The fifth sin: Lying

In order to protect their own interests and marginalize and suppress those countries that disagree with them, the United States and its allies have resorted to lying and abusing, making up counterfactual evidence and false statements with no bottom lines, and repeatedly deceiving the world and provoking conflicts and clashes under the pretext of fabrications.

On the grounds of "washing powder," the United States provoked the Iraq War with its allies.

On Feb. 5, 2003, in a UN Security Council meeting on Iraq, then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell presented a test tube containing white powder, claiming that it was the evidence that Iraq was developing chemical weapons. On that ground, a combined force of troops from the United States and Britain launched the Iraq War on March 20. By the end of 2011 when the United States withdrew all its troops from Iraq, it found no evidence of any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

While responding to the accusation by Western countries in 2014 that Russia had been secretly annexing eastern Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin said: "Proof? Let's see it!"

"The entire world remembers the U.S. secretary of state demonstrating the evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, waving around some test tube with washing powder in the UN Security Council," he said.

◆The United States made up the story of war hero Jessica Lynch.

In April 2003, the U.S. military portrayed the heroic story of Jessica Lynch, a female soldier who served in Iraq. Lynch was wounded in an ambush by Iraqis but fought till the end in this outnumbered clash, according to the U.S. military. It later claimed that the 19-year-old was raped and tortured after being captured.

The story infuriated the Americans. U.S. special forces raided the hospital where Lynch was held and rescued her. CNN filmed the entire operation and released the footage of the rescue a few days later.

An all-American heroine, the story of Lynch's capture and rescue became one of the great patriotic moments of the conflict, which gave a huge boost to the morale of the U.S. military, and made up a stunning storyline for Hollywood filmmakers.

As a matter of fact, however, Lynch never fired her weapon during the battle. She was seriously injured as the vehicle she and her fellow soldiers were riding in crashed in the ambush. Iraqi medical staff who rescued Lynch reached out to the U.S. military to free her, but was rejected.

According to Iraqi doctors, the hospital informed them of the rescue operation in advance that the operation was a show performed by the military.

In April 2007, appearing as a witness at the congressional committee investigating military misinformation from the battlefield, Lynch recalled the friendly Iraqi medical staff in the rescue and the fine treatment she had received during the time she was wounded and taken prisoner of war, saying that the tales of great heroism by the Pentagon was a hype based on lies.

◆The U.S.-led NATO brazenly launched Kosovo War on the baseless fabrications of genocide.

On March 24, 1999, the 78-day Kosovo War broke out as the U.S.-led NATO launched an airstrike against Yugoslavia. A total of more than 2,000 people were killed, more than 6,000 injured, and nearly 1 million people became refugees in the war which also caused an economic loss of over 200 billion dollars on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

On April 7, 1999, then U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen said, "the appalling accounts of mass killing in Kosovo" made it clear that the war "is a fight for justice over genocide."

Then U.S. President Bill Clinton defended NATO's air attacks on Yugoslavia, claiming that "Nine of every 10 Kosovar Albanians now has been driven from their home; thousands murdered; at least 100,000 missing ..." and that NATO works to reverse systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing and mass killing. CNN reported that Clinton criticized the Serb campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and compared the actions to those of Adolf Hitler during the Holocaust.

The Washington Times reported in November 1999 that the Clinton administration exaggerated the number of ethnic Albanians killed by Serbs.

In addition, according to the United Nations Charter, "all members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state," except in a few circumstances where the UN Security Council shall decide whether to use force. However, the United States and NATO launched the operation without the UN authorization.

◆The United States and its allies launched the Syrian war under the hoax of self-initiated chemical weapon attacks.

In early 2011, anti-government demonstrations spread across Syria, which later escalated into a civil war. With the financial support from the United States, the White Helmets, also known as Syria Civil Defense, faked videos of false-flag airstrikes and chemical attacks on civilians, putting a target on the back of the Syrian government.

Taking the videos as evidence, the governments of the United States, Britain and France later claimed that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons to attack its civilians, and thus launched targeted airstrikes in the country.

According to a UN report released in 2019, "there are reasonable grounds to believe that international coalition forces may not have directed their attacks at a specific military objective, or failed to do so with the necessary precaution."

