Indirectly lethal knowledge
Recent revelations of American military 'cash for comment' in the Iraqi media should not be surprising - indeed, it's not only a sign of losing the battle for public support, it may be the least of a range of disturbing covert activities that are emerging into the media's focus.
American involvement in 'counterinsurgency programs' (such as Vietnam, El Salvador) is a matter of record - that many of these programs were little more than organised murder of leftists and dissenters is almost always downplayed.
The New York Times publishes reportage alleging Iraqi security forces are carrying out summary executions, substantiated by at least one human rights organization. American officials overseeing the training of the Iraqi Army and the police are said to 'acknowledge that police officers and Iraqi soldiers, and the militias with which they are associated, may indeed be carrying out killings and abductions in Sunni communities' with the convenient caveat that the action is 'without direct American knowledge'.
Note the phrasing 'without direct' knowledge, not 'the complete absence of knowledge'. Damage limitation and misdirection arguably form the qualification that '...they also say it is difficult, in an already murky guerrilla war, to determine exactly who is responsible'.
Adding to the 'murk' is the recent video showing private security contractors working for Aegis Defense Services (formerly known as Sandlines, by the way) firing lethally and indiscriminately at Iraqi civilian motorists in Baghdad.
Some commentators are are charging media complicity in playing 'a pivotal role in trying to obfuscate the details of America's involvement in the terror-war'. Research is presented that describes the Iraqi Interior Ministry as 'the hub of the clandestine death squad activity'. One writer decries the assumption (as in the NYT's line) 'that the ministry is manned exclusively by theocratic Shiites' as 'more misleading gibberish'.
Torture chambers, death squads, and random shootings and bombings have today become the tools of 'democratic' nations - but are presented as the behaviour of enemies and rogue elements to maintain the media fiction of a clean conflict with noble intentions. At very least the public is being distracted by ongoing disinformation efforts that seem to whitewash the real perpetrators and planners of crimes against humanity, while fostering the insurgency it hides behind.
Item posted by AutoEditor at 10:34 am ::
