"Without censorship, things can get terribly confused
in the public mind." General William Westmoreland,
Commander of the US forces in Vietnam,
on why the media should be controlled in wartime.
A pundit once remarked that a person should
never have to see how sausages or wars are made,
inferring that the observation of such
gruesome, repugnant spectacles would repulse any normal human being.
People who are familiar with Upton
Sinclair's book, "The Jungle", know about the hideous conditions and
the health hazards that existed at American
meat packing companies at the turn of the century. Animals were
butchered in appallingly filthy, contaminated
slaughter houses. The working conditions were horrible and dangerous.
This was before there was any regulation
of stock yards or food producers.
More recently, Eric Schlosser's book, "Fast
Food Nation", portrays the butchering of animals for America's
franchise restaurants as so disgusting
that it would make a vegetarian out of the most devout carnivore.
Butchers stand ankle deep in blood as they
render cattle for market. Workers often develop carpel tunnel
syndrome from the repetitive motion. Others
lose limbs or suffer severe cuts.
The portrayal of war by correspondents,
photographers and poets makes any thinking mortal realize the
brutality and futility of combat. Historical
books about soldier's true experiences at war have always shown
the inhumanity and wretchedness of the
mass murder. They paint vivid images of the carnage that they found so
appalling.
During World War 11, Americans had been
blind-sided at Pearl Harbor and fascism threatened our way of life.
We were united against our common foe.
Correspondents like Ernie Pyle lived in the trenches and foxholes
alongside our troops. Pyle was beloved
by our nation because he risked his life and lived with the same deprivations
in the field as the soldiers. Citizens
relied on his reports to understand what life was like for their loved
ones. It was said
that he covered a "democracy at war". He
was killed by a Japanese sniper in the South Pacific. Aging veterans still
make
the pilgrimage to his home to pay homage
to the man who told their stories.
After Pearl Harbor, our nation was united.
Graphic accounts and photos of the brutality of war only helped to
stiffen the resolve of our citizens. Pictures
of American dead on the beaches of Europe and the South Pacific
made us aware of the ultimate sacrifice
that our fellow soldiers were making to preserve our democracy from tyranny.
Unlike WW 11, this nation was more ambivalent
about the war in Vietnam. Most Americans could not even find
the country on a map. Even fewer knew anything
about their history. Was Ho Chi Mihn a nationalist or a communist?
After all, he had drafted a constitution
for his people based on our own. He had been an ally of ours in the fight
against
the Japanese. The OSS sent medical help
when he was ill. After the war, he wanted America to recognize the right
of
Vietnam to resist recolonization by the
exploitive French. Many wondered how an agrarian nation half way around
the
world from us could present a threat to
the world's premier nuclear power.
With the advent of television, Americans
growing up during the Vietnam era became accustomed to daily coverage
of the war. Photos in magazines showed
naked, terrified children fleeing napalm attacks. Images in the media showed
civilian bodies lying in the ditches of
My Lai. Graphic footage showed a South Vietnamese officer summarily executing
a Viet Cong at point blank range. We saw
the aluminum caskets and the body bags with the corpses of our friends,
neighbors and family members being unloaded
from helicopters and large transport aircraft. Americans were inundated
with accounts of the atrocities, massacres
and ambushes.
America's "Best and the Brightest", such
as Robert MacNamara, warned us that Vietnam could be the toppled domino
that would lead to world-wide communism.
While our government assured us that the war was proceeding brilliantly
and that there was a light at the end of
the tunnel, the coverage on the evening news suggested otherwise. When
the
Tet Offensive surprised our military with
coordinated attacks throughout South Vietnam, it was a wake-up call that
maybe all was not well. Skeptical journalists
covering the war knew that they were being lied to by the brass and began
to tell Americans at home. Vietnam did
not seem to be worth the lives of our troops. Nightly television footage
and
photographs of the carnage allowed our
citizens at home to come to their own conclusions about how the war was
being waged.
