topic by
observer
3/26/2002 (8:39) |
|
A compliant press is preparing the ground for an all-out attack on Iraq. It never mentions the
victims: the young, the old and the vulnerable : John Pilger :21 Mar 2002
The promised attack on Iraq will test free journalism as never before. The prevailing media
orthodoxy is that the attack is only a matter of time. 'The arguments may already be over,'
says the Observer, 'Bush and Blair have made it clear . . .' The beating of war drums is so
familiar that the echo of the last round of media tom-toms is still heard, together with its
self-serving 'vindication' for having done the dirty work of great power, yet again.
I have been a reporter in too many places where public lies have disguised the culpability for
great suffering, from Indochina to southern Africa, East Timor to Iraq, merely to turn the
page or switch off the news-as-sermon, and accept that journalism has to be like this -
'waiting outside closed doors to be lied to', as Russell Baker of the New York Times once
put it. The honourable exceptions lift the spirits. One piece by Robert Fisk will do that,
regardless of his subject. An eyewitness report from Palestine by Peter Beaumont in the
Observer remains in the memory, as singular truth, along with Suzanne Goldenberg's brave
work for the Guardian.
The pretenders, the voices of Murdochism and especially the liberal ciphers of rampant
western power can rightly say that Pravda never published a Fisk. 'How do you do it?' asked
a Pravda editor, touring the US with other Soviet journalists at the height of the cold war.
Having read all the papers and watched the TV, they were astonished to find that all the
foreign news and opinions were more or less the same. 'In our country, we put people in
prison, we tear out their fingernails to achieve this result? What's your secret?'
The secret is the acceptance, often unconscious, of an imperial legacy: the unspoken rule of
reporting whole societies in terms of their usefulness to western 'interests' and of
minimising and obfuscating the culpability of 'our' crimes. 'What are 'we' to do?' is the
unerring media cry when it is rarely asked who 'we' are and what 'our' true agenda is, based
on a history of conquest and violence. Liberal sensibilities may be offended, even shocked
by modern imperial double standards, embodied in Blair; but the invisible boundaries of how
they are reported are not in dispute. The trail of blood is seldom followed; the connections
are not made; 'our' criminals, who kill and collude in killing large numbers of human beings
at a safe distance, are not named, apart from an occasional token, like Kissinger.
A long series of criminal operations by the American secret state, identified and
documented, such as the conspiracy that oversaw the 'forgotten' slaughter of up to a million
people in Indonesia in 1965-66, amount to more deaths of innocent people than died in the
Holocaust. But this is irrelevant to present-day reporting. The tutelage of hundreds of
tyrants, murderers and torturers by 'our' closest ally, including the training of Islamic jihad
fanatics in CIA camps in Virginia and Pakistan, is of no consequence. The harbouring in the
United States of more terrorists than probably anywhere on earth, including hijackers of
aircraft and boats from Cuba, controllers of El Salvadorean death squads and politicians
named by the United Nations as complicit in genocide, is clearly of no interest to those
standing in front of the White House and reporting, with a straight face, 'America's war on
terrorism'.
That George Bush Sr, former head of the CIA and president, is by any measure of
international law one of the modern era's greatest prima facie war criminals, and his son's
illegitimate administration a product of this dynastic mafia, is unmentionable.
The rest of the answer to the incredulous question raised by the Pravda editors in America
is censorship by omission. Once vital information illuminates the true aims of the 'national
security state', the euphemism for the mafia state, it loses media 'credibility' and is
consigned to the margins, or oblivion. Thus, fake debates can be carried on in the British
Sunday newspapers about whether 'we' should attack Iraq. The debaters, often proud
liberals with an equally proud record of supporting Washington's other invasions, guard the
limits.
