Fwd: [libertyunderground] Norman Solomon: A New Phase of Bright Spinning Lies About Iraq

[Guest guest]

I was in Vietnam in 1966-67, when the corporate media propaganda of showing

" Viet Cong " bodies on the nightly TV network news was still in fashion.

Realizing it was not rallying the public into thinking we were " winning, " but

backfiring in repulsing the public and turning them against the war, corporate

bigs decided to take all bleeding off the air, and have done that since.

 

So we now have wars with no bleeding. Drop tons of bombs, but don't show the

results (and call it " journalism " ). Make it into a kind of video game with

smart bombs going into buildings defined as valid targets (but don't show the

bodies). That's how you gain support for horror. It works. They were able to

get support from the majority of Americans for the invasion of Iraq by blasting

lies daily all over corporate media. Although wounded American soldiers were

shown, to gain sympathy for the war, wounded children were hidden out of sight.

 

Corporate media bray constantly that they like to give " both " sides of issues.

The peace side need not apply for microphone access, however. Every American

heard hordes of military generals and other officials who could not disagree

with administration rhetoric without losing their jobs. Don Rumsfeld's " We know

exactly where the weapons of mass destruction are hidden " comes to mind as the

unopposed viewpoint blasted around the clock by corporate media.

 

Shock and Awe was shown as a magnificent fireworks display. Not a drop of

blood. The toppling of the Saddam statue was staged by followers of Pentagon

intelligence source Ahmad Chalabi in downtown Baghdad, surrounded by U.S. tanks.

At the time, we sent pictures of close ups of their faces around the internet,

identifying them, and a wide shot of the staged demonstration showing the circle

of U.S. tanks around it. Even right wing columnists reported at the time that

the U.S. flag placed over the statue's head, was the one which had flown over

the Pentagon on 9/11 (spontaneous demonstration, hell). Corporate media are

still reporting this phony event on behalf of the Bush Administration as proof

that Iraqis love to be invaded and occupied by foreigners.

 

The millions of people who marched for peace were almost entirely ignored.

 

The experts, Scott Ritter, former chief weapons inspector in Iraq and Hans

Blix, representing the U.N. as chief weapons inspector in Iraq, who we cited at

the time of the invasion, were attacked in corporate media and made to look like

lunatics for saying there were no weapons of mass destruction.

 

Peace movement leaders were ignored, as Democrats, nearly all united in

supporting Bush, were presented by corporate media as " opposition. " As Gore

Vidal so succinctly put it twenty years ago on the Johnny Carson Tonight Show,

" The Democrats and Republicans are funded by the same corporations. "

 

It is not difficult to see into the future of news stories in the Land of the

Free. Corporate media and corporate government work for the same masters. Bush

is in trouble, representing the government wing of corporate empire, so

corporate media are rallying to his defense. They can't be too obvious, so have

a cadre of talking heads pre-defined as opposition voices at the ready (Tom

Friedman of the NY Times and Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, both defined

as " opposing liberals, " spread the lies when going to war repeatedly in the name

of giving " both sides. " Corporate media journalists who opposed the war have

largely lost their jobs, but nobody, as far as we know, who spread the lies

supporting the war, has lost their job.

 

 

On behalf of Bush and keeping Republicans from losing both houses of Congress

in the 2006 elections, the corporate media response is executing now on two

fronts: 1) to convince the irate masses that troops are about to be withdrawn

from Iraq (the page one headline on my local newspaper today, ABC

http://abcnews.go.com/ , CBS http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/home/main100.shtml

NBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10573155/ , etc.), and 2) to replace the small

number of ground troops who will actually be sent home, with increased bombing

(together with massive increases in Iraqi casualties), as control of the skies

is guaranteed. We have reported all this before, but Norman Solomon does a

great job of putting it together here --Jack

 

 

 

 

 

A New Phase of Bright Spinning Lies About Iraq

 

by Norman Solomon

 

Three days before Christmas, the Bush administration launched a new

salvo of bright spinning lies about the Iraq war. " In an interview with

reporters traveling with him on an Air Force cargo plane to Baghdad, " the

Associated Press reported Thursday morning, Donald Rumsfeld " hinted that a

preliminary decision had been made to go below the 138,000 baseline " of U.S.

