The Real First Casualty of War - Journalists are killers too!
NEVER BELIEVE ANYTHING UNTIL IT HAS BEEN OFFICIALLY DENIED
by Henk Ruyssenaars
FPF - Amsterdam - April 21st - 2006 - It's today three years and five days ago I published a story on the way journalists fertilize the global battlefields with the media manure they are spreading. (And I will never forget nor forgive the so called Journalists Union in The Netherlands (NVJ) for their part in the global war crimes. They killed 'journalism' in Holland, and are guilty.) - In a very good article today one of the favorite reporters of the FPF, John Pilger, enforces what was written in his usual eloquent manner, with some hair raising examples from the harsh reality a real journalist should describe. Otherwise it's never going to be a humane world, contrary to what has been happening for ages.*
Because, as I wrote: ''Journalists are killers too...! A question which needs an answer is however the following: are journalists killers too...? - And the answer is an unequivocal YES! Journalists kill when keeping silent about crimes by their governments and others. Or help fabricate propaganda supporting wars. I sincerely hope to see the day when all those followers of Nazi propagandists Joseph Goebbels - propagandists of ALL nationalities, and we know who they are, will be judged for their crimes against humanity.- Url.: http://tinyurl.com/4gwdv -
Like Pilger I've been living abroad for more than four decades, and find it unbelievable that so many of the people you thought you knew have sold themselves lock, stock and barrel to the killers. And those despicable cancerous information spreading traitors of humanity permanently 'forget' to inform the people they are supposed to work for - the readers, listeners, viewers, about the tens of millions of deaths in the trail of the cretins which have enslaved those Judasses. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/h4922
It's like Pilger writes too: without those silent and sometimes secretly collaborating cowards, those miserable megaphones of the group which has the gold and the guns; all the massacres, the global suffering, the fake drama of the 9/11 'inside job* and the fake 'War on terror' or their Holodomors* - would never have been possible!
I do hope that those war propaganda criminals - of which some still claim the title of 'Journalist' - will burn in Hell forever. If they - and the Group - sizzle like bacon one minute for every human being killed by their malignancy - they will be there for centuries. As they all, and very much deserve. - HR
JOHN PILGER: THE REAL FIRST CASUALTY OF WAR
How guilty those creatures in the propaganda press are is very well described by John Pilger in his article about The Real First Casualty of War: ''During the 1970s, I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. The dissident novelist Zdenek Urbánek told me, "In one respect, we are more fortunate than you in the west. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and watch on television, nothing of the official truth. Unlike you, we have learned to read between the lines, because real truth is always subversive."
This acute skepticism, this skill of reading between the lines, is urgently needed in supposedly free societies today. Take the reporting of state-sponsored war. The oldest cliché is that truth is the first casualty of war. I disagree. Journalism is the first casualty. Not only that: it has become a weapon of war, a virulent censorship that goes unrecognized in the United States, Britain, and other democracies; censorship by omission, whose power is such that, in war, it can mean the difference between life and death for people in faraway countries, such as Iraq.
AS A JOURNALIST FOR MORE THAN 40 YEARS, I HAVE TRIED TO UNDERSTAND HOW THIS WORKS.
In the aftermath of the U.S. war in Vietnam, which I reported, the policy in Washington was revenge, a word frequently used in private but never publicly. A medieval embargo was imposed on Vietnam and Cambodia; the Thatcher government cut off supplies of milk to the children of Vietnam. This assault on the very fabric of life in two of the world's most stricken societies was rarely reported; the consequence was mass suffering.
It was during this time that I made a series of documentaries about Cambodia. The first, in 1979, Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia, described the American bombing that had provided a catalyst for the rise of Pol Pot, and showed the shocking human effects of the embargo. Year Zero was broadcast in some 60 countries, but never in the United States. When I flew to Washington and offered it to the national public broadcaster, PBS, I received a curious reaction. PBS executives were shocked by the film, and spoke admiringly of it, even as they collectively shook their heads. One of them said: "John, we are disturbed that your film says the United States played such a destructive role, so we have decided to call in a journalistic adjudicator."
PBS: THE TERM "JOURNALISTIC ADJUDICATOR" WAS OUT OF ORWELL.
PBS appointed one Richard Dudman, a reporter on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and one of the few Westerners to have been invited by Pol Pot to visit Cambodia. His dispatches reflected none of the savagery then enveloping that country; he even praised his hosts. Not surprisingly, he gave my film the thumbs-down. One of the PBS executives confided to me: "These are difficult days under Ronald Reagan. Your film would have given us problems."