These 'debates' are framed in such a way that Iraq is neither a country nor a community of
22 million human beings, but one man, Saddam Hussein. A picture of the fiendish tyrant
almost always dominates the page. ('Should we go to war against this man?' asked last
Sunday's Observer). To appreciate the power of this, replace the picture with a photograph
of stricken Iraqi infants, and the headline with: 'Should we go to war against these
children?' Propaganda then becomes truth. Any attack on Iraq will be executed, we can rest
assured, in the American way, with saturation cluster bombing and depleted uranium, and
the victims will be the young, the old, the vulnerable, like the 5,000 civilians who are now
reliably estimated to have been bombed to death in Afghanistan. As for the murderous
Saddam Hussein, former friend of Bush Sr and Thatcher, his escape route is almost certainly
assured.
The column inches now devoted to Iraq, often featuring unnamed manipulators and liars of
the intelligence services, almost always omit one truth. This is the truth of the American-
and British-driven embargo on Iraq, now in its 13th year. Hundreds of thousands of people,
mostly children, have died as a consequence of this medieval siege. The worst, most
tendentious journalism has sought to denigrate the scale of this crime, even calling the
death of Iraqi infants a mere 'statistical construct'. The facts are documented in
international study after study, from the United Nations to Harvard University. (For a digest
of the facts, see Dr Eric Herring's Bristol University paper 'Power, Propaganda and
Indifference: an explanation of the continued imposition of economic sanctions on Iraq
despite their human cost', available from eric.herring@bristol.ac.uk)
Among those now debating whether the Iraqi people should be cluster-bombed or not,
incinerated or not, you are unlikely to find the names of Denis Halliday and Hans von
Sponeck, who have done the most to break through the propaganda. No one knows the
potential human cost better than they. As assistant secretary general of the UN, Halliday
started the oil-for-food programme in Iraq. Von Sponeck was his successor. Eminent in their
field of caring for other human beings, they resigned their long UN careers, calling the
embargo 'genocide'.
Their last appearance in the press was in the Guardian last November, when they wrote:
'The most recent report ofthe UN secretary general, in October 2001, says that the US and
UK governments' blocking of $4bn of humanitarian supplies is by far the greatest constraint
on the implementation of the oil-for-food programme. The report says that, in contrast, the
Iraqi government's distribution of humanitarian supplies is fully satisfactory...The death of
some 5-6,000 children a month is mostly due to contaminated water, lack of medicines and
malnutrition. The US and UK governments' delayed clearance of equipment and materials is
responsible for this tragedy, not Baghdad.'
They are in no doubt that if Saddam Hussein saw advantage in deliberately denying his
people humanitarian supplies, he would do so; but the UN, from the secretary general
himself down, says that, while the regime could do more, it has not withheld supplies.
Indeed, without Iraq's own rationing and distribution system, says the UN Food and
Agriculture Organisation, there would have been famine. Halliday and von Sponeck point out
that the US and Britain are able to fend off criticism of sanctions with unsubstantiated
stories that the regime is 'punishing' its own people. If these stories are true, they say, why
does America and Britain further punish them by deliberately withholding humanitarian
supplies, such as vaccines, painkillers and cancer diagnostic equipment? This wanton
blocking of UN-approved shipments is rarely reported in the British press. The figure is now
almost $5bn in humanitarian-related supplies. Once again, the UN executive director of the
oil-for-food programme has broken diplomatic silence to express 'grave concern at the
unprecedented surge in volume of holds placed on contracts [by the US]'.
By ignoring or suppressing these facts, together with the scale of a four-year bombing
campaign by American and British aircraft (in 1999/2000, according to the Pentagon, the
US flew 24,000 'combat missions' over Iraq), journalists have prepared the ground for an
all-out attack on Iraq. The official premise for this - that Iraq still has weapons of mass
destruction - has not been questioned. In fact, in 1998, the UN reported that Iraq had
complied with 90 per cent of its inspectors' demands. That the UN inspectors were not
'expelled', but pulled out after American spies were found among them in preparation for an
attack on Iraq, is almost never reported. Since then, the world's most sophisticated
surveillance equipment has produced no real evidence that the regime has renewed its
capacity to build weapons of mass destruction. 'The real goal of attacking Iraq now,' says
Eric Herring, 'is to replace Saddam Hussein with another compliant thug.'
