It is really amazing how they did it. I remember that we had gotten to where we could not watch TV because of the propaganda. I was on DU then, new to the internet forums, very anti-Bush, but previously trusting of my government.
There were a couple of other forums then, not too large yet. I had begun to search the internet because I knew we were being lied to about Iraq. The churches here were preaching in favor of the war, and that was making me suspicious.
At DU there was constant talk about the war being unnecessary. We tried to reach our congressmen before the October 2002 vote to invade. Yeh, some will say it was not a vote for war, but I think our congress had seen enough of George Bush by then to know he would attack that country.
It was the most frustrating time we had ever been through. The October vote to give Bush that power was tragic enough, but when the bombs started falling in March 2003 it was sickening.
CNN admitted they had failed to report fairly and honestly on the war in Afghanistan. They also failed to report honestly on Iraq. From 2002.
The Lapdog Conversion of CNNIn an August 15 news item carried by Press Gazette Online, Rena Golden, the executive vice-president and general manager of CNN International, admitted censoring news regarding the US war in Afghanistan. This censorship, she explained, "wasn't a matter of government pressure, but a reluctance to criticize anything in a war that was obviously supported by the vast majority of the people."
How exactly the American public are expected to judge the validity of the US war in Afghanistan -- and, indeed, the entire war on terrorism -- when news organizations refuse to provide crucial information is not explained. In essence, Golden admits public opinion is cast by one source -- the government -- and the media has essentially abrogated its responsibility to provide additional, even contrary information on these momentous issues.
Additionally, CNN New Delhi chief Satinder Bindra said many journalists pushed "harder than they should for a story," thus endangering the lives of other journalists covering the war from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Bindra did not comment on how exactly journalists might be expected to receive information for their stories, or what precisely constitutes pushing "harder than they should." Maybe Bindra expects them to remain ensconced in their Islamabad hotel rooms and wait patiently for the news to arrive by courier? Or stay in Washington and rely on Donald Rumsfeld as their only source?
The Pentagon played a huge role.
So confident is the Pentagon corporate media resides in its hip pocket that back in December they dropped a requirement demanding journalists covering Afghanistan be part of an exclusive and authorized group, otherwise known as a "press pool." The press pool concept was devised in 1983 when the US invaded Grenada. It was updated in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War after publishers such as MacArthur began murmuring about military censorship. The relaxation of the press pool rules in December, however, did not prevent the military from denying journalists access to the war zone. On December 6, when American troops were hit by a stray bomb north of Kandahar, photojournalists were locked in a warehouse by Marines to make sure they didn't take pictures of wounded soldiers.
More recently, media access to the Uruzgan wedding massacre was sharply curtailed. When journalists in Kabul submitted a request to join press officers at the Bagram air base -- in order to travel by helicopter to the site -- they were steadfastly denied permission by the military. Only two journalists traveled with US investigators to villages near Deh Rawud -- one was a reporter from the US armed forces newspaper Stars and Stripes and the other was cameraman from the Associated Press Television Network.
Embedded journalism...it did not work. Loyalties lay elsewhere than with the public good.
This is the worst. Propaganda, coerced and manufactured.
But the Pentagon's war against media coverage in Afghanistan is not limited to reporters and news crews on the ground. In October, as the brass busily prepared for war, they used public money, at the none too shabby tune of $2 million per month, to secure exclusive rights to all new high-quality commercial spy satellite images of Afghanistan. During a policy debate on the release of satellite imagery, the idea was floated that the Pentagon might shoot down the commercial satellites if they were not allowed to control the images. Regardless, in December the Pentagon decided not to continue the exclusive contract. Considering CNN's recent admission of tailoring news in deference to the sensitivities of the American people, access to satellite photographs is a moot point -- chances are they would not publish them anyway.
We knew all this, but there was nothing we could do. The drumbeats on the media got louder as the date of the invasion of Iraq got closer. Bob Simon's 60 Minutes piece did not mention many names, but we know them....all the talking heads.
This was a very brave piece for 2002.
Selling The Iraq War To The U.S.CBS) Politicians have had to sell the public on going to war since Colonial times, but they never had the arsenal of advertising and communications techniques the Bush administration is using to sell a possible war on Iraq. Bob Simon reports on those techniques and those employed by the elder Bush prior to the 1991 Gulf War.
Simon reminds viewers that a horrible story spread widely by the first Bush administration prior to the Gulf War about Kuwaiti babies pulled from incubators by invading Iraqis turned out not to be true. The current Bush administration may be also misinforming the public in its efforts to justify a possible second war with Saddam Hussein.
One example of misinformation, according to physicist and former weapons inspector David Albright, was the Bush administration’s leak to the media in September about Iraq’s attempt to import aluminum tubes which administration officials claimed were headed for Iraq’s nuclear program.
“I think it was very misleading,” says Albright, who directs the Institute for Science and International Security. Albright says the tubes could be possibly used for a nuclear program, but were more suited to conventional weapons production. Government experts thought that too, Albright tells Simon, but administration officials “were selectively picking information to bolster a case that the Iraqi nuclear threat was more imminent than it is, and, in essence, scare people.
More and more I believe Naomi Klein had it right when she said that Iraq was going to be rebuilt as a corporate utopia without regulations. Our Congress overall had to know there was more to it than was being told.
The theory that Iraq was intended to be rebuilt as a global corporate "utopia"The role of good government, then, is to create the optimal conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed, so that they in turn can meet the needs of the society. The problem is that governments, even neoconservative governments, rarely get the chance to prove their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological advances, even George Bush's Republicans are, in their own minds, perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and alarmist environmentalists.
..."Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. A country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never seen. Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership restrictions. The people of Iraq would, of course, have to endure some short-term pain: assets, previously owned by the state, would have to be given up to create new opportunities for growth and investment. Jobs would have to be lost and, as foreign products flooded across the border, local businesses and family farms would, unfortunately, be unable to compete. But to the authors of this plan, these would be small prices to pay for the economic boom that would surely explode once the proper conditions were in place, a boom so powerful the country would practically rebuild itself.
..."The theory is that if painful economic "adjustments" are brought in rapidly and in the aftermath of a seismic social disruption like a war, a coup, or a government collapse, the population will be so stunned, and so preoccupied with the daily pressures of survival, that it too will go into suspended animation, unable to resist. As Pinochet's finance minister, Admiral Lorenzo Gotuzzo, declared, "The dog's tail must be cut off in one chop."
Those who voted for this war, this invasion, this occupation, had to have known there was more to it than just Saddam Hussein.
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