[Media-watch] John Pilger on the media in Britain

[Mark and Andrea]

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=5615


How To Silence An Awkward Newspaper
by John Pilger
May 28, 2004




              TERROR WAR


  The editor of the Daily Mirror, Britain's most famous mass-circulation
newspaper, was sacked because he ran the only English-language popular paper
to expose the "war on terror" as a fraud and the invasion of Iraq as a
crime. He was marked long before the Mirror published the notorious,
apparently faked pictures of British troops torturing Iraqi prisoners.



  On 4 July 2002, American Independence Day, the Mirror published a report
of mine, displayed on the front page under the headline "Mourn on the Fourth
of July" and showing Bush flanked by the Stars and Stripes.



  Above him were the words: "George W Bush's policy of bomb first and find
out later has killed double the number of civilians who died on 11
September. The USA is now the world's leading rogue state". It was the
Mirror at its most potent; not since it distinguished itself as the first
mass-circulation paper in the western world to oppose the US invasion of
Vietnam and, before that, the British invasion of Suez, had it confronted
the rapacious policies of a British government and its principal ally. Most
of the Western media were then consumed and manipulated by the fake issue of
Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction: "45 minutes from attack",
said the London Evening Standard front page; "He's got 'em... let's get
him", said the London Sun.



  In contrast, the Mirror reported that Bush and Blair were lying, that the
"liberation" of Afghanistan had installed warlords as barbaric as the
Taliban, that US forces had killed almost double the number of civilians
killed in the twin towers on 11 September 2001, and that the coming invasion
of Iraq had been long planned. It was certainly not the first to say this,
but it made sense of it for a popular readership.



  The day after the "mourn on the Fourth of July" piece was published, a
senior executive of the New York investment company Tweedy Browne, major
shareholders in the Trinity Mirror newspaper group, called the Mirror and
shouted down the phone at senior management, demanding Morgan's head and
mine. This pressure continued as the Murdoch press in the United States and
other lunar right-wing papers and broadcasters railed against the
"treacherous" Mirror. When, on 1 May last, the Mirror published its
"torture" photographs, Tweedy Browne again led the charge of powerful
shareholders, notably Fidelity Asset Management, the biggest mutual company
in America, run by the billionaire Edward C Johnson III, a donor to the Bush
re-election campaign. "We will have to look very carefully," said an
executive of Deutsche Asset Management, another shareholder, "at what
Trinity Mirror does next in order to protect the value of the Mirror brand."
Was corporate influence on the press, and its right to be wrong, ever more
eloquently expressed? Morgan had only just survived a year earlier when a
new Trinity Mirror senior management under the chief executive, Sly Bailey,
ordered him to "tone down" the anti-war coverage and return the paper to
celebrities and faithless royal butlers (who had never departed). In the
following months, the Mirror, along with the other anti-war daily newspaper
in Britain, the Independent, was vindicated. Today, Bush and Blair are
universally distrusted and reviled, and the defeat of their atrocious
enterprise seems assured.



  In bringing this truth to the public, the Mirror departed from the pack as
no popular paper has, and the part it played ought not to be buried in the
mire of the British tabloid world. For two years, the Mirror represented a
majority of the British people, whose critical understanding of Blair's
pre-invasion charade was always ahead of journalists'. The Mirror did what a
newspaper is meant to do: it kept the record straight. Instead of
channelling and amplifying official lies, the Mirror more often than not
challenged and exposed them to a readership often dismissed or patronised by
those claiming to know what "the public really wants".



  Since Morgan's departure, no newspaper has demanded that the Ministry of
Defence produce the "incontrovertible evidence" that the Mirror's
photographs were faked. The hearsay and apologetics of a regiment with a
documented record of brutality in Iraq, facing at least five murder
prosecutions, have been accepted. If the Mirror was stitched up, was it
merely for money? Instead of pursuing that, as the editors of MediaLens
website point out, "a cowed media lined up to heap invective on the sacked
editor and to declare the decision 'correct', 'necessary', 'inevitable'".