The attempts by journalists in the US and Britain, acting as channels for American
intelligence, to connect Iraq to 11 September have also failed. The 'Iraq connection' with
anthrax has been shown to be rubbish; the culprit is almost certainly American. The rumour
that an Iraqi intelligence official met Mohammed Atta, the 11 September hijacker, in Prague
was exposed by Czech police as false. Yet press 'investigations' that hint, beckon, erect a
straw man or two, then draw back, while giving the reader the overall impression that Iraq
requires a pasting, have become a kind of currency. One reporter added his 'personal view'
that 'the use of force is both right and sensible'. Will he be there when the clusters spray
their bomblets?
Those who dare speak against this propaganda are abused as apologists for the tyrant. Two
years ago, on a now infamous Newsnight, the precocious apostate Peter Hain was allowed to
smear Denis Halliday, a man whose integrity is internationally renowned. Although dissent
has broken through recently, especially in the Guardian, to its credit, that low point in British
broadcasting set the tone. If the media pages did their job, they would set aside promoting
the careers of media managers and challenge the orthodoxy of reporting a fraudulent 'war on
terrorism'; they owe that, at least, to aspiring young journalists. I recommend a new website
edited by the writer David Edwards, whose factual, inquiring analysis of the reporting of Iraq,
Afghanistan and other issues has already drawn the kind of defensive spleen that shows how
unused to challenge and accountability much of journalism, especially that calling itself
liberal, has become. The address is www.medialens.org
It is time that three urgent issues became front-page news. The first is restraining Bush and
his collaborator Blair from killing large numbers of people in Iraq. The second is an arms and
military technology embargo applied throughout the Gulf and the Middle East; an embargo on
both Iraq and Israel. The third is the ending of 'our' siege of a people held hostage to
cynical events over which they have no control.
A compliant press is preparing the ground for an all-out attack on Iraq. It never mentions the
victims: the young, the old and the vulnerable : John Pilger :21 Mar 2002
The promised attack on Iraq will test free journalism as never before. The prevailing media
orthodoxy is that the attack is only a matter of time. 'The arguments may already be over,'
says the Observer, 'Bush and Blair have made it clear . . .' The beating of war drums is so
familiar that the echo of the last round of media tom-toms is still heard, together with its
self-serving 'vindication' for having done the dirty work of great power, yet again.
I have been a reporter in too many places where public lies have disguised the culpability for
great suffering, from Indochina to southern Africa, East Timor to Iraq, merely to turn the
page or switch off the news-as-sermon, and accept that journalism has to be like this -
'waiting outside closed doors to be lied to', as Russell Baker of the New York Times once
put it. The honourable exceptions lift the spirits. One piece by Robert Fisk will do that,
regardless of his subject. An eyewitness report from Palestine by Peter Beaumont in the
Observer remains in the memory, as singular truth, along with Suzanne Goldenberg's brave
work for the Guardian.
The pretenders, the voices of Murdochism and especially the liberal ciphers of rampant
western power can rightly say that Pravda never published a Fisk. 'How do you do it?' asked
a Pravda editor, touring the US with other Soviet journalists at the height of the cold war.
Having read all the papers and watched the TV, they were astonished to find that all the
foreign news and opinions were more or less the same. 'In our country, we put people in
prison, we tear out their fingernails to achieve this result? What's your secret?'
The secret is the acceptance, often unconscious, of an imperial legacy: the unspoken rule of
reporting whole societies in terms of their usefulness to western 'interests' and of
minimising and obfuscating the culpability of 'our' crimes. 'What are 'we' to do?' is the
unerring media cry when it is rarely asked who 'we' are and what 'our' true agenda is, based
on a history of conquest and violence. Liberal sensibilities may be offended, even shocked
by modern imperial double standards, embodied in Blair; but the invisible boundaries of how
they are reported are not in dispute. The trail of blood is seldom followed; the connections
are not made; 'our' criminals, who kill and collude in killing large numbers of human beings
at a safe distance, are not named, apart from an occasional token, like Kissinger.
