by John Pilger
New Statesman
March 23, 2002
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 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 medireview 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED])
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 writers David Edwards and David Cromwell, 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
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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