Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences

eventually revised to 200,000, then to 100,000, then to 8000. ^{169} It later emerged, however, that no killings had occurred, with 1,400 bodies found by international investigators all belonging to victims killed after nato's bombing campaign had begun and long after the claims of genocide of tens or hundreds of thousands were made. ^{170}

The American Association for the Advancement of Science's war-crimes specialist Patrick Ball, who claimed Yugoslav forces were hiding the bodies of their victims very effectively and “were not going to leave any bodies lying around as evidence,” still extrapolated based on such assumptions a death toll of 9000 plus or minus 3000. This was not a body count, but an estimate based on the assumption that the Serbs were effective at hiding the bodies of their victims. ^{171} British Foreign Office Minister Geoff Hoon subsequently referred to claims of around 10,000 ethnically cleansed by Yugoslav forces “in more than 100 [separate] massacres,” ^{172} a figure which American officials referred to as “conservative in the extreme.” ^{173} The figure originated with the Kosovo-based Council for the Defence of Human Rights and Freedoms, many of the staff of which were K.L.A members, although the highly partial nature of the source was not made an issue as its claims aligned with Western interests. The U.S. State Department and multiple media outlets used this figure, which was impossible to verify because the K.L.A-linked council refused to share its list of missing persons. ^{174} The New Statesman was among the minority of Western outlets which highlighted that these claims were “utterly unsubstantiated” – stressing how unreliable such claims really were by highlighting how the number had so quickly fallen from hundreds of thousands to just tens of thousands. ^{175}

While the term genocide was used to provide nato with a pretext to launch its military campaign, the findings of forensic teams on the ground showed that the Western narrative was very far removed from reality. ^{176} The leader of a Spanish team sent to Kosovo, for one, complained angrily that he and his colleagues had become part of “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one – not one – mass grave.” ^{177} A United Nations court subsequently ruled in September 2001. that Yugoslavia had not carried out genocide in Kosovo – a verdict harshly criticised in the West and deemed highly controversial for contradicting the Western narrative. This was particularly remarkable considering the massive and near unchallenged Western influence over U.N proceedings, especially in the post-Cold War years, and was only possible due to the overwhelming nature of available evidence contradicting Western allegations of genocide. ^{v} The Guardian, a leading proponent of the war, conceded in an article nine years later in 2008: “The 'genocide' in Kosovo was a complete fabrication: but it helped Blair and Clinton spin their narrative of a 'humanitarian' intervention, to cloak the real economic and strategic reasons for nato's military intervention.” ^{178}

As France's Le Monde Diplomatique observed 20 years later in 2019: “In order to justify their own use of force, Western forces denounced Serbian intransigence, and exaggerated the gravity of the situation on the ground, calling it a 'genocide', and putting forward fake news that was taken up by a host of media outlets.” ^{179} Indeed, in the three months from June to August 1999 alone the New York Times ran eighty articles, nearly one a day, that made some reference to mass graves in Kosovo. ^{180} What mass killings did occur, however, appeared to have been done by the K.L.A rather than by the government as international investigations made clear. ^{vi} As the Wall Street Journal noted in December 1999 following its own investigation that “the huge killing fields some investigators were led to expect … the pattern is of scattered killings [mostly] in areas where the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army had been active.” It concluded that “nato stepped up its claims about Serb 'killing fields'” essentially to divert attention away from its own killings – in response to “a fatigued press corps drifting toward the contrarian story: civilians killed by nato's bombs.” Referring to a much hyped “mass-grave obsession,” the Journal stressed that this atrocity propaganda largely came from the K.L.A, the very party responsible for the majority of the killings, and that no genocide had in fact been perpetrated. ^{181} Such admissions were rare in Western media, with the Wall Street Journal standing out for conceding these points.

A further very significant disclosure, which was confirmed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in October after hostilities concluded, was that the Trepca lead and zinc mines which were central to the Western narrative alleging genocide, contained no corpses, remains or even teeth. This contradicted repeated claims by nato and American officials and by Western media outlets that over 1000 corpses of genocide victims had been hidden there, many disposed of in vats of hydrochloric acid, and that the mines were the site of a “mass dumping of executed corpses” and “Auschwitz-style furnaces.” ^{182} The Daily Mirror predicted that the names of the victims at the mines would “live alongside those of Belsen, Auschwitz and Treblinka,” ^{183} with Western media outlets widely setting a similar tone. As Michael Parenti noted regarding the investigation and the absence of mass graves which the Western narrative indicated certainly existed: “How the Serbs accomplished these mass-grave disappearing acts without being detected is not explained.

Where was the evidence of mass grave sites having been disinterred? Where were the new grave sites now presumably chock full of bodies? And why were they so impossible to detect? Questions of this sort were never posed. ^{184} The Western narrative, although later thoroughly disproven, was highly successful, and after over a decade of operations against Yugoslavia the West's objectives in what remained of the state were fully attained in 1999 as a direct result of effective atrocity fabrication.

Chapter Six

The Iraq War

9/11 as a Pretext for War: Inventing a Baghdad-Al Qaeda Connection

On September 20, 2001, nine days after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the George W. Bush administration declared that the United States was at war. Quickly declaring Al Qaeda to be the perpetrator, and launching a war on October 7 against Afghanistan which had longstanding ties to the terror group, administration officials soon came to see the 9/11 attacks as an opportunity for military intervention against other state adversaries. Foremost among these were the three countries named as members of the 'Axis of Evil' by President Bush in his 2002 State of the Union Address – namely Iraq, ee-rahn and North Korea. Of these Iraq, which was both the easiest to casually tie to 9/11 due to its Arab and Sunni Muslim population, and which also presented by far the softest military target, was reported to be the primary target on Washington's list even before the first troops had moved into Afghanistan.

On September 12, as the National Security Council (N.S.C) met to formulate a policy response to 9/11, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld first raised the possibility of attacking Iraq. State Secretary Colin Powell, although not opposed to military action, stressed that as a priority, “the American people want us to do something about Al Qaeda” – which was based primarily in Afghanistan. ^{1} Richard Clarke, who served as the administration's counterterrorism chief and chaired the N.S.C meeting, was stunned when he found the discussion focused on Iraq. “Then I realised with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and [Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul] Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda,” he recalled. ^{2} When Rumsfeld argued: “There aren't any good targets in Afghanistan, and there are lots of good targets in Iraq,” Clarke angrily responded that there were lots of targets everywhere, “but Iraq had nothing to do with it [9/11 attacks].” ^{3} President Bush subsequently pulled Clarke into a room and asked: “See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way.” ^{4} Clarke reportedly again made clear that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks, but the president persisted. After Clarke re-examined the data, he consulted with intelligence experts who signed off on a report to the president stating there was no evidence linking Baghdad to the 9/11 attacks. Clarke later noted: “It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer.'” ^{5}

According to a senior administration official cited by the Washington Post, a September 17 top-secret document which outlined plans for a military campaign against Afghanistan also directed the Pentagon to begin planning the invasion of Iraq. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, an influential neoconservative member of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board, stated at a September 19 to 20 meeting regarding the 9/11 attacks: “If we don't use this as the moment to replace Saddam after we replace the Taliban, we are setting the stage for disaster.” The Pentagon notably authorised former C.I.A Director James Woolsey, a neoconservative member of the board, to fly to London on a government plane to find evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.

On September 17 President Bush reportedly told his advisors: “I believe Iraq was involved” – an inclination he voiced on at least one other occasion. Having been shown no intelligence to this effect, whether this assertion was a hunch based on the prevailing American metanarrative on Iraq, or an early sign of the president's intention to use 9/11 as a pretext for war, remains uncertain. By September 21 the C.I.A had informed the president that no Al Qaeda-Baghdad link existed, but Bush continued to press intelligence agencies to find a connection. Following the creation of the Office of Special Plans O.S.P by Secretary Rumsfeld the following year, this pressure on intelligence analysts to select raw data supporting the purported ties between Baghdad and Al Qaeda, as well as on Iraqi development of weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D), escalated further. As a Pentagon adviser acknowledged:"The goal of Special Plans [was] … to reveal what the intelligence community can't see" – providing intelligence which suited Washington's agenda but did not necessarily reflect the real state of affairs.

Iraq had been explicitly on Washington's target list for the preceding three years, since the U.S. Congress and Senate had passed the Iraq Liberation Act by an overwhelming majority in 1998. The legislation stipulated that Washington should work "to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace it." The U.S. subsequently more openly provided financial assistance to pro-Western Iraqi opposition groups and funded radio and television broadcasts into the country to propagate American-favoured political narratives. The consensus in Washington had shifted away from that of 1991, when leaving the Ba'athist government in power was seen to be in the American interest, with the new legislation of 1998 and extensive airstrikes launched by the Bill Clinton administration in its aftermath marking a turning point in the long campaign against Iraq.

The impetus for imposing a change in government on Iraq increased from 2001. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, one of the leading figures on the N.S.C, recalled that at the Bush administration's first N.S.C meeting on January 30, 2001, the president's National Security Advisor Susan Rice raised the agenda topic: "How Iraq is destabilising the region." O'Neill later observed: "Ten days in, and it was about Iraq." This was partly motivated by concerns that the U.N sanctions regime on Baghdad was soon to expire, and with oil prices high and much of the world willing to do business the country had the potential to make a swift recovery from the crisis of the 1990s and re-emerge as a major power that could undermine Western hegemony in the Middle East. Indeed, even with sanctions in place, Iraq had already begun to show some signs of an economic recovery by 1997 – a few months before the Clinton administration had launched its own major attack. At his senate confirmation hearing that month Secretary of State Colin Powell pledged to the Senate that the new administration would reenergise the U.N sanctions on Iraq, but although this was considered vital to U.S. interests Washington's ability to do this unilaterally was limited. Leading figures in the Bush administration including Defence Secretary Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy State Secretary Richard Armitage, and Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, argued in a joint statement that the policy of simply containing Iraq had to be rejected on the basis that the U.S. “can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions.”

Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Armitage and Zoellick were all subscribers to the increasingly prominent neoconservative school of thought, which heavily influenced the Bush administration and called for the U.S. to take “an imperial role” in world affairs and establish a “benevolent global hegemony.” Eighteen leading neoconservatives had sent an open letter to President Bill Clinton on January 26, 1998 urging him to work towards “the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power.” Ten of them received positions in the new Bush administration. The neoconservatives were said to have “a focus on the Middle East and global Islam as pivotal to America's national interests.” Their resulting foreign policy outlook was arguably highly detrimental to America's hegemonic position since the most formidable challengers to its power such as China and North Korea were outside the Islamic world and were notably largely ignored in the Bush years.

Attacking Iraq was not only a time sensitive issue due to the expiry of U.N sanctions, but it was also militarily one of the most vulnerable American adversaries for several reasons including the destruction of much of its forces in 1991 and the arms embargo imposed since which prevented its military's replenishment or modernisation. Baghdad's acceptance of highly intrusive U.N inspections throughout much of the 1990s, meanwhile, had allowed the U.S. and its allies to ensure that it had been stripped of ballistic missiles and chemical weapons which could have otherwise enabled it to deter or retaliate against future Western attacks. By contrast North Korea, which had by far the largest and most sophisticated defence sector of the three axis members, had proliferated many of its technologies including medium range ballistic missiles to ee-rahn. The fact that Iraq's population was far less homogenous than those of the other two targets, with sizeable Shiite and Kurdish minorities which had shown a propensity for rebellion in the past, and which potentially had much to gain from seeing crippling Western sanctions end if the government in Baghdad was removed, also made the country a more attractive target.

In order to justify a full-scale invasion of Iraq Washington leveraged the preceding negative portrayals of the country and of President Hussein in particular to claim that the kind of government it represented was a threat to the world if allowed to continue to exist. Negative portrayals of the country had already made a strong imprint on the American and Western consciousness and formed a metanarrative which presented Baghdad as capable of almost any kind of evil act. A poll conducted by Time and C.N.N on September 13, 2001, found that 78 percent of Americans suspected Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks. A Gallup poll conducted from September 21 to 22 found that over 68 percent of respondents in the U.S. supported removing Saddam Hussein from power. The administration had not yet tied Iraq to terror groups in any statements, but such perceptions were already predominant largely as a legacy of Gulf War propaganda efforts. Indeed, a Gallup poll conducted before the 9/11 attacks in February 2001 had found that 85 percent of Americans had an “unfavourable” opinion of Iraq – the worst of 26 countries the poll asked about.

An April 1991 Gallup Poll found that 57 percent of Americans felt hostilities with Iraq had ended too soon – with Washington's decision not to invade that year and to allow the Ba'athist government to stay in power considered controversial. In mid-August 1992 almost two-thirds of respondents polled supported a new military campaign to overthrow the Iraqi government by force. A poll after 9/11 in mid-December, 2001, found that 61 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein had to be removed from power for the War on Terror to be successful – despite the administration having as yet made no indications to the public of a connection between Baghdad and Al Qaeda or terror attacks. The Bush administration's thought, although sharply contradicting available intelligence, closely reflected the major public consensus which had itself been shaped by 13 years of propaganda – much of it based on total fabrications. Subsequent statements by Bush administration figures served to remind the public that Saddam Hussein was to be viewed as 'another Hitler' and a 'madman,' recalling the rhetoric of the Gulf War.

To provide further impetus to the need for military action, the argument for war centred around two new aspects of the 'Iraq Threat' which had not been significant parts of the narrative of the Gulf War. These were allegations of ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and the country's alleged development of weapons of mass destruction. The former allowed the case for war to benefit from post-9/11 fervour and public calls for harsh retaliation against those responsible, while making the danger Iraq allegedly posed appear far more imminent. Although developing weapons of mass destruction was hardly an atrocity, nor did it violate international norms since several other states had done or were doing so, Iraq's Ba'athist government had been portrayed as so terribly atrocious in nature that its possession of such weapons was considered totally unacceptable. Thus, the fabricated weapons program was made significant largely due to a metanarrative which had been built on fabricated atrocity stories such as the 1990 slaughter of incubator babies, in contrast to weapons programs in other countries which aroused far milder public responses.

In February 2002 chairman of the influential neoconservative Project for a New American Century think tank William Kristol testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when asked about the next step in the war on terrorism: "the short answer is that Iraq is next."²⁸ The first significant allusion of possible Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda had come on December 9, 2001, when Vice President Dick Cheney, appearing on N.B.C's Meet the Press, said an alleged meeting between Al Qaeda plotter Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi agent in Prague was “pretty well confirmed.” Secretary Rumsfeld subsequently alluded to the possibility of Iraq harbouring Al Qaeda terrorists in August 2002, claiming the following month that evidence for such ties was “bulletproof.” Administration officials increasingly raised the possibility of ties between Baghdad and the terror group. On September 9, Cheney claimed U.S. intelligence reports after September 11 had disclosed “a number of contacts over the years” that pointed to links between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks.

The president himself began to allude to the possibility of Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda from September 2002, although not claiming it outright. As a Yale Review of International Studies paper on the image of Saddam Hussein highlighted, Bush “simply tarred both Hussein and Al-Qaeda with the same terroristic brush to imply a relationship. The persistence of such insinuation effectively allowed the Bush administration to claim that Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda worked together, and that Hussein was involved in 9/11, without ever outright saying so.” Of the 13 speeches the president gave between that of September 12, 2002 at the United Nations General Assembly, and the conclusion of the invasion of Iraq in May 2003, twelve mentioned Iraq and terrorism in the same paragraph and ten placed them in the same sentence.

Other administration officials similarly implied a connection between Baghdad and Al Qaeda without stating it explicitly. In response to a New York Times story claiming a link between Iraq and terror groups, which was later proven to be entirely false, ^{ii} President Bush's National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said:"I think it surprises no one that Saddam Hussein is engaged in all kinds of activities that are destabilising." Creating the image of such ties was heavily dependent on how American and Western perceptions had been shaped regarding 'what kind of country' Iraq was – leading the public to assume what officials would not state outright.

A possible connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda became increasingly central to Washington's arguments for war, and was made more serious by claims that the weapons of mass destruction Iraq was allegedly developing could be proliferated to terror groups. As Vice President Cheney declared in March 2002, in reference to Iraqi W.M.D and its alleged ties with terror groups: “The United States will not permit the forces of terror to gain the tools of genocide.” President Bush elaborated in a speech at West Point in June: “Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons or missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.” The W.M.D argument alone may not have been sufficient to sway the American public, for which claims of ties to terror groups were much more important. Polls showed that 82 percent of Americans said they would support the war regardless of whether W.M.D's were found in Iraq, and 64 percent said “Saddam Hussein should be removed from power in Iraq, regardless of whether U.N. inspectors find evidence of weapons of mass destruction.” Indeed, from January 2002 to May 2003 President Bush referred to Iraq's alleged ties to terror groups over five times as much in his speeches as he did to alleged W.M.D's (an average of 12.2 mentions per speech versus 2.3 mentions). While the latter allegation held more sway internationally, particularly in Britain, the former had a stronger impact on the post-9/11 American public.

The importance of the Al Qaeda link was highlighted by the fact that poll respondents who considered Al Qaeda to be America's greatest threat were more likely to favour invading Iraq than those who thought Iraq itself was America's most important threat. Even if Iraq had W.M.D and became the world's seventh non-Western nuclear weapons state, it had no reason to suddenly attack the U.S. with them much as it had refrained from using its chemical or biological weapons even at the height of the Gulf War. While Iraq on its own was not a threat, the image of a Baghdad-Al Qaeda axis added an unpredictable and undeterrable element to the enemy, and effectively framed Iraqi W.M.D's as a force multiplier to future 9/11-type attacks. This was key to conveying an imminent need for action against Baghdad.

June 2002 saw the initiation of preliminary military actions against Iraq to pave the way for an invasion, with American and British combat aircraft assigned to patrol no fly zones over Iraq since 1991 reassigned to carry out offensive sorties without provocation under the then-secret Operation Southern Focus. British MoD figures released three years later showed that, despite U.S. claims that renewed air attacks were a response to increased Iraqi provocations, Iraqi actions which could be construed as such had in fact been in decline before the operation was initiated. Multiple official sources, including U.S. Army General and centcom Commander Tommy Franks who in 2003 oversaw the invasion of Iraq, later conceded that Operation Southern Focus was falsely premised on a response to Iraqi resistance to the no fly zone, and was in fact an attempt to destroy Iraqi air defences to pave the way for invasion. Defending minorities within Iraq was also used as a pretext for the escalated air assault, although this was later conceded by Whitehall officials to have been false with the weakening of Iraqi air defences and communications systems being the actual goal. These attacks continued for nine months, with a large 100-aircraft strike three months into the operation ensuring that Iraq would be blind to special forces and other assets entering its territory through neighbouring Jordan.

In July 2002 the administration formed the White House Iraq Group to create a media strategy to promote war. Its campaign centred on the narrative that Iraq would provide terror groups with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, and on the argument that the only sure defence was to forcefully dismantle the Iraqi government before it could arm its alleged terrorist accomplices. Even many of the most tenuous claims by administration officials regarding ties to Al Qaeda or W.M.D were almost never questioned in major media outlets, which to the contrary only amplified the government's line. Leading journalist Bob Woodward, for example, when asked on C.N.N what would happen if America went to war and didn't find any W.M.D's, answered:"I think the chance of that happening is about zero. There's just too much there." Several media outlets would later apologise for their uncritical and one-sided coverage, but only once the war was over and the damage was done – before then going on to similarly support future unprovoked military assaults based on similarly tenuous pretexts.

Addressing the press alongside British Prime Minister Tony Blair on September 7, 2002, President Bush asserted the existence of a new report from the U.N International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A) which stated that an Iraqi nuclear arsenal was imminently expected to materialise. “A report came out of the I.A.E.A that they [Iraq] were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need,” he stated. This was one of the most blatant examples of a fabricated claim by the administration, and the I.A.E.A had notably never issued any report which even an imaginative interpretation could reach such a conclusion from. Award winning former Wall Street Journal reporter and president of Harper's Magazine John MacArthur described Bush's claim as a “near total fabrication,” and “a completely uncorroborated case for pre-emptive war,” stressing that “for public relations purposes, it hardly mattered that no such I.A.E.A report existed, because almost no one in the press bothered to check out the president's claim.” The Washington Post's Kayren DeYoung notably quoted an I.A.E.A spokesman saying that “the agency has issued no new report,” but she didn't confront the White House with this information nor was it ever mentioned by the Post beyond her 20-second summary of the press conference. The right-leaning Washington Times was effectively alone in addressing the issue, and pointed out that there were no new reports from the I.A.E.A as the president claimed, nor had the agency ever issued any report with a time frame for an Iraqi nuclear weapons program. It also cited spokesman from the U.N inspection teams Mark Gwozdecky, who reported on the actual state of the Iraqi nuclear industry and the possibility of developing nuclear weapons. He stated: “we had concluded that we had neutralised their nuclear weapons program.

We had confiscated their fissile material. We had destroyed all their key buildings and equipment.

Aside from the Washington Times, U.S. and Western press, and the New York Times in particular, not only did not question the president's claims, but played an important role in ensuring that they resonated with the public. The Times, in John MacArthur's words, inflated what appeared to be a totally fabricated claim by President Bush"into something resembling a prediction of nuclear Armageddon" while repeatedly citing"anonymous administration sources" for increasingly ludicrous claims.

President Bush formally introduced plans for war on Iraq on September 11, 2002, in a national address from Ellis Island, New York City, which commemorated the 9/11 attacks. The occasion chosen did more to cement the idea in the minds of the public of a connection between the threat from Al Qaeda and the need for an attack on Iraq – which the president now stated explicitly. Bush alleged that Iraq trained Al Qaeda in bomb making and other key skills, provided medical treatment to its leadership, and maintained “high level contacts” with the terror group. This partnership was supposedly intended by Baghdad to “allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.” “The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstructing its nuclear weapons program,” he further alleged, stressing the importance of military action to forestall the possibility of a nuclear armed Iraq – a possibility that allegedly could materialise within a year. The terrifying narrative Bush put forward was that Baghdad obtaining nuclear weapons could directly result in nuclear attacks by Al Qaeda on the United States – none of which would be traceable to Iraq.

The following day on September 12 President Bush addressed the U.N General Assembly with a focus on portraying an imminent Iraqi threat, and much like American delegations had in 1990 he stirred emotions through graphic depictions of alleged humanitarian abuses by Baghdad. “Wives are tortured in front of their husbands, children in the presence of their parents,” he claimed before the world. The U.S. subsequently used the U.N as a forum to press its claims particularly surrounding Iraq's alleged development of nuclear weapons – claims which leading international experts firmly refuted. U.N weapons inspector Hans Blix told reporters before meeting the Security Council: “We haven't found any smoking guns.” I.A.E.A Director General Dr. Mohamed Al Baradei reported in late January: “We have to date found no evidence that Iraq has revived its nuclear program.” Baradei subsequently told the U.N Security Council on March 7 that documents purportedly showing Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium from Niger, which were thought to have been supplied by Britain or the U.S. who were pushing this claim, were forgeries.

In response to the questions raised regarding Iraq's development of weapons of mass destruction, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer responded: “We know for a fact that there are weapons there.” Deputy Defence Secretary Wolfowitz told the Council on Foreign Relations on January 23, 2003: “Iraq's weapons of mass terror and the terror networks to which the Iraqi regime are linked are not two separate themes – not two separate threats. They are part of the same threat.” National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice wrote a New York Times Op-Ed that same day titled “Why We Know Iraq Is Lying,” which described Iraq's weapons disclosure to the United Nations as “a 12,200-page lie.”

To undermine Washington's case for war and prove its own innocence, Baghdad had notified U.N Secretary General Kofi Annan in late September that it would allow U.N weapons inspectors to return “without conditions.” This was a major concession reflecting the seriousness of the situation, since U.S. and British intelligence had previously infiltrated U.N inspection teams not only for espionage, but also to attempt unsuccessfully to engineer a coup in Iraq and assassinate Saddam Hussein. U.N inspectors had otherwise passed on their findings and large quantities of seized Iraqi government documents to Washington before doing so to the United Nations itself, highlighting controversies regarding how impartial the inspection regime could have been and drawing strong criticisms from several quarters of the U.N. Iraq's prior reluctance to allow inspections was portrayed in the West either as paranoia, or more often as a sign that it was hiding something, with the U.S. and British operations that used the inspections as cover only later being revealed. It nevertheless appeared to be the correct move by Baghdad. As a U.S. government source who insisted on anonymity stated in 2002, the Bush administration “doesn't want to have U.N weapons inspectors go back in, because they might actually show that the probability of Iraq having [threatening illicit weapons] is much lower than they want us to believe.” “This administration is capable of any lie … in order to advance its war goal in Iraq,” the source concluded. Washington's timetable for military action notably overrode, the timetable and processes set by the U.N Security Council for inspections in Iraq, thus effectively terminating the possibility.

The U.N was again used as a forum to make the case for war when on February 5, 2003, State Secretary Powell addressed the Security Council to advocate a U.S.-led invasion. Like all major figures in the administration Powell was a hardliner, and in the 1990s had indicated the possibility of a Desert Storm-like military campaign to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. Where he stood out was in his high approval ratings and credibility which made him the ideal figure to deliver such a presentation. Powell reportedly insisted that C.I.A Director George Tenet sit directly behind him during the speech to provide the impression that everything said had the full support of the intelligence community. It proved successful, with some studies pointing to a 30-point rise in the number of Americans who felt convinced of a Baghdad-Al Qaeda connection following Powell's speech at the Security Council.

An assessment by scholars at Princeton University published by the American Political Science Association in 2005 concluded:

the 2003 war in Iraq received high levels of public support because the Bush administration successfully framed conflict as an extension of the war on terror, which was a response to the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Our analysis of Bush's speeches reveals that the administration consistently connected Iraq with 9/11. New York Times coverage of the president's speeches featured almost no debate over the framing of the Iraq conflict as part of the war on terror. The assertion had tremendous influence on public attitudes, as indicated by polling data from several sources.... In 2002 the terrorism frame was available, believable, and understandable to a country scarred by September 11, making the frame powerful and convincing.

They stressed that although “President Bush never publicly blamed Saddam Hussein or Iraq for the events of September 11, but by consistently linking Iraqi with terrorism and Al Qaeda he provided the context from which such a connection could be made.... The way language and transitions are shaped in his official speeches almost compelled listeners to infer a connection.” They elaborated on the technique and its success:

The administration juxtaposed allusions to Iraq with the terms terror, bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Furthermore, there was little elite opposition to this rhetoric, leaving the American public with a one-sided flow of information.... The connection between Iraq and 9/11 made the latter the most relevant consideration in the minds of the American people when they thought about the war in Iraq, which increased support for the war.

In his January 2003 State of the Union Address, President Bush made one of most the direct allusions to the possibility of Al Qaeda being equipped with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, evoking the painful memories of the 9/11 attacks and strongly implying links to Iraq. He stated: “Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans – this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.” The distinction between “imagine the hijackers …” and “the hijackers could have been/could be in future.” was a significant one, but not one most viewers would notice. superscript 3 Fifty days later, on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the majority of Americans believed President Saddam Hussein was involved superscript 4 in the 9/11 attacks.

Truth or Fabrication?

In the lead up to the Iraq War, and increasingly so afterwards as more papers were declassified and more officials provided new testimonies, it became clear not only that the Bush administration had misled the public, but that the claims it used to justify the invasion were outright false and sharply contradicted the intelligence it was being given. In 2015 ^{v} the C.I.A's 93-page 2002 National Intelligence Assessment (N.I.E) was declassified, and showed that claims of ties between Al Qaeda and Baghdad were not supported by available intelligence. The N.I.E concluded that there were no operational ties between Iraq and the terror group, casting claims by administration officials in a new light. Secretary Rumsfeld, for example, had stated: “We do have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad. We have what we consider to be very reliable reporting of senior-level contacts going back a decade, and of possible chemical-and biological-agent training.” President Bush made multiple claims to the same effect, including after Baghdad was captured that “we have removed an ally of Al Qaeda.” The C.I.A's own documents indicated that these were all entirely false.

The only source for claims that Iraq was training Al Qaeda to use chemical and biological weapons came from detained jihadist Ibn al-Shaykh Al Libi, a Libyan who operated a training camp in Afghanistan. He later retracted his claims, stating that he was under torture and was only telling his captors what they wanted to hear. The case of Al Libi was an example of what former Congressman Lee Hamilton, who served multiple foreign affairs and intelligence committees, described as follows: “the intelligence that you get is driven by the policy, rather than the policy being driven by the intelligence.” David Kay, a former Iraq weapons inspector who also headed the Iraq Survey Group, stressed to similar effect in an interview in 2006 that assessments were trying to drive towards a policy conclusion while the information available simply didn't support it. A 2014 Rand Corporation report on the case for war in Iraq similarly highlighted that many intelligence reports from the time were flawed and unreliable because they were “influenced by policymakers' desires.” Al Libi's statements extracted through torture were a case in point. ^{vi}

National Security Advisor Susan Rice had received a memo on September 18, 2001, summarising intelligence on the possible relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq, which concluded there was little evidence of any links. The administration's narrative of an Iraqi threat, however, continued to be centred on claims that Baghdad was working with the terror group. Claims frequently cited by the vice president that 9/11 conspirator Mohammed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer were at the centre of the case presented for these ties, although by the time they began to be voiced the C.I.A and F.B.I had already reported their conclusion that such a meeting never took place.

The C.I.A's 2002 National Intelligence Assessment notably stressed that “the information we have on Iraqi nuclear personnel does not appear consistent with a coherent effort to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program,” and that there were no definitive signs of development of chemical or biological weapons. Thus, when President Bush stated in 2002 that Iraq “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons” and that “the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program,” this sharply contradicted the information his administration was actually receiving. The U.S. Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence itself eventually concluded that the Bush administration's claims about Iraq's W.M.D program were “not supported by the underlying intelligence reporting.”

In August 2002 when Vice President Cheney said: “Simply stated, there's no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” there was nothing approaching confirmed intelligence to this effect. Indeed, General Anthony Zinni who had accessed the same intelligence later recalled regarding Cheney's speech: “It was a total shock. I couldn't believe the vice president was saying this, you know? In doing work with the C.I.A on Iraq W.M.D, through all the briefings I heard at Langley, I never saw one piece of credible evidence that there was an ongoing program.”

In October President Bush claimed that Iraq had a “massive stockpile” of biological weapons, although C.I.A Director George Tenet highlighted that the C.I.A had informed policymakers there was “no specific information on the types or quantities of weapons agent or stockpiles at Baghdad's disposal.” On December 31, in an effort to justify a policy focus on Iraq over North Korea which multiple reports indicated already had nuclear weapons, the president declared: “We do not know whether or not he [Saddam Hussein] has a nuclear weapon.” This was one of the most difficult comments to substantiate, although it did serve to portray Iraq as a more imminent threat. C.I.A Director Tenet later testified “We said that Saddam did not have a nuclear weapon and probably would have been unable to make one until 2007 to 2009.”

Indeed, if there was any significant ambiguity on Iraq's possession of any substantial chemical or biological weapons arsenals, let alone nuclear weapons which were much harder to produce, the invasion likely would not have been carried out in the way it was.

Regarding Iraq's interest in the procurement of aluminium tubes, which was cited as proof that it was developing nuclear weapons, the U.S. Department of Energy concluded ^{vi} that their dimensions were “consistent with applications to rocket motors” which was a “more likely end use.” The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research also indicated that the tubes' purpose was not for the development of nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice subsequently stated that the tubes “are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs” – which she used to argue for military action on the basis that “we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” This had caused controversy at the time with the Institute for Science and International Security being one of many parties to have alleged in 2002 that the administration was exerting pressure on its own analysts for evidence that could be interpreted in a certain way – namely to support its narrative regarding Iraq's W.M.D's and Al Qaeda ties. The institute stressed that evidence for an Iraqi nuclear weapons program was underwhelming.

Although Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed 13 years later that his U.N speech was a “great intelligence failure,” available evidence strongly indicated that he had knowledge of but intentionally contradicted what intelligence agencies were saying and was deliberately committing lies to the record to provide pretext for war. ^{viii} These included, among many other mistruths, lies regarding the designs of Iraq's aluminium tubes, doctoring of U.N evidence on Iraqi compliance with requests for disarmament to portray it as proof Iraq was hiding weapons, and lies by omission regarding Iraq's V.X nerve agent program. Among several dozen outright lies committed to the record, when quoting intercepts of the conversations of Iraqi officers, Powell went so far as to add sentences that were not in the original quotes to make it appear as though they were talking about hiding evidence of W.M.D. None of the incriminating parts of conversation could be found in the original transcripts.

An early indicator of how tenuous administration allegations against Iraq were came in February 2003, when Secretary Powell informed the U.N Security Council that a “poison factory” in Northern Iraq was linked to Al Qaeda. No evidence was provided, and when Western reporters subsequently visited the compound, they found nothing of the kind. “There is no sign of chemical weapons anywhere – only the smell of paraffin and vegetable ghee used for cooking,” British reporter Luke Harding reported. A State Department official responded to the embarrassment by telling the New York Times: “a 'poison factory' is a term of art.” The claim marked part of what would become a growing trend of satellite images of buildings which could be put to almost any use being cited by the U.S. and its European partners as evidence of a site where some kind of malign activity was committed. Although there were Islamist fighters at the site, this was explained by its location in Iraq's Kurdistan region over which the Iraqi government had exercised almost no control since 1991 after Kurdish separatist groups there were placed under Western protection. Even if there had been a poison factory there, Baghdad could hardly have been held responsible.

Secretary Powell subsequently announced a threat from a new Iraqi drone – which was portrayed as a major threat that was able to launch biological weapons attacks far and wide. Four months prior in October President Bush had alluded to the possibility that Iraqi drones could be used to launch attacks on the U.S. – meaning either that Iraq had the only drones in the world with intercontinental ranges or it had some kind of operating base in the Americas which were both ludicrous propositions. Washington's concerns were soon echoed by London. The possibility of Iraqi drones flying down American streets launching W.M.D's was widely reported in U.S. media and contributed to portraying Iraq as an imminent threat. The drone referred to, it quickly emerged, was no better than a civilian hobby model and had a wooden propeller, engines smaller than those of a lawnmower and a range of no more than five miles.

The Iraq War was thus based on claims which the administration, in the best cases, was aware were highly tenuous, and in the worst cases knew were outright lies. The invasion's far-reaching consequences were thus all direct results of fabricated information vilifying the government in Baghdad, associating it with the 9/11 atrocity, and falsely portraying it as an imminent threat with malign intentions.

False Claims of Iraqi Atrocities

The credibility of U.S. allegations against Iraq, in particular that of its development of weapons of mass destruction, was bolstered by corroborating claims from Britain which would be its primary coalition partner in launching the invasion. A 55-page dossier published in September 2002 by the British government, based on reports made by the Joint Intelligence Committee, alleged that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons. This included claims that Baghdad sought “significant quantities of uranium from Africa” for such purposes, although the sources for large majority of the evidence were not reported supposedly to protect anonymity. Its findings, according to Prime Minister Tony Blair, left both London and the world no choice but to act.

British reports that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, and Al Hussein Scud-derived ballistic missiles capable of carrying them, were presented by politicians and major media outlets as evidence of an imminent threat to the Western world. Britain's most popular daily newspaper The Sun, for example, claimed “Brits 45mins from doom,” while the Daily Star reported “Mad Saddam ready to attack: 45 minutes from a chemical war,” and the Daily Mail published the headline “Just 45 minutes from attack.” Prime Minister Blair similarly alluded to the possibility that Iraq, again personified as Saddam Hussein, would not only expand its arsenal, but also “use the weapons he has” unless swift action was taken.

Even if Iraq did have the chemical and biological weapons it was alleged to, presenting the case that the country would use them unprovoked was somewhat ludicrous. The missiles Iraq allegedly had, even according to the dossier itself, had only a 650 kilometers range allowing them to reach only "Cyprus and nato members Greece and Turkey as well as all Iraq's neighbours." The fact that Britain had a military base on Cyprus was used to spin this as a sign that Iraq not only could hit Britain, since the base was technically British soil, but that such an attack was going to be initiated without provocation. Iraq's alleged capability was far from remarkable, not only compared to Western and Western-aligned states such as Saudi Arabia and Israel, but even compared to other U.S. adversaries. Syria and ee-rahn, for example, used North Korean missiles with ranges of 1000 kilometers and 1500 kilometers respectively and much more survivable and sophisticated terminal warheads, and the former likely fielded more chemical weapons that Iraq ever had. Blurring the very distinct lines between a deterrent, and a weapon which would be used as soon as the owner had the chance to, was later similarly used by advocates of war to portray North Korea as ready to launch nuclear attacks on the United States as soon as it developed a nuclear-tipped missile capable of reaching it. As it was, however, Iraq actually had neither.

Major General Michael Laurie, who had been involved in producing the dossier, wrote to a subsequent inquiry in 2011, later known as the Chilcot Inquiry, that “the purpose of the dossier was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence, and that to make the best out of sparse and inconclusive intelligence the wording was developed with care.” The claim that Iraqi missiles could reach British territory within 45 minutes was found not only to have been misleading, but to have been outright false, and had been inserted by the government's director of communications, Alastair Campbell, against the wishes of the intelligence agencies. British weapons expert David Kelly from the Defence Ministry, who had led ten unscom missions to Iraq, spoke with journalists highlighting that the dossier, and in particular the '45 minutes' claim, were misleading. Kelly was subsequently reported to have committed suicide under circumstances for years seen as suspicious.

