Wag the Dog: Media Publish Photoshop Forgery to Sell Image of War Torn Syria


Aaron Dykes
Infowars.com
July 31, 2012
While mainstream press have been hailing the virtues of the alliance between al Qaeda, the Syrian Free Army and the West in opposing Assad in Syria, they’ve also been caught once again “faking the war” to play up sympathy for an all out invasion.
Austria’s largest daily paper, Kronen Zeitung, with some 3 million readers daily, published this sympathetic photo, seemingly portraying a man carrying a baby and a woman in burka fleeing from some war-torn corner of Aleppo. However, it was later exposed to be a Photoshop forgery, juxtaposing the people walking on a normal looking corner with that of a blown out city block ravaged by heavy damage.
The subjects were apparently taken from the previously-published file photo credited to theEuropean Pressphoto Agency, as the publishing notes next to the image indicate. The revealing side by side comparison was first posted to Reddit.com.
Gizmodo points out:
Just to be clear, the family in the photograph is, in fact, in Syria; the original photo (on the right) came from the European Pressphoto Agency. But merely fleeing a city ravaged by guns and mortars apparently isn’t quite dramatic enough on its own. The editors of the Krone—as it’s commonly called—needed this baby to sing.
A nearly identical example of war propaganda is depicted in the 1997 film Wag the Dog, where green screen technology was used to place an actor in a studio with a kitten in a war torn zone in Bosnia:

To be sure, the entire perception of the conflict in Syria has been (purposely) distorted in the media, including many blatant lies.
Remember the Syrian Danny hoax?
Advocating intervention, “Syrian Danny” was caught faking gun fire on CNN in order to portray heavy fighting that wasn’t really going on in the background while he literally begged for Western-backed forces to enter Syria and overthrow Assad. Paul Joseph Watson described the hoax: While waiting to be connected, Danny says, “Well, let the gunfire sound then,” before subsequently asking someone off camera, “Did you tell him to get the gunfire ready?” An explosion is heard soon after, but Danny doesn’t even flinch. The following video demonstrates this amazing stunt, which correlated with numerous other exaggerated reports issued by propaganda-activist Danny.
Another hoax was revealed after the BBC falsely portrayed an Assad-led massacre of children in Houla, using a photo from dead children in Iraq to play up the scale of the atrocity, which was later found to be the work of the al Qaeda-led Free Syrian Army.
A reported massacre in Homs was likewise a deception:
Obviously, these incredible lies and deceptions are not limited to the Syrian conflict, but have become a mainstay in this age of modern media. From the phony babies in incubators testimony to demonize Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf war, to the lies about WMDs in Iraqthe next time around, false flag events to start most 20th Century wars, and so much more: these lies are not crafted to fool fact checkers, critics, historians or true investigative reporters, but to goad the general public into a wave of hysteria ensuring enough support to start a war and profit from the destruction.
Is it any wonder the chemical weapons / WMD story is being rehashed to drum up a crescendo of apparent legitimacy for an otherwise naked coup? They are literally asking the public to cheer for al Qaeda.
Modern warfare is no longer limited to the physical assault. Television and the Internet have made propaganda an indispensable force to wage war by other means– besieging allies and public support to isolate Assad and diffuse his defenses on the media/international community front long enough to complete the kill. Syria, like Libya, has been a classic proxy war, with the hidden hand of the United States and its western allies only partial obscured. That is, in the most general sectors of public knowledge, opinion and discussion about the Syrian conflict is saturated with the deliberately crafted lie demonizing the target and producing mass levels of knee-jerk support for the action. In this case: bad guy = AssadGaddafi Saddam Bin Laden baby talk about boogie men.
But the truth is plainly laid as well, for anyone willing to face it.

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