Cynthia McKinney says she now harbors "almost a hatred for the special interest press, because they are actively lying to us." I feel the same way about the U.S. corporate media, whose incessant, daily lies about Libya are killing people and robbing them of their country. The U.S. press trumpeted the entirely unsubstantiated mega-lie, that Libyan soldiers were being fed rations of Viagra and ordered to engage in the mass rape of Libyan women. It was a total invention of the U.S.-backed rebels in Benghazi and, no doubt, their American and European handlers. Now, even Amnesty International, which has never been a friend of Moammar Gaddafi’s government, reports they "have not found any evidence or a single victim of rape or a doctor who knew about somebody being raped." Nothing. The rebels and their foreign friends made the story up out of whole clothe. Such lies were used to justify continued NATO bombing of Libya as necessary to protect the Libyan people – to protect Libyan women from rape by soldiers.

The massed corporate media have far more resources than Amnesty International, or Human Rights Watch, which also found no evidence of rapes. The New York Times and CNN and the rest could have checked the allegation, and exposed it. Instead, they parroted the damnable lie as if it were fact. Why? Because the lie about mass rape conforms to the foreign policy objectives – the war aims – of the U.S. government. The U.S. corporate media do not search for truth, they search for whatever buttresses the American government’s version of the truth. They are whores, mercenaries and propagandists, posing as journalists. In times of war, that makes them complicit in every war crime committed by the U.S. government. The U.S. media are killers, facilitators of the most horrible crimes.

If they had bothered to check the rape allegations, they would have had to contradict Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who falsely accused Col. Gaddafi of using rape as a weapon of war. The U.S. media would have had to discredit Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the shameless, U.S.-butt-kissing prosecutor for the International Criminal Court. Moreno-Ocampo now admits he doesn’t have any evidence connecting Gaddafi to rapes, but he’s indicted him, anyway, for various and sundry "crimes" that are just as illusory.

"The rebels have put up signs vowing to "purge slaves [and] black skin."

These same media pretend not to see that which has been obvious from the very beginning of the Libyan crisis: The rebels use anti-Black racism as a tool of war. They have slaughtered many hundreds of Black immigrant workers as well as fellow Libyans who are Black. Right in front of the eyes of western reporters in Misrata – who have made heroes and saints of the rebels – a whole neighborhood of Black Libyans was ethnically cleansed, the residents sent in hiding with bounties on their heads. Fortunately, the Wall Street Journal saw fit to print this story, probably on the theory that businesspeople need real facts to safeguard their money. Rebels in Misrata are threatening to erase the mostly Black city of Tawergha, just 25 miles south of, off the face of the earth, and to bar the Black Libyans from working or going to school ever again in Misrata. Along the road, the rebels have put up signs vowing to "purge slaves [and] black skin."

It has taken four months for one major U.S. media outlet to report on the race war the U.S. has instigated in Libya. So, yes, Cynthia McKinney, I hate them, too. For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to www.BlackAgendaReport.com.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.