[Mb-civic] The Real First Casualty of War

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12798.htm

The Real First Casualty of War

By John Pilger

04/20/06 -- -- During the 1970s, I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then
a Stalinist dictatorship. The dissident novelist Zdenek Urbánek told me,
"In one respect, we are more fortunate than you in the west. We believe
nothing of what we read in the newspapers and watch on television, nothing
of the official truth. Unlike you, we have learned to read between the
lines, because real truth is always subversive."

This acute skepticism, this skill of reading between the lines, is
urgently needed in supposedly free societies today. Take the reporting of
state-sponsored war. The oldest cliché is that truth is the first casualty
of war. I disagree. Journalism is the first casualty. Not only that: it
has become a weapon of war, a virulent censorship that goes unrecognized
in the United States, Britain, and other democracies; censorship by
omission, whose power is such that, in war, it can mean the difference
between life and death for people in faraway countries, such as Iraq.

As a journalist for more than 40 years, I have tried to understand how
this works. In the aftermath of the U.S. war in Vietnam, which I reported,
the policy in Washington was revenge, a word frequently used in private
but never publicly. A medieval embargo was imposed on Vietnam and
Cambodia; the Thatcher government cut off supplies of milk to the children
of Vietnam. This assault on the very fabric of life in two of the world's
most stricken societies was rarely reported; the consequence was mass
suffering.

It was during this time that I made a series of documentaries about
Cambodia. The first, in 1979, Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia,
described the American bombing that had provided a catalyst for the rise
of Pol Pot, and showed the shocking human effects of the embargo. Year
Zero was broadcast in some 60 countries, but never in the United States.
When I flew to Washington and offered it to the national public
broadcaster, PBS, I received a curious reaction. PBS executives were
shocked by the film, and spoke admiringly of it, even as they collectively
shook their heads. One of them said: "John, we are disturbed that your
film says the United States played such a destructive role, so we have
decided to call in a journalistic adjudicator."

The term "journalistic adjudicator" was out of Orwell. PBS appointed one
Richard Dudman, a reporter on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and one of the
few Westerners to have been invited by Pol Pot to visit Cambodia. His
dispatches reflected none of the savagery then enveloping that country; he
even praised his hosts. Not surprisingly, he gave my film the thumbs-down.
One of the PBS executives confided to me: "These are difficult days under
Ronald Reagan. Your film would have given us problems."

The lack of truth about what had really happened in southeast Asia - the
media-promoted myth of a "blunder" and the suppression of the true scale
of civilian casualties and of routine mass murder, even the word
"invasion" - allowed Reagan to launch a second "noble cause" in central
America. The target was another impoverished nation without resources:
Nicaragua, whose "threat," like Vietnam's, was in trying to establish a
model of development different from that of the colonial dictatorships
backed by Washington. Nicaragua was crushed, thanks in no small part to
leading American journalists, conservative and liberal, who suppressed the
triumphs of the Sandinistas and encouraged a specious debate about a
"threat."

The tragedy in Iraq is different, but, for journalists, there are haunting
similarities. On Aug. 24 last year, a New York Times editorial declared:
"If we had all known then what we know now, the invasion [of Iraq] would
have been stopped by a popular outcry." This amazing admission was saying,
in effect, that the invasion would never have happened if journalists had
not betrayed the public by accepting and amplifying and echoing the lies
of Bush and Blair, instead of challenging and exposing them.

We now know that the BBC and other British media were used by MI6, the
secret intelligence service. In what was called "Operation Mass Appeal,"
MI6 agents planted stories about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass
destruction - such as weapons hidden in his palaces and in secret
underground bunkers. All these stories were fake. But this is not the
point. The point is that the dark deeds of MI6 were quite unnecessary.
Recently, the BBC's director of news, Helen Boaden, was asked to explain
how one of her "embedded" reporters in Iraq, having accepted U.S. denials
of the use of chemical weapons against civilians, could possibly describe
the aim of the Anglo-American invasion as to "bring democracy and human
rights" to Iraq. She replied with quotations from Blair that this was
indeed the aim, as if Blair's utterances and the truth were in any way
related. On the third anniversary of the invasion, a BBC newsreader
described this illegal, unprovoked act, based on lies, as a
"miscalculation." Thus, to use Edward Herman's memorable phrase, the
unthinkable was normalized.

