NEW DELHI: Former head of the US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) Lt. General Michael Flynn was put on the defensive by Al Jazeera’s smart and aggressive interviewer Mehdi Hasan in a short but information packed interview. Flynn was not allowed by Hasan to get away with evasion, and was confronted with detailed information and intensive questioning on the US policy and strategy in West Asia.

In the process Flynn involuntarily embraced the classified documents released by America’s Judicial Watch a few weeks ago that were the first to confirm what had been in the realm of ‘informed speculation’ till now that the Americans had a good idea about the emergence of the Islamic State as far back as 2012. Flynn admitted this in response to a specific question saying, “I think it was a decision. I think it was a willful decision.” See here.

In fact Flynn admitted that a full analysis of the situation on the ground had been made available to the top echelons of the US Administration. When he spoke of this Hasan pointedly asked “ So the administration turned a blind eye to your analysis?” Instead of evading this Flynn went into it head on with, “ I don’t know that they turned a blind eye, I think it was a decision. I think it was a willful decision.”

The confirmation of the documents obtained and released by the Washington based Judicial Watch by the DIA’s own chief who had been in charge during the relevant period should have made headlines in the global mainstream media, and triggered off a huge debate. But the ‘big boys’ barely touched the story, except for a few exceptions here and there. The silence with which the documents and the subsequent interview have been received, suggests to any journalist, a conspiracy that has the corporate media refusing to rock the boat insofar as the United States and its allies in the West and in West Asia are concerned.

The Citizen tried to locate the reasons for this deafening silence and came across two very interesting reports that really began the entire story. One was by a former US Marine who had been in Syria, Brad Hoff who now runs a blog. It appears that he was the first to notice this document in the declassified papers, and ran a story of US complicity in arming and creating these groups. He has expressed surprise at his blogs about the silence of the major networks and newspapers. He made several telephone calls to the DIA but these were not accepted, or returned. He instead received calls as he put it from a “number of individuals who attempted to assure me that the true experts and “insiders” knew the document was unimportant and therefore irrelevant within the intelligence community and broader Syria policy.”

The mainstream networks and newspapers in the US, UK that control the propaganda machinery were silent. Hoff’s article on the DIA documents, however, resonated on the internet and was carried by several websites that become one of the many in the deep well of cyber space. However, this hurt sufficiently for the Daily Beast to write an article The ISIS Conspiracy That Ate the Web . This Hoff pointed out cited former NSA officer John Schindler as an expert source. Schindler concluded of the DIA document: “it’s difficult to say much meaningful about it… Nothing special here, not one bit.” After this a senior CIA official who he knew contacted him saying to stop writing against Schindler.

Somewhere around this time another well known UK journalist and author Nafeez Ahmad picked up on the story and wrote an article that a well known British newspaper refused to carry. Ahmad found no takers for his report and in a subsequent interview to the alternative media on the web admitted that there seemed to be a conspiracy by the corporate media to keep this story out of the mainstream. His efforts to get it out, despite his excellent reputation as an investigative journalist, were in vain. And as he noted in the interview, in the UK at least he knows of a ‘de-notice’ from government to newspapers. This, he said, was not a legal, binding order but a sort of cautionary word from the government that it would be best not to publish in the national interest. Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

Around this time the Russian media carried some of the details This was followed by the German media. As a result of this and Ahmad’s story Hoff notes in another blog that his many calls to the DIA that had been ignored were finally returned. But the response to his very pointed question , “Are you able to at least deny that the DIA’s analysis revealed that the West backed ISIS at some point during the conflict in Syria” was not met with a denial. But with a “no comment.”

The startling revelations were blacked out by the big media. But Al Jazeera came in with the Interview that alerted The Citizen, as this fed directly into the DIA documents that were in the limited public domain by then.

The reasons for this conspiracy of silence is not hard to find. Hoff points at one when he writes, “but knowledge of the DIA ISIS document threatens to awaken the American people from their slumber. They have been told non-stop, from all corners, that Islamic State is the single greatest and most horrific terror threat that mankind has ever seen, representing a new and unique form of evil.

Americans need to read about the origins of IS in the plain words of the internal Pentagon document. They need to know that a defense official couldn’t simply say that the idea of the West backing the Islamic State was ludicrous. They need to know that in America one is now forced by the realities of recent alliances to say “no comment” to such a question that only a few short years ago would be unthinkable to even formulate.

While the mainstream media will likely refuse to cover this, it is not going away.”

The Indian mainstream media has also shown no interest in what is perhaps the biggest story of the decade. In that it is a confirmation from the Defence Intelligence Agency of the UNited States and its former chief of their government’s involvement in fanning the fire, and allowing the Islamic State to take shape despite full intelligence information about this. But then the Indian media barely knows the region, covers it only very infrequently, and hence are not really part of this report at this point in time.

The Western media cannot pretend it did not know about these documents. As it had made a big issue of the Benghazi disclosures carried in the same set of documents released by Judicial Watch. So while that story was played out, this far more sensational, relevant and startling document went unreported. With not even a mention, or a half centimetre tempered with the classic journalistic words “meanwhile”, “also…”

When the US tanks rolled into Iraq they carried what the Pentagon described as “embedded journalists” a term coined for the first time. These journalists covered the war as American soldiers, raising the flag and shouting ‘victory’ with not a word about the ghastly attack, the deaths of thousands, the complete annihilation of entire villages with the Iraqis, and of course subsequently the torture of prisoners in jails. The entire American media helped then President George W.Bush justify the attack on one ground or the other, and gave his policy such a boost that he got a second term in office.

The US media and to some extent the British as well have adopted a one sided policy for West Asia where the truth is as the governments’ say it. There has been no attempt at independent reporting with the attacks on civilians, the largescale arrests, the looting of palaces and museums often by the soldiers that are all part of the records of the West Asian nations under siege, do not find even a mention in the big corporate media. The conspiracy has to do with the corporates many of which have stakes in the chaos in West Asia (from weaponry to oil) , the advertisements they give to the big media, and the ownership patterns that reflect the close connections bordering on the cozy between them and of course, the concerned governments who have high stakes in the region.

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SEEMA MUSTAFA.