A long series of criminal operations by the American secret state, identified and
documented, such as the conspiracy that oversaw the 'forgotten' slaughter of up to a million
people in Indonesia in 1965-66, amount to more deaths of innocent people than died in the
Holocaust. But this is irrelevant to present-day reporting. The tutelage of hundreds of
tyrants, murderers and torturers by 'our' closest ally, including the training of Islamic jihad
fanatics in CIA camps in Virginia and Pakistan, is of no consequence. The harbouring in the
United States of more terrorists than probably anywhere on earth, including hijackers of
aircraft and boats from Cuba, controllers of El Salvadorean death squads and politicians
named by the United Nations as complicit in genocide, is clearly of no interest to those
standing in front of the White House and reporting, with a straight face, 'America's war on
terrorism'.
That George Bush Sr, former head of the CIA and president, is by any measure of
international law one of the modern era's greatest prima facie war criminals, and his son's
illegitimate administration a product of this dynastic mafia, is unmentionable.
The rest of the answer to the incredulous question raised by the Pravda editors in America
is censorship by omission. Once vital information illuminates the true aims of the 'national
security state', the euphemism for the mafia state, it loses media 'credibility' and is
consigned to the margins, or oblivion. Thus, fake debates can be carried on in the British
Sunday newspapers about whether 'we' should attack Iraq. The debaters, often proud
liberals with an equally proud record of supporting Washington's other invasions, guard the
limits.
These 'debates' are framed in such a way that Iraq is neither a country nor a community of
22 million human beings, but one man, Saddam Hussein. A picture of the fiendish tyrant
almost always dominates the page. ('Should we go to war against this man?' asked last
Sunday's Observer). To appreciate the power of this, replace the picture with a photograph
of stricken Iraqi infants, and the headline with: 'Should we go to war against these
children?' Propaganda then becomes truth. Any attack on Iraq will be executed, we can rest
assured, in the American way, with saturation cluster bombing and depleted uranium, and
the victims will be the young, the old, the vulnerable, like the 5,000 civilians who are now
reliably estimated to have been bombed to death in Afghanistan. As for the murderous
Saddam Hussein, former friend of Bush Sr and Thatcher, his escape route is almost certainly
assured.
The column inches now devoted to Iraq, often featuring unnamed manipulators and liars of
the intelligence services, almost always omit one truth. This is the truth of the American-
and British-driven embargo on Iraq, now in its 13th year. Hundreds of thousands of people,
mostly children, have died as a consequence of this medieval siege. The worst, most
tendentious journalism has sought to denigrate the scale of this crime, even calling the
death of Iraqi infants a mere 'statistical construct'. The facts are documented in
international study after study, from the United Nations to Harvard University. (For a digest
of the facts, see Dr Eric Herring's Bristol University paper 'Power, Propaganda and
Indifference: an explanation of the continued imposition of economic sanctions on Iraq
despite their human cost', available from eric.herring@bristol.ac.uk)
Among those now debating whether the Iraqi people should be cluster-bombed or not,
incinerated or not, you are unlikely to find the names of Denis Halliday and Hans von
Sponeck, who have done the most to break through the propaganda. No one knows the
potential human cost better than they. As assistant secretary general of the UN, Halliday
started the oil-for-food programme in Iraq. Von Sponeck was his successor. Eminent in their
field of caring for other human beings, they resigned their long UN careers, calling the
embargo 'genocide'.