troops in Iraq. Throughout 2006, until Election Day in early November, this

kind of story will be a frequent media refrain as the Bush regime does whatever

it can to prevent a loss of Republican majorities in the House and Senate. By

continuing to fortify large military bases in Iraq -- and by continuing to

escalate an air war there courtesy of U.S. taxpayers but largely outside the

U.S. media frame -- the White House is determined to exploit every weakness and

contradiction of antiwar sentiment inside the United States. There's a lot for

the pro-war propagandists to exploit. American opponents of this war

often emphasize the deaths and injuries of U.S. troops and the anguish of loved

ones at home. At the same time, to whatever extent it's a conscious strategy or

a genuine nationalistic form of narcissism, Americans who denounce the war

commonly seem to be playing to a media gallery that can easily acknowledge the

importance of American lives -- but downplays the loss of Iraqi lives unless

those tragedies can be pinned on enemies of the U.S. occupation. What's on the

horizon for 2006 is that the Bush administration will strive to put any real or

imagined reduction of U.S. occupation troop levels in the media spotlight.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon will use massive air power in Iraq. It's a process

already underway, as independent journalist Dahr Jamail -- who worked on the

ground in Iraq for more than eight months of the U.S. occupation -- pointed out

in a mid-December article titled " An Increasingly Aerial Occupation. " As he put

it: " The American media continues to ignore the

increasingly devastating air war being waged in Iraq against an ever more

belligerent Iraqi resistance -- and, as usual, Iraqi civilians continue to bear

the largely unreported brunt of the bombing. " Yes, we should demand swift

withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. But, at this point, to do so without also

demanding an end to U.S. bombing of Iraq is to fall into a trap laid by the war

makers in Washington. This kind of thing has happened before -- with devastating

results for people trying to survive a Pentagon air war that was receiving

little U.S. media attention. The Nixon administration was eager to divert

attention from the slaughter in Southeast Asia to peace talks in Paris -- and to

the gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam over a period of more than

three years. In general the networks were all too willing to oblige. The

negotiations and withdrawals served as diversions from bloody facts of the

continuing war. The tonnage of U.S. bombing actually increased --

while the networks' focus moved away from the ongoing bloodshed. At NBC, for

instance, " although combat footage was sent to New York from the Saigon bureau

every day for two months following the [early November 1968 U.S.] decision

[initiating peace negotiations in Paris], it was aired only three times on the

evening news, " journalist Edward Jay Epstein noted. " The preceding year, when

there had been almost the same number of American combat deaths during the same

period, combat stories were shown almost every night of the week. " With the

media wisdom determining that the main Vietnam story had become the

negotiations, NBC News producer Robert Northshield said that " combat stories

seemed like a contradiction and would confuse the audience. " Other networks came

to similar conclusions. And the media evasions were to become more extreme as

Washington reduced the number of American troops in Vietnam. A typical

approach was embodied in edicts handed down at ABC, where the executive

producer of the evening news, Av Westin, put out a March 1969 memo that

explained: " I have asked our Vietnam staff to alter the focus of their coverage

from combat pieces to interpretive ones, pegged to the eventual pull-out of the

American forces. This point should be stressed for all hands. " In a telex to the

network's Saigon bureau, Westin gave the news of his decree to the news

correspondents: " I think the time has come to shift some of our focus from the

battlefield, or more specifically American military involvement with the enemy,

to themes and stories under the general heading 'We Are on Our Way Out of

Vietnam.' " For U.S. media, the Vietnam story had been front-and-center when

American soldiers were firmly deployed there. But as the White House gradually

pulled troops from Vietnam, the media shifted farther away from the actual

destruction of people, villages, farmland and ecosystems -- even while the U.S.

air war and coordinated ground assaults in Southeast Asia persisted

at a very high rate of killing. During 2006, reductions of U.S. troop levels

in Iraq -- accompanied by intensive media spin about prospects for U.S. military

disengagement -- are likely even while the already-horrific air war escalates.

Those who die under U.S. bombs will rarely make the TV network news or the

newspapers back in the United States. The Bush administration is eager to

downplay the escalating air war. In 2006, the antiwar movement must do the

opposite. Part of this article is adapted from Norman Solomon's new book " War

Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. " For

information, go to: www.WarMadeEasy.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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" When the power of love becomes stronger than the love of power, we will have

peace. "

Jimi Hendrix