[Media-watch] Pilger - Iraq:unthinkable becomes normal

[David J McKnight]

http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_NS&newDisplayURN
=200411150006

Iraq: the unthinkable becomes normal 
     John Pilger
     Monday 15th November 2004 
    
    
    
     Mainstream media speak as if Fallujah were populated only by foreign
"insurgents". In fact, women and children are being slaughtered in our
name. By John Pilger

     Edward S Herman's landmark essay, "The Banality of Evil", has never
seemed more apposite. "Doing terrible things in an organised and systematic
way rests on 'normalisation'," wrote Herman. "There is usually a division
of labour in doing and rationalising the unthinkable, with the direct
brutalising and killing done by one set of individuals . . . others working
on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more
adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace
patterns). It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to
normalise the unthinkable for the general public."

     On Radio 4's Today (6 November), a BBC reporter in Baghdad referred
to the coming attack on the city of Fallujah as "dangerous" and "very
dangerous" for the Americans. When asked about civilians, he said,
reassuringly, that the US marines were "going about with a Tannoy" telling
people to get out. He omitted to say that tens of thousands of people would
be left in the city. He mentioned in passing the "most intense bombing" of
the city with no suggestion of what that meant for people beneath the bombs.

     As for the defenders, those Iraqis who resist in a city that
heroically defied Saddam Hussein; they were merely "insurgents holed up in
the city", as if they were an alien body, a lesser form of life to be
"flushed out" (the Guardian): a suitable quarry for "rat-catchers", which
is the term another BBC reporter told us the Black Watch use. According to
a senior British officer, the Americans view Iraqis as Untermenschen, a
term that Hitler used in Mein Kampf to describe Jews, Romanies and Slavs as
sub-humans. This is how the Nazi army laid siege to Russian cities,
slaughtering combatants and non-combatants alike. 

     Normalising colonial crimes like the attack on Fallujah requires such
racism, linking our imagination to "the other". The thrust of the reporting
is that the "insurgents" are led by sinister foreigners of the kind that
behead people: for example, by Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian said to be
al-Qaeda's "top operative" in Iraq. This is what the Americans say; it is
also Blair's latest lie to parliament. Count the times it is parroted at a
camera, at us. No irony is noted that the foreigners in Iraq are
overwhelmingly American and, by all indications, loathed. These indications
come from apparently credible polling organisations, one of which estimates
that of 2,700 attacks every month by the resistance, six can be credited to
the infamous al-Zarqawi.

     In a letter sent on 14 October to Kofi Annan, the Fallujah Shura
Council, which administers the city, said: "In Fallujah, [the Americans]
have created a new vague target: al-Zarqawi. Almost a year has elapsed
since they created this new pretext and whenever they destroy houses,
mosques, restaurants, and kill children and women, they said: 'We have
launched a successful operation against al-Zarqawi.' The people of Fallujah
assure you that this person, if he exists, is not in Fallujah . . . and we
have no links to any groups supporting such inhuman behaviour. We appeal to
you to urge the UN [to prevent] the new massacre which the Americans and
the puppet government are planning to start soon in Fallujah, as well as
many parts of the country."

     Not a word of this was reported in the mainstream media in Britain
and America.

     "What does it take to shock them out of their baffling silence?"
asked the playwright Ronan Bennett in April after the US marines, in an act
of collective vengeance for the killing of four American mercenaries,
killed more than 600 people in Fallujah, a figure that was never denied.
Then, as now, they used the ferocious firepower of AC-130 gunships and F-16
fighter-bombers and 500lb bombs against slums. They incinerate children;
their snipers boast of killing anyone, as snipers did in Sarajevo.

     Bennett was referring to the legion of silent Labour backbenchers,
with honourable exceptions, and lobotomised junior ministers (remember
Chris Mullin?). He might have added those journalists who strain every
sinew to protect "our" side, who normalise the unthinkable by not even
gesturing at the demonstrable immorality and criminality. Of course, to be
shocked by what "we" do is dangerous, because this can lead to a wider
understanding of why "we" are there in the first place and of the grief
"we" bring not only to Iraq, but to so many parts of the world: that the
terrorism of al-Qaeda is puny by comparison with ours.