Despite the leaked Pentagon Papers which
showed that our generals really thought that the war could not be won
and that the best case scenario would be
a stalemate, many hawks in the military concluded that the media was somehow
responsible for our failures in Vietnam.
Rather than blame our country's poorly thought out policies, they convinced
themselves
that the press were traitors who under
minded the determination of our citizens to see their war to it's successful
conclusion.
America's generals were determined not to
allow the press to undermine their actions again. From then on, reporters
were to
be treated as hostile to their mission
and were to be marginalized. Journalists would no longer be given the freedom
to report
our nation's wars. Our armed forces had
no use for an informed citizenry.
The underlying reasons for this policy of
censorship was that if Americans were exposed to graphic footages of the
massacres
and atrocities which take place during
any war, we might once again reconsider our policies and conclude that
they were morally
bankrupt. Out of sight, out of mind. A
conscious decision was made to censor all of our future wars.
Our campaign against Grenada did not receive
any substantial coverage by the US media. Access to the scenes of violence
was
controlled. Press accounts were cleaned
up for domestic consumption. Journalists could only report what the Pentagon
wanted
them to see. Americans saw photo-ops of
American medical students who were saved from the tyranny of a slightly
left-leaning
head of government by the US calvary, even
though some of these future doctors didn't realize they were in need of
saving.
Pulitzer prize winning journalist Patrick
J. Sloyan wrote that "Reporters were banned from Grenada. Those who tried
to land
on the island such as Morris Thompson of
Newsday were arrested and imprisoned on US ships offshore. All details
and videos
were supplied by military reporters and
Pentagon briefings."
It is widely suspected that the Grenada
campaign was a "wag the dog" scenario to distract the American's attention
from the
terrorist attack on a US Marines barrack
two days before that killed 241 of our troops. The Reagan administration
had sent
them to Beirut on a fool's mission and
we were pondering why they had been stationed there in the first place.
We also saw comprehensive censorship implemented
during the campaign in Panama to oust Manuel Noriega. Like bin Laden,
Noriega was once a CIA asset who had worked
closely with US intelligence. Like Saddam Hussein, he had been an ally
of the
Reagan/Bush administrations. Noriega was
lauded for his cooperation with our government by George H. W. Bush long
after
he was known to have been involved in drug
smuggling, money laundering and other criminal behavior.
Critics of the Bush administration suggest
that some of Noriega's crimes were committed on behalf of the CIA during
the
Reagan/Bush era. The CIA's own inspector
general admitted in 1998 that the CIA was complicit in Contra drug smuggling.
Some people believe that Noriega became
too greedy with the profits. When he no longer served our interests and
became
an inconvenient liability like Saddam,
our government did not hesitate to turn on him like a rival Mafia don.
The Bush administration, in what would become
a familiar pattern, launched a PR campaign to demonize the dictator in
the
eyes of Americans. Our army then invaded
in a poorly conceived and bungled attack which resulted in unnecessary
US
casualties and the deaths of perhaps 3000
innocent civilians who had labored under the illusion that they were our
friends and allies.
The press was kept away from the carnage.
There would be no evening news coverage showing shattered, bloody bodies.
Battlegrounds were sanitized. Corpses were
quickly hidden from view. No footage that showed the Pentagon or the
administration in a bad light would be
allowed to appear in the US media.
When images of the coffins of US troops
arriving stateside appeared on a split screen with Bush gloating and boasting
of
his great success in Panama, the Pentagon
ordered that the media be prohibited from filming the return of our soldier's
caskets.
The cover-up was complete. Most Americans
are still unaware of the immense loss of life.
These were not wars at all. There was only
token resistance by a handful of defenders to our overwhelming force. They
were
one-sided massacres. If Americans understood
the real reasons for these campaigns and saw the slaughter, they would
have
been appalled at our government's actions.