The invasion began on March 10, 2003, ^{x} and was carried out without authorisation from the United Nations Security Council or the pretext of defence from an Iraqi attack, which made it a serious breach of the U.N charter and an illegal act of aggression – the supreme international crime. This was one of several U.S. led crimes of aggression which violated international law, with preceding examples including the invasions of Grenada and Panama and the illegal air campaigns and no fly zones targeting Yugoslavia and post-Gulf War Iraq.

Following the invasion U.S. and allied allegations of Iraq's development of weapons of mass destruction were revealed to have been totally fabricated. They had proven invaluable as a pretext for hostile policies towards Baghdad, however, particularly when paired with efforts to portray the Iraqi leadership as a potential supplier of such weapons to Al Qaeda, and otherwise as irrational or insane and therefore willing to use such weapons unprovoked. As Professor Robert Swansbrough, President Bush's most prominent biographer, stressed: “The Bush administration's call for a pre-emptive war against Iraq – replete with frightening warnings about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein's links to Al Qaeda and hints of the Iraqi' dictator's role in the 9/11 attacks on America – created a powerful juggernaut towards a 'war of choice' with Iraq.” He noted regarding the Bush administration's decision to go to war “once the president had made that decision, groupthink shunted aside warnings, contrary data, and less optimistic assumptions that disputed the president's preferred policy.”

The head of Britain's M.I 6 Sir Richard Dearlove similarly concluded, as documented in the Downing Street Memorandum published in 2005: “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” He recalled that many figures in the administration had been “playing fast and loose with the evidence” to provide a pretext for the policies they hoped to enact.

Many of the statements by U.S. officials were found to have been not only misleading, but outright false. An example was an address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on August 26, 2002, when Vice President Cheney unequivocally declared “we now know” that Iraq has resumed its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. The C.I.A had not cleared the speech, which went well beyond the facts the intelligence community had established. Another was an address on October 7, 2002 during which President Bush stated: “We know Iraq and Al Qaeda had high-level contacts over a year.” House Speaker Dennis Hastert summarised five days later regarding this claim: “is there a direct connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda? The president thinks so.” This unevidenced claim was seen as a highly dubious by experts considering, among other factors, the sharp animosity between the secular Ba'ath Party and the fundamentalist terror group and their starkly opposing backgrounds and ideologies. As a cato Institute report noted: “as a secular leader of a country divided along religious lines, Saddam represented everything that the global jihadists and Islamic fundamentalists hate. Saddam was deterred from cooperating with terrorists because he feared the terrorists.” Colin Powell's Chief of Staff, Larry Wilkerson, was one of many who stated that available evidence showed the agendas of the state and the terror group were “incompatible,” leaving little room for cooperation. With a Catholic, Tariq Aziz, as one of his closest confidants, former foreign minister, and deputy prime minister, Saddam Hussein's Iraq had consistently had some of the very worst relations with Islamist groups of any country in the Arab world, and had abolished Sharia courts very early on. For those familiar with Iraq the allegations of ties to Al Qaeda appeared absurd.

The primary argument for war with Iraq was not that it was committing atrocities, but rather that there was an imminent need to pre-empt an atrocity by terrorists using Iraqi W.M.D – a narrative bolstered by a strongly implied connection between Baghdad and the mass killings of 9/11. The British narrative placed a lesser emphasis on possible Baghdad-Al Qaeda ties, but instead strongly implied that an Iraq with an expanded W.M.D capability would not use it as a deterrent, and could instead use it to attack the West without warning. Both narratives were perhaps best summarised by the statement of President Bush: “facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof – the smoking gun – that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” The atrocity fabricated for Iraq by its Western adversaries, pertaining to its weapons program, was one yet to happen and which invading the country was presented as the only means to prevent.

J.D. Maddox, an intelligence officer for the Department of Energy assigned to the Iraq Survey Group – the American-led team searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – recalled regarding his deployment to Iraq in June 2003 and growing disillusionment with Washington's narrative:

I had privately questioned the motive for going into Iraq, suspicious of the way the administration had shifted its justification over time, but I still chose to go. Secretary of State Colin Powell's now-notorious United Nations speech on February 5, 2003 – when he argued that Saddam Hussein's regime had developed weapons of mass destruction and posed an imminent threat – assuaged any reservations I might have had. 'Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources,' he said. 'These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.' There was no more trustworthy spokesman, I thought at the time....

After just a short time with the group, I had little belief that we would find any nuclear weapons. During late-night rants, my fellow intelligence officers debunked the stories that the Iraqi government had access to African uranium, had developed special centrifuges or was driving biological-warfare trailers around the country. But nobody said anything during work hours. That argument had already been made and lost in Washington.... The Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were no more than a bit of improvised sham, a con man's counterfeit goods.

Maddox highlighted that those who believed W.M.D would be found were a minority by the time he arrived, as well as the tremendous disconnect between what the military saw on the ground, and what the media and government claimed at home. He recalled: “when I returned to Washington, some weeks later, it was clear to me that people who hadn't served in Iraq knew little of what was really going on. A friend asked me how the search for weapons of mass destruction was going. I responded wryly, 'Well, I'm back, aren't I?' I avoided explaining the enormity of it.” Regarding the findings of the group he had been working with, he noted: “When the Iraq Survey Group's interim progress report was released, in October 2003, the truth became unavoidable. It offered a thinly veiled admission of failure to find any convincing evidence of recent W.M.D. activity.” After that, Maddox recalled: “It became impossible to square my American sense of free will – our image of ourselves as empowered citizens participating in informed choices – with the reality of the way that we were hoodwinked into going along with the invasion of Iraq. I had been taught throughout my childhood and my military training that America conducts wars based on just cause, but the reality emerging from Iraq was that we had been compelled by deception.

U.S. government funded Iraqi National Congress I.N.C made up of anti-government defectors, which were relied on heavily by the administration to accuse Baghdad of developing W.M.D's and maintaining ties to Al Qaeda, considered the invasion to be a major victory. After post-invasion investigations proved their claims to be entirely fabricated, the head of the congress Ahmed Chalabi proudly declared:"We are heroes in error.... As far as we're concerned, we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important." In aiding the Bush administration, the defectors had not only gained funding and a living in the U.S., but now had a chance to gain power and influence in Iraq itself. Their statements consistently contradicted available intelligence, but administration officials could choose to believe and cite these defector sources with whom they had a common agenda. Similar defector sources would continue to be cited and placed on a pedestal to profoundly shape Western narratives surrounding other adversaries – most notably North Korea and China (See Chapters 7 and 10).

Complementing claims that Iraq posed an imminent threat to Western security through W.M.D development and Al Qaeda ties, a secondary narrative portraying the invasion of the country as a humanitarian action also played a significant role in providing pretext for war. Like in 1990 to 91, when the Kuwaiti population were portrayed as the victims in fabricated atrocity stories, in the months preceding 2003 invasion new horror stories cast Iraq's own population in the role of those a Western war effort was needed to save. Iraq's government was far from the most humane in its treatment of dissent, as perhaps best demonstrated by its large-scale chemical attacks on Kurdish villages in the 1980s for which it had received full U.S. support. Its post-1980s practices, namely various forms of torture, were hardly sufficient to evoke an extreme enough reaction overseas, both because such practices were almost unanimous in the Arab world and extremely common in much of the third world, and because the U.S. and Britain themselves were known to be severely torturing suspected jihadists at the time. Indeed, several of America's own victims were tortured to death at various'black sites' across the world, and many including U.S. citizens were arrested and held indefinitely without trial. Iraq's abuses thus had to be portrayed as out of the ordinary, and shown to be particularly grotesque.

The most prominent atrocity story was that of 'Saddam's human shredder.' This was a plastic shredding machine into which the Iraqi president was reported by Western sources to feed his enemies into, feet first, as a particularly brutal form of execution, which was described in graphic detail. According to Western coverage, the remains of the victims were subsequently used as fish food. “See men shredded, then say you don't back war,” the (London) Times headline read on March 18. The story itself originated in an address to the British House of Commons, with member of parliament Ann Clwyd writing a piece in the Times on the day of the Iraq debate in the House. When Australian Prime Minister John Howard addressed his country on March 20 to explain why Australian forces would support the U.S.-led coalition, he alluded to a humanitarian mission justified by “the use of a human shredding machine as a vehicle for putting to death critics of Saddam Hussein.” “This is the man, this is the apparatus of terror, we are dealing with,” he concluded.

Citing the shredder story, the Daily Mail slammed activists and religious leaders who refused to endorse the war, stating:"bodies got chewed up from foot to head.... This is the evil that the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Anglican bishops refuse to fight." Fittingly headlined"This war I.S about good versus evil," the paper claimed that those protesting against the war were"committing nothing less than an act of treachery" for defending"a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler." Those"fighting against a free democracy," it added, could never be on the right side – an absolutist ideological argument. Other publications across much of the British media spectrum made claims to similar effect, with the Telegraph asserting that peace activists, by opposing the invasion, were effectively telling Iraq to “crank up the shredder.”

This alleged Iraqi atrocity, like so many others vilifying Western adversaries at times of high tensions, proved to be a baseless fabrication. As the Guardian observed in 2004: “The horror of one of Saddam's execution methods made a powerful pro-war rallying cry – but the evidence suggests it never existed.” The Sun noted regarding the atrocity's impact in providing support for an invasion: “Public opinion swung behind Tony Blair as voters learned how Saddam fed dissidents feet first into industrial shredders.” It had a similarly strong impact in the United States. The human shredder story would likely have played a much larger role in shaping the narrative for the war if it had been published earlier, much like the story of Kuwaiti babies being thrown out of incubators did in the Gulf War. As former Wall Street Journal reporter and president of Harper's Magazine, John MacArthur, noted in reference to consistencies in fabricated atrocity propaganda between the two wars: “These are all the same people who were running it more than 10 years ago. They'll make up just about anything … to get their way.”

Seeking to capitalise on growing claims of Iraqi atrocities and to broaden support for military action, President Bush's rhetoric notably changed 15 days before the beginning of the war from February 23, 2003. The core message of subsequent statements was not the imminent threat from weapons of mass destruction or terrorism, but rather the need to promote the Western political model, Western-style liberal democracy, by imposing this system on Iraq. This ideological argument invoked the Western world's age-old belief in the 'civilising mission' – which in its latest iteration had evolved into the 'democratising mission' – to spread its ideology, political models and way of life across the world. Portrayals of the supposed depravity of the Iraqi system affirmed the idea of Western supremacy, and the need for a 'civilising mission' to build a better Iraq that was influenced by Western ideology and political values. ^{xi}

Following the invasion, it became increasingly clear that Baghdad had no ties to Al Qaeda and no W.M.D's – with even its old chemical and biological programs having been abandoned in exchange for expected sanctions relief as international inspectors had verified in the 1990s. Indeed, many analysts noted that if Iraq really had W.M.D's, and the U.S. and its allies had not been able to get inspectors into the country to confirm they were gone, an invasion would have been unlikely due to the danger that such weapons would be used to retaliate against Western and allied targets.

While an illegal U.S. and British-led invasion in 2003 was based on the pretext of halting Iraq's W.M.D development, when this narrative had been fully debunked the invasion needed to be retrospectively justified with a new round of fabricated atrocities. These efforts benefitted from the metanarrative created from 1990, and amplified after 2001, which cast Baghdad as capable of practically any evil deed. In November and December 2003, as the war faced growing criticism for being unjust and conducted on false premises, British Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed that “400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves [writer's italics]” – victims of government massacres. In doing so, Blair attempted to vindicate the invasion by reframing it as humanitarian war. The claim was widely cited by prominent sources, including by members of parliament, and widely published including in the introduction to a you-sayd pamphlet dedicated exclusively to the issue titled “Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves.” Blair is quoted as having stated on November 20: “We've already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.” The pamphlet further elaborated “If these numbers prove accurate, they represent a crime against humanity surpassed only by the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Pol Pot's Cambodian killing fields in the 1970s, and the Nazi Holocaust of World War 2.”

Since Prime Minister Blair alleged that the larger number of bodies had been found, rather than asserting that they would be found, it appeared a very deliberate falsification to vilify Iraq and dissipate growing criticism of London and Washington's actions. It was only in July the following year, after the story had circulated for over six months, that Downing Street admitted its claims had been false. Even a retracted atrocity fabrication, however, would continue to reinforce the metanarrative which had shaped public opinion to favour the war, and to view Western military action as justified against those countries outside the Western sphere of influence accused of humanitarian abuses. The saying in American politics that “voters, once deceived, tend to stay that way despite all evidence” summarised the value of alleging extreme atrocities even if these allegations were then quietly retracted. As noted by professor at the Catholic University of Louvain, Jean Bricmont in his book on the subject of atrocities and humanitarian military action regarding the Iraqi mass graves case specifically:

The lie remains in the public consciousness and has its effect if someone points out that the U.S. war has cost the lives of 100,000 Iraqi civilians, the immediate answer is:'Ah, yes, but they found 400,000 bodies in Saddam's mass graves'.... What would be the reaction if the leader of a Third World country multiplied by a factor of 80 the number of dead at Sabra and Chatila (160,000), or during the Vietnam War (240 million) or in the invasion of Iraq (8 million)? How much credibility would he retain?

Iraq's Fate After a Humanitarian Premised Invasion

Following the U.S.-led invasion Iraq would remain in a near constant state of instability with serious negative implications for its population. The conduct of U.S. and allied forces exacerbated the suffering, including not only the kinds of munitions used but also the comportment of servicemen conditioned for extreme violence. Representative Duncan D. Hunter, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, said his military unit “killed probably hundreds of civilians.” This statement was an attempt to justify Navy Seal chief Edward Gallagher's killing of an Iraqi prisoner, to which Hunter responded: “I frankly don't care if he [the prisoner] was killed.

I just don't care. Even if everything that the prosecutors say is true in this case, then, you know, Eddie Gallagher should still be given a break, I think.” Claiming Gallagher was not guilty of any unique crime, and implying a prevailing norm among personnel in Iraq, Hunter stated: “Well, then, how do you judge me? So, I was an artillery officer, and we fired hundreds of rounds into Fallujah, killed probably hundreds of civilians – if not scores, if not hundreds of civilians. Probably killed women and children, if there were any left in the city when we invaded. So do I get judged, too?” His statement ultimately pointed to the fact that only a small fraction of atrocities and war crimes committed were ever publicised, with the majority being overlooked. Gallagher's target had notably been a teenage combatant who he killed with a knife before posing with his corpse for photos, which Hunter defended by saying he had also posed for pictures with dead combatants.

U.S. Marine sniper Rudy Reyes recalled being shown footage of targets having their heads blown off by sniper rifles in order to become desensitised to violence before being sent to Baghdad in 2003. Marines were “systematically programmed to kill,” he said. “In our boot camp, do you know how we say the word 'yes'? It's the word 'kill'. It's the only way you can say 'yes'.” “We're watching real world: head shots, footage of sniper kills. And then they're slowing it down in slow motion, head expanding three times the size, then vacuum collapse, then brains and skull.” He initially questioned if he was capable of continuing, “because there was still some human in me,” but the extreme desensitisation to violence led his group of Marines to slaughter Iraqi civilians including children. More extreme methods of desensitising Western forces for war were known, a notable example being the junior Australian personnel in Afghanistan given civilians to kill by hand by their seniors – mental preparation for war in the country known as 'blooding.' British special forces had a similar practice.

U.S. Army Corporal Michael Prysner was one of many former servicemen who stressed that, much like in its wars in the Philippines Japan, Korea and Vietnam, racial dehumanisation of the population significantly influenced the conduct of American personnel. Although less well documented and arguably much less severe than in the wars in East Asia, the Iraqi population still suffered greatly for being perceived as less than human in the eyes of Western occupation forces. Another Marine recalled regarding how perceptions of the Iraqis fuelled misconduct: “If they looked like an insurgent, you did what you wanted for them. . . . The Marines took it upon themselves to shoot at, beat, rob, rape, kill whomever they wanted to. And that's being proposed on the news as a few bad apples, an isolated incident.” Regarding how Marines' training influenced their conduct, he stated “what's inherent to that training? Well people in the Middle East are referred to as sand niggers, hajis, camel jockeys, towel heads, barbarians, terrorists.

Women [as] bitches, c***s.” These prevailing attitudes which fuelled misconduct, according to him, were “all firmly entrenched in the training, all firmly entrenched in the ideology. All firmly entrenched in the linguistics and lexicon within the military.”

Speaking to Middle East Eye in 2019, British personnel recalled that rules of engagement in Iraq as well as Afghanistan allowed them to kill suspicious looking unarmed civilians – with one describing the result as a “killing spree.” In the Iraqi city of Basra anyone holding a phone or a shovel could be considered a combatant and shot on the spot. One serviceman recalled: “We were shooting old men, young men. This is what I witnessed. I have never seen such lawlessness.” They revealed instances in which, after young boys were killed, weapons were planted on them to make them look like combatants. “Our commanders, they would tell us: 'We will protect you if any investigation comes. Just say you genuinely thought your life was at risk – those words will protect you,'” one of the former servicemen said. Some British activists alleged that because the military was “allowed to run their own criminal courts and prosecution service,” and was able to exert considerable pressure domestically, its personnel could not be held accountable for such conduct.

Although the overthrow of the Iraqi government in May 2003 left U.S.-led coalition forces fighting only insurgents with handheld weapons, meaning they faced no tanks, armour or bunkers, U.S. forces still made extensive use of depleted uranium weaponry (see Chapter 4) including in civilian areas. In 2014 reports emerged that showed that U.S. forces fired depleted uranium rounds in population centres such as Samawah, Nasiriyah and Basrah. From 2005 Iraqi doctors observed a staggering increase in rates of infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by U.S. Marines the previous year, with these rates exceeding those among survivors of the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. As The Independent observed in 2011:

Iraqi doctors in Fallujah have complained since 2005 of being overwhelmed by the number of babies with serious birth defects, ranging from a girl born with two heads to paralysis of the lower limbs. They said they were also seeing far more cancers than they did before the battle for Fallujah between U.S. troops and insurgents. Their claims have been supported by a survey showing a four-fold increase in all cancers and a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14s. Infant mortality in the city is more than four times higher than in neighbouring Jordan and eight times higher than in Kuwait.

Similar effects were seen in parts of Yugoslavia and in southern Iraq after the Gulf War. Professor Chris Busby, one of the authors of a survey of 4,800 Fallujah residents, said regarding the cause of cancers and birth defects “to produce an effect like this, some very major mutagenic exposure must have occurred in 2004 when the attacks happened.” What was striking, he noted, was not only the greater prevalence of cancer, but the speed at which it affected people. The fallout, he concluded, suggested that some kind of uranium weapon was used. The survey was carried out by 11 researchers in January and February, who visited 711 houses in Fallujah, and concluded that the effects on the population were “similar to that in the Hiroshima survivors who were exposed to ionising radiation from the bomb and uranium in the fallout.”

Aside from their toxic effects, depleted uranium rounds were also incendiary and thus had a much greater threat of collateral damage than normal munitions. Fallujah had also been bombardled with white phosphorous which represented another serious war crime. The Independent reported: “U.S. commanders largely treated Fallujah as a free-fire zone to try to reduce casualties among their own troops. British officers were appalled by the lack of concern for civilian casualties,” with officers who ordered such attacks not seeing them as significant enough to be worth reporting to superiors. A decline in healthcare and sanitary conditions in Iraq after 2003, where it was already much lower than before 1991 due to 12 years of sanctions and the bombing of key infrastructure, only worsened the situation – as did the population's fear of U.S. military checkpoints which prevented them from going to Baghdad for healthcare.

The treatment of Iraqis suspected of aiding the insurgency was similarly egregious, with many held without charge or legal access, killed in custody or subjected to severe torture. The Washington Post described “prisoners forced to retrieve their food from toilets” and produced 65 pages worth of sworn statements. It reported:

The detainees said they were savagely beaten and repeatedly humiliated sexually by American soldiers working on the night shift at Tier 1 A in Abu Ghraib [prison] during the holy month of Ramadan ... pressed to denounce Islam or were force-fed pork and liquor. Many provided graphic details of how they were sexually humiliated and assaulted, threatened with rape, and forced to masturbate in front of female soldiers....

Many of them recalled the same event or pattern of events and procedures.... Most of the detainees said in the statements that they were stripped upon their arrival to Tier 1 A, forced to wear women's underwear, and repeatedly humiliated in front of one another and American soldiers. They also described beatings and threats of death and sexual assault if they did not cooperate with U.S. interrogators. Kasim Mehaddi Hilas, detainee No. 151108, told investigators that when he first arrived at Abu Ghraib last year, he was forced to strip, put on a hood and wear rose-colored panties with flowers on them.'Most of the days I was wearing nothing else,' he said in his statement.

During the rape of a boy between 15 and 18 years old, other prisoners heard his screams and watched the assault, with a female soldier taking pictures. “The kid was hurting very bad,” one prisoner said. He recalled prisoner being punished for asking for time to pray by being cuffed to the bars of a cell window and left for close to five hours – his feet dangling off the floor. The prisoner also watched a detainee being tied to his bed and sodomised by soldiers with a phosphoric light. Another recalled regarding that incident that the Iraqi victim: “was screaming for help.... There was also a white female soldier, short, she was taking pictures.”

Others recalled being beaten severely, having U.S. personnel step on their heads, and having the chemicals from phosphoric lights poured on them – which made their bodies glow for the soldiers' amusement. “They were taking pictures of me during all these instances," the victim recalled, and that he was subsequently sodomised with a nightstick.

Detainee No. 13077, Hiadar Sabar Abed Miktub al-Aboodi, recalled: “They forced us to walk like dogs on our hands and knees. And we had to bark like a dog, and if we didn't do that they started hitting us hard on our face and chest with no mercy. After that, they took us to our cells, took the mattresses out and dropped water on the floor and they made us sleep on our stomachs on the floor with the bags on our head and they took pictures of everything.”

Detainee No. 151362, Ameen Saeed Al-Sheik, recalled: “They said we will make you wish to die and it will not happen.... They stripped me naked. One of them told me he would rape me. He drew a picture of a woman to my back and makes me stand in shameful position holding my buttocks.”

Detainee No. 18170, Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh, recalled a soldier brought a box of food and he made me stand on it with no clothing, except a blanket. Then a tall black soldier came and put electrical wires on my fingers and toes and on my penis, and I had a bag over my head.... 'Do you pray to Allah?' [one asked]. I said 'yes.' They said, ['Expletive] you. And [expletive] him.' One of them said, 'You are not getting out of here health[y], you are getting out of here handicapped.' And he said to me, 'Are you married?' I said, 'Yes.' They said, 'If your wife saw you like this, she will be disappointed.' One of them said, 'But if I saw her now she would not be disappointed now because I would rape her.'

The soldiers told him that if he cooperated, they would release him in time for Ramadan. He said he did but was not released. One soldier continued to abuse him by hitting his broken leg and ordered him to curse Islam. "Because they started to hit my broken leg, I cursed my religion. They ordered me to thank Jesus that I'm alive." After being handcuffed him to a bed, he was asked “Do you believe in anything?” “I said to him, 'I believe in Allah.' So he [soldier] said, 'But I believe in torture and I will torture you.'”

Only a small portion of the evidence of abuses committed against Iraqi prisoners would ever become available to the public. Journalist Seymour Hersh, who gained special access to a greater quantity of the evidence, recalled regarding its contents:

Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men.

This is at Abu Ghraib.... The women were passing messages out saying, 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomised with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has.

Rick Pearlstein recalled after hearing him speak, that Hersh “said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, 'You haven't begun to see evil…' then trailed off. He said, 'horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.' He looked frightened.”

Iraqi businesswoman Huda Alazawi, who was suspected of ties to insurgent groups, recalled: “They handcuffed me and blindfolded me and put a piece of white cloth over my eyes. They bundled me into a Humvee and took me to a place inside the palace. I was dumped in a room with a single wooden chair. It was extremely cold.” After being joined by her crying sister and left there overnight, Alazawi was taken to a “torturing place” where: “The U.S. officer told us: 'If you don't confess, we will torture you.

So you have to confess.' My hands were handcuffed. They took off my boots and stood me in the mud with my face against the wall. I could hear women and men shouting and weeping. I recognised one of the cries as my brother Mu'taz. I wanted to see what was going on so I tried to move the cloth from my eyes. When I did, I fainted."

Alazawi recalled being beaten by an American soldier, and her brother being sexually abused in custody. American guards then made her stand with her face against the wall for 12 hours, then returned her to her cell at midnight. “The cell had no ceiling. It was raining. At midnight they threw something at my sister's feet. It was my brother Ayad. He was bleeding from his legs, knees and forehead.

I told my sister: 'Find out if he's still breathing.' She said: 'No. Nothing.' I started crying. The next day they took away his body.” Her brother had been tortured to death and his corpse thrown in with his sisters – perhaps as a threat to compel them to confess. His body had extensive bruising to the chest and arms, and a severe head wound above the left eye. Photos were shown to British journalists as evidence, although his death certificate from an American doctor claimed he died from “cardiac arrest of unknown etiology.”

After being put on a minibus with 18 other detainees, Alazawi recalled the U.S. personnel told them: “Nobody is going to sleep tonight.” They played scary music continuously with loud voices. As soon as someone fell asleep, they started beating on the door. It was Christmas. They kept us there for three days.

Many of the U.S. soldiers were drunk.” An American serviceman eventually broke her shoulder, and she was transferred to Abu Ghraib prison and kept in solitary confinement for 156 days in a two-metre-square cell, initially with no bed and a bucket for a toilet. Prisoners under punishment were thrown in one-metre-square cells and had cold water poured on them for hours. Dogs were used to torture inmates and allowed to bite them, and female detainees including children were on occasion raped. “The American interrogators were entirely ignorant and knew nothing about Iraqi people. The vast majority of people there were innocent,” Alazawi concluded.

Reports from U.S. military personnel, alongside photographic evidence, verified claims of abuse, including arranging male prisoners naked in a pile and jumping on them, forcing prisoners to rape one another and simulating electric torture. U.S. Major General Antonio Taguba, commenting on the photos American soldiers took as evidence of their own sexual abuse against Iraqis, said that they “show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.” Many of these pictures were not released, as it was believed that it would seriously tarnish the country's image. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld commented: “If these are released to the public, obviously it's going to make matters worse.” President Obama, upon taking office, also strongly opposed releasing the photos, stating that they would “inflame anti-American public opinion.” This decision was supported by General Taguba, and was vital to preserving the United States' international image and to concealing some of the real consequences of Washington and its allies' humanitarian-premised war. These very real and egregious humanitarian abuses against the Iraqi population were direct results of successful U.S. and allied fabrication of false allegations of Iraqi atrocities, W.M.D development and ties to terror groups, without which no invasion would have been possible.

International authority on Iraq and the Arab world, President Emeritus of the International Association of Middle East Studies and consultant to the State Department, the Department of Defence and you-sayd, Raymond Baker, observed in 2010 seven years after the invasion:

The consequences in human and cultural terms of the destruction of the Iraqi state have been enormous: notably, the deaths of over 1 million civilians; the degradation in social infrastructure, including electricity, potable water, and sewage systems; the targeted assassination of over 400 academics and professionals and the displacement of approximately 4 million refugees and internally displaced people. All of these terrible losses are compounded by unprecedented levels of cultural devastation, attacks on national archives and monuments that represent the historical identity of the Iraqi people. Rampant chaos and violence hamper efforts at reconstruction, leaving the foundations of the Iraqi state in ruin.

Foreign Affairs in 2012 described “the Iraq we left behind” as “the world's next failed state.” In sharp contrast to the Ba'athist period, and relative prosperity preceding Western sanctions and bombings or the imposition of a Western-style political system, it noted:

The Iraqi state cannot provide basic services, including regular electricity in summer, clean water, and decent health care; meanwhile, unemployment among young men hovers close to 30 percent, making them easy recruits for criminal gangs and militant factions... the current pace of bombings and shootings is more than enough to leave most Iraqis on edge and deeply uncertain about their futures. They have lost any hope that the bloodshed will go away and simply live with their dread.

Human Rights Watch reported to similar effect: “The rights of Iraq's most vulnerable citizens, especially women and detainees, are violated with impunity, and those who would expose official malfeasance or abuses by armed groups do so at enormous risk. The 2003 invasion and its resulting chaos have exacted an enormous toll on Iraq's citizens.” Taking women's rights as an example, which contrasted very sharply with the Ba'athist era:

The deterioration of security has promoted a rise in tribal customs and religiously-inflected political extremism, which have had a deleterious effect on women's rights, both inside and outside the home. For Iraqi women, who enjoyed some of the highest levels of rights protection and social participation in the region before 1991, these have been heavy blows. Militias promoting misogynist ideologies have targeted women and girls for assassination, and intimidated them to stay out of public life...

Trafficking in women and girls in and out of the country for sexual exploitation is widespread.

The full consequences of the invasion are too great to cover in this volume, but one result would be over one million Iraqi deaths by September 2007, according to Britain's Opinion Research Business polling group. Approximately 40 percent of the country's middle class had fled within four years of the invasion, with 2 million refugees leaving the country and a further 1.7 million left internally displaced – figures which only increased in the following years.

The invasion ultimately saw Iraq transformed from a recovering and stable power with considerable economic potential into a weak and internally divided nation over which various foreign powers fought for control. The weak institutions of the post-Baathist government established under the U.S.-led occupation, and foreign sponsorship of various non-state groups including radical jihadist groups backed by Western-aligned Gulf States, to which State Department officials turned a blind eye, ensured a perpetuation of this situation. Indeed, President Barack Obama himself acknowledged that the rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and later the creation of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria isis terror group, were direct consequences of the U.S.-led invasion. There was no notable presence of jihadist terror groups on Iraqi soil before March 2003, but by the end of the year Iraq had become one of the leading hotspots for terrorist activities. The eventual rise of the Islamic State was thus also a direct consequence of Washington's fabricated atrocities and other false narratives to vilify Baghdad, including not only those in 2001 to 03, but also in 1990 to 91, which had been essential to paving the way to two devastating assaults on the country. An investigative report released by the British government in 2016 strongly indicated that intelligence officials knew before March 2003 that the invasion would only fuel terrorism and lead to instability and societal collapse. Indeed, Britain's Defence Intelligence Service D.I.S had predicted as early as March 2002 that an invasion would lead to “political disintegration and extremist violence in Iraq.”

Although Western forces formally withdrew from Iraq in 2011, Western military contractors would remain indefinitely. U.S. personnel, alongside those from allied states such as Britain and Norway, returned within three years and appeared set to stay indefinitely despite significant clashes with militia forces loosely aligned with the Iraqi government. On January 4, 2020, the C.I.A assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani near Baghdad International Airport after he had been invited to the country for peace talks and was scheduled to meet the Iraqi Prime Minister. Soleimani's killing, likely many U.S. actions taken in the country over the preceding two decades, was considered by analysts to be illegal, if not a war crime, and as a serious breach of Iraqi sovereignty it demonstrated just how limited this sovereignty was. The Iraqi parliament passed a resolution the following day calling for the removal of U.S. and foreign forces from the country, but the U.S. State Department made clear the following week that the issue of a troop withdrawal would not be open for discussion with the Iraqis. Baghdad was left issuing somewhat feeble protests as the U.S. launched continuous airstrikes on various militia groups in the destabilised country, and ultimately had only limited sovereignty as Western forces were able to operate on its soil effectively at will.

Chapter Seven

The U. S.–North Korean Conflict

Shaping Global Opinion of North Korea

North Korea in 2020 marked its 70th year in a state of war with the United States – the longest war between two industrial powers in world history – making it the oldest state adversary ever faced by Western empire. The conflict had taken on newfound importance for Washington after the Soviet Bloc's disintegration, with immense Western pressure on much of the world to eschew ties with Pyongyang and intense Western economic sanctions between them leaving the country increasingly isolated. With Soviet protection and military aid lost military pressure simultaneously escalated, leading Washington to come close on multiple occasions to launching attacks. From the 1990s, and increasingly in the 20th century, a strong consensus emerged in the Western world that North Korea's destruction was not only inevitable, in line with broader perceptions of an 'end of history' and inevitable global westernisation, but that this process had to be accelerated. In more extreme terms, as noted by the Centre for the National Interest's Director of Korea Studies Harry J. Kazianis: “North Korea is a stain on human history that needs to be expunged” – a statement which broadly reflected Western thinking towards the country.

Western economic warfare efforts, although pursued over several decades, succeeded only in curbing North Korea's potential growth but not in forcing it into crisis as was achieved in Iraq, Venezuela, ee-rahn, Syria or other Western targets with more vulnerable economies. The East Asian state succeeded in sustaining economic growth, albeit at a slow rate, and in keeping both exchange rates and prices for most basic goods stable despite sanctions that were wholly unparalleled worldwide in their intensity. This was largely explained by the robustness of the state's economy, which before the 1990s had been one of the most developed of all Western adversaries. Data from the Geneva-based World Intellectual Property Organization showed that, in terms of registered industrial designs North Korea was second only to the Soviet Union among socialist countries by the mid-1980s, with sustained investment raising it to fourth place in the world in 1990 behind only Japan, South Korea and the United States. High levels of technical education among the workforce even in rural areas were repeatedly observed by foreign professionals, while domestic industrial works such as hydroelectric dams were, according to experts from companies such as the Swiss-Swedish A.B.B Group, considered nothing less than “engineering masterpieces.”

North Korea repeatedly proved resilient not only to Western economic pressure, but also to military threats, with its emphasis on military readiness, widespread political education and a sizeable defence industry limiting options for a Western assault. In the mid-2010s a conventional invasion was projected to lead to the loss of approximately 200,000 American military personnel, while other reports indicated that the Pentagon could expect a loss of up to 500,000 troops under its command within 90 days of the outbreak of war. These figures did not account for North Korean weapons of mass destruction or its ability to deliver them to U.S. territories such as Guam or Hawaii. The price of military action grew considerably further from 2017 after the ability to strike cities across the U.S. mainland with thermonuclear warheads was demonstrated in Korean weapons tests and confirmed by American intelligence. In a war with the country a victory for U.S. and allied forces was considered far from assured, and the eradication of cities across the American mainland was a significant possibility.

Facing limitations in their ability to impose military and economic pressure on North Korea, the U.S. and its partners capitalised on their tremendous advantages in controlling the global information space to launch complementary campaigns on a third front. These included not only efforts to spread Western-favoured political narratives among North Korea's population through radio broadcasts among other means, but also to promote a negative image of the country overseas. Unlike Iraq in 1991 or Libya in 2011, where intense atrocity fabrication over a period of several months or even days was used to rapidly reshape international public opinion in preparation for war, in the Korean case atrocities and other misconduct were fabricated over decades to mould world opinion over time. The low likelihood of an imminent hot war, and very long span of cold conflict, created conditions for which this kind of information campaign was ideal.

Western efforts in the information space have served to seriously tarnish North Korea's image, to portray its population as better off if their country were brought under Western influence, and to help cast any prospective Western assault as a justified humanitarian endeavour. As North Korea in many ways represents the epitome of rejection of westernisation, discrediting its policy direction as an alternative to submission to Western hegemony and preventing the emergence of any kind of North Korean soft power are other notable achievements of these efforts. The Western campaign in the information space has included not only the fabrication of Korean atrocities and other forms of misconduct by both in Western media outlets and by various anti-Pyongyang human rights groups, but also consistent framing of Pyongyang as the sole perpetrator in major international incidents based on questionable or non-existent evidence.

Atrocity Fabrication Through Defectors

Since the 1990s atrocity fabrication has played a central role in Western efforts to shape public opinion of North Korea both within Western countries and internationally, with North Korean defectors residing in the West or in Western-aligned states often being at the crux of these efforts. Defectors have consistently been able to derive significant financial benefits from denouncing their former homeland, with the more extreme stories gaining the most publicity, while some of the most prominent figures have gained celebrity status in the West. Although the accounts of a small number of defectors have served as the most essential source of extreme negative stories about the country, the most influential and best publicised testimonies alleging the most egregious abuses by the Korean state have consistently suffered from serious inconsistencies.

One such defector was Shin Dong Hyuk, whose allegations of severe human rights abuses were widely reported as fact by Western press, activists, political figures and N.G.O's despite a lack of evidence. Shin's life story, Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Journey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, was written by former Washington Post journalist Blaine Harden based on Shin's narration. The title was strongly indicative of the agenda it represented – the story of 'Western good' against 'Asian communist evil' – and it became a bestseller promoted in Western countries as a key reference for understanding North Korea. Translated into 27 languages and sold worldwide, Western human rights organisations heavily based several of their reports on the country on Shin's testimony. This testimony, retold several times in movies and documentary films, was then used as a pre-text for further Western economic sanctions and was said to have “shifted the global discourse about North Korea.” A Western-led United Nations commission in 2014 – Justice Michael Kirby's Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (D.P.R.K – the official name of North Korea) – based its report and positions almost exclusively on Shin's testimony. A member of the commission referred to him as the world's “single strongest voice” on Pyongyang's alleged abuses. Shin was the first defector to have his testimony on human rights in North Korea heard by the United Nations.

Choe Sung Hun, the New York Times correspondent in Seoul, highlighted growing suspicions surrounding Shin's testimony and later concluded: “Shin lied to me and so many others.” Professor Andrei Lankov, an expert on and outspoken critic of North Korea, acknowledged that Shin had been pressured by anti-Pyongyang groups to tell his story as he did, with the hype surrounding him for years preventing an objective analysis that would later expose him as a fake. Lankov emphasised that this was part of a widespread issue, with defectors facing considerable pressure to fabricate extreme stories. Other lower profile North Korean defectors notably referred to Shin's testimony as “complete lies.”

