Vancouver Sun July 22, 2004
Silence shrouds the moral abyss spawned by the war against Iraq
By Stephen Hume
On what appeared to be its website last week, the British newspaper The Independent carried a four-paragraph item dated July 16.
I say "appeared," because who knows anymore what's real and what's not? How do I know the website wasn't a fake lofted by some dirty trickster in the political spin wars?
In our brave new media world, weapons of mass destruction turn out to be, in the words of a new documentary currently doing the indy film festival circuit, Weapons of Mass Deception.
Photos of British soldiers abusing prisoners in Iraq turn out to be false -- although I note that an official investigation into the alleged abuses quietly continues. Ditto for explicit digital images that purported to show coalition soldiers serially raping Iraqi women. They were lifted from a pornographic film.
However, pictures of U.S. soldiers sexually humiliating prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison proved legit after first being denounced as fakes.
Alternately, the story of plucky heroine Jessica Lynch and her rescue by brave fellow soldiers turns out to have been hugely embroidered for a gullible media by the military spin machine.
Welcome to the world of Wag the Dog, the movie in which a bogus war is sold on television to the American public to shore up a U.S. president's sagging ratings.
Which brings me back to that item that appeared to have appeared in The Independent. It was forwarded to me by a reader, but I learned long ago to go to original sources whenever possible.
Checking took me to what I think was The Independent's website. The story cited investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who chronicled for the New Yorker Magazine the appalling abuse of prisoners under the control of U.S. military authorities at Abu Ghraib.
"It's worse," Hersh apparently told a meeting of the American Civil Liberties Union in San Francisco, although he didn't go into details, presumably because he hasn't finished reporting on the subject.
Hersh said a film depicts young Iraqi boys being sexually assaulted.
"The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys shrieking," Hersh told the silent audience. "That your government has."
Now here's the interesting thing. When I searched the database of American periodicals that's part of the Canwest electronic library, I didn't find a single hit on this particular story. On the web I did find a reference to a United Press International item, probably based on The Independent.
When I Googled it, I found Hersh's speech was a subject of wide discussion on independent media sites, blogs, forums and web-based list servers. But none of the hits led to a report in the mainstream media.
Did he say it? I drilled a little deeper. At the ACLU site, I found a streaming video of the Hersh speech. (You can watch it yourself at http://www.aclu.org/2004memberconf/Program/program.htm; starting at 1:07:50 with the relevant comments coming at 1:30:28).
Apparently he did say it -- that caveat again. He said more. He said women had sent notes from the prison asking their husbands to kill them because of what they'd experienced.
So here we have an issue which seems of crucial importance -- allegations of monstrous treatment of mothers and children in the custody of U.S. occupation forces. It's widely discussed by techno-savvy young people around the world, but goes largely unremarked by the U.S. media.
For me, it was a telling moment. It suggests that not only is the moral authority of the U.S. in tatters, so, increasingly, is the credibility of a media that likes to present itself as a model for free expression.
Frankly, President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair can twist, weasel, equivocate, obfuscate, deny, dissimulate and strew the political landscape with as many red herrings as they like.
It won't change the fact that they beat the drums for a war that has caused the deaths of thousands of soldiers and tens of thousands of innocent civilians based upon information that even a smidgin of prudence would have warned them was unreliable.
So where were the vaunted U.S. media when the governments they claim to hold accountable began marching toward the moral abyss?
The so-called liberation of Iraq is now a nightmare of civil violence in which senior officials of the new regime are routinely assassinated, a clandestine resistance seems to be growing rather than shrinking and the moral capital accumulated by Britain and the U.S. over many decades has been squandered in a matter of months.
Yet few media moguls seem to be asking about the global consequences of the foreign affairs catastrophe visited upon us all by the hubris of these two governments.
What Hersh was really pointing to at the ACLU conference was that dreadful, disheartening moment at which citizens discover that the only cop in town has gone bad.
Much is now being made by politicians and pundits of the "failure of intelligence" in presenting an accurate assessment of reality. But the intelligence that failed was not that of the spooks, it was among the elected representatives and the media who abandoned their simple common- sense mandate to challenge, challenge and challenge again any evidence presented to justify killing people.
Instead, those who produced contrary views were ridiculed, reviled and bullied in a fashion that is unfathomable for nations wedded to the notion of free speech.
Weapons inspectors Scott Ritter and Hans Blix, Prime Minister Jean Chretien, U.S. anti-terrorism expert Richard Clarke and the leaders of France and Germany all expressed doubts about the rationale for war and the existence of weapons of mass destruction. They found themselves dismissed as fools and dupes.
Well, somebody was duped all right -- it was the U.S. Congress, the British House of Commons and the people of both countries.
When institutions become so desensitized that allegations about the rape of children being videotaped for the amusement of the captors results only in a deafening silence, when the conversation about it must take place outside the mainstream media, every American and every Briton should be asking how their country came to find itself in the service of such values.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Michael A. Lebowitz Professor Emeritus Economics Department Simon Fraser University Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
Currently based in Venezuela. Can be reached at Residencias Anauco Suites Departamento 601 Parque Central, Zona Postal 1010, Oficina 1 Caracas, Venezuela (58-212) 573-4111 fax: (58-212) 573-7724
