[R-G] John Pilger: Western media justify Iraq, Afghan bloodshed

[Anthony Fenton]

John Pilger: Western media justify Iraq, Afghan bloodshed

John Pilger
13 September 2008
http://www.greenleft.org.au/2008/767/39585

Try to laugh, please. The news is now officially parody and a game for  
all the family to play.

First question: Why are “we” in Afghanistan?

Answer: “To try to help in the country’s rebuilding program.” Who says  
so? Huw Edwards, the BBC’s principal newsreader.

What wags the Welsh are.

Second question: Why are “we” in Iraq?

Answer: To “plant a western-style open democracy”. Who says so? Paul  
Wood, the former BBC defence correspondent, and his boss Helen Boaden,  
director of BBC News. To prove her point, Boaden supplied  
Medialens.org with 2700 words of quotations from Tony Blair and George  
Bush.

Irony? No, she meant it.

Take Andrew Martin, divisional adviser at BBC Complaints, who has been  
researching Bush’s speeches for “evidence” of noble democratic reasons  
for laying to waste an ancient civilisation.

Says he: “The ’D’ word is not there, but the phrase ’united, stable  
and free’ [is] clearly an allusion to it.” After all, he says, the  
invasion of Iraq “was launched as ’Operation Iraqi Freedom’”.

Moreover, says the BBC man, “in Bush’s 1 May 2003 speech (the one on  
the aircraft carrier) he talked repeatedly about freedom and  
explicitly about the Iraqi transition to democracy … These examples  
show that these were on Bush’s mind before, during and after the  
invasion.”

Try to laugh, please.

Laughing may be difficult, I agree, given the slaughter of civilians  
in Afghanistan by “coalition” aircraft, including those directed by  
British forces engaged in “the country’s rebuilding programme”. The  
bombing of civilian areas has doubled, along with the deaths of  
civilians, says Human Rights Watch.

Last month, “our” aircraft slaughtered nearly 100 civilians, two- 
thirds of them children between the ages of three months and 16 years,  
while they slept, according to eyewitnesses.

BBC television news initially devoted nine seconds to the Human Rights  
Watch report, and nothing to the fact that “less than  
peanuts” (according to an aid worker) is being spent on rebuilding  
anything in Afghanistan.

As for the notion of a “united, stable and free” Iraq, consider the no- 
bid contracts handed to the major western oil companies for ownership  
of Iraq’s oil. “Theft” is a more truthful word.

Written by the companies themselves and US officials, the contracts  
have been signed off by Bush and Nouri al-Maliki, “prime minister” of  
Iraq’s “democratic” government that resides in an air-conditioned US  
fortress.

This is not news.

Try to laugh, please, while you consider the devastation of Iraq’s  
health, once the best in the Middle East, by the ubiquitous dust from  
British and US depleted uranium weapons. A World Health Organisation  
study reporting a cancer epidemic has been suppressed, says its  
principal author.

This has been reported in Britain only in the Glasgow Sunday Herald  
and the Morning Star. According to a study last year by Basra  
University Medical College, almost half of all deaths in the  
contaminated southern provinces were caused by cancer.

Try to laugh, please, at the recent happy-clappy Nurembergs from which  
will come the next president of the US. Those paid to keep the record  
straight have strained to present a spectacle of choice. Barack Obama,  
the man of “change”, wants to “build a 21st-century military … to stay  
on the offensive everywhere”.

Here comes the new Cold War, with promises of more bombs, more of the  
militarised society with its 730 bases worldwide, on which the US  
people spend US$0.42 of every tax dollar.

At home, Obama offers no authentic measure that might ease the US’s  
grotesque inequality, such as basic health care. John McCain, his  
Republican opponent, may well be a media cartoon figure — the fake  
“war hero” now joined with a Shakespeare-banning, gun-loving,  
religious fanatic — yet his true significance is that he and Obama  
share essentially the same dangerous prescriptions.

Thousands of decent US people came to the two nominating conventions  
to express the dissenting opinion of millions of their compatriots who  
believe, with good cause, that their democracy is evaporating.

They were intimidated, arrested, beaten, pepper-gassed; and they were  
patronised or ignored by those paid to keep the record straight.

In the meantime, Justin Webb, the BBC’s North America editor, has  
launched a book about the US, his “city on a hill”. It is a sort of  
Mills & Boon view of the rapacious system he admires with such  
obsequiousness.

The book is called Have a Nice Day.

Try to laugh, please.

[Reprinted from http://johnpilger.com.