     There is nothing illicit about this cover-up; it happens in daylight.
The most striking recent example followed the announcement, on 29 October,
by the prestigious scientific journal, the Lancet, of a study estimating
that 100,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the Anglo-American invasion.
Eighty-four per cent of the deaths were caused by the actions of the
Americans and the British, and 95 per cent of these were killed by air
attacks and artillery fire, most of whom were women and children.

     The editors of the excellent MediaLens observed the rush - no,
stampede - to smother this shocking news with "scepticism" and silence.
They reported that, by 2 November, the Lancet report had been ignored by
the Observer, the Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, the Financial Times, the
Star, the Sun and many others. The BBC framed the report in terms of the
government's "doubts" and Channel 4 News delivered a hatchet job, based on
a Downing Street briefing. With one exception, none of the scientists who
compiled this rigorously peer-reviewed report was asked to substantiate
their work until ten days later when the pro-war Observer published an
interview with the editor of the Lancet, slanted so that it appeared he was
"answering his critics". David Edwards, a MediaLens editor, asked the
researchers to respond to the media criticism; their meticulous demolition
can be viewed on the [http://www.medialens.org] alert for 2 November. None
of this was published in the mainstream. Thus, the unthinkable that "we"
had engaged in such a slaughter was suppressed - normalised. It is
reminiscent of the suppression of the death of more than a million Iraqis,
including half a million infants under five, as a result of the
Anglo-American-driven embargo.



     In contrast, there is no media questioning of the methodology of the
Iraqi Special Tribune, which has announced that mass graves contain 300,000
victims of Saddam Hussein. The Special Tribune, a product of the quisling
regime in Baghdad, is run by the Americans; respected scientists want
nothing to do with it. There is no questioning of what the BBC calls
"Iraq's first democratic elections". There is no reporting of how the
Americans have assumed control over the electoral process with two decrees
passed in June that allow an "electoral commission" in effect to eliminate
parties Washington does not like. Time magazine reports that the CIA is
buying its preferred candidates, which is how the agency has fixed
elections over the world. When or if the elections take place, we will be
doused in cliches about the nobility of voting, as America's puppets are
"democratically" chosen.

     The model for this was the "coverage" of the American presidential
election, a blizzard of platitudes normalising the unthinkable: that what
happened on 2 November was not democracy in action. With one exception, no
one in the flock of pundits flown from London described the circus of Bush
and Kerry as the contrivance of fewer than 1 per cent of the population,
the ultra-rich and powerful who control and manage a permanent war economy.
That the losers were not only the Democrats, but the vast majority of
Americans, regardless of whom they voted for, was unmentionable.

     No one reported that John Kerry, by contrasting the "war on terror"
with Bush's disastrous attack on Iraq, merely exploited public distrust of
the invasion to build support for American dominance throughout the world.
"I'm not talking about leaving [Iraq]," said Kerry. "I'm talking about
winning!" In this way, both he and Bush shifted the agenda even further to
the right, so that millions of anti-war Democrats might be persuaded that
the US has "the responsibility to finish the job" lest there be "chaos".
The issue in the presidential campaign was neither Bush nor Kerry, but a
war economy aimed at conquest abroad and economic division at home. The
silence on this was comprehensive, both in America and here.

     Bush won by invoking, more skilfully than Kerry, the fear of an
ill-defined threat. How was he able to normalise this paranoia? Let's look
at the recent past. Following the end of the cold war, the American elite -
Republican and Democrat - were having great difficulty convincing the
public that the billions of dollars spent on the war economy should not be
diverted to a "peace dividend". A majority of Americans refused to believe
that there was still a "threat" as potent as the red menace. This did not
prevent Bill Clinton sending to Congress the biggest "defence" bill in
history in support of a Pentagon strategy called "full-spectrum dominance".
On 11 September 2001, the threat was given a name: Islam.