It was only several years after Shin's testimony was published that its writer, Blaine Harden, himself revealed that the defector had fabricated much of his story while the book was being drafted. Shin later admitted to much the same. Referring to him as an “unreliable narrator” Harden re-emphasised that “Shin was the only source of information about his early life” which allowed the defector to alter his account as he pleased in the knowledge that it would be accepted without corroboration or evidence. Harden added that he would not be surprised if Shin made further alternations to his testimony in future.

An assessment of North Korean defector testimonies in the International Journal of Communication Ethics highlighted that “the discrediting of Shin did little to dampen the enthusiasm for celebrity defectors and their stories,” with his testimony being far from the last to significantly influence both policy and world opinion before being proved false. Western sanctions on Pyongyang and U.N reports made on the basis of Shin's allegations were notably not reviewed, much less changed, which marked a notable success for the anti-Pyongyang groups which pressured him into fabricating North Korean atrocities and supported his work's propagation. What the D.P.R.K's adversaries needed was not necessarily a verifiable story, but rather an emotional and horrifying one which could be used to vilify it before the world and serve as a pretext for further hostile actions. Shin's testimony filled this role perfectly, and there was no need for it to be even remotely true to do so.

Shortly after the flaws in Shin's testimony were exposed another defector, Park Yeonmi, rose to high prominence through similarly fierce promotion and strong endorsements in the West. At her debut speech at the One Young World Summit in Dublin in October 2014 she dressed in highly presentable pink traditional clothing and, much as Nayirah had, conspicuously wiped her eyes and held her hand to her mouth with long pauses which gave her words much added dramatic effect. Much as Colin Powell was described as having committed “lie after lie” to portray an Iraqi threat, from advanced drones to a poison factory to false claims regarding aluminium tubes, so too did Park Yeonmi commit falsehood after falsehood to the record. Much as Powell's statements continued to be debunked, only for him to come out with more, so too were most of Yeonmi's claims relatively easy to confirm as false – as was clear to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of North Korea. This did not stop her from making more claims which continued to be widely publicised by a Western press eager for such stories, and her fame quickly became unprecedented among celebrity defectors.

Park's false claims to global audiences regarding life in North Korea are too numerous to list, but some examples are given below. In the first line of her opening One World Summit speech she stated: “North Korea is an unimaginable country. There is only one channel on tv. There is also no internet.” For anyone with a basic knowledge of the country, who has exchanged emails with friends in Pyongyang or flicked through multiple channels showing several foreign films, these claims are ludicrous – but perfectly believable for Western audiences. When addressing the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club, Park claimed North Koreans had never heard of Africa – although almost every senior and middle school in the country has a world map with Africa clearly labelled. A look at a high school history textbook shows that African history receives more attention than it does in most Western countries or anywhere else in East Asia. This is not to mention the performing arts shows put on by the many African students in Pyongyang coming from across the continent – from Zimbabwe and Uganda to Nigeria and Senegal. When Park claimed anyone with a height over 4 foot ten was conscripted into the military, this appeared to have no basis in reality since the country had an all-volunteer force. Of hundreds of North Koreans the writer has met and the dozens to whom he has spoken about the military, none recalled ever being conscripted and all were over five foot. When Park claimed there was no word for 'love' in North Korea, one needed only listen to one of its many popular love songs to know that there were many, and that her claim was totally ludicrous. She also claimed that there was virtually no word for 'I,' and that North Koreans had to say 'we' for everything from school – again totally ludicrous for anyone who has watched television or any kind of North Korean popular media or heard people have daily conversations across the country. Her claims relied on her audiences' total ignorance about the country, and to the prejudiced metanarrative which Western coverage had fostered for decades.

Before the end of 2014 a number of foreign journalists, many based in Seoul, had begun to question the truthfulness of Park's story, with freelance journalist John Power publishing articles for The Diplomat and the Christian Science Monitor highlighting her serious inconsistencies. The result, he noted, was harsh attacks on him by the often radical anti-North Korean groups which supported her. "I got a lot of grief for the story I wrote about Yeonmi Park. I pissed off every right-winger. . . . I wrote the story raising the questions people had about her and it got me in a load of shit," he noted. Such attacks may have been intended to deter others from highlighting the extremely tenuous nature of her claims.

Dr. Andrei Lankov observed that there were"bigger forces of manipulation at play" with Park's rise to fame, highlighting that it was part of a broader phenomenon under which parts of the typical defector story had to be fabricated for the story to sell."The real story of the refugee does not sell. It's easier to create some fake stories about obligatory torture in the camps every second Saturday then to tell the real story which is boring," he concluded.

Award-winning documentary producer Mary Ann Jolley, having interviewed Park several times, observed in 2014: “Was the story she told of her life in North Korea accurate? The more speeches and interviews I read, watch and hear Park give, the more I become aware of serious inconsistencies in her story that suggest it wasn't ... if someone with such a high profile twists their story to fit the narrative we have come to expect from North Korean defectors, our perspective of the country could become dangerously skewed.” Jolley was one of many to highlight that the facts Park presented consistently failed to stand to reason, for example: “In telling of her escape from North Korea, Park often says she crossed three or even four mountains during the night to get to the border and describes the pain she endured because her shoes had holes in them. However, Hyesan where Park was living is right on the river that divides the two countries and there are no mountains to cross.”³¹ Park similarly claimed to have crossed the Gobi Desert from China into Mongolia at temperatures of minus 40 degrees with her mother and five other people including a baby – none of whom had any winter clothing, gloves, scarves or any guide. She claimed they crossed the entire desert on foot in such extreme weather in a single day, and when asked how this feat, which was impossible for many reasons, was achieved, she said it was a miracle.³²

Another noteworthy claim which Park repeated several times was the following: “when I was nine years old, I saw my friend's mother publicly executed. Her crime – watching a Hollywood movie.” This, too, was ridiculous, with even staunch critics of North Korea including professors in South Korea and other defectors highlighting that while the country did have the death penalty, it was reserved for crimes such as murder, human trafficking or smuggling.

Park described extreme hardship and having to “go to the mountain to get the grass to eat” and forage for food “like grass or sometimes dragonflies,” “eating grasshoppers, dragonflies, a lot of insects, tree bark, plants, flowers.” “To watch dead bodies was my routine life. That's how many people were dying from [lack of] food, and starving,” she noted on a separate occasion. A 2021 iteration of the story was even more extreme, recalling “piles of human bodies” every spring from malnutrition, “and you see children, just rats eating human eyes, first, and then children catching these rats and they eat them and they somehow die from – I don't know what it is. Then rats eat the children back. So this cycle of us eating rats and they eat us back is going to continue and continue.” Such horror stories were very far from atypical particularly in her later talks.

Earlier in her career preceding her major debut in 2014, however, when Park was interviewed alongside other defectors on the South Korean television show 'Now On My Way to See You,' her mother was asked: "When we talk about stories of people eating grass or people struggling to eat, Yeju [Park's pseudonym at the time] says, 'Oh that never happened....' Why is that? Did Yeju never go through these experiences?" Park's mother replied:"We were not to that extent. We were just never in a position where we were starving." She claimed her daughter didn't know about any serious hardship in North Korea until she left the country, stating:"Her father did his best to give his kids a better life, so... the kids didn't know the truth about what was going on in North Korea," highlighting that Yeonmi only learned about such stories after being featured on'Now On My Way to See You.' The contradictions regarding Park's personal experiences, including the kinds of abuses and hardships she claimed to have faced, were even more extreme, as well documented by another defector named Park Joo.

Park Yeonmi's early perceptions of North Korea contrasted sharply with her much more extreme claims of later years. For example, her mother stated regarding a defector T.V program she appeared on, where other defectors recounted various horror stories regarding their experiences: “She calls me before and after a show recording, asking me, 'Am I really North Korean?' She says she has no idea what the other girls on the show are talking about. She says she thinks everyone is lying on the show.”

Lee Je Son, another North Korean defector, noted that several facts about Park's story were clearly false. Regarding some of Park's claims she commented “no one would believe this unless they were an idiot.” South Korean professors Shi Eun Yu and Kim Hyun Ah, who worked at the country's processing sector for North Korean defectors, strongly refuted several of Park's statements. “It's not possible” they stated outright. Swiss businessman Felix Abt, who had worked and travelled extensively in North Korea for seven years, strongly refuted Park's claims as “obviously exaggerated or plain false,” noting multiple significant inconsistencies.

Park's narrative was nevertheless highly prized in the West for the emotional deliveries she gave, for the way her extreme claims could grab headlines, and for affirming Western supremacy by presenting westernisation as the solution to and inevitable fate of her country. She was thus strongly endorsed and promoted by Western sources because, like Nayirah, her story suited the Western agenda against a key target. Following her debut, she embarked on an international promotional tour that included radio and television appearances around the world, and subsequently appeared on a panel at the U.S. State Department on Human Rights Day to present her claims. Several journalists, such as veteran D.P.R.K analyst Michael Basset, continued to conclude that Park's statements regarding North Korea were out of touch with the reality in the country, and that she was using outright lies to gain fame and, in the process, tarnish the country's image. Park meanwhile reaped a small fortune from her sensationalized speeches, from which she earned over 12,500 per speech according to her agent.

Much as public relations firm Hill+Knowlton had helped to create Nayirah as a phenomenon, Park was similarly supported and trained by the Teach North Korean Refugees Global Education Center, which was founded by International Director of the Atlas Network N.G.O Casey Lartigue. Lartigue was the host of North Korea Today, and his N.G.O was funded by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Congress. It in turn directly funded defectors such as Park and defector groups to promote anti-North Korean narratives. When meeting with the writer in person, Lartigue emphasised that he and his associates had the goal of nothing less than the total destruction of North Korea's political system, the remaking of its society and punishment of its leadership. "If you met [North Korean leader, Chairman] Kim Jong Un, what would you say to him?" he asked. Answering his own question, he said: "I would have nothing to say to him, there's nothing one can say to these kinds of people, their only job is killing Koreans, and the only way to help North Koreans is to bring them down." He showed the writer photos of himself alongside Park, whose work he expressed considerable pride in and to whom he said his organisation had provided tremendous support, alongside other defectors, to speak against the country. To one familiar with North Korea, Lartigue gave the impression of an extremist who firmly believed that those who resisted Western power and rejected Western hegemony, values and ideology needed to be neutralised. The support of his organisation, which widely recruited and groomed defectors in South Korea, was central to facilitating Park Yeonmi's rise to international fame.

At the time of this writing Park had gained 600,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel Voice of North Korea and was publishing new videos several times a week making consistently ludicrous claims and frequently predicting the country's imminent collapse or its leadership's imminent overthrow. Examples from the first half of 2021 alone include: Kim Jong Un's sister and many North Korean children being frequent consumers of crystal meth; disabled people and AIDS patients being executed or experimented on with chemical weapons; women being sold by the government as sex slaves to China; Kim Jong Un being secretly gay; Kim Jong Un having several mistresses and female sex slaves; among hundreds of others. An entire volume would need to be written on the Park Yeonmi phenomenon in order to debunk the literally hundreds of total fabrications which she spread to her large audience.

Shin and Park were very far from isolated examples, with notable others including:

- Defector Lee Soon Ok, who gave testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives in 2004 elaborating on claims that Christians were tortured and burned to death molten iron in North Korean political prisons. The head of the North Korean Defectors' Association in Seoul, Chang In Suk, claimed to know first-hand that Lee was never a political prisoner as claimed, with many other defectors agreeing that Lee's accounts were very far from credible.

- Defector Kwon Hyuk, who told the U.S. Congress that he was an intelligence officer at North Korea's embassy in Beijing and had witnessed the government conducting human experiments on political prisoners. His testimony was key to building support for passing the North Korea Human Rights Act in 2004 to place further sanctions on the country. His story was subsequently retold in a prominent B.B.C documentary which brought it to the public's attention, but a more detailed analysis by South Korea's Yonhap news agency subsequently largely discredited his claims.

• Defector Kim Hye Kyung testified before the Canadian parliament that she knew a woman who killed her baby and sold it as pork in a market in North Korea – which she portrayed as reflecting the general state of affairs in the country. Her testimony was widely questioned by Korean defectors and analysts.

These testimonies were highly valued in the West for the self-gratification they provided, appearing to affirm the idea of Western superiority over the world's least westernised state, as well as providing pretexts for hostile policies against the East Asian adversary usually including further economic sanctions.

Writing for the International Journal of Communication Ethics, in a study of how defector testimonies shaped coverage of North Korea, journalism educator in South Korea Richard Murray noted that much Western reporting was “highly speculative or loosely fictional,” with uncritical use of defectors skewing the world's understanding of the country. He observed:

There were issues in the reliability of all these sources with defectors and their testimony being particularly problematic. Issues in which defectors and how defector testimony was used reigned supreme. Defector testimony was used to support an isolationist premised narrative on North Korea under the guise of human rights.... Stereotyping, caricature and lazy analysis are all hallmarks of the use and treatment of North Korean refugees and their community as a whole in reporting [on] North Korea from South Korea... the marketplace for defector stories is crowded and that has led to defectors outgoing each other to sell their stories.

New York Times correspondent Choe Sung Hun similarly observed regarding defectors: “some of them have a habit when they meet a reporter, they begin imagining: 'What kind of answer is he looking for?' They will provide the answer they think you want … horrible made-up stories about N.K.” Efforts by anti-North Korea and human rights organisations to use defectors to manipulate journalists were widespread, he observed, and there was a strong tendency to “exaggerate and make up stories,” recounting: “I see human rights activists doing this all the time.”

Media outlets also played important roles in interpreting and at times distorting defector accounts to fit into the narratives that were most favoured. As noted by lecturer at Leiden University and head of Korea work at the International Crisis Group Christopher Green, media outlets and scholars consistently dishonestly portrayed North Koreans as leaving their country only due to hardship and deprivation. He highlighted that the primary reasons for leaving ranged from wanting to be with loved ones abroad or wanting a better education for their children, and often had nothing to do with living conditions in North Korea itself – but that this kind of story would not be fit in with the narratives journalists or scholars sought to convey. The South Korean government's National Human Rights Commission of Korea similarly observed “a tendency on the part of journalists … distorting defector accounts of life and escape from North Korea.”

The manipulation of defector testimonies by media outlets in countries hostile to North Korea, and the use of financial incentives as a means of extracting false testimony, was attested to by defector Kim Ryon Hui in a 2018 interview with Korean-American documentary producer David Yun. Having repeatedly criticised the campaign to vilify the country, she stated:

It is defectors who say that there really are human rights violations in the North, but we have to examine defectors very closely. There is a T.V show called Now On My Way to See You in South Korea. It's a show starring defectors and their stories.... When you watch this show and all its star defectors, you will watch with tears running down your face. 'North Korea has to be destroyed.' 'We must liberate North Koreans and given them freedom.' It will make you say things like that. ... However, partition [of Korea] means that news from the other side is not told truthfully. Instead, the prolonged [Korean] war creates a need to distort truth and tell lies. The people who need war are creating this.

Now On My Way to See You airs four times a month ... two days of shooting makes four episodes for a month. The pay for two days of work is 2,000 dollars. No worker, no matter who they are, if they had a job that pays 2,000 dollars for 2 days, what would they do? They would try their best to hold on to that job. But 'the North lives in extreme poverty,' 'we starve and shiver' – just these testimonies won't keep you on the show. It's more difficult than keeping a job at Samsung or those huge corporations.

You're going to need more of 'I was so hungry I ate a human being,' 'I gave birth to a baby, but because he's disabled the government buried him alive.' Only these kinds of testimonies can get you a place on the show. I have a friend that got a call from Now On My Way to See You staff. This friend was caught three times while trying to live in China and was caught by Chinese authorities each time. And when the show found out they called and asked my friend if he could join the cast.

'We heard you were caught three times. All you have to do is tell us the story,' they said. So my friend replied 'I have no idea what other defectors are talking about on your show.

I was caught three times [and returned to North Korea], but I never have experienced what the defectors claim on your show. I don't know what country they're talking about.' Then, the show staff member said: 'Sir, you can't say that kind of stuff.' Then added: 'Don't worry we will give you a script. All you have to do is read it out loud'.... So the show has a pre-made script at the ready, and when the defector doesn't know what to say the script is given to fill the space. So they take a kernel of truth like my friend who did get caught three times and when they take that and pile lies on top of it – it becomes the new reality. It becomes the new truth. I think this is very unfortunate.

A defector interviewed under the name Mr. Choi, who also lived in South Korea, similarly referred to North Koreans who made inflated claims about unfathomable human rights abuses and horrors in the north as “the defectors who just read aloud the N.I.S' fictions” – the N.I.S (National Intelligence Service) being South Korea's chief intelligence agency equivalent to the C.I.A. “These guys don't work for money; they don't work in factories or companies. They talk for money,” he concluded.

While the allure of fame and fortune motivated some defectors to seek celebrity status with extreme testimonies, the need to subsist in South Korea was also a significant motivator since northerners earned significantly less money than locals, faced discrimination in employment, education and healthcare access, and often struggled to adapt to life. The fact that defectors and their children residing in Seoul have been known in extreme cases to die of starvation was an important indicator of this. Statistics ranging from defectors' unemployment rates to high school dropout rates among their children further demonstrated this, making sensationalist reporting an attractive avenue to escape poverty. Dr. Konstantin Asmolov, a leading fellow at the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute for Far Eastern Studies Korean Studies Centre, was among those to observe to this effect: “The media has enough materials about how difficult they find it to adapt in the South and that they are considered second-class citizens there. One of the few ways to get more is to actively participate in propaganda against North Korea, telling the public not so much what is really going on, but what is desired to be heard. And as the competition is high, it is necessary to tell something particularly terrible and become the author of an 'exclusive rumor.'”

Senior lecturer in Korean studies at the University of Melbourne Song Jiyoung similarly observed:

Cash payments in return for interviews with North Korean refugees have been standard practice in the field for years.... A government official from the South Korean Ministry of Unification told me the range of fees could vary wildly, from $50 to 500 per hour, depending on the quality of information. But this practice raises a difficulty: how does the payment change the relation between a researcher and an interviewee, and what effect will it have on the story itself? This practice also drives the demand for 'saleable stories': the more exclusive, shocking or emotional, the higher the fee.

Song highlighted that defectors “have become well aware of what the interviewer wants to hear. Whether speaking to the U.N, U.S. Congress or western media, the questions are the same every time: why did you leave North Korea, and how terrible is it?” He added that “first-person testimonies have become the norm, and have increasingly come to involve younger victims with more tragic, dramatic, visual and emotional accounts.” With cross-examination and by consulting multiple sources being highly time-consuming, he noted, unverified information was often accepted at face value to satisfy the demand for extreme headlines.

In my 16 years studying North Korean refugees, I have experienced numerous inconsistent stories, some intentional omission and occasionally, some lies ... many refugees say they feel pressured for defector stories. Ahn Myung Chol, a former prison guard at Camp 22, said people liked shocking stories and these so-called 'defector-activists' were merely responding to this desire. Chong Kwang-il, a former prisoner at Camp 15, said the fame brought by media exposure trapped them, forcing them to reproduce a certain narrative.

Song noted that the accuracy of testimonies often mattered little to activists and those who were receiving them so long as they portrayed North Korea negatively. These false testimonies had very real consequences. U.S. legislation including the North Korea Human Rights Act, and subsequent much harsher measures passed under the Obama administration, were overwhelmingly reliant on the oral accounts of defectors to provide justification. The same was true for the 2013 U.N Commission of Inquiry into human rights in North Korea which launched a report that overwhelmingly relied on defector testimony.

It was not only the claims defectors which were fabricated, but in many cases also the claims that any defection had occurred at all. The most prominent example was the extreme coercion used to force Korean prisoners of war to refuse repatriation during the Korean War (see Chapter 2). A more recent example was the case of 12 North Korean waitresses employed in China, who were reported to have sought asylum in South Korea in 2016. At a time of high tensions, this was widely hailed by Western media outlets as yet another sign of the disillusionment of North Korea's population with their country and its leadership. While Pyongyang continued to insist that its waitresses had been kidnapped, publicising interviews with their bereaved families, these claims were inevitably dismissed in the West as propaganda. With the inauguration of a new administration in South Korea in 2017, however, it emerged the following year that the waitresses had indeed been kidnapped by South Korean intelligence, reportedly on personal orders of President Park Geun Hye, and that they wished to return home. The women had been denied access to the press or lawyers to prevent this from becoming known. Only after being reported in South Korean media was this later re-reported by a number of Western outlets, although seven years later the women remain in custody and unable to return. Many other supposed defectors claimed to have been similarly coerced or tricked into moving to South Korea from China and were prevented from returning, although this was very seldom reported as it contradicted the Western narrative of the North as near unliveable and as a country-sized prison.

For Western efforts to vilify Pyongyang it was an inconvenient truth that significant numbers of defectors sought to return to North Korea, with most prohibited from leaving South Korea although some succeeded. Indeed, the numbers seeking to return to their country after experiencing life in the South rose throughout the 2010s. As one North Korean living in Seoul, Kwon Chol Nam, said when interviewed in 2017: “even though North Korea is poorer, I felt more free there. Neighbours and people help each other and depend on each other. Life is simpler there and here they are just slaves to money.” Kwon was arrested by South Korean police for attempting to return home, and his case was far from exceptional. Indeed, on the very day that Kwon's interview was published, a U.N human rights hearing on North Korea held in Seoul was interrupted by a tearful defector, Kim Ryon Hui, who begged to be allowed to return home after having repeatedly attempted to leave the South for years. This reality undermined efforts to portray the North Korean state as one committing untold horrors within its borders, and was carefully omitted from Western reporting. Also omitted were the rewards offered by South Korea of up to 860,000 per person, depending on circumstances, for defections.

North Korea in the Western Press

Beyond defector testimonies, efforts to vilify North Korea have relied heavily on Western media outlets and various anti-Pyongyang human rights groups' fabrication or misrepresentation of information. Several Western journalists have attested to the unreliability of major outlets' reporting on the country, with Max Fisher from the Washington Post writing that when covering North Korea:"almost any story is treated as broadly credible, no matter how outlandish or thinly sourced." Isaac Stone-Fish wrote in Foreign Policy that:"as an American journalist you can write almost anything you want about North Korea and people will just accept it.” He admitted to having done the same himself, detailing a severe North Korean drug epidemic without evidence which later proved to be entirely false. A study published in the International Journal of Communication Ethics by Richard Murray observed accordingly: “North Korea's isolation has resulted in an 'anything goes' approach to reporting on the nation that would not be acceptable in covering any other country.” The Telegraph similarly noted: “when it comes to covering news about the 'Hermit Kingdom' it seems that sometimes the rule book is thrown out the window.” A report from Business Insider came to much the same conclusion – that almost any story depicting the country negatively was generally accepted in Western press.

Korean Studies professor at Colombia University and prominent expert on North Korea, Charles Armstrong, referred to the country's post-Cold War isolation as having “served in the West as a blank screen on which many – often mutually contradictory – fears and fantasies have been projected.” One way this manifested was in common fabricated reports of executions carried out by the Korean state, with Western reports that high profile North Korean figures from leading pop singers to generals were ordered killed consistently followed by reappearances by the same supposedly dead figures on camera. An example was C.N.N's report in May 2015, which it framed as revealing “the ugly truth about the regime,” alleging that Chairman Kim Jong Un had personally ordered his aunt Kim Kyong Hui to be poisoned and killed. The killing of an elderly family member by the leader of one of the West's main adversaries was subsequently widely re-reported by Western news outlets, and as was often the case defectors were cited as the source. Mrs. Kim was very much alive, however, went on to make a public appearance in January 2020.

Another example was the report in 2013 that famous North Korean singer Hyon Song Wol not only had been arrested, but was secretly the former girlfriend of Chairman Kim who had then ordered her execution by firing squad along with 11 other entertainers. Widespread reports in Western media outlets surrounding the story included an extramarital affair by the Korean leader and the much older singer, Hyon and other singers trading in sex tapes, and several other claims which, although appearing ridiculous to those familiar with North Korea, were believable enough for public consumption. Hyon's fame as a symbol of Korean performing arts, and her frequent singing of national songs at major events, meant she was a particularly attractive target for a fabricated story involving pornography and execution for those seeking to tarnish North Korea's image. She reappeared on television several months after her supposed execution, however, and subsequently performed several times including on goodwill visits to South Korea in 2018 with no sign of any veracity to the allegations made.

Serbian volleyball coach Branislav Moro, who trained North Korea's national team, noted as an example of the near-complete detachment of Western reporting from reality that major Western media outlets had reported on the executions of North Korean athletes as punishment for their failure to win medals at international competitions. Moro stated:"for example, I sit right next to one of those'killed' athletes and I'm too ashamed to tell him that he's supposed to be dead. I even used my cell phone to check on the internet to confirm his identity. Basically, there is very little truthful information out there." Moro stressed that this was indicative of a wider phenomenon under which Western press' fabricated stories of misconduct by the Korean state served to harm its international image.

Another notable prior example was the reporting by a number of Western organisations, most prominently the Washington-based Human Rights Without Frontiers, regarding the fate Korean defector Yu Tae Jun. Yu had defected to South Korea and received southern citizenship, but later returned to find his wife. The rights group's report stated:

In June of last year he is known to have been executed in South Hamyong Province in North Korea. It is known that the North Korean government executed many former North Koreans, however this is the first time that the victim has actually been identified. In addition, due to the fact that Mr. Yu was a South Korean citizen, the repercussions for this incident are expected to be large. Mr. Yu was publicly executed in front of a group of North Korean citizens. It is known that he was charged with going to South Korea and committing treason against the Pyongyang government.

“By all accounts,” seconded prominent British rights expert Aidan Foster-Carter, “he's now very dead – at just 33.” Western and South Korean media were quick to pick up on this execution, with prominent Seoul-based paper Chosun Ilbo reporting on it on ten separate occasions.

After reports of his public execution had circulated in Western press for some months, the “now very dead” Yu Tae Jun gave a press conference in North Korea on June 12, 2001. He subsequently returned to South Korea in 2002, having been fully pardoned for his defection by Pyongyang. Yu's mother, Ahn Chong Suk, stated regarding the circumstances of his return: “I heard from my son that the North Korean leader directed my son's pardon on April 30 last year by saying that a man who loves his wife also loves the fatherland.” She nevertheless cautioned her son to lie about the circumstances of his return because otherwise “it might make [North Korean leader Chairman] Kim Jong Il look good.” Yu's case was far from an exceptional one in terms of the coverage it received from Western human rights groups and media outlets. False reports of executions went as far as the claim in 2019 by leading British papers, citing anonymous sources, that a North Korean general had been executed by being thrown in piranha tank built specifically for such killings. This fit in with reports in Western press over several years of a range of other execution methods, consistently based on anonymous sources, ranging from feeding to tigers and dogs to blasts with anti-aircraft artillery.

Perhaps the leading media source of extreme fabricated stories on North Korea was Radio Free Asia (R.F.A), a U.S. government-funded non-profit broadcasting corporation with the stated purpose of “advancing the goals of U.S. foreign policy.” One of its most widely circulated and spectacular stories in the early years of Kim Jong Un's leadership was that the new leader had “fed his uncle to dogs” – a story widely re-reported in Western news outlets which proved to be entirely false. R.F.A was a leading producer of fabricated stories either alleging severe North Korean government abuses of its population or claiming the state had instituted absurd new policies. Another notable example was a report shortly after Chairman Kim's accession that all men in North Korea were required by law to copy his exact haircut – which was similarly re-reported as fact without evidence or corroboration. As was very often the case with R.F.A stories in particular, it turned out to be entirely false. Foreign businessmen and N.G.O workers in Pyongyang at the time all contradicted the story – in the words of the director of Singapore-based N.G.O Choson Exchange it was “just stupid.” In 2017 R.F.A reported that the Chinese Foreign Ministry had advised all its citizens to immediately evacuate North Korea for their safety, and while some who heard the broadcast did evacuate there was no record of such a warning ever being issued. The ministry subsequently had to release a statement denying the report which it referred to as Fake News.

R.F.A retained close ties to U.S. intelligence from its foundation, and was referred to by the New York Times as a “C.I.A broadcasting venture” established during the Cold War as part of a generously funded agency propaganda network alongside Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Free Cuba Radio and several others. By fabricating stories misrepresenting and demonising North Korea, the state-funded outlet advanced U.S. foreign policy goals by depicting America's oldest state adversary as a pariah and exacerbating tensions around it.

Alongside outright fabrications, news from North Korea was often misrepresented in Western reporting with similar results. An example was a report in 2012 that Pyongyang had claimed to have discovered a “unicorn lair.” This was again widely re-reported by Western media outlets and was one of many fabricated stories to appear in the New York Times–endorsed bestselling guide to the country titled North Korea, Unmasking Three Generations of Madmen. ^{ii} The original Korean statement announced the discovery of an archaeological site associated with the ancient capital of King Dongmyeong of Gogurye, a poetic term for which is “kiringul” – a unicorn lair. ^{iii}

Complementing Western reporting vilifying the D.P.R.K, positive imagery of the state was consistently depicted either as a facade or censored entirely. The blocking of North Korean-run or pro-North Korean media content by American social media platforms such as YouTube represented only part of the picture. A prominent article written for the German Institute of Global Area Studies by researchers David Shim and Dirk Nabers regarding portrayals of North Korea in the West concluded that positive images were tightly and effectively censored. “Images of North Korea showing its military 'strength' and internal 'weakness' are highlighted as idiosyncratic aspects to emphasise its Otherness. The use of images marks North Korea in particular ways, which separate 'them' from 'us'… A good example of what is made almost invisible in Western representations of North Korea is smiling or joyful ordinary North Korean people,” they concluded.

One seemingly trivial but significant example of suppression of positive imagery of North Korea was the response to the popular apolitical video blog by British traveller Louis Cole, which focused on the quality of attractions such as its fun karaoke and water parks and the kind local people. When the videos' popularity risked undermining predominant Western portrayals of North Korea, Cole was heavily criticised by organisations such as New York-based Human Rights Watch for failing to speak negatively about the country's politics, and was even widely accused of being a paid agent ^{iv} of Pyongyang. Cole was instead expected to describe the country in line with the way its image had been constructed in the West – an invisible “true North Korea” never seen on camera but which Western sources insisted represented the reality of the country: one where seemingly happy and well fed people were supposedly secretly starving and miserable behind closed doors.

The extent to which positive aspects and achievements of North Korea were denied or dismissed, based on the supposition that the country must actually look different in secret, reflected the strength of the metanarrative the Western world had constructed which predisposed populations exposed to its media to dismiss positive stories and accept negative ones. Dr. Konstantin Asmolov observed to this effect:

the author sees one more aspect associated with the fundamental demonstration of the D.P.R.K as the Land of Darkness. After all, from the standpoint of the demonising propagandists, such a state is fundamentally unable to create something positive, especially something aimed at improving the living standards of the population. . . . If something is noticed there which is along the lines of improving the living standards of the population, it is propaganda, and the actual situation does not work that way. If they invent something useful, that is not actually their own invention, they just stole it. If something is built there, then the building has been erected on the bones of countless prisoners, or it has something to do with the Potemkin village.

Even in supposedly apolitical content, North Korea could very seldom be mentioned in the West without harsh rebuke. Whether it be a travel guide, an art gallery or a collection of mountain scenery there was almost always additional commentary labelling it as something along the lines of the “most vicious, paranoid, murderous dictatorship” – as a British book on flag designs referred to it. This is not only indicative of the degree of animosity felt in the Western world towards its oldest adversary – but also an almost total inability to view it apolitically.

Sinking a South Korean Warship: An Attack That Never Happened

As tensions between Pyongyang and Washington increased in the 2010s North Korea was increasingly accused of launching attacks based on dubious evidence. This served to provide additional pretext both for U.S. involvement in East Asia, furthering the goals of the Obama administration's Pivot to Asia initiative, and for placing additional pressure on Pyongyang.

On March 26, 2010, the South Korean Navy Pohang Class corvette R.O.K's Cheonan sank during anti-submarine warfare exercises killing 46 seamen onboard. The incident was initially widely blamed by families of the dead on the incompetence of the Navy, but some weeks later local media began to speculate that North Korea may have been to blame. Evidence at the time was highly questionable – namely citing an unnamed N.G.O representative who said he received a call from a North Korean officer of high rank boasting that he had orchestrated the entire operation to target the Cheonan. When it was pointed out that there were no traces of North Korean submarines in the area, as verified by its very close monitoring by specialised anti-submarine warfare assets, a number of media outlets then claimed that if it was not North Korea's navy then its saboteur bombers must have been responsible. Some Japanese and Russian outlets meanwhile claimed the corvette was sunk by an American submarine, and that Seoul was concealing the truth by blaming the North. Such allegations were supported by notoriously high rates of friendly fire accidents in the U.S. Military, and it was confirmed that American submarines had been present. No evidence was presented, however, to prove the U.S. had been the perpetrator.

With a new administration in Seoul officially seeking to abandon the previous policy of rapprochement with Pyongyang, the spinning of the Cheonan incident as a North Korean plot not only shielded Seoul, the Navy and the U.S. from criticism, but also provided pretext for a policy shift. Experts nevertheless continued to support the conclusion that the sinking was caused by an accident rather than a North Korean attack, with South Korean Defence Minister Kim Tae Young suggesting that one of the many mines placed by South Korean forces in the 1970s was responsible. Citing interviews with surviving crew who had been operating the frigate's sensors as evidence refuting the torpedo theory, he called reports of a northern torpedo attack “unfounded.” A commission of six nations, all but the R.O.K being Western states, itself concluded on May 7 that the corvette was most likely “destroyed by a torpedo made in Germany” – a weapon widely employed by South Korean submarines to which North Korea did not have access. The commission's report led to speculation that friendly fire may have been to blame. This conclusion, too, was called into question, as the torpedo's remains were corroded which led experts to believe they must have been submerged for several years.

The only evidence offered that the torpedo was North Korean was a “No. 1” inscribed in purple marker on one of the parts. This proved wholly insubstantial and led to widespread satirical responses in South Korea – the most prominent being the photoshopping of iPhones with the same “No. 1” as supposed evidence that they too were North Korean. As University of Virginia professor Lee Seunghun observed: “You could put that mark on an iPhone and claim it was manufactured in North Korea. The government is lying when they said this was found underwater. I think this is something that was pulled out of a warehouse of old materials to show to the press.

Dr. Suh Jae Jung, a political analyst at Johns Hopkins University in Washington D.C., was among many experts who argued that the evidence cited in no way proved North Korea had attacked the Cheonan. The biggest inconsistency, he argued, was the white powder found on the warship which could not have resulted from such an explosion. Experiments replicating the chemical process showed that the powder was rust from water exposure over time. He claimed instead that the Cheonan was most likely sunk by an older South Korean mine – as the defence minister had originally stated. Dr. Konstantin Asmolov independently assessed in detail the circumstances of the Cheonan's sinking which effectively ruled out a North Korean attack. Noting that the warship was “specifically designed to hunt enemy submarines,” he stated:

It is strange that in the close-combat conditions, and low (15–20m) depths in the area of the tragedy, its crew not only did not find an enemy ship, but also could not detect any torpedo firing. In such a case, the enemy boat as described above had to overtake the A.S.W [anti-submarine warfare] barrier deployed near the border, make its way unnoticed into the waters off the island of Baengnyeong teeming with enemy ships, submarines and aircraft, then discreetly attack the corvette, sink it with the very first torpedo, and then safely leave, avoiding other anti-submarine ships and helicopters.... The question of how it [the alleged North Korean submarine] managed to remain undetected during the exercise and sink a vessel intended for combatting enemy submarines remained open, but that no longer bothered anyone.

The likelihood of such a trajectory by a North Korean torpedo seemed highly implausible if not impossible. Asmolov called the chances of this happening “miraculous,” and was hardly alone in reaching this conclusion. As observed in the Japanese Asia-Pacific Journal:

The Cheonan was a patrol boat whose mission was to survey with radar and sonar the enemy's submarines, torpedoes, and aircraft.... If North Korean submarines and torpedoes were approaching, the Cheonan should have been able to sense it quickly and take measures to counterattack or evade. Moreover, on the day the Cheonan sank, U.S. and R.O.K [Republic of Korea – the official name of South Korea] military exercises were under way, so it could be anticipated that North Korean submarines would move south to conduct surveillance. It is hard to imagine that the Cheonan sonar forces were not on alert.

Prominent South Korean papers similarly stressed the low likelihood that a submarine could have operated undetected by the Cheonan and other surveillance assets deployed by both U.S. and South Korean forces in a state of high combat readiness. Director of the program on U.S.-Korea policy at the Council on Foreign Relations Scott Snyder cited similar facts and voiced serious doubts regarding the narrative of a North Korean attack.

Further inconsistencies with the narrative of North Korean culpability were widely highlighted by South Korean official sources, from Defence Ministry Official Kim Chul Woo and investigative panel member Shin Sang Cheol to lawmaker Lee Jung Hee and former senior presidential secretary Park Seon Won, among others. Many were openly prosecuted by the state on the basis that they were spreading “groundless rumours,” which carried with it the serious charge of undermining national security and thus deterred others from voicing scepticism or carrying out their own independent assessments. Shin had noted regarding his own findings during the investigation: “I couldn't find the slightest sign of an explosion. The sailors drowned to death. Their bodies were clean. We didn't even find dead fish in the sea." He presented considerable evidence for his claim that the ship had run aground and collided with another vessel, concluding that what had occurred was nothing more than"a simple traffic accident at sea." The Defence Ministry responded by asking the National Assembly to eject Shin from the panel for"creating public mistrust" in the investigation.

