By Wayne Madsen

The neocons, who can always be relied upon to lie, cheat, steal, fabricate, have also refined the propaganda art of mistranslating foreign language quotes of various foreign leaders for their own insidious purposes.

In 2006, the corporate media hyped the supposed statement in Farsi by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad that Israel should be “wiped off the map.” In fact, what Ahmedinejad actually said was”the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” Certainly, regime change, something the neocons advocate against governments hostile to their global designs, is not the same as wiping a nation off the map.

The mistranslations of Ahmedinejad’s speeches were largely courtesy of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a Mossad front operation that operates out of a post office box in Washington, DC.

It now appears that Reuters, taking a page from MEMRI, is conducting the same kind of mistranslation operations against Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. In a July 24 report from Foros, Ukraine, Putin is quoted that he recently met the so-called Russian spies, arrested in the United States and swapped for four Western agents imprisoned in Russia. The article claimed that Putin said he “sang Soviet songs” with the expelled agents told them he admired what they did. However, one of the expelled agents, Anna Chapman is only 29 years old and she would have only ten years old when the USSR collapsed.

Reuters was apparently playing as fast and loose with translations of Russian as MEMRI does with Farsi and Arabic. RIA Novosti reported that what Putin actually said was he and the expelled agents “sang patriotic songs accompanied by live music and talked about life during the meeting.” That is certainly different than Putin, an ex-KGB agent, singing “Soviet songs” as part of some sort of nostalgic remembrance of the former Soviet Union and KGB. But that is the picture painted by Reuters from Ukraine, a nation that is embedded with operatives of the CIA’s master-manipulator of disinformation tactics in the former Soviet bloc, George Soros.

The neocon Wall Street Journal also ran with the “Soviet song” story, when, in fact, one of the songs was from a 1968 series that ran on television in Moscow. The Guardian (UK), which has suspiciously hyped the Wikileaks’ leak of tens of thousands of classified documents dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan and had to point out that it did not pay Wikileaks for the material, described the TV show theme song as a “sentimental Soviet song.” Putin did not call the song Soviet — that task was taken up by certain Western media like The Guardian, which are more interested in propaganda dissemination than in news reporting.

A former U.S. intelligence analyst who tracked Russian government communications told WMR, “The Russian word for Soviet is советский (Sovetskiy). The Russian word for patriotic is отечественный (otechestvennyy). Putin either said Soviet or he said patriotic. If Putin was speaking in Russian, as of course he would, then these words could not have been ‘mistranslated’ by Reuters. Patriotic Russians these days do not sing the Soviet anthem.”

Putin was also reported to have told the alleged Russian agents, “As far as those people are concerned — everyone of them had a tough life.” Reuters reported that Putin was referring to the expelled agents. However, according to the former U.S. intelligence analyst, Reuters, again, appears to have mistranslated Putin’s comments. The ex-analyst said, “When Putin spoke of ‘their life being hard,’ he was not referring to the alleged hard life of the so-called Russian spies. He was speaking generically about the difficulty of being a spy.” Putin was a KGB agent assigned to East Germany during the Cold War.

Reuters and RIA Novosti agreed on one of Putin’s comments to the swapped agents. Putin said he knows those who betrayed the agents by name. Putin said of the scandal, “As I said earlier, this came as a result of betrayal. They [the betrayers] always end up badly taking to drink or drugs, in a gutter’ he said, adding that he knew all betrayers by their names.”

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has also been a victim of mistranslations from the same “usual suspects.” In 2006, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles launched a polemic against Chavez claiming he said, “the world has wealth for all, but some minorities, the descendants of the same people that crucified Christ, have taken over all the wealth of the world.” The canard of Chavez’s anti-Semitism was echoed by the neocon Weekly Standard, as well as the Voice of America. In fact, Chavez was not talking about Jews but the Romans and Spaniards.

Chavez actually stated, “The world has an offer for everybody but it turned out that a few minorities — the descendants of those who crucified Christ, the descendants of those who expelled Bolivar from here and also those who in a certain way crucified him in Santa Marta, there in Colombia — they took possession of the riches of the world, a minority took possession of the planet’s gold, the silver, the minerals, the water, the good lands, the oil, and they have concentrated all the riches in the hands of a few; less than 10 percent of the world population owns more than half of the riches of the world.”

The neocons would have the world believe that Chavez said the Jews expelled Simon Bolivar from Venezuela, when in fact he was referring to the Romans who crucified Christ and the Spaniards who expelled Bolivar. Facts matter little to the neocons whose stock in trade is comprised of mistruths, half truths, and blatant forgeries.

Ousted President Manuel Zelaya was also subjected to mistranslations after he re-entered Honduras and was given refuge in the Brazilian embassy. Again, the culprits were the “usual suspects,” particularly the Miami Herald.

WMR exposed this disinformation tactic: “The Herald reported on a telephone interview with Zelaya and said the Honduran leader said he was being subjected to ‘high-frequency radiation’ from Israeli mercenaries who are supporting the Honduran junta. The paper also reported that Zelaya said that the Israelis were using ‘mind-altering’ gas and radiation. In actuality, that is not what Zelaya stated in his conversation on September 24 with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who was attending the UN General Assembly session in New York. Chavez said he spoke to Zelaya by phone at 1:00 pm EDT and the Honduran leader said a piece of equipment on the rooftop of a neighboring home had been recovered and brought into the embassy by Zelaya loyalists. When Zelaya checked the gear’s serial number on the Internet, it turned out the equipment was a cell phone jamming device manufactured in Israel. What Zelaya stated to Chavez and presumably to the Miami Herald is that the junta and its Israeli private security company advisers were jamming the cell phones of those holed up inside the embassy. Zelaya never spoke of radiation death rays but that is the impression the Herald gave and it was quickly picked up by various neocon and Zionist-controlled media outlets.”

The cold warriors and their allies — the Zionists, the right-wing Cuban exiles, and other retrogressive elements in the Obama administration — appear hell-bent on re-creating the Cold War. Putin joins Ahmedinejad, Chavez, and Zelaya in the neocon mistranslation arena of lies and distortions. The latest ploy of the neocons is to paint Putin as an unrepentant Soviet KGB agent.

Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report

, Jul 28, 2010,