We’re approaching the 20th anniversary of the illegal US invasion and occupation of Iraq, a horrific period in US history that left over a million Iraqis dead and thousands of US soldiers in body bags. Meanwhile, the neocon monsters who organized and carried it out are still in positions of power and authority. Even worse, they’re not the least bit sorry for having killed a million innocent people and the minute they get the chance, they’ll do it again.

That’s why we’re constantly being bombarded by war propaganda, from sinister Chinese spy balloons to evil Russian bots manipulating our precious democracy. Sometimes I have to stop and stare in wonder at how insidious the US empire is at manipulating the ways Americans think about the world. It’s depraved, it’s abusive, and it’s profoundly destructive, but damned if isn’t stupefyingly effective.

Basically, US intelligence and the accompanying news reports based on this intelligence are no longer the sincere attempt to understand a complex reality, but rather, have become tools to falsify a nuanced reality and propagandize a poorly educated populace. In other words, our discourse no longer revolves around a grasp of reality. It is about the installation of ideological pseudo-realism, or narrative, which produces a singular groupthink, such that everyone lives passively by it, until it is far too late to change course.

Unfortunately, the managers of empire have become enamored by the manipulation as well. It’s not just the poorly educated that have been propagandized. One of the most amazing developments since the election of Trump has been the mass formation psychosis that’s taken hold of well educated liberals. The truth is that the establishment in Washington DC has become so detached from reality that they live on a different planet. Russia-gate is a case in point.

And in this environment the neocons hold the whip hand with their control over the dominant organs of the corporate media–New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Fox, MSNBC etc. We saw this dynamic 20 years ago in the run up to the US invasion of Iraq when the neocons and their corporate media insiders–read Judith Miller and Michael Gordon–were allowed to fix the intelligence around policies, rather than the traditional function of shaping policies to sound analysis.

They even had a term for it–stove-piping. The politicization of intelligence reached its apex with Dick Cheney’s initiation of a Team ‘B’ intelligence unit reporting personally to him. It was intended to furnish the “anti-intelligence” to combat the intelligence service output. Of course, the Team ‘B’ initiative shook confidence amongst the analysts, and by-passed the work of the traditional cadre, just as Cheney had intended. After all, he had a war to sell.

Recently Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, told the world that the US supports Ukrainian attacks on military targets on the Crimea peninsula. “Crimea, which includes the port of Sevastopol where Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is based, is seen by Western and Russian diplomats as the biggest flashpoint of the Ukraine war.”

I’m sure that will turn out just swell, in fact I’ll start work on the fallout shelter.

What’s not surprising is that Victoria Nuland was also Dick Cheney’s foreign policy advisor during the early years of the Iraq war. After all, the show must go on.

In a healthy society they lock up mass murderers and throw away the key.

They certainly don’t celebrate their achievements.