President Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway’s fictitious account of an Islamist terrorist attack carried out by two Iraqi refugees in Bowling Green, Kentucky has an eerily similar historical parallel. On August 31, 1939, the eve of the outbreak of World War II, the Nazi German propaganda machine falsely claimed that Polish troops crossed the German frontier and attacked a German radio station in the town of Gleiwitz.
The Nazi account of the “attack” was false, “fake news” in more Trumpian terms. German military personnel dressed in Polish uniforms took over the Sender Gleiwitz radio station and broadcast a message in Polish billed as an anti-German diatribe by Polish saboteurs. A pro-Polish German farmer was murdered by the Nazis and his corpse was dressed in a Polish military uniform and was passed off by the Nazi propagandists as “proof” of the Polish attack. Prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp received the same treatment as the farmer. They were killed and their bodies disfigured to the point where their true identities could not be determined. However, the Nazis claimed the dead prisoners were additional Polish “invaders” killed by innocent” Germans trying to protect the “Fatherland” from the “aggressive” Poles. The Gleiwitz incident was used by Adolf Hitler as justification for the German blitzkrieg invasion of Poland.
On August 22, 1939, a little over a week before the Gleiwitz caper, Hitler told his generals: “I will provide a propagandistic casus belli. Its credibility doesn’t matter. The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth.”
Hitler’s ghost must be advising Conway, her White House colleague Steve Bannon, and Trump, whose first wife Ivana Trump, claimed the now-president kept a copy of Hitler’s speeches, titled My New Order at his bedside. The Hitler book includes his speeches made before and after the infamous Gleiwitz incident. One passage justifies Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Hitler believed that Poland wrongly occupied the “lost” German territories of “West Prussia and Upper Silesia and parts of East Prussia.” By invading his neighbors, Hitler essentially wanted to “make Germany great again.”
Conway, in a Hitleresque manner, took an incident involving the arrest of two Iraqis living in Bowling Green in 2011 for trying to send weapons and money to Islamist insurgents in Iraq and turned it into a terrorist “massacre” in the Kentucky city. The two Iraqis, Mohanad Shareef Hammadi and Waad Ramadan Alwan, pleaded guilty and received life prison terms. The two admitted to having helped plan attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, not in the United States.
The press must be as vigilant as possible over the Trump administration. The “Bowling Green Massacre” is as fake as the “attacks” by North Vietnamese gunboats on the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy in the Gulf of Tonkin in early August 1964. There were no such attacks by the North Vietnamese but the phony Gulf of Tonkin “crisis” and the subsequent Gulf of Tonkin Resolution by Congress were used by the Lyndon Johnson administration to plunge the United States deeply into the war in Indochina.
On the same day Conway proffered her tall tale about Bowling Green, Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer engaged in his own fakery. During the daily press briefing at the White House, Spicer falsely asserted that Iran attacked a U.S. Navy ship. Spicer tried to alter a Yemeni Houthi attack on a Saudi naval frigate in Yemeni waters off the coast of that civil war-plagued nation into an Iranian attack on a U.S. warship. Although Spicer later corrected himself by stating the attack was on a Saudi ship, he let stand the impression that Iran carried out the attack. The Pentagon has only admitted that it is believed that Houthis, who are allied religiously with the Shi’a government of Iran, carried out the attack.
There are many players in the Yemeni civil war: Houthis, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, guerrillas loyal to the Islamic State, South Yemeni pro-independence al-Hirak units, troops answerable to the “official” Yemeni government, forces loyal to the ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh, mercenaries employed by former Blackwater chief Erik Prince’s Abu Dhani-based Reflex Responses, and a few isolated bands who swear allegiance to some ousted British colonial-era sultans and want the old thrones restored. It would be surprising if Trump and his inner circle even know that ground game in Yemen. But that did not stop them from ordering a Navy SEAL team assault on a compound in Yemen that resulted in the death of a U.S. Navy SEAL team member and the 8 year-old daughter of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, previously killed in a U.S. missile attack in Yemen. Given the propensity of the Trump administration for fake news, the American “Gleiwitz” could easily come in Yemen, where there are many potential “suspects” to falsely pin blame on.