The lack of truth about what had really happened in southeast Asia – the media-promoted myth of a "blunder" and the suppression of the true scale of civilian casualties and of routine mass murder, even the word "invasion" – allowed Reagan to launch a second "noble cause" in central America. The target was another impoverished nation without resources: Nicaragua, whose "threat," like Vietnam's, was in trying to establish a model of development different from that of the colonial dictatorships backed by Washington. Nicaragua was crushed, thanks in no small part to leading American journalists, conservative and liberal, who suppressed the triumphs of the Sandinistas and encouraged a specious debate about a "threat."
THE TRAGEDY IN IRAQ IS DIFFERENT, BUT, FOR JOURNALISTS, THERE ARE HAUNTING SIMILARITIES.
On Aug. 24 last year, a New York Times editorial declared: "If we had all known then what we know now, the invasion [of Iraq] would have been stopped by a popular outcry." This amazing admission was saying, in effect, that the invasion would never have happened if journalists had not betrayed the public by accepting and amplifying and echoing the lies of Bush and Blair, instead of challenging and exposing them.
BBC (BROADCASTING BLAIR'S CRAP - HR): THE UNTHINKABLE WAS NORMALIZED
We now know that the BBC and other British media were used by MI6, the secret intelligence service. In what was called "Operation Mass Appeal," MI6 agents planted stories about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction – such as weapons hidden in his palaces and in secret underground bunkers. All these stories were fake. But this is not the point. The point is that the dark deeds of MI6 were quite unnecessary. Recently, the BBC's director of news, Helen Boaden, was asked to explain how one of her "embedded" reporters in Iraq, having accepted U.S. denials of the use of chemical weapons against civilians, could possibly describe the aim of the Anglo-American invasion as to "bring democracy and human rights" to Iraq. She replied with quotations from Blair that this was indeed the aim, as if Blair's utterances and the truth were in any way related.
On the third anniversary of the invasion, a BBC newsreader described this illegal, unprovoked act, based on lies, as a "miscalculation." Thus, to use Edward Herman's memorable phrase, the unthinkable was normalized.
Such servility to state power is hotly denied, yet routine. Almost the entire British media has omitted the true figure of Iraqi civilian casualties, willfully ignoring or attempting to discredit respectable studies. "Making conservative assumptions," wrote the researchers from the eminent Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, working with Iraqi scholars, "we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more, have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq … which were primarily the result of military actions by coalition forces. Most of those killed by coalition forces were women and children…." That was Oct. 29, 2004. Today, the figure has doubled.*
"WAR ON TERROR" IS A FAKE METAPHOR THAT INSULTS OUR INTELLIGENCE.
Language is perhaps the most crucial battleground. Noble words such as "democracy," "liberation," "freedom," and "reform" have been emptied of their true meaning and refilled by the enemies of those concepts. The counterfeits dominate the news, along with dishonest political labels, such as "left of center," a favorite given to warlords such as Blair and Bill Clinton; it means the opposite. "War on terror" is a fake metaphor that insults our intelligence. We are not at war. Instead, our troops are fighting insurrections in countries where our invasions have caused mayhem and grief, the evidence and images of which are suppressed. How many people know that, in revenge for 3,000 innocent lives taken on Sept. 11, 2001, up to 20,000 innocent people died in Afghanistan?
HUGO CHÁVEZ'S VENEZUELA IS CURRENTLY BEING SOFTENED UP ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC.
In reclaiming the honor of our craft, not to mention the truth, we journalists at least need to understand the historic task to which we are assigned – that is, to report the rest of humanity in terms of its usefulness, or otherwise, to "us," and to soften up the public for rapacious attacks on countries that are no threat to us. We soften them up by dehumanizing them, by writing about "regime change" in Iran as if that country were an abstraction, not a human society. Hugo Chávez's Venezuela is currently being softened up on both sides of the Atlantic. A few weeks ago, Channel 4 news carried a major item that might have been broadcast by the U.S. State Department. The reporter, Jonathan Rugman, the program's Washington correspondent, presented Chávez as a cartoon character, a sinister buffoon whose folksy Latin ways disguised a man "in danger of joining a rogues' gallery of dictators and despots – Washington's latest Latin nightmare." In contrast, Condoleezza Rice was given gravitas and Donald Rumsfeld was allowed to compare Chávez to Hitler.
