The
War On Truth
By John Pilger
Znet
01 August, 2003
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.