Lee Jung Hee was sued for defamation by the Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff for pointing out, in a speech before the national assembly, that the feed from a thermal observation device showing the moment the warship's stern and bow split apart, which would have indicated how the incident occurred, was being purposefully withheld. Former secretary Park, meanwhile, was charged with libel for simply requesting greater transparency and expressing doubts about the official narrative, stating regarding the resulting lawsuit:"I asked for the disclosure of information for a transparent and impartial investigation into the cause of the Cheonan sinking... the libel suit seeks to silence public suspicion over the incident." As Dr. Asmolov observed:"it started to become clear to experts that what's important is not who actually sank the ill-fated corvette, but who is named responsible for the tragedy."

The Cheonan incident played well into the hands of the U.S. and the new Lee administration by reversing inter-Korean rapprochement, and was well timed with escalating sanctions to cut North Korea off from its valuable economic relationship with the South. Lee's administration used the incident to end almost all trade and escalated pressure on Pyongyang on both the military and information fronts. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited South Korea soon afterwards and spoke of designs towards “changing the direction of North Korea” and “offering the opportunities for a better life for the people of the North,” which based on how such rhetoric was commonly used in the West was widely interpreted as a thinly veiled call for toppling the non-westernised government there. It was hoped that the Cheonan incident would allow the Obama administration to rally greater support from other regional actors and from the South Korean public for a hard line against Pyongyang.

While it remains uncertain how the Cheonan sank the narrative of North Korean culpability, which was later pressed by the Western-led investigation team and repeated to the exclusion of all others across Western media, remains highly implausible. This is particularly true when considering the changing nature of the claims and the nature of the evidence cited. While the Cheonan sinking would have represented one of the most successful North Korean military operations since the Korean War, and Pyongyang had historically never shied away from claiming credit for previous strikes, it denied any involvement from the outset with state media referring to the loss of “fellow countrymen” as a “regrettable accident.”

A Chemical Assassination in Malaysia

On February 13, 2017, Kim Jong Nam, the half-brother of Chairman Kim Jong Un, was assassinated at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The perpetrators, two women of Indonesian and Vietnamese origin, reportedly used a V.X nerve agent, and within hours South Korean officials stated with certainty that Pyongyang was responsible – forming it a “naked example of Kim Jong Un's reign of terror.” Western sources were quick to follow, despite no investigation having taken place, and the incident was used as a pretext to swiftly impose further economic sanctions against North Korea. The extent of Western speculation was overwhelming, and leading media outlets had the influence needed to turn this theory into an effective fact regardless of what investigators would conclude. Reports in Western media and subsequent accusations by Western experts and officials focused overwhelmingly on what Western and South Korean sources had to say while ignoring the Malaysian investigation.

In sharp contrast to the Western press, official Malaysian sources never accused North Korea of masterminding the assassination. The Malaysian side announced only that South Korea and the United States had accused Pyongyang of being behind the attack, without an investigation of their own or presentation of evidence, and that North Korea had denied this. South Korean media were quick to depict Ri Jong Chol, a North Korean residing in Malaysia, as the mastermind behind the attack. Ri was subsequently questioned by Malaysian police and quickly released due to a lack of evidence. Staff at the North Korean embassy in Malaysia were also cleared of all suspicion and, after questioning by police, were no longer mentioned in the investigation.

The case was effectively closed in April 2019 with light sentences given to both the women on the basis that neither were aware of what they were doing, as both thought they had been carrying out a televised prank. The official result of the investigation did not state that North Korea was the perpetrator. Claims of North Korean culpability were later dismissed as pure speculation by the Malaysian Prime Minister.

While the lack of evidence implicating North Korea as the perpetrator did not rule out the possibility of its responsibility, it highlighted the extent to which its adversaries could shape narratives and manipulate global opinion based on totally unproven accusations. Multiple parties including hardline anti-D.P.R.K elements in South Korea and the Western world had incentives to assassinate Kim Jong Nam – whether to end what appeared to be a soft line against North Korea by the new Donald Trump administration, to frame Pyongyang, or to dispose of Kim who had been working as a C.I.A informant. North Korea also had incentives to carry out the killing, including eliminating Kim as an C.I.A asset or staging a show of force to demonstrate the reach of its operatives and its expertise in deploying chemical agents abroad. Considering that the killing was done very publicly, however, when Kim Jong Nam had regularly stayed at the country's embassy and could have been quietly disposed of there, and the fact that it occurred at a time of potential détente with the U.S. under a new administration, indicated that Pyongyang was less likely to be culpable.

The Death of an American Student

On January 2, 2016, American student Otto Warmbier was arrested in Pyongyang after entering as a tourist. He was accused of carrying out a “hostile act against the state” after breaking into a restricted government area of the Yanggakdo Hotel and stealing a poster. Two months later he was convicted under Article 60 of the country's criminal code, with the prosecution citing his confession, C.C.T.V footage, forensic evidence, and witness testimonies to sentence him to 15 years of hard labour. The sentence was near unanimously criticised by Western sources, although it was no harsher than that he could have received in the United States or several Western aligned states for similar acts. ^{v}

On June 13, 2017, fifteen months after the sentencing, State Secretary Rex Tillerson announced that North Korea had released Warmbier to American custody. Media outlets subsequently reported that the State Department had been informed Warmbier had fallen into a coma and was seriously ill, and he was hospitalised as soon as he returned to the United States. Warmbier died six days later, although the cause of his illness was unclear. Damage to his brain tissues from suffocation and reports of hypoxia, alongside the total lack of trauma or injury on the rest of his body, was consistent with an attempted suicide by hanging which a number of analysts speculated was the likely cause. A blood clot, pneumonia, sepsis, kidney failure, and sleeping pills were also cited as potential causes, and could have caused him to stop breathing if he had botulism and was paralyzed from it.

The Director of the University of Cincinnati Medical Center's Neurocritical Care Program, Dr. Daniel Kanter, stated regarding the student's condition: “We have no certain or verifiable knowledge of the cause or circumstances of his neurological injury.... This pattern of injury, however, is usually seen as the result of cardiopulmonary arrest, where the blood supply to the brain is inadequate for a period of time, resulting in the death of brain tissue.” He further noted that there was no trauma to the head or skull. Warmbier reportedly had had a neurological injury “for 15 months or so” indicating he may already have been in poor health before entering North Korean custody. C.N.N Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta speculated that medication given to Warmbier after his arrival in the U.S. could have directly caused his situation to deteriorate leading to his eventual death.

Shortly after his death Warmbier's parents alleged that their son's passing was the result of torture in North Korea, an account which fit in with prevailing Western preconceptions of the kind of country it was, but which was strongly contradicted by both the results of medical examinations and the experiences of previous American prisoners in the country. ^{vi} The Hamilton County Coroner's Office carried out an external examination of Warmbier's body which, according to reports from C.N.N and other outlets, strongly contradicted the account of his parents. For example, Warmbier's father had made an emotionally charged statement that:"His bottom teeth look like they had taken a pair of pliers and rearranged them." Directly contradicting this, the coroner's report stated:"the teeth are natural and in good repair." Addressing the claims by Warmbier's parents of forced rearranging of his teeth, Coroner Dr. Lakshmi Kode Sammarco stated:"I felt very comfortable that there wasn't any evidence of trauma. We were surprised at the [parents'] statement." She said her team, which included a forensic dentist, thoroughly evaluated and assessed various scans of his body.

Warmbier's parents declined to comment on the coroner's report and refused to allow an autopsy which could determine the cause of their son's death. They instead continued to support a narrative accusing the North Korean government of torture, and subsequently sought through an American federal court to obtain half a billion dollars in compensation from the East Asian state. Forensic scientists were highly critical of the unusual and unexpected decision not to perform an autopsy, which Warmbier's parents did not explain, and which ensured that the cause of death would remain unknown. This decision led to speculation that Warmbier's parents sought to protect their narrative from expected contradiction by the autopsy, thus not only supporting the hard-line positions of many in the U.S. government against and further vilifying North Korea, but also potentially winning them very significant financial rewards. Subsequent moves by the United States Navy to seize a North Korean cargo ship in 2018 and escort it to U.S. territory, where it was later sold at auction, were followed by a decision by the Marshals Service to provide Warmbier's parents with part of the receipts from the sale – a major loss to the Korean merchant shipping fleet. The legality of the seizure remains disputed.

Hacking Sony

In 2015 North Korea was accused of hacking Sony Pictures and publishing company documents in response to its release of the film The Interview earlier that year. Pyongyang had requested that the production not be shown due to its crude and at times vulgar depictions of North Korea and the gory killing of its leader. The film was widely accused even by Pyongyang's Western critics of having strong racist and bigoted depictions of East Asian peoples and particularly women. American author and journalist Tim Shorrock, a regular contributor to The Nation and The National Interest and expert on U.S.-Korea relations, observed:"The film used every racist image and trope that [director Seth] Rogen could dream up, from the sing-songy caricatures of Asian speech that were a film staple in the 1940s and'50s, to the concept that Koreans are either robotic slaves (like Kim's security guards) or sex-starved submissives who crave American men."

The Sony hack, which had seen malware erase key computer infrastructure, revealed the extent of the firm's close contacts with the Democratic Party and the U.S. defence establishment, which had requested production of The Interview and directly influenced its content. This came as part of a broader trend under the Obama administration towards a strong emphasis on the weaponization of information and close cooperation with media organisations. Director Seth Rogen himself attested to this, stating: “Throughout this process, we made relationships with certain people who work in the government as consultants, who I'm convinced are in the C.I.A.” Chief executive of Sony Entertainment Michael Lynton remained in communication with the State Department during the film's development, and was told that it could have a real impact on North Korea. Sony was further advised to keep Chairman Kim's gory execution in the film, as it was something American defence analysts and Korea experts believed the D.P.R.K's population “needed to see” and that could inspire anti-government activities.

Executive board member of the Korea Policy Institute Professor Christine Hong observed regarding the production and its intentions:

if you actually look at what the Sony executives did, they consulted very closely with the State Department, which actually gave the executives a green light with regard to the death scene. And they also consulted with a Rand North Korea watcher, a man named Bruce Bennett, who basically has espoused the thesis that the way to bring down the North Korean government is to assassinate the leadership. And he actually stated, in consulting with Sony about this film, that this film, in terms of the South Korean market, as well as its infiltration by defector balloon-dropping organisations into North Korea, could possibly get the wheels of a kind of regime change plot into motion. ^{vi} So, in this instance, fiction and reality have a sort of mirroring relationship to each other.

The alleged North Korean hack was used as a pretext for additional economic sanctions, and shortly after President Obama warned of a proportional response a large scale cyberattack on Korean internet servers was carried out and widely speculated to have been perpetrated by the U.S. Many experts raised serious questions regarding Pyongyang's responsibility, and while there was evidence of considerable cyber espionage targeting South Korea there was none of significant cyber warfare efforts against the United States and, according to experts, much evidence to the contrary. As Kurt Stammburger, senior vice president at the leading American cybersecurity firm Norse Corp, informed law enforcement: “We can't find any indication that North Korea either ordered, masterminded or even funded this attack…. Nobody has been able to find a credible connection to the North Korean government.” Data instead pointed to a former Sony employee with insider knowledge of the company. Shlomo Argamon, chief scientist at cybersecurity consulting firm Taia Global, similarly found a complete lack of any indication that North Korea was responsible, stating “there's certainly reason to doubt the total attribution of this to North Korea.” A number of other experts, including hackers and security researchers, reached similar conclusions. Portraying Pyongyang as the culprit nevertheless did much to further cement the state's image as a transnational threat and an easily provoked aggressor, both vilifying it and vindicating those who had long called for a harder policy line.

The Metanarrative's Influence on Analysts and Policymakers

The metanarrative built up around North Korea proved effective not only in shaping global public opinion, but also in deeply influencing officials and policymakers. In his coverage of the lead up to the 2003 Iraq War, award winning American journalist, former Wall Street Journal reporter and president of Harper's Magazine, John MacArthur, had observed: “the success of 'Bush's P.R War' … was largely dependent on a compliant media that uncritically repeated every fraudulent administration claim about the threat posed to America by Saddam Hussein.” In the Korean case the reverse was largely true, with media's phantastic depictions of what went on in the world's least westernised country strongly influenced policymakers, while the tremendous quantities of false information on which predominant narratives were based often prevented officials at all levels from making sound assessments. As C.I.A analyst John Nixon observed, policymakers conditioned to see the country as “evil” could not analyse intelligence objectively and the C.I.A itself “seemed completely locked into its interpretations of Kim [Jong 2],” with information contradicting the prevailing narrative routinely ignored.

The impact of this cognitive dissonance was exemplified by the testimony former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who when visiting Pyongyang in 2000 recalled having been seriously misinformed by prejudiced intelligence officials. “I went having been briefed on what kind of a weirdo he [Kim Jong Il] was from our own people. He was portrayed as a reclusive-like with many girlfriends and watching porn movies – basically a very weird kind of person,” she elaborated. Albright stressed that the Korean leader made the opposite impression in person, stating: “He was actually quite charming.... He was very, very well prepared, responded without notes, was not only respectful but also interested in what I had to say." To her surprise the talks were a success. In an interview eighteen years later her impression remained unchanged, recalling:

I do think that what is interesting is how smart and informed Kim Jong Il was ... he technically knew an awful lot of things. We were actually talking about missile limits at the time. He did not consult his experts. He really was able to talk about various aspects of the programs.

And he spent a lot of time on it. It was very interesting. He also could be very gracious. I mean, it was all kinds of dinners and all kinds of things. But I think that he was determined to make some progress.... I was surprised by how technically adept and smart he was.

According to Albright, the success of future negotiations would rely heavily on whether American leaders recognised the North Korean leadership for what it was – in sharp contrast to what the prevailing narratives, up to and including those in her briefings, had led her to believe.

Chapter Eight

The nato-Libyan War

The West Makes War on Libya

The Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya emerged from the mid-1970s as the leading opponent of Western hegemony on the African continent, and repeatedly came to blows with U.S., British and French forces during the Cold War. The country's large oil reserves were not only located near major consumer bases in Europe, but were also easy to extract and had low refining costs, providing the wealth needed to raise living standards to the highest levels on the African continent. Libya's wealth was also used to pursue foreign policy goals against the interests of Western hegemony, often aligned with pan-African causes, including providing training and material support for the A.N.C in South Africa and the Zimbabwean African National Liberation Army as well as building up its own armed forces with Soviet Bloc equipment.

By the mid-1980s Libya was a leading regional military power with the most impressive air force inventory in Africa or the Arab world and was a persistent thorn in the side of Western foreign policy designs both on the continent and beyond. Its activities included donating tanks and fighter jets to Syria at a time of conflict with the United States, equipping ee-rahn with its first ever ballistic missiles and its most capable battle tanks to counter a Western-backed Iraqi invasion, arming and funding the Irish Republican Army against the British government, and supporting the Soviet arms industry as its best paying foreign client. For his contributions to the A.N.C's struggle, the grandson of party leader Nelson Mandela ^{i} was named after Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, while Gaddafi's daughter served pro-bono on the legal team representing Iraqi president Saddam Hussein after he was captured by U.S. forces in 2003. Libya had also strongly supported Yugoslavia when it came under Western assault in the 1990s.

Fearing an Iraq-style Western assault in the 2000s, after the U.S.S.R's disintegration had allowed the West to impose harsh sanctions and arms embargoes through the United Nations, Libya agreed to unilaterally disarm and accept intrusive Western inspections of its military facilities in exchange for Western security guarantees and sanctions relief. Despite the partial reproachment that followed, Tripoli nevertheless continued to seriously challenge Western hegemony over Africa in other ways. When the U.S. Department of Defence established the United States Africa Command as a unified combatant command in 2007, which was interpreted to signal the beginning of a renewed focus on the continent by the Pentagon, Libya proved a major barrier to Washington's designs. When countries were offered payment to serve as hosts for the new command, Tripoli notably offered its own funds for them to reject it, and while this was not the only factor in the repeated rejections africom faced it was a significant one. The official news site of the United States Army referred to Libya as having “voiced the most radical opposition against africom” alongside Nigeria and South Africa, with all three being “early and vociferous critics.”

As the continent's wealthiest country, and guided by a pan-African foreign policy outlook, Libya was well positioned to spearhead efforts to unify and increase cooperation between African states. The country by 2011 had one of the largest sovereign investment funds in the world, more than 150 billion dollars in overseas financial assets, and a much larger domestic reserve, which not only guaranteed prosperity domestically but also allowed it to support major pan-African projects. An example was the Libyan government's position as by far the largest investor in Africa's first satellite in 2007 under the Regional African Satellite Communication Organisation, which was hailed as saving countries on the continent collectively several hundreds of millions of dollars annually which were previously being paid to foreign operators. Libya had allocated 30 billion for the African Union's three largest financial projects aimed at ending African dependence on external finance, and the African Investment Bank headquartered in the country was to provide low interest loans for development programs on the continent.

Libya's most significant program for African economic integration was the creation of a gold backed currency – the African Gold Dinar – which was cited as a leading threat to the status quo of Western influence and the ability of Western parties to extract resources from the continent on favourable terms. The project was seen to particularly threaten French interests, undercutting Paris' sphere of influence in resource rich Francophone West Africa where the C.F.A franc, a currency guaranteed by the French Treasury, was in use. With fourteen African countries bound to agreements providing Paris with special rights, including placing the majority of their foreign reserves in the French Central Bank, use of the Franc, and provision of first rights to major infrastructure contracts or resource extraction opportunities to French firms, the potential loss of these benefits could devastate France and the wider E.U. Paris and many of its European partners were thus among the leading proponents for action against Libya and were the most threatened by its actions on the continent. As former French President Francois Mitterand highlighted regarding the importance of special ties to former colonies in Africa to France's economic wellbeing:"Without Africa, France will have no history in the 21st century." His successor, Jacques Chirac, similarly warned:"Without Africa, France will slide down into the rank of a third world power." Former French foreign minister Jacques Godfrain stated to similar effect that while France was"a little country, with a small amount of strength, we can move a planet because [of our] relations with 15 or 20 African countries."

When the Western powers made war on Libya in 2011 France was notably the first to strike, with leaked emails from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton later revealing the prime motivation for Paris' moves to both attack the country and to press its Western allies to join it in doing so. As Vice News reported, the French government not only had “a desire for Libyan oil,” but the fact that “Gaddafi secretly planned to use his vast supply of gold to displace France's primacy in the region” reportedly “freaked out” President Nicholas Sarkozy. This was entirely consistent with the degree to which France depended on Africa, and West Africa in particular, for its economic wellbeing and status as a major power – an empire in all but name which was seen by African scholars to pose a continued burden on its former colonies. With Europe and France in particular having been heavily reliant since the colonial era on the economic benefits their hegemony over Africa brought, Libya's pan-African policies, which rejected and threatened to deeply undermine this hegemony appeared particularly dangerous.

The U.S. had notably committed itself since the 1940s to helping its European partners retain their spheres of influence on the African continent, with the resulting access to its tremendous resources on very favourable terms having been a major boon to the Western Bloc's collective strength in the Cold War. As head of the U.S. State Department's Policy Planning Staff George Kennan had observed at the outset of the Cold War, the economic wellbeing of Western Europe depended heavily on such access to Africa – a reality which had changed little since then. “The only way in which a European union, embracing Britain but excluding eastern Europe, could become economically healthy would be to develop the closest sort of trading relationships either with this hemisphere or with Africa," according to the Policy Planning Staff. It advocated at the time arrangements whereby a, union of Western European nations would undertake jointly the economic development and exploitation of the colonial and dependent areas of the African Continent… the idea itself has much to recommend it. The African Continent … lies easily accessible to the maritime nations of Western Europe, and politically they control or influence most of it. Its resources are still relatively undeveloped.

It was on this basis that John Perkins, the former chief economist at the Chas T. Main strategic consulting firm and lecturer at leading universities including Harvard, Oxford, referred to the campaign against Libya as “a war in defence of empire.” Its purpose, according to Perkins, was to neutralise the threat Libya's gold backed currency would pose to the West's ability to access African resources on privileged terms.

In mid-February 2011 the sudden outbreak of concerted attacks on Libyan armouries and security forces by unknown militants saw Libyan forces respond with water cannon and rubber bullets but refrain from using lethal force. The B.B.C acknowledged that internet footage uploaded and widely circulated at the time claiming to show security forces firing live ammunition was fake. In the country's second largest city Benghazi insurgents used firearms, Molotov cocktails, bulldozers, and bomb-laden vehicles to assault and capture the army garrison on February 20, five days after the first signs of unrest. Similar assaults were reported across the country. On February 21 militants in Libya's third largest city Misrata attacked police and army bases and seized arms. The U.N reported: “Protests appeared to have escalated rapidly, however, with demonstrators attacking offices of the Revolutionary Committees, police stations and military barracks on February 21 and 22, 2011, and arming themselves with weapons found at these locations." Libyan government forces responded by using live ammunition on the now well armed insurgents.

Libyan counterinsurgency operations quickly expelled militants from the cities of Zawiya, Misrata and Ajdabiya, before moving on to Benghazi. Civilian casualties were modest despite insurgents hiding in civilian areas, and by the end of February it appeared the conflict would end in a matter of days. The city of Misrata saw the most intense clashes between insurgents and government forces, but figures show that the Libyan Armed Forces conducted themselves well and avoided harming civilians. Human Rights Watch reported that 949 people in Misrata were wounded in the first seven weeks of fighting, of whom only 22 were women and 8 children. With over 97 percent of the wounded being males, this provided a strong indication that civilians were not being targeted. While Western media outlets and N.G.O's were quick to present Libyan counterinsurgency operations as an indiscriminate massacre of civilians, the female percentage would have been closer to 50, and certainly not under 3 percent, had this been the case.

The fact that Misrata's medical facilities documented only 257 people killed in a city of 400,000 after almost two months of fighting in the conflict's most intense theatre, including both insurgents and government forces, meant at most 0.0006 percent of the population were killed. This was a very low figure for a counterinsurgency operation in the heart of a major city, and again showed that the Libyan Military was not applying indiscriminate force and was avoiding collateral damage to civilians. Similar trends were observed across Libya's major cities. In Tripoli, for example, when insurgents targeted and burned down government buildings only one percent of those killed in the ensuing operations by security forces were female.

Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the L.B.J School of Public Affairs, University of Texas, Alan J. Kuperman observed to this effect:

the regime was responding to the protesters' escalation of violence ... the image created by Western media of Qaddafi's [Gaddafi's] forces initiating violence by attacking purely peaceful protesters was false....Although the government did respond forcefully to the rebels, it never targeted civilians or resorted to 'indiscriminate' force, as Western media reported. Indeed, early press accounts exaggerated the death toll by a factor of ten...the international press also reported incorrectly, starting on February 21, that Qaddafi's air force was indiscriminately strafing and bombing civilians in Benghazi and Tripoli. Only after the war ended did a prominent article, by the International Crisis Group's North Africa Project leader, reveal that 'the story was untrue.'

A French doctor working in a Benghazi hospital reported that even after escalating to use live ammunition, Libyan forces were shooting to incapacitate insurgents rather than kill them and targeted the legs and abdomen. After later defecting, a high-level Libyan general similarly informed a U.N inquiry that government forces only used live ammunition after insurgents began to themselves use firearms.

Throughout the conflict questions were repeatedly raised regarding who Libya's insurgents were, how they had coordinated and trained for simultaneous attacks across the country, and why they had initiated a military campaign which it was clear from the outset could only succeed if Western militaries were to intervene in support. Some indications could be found in neighbouring Syria, which alongside Libya had long been one of the two staunchest opponents of Western hegemony in the Arab world and which was targeted simultaneously by a very similar form of attack, and by many of the same foreign actors. Both insurgencies saw very swift calls in the West for military intervention against the targeted governments, and gained considerable support not only from Western media outlets but also from major tech giants such as Google. French Foreign Minister Ronald Dumas noted that Britain had been training insurgents since at least 2009 to “invade” Syria, with multiple other reliable sources confirming that the insurgency had arms, training and support from Western powers and their partners including the deployment of Western and allied special forces alongside them. In Libya the confirmed presence of Western special forces on the ground within days of the insurgency's outbreak indicated that it had been long in the planning much as was the case in Syria. Muammar Gaddafi, for his part, referred to the insurgents as “the traitors who are working for the United States and Britain, the colonialists.”

A report from the National Interest in 2014 highlighted, on the basis of a body of evidence that had grown considerably since 2011, that Libya's insurgency was both separatist and jihadist in nature, stating:

The uprising in Libya began as a struggle for succession of the east – a struggle which had been ongoing. … A decisive factor in the campaign against Gaddafi was a large influx of mujahideen, many affiliated with Al Qaeda – many of whom hailed themselves from Eastern Libya, which had become a major source of transnational jihadists over the lifespan of the regime: Cyrenaica provided by far the most foreign fighters per capita to the insurgency in Iraq, just as the easterners had made a decisive contribution in the 1980s against the Russians in Afghanistan, with many ascending to pivotal roles in Al Qaeda's central leadership over the successive decades.

This assessment was supported by the fact that a few months after the government's defeat, militias in the east quickly moved to declare autonomy from Tripoli.

A later report from the National Interest observed that the West had supported “a rebellion that was actually led by Al Qaeda militants, not by pro-Western liberals as reported at the time.... The conventional narrative improbably suggests that Libyan human rights lawyers, reacting spontaneously to regime violence, somehow acquired arms and conquered half the country in a week. The truth makes much more sense: the rebellion was led by Islamist veterans of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.” A hallmark of jihadist operations, suicide bomb vehicles played a prominent role from the outset of hostilities while Benghazi saw Al Qaeda's flag widely waved in the streets and hoisted over the main courthouse after the city was placed under insurgent control. Citing multiple testimonies by jihadist leaders, many of whom went on to take major roles in the leadership of post-Jamahiriya Libya, the report stated regarding their initial operations:

evidence reveals that the Islamists planned the launch of the rebellion prior to any peaceful protests and then used snowball tactics, targeting a series of increasingly important security installations by obtaining weapons from each facility to use against the next larger one.... The militants initially attacked police stations with rocks and petrol bombs to get firearms, which they used against internal-security forces to acquire higher-calibre weapons. In turn, they utilised this materiel to attack an army barracks to acquire even heavier weapons and armoured vehicles, which they then deployed to capture eastern Libya's main garrison and four air bases – all during the week of February 15 to 21, 2011.

Following the Jamahiriya's eventual overthrow, these militants pressed hard not only for both greater autonomy for the eastern regions, but also for the writing into Libya's constitution of conservative interpretations of Islamic law and a guarantee that this would serve as the foundation of law in the new Libya. Many went on to join eastern separatist movements when their conditions were not fully met. As noted in the National Interest: “At the time, Gaddafi was ridiculed for asserting that the rebellion was an Islamist plot, but in retrospect the evidence vindicates him.”

Leaked emails from State Secretary Hillary Clinton later provided evidence of war crimes perpetrated by insurgents, of Western special forces operating alongside them from the war's outset, and that the insurgency was well known to have a significant Al Qaeda presence among its ranks. Militias with ties to Al Qaeda received training and support from abroad to join the fight against the Libyan government. This was far from unprecedented, a notable example being reports from French intelligence that Britain's M.I 6 was heavily funding an Al Qaeda affiliate in Libya in the 1990s, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which fought against the government and attempted to assassinate Gaddafi. When insurgents proved incapable of capturing major targets such as the city of Benghazi, foreign special forces units and Qatari forces in particular were deployed to do the job for them.

Western governments and media outlets were quick to portray not only a grassroots revolution being fought in the name of Western political values – a serious misrepresentation of the jihadist insurgency – but claimed there was a looming threat of a massacre by government forces. French President Nicolas Sarkozy stressed that the Libyan population wanted to “liberate themselves from servitude,” and that France had a responsibility to prevent a “killing spree” by the state. France, he said, had “decided to assume its role before history.” “We have a duty to respond to their anguished call,” he claimed, and led Paris to become the first country to recognise insurgents instead of the U.N-recognized government as the legitimate leadership of Libya. This fit in with the prevailing Western paradigm for portraying much of the non-Western world as tyrannical 'dictatorships' and 'despots' who stood between their people and westernisation, and a moral obligation for the West to overthrow such leaders and thus further the tide of history. Other similar statements from across the Western world were quickly forthcoming.

Dr. Nicola Pedde, Director for Middle East Research at the Italian Defence Ministry's Centre for High Studies of Defence, and Director of the Institute for Global Studies think tank, highlighted regarding foreign involvement in the Libyan conflict's first two months – covert at first but subsequently with open attacks by Western states:

From the beginning, the coordinated series of actions, the availability of a large quantity of weapons and ammunition, and the existence of a series of targets on the ground clearly demonstrated the presence of a plan, something which is incompatible with a simple riot. Another factor of fundamental importance has to do with the rapid reactions of certain European governments, particularly those of France and Great Britain, which almost immediately supported the anti-governmental positions. . . . Massive global media coverage started to disseminate a narrative of the Libyan crisis that was largely built on the idea of a violent government reaction to an attempt at a peaceful popular revolt. The primary source of this narrative was the Qatari news network Al Jazeera, which started broadcasting images of violence, destruction, rage and death on a systematic basis, convincing the European public that a massacre had been started by Gaddafi with the aim of ensuring the continuation of his power and privileges.

Most of the news stories which were systematically communicated to western households described how Gaddafi's air force was indiscriminately bombing urban areas, creating thousands of civilian casualties. Thus the message was that it was a massacre which had to be stopped at all costs, with the support of the international community.

The Western military assault on Libya was paired with harsh economic warfare efforts, to which the country had become increasingly vulnerable over the past decade as it relied more heavily on Europe for trade, with loss of access to key medicines being particularly damaging. After gaining support from the United Nations Security Council for military action France launched the first airstrikes on March 19. While Paris took the opportunity to showcase its new Rafale fighter jets, which had failed to gain any traction on export markets, the very poor state of Libya's wholly neglected defences meant resistance was negligible – and any remotely modern fighter jet could have braved them to launch attacks. Although Libya did have the largest fleet of Mach 3+ combat aircraft in the world, a force which has acquired in the 1980s would have been more than sufficient to keep any European combined force at bay, they had flown little since the turn of the century and particularly after Tripoli's rapprochement with the West in 2004. Lacking not only avionics or weapons upgrades, but even trained pilots or adequate maintenance, they were of no use. ^{iii} As Gaddafi's son, Saif Al Islam, would lament several weeks later: “One of our big mistakes was that we delayed buying new weapons, especially from Russia, it was a big mistake. And we delayed building a strong army because we thought that we will not fight again, the Americans, the Europeans are our friends [since disarming under Western pressure to normalise relations from 2003.] ” The country had been set to acquire modern air defences, which would have been operational within 2 to 3 years and were considered by Western experts to be sufficient to deter and if necessary seriously impede European or U.S. attacks. The timing of the Western assault was thus critical, and exploited delays in Libya's military modernisation caused by Tripoli's complacency.

The U.S. was quick to follow France in attacking and launched B-2 heavy bombers and F-16 and F-15 fighters for major airstrikes. The Navy fired 112 cruise missiles at targets across Libya on the first day, positioning three nuclear attack submarines, two amphibious assault ships and two guided-missile destroyers and four other warships in the Mediterranean to support operations. Britain, Italy, Canada and kuh-taar were the next to join, followed shortly by Spain and Denmark. More Western powers such as Sweden and Belgium joined the assault in the following weeks. Despite the almost total incapacity of Libyan defences, the campaign was cited as an example of the staggering inefficiencies and underwhelming capabilities of European nato. members – in spite of their very considerable collective military spending of approximately 200 billion and despite European states having led calls for an attack. ^{iv} This forced the United States to intervene heavily on their behalf to an extent it had not previously anticipated. Extremely low combat readiness rates in several countries such as Spain and Germany, understocked cruise missile arsenals such as those in Britain, or command and control problems affecting Europeans more generally, were among the many issues preventing most from contributing more than token forces. The air campaign was paired with provision of arms and training to insurgents and a full spectrum media campaign, with kuh-taar ^{v} also setting up communications networks and deploying its special forces for combat on the ground to support Western efforts. Doha simultaneously led calls for the West to launch a similar air campaign against Syria, and was found to be supporting Al Qaeda insurgents in both countries. Western arms sent to Libya also ended up in Al Qaeda's hands, with the terror group emerging as a particularly effective fighting force against the Libyan government.

Even before the first strikes were launched, it was clear from Western rhetoric, from prior similar military interventions, and from the clear motives behind the assault that the purpose of the campaign was not to protect civilians in Libya – who there was negligible evidence were ever in danger. The goal was instead to win the war for the insurgency, establish a pro-Western government, and eliminate the Libya Arab Jamahiriya which had been a major thorn in the side of Western hegemonic designs in Africa and beyond for decades. This became all the more clear once the first airstrikes began, as Libyan infrastructure and other targets across the country were bombarded from the air very often far from where any fighting was taking place. Strongholds of government support were singled out for particularly intense bombardment of civilian infrastructure.

Western journalists on the ground reported that Western air and missile strikes were causing extremely high civilian casualties, far greater than the Libyan government had even been accused of causing, with civilian targets across the capital Tripoli such as universities and hotels bombarded repeatedly and very heavily. European and American warplanes were described as “massacring anyone that moved” outside insurgent-held areas. British war correspondent Lizzie Phelan reported from Tripoli: “When nato's intensive bombing of Tripoli began on August 19th, I could hear those daily lives being robbed by the bombs and Apaches [attack helicopters] all around the hotel with the most brutal force one can imagine, while the world was being told that the Libyan people were being 'liberated.'” Describing streets “lined with bodies” and hospitals “drowning with dead and injured bodies,” Phlean said her first-hand experience and sources on the ground all corroborated figures from the Libyan government of a severe civilian death toll – including in one instance 1,300 dead and 5000 wounded in Tripoli alone in just twelve hours of Western strikes.” ^{vi} She documented and photographed multiple cases of civilian targets being purposefully struck which killed large numbers of innocents. Phelan's observations were later supported by Pentagon documents released in 2021 showing that claims of nato precision strikes and resulting low civilian casualties often had little substance to them and devastated the targeted populations.

The Western powers and the insurgents they were arming and training on the ground consistently eschewed opportunities for ceasefires. While the Libyan government accepted offers from multiple neutral third parties for mediated peace talks, the Islamist-led insurgent leadership was adamant that they “totally rejected the concept of talks.” Tripoli even offered a ceasefire deal which would see Gaddafi sidelined from power and a new constitutional government formed to include both sides, but this was also firmly rejected. The only outcome acceptable was the execution or expulsion of the Jamahiriya leadership and imposition of their own rule over the country. As Princeton University international law professor Richard A. Falk was one of many to observe: “nato forces were obviously far less committed to their supposed protective role than to ensuring that the balance of forces within Libya would be tipped in the direction of the insurrectionary challenge.”

A Massacre Imagined in the West

In a March 26 radio address U.S. President Barack Obama said Western attacks were necessary because the Libyan government imminently threatened “a bloodbath.” Two days later, he asserted “We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi – a city nearly the size of Charlotte (N.C.) – could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.” While this narrative cast a Western attack on Libya as a moral endeavour to save civilian lives, assessments by scholars and analysts repeatedly concluded that claims of such an imminent atrocity were entirely fabricated and had almost no basis in reality.

Writing for Foreign Policy in April 2011, leading authority on international relations and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University, Steve Walt, stated: "the claim that the United States had to act to prevent Libyan tyrant Muammar al-Gaddafi from slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Benghazi does not stand up to even casual scrutiny … his forces did not conduct deliberate, large-scale massacres in any of the cities he has recaptured.” Although referring to Gaddafi as “a tyrant with few (if any) redemptive qualities,” Walt stressed that the population was never in danger with threats made by the country's leadership directed towards the insurgents and not the public.65 Describing the nature and motives for the Western military campaign, Walt clarified that Washington had “launched a new war against Libya. As in Iraq, the real purpose of our intervention is regime change at the point of a gun.”66

Twenty-eight-year C.I.A veteran and Senior Fellow at the Centre for Security Studies of Georgetown University, Paul R. Pillar, similarly observed that “a warning by the former dictator to deal harshly with those who took up arms against his regime was falsely translated into a prediction of a genocidal bloodbath.” The result, he noted three years later, had been a “never ending Libya nightmare” due to Western intervention. Assistant professor at National Defence University Paul Miller, who served on the National Security Council under the Bush and Obama administrations, was another to raise serious questions regarding Western claims of an imminent massacre in Benghazi. The New York Times later reported regarding the veracity of insurgent allegations of government misconduct, which played an important role in providing pretext to a Western attack: “the rebels feel no loyalty to the truth in shaping their propaganda,” and made “vastly inflated claims.”

Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the L.B.J School of Public Affairs, University of Texas Alan J. Kuperman stressed that evidence such as footage of any kind of massacre by government forces was conspicuous by its absence. “Despite ubiquitous cellphone cameras, there are no images of genocidal violence, a claim that smacks of rebel propaganda,” he concluded. Contrasting the European and U.S. narrative claiming an imminent mass slaughter in Benghazi to the actual conduct of Libya's armed forces, Kuperman observed:

Gaddafi's regime never threatened or perpetrated revenge killings against civilians.... From March 5 to March 15, Libyan government forces retook all but one of the major rebel-held cities, including Ajdabiya, Bani Walid, Brega, Ras Lanuf, Zawiya, and most of Misurata [Misrata]. In none of those cities did the regime target civilians in revenge, let alone commit a bloodbath. When the regime was poised in mid-March to recapture the last rebel-held city, Benghazi, it again threatened ruthless violence against rebels who stayed to fight, as reported.

