War Made Invisible – How America Hides the Human Toll or Its Military Machine
Recent Articles:
- Daniel Ellsberg Speaks to Us as the War on Iran Continues
- The Actual Gavin Newsom Is Much Worse Than You Think
- Ending Republican Control Will Require Overcoming the Democratic Leadership
- Why is the Democratic party hiding its 2024 autopsy report?
- We Need to Know How Corporate Democrats Made President Trump Possible
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Big Star-Spangled Lies for War
A lot of people want to believe that the current war on Iraq is some kind of aberration — a radical departure from the previous baseline of U.S. foreign policy. That’s a comforting illusion.
Yes, the current administration in Washington is notable for the extreme mendacity and calculated idiocy of its claims. But — decade after decade — the propaganda fuel for one U.S. war after another has flowed from a standard set of lies.
Read the full piece adapated from War Made Easy.
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Radio… and a review
Norman Solomon was on KQED’s Forum and the Joy Cardin Show (audio is online for both).
War Made Easy was reviewed by David Swanson.
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The Incredible Blight of TV Punditry
When super-pundit Robert Novak stormed off the set of a live CNN show Thursday — just after uttering what the New York Times delicately calls “a profanity” — it was an unusual episode of TV punditry. With rare exceptions, the slick commentators of televisionland keep their cool. But we’d be much better off if they all disappeared.
Novak’s unscripted exit from the telecast may have been a preemptive strike — a kind of semiconscious work stoppage — to avoid squirming under the hot lights. “The moderator of the program, Ed Henry, later said on the air that he had warned Mr. Novak that he planned to ask him ‘about the CIA leak case,’” the Times reports. As a bottom-feeding big fish in the pond of political journalism, Novak wants control over the sunlight in his face…
Read the full column. -
Media Flagstones Along a Path to War on Iran
On Tuesday, big alarm bells went off in the national media echo chamber, and major U.S. news outlets showed that they knew the drill. Iran’s nuclear activities were pernicious, most of all, because people in high places in Washington said so.
It didn’t seem to matter much that just that morning the Washington Post reported: “A major U.S. intelligence review has projected that Iran is about a decade away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon, roughly doubling the previous estimate of five years, according to government sources with firsthand knowledge of the new analysis. The carefully hedged assessments, which represent consensus among U.S. intelligence agencies, contrast with forceful public statements by the White House.”
By evening — hours after the Iranian government said it would no longer suspend activities related to enriching uranium — American news outlets were making grave pronouncements…
Read the full column.
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Operation Withdrawal Scam
A few days ago, the White House launched a new phase of its propaganda siege for the Iraq war.
The opening salvo came on July 27, when the commander of American forces in Iraq said that continuation of recent trends would make possible “some fairly substantial reductions” of U.S. troop levels in the spring and summer of 2006….
Gen. Casey’s statement, which made big news, was the start of a media offensive likely to last for the next 15 months, until the congressional elections. We might call it Operation Withdrawal Scam…
Read the full column.
Also see Norman Solomon’s Ask This on Nieman Watchdog.
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‘This Guy is a Modern-Day Hitler’
Evil that warrants the large-scale killing of war needs a face. But that face cannot belong to some amorphous mass of an enemy population; in fact, it’s a ritual for the president to offer assurances that civilians who may be caught in the crossfire are not among the Pentagon’s targets. The bull’s-eye must be painted on someone who links the nascent war to an indisputably justified one of the past.
For this purpose, Hitler’s name has been pressed into service, intermittently, for decades. Pointed mentions of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust open floodgates of emotion, connecting a present-day foe with a regime that slaughtered millions of people near the fulcrum of the twentieth century. What helps to do the trick is the message that while horrors of the past cannot be changed, they can be prevented in the near future.
At a press conference on July 28, 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson spoke…
Read the full excerpt from War Made Easy.
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In Praise of Kevin Benderman
Conscience is not in the chain of command.
“Before being sentenced to 15 months for refusing to return to Iraq with his Army unit, Sgt. Kevin Benderman told a military judge that he acted with his conscience, not out of a disregard for duty,” the Associated Press reports. Benderman, a 40-year-old Army mechanic, “refused to go on a second combat tour in January, saying the destruction and misery he witnessed during the 2003 Iraq invasion had turned him against war.”
Three weeks ago, his wife Monica Benderman wrote…
Read the full article.
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Thomas Friedman, Liberal Sadist?
The acclaimed New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has often voiced enthusiasm for violent destruction by the U.S. government. Hidden in plain sight, his glee about such carnage is worth pondering.
Many people view Friedman as notably articulate, while others find him overly glib, but there’s no doubt that he is an influential commentator with inherently respectable views. When Friedman makes his case for a shift in foreign policy, the conventional media wisdom is that he’s providing a sober assessment. Yet beneath his liberal exterior is a penchant for remedies that rely on massive Pentagon firepower.
And so, his July 27 column…
Read the full Media Beat column.
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“Wagging the Puppy” — and Unleashing the Deadly Dogs of War
Midway through this month, the Karl Rove scandal was dominating the national news — until the sudden announcement of a Supreme Court nominee interrupted the accelerating momentum of the Rove story. Since then, some anti-Bush groups and progressive pundits have complained that the White House manipulated the media agenda. But when it comes to deploying weapons of mass distraction, the worst is yet to come.
Changing the subject is, of course, a key aspect of political damage control. Media spin is often most effective when it displaces one storyline with another…
Read the full column.