The Trump administration has recently “put Iran on notice,” rattled sabers at China over the South China Sea, and is making verbal threats against Russia over the fighting in eastern Ukraine. It has demonized U.S. visa holders and green card residents from seven predominantly Muslim nations. It has parlayed one “fake news” story after another. It is also on the precipice of using Hitler’s playbook “My New Order,” Trump’s favorite reading material and which is certainly on Bannon’s bookshelf, to foment a new “Gleiwitz Incident.”
* * *
Personal note: This editor met Kellyanne Conway a few times before she was married and when her name was Kellyanne Fitzpatrick in the Fox News “green room” at the 400 North Capitol Street studios. It was at the outset of the George W. Bush administration when I was tapped to be both a national security commentator and the “liberal” punching bag for the likes of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Greta van Sustren, the latter actually more vicious than her two male colleagues. Kellyanne, always very friendly, was usually decked out in provocative clothing accentuated by miniskirts. In a studio populated by what were known as “news babes”—the favored hires of News Corp.’s owner Rupert Murdoch—Kellyanne overcame a lot of stiff competition for stares. At the time, she was a Republican Party operative and frequent television debater always ready to defend the Bush-Cheney duo and their war agenda. Kellyanne is not coming up with memes like the “Bowling Green Massacre.” She does not have the brains for that. Kellyanne is the messenger. Those behind the use of the Nazi “Big Lie” are those who admire Hitler and his Nazi gang. They are Bannon and Trump, himself. Kellyanne is the pretty little messenger gal just as she was at Fox News. I knew one thing about Kellyanne’s flirtatious behavior and it’s a slogan I learned from an old friend, a World War II vet who arrived in Paris a few months after D-Day: “If it smells like cologne, leave it alone.”
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
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The ‘Bowling Green Massacre’ and the Gleiwitz attack
Posted on February 6, 2017 by Wayne Madsen
President Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway’s fictitious account of an Islamist terrorist attack carried out by two Iraqi refugees in Bowling Green, Kentucky has an eerily similar historical parallel. On August 31, 1939, the eve of the outbreak of World War II, the Nazi German propaganda machine falsely claimed that Polish troops crossed the German frontier and attacked a German radio station in the town of Gleiwitz.
The Nazi account of the “attack” was false, “fake news” in more Trumpian terms. German military personnel dressed in Polish uniforms took over the Sender Gleiwitz radio station and broadcast a message in Polish billed as an anti-German diatribe by Polish saboteurs. A pro-Polish German farmer was murdered by the Nazis and his corpse was dressed in a Polish military uniform and was passed off by the Nazi propagandists as “proof” of the Polish attack. Prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp received the same treatment as the farmer. They were killed and their bodies disfigured to the point where their true identities could not be determined. However, the Nazis claimed the dead prisoners were additional Polish “invaders” killed by innocent” Germans trying to protect the “Fatherland” from the “aggressive” Poles. The Gleiwitz incident was used by Adolf Hitler as justification for the German blitzkrieg invasion of Poland.
On August 22, 1939, a little over a week before the Gleiwitz caper, Hitler told his generals: “I will provide a propagandistic casus belli. Its credibility doesn’t matter. The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth.”
Hitler’s ghost must be advising Conway, her White House colleague Steve Bannon, and Trump, whose first wife Ivana Trump, claimed the now-president kept a copy of Hitler’s speeches, titled My New Order at his bedside. The Hitler book includes his speeches made before and after the infamous Gleiwitz incident. One passage justifies Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Hitler believed that Poland wrongly occupied the “lost” German territories of “West Prussia and Upper Silesia and parts of East Prussia.” By invading his neighbors, Hitler essentially wanted to “make Germany great again.”
