[A-List] By John Pilger

[James Daly]

We need to be told

When journalists report propaganda instead of the truth, the 
consequences can be catastrophic - as one largely forgotten instance 
demonstrates.

By John Pilger

10/13/05 "ICH" -- -- ''The propagandist's purpose," wrote Aldous 
Huxley, "is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets 
of people are human." The British, who invented modern war propaganda 
and inspired Joseph Goebbels, were specialists in the field. At the 
height of the slaughter known as the First World War, the prime 
minister, David Lloyd George, confided to C P Scott, editor of the 
Manchester Guardian: "If people really knew [the truth], the war would 
be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know, and can't know."

What has changed?

"If we had all known then what we know now," said the New York Times 
on 24 August, "the invasion [of Iraq] would have been stopped by a 
popular outcry." The admission was saying, in effect, that powerful 
newspapers, like powerful broadcasting organisations, had betrayed 
their readers and viewers and listeners by not finding out - by 
amplifying the lies of Bush and Blair instead of challenging and 
exposing them. The direct consequences were a criminal invasion called 
"Shock and Awe" and the dehumanising of a whole nation.

This remains largely an unspoken shame in Britain, especially at the 
BBC, which continues to boast about its rigour and objectivity while 
echoing a corrupt and lying government, as it did before the invasion. 
For evidence of this, there are two academic studies available - 
though the capitulation of broadcast journalism ought to be obvious to 
any discerning viewer, night after night, as "embedded" reporting 
justifies murderous attacks on Iraqi towns and villages as "rooting 
out insurgents" and swallows British army propaganda designed to 
distract from its disaster, while preparing us for attacks on Iran and 
Syria. Like the New York Times and most of the American media, had the 
BBC done its job, many thousands of innocent people almost certainly 
would be alive today.

When will important journalists cease to be establishment managers and 
analyse and confront the critical part they play in the violence of 
rapacious governments? An anniversary provides an opportunity. Forty 
years ago this month, Major General Suharto began a seizure of power 
in Indonesia by unleashing a wave of killings that the CIA described 
as "the worst mass murders of the second half of the 20th century". 
Much of this episode was never reported and remains secret. None of 
the reports of recent terror attacks against tourists in Bali 
mentioned the fact that near the major hotels were the mass graves of 
some of an estimated 80,000 people killed by mobs orchestrated by 
Suharto and backed by the American and British governments.

Indeed, the collaboration of western governments, together with the 
role of western business, laid the pattern for subsequent 
Anglo-American violence across the world: such as Chile in 1973, when 
Augusto Pinochet's bloody coup was backed in Washington and London; 
the arming of the shah of Iran and the creation of his secret police; 
and the lavish and meticulous backing of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, 
including black propaganda by the Foreign Office which sought to 
discredit press reports that he had used nerve gas against the Kurdish 
village of Halabja.

In 1965, in Indonesia, the American embassy furnished General Suharto 
with roughly 5,000 names. These were people for assassination, and a 
senior American diplomat checked off the names as they were killed or 
captured. Most were members of the PKI, the Indonesian Communist 
Party. Having already armed and equipped Suharto's army, Washington 
secretly flew in state-of-the-art communication equipment whose high 
frequencies were known to the CIA and the National Security Council 
advising the president, Lyndon B Johnson. Not only did this allow 
Suharto's generals to co-ordinate the massacres, it meant that the 
highest echelons of the US administration were listening in.

The Americans worked closely with the British. The British ambassador 
in Jakarta, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, cabled the Foreign Office: "I have 
never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia 
would be an essential preliminary to effective change." The "little 
shooting" saw off between half a million and a million people.

However, it was in the field of propaganda, of "managing" the media 
and eradicating the victims from people's memory in the west, that the 
British shone. British intelligence officers outlined how the British 
press and the BBC could be manipulated. "Treatment will need to be 
subtle," they wrote, "eg, a) all activities should be strictly 
unattributable, b) British [government] participation or co-operation 
should be carefully concealed." To achieve this, the Foreign Office 
opened a branch of its Information Research Department (IRD) in 
Singapore.