During the Gulf War, reporters were again
assigned to pools which would only be allowed to cover sights previously
selected
by the Pentagon. The graphic footage of
American war planes bombing the retreating Iraqis at the "Highway of Death"
was
scrubbed although some shots of the horrific
slaughter were leaked out by independent photographers. (See, "The Unseen
Gulf War by Peter Turnley at digitaljournalist.org/issue
0212/pt_intro.html).
Images of the carbonized bodies of Iraqi
tank crews burned beyond recognition by our depleted uranium shells (dubbed
"crispy critters" by our troops) which
appeared abroad were not shown by our media.
In the February 14th edition of the Guardian,
Patrick J. Sloyan wrote an article entitled, "How the Mass Slaughter of
a Group
of Iraqis went Unnoticed". According to
Sloyan, reporters including Leon Daniel were prevented from observing a
large tank battle.
An estimated 6000 Iraqis had been killed.
"It was a battlefield without the stench of urine, feces, blood and bits
of flesh."
When they were finally permitted to see
the site, they asked where the bodies were. An army major replied, "What
bodies?"
Observers claim that US tanks moving parallel
to Iraqi trenches poured machine gun fire into their troops while armed
vehicles
with immense plows buried the soldiers,
dead and alive. "The tanks had flanked the lines so that tons of sand from
the plough
spoil had funneled into the trenches. Just
behind the tanks, straddling the trench line, came Bradleys pumping machine-gun
bullets into Iraqi troops."
Sloyan quotes Colonel Anthony Moreno who
said that "I came through right after the lead company...What you saw was
a
bunch of buried trenches with people's
arms and legs sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have buried
thousands."
"Two other brigades used the same tank-mounted
ploughs and Bradleys to obliterate an estimated 70 miles of defensive trenches...
The finishing touches were made by armored
combat earth-movers (ACEs). These massive bulldozers, with armored cockpits
impervious to small-arms fire, smoothed
away any hint of the carnage.
Daniel said that, "They wouldn't allow us to see anything."
Military handlers "interrupted interviews
to chastise soldiers into changing their statements while reporters stood
back, or forcibly
removed film from cameras that captured
images deemed offensive by an Army public affairs officer." Dick Cheney,
one of the
architects of the Pentagon's censorship
policy remarked of the press that, "Frankly, I looked on it as a problem
to be managed."
The American press, cowed by the administration,
allowed themselves to be censored. They no longer were engaged in journalism.
They were now doing PR for the Pentagon.
Sloyan wrote that life was much more difficult
for independent journalists. "More than 70 operating outside the pool system
were
arrested, detained, threatened at gun point
or chased from the front line. Army public affairs officers made nightly
visits to hotels
and restaurants in Hafir al Batin, a Saudi
town on the Iraqi border. Reporters and photographers would bolt from the
table.
The slower ones were arrested.
Photographer Scott Applewhite went to the
scene of a SCUD attack on an American tent which killed 25 and wounded
70.
Applewhite was stopped by military police.
When he objected, "they punched and handcuffed him while ripping the film
from
his cameras." Pictures of dead Iraqi civilians
and "collateral damage" were censored.
During the Gulf War, Colin Powell claimed
that the number of Iraqi casualties did not concern him. A government contractor
who estimated the deaths at around 158,000,
much higher then official figures, was harassed and fired.
Sloyan writes that "Not a single eyewitness
account, photograph or strip of video of combat between 400,000 soldiers
in the
desert was produced by this battalion of
professional observers."
Aside from not being allowed to witness
the repulsive carnage of war, Americans at home were also conveniently
prevented
from seeing just how dumb our "smart" bombs
really were and that our cruise missiles which seemed so effective and
accurate
on the video tapes, were actually failing
to hit their targets in the majority of firings. Patriot missiles designed
to intercept in-coming
SCUDs which were touted by the Pentagon
as being so effective were also found to have been largely unsuccessful.
Taxpayers
witnessing such waste in the development
of these multi-million dollar weapons systems might have suspected that
this war was
a boondoggle for the merchants of death.