Kuperman highlighted the discrepancy between the stated goal of the Western attacks – protecting civilians – and what appeared to be their actual objective, “bolstering anti-government forces by attacking the Libyan army, especially near Benghazi.” He emphasised that insurgents had known their only chance of prevailing was to gain Western military support, which was an objective shared by their foreign sponsors. Contrasting the situation in Libya to other Arab states, Kuperman stated: “Ironically, Obama has applied little pressure on Yemen and Bahrain, which slaughtered peaceful protesters, but he bombed Libya for responding to armed rebels. This sends precisely the wrong message to the Arab street: If you want U.S. support, resort to violence.” He strongly implied that the U.S. was “falsely claim [ing] 'humanitarian' grounds for intervention driven by other objectives,” as claims that the Western assault was motivated by the need to protect civilians did not stand up to scrutiny and “actually magnifies the threat to civilians in Libya.”

Steve Chapman, from the Chicago Tribune's editorial board stated to similar effect: "Obama implied that, absent our intervention, Gadhafi might have killed nearly 700,000 people, putting it in a class with the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. White House adviser Dennis Ross was only slightly less alarmist when he reportedly cited 'the real or imminent possibility that up to a 100,000 people could be massacred.' These are outlandish scenarios that go beyond any reasonable interpretation of Gadhafi's words." The case for war was “absent specific, reliable evidence,” he stressed. “Bush had a host of reasons (or pretexts) for invading Iraq. But Obama has only one good excuse for the attack on Libya – averting mass murder,” a narrative which was even more fragile than that of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Regarding the extreme paucity of evidence, Chapman highlighted:

Where Bush sent Colin Powell to the United Nations to make the case against Saddam Hussein, Obama has treated the evidence about Gadhafi as too obvious to dispute. I emailed the White House press office several times asking for concrete evidence of the danger, based on any information the administration may have. But a spokesman declined to comment. That's a surprising omission, given that a looming holocaust was the centrepiece of the president's case for war.

Highlighting the similarity between the proclaimed need of both administrations to launch attacks to avert humanitarian disasters which there was no evidence actually existed, Chapman stressed: “In 2002, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice waved off doubts about Saddam Hussein's nuclear ambitions, saying, 'We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.' Right now, the Benghazi bloodbath looks like Obama's mushroom cloud.” The Bush administration had provided false evidence based on questionable intelligence, and its successor had provided effectively none at all, in both cases to assault and destroy longstanding Western adversaries in the Arab world without provocation leaving failed states in their wake.

Citing Walt, associate professor at Indiana University's School of Global and International Studies David Bosco wrote a separate column for Foreign Policy concurring with his assessment. He stressed that the humanitarian pretexts for the Western assault on Libya were false and had been based largely on speculation of what the Libyan Armed Forces would do. This speculation had little basis in reality and contrasted sharply with the military's actual prior conduct. The ability to base claims of an imminent humanitarian crisis purely on presumption depended heavily on prevailing Western worldviews and portrayals of the world outside its own sphere of influence – namely a world of 'murderous authoritarians' content to 'slaughter their own people.' As shown throughout this work, a significant majority of cases where Western adversaries were accused of conducting genocidal killings within their borders proved to be entirely fabricated, but the weight of decades of fabrication, from the imagined but non-existent Iraqi mass graves to Tiananmen Square, built consensus towards viewing Libya, as a non-westernised state, as one of 'those types.' It was far from uncommon for the entire world of politically non-westernised countries to be painted in the West with the same brush. Fabricated atrocities had a cumulative effect, making future atrocities by the West's enemies seem more believable. Only on this basis could the Western narrative of a Libyan massacre be believed despite a total lack of evidence, and considerable evidence to the contrary showing the good conduct of government forces.

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had himself stated on March 17 regarding upcoming counterinsurgency operations in Benghazi: “We have left the way open to them. Escape. Let those who escape go forever … whoever hands over his weapons, stays at home without any weapons, whatever he did previously, he will be pardoned, protected.” For “traitors” who continued to attack security forces, and who called for Western military intervention to provide air support, “we will have no mercy on them.” This last sentence was taken out of context, however, and was repeatedly replayed by news outlets across the Western world, and those in Western-aligned Arab states such as kuh-taar's Al Jazeera, ^{vi} to claim that Gaddafi was somehow threatening the entire population of Benghazi with a mass slaughter. Some scholars such as Nicola Pedde claimed that Western public support for military intervention was built up “mostly because of the narrative broadcast by Al Jazeera which built on the fear of carnage and violence by Gaddafi.” This indicated a very central role for the Qatari channel in facilitating the initiation of the Western assault.

Among Arab states kuh-taar's foreign policy was most closely aligned with Western interests, and Al Jazeera in turn was directed by the Qatari royal family. Among Al Jazeera's controversies were its favourable coverage of terror attacks in Algeria, some of which were linked to Al Qaeda, and a strong general bias in favour of Islamist militant groups. Described by scholars as having “mobilised Arab support” for the nato war efforts against Libya and Syria, leaked documents had shown that the U.S. State Department was able to directly exert an influence over its news coverage. This also aligned with Doha's own goal of bringing Islamist parties to power in the Arab world and toppling secular governments. Leaked emails also highlighted its practice of coaching eyewitnesses to give false testimony and fabricate information.

Consequences of Atrocity Fabrication for Libyan Civilians

With nato and kuh-taar waging a concerted air war on Libya and providing insurgents on the ground not only with generous funds, arms, equipment and training, but special forces to back them on the battlefield, the Libyan Armed Forces struggled to hold their own. Fighting for months without any cover from near constant air attacks, the fact that military could maintain a cohesive force and relatively high morale was itself a major achievement. As leading expert on the Libyan conflict and research fellow with the Southwest Initiative for the Study of Middle East Conflicts, Musa al-Gharbi, observed: “contrary to the Obama administration's Reaganesque calculations, the relatively small national military did not defect or desert the Colonel [Gaddafi] until his final days.” As a result, he observed:

The rebels were able to repel Gaddafi's forces and advance on the capital because of the nato intervention – which began in March 2011 as a no-fly zone to protect the rebels but was quickly forced to expand far beyond its U.N. mandate because, despite small anti-government protests in Tripoli and other parts of the country, beyond Cyrenaica [an Islamist stronghold in eastern Libya] the people did not rise up en masse to overthrow the regime. … And so, the revolution had to be carried largely by the east and its foreign patrons, from the beginning to the bitter end.

Both nato and the insurgents ensured that the war would be pursued until the country was in their hands, with offers for ceasefires or mediation from Tripoli and the African Union flatly rejected by both. South African President Jacob Zuma visited Libya twice during the conflict and made two desperate attempts to broker a ceasefire – efforts he slammed nato for undermining. He accused the Western alliance of abusing U.N resolutions to pursue “regime change, political assassinations and foreign military occupation.” These peace plans were also rejected, with insurgents expressing faith in the Western air campaign's ability to deliver them a total victory. South Africa's position ^{viii} represented part of a broader trend on the continent towards opposing the Western assault on Libya. In August after Libyan forces had held out for months longer than expected, the Obama administration sought to increase pressure on Tripoli by sending a delegation to tour key African states and press them to cease their efforts to mediate the conflict or otherwise support Libya.

Muammar Gaddafi himself, a man best known in the West before 2011 as the archenemy of Ronald Reagan when their two countries clashed during the 1980s, had for decades symbolised rejection of Western hegemony and was targeted accordingly for assassination by his European adversaries. Western powers had made several attempts on his life during his time in power, but with a full-scale war underway the opportunities to see this through had increased significantly. U.S. assassination attempts resulted in the death of his daughter in 1986, and his son and three grandsons in a U.S. airstrike on April 30, 2011. An American eyewitness who visited the site of the April strike claimed that the target had been a house owned by his wife, rather than a military compound as the U.S. claimed, and that it only missed him because he was 500 feet outside the residence.

After French intelligence tracked down Gaddafi's location in October, French air units neutralised his convoy before insurgents were signalled to move in and finish him off. On October 20, after being captured, Gaddafi was beaten by militants and sodomized with a bayonet and with glass, then shot in the street. A leader who had lifted his population out of poverty and raised Libya to the status of a major regional power, his last words while being tortured by the militant youths were: “what did I do to you?” The Guardian referred to his death as “a spectacle of pain and humiliation.” Dozens of his supporters were also reported killed while in captivity that day, and Gaddafi's body was then exhibited in a freezer by militants for several days as a trophy of their victory. According to Time, which justified his killing rather than capture, Gaddafi would have likely escaped from Sirte, the city where he died, had he not insisted on taking many of his wounded allies with him. He had also refused multiple offers of asylum abroad, pledging to fight and die in Libya. Gaddafi's death was hailed as a positive step forward in statements from Western capitals almost without exception, from Ottawa, Canberra and Washington to Copenhagen, Paris and the Vatican. The response across Africa was precisely the opposite, with deep regrets for the Libyan leader's brutal demise expressed across much of the continent.

Under the pretext of protecting Libyan civilians the Western assault on the country devastated infrastructure that had been built up over decades. ^{ix} The campaign “tore the country apart and destroyed much of its infrastructure,” according to Germany's Deutsche Welle. As a result of the intensive Western air assault, and the political turmoil that followed and prevented an effective recovery, post-war Libya would for years lack reliable electricity with power cuts regularly lasting up to nine hours. Prices for essential goods and medical supplies increased exponentially, while sharp cuts to the Jamahiriya-era food subsidies left many in desperation. Britain's Daily Mail interviewed a number of Libyans in 2016, by which time food costs had quintupled, government workers had often been unpaid for months, and water was increasingly scarce, to investigate the effects the humanitarian-primised Western assault had had on the people it claimed to be protecting. One man stated: “Libya died with Gaddafi. We are not a nation anymore; we have become just warring groups of tribes.” Another, a former anti-government fighter, reflected on the way he had been misled to hate and oppose the government, stating: “I joined the revolution in the first days and fought against Gaddafi. Before 2011 I hated Gaddafi more than anyone. But now life is much, much harder, and I have become his biggest fan.” A third simply said: “Before Libya was much better.”

Another recalled: “There was always money and electricity and, although people did not have large salaries, everything was cheap, so life was simple.” All consistently believed that the country had been better under the republic that the West had torn down, including those who had previously taken up arms against it. A businessman from Tripoli who had harshly criticized the former leader also admitted: “It's just that people's lives are so difficult now compared to under Gaddafi.” A British woman who lived in Libya with her local husband stated regarding the rapid deterioration after Western intervention: “I used to walk home alone at midnight with no fear. But now I don't like to go outside alone after dark. I don't feel safe.” Residents from all walks of life and from all political affiliations were unanimous in their nostalgia for what had been before the West had used humanitarian pretexts to launch its assault to destroy the Jamahiriya.

A long-lasting consequence of both Western attacks and post-war neglect under the post-Jamahiriya regime was the damage to Libya's water infrastructure. The country had been water scarce throughout its history, and it was only through extensive investment that fresh water had been made relatively abundant in the Jamahiriya era. The main factory providing pre-stressed concrete cylinder pipes to the massive 27 billion Great Man-Made River (G.M.R) project, the world's largest irrigation project which had provided 70 percent of Libya's fresh water, was targeted in a U.S. airstrike on July 22. Key water ducts and a factory that produced spare parts for that factory were also levelled from the air. With these destroyed it was impossible to keep the G.M.R operational and repair leaks or breakages. The G.M.R project had been key to facilitating the modernisation of the Libyan economy and its industrialisation and urbanisation, and had made the country a world leader in hydrological engineering which was expected to export its knowhow and technologies across much of Africa. The Western strikes, like many attacks on Libyan infrastructure throughout the months-long assault, were serious war crimes, as were attacks by insurgents on water pipelines, confirmed by unicef, which Western sources had initially blamed on government forces. The U.N agency reported that while water infrastructure came under attack, the Libyan government had worked closely with a U.N technical team to “facilitate an assessment of water wells, review urgent response options and identify alternatives for water sources.”

By August, unicef reported that the conflict had “put the Great Manmade River Authority, the primary distributor of potable water in Libya, at risk of failing to meet the country's water needs.” Christian Balslev-Olesen from unicef Libya's head of office stressed that “the current situation is the absolute worst-case scenario, and a swift resumption of water supplies is critical.” Disruption caused by the attacks “could turn into an unprecedented health epidemic” if water supplies were not quickly restored. By September unicef reported that the attacks on water infrastructure had left four million Libyans without potable water, with issues persisting for several years and infrastructure having yet to fully recover a decade later. Much of Libya's population was forced to rely on imported bottled water delivered as emergency aid by the U.N agency.

In response to criticisms of Western attacks on infrastructure, research director for the U.S. intelligence contractor Stratfor, Kevin Stech, proposed that the Libyan population revert to relying on limited well water as they had in the pre-Jamahiriya era. “How often do Libyans bathe? You'd have drinking water for a month if you skipped a shower. Seriously. Cut the baths and the showers and your well water should suffice for drinking and less-than-optional hygiene,” he commented. His statement created a revealing contrast with that of a senior figure in the Great Man-Made River Authority, Adam Kuwairi, who had stated when the project made fresh water available for the first time in Libya's history: “The water changed lives. For the first time in our history, there was water in the tap for washing, shaving and showering. The quality of life is better now, and it's impacting on the whole country.” The impacts of Western intervention, under humanitarian pretexts allegedly to protect Libyan civilians from their government were the direct opposite of the effect the Jamahiriya era had had on living standards in the country – much as it was clear which party was genuinely protecting Libyan civilians and had their interests at heart.

These kinds of infrastructure attacks were hardly unprecedented, a notable example being the Western bombardments of Iraq in 1991 which had similarly specifically targeted water and sewage infrastructure. Combined with subsequent sanctions to prevent restoration, this provoked a major health crisis (see Chapter 4). nato's bombardment of Yugoslav infrastructure in 1999 had been similarly devastating (see Chapter 5). The Libyan government had warned on April 3 that any Western attack on the G.M.R would risk a “human and environmental disaster.” Engineer and project manager Abdelmajid Gahoud told foreign journalists in Tripoli at the time: “If one of the pipelines is hit, the others are affected as well, which could mean a humanitarian catastrophe. If part of the infrastructure is damaged, the whole thing is affected and the massive escape of water could cause a catastrophe,” which would leave 4.5 million Libyans without drinking water.

The water situation only continued to worsen with time, as did electricity shortages. As former foreign correspondent for the B.B.C and the Financial Times Kieran Cooke reported regarding the state of Libyan infrastructure in 2017:

chronic power shortages in most areas of the country are seriously impeding the operation of water-pumping stations and wells. More than 90 percent of people in Libya – the population has doubled since the early 1980s – live in cities and towns on the coast. Coastal aquifers have either been drained dry or are being tainted by seawater intrusion.

Old desalination plants are in need of repair. Plans to build new ones are on hold as the fighting continues. Meanwhile power blackouts mean people in Libya's two main cities – Tripoli and Benghazi – have to go without water for up to eight hours a day, sometimes longer. Other parts of the country, including farming regions dependent on the G.M.R for irrigating crops, are similarly affected.

Political instability following the Western and insurgent victory left Libya in a near-constant state of conflict which further eroded living standards, prevented post-war recovery, and facilitated the penetration of the country by various foreign interests – which then increasingly made rival factions their proxies in a battle for influence. On June 1, 2013, Libya's oil rich eastern Cyrenaica region declared autonomy and plans to form its own separate legislature. The region's long history of strong separatist and radical Islamist tendencies had made it the centre of the insurgency, and after attempting to impose strict Islamic law on the whole country with its significant influence on the post-war central government it later sought separation. In September 2013 separatists in Libya's southern Fezzan region declared autonomy, appointing a president and creating an independent military. While lacking easy access to seaports to export their oil they quickly set up blockades to prevent the central government from exporting its own. More parties quickly involved themselves in the battle over resources, often with the backing of various foreign countries, as a unified Libyan state and identity increasingly fractured. Conflict between tribes, as well as between ethnic groups including Arabs, Tebus, and Tuaregs, fractured the country. Libya became a country which foreign powers fought over, rather than a major power in its own right which it had become in the Jamahiriya era when it had projected influence across the African continent and beyond.

By 2014 a permanent partitioning of Libya was widely predicted, with the Islamic State terror group feared by the end of the year to potentially be able to take a third of the country. The closest thing Libya had to a government was itself seen to be “dominated by Islamist-leaning politicians” – a result of the jihadists' role in spearheading the insurgency that brought them to power. Intelligence analyst at the geopolitical risk consulting firm Max Security Solutions, Jacob Steinblatt, highlighted that year that an “unstable security environment and governmental inability to enforce the rule of law in much of the country” had left Libya open for “tribal or other autonomous militias to disrupt operations at oil-producing facilities in an effort to settle disputes or address financial and political complaints.” Analysts writing for the National Interest observed in April 2014: “Since the overthrow of Gaddafi, the capital has long been consumed by fierce struggles between Islamists and the coalition aligned with former prime minister Ali Zeidan, largely perceived as Western proxies – each with their own parliamentary blocs and militias.

Six years later the constant factional conflict had largely continued, solidifying more clearly into a proxy war in which both sides were dependant on nato member states' patronage. In the title of a prominent 2020 article, the National Interest referred to"Libya: A Country Up for Grabs?" and was among multiple sources to warn of the possibility that ongoing civil war would leave it permanently divided into two states.

More serious still were the widespread and often brutal reprisals the insurgents carried out once the U.S. and European air campaign brought them to power. The Western-backed and predominantly Islamist militants tortured, beat, arbitrarily detained, and massacred thousands of suspected Jamahiriya and Gaddafi supporters, terrorising the population against expressing nostalgia for the previous republic. A report by the U.N Human Rights Council's International Commission of Inquiry on Libya reflected the deterioration in law and order and the serious crimes committed by the militants. The Washington Post described the situation as follows: “ [A] nti-Gaddafi militias carried out reprisal killings of suspected regime loyalists and mercenaries, as well as the wide-scale torture of detainees.... Serious abuses continue to be carried out by militias aligned with Libya's new government.” A Human Rights Watch official characterized this behaviour as “a trend of killings, looting and other abuses committed by armed anti-Gaddafi fighters who consider themselves above the law.”

A yet darker side to the new country the West's humanitarian-premised war had created was perhaps the most serious case of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the 21st century. It was perpetrated against black Africans who the Jamahiriya era government had protected but who jihadist insurgents targeted for mass slaughter and extermination, with the genocidal conduct of the militants the West had brought to power bearing a very sharp contrast to the Jamahiriya's Pan-Africanism. Much as the Western military campaign had been facilitated by presumed but totally unevidenced atrocities, the massacre of Libya's black population was fuelled. by outright atrocity fabrication – the primary culprit being kuh-taar's Al Jazeera news network.

Shortly after the outbreak of the insurgency Al Jazeera claimed that black African mercenaries were fighting alongside government forces in Libya and systematically raping Libyan women. The National Transitional Council in Benghazi which represented the insurgency, as well as British Defence Minister Liam Fox and nato spokesperson Oana Longescu, echoed these claims, which were taken as evidence of the depravity of the 'Gaddafi-regime.' U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice supplemented these stories with claims that pro-government forces in Libya were being supplied with Viagra ^{x} to commit mass rapes – an unfounded claim ^{xi} which originated with Hillary Clinton's close confidant Sidney Blumenthal and was later discredited. As observed in the Foreign Policy Journal regarding Western coverage of such claims: “as long as it painted Gaddafi and his supporters as monsters, and so long as it served the cause of prolonged military action in Libya, it was deemed credible by network news.” The narrative built on longstanding stereotypes in both the West and the Arab world portraying black Africans as sexually potent and a threat to the chastity of European or white Arab women, as well as the Jamahiriya and Gaddafi's close ties with sub-Saharan Africa which were looked on disapprovingly in both the Arab world and the West. ^{xii}

Regarding the perpetuation of this imagined atrocity Professor at Concordia University Maximilian Forte highlighted: “two of those responsible for giving credibility to falsehoods of African mercenaries landing in Libya were Mona El Tahawy, Egyptian-American journalist and a frequent guest on C.N.N and Al Jazeera, and Dima Khatib, Palestinian journalist and Al Jazeera's Latin America bureau chief.” He stressed that longstanding bigoted perceptions of black Africans in the Arab world, as well as among much of Libya's population in spite of the government's pan-African policies, provided fertile ground for this story. Forte stressed “the role of the mainstream media, led by Al Jazeera, as well as the seeding of social media, in creating the African mercenary myth,” which in turn fueled the “deadly, racist practice” of ethnic cleansing by Western and Qatari backed militias.

Amnesty International crisis researcher Donatella Rovera, who spent time in post-war Libya investigating the situation, stated in an interview with Austria's The Standard regarding the purported myth of rapist African mercenaries:"We examined this issue in depth and found no evidence. The rebels spread these rumors everywhere, which had terrible consequences for African guest workers: there was a systematic hunt for migrants, some were lynched and many arrested. Since then, even the rebels have admitted there were no mercenaries."

Western and Qatari backed Islamist militias adopted slogans such as “the brigade for purging slaves, black skin,” according to a Human Rights Watch investigation. Irish journalist Mary Fitzgerald reported public hangings of black men in insurgent-held areas with accompanying graffiti describing them as 'black slaves' (abid) – a common derogatory term in Arabic for black Africans. A B.B.C News report cited a Turkish construction worker in Libya who recalled: “We had 70 to 80 people from Chad working for our company. They were cut dead with pruning shears and axes, attackers saying: 'You are providing troops for Gaddafi.' The Sudanese were also massacred. We saw it for ourselves.” The militants who made up the new post-Jamahiriya regime did not differentiate between Libyan citizens with black African features, and sub-Saharan expatriate workers. The most notorious case was the fate of the town of Tawergha with a population of 35,000 demographically comprised overwhelmingly black Libyans, which vanished almost overnight after Jamahiriya forces retreated and it was captured by Western-backed Misratan brigades. Tawergha's entire population were either killed or expelled, with their homes and shops burned and looted under the pretext that they had been 'mercenaries' and supported Gaddafi's Jamahiriya. In nearby Misrata the black Libyan minority that inhabited its Ghoushi neighbourhood were similarly purged, with the Western-backed insurgents putting bounties on the heads of those few blacks who remained in hiding. Video footage clearly showed the insurgents in Benghazi carrying out public lynchings of blacks.

Bryan Chan from the Los Angeles Times was given access to an insurgent-run prison in Benghazi in March 2011 and was shown terrified black men being paraded before the cameras. The colour of their skin, and for foreign workers their West African passports, were regarded as all the proof needed that they were loyal to the government. Chan's Libyan interpreter asked him: “So what do you think? Should we just go ahead and kill them?” Considering the fates of most blacks in the country who fell into the insurgents' hands, this or sale into slavery were the most likely outcomes for the captives.

The New York Times reported regarding the consequences of the insurgency's victory for black African expatriate workers across Libya: “For the more than one million African guest workers who came to oil-rich Libya seeking their fortunes, it has meant terror.... These innocent migrant laborers now find themselves singled out by ordinary Libyans and rebels who believe they are the enemy.” Although it strongly criticised the African Union for not siding with the insurgents and for its support for the Jamahiriya, the Guardian admitted that the result of nato and the insurgency's victory was an “ugly race war” which polarised relations between Libya and sub-Saharan Africa. It described “pogroms” against blacks reminiscent of Nazi Germany and concluded that as a result of nato's success: “Libya's role as the ideological and financial engine of Africa has ended.”

Video footage of blacks being tortured by insurgents, including being kept in animal cages and forced to swallow the flag of the Jamahiriya, surfaced on the internet and provided a small indication of the kind of atrocities being perpetrated across the country by the militants the West had empowered. In sharp contrast to its pan-African past, the new Libya quickly saw the emergence of regular slave markets as blacks were kept in chains or cages, sold for free labour, and often given hot iron cattle brands on their faces to identify them. Black women and girls unfortunate enough to be captured by the Western-backed militants were subjected to mass rape, according to U.N reports. Black men and those seen to be 'pro-Gaddafi' were also reportedly raped by insurgents as a means of humiliation and subjugation, and at times imprisoned and raped by militants frequently for serval years under the post-Jamahiriya regime. These practices continued to be reported into the latter half of the 2010s, with uniformed personnel from the new Libyan government responsible for frequent cases of rape against black children of West African origin.

In April 2012 six months after the Jamahiriya fell Human Rights Watch reported that the very severe mistreatment of blacks by the new authorities persisted and “appear to be so widespread and systematic that they may amount to crimes against humanity.” A report by the U.N Human Rights Council's Commission of Inquiry in May highlighted that war crimes were being committed against the black population. Reports of the atrocities only worsened with time. Racial divisions exacerbated by the African mercenary narrative effectively destroyed Libya's relations with sub-Saharan Africa and thereby ended a serious threat to Western hegemony on the continent. A report by Ghanaian lawyer Bobby Banson claimed in 2017 that blacks imprisoned or enslaved were having their organs harvested and sold on a significant scale by the post-Jamahiriya regime. Other reports, such as that by former Nigerian minister Femi Fani-Kayode, made the same claims. Multiple sub-Saharan states protested and recalled their ambassadors from Libya over the abusees. The Guardian summarized the sharp shift away from Pan-Africanism overseen under the new Western-installed government as follows: “culturally, ideologically and financially, Libya has moved towards a greater identification with its north African, Middle Eastern and south Mediterranean neighbors. Libya is embracing its Arab heritage.”

The war against Libya was hailed across the Western world as an example of successful humanitarian intervention by West – one which could set a precedent for similar Western attacks on alleged humanitarian abusers in future. Strongly reflecting the consensus view in the West, U.S. Permanent Representative on the nato Council Ivo H. Daalder and U.S. Navy Admiral James G. Stavridis published an article in Foreign Affairs in March 2012 titled: 'nato's Victory in Libya: The Right Way to Run an Intervention.' “nato's operation in Libya has rightly been hailed as a model intervention.... nato's involvement in Libya demonstrated that the alliance remains an essential source of stability.... By any measure, nato succeeded in Libya.... It enabled the Libyan opposition to overthrow one of the world's longest-ruling dictators,” they stated. By the time it was written, the ethnic cleansing of tens of thousands of blacks by the insurgents the West had supported, and the radical jihadist nature of these militants, were overwhelmingly evident. Nevertheless, it was difficult to dispute that the result of the war benefitted Western interests tremendously, destroying a longstanding obstacle to Western empire while protecting the privileged living standards of Europe at Africa's expense and at an extreme but highly acceptable cost to Libyan and African civilians.

As observed by cato Institute Research Fellow in Defence and Homeland Security Studies Benjamin H. Friedman, those “who championed Libya as a model intervention turned their attention elsewhere as it deteriorated.” The fallout from the campaign, not to mention the extreme lack of evidence for a humanitarian pretext to attack to begin with, were inconvenient truths for those who sought to establish Western humanitarian-premised military interventions as a new norm in the world. The new Libya after humanitarian intervention saw Western special forces continue to operate freely on its soil, occasional bombings by Western aircraft, and much of the country's armories transferred to Al Qaeda-linked militants in Syria – where the Western powers and kuh-taar were seeking to apply a similar model to topple another longstanding adversary.

While the death toll from what would have been a short- lived insurgency was expected to reach approximately 1,100, the large majority of them militants and security forces, government massacres imagined in Western minds but far removed from re- ality were used as a pretext for a war which caused over 90,000 casualties in its initial months alone. The figure for total deaths resulting from the Western assault was considerably higher, with the town of Tawergha alone, which had a predominantly black population, found almost completely empty after Western-backed militants took it over and engaged in thorough ethnic cleansing of its population of 35,000. Indeed, the insurgents had long threatened to wipe the black city “off the map,” and its fate was hardly unexpected nor was the character of the militias the West was supporting at all a mystery. Even many years later close to the end of the decade, ongoing instability meant that almost a quarter of Libya's population were internally displaced and in urgent need of humanitarian assistance, according to reports from the U.N High Commission for Refugees. The death toll grew signi- ficantly higher in the decade following the Jamahiriya's fall, as

Libya became a battle ground for Arab and nato states to wage seemingly unending proxy wars by supporting various factions in the permanently fractured country against one another. In 2017, former U.S. Ambassador to the country, John Graham, called the new Libya “a completely failed state.”

The fallout from the Western victory in Libya notably went well beyond the country's borders, and Gaddafi's torturous death was seen by many as symbolizing the imposition of Western power over Africa. The Jamahiriya's downfall considerably strengthened the Western position on the continent while seriously weakening the African Union, which was reflected in the sharply contrasting responses to his demise in the West and Africa. Former Namibian president Sam Nujoma notably predicted regarding the implications the Western military campaign had for all of Africa: “foreign-sponsored killing of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi must serve as a lesson to Africa that foreign aggressors are readying themselves to pounce on the continent.” This may well have been substantiated by the subsequent rapid expansion of africom and of the Western military presence across the continent which was now almost totally unimpeded. The decline in major pan-African projects for infrastructure and development which had brought much of the continent together were further direct consequences of the Western victory in Libya.

An example of a state which suffered was Sudan, which had formerly benefitted greatly from Libyan economic and political support, ^{xiii} but endured isolation and gradual economic decline from 2011 under harsh Western economic sanctions. The loss of Libyan support contributed to facilitating an eventual Western-backed military coup in the country in 2019 and an even sharper economic decline in the aftermath. Other examples were Mali, Nigeria and Algeria, where Islamist insurgents received substantial quantities of heavy weapons and logistical support through post-Jamahiriya Libya, and in the former two went on to gain considerable ground from government forces.

nato's humanitarian-premised intervention placed Libya's large arsenals at the disposal of Islamist militias who in turn passed them on both for profit and out of ideological affinity. Nigeria's Boko Haram was a major beneficiary, and as a direct result emerged as the world's deadliest terrorist origination. Libya's fall under Western assault had similar negative reverberations across the African continent, but particularly in West Africa where it directly empowered terrorist actors.

The Assault on Libya as a Model for Future Western Interventions

Despite its devastating consequences, three separate aspects of the war on Libya were cited in the West to characterise it as an ideal military campaign. Firstly, the campaign was and continues to be presented in the West has having liberated the Libyan people and prevented a humanitarian disaster. Although available evidence indicates that precisely the opposite is true, the supposed success of the humanitarian war led it to be widely cited as a precedent for the West to consider further similar attacks on states outside its sphere of influence using similar pretexts.

Secondly the Western campaign served as a model for an inexpensive war relying on special forces, air and naval assets, extensive use of media and particularly social media, and on organizing and supporting militants on the ground rather than sending in Western troops. This was frequently contrasted with the heavy handed 'boots on the ground' invasions of the George W. Bush era, and significantly furthered Western hegemony in the world at a much lower cost. As U.S. Permanent Representative on the nato Council Ivo H. Daalder and U.S. Navy Admiral James G. Stavridis observed in March 2012 regarding the campaign's major achievements: “it accomplished all of this without a single allied casualty and at a cost – 1.1 billion for the United States and several billion dollars overall – that was a fraction of that spent on previous interventions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq.” They referred to it as “a teachable moment” which could be a model for future military interventions. As U.S. Vice President Joe Biden stated, implying a contrast with the costly Iraq War: “nato got it right. In this case, America spent 2 billion and didn't lose a single life. This is more the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has in the past.”

A very similar model was applied in Syria, and although less successful it still ensured that the damage done to the country far outweighed the costs to the Western powers which had initiated the campaign. Germany's Deutsche Welle thus observed regarding the Libya model's possible future applications against other Western adversaries: “The template of surgical airstrikes, supported by Special Forces on the ground and the covert training of indigenous, opposition forces seems tailor-made for missions where large-scale invasions would be counter-productive at best, and hugely inflammable at worst. U.S. planners … are thought to favour such an approach should the option of military action against ee-rahn become a reality.” U.S. Senator John McCain, who would soon afterwards become Chairman of Senate Joint House Services Committee, stated that this new kind of warfare centred around building up and supporting insurgencies was “a virus that will attack Moscow and Beijing.” President of the Joseon Institute and founder of Liberty in North Korea and Pegasus Strategies Adrian Hong, who later led a violent attack on the North Korean embassy in Spain and worked in close cooperation with U.S. intelligence, stated in much the same vein following successful operations to destabilize Libya and Syria that the offensives were “a dress rehearsal for North Korea.”

Thirdly, the term 'Libya Model' was used to refer to the country's unilateral disarmament in the early 2000s, including permitting deep Western inspections of its military facilities as part of the process. Upon Libya's disarmament in 2003 U.S. President George W. Bush had pledged that the country would be “a model for other countries” in the consequences of their disarmament and reconciliation with the West. The war in 2011 and subsequent decade of disaster placed Tripoli's decision to disarm in a new context – with the 'Libya Model' coming to refer to the potential fates of those states which placed their trust in Western security guarantees and abandoned efforts to deter Western military action themselves. This had significant consequences for North Korea in particular, where the Libyan precedent was repeatedly cited by a range of figures from Daniel R. Coats, the Trump Administration's Director of National Intelligence, to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and Russian President Vladimir Putin as indicating why Pyongyang would never unilaterally disarm.

Libya's fate proved that once a Western adversary disarmed, the West could always exploit the opening presented by fabricating whatever atrocities were needed to justify an attack.

Chapter Nine

The Syrian Insurgency

Misattributing Atrocities

The Syrian Arab Republic emerged in the 1970s as the Western world's leading adversary in the Arab Middle East, with the coming to power of the Ba'ath Party and a Corrective Revolution within the party in 1970 ending two decades of instability and an era of multiple Western sponsored coups and coup attempts. Over the following decade Syria strengthened ties with the Soviet Union, North Korea and ee-rahn, invested in becoming a leading regional military power, and saw its forces clash on multiple occasions with U.S. and U.S.-aligned Israeli forces. Although keeping a low profile following the Cold War's end in 1989, Syria gained attention after the fall of Iraq in 2003 as the only Arab country in the region that remained outside the Western sphere of influence. While Syria was directly threatened, and a U.S.-led invasion openly discussed, the country's Korean-supplied ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, high combat readiness and relatively capable air force and air defences were seen as valuable deterrents to a similar Western assault.

Three major factors made Syria a priority Western target from the late 2000s, including the need to undermine the Syrian-and Iranian-backed Lebanese militia Hezbollah, which had dealt Israel its first ever military defeat in 2006, as well as the Syrian government's refusal to approve a critical Western-favoured Qatari gas pipeline over a rival Iranian one for exports to Europe. The need to isolate China, Russia, North Korea and particularly ee-rahn, with Syria being an important economic and strategic partner of all four of the Pentagon's designated 'great power adversaries,' was another important factor among multiple more minor ones.

Available evidence indicates that Western plans to topple the Syrian government through support for an insurgency dated back to the Barack Obama administration's first year. French Foreign Minister Ronald Dumas noted in 2009 that Britain had begun training militiamen for operations in Syria, with cables and reports from American, Saudi Arabian and Israeli intelligence agencies indicating that they were also involved from that stage. Operations began in March 2011, with leaked emails from leading private intelligence firm Stratfor showing that from that time nato members Britain, France, the U.S. and Turkey, alongside Western-aligned Jordan, all covertly deployed special forces to Syrian territory to support anti-government militias. This marked the beginning of a major insurgency with the explicit purpose of forcing a “collapse” of the state “from within.” Western air operations were also considered from the outset, with the Stratfor emails stressing that the Pentagon believed further vilification of the Syrian state, namely through “media attention on a massacre” by government forces, would provide humanitarian pretexts for an eventual Libyan-style Western assault. Nevertheless the country's dense air defence network, large and sophisticated ballistic missile arsenal, and sizeable chemical weapons stockpiles, were cited as major obstacles.

From the war's outset media coverage in the Western world and in Western-aligned states consistently vilified the Syrian government and portrayed the insurgency as a moderate and popular uprising. Britain notably played a leading role in the media campaign, and using former British diplomats, intelligence officers and army officers as intermediaries it covertly established a network of journalists across Syria “in an attempt to shape perceptions of the conflict.” These efforts were managed by the Ministry of Defence and aimed to bring about “attitudinal and behavioural change” with the goal of “reinforcement of popular rejection of the [Syrian President Bashar Al] Assad regime.” Media content produced by the network of journalists in the pay of the British government was supported to reach outlets such as B.B.C Arabic and Al Jazeera.

It was essential for the West to be able to portray at least some of the militias it backed in the Syrian War as representing a westphilian alternative to the ruling Ba'ath Party. While the War on Terror in the previous decade meant jihadism which dominated the insurgency could not be lionised as it had been when the U.S. and Britain previously supported Islamists against the Afghan government in the 1980s, the West relied heavily on portrayals of the Free Syrian Army (F.S.A) as a moderate 'right side' in the war. Formed in July 2011, the F.S.A was a loose coalition of anti-government militias, rather than a centralised paramilitary organisation with a chain of command and included multiple radical jihadist groups in its ranks. In the early stages of the war the Al Nusra Front, at the time an official branch organisation of Islamic State and affiliate of Al Qaeda, was also a part of the Free Syrian Army. The Washington Post would refer to Al Nusra in late 2012 as the most aggressive and successful arm of the F.S.A, and according to the Russian Foreign Ministry it continued for years to be labelled as a Syrian moderate opposition force by the United States.