Such servility to state power is hotly denied, yet routine. Almost the
entire British media has omitted the true figure of Iraqi civilian
casualties, willfully ignoring or attempting to discredit respectable
studies. "Making conservative assumptions," wrote the researchers from the
eminent Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, working with
Iraqi scholars, "we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more, have
happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq . which were primarily the result
of military actions by coalition forces. Most of those killed by coalition
forces were women and children.." That was Oct. 29, 2004. Today, the
figure has doubled.

Language is perhaps the most crucial battleground. Noble words such as
"democracy," "liberation," "freedom," and "reform" have been emptied of
their true meaning and refilled by the enemies of those concepts. The
counterfeits dominate the news, along with dishonest political labels,
such as "left of center," a favorite given to warlords such as Blair and
Bill Clinton; it means the opposite. "War on terror" is a fake metaphor
that insults our intelligence. We are not at war. Instead, our troops are
fighting insurrections in countries where our invasions have caused mayhem
and grief, the evidence and images of which are suppressed. How many
people know that, in revenge for 3,000 innocent lives taken on Sept. 11,
2001, up to 20,000 innocent people died in Afghanistan?

In reclaiming the honor of our craft, not to mention the truth, we
journalists at least need to understand the historic task to which we are
assigned - that is, to report the rest of humanity in terms of its
usefulness, or otherwise, to "us," and to soften up the public for
rapacious attacks on countries that are no threat to us. We soften them up
by dehumanizing them, by writing about "regime change" in Iran as if that
country were an abstraction, not a human society. Hugo Chávez's Venezuela
is currently being softened up on both sides of the Atlantic. A few weeks
ago, Channel 4 news carried a major item that might have been broadcast by
the U.S. State Department. The reporter, Jonathan Rugman, the program's
Washington correspondent, presented Chávez as a cartoon character, a
sinister buffoon whose folksy Latin ways disguised a man "in danger of
joining a rogues' gallery of dictators and despots - Washington's latest
Latin nightmare." In contrast, Condoleezza Rice was given gravitas and
Donald Rumsfeld was allowed to compare Chávez to Hitler.


Indeed, almost everything in this travesty of journalism was viewed from
Washington, and only fragments of it from the barrios of Venezuela, where
Chávez enjoys 80 percent popularity. That he had won nine democratic
elections and referendums - a world record - was omitted. In crude Soviet
flick style, he was shown with the likes of Saddam Hussein and Muammar
Gaddafi, though these brief encounters had to do with OPEC and oil only.
According to Rugman, Venezuela under Chávez is helping Iran develop
nuclear weapons. No evidence was given for this absurdity. People watching
would have no idea that Venezuela was the only oil-producing country in
the world to use its oil revenue for the benefit of poor people. They
would have no idea of spectacular developments in health, education,
literacy; no idea that Venezuela has no political jails - unlike the
United States.

So if the Bush administration moves to implement "Operation Bilbao," a
contingency plan to overthrow the democratic government of Venezuela, who
will care, because who will know? For we shall have only the media
version; another demon will get what is coming to him. The poor of
Venezuela, like the poor of Nicaragua, and the poor of Vietnam and
countless other faraway places, whose dreams and lives are of no interest,
will be invisible in their grief: a triumph of censorship by journalism.

It is said that the Internet offers an alternative, and what is wonderful
about the rebellious spirits on the World Wide Web is that they often
report as many journalists should. They are mavericks in the tradition of
muckrakers such as Claud Cockburn, who said: "Never believe anything until
it has been officially denied." But the Internet is still a kind of
samizdat, an underground, and most of humanity does not log on, just as
most of humanity does not own a mobile phone. And the right to know ought
to be universal. That other great muckraker, Tom Paine, warned that if the
majority of the people were being denied the truth and ideas of truth, it
was time to storm what he called the "Bastille of words." That time is
now.

This is an abridged version of an address, "Reporting War and Empire," by
John Pilger at Columbia University, New York, in company with Seymour
Hersh, Robert Fisk, and Charles Glass.


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"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

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