- On 8 April, newspapers around the world carried a despatch
from a Reuters correspondent, "embedded" with the US army, about
the murder of a ten-year-old Iraqi boy. An American private had "unloaded
machine-gun fire and the boy . . . fell dead on a garbage-strewn stretch
of wasteland". The tone of the report was highly sympathetic to the
soldier, "a softly spoken 21-year-old" who, "although he
has no regrets about opening fire, it is clear he would rather it was not
a child he killed".
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- According to Reuters, children were "apparently"
being used as "fighters or more often as scouts and weapons collectors.
US officers and soldiers say that turns them into legitimate targets."
The child-killing soldier was allowed uncritically to describe those like
his victim as "cowards". There was no suggestion that the Americans
were invading the victim's homeland. Reuters then allowed the soldier's
platoon leader to defend the killer: "Does it haunt him? Absolutely.
It haunts me and I didn't even pull the trigger. It blows my mind that
they can put their children in that kind of situation." Perhaps guessing
that readers might be feeling just a touch uncomfortable at this stage,
the Reuters correspondent added his own reassuring words: "Before
- like many young soldiers - he [the soldier] says he was anxious to get
his first 'kill' in a war. Now, he seems more mature."
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- I read in the Observer last Sunday that "Iraq was
worth ?20m to Reuters". This was the profit the company would make
from the war. Reuters was described on the business pages as "a model
company, its illustrious brand and reputation second to none. As a newsgathering
organisation, it is lauded for its accuracy and objectivity." The
Observer article lamented that the "world's hotspots" generated
only about 7 per cent of the model company's ?3.6bn revenue last year.
The other 93 per cent comes from "more than 400,000 computer terminals
in financial institutions around the world", churning out "financial
information" for a voracious, profiteering "market" that
has nothing to do with true journalism: indeed, it is the antithesis of
true journalism, because it has nothing to do with true humanity. It is
the system that underwrote the illegal and unprovoked attack on a stricken
and mostly defenceless country whose population is 42 per cent children,
like the boy who was killed by a soldier who, says the Reuters story, "now
seems more mature".
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- There is something deeply corrupt consuming this craft
of mine. It is not a recent phenomenon; look back on the "coverage"
of the First World War by journalists who were subsequently knighted for
their services to the concealment of the truth of that great slaughter.
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- What makes the difference today is the technology that
produces an avalanche of repetitive information, which in the United States
has been the source of arguably the most vociferous brainwashing in that
country's history.
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- A war that was hardly a war, that was so one-sided it
ought to be despatched with shame in the military annals, was reported
like a Formula One race, as we watched the home teams speed to the chequered
flag in Baghdad's Firdos Square, where a statue of the dictator created
and sustained by "us" was pulled down in a ceremony that was
as close to fakery as you could get. There was the CIA's man, an Iraqi
fixer of the American stooge Ahmad Chalabi, orchestrating that joyous media
moment of "liberation", attended by "hundreds" - or
was it "dozens"? - of cheering people, with three American tanks
neatly guarding the entrances to the media stage. "Thanks, guys,"
said a marine to the BBC's Middle East correspondent in appreciation of
the BBC's "coverage". His gratitude was hardly surprising. As
the media analyst David Miller points out, a study of the reporting of
the war in five countries shows that the BBC allowed the least anti-war
dissent of them all. Its 2 per cent dissenting views was lower even than
the 7 per cent on the American channel ABC.
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- The honourable exceptions are few and famous. Of course,
no one doubts that it is difficult for journalists in the field. There
is dust and deadlines and danger, and a dependent relationship on an alien
military system. It is unfathomable which of these constraints contributed
to the Reuters travesty described above. None, I suspect; for what it represented
was the essence of propaganda. The protection of and apologising for "our"
side is voluntary; it comes, it seems, with mother's milk. The "others"
are simply not the same as "us".
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- Imagine the terror of a mother, cowering with her children
on the road as the "softly spoken 21-year-olds" decide whether
to kill them, or kill the old man failing to stop his car? The children
are clearly "scouts"; the old man is, well, who knows and who
cares? Now imagine that happening in a British high street during an invasion
of this country. Absurd? That only happens in countries like Iraq, which
can be attacked at will and without a semblance of legitimacy or morality:
weak countries, of course, and never countries with weapons of mass destruction;
the Americans knew Saddam Hussein was disarmed.
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- The corruption of journalism is most vivid back in the
commentary booth, far from the dust and death. "Yes, too many died
in the war," wrote Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer. "Too many
people always die in war. War is nasty and brutish, but at least this conflict
was mercifully short. The death toll has been nothing like as high as had
been widely feared. Thousands have died in the war, millions have died
at the hands of Saddam."
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- Mark his logic, for it is at the heart of what is dispensed
day after day, night after night. The clear implication is that it is all
right to have killed thousands of people in the invasion of their homeland,
because "millions" died at the hands of their dictator. The lazy
language, the idle dismissal of human life - each life part of so many
other lives - is striking. Saddam Hussein killed a great many people, but
"millions"? - the league of Stalin and Hitler? David Edwards
of MediaLens asked Amnesty International about this. Amnesty produced a
catalogue of Saddam's killings that amounted mostly to hundreds every year,
not millions. It is an appalling record that does not require the exaggeration
of state-inspired propaganda - propaganda whose aim, in Rawnsley's case,
is to protect Tony Blair from the grave charges of which many people all
over the world believe he is guilty.
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- There is, for example, not a single mention by Rawnsley
of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died as a direct result of the
12-year, medieval siege of Iraq conducted by America and backed by Britain
- and enthusiastically by Blair. Professor Joy Gordon in Connecticut has
spent three years studying this embargo as a weapon of social destruction.
A preview of her voluminous, shocking work appeared in Harper's Magazine.
She describes "a legitimised act of mass slaughter".
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- The protectors of Blair regard the entirely predictable
crushing of a third-world minnow by the world's superpower as a "vindication".
The great Israeli journalist and internationalist Uri Avnery wrote recently
about this corruption of intellect and morality. "Let's pose the question
in the most provocative manner," he wrote on 18 April. "What
would have happened if Adolf Hitler had triumphed in World War Two? Would
this have turned his war into a just one? Let's assume that Hitler would
have indicted his enemies at the Nuremberg war crimes court: Churchill
for the terrible air raid on Dresden, Truman for dropping the atom bombs
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Stalin for murdering millions in the Gulag
camps. Would the historians have regarded this as a just war? A war that
ends with the victory of the aggressor is worse than a war that ends with
their defeat. It is more destructive, both morally and physically."
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- http://pilger.carlton.com/print/132939
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