PETER'S NEW YORK, Saturday, October 15, 2011--An article carried today by the Russian news service Pravda claimed Libyan armed forces under Col. Muammar Qaddafi have downed ten NATO helicopters over Sirte, a moderate-sized coastal city now under seige by NATO-backed insurgents. The article also claims that Red Cross personnel are being used to call in coordinates for NATO air strikes.
"[T]errorists were running and surrendering in droves in Sirte after continually failing to quell the outbreak of pro-Gaddafi guerrilla resistance in the city," said Pravda's Lisa Karpova, citing the Cuban news service Prensa Latina as a source. "There were ten helicopters firing on civilians that were shot down by the resistance," Karpova's article said.
Karpova also related news of the reported downing of a NATO helicopter in Tripoli.
Wrote Karpova: "Local residents said resistance fighters came to Abu Salim hours before marching and shouting phrases in favor of Gaddafi. The TNC fired on the demonstrators, then a NATO helicopter came in to fire indiscriminately on the crowd. The helicopter was quickly shot down."
Among other claims in the Pravda article was the sensational claim that the United Nations and the Red Cross were assisting NATO in conducting bombing runs over Sirte.
"UN and Red Cross agencies were observed by the resistance giving bombing coordinates to NATO in Sirte," said Karpova's aticle. "Some of them even fired on civilians themselves."
The report in Pravda balances claims that forces under the umbrella of the National Transitional Council, a rag-tag group of fighters from all over the Middle East and surrounding countries backed by fierce NATO bombing, are continually racking up victories against the Libyan government, which has not abdicated its authority. Many claims of the NTC fighting group are issued for propaganda purposes and repeated slavishly in the U.S. mainstream media as fact, only later to be established as fabrications. The U.S. media has almost universally written articles as if the NTC are the "good guys" and Qaddafi's legally constituted armed forces, often in uniform as is required by international convention, are the "bad guys." It also often leaves out the prominent role of NATO bombing in what it claims are NTC advances. And it reports only marginally from the viewpoint of the Libyan forces aligned with Qaddafi.
The Pravda news report stands in stark contrast to those issued by the major U.S. and British news services. These services act as virtual public relations arms of their respective governments, even though the press in the two countries is supposed to be independent. The infiltration of the American media by government intelligence agencies was exposed as early as 1977 in a lengthy article by Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame, while the problem is believed to have worsened by many orders of magnitude since then. Such infiltration is likely a violation of U.S. law, but the Obama Administration and many former American regimes appear to rule by fiat, with the tacit support of the U.S. Congress.
In the meantime, Americans are starved for news, and are getting what little is available from alternative news websites and foreign news services that uphold higher standards of journalism.
Serious war crimes charges are likely to be filed against the military and civilian leaders of NATO countries by several groups which have been monitoring NATO actions over Libya. The United Nations and the International Criminal Court, as well as much of the Western world's mainstream media are also likely to be targets of future investigations into war crimes committed during the NATO attack on Libya.
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