MEDIA SPIN: ATTROCITIES ARE "OK" IN BUSH'S IRAQ OCCUPATION, SHUT UP AND WAVE FLAG

Robert Fisk: Attacked for telling some home truths
By Robert Fisk
26 November 2003
The Independent

Are we now to support atrocities against the 'scum of the earth' in
our moral campaign against Evil?

In Iraq, they are just numbers, bloodstains on a road. But in the
little town of Madison in Wisconsin last week, they were all too real
on the front page of the local paper, the Capital Times. Sergeant
Warren Hansen, Specialist Eugene Uhl and Second Lieutenant Jeremy
Wolfe of the 101st Airborne Division were all on their way home for
the last time.

Hansen's father had died in the military. Uhl would have been 22 at
Thanksgiving but had written home to say he had a "bad feeling". His
father had fought in Vietnam, his grandfather in the Second World War
and Korea. Two of the three men were killed in the Black Hawk
helicopter crash over Tikrit just over a week ago.

But of course President Bush, our hero in the "war on terror", won't
be attending their funerals. The man who declined to serve his nation
in Vietnam but has sent 146,000 young Americans into the biggest rat's
nest in the Middle East doesn't do funerals.

Nor do journalists, of course. The American television networks have
feebly accepted the new Pentagon ruling that they can't show the
coffins of America's young men returning from Iraq. The dead may come
home but they do so in virtual secrecy.

Things are changing. At a lecture I gave in Madison last week, there
was a roar of applause from the more than 1,000-strong audience when I
suggested that the Iraq war could yet doom George Bush's election
chances next year. A young man in the audience stood up to say that
his brother was in the military in Iraq, that he had written home to
say that the war was a mess, that Americans shouldn't be dying in
Iraq.

After the lecture, he showed me his brother's picture - a tall 82nd
Airborne officer in shades and holding an M-16 - and passed on a
message that the soldier wanted to meet me in Baghdad next month.

But I'd better make sure I don't reveal his name because those in
America who want to keep the people in the dark are still at work.

Take the case of Drew Plummer from North Carolina who enlisted during
his last year in high school, just three months before 11 September
2001. Home on leave, he joined his father, Lou, at a "bring our troops
home" vigil. Lou Plummer is a former member of the US 2nd Armoured
Division whose father, unlike Mr Bush, served his country in Vietnam.
Asked for his opinion on Iraq by an Associated Press reporter, Drew
Plummer replied that "I just don't agree with what we're doing right
now. I don't think our guys should be dying in Iraq. But I'm not a
pacifist. I'll do my part."

But free speech has a price for the military in America these days.
The US Navy charged Drew Plummer with violating Article 134 of the
Uniform Code of Military Justice: Disloyal Statements. At his official
hearing, he was asked if he "sympathises" with the enemy or was
considering "acts of sabotage". He was convicted and demoted.

Yet still the US press turn their backs on this. How revealing, for
example, to find that the number of seriously wounded soldiers brought
home to America from Iraq is approaching 2,200, many of whom have lost
limbs or suffered facial wounds. In all, there have been nearly 7,000
medical evacuations of soldiers from Iraq, many with psychological
problems.

All this was disclosed by the Pentagon to a group of French diplomats
in Washington. The French press carried the story. Not so the papers
of small-town America, where anyone trying to tell the truth about
Iraq will be attacked.

And while the Pentagon is now planning to have 100,000 GIs in Iraq
until 2006, the journalistic heavyweights are stoking the fires of
patriotism with a new and even more chilling propaganda line. One of
the most vicious has just been published in The New York Times.
Claiming that Saddam's torturers are attacking American troops - some
of his intelligence men are now working for the occupying army, but
that's another matter - David Brooks writes that "history shows that
Americans are willing to make sacrifices. The real doubts come when we
see ourselves inflicting them. What will happen to the national mood
when the news programmes start broadcasting images of the brutal
measures our own troops will have to adopt? Inevitably there will be
atrocities that will cause many good-hearted people to defect from the
cause ... somehow ... the Bush administration is going to have to
remind us again and again that Iraq is the Battle of Midway in the war
on terror ..."

What on earth is one to make of this vile nonsense? Why is The New
York Times providing space for the advocacy of war crimes by US
soldiers? I doubt the US channels will broadcast any images of "brutal
measures" - they've already had the chance to do so and have declined.
But atrocities? Are we now to support atrocities against the "scum of
the earth" - Mr Brooks' word for the insurgents - in our moral
campaign against Evil?

Amid such filth, we should perhaps remember the simple courage of Drew
Plummer. And remember, too, the following names: Army Private First
Class Rachel Bosveld, aged 19, Army Specialist Paul Sturino, aged 21,
Army Reservist Dan Gabrielson, aged 40, Army Major Mathew Shram, aged
36, Marine Sergeant Kirk Strasekie, aged 23. They, too, came from
Wisconsin. And they, too, died in Iraq.

http://www.bestofdesign.co.uk/antiwarblog/archives/000092.html

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