The War on Truth
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?
07/31/03: (Z Net) 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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