An F.S.A co-ordinator going by the name of Abu Haidar notably stated, regarding the role of Al Nusra in the revolution the Free Syrian Army was professing to lead, that the Al Qaeda affiliate “have experienced fighters who are like the revolution's elite commando troops.” The radical jihadist group received widespread praise from among the F.S.A leadership, with F.S.A forces widely chanting in December 2012 “we are all Al Nusra Front” in protest against claims the Al Qaeda affiliate was a terrorist organisation. Twenty-nine of the militant groups which comprised the F.S.A, including fighting brigades and civilian committees, signed a petition calling for mass demonstrations in support of Al Nusra – reflecting the high regard in which it was held throughout the F.S.A. The fact that Al Nusra was accepted into Free Syrian Army ranks as an integral member, and the nature of the ties between it and other F.S.A factions, reflected the F.S.A's strongly Islamist orientation which was well concealed by the media coverage of its foreign sponsors. Jihadist groups including several Al Qaeda affiliates could thus receive considerable material support from the West, Turkey, kuh-taar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel for operations against the Syrian government, with extensive efforts made to portray these insurgents as freedom fighters striving for Western-style liberal democracy.

With Stratfor having reported that the Pentagon sought to “focus media attention on a massacre,” which provided not only a pretext for increased Western intervention but also a further opportunity to portray the Syrian government as the 'wrong side' in the war, fabricated atrocity stories increasingly dominated Western coverage. The war's initial stages saw no shortages of atrocities committed, although those verified were overwhelmingly committed by Islamist insurgent groups rather than by the Syrian armed forces – officially the Syrian Arab Army (S.A.A). Thus, much as had been done in Korea, Western reports consistently misattributed incidents such as massacres committed by insurgents to the S.A.A – simultaneously whitewashing Western-backed groups and vilifying Damascus. As had been the case for coverage preceding the Iraq War many of the reports in Western outlets such as Reuters consistently cited activists with known ties to anti-government groups and to Western governments as reliable sources on events – while sources with ties to the Syrian government were almost never cited as such.

In May 2012 Western media outlets widely reported that government forces had killed large numbers of civilians without provocation in the town of Houla, describing vivid scenes of innocents trying to rescue their families as the Syrian Arab Army bombarded them using artillery before sending in ground forces who “just slaughtered everybody.” The Guardian described a “bloody horror that left more than 100 Syrians dead.” An investigation the following month however, reported by Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, showed that insurgent militias had been responsible – not government forces.

In August 2012 the massacre of 245 people in the Daraya suburb was covered almost unanimously in Western reports as a war crime by “Assad's army,” although as was often the case there was little evidence for this claim and anti-government activists were cited as the source. British journalist from the Independent Robert Fisk, who investigated the incident on the ground and conducted multiple interviews, subsequently confirmed that the Free Syrian Army had been responsible and had massacred both the civilians and the off-duty soldiers it had been holding prisoner.

In December a massacre of between 120 and 150 villagers in the town of Aqrab was also blamed on the Syrian government, with the New York Times suggesting that “members of Assad's sect” were responsible. After launching a thorough investigation on the ground including multiple interviews with survivors, British journalist Alex Thompson reported that the Free Syrian Army had been the perpetrator and had held 500 villagers from the president's Alawite religious minority hostage for nine days before carrying out mass executions.

In December 2013 the abduction of an N.B.C News team was blamed throughout Western media reports on forces aligned with the Syrian government. It was only a subsequent investigation that revealed that the culprits were “a Sunni criminal element affiliated with the Free Syrian Army” – as described by the New York Times.

These cases all exemplified a far wider trend which prevailed throughout the war, and although individual reports of atrocities could each be disproved, the metanarrative they created in much of the world of severe Syrian government misconduct could not be dispelled. This provided grounds for support for Western moves to more openly back the insurgency, consider direct military action against Damascus, and to insist on a change in government and on the Syrian president being removed from power.

The 2013 Chemical Attack Near Damascus

From mid-2013 the Western-backed insurgency in Syria suffered a growing number of setbacks, with the Battle of Qusayr in May-June, which marked the entry of the Lebanese Hezbollah militia into the war in support of Damascus, being a major turning point. In the face of highly unfavourable power trajectories on the ground, the U.S. and its allies sought to intervene more directly in late 2013 to decisively turn the tide against the Syrian government and bring insurgents to power as they had in Libya two years prior.

Western military intervention was initially intended to involve imposition of a Libyan-style 'no-fly zone' on Syria, shooting down any Syrian aircraft that took off to cut air supplies into the country and prevent the military from providing fire or logistical support to ground forces. All precedents suggested that this would be followed by both Western strikes on Syrian airfields and other positions and provision of more active material and battlefield support to insurgent groups, which would continue until an outcome to the war favourable to Western interests was realised most likely with militants taking over Damascus. ^{i}

Retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General David A. Deptula, who had overseen the imposition of a no-fly zone over Iraq in the 1990s under Operation Northern Watch, indicated in May 2013 that imposing a no-fly zone could be a means to cut the transfer of supplies to Syria from abroad. Citing the Libyan precedent, he noted that Western air units could subsequently be employed to “target Syrian leadership and active military units” from the air, indicating that the more benign 'no-fly zone' would likely pave the way to more aggressive attacks still. The Washington Post similarly observed that a no-fly zone would likely be just a first step towards facilitating more active Western offensive operations against Syria. It stressed, as many publications across the Western world did at the time, that conducting such operations against “the oppressor,” as it referred to Damascus, was a moral obligation for Western countries.

President Obama asked the Pentagon to draw up plans for imposing a no-fly zone over Syria in the penultimate week of May 2013. The Pentagon had previously drawn up such plans in April although the administration had not asked to be shown them. France, Britain, kuh-taar and Turkey by contrast, had been strongly calling for a no-fly zone up to that point. The president notably told aides that a no-fly zone “would require a much larger military operation than its proponents believe,” with the sizes of the Syrian air, air defence and ballistic missile forces being among the deterring factors. Syria was assessed to have “one of the densest air-defence systems in the world” and an air force with combat experience and some relatively capable fighter classes. This included Su-24 M2 strike fighters which in September would conduct a show of force to demonstrate their ability to retaliate against Britain's R.A.F Akrotiri airbase in Cyprus.

President Obama soon afterwards expressed scepticism that a no-fly zone alone could have a significant impact on the conflict. The president's National Security Advisor Spokesman Benjamin Rhodes appeared similarly hesitant, indicating “great and open-ended costs,” with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey emphasising the danger of 'mission creep' – namely that a no-fly zone could lead the U.S. to commit to further offensive operations against the Syrian government. If Syria's aerial warfare capability was neutralised, he warned, “the question then becomes: If you eliminate one capability of a potential adversary, will you be inclined to find yourself in a position to be asked to do more against the rest?”

The administration's caution came largely as a result of its Pivot to Asia foreign policy initiative and the perceived need to divert attention away from the Middle East to a theatre that was much more important to securing U.S. and Western hegemony. North Korea, for one, showed signs of making a breakthrough in developing longer ranged nuclear tipped missiles capable of striking American territory – a potential game changer in the country's then 63 year-long ongoing conflict with the United States. China, meanwhile, was poised to overtake the U.S. as the world's largest economy (measured by purchasing power adjusted G.D.P which it would achieve in 2014. The administration's strategy for tackling Beijing by drastically expanding the American military presence in East Asia and isolating China from the rest of the region was already being seriously undermined by the drag of Middle Eastern commitments, and could unravel entirely should it be forced to commit to war in Syria. Unlike in Libya, from which attention could largely be diverted once Tripoli fell, the presence of sizeable arsenals of chemical weapons and ballistic missiles in Syria meant that even if Damascus fell to insurgents, Western boots on the ground would be needed at the very least to secure these weapons.

The Obama administration continued to face strong pressure from both its European and Middle Eastern partners, and from much of its own foreign policy establishment, to launch a direct attack on Syria. This culminated in an incident on August 21, 2013, when after almost three months of major gains by Syrian and allied forces reports from Syrian anti-government sources emerged claiming that the Syrian Arab Army had killed up to 635 people in Eastern Ghouta, a suburban area in the Damascus governate, with sarin nerve gas. The publication of footage purporting to show civilians affected by the attacks fuelled calls in the West for military action. After filing a request, inspectors from the United Nations were subsequently granted both access to sites in Eastern Ghouta and a ceasefire surrounding the area by the Syrian government. U.N investigators confirmed that sarin had been used, although they noted that insurgents controlling the sites before they arrived could have moved and manipulated evidence. Reports made no indication as to which party was responsible.

Western governments almost unanimously very quickly alleged that Damascus was the perpetrator of the sarin attack, and despite significant evidence that Islamist insurgents were the perpetrators the possibility of there being any culprit other than the government was dismissed entirely. One of the most significant factors indicating Damascus' innocence was circumstantial. President Obama had vowed in August 2012 to take direct action if Syria used its chemical weapons, which was a red line strongly supported by his European allies. By August 2013 the Syrian Arab Army had been gaining ground for months, and at a time when many in the West were seeking a pretext for an attack it would have made little sense for government forces to suddenly, unnecessarily and conspicuously use such weapons to provide them with one. Insurgent groups seeking the state's overthrow, by contrast, had much to from a chemical attack, as a mass Western assault on Syria would likely turn the tide of the war in their favour.

There was significant evidence that Islamist insurgents had access to sarin and had used chemical weapons in the past. Former Chief Prosecutor of two United Nations international criminal law tribunals, and former Swiss attorney general and ambassador, Carla Del Ponte, served on the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic in 2013, and had reported in May that “opponents of the regime” were conducting the sarin gas attacks. Later that month, Turkish security forces arrested members of the Al Nusra Front who were found to be in possession of two kilograms of sarin. This proved that Islamist insurgents had access to the very weapon the Syrian government would in August be accused of using in Eastern Ghouta.

The case for insurgents being responsible for the sarin attack was further strengthened by a study by Theodore A. Postol, a professor of science, technology and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Richard M. Lloyd, an analyst at the military contractor Tesla Laboratories, which was published by the New York Times in December. Based on an evaluation of the exteriors of the rockets which delivered the nerve agent, they suggested that the motors taken from B.M-21 122 millimeters artillery rockets were used to launch the attack. Although B.M-21s were used extensively by both government and insurgent forces, the experts concluded based on the calculated maximum ranges for the sarin-filled rockets that the attack could not have come from Syrian Arab Army positions, and that Islamist insurgents were the most likely perpetrators.

Evidence implicating Al Nusra mounted quickly, with Associated Press correspondent Dale Gavlak and reporter Yahya Ababneh publishing the results of interviews with doctors, Ghouta residents and insurgents who widely expressed certainty that the Al Qaeda affiliate was responsible for the sarin attack. The reports indicated that the sarin used had been supplied by Saudi Arabian intelligence services, which had provided significant material support to the insurgency since early 2011. Although unverified, this report closely corroborated with others regarding Al Nusra's possession of chemical weapons. The report gained greater credibility in 2017 when leaked documents from the U.S. National Security Agency showed that Saudi sponsors were indeed able to order the insurgents they had armed in Syria to carry out specific kinds of attacks against very specific targets to achieve political ends.

In December Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported, based on multiple interviews with U.S. intelligence officials and an extensive investigation, that the Obama administration had dishonestly “cherry-picked intelligence” to implicate Damascus in the Ghouta sarin attack and thereby provide a pretext for further hostile policies against Syria. This including burying intelligence on the Al Nusra Front and avoiding considering it a suspect despite its large presence in Eastern Ghouta, its strong incentive to carry out attacks, and full knowledge that the terror group had access to sarin. Hersh concluded regarding the findings presented by President Obama's administration:

In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significantly, he failed to acknowledge something known to the U.S. intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country's civil war with access to sarin.... In the months before the attack, the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports, culminating in a formal Operations Order – a planning document that precedes a ground invasion – citing evidence that the Al Nusra Front ... had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the attack occurred Al Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad ... in recent interviews with intelligence and military officers and consultants past and present, I found intense concern, and on occasion anger, over what was repeatedly seen as the deliberate manipulation of intelligence. One high-level intelligence officer, in an email to a colleague, called the administration's assurances of Assad's responsibility a 'ruse.' The attack 'was not the result of the current regime,' he wrote. A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information – in terms of its timing and sequence – to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening. The distortion, he said, reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the Johnson administration reversed the sequence of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of the early bombings of North Vietnam. The same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy: 'The guys are throwing their hands in the air and saying, “How can we help this guy” – Obama – “when he and his cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?”'

Citing considerable evidence that Al Nusra was responsible, Hersh concluded: “The cherry-picking [of intelligence] was similar to the process used to justify the Iraq War … the White House's misrepresentation of what it knew about the attack, and when, was matched by its readiness to ignore intelligence that could undermine the narrative. That information concerned Al Nusra.” He further cited a four-page top secret cable forwarded on June 20, 2013 to Deputy Director of the Defence Intelligence Agency David R. Shedd which confirmed previous reports that Al Nusra could acquire and use sarin. This effectively collapsed the central argument for Syrian government culpability, which was that it was the only party that could launch sarin attacks. “Already by late May, the senior intelligence consultant told me, the C.I.A had briefed the Obama administration on Al Nusra and its work with sarin,” Hersh stated, highlighting a later intelligence document showing that the Al Qaeda affiliate had recruited expertise from the pre-2003 Iraqi military which had had a major chemical weapons program. These assessments were complemented by a Joint Chiefs of Staff Operations Order for a potential deployment of U.S. forces to Syria, which warned that insurgents were capable of producing and employing sarin that could threaten American personnel.

Citing talks with National Security Agency and government officials, Hersh further highlighted that America had an advanced early warning capability to closely monitor even basic low level activities at Syrian chemical sites as well as extensive surveillance of Syrian communications. None of these intelligence assets gave any indication of Syrian culpability for the Ghouta incident. In 2014 a former senior U.S. intelligence official with access to current intelligence told Hersh that Turkey was providing insurgents with training in chemical warfare, and that the Ghouta attack was “a covert action planned by [Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdogan's people to push Obama over the red line.... The deal was to do something spectacular. Our senior military officers have been told by the D.I.A and other intelligence assets that the sarin was supplied through Turkey – that it could only have gotten there with Turkish support. The Turks also provided the training in producing the sarin and handling it.” This came as a growing consensus had formed in Ankara that the insurgency was failing and that engineering a U.S. military intervention was the most effective way to turn the tide. Erdogan was among those known to be strongly supportive of Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria.

A classified brief issued by the U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency stated that Al Nusra maintained a sarin production cell which represented “the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida's pre-9/11 effort.” “Turkey and Saudi-based chemical facilitators were attempting to obtain sarin precursors in bulk, tens of kilograms, likely for the anticipated large scale production effort in Syria,” it further highlighted. Citing sources within the Pentagon, Hersh reported that British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in Ghouta and confirmed that it didn't match any known to exist in Syria's arsenal. He also noted, citing a source with knowledge of the U.N's activities, that an investigation of the smaller Khan Al Assal chemical weapons attack in March 2013 by a U.N mission had clearly shown insurgents to be responsible – although “it did not come out in public because no one wanted to know.”

Further evidence of insurgent culpability for the Ghouta sarin attack surfaced in December, when U.N reports observed strong similarities between it and the preceding smaller Khan Al Assal sarin attack, with both bearing the “same unique hallmarks.” The majority of targets struck with sarin at Khan Al Assal were Syrian Arab Army soldiers, which indicated that the strike, and by extension the latter very similar attack in Ghouta, could not have been carried out by Syrian government forces. The U.N report did not explicitly assign blame for chemical attacks to any party, but gave evidence strongly implicating anti-government forces. Video evidence in 2014 showing chemical attacks by Al Nusra against Syrian Arab Army soldiers further undermined the case for government culpability for prior sarin use. U.N Secretary General Ban Ki Moon subsequently informed the Security Council in July that Syrian government forces had seized cylinders of sarin nerve gas from insurgents. The following year Kurdish militias operating in northern Syria also showed evidence that jihadist insurgents had a chemical weapons capability, seizing canisters as evidence.

Despite the available evidence, the Ghouta sarin attack strengthened calls in the West not only for a no-fly zone, but also for a more comprehensive humanitarian-premised assault on Syria to topple its government by force. Warships from the British Royal Navy and the United States Navy were deployed close to Syrian territory within a week and by August 26 included a British aircraft carrier, an assault ship, two frigates, an attack submarine, and four American destroyers. British Foreign Secretary William Hague stated that day that diplomacy in Syria had failed, and that military action would be considered even without U.N authorisation. The Western naval and air contingents in the theatre continued to grow, with the joint campaign being planned intended to “completely eradicate any military capabilities [Syrian President Bashar Al] Assad had” – as opposed to neutralising a specific weapons facility or sending a message with a limited strike. Targets included every known logistics and weapons depot, command and control facility, and military and intelligence building under Syrian government control, and would also extensively target key civilian infrastructure including electric power grids and oil and gas depots.

On August 25 British government sources revealed that strikes could begin within a week, with U.S. and European officials claiming an attack was a moral obligation. Reflecting widespread perceptions in the West that Western powers had the right to violate international law in pursuing their foreign policy objectives, if done in the name of Western values or a perceived moral cause, the New York Times published an opinion piece on August 27 stressing that “ethics, not only laws, should guide policy decisions.” It was fittingly titled “Bomb Syria, Even If It Is Illegal.” In the eyes of analysts across the Western world, as expressed in multiple papers and editorials, if Western foreign policy contravened international law, it could only mean the law was too constrained. The Europeans and Americans' right to attack non-Western countries was considered above being questioned. This extreme outlook, driven by the idea of Western supremacy, would force Damascus and its partners to resort to more active means than reliance on the law to prevent a Western attack. A successful Western assault was expected to result in a takeover of Damascus by Western-backed Islamist militants and a setting back of economic and social progress in the country by many generations, as had been seen in Afghanistan in 1992 when Western support similarly brought jihadists to power.

A Western attack was ultimately prevented not by the evidence of culpability for the Ghouta incident, which as an atrocity fabrication was the key pretext for U.S.-led intervention, but rather by multiple strategic factors. Regarding President Obama's reservations, his advisor Benjamin Rhodes observed: "He did not see where a more interventionist military option led us, other than being deeper and deeper in a conflict that is extraordinarily complex and shows no signs of having a military solution." Plans presented to Obama "didn't feel fully baked," according to Rhodes, with much uncertainty regarding the consequences an attack could have. The Pentagon estimated that should the Syrian government be toppled, 75,000 U.S. personnel would be required on the ground to secure the country's sizeable chemical and ballistic missiles arsenals to prevent them from being acquired by Al Qaeda or other jihadist groups. Such a commitment threatened to unravel the Pivot to Asia initiative entirely, and Obama refused to issue an executive order for an attack and instead sought authorisation from Congress. Concerns that war in Syria would be unaffordable given America's already overstrained overseas commitments were widely shared by members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, with the recent memory of how the Iraq War weakened America's standing in the world being a major factor.

Syria's longstanding strategic partner Russia notably took a firm stance, slamming Western efforts to “create artificial groundless excuses for a military intervention in the region” and to commit “a crude violation of international law” by attacking a U.N member state. The chief of the Russian parliament's foreign affairs committee Alexei Pushkov warned on September 11 that if Washington attacked Syria, Moscow would consider drastically increasing arms sales to ee-rahn and restricting supplies to U.S. forces in Afghanistan through Russian territory. Russian President Vladimir Putin further indicated that an American attack would undermine future cooperation on the Iranian nuclear program, with Moscow having many more drastic cards to play to bolster Tehran, the Western Bloc's primary regional adversary, should Syria come under direct attack. A major turning point was a vote in the British parliament of 285 to 272 against endorsing military action, with the vote heavily influenced by concerns that attacking Syria would lead to conflict with the country's allies. Hezbollah, ee-rahn and Russia were respectively mentioned 11,43 and 68 times when the vote was being discussed in parliament.

On September 9, amid fast receding support for an attack in the U.S., Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov proposed that Syria place its chemical weapons arsenal under international control for destruction. President Putin published an article in the New York Times three days later arguing for preserving international law and denying Al Qaeda the opportunity to gain ground in Syria, and instead proposed cooperation between Washington and Moscow to peacefully destroy Syria's chemical arsenal. “No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists,” he stated. The U.S. and its European partners officially accepted the proposal through a Framework Agreement signed on September 14 and agreed to by all members of the U.N Security Council under Resolution 2118. This led to Syria's entire chemical arsenal being neutralised by June 23, 2014, by a joint mission of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

Syria had been vigilant enough to pursue and maintain a formidable deterrent capability, including survivable ballistic missile launchers capable of engaging nato targets across the region and beyond with conventional and chemical warheads, as well as relatively capable conventional forces. While Western powers would no longer consider military intervention to topple the Syrian state after 2013, however, future allegations of chemical weapons attacks would be used as pretexts to launch more limited illegal strikes to further strengthen insurgents and strain the resources of Damascus and its allies. Preventing a government victory and a return to the pre-war status quo remained a key Western objective.

White Helmets, Political Theatre and More Western Attacks

By the spring of 2017, four years after the Eastern Ghouta sarin attacks, special forces from the U.S. and several of its European partners had been deployed to support a new insurgent coalition in Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces (S.D.F), which received considerable Western material and air support. The S.D.F had replaced the Free Syrian as the primary recipient of Western backing and managed to occupy a significant segment of Syrian territory after wrestling it from the control of the Islamic State (I.S). terror group. It relied heavily on growing numbers of Islamist militias to swell its ranks, with jihadist factions joining in the first quarter of 2016 alone including the Martyrs of Dam Brigade, the Martyr Qasim Areef Battalion, the Soldiers of the Two Holy Mosques Brigade – a former part of the Army of Mujaheddeen – and the Jihad in the Path of God Brigade. The S.D.F also relied on the forceful conscription of local men in captured areas, as well as forced recruitment of children of both genders, some as young as 13, who were forced into active duty according to United Nations reports.

Following the disintegration of the Islamic State, which had quickly expanded from 2014 to hold the largest portion of Syrian territory the following year, Syrian government forces and the U.S. and S.D.F fiercely competed to capture territory formerly held by the terror group. As tensions between Washington and Damascus escalated, the Western-backed White Helmets organisation in April alleged that the Syrian government had carried out a chemical weapons attack in the town of Khan Shaykhun in the Idlib governate on April 4, 2017. The governments of the United States, Britain, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel quickly claimed that Damascus was responsible. Russia and Syria denied the allegations, claiming that the attack had been staged by the White Helmets to provide the Western powers with a pretext to attack Syrian government positions.

It was only the following year that U.S. Defence Secretary James Mattis conceded what Damascus, Moscow and several journalists and analysts had emphasised from the outset – namely that there was no evidence of a Syrian chemical attack in Khan Shaykhun. “We have other reports from the battlefield from people who claim it's been used [but] we do not have evidence of it,” Mattis stated, indicating the White Helmets had essentially been taken at their word as a pretext for military action. “We're looking for evidence of it,” Mattis concluded, but a year later there was still nothing to implicate Damascus. Considering the level of intelligence sharing between nato allies, Mattis' statement directly contradicted a French claim from a year prior that Paris had undeniable proof of Syrian government culpability. France's evidence either did not exist or was deemed insufficient by the U.S.

The White Helmets had played a growing role in the Syrian War since 2014, and was the centre of much controversy with Russia, ee-rahn and Syria all considering it a terrorist organisation while the Western powers hailed it as a humanitarian group. It received funding from many of the same parties which were sponsoring the Islamist insurgency against the Syrian state. The organisation received extremely polarised coverage in global media, with major Western outlets issuing sharp rebukes to even slight criticisms of it. Non-Western and 'alternative media' outlets meanwhile repeatedly published images of White Helmets and Al Qaeda affiliated jihadists standing side by side, alongside verified quotes from jihadist groups praising the organisation's members as comrades in arms against Damascus. The White Helmets' ties with radical jihadist groups led to it being banned from operating in both Kurdish and government controlled parts of Syria. The leading co-founder of the White Helmets organisation was former British Army officer James Le Mesurier, also a former member of the Olive Group private security firm which would later merge with America's Blackwater. The Russian Foreign Ministry claimed Le Mesurier was also a former M.I 6 agent, which was not uncommon for retired officers involved such activities.

Journalists and observers in Syria issued multiple harsh criticisms of the White Helmets, slamming it as a tool for atrocity fabrication to further Western interests which was exacerbating the population's suffering. Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett, who reported from the frontlines in the country, presented considerable evidence that the White Helmets frequently staged videos for propaganda purposes, although such claims were roundly dismissed across major Western news outlets. Australian journalist John Pilger similarly referred to the White Helmets as a “complete propaganda construct” of the Al Qaeda affiliated Al Nusra Front. British journalist Vanessa Beeley, who observed the Syrian conflict for several weeks on the ground and conducted multiple recorded interviews with locals, similarly concluded that the White Helmets had “ties to private security firms and to deep state in both U.S. and U.K." It was being used to fabricate atrocities and provide pretexts for Western military intervention and was comprised of members of Al Qaeda linked terror groups.

Delegations from the British parliament's House of Lords and from the Church of England who visited Syria as observers in 2018 fully verified the claims made by Bartlettt, Beeley, Pilger and others. Claims regarding the White Helmets' nature as a propaganda group were supported by later footage of a White Helmets film set in Syria showing an S.A.A chemical attack being staged, with actors appearing in multiple scenes playing the roles of both victims and paramedics. Footage of White Helmets not only posing with members of U.N-recognized terrorist groups, but also assisting jihadist militants in disposing of the bodies of beheaded Syrian soldiers, supported the claim that the group was indeed linked to jihadist terror operations in the country.

Western claims that the Syrian government was the perpetrator of a sarin attack in Idlib in April 2017 were highly questionable, not only because of the aforementioned evidence showing that insurgents had a sarin capability, but also because the evidence of any sarin use at all was in this case questionable. Former U.N weapons inspector Scott Ritter notably criticised the O.P.C.W investigation on the grounds that it relied almost solely on chemical samples provided by the White Helmets and groups with ties to the insurgency. This gave these actors, which had much to gain from implicating Damascus and providing a pretext for Western military action, considerable room to fabricate evidence. Britain's ambassador to the United Nations announced that samples had also been provided to British scientists and “tested positive for sarin or a sarin-like substance,” although when journalist Tim Ripley from Jane's Defence Weekly sought to access the scientific reports through a Freedom of Information Act, the Foreign Office refused to “confirm or deny” whether they actually existed. Evidence was thus tenuous not only that the Syrian government was complicity in a sarin attack, but that any kind of sarin attack had occurred.

Washington nevertheless pledged to take military action against Damascus, with the Syrian Air Force's Shayrat Airbase near the city of Palmyra chosen as the target on the basis of claims that the chemical attack had been launched from the facility. The U.S. had no legal pretext for launching a strike, not only because the sarin attack was unproven but also because use of chemical weapons did not equate to a green light for Western attacks against a U.N member state under international law.

Due to the significant presence of Russian forces in Syria, which had intervened with Damascus' permission in August 2015 to pre-empt Western and Turkish plans for safe zones and no-fly zones on Syrian soil, any potential attack was seriously complicated by the need to avoid direct clashes with the Russian Military. Fifty-nine Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched from American destroyers, representing a relatively modest strike with munitions which had neither the speed nor the penetrative capabilities to threaten targets sheltered by fortifications. The Russian presence ensured the S.A.A had prior warning and was able to take cover, and the physical impact of the attack was limited. Had Russian units not been present to hold the Western powers in check, however, the fabricated Syrian sarin attack could have potentially been used as a pretext for a much larger and more damaging assault rather than the token strike actually launched. ^{ii}

The West's centuries-old view of itself both as the possessor of the world's supreme moral and humanitarian values, and as a steward of global order with universal jurisdiction to intervene in line with these values, was consistently seen to supersede international law when pertaining to attacks on non-Western U.N member states. This resulted in considerable demand in the Western world. for military action against Syria, with the illegal strike appearing to be intended primarily to satisfy this rather than to meaningfully erode the S.A.A's capabilities.

The U.S. attack was further seen to benefit the American position in Northeast Asia, the primary foreign policy focus of both the Trump and Obama administrations, as a show of force to signal both North Korea and China at a particularly sensitive time. Tensions with Pyongyang were rising fast in early 2017, with the East Asian state on the verge of developing a viable nuclear missile deterrent capable of striking the American mainland which it proceeded to demonstrate later that year. The U.S. had come to rely heavily on pressuring China, North Korea's leading trading partner, to increase pressure on Pyongyang. With Beijing having effectively closed the only legal avenue for unprovoked Western attacks on either North Korea or Syria with its veto at the United Nations Security Council, it was thus notable that the American attack on Syria was launched as President Donald Trump was hosting his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping for dinner. Syria was a close economic and defence partner of both China and North Korea, and the attack sent an unmistakable message that American military action could not be constrained by international law, the U.N Charter or the Security Council.

By demonstrating a willingness to launch attacks without U.N.S.C approval and as brazen crimes of aggression, the American strike on Syria had serious implications for the Korean Peninsula. Trump reportedly leaned over to Xi mid-meal and informed him that a strike which he had ordered was then underway. Although Xi succeeded over the following days in convincing Trump that China was not in a position to influence Pyongyang, the American attack arguably had far greater significance for Northeast Asia than it did for Syria itself. North Korea cited this kind of illegal Western military action, which it termed “a clear and unforgivable act of aggression against a sovereign state,” as precisely the reason why it was pursuing a nuclear deterrent in the first place. Washington's ability to signal its adversaries in such a way was directly facilitated by the ability to fabricate atrocities as pretexts for its military strikes.

Douma and Another Western Attack on Syria

On April 7, 2018, an alleged chemical weapons attack in the insurgent-held southwestern city of Douma killed an estimated 40 to 50 people, leading to a chain of events which largely mirrored that from April the previous year. Claiming to have proof of Damascus' culpability, France led the Western world in blaming the Syrian government and in calling for military action in response, with Britain and the United States closely following. Russia and Syria both claimed that the incident was staged, with the Syrian Foreign Ministry referring to Western claims of such attacks as having become an “unconvincing stereotype.” A number of analysts supported the assessment that the attack was indeed staged on the basis of both available evidence that the White Helmets had staged such attacks in the past, and because the Syrian government, having almost neutralised the insurgency in that part of the country, had no incentive to carry out chemical attacks. The Russian Military had notably issued statements in mid-March citing “reliable intelligence” that the White Helmets and affiliated militants were planning to stage and film a chemical weapons attack on civilians as a means of providing Western powers with a pretext to launch another attack.

At the United Nations Security Council the three Western permanent members vetoed a Russian-proposed resolution to investigate the alleged chemical attack, with Russia reciprocating by vetoing a Western-proposed resolution that could have legitimised a Western attack on the Syrian government. On April 14 France, Britain and the U.S. again bypassed the Council to launch another attack on Syrian government positions, and like their attack in April 2017 it constituted a crime of aggression without provocation or U.N authorisation. The B.B.C highlighted that the justification for the attack “would return the world to the era before the advent of the U.N Charter” – which had outlawed crimes of aggression and stripped states of the right to unilaterally attack others. The strikes were nevertheless supported by both the European Union and by nato.

It was particularly notable that no evidence of Syrian culpability had been presented, with the Western attack carried out just hours before inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons arrived in the country. Sites targeted included a scientific research centre in Damascus, an equipment storage facility and command post near Homs, and multiple alleged chemical weapons storage facilities. This was still far more moderate than the assault which would likely have been launched had Russian forces not been present, and represented only a small fraction of the firepower the Western powers had intended to bring to bear in the planned 2013 assault.

American B-1 B heavy bombers deploying from kuh-taar fired nineteen J.A.S.S.M-A cruise missiles, which were supplemented by sixty Tomahawk missiles fired by a cruiser and two destroyers from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. This was disputed by an anonymous official from the U.S. Department of Defence who informed the Washington Post that 100 Tomahawk missiles had been launched – with the discrepancy potentially covering for the fact that several missiles may have been intercepted. A nuclear powered attack submarine launched six more Tomahawks from the Mediterranean, with 28 fighters and two electronic warfare jets deployed as a precaution against Syrian retaliation. Britain and France between them launched 20 cruise missiles from nine fighter jets and a frigate, with the attack force supported by extensive aerial refuelling, airborne early warning and reconnaissance aircraft from the U.S. and France. As had been the case in 2017 the Western powers were deterred from launching anything more than a token attack, which was harshly criticised by Turkish and Israeli officials for not going further and destroying more targets. Multiple reports indicated that the attack had been blunted by Syrian defences which shot down several missiles, and although these were unconfirmed, the S.A.A had demonstrated improved air defence capabilities against highly survivable targets in the preceding months.

While a larger Western attack had been deterred, Western analysts widely questioned why Syria's government could not be brought down completely with military action, as the governments of Iraq, Panama, Libya, Grenada and many more before them had been. A notable example was an article published by The Conversation titled: 'Why Can't Trump Just Take Out Assad?'. This issue was raised on the dual basis that not only did the West have an inherent right as the self-perceived global policeman and moral leader to act above international law and determine which governments could stay and which needed to be brought down, but also that the West had near unrestricted power to do so in the post-Cold War world. While the former remained central to the predominant European and American views of the West's place in the world, the latter was no longer the case. ^{iii} With Russia's air defences and fighters on standby, and its warships and bombers beyond Syria well within a few minutes' range of it, the U.S. was forced to refrain from its tendency to launch strikes on the capitals of third world countries and assassinate their leaders. As the Western powers repeatedly demonstrated that they could violate international norms and laws against military aggression with impunity, very often relying on atrocity fabrication for justification, military force appeared to many state actors to be vital as a means to rein in Western ambitions.

The O.P.C.W released its report on the alleged Douma chemical weapons attack in December 2019, which sparked considerable controversy due to both the methodology used and the leaks by whistleblowers from within the organisation highlighting misconduct in the investigation. While the report alleged that the Syrian government was responsible for a chemical attack, leaked documents and emails showed that a significant number of the inspectors raised the issue that the final report “did not reflect the views of the team members that deployed to Douma.” The documents revealed that the O.P.C.W had omitted evidence which had strongly contradicted the claim that Syria had been responsible.

Regarding how the report reached its conclusions British O.P.C.W engineer & ballistics expert Ian Henderson, who had been on the ground in Douma at the site of the alleged attack as part of the investigation team, noted:

My concern which is shared by a number of other inspectors relates to the subsequent (O.P.C.W) management lockdown and the practices in the later analysis and compilation of the final report. There were two teams deployed, one team, which I joined shortly after the start of field deployments, was to Douma in Syria. The other team deployed to country X. The main concern relates to the announcement, in July 2018, of a new concept, the so-called F.F.M [Fact-Finding Mission] core team which essentially resulted in the dismissal of all of the inspectors who had been on the team deployed to locations in Douma and had been following up with their findings and analysis. The findings in the final F.F.M report were contradictory, were a complete turnaround with what the team had understood collectively during and after the Douma deployments and by the time of release of the interim report, in July 2018, our understanding was that we had serious misgivings that any chemical attack had occurred.

What the final F.F.M report does not make clear, and thus does not reflect the views of the team members who deployed to Douma, in which case I can only really speak for myself at this stage. The report did not make clear what new findings, facts, information, data or analysis in the fields of witness testimony, toxicology studies, chemical analysis and engineering and or ballistic studies, had resulted in a complete turnaround in the situation from what was understood by the majority of the team and the entire Douma team in July 2018. In my case, I had followed up with a further six months of engineering and ballistics studies into the cylinders, the result of which had provided further support for the view there had not been a chemical attack.

The conclusions of the team on the ground were essentially discarded, while the O.P.C.W put forward the entirely contradictory conclusions of a second team based outside Syria instead. Several of Henderson's colleagues made similar reports regarding the nature of the O.P.C.W's investigation. Significant documentation released through Wikileaks supported these claims and highlighted the deliberate omission and misrepresentation of evidence.

Former Director of Britain's special forces Major General John Holmes, who had headed a panel of nine to hear whistleblower testimony from a senior O.P.C.W scientist in Brussels, said the case for a lack of O.P.C.W transparency in the Douma investigation was “very convincing.” He stressed the possibility that perhaps “the issued report did not reflect the findings on the ground.” The whistleblower, reporting anonymously as 'Alex,' had stated that “most of the Douma team felt the two reports on the incident, the interim and final reports, were procedurally irregular and possibly fraudulent.” Holmes highlighted that 'Alex' “stood there for four-five hours and he had proof of all his allegations,” and that he was “extremely well qualified” for his position and highly convincing. All the documents in the whistleblower report, according to Holmes, contained strong indicators that the O.P.C.W report did not reflect the findings on the ground. He cited as an example the positions of the alleged gas canisters which showed that they could not have been dropped from the air by S.A.A aircraft as the White Helmets and the final O.P.C.W report had claimed. Holmes highlighted that biases and external influences on the O.P.C.W's procedures could lead to the organisation losing credibility, and that it was essential for the organisation to prevent such recurrences for the sake of its reputation.

Former Chief of Staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and retired Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson similarly stressed that the O.P.C.W's conduct in Douma needed to be corrected for the sake of the organisation's future credibility and viability. The investigation, he stated, was "a very convoluted process which produced a good report [the first report exonerated Damascus] and then produced a report that was more politically influenced than it was a report on the facts." He described it as a "tragic mistake," an "egregious situation" and "an attempt to subvert an otherwise pretty sound organisation." Wilkerson noted regarding the O.P.C.W report that it came as part of a broader trend under which the U.S. placed immense pressure on international organisations bias their work in favour of its interests – something he had witnessed firsthand.

He highlighted as an example the efforts leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq to pressure the International Atomic Energy Agency to fall in line with allegations that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons, which was the central pretext for taking military action but went against all available evidence. Another example was the extensive U.S. effort to ensure that from its foundation the International Criminal Court would never prosecute Americans for war crimes. Beyond these two examples Wilkerson stated:"we brought undue pressure on other international organisations to more or less influence them to make decisions that were in line with our policy preferences and in line with our security preferences."

