Stephen Kinzer’s 1994 New York Times piece on Amanpour succinctly described her – and her employer’s – methods, quoting a “network insider” wishing to remain anonymous:

“I have winced at some of what she's done, at what used to be called advocacy journalism," he said. “She was sitting in Belgrade when that marketplace massacre happened, and she went on the air to say that the Serbs had probably done it. There was no way she could have known that. She was assuming an omniscience which no journalist has.”

The massacre in question was the explosion at the Sarajevo “Markale” marketplace of February 5, 1994, which led to a NATO ultimatum to the Bosnian Serbs to withdraw their heavy weapons from around the Bosnian capital, part of a steady march towards NATO’s first military engagement in the alliance’s history, which opened the doors to its subsequent eastward expansion, which has just about revived the Cold War in Europe.

As it turned out, it wasn’t the Serbs that were responsible for the shelling that caused the massacre, which resulted in over 200 casualties, including 68 civilian dead – but the Western media darling Bosnian Muslims. According to a Deutsche Presse-Agentur report, “a U.N. report clearly blamed the Muslims for firing on their own people in order to create international sympathy and get the West to fight on their side against the Serbs.”

Unfortunately, the DPA report was published only after two years of systematic obfuscation:

“Until Thursday, U.N. officials strongly denied the report existed, even after it was quoted in press reports. [U.N. Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Yasushi] Akashi told DPA that not only did the first report exist, but that some journalists already had a copy. He said the details were in a 1995 story by U.S. journalist David Binder, who quoted from the confidential report.

According to Binder, the report said U.N. peacekeepers were prevented by Muslim police from entering the site in the aftermath of the explosion. No doctors were allowed on the scene and the 197 victims were carried away to a hospital within 25 minutes.

After studying the crater left by the mortar shell and the distribution of the shrapnel, the report concluded that the shell was fired from behind Muslim lines. U.N. monitors reported no Serbian shelling that day from points near the marketplace.

The official U.N. report that was subsequently released said the evidence as to who fired the shell was inconclusive, since it originated from an area where Muslim and Serb lines were very close. The two reports represented divergent views, but the United Nations chose to publish the neutral report and keep the other secret.”

By the time the truth came out (the DPA report was dated June 6, 1996), NATO had found a new meaning in life, Bosnia and Herzegovina had been turned into a Western protectorate, “humanitarian interventionism” had gained the necessary momentum, and the unipolar war machine could move on to the bombing of what remained of Yugoslavia – Serbia and Montenegro – in spring of 1999, without bothering to get a U.N. mandate, leading to the subsequent forcible secession of Serbia’s Kosovo province and its transformation into a crime-ridden, Islamist infested, terrorist-ruled failed state, proudly overseen by the EU and NATO. Well done Amanpour and CNN! (Note also the striking similarities with the Syrian “poison gas” false flag attacks – it seems that the Yugoslav civil war was a veritable breeding ground for interventionist ideas and media scenography.)

The Markale deception was far from the only one involving CNN and its star reporter in their coverage of the Yugoslav wars. There was, for example, the deliberate misidentification of the Bosnian Muslim/Croat stronghold of Kiseljak as Serb only to underscore faux Serb “cruelty” (“While people in Sarajevo are dying from starvation, the Serbs are living here in plenty”). There was the staging of scenes involving Kosovo Albanian refugees fleeing the NATO bombing to neighboring Macedonia: 

“Mr. Stojcic… witnessed a CNN camera crew coaching refugees on how to act for the cameras. He eye-witnessed a man cross the border with two children. CNN spoke to the man and sent him back to cross the border so that he could cross again in front of the camera, the second time the man crossed over he had his children crying for the cameras.

Mr. Stojcic also witnessed a group of refugees throwing a child in to the mud; a CNN camera crew then filmed the child after it was crying and covered in mud. The witness identified Christiane Amanpour as the CNN reporter who was on the spot in the refugee camps. He said that CNN was the worst media outlet, as it was the most prone to staging scenes for its news broadcasts”.

And there was involvement in the choreography surrounding the staged “massacre” in the Kosovo village of Racak, where Serbian police liquidated terrorists belonging to the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) during a firefight, but which was used as the “humanitarian” trigger (“galvanizing incident” in the words of then U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright) for the illegal NATO bombing of Yugoslavia:

“Further investigation shows that two TV journalists for Associated Press and two teams of OSCE observers also saw the fight for Racak from a hill, entered when Serb security forces did and left when they left. The AP crew filmed a deserted village. It was overnight that the KLA returned and gathered their dead from the fighting. Next day, [Head of OSCE’s Kosovo Verification Mission, U.S. diplomat William] Walker told the world how adults and children had been ‘executed,’ some as they tried to flee. CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour, wife of U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin, showed little skepticism in reporting on the ‘massacre of civilians’.”

CNN was even caught using Pentagon psyops personnel from the Fourth Psychological Operations Group based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to “help” with its reporting of NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia, surely to make it more “objective.”