Closely allied with the military-industrial
complex, the Reagan/Bush administrations did not want to expose their cronies
and
campaign contributors in the defense industry
to charges of war profiteering. (In perhaps one of the biggest conflicts
of interest
for any president, George H.W. Bush owns
a large stake in the Carlyle group which is making a killing from this
war. Cheney's
Halliburton will make fortunes from no-bid
contracts. Bechtel, home to many former republican politicians, is equally
well positioned.)
The media was effectively muzzled from reporting
that the Reagan/Bush administrations had illegally sold hundreds of millions
of
dollars worth of weapons and the dual-use
technology for the manufacture of biological and chemical weapons to Saddam
long
after we knew he had gassed the Kurds and
Iranians. These weapons were then used against our troops. Allegations
are now
quietly leaking out that in this most recent
war, our troops have finally found Saddam's WMD: US missiles that our government
sold him!
Before this last war, the Bush administration
seized Iraq's dossier prepared for the UN outlining their weapons program
and
censored 8000 pages which listed foreign
countries that sold Saddam weapons. A leaked copy revealed that 24 companies
selling arms to Iraq were from the United
States.
The footage of the war that the Pentagon
did release was a dazzling, high-tech video display of "smart" bombs plowing
into
abstract targets, resembling more of an
arcade game than the wholesale murder of human beings. It seemed only a
bit more
"virtual" then a Nintendo game. Soldiers
seen manipulating complicated electronic devices and laptops appeared more
like
technicians than paid professional killers.
The Pentagon portrayed this war as a pyrotechnics show with flash pods
and
special effects like those at a rock concertl.
American audiences did not witness how a
single cluster bomb could kill virtually every living being in the space
of ten
football fields. They did not see the charred
flesh of civilians who were mistakenly bombed in their shelters.
The aftermath of the war was also hidden
from the American public. Our media did not report on the devastated infrastructure
of Iraq. Electric grids had been bombed.
The water supply was devastated. Hospitals had been destroyed Sewage ran
through
the streets. Epidemics flourished. Cholera,
diarrhea and typhus were common. The media never mentioned the estimated
500,000
Iraqi children who died from malnutrition
and disease. They did not report on the sky-rocketing rates of leukemia
and cancer
thought to have been caused by our depleted
uranium shells.
In the recent campaign against the Taliban,
journalists were again isolated from the battle scenes. One correspondent
who
was investigating reports of civilian casualties
claimed he was thwarted by US soldiers who threatened to shoot him if he
continued. Other reporters believe that
soldiers from the Northern Alliance were instructed by American soldiers
to harass them.
US media did not show photos of the wedding
procession which was turned into a funeral by our bombs. We did not see
the
dismembered bodies or the bloated corpses.
A documentary entitled, "Afghan Massacre;
The Convoy of Death" alleges a media cover-up of US complicity in the massacre
of up to 3000 Taliban prisoners. According
to 'Democracy Now', the producer Jamie Doran was told by the State Department
officia,l Larry Schwartz, that his film
would not receive coverage in our main stream media. Schwartz is quoted
as saying,
"You have to understand, we're involved
with the national [ newspapers] on a daily basis - this story won't run,
even if it's true."
Televison industry insiders told Doran,
"not now Jamie."
The American people no longer know how our
army conducts it wars. There are reports leaking out that our intelligence
agents
use "stress and duress" techniques, beating
up prisoners to get information. Two Afghans recently died at our POW camps
there
and their deaths are being investigated
as homicides. A BBC crew that recently toured Guantanamo had their visit
cut short when
a prisoner attempted to speak to them.
Some prisoners are "rendered" to other allied countries which regularly
use torture. One
US intelligence officer said that if the
guards are not violating the prisoner's civil rights once and awhile, the
probably aren't doing
their job. Now, the US is considering executing
prisoners at Guantanamo after a military tribunal. Amnesty International
says the
US is routinely violating the Geneva Convention.