Their last appearance in the press was in the Guardian last November, when they wrote:
'The most recent report ofthe UN secretary general, in October 2001, says that the US and
UK governments' blocking of $4bn of humanitarian supplies is by far the greatest constraint
on the implementation of the oil-for-food programme. The report says that, in contrast, the
Iraqi government's distribution of humanitarian supplies is fully satisfactory...The death of
some 5-6,000 children a month is mostly due to contaminated water, lack of medicines and
malnutrition. The US and UK governments' delayed clearance of equipment and materials is
responsible for this tragedy, not Baghdad.'
They are in no doubt that if Saddam Hussein saw advantage in deliberately denying his
people humanitarian supplies, he would do so; but the UN, from the secretary general
himself down, says that, while the regime could do more, it has not withheld supplies.
Indeed, without Iraq's own rationing and distribution system, says the UN Food and
Agriculture Organisation, there would have been famine. Halliday and von Sponeck point out
that the US and Britain are able to fend off criticism of sanctions with unsubstantiated
stories that the regime is 'punishing' its own people. If these stories are true, they say, why
does America and Britain further punish them by deliberately withholding humanitarian
supplies, such as vaccines, painkillers and cancer diagnostic equipment? This wanton
blocking of UN-approved shipments is rarely reported in the British press. The figure is now
almost $5bn in humanitarian-related supplies. Once again, the UN executive director of the
oil-for-food programme has broken diplomatic silence to express 'grave concern at the
unprecedented surge in volume of holds placed on contracts [by the US]'.
By ignoring or suppressing these facts, together with the scale of a four-year bombing
campaign by American and British aircraft (in 1999/2000, according to the Pentagon, the
US flew 24,000 'combat missions' over Iraq), journalists have prepared the ground for an
all-out attack on Iraq. The official premise for this - that Iraq still has weapons of mass
destruction - has not been questioned. In fact, in 1998, the UN reported that Iraq had
complied with 90 per cent of its inspectors' demands. That the UN inspectors were not
'expelled', but pulled out after American spies were found among them in preparation for an
attack on Iraq, is almost never reported. Since then, the world's most sophisticated
surveillance equipment has produced no real evidence that the regime has renewed its
capacity to build weapons of mass destruction. 'The real goal of attacking Iraq now,' says
Eric Herring, 'is to replace Saddam Hussein with another compliant thug.'
The attempts by journalists in the US and Britain, acting as channels for American
intelligence, to connect Iraq to 11 September have also failed. The 'Iraq connection' with
anthrax has been shown to be rubbish; the culprit is almost certainly American. The rumour
that an Iraqi intelligence official met Mohammed Atta, the 11 September hijacker, in Prague
was exposed by Czech police as false. Yet press 'investigations' that hint, beckon, erect a
straw man or two, then draw back, while giving the reader the overall impression that Iraq
requires a pasting, have become a kind of currency. One reporter added his 'personal view'
that 'the use of force is both right and sensible'. Will he be there when the clusters spray
their bomblets?
Those who dare speak against this propaganda are abused as apologists for the tyrant. Two
years ago, on a now infamous Newsnight, the precocious apostate Peter Hain was allowed to
smear Denis Halliday, a man whose integrity is internationally renowned. Although dissent
has broken through recently, especially in the Guardian, to its credit, that low point in British
broadcasting set the tone. If the media pages did their job, they would set aside promoting
the careers of media managers and challenge the orthodoxy of reporting a fraudulent 'war on
terrorism'; they owe that, at least, to aspiring young journalists. I recommend a new website
edited by the writer David Edwards, whose factual, inquiring analysis of the reporting of Iraq,
Afghanistan and other issues has already drawn the kind of defensive spleen that shows how
unused to challenge and accountability much of journalism, especially that calling itself
liberal, has become. The address is www.medialens.org
It is time that three urgent issues became front-page news. The first is restraining Bush and
his collaborator Blair from killing large numbers of people in Iraq. The second is an arms and
military technology embargo applied throughout the Gulf and the Middle East; an embargo on
both Iraq and Israel. The third is the ending of 'our' siege of a people held hostage to
cynical events over which they have no control.
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