THIS TRAVESTY OF JOURNALISM
Indeed, almost everything in this travesty of journalism was viewed from Washington, and only fragments of it from the barrios of Venezuela, where Chávez enjoys 80 percent popularity. That he had won nine democratic elections and referendums – a world record – was omitted. In crude Soviet flick style, he was shown with the likes of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, though these brief encounters had to do with OPEC and oil only. According to Rugman, Venezuela under Chávez is helping Iran develop nuclear weapons. No evidence was given for this absurdity. People watching would have no idea that Venezuela was the only oil-producing country in the world to use its oil revenue for the benefit of poor people. They would have no idea of spectacular developments in health, education, literacy; no idea that Venezuela has no political jails – unlike the United States.
So if the Bush administration moves to implement "Operation Bilbao," a contingency plan to overthrow the democratic government of Venezuela, who will care, because who will know? For we shall have only the media version; another demon will get what is coming to him. The poor of Venezuela, like the poor of Nicaragua, and the poor of Vietnam and countless other faraway places, whose dreams and lives are of no interest, will be invisible in their grief: a triumph of censorship by journalism.
It is said that the Internet offers an alternative, and what is wonderful about the rebellious spirits on the World Wide Web is that they often report as many journalists should. They are mavericks in the tradition of muckrakers such as Claud Cockburn, who said: "Never believe anything until it has been officially denied."
But the Internet is still a kind of samizdat, an underground, and most of humanity does not log on, just as most of humanity does not own a mobile phone. And the right to know ought to be universal. That other great muckraker, Tom Paine, warned that if the majority of the people were being denied the truth and ideas of truth, it was time to storm what he called the "Bastille of words." That time is now.
This is an abridged version of an address, "Reporting War and Empire," by John Pilger at Columbia University, New York, in company with Seymour Hersh, Robert Fisk, and Charles Glass.
[enditem] - Url.: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12798.htm
Hitler: An Officer And A Gentleman? - History's warning regarding a compliant media. - by HR - Url.: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4420.htm
Genocide and alibi-journalism - Url.: http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/05-23-05/discussion.cgi.47.html
FPF - Web Results HR +Journalism - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/7w8eo
"If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all the time."
- Abraham Lincoln - (1809 -1865) 16th US President
SOME EXAMPLES OF MASS MURDER AND ITEMS NEVER TO BE MENTIONED BY 'AP', AS THE 'ASSOCIATED PROPAGANDA' SHOULD BE NAMED - THE 'PROJECT FOR A NEWSPEAK AMERICAN CENTURY':
* Iraq: Pictures from the front line: What the U.S. Press Won't Show You. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/qxbxn
* HOLODOMOR = HOLOCAUST 0F MORE THAN 6 MILLION IN UKRAINE - Writer Eric Margolis: "The Soviet's genocide accounted for at least 40 million victims, not including 20 million war dead. Kaganovitch and many senior OGPU officers (later, NKVD) were Jewish." - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/kycrw - Stalin's Terminator: LAZAR KAGANOVITCH - Url.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
* US CONGRESSMAN RON PAUL CONFIRMING THE CREATION OF A WORLD GOVERNMENT - "He asked if there was an international conspiracy to overthrow our government: The answer is ''Yes" - Short video - Url.: http://100777.com/media/RonPaul-NewWorldOrder.wmv
* CONCENTRATION CAMPS IN THE US? - 'IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE!' - But of you don't react now... - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/o6lpx
* BEING DEMONIZED c.q. 'KILLED' BY THE PNAC CRIMINALS, BECAUSE OF WHAT THEY THEY WROTE: Prof. John J. Mearsheimer (fired) of the University of Chicago's Department of Political Science and Prof. Stephen M. Walt (fired) of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government: 'The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy' - Working Paper Number: RWP06-011 - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/fsl7h
* THE 'WHY' OF GLOBAL RESISTANCE - HOW IT IS DONE BY THE PNAC'S CIA JACKALS & THE WORLD BANK's SERIAL KILLER WOLFOWITZ - 'Confessions of an economic 'hit man'. World Bank insider Perkins explains: "Jackals' are C.I.A. - sanctioned people that come in and try to foment a coup or revolution. If it doesn't work, they perform assassinations, or try to." - They steal billions for the World Bank, IMF, USAID, UNDP, AID etc. - Perkins web site - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/jvhbu - It's your life too: Must watch Video Url.: www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8171.htm