Human rights activists are forbidden from
visiting our POW camps. Prisoners are kept in solitary confinement. Leaked
pictures
show sensory deprived prisoners in four-point
restraint with ear plugs and blacked-out goggles. Some are forced to kneel
on
concrete for hours. Others have loud rock
music blasted at them. Has our democracy been co-opted by Nazis? How are
we
different then the Waffen SS? Weren't we
the "white hats" who prosecuted German war criminals at Nuremburg for the
same
offenses? Has the United States become
a fascist nation without it's citizens knowing? There is a reason why George
W. Bush
does not want an International Criminal
Court.
Now, Dubya has had his own Iraqi war. The
reasons for it seem to change from day to day. Bush continued to flog off
discredited
reports that aluminum tubes were to be
used to enrich uranium. A "sexed up" report by Tony Blair (now known as
the "dodgy dossier")
was found to have been plagiarized from
a ten year old graduate thesis. A report that said Niger was providing
uranium to Iraq was
known to be a forgery. Trucks which Bush
claims were to be used to develop WMD apparently were really to produce
hydrogen
for weather balloons. The CIA has been
leaking for months that the administration was "cherry picking" only that
information which
bolstered their case for war. Those people
who read the foreign press have known about this for months. The US press
is finally
beginning to report on this.
American generals such as Zinni, Clark,
Schwarzkoph and Shinseki were reluctant to see us go to war. (Clark recently
disclosed
that the administration pressured him to
report links between Osama and Saddam and he refused to do so when they
would not
provide evidence.) Brent Scowcroft and
other allies of the first Bush administration voiced reservations about
the war but these
chicken hawks steam rolled these critics
and the media acquiesced.
Cheney's claim that American troops would
be greeted as liberators has proven to be wishful thinking. Wolfowitz's
belief that
General Shinseki was wrong in saying that
at least 200,000 troops would be necessary to occupy the country was "wildly
off
the mark". The certainty of the neocons
in the correctness of their assumptions is baffling, but as Bertrand Russell
once said,
"The whole problem with the world is that
the fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people
are
full of doubts. Many people would sooner
die then think; in fact they do so."
The ongoing revelations about this war show
that we are sinking into the quagmire in both Afghanistan where the Taliban
have
regrouped for attacks against us and in
Iraq where our troops are routinely being murdered in urban warfare. There
were around
25 attacks against our troops in one day,
recently. Critics of this war warned of a Stalingrad scenario where guerillas
would fight
skirmishes from the rubble. Despite the
media's poor coverage, it is even becoming apparent to the red states that
we are in trouble.
Reporters covering this nation's wars are
now required by the Pentagon to go through indoctrination courses. They
are "embedded"
in military units where it is hoped that
they will be reluctant to report unfavorable news about their new acquaintances
in the service
who guard their lives. Doonesbury cartoonist
Gary Trudeau compares this effect on the reporters as similar to the Stockholm
Syndrome in which hostages begin to empathize
with their captors.
Embedded reporters are forbidden from traveling
independently or to use their own transportation. One BBC reporter claimed
that the US military threatened to attack
all satellite communication gear that was transmitting and told her that
they could not
guarantee her safety as an independent
journalist. She took this to be thinly veiled threat. Several reporters
have been killed.
A US tank crew fired a shell at the Palestine
Hotel where scores of journalists were base, killing two. Our troops have
repeatedly targeted Middle Eastern television
stations like Al Jazerra that broadcast pictures of US POWs and civilian
casualties.
When a photographer attempted to film a
convoy which was recently attacked, wounding several Syrians, a US soldier
threatened to break his camera if he continued.
The corporate media has consistently portrayed
Bush in a favorable light in this war. His history has been white washed
by the press.
Dubya (who never refuted allegations that
he was AWOL from the Texas National Guard for 17 months) landed on an air
craft carrier
in a pilot costume to proclaim "Mission
Accomplished", never mind that our troops are dying daily. Photo-ops and
sound bites help
to deflect our attention from the reality
of war. The Jessica Lynch story has been revealed to be a Pentagon fabrication.
