Balochistan Point Voice of Nation
By Qaisar Shehzad Farooq
When war and propaganda combine at a time truth is the first sacrifice. The main objective of war propaganda is to fabricate an enemy in a terror context to convince the public that war is justified for humanitarian noble cause.
In the morning of September 11 Bush administration declares that al-Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center and Osama bin Laden is the main perpetrator. In the dusk of the September 11, a meeting of war cabinet comprising selective members from forces, intelligence and politician have been organized and at the end of the this historic White House meeting the war on terror was officially launched without keeping into consideration the intelligence foreknowledge warnings and forensic investigation of the wreckage. The rest is the history of winners and losers in the context of terrorism and war against terrorism.
Frames have been drafted from the history of Soviet Afghan War to compel the public opinion in the controlled pipelines toward selective directions. Secret diplomatic agreements between the winners of Jimmy Carter’s Operation Cyclone i.e. Osama bin Laden, Saudi intelligence chief prince Turk al-Faisal and General Zia-ul-Haq are declassified to feed crispy themes in the news rooms against religious extremism and fundamentalism and to formulate the public opinion in the favor of Global War against Terrorism.
A famous Kenyan proverb says ‘When elephants fight it is the grass that suffers’ all powerful nations and strong economies in the world have their basic concern with power and profit. South Asian countries due to their geographical location and geopolitical relations remain a battlefield between strategic competitors throughout the history. United States are striving for control in the Middle East and Central Asia to dominate the energy reservoirs in the Gulf region and Caspian Sea basin, and to counter with any confrontation with this nuclear region in the coming centuries where China, Russia, India, Pakistan and nuclear ambitious Iran exist.
This game of bombs and blood to achieve peace and democracy is not only played in the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq only, but since September 11 under the pretext of the Global War against Terrorism, the United States sought war and intervention in Libya, Yemen, Colombia, Sudan and Pakistan to boost up the dominance of the United States and to lining the pockets of Transnational Corporations with the prize of war, the oil and other natural resources.
Media is being used as a psychological weapon and targets are chosen because of their psychological value rather than military value and the war monger focus on the morale deterioration of the subjects rather than murder and massacre. Information warfare is known as psychological warfare in broader perspective to distort the opponent’s view of reality to project a false view of things and manipulate the will of opponent to engage him in hostile activities.
Undoubtedly, September 11 was not only a tragic incident for the families and hometown of the victims but it was an attack on the sovereignty and solidarity of the United States of America. We are sorry for all of those that died on 9/11 and for all of those that died because of it. Because of those 19 sadistic hijackers America declare war on many nations. At least 7, 23,206 people have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq up till January 2009 and hundreds of thousands victimized by the US conquest and by United State need to feel safer and safest. Being a student of media and communication studies, I was forced to remain concentrated on the framing strategy to explore the terrorism & media relationship in the broader context of agenda setting theory which was used during Global War against Terrorism by the mainstream media but it may be the attention-grabbing area for the strategic communication researchers.
There is a dire need to rethink 9/11 because it is still a question mark for investigation authorities to disclose the real bakers’ sponsors and beneficiaries of this un-ended war. It is also a matter of significance for anthropologists to explore that how the power players transfer the paradigms from war of drugs to war for weapons of mass destruction and then to Global War against Terrorism. Cries of all the victims and tears of their families are still waiting for kind considerations of historians, political and social scientists, foreign policy and International Relations IR experts to study the lust of power players and to diagnose the mentality of both the terrorist and the war mongers. The souls of all those that died on 9/11 and all of those that died because of it are focused on the mainstream media and intellectuals to know about the crime and cause of their brutal killing.
The writer is a media researcher and strategic expert.
Published in The Balochistan Point September 27, 2013
