Will Elena Benador Start World War III?
Joseph Cannon rightly calls our attention to Elena Benador, the woman who played a crucial role in brainwashing millions of Americans into supporting the invasion of Iraq - and is trying to do the same in Iran. Here's what the Jim Lobe wrote about her in 2003:
When historians look back on the United States war in Iraq, they will almost certainly be struck by how a small group of mainly neo-conservative analysts and activists outside the administration were able to shape the US media debate in ways that made the drive to war so much easier than it might have been… But historians would be negligent if they ignored the day-to-day work of one person who, as much as anyone outside the administration, made their media ubiquity possible. Meet Eleana Benador, the Peruvian-born publicist for [Richard] Perle, [James] Woolsey, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney and a dozen other prominent neo-conservatives whose hawkish opinions proved very hard to avoid for anyone who watched news talk shows or read the op-ed pages of major newspapers over the past 20 months.
Now Benador's clients are working just as hard to get the U.S. to invade Iran. One of her clients is Amir Taheri, who is a "commentator for CNN." (CNN does not publish a list of commentators, which is extremely suspicious. What are they hiding?) Taheri became infamous this week for writing a bogus story claiming Iran just passed a law requiring Jews to wear yellow stripes.
Jews would be marked out with a yellow strip of cloth sewn in front of their clothes while Christians will be assigned the colour red. Zoroastrians end up with Persian blue as the colour of their zonnar.
There was absolutely no basis for this claim - Taheri pulled it straight out of his ass - and it was denied immediately by Maurice Motamed, the representative of the Iranian Jewish community in Iran's parliament. But because it served the neocon propaganda purpose of demonizing Iran, Taheri's Big Lie instantly circulated throughout the global neocon conspiracy, including Rush Limbaugh, the Jerusalem Post and NewsMax.
- Bob Fertik's blog
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Benador jsut one of dozens of Mockingbirds
If anyone thinks that the infamous "Mockingbird" propaganda operation was closed down, they are extremely naive. They have just become better at hiding the media's "deep collusion" (as opposed to the obvious daily spin jobs) with the White House/Pentagon.
Benador and her creepy ilk don't come up with this stuff on their own, they are not random rants or isolated instances of "bad information." The crap Benador et al. disseminate is carefully orchestrated, and part of a much larger network of "media operatives" (for lack of a better word) and their "handlers" behind the scenes.
And, worst of all, the operation is extremely well funded. The PSYOPS arm of the Pentagon had its budget nearly tripled in the past two years. The amount of money being poured into propaganda schemes is staggering.
I believe that operatives like Benador should be held accountable - and I mean CRIMINALLY accountable - for their actions. People like Benador, Judith Miller, and others who have intentionally lied and manipulated the truth to embroil nations in needless war, costing tens of thousands of lives and thrusting hundreds of thousands of people into a nightmare, should be shipped to Guantanamo for life, along with the people they work for. These people are at best, pathetic pawns so desperate to feel some sort of patriarchal approval (note how many are women) that would sell out their own grandmas, at worst soul-dead psychopaths.