* US BABY GENOCIDE DEFENDED: Former U.S. PNAC-Secr. of State Madeleine Albright-Korbel, 10 years ago in her comment on the at least HALF A MILLION dead children in Iraq, which now is estimated at ONE MILLION MORE BY UNICEF: "WE THINK THE PRICE IS WORTH IT" - On CBS '60 Minutes' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/2vmc8
* PRESENT AND PAST - UNICEF reports on another PNAC HOLOCAUST: 'The under-5 infant mortality for 2003 was 110,000 in occupied Iraq, 292,000 in occupied Afghanistan.' - Gideon Polya: 'Non-reportage of US-linked infant mass mortality' - December 23, 2004 - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/rb3rx
* The 'PROJECT FOR A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY's is HOLOCAUSTING MORE TODDLERS: 'Children Continue To Be the Main Victims Of the U.S. War Crimes.' - By Dr. César Chelala - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/oys87
* 'PROJECT FOR A NUCLEAR AMERICAN CENTURY': NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST FOR YOU TOO - Depleted Uranium for Dummies - Url.: http://www.notinkansas.us
* THE NEW SCIENTIST ABOUT ONE OF THE PNAC'S WEAPONS AGAINST US: SWEEPING STUN GUNS TO TARGET AND CONTROL YOU AND/OR CROWDS - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/kbx58
* THIS IS A VERY INFORMATIVE ARTICLE - AN EYE-OPENER - After working around the globe for more than forty years, I can not find anything wrong with this eloquent description of the state of affairs: ''Just six simple words that carry the weight of the world upon them, six simple words that act as the engine for so much turmoil and unrest.'' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/gj4x5
* WHO RULES AMERICA - AND OUR LIVES? - Please read the following article with an open mind, and if you don't believe it you can verify it for yourself, as the author suggests. Keep in mind the intense and non-stop psychological conditioning already for ages being used by major media - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/evpf
* 6 MILLION PEOPLE WERE KILLED? - ANOTHER HOLOCAUST - THIS IS ONE OF MANY BY THE PNAC's CIA: John Stockwell, former CIA Station Chief in Angola in 1976, working for then Director of the CIA, George Bush. said and wrote in 1986: ''How 6 million People Were killed in CIA secret wars against Third World countries.'' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/gpcg
* "Sarah, if the American people had ever known the truth about what we Bushes have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and lynched." - George Bush Senior speaking in an interview with Sarah McClendon in December 1992.
* How The Bush Family Made Its Fortune From The Nazis - THE DUTCH CONNECTION - by John Loftus, a former U.S. Department of Justice Nazi War Crimes prosecutor, the President of the Florida Holocaust Museum and the highly respected author of numerous books on the CIA-Nazi connection including The Belarus Secret and The Secret War Against the Jews, both of which have extensive material on the Bush-Rockefeller-Nazi connection. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/omczx -
* GLOBAL PREDATORS - ‘FRAUDS-R-US’ - The Bush Family Saga - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/elarx
* The 9/11 drama was the 'trigger' used by the PNAC Group, killing Americans to further their inhuman goals: Anybody who after seeing this video - '9/11 revisited' - still believes the version from the 'PNAC pack' - the Washington cabal - is beyond all professional help - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/jn5jx
* SCHOLARS FOR 9/11 TRUTH - American and other scientists, diplomats, researchers etc.: What happened on 9/11? - What is happening to our world? - How can we improve our situation? - Url.: http://www.st911.org/
* The MAD COW MORNING NEWS is one of the absolutely best 9/11 sites on Internet - by Daniel Hopsicker - Url.: http://www.madcowprod.com/01042004.html
* PSYOPS: How to make anybody say and see anything - William M. Arkin's "The U.S. Military Online" - When Seeing and Hearing Isn't Believing - Special to the Washington Post - already on Feb. 1, 1999 - Url.:http://tinyurl.com/hvnrq
* FOX: Video 49 min. - The example how viewers are brainwashed and 'outfoxed' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/b2zzl
* All the more reason to read the FIGHTIN' COCK FLYER - Url.: http://fightincockflyer.blogspot.com/
* THE ONLY SOLUTION? - Help all the troops - of whatever nationality - to come back from abroad! - AND WITH ALL THEIR WEAPONS, WHICH WE ARE FORCED TO PAY FOR BY TAXES - [http://www.apfn.org/apfn/reserve.htm] - We need them badly at home in many countries to fight with us against our so called 'governments' and their malignant managers - Url.: http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/
The Dutch author this far has lived and worked abroad for more than 4 decades for international media - when they still knew what honest journalism was - as an independent foreign correspondent. Of which 10 years - also during Gulf War I - in the 'Arab World' and the Middle East. Seeing worldwide that every bullet and every bomb breeds more terrorism !
* FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 - any copyrighted work in this message is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information. Url.: http://liimirror.warwick.ac.uk/uscode/17/107.html
FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
http://forpressfound.blogspot.com/
Editor: Henk Ruyssenaars
http://tinyurl.com/amn3q
The Netherlands
fpf@chello.nl
-0-
by Henk Ruyssenaars
FPF - Amsterdam - April 21st - 2006 - It's today three years and five days ago I published a story on the way journalists fertilize the global battlefields with the media manure they are spreading. (And I will never forget nor forgive the so called Journalists Union in The Netherlands (NVJ) for their part in the global war crimes. They killed 'journalism' in Holland, and are guilty.) - In a very good article today one of the favorite reporters of the FPF, John Pilger, enforces what was written in his usual eloquent manner, with some hair raising examples from the harsh reality a real journalist should describe. Otherwise it's never going to be a humane world, contrary to what has been happening for ages.*
Because, as I wrote: ''Journalists are killers too...! A question which needs an answer is however the following: are journalists killers too...? - And the answer is an unequivocal YES! Journalists kill when keeping silent about crimes by their governments and others. Or help fabricate propaganda supporting wars. I sincerely hope to see the day when all those followers of Nazi propagandists Joseph Goebbels - propagandists of ALL nationalities, and we know who they are, will be judged for their crimes against humanity.- Url.: http://tinyurl.com/4gwdv -
Like Pilger I've been living abroad for more than four decades, and find it unbelievable that so many of the people you thought you knew have sold themselves lock, stock and barrel to the killers. And those despicable cancerous information spreading traitors of humanity permanently 'forget' to inform the people they are supposed to work for - the readers, listeners, viewers, about the tens of millions of deaths in the trail of the cretins which have enslaved those Judasses. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/h4922
It's like Pilger writes too: without those silent and sometimes secretly collaborating cowards, those miserable megaphones of the group which has the gold and the guns; all the massacres, the global suffering, the fake drama of the 9/11 'inside job* and the fake 'War on terror' or their Holodomors* - would never have been possible!
I do hope that those war propaganda criminals - of which some still claim the title of 'Journalist' - will burn in Hell forever. If they - and the Group - sizzle like bacon one minute for every human being killed by their malignancy - they will be there for centuries. As they all, and very much deserve. - HR
JOHN PILGER: THE REAL FIRST CASUALTY OF WAR
How guilty those creatures in the propaganda press are is very well described by John Pilger in his article about The Real First Casualty of War: ''During the 1970s, I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. The dissident novelist Zdenek Urbánek told me, "In one respect, we are more fortunate than you in the west. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and watch on television, nothing of the official truth. Unlike you, we have learned to read between the lines, because real truth is always subversive."
This acute skepticism, this skill of reading between the lines, is urgently needed in supposedly free societies today. Take the reporting of state-sponsored war. The oldest cliché is that truth is the first casualty of war. I disagree. Journalism is the first casualty. Not only that: it has become a weapon of war, a virulent censorship that goes unrecognized in the United States, Britain, and other democracies; censorship by omission, whose power is such that, in war, it can mean the difference between life and death for people in faraway countries, such as Iraq.
AS A JOURNALIST FOR MORE THAN 40 YEARS, I HAVE TRIED TO UNDERSTAND HOW THIS WORKS.
In the aftermath of the U.S. war in Vietnam, which I reported, the policy in Washington was revenge, a word frequently used in private but never publicly. A medieval embargo was imposed on Vietnam and Cambodia; the Thatcher government cut off supplies of milk to the children of Vietnam. This assault on the very fabric of life in two of the world's most stricken societies was rarely reported; the consequence was mass suffering.
It was during this time that I made a series of documentaries about Cambodia. The first, in 1979, Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia, described the American bombing that had provided a catalyst for the rise of Pol Pot, and showed the shocking human effects of the embargo. Year Zero was broadcast in some 60 countries, but never in the United States. When I flew to Washington and offered it to the national public broadcaster, PBS, I received a curious reaction. PBS executives were shocked by the film, and spoke admiringly of it, even as they collectively shook their heads. One of them said: "John, we are disturbed that your film says the United States played such a destructive role, so we have decided to call in a journalistic adjudicator."
PBS: THE TERM "JOURNALISTIC ADJUDICATOR" WAS OUT OF ORWELL.
PBS appointed one Richard Dudman, a reporter on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and one of the few Westerners to have been invited by Pol Pot to visit Cambodia. His dispatches reflected none of the savagery then enveloping that country; he even praised his hosts. Not surprisingly, he gave my film the thumbs-down. One of the PBS executives confided to me: "These are difficult days under Ronald Reagan. Your film would have given us problems."
