Nicaragua : NATO psy-warfare media aim for regime change

[Judi Lynn]

Nicaragua : NATO psy-warfare media aim for regime change

by toni solo, May 10th 2011

North American and European media coverage of Nicaragua in recent years has followed the same template applied to other countries targeted by the US government and their NATO allies. The modus operandi is always the same : military encirclement, diplomatic isolation, media demonization, funding of local proxies and violent provocation. If that mixture fails to bring about regime change, the US government and its NATO and regional allies then apply economic sanctions and, where necessary, armed aggression.

Over the years, Nicaragua has been subject to coverage by media from across the whole gamut of NATO country psy-warfare assets. The latest adjunct to NATO's darkness-visible psy-warfare offensive against Nicaragua is Tom Hennigan's article “After the revolution” in the Irish Times. Hennigan's article is almost 100% fact-free NATO psy-warfare. It reaffirms the main NATO psy-warfare lie on Nicaragua – that President Daniel Ortega is a corrupt, repressive tyrant.

Nicaragua's general elections will be held on November 6th this year. Hennigan's version of NATO's regime change media template for Nicaragua confirms the main themes that will be used with increasing vehemence as the election campaign proceeds – bogus claims of electoral fraud and unconstitutional illegality. Those fake themes apart, omission too is a vital component of the regime-change psy-warfare NATO country media machine.

Omission is NATO's gagged phantom hostage, held forever in a kind of media Guantanamo Bay Block Alpha for especially troublesome prisoners. On Nicaragua, a media-water-boarded Omission emits muffled lacunae signalling two information vacuums diligently maintained by NATO's psy-warfare propagandists. The first excludes facts exposing the Nicaraguan opposition's dishonesty and deceit. The second negates the incredible success of President Ortega's Sandinista led government just four and a half years after taking office.

More:
http://www.tortillaconsal.com/nato_psywarfare.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. Very important article! Thanks for posting! Forewarned is forearmed!

Not that we didn't know that there is a U.S./EU corpo-fascist media conspiracy against leftist governments in Latin America--so blatant that their cookie-cutter "talking points" seem to issue from one source, they are so uniform and monotonous, with the Associated Pukes, the New York Slimes, Rotters, the BBCons, et al, routinely producing headlines that reiterate the "talking points" with generally short articles containing unattributed allegations against the target leftist leader ("His critics say...".) The OP is illuminating as to who, in fact, "his critics" are--USAID and EU/NATO funded operatives in the country, parading as the rightwing opposition, often from the lunatic fringe.

The classic, of course, is the corporate media's campaign against Hugo Chavez. The more truly democratic Venezuela has become, the more they call him a "dictator." The distortions, omissions of facts, omission of context, tag lines ("Hugo Chavez, friend of Fidel Castro...."), and bald-faced lies that I have seen in this "news media" campaign against Chavez have totally shocked me. It is a throwback to the 1950s and McCarthyism. But, interestingly, in that era, our political establishment finally abandoned McCarthy as too extreme. That is NOT happening now. Now, demonization of the "enemies" of "organized money" (as FDR put it) is unchecked. Greed speaks without any restraining ethics or moderating reason. It is naked.

And now they're after Daniel Ortega in the same vein--"authoritarian," "dictator," "repressor of free speech," etc. And here's a very, VERY interesting twist, which this OP alerted me to. Given that the "news media" campaign against Chavez could never fault Venezuela's election system--one of the best in the world, on the face of the facts, as well as being established, monitored and certified by the Carter Center, and the OAS and EU election monitoring groups--this "news media" conspiracy (out of Langley?) has contrived to accuse the Ortega government of election fraud in the 2008 municipal elections. The OP establishes what a fraud this claim of "election fraud" is. And now we know WHY they have perpetrated it: because they could not assail Chavez on the election system, and this has been a powerful fact to counter their goddamned lies. It was the first thing that I looked into, for instance, when I began reading about this "dictator' in Venezuela about a half a decade ago. Lo and behold, this "dictator" was elected in an election system that is far, FAR more transparent than our own. It was the very first thing that alerted me to the vicious campaign against Chavez, and, by implication, against the people who elected him. The designers of this "news media" war against the left in Latin America apparently learned a lesson from this, and set up an entirely phony "election fraud" charge against Ortega, back in 2008, using a USAID-funded front group, to be trumpeted by all the corpo-fascist media horns as needed, in the upcoming presidential election in Nicaragua this year.

Here is some info on it, from the OP, that we need to bookmark.

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A primary theme of the NATO country psy-warfare phoney-reporters is the alleged electoral fraud in the municipal elections of 2008 in which the FSLN increased the number of municipalities they governed from 93 to 104. Opinion polls had predicted that kind of result. The glib NATO psy-warfare claims of alleged fraud have never been supported by credible factual documentation.

Nor is the monitoring presence in those elections ever acknowledged of international election specialists from organizations throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. The NATO country psy-warfare correspondents invariably cite USAID funded election-disinformation body Etica y Transparencia as a source. Etica y Transparencia has a link to their report on the 2008 municipal elections on their web site.

But the link is empty and has been for months. So it has been impossible to check the incessant claims of fraud against freely available supporting evidence. That has not stopped NATO country psy-warfare troupers unscrupulously citing Etica y Transparencia as if it were independent or authoritative, which it is not. The repeated insistence on electoral fraud in 2008 lacks credible supporting evidence, apart from self-interested claims by the Nicaraguan opposition.

--from the OP (my emphasis)

--

In summary...

--FSLN (Sandinista) gains in the 2008 municipal elections in Nicaragua were predicted by pre-election polls;

--There is no extant evidence of election fraud;

--The entity with the blank link to purported evidence of election fraud (Etica y Transparencia) is USAID-funded;

--Those elections were monitored by international election monitoring groups (who don't just drop in on election day--they work, often for months, sometimes years, to help set up an honest, transparent system that it is possible to monitor).

Another evidence of the power of honest, transparent elections (real elections) in Venezuela, Nicaragua and other countries that have elected leftist governments, is the length to which the U.S. State Department has gone to produce FRAUDULENT elections in Honduras and Haiti. The martial law election that the U.S. set up in Honduras was so fraudulent that no reputable election monitoring group on earth would touch it, and Clinton then employed entities like John McCain's "International Republican Institute" (Tea Partyers!) and other USAID-NED-CIA bullshit groups to try to give an appearance of legitimacy. And when that didn't work--the rest of Latin America refused to acknowledge that (s)election--Clinton then somehow acquired the OAS name for another phony election monitoring group, in Haiti, comprised of 6 members from Haiti's traditional oppressors (the U.S., France and Canada) and one Jamaican, to "certify" an election in which SEVENTY-FIVE PERCENT of Haitians DIDN'T VOTE, because the majority party in Haiti (Aristide's Lavalas party) was banned from the ballot!

I don't know how she managed to put the 'OAS" name on this phony group. It was an insult to the OAS election monitoring project, which has done a good job up until now--and it is an extremely worrisome precedent. It is also indicative of HOW IMPORTANT the elections "talking point" is to the propagandists in Langley or wherever this anti-Left campaign is being designed and faxed or emailed (or passed along in dark alleys) to its corpo-fascist media agents.