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by
John Pilger
April
26, 2003
On
8 April, newspapers around the world carried a dispatch from a Reuters
correspondent, "embedded" with the US army, about the murder of a
ten-year-old Iraqi boy. An American private had "unloaded machine-gun fire
and the boy . . . fell dead on a garbage-strewn stretch of wasteland". The
tone of the report was highly sympathetic to the soldier, "a softly spoken
21-year-old" who, "although he has no regrets about opening fire, it
is clear he would rather it was not a child he killed".
According
to Reuters, children were "apparently" being used as "fighters
or more often as scouts and weapons collectors. US officers and soldiers say
that turns them into legitimate targets." The child-killing soldier was
allowed uncritically to describe those like his victim as "cowards".
There was no suggestion that the Americans were invading the victim's homeland.
Reuters then allowed the soldier's platoon leader to defend the killer:
"Does it haunt him? Absolutely. It haunts me and I didn't even pull the trigger.
It blows my mind that they can put their children in that kind of
situation." Perhaps guessing that readers might be feeling just a touch
uncomfortable at this stage, the Reuters correspondent added his own reassuring
words: "Before - like many young soldiers - he [the soldier] says he was
anxious to get his first 'kill' in a war. Now, he seems more mature."
I
read in the Observer last Sunday that "Iraq was worth £20m to
Reuters". This was the profit the company would make from the war. Reuters
was described on the business pages as "a model company, its illustrious
brand and reputation second to none. As a newsgathering organisation, it is
lauded for its accuracy and objectivity." The Observer article lamented
that the "world's hotspots" generated only about 7 per cent of the
model company's £3.6bn revenue last year. The other 93 per cent comes from
"more than 400,000 computer terminals in financial institutions around the
world", churning out "financial information" for a voracious,
profiteering "market" that has nothing to do with true journalism:
indeed, it is the antithesis of true journalism, because it has nothing to do
with true humanity. It is the system that underwrote the illegal and unprovoked
attack on a stricken and mostly defenceless country whose population is 42 per
cent children, like the boy who was killed by a soldier who, says the Reuters
story, "now seems more mature".
There
is something deeply corrupt consuming this craft of mine. It is not a recent
phenomenon; look back on the "coverage" of the First World War by
journalists who were subsequently knighted for their services to the
concealment of the truth of that great slaughter.
What
makes the difference today is the technology that produces an avalanche of
repetitive information, which in the United States has been the source of
arguably the most vociferous brainwashing in that country's history.
A
war that was hardly a war, that was so one-sided it ought to be dispatched with
shame in the military annals, was reported like a Formula One race, as we
watched the home teams speed to the chequered flag in Baghdad's Firdos Square,
where a statue of the dictator created and sustained by "us" was
pulled down in a ceremony that was as close to fakery as you could get. There
was the CIA's man, an Iraqi fixer of the American stooge Ahmad Chalabi,
orchestrating that joyous media moment of "liberation", attended by
"hundreds" - or was it "dozens"? - of cheering people, with
three American tanks neatly guarding the entrances to the media stage.
"Thanks, guys," said a marine to the BBC's Middle East correspondent
in appreciation of the BBC's "coverage". His gratitude was hardly
surprising. As the media analyst David Miller points out, a study of the
reporting of the war in five countries shows that the BBC allowed the least
anti-war dissent of them all. Its 2 per cent dissenting views was lower even
than the 7 per cent on the American channel ABC.
The
honourable exceptions are few and famous. Of course, no one doubts that it is
difficult for journalists in the field. There is dust and deadlines and danger,
and a dependent relationship on an alien military system. It is unfathomable
which of these constraints contributed to the Reuters travesty described above.
None, I suspect; for what it represented was the essence of propaganda. The
protection of and apologising for "our" side is voluntary; it comes,
it seems, with mother's milk. The "others" are simply not the same as
"us".
Imagine
the terror of a mother, cowering with her children on the road as the
"softly spoken 21-year-olds" decide whether to kill them, or kill the
old man failing to stop his car? The children are clearly "scouts";
the old man is, well, who knows and who cares? Now imagine that happening in a
British high street during an invasion of this country. Absurd? That only
happens in countries like Iraq, which can be attacked at will and without a
semblance of legitimacy or morality: weak countries, of course, and never
countries with weapons of mass destruction; the Americans knew Saddam Hussein
was disarmed.
The
corruption of journalism is most vivid back in the commentary booth, far from
the dust and death. "Yes, too many died in the war," wrote Andrew
Rawnsley in the Observer. "Too many people always die in war. War is nasty
and brutish, but at least this conflict was mercifully short. The death toll
has been nothing like as high as had been widely feared. Thousands have died in
the war, millions have died at the hands of Saddam."
Mark
his logic, for it is at the heart of what is dispensed day after day, night
after night. The clear implication is that it is all right to have killed
thousands of people in the invasion of their homeland, because
"millions" died at the hands of their dictator. The lazy language,
the idle dismissal of human life - each life part of so many other lives - is
striking. Saddam Hussein killed a great many people, but "millions"?
- the league of Stalin and Hitler? David Edwards of MediaLens asked Amnesty
International about this. Amnesty produced a catalogue of Saddam's killings
that amounted mostly to hundreds every year, not millions. It is an appalling
record that does not require the exaggeration of state-inspired propaganda -
propaganda whose aim, in Rawnsley's case, is to protect Tony Blair from the
grave charges of which many people all over the world believe he is guilty.
There
is, for example, not a single mention by Rawnsley of the hundreds of thousands
of Iraqis who died as a direct result of the 12-year, medieval siege of Iraq
conducted by America and backed by Britain - and enthusiastically by Blair.
Professor Joy Gordon in Connecticut has spent three years studying this embargo
as a weapon of social destruction. A preview of her voluminous, shocking work
appeared in Harper's Magazine. She describes "a legitimised act of mass
slaughter".
The
protectors of Blair regard the entirely predictable crushing of a third-world
minnow by the world's superpower as a "vindication". The great
Israeli journalist and internationalist Uri Avnery wrote recently about this
corruption of intellect and morality. "Let's pose the question in the most
provocative manner," he wrote on 18 April. "What would have happened
if Adolph Hitler had triumphed in World War Two? Would this have turned his war
into a just one? Let's assume that Hitler would have indicted his enemies at
the Nuremberg war crimes court: Churchill for the terrible air raid on Dresden,
Truman for dropping the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Stalin for
murdering millions in the Gulag camps. Would the historians have regarded this
as a just war? A war that ends with the victory of the aggressor is worse than
a war that ends with their defeat. It is more destructive, both morally and
physically."
John Pilger is a renowned investigative
journalist and documentary filmmaker. His latest book is The New Rulers of
the World (Verso, 2002). Visit John Pilger’s website at: http://www.johnpilger.com