But it was the construction of the narrative of the Srebrenica “genocide” that was perhaps the crown jewel of CNN’s and the rest of Western MSM reporting from ex-Yugoslavia. Its function was not just to demonize the Serbs, but rather the construction of one of the “founding myths” of post-Cold War Western interventionism, embodied in the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine, subsequently used to justify worldwide “humanitarian interventions” – spearheaded by the usual suspects, the U.S. and/or NATO – from Kosovo, to Iraq, Libya, and Syria (hello CNN!). During the two decades long unipolar moment, Srebrenica was manufactured into one of the most important symbols of militant neolibcon globalism and its unchained “tyranny of good intentions.”

So it was not surprising that CNN and fading Hollywood globalist icon Angelina Jolie recently teamed up in order to keep the Srebrenica myth flame burning. Using the occasion of the death of Hatidza Mehmedovic, a Bosnian woman that led the Association of the Mothers of Srebrenica, Jolie and CNN regurgitated the now familiar Western propaganda claims about the “the worst massacre on European soil since the Holocaust,” and the “at least 8,000 innocent men and boys” that were executed by bloodthirsty Serb troops in July 1995.

Never mind the fact that not even the NATO-financed War Crimes Tribunal for ex-Yugoslavia in The Hague has dared invoke the now discredited “more than 8,000” figure in its later judgments; that one of the Tribunal’s judges recently admitted that “if any of the victims’ family members were to ask him who ordered the executions and why, he would be unable to answer”; that no mention is ever made of the thousands of Serb civilians from nearby villages brutally massacred during the previous three years by armed Bosnian Muslim troops using Srebrenica’s UN “demilitarized zone” status as a base of operations; of the “black flights” bringing arms to Srebrenica (while NATO was enforcing the “no fly zone” above Bosnia-Herzegovina); of Bill Clinton having assured the Bosnian Muslim leader, Alija Izetbegovich, that there would be a NATO intervention if the Serbs were to kill “at least 5,000 people” in Srebrenica; that incoming Serb forces were vastly outnumbered and outgunned by the defending Bosnian Muslim troops; that credible sources, UN and even U.S. officials and experts have put the number of executed prisoners into the hundreds, rather than thousands, while estimating that anywhere from 2000 to 5000 of the “genocide” victims were in fact Bosnian Muslim Army military casualties fallen in battle with Serb forces or internecine fighting; that the forensic evidence used by the Tribunal to pass “genocide” verdicts is highly suspect and not subject to independent verification; that a number of family members of “genocide victims” have reburied their loved ones’ bodies outside of the Srebrenica Memorial cemetery having become aware of the massive manipulation with victim numbers, identities, and true causes of death; that the Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center himself has publicly stated on several occasions that what happened in Srebrenica “does not fit the description or definition of genocide” (but, of course, Angelina Jolie and CNN know better!) etc. (See here for a more detailed debunking of the Srebrenica propaganda myth.)

But, why quibble about the facts if you can continue your fake news narrative in parallel with “atrocity porn” virtue-signaling, keeping alive the humanitarian interventionist flame in the face of NATO’s increasingly uncertain future in the Age of Trump, if you can use the occasion of someone’s death to keep the Clintonite legacy on life support at least until 2020, and the CNN and MSM-manufactured Fake-News Balkans protectorate – based on the lie of “Serb aggression” and scapegoating for the German and, later, U.S.-led dismemberment of Yugoslavia – somehow intact in the face of “malign Russian influence” and the unthinkable prospect of U.S.-Russian rapprochement…

If anything useful can be gleaned out of “CNNgelina’s” latest addition to the Srebrenica and Balkan faux narrative, it is the reminder that it’s not just Trump who has the fake news problem, and that it didn’t start with him or his election. By repeating for the umpteenth time the discredited Srebrenica lies, CNN has reminded us just how much they are willing and able to lie about everything else. And just how great a danger to global peace the unrepentantly Orwellian and potent combination of Western MSM propaganda, Hollywood “liberalism” and NATO’s globalized militarism truly represents.

Which, when you think about it, sounds a lot like her real life role as UN Special Envoy on human rights. In her latest «starring role», she is cast alongside British Foreign Minister William Hague. The «location»’ is the Democratic Republic of Congo. Both travelled to the war-ravaged Central African country this week to highlight the harrowing crime of rape against women as a result of conflicts.

This is not the first time that the unlikely pair has teamed up for this purpose. Previously, actress Jolie and Britain’s most senior diplomat have collaborated to ‘focus public attention’ on violence against women in Libya, Mali and Syria, among other international war zones.

Speaking to the Guardian newspaper while onboard a RAF aircraft courtesy of Mr Hague, the Hollywood star said: "There were hundreds of thousands of women raped during the Rwandan genocide. There are hundreds of thousands of people being raped in the Congo. Tens of thousands of women raped in Bosnia. God knows how many people raped in Syria».

Asked what she wanted to achieve by working with the British government to champion this appeal, the action-movie siren replied: "An end to impunity».

At which point Angelina Jolie, if she really understood the causes of these conflicts and the violence against women, should have reached over to slap handcuffs on the British foreign secretary and make a citizen’s arrest of a top war criminal.

