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John Pilger
07/31/03 Z-Net
'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 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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