     Flying into Philadelphia recently, I spotted the Kean congressional
report on 11 September from the 9/11 Commission on sale at the bookstalls.
"How many do you sell?" I asked. "One or two," was the reply. "It'll
disappear soon." Yet, this modest, blue-covered book is a revelation. Like
the Butler report in the UK, which detailed all the incriminating evidence
of Blair's massaging of intelligence before the invasion of Iraq, then
pulled its punches and concluded nobody was responsible, so the Kean report
makes excruciatingly clear what really happened, then fails to draw the
conclusions that stare it in the face. It is a supreme act of normalising
the unthinkable. This is not surprising, as the conclusions are volcanic.

     The most important evidence to the 9/11 Commission came from General
Ralph Eberhart, commander of the North American Aerospace Defence Command
(Norad). "Air force jet fighters could have intercepted hijacked airliners
roaring towards the World Trade Center and Pentagon," he said, "if only air
traffic controllers had asked for help 13 minutes sooner . . . We would
have been able to shoot down all three . . . all four of them."

     Why did this not happen?

     The Kean report makes clear that "the defence of US aerospace on 9/11
was not conducted in accord with pre-existing training and protocols . . .
If a hijack was confirmed, procedures called for the hijack coordinator on
duty to contact the Pentagon's National Military Command Center (NMCC) . .
. The NMCC would then seek approval from the office of the Secretary of
Defence to provide military assistance . . . "

     Uniquely, this did not happen. The commission was told by the deputy
administrator of the Federal Aviation Authority that there was no reason
the procedure was not operating that morning. "For my 30 years of
experience . . ." said Monte Belger, "the NMCC was on the net and hearing
everything real-time . . . I can tell you I've lived through dozens of
hijackings . . . and they were always listening in with everybody else."

     But on this occasion, they were not. The Kean report says the NMCC
was never informed. Why? Again, uniquely, all lines of communication
failed, the commission was told, to America's top military brass. Donald
Rumsfeld, secretary of defence, could not be found; and when he finally
spoke to Bush an hour and a half later, it was, says the Kean report, "a
brief call in which the subject of shoot-down authority was not discussed".
As a result, Norad's commanders were "left in the dark about what their
mission was". 



     The report reveals that the only part of a previously fail-safe
command system that worked was in the White House where Vice-President
Cheney was in effective control that day, and in close touch with the NMCC.
Why did he do nothing about the first two hijacked planes? Why was the
NMCC, the vital link, silent for the first time in its existence? Kean
ostentatiously refuses to address this. Of course, it could be due to the
most extraordinary combination of coincidences. Or it could not.

     In July 2001, a top secret briefing paper prepared for Bush read: "We
[the CIA and FBI] believe that OBL [Osama Bin Laden] will launch a
significant terrorist attack against US and/or Israeli interests in the
coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass
casualties against US facilities or interests. Attack preparations have
been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning."

     On the afternoon of 11 September, Donald Rumsfeld, having failed to
act against those who had just attacked the United States, told his aides
to set in motion an attack on Iraq - when the evidence was non-existent.
Eighteen months later, the invasion of Iraq, unprovoked and based on lies
now documented, took place. This epic crime is the greatest political
scandal of our time, the latest chapter in the long 20th-century history of
the west's conquests of other lands and their resources. If we allow it to
be normalised, if we refuse to question and probe the hidden agendas and
unaccountable secret power structures at the heart of "democratic"
governments and if we allow the people of Fallujah to be crushed in our
name, we surrender both democracy and humanity.

     John Pilger is currently a visiting professor at Cornell University,
New York. His latest book, Tell Me No Lies: investigative journalism and
its triumphs, is published by Jonathan Cape 
    

     This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For the latest in
current and cultural affairs subscribe to the New Statesman print edition. 
    

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