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Deception On Iraq from the White House and US Media

Today's Alternative News: 04/18/03


Sam Hamod

By now it must be evident that there has been a lot of nonsense in the reporting from Iraq, especially by the “imbedded reporters” because they have basically shown us a “bloodless war.” Anyone who has been in battle, and I have been in two wars, knows that there is blood everywhere and that the noise is overwhelming and endless. Somehow, we saw wounded soldiers only, with bandages, no blood, and no footage of civilians without limbs who lay their bleeding with no medical help! We kept hearing how we’d “get a front seat for the truth about the war.” Instead, we got a sham of reality, a sanitized version of war from these network people.

Fortunately, we had BBC, Al Jazeera, Al Minar TV and Robert Fisk of the Independent and others who brought the truth home to us; if we’d had to rely upon CNN, NBC, MSNBC, CBS and FAUX (FOX), we would have seen this as a war with almost no civilian casualties, few real Iraqi soldiers slaughtered and burned to death in their pre-1991 vintage tanks and we would have never gotten the truth that, up to today, there is no real water supply into Basra and Um Kassar, nor in Baghdad.

Americans were also lied to about the deaths and injuries to our own innocent troops. If you noticed, most of the dead were either Black or Latino, all the officers except for the window-dressing, Gen. Vincent Brooks, were white. From black soldiers whohave written to their parents, it also appears that most of the seriously wounded were Blacks and Latinos, though there were also some whites, but usually poor southerners or West Virginians or poor Texans who were killed or maimed. None of this came out from the major US networks, but it did come out from some others sources. As to Brooks, as one African American veteran put it, “Have you noticed that it was always white officers at first, but when things started going bad and we saw many of those captured or wounded were Blacks or Latinos, they put Uncle Tom Vincent Brooks on the tube everyday—just the way they put Uncle Tom Colin Powell on TV at the UN—as if there were a lot of Black officers of high rank and as if there were other Blacks in Bush’s cabinet. Hell, we know better.”

Finally, today, CNN took the cake, along with the other major American TV networks by shortchanging the number of demonstrators against the US in the streets of Baghdad. CNN reported only hundreds and downplayed it; the BBC, Al Jazeera, Al Minar, French, German and Chinese stations reported many, many thousands in the streets demanding, loudly, “’Americans go home,” “Fuck you, America,” “Get out of our faces.” and other epithets and slogans. The anger was clear and growing. But, our media keeps downplaying the anger and anti-American feeling in the major cities; it is also growing more bitter in Mosul where American troops have pulled out of the center of the city so as not to have to deal with the angry crowds of Iraqi Shi’a, Sunni, Kurds, Turkomen and Chaldeans.

What we have then is deception of the American people on a grand order, first from the Bush team with its constant barrage of lies about Saddam being tied to Al Queda and Bin Laden (both of whom were enemies and wanted one another dead), the still as yet unfound poison, chemical and other “weapons of mass destruction,” the number of civilians dead and wounded by our “smart missiles” (some of which landed hundreds of miles off target in the desert of Saudi Arabia!) and countless other times in the wrong neighborhoods (or were these neighborhoods the real target so as to terrorize the people), the looting of the hospitals and museums while our troops were spending time tearing down statues of Saddam Hussein and planting American flags on buildings, mosques and in city squares, and the final hypocrisy, the alleged “liberation” of a people who didn’t ask us to come in and destroy their country while we “liberated” their oil and left their lives in ruins without water, medicine, jobs or food. But by now the media’s complicity is clearer than ever by their sanitizing of events, massaging of numbers of protesters, never letting the blood of war show and their hypocrisy by their attitude that an American killed or wounded is a major event, but that the other humans, the Iraqis, don’t really matter because they aren’t as human as we are. Ah, this also smells of racism, of a sort that the media was part of in the US for over a century, where Blacks were less than whites—now Iraqis are less human than Americans—at least that’s the message our media is trying to pass off on us. Ah, the deception goes on and one. No this is not news were getting, often it is fiction to fit the myths the American government and the media wish to perpetrate on the American people so that they will stay docile, supportive of war and continue believing that by killing people you make your own people safer—what utter nonsense.

Professor Sam Hamod is an expert in world affairs, especially the Middle East and the Islamic World; he served as an advisor to the US State Department; as a professor at Princeton, Michigan, Iowa and Howard ; as Editor of THIRD WORLD NEWS (Wash, DC) and as Director of The Islamic Center of Washington, DC.

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