Conway, in a Hitleresque manner, took an incident involving the arrest of two Iraqis living in Bowling Green in 2011 for trying to send weapons and money to Islamist insurgents in Iraq and turned it into a terrorist “massacre” in the Kentucky city. The two Iraqis, Mohanad Shareef Hammadi and Waad Ramadan Alwan, pleaded guilty and received life prison terms. The two admitted to having helped plan attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, not in the United States.
The press must be as vigilant as possible over the Trump administration. The “Bowling Green Massacre” is as fake as the “attacks” by North Vietnamese gunboats on the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy in the Gulf of Tonkin in early August 1964. There were no such attacks by the North Vietnamese but the phony Gulf of Tonkin “crisis” and the subsequent Gulf of Tonkin Resolution by Congress were used by the Lyndon Johnson administration to plunge the United States deeply into the war in Indochina.
On the same day Conway proffered her tall tale about Bowling Green, Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer engaged in his own fakery. During the daily press briefing at the White House, Spicer falsely asserted that Iran attacked a U.S. Navy ship. Spicer tried to alter a Yemeni Houthi attack on a Saudi naval frigate in Yemeni waters off the coast of that civil war-plagued nation into an Iranian attack on a U.S. warship. Although Spicer later corrected himself by stating the attack was on a Saudi ship, he let stand the impression that Iran carried out the attack. The Pentagon has only admitted that it is believed that Houthis, who are allied religiously with the Shi’a government of Iran, carried out the attack.
There are many players in the Yemeni civil war: Houthis, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, guerrillas loyal to the Islamic State, South Yemeni pro-independence al-Hirak units, troops answerable to the “official” Yemeni government, forces loyal to the ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh, mercenaries employed by former Blackwater chief Erik Prince’s Abu Dhani-based Reflex Responses, and a few isolated bands who swear allegiance to some ousted British colonial-era sultans and want the old thrones restored. It would be surprising if Trump and his inner circle even know that ground game in Yemen. But that did not stop them from ordering a Navy SEAL team assault on a compound in Yemen that resulted in the death of a U.S. Navy SEAL team member and the 8 year-old daughter of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, previously killed in a U.S. missile attack in Yemen. Given the propensity of the Trump administration for fake news, the American “Gleiwitz” could easily come in Yemen, where there are many potential “suspects” to falsely pin blame on.
The Trump administration has recently “put Iran on notice,” rattled sabers at China over the South China Sea, and is making verbal threats against Russia over the fighting in eastern Ukraine. It has demonized U.S. visa holders and green card residents from seven predominantly Muslim nations. It has parlayed one “fake news” story after another. It is also on the precipice of using Hitler’s playbook “My New Order,” Trump’s favorite reading material and which is certainly on Bannon’s bookshelf, to foment a new “Gleiwitz Incident.”
* * *
Personal note: This editor met Kellyanne Conway a few times before she was married and when her name was Kellyanne Fitzpatrick in the Fox News “green room” at the 400 North Capitol Street studios. It was at the outset of the George W. Bush administration when I was tapped to be both a national security commentator and the “liberal” punching bag for the likes of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Greta van Sustren, the latter actually more vicious than her two male colleagues. Kellyanne, always very friendly, was usually decked out in provocative clothing accentuated by miniskirts. In a studio populated by what were known as “news babes”—the favored hires of News Corp.’s owner Rupert Murdoch—Kellyanne overcame a lot of stiff competition for stares. At the time, she was a Republican Party operative and frequent television debater always ready to defend the Bush-Cheney duo and their war agenda. Kellyanne is not coming up with memes like the “Bowling Green Massacre.” She does not have the brains for that. Kellyanne is the messenger. Those behind the use of the Nazi “Big Lie” are those who admire Hitler and his Nazi gang. They are Bannon and Trump, himself. Kellyanne is the pretty little messenger gal just as she was at Fox News. I knew one thing about Kellyanne’s flirtatious behavior and it’s a slogan I learned from an old friend, a World War II vet who arrived in Paris a few months after D-Day: “If it smells like cologne, leave it alone.”
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
Copyright © 2017 WayneMadenReport.com
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).