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--- Begin Message --- -Caveat Lector-you know, whatever pathological liars say, they mean the opposite. So let's do the opposite of shutting up. N:http://www.counterpunch.com/fisk04102004.html
April 10 / 12, 2004
War Lords to Their Critics: "Just Shut Up"
Bush's War and the Lapdog Press Corps
By ROBERT FISK
Just shut up. That's the new foreign policy line of our masters. When
Senator Edward Kennedy dubbed Iraq "George Bush's Vietnam", US
Secretary of State Colin Powell told him to be "a little more
restrained and careful" in his comments. I recall that when the US
commenced its bombing of Afghanistan, the White House spokesman
claimed that some journalists were "asking questions that the
American people wouldn't want asked". Back in the early 1980s, when I
reported on the Iranian soldiers on a troop train to Tehran who were
coughing Saddam's mustard gas out of their lungs in blood and mucus,
a Foreign Office official told my then editor on The Times that my
dispatch was "not helpful". In other words, stop criticising our
ally, Saddam.
So maybe the policy has been around for quite a while. When the
occupation authorities deliberately concealed the attacks against US
troops after the start of the Iraq occupation last year, journalists
who investigated this violence were told that they weren't covering
the big picture, that only small areas of Iraq were restive. And
there was a lot of clucking of tongues when a few of us decided to
take a close look at US proconsul Paul Bremer's press laws last year.
A whole team of "Coalition Provisional Authority" lawyers was set up
to see how they could legalise the closure and censorship of Iraqi
newspapers that "incited violence". And whenever we raised questions
about it, the CPA spokesman--and its current attendant lord, Dan
Senor, used the same phrase last week--would announce that "we will
not tolerate iincitement to violence".
So when Bremer's own closure last week of Muqtada Sadr's silly little
weekly--circulation about a quarter that of the Kent Messenger--
incited the very violence he supposedly wanted to avoid, what diid the
American High Commissioner announce? "This will not be tolerated."
One of the paper's major sins was to have condemned Paul Bremer for
taking Iraq down "Saddam's path", an article which Bremer condemned
in painstaking detail in his signed letter--in execrable Arabic--to
the editor of the miscreant paper.
Now I'm all against incitement to violence. Just like I'm against
incitement to war by the use of fraudulent claims of weapons of mass
destruction and secret links to al-Qa'ida. Just like I'm against the
use of Saddam's army against Iraqi cities and the use of America's
army against Iraqi cities. For let's remember that some of Muqtada
Sadr's dangerous militiamen fought Saddam in the 1991 insurgency--the
one we supported and then betrayed. Saddam, of course, knew how to
deal with resistance. "We will not tolerate...," he told his
commanders. And we all know what that meant. No, the Americans are
not Saddam's army. But the siege of Fallujah is likely to give that
city the heroic status among future generations of Iraqi Sunnis as
Basra--surrounded by Saddam's hordes in 1991--holds among Iraqi Shias
today.
But still, we must shut up. I remember how llast autumn the cabal of
right-wing neo-conservatives who urged the Bush administration into
this war suddenly went to ground. What was this so-called neo-
conservative lobby behind Bush and Cheney, a New York Times columnist
demanded to know, these so-called former Likudist supporters of
Israel? When one of them, Richard Perle, turned up on a radio show
with me a few weeks ago, he insisted that things were getting better
in Iraq, that we were all en route to a cracking little democracy in
Mesopotamia.
The moment I suggested that this was a massive case of self-delusion,
Perle replied that Fisk had "always been for the maintenance of the
Baathist regime". I got the message. Anyone who condemned this bloody
mess was a secret Baathist, a lover of the dictator and his
torturers. Thus far have the falcons of Washington fallen.
Of course, the "shut-up" principle works both ways. Back on 16 March
2003, when the world was obsessed with the war that would break out
in Iraq three days later, a tragedy occurred on another battlefield
500 miles west of Baghdad. On that day, an Israeli soldier and his
commander drove a nine-ton Caterpillar bulldozer over a young
American peace activist called Rachel Corrie who was unarmed, clearly
visible in a fluorescent jacket and trying to protect a Palestinian
home that the Israelis intended to destroy. The Caterpillar was part
of the regular US aid to Israel. Israel acquitted its own army of
responsibility for Rachel's death--which was taped on video by her
appalled friends--and the Bush administration remained gutlessly
silent.
Rachell's grieving mother Cindi has been a picture of dignity. US
citizens, she wrote, "should ask themselves how it is that an unarmed
US citizen can be killed with impunity by a soldier from an allied
nation receiving massive US aid... When three Americans were killed,
presumably by Palestinians, in an explosion on October 15th, 2003 ...
the FBI came within 24 hours to investigate the deaths. After one
year, neither the FBI nor any other US-led team has done anything to
investigate the death of an American killed by an Israeli."
Well, the answer is that Bush and his administration know how to shut
themselves up when it pays them to do so. That's what Condoleezza
Rice initially tried to do when summoned before the 11 September
hearings. And, thanks to the subservience of many members of the
White House and Pentagon press corps, the administration has an easy
time. Why, for example, no press conference questions about Rachel
Corrie?
It seems that as long as you say "war on terror", you are safe from
all criticism. For not a single American journalist has investigated
the links between the Israeli army's "rules of engagement"--so
blithely handed over to US forces on Sharon's orders--and the
behaviour of the US military in Iraq. The destructionn of houses
of "suspects", the wholesale detention of thousands of Iraqis without
trial, the cordoning off of "hostile" villages with razor wire, the
bombardment of civilian areas by Apache helicopter gunships and tanks
on the hunt for "terrorists" are all part of the Israeli military
lexicon.
In besieging cities--when they were taking casualties or the number
of civilians killed was becoming too shameful to sustain--the Israeli
army would call a "unilateral suspension of offensive operations".
They did this 11 times after they surrounded Beirut in 1982. And
yesterday, the American army declared a "unilateral suspension of
offensive operations" around Fallujah.
Not a word on this mysterious parallel by America's reporters, no
questions about the even more mysterious use of identical language.
And in the coming days, we shall--perhaps--find out how many of the
estimated 300 dead of Fallujah were Sunni gunmen and how many were
women and childreen. Following Israel's rules is going to lead the
Americans into the same disaster those rules have led the Israelis.
But I guess we'll shut up about it.
In the end, I suspect, the Iraqis will probably have a greater say in
the US presidential elections than American voters. They will decide
if President Bush loses or wins. The same may apply to Mr Blair.
Funny thing, that a far away people, just 26 million, can change our
political history. As for us, I guess we'll be expected to shut up.
Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity the
Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's hot new book, The
Politics of Anti-Semitism.
Post your free ad now! Yahoo! Canada Personals
Please let us stay on topic and be civil.-Home Page- www.cia-drugs.org
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