Posted on 4-8-2003
Media
Is Murder
By John Pilger, The New Statesman, 04 August 2003
The White House sets the tone and the media echo a line
that celebrates the victimhood of the invader and the evil of
the Iraqis. And then London takes its cue.
In Baghdad, the rise and folly of rapacious imperial
power is commemorated in a forgotten cemetery called the North
Gate. Dogs are its visitors; the rusted gates are padlocked,
and skeins of traffic fumes hang over its parade of crumbling
headstones and unchanging historical truth.
Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude is buried here,
in a mausoleum befitting his station, if not the cholera to
which he succumbed. In 1917, he declared: "Our armies do
not come . . . as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators."
Within three years, 10,000 had died in an uprising against the
British, who gassed and bombed those they called "miscreants".
It was an adventure from which British imperialism in the Middle
East never recovered.
Every day now, in the United States, the all-pervasive
media tell Americans that their bloodletting in Iraq is well
under way, although the true scale of the attacks is almost
certainly concealed. Soon, more soldiers will have been killed
since the "liberation" than during the invasion. Sustaining
the myth of "mission" is becoming difficult, as in
Vietnam. This is not to doubt the real achievement of the invaders'
propaganda, which was the suppression of the truth that most
Iraqis opposed both the regime of Saddam Hussein and the Anglo-American
assault on their homeland. One reason the BBC's Andrew Gilligan
angered Downing Street was that he reported that, for many Iraqis,
the bloody invasion and occupation were at least as bad as the
fallen dictatorship.
This is unmentionable here in America. The tens of thousands
of Iraqi dead and maimed do not exist. When I interviewed Douglas
Feith, number three to Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, he shook
his head and lectured me on the "precision" of American
weapons. His message was that war had become a bloodless science
in the service of America's unique divinity. It was like interviewing
a priest. Only American "boys" and "girls"
suffer, and at the hands of "Ba'athist remnants",
a self-deluding term in the spirit of General Maude's "miscreants".
The media echo this, barely gesturing at the truth of a popular
resistance and publishing galleries of GI amputees, who are
described with a maudlin, down-home chauvinism which celebrates
the victimhood of the invader while casting the vicious imperialism
that they served as benign. At the State Department, the under-secretary
for international security, John Bolton, suggested to me that,
for questioning the fundamentalism of American policy, I was
surely a heretic, "a Communist Party member", as he
put it.
As for the great human catastrophe in Iraq, the bereft
hospitals, the children dying from thirst and gastroenteritis
at a rate greater than before the invasion, with almost 8 per
cent of infants suffering extreme malnutrition, says Unicef;
as for a crisis in agriculture which, says the Food and Agriculture
Organisation, is on the verge of collapse: these do not exist.
Like the American-driven, medieval-type siege that destroyed
hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives over 12 years, there is
no knowledge of this in America: therefore it did not happen.
The Iraqis are, at best, unpeople; at worst, tainted, to be
hunted. "For every GI killed," said a letter given
prominence in the New York Daily News late last month, "20
Iraqis must be executed." In the past week, Task Force
20, an "elite" American unit charged with hunting
evildoers, murdered at least five people as they drove down
a street in Baghdad, and that was typical.
The august New York Times and Washington Post are not,
of course, as crude as the News and Murdoch. However, on 23
July, both papers gave front-page prominence to the government's
carefully manipulated "homecoming" of 20-year-old
Private Jessica Lynch, who was injured in a traffic accident
during the invasion and captured. She was cared for by Iraqi
doctors, who probably saved her life and who risked their own
lives in trying to return her to American forces. The official
version, that she bravely fought off Iraqi attackers, is a pack
of lies, like her "rescue" (from an almost deserted
hospital), which was filmed with night-vision cameras by a Hollywood
director. All this is known in Washington, and much of it has
been reported.
This did not deter the best and worst of American journalism
uniting to help stage-manage her beatific return to Elizabeth,
West Virginia, with the Times reporting the Pentagon's denial
of "embellishing" and that "few people seemed
to care about the controversy". According to the Post,
the whole affair had been "muddied by conflicting media
accounts". George Orwell described this as "words
falling upon the facts like soft snow, blurring their outlines
and covering up all the details". Thanks to the freest
press on earth, most Americans, according to a national poll,
believe Iraq was behind the 11 September attacks. "We have
been the victims of the biggest cover-up manoeuvre of all time,"
says Jane Harman, a rare voice in Congress. But that, too, is
an illusion.