"Launching indiscriminate attacks that result in death or injury to civilians amounts to a war crime in cases in which such attacks are conducted recklessly," said the report by the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria.

Vladimir Chizhov, Russia's permanent representative to the EU, said the White Helmet had repeatedly used the tactic of faked videos to frame the Syrian and Russian governments. According to Chizhov, there are personnel "specifically trained" by the White Helmet, who "were already caught in the act with staged videos."

Aside from providing the so-called humanitarian aid, the White Helmet had long been producing fake news and spreading misinformation, said Russian and Syrian reports, adding that Western countries including the United States, Britain, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium have been its long-time sponsors.

◆The United States and its allies made up a pack of lies about the COVID-19 pandemic in an attempt to deflect blame for their ineffective response to the epidemic in their own countries.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. administration and other Western governments have shrugged off the WHO guidelines to take effective prevention measures, instead, they have been casting blame and doubts on China.

From gloating to waiting for the so-called herd immunity, they have resorted to a series of fabrications to numb their people, claiming that "the virus was leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan;" "the virus originated in Wuhan;" and "it was the Chinese government's procrastinated response that had caused the outbreak to spread around the world."

Trump and Pompeo keep claiming to have collected new evidence that the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The Multi-Agency Collaboration Environment (MACE), a major Department of Defense contractor, released a report saying that the novel coronavirus was released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was criticized by The Daily Beast, a U.S. news and opinion website, as being "filled with information that's just plain wrong."

The 30-page document claimed to rely on social media postings, commercial satellite imagery, and cellphone location data to draw the conclusion that some sort of "hazardous event" occurred at the Wuhan lab in October 2019.

Earlier this year, a WHO expert team that visited Wuhan in central China to carry out the virus source tracing research concluded that a laboratory incident is "extremely unlikely" to be the cause of COVID-19, which, however, was ignored and questioned publicly by the United States and other Western countries.

According to the WHO, China has provided the organization with information about a cluster of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan as early as Jan. 3, 2020. Two days later, on Jan. 5, the WHO shared detailed information about the cluster of cases through the International Health Regulations (2005) Event Information System, which is accessible to all its members. The event notice provided information on the cases and advised its members to take precautions to reduce the risk of acute respiratory infections. Yet Western countries turned a deaf ear to the advice.

◆The United States wrongly accused China of militarizing the South China Sea, and strengthened its military deployment with its allies in the region.

In recent years, the United States has stepped up its military deployment with its allies such as Japan and the Philippines, citing the so-called "freedom of navigation," while misleading international public opinion by accusing China of militarizing the South China Sea.

According to incomplete statistics, from 2017 to 2020, the U.S. military conducted "Freedom of Navigation Operations" as many as 15 times in the South China Sea.

What's more, the United States strengthened the deployment of military forces in surrounding areas of the South China Sea, especially that of sophisticated strategic weapons, and continued to seek to strengthen military partnerships with the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan and other countries. The United States also strived to seek cooperation with its allies in the Asia-Pacific region.

East Asia Forum, an international policy forum based in Australia, pointed out in an article published on May 2, 2017, that "media distortion flourishes when academic analysts themselves push U.S.-slanted research."

"The U.S. argument is that freedom of navigation is indivisible and includes both commercial navigation and U.S. IRR probes. The United States then argues that China's interference with its military vessels and aircraft in and over China's exclusive economic zone violates freedom of navigation," it said.

◆The United States fabricated a preposterous lie about a "genocide" in Xinjiang, wooing its allies to impose sanctions on China.

In the past two years, based on so-called Xinjiang-related research reports concocted by pseudo-scholars such as Adrian Zenz, and experiences of some so-called "witnesses," the United States has wooed anti-China forces in the West to make up and disseminate fallacies related to Xinjiang, falsely accuse China of committing genocide against Uygurs in Xinjiang, defame China's policy on Xinjiang, grossly interfere in China's internal affairs, and announce sanctions against Chinese entities and individuals, in an attempt to deceive the international community and disrupt Xinjiang's stability and development.

According to The Grayzone, a U.S.-based independent news website which produces original investigative journalism, Zenz, a German far-right ideologue, has invented statistics and spun tales to justify his false conclusion.

"A careful review of Zenz's research shows that his assertion of genocide is contradicted by flagrant data abuse, fraudulent claims, cherry-picking of source material, and propagandistic misrepresentations," said the website in its report.