The media has given Bush a pass on many
other scandals as well. His past has been sanitized as much as his wars
including
allegations of insider trading, perjury
in a Texas funeral home scandal, a possible cocaine arrest cover-up, the
diversion of
University of Texas funds to his cronies
and the land-grab scam of the Texas Ranger Stadium. The Fox "Fair and Balanced"
News, which maintains a 24/7 assault on
liberals, is run by veteran republican media consultant, Roger Ailes, who
once said
that Americans don't want to be informed;
they only want the illusion of being informed. Happy to comply, Fox has
been a
cheerleader for Dubya's wars, abandoning
any semblance of objectivity.
Colin Powell's son, Michael, has been working
feverishly to deregulate the media so that extreme right wingers like Rupert
Murdoch
and the Reverend Moon (who has given millions
to Dubya's father) can more thoroughly monopolize the news. Moon, who owns
the
Bush mouthpiece, The Washington Times,
believes he is the new Messiah. He has links to many right wing juntas
and has denounced
Americans for their independence of thought.
Clear Channel, which is owned by a close
Bush crony, owns around 1200 radio stations as well as bill boards. They
organized
pro-war rallies and lead the attacks on
the Dixie Chicks. The corporate media featured an overwhelming number of
hawks on
their talk shows. Perhaps around five percent
of the talking heads had reservations about the war. The number of anti-war
activists
at rallies was consistently under reported.
The ten million who demonstrated world wide on February 15th were dismissed
by Bush
as a focus group. Karl Rove contrived to
have protesters at Bush appearances corralled into the Orwellian termed
"First Amendment
Zones" where they would be overlooked by
the press.
Talk Radio is dominated by screeching heads
who stay on message for the Bushies. The eloquent Michael Savage rants
about the
imagined foibles of "turd world countries".
Bill O'Reilly was recently exposed by Al Franken on C-Span for his repeated
lies about
winning a Peabody award for excellence
in broadcasting. (Franken also exposed the Fiery Nazi Windbag's serial
lying in his book,
Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot.")
Web sites like mediawhoresonline.com, bushwatch.com,
buzzflash.com, democrats.com and bartcop.com thoroughly dissect and
discredit the shoddy stenography of hacks
like Ann Coulter and more mainstream reporters like Judith Miller. But
the republicans
understand Goebbel's theory that a big,
audacious lie is more easily believed by the masses than a small one and
that a lie repeated
often enough becomes the truth. Former
CIA director, William Colby, once remarked that "The CIA owns every one
of any
significance in the major media." It appears
that the media has now become a subsidiary of the Bush Family Dynasty.
The censorship and slanting of the news
has very real consequences for our troops in the field. We are not hearing
much in the press
about the more than 200,000 vets who are
on disability for Gulf War Syndrome or the more then 10,000 who have died
from the illness.
If depleted uranium is the cause of this
syndrome as many suspect, then tens of thousands of our troops in Iraq
and Afghanistan can be
expected to also become ill as our army
continues to use DU. The lives of our troops are more expendable then toilet
paper for this
Pentagon and the media is complicit in
the cover up.
The corporate media has also been silent
about allegedly faulty respirators and defective chemical hazard suits
issued to our troops.
Fox hasn't been reporting on the experimental
vaccines administered to our troops such as the anti-malaria drug which
is thought to
have triggered murderous paranoid, psychotic
reactions in vets returning from Afghanistan.
There have been few stories about this administration's
plan to use tactical nuclear bombs in our new wars. What ramifications
does this have for our troops who find
themselves downwind from the radiation?
The media has been assisted in foisting
off propaganda on the American public by public relations firms like Hill
and Knowlton
and the Rendon group which fabricate lies
and sow disinformation such as the story about Iraqi soldiers ripping babies
from their
incubators. This was proven to be a fabrication.
The Pentagon has been surprisingly open
about it's attempts to distribute propaganda for foreign and domestic consumption.
