BBC: The Ministry of Information

It has become increasingly clear that the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) and its News departments are making a concerted effort to misinform and mislead the public.

BBC: The Ministry of Information

[caption] The real terrorists: After shooting and killing Iraqi police and civilians in Basra, two British agents from the Special Air Service (SAS) or a branch organization of the special forces, disguised as suicide bombers from the Mehdi Army, were caught "red-handed" in a car loaded with explosives on September 19, 2005.
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BBC: The Ministry of Information

by Nicholas Mollo, 8 October 2010

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history. -- George Orwell

I am no journalist but it has become increasingly clear that the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) and its News departments are making a concerted effort to misinform and mislead the public.

Recently the BBC News Website site had a facelift that appeared to many critics to be an attempt to dumb down content and limit accessibility to a wider range of news stories (1). The lists of stories available on the new BBC website appear to have been greatly reduced and navigation to a wider array of content has been made more difficult.

The news stories highlighted on the BBC News Website are often a regurgitation of the contrived news coverage that is prevalent in most mainstream media outlets. Yet the BBC conforms to the “standard operating procedure” by reporting stories in favour of the establishment.

A recent front-page story states, “Who's blamed by BP for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill?” (1) This story avoids the reasonable assessment that the Oil disaster is a result of the practices of BP, (the fourth largest company in the world) and simply lists those that BP blames. The story essentially gives BP’s side of the story without any critical independent assessment or balanced objectivity.

The BBC News coverage of the BP Oil disaster is skewed to detract from the obvious malfeasance of the global corporation called BP. For the last few weeks stories about the BP oil disaster have been suspiciously absent from the BBC website while the Science and Environment section runs a story about the enormous bio diversity and wealth of new creatures discovered in our seas in the last decade (2).

A BBC story from 7 October 2010 “White House rejects criticism from Gulf oil spill probe” (3) refuses to mention BP by name until the 9th paragraph. Apart from continuing to use the word “spill” that clearly diminishes the environmental impact and scale of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the BBC presents us with yet another story that positively reflects the BP corporation, “BP forms 'powerful' new safety unit” (4) from 29 September 2010.

The BBC has also been reflecting the “heightened threats” of terrorism that have recently been promoted by MSM with stories such as “MI5 head warns of serious risk of UK terrorist attack” (5) from 17 September 2010. One concern the BBC tells us is that “a number of individuals, convicted of offences in the years after the 9/11 attacks, are now coming out of prison having served their terms”.

What is clear from the above stories is that the BBC is simply telling the official narrative without any journalistic contradictions or verification of fact.

A BBC story from 8th October 2010 called “Security contractors in Afghanistan 'fund Taliban'” (6) touches on a subject reported in the newly published book “Censored 2011” by the Project Censored team. (7) In contrast with the BBC’s reporting of what is essentially the same story, Project Censored’s chapter number 10 of most censored stories of 2010 is called, “US funds and Supports the Taliban”. (8)

What the BBC story tells us is that “Some 26,000 private security personnel, mostly Afghans, operate in Afghanistan.” Yet this explanation fails to address the huge number of private mercenaries (private contractors) employed by the US Administration that in fact exceed the number of US military personnel on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The BBC story shifts or manages the news to focus attention away from American involvement and in doing so, blame the “mostly Afghans”. Rather than exploring the ever increasing and insidious role played by US private security companies such as Blackwater (Xe) in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan or the over $100 billion paid to them by the US Department of Defence and the State Department before 2008, the BBC manages the news story to highlight Afghan sub-contractor and security personnel corruption.

The BBC’s coverage of the attacks of September 11th 2001 has also been “propagandized” with the result that many feel the BBC’s reputation has been irrevocably damaged. Their scandalous series of shows called “The Conspiracy Files” (10) have been a direct attempt by the BBC to control the narrative of that tragic event in support of the offical conspiracy theory.

By way of omissions and distortions the BBC have tried unsuccessfully to vilify and discredit the 9/11 Truth Movement. The BBC was not above trying to associate believers in an alternative conspiracy theory of 9/11 with holocaust deniers!