The lack of truth about what had really happened in southeast Asia – the media-promoted myth of a "blunder" and the suppression of the true scale of civilian casualties and of routine mass murder, even the word "invasion" – allowed Reagan to launch a second "noble cause" in central America. The target was another impoverished nation without resources: Nicaragua, whose "threat," like Vietnam's, was in trying to establish a model of development different from that of the colonial dictatorships backed by Washington. Nicaragua was crushed, thanks in no small part to leading American journalists, conservative and liberal, who suppressed the triumphs of the Sandinistas and encouraged a specious debate about a "threat."
THE TRAGEDY IN IRAQ IS DIFFERENT, BUT, FOR JOURNALISTS, THERE ARE HAUNTING SIMILARITIES.
On Aug. 24 last year, a New York Times editorial declared: "If we had all known then what we know now, the invasion [of Iraq] would have been stopped by a popular outcry." This amazing admission was saying, in effect, that the invasion would never have happened if journalists had not betrayed the public by accepting and amplifying and echoing the lies of Bush and Blair, instead of challenging and exposing them.
BBC (BROADCASTING BLAIR'S CRAP - HR): THE UNTHINKABLE WAS NORMALIZED
We now know that the BBC and other British media were used by MI6, the secret intelligence service. In what was called "Operation Mass Appeal," MI6 agents planted stories about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction – such as weapons hidden in his palaces and in secret underground bunkers. All these stories were fake. But this is not the point. The point is that the dark deeds of MI6 were quite unnecessary. Recently, the BBC's director of news, Helen Boaden, was asked to explain how one of her "embedded" reporters in Iraq, having accepted U.S. denials of the use of chemical weapons against civilians, could possibly describe the aim of the Anglo-American invasion as to "bring democracy and human rights" to Iraq. She replied with quotations from Blair that this was indeed the aim, as if Blair's utterances and the truth were in any way related.
On the third anniversary of the invasion, a BBC newsreader described this illegal, unprovoked act, based on lies, as a "miscalculation." Thus, to use Edward Herman's memorable phrase, the unthinkable was normalized.
Such servility to state power is hotly denied, yet routine. Almost the entire British media has omitted the true figure of Iraqi civilian casualties, willfully ignoring or attempting to discredit respectable studies. "Making conservative assumptions," wrote the researchers from the eminent Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, working with Iraqi scholars, "we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more, have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq … which were primarily the result of military actions by coalition forces. Most of those killed by coalition forces were women and children…." That was Oct. 29, 2004. Today, the figure has doubled.*
"WAR ON TERROR" IS A FAKE METAPHOR THAT INSULTS OUR INTELLIGENCE.
Language is perhaps the most crucial battleground. Noble words such as "democracy," "liberation," "freedom," and "reform" have been emptied of their true meaning and refilled by the enemies of those concepts. The counterfeits dominate the news, along with dishonest political labels, such as "left of center," a favorite given to warlords such as Blair and Bill Clinton; it means the opposite. "War on terror" is a fake metaphor that insults our intelligence. We are not at war. Instead, our troops are fighting insurrections in countries where our invasions have caused mayhem and grief, the evidence and images of which are suppressed. How many people know that, in revenge for 3,000 innocent lives taken on Sept. 11, 2001, up to 20,000 innocent people died in Afghanistan?
HUGO CHÁVEZ'S VENEZUELA IS CURRENTLY BEING SOFTENED UP ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC.
In reclaiming the honor of our craft, not to mention the truth, we journalists at least need to understand the historic task to which we are assigned – that is, to report the rest of humanity in terms of its usefulness, or otherwise, to "us," and to soften up the public for rapacious attacks on countries that are no threat to us. We soften them up by dehumanizing them, by writing about "regime change" in Iran as if that country were an abstraction, not a human society. Hugo Chávez's Venezuela is currently being softened up on both sides of the Atlantic. A few weeks ago, Channel 4 news carried a major item that might have been broadcast by the U.S. State Department. The reporter, Jonathan Rugman, the program's Washington correspondent, presented Chávez as a cartoon character, a sinister buffoon whose folksy Latin ways disguised a man "in danger of joining a rogues' gallery of dictators and despots – Washington's latest Latin nightmare." In contrast, Condoleezza Rice was given gravitas and Donald Rumsfeld was allowed to compare Chávez to Hitler.
