|
| quote: | | . Did u know that reporters who strayed from the Army and got real stories and tried to air them were really given a hard time by the CIA! Im guessing the same thing happened in Afghanistan and will repeat in Iraq. |
Yeah, Patrick Turnley breifly mentions it on his webpage (the second link) and I saw something about it on Fox News of all places I think it was. Basically, if you want to go down there with the soldiers and take pictures of the action, you need a "press pass" of sorts - personal identification that authorizes you to take these pictures. The journalists like Patrick Turnley, however, were made well aware that if any "unsavoury" images get back - that is, images the army/government does not want you to see - you have the press pass taken off you and are either forced to go home or, at the very least, forced away from the front lines. This expalins why we have seen so few images of the bloodshed from the the Gulf War / Afghanistan, which results in two things:
1) The public are deliberately made ignorant of much of what is occuring in these wars - namely they are being fed "propoganda" in the sense that the government dictates what they are and are not allowed to see.
2) In this state of ignorance - where no blood-shed ever makes it onto our TV screens - we are made to think that the operations are clean and precise, with bloodshed reduced to bland statistics, "collateral damage". How can we morally oppose a war when we don't properly understand what's happening?
It's worth noting that coverage of the World Trade Center tragedies (and they were tragedies) wasn't censored at all. Can you imagine people supporting the attack on Afghanistan if they had the deaths broadcast into their home? Even if we only count the reported deaths, the tally far exceeds the death tally from the WTC disaster, yet because these deaths are faceless - because we have no humane way of connecting with these "numbers" - the outpouring of sympathy is far diminished and the "public opinion" war is easily won. Take a look for yourself:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/1740538.stm
Then take a look at what they have in store for Iraq this time around. Notice the terminology:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003...ain537928.shtml
| quote: | On the second day, the plan calls for launching another 300 to 400 cruise missiles.
"There will not be a safe place in Baghdad," said one Pentagon official who has been briefed on the plan.
"The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before," the official said. |
| quote: | "We want them to quit. We want them not to fight," says Harlan Ullman, one of the authors of the Shock and Awe concept which relies on large numbers of precision guided weapons.
"So that you have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in minutes," says Ullman. |
| quote: | | "You're sitting in Baghdad and all of a sudden you're the general and 30 of your division headquarters have been wiped out. You also take the city down. By that I mean you get rid of their power, water. In 2,3,4,5 days they are physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted," Ullman tells Martin. |
Not one mention of civilian casualties. Once again the dead are relegated to meaningless numbers so that we can sit back and watch the fireworks in "awe" without that pesky moral twinge: "I wonder if this is morally right? Of course it is, it's for their own good!".
Utterly, utterly reprehensible:
http://www.friendsjournal.org/conte...il/feature.html
| quote: | | Renegade, U stated that the area has "incredible poverty" I agree with this. However. Can it not be argued that the billions of oil $$$ that Sadam pockets for himself and spends on 25 palaces and large cruise boats should be in the hands of the people and therefore gives further justification the need for US liberation? The point here is that the US apparently "intends" to help the people by remodeling the government so the $$$ will find its way into the peoples hands. |
Partly true - Saddam Hussein is as corrupt as any other iron-fist dictator - but the sanctions placed on Iraq after the Gulf War basically destroyed Iraqs economy and even if Saddam Hussein were the most humanitarian man on the planet, he just does not have the means to feed his own people.
See here for the "myths" about Iraqi sanctions:
http://www.nonviolence.org/vitw/pag...lity_print.html
And this is a World Health Organisation report about the impact the sanctions have had on Iraqi society (it's old -1996 - but, if anything, things have gotten even worse since then):
http://www.who.int/disasters/repo/5249.html
The old "it's all Saddam's fault" line just isn't true.
___________________
http://eschatonnow.blogspot.com/
|
The Reality Of War
