http://www.iht.com/articles/520000.html
Frank Rich: The unraveling of U.S. propaganda Frank Rich NYT May 14, 2004 NEW YORK It's almost too perfect. Two young working-class women from opposite ends of West Virginia go off to war. One is blond and has aspirations to be a schoolteacher; the other is dark, divorced and now carrying an out-of-wedlock baby. One becomes the heroic poster child for Operation Iraqi Freedom, the subject of a hagiographic book and TV movie; the other becomes the hideous, leering face of American wartime criminality, Exhibit A in the indictment of its descent into the gulag. In the words of Time magazine, Private First Class Lynndie England is ''a Jessica Lynch gone wrong.'' Maybe that's true - people are just starting to hear England speak for herself - but there's a more revealing story in these women than the cheap ironies of their good witch/wicked witch twinship might suggest. America's 13-month journey from Jessica Lynch's profile in courage to Lynndie England's in sadism is less the tale of two women at the bottom of the chain of command than a gauge of the hubris by which those at the top have lost the war in the international and domestic courts of public opinion. And the supposedly uplifting Lynch half of the double bill is as revealing of what's gone wrong for America in Iraq - and gone wrong from the start - as is her doppelganger's denouement at Abu Ghraib. Flash back for a moment to the creation of Jessica Lynch Superstar, a story regurgitated without question by much of the press. It was in early April 2003 that the stories first surfaced about the female Rambo who had shot her way out of an ambush. ''She Was Fighting to the Death'' read the headline in The Washington Post, an account that was then regurgitated without question by much of the press. Later we learned that this story was almost entirely fiction, from the heroine's gunplay to the reports of her being slapped around by her Iraqi captors to the breathless cliffhanger of her rescue. Meanwhile, Lynch herself, unable to speak, was reduced to a mere pawn, an innocent bystander to her own big-budget biopic. When she emerged six months later, Diane Sawyer asked if it bothered her that she had been showcased by the military. ''Yeah, it does,'' she answered. ''It does that they used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff. Yeah, it's wrong.'' This wrong was not committed not by accident but by design. In ''Control Room,'' the revelatory documentary about the Arab satellite news station Al Jazeera, opening in New York this Friday before fanning out nationally, the audience is taken into the Central Command's media center in Doha, Qatar, in early April 2003 to see American mythmaking in action. The Lynch episode came at a troubling moment in the war; the troops were being stretched thin, the coalition had mistakenly shot up a van full of Iraqi women and children, and three Marines had just been killed in the latest helicopter crash. But as we see in ''Control Room,'' the CentCom press operation was determined to drown out such bad news by disseminating the triumphant prepackaged saga of its manufactured heroine no matter what. The documentary captures some of the briefing at which the dramatic Lynch story was first laid out. An American journalist on hand, the veteran CNN correspondent Tom Mintier, grumbles afterward about how the ''minute by minute'' account of the rescue has superseded the major news he and his colleagues had been waiting for: the fate of troops just entering Baghdad. His cavils were useless, however; the instant legend was moving too fast to be derailed. Soon the U.S. military would buttress it with a complementary video, shot and edited by its own movie crew: an action-packed montage of the guns-blazing Special Operations rescue raid, bathed in iridescent ''Matrix''-green glow of night-vision photography. But The marketing of this Jerry Bruckheimer-style video was itself an exercise in hype, meant to blur and inflate the Lynch episode further. The director of ''Control Room'' is Jehane Noujaim, an Egyptian-American who is a prot�g� of D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, the chroniclers of the '92 Clinton campaign in ''The War Room.'' Though Noujaim's principal subject may be the Arab station that has been widely condemned as a fount of anti-American propaganda, her eye for the American media is no less keen. The true control room in ''Control Room'' is not so much the Al Jazeera HQ as the coalition media center. It is there, from a costly Hollywood set, that the military commanded its own propaganda effort, which was aided and abetted by an American press media sometimes as eager to slant the news as its Arab counterpart. The attractively forthright American press officer we follow throughout the documentary, Lieutenant Josh Rushing of the Marines, doesn't deny the symmetry: ''When I watch Al Jazeera, I can tell what they are showing and then I can tell what they are not showing - by choice. Same thing when I watch Fox on the other end of the spectrum.'' Revisiting the invasion of Iraq again In ''Control Room,'' one can see how much the administration of George Bush was seduced into complacency early on, not