THIS TRAVESTY OF JOURNALISM
Indeed, almost everything in this travesty of journalism was viewed from Washington, and only fragments of it from the barrios of Venezuela, where Chávez enjoys 80 percent popularity. That he had won nine democratic elections and referendums – a world record – was omitted. In crude Soviet flick style, he was shown with the likes of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, though these brief encounters had to do with OPEC and oil only. According to Rugman, Venezuela under Chávez is helping Iran develop nuclear weapons. No evidence was given for this absurdity. People watching would have no idea that Venezuela was the only oil-producing country in the world to use its oil revenue for the benefit of poor people. They would have no idea of spectacular developments in health, education, literacy; no idea that Venezuela has no political jails – unlike the United States.
So if the Bush administration moves to implement "Operation Bilbao," a contingency plan to overthrow the democratic government of Venezuela, who will care, because who will know? For we shall have only the media version; another demon will get what is coming to him. The poor of Venezuela, like the poor of Nicaragua, and the poor of Vietnam and countless other faraway places, whose dreams and lives are of no interest, will be invisible in their grief: a triumph of censorship by journalism.
It is said that the Internet offers an alternative, and what is wonderful about the rebellious spirits on the World Wide Web is that they often report as many journalists should. They are mavericks in the tradition of muckrakers such as Claud Cockburn, who said: "Never believe anything until it has been officially denied."
But the Internet is still a kind of samizdat, an underground, and most of humanity does not log on, just as most of humanity does not own a mobile phone. And the right to know ought to be universal. That other great muckraker, Tom Paine, warned that if the majority of the people were being denied the truth and ideas of truth, it was time to storm what he called the "Bastille of words." That time is now.
This is an abridged version of an address, "Reporting War and Empire," by John Pilger at Columbia University, New York, in company with Seymour Hersh, Robert Fisk, and Charles Glass.
[enditem] - Url.: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12798.htm
Hitler: An Officer And A Gentleman? - History's warning regarding a compliant media. - by HR - Url.: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4420.htm
Genocide and alibi-journalism - Url.: http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/05-23-05/discussion.cgi.47.html
FPF - Web Results HR +Journalism - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/7w8eo
"If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all the time."
- Abraham Lincoln - (1809 -1865) 16th US President
SOME EXAMPLES OF MASS MURDER AND ITEMS NEVER TO BE MENTIONED BY 'AP', AS THE 'ASSOCIATED PROPAGANDA' SHOULD BE NAMED - THE 'PROJECT FOR A NEWSPEAK AMERICAN CENTURY':
* Iraq: Pictures from the front line: What the U.S. Press Won't Show You. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/qxbxn
* HOLODOMOR = HOLOCAUST 0F MORE THAN 6 MILLION IN UKRAINE - Writer Eric Margolis: "The Soviet's genocide accounted for at least 40 million victims, not including 20 million war dead. Kaganovitch and many senior OGPU officers (later, NKVD) were Jewish." - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/kycrw - Stalin's Terminator: LAZAR KAGANOVITCH - Url.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
* US CONGRESSMAN RON PAUL CONFIRMING THE CREATION OF A WORLD GOVERNMENT - "He asked if there was an international conspiracy to overthrow our government: The answer is ''Yes" - Short video - Url.: http://100777.com/media/RonPaul-NewWorldOrder.wmv
* CONCENTRATION CAMPS IN THE US? - 'IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE!' - But of you don't react now... - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/o6lpx
* BEING DEMONIZED c.q. 'KILLED' BY THE PNAC CRIMINALS, BECAUSE OF WHAT THEY THEY WROTE: Prof. John J. Mearsheimer (fired) of the University of Chicago's Department of Political Science and Prof. Stephen M. Walt (fired) of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government: 'The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy' - Working Paper Number: RWP06-011 - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/fsl7h
* THE 'WHY' OF GLOBAL RESISTANCE - HOW IT IS DONE BY THE PNAC'S CIA JACKALS & THE WORLD BANK's SERIAL KILLER WOLFOWITZ - 'Confessions of an economic 'hit man'. World Bank insider Perkins explains: "Jackals' are C.I.A. - sanctioned people that come in and try to foment a coup or revolution. If it doesn't work, they perform assassinations, or try to." - They steal billions for the World Bank, IMF, USAID, UNDP, AID etc. - Perkins web site - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/jvhbu - It's your life too: Must watch Video Url.: www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8171.htm
* US BABY GENOCIDE DEFENDED: Former U.S. PNAC-Secr. of State Madeleine Albright-Korbel, 10 years ago in her comment on the at least HALF A MILLION dead children in Iraq, which now is estimated at ONE MILLION MORE BY UNICEF: "WE THINK THE PRICE IS WORTH IT" - On CBS '60 Minutes' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/2vmc8