In every instance of war that the actress cited, the British government has had a hand in either fomenting or fuelling. William Hague, in particular, has personally overseen British-sponsored terrorism in Libya, Mali and Syria.

It was Hague’s British regime that led the NATO blitzkrieg during 2011 in Libya to topple the government of Muammar Gaddafi. For seven months, British Typhoon fighter bombers engaged in over 10,000 sorties along with other NATO forces, to demolish that North African country. As many as 50,000 people were killed during the aerial bombardment. Countless numbers among Libya’s six-million nation were turned into refugees and now live under an anarchic regime of extremists and deprivation that NATO installed.

The same brand of Al Qaeda bandits and cut-throats that NATO warplanes paved the way for in Libya is being armed, trained, funded and directed in Syria by Britain and its allies.

As with Libya, Britain has taken a lead role in Syria along with France in arming a terror network – that the Western media euphemistically call «rebels» – to overthrow the sovereign government of Bashar Al Assad. British Special Forces have long-established training camps in Jordan from where graduated death squads can then ply their terror trade across the border in Syria.

Up to five million people have been displaced in the violence unleashed over the past two years in Syria by Britain and its NATO allies, the US and France, and their proxies, Turkey and the Gulf Arab dictatorships. In fleeing British-sponsored death squads and car bombers, up to a million Syrian civilians now reside in tents along the borders with Turkey, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon. Rape, of course, has been used as a weapon of terror by the militants in Syria to sow fear and dislodge popular support for the Damascus government.

Meanwhile, in the West Africa country of Mali, another humanitarian crisis is unfolding and doubtless involving yet more violence against women. Violence against women and children is always a corollary of war. Over a million Malians out of a total population of 15 million have fled their country, many of them since France launched its neo-colonial war on 11 January. In just over two months, another society has been turned over and shafted by NATO powers. France may have headed up this operation, but Britain has provided key military, logistical and political cover for the state terrorist subjugation of this impoverished African country. This week, the first contingent of British troops arrived in Mali – before the much-vaunted African-led forces – which belies the real imperialist scramble going on in West Africa and elsewhere across the continent.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Angelina Jolie and William Hague made their high-profile appearance this week, it is estimated that over six million people have been killed and millions more displaced in ongoing wars since the 1990s. The main contributor to the genocide particularly in the Eastern Congo is the militant groups backed by neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda. The regimes in both of these countries are clients of the US and Britain…

International war crimes lawyer Christopher Black says that one of the biggest untold stories of modern times is that the genocidal regime that came to power in Rwanda in the mid-90s did so with the crucial complicity of the US and Britain. The Rwandan and Ugandan regimes have since then exported war, violence, systematic crimes and rape into the Congo. Decades before this egregious episode, the mineral-rich Congo was riven by military coups led by the US, France and Belgium, most notoriously involving the assassination of elected leader Patrice Lumumba in 1960. Africa is indeed an appalling mess, but it is so as a direct result of rapacious Western capitalist powers that have marauded and exploited that continent relentlessly.

Angelina Jolie may well visit all these war zones and issue appeals for the millions of women subjected to rape and other violence. Who the actual perpetrators of specific crimes are will probably never been known nor traced. But one thing is beyond doubt. Britain has played a key role in instigating and fuelling the wars in these very countries – and many more besides down through the decades. The indiscriminate violence and social chaos of wars always beget violence against women and children.

So, in a very palpable way, if the sultry actress really wants to end impunity for rapists in war zones, then her public relations co-star and British Foreign Secretary William Hague is top of the wanted list – along with his American and French counterparts, John Kerry and Laurent Fabius, and most of their predecessors.

Ironically perhaps, Angelina Jolie and her husband, screen pin-up Brad Pitt, are among the Hollywood A-List who are reckoned by the Western media to be ambassadors for various ‘good causes’ of humanitarian, political and environmental concern. To their millions of fans worldwide, the glamorous couple probably instills feel-good sentiment, which in turn publicizes their movies and rakes in zillions of dollars more for these absurdly rich «stars». Perhaps as individuals, these celebrities are well meaning. But their PR value of giving cover to war criminals is priceless, and they are to be condemned nonetheless as unwitting agents.

As with so much else that spews out of Hollywood, such as the recent anti-Iran film Argo and innumerable movies glorifying Western wars and state-sponsored terrorism, the function is to propagandize and deceive public understanding on a mass scale – all in the name of «culture». Instead of seeing the true roots and authors of war and suffering, and in particular war-related violence against women, the public ends up being conditioned to normalize the abnormal and to invert reality. Incredibly, a war criminal like William Hague is transformed into a chivalrous hero on the side of women’s rights thanks in large part to the glamorous glow afforded by a Hollywood celeb. That is one hell of an award-winning act. No wonder there is impunity for the arch-criminals.

We may easily dismiss Angelina Jolie as a pathetic «bimbo» not worth a second thought. But the sanitizing job she performs for British, American and French state terrorism in the eyes of millions around the world makes her a dangerous commodity. A femme fatale indeed…