invasion.
The details of the Hill & Knowlton public relations campaign, including the incubator
testimony, were published in John R. MacArthur's Second Front: Censorship and
Propaganda in the Gulf War (Berkeley, CA: University of CA Press, 1992), and came to
wide public attention when an Op-ed by MacArthur was published in The New York
Times. This prompted a reexamination by Amnesty International, which had originally
promoted an account alleging even greater numbers of babies torn from incubators
than the original fake testimony. After finding no evidence to support it, the organization
issued a retraction. President Bush then repeated the incubator allegations on
television.

The Pentagon statement claiming a buildup of Iraqi forces on the Kuwaiti border were later also
shown to be false, as evidenced by satellite images acquired by the St. Petersburg Times.

This type of choreography was used again in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, known as the Iraq War,
when U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell -- waving a vial of fake anthrax and displaying
mischaracterized photos -- testified before the UN Security Council that the Pentagon had proof
weapons of mass destruction were being manufactured by Iraq. Exposure of this fraud in
the New York Times by former U.S. Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson led to the leaked identity of
CIA agent Valerie Plame (Wilson's wife) by Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis
Libby.

Libby was subsequently convicted on federal charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. An
investigation after the invasion showed Iraq's WMD program had ended in 1991. Despite all the
claims made by Powell being discredited at the time by US and UN agencies, the momentum
generated by Powell, Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld led to a war currently in its
twelfth year.

Now, it turns out this scenario has repeated itself in the US campaign leading up to the 2011
bombing of Libya. The Syrian Civil War is presently in its fifth year.

In 2014, the New York public relations firm Purpose created a campaign to rally international
support for the Syrian "humanitarian intervention." A euphemism for armed aggression by the
US and NATO in places like Libya, this Syrian campaign in 2012 was backed by the New York
lobby Avaaz, which in turn set up communications support for the so-called Syrian resistance.

In 2012, Avaaz was allegedly implicated in sponsoring fabricated videos of civilian massacres, to
back deeper foreign intervention in Syria. YouTube video links of phony reporting by Avaaz
associates are available in this blog report.

The CEO of Purpose, Jeremy Heimans, is a co-founder of Avaaz. His associate, David Madden -a World Bank and UN Development Program consultant -- is co-founder of Purpose, Avaaz and
MoveOn.

Avaaz was created in part by MoveOn, a Democratic Party associated PAC, formed in response
to the impeachment of President Clinton. Avaaz and MoveOn are funded in part by convicted
inside-trader and billionaire hedge fund mogul George Soros.

Amnesty International (a shill for US wars) supports the Purpose/Avaaz Syrian campaign.

Fog of War
In Smart Power & The Human Rights Industrial Complex, Patrick Henningsen reveals
perception management by the NGO sector as co-marketing of foreign policy objectives of
the US State Department, Pentagon and NATO. As Henningsen notes, leading human rights
organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have become
virtual clearinghouses for interventionist propaganda.
Says Henningsen, in the Balkans, Ukraine, Syria and Yemen where they supported regime
change NGOs function as public relations extension to a United Nations western member
Security Council bloc, namely the US, UK and France. To successfully frame geopolitical
narratives on which these NGOs derive their fundraising campaigns, the lucrative revolving door

between NGOs, government and media converge to form a highly efficient, functioning
alliance.
Underwritten by some of the worlds leading transnational corporations, these organizations have
well-developed links leading straight into the heart of the military industrial complex. Blinded
by the fog of mass media and bombarded with faux moral imperatives, public opinion is led by
these NGOs into supporting western-backed rebels and terrorists under the banner of human
rights.

Something for Everyone

Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clintons State
Department
By David Sirota and Andrew Perez

Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Under Hillary Clinton, the State Department approved $165 billion worth of
commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments had given millions
to the Clinton Foundation.

Other Interests

Back in March 2010, Harpers magazine looked at the Pentagons relationship

with the dictatorship of Uzbekistan, a notorious abuser of human rights,
including boiling dissidents alive. In the article, Ken Silverstein sheds light on
the Pentagons shady deals with a company owned by the dictators
daughter, Gulnara Karimovaa friend of Bill Clinton, and benefactor of his
foundation.
In December 2012, in an article at Toward Freedom, Puck Lo reported on the
Cotton Campaign calling for an international boycott of Uzbek cotton, which
according to human rights organizations is harvested by forced labor
including hundreds of thousands of young children for the benefit of the
Government of Uzbekistan.
As noted by Lo, the European Union due to the child and forced labor issue
refused to extend a bilateral trade agreement with Uzbekistan. Meanwhile,
the United States restored military aid to Uzbekistan that was cut off in 2003
due to the countrys dismal record of human rights abuses. As U.S. Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton remarked, We have other interests.
Further Reading
9/11 As Sequel to Iran-Contra: Armitage, Carlucci and Friends
Welcome to the Brave New World Brought to You by Avaaz

Jay Thomas Taber is an associate scholar of the Center for World Indigenous Studies, a
correspondent to Forum for Global Exchange, and a contributing editor of Fourth World
Journal. Since 1994, he has served as communications director at Public Good Project, a
volunteer network of researchers, analysts and journalists engaged in defending democracy. As a
consultant, he has assisted indigenous peoples in the European Court of Human Rights and at
the United Nations. Email: tbarj [at] yahoo.com Website:www.jaytaber.com