The verboten truth is that the unprovoked attack on Iraq
and the looting of its resources is America's 73rd colonial
intervention. These, together with hundreds of bloody covert
operations, have been covered up by a system and a veritable
tradition of state-sponsored lies that reach back to the genocidal
campaigns against Native Americans and the attendant frontier
myths; and the Spanish-American war, which broke out after Spain
was falsely accused of sinking an American warship, the Maine,
and war fever was whipped up by the Hearst newspapers; and the
non-existent "missile gap" between the US and the
Soviet Union, which was based on fake documents given to journalists
in 1960 and served to accelerate the nuclear arms race; and
four years later, the non-existent Vietnamese attack on two
American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin for which the media
demanded reprisals, giving President Johnson the pretext he
wanted to bomb North Vietnam.
In the late 1970s, a silent media allowed President Carter
to arm Indonesia as it slaughtered the East Timorese, and to
begin secret support for the mujahedin, from which came the
Taliban and al-Qaeda. In the 1980s, the manufacture of an absurdity,
the "threat" to America from popular movements in
Central America, notably the Sandinistas in tiny Nicaragua,
allowed President Reagan to arm and support terrorist groups
such as the Contras, leaving an estimated 70,000 dead. That
George W Bush's America gives refuge to hundreds of Latin American
torturers, favoured murderous dictators and anti-Castro hijackers,
terrorists by any definition, is almost never reported. Neither
is the work of a "training school" at Fort Benning,
Georgia, whose graduates would be the pride of Osama Bin Laden.
Americans, says Time magazine, live in "an eternal
present". The point is, they have no choice. The "mainstream"
media are now dominated by Rupert Murdoch's Fox television network,
which had a good war. The Federal Communications Commission,
run by Colin Powell's son Michael, is finally to deregulate
television so that Fox and four other conglomerates control
90 per cent of the terrestrial and cable audience. Moreover,
the leading 20 internet sites are now owned by the likes of
Fox, Disney, AOL Time Warner and a clutch of other giants. Just
14 companies attract 60 per cent of the time all American web-users
spend online.
The director of Le Monde Diplomatique, Ignacio Ramonet,
summed this up well: "To justify a preventive war that
the United Nations and global public opinion did not want, a
machine for propaganda and mystification, organised by the doctrinaire
sect around George Bush, produced state-sponsored lies with
a determination characteristic of the worst regimes of the 20th
century."
Most of the lies were channelled straight to Downing
Street from the 24-hour Office of Global Communications in the
White House. Many were the invention of a highly secret unit
in the Pentagon, called the Office of Special Plans, which "sexed
up" raw intelligence, much of it uttered by Tony Blair.
It was here that many of the most famous lies about weapons
of mass destruction were "crafted". On 9 July, Donald
Rumsfeld said, with a smile, that America never had "dramatic
new evidence" and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz earlier revealed
that the "issue of weapons of mass destruction" was
"for bureaucratic reasons" only, "because it
was the one reason [for invading Iraq] that everyone could agree
on."
The Blair government's attacks on the BBC make sense
as part of this. They are not only a distraction from Blair's
criminal association with the Bush gang, though for a less than
obvious reason. As the astute American media commentator Danny
Schechter points out, the BBC's revenues have grown to $5.6bn;
more Americans watch the BBC in America than watch BBC1 in Britain;
and what Murdoch and the other ascendant TV conglomerates have
long wanted is the BBC "checked, broken up, even privatised
. . . All this money and power will likely become the target
for Blair government regulators and the merry men of Ofcom,
who want to contain public enterprises and serve those avaricious
private businesses who would love to slice off some of the BBC's
market share." As if on cue, Tessa Jowell, the British
Culture Secretary, questioned the renewal of the BBC's charter.
The irony of this, says Schechter, is that the BBC was
always solidly pro-war. He cites a comprehensive study by Media
Tenor, the non-partisan institute that he founded, which analysed
the war coverage of some of the world's leading broadcasters
and found that the BBC allowed less dissent than all of them,
including the US networks. A study by Cardiff University found
much the same. More often than not, the BBC amplified the inventions
of the lie machine in Washington, such as Iraq's non-existent
attack on Kuwait with scuds. And there was Andrew Marr's memorable
victory speech outside 10 Downing Street: "[Tony Blair]
said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath,
and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on
both those points he has been proved conclusively right."
Almost every word of that was misleading or nonsense.
Studies now put the death toll at as many as 10,000 civilians
and 20,000 Iraqi troops. If this does not constitute a "bloodbath",
what was the massacre of 3,000 people at the twin towers?
In contrast, I was moved and almost relieved by the description
of the heroic Dr David Kelly by his family. "David's professional
life," they wrote, "was characterised by his integrity,
honour and dedication to finding the truth, often in the most
difficult circumstances. It is hard to comprehend the enormity
of this tragedy." There is little doubt that a majority
of the British people understand that David Kelly was the antithesis
of those who have shown themselves to be the agents of a dangerous,
rampant foreign power. Stopping this menace is now more urgent
than ever, for Iraqis and us
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