Comparisons between the alleged Douma chemical attack and Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction were made widely, including by former U.N Assistant Secretary-General and U.N Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq Hans von Sponeck. Criticising sensational reporting on the Douma chemical attacks Wilkerson stated:

I saw that some of the claims were preposterous, simply preposterous. When you see a man standing beside a crater, for example, and allege V.X or Sarin was used, you know its preposterous. The man would be dead. I know how effective these kinds of chemical weapons are. And I know also what kind of weapons Syria had in stockpile. We had a dossier on that.... Count me very sceptical on even any use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government in Syria, that's the start point.

Former British ambassador to Syria Peter Ford noted regarding the danger to Western interests posed by revelations that the chemical weapons allegations were false:

It's an embarrassing development for the three powers [U.S., Britain and France] which used the pretext of the Douma incident to bomb Syria in 2018. The whole narrative for the war of Syria would come apart at the seams. It would call into question not only the Douma incident but all the other many incidents that had been cited to allegedly prove that Assad is a butcher who is gassing his people. And the thing about Douma is that it was the one and only occasion when independent international experts were able to go to the alleged site of the alleged incident and actually find out what went on or what didn't go on in this case. … The evidence pointed away from Assad being responsible. It's clear from the latest leaks that the people, the experts who actually went to the site were very unhappy about the way their findings were doctored by other officials of the O.P.C.W, some of whom were working from Turkey and working hand-in-glove with the Western powers.

Ford referred to claims of Syrian Arab Army chemical weapons attacks on civilians as “the crux of the anti-Syria narrative” in the West. He stressed that these allegations were vital to prevent the Syrian government from being seen as the 'good side' in the war whenever evidence emerged that the anti-government insurgency was mainly comprised of Al Qaeda type Islamist groups. Much as was the case with critics of the White Helmets, Western media outlets would harshly attack those journalists, experts and investigators who highlighted the considerable inconsistencies in the allegations being made against the Syrian state.

(For a fuller account by the author of the Syrian War, including all incidents surrounding chemical weapons, atrocity fabrication and Western military intervention, see A. B. Abrams' book World War in Syria: Global Conflict on Middle Eastern Battlefields, Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2021.)

Chapter Ten

Xinjiang and the Sino-U. S. Conflict

Xinjiang Security Challenges and Foreign Involvement

China's westernmost province of Xinjiang has for centuries been home a diversity of ethnic groups including Tibetans, Tajiks, Hui, Han and Uyghur (otherwise Uygur/Uighur) peoples. Rich in natural resources including arable land and fossil fuels, its position bordering eight central and south Asian countries including oil rich Russia and Kazakhstan has made the province an artery for overland energy imports with a key role in China's food and energy security. Xinjiang's secure and expanding pipelines became particularly important in the 2010s as prominent American strategists began to highlight the possibility of cutting China's maritime energy imports via distant blockade to strangle its economy. The province's emergence as a major logistics hub for China's ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (B.R.I) to integrate the economies of Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe only amplified its strategic importance, as it increasingly represented China's door to Eurasia.

The American strategic imperative of preventing Eurasian economic integration, most famously articulated by one of Washington's leading geopolitical strategists Zbigniew Brzezinski, provided a strong motivation for Washington to target B.R.I. The U.S. Senate's Strategic Competition Act of 2021, which allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to creating media content negatively covering B.R.I-associated programs, was one of many consequences, and leveraged various state propaganda tools such as Radio Free Asia which simultaneously received significant funding increases. Xinjiang's position meant American and allied efforts to stifle B.R.I also came to target the province's economy and its stability from the late 2010s, with these efforts escalating the following decade.

Like Tibet before it in the 1950s and 60s (see Chapter 3), U.S. efforts to stir unrest in Xinjiang leveraged the relatively low living standards of the province's Muslim and Turkic Uyghur ethnic minority. Having migrated to China from Central Asia in previous centuries, their nomadic lifestyle fuelled low literacy and education rates and at times caused difficulties integrating into modern society. Many Uyghurs were thus susceptible to Islamic extremism with significant numbers joining U.N-recognised terrorist organisations such as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (E.T.I.M), ^{ii} which later rebranded itself as the Turkistan Islamic Party (T.I.P), as well as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State to fight in multiple jihadist wars overseas. The possibility of expanded terrorist attacks by radicalised Uyghurs, and of the minority's economic status fuelling recruitment to radical groups, had the potential to turn Xinjiang into another Tibet or a Chechnya should radical elements be strengthened sufficiently.

The U.S. and many of its allies, most notably Britain and Turkey, had very long histories of supporting radical Islamist forces in states outside the Western sphere of influence. In Indonesia, for example, the C.I.A had in the 1960s funded and cooperated closely with Islamist elements which launched multiple armed rebellions and assassination attempts on the life of the country's president. Islamists then played a central role in the 1965 Western-backed military coup in the country, and were responsible for a large portion of the killings of suspected communists, the Chinese minority, government supporters and their families. Deaths primarily at the hands of Islamists and the military were estimated at between 500,000 and over 3 million, with the U.S. embassy providing the kill lists used and thereby effectively eliminating opposition to Western interests in Indonesia. This was supported by broadcasts by British intelligence posing as local nationalists urging further killings and further vilifying the politically unfavourable elements which the Islamists were targeting.

In Afghanistan radical Islamist insurgents received several billion dollars' worth of material support from the C.I.A and Britain's M.I 6 from July 1979, with radicals chosen for backing over more moderate anti-government factions. The C.I.A Station Chief in Kabul Graham E. Fuller described the primary recipients of armaments as “nasty” and “ideologically zealous.” Justified on the basis of alleged Afghan and allied Soviet humanitarian abuses, Western intervention strengthened extremist militias over both more moderate factions and the government, moving the country in a more radical direction and paving the way for the rise of Al Qaeda. Similar Western operations to support Islamist jihadist insurgencies have been far from uncommon, and have ranged from planned British and French operations to destabilise Muslim regions of the Soviet Union in the 1940s, to later Western operations in Libya and Syria (see Chapters 8 and 9).

Graham E. Fuller, a key architect of the Afghan insurgency who then served as the C.I.A National Council on Intelligence's deputy director, stated regarding the agency's support for Islamist insurgents in the Russian Caucasus in the 1990s: “The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvellously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilise what remains of Russian power.” The U.S. Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare's director, Yossef Bodansky, detailed the C.I.A's strategy to destabilise Central Asia by using Islamist proxies as follows:

A formal meeting in Azerbaijan in December 1999 in which specific programs for the training and equipping of Mujahedeen from the Caucasus, Central/South Asia and the Arab world were discussed and agreed upon, culminating in Washington's tacit encouragement of both Muslim allies and U.S.'private security companies' … to assist the Chechens and their Islamist allies to surge in the spring of 2000 and sustain the ensuing Jihad for a long time … Islamist Jihad in the Caucasus as a way to deprive Russia of a viable pipeline route through spiralling violence and terrorism.

Russian government agencies claimed to have evidence of contacts between Islamist insurgents and Western intelligence agencies, and in the late 2010s and early 2020s repeatedly claimed that the U.S. was actively supporting the Islamic State and other radical groups in both Syria and Afghanistan. Allegations of U.S. support 3 for jihadists in Syria were made by all non-Western state actors with boots on the ground, and even by Congressmen and Senators in the U.S. itself.

As Western cooperation with Islamist groups expanded, and as Washington's attentions came to focus more on Beijing in the 2010s, the possibility of similar operations targeting Xinjiang only grew. In 2018 former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, noted to this effect that a primary reason for the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan was its proximity to powerful Uyghur Islamist militants in Xinjiang:

If the C.I.A has to mount an operation using those Uyghurs, as [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan has done in Turkey against [Syrian President Bashar Al] Assad, there are 20,000 of them in Idlib in Syria right now for example ... those Uyghurs that Erdogan invited in. Well, the C.I.A would want to destabilise China and that would be the best way to do it. To foment unrest and to join with those Uyghurs in pushing the Han Chinese and Beijing from internal places rather than external.

Wilkerson's assessment was supported by former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who in 2018 strongly implied that Western powers were supporting terrorists in Afghanistan to use the country as a hub for jihadist operations into neighbouring states. Having served as president for 13 years and worked closely with nato states, Karzai recalled regarding the Islamic State (I.S) terror group in Afghanistan: “every day the local people, the local elders, government officials, media and others began to report that unmarked foreign helicopters, would go in and support extremists in all parts of the country … there's a lot of evidence, unfortunately, that shows that these extremist forces are supplied from the foreign bases within Afghanistan.” The only foreign bases in the country belonged to the U.S.-led coalition, with Karzai claiming that support for I.S jihadists was given “for objectives beyond Afghanistan, to cause trouble in the region.” As Afghanistan bordered Xinjiang, ee-rahn, and major Chinese B.R.I partners, a terrorist presence could seriously undermine Western adversaries.

F.B.I whistleblower Sibel Edmonds noted in a 2015 interview to similar effect regarding the cultivation of jihadist elements in Xinjiang:

a lot of these people are taken out [of China] by the operatives, in this case most of the time by the Turks. And they are taken out, they are trained, and then they are armed, and then they are sent back. And there are various areas with porous borders. Even if you look at Afghanistan, especially now that we (nato) have Afghanistan as a kind of base, you can see how easy it is to smuggle these people out – I mean to get them out, train them, militarily train them and arm them, tell them what to do in terms of the next stage of operations, then send them back from the other side going through central Asian Caucuses to Afghanistan and then back to Xinjiang where, lo and behold, some terror events take place and people have no idea – how did they get the guns, how were they trained militarily because Xinjiang is under China's control? Well, they are trained outside. So that is the goal and that is the operation."²⁵

Edmonds predicted that the West would fabricate allegations of humanitarian abuses in Xinjiang and ensure that its media gave the issue considerable attention to fuel anti-Chinese sentiments, just as the U.S. had previously done in Tibet ^{iv} where a similar campaign of training militants outside the country had been pursued from the 1950s.

While the Turkistan Islamic Party was responsible for terror attacks on civilians across the Chinese mainland, its forces were deployed to Syria alongside jihadists from across the Muslim world in the 2010s. There they proved highly effective in combat, using drones and car bombs to take a significant toll on the Syrian Army in early 2020 in particular, and were considered to have exerted a disproportionate influence over the areas occupied and been a major boon to the insurgency due to their ferocity. Turkey had long retained close ties to Islamist groups in Xinjiang, and an estimated 5000 fighters had been recruited from there to join various terror groups in Syria – although some estimates were considerably higher. According to Western reporters on the ground and civilians interviewed, T.I.P militants committed particularly severe atrocities against the local population.

The Uyghur jihadists' bastion in Syria's Idlib governate straddling the Turkish border had been of considerable concern in Beijing, resulting in greater Chinese interest in the Syrian conflict and closer security cooperation and intelligence sharing with Damascus. Other support for counterterror operations was also provided the exact nature of which was not confirmed. Many militants interviewed considered Idlib to be a staging ground and opportunity to gain experience for attacks on China, with one Uyghur jihadist in Syria informing the Associated Press in 2017: “We didn't care how the fighting went or who [Syrian President] Assad was. We just wanted to learn how to use the weapons and then go back to China.” Multiple sources affirmed that this was Uyghur militants' primary goal both in Syria and from operations elsewhere in the world, with Chinese military officials reaching the same conclusion.

As early as October 2012 Chinese Major General Yin Jinan warned that “East Turkestan organisations are taking advantage of the Syrian civil war to obtain experience and raise the profile of Xinjiang among jihadists from other theatres.” A 2016 report by Riyadh-based Al Arabiya similarly observed that the number of Uyghur militants in Syria had grown rapidly over the past year, with their presence concentrated in “the strategic town of Al Shoghur, Ariha, and the highlands of Jabal Al Zawiya” near Turkey as they settled in deserted towns formerly inhabited by religious minorities. Minorities such as the Alawites mentioned by Al Arabiya were frequently massacred by jihadists from the war's outset, with Executive Director of the Middle East Centre for Reporting and Analysis Seth J. Frantzman thus observing that militants in Idlib “spend their time attacking local people and killing minorities,” and that “religious minorities have all been removed from an area that was once diverse.” As early as September 3, 2015, T.I.P-affiliated Uyghur jihadists were observed ethnically cleansing Syrian settlements and colonising them with their families, massacring and otherwise terrorising Syria's Christian, Shiite and Druze minorities, desecrating religious sites and participating in suicide bombings. Fighting for both Al Qaeda and Islamic State, and demonstrating a particular tendency to rely on child soldiers, they established multiple terrorist training camps in Syria

Playing a central role ^{vi} in facilitating Uyghur militants' deployments to Syria, the Turkish government provided forged Turkish documents and directed recruits them to seek the assistance of Turkish embassies if apprehended. Turkish nationals with ties to security services also operated smuggling rings to move recruits out of China. Both Middle Eastern and Chinese sources widely reported that Turkey supplied fake passports to this end, as part of Ankara's wider policy of backing Islamist terror groups fighting against the Syrian government. In Idlib Turkey ensured jihadists could sustain their war with food and supplies, and actively deployed its military to protect them. This went as far as shooting down Syrian aircraft deep inside Syrian airspace without provocation, deploying fighter jets and rocket artillery to provide fire support to terrorists on the ground, and interspersing its special forces among the jihadists as advisors.

It was not uncommon for Syrian personnel captured by these militants to be grotesquely mutilated. nato expressed full solidarity with Turkey's actions, and the U.S. offered to supply ammunition to support Turkish operations alongside jihadists on Syrian soil. Writing for the National Interest in 2019, leading U.S. terrorism expert Professor Robert Rabil described the terror state Turkey was fostering as follows: “Idlib is virtually an Islamic state ruled by the most hardcore of Salafi-jihadis,” and that it “has the largest concentration of hardened and most unyielding Salafi-jihadis. Estimates of their number vary with the median ranges between sixty thousand and ninety thousand.” This was significantly larger than the active military manpower of most countries.

Associate professor at the National Security College, Australian National University, and author of Xinjiang and China's Rise in Central Asia: A History, Michael Clarke, observed: “The apparent linkage of Uyghur militants not only to long-standing sanctuaries in the 'Af-Pak' frontier region but also to the jihadist 'witches brew' of Syria points to an unprecedented transnationalisation of Uyghur terrorism … the danger for Beijing is that some may either return to Xinjiang or seek to influence or recruit others.” The ability of the U.S. and its allies to direct Islamist terror groups against their adversaries was a much prized asset, which was perhaps most clearly seen in Syria where a jihad was created and materially supported against the Western world's oldest state adversary in the Arab world. Terror groups directed to fight in support of nato interests had considerable potential to destabilise countries or regions with significant Muslim populations that were aligned with Beijing including Xinjiang itself.

Beyond Syria several Central, South and Southeast Asian-based Islamist terror groups, many of which had affiliated sister groups in Syria, were joined and influenced by Uyghur militants. A major early terror attack perpetrated by militants from the Chinese minority group was the bombing of a Buddhist shrine in Bangkok in August 2015 which caused 145 civilian casualties – the largest terror attack in Thai history. The militants had been based in Turkey and travelled to Southeast Asia specifically to carry out the attack, allegedly in retaliation for Bangkok's cooperation. with Beijing in counter-terrorism activities and refusal to allow Uyghur Islamists wanted by Chinese authorities to travel to safe haven in Turkey. Further terror attacks led transnational Uyghur militants to be considered “an underexamined Jihadist challenge,” as noted in a 2017 paper by experts from Rand Corporation and the U.S. Army War College. One of the largest attacks occurred on October 8, 2021, and saw Chinese Uyghur jihadists affiliated with E.T.I.M attack an Afghan mosque causing over 100 casualties from the Shiite religious minority. The jihadists slammed the Taliban government's relative tolerance towards the Shiite faith and pledged to slaughter Shiites across the Muslim world. Experts consistently highlighted that while terrorists went after softer targets abroad, there was little doubt that their final goal was “to export the fight back to Xinjiang.”

While targeting local governments, militants also singled out Chinese interests and investments for attacks. An early example was an attack on the Chinese embassy in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek on August 30, 2016 by a suicide bomber, injuring two Kyrgyz security guards and three embassy staff. The Kyrgyz State National Security Committee disclosed that the bomber was a Uyghur and “a member of the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement,” and that an ethnic Uzbek who “underwent training in Syria in carrying out acts of terrorism and sabotage” was suspected of assisting him in making the explosive device and procuring the vehicle used. The Uzbek fled to Istanbul “several hours before the terrorist attack on August 30”. This was hardly an isolated incident, and in 2014 Kyrgyz border guards killed 11 E.T.I.M members near the border with China.

In China itself Uyghur Islamist militants carried out multiple major attacks primarily targeting infrastructure and civilians, including in many cases killings of the Muslim Uyghur civilians who were unsupportive of the jihadist cause. One of the earliest was the bombing of two busses and attempted bombing of a cinema and a residential building by E.T.I.M in the provincial capital of Urumqi in 1992 causing 26 casualties. This was followed by the bombing of three busses in 1997 leaving nine dead and 68 seriously injured by the E.T.I.M-affiliated Uyghur Liberation Party.

A year later six bombs in the city of Qaghiliq, also in Xinjiang, struck economic and industrial targets and the homes and offices of government officials and public security agents. In March 2008 a flight from Urumqi to Beijing was targeted by Uyghur militants, with flammable materials discovered in the plane's toilet, although the attempt was thwarted. A separate attack linked to Xinjiang terror groups targeting the Beijing Olympics was also thwarted that year.

Three further terror attacks on August 4, 10, and 12, 2008, targeted Kashgar, Kuqa and Yamanya respectively, all in Xinjiang, the first of which saw militants in paramilitary uniforms drive a truck into a group of approximately 70 jogging policemen before attacking them with grenades and machetes. Sixteen were killed and several more injured. The second saw seven militants armed with homemade explosives drive cars into government buildings causing at least three casualties. The third saw three security officers killed in a stabbing attack. E.T.I.M was suspected of involvement in all the attacks. In July the following year major riots by radicalised Uyghurs saw at least 197 non-Muslim civilians killed and 1,721 others injured, with government sources reporting that the attacks were planned by the Munich-based and U.S. government funded separatist group the World Uyghur Congress.

More than a dozen further attacks by radicalised Uyghur Islamists over the following decade took a heavy toll on China's civilian population, targeting civilians indiscriminately and in many cases killing dozens at a time. A 2016 study commissioned by the U.S. government highlighted that from 2012 to 2014 attacks in China “apparently became more frequent, more geographically dispersed, and more indiscriminately targeted.” Targets ranged from off-duty coal miners – of whom at least 50 were killed in September 2015 – to commuters at Kunming railway station where knife-wielding militants slaughtered 31 and injured another 140 in March 2014. The Kunming attack was referred to by some analysts as 'China's 9/11,' but was far from outstanding in its severity among the many attacks perpetrated. The most well-known attack was perpetrated on October 28, 2013, when an E.T.I.M suicide attack on Tiananmen Square caused 40 civilian casualties. Security at Tiananmen, which symbolised the heart of the People's Republic of China, had to be stepped up considerably afterwards.

Western reports were notably frequently sympathetic towards the perpetrators of terror attacks in China, with commentaries published that would be unthinkable if Western or Western-aligned countries had been similarly targeted. Terror attacks by E.T.I.M alone between 1997 and 2014 claimed more than 1,000 civilian lives in China and wounded significantly more, while also killing police, causing very extensive damage and forcing the government to divert considerably more resources to internal security. Attacks by other Uyghur militant groups increased the toll further.

Multiple terror attacks, significant Uyghur participation in transnational jihadist campaigns particularly in Syria, growing signs of cooperation between the U.S. and its allies and transnational jihadist groups, and escalating Western efforts to place pressure on China, ultimately led Beijing to respond. From 2017 steps were taken to deradicalise parts of the Uyghur population and better integrate those vulnerable to radicalisation into society. New centres were established to teach Uyghurs in need practical skills which would allow them to better find employment and cope with modern life, and thereby reduce the appeal of criminal activities or terrorism. In light of reports that Uyghurs joining jihadist groups were almost without exception the “unskilled, and uneducated,” provision of education and employment skills was a potentially highly effective means of stemming the terrorist threat. By March 2019 terror attacks and crime had already begun to decline, with the chairman of Xinjiang's regional government Shohrat Zakir announcing that the centres could close completely once their role was fulfilled. Official reports referred to the new faculties as vocational training centres, and while it remained questionable to what extent many Uyghurs had free choice in entering them, there were no indications from any credible sources that they were intended to do anything other than providing such training.

Pakistani Xinjiang analyst Sultan M. Hali, who had spent considerable time across the border in the province and “spoken to Uyghurs and even Pakistanis having Uyghurs spouses, residing in Xinjiang for over three decades," provided perhaps the best description of the intention of training centres as follows:

For ages, the opulent eastern provinces of China had presented a stark contrast with the underdeveloped western provinces, but with the advent of the B.R.I [Belt and Road Initiative] this disparity has been removed. The sense of deprivation of the underprivileged Uyghurs was exploited by China's disparagers to coerce them to insurgency and violent extremism. Progenitors of the propaganda machinery included Uyghurs settled in the Occident using social media to incite Uyghurs in Xinjiang to demand their rights and indulge in violence. Numerous acts of violence erupted in 2009 and since then there have been sporadic incidents.

The Chinese government dealt with the issue in a novel fashion. It decided to remove the sense of deprivation of the Uyghurs by providing them opportunities of better employment, higher education and vocational training so that they could get gainfully employed in the mushroom growth of jobs offered under the B.R.I umbrella.

Chinese efforts mirrored similar deradicalisation programs in Indonesia, France and other countries facing similar issues with terrorism, although due to their very different relationships with the Western world the Indonesian and French programs received entirely different coverage in Western media. The Chinese program saw a metanarrative created around it by Western N.G.O's and media outlets that was very far removed from any verifiable reality on the ground, and was based on highly dubious and in many cases entirely fabricated source materials. As China emerged as an unprecedentedly potent challenger to Western power, this narrative sought to vilify and provide pretext for hostile actions against it.

Western Claims of Concentration Camps and Genocide in Xinjiang

Following the opening of training centres in Xinjiang Western coverage almost immediately portrayed them as concentration camps, consistently using language to strongly imply parallels with the Nazi Holocaust against Europe's minorities and at times comparing them explicitly. The narrative subsequently escalated to claim the centres were tools for genocide, and that Uyghurs were being disappeared, forcibly sterilised and enduring other similar atrocities. These claims relied overwhelmingly on U.S. government-funded anti-China groups dominated by hard-line Uyghur dissidents with Islamist or separatist positions such as the World Uyghur Congress, the Uyghur Human Rights and Democracy Foundation and the Uyghur American Association. These were all heavily funded by the U.S. Congress through the National Endowment for Democracy (N.E.D), which had been closely affiliated with the C.I.A since its foundation and tasked with carrying out overtly what the agency had formerly done alone and more covertly.88 Their reliance on defectors from Xinjiang residing in the West or in Western-aligned countries to fabricate claims of atrocities against China closely mirrored the information campaigns preceding the 2003 Iraq War (see Chapter 6) and that which targeted North Korea over a much longer period (see Chapter 7).

The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (C.H.R.D) was another major source of Xinjiang genocide allegations and was heavily funded by the U.S. Congress through the N.E.D, receiving approximately $500,000 annually. Having spent years campaigning against Beijing and in support of extreme right-wing opposition figures, it was widely cited in Western reports as a credible and impartial source on Xinjiang. C.H.R.D listed its address as the Washington D.C. office of Human Rights Watch on its tax forms, which also had longstanding ties to Western intelligence agencies, and which had played a central role in promoting many of the fabricated atrocities covered throughout this work against previous targets such as Iraq.

C.H.R D itself relied very heavily in its coverage of Xinjiang on citing Radio Free Asia (R.F.A) – a U.S. state-funded media outlet which the New York Times itself referred to as a “C.I.A broadcasting venture.” It had a long history of producing particularly ludicrous fabricated stories to vilify Western adversaries (see Chapter 7). Beyond R.F.A, C.H.R.D's sources included the World Uyghur Congress, the International Uyghur Human Rights and Democracy Foundation and the Uyghur American Association, all of which were funded by the U.S. government. These groups played comparable roles to that of the Iraqi National Congress leading up to the Iraq War and were similarly comprised of defectors dependant on Western patronage and aligned with Western interests seeking to promote policies that would undermine the governments of their home countries. World Uyghur Congress Chairman Omer Kanat was notably a former Radio Free Asia employee, and both Washington funded organisations played similar roles with Kanat's new job having a more specific focus on Xinjiang.

Other than U.S. government-funded groups, the only widely cited source for Western reports claiming Chinese abuses in Xinjiang was the German scholar Adrian Zenz. Based on inference and second-hand data, Zenz claimed in 2019 to have found that 1.5 million Uyghurs had been imprisoned in concentration camps, which he followed in 2021 with a claim that China was carrying out genocide. Although hailed by multiple Western media outlets as a “world leading expert” on Xinjiang and “the go to source” on the issue, as the B.B.C referred to him, Zenz's credibility was highly questionable. He had taught exclusively in evangelical theological institutions and never at mainstream universities, ^{viii} and his reports on Xinjiang, although very widely cited by Western media outlets and N.G.O's, were not published in peer-reviewed journals overseen by academic institutions. Other significant red flags raised by Zenz's work indicated that it was something other than honest and transparent scholarship. One was that while academic papers required funding sources to be listed, those details were missing from his publications. Another was that while the research relied heavily on Chinese language sources, and as Zenz could not read Chinese, there was likely a team of unidentified people involved in writing his papers despite his being listed as the sole author.

Zenz was notably an independent contractor and senior fellow in China studies with the U.S.-government-funded Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation V.C.M.F, a far-right nonprofit with a long history of controversy particularly over its claims of crimes committed by socialist countries. Its sources for such claims were often guilty of serious data manipulation. The organisation long equated communism with the Nazi Holocaust and claimed 100 million deaths had resulted from the ideology – a figure which received negligible recognition from credible historians and had a very questionable methodology behind it. V.C.M.F's claims were considered highly dubious by most moderate conservatives and anti-communists, and Zenz' membership alone arguably excluded him as a credible impartial source on China.

Zenz himself showed strong signs of being a religious extremist who saw his work as a crusade against the leading challenger to Western global hegemony, ^{ix} stating to this effect regarding his work on Xinjiang: “I feel very clearly led by God to do this. I'm not afraid to say that.... With Xinjiang, things really changed. It became like a mission, or a ministry.” Before his work on China, Zenz had authored the book Worthy to Escape: Why All Believers Will Not Be Raptured Before the Tribulation in which he referred to gender equality as a “satanic campaign,” and framed anti-hate crime legislation and tolerance thinking as conspiracies driven by the “leopard-like power behind the antichrist.” He also decried that “rising numbers of countries are banning all forms of physical punishment of children, the primary scriptural method for instilling respect for authority in the young generation and protecting them from rebellious tendencies,” assuring readers that “true scriptural spanking is loving discipline and not violence.” All opposition and contradiction to Christian teachings, according to Zenz, were satanic.

Christian extremists had long viewed the perpetuation of Western hegemony over the world as a holy mission – particularly when Western power was challenged by Asiatic communist countries – and Zenz thus had a strong motive to ensure his work was as damaging to China as possible. While such radical sources would usually face dismissal or ridicule, usual standards were largely forgotten as the Western world came to perceive an increasingly imminent threat to its hegemony from China's rise.

Mirroring campaigns targeting North Korea, emotional but highly inconsistent female defector testimonies formed an important part of efforts to sway world opinion against the Chinese government over alleged abuses Xinjiang. The most notable example was Tursunay Ziawudun, presented in the West as a concentration camp survivor, who gained significant publicity and support from the B.B.C, R.F.A and C.N.N in particular. Much like prominent North Korean defectors her narrative changed drastically over time with later versions becoming more extreme and widely deviating from the originals. Speaking to the B.B.C in February 2021 she alleged that female detainees in the alleged Chinese “concentration camps” were removed from the cells “every night” and raped by masked Chinese men, and that she was tortured, gang-raped and had her genitals electrocuted. “Their goal is to destroy everyone,” she stressed. The B.B.C cited Adrian Zenz to corroborate her claim. These extreme claims not only lacked corroboration by credible sources, but sharply contradicted Ziawudun's first testimony in 2017 when she said regarding her time in the same centre: “To be honest, it wasn't that bad. We had our phones.

We had meals in the canteens. Other than being forced to stay there, everything was fine.” She stated the following year: “I wasn't beaten or abused. The hardest part was mental.”

Further doubts regarding Tursunay's claims surfaced when a C.N.N report, which showed her passport I.D page, censored the renewal date. The original image revealed not only that supposed victims of genocide held in concentration camps could be issued passports, but also that her passport had been renewed during the time she said she was in such a camp. This was speculated to be the reason why C.N.N censored the date. Ziawudun's role drew significant parallels to that of Park Yeonmi for the campaign against North Korea, although she gained considerably less publicity and was less effectively promoted.

Arslan Hidayat, another prominent Uyghur defector activist who sported an Islamist-style beard, was one of the top sources of information on Xinjiang for many in English speakers. His work proved little more reliable than that of Tursunay or his counterparts from North Korea, however, as exposed in multiple interviews. When confronted over a picture of a girl crying at a nursery, for example, which he published with a caption claiming she was a Uyghur forcibly separated from her parents by the Chinese government, Hidayat conceded that this was fake and that such falsifications were common among anti-China activists. This kind of misrepresentation of photos or footage by activists and Western media outlets was far from unusual, a notable other example being a video posted on social media by a social worker in Xinjiang of herself crying with her daughter. They could only talk from a distance and could only see each other for a short time and were separated due to COVID-19 restrictions as attested to by the woman who posted it herself. The video was widely circulated on the internet with captions claiming the crying woman was being taken from her daughter to a concentration camp.

When Hidayat was confronted over his claim that China was forcibly shaving the heads of Uyghur women to sell their hair as part of a 1.8 billion scheme – due to a lack of evidence or any signs of bald Uyghur women in the province – he said his source had been Radio Free Asia. To amount to sales of 1.8 billion, the 13 tons of hair said to have been forcibly collected would have needed to sell for 8,000 for each single head of hair. It was yet another ludicrous claim by the U.S. state-funded media outlet which became part of the Xinjiang metanarrative in the West. Like many similar claims against Chinese authorities in Xinjiang, this story was echoed by leading figures in the U.S. foreign policy establishment. A prominent example in this case was military analyst at the C.I.A's Strategic Assessment Group and Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council Matthew Kroenig, a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, who repeated the impossible claim.

Hidayat and other anti-China activists widely claimed that the Uyghur language had been banned in public places, which was frequently repeated in Western reporting. This starkly contradicted footage and testimony from foreign visitors to the province that the Uyghur language could be widely heard and that everything from street signs to restaurant menus and I.D cards were written in it. When confronted over this Hidayat's answer was highly insightful, claiming that such footage and accounts were entirely staged and the local population were being taught to read, write and speak in their allegedly banned language in case tourists showed up. This somewhat absurd line of argument used to justify stark discrepancies between what could be seen on the ground, and what the West and various activists claimed, was far from unique to Xinjiang. A better-known example was North Korea where it was often claimed by Western sources that hundreds of seemingly well fed, smiling and prosperous people in modern buildings were staging their activities for foreigners, that their buildings were showpieces (plastic cutouts, empty inside, or something similar) and that they were secretly starving and suffering immensely behind closed doors. The fact that this narrative was considered believable by many, particularly for Korea but also for Xinjiang, was a testament to the power Western metanarratives had.

Alongside U.S. government funded media outlets and organisations and Adrian Zenz, Western claims regarding Xinjiang also relied on misrepresented footage of the province. Perhaps the most notable was drone footage which emerged in September 2019 which it was claimed showed hundreds of concentration camp prisoners chained and blindfolded in a railway marshalling yard, which was allegedly taken by activists in August. The footage was widely cited by Western news outlets and political figures as evidence of ongoing genocide. There was no evidence that the prisoners were from a select ethnic group, and a closer look at the images showed that their hoods read 'Kashi Detention House' – a criminal detention facility which had nothing to do with Uyghurs or the government's education centres. Indeed, the treatment and level of security shown strongly contrasted the known conditions in the centres. A zoomed-out image revealed that the number of prisoners was much smaller than the impression given by the screenshots or clips used in Western reports. As the footage was consistently mislabelled in the West, the Auschwitz Museum in Poland was among the many Western sources to heighten the perception of genocidal intent by publishing corresponding photographs of Jews being forced onto trains before being sent to death camps.

A second image which came to characterise the Western narrative on Xinjiang was a photograph of men in prison uniforms sitting in rows. Taken from the Xinjiang Judicial Administration's WeChat social media page, the WeChat logo was notably cut off in all major Western uses of the image which required cropping out the hands of the front row of prisoners. The B.B.C was the first to do this, while others then used the cropped image provided by the B.B.C. The photograph – dubbed by some the “world's most misused photo” – became the West's poster image for the alleged Chinese atrocities. It was accordingly used the cover for hundreds of articles on “concentration camps” and “genocide,” and even as the cover image for the Wikipedia page on “Uyghur genocide.” Looking to the original WeChat post, other photos of the same event from different angles showed that the number of prisoners was far smaller than the first angle chosen by the B.B.C made it appear, and that they were attending a lecture on prisoner reform. This could be seen from the slogans on the front stage as well as the original captions. The images had been taken in a regular prison in the spring of 2017 and had nothing to do with the education centres. Much like the 'tank man' footage outside Tiananmen square (see Chapter 3), Western sources again picked a particular image and misrepresented it to support a fabricated narrative.

The metanarrative surrounding Xinjiang grew increasingly extreme from late 2017 as Sino-U.S. tensions were escalating under the Donald Trump administration, and from that time into early 2018 claims by Western sources for the number of Uyghurs forced into concentration camps ranged from 120,000 to one million. These figures consistently relied on Radio Free Asia as a source, which itself cited anonymous sources for its claim as it consistently had for multiple fabricated stories in the past. The narrative later escalated portray the entire Uyghur population being held under suspicion, and a much larger proportion being forced into camps. The term 'genocide' simultaneously fast became increasingly widely used.

The one million figure was based on a single report by Istiqlal T.V, a media organisation run by anti-Beijing Uyghur exiles based in Turkey which advocated jihad against the Chinese state to turn Xinjiang into an 'Uyghuristan' or 'East Turkistan.' The station frequently hosted terrorist figures including the leader of the U.N-listed terrorist organisation E.T.I.M, Abdulkadir Yapuquan, who was a regular guest. As the Los Angeles Times noted, when Istiqlal T.V hosted Yapuquan “his interviews often extended into hours-long emotional tirades against China.” The channel's background made the widespread use of Istiqlal T.V's figures in the West, and its treatment as a credible source, all the more remarkable.

Radio Free Asia subsequently trumped Istiqlal T.V's numbers in May 2018 to become the first major source to claim a figure of 3 million Uyghurs held in concentration camps, which was widely echoed by others now citing the U.S.-government funded outlet as their source. Western media outlets began to claim a figure of 1.5 million in the second quarter of 2019 based on an estimate by Adrian Zenz, who subsequently claimed an increased figure of 1.8 million in November 2019. The U.S. Defence Department formally accused China of “mass imprisonment of Chinese Muslims in concentration camps” in May 2019. Even larger figures would later be cited by Western activists and journalists, with Australian journalist C.J Werleman claiming “5 million Uyghur Muslims are being detained tortured and killed” in October 2020. He claimed the following month that “upwards of 6 million” were in concentration camps and subjected to “heinous and vicious” treatment by the state.

An Associated Press report in June 2020 took these claims further, accusing the Chinese government of:

taking draconian measures to slash birth rates among

Uighurs and other minorities as part of a sweeping campaign to curb its Muslim population. … The campa- ign over the past four years in the far west region of

Xinjiang is leading to what some experts are calling a form of 'demographic genocide.' … Having too many children is a major reason people are sent to detention camps, the A.P found, with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines. Police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.

It quoted Uyghur defectors residing overseas who claimed:"They want to destroy us as a people." Alongside the defectors, many of whom were based in Turkey, the report also relied heavily on the assessments of Adrian Zenz. It cited China experts from Britain and the U.S. referring to the policy as"genocide, full stop … slow, painful, creeping genocide … direct means of genetically reducing the Uighur population."

Although Western sources widely claimed China was ster- ilising Uyghurs and encouraging migration by the Han majority ethnic group to colonise Xinjiang, official figures showed that the Uyghur population grew by 25.04 percent from 2010 to 2018 alone. This represented an increase of 2.55 million, up from 10.17 million to 12.72 million, which was a much higher growth rate than average for Xinjiang's population at 13.99 percent, as well as being higher than that of all ethnic minority groups. The Han population's growth, by contrast, was just two percent. Data in

Adrian Zenz's own reports showed that the Uyghur population almost doubled from 1985 to 2018 while the Han majority popu- lation fell substantially from 2015 to 2018.

The Uyghurs, as with all 55 minority groups, had been exempted from China's one child policy, with families of half a dozen or more being far from unheard of as a result. Although fertility rates were far above average among China's Muslim minorities, by the 2010s they were falling for all ethnic groups as living standards improved and the economy modernised. This represented part of a globally observable trend towards families having fewer children as countries became more affluent. As medical statistician at St. Luke's International University in Japan, Professor Stuart Gilmour, was one of many to observe, Western allegations of genocide and mass sterilisation relied on “present [ing] the benefits of birth control strategies as genocide,” highlighting that fertility rates were falling across much of the world. “Is every country in Asia conducting genocide on its own people?,” he posited, pointing to similar and in many cases more drastic falls in birth rates across the continent to show how this widely occurring phenomenon was being totally misrepresented to further the narrative of abuses in Xinjiang.