Our government broadcasts pro-US radio
shows to a dubious audience in the Middle East. Polls show that the Muslim
countries
hate us more then ever. They saw how our
"shock and awe" campaign leveled much of Baghdad. They have seen the carnage
and blood. Most Europeans now think that
Bush is more dangerous than bin Laden. Maybe the Pentagon will start to
paint
yellow "smiley faces" on their cluster
bombs.
It is not only our nation's wars that this
administration does not want us to see. As soon as the took power, they
declared that
they could withhold all presidential papers,
including those of Dubya's father which could implicate him in Iran-Contra
gate
scandals. Bush also hid his papers from
his tenure as Texas governor.
Our nation's energy policy was written in
secret so that we won't know the extent to which Enron and US oil helped
to formulate
our laws. It is not only a matter of what
Bush knew about Enron's gouging of California for billions of dollars but
also whether
they influenced foreign policy when they
planned to build a pipeline in Afghanistan. This administration met with
the Taliban to
help Enron's case and threatened to bomb
them if they did not cooperate. Some people think that the attack on the
WTC was
a pretext for this promised attack on Afghanistan.
Bush holds few press conferences and the
ones that he does have are tightly scripted. Any respectable journalist
like Helen Thomas
who asks uncomfortable questions gets exiled
to the Siberia of seating assignments and is never called on again. Others
are frozen
out from any access to the White House.
The press corp now only lobs softballs at Bush.
The EPA recently censored scientific conclusions
about global warning which blamed smokestack and tail pipe emissions for
much of the problem.
Bush and Cheney are also pulling out all
of the stops to thwart an investigation into the World Trade Center tragedu.
It appears
that they fear damaging information about
what they knew could effect the next presidential election. What are they
trying to hide?
This administration, with the complicity
of the media has kept us uninformed and ignorant. As Mark Twain once said,
'if you don't read the papers, you are
uninformed. If you do read the papers you are misinformed'.
Of course, it is possible that if our citizens
were informed they still might back this administration.
To paraphrase H. L. Mencken, "No one ever
went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Albert
Einstein
once said, "The tyranny of ignoramuses
is insurmountable and assured for all time." Musician and composer Frank
Zappa claimed
that, " It's not getting any smarter out
there. You have to come to terms with stupidity and make it work for you."
Hitler said,
"What good fortune for those in power that
the people do not think."
Republican pollster Frank Luntz recently
said that, "It doesn't matter whether any WMD are found "because the rationale
for the
war changed. Americans like a good picture.
And one picture of an Iraqi child kissing a US soldier is more powerful
than two
months of debate on the floor of Congress."
Karl Rove once said that the ideal campaign image should be conceived of
as an
image on the television set with the sound
off. Most Americans think with their brain stem, not the frontal lobes.
Bush now dismisses critics who wonder where
the WMD are as "revisionist historians" but it is this administration that
is revising history.
By repeatedly mentioning Osama and Saddam
in his speeches, he has convinced many Americans that the two are allies
when there is
no proof. Similarly, Bush has managed to
convince many people that Saddam had a hand in the World Trade Center tragedy
and that
Iraqis hijacked the planes when there were
none on board. Fifteen of them were from our ally, Saudi Arabia.
Bush has been quoted as saying that "You
can fool some of the people all of the time and those are the ones you
concentrate on."
This administration operates on this assumption.
His "Clean Air" and "Healthy Forests" campaigns are misnomers which have
exactly
the reverse effect on our environment.
He campaigned in the primary with a stage full of minorities while he planned
to gut affirmative
action and programs which help the poor.
As Hiram Johnson once said, "The first casualty
when war comes, is truth." The Bush administration did not even wait until
they got t
heir wars before they started lying to
us. The British are incensed that Tony Blair lied to them. We can only
hope that Americans will
become similarly outraged.
It was said of the renowned Ernie Pyle that
he reported on a "democracy at war".
We are at war, but we are no longer a democracy