  The BBC, having got rid of the one reporter, Andrew Gilligan, who caught
out Blair, and having duly disported itself before the whitewashing Hutton
inquiry, allowed Andrew Neil to dominate its news of Morgan's sacking with
an attack on the Mirror's "very slanted and skewed journalism" - and this
from a former Murdoch editor, a caricature who waved his champagne glass at
5,000 men sacked by his master, whose scurrilous London Sunday Times smear
campaigns included the notorious campaign against the current affairs
programme Death on the Rock, which had lifted a veil on the secret British
state and its terrorism.



  The collusion of the respectable media in the epic crime in Iraq is rarely
discussed. Recently, there have been honourable exceptions. David Rose, who
wrote major investigative articles for the Observer that linked Saddam
Hussein to al-Qaeda and to the anthrax attacks in America - claims long
discredited - wrote in the Evening Standard that he looked "back with shame
and disbelief" at his support for the invasion. In the United States, a
number of journalists have written regretfully about the supine way the
freest press in the world allowed the Bush regime to get away with its lies.



  Charles Lewis, a former CBS star reporter and now director of the Centre
for Public Integrity, told me that had the media "fulfilled their unique
constitutional role and challenged the administration's lies, such as those
tying Iraq to al-Qaeda, there is a very, very good chance we would not have
gone to war".



  With the exception of the Mirror, the Independent and intermittently the
Guardian, the same can be said of the British media. British television
rarely showed the full horror of "shock and awe" that the Arab world saw via
its satellite broadcasters.



  Videotape and photographs were sanitised. Phillip Knightley points out
that there was an "unwritten agreement that nothing too horrific made it on
to the screen or the front pages. Take the photograph of a weeping Iraqi
grandfather cradling in his arms his little granddaughter, severely injured
in a Coalition bomb attack on Basra... You cannot recall it? I am not
surprised..." This picture, like so many pictures of suffering civilians,
ran in its entirety in the Arab press, but was cropped in Britain and
America so that what was left of the little girl's horribly mangled feet was
not visible. The excuse was that it was not "tasteful".



  The campaign against the BBC by Blair's spin-master, by the Murdoch press
and Conrad Black's Telegraph and finally by Hutton, was Goebbels-quality: a
deliberate distraction, and perverse in the extreme. No follower of the
government's war agenda was more faithful than the BBC. A comprehensive
Media Tenor survey of coverage of Iraq by the world's leading broadcasters'
found that the BBC had given just 2 per cent to demonstrations of anti-war
dissent - less than even American broadcasters. A Cardiff University study
found no evidence that the BBC was anything but pro-war. Historically, the
BBC has always supported the establishment's wars by declaring the status
quo (war) neutral and dissent "biased". Propaganda made respectable
dominates the very language and tone of news and current affairs.



  Thus, BBC1's Panorama on 23 September 2002 claimed to have "hard evidence"
about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, having accepted as true a fake
story about a secret biological weapons laboratory under a major hospital in
Baghdad. In common with most of the media, the BBC went along with the
greatest hoax of all: Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations
Security Council in February last year as a final justification for the
invasion. This was made up of cartoon-like drawings, such as "Slide 21", of
which Powell said: "Here you see both truck- and railcar-mounted mobile
factories." Powell called this "diagramising". Of the satellite images he
presented, he said, "The photos that I am about to show you are sometimes
hard for the average person to interpret, hard for me. The painstaking work
of photo analysis takes experts with years and years of experience, poring
for hours and hours over light tables." This was the "irrefutable evidence"
for "65 facilities [that have] housed chemical weapons".



  It was all fake, as the profoundly cynical Powell has since hinted. Bush
himself has since joked about the lack of evidence of weapons; Paul
Wolfowitz has revealed that the WDM "story" was "agreed" as one that the
public would swallow; Donald Rumsfeld has admitted there was no link between
Iraq and al-Qaeda. Thanks to their propaganda, played unchallenged through
most of the media, millions of Americans still believe it. In Iraq, soldiers
talk about killing and mistreating Iraqis "as payback for 9/11".