Having visited Xinjiang "from one end to the other" and "seen a lot of things" during his trips, French writer Maxime Vivas recounted what he saw in a book entitled "Uygurs, to put an end to fake news," which has dismantled the lie of genocide in Xinjiang.

◆The United States and its allies vilified China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and fabricated lies such as China's "new colonialism" and "debt trap diplomacy."

The United States and its allies have been vilifying the BRI. Deliberately ignoring the positive role of Chinese investment in promoting regional economic development, some Western media and politicians are fueling hypes of the so-called "new colonialism" and "new imperialism," and disseminating such fallacies as the countries joining the BRI are falling into China's "debt trap," and China is the sole beneficiary of its investment.

The narrative of Chinese "dept-trap diplomacy" is just a powerful, well-told lie, which wrongfully portrays China and the developing countries it deals with, according to an article co-authored by Deborah Brautigam, an international political economy professor at Johns Hopkins University, and Meg Rithmire, an associate professor at Harvard Business School.

The authors indicated in the piece published on the Atlantic that the former U.S. administration was touting the fallacy of "debt-trap diplomacy," taking the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota as the prime example to warn against China's strategic use of debts.

However, it was Canadian and Danish firms -- not China -- that first carried out feasibility studies for the port, putting forward plans to finance, build and operate the project, but failed to move forward, said the article.

In 2007, with China Harbour Engineering Company lobbying hard, the Export-Import Bank of China offered a more than 300-million-dollar, 15-year commercial loan for the project, and the group won the contract.

Among the creditors of Sri Lanka's foreign debt, Japan and the World Bank are the biggest owners. The Hambantota Port debt in 2017 accounted for only 5 percent of Sri Lanka's foreign debt, which was not the cause of the country's financial crisis, said a former central bank governor. Politicians and media from the United States and other Western countries have been turning a deaf ear to the will of developing countries to pursue development.

Fueling U.S. oppression and economic decoupling from China, Australia made up preposterous fabrications hyping up the so-called "China threat" theory and "China interference" theory, continued to stipulate such bills as "foreign interference laws" and "Foreign Relations Act," rejected a number of Chinese companies' investment in Australia and tore up Victoria State's BRI agreements with China citing national interest.

◆In the name of "human rights" and "democracy," the United States and its allies keep selling the world conspiracy and lies.

Some former suzerain states in European countries promised their African colonies that the Western-style democracy was the "gospel" of development, which, in reality, pushed African countries into the trap of endless political succession crisis and development deficit. Europe claimed to have provided the largest aid to Africa but turned out to be just lip service, which procrastinated the development of Africa.

After the start of the Arab Spring movement, the EU promised to increase aid to Arab countries year by year, but facts have shown a downward trend. In 2014, the EU accomplished only 20 percent of its goal for the year. The bloc branded itself as the biggest funder of the COVAX mechanism, but the number of vaccines it exported to developing countries is less than 5 percent of its production capacity.

On April 19, 2021, Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent from the United Nations Human Rights Council issued a joint statement, strongly rejecting a British government-backed report on racism and ethnic disparities in the country, saying the report further distorted and falsified historic facts, and could even fuel racism, racial discrimination and negative racial stereotypes.

The statement condemned the report's assertion that while there might be overt acts of racism in the UK, there was no institutional racism there.

"The report's conclusion that racism is either a product of the imagination of people of African descent or of discrete, individualized incidents ignores the pervasive role that the social construction of race was designed to play in society, particularly in normalizing atrocity, in which the British state and institutions played a significant role," the statement said.

According to experts, many previous studies and reports have all shown the damaging impact of institutional racism and deep-rooted inequities in areas such as health, education, employment, housing, stop-and-search practices, and the criminal justice system in the UK.

The statement pointed out that the report's mythical representation of enslavement is an attempt to sanitize the history of the trade in enslaved Africans.

"This is a reprehensible, although not unfamiliar tactic, employed by many whose wealth came directly from the enslavement of others, ever since slavery was outlawed. Seeking to silence the brutal role of enslavers, the mind-numbing generational wealth they accrued, and the social capital and political influence they gained from exploiting Black bodies is a deliberate attempt at historical misrepresentation," it said.

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