just by the relative ease with which it took Iraq, but also by its success at news management. The Lynch triumph was followed within days by the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue (which looks more like a staged event than a spontaneous Iraqi outpouring when Noujaim shows it in wide-angle shots). Next up was ''Top Gun.'' Yet America was very good at feigning ignorance about its own propaganda while decrying Al Jazeera's fictionalizations. In one particularly embarrassing illustration of American hypocrisy, we're reminded of how Donald Rumsfeld berated the channel for violating the Geneva conventions by broadcasting pictures of American prisoners of war. By the time of his outburst - March 2003 - we were very likely already violating the conventions ourselves. The confidential Red Cross report uncovered this week by The Wall Street Journal reveals that complaints about American abuse of Iraqis had already started by then, 10 months before the Pentagon launched the investigation. In retrospect, much of what we saw during Operation Iraqi Freedom was as fictionalized as CentCom's version of ''Saving Private Jessica.'' When we weren't staging the news, we were covering it up. ''A war with hundreds of coalition and tens of thousands of Iraqi casualties'' was transformed ''into something closer to a defense contractor's training video: a lot of action, but no consequences, as if shells simply disappeared into the air and an invisible enemy magically ceased to exist.'' That was the conclusion reached by one of the leaders of a research project at George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs, which examined 600 hours of war coverage on CNN, Fox and ABC from the war's March 20, 2003, start to the April 9 fall of Baghdad, ''to see how 'real' the war looked on TV.'' Of the 1,710 stories they surveyed, ''only 13.5 percent included any shots of dead or wounded coalition soldiers, Iraqi soldiers or civilians.'' That brief war, since renamed ''major combat operations,'' seems like a century ago. As ''Saving Private Jessica'' symbolizes how effectively the U.S. military and administration controlled the news during Operation Iraqi Freedom, so the photos of Lynndie England and her cohorts symbolize their utter loss of that control now. More scoops are on the way, and not just those of torture. ''Everybody wants to cut to the chase, but the movie has just started,'' a top Republican aide told The New York Times this week. We are only beginning to learn, for instance, about the shadowy roles played by America's most sizable ally in ''the coalition of the willing'' - not the British, with some 9,000 troops, but the mercenaries, whose duties and ranks (now at some 20,000) have crept up largely out of our view. It has taken a while for Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers to figure out just how much their power to enforce their own narrative of this war has waned. Their many successes in news management have been their undoing, leaving them besotted by their own invincibility and ill-equipped for failure. Clearly they still believed they could control the pictures. According to Rumsfeld's own testimony to Congress, he was ''surprised'' that lowly enlisted men could be ''running around with digital cameras'' e-mailing grotesque snapshots all over the world. When Bush traveled to the Pentagon on Monday, it was nothing if not an odd moment to congratulate the secretary of defense - who has literally thrown the reputation of the United States and its the honorable military to the dogs - for doing a ''superb job.'' But to understand where Bush is coming from, recall the interview he gave last autumn to Brit Hume of Fox News, in which he griped about the press's challenging administration propaganda from Iraq. ''The best way to get the news is from objective sources,'' he said back then, ''and the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world.'' Perhaps someone on that staff might tell him that, according to the latest polls, most of the United States has changed the channel. The New York Times [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar. Now with Pop-Up Blocker. Get it for free! http://us.click.yahoo.com/L5YrjA/eSIIAA/yQLSAA/BRUplB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> *************************************************************************** Berdikusi dg Santun & Elegan, dg Semangat Persahabatan. Menuju Indonesia yg Lebih Baik, in Commonality & Shared Destiny. www.arsip.da.ru *************************************************************************** __________________________________________________________________________ Mohon Perhatian: 1. Harap tdk. memposting/reply yg menyinggung SARA (kecuali sbg otokritik) 2. Pesan yg akan direply harap dihapus, kecuali yg akan dikomentari. 3. Lihat arsip sebelumnya, www.ppi-india.da.ru; 4. Posting: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 5. Satu email perhari: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 6. No-email/web only: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 7. kembali menerima email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ppiindia/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
