by Stephen Gowans - November 12, 2001
http://www.oureffort2001.com/RESEARCH/TALIBAN/masters1125.htm
Washington pulls out the stops in
its own propaganda war
One of the surest ways of knowing you're being blanketed by propaganda
is to be told that whatever makes Washington look bad is propaganda. That's been happening a lot lately.
As the devastation in Afghanistan becomes clearer, as stories of broken
bodies and blood and flattened Red Cross depots and orphaned children
and weeping mothers trickle out of the war-torn and drought-stricken
country, the White House and the State Department and the Pentagon fire
back: Don't believe it. It's propaganda.
If it looks like the war that was supposed to capture Osama bin Laden
dead or alive has become a war on Afghans, well, that's just because the
Taliban, backward, medieval, unworldly, are masters of deception.
Through guile they've lured us all into believing innocents are being
blasted away, displaced, and threatened with starvation.
But isn't it always that way? The other side, no matter how small, no
matter how poor, no matter how devastated by war, crippled by sanctions,
weakened by IMF reforms, is always cunningly able to manipulate
perceptions, twist the truth, exaggerate, tell tall tales, while
Washington, with its ready access to the media, to PR firms, to
spin-doctors, to overnight polling, struggles to get its message -- and
the truth -- out.
The 1.5 million Iraqis the UN says have died from sanctions-related
causes? Iraqi propaganda.
The thousands of Yugoslav civilians who died during NATO's 78-day air
war against Yugoslavia in 1999? Propaganda.
The war crimes the US committed against the Serbs and Iraqis, against
Afghans and Sudanese? Propaganda.
When NATO missiles destroyed the Serb Radio-TV building, killing
civilians inside, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said the attack was
necessary to shut down Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's
"propaganda machine." But Serb Radio-TV was relaying pictures
of the extent of devastation NATO bombs were wreaking on civilian
infrastructure, and people. Not soldiers, and police, but old ladies,
and children, and, well, people who looked like you and me. It made
people in the West wonder whether bombing was the answer. It made them
ask questions and squirm in discomfort and wonder about the war's
morality.
And one thing you can't have is the public going soft on you. No sir!
You don't want a repeat of what happened to former president Lyndon
Johnson. When he looked out his window in 1968 to see hundreds of
thousands of protesters, he knew, then and there, the Vietnam war was
lost.
Astonishingly, the attack on the Serb broadcasting building, a blatant
war crime, has never been the object of a war crimes indictment, but
then hundreds of war crimes committed by the United States in other wars
have been sheltered from prosecution, too. It helps when you have a veto
over the Security Council. It helps when you refuse to approve an
International Criminal Court that could impartially prosecute war
crimes, demanding blanket immunity from prosecution as the price of your
approval.
Instead, the Hague Tribunal, a creation of the UN Security Council, and
therefore under the control of the principal members of NATO, threatened
to indict Milosevic for the attack. Milosevic knew of the attack in
advance, the Tribunal's chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte charged, and
failed to warn the civilians inside, a cynical ploy to use their deaths
for propaganda purposes.
See the pattern?
Commit outrages, trample international law, ignore international
protocols banning attacks on civilians, and then, when the other side
complains, and the public gets restive, dismiss it all as propaganda.
But it must be propaganda, right? We're civilized. We would never kill
countless numbers of civilians.
Yeah, so maybe we used weapons of mass destruction against Hiroshima and
Nagasaki (and lied about the targets being military bases selected to
minimize civilian casualties.) Maybe we firebombed Tokyo during WW II.
Maybe we carpet bombed North Korea until there were no targets left to
bomb, killing millions. Maybe we stood by and watched with a check list
as Indonesian dictator Suharto rounded up and murdered up to a million
communists. Maybe we carpet bombed North Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, wiping
out three million. Maybe we killed 200,000 in the Gulf War. Maybe we
killed 2,000 Panamanian civilians to arrest Manuel Noriega, a former CIA
operative. Maybe we bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days, killing thousands.
But that was all in the past. This time it's different, right?
So why has the Pentagon bought the exclusive rights to photos taken of
Afghanistan by a commercial satellite, photos it's not letting anyone
else see? It's not as if the Pentagon needs the photos. It has its own
satellites that provide far better photos. It's more like the Pentagon
doesn't care to have you see what's really going on.
So why did Washington prevail on television networks and newspapers not
to broadcast and publish the statements of Osama bin Laden, at least not
without a fair amount of judicious editing? Why doesn't Washington want
its free press to allow you to hear what bin Laden has to say? Is it
because the Saudi millionaire isn't taking credit for the Sept. 11
attacks (a reminder, perhaps, that Washington has yet to produce any
concrete evidence that bin Laden, Al Qaeda or the Taliban had anything
to do with the attacks of the Pentagon and the WTC)?
So why did CNN chairman Walter Isaacson order CNN reporters "to
make sure people understand that when they see civilian suffering there,
it's in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering
in the United States," (as if the suffering of innocent people in
one part of the world justifies the suffering of innocent people in
another part of the world)?