The BBC news headline “9/11 third tower mystery 'solved'” (11) from the 4th July 2008 is another example of what can only be defined as News Abuse. The article claims, “With no steel from Tower 7 to study, investigators have instead made four extremely complex computer models worked out to the finest detail. They're confident their approach can now provide the answers. Dr Sunder says the investigation is moving as fast as possible.”

This article includes a section called “Conspiracy theories” and then proceeds to list four facts about “Tower Seven”. This very short and selective list of facts is “diminished” by the BBC’s following statement, “But now nearly seven years after 9/11 the definitive official explanation of what happened to Tower Seven is finally about to be published in America.”

Considering the wealth of empirical evidence that contradicts the official conspiracy of 9/11, the BBC has yet to reveal or expose the anomalies contained in the official narrative. In fact they have gone the other way by trying to discredit or vilify people with alternative theories.

In February 2007 Richard Porter the Director of News Content at BBC World News was forced to defend the position that the BBC is not part of a conspiracy to “manipulate the audience”. This in part was a response to the fact that the BBC World News reported the collapse of World Trade Center 7 some 20 minutes before it actually occurred. (12)

World Trade Center 7 was a 47 story building that collapsed at 5.21pm on September 11th 2001 into its own footprint at freefall speed. (18) (19)

Richard Porter commented on the BBC The Editors blog, “We're not part of a conspiracy. Nobody told us what to say or do on September 11th. We didn't get told in advance that buildings were going to fall down. We didn't receive press releases or scripts in advance of events happening”. (13)

Richard Porter’s lack of a convincing answer as to why the BBC World News had reported the collapse of a 47 story building more than 20 minutes before it actually happened or why the news anchor had given an “official’ explanation for the reasons for that collapse, caused nearly 600 comments to be posted on the BBC website, the majority of which were incredulous. This forced Richard Porter to clarify his earlier post.

After a fuller yet no more convincing answer, Richard Porter ended his explanation with the words “There's no story here”. (14) This “answer” again caused consternation and over 600 comments were posted on the BBC website before the post was “closed to new comments”.

The BBC has recently shown a new documentary called Secret Iraq in the UK. The BBC states that Secret Iraq is “a landmark two-part documentary series that sheds new light on the dramatic story of Iraq after the fall of Saddam”. (15) The BBC “documentary” appears to be an open and objective investigation into the invasion of Iraq but it gives a very suspect and one-sided account of a particular event that happened in Basra in 2005.

The BBC news website reported about the story and called it “Iraq probe into soldier incident” 20th September 2005. (16) A better headline would have been
“SAS Dressed As Iraqis Kill Local Police.”

What is clear is that two British SAS elite special forces dressing in Arab clothing including dark wigs drove their car towards a group of Iraq Police and began firing. The BBC stated, “Basra governor Mohammed al-Waili said the men - possibly working undercover - were arrested for allegedly shooting dead a policeman and wounding another”.

Early BBC radio reports stated the car contained explosives but this was changed in the BBC website article to “equipment carried in the men's car, showed assault rifles, a light machine gun, an anti-tank weapon, radio gear and medical kit. This is thought to be standard kit for the SAS operating in such a theatre of operations”.

The SAS soldiers were arrested by Iraq Police and taken to a nearby jail. The British demanded the immediate release of the two soldiers but Basra authorities rejected this. What resulted was an attack by British forces on the Iraqi jail using tanks and armoured personnel carriers to “rescue” the SAS soldiers. (17)
The BBC documentary Secret Iraq does mention that the captured soldiers were SAS but does not mention their nefarious mission or suspect conduct. The BBC film blames corrupt Iraqi police for kidnapping the soldiers and others insurgents for attempting to murder them.

The BBC’s Secret Iraq tells the story of the British forces assault on the Iraqi Police station as a mission to save two innocent soldiers from the clutches of an out-of-control mob and corrupt Iraqi Police force with murderous intentions. Rabia Siddique, a former legal adviser to the British Army states, "It was a nick of time thing!"

As has been shown in the examples above, the BBC is not independent from direct government intervention. It is clear that the BBC misinforms the public on a daily basis by way of distortion, omission and News Abuse methodology.

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. -- George Orwell

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Notes:

(1)