In September 2020 an open letter addressed to China's ambassador to London, signed by more than 120 British members of parliament and peers from multiple political parties, accused China of a “systematic and calculated programme of ethnic cleansing.” It referred to “sickening” misconduct and “truly chilling” behaviour, likening it to the Nazi German Holocaust. The letter cited the aforementioned railway station drone footage of Kashi Detention House prisoners, which was passed off as footage of Uyghur concentration camp victims, as evidence for their claim. Parliament passed a non-binding motion seven months later accusing China of committing genocide, although this was not supported by the British government itself.

In November 2020 Britain's Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott condemned the “massacres of Muslims in Uyghur” on Twitter, although having set her account to disallow replies no one could point out to her that “Uyghur” was not a place. Her claim was met with widespread surprise, as even Western human rights N.G.O's and media outlets hadn't yet claimed there were massacres. This placed Abbott ahead of the curve in the campaign of escalating claims. Based on patterns set by prior Western atrocity fabrication efforts, future allegations of massacres and well-hidden mass graves in Xinjiang remained a significant possibility, and as Western claims grew increasingly extreme, they were a natural next step after allegations of concentration camps, forced sterilisation and state sanctioned rapes.

The Western Campaign Escalates

Despite being a major Al Qaeda affiliate, and having committed multiple widely recognised atrocities against civilians, the East Turkistan Islamic Party's designation as a terrorist organisation was rescinded by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in November 2020.× This potentially paved the way for more overt support and cooperation as part of a broader campaign targeting China.¹²⁹ Sofyan Tsauri, a former member of Al Qaeda in Southeast Asia, was one of many who highlighted that this could signify that the “U.S. was considering rallying radical groups to fight China.” “The U.S. used Muslims to fight against Russia … and later eliminated [them]. Is this same formula going to be used against China?” he posited, noting that radical jihadist groups were often supported and provoked to wage wars in ways that furthered Western geopolitical objectives. Chinese state media claimed that E.T.I.M's delisting was part of a broader campaign in the West to whitewash the terror group and reframe its history of relations with Al Qaeda.

On January 19, 2021, Secretary Pompeo, as arguably the most hardline anti-Beijing senior official in Washington, formally accused China of genocide against the Uyghur population. This was his last major act in office, and came three months after the introduction of a Senate resolution in October accusing China of genocide. Pompeo cited Adrian Zenz by name as well as his paper alleging forced sterilisation ^{xi} as the basis for his allegations. Like Zenz, Pompeo was seen to “blend policy and belief” and professed that God “informs everything I do” – indicating that this was particularly the case in foreign policy. He had a history of espousing religious nationalism which particularly influenced his positions towards both China ^{xii} and Muslim actors.

The Joe Biden administration, inaugurated on January 20 just one day after Pompeo's genocide allegation, quickly reaffirmed the statement. The State Department's Office of the Legal Advisor, however, concluded the following month that there was insufficient evidence to prove genocide. Nevertheless, on February 23 and 26 the Canadian and Dutch parliaments respectively followed Washington's lead and formally accused Beijing of committing genocide against the Uyghur minority. Alongside the Donald Trump administration these had been among the Western governments to take the most hardline positions against China, with others widely reported to be planning to follow suit.

From March 2021 leading Western media outlets very widely cited a report from the Newlines Institute titled: “The Uyghur Genocide: An Examination of China's Breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention.” It was hailed as a “landmark” and the “first independent report” to determine that China “bears State responsibility for committing genocide against the Uyghurs,” and accused Beijing of having violated “each and every act” of the U.N convention against genocide. Former U.S. ambassador to the U.N Samantha Power, a longstanding leading proponent of global jurisdiction for Western humanitarian military intervention, cited the report claiming: “This report shows how this [genocide] is precisely what China is doing with the Uyghurs.” Similar claims were made by leading policy hawks across the Western world.

While the Newlines Institute was portrayed as being an independent and non-partisan source, closer examination showed that its credibility was highly questionable. Published on March 8, its report was very similar to one by the U.S. government-funded World Uyghur Congress less than a month prior. It was financed by the Newlines Institute's parent organisation the Fairfax University of America, an institution of very poor repute which state regulators had moved to shut down in 2019 after finding “teachers weren't qualified to teach their assigned courses,” “patently deficient” academic quality and “rampant” plagiarism that was ignored. At the time the report was published, Fairfax's license was in jeopardy of being revoked after an advisory board to the Department of Education recommended terminating recognition of the university's accreditor. It was considered a “visa mill” for international students rather than a legitimate university, with only 1 to 3 percent of its students coming from North America.

Much like Zenz's work, the Newlines Institute notably avoided consulting a wide range of authorities or academic experts or subjecting its study to peer review and instead relied entirely on "a narrowly focused community of like-minded ideologues" – as some analysts referred to it. The report was described by U.S. analysts as having “restricted its survey to a narrow range of deeply flawed pseudo-scholarship along with reports by U.S. government-backed lobbying fronts for the exiled Uyghur separatist movement.” Its primary sources other than Adrian Zenz were Radio Free Asia and the World Uyghur Congress, both of which were funded by the U.S. government.

The report's principal author, Yonah Diamond, had for months been a leading advocate of a hardline approach by the Western world towards China. He previously deemed the United Nations to be “beholden to the Chinese government” and was outspoken in calling for unilateral American action to “punish” Beijing. The Newlines Institute itself was also a longstanding advocate for the assertion of Western power to combat almost all major Western adversaries – each one using humanitarian pretexts – using sanctions and other means to support the overthrow of governments in Syria, Venezuela, ee-rahn, and Russia among others. The paper's signatories, hailed as experts, were primarily Newlines Institute members and members of the hawkish InterParliamentary Alliance on China which was another grouping known for taking particularly aggressive positions against Beijing.

Considerable funding and attention were being devoted in Washington towards supporting the Xinjiang narrative and funding overseas anti-Beijing Uyghur groups, with U.S. and other Western media outlets allocating significant airtime and column space to the issue. This reflected the importance this narrative played in the broader Western campaign against China, and contributed to defining the East Asian challenger to Western hegemony as an ultimate other and as the enemy of the time.

In the second week of August 2018 major Western media outlets published articles claiming that the United Nations had reported China was holding one million Uyghurs in concentration camps. While the claim appeared to lend unprecedented credibility to the Western narrative, subsequent assessments revealed them to be a result of serious misrepresentation of facts. A spokesperson from the U.N Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Julia Gronnevet, confirmed that the allegation was not made by the United Nations in any capacity. It had been made only by a single member of an independent committee who had authority to speak neither for the U.N as a whole nor even for the committee itself. That member was the only American on the committee and had no background of scholarship or research on China.

The report on the purported U.N claim was first made by London-based Reuters on August 10 in an article titled “U.N. says it has credible reports that China holds million Uighurs in secret camps,” and this was then quickly re-reported by every major Western media outlet. While Reuters' headline attributed the claim to the United Nations, the body of its article ascribed it more specifically to the U.N Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The committee itself made clear on its own website that it was “a body of independent experts” neither comprised of U.N officials nor representing the U.N. The article was thus highly misleading and the words “U.N. says” an outright misrepresentation.

The subsequent official news release from the O.H.C.H.R on the committee's presentation highlighted that only its sole American member, Gay McDougall, had made any mention of"camps" in China with no other members indicating they supported this claim. The Associated Press subsequently reported that McDougall"did not specify a source for that information in her remarks at the hearing," with a video of the session confirming that she provided no evidence and cited no sources. As was often the case when covering Xinjiang, Western media was portraying a Western position isolated from the wider world, and in this case the isolated position of only the United States on an international panel, as reflecting the position of the international community when this was very far from the case.

American journalists Ben Norton and Ajit Singh themselves concluded after investigating Reuters' claim that "one American member of an independent U.N body made a provocative claim that China was interning 1 million Muslims but failed to provide a single named source. And Reuters and the Western corporate media ran with it anyway, attributing the unsubstantiated allegations of one U.S. individual to the U.N as a whole." The O.H.C.H.R, they stated, had “acknowledged that the comments by McDougall, the lone American member of an independent committee, were not representative of any finding by the U.N as a whole. The report by Reuters is simply false.”

Much as the U.S. government and various Western N.G.O's and think tanks had previously shown often grainy images of buildings as supposed evidence of both Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and North Korean political prison camps, so too were such images presented as sites built for the state's genocide in Xinjiang. These images often turned out to be all kinds of buildings such as apartment complexes, many of which had little connection with the government. The Australian Defence Department-funded defence think tank, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute A.S.P.I, was responsible for a disproportionate number of these claims which went on to be widely re-reported. Chinese media outlets responded by revealing images from the ground of the areas photographed debunking supposed satellite evidence of detention centres. For example, a “4th level detention centre with a well and a watchtower” turned out to be a gerocomium. A “1st level re-education camp” turned out to be a logistics park, and two “1st level detention centres” turned out to be an elementary and middle school. From the air, however, one could claim they were just about anything. Images of elderly Xinjiang residents receiving medical care were similarly cited by Adrian Zenz as evidence of forced birth control in Xinjiang – although there was nothing in the photo to indicate that nor did any of the couples pictured appear to be of childbearing age.

Western allegations of genocide and widespread abuses in Xinjiang were not only contradicted by visiting delegations from across the non-Western world, but also by Western and other foreigners on the ground in China. Much like the aforementioned allegations against North Korea, Western claims of atrocities in Xinjiang relied heavily on widespread ignorance to appear at all credible. Former London Metropolitan Police officer Jerry Grey, who spent much time travelling Xinjiang, recalled regarding how Western allegations were totally at odds with his firsthand observations:

This is absolute rubbish – there are not a million Uighurs in concentration camps, that is just total baloney. . . . The Uyghurs that we spoke to didn't seem to have a problem. Remember, there are 11 to 12 million Uyghurs there. There is absolutely no evidence, no real evidence, to suggest that one million of them are in camps.... We went to a restaurant, where they had dancers. This was not a tourist restaurant – this was just a normal restaurant. They sing and they dance.

That's what Uyghurs tend to do when they are having fun. I heard and saw the language is very much alive.⁹⁹ People speak their local language. And every shop, every menu, every restaurant has their local language written there, so when I read that the local language was being destroyed, I disagree with that.¹⁵⁷

“Xinjiang looks good. Safe, secure and all the people I spoke with seem happy about it,” Grey concluded.” Pre-empting a common Western argument used to discredit observers who contradicted narratives against a Western adversary, namely that that adversary had carefully staged whatever the observer saw, he asserted:

If anyone thinks I am telling a lie, please come over here and show me what it is that you see ... to indicate this kind of treatment is going on. Because I didn't see it, I saw no evidence of it and, while I saw huge security presence, I was free to travel anywhere, take pictures of anything and had no restrictions placed on me. No policeman has ever said to me, 'Can I see your camera, can I see what pictures you've got?' In other words, they are not afraid of me taking photographs of anything that I see. If they were afraid, they would stop me going there first – if I did go there without permission, they would want to see my photographs, nobody ever did. That tells they are not trying to hide anything.

Canadian businessman and analyst of Chinese politics Daniel Dumbrill, who resided in China for over a decade, noted to similar effect:

We're expected to believe that the population of Uyghurs is being eradicated. It's a ridiculous statement whether it is in a literal sense or even a cultural sense. Uyghurs in China have been growing faster than the majority Han Chinese in part because they weren't subject to the one-child policy, they have 20,000 mosques built, ^{xiv} their script is written on the national currency, [something he later noted Canada didn't do for its indigenous people], the biggest star in China is a Uyghur woman who was recently signed on by L.V [Louis Vuitton] as their brand ambassador, where Uyghur children can get into top universities easier than Han Chinese and have halal foods prepared for them in canteens and they have prayer areas on campus.

Western media outlets consistently harshly criticised expatriates living in China, many of whom visited Xinjiang, who denounced Western claims of genocide. The B.B.C, for one, equated such questioning of the Western narrative with “spreading Communist Party disinformation" and strongly implied the need for policing to restrict such expats' reach on YouTube and other social media platforms.

Even some dedicated critics of the Chinese government and its policies conceded that Western reporting and the work of hardline activists did not reflect reality on the ground. Founder of the Xinjiang Victims Database in 2018 Gene Bunin, for example, noted regarding the B.B.C's reporting:"You cannot write a news story claiming systematic rape based on three eyewitness accounts, not all of whom are reliable.... You just can't and the B.B.C should know better. Take that from someone who's been dealing with testimonies 24/7 for the past two years now." Ma Haiyun, an associate professor of history at Frostburg State University in Maryland and member of China's Hui Muslim minority with a long family history of fighting the Chinese government, similarly noted regarding the hysteria generated around the Xinjiang issue and the resulting inability to question the Western narrative:"In the current political climate, if you publicly state that there is no genocide in Xinjiang, it will affect your reputation to the point where if I said this, half of my friends would cut me off.""This labelling of the situation in Xinjiang as a genocide, it's all tied to geopolitics, it's all because of U.S.-China tensions," he concluded. Ma's claims corroborated widespread observations regarding an anti-China hysteria which gripped the Western world and led to almost any alleged Chinese atrocity, no matter how ludicrous or thinly evidenced, being portrayed as credible if not above question.

Philip J. Cunningham, a Niemen Fellow at Harvard University, Knight Fellow and Fulbright Scholar, was one of many to observe that Western media was:

complicit in the silencing and outright ridicule of views that don't comport with the flavour-of-the-month trends coming out of the corridors of power. Take Xinjiang, for example. The dominant narrative at the moment is that China is committing genocide in Xinjiang. … Is it not worth considering the possibility that the freighted

term 'genocide' is being bandied about to inflict maximum pain on China, rather than to reflect an honest assessment of the situation on the ground?

Observing “the juxtaposition of trains and work camps [to] evoke powerful emotions in the West,” Cunningham highlighted efforts to evoke the memory of the Holocaust. “To date, the strongest accusations come from N.G.O's and researchers who wear the anti-China agenda on their sleeve.… Their accusations, some quite horrific, are based on zero access and anecdotal information. The incompleteness of their research leaves no choice but to extrapolate. Some of the dots connect, some don't,” he noted. Comparing the situation to the 2003 Iraq War, he highlighted that the U.S. and Britain had used “a crock of lies, half-truths and half-baked speculation” to provide pretext for their invasion – which “had the ring of truth, the imprimatur of respected agencies and elite analysts and, while they didn't present a slam-dunk case, it was presented as such in the media.” He observed that there was effectively a witch hunt against scholars who challenged the allegations made against China, and that there was a prevailing “fear of a backlash for challenging the dominant narrative of the day.” He cited China researcher Jane Golley from Australia National University who had said scholars chose to remain anonymous when challenging the Western narrative precisely for this reason – because they were afraid.

Echoing the observations of Cunningham and Golley regarding how Western populations were deterred from questioning key narratives, Daniel Dumbrill observed in a viral video in March 2021:

People are also frightened out of asking questions. I want to give you a personal example of that. My father … in an academic theology forum he contributes towards, he asked the question whether we should be concerned about the intentions behind the [Western] narrative and if it really is in the best interests of the Uyghur population or if it's being used to satisfy some sort of Western imperialistic agenda. His question was, how do we support the Uyghurs and how do we help them without being used as a tool. With this mild statement in mind, my father was labelled a genocide denier. Not even in a theology forum, full of academics, was he allowed to ask a question or to even question the intentions. ... Now take that one step further, imagine someone who actually is sceptical of the whole narrative and are seeing these massive red flags.

There's no room for them in society to talk about it. Consent is being manufactured scaring people into a specific narrative... we didn't learn from the problematic phrase used by George Bush during that time –'you're either with us or against us.' There's no room to question the narrative. You can't stand in the middle while trying to figure things out.

This was hardly unique to commentary concerning Xinjiang, with the political culture in the West leading to widespread self-censorship particularly over claims of atrocities or national security threats. Taking the media response to fabricated claims surrounding the Iraq War as an example, Columnist Norman Solomon observed: “In contrast to state censorship, which is usually easy to recognise, self-censorship by journalists is rarely out in the open. In the highly competitive media environment, you don't need to be a rocket scientist or social scientist to know that dissent does not boost careers.... The rewards of going along to get along are clear. So are the hazards of failure to toe the line.” Surveys repeatedly highlighted that despite rising doubts regarding the veracity of claims against Iraq, no leading U.S. outlets expressed significant disagreement and differed only on the means or urgency for disarming or overthrowing the Iraqi government. The penalty for doing more could be severe. This closely mirrored the case for the Xinjiang narrative.

Dumbrill observed that as a direct consequence of the lack of discourse and the inability to question claims of Chinese atrocities, Western populations widely supported more hardline positions against China ranging from sending warships close to its coasts to installing Western missiles across East Asia. He stressed a significant conflict of interest as weapons producers played key roles in financing anti-China narratives, the leading example being Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing and others' funding of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which resulted in public support for military pressure on Beijing. Dumbrill further observed the irony that Western weapons producers funding such narratives relied on exploited prison labour in the U.S. to make their components, which was much closer to slave labour than anything found in Xinjiang.

U.S. journalist Max Blumenthal noted to similar effect regarding the Western narrative on Xinjiang, and the pressure not to question the narratives put out by Adrian Zenz in particular: “Within the academic world there's a lot of pressure and censorship and self-censorship. If you speak out about this, you will pay a price. You speak out about this in media, and you will pay a price. … It's pretty obvious that people get in hot water for questioning Zenz.” Tweets highlighting inconsistencies in Zenz's stories were notably erased on many occasions, and those who opposed the Western narrative to which Zenz was central were at risk of being labelled 'genocide deniers' and equated with deniers of the Holocaust.

Using language and imagery to associate Xinjiang with the European Holocaust was widespread in the West. As Quartz magazine noted in August 2020, drawing parallels to the Holocaust played an important role in the media campaign and “helped stimulate global awareness and discussion over the Xinjiang issue”—much as had been done in multiple aforementioned cases of Western atrocity fabrication from Yugoslavia to Iraq. Historian at Georgetown University James Millward, for example, alluded to “Beijing's attempt to find a final solution to the Xinjiang problem … those of us who are students of history know what that means”—a close allusion to Nazi Germany's “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” “We may see mass murder,” Millward added, stressing that while China had only stopped short of “gassing Uighurs” in camps so far it could take things further in future.

Allusions to China as a “new Nazi Germany” were increasingly echoed by Western politicians from 2020, ^{xv} which was consistent with prior Western atrocity fabrication efforts spanning over half a century.

A Turning Point in Western Isolation from the International Community

One of the key objectives of Western efforts to fabricate the narrative of a Chinese genocide was to turn global opinion against Beijing and unite the international community behind the West in its confrontation with China. Because similar efforts to use atrocity fabrication had been internationally successful in the past against targets ranging from Yugoslavia and (1980s) Afghanistan to North Korea and Libya, the failure of the new campaign against China to gain traction outside the Western world was widely met with surprise. Calls from Western governments, activists and media outlets for the world and Muslim countries in particular to fall in behind the West in criticising and taking a hard line against China were consistently met only with silence, leaving the West alone in making its tenuous claims of Chinese abuses. As an assessment by the Jamestown Foundation observed in May 2019: “Amid mounting Western criticism of China's handling of its minorities in Xinjiang, especially over the last couple years, there has been a puzzling lack of outcry from the larger Muslim world.” C.N.N observed weeks later that Muslim countries' support for Chinese policies in Xinjiang were “shattering any myths of Islamic solidarity. The lack of anti-Chinese statements from Muslim governments, even those aligned with Western interests such as Brunei and Saudi Arabia, and the fact that many of these actually voiced support for Beijing and its deradicalisation program, was in many ways unprecedented considering the enormity of the Western campaign.

While lack of support from Muslim states for the Western narrative on Xinjiang was widely cited in the West as a sign of lacking “Islamic solidarity” and a disappointment, this was based on the assumption that this narrative was itself at all credible. What it instead appeared to reflect was the lack of credibility the West had when claiming atrocities were being committed by whichever country was at the time its target – a trend that had become particularly apparent over the past three decades. The governments of Muslim countries could well have been more aware of the magnitude of the West's history of atrocity fabrication and other false allegations because it was very often Muslim states that were targeted.

While many Muslim individuals were taken in by Western claims of an ongoing genocide, for government officials with even a modicum of political education such claims could well be viewed highly suspiciously. From Nayirah and the Kuwaiti babies in incubators to Iraqi human shredders and Syrian chemical attacks, preceding Western fabrications left the credibility among Muslim statesmen of Western claims of its adversaries' atrocities extremely questionable. Governments in Muslim-majority states instead consistently voiced only support for China's position.

On an official visit to China in February 2019 Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman stated regarding deradicalisation policies in Xinjiang:"We respect and support China's rights to take counter-terrorism and de-extremism measures to safeguard national security." Bin-Salman issued a similar statement in March 2021 both supporting Beijing's policies in Xinjiang and opposing Western efforts to create a wedge between China and the Islamic world. This was a particularly heavy blow to Western efforts to spark global outrage against and alienate the world from China, with Saudi Arabia considered the centre of Sunni Islam and the custodian of its holiest sites as well as a usually dependable Western client state. Riyadh's position was framed in Western media as the kingdom “defending China's oppression of Muslims,” “defending China's right to put Uighurs in concentration camps,” and “giving Xi Jinping a reason to continue his 'precursors to genocide'.”

Such responses reflected an almost total lack of introspection and extreme degree of self-righteousness in the West. If essentially the entire non-Western world's only comments on Chinese policies in Xinjiang were of support for Beijing, this could not be taken as an indicator that the West might be wrong on the issue. Rather, it was taken to mean that the whole world was wrong and reprehensible for not supporting the Western position, as Western allegations, like those fabricated against many Muslim countries of various abuses in the past, were portrayed as being unquestionable facts. While Western reports framed Muslim states as “reluctant to speak out against Beijing's policies,” considering the significant Western pressure on Muslim states to do so, and in many cases their outright praise for China's Xinjiang policies, what was seen appeared to be not reluctance to support the Western narrative but instead outright disdain for it.

With the West presenting its narrative on Xinjiang as an undisputed truth, every Muslim country failing to support it had to be portrayed as having some ulterior motive for doing so. For poorer countries such as Pakistan, they were cast as being “paid off with aid,” while richer ones like Saudi Arabia were portrayed as being paid off by promises from Beijing not to raise their own alleged human rights issues. A nefarious Chinese influence operation was thus fabricated to explain away the Western world's extreme international isolation on the Xinjiang issue. Radical anti-Beijing activists claimed that the fact that Muslim-majority countries did not accept their position showed “that there are no real Muslim countries,” as if there were then such a country “would at least do what the U.S. is doing … sanction Chinese officials.” With this radical position having almost no support outside the West, narratives focused essentially on delegitimising the voices of non-Western states on the issue.

While Western media outlets and N.G.O's repeatedly claimed that foreign investigators had had no access Xinjiang, an argument which was previously used multiple times including to presume Iraq's guilt for both killing Kuwaiti babies and developing W.M.D, this was very far from the case. In December 2018 diplomats from 12 countries including India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Russia, Afghanistan, Thailand and Kuwait toured Xinjiang for three days. They visited local markets, farmers, educational institutes, mosques, factories, as well as vocational education and training centres. These were the same training centres which were widely being equated in Western coverage with a new Auschwitz or Birkenau. This group of diplomats was just one of four visiting Xinjiang from December to February, which Reuters referred to as China “inviting waves of diplomats.”

In January 2019 ^{xvi} 12 media representatives from Egypt, Turkey, ^{xvi} Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka visited an education centre in Xinjiang and interviewed locals – representing one of several visits by non-Western press who had full access. In February senior diplomats from eight countries at the United Nations Geneva office visited Xinjiang and assessed Chinese government policies highly positively. Some of the countries represented included Egypt, Cambodia, Pakistan, Senegal and Belarus. Nonetheless, Reuters stressed in February 2019 that the West was at the time still holding out “hope that the wider Islamic world could soon start making critical comments about Xinjiang” – hopes which would quickly be further dashed.

In March 2019 the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (O.I.C), which represented 56 Muslim-majority countries, reported on the findings of the delegation it had sent to Xinjiang upon Beijing's invitation. The O.I.C had previously been critical of Chinese policies in the province on the basis of prevailing narratives in the Western-dominated global media landscape, but after the delegation freely spoke with religious leaders and with students at training centres these narratives were found to conflict sharply with the situation on the ground. The organisation stated that it: “welcomes the outcomes of the visit conducted by the General Secretariat's delegation upon invitation from the People's Republic of China; commends the efforts of the People's Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens; and looks forward to further cooperation between the O.I.C and the People's Republic of China.”

Subsequently in June the United Nations' top counterterrorism official, the Undersecretary General for Counterterrorism, visited Xinjiang despite strong Western protests. The Chinese Foreign Ministry then announced that it had reached a “broad consensus” with the U.N on Xinjiang. The visit was widely labelled controversial in the Western world, although outside the West there was virtually no perception of any kind of controversy. When the U.N official failed to affirm the Western narrative after his visit this did not lead Western parties to re-evaluate their own positions but instead sparked an escalation of Western condemnation of his visit. Essentially, even if the U.N or much of the non-Western world observed Xinjiang first-hand, if they failed to confirm what Western narratives were claiming then they all had to be portrayed as outright wrong and delegitimised accordingly.

In August a further group of ambassadors and envoys from Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bahrain and Nigeria toured Xinjiang and evaluated the Chinese government's efforts in a range of areas including safeguarding citizens' freedom of religious belief and improving people's livelihood. Nepalese ambassador Leela Mani Paudyal noted after the visit:

The vocational education and training centres in Xinjiang are not 'concentration camps' as described by some Western media, but schools to help those influenced by extreme thoughts to eliminate the harmful thoughts and learn vocational skills. Every student I saw here is happy. They learn not only laws and regulations, Standard Chinese, but also professional skills, which I believe will give them an edge to adapt to the society after graduation and become a strong competitor in the job market.... This anti-terrorism example is worthy of learning by many countries.

In September 2019 a delegation of envoys from 16 African countries and the African Union visited Xinjiang and toured communities, mosques and local firms. They praised the Chinese government's efforts to promote social harmony, safeguard citizens' freedom of religious belief and protect the traditional culture of ethnic minorities. After visiting education centres – the ones widely compared in the West to Nazi death camps – Ugandan ambassador Chrispus Kiyonga commented: “I agree with the practice of the centre, which shows that the government is responsible to its people. The students here are happy and learn a lot of practical skills.” Others made comments to similar effect.

Foreign visits notably declined from late 2019 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, although in October 2020 envoys and diplomats from 20 Muslim-majority Arab states representing the Arab League visited Xinjiang. They commented positively on the province's economic, social and human rights development achievements. The delegation also went to Islamic schools, mosques and other places to learn about the protection of freedom of religious belief in Xinjiang, with many of the Arab representatives subsequently slamming Western claims regarding the state of affairs as being far removed from reality.

In March 2021 ambassadors to China from the Republic of Congo, Burkina Faso and Sudan spoke at the Seventh Ambassador Lecture in Beijing themed 'Xinjiang in the Eyes of African Ambassadors to China,' reflecting highly positively on the state of affairs. Congolese ambassador Daniel Owassa stated: “Some Western forces hyping up the so-called Xinjiang-related issues are actually launching unprovoked attacks on China to serve their own ulterior motives.” Western media outlets responded indignantly to the fact that not a single African country would support the West's efforts at the U.N to portray China as an egregious human rights abuser – if not a genocidal actor – and criticise it as such. The B.B.C was among those to again frame this not as a result of the tenuous nature of Western claims, but rather that African states must have been paid off by China – the only explanation in Western eyes for states not to support 'truth' whatever the West dictated truth to be.

As COVID-19 related travel restrictions were mildly relaxed in mid-2022 the United Nations' top human rights official, the High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, made a six-day visit to Xinjiang in May. The U.S. State Department slammed the visit and the official's subsequent"silence" on what the West claimed was an ongoing genocide. Bachelet confirmed that her delegation had been able to organise meetings and hold open discussions with former trainees of vocational education and training centres and people from all manner of sectors, describing the meetings as"unsupervised and organised by us." For her visit and her failure to support the Western narrative, Bachelet faced extremely harsh criticism from across the spectrum of Western sources, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Campaign for Uyghurs, and the World Uyghur Congress. Slammed as having"whitewashed China's atrocities," she saw widespread calls across the Western world for her resignation including from over 230 N.G.O's, with editorial boards of major papers from the Washington Post to the Guardian issuing special publications criticising her visit in the harshest terms. This immense Western pressure was widely thought to have been the cause for Bachelet to announce, two weeks after her return, that she would not seek a second term in office. Her statements nevertheless made her the latest in a long line of official visitors to Xinjiang to highlight how little substance the Western narrative had.

A notable outlier in non-Western reports on Xinjiang which prompted widespread speculation as to its origins was a strongly worded O.H.C.H.R report on August 31 2022 claiming severe human rights abuses, many of which echoed the unevidenced claims made by Adrian Zenz and widely circulated by Western sources such as forced birth control for Uyghurs. The report was released just minutes before midnight when the term of High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet ended, with Bachelet notably neither signing her name on the final report nor releasing it to a press conference which would have been the norm. This fuelled speculation that the report was very different from what Bachelet and members of delegations who had been to Xinjiang actually wanted published – potentially mirroring the similar discrepancy between the observations of O.P.C.W investigators on the ground in Syria and the final report on the subject of their investigation which was entirely contradictory (see Chapter 9). While U.N reports, including those mentioned above among others, had consistently been highly positive in their findings on state policies after representatives and delegations were granted considerable access, the August report was entirely contradictory and out of line with widespread U.N findings. Bachelet herself had praised Chinese authorities' cooperation with her office, their highly successful poverty alleviation schemes, their efforts to help resolve tensions in neighbouring countries, and their full recognition of the linguistic and cultural identities of ethnic minority groups, and said she had personally interacted with supply chain managers and was encouraged by their engagement with human rights standards. The strange contradictions between the last-minute August 2022 report and the remainder of U.N reports on Xinjiang, and the veracity of widespread suspicions that it had based its conclusions on materials from Western government funded sources rather than firsthand experience, remain unresolved at the time of writing.

Western displeasure as international delegations and experts visited Xinjiang, and either failed to affirm or directly contradicted Western allegations, recalled prior U.S. opposition to U.N inspectors going to Iraq in 2003 where it had been expected that their findings would disprove American claims ^{xviii} regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. International responses to Chinese policies in Xinjiang and visits by foreign representatives highlighted the West's isolation from the wider world on the issue, with the fact that non-Western countries and organisations even undertook to review the situation on the ground firsthand seen by some analysts to indicate the limited credibility Western claims had. Indeed, with the sole partial exception of Japan, even five years into the campaign in the early 2020s there was not a single non-Western country which had supported the Western narrative. The reality of this isolation was received poorly in the West, particularly among anti-China N.G.O's, an example being the 2019 visit by the U.N Undersecretary General for Counterterrorism which Time referring to as having “infuriated” Western governments and N.G.O's and “provoking outcry” in the Western world.

The West's isolation from the world was also seen at the United Nations. Of the 22 countries which launched a joint statement to the High Commissioner of the U.N Human Rights Council in July 2019, the only non-Western country was Japan. At the same Council session 50 countries from across the non-Western world, including 23 Muslim-majority countries, defended China's position. Among them were Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Nigeria, the United Arab Emirates, Syria, Somalia, Egypt and Algeria. Western media outlets responded by asserting that almost all the 50 countries defending China were themselves human rights abusers – which itself highlighted the value of politicised human rights. to the West's geopolitical position. Practically any non-Western country which stepped out of line with Western geopolitical designs could be vilified as a human rights abuser, which was an effective asset used to deter countries from doing so.

In October 2019 a Western bloc of 23 countries launched another round of criticism of alleged abuses in Xinjiang – which was again countered by support for China from across the non-Western world as 54 countries issued a joint statement supporting its Xinjiang policies. ^{xix} The 54 had all sent delegations to Xinjiang to observe the reality on the ground firsthand, and described policies there as having “effectively safeguarded the basic human rights of people of all ethnic groups.” Again the West, backed only by Japan, was isolated from the international community.

Expressing frustration at the U.N and non-Western countries' reluctance to support the Western narrative on Xinjiang, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large on Women's Issues Kelley Currie slammed"the complete lack of curiosity or concern we see from the U.N" which she claimed was"failing to speak out about the situation in Xinjiang." This followed harsh criticisms of the U.N and of Secretary General Antonio Guterres for not taking a more assertive line in support of the Western position. A notable example was a hardline opinion piece in the Washington Post in April 2019 by Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth, who claimed that Guterres' term in office"is becoming defined by his silence on human rights – even as serious rights abuses proliferate" in particular in Xinjiang. Roth said while Western governments had raised the issue"Guterres has not said a word about it in public. Instead, he praises China's development prowess and rolls out the red carpet for President Xi Jinping." Again, in Western eyes it could never be the West's tenuous allegations that may be wrong, but rather every other party, be they the Arab League, the African Union, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, or Pakistan which bordered Xinjiang, that had to be in error for failing to back the Western line. ^{xx}

October 2020 saw the United States, Germany, Britain and other Western countries again press for condemnation of China at the United Nations on issues related to Xinjiang and Hong Kong, although they again gained no non-Western support other than from Japan. By contrast nearly 70 countries voiced their support for China's position, with Pakistan, Kuwait and Cuba each leading separate groupings of nations to issue joint statements praising Beijing's human rights and rebutting Western allegations.¹²¹ Beijing's permanent representative to the United Nations Zhang Jun accused the United States specifically of campaigning against China to cover its own serious shortcomings, stressing that "blaming China cannot cover up your poor human rights records." He further retorted that Washington failed to protect the basic rights of its own people, highlighting that its policies had allowed 200,000 Americans to lose their lives to COVID-19 so far.²¹³

The same trend could be seen the following year, where in June 2021 more than 90 countries expressed support for China's stance and 65 declared their opposition to interference in China's domestic affairs in Xinjiang and Hong Kong. This represented a clear rebuke of the Western campaign. In July, at the 47th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, envoys of 30 countries voiced support for China's Xinjiang policies while slamming Western efforts to fabricate claims of humanitarian abuses to undermine Beijing. Among those represented were Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, ee-rahn, Laos, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka and Russia. Representatives from Xinjiang were invited to share their stories at the meeting. Opposition to interference in China's internal affairs had been voiced by 70 countries at the 46th session of the Council in March. Thus while Western media outlets continued to refer to “the international community's attempt to challenge its [China's] policy in Xinjiang,” this represented a serious misuse of the term “international community” to describe a very isolated Western position. While this was in line with a longstanding tendency for the West to perceive and portray itself as representing the world, it was a portrayal very far detached from reality.

Just as in the 1990s when a potent metanarrative based on fabricated atrocities led much of the world to see Iraq as the ultimate 'other' and the leading threat to humanitarian norms, the Xinjiang narrative was similarly intended to make the targeting of China appear more justified in the eyes of Western populations whether with sanctions, military pressure or other means. Beyond the Western world multiple forms of media were used extensively to propagate the narrative and targeted Muslim populations in particular, an example being U.S. embassy web pages in Muslim countries that consistently gave particularly high publicity to the allegations. Pages and groups on Facebook, Twitter and other Western platforms which were followed in Muslim majority countries and published in their languages were widely seeded with videos and images purportedly showing Chinese brutality against the Uyghur Muslim minority. As far as the writer's investigation found none of these were genuine. Some were photoshopped, while others showed violent acts among non-Uyghur East Asians which were seemingly intentionally mislabelled. While focused on Muslim populations such efforts were global, and in several cases the social media accounts purporting to tell the stories of oppressed Uyghur people were found to be run by C.I.A alumni and other individuals with close ties to Western governments.

An example of the kind of false content propagated was a video widely circulated in Muslim countries in 2018 which claimed to show a Uyghur being beaten for having a copy of the Quran. It actually showed an Indonesian policeman beating a pickpocket. A picture claiming to show a Chinese police officer strangling a Uyghur woman for performing Muslim prayer was actually a video of a police officer restraining a drunk and violent non-Uyghur woman in Shenzhen. A picture claiming to show Uyghur forced labour, first published by Forbes, actually showed factory workers in Brazil in 2010. Forbes later changed the picture without announcing the error. A picture showing a man with his eyes, mouth and ears sewn shut was similarly passed as a depiction of Chinese atrocities against the Uyghur population, often used as a cover for related articles, but actually showed protester Abas Amini expressing disgust at Britain's treatment of asylum seekers in 2003. Much of this content was debunked by the Indonesian fact-checking agency A.F.P Fact Check, although not before making profound marks on public opinion.

Although long suspected on the basis of prior practices, the involvement of Western governments in propagating such content was confirmed in August 2022 by a joint investigation by Stanford University and the New York-based social media analytics firm Graphika. This found that defaming China, and the authorities in Xinjiang in particular, had been at the crux of a very large five-year social media disinformation campaign by the U.S. and Britain targeting Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and Central Asia with false information. Personnel responsible posed as journalists running independent media outlets, used A.I-generated faces to make multiple fake personas on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other media, created memes and short videos for sharing, ran hashtag campaigns across platforms, launched online petitions, and had “an interconnected web of accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and five other social media platforms.” This enabled them to support their fabricated stories by quoting one other, while state media outlets known for

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