And why did Rick Davis, CNN's head of standards and practices, tell
anchors to put scenes of Afghans suffering "into context?" He
recommended anchors say: "The Pentagon has repeatedly stressed that
it is trying to minimize civilian casualties in Afghanistan, even as the
Taliban regime continues to harbor terrorists who are connected to the
Sept. 11 attacks that claimed thousands of innocent lives in the US. We
must keep in mind...that these US military actions are in response to a
terrorist attack that killed close to 5,000 innocent people in the
US."
When US warplanes attacked the remote Afghan farming village of
Chowkar-Karez, dozens of civilians were killed. A Pentagon official
said, "the people there are dead because we wanted them dead."
Their crime? They sympathized with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. So, if the
Pentagon is deliberately attacking civilians, why is CNN continuing to
point to the Pentagon's less than honest assurances that it's minimizing
civilian casualties? Far from minimizing noncombatant deaths, the US
military is deliberately attacking civilians. To say otherwise is
propaganda, isn't it?
So why did representatives of Hollywood studios, including the actor
Sally Field, agree that Hollywood would produce films that keep the
public on side the war on terrorism? Isn't that propaganda? Is there
some reason the public may no longer want to be on side? Is there a risk
the public could go soft?
And what of New York-based Human Rights Watch? Is it part of
Washington's propaganda machine, part of its plan to prevent the public
from rethinking its support for the war?
You wouldn't think so, at first. Didn't Human Rights Watch document the
deaths of 500 Yugoslav civilians, and chastise NATO for not taking
sufficient care in its bombing of Yugoslavia? And didn't the group
establish that there were between 25 and maybe as many as 35 civilians
killed by US warplanes at Chowkar-Karez?
Yes, it did. But its estimate of the number of civilians killed in
Yugoslavia (500) was on the low side of other estimates, even less than
NATO's own initial estimate. And Human Rights Watch never accused NATO
of war crimes, not even for the bombing of Serb Radio-TV.
The group's finding that between 25 and 35 civilians were killed at
Chowkar-Karez is consistent with its estimates of casualties in the 1999
NATO air war against Yugoslavia -- both contradict the other side's
estimates and therefore corroborate the Washington line that the number
of civilian casualties is being exaggerated.
The Pentagon never denies that civilian casualties have occurred.
Instead, it argues that the true number is inflated (although how it
could know since it doesn't have soldiers on the ground is a question
the media steers clear of), making the case that the enemy has an
interest in inflating the numbers, which, of course, it does (just as
the Pentagon has an interest in minimizing them.)
Human Rights Watch, presenting itself as an impartial observer,
corroborates the charge by producing lower estimates than the enemy
government does, and thereby underscores Washington's claim that the
enemy is exaggerating for propaganda purposes. The result is that
attention is deflected from more pertinent matters: there are civilian
casualties; the reasons for inflicting harm on civilians are entirely
bogus; the civilian casualties may not be unintended at all.
So it is that Human Rights Watch will grant that there were civilian
casualties at Chowkar-Karez, making the point that there are fewer
casualties than the Taliban says, without addressing the issue of
whether US warplanes committed a war crime by deliberately attacking the
civilians? Absurdly, the question becomes, were there 35 killed or 100?
as if 35 is all right.
Who is Human Rights Watch, anyway? Take a look at the organization's web
site and it becomes immediately clear that this isn't a group of
financially struggling human rights advocates, camped out in a low-rent
office in some crummy part of town, proudly maintaining its independence
from government and corporate elites. On the contrary, it's well-funded,
and it's well-connected. Its links snake through the foreign policy
establishment of the United States, through the State Department, and
through the government's propaganda arm, Radio Free Europe.
How immensely bold then to claim that the Taliban are propaganda
specialists. Please. With its PR firms, its polling, its PsyOps, it
press offices, with CNN and the press yielding to the White House
request not to disclose Osama bin Laden's remarks unedited, with
Hollywood pledging to join the fight against terrorism, the real
propaganda specialists are to be found in Washington, and New York, and
L.A., not Kabul. Yes, the Taliban have an interest in inflating the
number of civilian casualties. But, by the same token, Washington has an
interest in minimizing, in obscuring, and in denying the true extent of
the human misery it's responsible for creating. And it has infinitely
more resources to do so.
Decades ago, the old Nazi, Hermann Goering, leaned in to his microphone
at the Nuremberg trials and held forth on war and propaganda. The Nazis,
with their Reichstag fire, their humanitarian intervention into the
Sudentenland, their stories of Germany under attack from within and
without, were masters of propaganda.
"Why of course the people don't want war," began Goering.
"That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the
country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to
drag the people along."
The Nazi leader paused, then continued. "All you have to do is to
tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack
of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."
Sound familiar?
Now, ask yourself this: Why is there so much Washington doesn't want you
to know?
And who are the real master propagandists?
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Stephen Gowans is
a writer and political activist who lives in Ottawa, Canada. He writes a
regular column for Canadian Content
and is also a frequent contributor to the Media
Monitors Network. In addition, Gowans maintains his own Web site, What's
Left in Suburbia?, that is filled with relevant information.
Please, DO NOT steal, scavenge or repost this work without the expressed written authorization of Swans, which will seek permission from the author. This material is copyrighted, © Stephen Gowans 2001. All rights reserved.