  In Britain, protecting the reputation of the British army from the current
contagion of revelations is a priority task. Ironically, Piers Morgan, who
has a brother in the army, was always reluctant to publish anything that
suggested "our boys" were like their rampaging allies. When the Mirror
published its "torture" photographs on 1 May, the paper stressed that the
transgressors were "rogue" soldiers.



  It was wrong.



  Hoax or otherwise, what the Mirror's photographs revealed was a trail of
abuse and worse that runs right through the British army in Iraq. Much of
the evidence for this has been collected by a tireless Birmingham solicitor,
Phil Shiner, acting for 13 Iraqi families, and by the Independent on Sunday,
whose outstanding investigations almost salvage the honour of British
journalism. The IoS reveals there are now nearly 40 cases of allegedly
unlawful killings of Iraqi civilians and prisoners by British forces since
the invasion. When compared with the 37 suspicious deaths of prisoners held
by the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, the potential scale of the British
crime becomes evident, although it is clear these figures represent only the
surface. Evidence that soldiers of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment carried
out systematic torture under the direction of an officer is to go to the
high court.



  "In some cases officers actually took part," says Amnesty International.



  Yet on 14 May, a colonel from this regiment had the nerve to suggest that
Morgan's "ego" was the price of "the life of the soldier" - a line almost
certainly spun for him. Journalists are well aware of what Amnesty calls
systematic abuse. A year ago, the Sun published "artist's impressions" of
photographs taken by soldiers of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers showing
them stringing up Iraqi prisoners of war from a fork-lift truck and forcing
them to simulate sex acts. Several of the soldiers have been prosecuted.



  A BBC newsreader referred to such photographs as "mere mementoes". Imagine
the response, had they been of Iraqis torturing British PoWs. On the day
Morgan was sacked, a BBC reporter, Nicholas Witchell, said: "After the
appalling reality of what the Americans have been doing, the Mirror's
pictures threatened to compromise the work of every British soldier." By
contrasting the "reality" of American abuse with the unreality of "the
Mirror's pictures", Witchell managed to whitewash the British army while
fretting that its good "work" in Iraq might be "compromised". Are BBC
trainees taught sophistry like this?



  The British army is doing no worse in Iraq than it has done in its long
history of colonial occupations. Torture was deployed as a strategy in
Palestine (where the British pioneered the terror tactic of home
demolitions), in Cyprus, the British Cameroons, Brunei, British Guiana,
Aden, Borneo and Northern Ireland. In Malaya, the conversion of entire
villages to concentration camps and the use of carcinogenic defoliants were
copied by the Americans in Vietnam. In Northern Ireland, British
interrogators refined their methods, reported Amnesty, "for the purpose or
effect of causing a malfunction or breakdown of a man's mental processes".
Little of this was reported at the time. Today, thanks to a couple of
"rogue" newspapers, the digital camera and the internet, the public is
getting the truth, day by day, image by image, fact by fact.



  Michael Berg, whose son Nick was beheaded in Iraq and who blames Bush and
Rumsfeld, asks: "How can you take responsibility when there are no
consequences?" As they manipulate the United Nations to set up a stooge
regime in Baghdad, the Americans and British are granting their own troops
immunity from prosecution. After all, said a BBC commentator, the soldiers'
misdeeds "do not compare with Saddam Hussein's systematic tortures and
executions". So the tyranny of Saddam Hussein is now the west's moral
compass, is it?



  Will journalists allow Blair to get away with yet another charade? Or will
they ask why Article 7 of the statute of the International Criminal Court,
to which Britain is a signatory, is not being invoked? This makes clear that
British and American behaviour in Iraq is categorised under "crimes against
humanity", for which the ultimate responsibility lies, as ever, at the top.



  First published in the New Statesman - www.newstatesman.co.uk

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Mark and Andrea


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