* PRESENT AND PAST - UNICEF reports on another PNAC HOLOCAUST: 'The under-5 infant mortality for 2003 was 110,000 in occupied Iraq, 292,000 in occupied Afghanistan.' - Gideon Polya: 'Non-reportage of US-linked infant mass mortality' - December 23, 2004 - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/rb3rx
* The 'PROJECT FOR A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY's is HOLOCAUSTING MORE TODDLERS: 'Children Continue To Be the Main Victims Of the U.S. War Crimes.' - By Dr. César Chelala - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/oys87
* 'PROJECT FOR A NUCLEAR AMERICAN CENTURY': NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST FOR YOU TOO - Depleted Uranium for Dummies - Url.: http://www.notinkansas.us
* THE NEW SCIENTIST ABOUT ONE OF THE PNAC'S WEAPONS AGAINST US: SWEEPING STUN GUNS TO TARGET AND CONTROL YOU AND/OR CROWDS - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/kbx58
* THIS IS A VERY INFORMATIVE ARTICLE - AN EYE-OPENER - After working around the globe for more than forty years, I can not find anything wrong with this eloquent description of the state of affairs: ''Just six simple words that carry the weight of the world upon them, six simple words that act as the engine for so much turmoil and unrest.'' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/gj4x5
* WHO RULES AMERICA - AND OUR LIVES? - Please read the following article with an open mind, and if you don't believe it you can verify it for yourself, as the author suggests. Keep in mind the intense and non-stop psychological conditioning already for ages being used by major media - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/evpf
* 6 MILLION PEOPLE WERE KILLED? - ANOTHER HOLOCAUST - THIS IS ONE OF MANY BY THE PNAC's CIA: John Stockwell, former CIA Station Chief in Angola in 1976, working for then Director of the CIA, George Bush. said and wrote in 1986: ''How 6 million People Were killed in CIA secret wars against Third World countries.'' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/gpcg
* "Sarah, if the American people had ever known the truth about what we Bushes have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and lynched." - George Bush Senior speaking in an interview with Sarah McClendon in December 1992.
* How The Bush Family Made Its Fortune From The Nazis - THE DUTCH CONNECTION - by John Loftus, a former U.S. Department of Justice Nazi War Crimes prosecutor, the President of the Florida Holocaust Museum and the highly respected author of numerous books on the CIA-Nazi connection including The Belarus Secret and The Secret War Against the Jews, both of which have extensive material on the Bush-Rockefeller-Nazi connection. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/omczx -
* GLOBAL PREDATORS - ‘FRAUDS-R-US’ - The Bush Family Saga - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/elarx
* The 9/11 drama was the 'trigger' used by the PNAC Group, killing Americans to further their inhuman goals: Anybody who after seeing this video - '9/11 revisited' - still believes the version from the 'PNAC pack' - the Washington cabal - is beyond all professional help - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/jn5jx
* SCHOLARS FOR 9/11 TRUTH - American and other scientists, diplomats, researchers etc.: What happened on 9/11? - What is happening to our world? - How can we improve our situation? - Url.: http://www.st911.org/
* The MAD COW MORNING NEWS is one of the absolutely best 9/11 sites on Internet - by Daniel Hopsicker - Url.: http://www.madcowprod.com/01042004.html
* PSYOPS: How to make anybody say and see anything - William M. Arkin's "The U.S. Military Online" - When Seeing and Hearing Isn't Believing - Special to the Washington Post - already on Feb. 1, 1999 - Url.:http://tinyurl.com/hvnrq
* FOX: Video 49 min. - The example how viewers are brainwashed and 'outfoxed' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/b2zzl
* All the more reason to read the FIGHTIN' COCK FLYER - Url.: http://fightincockflyer.blogspot.com/
* THE ONLY SOLUTION? - Help all the troops - of whatever nationality - to come back from abroad! - AND WITH ALL THEIR WEAPONS, WHICH WE ARE FORCED TO PAY FOR BY TAXES - [http://www.apfn.org/apfn/reserve.htm] - We need them badly at home in many countries to fight with us against our so called 'governments' and their malignant managers - Url.: http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/
The Dutch author this far has lived and worked abroad for more than 4 decades for international media - when they still knew what honest journalism was - as an independent foreign correspondent. Of which 10 years - also during Gulf War I - in the 'Arab World' and the Middle East. Seeing worldwide that every bullet and every bomb breeds more terrorism !
* FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 - any copyrighted work in this message is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information. Url.: http://liimirror.warwick.ac.uk/uscode/17/107.html
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Editor: Henk Ruyssenaars
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