The IRD was a top-secret, cold war propaganda unit headed by Norman 
Reddaway, one of Her Majesty's most experienced liars. Reddaway and 
his colleagues manipulated the "embedded" press and the BBC so 
expertly that he boasted to Gilchrist in a secret message that the 
fake story he had promoted - that a communist takeover was imminent in 
Indonesia - "went all over the world and back again". He described how 
an experienced Sunday newspaper journalist agreed "to give exactly 
your angle on events in his article . . . ie, that this was a 
kid-glove coup without butchery".

These lies, bragged Reddaway, could be "put almost instantly back to 
Indonesia via the BBC". Prevented from entering Indonesia, Roland 
Challis, the BBC's south-east Asia corres-pondent, was unaware of the 
slaughter. "My British sources purported not to know what was going 
on," Challis told me, "but they knew what the American plan was. There 
were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in 
Surabaya, and British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian 
troops down the Malacca Straits so that they could take part in this 
terrible holocaust. It was only later that we learned that the 
American embassy was supplying names and ticking them off as they were 
killed. There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto regime, 
the involvement of the IMF and the World Bank was part of it . . . 
Suharto would bring them back. That was the deal."

The bloodbath was ignored almost entirely by the BBC and the rest of 
the western media. The headline news was that "communism" had been 
overthrown in Indonesia, which, Time reported, "is the west's best 
news in Asia". In November 1967, at a conference in Geneva overseen by 
the billionaire banker David Rockefeller, the booty was handed out. 
All the corporate giants were represented, from General Motors, Chase 
Manhattan Bank and US Steel to ICI and British American Tobacco. With 
Suharto's connivance, the natural riches of his country were carved 
up.

Suharto's cut was considerable. When he was finally overthrown in 
1998, it was estimated that he had up to $10bn in foreign banks, or 
more than 10 per cent of Indonesia's foreign debt. When I was last in 
Jakarta, I walked to the end of his leafy street and caught sight of 
the mansion where the mass murderer now lives in luxury. As Saddam 
Hussein heads for his own show trial on 19 October, he must ask 
himself where he went wrong. Compared with Suharto's crimes, Saddam's 
seem second-division.

With British-supplied Hawk jets and machine-guns, Suharto's army went 
on to crush the life out of a quarter of the population of East Timor: 
200,000 people. Using the same Hawk jets and machine-guns, the same 
genocidal army is now attempting to crush the life out of the 
resistance movement in West Papua and protect the Freeport company, 
which is mining a mountain of copper in the province. (Henry Kissinger 
is "director emeritus".) Some 100,000 Papuans, 18 per cent of the 
population, have been killed; yet this British-backed "project", as 
new Labour likes to say, is almost never reported.

What happened in Indonesia, and continues to happen, is almost a 
mirror image of the attack on Iraq. Both countries have riches coveted 
by the west; both had dictators installed by the west to facilitate 
the passage of their resources; and in both countries, blood-drenched 
Anglo-American actions have been disguised by propaganda willingly 
provided by journalists prepared to draw the necessary distinctions 
between Saddam's regime ("monstrous") and Suharto's ("moderate" and 
"stable").

Since the invasion of Iraq, I have spoken to a number of principled 
journalists working in the pro-war media, including the BBC, who say 
that they and many others "lie awake at night" and want to speak out 
and resume being real journalists. I suggest now is the time.

John Pilger's book Tell Me No Lies: investigative journalism and its 
triumphs is published in paperback by Vintage. To contact the Free 
West Papua Campaign, e-mail [samoxen at aol.com] or phone 01865 241 1200

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is 
distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior 
interest in receiving the included information for research and 
educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation 
whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information 
Clearing House endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

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